More and more businesses around the world are contemplating their return to office strategy. Will they require remote workers to return? Is their office space already designed to support hybrid work or do they need to make structural changes? Is it even safe to return to the office? While some of these questions can be deferred to the national level— regardless of how excited your team may be to return to the office, your organization still has to work in accordance with everchanging lockdown restrictions— for the most part, each company is left to their own discretion when it comes to strategizing their return to office.
Similar to our findings from our U.S. State of Work Report, it’s clear that European businesses are just as keen on hybrid work as the rest of the world with only 11% of business leaders saying that they expect their employees to return to the office full-time post-COVID-19.
This shift to hybrid work comes as no surprise (we’ve known that The Future of Work is Here for a while now). Over a year ago, when we conducted our 2020 UK State of Remote Work Report, it was already clear that European businesses were interested in transitioning to a more flexible workstyle with 41% of office workers saying that they would be likely to resign if they were forced to return to the office against their will and 45% willing to take a pay cut in order to continue working from home in the long-term.
So, what does this embrace of hybrid work look like in practice? Read on for the top stats from the European State of Hybrid Work Report 2021 and what they mean for the return to office.
The transition to hybrid work can be an intimidating one for companies used to the hard and fast workplace policies of yesteryear— the cubicle lifestyle, constant conference room meetings, a strict 9 to 5 schedule. But it doesn’t need to be approached as a daunting task. In fact, the transition to hybrid work is a rather straightforward one, as long as you approach it with the right mindset. As this 92% of organizations know, the journey toward hybrid work begins with a single footstep (or more literally, a single decision to embrace progressive workplace policies).
The most popular flexible policies that these organizations plan to explore include:
If you are hesitant to shift completely to hybrid work, start by drafting more flexible policies. To help get you started, here is The Ultimate Guide to Crafting Remote Work, Flexible Schedule, and Working from Home Policies [+ Templates].
This belief is held by the majority of business leaders, regardless of the size of their operation. However, Enterprise businesses are slightly more enthusiastic about it, with 73% of Enterprise leaders agreeing with the statement and only 55% of small and medium sized companies agreeing.
While there are many reasons why a company may experience increased profits once they embrace hybrid work, the two key reasons that business leaders are pointing at for increased profits are access to a wider talent pool (56%) and the ability to lessen their commercial footprint and costs (49%).
Lessening real estate costs is an increasingly popular talking point in the argument for hybrid and remote work. Even in the pre-pandemic years organizations were beginning this process of physically downsizing their office space to cut costs. Now, in the face of transitioning to hybrid work, companies are once again contemplating their need for office space. And while it may be an instinct to assume an increase in hybrid work means a decrease in office space, only 11% of business leaders are planning to get rid of their office space completely. Instead, 63% plan to maintain their same amount of office space and 14% are even planning to grow their footprint.
It will be years before we can see the full view of how businesses and individual employees were affected by COVID-19. Whether you were already leading remote teams or March 2020 was the first time your employees worked from somewhere other than the company offices, every business felt the impact of the pandemic. As organizations continue adapting to these changes, 39% of business leaders anticipate that COVID-19 will continue to impact their business for up to six more months.
However, as the aforementioned 52% of business leaders would agree, this impact is not all negative. An increase in employee wellbeing is always something to celebrate, and when it comes at the hands of the transition to hybrid and remote work even moreso. The cherry on top of this positively impacted pie is 50% of business leaders agreeing that remote and hybrid work also positively impacts business costs.
With a significant amount of global vaccination efforts behind us and many more to come, “vaccine passports” have become a hot topic for business leaders and individual employees alike. Can they really be enforced? What happens if your top talent declines vaccination but wants to work from the office? These 24% of European business leaders stating that they will enforce vaccine passports marks a shift in how the world will approach the return to office in a post-pandemic world. However, not all European business leaders are on exactly the same page or caution-level on this issue.
In line with the average, 23% of UK and 21% of Nordic business leaders are pro-vaccine passports. However, France is less strict with only 19% of business leaders planning to enforce the use of vaccine passports. On the flipside of the vaccine passport coin is Germany, which boasts the most cautious amount of business leaders, with 31% insisting on the use of vaccine passports to monitor a safe return to office.
To set your hybrid teams up for ultimate success, it may be necessary for you to revamp and rewire your office space with new tech. The good news is, depending on your company's past and current tech usage, this tech-heavy shift likely won’t require a complete overhaul. Instead, think of it as an opportunity to expand how your organization uses your tech tools, apps, and software on a daily basis. The goal here is to not only implement progressive policies, but actually useful ones. Therefore, before implementing any changes take the time to survey your employees on what changes to the office will be the most useful to support their return. Then, take their input into consideration when enacting these changes.
Let’s take a look at how European companies are prepping their offices to support hybrid work:
The use of productivity apps to monitor employee behavior has been hotly debated for years now and is often a source of contention between employees who do not want to be monitored and their bosses who insist on it. The primary argument for the use of productivity monitoring apps is that 74% of business leaders say that remote work makes them feel a lack of control over their business, and even though 83% of these leaders think there are ethical concerns with employee monitoring 78% of doing it.
For employees, the idea of being monitored either with or without their knowledge is a source of workplace anxiety. 56% of employees say that they feel stressed about their employer surveilling their communications, with 41% saying that they constantly wonder if they are being watched.
Ultimately, the decision to monitor employees is in the hands of the business leaders themselves. Depending on where you work, the chances of your employer monitoring your behavior fluctuates. In Germany, your chances of being monitored are above average with 37% of business leaders saying they plan on utilizing activity monitoring of remote employees. If you are more hesitant to be monitored, you may want to consider moving to the Nordic region, where only 22% of business leaders plan to monitor their remote employees.
The hybrid future of work has arrived. For greater insights into how industry leaders are navigating the return to office, check out the complete State of Hybrid Work 2021: European Edition.