Flexible work is here to stay in many industries. Yet, research suggests most senior executives have yet to embrace a flexible mindset toward the new world of work.
A survey published earlier this year by the University of Oxford and global consulting firm Protiviti, a Robert Half subsidiary, found that 70% of business leaders expect their companies will be embracing a hybrid working model in 2032. However, in that same survey, 57% of business leaders said they’ll mandate how, when and where employees will work in 2032.
Meanwhile, in a recent McKinsey survey, 87% of employed people in the U.S. said they’d take the opportunity to work flexibly if their employers gave them that option. And according to a Pew Research Center survey, 60% of workers with jobs that can be done remotely said they’d like to work from home all or most of the time for the long term—up from 54% in 2020.
Given that millions of workers want to work remotely, why are so many executives looking to take a hard line on flexible work? Here are three factors driving this thinking, along with counterpoints for business leaders to weigh:
1. Productivity concerns
This is a natural worry for executives. However, consider this: U.S. productivity in the decade following the Great Recession grew at a slower pace than in any other decade since World War II, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF). But during the pandemic, productivity has soared, and WEF attributes that trend to “an upsurge of efficiency in work-from-home
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