Most Employers Don’t Consider What Employees Want When Determining Hybrid Work Strategies

Flexibility is ranked as a leading driver of talent attraction and retention, yet only 33% of large organizations consider employee input when determining where work is performed, according to a new global study by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp).

Only 25% of organizations surveyed for the study take employee feedback into account to decide when work should happen.

But high-performance organizations are 3x more likely to consider employee input in such decisions than their lower-performing counterparts.

Outlined in the new study—Flexibility or Flight: Hybrid Strategies to Attract and Retain Talent—which gathered perspectives from 1,199 executives and employees located in 70 countries, explores the question of how to best manage hybrid work. The research found that some hybrid work models are too rigid, inadvertently creating risk when it comes to keeping top talent.

True flexibility

The study found that organizations unwilling to maximize and broaden the use of flexibility are likely to face significantly higher rates of employee turnover as workers move to companies that offer flexible work arrangements.

What workers want is true flexibility—the ability to work when and where it suits them best.

The study found that high-performance organizations are 3x more likely to provide employees flexibility to choose where one works, the number of days worked in a given setting, and the times during the day that work gets done.

True flexibility for onsite workers

While onsite workers by definition may not be able to work remotely, this population should not be overlooked. The study covers some practices that provide a degree of flexibility to on-site works. For example, high-performance organizations are 2X more likely to allow workers to stagger hours within a fixed schedule.  

The Flexibility or Flight: Hybrid Strategies to Attract and Retain Talent study—which includes research-based recommendations, corporate examples, and insights from executives at Zillow, Cisco, Elkay, PwC, Verizon, 3M, ManpowerGroup, and Microsoft—is available today exclusively to i4cp members and can be downloaded here.

We thank our survey distribution partners, which included Human Resource Executive, HRM Asia, National Human Resources Association – Los Angeles, iVentiv, The Ayers Group, and The Talent Company.