Can Companies Arm-Twist Employees to Work-from-Office?

 Around 14 years back, at a time when millennials had started entering the workforce in large number, an IT major in India, let’s call it ‘I’ well-known for its progressive HR policies, made a huge blunder that led to not only poor publicity of the company, but also damaged employee engagement and tarnished its reputation and employer brand. In the subsequent best employer surveys, the company dropped sharply from being the number one company to 5^th or 6^th rank. One of the prime reasons that came out of these surveys as the cause of this drop was poor internal communication and decisions of leaders that did not reflect contextual realities.

Cut to 2024, is it once again on the path to commit similar blunder again? Have they and their contemporaries not learnt lessons from their past mistakes? Let’s see.

It all started for this company around 2010 when they started receiving lots of complaints about poor resolution client problems. The company in turn hired an independent consultant to investigate into the matter. The investigation revealed that many employees in client-facing role had been promoted out of retention pressures, rather than merit and hence may not be well-prepared to meet the demands of the role. Owing to this, their ability to understand client needs and resolve their problems was not as efficient as it should be. To resolve this issue the consultant developed a role-based assessment that would reassess the competency of every member of the company in client-facing roles. The implementation of this new role assessment led to around 5000 demotions in the company.

The employees were angered by this approach of the company and their anger burst on social media where they started venting their frustration. The company fearing a serious backlash gave a knee-jerk response to such protests and attempted to clamp-down the same by introducing a strict social media policy. The obvious attempt to gag the employee voice led to such expressions going ballistic on social media. Many employees created anonymous accounts and started posting abusive content about the company on social media. In short, it became bad to worse!

This also drew serious public criticism about the company. Clearly the internal communication had not remained as efficient as it used to when the company was smaller. The internal communication strategy had not been able to keep-up the pace of its growth. Result, many leadership decisions had not been communicated well down the ranks, resulting in misconstrued perceptions and strong emptions against the company among the employees. The leadership decisions, their response when faced with criticism and then backstepping revealed that they had a poor understanding of the new generation, their life and their media. Finally, after much damage had been done, sense seemed to prevail in the company when they decided to introduce a Facebook equivalent within the company (like an internal Facebook) for the employees to freely express their opinions. They also introduced a company radio service for the employees to communicate important decisions and the rationale behind those decisions.

Déjà vu Moment?

14 years later, at a time when now Gen Z entering the workforce in hordes and are set to dominate workforce, along with younger millennials, in years to come, the company’s leadership seems to be in similar conundrum. Recently, it has started introducing policies to force employees to work-from-office for most days of the week. Employees who choose to work remotely would face repercussions if they do not work from office. This is seen mostly as an arm-twisting technique by the Gen Z employees and younger millennials who would like to have greater autonomy in choosing their work approach – remote, in-person or hybrid, depending on their choice, rather then being forced to come to office for work. As long as the work gets done and the productivity is maintained they see no reason why companies must arm-twist them into physically attending work. The Covid era has clearly thrashed-out the myths propagated about remote working. Besides, high rental cost, higher commute cost and time considering the clogged roads of most metros, have encouraged younger generation employees to work remotely more often than not.

                                    Image Credit: Microsoft Designer via LinkedIn

Other contemporary company have followed suit. Another IT company let’s call it ‘W’ has reportedly sent emails to their employees giving them an ultimatum that if they fail to report physically in the office for a minimum of 3 days in a week, they will lose their paid leaves. Another company let’s call it ‘T’ has linked variable pay to presence of employees in office. If their attendance in office falls below a particular percentage, they would lose all of their variable pay and as their attendance in office would improve, so would their chances of getting a higher variable pay. And all these years we thought variable pay was linked to performance, but now it seems it is linked to attendance!!!

The logic behind such arm-twisting seems hazy and not linked to their performance. It’s either poor HR or poor leadership thinking who continue to poorly understand the Gen Zs and younger millennial generations and impose irrational arbitrary policies on them. Such decisions are once again reflective that the leaders of these companies have poor understanding of new generation’s life realties and expectation from work. Gen Z employees who value work but value life equally, flexibility at work goes a long way in engaging them. Rather than losing 3 hours in commute every day, Gen Z would rather prefer to use that time to finish their work early and get on with their life. Work-from-office cannot be simply imposed if there is no evidence that it leads to better performance or productivity.

The signs of growing opposition from the employees are already evident. For instance, ‘Coffee Badging’ is becoming commonplace thing where employees are coming to work to show their faces and then leaving after they have a coffee. This rise in tokenism to thwart the forced office attendance will only erode productivity, lead to higher loss of work time, poor engagement and in the medium run might lead to rise in attrition and losses.

Are these companies committing the same mistake that ‘I’ committed 14 years back? Have they and their contemporaries learnt from those mistakes? Is it time for leadership to reflect on their decisions and accept the new direction in which the future of work is heading?

Learning from mistakes is wise, progressive and need of the hour. Lest they risk losing reputation and relevance.