4 days Ago By Michele Weldon
America is heading back to work in person. But this is about way more than changing out of yoga pants and gym clothes. It is also about more than exchanging jokes at the watercooler.
This is a societal schism without a surprise: Women, people of color, underrepresented identities, and those with disabilities and fewer options due to historic and systemic economic insecurity bear the brunt of both in-person demands and work-from-home requirements. Demanding everyone unilaterally go back to the office post-COVID-19 is an expensive and unreasonable request for far too many. Amazon, with 1.
52 million employees globally, is a recent example. After recently shutting down its Goose Island fulfillment center after 10 years, Amazon has around 300 job openings in Chicago, including office work. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy unapologetically announced last month a mandated return to the office five days a week.
Exceptions are only for extenuating circumstances. At Amazon, the bulk of the corporate workforce is male, with 76.9% of senior leaders male.
This new missive appears insensitive and is earning pushback. In his recent letter to office employees, Jassy wrote: “We understand that some of our teammates may have set up their personal lives in such a way that returning to the office consistently five days per week will require some adjustments. To help ensure a smooth transition, we’re going to make this new expectation active on January 2, 2025.
” Happy new year to those who enjoyed work from home as well as the convenience of hybrid work. More recently, 3M Co., with 85,000 employees globally, announced the expectation that managers and directors would start to return to the office three days a week — Tuesday through Thursday — this month.
Microsoft is apparently not following in Amazon or 3M’s back-to-work footsteps for some of its 228,000 employees, including 126,000 in the U.S. and five offices in Chicago and suburbs.
Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie reportedly told members of Microsoft’s cloud and artificial intelligence departments that they could stay flexible as long as they stay productive. COVID-19 changed the planet — especially in the way millions do their work. As a new COVID-19 variant spreads in the U.
S. and the government is once again offering free COVID-19 test kits, it is complicated to consider the recent demands of employers for workers to return to the office in person every day. The shift back to in-person work is sweeping the nation , with 60% of workers in 2019 working on-site, compared with 21% working on-site in the second quarter of this year.
Seventy percent of employees worked remotely in the second quarter of 2020, compared with just 27% working remotely in the second quarter of this year. More than half of employees in the second quarter of this year had a hybrid work schedule. For some, back to the physical workplace is a relief; for others, it is a tone-deaf requirement by out-of-touch leadership.
Certainly, some people enjoyed the pandemic response of working from home: saving commute time and money, and having the ability to handle home and family emergencies as needed. They had more time to be flexible for family events, health maintenance and personal care. The predominant cultural assumption was this was universally a good thing for everyone: time to bake bread, sing from the balcony, be your true self, avoid COVID-19 transmission and stay safe.
You could also help children with homework. But inequities and access to resources worsened the transition of spaces for some, with gender, race, ethnicity, geography and socioeconomics as major divisive factors. A new study of workers in 29 countries by professor Yang Hu of Lancaster University shows that, “among people with a higher level of digital literacy and in countries where people use the internet more intensely, women are particularly more likely than men to suffer the ‘digital double burden.
’” Megan Dalla-Camina, founder and CEO of Women Rising, writes in Psychology Today that the motherhood paradox “is a societal expectation that women should work as if they don’t have children while simultaneously parenting as if they don’t work.” Yes, some disliked working from home. Many had to assume multiple time-consuming shifts — child care, elder care, home-schooling, housework — without any reduction in professional requirements for work.
Still, others who were required to be on-site reported suffering as well. Health care workers felt burned out in particular. Today, after 4 1⁄2 years of adjustments after the pandemic hit the U.
S., apparently the reaction to COVID-19 accommodations is: Enough. Meet your colleagues in the conference room and not on Zoom.
How to resolve this conundrum is for employers and employees to negotiate mutually acceptable, respectful agreements on when and where to do their work. That means compromise and a true understanding that COVID-19 rearranged work life and workplaces forever. Hybrid work may be a forever reality.
I’ve worked remotely from my Chicago-area home office for several years on multiple employment contracts, and I am now shifting back to partial in-person work. I understand the adjustments can be difficult on both sides. It is time to consider the holistic needs of the employee.
And offer choice. Michele Weldon is an author, journalist, emerita faculty member in journalism at Northwestern University, senior leader with The OpEd Project and editorial director of Take The Lead. Her latest book is “ The Time We Have: Essays on Pandemic Living.
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