Most companies prefer their employees back to offices but are giving them the choice

• Over 77% of the employers want to give their employees to choose their preferred work mode, says a Teamlease survey.
• Organizations want their employees back as they find it difficult to evaluate employee performance.
• Only 5% of the companies have the intention to stay as virtual-only organisations.

As Covid and its fears ebb, organizations want their workforce back to offices. As many as 58% of companies surveyed by Teamlease think work will be completely in-office going ahead. But few are forcing them back. Over 77% of the employers want to give this option to its employees, as per the Future-Readiness of Organizations for a Hybrid World report.

Organizations want their employees back as they find it difficult to evaluate employee performance. According to the survey, around 40.7% of respondents find employee performance and productivity measurement as a significant challenge in virtual work settings.

The survey has a good mix of large organizations (53.87%), startups (20.54%), and SMBs (25.59%) with industries ranging from technology to manufacturing to BFSI to FMCG to retail to health to automobile.

Very few companies are switching to complete remote model

Also, very few organizations, as low as 5% intend to stay as virtual-only organizations. But the hybrid work model too throws up infrastructural challenges. For one, they are having a hard time deciding whether or not to lease an office space.

About 36% of them said they had office space on lease before the pandemic but moved to fully-remote work settings without an operational office. And 18.15% of employers are planning to lease physical workspaces.

“As the economy is slowly opening up and organizations are looking to welcome their employees back, they want to foolproof their workspaces and environment to accommodate the employee preferences in a way that also aligns with business sustainability and growth. Both can be balanced in the best way possible by redefining what productivity looks like, how it’s measured, and how employees are being engaged and retained in the long term,” said Ajoy Thomas, VP at TeamLease.

Companies are more focusing on business sustainability, workforce health

In order to plan and build organizational resilience, 50% of the employers are planning to increase their learning and development budgets by at least 15-20% in 2022.

“Business resilience also encompasses mental health-related initiatives to increase by 10-20% for 46.42% of the participating companies with 29.76% saying it will be 20-30% for them. Onboarding and implementation of new tools is also a top-order priority with organizations with 26.48% planning to employ remote employee performance apps,” the report says.

To cope with the current challenges such as planning for a hybrid work environment and infrastructure, the companies are trying to come up with devising strategic approaches to mitigate the challenges.

And 33% of the companies are rolling out talent development programmes that are flexible, personalized, modular, and recognize individualistic learning patterns for the employees, as per the report.

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