Bosses worldwide, including Amazon and Dell, are scaling back remote work, with employees told to return to the office full-time. While over a third of Australians still work from home, growing skepticism among businesses sparks debate: is 2025 the end of remote work?
For more, Managing Director of Employee Matters Natasha Hawker joins.
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More and more bosses around the world are scaling back on remote work, including industry giants like Amazon and Dell. Employees for both companies have been told they need to return to work five days a week in the office. But despite over a third of Australians still working from home, many businesses remain skeptical, leaving some professionals to wonder, could 2025 be the year that remote work is officially a thing off the past? Well, for more, we're joined now by managing director of employee matters, Natasha Hawker. Welcome to Unitasha. Okay. So seven out of 10 employees at Amazon say that they're looking for work elsewhere. Yeah, there's a lot of it. I think there is a lot of people that are returning at that bigger end of town. CBA is another one, New South Wales Government. But yes, you're right. In Australia, ABS did some statistics. It said 36% of employees usually work from home, and that's off a high of 40% back in August 2021. And most of those employees are really keen to keep that working from home. And I can't help but think maybe with some of these large rental leases, that's causing some of the bigger end of town to push their workers back to work rather than it being about productivity. Correct. Okay. So you are a big advocate for working from home. Why? I just think there are enormous benefits. And what we've done by allowing our employees because of COVID to work from home, it's very difficult to put that genie back in the bottle. Those employees really want that. We have, when we recruit for our clients, we have candidates that will not go to an interview unless they've seen the working from home policy that says they can work from home. Interesting when you quoted that at its peak in 2021, August 2021, 40% of people were working from home. Now it's 36. So it's a very small amount less. Do you suspect that despite these big companies that were hearing about Amazon and Dell, that others have seen the writing on the wall and they don't want to lose their employees? I think that's very much the case, Mon. I think there's a lot of cases where for this, if you forced your employees to come back to work, there was a survey done by Randstadt that said, if you were forced, would you return to the office? 41% said they reluctantly go back. 26% said they would be looking for hybrid roles and 6% said they would resign without another job to go to. That sounds like a mutiny to me. So you risk losing your top performance and we're still in an incredibly tight applicant market. You do not want to lose your high performance. So I think a lot of companies are going, you know what? It's here to stay. Yeah, okay. Just to be clear though, you can be forced back into the office. Is that right? Yes, you can. All right. Thank you very much, Natasha. Good to chat. Thank you. (whooshing)
