The WFH-WFO faultlines

There’s an episode in that timeless American sitcom Friends in which Rachel, the ambitious fashion executive, decides to take up smoking. This momentous (and short-lived) life-choice is dictated by the habits of her boss and a colleague. Every day, both would head for the designated smoking area to hang out over a cigarette or two. Rachel, a committed non-smoker, finds herself excluded from this variant of the water cooler confab and decides to join the gals, as it were, by lighting up. Career-wise at least, it proves an eye-opening decision after she discovers during one of these sessions that her co-workers had been planning an overseas junket without her.  

Like Rachel, employees in the post-pandemic corporate world will discover that the issue of inclusion or exclusion within office culture just got a whole lot more complicated on account of the emerging organisational confusion over work from home (WFH) versus work from office (WFO). Most employees embraced the WFH culture for obvious reasons. But now that the threat of Covid-19 has receded, corporations that had once championed the virtues of WFH — including the potential cost saving to be derived from less real estate, electricity and maintenance bills — are suddenly discovering its downsides.

Stipulations that employees attend the office at least twice or three times a week are being met with mulish pushback — and exits. As early as September last year, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 3 per cent of employees decided to quit after WFO rules came back into play.  In India, a survey by staffing agency CIEL as recent as June this year showed that at IT companies, three out of four employees chose not to attend office even though their organisations have resumed partial WFO routines. The survey added that many IT companies are treading softly on the issue of re-imposing full WFO rules for fear of resignations — this at a time when the Big Four all reported higher attrition rates for the quarter just gone by.

Corporations now recognise that WFH cannot be wished away. It is a fair bet that all those Great Places to Work surveys of the future will include a metric for employees to rate their employers on their WFH or WFA (Work From Anywhere) policies — or lack thereof. But you can see the WFH-WFO fault-lines hardening. From the point of view of workplace culture this dichotomy is unlikely to create a healthy environment. Most obviously, it will produce a division between the WFH-haves and have-nots, with the balance of advantage lying with the latter. For HR and line managers, the issue has created new challenges beyond determining whether employee X or Y is skiving off or doing other things when she should be at her desk. Rewards and increments will increasingly have to move beyond judging quality of work or metrics such as standard Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to include the WFH/WFO dynamic. You can almost predict the resentment building up for well-rewarded WFHers from the WFOers.

The problem is that the notion that WFH equals less pay and perks has been hardwired into corporate thinking not least because of the manner in which salaries are structured around differential cost of living in cities.  Yet the irony of the current aversion to a more active WFH policy is that managements have equipped their employees with laptops, mobile phones and sophisticated software so that they can work from anywhere, all the time.  

In 2013 Marissa Meyer set off a storm when she ditched the partial WFH policy at Yahoo!, suggesting that it somehow weakened team spirit and productivity. For all its virtues, corporations that feel compelled to offer WFH, even partially, will find themselves coping with a less cohesive culture that no amount of online meetings can repair. In that sense, Ms Meyer was right to point out that an organisation is more than a sum of its functions.  Big corporations can partly paper over the cracks by organising the usual pre-Covid-19 calendars of get-togethers and offsites. Smaller companies may not have the wherewithal to do so.  Like Rachel in Friends, WFH employees will inevitably discover that the workspace can become exclusionary — not just in terms of access to junkets, office gossip or access to the boss but in terms of career progression too.

Those who stand to both gain and lose from the WFH/WFO dichotomy are women. WFH has proved hugely useful for professional Indian women who are typically saddled with family and household responsibilities. It significantly expanded the talent pool for corporations that would otherwise hesitate to employ women (especially younger women). But now that brief honeymoon has ended, and gender dynamics are bound to come into play. Men have long been adept at setting up workplace practices that exclude women. The obvious struggles of new mothers to physically attend office has offered male bosses an incentive to downgrade them. Likewise, the proclivity for calling after-hours or weekend meetings that women with children find difficult to attend. Online meetings certainly reduced those pressures, but WFO rules will neutralise them soon.