Dive Brief:
- Halfway into 2024, 71% of U.S. organizations have a policy that mandates some in-office work each week, but only 14% require employees to be in the office five days a week, according to new research by CBRE.
- Fifty-eight percent of organizations have a hybrid or flexible office attendance policy requiring one to four in-office days per week, according to the U.S. Office Attendance Policies Midyear 2024 report, which tracked policies for over 340 U.S. companies beginning in January 2023.
- Companies that are fully remote, with no in-office attendance option, have higher average turnover rates, 16.5%, compared with companies that have any other attendance strategy, the report found. Those average turnover rates vary from 10.7% for companies that require an equal mix of in-office and remote work to 12.8% for companies that leave work location up to the employee.
Dive Insight:
The option for remote work is not resulting in companies getting rid of their offices entirely, the survey found, with 99% of respondents saying they have office space available. But policies regarding in-office work continue to evolve.
At the end of last year, 25% of North American companies said they were planning to increase the time required in office compared with six months prior, according to a December 2023 VTS survey of more than 400 business leaders. Sixty-eight percent of Fortune 100 companies had landed on a hybrid strategy for their office workers, averaging three days required in the office per week, with significant variation across industries, according to JLL Research information provided to Facilities Dive in January.
The CBRE report says companies are using a range of policies for hybrid work, including required in-office days, teams and managers selecting the in-office days and employee choice. While 81% have set an expectation for in-office frequency, 19% have designated days required for all employees to work on-site.
Thirty-six percent of organizations with hybrid or flexible attendance policies require three or more days of office attendance per week, with 15% requiring two or fewer days of office attendance per week. Only 6% of organizations required an equal mix of office and remote work, the report says.
A focus group of more than 50 CBRE clients found that few enforce compliance with their office attendance policies, but 78% of focus group participants said they have started to track adherence to office policy “through badge show-up data or on-site manager reporting.”
“The variety of strategies companies are using to implement their office policies illustrates the importance of articulating the value of the office to the organization and providing the training and workplace experience investments to support that vision,” the report states.
Like previous surveys, CBRE’s report found industry variation in attendance policy: Technology and professional services companies are most likely to have “remote-centric” policies, while companies in financial services, life sciences and legal firms have more office-centric policies. The survey found that 76% of law firms and 75% of financial services firms report they have either fully or mostly in-office attendance policies compared with 60% of life sciences companies and 63% of industrial and logistics companies.
Forty-five percent of healthcare companies’ corporate offices and 40% of tech companies report having employee choice policies compared with 28% of all companies in the data set, CBRE says.
