The Expert Podcast

We’ve been seeing this trend in a lot of our operations where remote work or work from home is starting to decline as an accepted job description for many companies. As the risk of the pandemic starts to wane and as companies are needing more productivity, a lot of companies are going back to requiring existing employees be in the office. Also, new employees are not being able to apply for a remote or work-from-home job. The percentage of jobs being offered that are work from home or that are remote is dropping dramatically.

Even a year, year and a half ago, 30%, 40%, 50% of job offerings on many of the job boards such as LinkedIn or Indeed were work from home or remote. Now, that number’s down to 10% or 15%, or sometimes 20% depending on the platform. Why is this? Well, companies recognize that they want to have more oversight and accountability for employees. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, it’s just a reality of company management. Sometimes it’s because the manager doesn’t feel like their role is required. If nobody’s in the office, why do you need a manager to manage people at home?

Whatever the reason, companies are shifting their job requirements to have more in-office or in-work job descriptions. Now here’s the thing: even though work from home is going away, the number of people in offices is still going to be less. Why is that? Well, at the same time this is happening, more layoffs are occurring. Some of these layoffs are quiet—meaning that they’re not really directly laying off existing employees—they are just not backfilling hiring for people that have lost their jobs, or people that have worked from home and decide they don’t want to come back to work if it’s in the office. They just don’t refill that job.

So, offices are still empty in many large cities—New York, Seattle, Portland, Dallas—but it’s not because of the fact people are working from home. It’s because companies are downsizing their footprint. In fact, we see this with the recent Twitter downsizing after Elon Musk bought the company. He is firing half the people there. Companies are realizing their employee footprint might be overkill. They might not need that much expense. And whether that’s true or not, they’re going to find out soon enough. They’re going to try to make a go with it with a smaller employee base.

So, if you’re job hunting, keep that in mind—you may not find as much work from home. If you’re an employer, you may find that there are fewer competitive options for an employee. If you’re looking out at the jobs, they may not be finding work from home, so this may shift the balance of employee-employer relationships.

If you want to take advantage of it as an employee, maybe you start with work in the office, be productive, show your value, and at some point, offer to say: “Look, if you let me work from home one day a week on a trial basis after 30 days, you can see if my productivity stays the same or goes up, and then we’ll make a decision from there.” Don’t necessarily make it an all-or-nothing ransom demand. You can tell your employer you want to try it out—and for them to try it out—and see if it works.

Employers want to keep good staff. They don’t want to get rid of people. If you’re a valuable employee, they want to keep you. But on the other hand, they do need that productivity. So, you can walk a fine line with that balance and maybe diplomatically offer something. If you’re a good employee, if you can prove productivity, then maybe working yourself back into some work-from-home or remote work might be a strategy as an employee.