According to a new report from Future Forum, a consortium focused on reimagining the future of work led by Slack Technologies Inc., 95% of those polled want flexible hours, compared to 78% who want location flexibility.
The new data, gathered from a survey of more than 10,000 knowledge workers in November 2021, provides a snapshot of how popular hybrid arrangements have become in the second year of the pandemic, how virtually all workers value schedule flexibility above all else, and the growing concerns that many bosses have about how to keep promotions and pay fair when some employees are in the office while others stay at home.
According to the survey, 72 percent of workers who are dissatisfied with their level of flexibility—whether in terms of time or location—are likely to look for a new job within the next year.
"If they don't get what they want, they're willing to look for another job," said Sheela Subramanian, vice president of the Future Forum.
Many employers have reluctantly embraced long-term hybrid and remote work arrangements after repeatedly postponing return-to-office dates or discovering that workers refused to come to work. Some executives are reconsidering in-person meetings as a result of this.
Maeve O'Meara, CEO of San Francisco-based healthcare technology company Castlight Health Inc., believes that employees should only gather when absolutely necessary. "We should really be organizing around bringing people together for a specific purpose, whether that's collaboration, innovation, planning, or just socializing," she says.
Agreements between team members about when members of the group will work are becoming more popular across industries, according to Ms. Subramanian. She believes that flexible schedules will survive the pandemic.
"There really needs to be a shift from presenteeism and activity tracking to actually understanding the results that people are driving and the value that they're creating," she says, adding that focusing on how many hours people work is out of date.
According to the Future Forum survey, which was conducted between November 1 and November 30, the share of people working in hybrid models, where they split their time between an office and a remote location, has increased by 12 percentage points since May, as more workers have returned part-time to their traditional workplaces. More than two-thirds of those polled said their preferred mode of operation was a hybrid setup.
While many large corporations have decided that the majority of their employees will combine remote work with in-office days, hybrid work is not without its drawbacks. Executives are concerned that hybrid work will increase inequity among rank-and-file employees, particularly women, working mothers, and people of color, who, when polled, said they preferred more flexible arrangements.
Seventy-one percent of executives polled said they work in the office at least three days a week; 63 percent of nonexecutive employees said the same. Their preferences are more diametrically opposed. Executives who work remotely are far more likely than nonexecutives to want to work at least three days a week in the office, with 75% versus 37% of employees.
According to Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University professor of economics who studies remote work, what employees want may not be the most effective way for organizations to operate. "There will be a battle royale over choice versus coordination," he predicted.
Some preliminary results from a forthcoming survey conducted by Mr. Bloom align with Future Forum's employee sentiment on the importance of flexibility. Mr. Bloom found that 75% of those polled prefer to choose which days they work from home rather than having their employer dictate which days they work.
"Firms will be hesitant to force employees to coordinate," Mr. Bloom predicted. "It's not going to go well because on any given day, 20% of the people will be at home."
Large meetings are more difficult to run when some people are in the office and others are not, according to him. When a company is sparsely populated, employees complain about a lack of energy in the workplace. Forcing a one-size-fits-all solution across a large workforce can appear risky to managers, he says, especially at a time when many workers are on the verge of quitting.
"They're going to feel like they have to let them choose," Mr. Bloom said of businesses.