In-person collaboration has been linked to high performance and job satisfaction, but these benefits don't increase with more days spent in the office.

In-person collaboration has been linked to high performance and job satisfaction, but these benefits don’t increase with more days spent in the office.

An oft-cited reason for in-person work mandates is that they help drive connection among a team. As more employers push for four and five days in the office, rhetoric has focused on the importance of collaboration and a sense of belonging that some leaders believe can only be fostered in a shared physical environment.

Yet some data shows the number of days people attend the office doesn’t directly correlate to that sense of connection. In fact, there’s only a 1% difference in the number of employees who say they feel connected to their organisation working four or five days a week as compared to those working two or three days on site. That slim leading edge went to the latter group, at 60%, according to a global survey of 1,115 employees by London-based workplace insights firm Leesman, seen by the BBC.

“There just doesn’t seem to be huge gains from the number of days people are in the office,” says Allison English, deputy CEO of Leesman. “It’s about the quality, not quantity, of time that matters. In fact, we see that the greater the number of in-person days, the less the worker is generally satisfied with work-life balance, impacting engagement and their connection to the organisation.”

  • Flying Squid
    78•6 months ago

    My last job was a hybrid schedule- 16 hours WFH, 24 hours WFO. Not only did that not make any sense, but absolutely nothing any of us did had to be done at the office and all meetings were either done by Discord or Zoom because the hybrid schedule was flexible.

    It wasn’t even a ‘we have to use this real estate’ situation because it was the office part of a manufacturing facility and they could have put in at least two more lines if they got rid of all of our stations and just kept the executive offices. They could have made more money by not having us there.

    So fucking stupid.

    • @[email protected]English
      44•6 months ago

      Managers are willing to spend company money - and your goodwill - chasing that feeling of “being in charge”, which is apparently a more pure high in-person:-P.

      • Track_ShovelEnglish
        8•6 months ago

        Yeah, don’t dilute the product with this TEAMS filler, SMDH

      • @[email protected]
        3•6 months ago

        My manager doesn’t really care about that, and hence, I’m currently only in office for our monthly company meeting, and thats mostly to help out the new CEO have a room of people instead of just a zoom call. I do enjoy when I go in, but once a month is enough for me. If I were closer, once a week would be fine too, but I really benefit in a ton of ways working from home, and in office I’m usually just helping others out and twidling my thumbs(helping people out is a major part of my job, but I can still do that remote as well).

    • HobbitFoot English
      11•6 months ago

      The bullshit is that managers don’t understand why RTO is valuable.

      The best thing to do is to let the groups that need face time to choose the days they come in and focus only on facilitating that time. If the group isn’t there at one time, RTO is worthless.

      • @[email protected]
        8•6 months ago

        My team has one day per week where we have our regular team meetings and the expectation is we are usually in the office on that day. Outside of that, we all set our own schedules based on our needs. Some people just like being in the office or have job duties that necessitate it. Others like me have little reason to be in the office other than specific meetings so I WFH 4 days most weeks, coming in on those if needed.

        It’s the best work setup I’ve had so far, and a lot of that is because our manager is actually great at her job.

      • @[email protected]
        2•5 months ago

        Exactly right. We came back to the office 1 day a week and moved every zoom/TeAmS meeting put of that day so we could focus on “in person” work…

        My wife’s team on the other hand, were told to come back 2 days a week, they chose whichever building from a few available and whatever day. The result is that she goes to an office to sit around strangers and do, uncomfortably, the same tasks she would do from home.

    • @IamAnonymous
      8•6 months ago

      We have the same schedule. I go in 3 days to run Teams meetings as all the participants are Suppliers and some are in a different country. Sometimes I have spent an entire day in a small conference room in meetings without “collaborating” with anyone at work.

      • Flying Squid
        3•6 months ago

        It’s so stupid, but the extra stupid in the case of that job was that not having everyone WFH was actually costing them money.