Work-From-Home Revolt! Return-To-Office Plans Unravel as Workers Rebel

tech.hindustantimes.com:

From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, companies fearful of losing talent are tweaking or scrapping dictates around how often workers need to be at their desks.

Even the most inflexible bosses are softening their return-to-office expectations.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief Jamie Dimon has been one of the most vocal critics of remote work, arguing that it’s no substitute for the spontaneous idea generation that results from bumping into colleagues at the coffee machine. But in his annual letter to shareholders last month, the head of America’s biggest bank allowed that working from home “will become more permanent in American business,” and estimated that about 40% of his 270,000-person workforce would work under a hybrid model, which includes days in the office and at home. 

Soon after Dimon’s missive, one of the bank’s senior technology executives told some teams that they could cut back from three days in the office per week to two, citing internal feedback.

Many white-collar workplaces are making similar retreats as their employees stubbornly stick to working from home while struggling with childcare, the grind of commuting and worries about rising Covid-19 cases. Bosses are wary of taking punitive action against those who aren't following their ambitious so-called RTO plans, fearing it will backfire in today’s tight labor market. That leaves them to reevaluate their carefully crafted strategies and reconsider what is a realistic long-term approach to in-person work.

“We are seeing policies slip in real time,” said Melissa Swift, the U.S. transformation leader at workforce consultant Mercer. “There was previously all this talk about how, for white-collar jobs, collaborating in the office was important. That’s slipping. Now, only