Is Forcing People back to the Office the Best for Everyone?
Blackrock and JPMorgan are the latest large corporations to enforce a return to the office policy JPMorgan is going full on-site, specifying 5 days a week for its MDs and Blackrock is mandating it to all its employees, ‘graciously’ allowing them a whole day every week to work remotely.
These two are getting added to the ‘Remote Work Vilains’ list that we posted about earlier this year. Thankfully there are many more companies being added to the ‘Heroes’ list every week!
According to a study conducted in April/ May 2023:
“Desire to work outside the office is high among remote-capable workers, with about 7 in 10 saying they’d choose to work from home “all of the time” (37%) or “most of the time” (35%).
Just 6% would opt to work remotely “rarely or never” and the remaining 23% would choose to work from home “some of the time”.
So why do these companies insist on forcing people into the office, when research shows that very few actually want to go into the office so often?
These are multi-billion-dollar companies that must have done the research.
I’m curious to see how this affects things and want to use Blackrock as an example to see how the company is faring now and we can compare in 6- 12 months' time.
The 4 things we’re going to look at are:
Company profits
Employee attrition
Employee satisfaction
Diversity and equity
Company profits
Admittedly I know very little about the ins and outs of huge corporations' financials, so rather than trying to understand all of the data points- let’s just use one-EPS
EPS, for those who don’t know, stand for ‘earnings per share’. This is the monetary value of earnings per outstanding share of common stock for a company. It is a key measure of corporate profitability and is commonly used to price stocks.
As of March 2023, this was 7.93
Employee Attrition
Attrition is the departure of employees from the organisation for any reason.
As of 28 May 2023, LinkedIn reported 25,619 employees, up 1% from the previous month, with the Median employee tenure- 4 years.
Employee Satisfaction
Now this one is a difficult one to measure and not only does poor employee satisfaction have a short-term effect on productivity and lead to higher attrition rates, but long term it can have a real negative impact on the whole company culture which again affects profits in the end.
All I have access to gauge this is the Glassdoor ratings which as of 28 May 2023, looks ‘OK’…
Diversity and equity
It’s a no-brainer that remote work positively impacts diversity and equity. Remote first companies hire people regardless of where they’re from, and where they live. It also opens up a multitude of doors to working parents, carers and those with mental and physical impairments.
Now of course I know 1 data point (company) is not enough to use as evidence and even if I had the time to analyse 100 companies, it would be difficult to pin the results down to the ‘return to the office’ policy- good old correlation vs causation.
However, it will be interesting to see all the same, don’t you think?
Ready to apply to genuine remote jobs? Check these out👇
Stay rebellious,
Michelle, Founder of Remote Rebellion