Third, in Tsipursky’s view, are the so-called quiet quitters. Like the Great Resignation, “quiet quitting” is a term as disputed as it has been deployed, with many describing it as a way for managers to put a label on unfounded worries that workers at home are slacking off. Tsipursky, though, turned the term on its head. It’s not about remote workers detaching from work, but instead about people resisting when pushed toward working conditions they don’t like. They don’t want to go back to the office, but they also don’t feel they can defy the rules outright. Instead, Tsipursky explained, many of these employees express frustration with return-to-office mandates in subtler ways, sometimes by spending their hours in the office avoiding work. “We had a client who noticed after people came back to the office that there was a substantial drop-off in productivity,” Tsipursky said. “The people who are least engaged and least productive are people who can work remotely but have to work in the office Monday through Friday from 9 to 5.”
Lastly there are the skeptics: people who, when they return to the office, bring with them an often justified sense of frustration and resentment. Workers of color, who can feel marginalized within corporate work structures, tend to bristle at return-to-office mandates, Tsipursky said. Surveys show that 81 percent of Black and Asian knowledge workers prefer remote or hybrid work, compared with 75 percent of white workers, in part because they feel that the office is best suited to the needs of white men, and returning to in-person work means returning to microaggressions. Parents, particularly mothers of young children, also tend to be skeptics because they’re better able to juggle professional responsibilities with child care when they’re home. A survey from FlexJobs, a remote-employment search site, found that 80 percent of women ranked remote work as a top job benefit, compared with 69 percent of men. Workers with disabilities and long-Covid symptoms, such as fatigue, might also fall into this category, according to Tsipursky, because while working at home they’re better able to meet their own physical needs.
What Tsipursky’s version of Scripture teaches, in other words, is that return-to-office resistance doesn’t always manifest in identical ways. Workers have distinct reasons for wanting to stay home and different ways of expressing that desire. Tsipursky told Knoblock that a mandate wasn’t the right way to deal with the nearly 30 percent of his workers who didn’t want to come back to the office. The heavy-handedness would worsen resistance and drive potential defectors toward competing employers.
“The key is not to have a command-and-control structure — that’s what so many bosses get wrong,” Tsipursky said. “People will take up invitations to come to the office because they want to.”
“We are so focused on the destination, the final destination,” said Nina Siemaszko, facing two researchers at the Information Sciences Institute seated on the office’s fifth floor, as she prepared to lead their free yoga session on a recent Thursday. Sunlight flooded into the space, as the researchers settled onto mats surrounded by foam blocks, bolsters, straps and blankets. “It’s the journey,” Siemaszko continued.
Emma Goldberg
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