‘If he works remotely, why can’t I?’: the tension between employees in hybrid work

In February 2022, the energy company where Mark works — based in Ohio, in the United States — said he would need to return to the office.

Mark’s bosses, who are a software engineer, praised his productivity while working remotely—after all, he had never missed a deadline. But at a company with over 1,000 employees, the department where Mark works was the first to be instructed to return to the office three days a week.

“Our team is small and we are all on good terms. We don’t need to be there,” argues Mark (his last name is withheld to avoid problems at his job). “Being in the office doesn’t benefit my daily responsibilities — I can do all my chores at home.”

For Mark, the reality is that only his team of five and a few other employees are back on the job site. “I can count on my fingers the number of employees present most days. We are at the base of the pyramid and were simply told that we need to be in the office”, he reports.

But senior-level colleagues at the same company can still work remotely. Some of them are working while traveling across the United States.

“They’re never in the office,” according to Mark. “We had company-wide meetings and these employees participated via video at tourist sites. Someone must have commented on the footage and they turned off the cameras at subsequent meetings.”

For Mark and his team, this disparity between who works remotely and who has to go back to the office is creating friction. Different employees are subject to different rules and it seems unfair that the reasoning behind the decisions has never been explained.

“[Essa questão] it’s never been discussed by management,” he reports. “We can raise questions about returning to the office during virtual meetings, but they’re never answered directly.”

As restrictions caused by the pandemic are lifted, more and more companies are calling their employees back to offices, but the rules are not universal for all workers. Some employers are making exceptions for individuals, or for specific groups of employees, in decisions that are difficult to explain when the world returns to the office. While some behaviors are required of most workers, others are allowed to maintain specific agreements.

And with employees within the same company working to very different attendance rules, tensions are starting to bubble to the surface, with consequences for work dynamics.

‘No clear policies’

Not surprisingly, getting employees back to the office is creating difficulties.

When the pandemic hit, employees had to adopt remote work almost overnight. Lockdowns followed and workers faced enormous disruptions in their daily lives.

Managers then needed to be flexible in deciding when and where teams would do their jobs. In some cases, parents changed their schedules and people with no available work space in cities moved to the countryside.

Two years later, many workers have created custom work environments that keep them productive outside of traditional office work patterns. And the employers of some of these employees now do not offer accommodations that allow them to maintain that standard.

This group could include people who moved away from their place of work during the pandemic and now want to keep their jobs remotely. And then there are the new employees, already hired for remote work.

But a large part of the workforce is being instructed by the same bosses to return to the office for full-time or hybrid work. This created a problem for employers: the apparent favoritism shown by granting flexibility to a few selected workers while imposing restrictions on the majority.

It’s easy for bosses to call in employees who still live within a reasonable distance of the office and junior-level employees. But senior and mid-level workers may have more leverage to keep arrangements flexible.

“Often, more experienced employees will vigorously defend their desire for remote or hybrid practices,” says Helen Hughes, a professor at the University of Leeds School of Business in the UK. “They often already have influence and social capital, based on relationships and reputation already built.”

Given the current labor shortage, experienced workers may also be in high demand — particularly in industries where competition for talent is most intense. And if companies want to keep these workers, they will need to make concessions in some cases.

But offering special working conditions to some employees can create a sense of inequity, possibly dividing teams and fueling resentment. “If decisions about who works from home and who needs to go to the office seem unfair, with some employees getting better deals, there is the potential to divide teams that are in and out of the workplace,” according to Hughes.

She adds that this situation risks intrigue and the division of the workforce into two camps — most office workers and a minority of remote workers — which can create divisions between teams.

And the lack of cohesion in a company, coupled with employee discontent, can have a range of negative consequences, with potential impact on work dynamics, according to Amy Butterworth, an advisory director at London-based flexible working consultancy Timewise. . For her, “the quality of work will suffer, there is a strong blow regarding inclusion and you will not get the best return from the teams”.

As companies struggle to craft return-to-office policies, the lack of plausible explanations from bosses can exacerbate the built-up tension.

When Sarah, a digital agency worker, started her new job in the north of England, her boss said they would need her in the office full-time because she lived nearby. But her colleagues were allowed to work remotely because they lived farther away.

“My boss didn’t have a clear policy on flexible working: he just decided on the go,” she says. “They said that since it was easier for me to go to the office, I should be there every day.”

For Sarah, this work dynamic did not create resentment against her colleagues, but against her employer. “At the end of the day, I was being punished for where I lived. Flexible working shouldn’t be related to your proximity to the office,” she says.

‘The managers themselves are ghosts’

To select which employees need to return to the office and which can work flexibly, employers are inadvertently creating unbalanced work dynamics, which is leading some workers to question this corporate-level decision making. In Mark’s case, he is particularly irritated that the company he works for has failed to explain why employees who worked productively in remote environments should be forced back to the office.

“We were simply told we need to go back, but the managers themselves are ghosts,” he says. “If access to the internet is all you need to do your job, work shouldn’t be restricted to any specific location.”

Butterworth says establishing fair work practices ultimately boils down to consulting employees directly.

“If a worker is reluctant to return to the office, the employer needs to demonstrate the importance to the individual, to their work and to the team as a whole. And if people have been hired specifically for remote work, you need to communicate why. they have a different structure,” she explains.

Understanding why employers allow one employee to work remotely and ask another to come into the office can help reduce team tension. For Butterworth, “It’s about looking at the needs of the job, the team, and the employee. If people understand those decisions, it’s easier to find a solution.”

The risk is that, without establishing careful consideration and transparent processes, some employees will feel disadvantaged if asked to return to the office while others remain in remote work. In addition to an instant attack on your motivation, this can create problems among colleagues, causing deep divisions in the workplace in the long run.

With little explanation as to why he needs to be at the office while others can work from anywhere, Mark is now looking for another job. “[Os gerentes] they use phrases like ‘team-building’ and ‘collaboration’ to justify returning to the office,” he says. Companies that are unable to offer flexibility will end up missing out on quality employees.”​