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More than five years after the pandemic began, workplace flexibility remains a contentious issue, accroding to a report in The Economist.
And as companies continue to reshape work policies, a new rationale has entered the spotlight - company culture.
If a message based on business performance wasn’t cutting through in encouraging workers back to the office, the thinking seems to be that an argument based on ideas, creative flow and cooperation might do the trick.
“This isn’t just about productivity metrics,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, the boss of Uber, recently. “It’s about building the culture that will drive Uber’s next phase of growth.”
That message was delivered when Uber instructed its workforce to return to the office at least three days per week. Khosrowshahi is far from alone in invoking culture to support return-to-office mandates.
Agility cited as key benefit
In January, Amazon directed staff to return to the office five days a week. “People riff on top of one another’s ideas better when they’re together,” said Amazon’s chief executive Andy Jassy, in an interview with Harvard Business Review.
Culture has always been hard to define, but executives have long believed it matters. “Employees who are in good physical, mental, and emotional health are more likely to deliver optimal performance in the workplace than employees who are not,” wrote Vice Admiral (VADM) Jerome Adams, in a Public Health Reports study titled The Value of Worker Well-being.
A new analysis combining data from CultureX and Work Forward’s Flex Index examines how remote work policies relate to company culture metrics. CultureX tracked nine markers based on feedback from Glassdoor users. Work Forward's Flex Index categorized more than 13,000 companies based on in-office requirements.
Firms with five-day mandates scored higher on “agility”(defined as the ability to anticipate and respond quickly to marketplace changes). “If you’re in the office,” said Charlie Sull of CultureX, “you’re going to be able to receive information much more quickly and efficiently, and respond to new circumstances in a more adaptive way.”
Cultural trade-offs emerge
Yet, while agility ratings do improve with more time in the office, other indicators suffer. Strict five-day office firms received lower employee marks for supportiveness, leadership quality, toxicity, candor, and work-life balance.
“Companies that really score highly on agility - NVIDIA, SpaceX, Tesla - tend to strike a deal with their employees,” said Don Sull of CultureX (Charlie’s father). “Employees are offered generous pay, great career opportunities and other perks. But the trade-off is the work-life balance tends to be really bad.”
The study found no major difference between fully in-office companies and more flexible ones on three other culture indicators.
A separate study from the University of Pittsburgh, led by Mark Ma, adds another dimension. It found that job satisfaction declined and turnover rose at companies that required a return to the office - without any improvement in performance.
Despite this, employers continue to focus on the collaborative value of physical proximity.
A 2020 study of 61,000 Microsoft employees noted that remote work made the company more “siloed” and less “dynamic.”
There are also concerns around onboarding, as “it is also hard to integrate new staff when their colleagues are not there to help them settle in.”
Still, nearly all workers favor some flexibility.
While leadership increasingly frames return-to-office mandates around cultural cohesion, rather than business performance (although ultimately all roads lead there) the available data reveals a more complex picture - one in which the type of culture a company values may dictate whether remote work is seen as a threat, a nice to have or an essential.
