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Recently, I visited a life-sciences company known for its clinical and commercial successes. Impressed by the facilities and the lively energy around me, I asked my host about the company’s work location policies. Employees were asked to show up in the office three days a week—days selected by the team, not by senior management.
Flexible workspaces accommodated the varying needs of different teams and tasks, and free breakfast was available in an expansive light-filled cafeteria. “People want to be here,” the executive explained. Employees were showing up more, not less, than the policy specified. Looking around, it was easy to understand why you’d want to be in this beautiful building, with its driven, smart professionals, eager to reduce patient suffering.
This company is a glimpse into a trend that will become common in 2024: Once enough people are in the office, the majority will want to be there too. FOMO will replace “you can’t make me.” The push to a return-to-office (RTO) will be replaced by a pull.
Research and popular media on remote work over the past three years have identified obvious benefits (ditching the commute) and shortcomings (loss of mentoring or innovation) of working from home.
As such, it was clear that navigating a return-to-office would require creative solutions and thoughtful experiments. However, RTO policies have usually been framed as mandates—or worse, as one-size-fits-all rigid plans. The result has been frustration and resistance. For instance, when Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently announced a RTO policy, workers demonstrated in protest.
In 2024, however, as a growing number of people realize some of the pleasures of returning to the office, the simple us-versus-them, employees-versus-bosses, young-versus-old narratives will dissipate. The future of work—if it’s to be effective in producing the products and services companies hope to provide their customers—will have to be cocreated. Many factors will drive the creative process, starting with the nature of the work itself. Notably, some work can be done anywhere, alone, with no harm to productivity or quality (penning an article); other work can only be done together and in person (the care of hospitalized patients). A vast landscape of work lies somewhere in between, with its quality determined by how effectively shifting configurations of people and skills come together to deliver products and services.
For instance, research on employee proximity conducted at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that sitting near senior colleagues led junior engineers to learn more and to be less likely to leave their jobs, an effect that was particularly pronounced for women and younger employees. Differences in types of work may help explain statistics estimating that 12 percent of full-time employees work from home; 60 percent fully in person, and 28 percent are hybrid. Although numbers vary widely across sources—for example, a McKinsey study estimated that 58 percent can work at home at least one day a week—they surely indicate a work in progress.
The days of debating whether or not remote work is good have ended; 2024 will be the year when companies will commit to redesigning work, experiment by experiment, learning from both successes and failures along the way. The best managers will navigate the uncertainty that lies ahead in virtually every domain of the economy through smart, small experiments to figure out what works—an approach that is quietly on the rise, and that calls for an end to the either-or debates that leave company managers exhausted and no closer to success.
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Companies that ask what makes sense for the work they do will get there faster. When global design firm Arup did this, they realized, as reported by London Business School professor Lynda Gratton, “while focus was indeed important, tasks requiring cooperation were more of a significant driver of productivity,” given the company’s complex engineering projects. Unless engineers, designers, planners, and other experts could easily ”bounce ideas off each other,” project quality and efficiency suffered.
Consider the psychological difference between experimenting and learning together, and doubling down on mandates from the top, as happened earlier this year at such companies as Morgan Stanley and Disney. Other companies taking the experimental route highlighted by Gratton include global giants Mars and Accenture. Accenture, for instance, piloted the use of virtual reality for onboarding and training (e.g., using realistic simulations with fictitious clients). Mars encouraged factories to experiment with flexible work, allowing different facilities to see what happened when associates worked from home for parts of the week. The experiments, designed to be temporary, spurred conversations by company leaders about the future of work in manufacturing. In the aftermath of the pandemic, IBM simply reopened 100 office locations across the country to see how individual employees and teams would use the opportunity to collocate.
Coming together to work hard and effectively for finite periods of time—in well-designed and well-supported physical environments—will, in 2024, be seen as both productive and desirable. Supporting this trend will be innovations that make workplaces more attractive, such as free on-site daycare and gyms, and clear norms about leaving work at the end of day, enabling post-work socializing for some and exercise and family time for others. If so, in 2024, offices and cities will fill up again. Our inherently social species will slowly rediscover the pleasure of being together.
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