Who’s going to win the return-to-office tug of war?

The game of tug of war is only possible under the right conditions. You need an agreed location, some rope, and – most importantly – two forces pulling strenuously in opposite directions.

Whether you realise it or not, there’s a colossal tug of war happening right now in many workplaces around the country. At one end of the rope are employers, usually owners or management who’ve spent decades in their jobs. At the other end, holding on for dear life, are individual employees picking up the slack for the first time.

For most of history, employers have had all the power. But since the pandemic, the paradigm has shifted.Credit: Tanya Lake

And in the centre, providing all the tension, are lofty questions about where, when and how we should work.

Cast your mind back just five years ago. Our cities, homes, offices and schedules looked different to how they do today. Cities were crammed with commuters every weekday, most homes and apartments didn’t have a dedicated space for working, offices were filled with workers from morning to night, and there was little flexibility to break free from those rules.

In fact, when most people asked to work from home (WFH) pre-2020, it was often met with a knowing wink and smile that it was a just thinly veiled code word for not getting much work done at all.

For most of history, employers have had all the power. They decided what location people should work from (for white-collar workers, usually an office close to a CBD), when they had to work (generally 9am to 5pm), and often even how to work (generally in a style that a manager closely oversaw).

The tug of war is here, it’s real, and it’s not resolving itself any time soon.

I know this power dynamic well, as an employer of hundreds of staff over 15 years. If someone wanted to work at the media company I co-founded, their only option was at our offices in Sydney or Melbourne, on our terms.

Then the pandemic happened. Overnight, office workers who could work from home were told to do so. Many of the rules we thought could never be broken were upended and – surprise, surprise – we discovered that they could be altered after all.

The early COVID-19 period, from 2020 to 2022, was the largest global experiment in how we worked and lived. Of course, not every type of worker was able to shift locations, with many tradespeople, hospitality workers, medical professionals and frontline workers required to work in site-specific locations. But for professional workers with a laptop and a will, the WFH change was swift.

It also flipped the power structure, giving many employees the ability to choose where they worked, and, for some, how they worked when managers no longer breathed down their necks. The switch was unexpectedly fast, which brings us to the tug of war we’re in today: employers v employees fighting it out to determine who controls the working conditions of the future.

Some big businesses, like Goldman Sachs and Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) and Tesla, have mandated a five-day return to the office, while others like Atlassian, Airbnb and Shopify require little physical time in the workplace. There’s even a growing number of Australian companies, including ANZ, Suncorp Group and Origin Energy, who have begun tying parts of workers’ annual bonuses to office attendance.

There’s no clear consensus on who’s going to win. I spoke to dozens of experts globally while researching and writing my new book, Work Backwards, and asked them who they thought would emerge victorious in the coming years.

“There’s not going to be a winner, but I see a nudge going towards the worker,” said Dr Michael P. Leiter, Professor Emeritus at Acadia University in Canada. “There’s more empowerment there on the individual level, both attitudinally as well as legally.”

“I’m cautious about how long it [the power shift to employees] will last,” said Dr Jim Stanford, the founding director of the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work. “Eventually, I think most of the labor will end up being back in conventional workplaces under the more immediate watchful eye of the employer.”

“I don’t think any of us know where it’s going to end up,” Kathryn Dekas, former Director of People Operations Future of Work at Google told me. “But one thing I do think is that right at this moment, we are still at the very beginning of this change.”

What we do know is that this tug of war isn’t going to be won any time soon. Neither side will give up their end of the rope easily – instead, we need to appreciate that tension can be healthy and productive on the never-ending journey to figuring out how to work better together.

Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards, Cult Status and Killer Thinking. He co-founded Junkee Media and writes a monthly newsletter called OUTLET that gives One Useful Thing Literally Every Time at timduggan.substack.com

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