A few months ago, the organisation floated an optional survey about return to office. It was slightly biased, and didn’t touch upon certain areas the many WFHers wanted to get feedback on.
For me, another big issue with the survey was that it collected stated preferences, and that too with a big selection bias due to being optional.
The survey findings, summarised, were used as a reason to mandate everyone to come to office at least 2 days a week.
A month of going into office, Covid cases in UK started increasing again. The organisation removed the mandate to come to office in November, making it optional.
This made an interesting scenario to get a pulse of the revealed preferences. Some early observations…
The number of people coming into office has reduced visibly. Drastically. Equally interesting has been the split. Number of people in deep work roles, like developers, have almost completely stopped coming to office. Numbers in pipeline roles – managers of various things and people mostly – are going into office a bit more. There’s also, expectedly, a strong inverse relationship between commute time and office attendance.
Anyone wanting to do an honest, unbiased assessment of people’s preferences about coming to office, now has a good dataset readily available. Just collect and compare data of our security pass swipes for November and October.