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Employees Wanting Work to Be Fully Remote Will Win This Fall

Employees Wanting Work to Be Fully Remote Will Win This Fall

Last updated on: July 27, 2022 at 12:04 pm by Gleb Tsipursky

Employees Wanting Work to Be Fully Remote Will Win This Fall 2022-07-27T12:04:51-04:00 Gleb Tsipursky

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The monumental battle over fully remote work is heating up this summer as more traditionalist business leaders are demanding that their employees come to the office much or all of the time.

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Google maps workers, asked to come back to the office full-time recently, fought back with a petition and threats of a strike, and won a reprieve of 90 days. Elon Musk demanded that all Tesla staff come to the office full-time despite insufficient spaces at Tesla offices, resulting in Tesla staff getting recruited by other companies. Apple employees are pushing back publicly against the leadership’s demand for three days in the office, with a recent letter saying “stop treating us like school kids who need to be told when to be where and what homework to do.”

The same struggles are happening at smaller US companies, as well as across the globe. Yet what these traditionalist executives are failing to realize is that the drama, stress, and tensions caused by their demands won’t matter. Fully remote work will win this fall.

New Covid Variants Fuel Fully Remote Work

That’s because of the new COVID variants, which the Biden administration predicts may lead to 100 million infections in the fall.

The most dangerous is BA.5, which is much more resistant than prior variants to protection from COVID caused either by vaccinations or prior infections. Its capacity to escape immunity combines with what appears to be increased transmissibility and ability to induce a worse disease.

Thus, it led to a rise in hospitalizations in Portugal, Israel, and other countries where it became dominant. We can expect the same in the US as BA.5 becomes increasingly dominant later this summer.

Perhaps you think COVID vaccines might protect us from this problem? Think again.

A Kaiser Permanente study on the original Omicron strain, BA.1, found that after two doses of Pfizer, vaccine effectiveness against hospital admission was at 41% after 9 months. A booster shot increased effectiveness against hospitalization to 85% for a couple of months, but it wore off quickly to 55% after three or more months.

Note that this is vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization, not infection: the vaccine is much weaker against infection. And it’s for the original Omicron strain BA.1, not BA.5, which is much more capable of immune escape, more transmissible, and causes more severe disease.

Let’s not forget that less than three-quarters of eligible Americans are vaccinated, less than half of all vaccinated Americans received a booster shot, and less than a quarter of those over 50 received a second booster.

Moreover, a new study shows that after an initial COVID infection, each subsequent infection with COVID results in higher risks of hospitalization and death.

In other words, after an initial infection, you end up with long-term or permanent damage that is exacerbated by subsequent infections. Thus, it’s important to minimize the number of times we get infected with COVID.

Unfortunately, the government is not taking steps needed to address this situation.

Despite multiple requests by the White House, the Congress is refusing to fund COVID vaccines and boosters, treatments such as Paxlovid, and research and production of next-generation vaccines. Election year politics at their worst.

The implication is clear: this fall will see a major COVID surge.

Moreover, we’ll be more vulnerable than before, given the lack of government funding for vaccines and treatments, and the vaccine escape of BA.5.

Opposition to Fully Remote Work by Traditionalist Leaders Will Backfire

During both the Delta surge and the Omicron surge, traditionalist companies that tried to force their employees back to the office, and experienced extensive drama and stress over this coercive approach, had to roll back their plans, with all that effort wasted.

Besides, the yo-yoing of going back and forth from home to the office and back home seriously undermined productivity, harmed engagement and morale, and impaired retention and recruitment.

We’ll see the exact same yo-yoing at Tesla, Apple, Google, and other companies led by traditionalist executives in a few months.

Egocentric Bias Leads Executives to Make Bad Decisions on Fully Remote Work

So why do they pursue this doomed effort to push their staff into the office? After all, these executives have the same information I do, and the implication is clear.

The key lies in what makes these executives feel successful and feeds their identity as leaders.

In fact, one leader wrote an op-ed piece about this topic, saying “There’s a deeply personal reason why I want to go back to the office. It’s selfish, but I don’t care. I feel like I lost a piece of my identity in the pandemic… I’m worried that I won’t truly find myself again if I have to work from home for the rest of my life.” By honestly saying the quiet part out loud, this op-ed reveals how other leaders use false claims about remote work undermining productivity, innovation, and social capital to try to cover up their true concerns.

This personal, selfish orientation speaks to a mental blindspot called the egocentric bias, an orientation toward prioritizing one’s own perspective and worldview over others.

It is important to empathize with and understand where such leaders are coming from, but following their personal and selfish predisposition will hurt the bottom lines for their companies.

The Future of Work: A Hybrid-First, Team-Led First Model

What works much better is a hybrid-first, team-led model: a flexible approach where individual team leads consult with their team members to decide what works best for them.

That goes for large companies, such as my client Applied Materials, a Fortune 200 high-tech manufacturer. It adopted an “Excellence from Anywhere” modality that focuses on deliverables rather than where someone works. That also goes for middle-size organizations, including another client, the Information Sciences Institute, a 400-staff data science and machine learning research center at the University of Southern California. ISI used this approach to gain leadership in hybrid and remote work.

Team members at Applied and ISI come to the office once or twice a week, whether to socialize or to collaborate more intensely, since for most people, intense collaboration works best in-person. Otherwise, team members stay at home, since workers are substantially more productive working remotely. And as COVID cases increase in their area, the teams flexibly adapt their approach to collaborate and socialize fully remotely.

A third client, the Jaeb Center for Health Research, chose to adopt a home-centric model. That’s because surveys showed the large majority of its staff wanted full-time remote work. Moreover, their research-focused activities are more individualized and less team-oriented than those at ISI or Applied. They only come to the office on rare occasions for meetings or training. Such remote-first, home-centric models will work well for organizations where individual employee productivity, rather than team productivity, is more important.

In short, flexible models – while going against the intuitions of many leaders – best fit the desires of most employees, whose biggest non-salary demand is flexibility. They address the risks associated with COVID variants, as well as other emergencies. And finally, they maximize profits for companies, by boosting retention, recruitment, collaboration, innovation, and productivity. The only obstacle is the personal, selfish orientation of traditionalist leaders, who need to recognize the danger they are posing to the success of their companies if they pursue their backward-looking coercive efforts to get their staff to return to the office.

Conclusion

Traditionalist business leaders are eager to get employees back into the office. They want staff back in the office for more time than employees had anticipated. However, the return to office demands by executives will backfire as the United States could see 100 million coronavirus infections this fall. This implication of the COVID surge is driven by new omicron subvariants that have shown a remarkable ability to escape immunity. Once again, workers will push back on office return plans. A wide-scale return to the office will prove to be a myth. With Covid case counts may soar this fall, fueled by the highly contagious Omicron variants, leaders should choose science over self interests. They should prepare their companies for the impending COVID wave this fall through a hybrid-first, team-led model which addresses the risks associated with COVID variants, as well as other emergencies.

Key Takeaway

Despite many traditionalist executives pushing for a return to the office, remote work will win this fall as the threat of new contagious COVID variants looms large. Companies that adopt a hybrid-first, team-led model will seize a competitive advantage…> Click to tweet

Image credits: gorodenkoff

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on July 19, 2022.

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky helps tech and insurance executives drive collaboration, innovation, and retention in hybrid work. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which helps organizations adopt a hybrid-first culture, instead of incrementally improving on the traditional office-centric culture. A best-selling author of 7 books, he is especially well-known for his global best-sellers Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019) and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020). His newest book is Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage (Intentional Insights, 2021). His writing was translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, Polish, Spanish, French, and other languages. His cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 650 articles and 550 interviews in prominent venues. They include Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, USA Today, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for mid-size and large organizations ranging from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from his research background as a cognitive scientist. After spending 8 years getting a PhD and lecturing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he served for 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University’s Decision Sciences Collaborative and History Department. He lives in Columbus, Ohio (Go Bucks!) and in his free time, he makes sure to spend abundant quality time with his wife to avoid his personal life turning into a disaster. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on LinkedIn @dr-gleb-tsipursky, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook @DrGlebTsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, YouTube, and RSS, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace by signing up for the free Wise Decision Maker Course at https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/newsletter/.

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About Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

Known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases, which devastate bottom lines and bring down high-flying careers. His expertise and passion is developing the most effective and profitable decision-making strategies, based on pragmatic business experience and cutting-edge behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience, to empower leaders to avoid business disasters and maximize their bottom lines. You can learn more here https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/glebtsipursky/ The bestselling author of several books, Dr. Tsipursky is best known for his national bestseller on avoiding disasters and achieving success in business and other life areas, The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide. His next book, Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters, is forthcoming with Career Press in November 2019. It’s the first book to focus on cognitive biases in business leadership and reveal how leaders can overcome these dangerous judgment errors effectively. After that he’s publishing The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships with New Harbinger in April 2020, the first book to focus on cognitive biases in professional and personal relationships and illustrate how we can defeat these dangerous judgment errors in our relationships. See more information here https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/author-page/ Dr. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles he published and over 350 interviews he gave to popular venues that include Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, The Conversation, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and many others, as you can see here https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/media/ Dr. Tsipursky's expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, speaking, and training for businesses and nonprofits. He serves as the CEO of the boutique consulting, coaching, and training firm Disaster Avoidance Experts, which uses a proprietary methodology based on groundbreaking research to help leaders and organizations maximize their bottom lines by addressing potential threats, seizing unexpected opportunities, and resolving persistent personnel problems. His clients include Aflac, Balance Employment Assistance Provider, Edison Welding Institute, Fifth Third Bank, Honda, IBM, International Coaches Federation, Ohio Hospitals Association, National Association of Women Business Owners, Sentinel Real Estate, The Society for Human Resource Management, RealManage, The Columbus Foundation, Vistage, Wells Fargo, the World Wildlife Fund, and over a hundred others who achieve outstanding client results. You can learn more about that here: https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/about Dr. Tsipursky also has a strong research and teaching background in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University and before that a Fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His dozens of peer-reviewed academic publications include journals such as Behavior and Social Issues, Journal of Social and Political Psychology, and International Journal of Existential Psychology and Psychotherapy. His civic service includes over 4 years as the Chair of the Board of Directors of Intentional Insights, an educational nonprofit advocating for research-based decision-making in all life areas. He also co-founded the Pro-Truth Pledge, a civic project to promote truthfulness and integrity for individual professionals and leaders in the same way that the Better Business Bureau serves as a commitment for businesses. He serves on the Advisory Board of Canonical Debate Lab and Planet Purpose, and is on the Editorial Board of the peer-reviewed journal Behavior and Social Issues. A highly in-demand international speaker, Dr. Tsipursky has over two decades of professional speaking experience across North America, Europe, and Australia. He gets top marks from audiences for his highly facilitative, interactive, and humor-filled speaking style and the way he thoroughly customizes speeches for diverse audiences. Meeting planners describe Dr. Tsipursky as "very relatable," as "a snap to work with," and as someone who "does everything that you would want a speaker to do." Drawing on best practices in adult learning, his programs address the wide spectrum of diverse learning styles, as attested by enthusiastic client testimonials and references. He regularly shares the stage with prominent leaders, for example recently speaking on a roundtable panel with the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, Secretary General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Elhadj As Sy, Chancellor of Austria Brigitte Bierlein, CEO of Penguin Random House Markus Dohle, and billionaire philanthropist and Chair of the Bertelsmann Management Company Liz Mohn. You can learn more about his speaking and see videos here: https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/speaking/ Dr. Tsipursky earned his PhD in the History of Behavioral Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011, his M.A. at Harvard University in 2004, and his B.A. at New York University in 2002. He lives in and travels from Columbus, OH. In his free time, he enjoys tennis, hiking, and playing with his two cats, and most importantly, he makes sure to spend abundant quality time with his wife to avoid disasters in his personal life. Learn more about him at https://DisasterAvoidanceExperts.com/GlebTsipursky, contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky and Twitter @gleb_tsipursky. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the “Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace,” by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Course at https:// DisasterAvoidanceExperts.com/Subscribe You can read more about the author here.

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