In the US, workers no longer want offices and prefer teleworking

Go to and from the office five times a week? “It’s just not what I want for my life,” says Claire, a 30-something consultant who, like millions of employees in the United States, prefers the telecommuting since the covid-19 pandemic completely changed the work scenario.

The pandemic has forced Americans to work at home, and now employers are struggling to break that habit and get them back to the office.

And the main reason is that before the coronavirus, workers were used to unfriendly working conditions: vacation short, maternity leave sometimes non-existent.

“These practices that the workers were accustomed to in USAthey have been disrupted since the pandemic,” Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP, a firm that provides personnel management services to companies, told AFP.

Offices in the United States are, on average, half empty compared to February 2020according to data from Kastle, a company that manages entry cards for some 40,000 companies in the country.

The phenomenon exhibits strong disparities: the offices of Silicon Valley, in California (west), barely recovered a third of their employees, while the proportion reaches half in the cases of New York and Washington (east), or two thirds in Houston or Austin (South Texas).

Employees of Amazon They protested on May 31 in front of the group’s headquarters in Seattle, against the recent obligation to go three days a week to the facilities of the e-commerce giant.

“The world is changing and Amazon must embrace the new reality of remote and flexible work,” organizers of the movement said in a statement. They also vindicated a question of equity, particularly for women, workers of color or with a disability.

By contrast, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy estimated in February that “working together and inventing is easier and more efficient (…) doing it in person.”

Elon Musk, founder of the electric car manufacturer Tesla and owner of the Twitter network, went further and prohibited teleworking in the name of productivity and “morality”: employees want “the worker (to go) to the factory, the chef to the restaurant to feed them, but not (attend) them” to the offices, he alleged.

Half-empty offices

One third of wage earners in USA you can work from wherever you want, compared to just 18% in France, according to a study by the firm ADP published in mid-April and carried out in 17 countries.

“An employer who imposes five (face-to-face) days per week would not be an option for me,” Claire stressed to AFP, who asks not to reveal her last name for professional reasons.

The woman goes to the office on an irregular basis, once every two weeks, sometimes more often. And she does not plan to return to the previous face-to-face regime.

She has replaced the subway with walks around her neighborhood, she wastes no time dressing to match and putting on makeup every morning, she works outdoors with her laptop as soon as the weather permits, and she no longer has to run in the afternoons to do her shopping.

He misses conversations with colleagues “a little bit,” but those “informal discussions clearly make the worker less productive,” he said.

But are you afraid of missing out on a promotion? If getting it involves “showing I’m at the office” every day, then definitely not. “It’s not the life I want!” she said sharply.

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“Challenge”

However, some executives recognize advances thanks to teleworking. “Issues of quality and efficiency of the way of life came up,” acknowledges Gayle Smith, president of the NGO One, based in Washington, and with several offices around the world.

“Raising children is a bit easier if you don’t have to take public transport every morning,” she told AFP.

Some of his employees even left Washington to live “closer to their aging parents” or accompany their partners’ job changes.

The executive does not observe a decrease in productivity, but misses the “positive” dynamics of face-to-face work. The equation is, for her, to reproduce that dynamic while maintaining the improvements in quality of life achieved with teleworking.

For companies, “it is a very difficult challenge, since this changed people’s lives and the way they work,” admits Smith.

Telecommuting is “part of a suite of benefits and options that companies can choose to offer their workers,” added Nela Richardson.

On the employee side, “the question is whether they are ready to sacrifice career advancement or salary to work completely remotely,” he adds.

For employees, according to this economist, it is above all about being able to “choose” their working hours.

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