To start with what we know: Flexible work arrangements, in which bosses trust their employees to do the job in whatever configuration works for them, are almost always best. best plan for everyoneCompanies that fail to meet workers’ desire for flexibility have paid dearly for the price. Over the past four years, flexible working has gone from a nice to have for a requirement for many job seekers, particularly caregivers, low-income workers and women, who are more likely than men fall into both categories.
And then there’s what we’re learning: No company can escape the consequences of moving away from remote work and hope to retain its entire workforce. Upwork, a freelance platform that connects companies with freelancers, recently released a series of reports revealing the outsized impact that back-to-office mandates have had on women in the workforce. The TL;DR version: It’s been terrible for them.
“The system isn’t working for women, so they’re choosing to opt out” in favor of alternative, flexible career paths, said Kelly Monahan, chief executive of Upwork’s research institute. Fortune.
In fact, according to a new study from Upwork, nearly two-thirds (63%) of executives whose companies have mandated a return to the office in some way say the policy has led to a disproportionate number of women quitting.
About the same proportion of executives told Upwork they’re struggling to fill those vacancies, and more than half agree that the hemorrhaging of their female employees has caused the company’s productivity to plummet. (They surveyed 2,500 workers around the world, including more than 1,500 executives.)
The problem didn’t start with the remote work revolution of the 2020s. “We lost decades of women’s participation in the workforce before the pandemic,” said Monahan, who has a doctorate in organizational leadership. The U.S. lags behind other major economies in creating a workforce that actually works for women. “We still have a culture that favors the people who originally created it.”
The Problem of Working Women in the United States
Don’t let the news of Vice President Kamala Harris’ candidacy for president distract you from the disappointing state of women’s power in the American workplace. Center for American ProgressOver the past 30 years, all G7 countries have seen at least 10% growth in the number of working women. In the United States, that figure has remained virtually unchanged, which CAP estimates will cost the country 5% of its potential GDP growth.
So the problem predates the Industrial Revolution, but the current situation, which is the widespread return to office work, continues to disproportionately harm women. “I’m very optimistic about alternative career paths because we don’t have the same social safety nets as other G7 countries,” Monahan said.
Looking for ways to take more control of their careers, many women (more than half, in Upwork’s survey sample) have turned to freelance work; nearly 30% of those women said no amount of money would entice them to return to full-time work. (Admittedly, Upwork is itself a freelance marketplace, relying on a steady stream of new freelancers looking for contract work to stay profitable.)
The productivity paradox remains, despite years of evidence
In his research, Monahan explored whether flexibility is “a benefit or a major challenge in job design” and whether “remote work is a benefit or just the way we work now.” Both questions remain paramount, even as we approach the five-year mark since the world went into lockdown due to COVID.
“There’s no evidence that more time spent in the office is linked to better performance; quite the opposite,” she said. “That doesn’t mean you have to work 100% remotely—and women don’t always ask for that—but it just means you have to have time to live outside of work.”
Underlying all of the new findings is the desire for employee trust, Monahan said. “Our data revealed that leaders who allow some level of flexibility (by offering employees hybrid options) are much more likely to have greater trust in their employees.” (After all, the the best companies to work for having happy employees because of the focus on trust and well-being, more than compensation or benefits.)
Monahan encourages leaders to ask themselves whether their hesitation to embrace more flexible and distributed ways of working is, at heart, a trust issue. “We can’t lead the same way we did when we were all working in person,” she hopes bosses will realize. “I encourage people who are in that gray area to have conversations with their teams and figure out how asynchronous work can help them work better.”
In fact, a Upwork Report 2023 found that top-performing companies actually had a wide variety of methods for asking employees to return to the office, but they stood out from their peers in their commitment to flexibility and trust: 62% of these companies worked remotely at least one to two days a week.
Research published by software company Atlassian Earlier this year, Upwork echoed the report, finding that one in three Fortune 500 and 1000 executives whose companies mandate some amount of in-person work say they’ve seen no change in productivity as a result. Those same executives also overwhelmingly agreed that how work gets done matters far more than where it gets done.
In general, the current approach to performance management and measurement is “very transactional,” Monahan said, with bosses focusing on what they can see. Often, measurable performance benchmarks don’t have columns that show where work was done. “These are micromanagement philosophies that boil down to end-to-end management.”
And employees are noticing. The majority of them told Upwork that their employer doesn’t have a clear picture of their productivity; most say they’d be happier and more productive if they had more say in how they’re evaluated.
But in companies that are flexible, performance measurement includes things like creativity, innovation, customer relationships, adaptability and contribution to the company’s strategy. “It’s much more about human-centered, relationship-oriented measures. That’s the reality of today,” she said. “We’re not working in isolation anymore.”
