Whitepapers

TASA ID: 22108

If you give any leader the opportunity to increase their talent pool of potential employees by 15% - with all these new hires belonging to an underrepresented minority - they’d jump at the chance, especially given tight labor markets and CEO desires to increase headcount. Yet too few leaders realize that, according to the US government, people with disabilities are the largest minority group in this country, with 50 million - 15% of the population - living with disabilities.

Sure, many executives feel concerned by the extra investments involved in providing accommodations for people with disabilities. Yet these accommodations might not involve anything besides full-time remote work, according to a new study by the Economic Innovation Group think tank. The study found that the employment rate for people with disabilities did not simply reach the pre-pandemic level by mid-2022, but rose far past it, to the highest rate in over a decade. Remote work, combined with a tight labor market, explain this high rate, according to the researcher’s analysis.

TASA ID: 22108

As part of ongoing cost-cutting measures under new owner and CEO Elon Musk, Twitter is shutting down its Seattle offices and Singapore offices, instructing employees to work remotely. That’s despite Musk earlier claiming that remote workers are only “pretending to work” and banning remote work at Twitter upon taking it over in early November.

So what explains his change of heart? Apparently, it’s the costs associated with the company’s Seattle office, including rent but also services such as cleaning and security.

TASA ID: 22108

Shortly before the layoffs at Salesforce, Marc Benioff, cofounder and co-CEO of Salesforce, recently sent a company-wide Slack message complaining about the low productivity of recent hires made during the pandemic and asked, “Are we not building tribal knowledge with new employees without an office culture?” Salesforce permits a high degree of flexibility for employees: teams and their leaders make the choice about what kind of work arrangements suit their needs best. However, does such flexibility threaten the development and integration of recently hired junior staff?

TASA ID: 22108

Disney’s CEO Bob Iger demanded on Monday January 9 that all employees return to the office for at least four days a week because "in a creative business like ours, nothing can replace the ability to connect, observe, and create with peers that comes from being physically together.” That’s similar to the sentiments expressed by Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, who demanded that employees come to the office for at least three days per week because “Innovation isn’t always a planned activity. It is bumping into each other over the course of the day and advancing an idea that you just had. And you really need to be together to do that.”

TASA ID: 22108

As increasing numbers of companies are requiring employees to return to the office for 3-5 days per week this fall, they’re running into the buzzsaw of what one of my clients called the “Four Horsemen of the Required Return to Office” - challenges with resistance, attrition, quiet quitting, and diversity.

The Four Horsemen stem from the fact that workers who are capable of working remotely prefer to do so for most or all of the time. For example, an August 2022 Gallup survey of remote-capable workers shows that 34% of respondents want to work full-time remotely, 60% want to work a flexible hybrid schedule, and only 6% want to work in a traditional office-centric setting. A June 2022 McKinsey survey of all workers, remote-capable and not, provides further context on preferences for hybrid work. It found that 32% of respondents want to work full-time remotely, 10% want to work remotely four days a week, 16% three days a week, 18% two days a week, 13% one day a week, and 13% prefer full-time in-office work. Thus over half of all respondents want to work less than half the time in the office. And a September 2022 survey from the School of Politics and Economics at King’s College reported that 25% of respondents would quit if forced to return to the office full time.