Most Workers Prefer to Work in the Office, But Need Changes Before They’re Comfortable Returning

An overwhelming majority of US workers feel like they’re more effective when they’re at the office and they’re eager to return. But most won’t feel comfortable unless companies make some changes to policies and office layouts.  

Those are the takeaways from “US Work From Home Survey 2020,” a new report from the Gensler Research Institute, the research arm of global architecture, design, and planning firm Gensler. The survey found than at least half of the 2,300-plus respondents said they’d need stronger policies against coming to work sick, increased opportunities to work from home, and an uptick in office cleaning before they’d feel comfortable coming back to the office.

The finding that workers prefer to work in the office aligns with data that Gensler has collected regularly since 2005. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, workers who had a choice about where to work spent 72% of their average work-week in the office while only 12% worked from home. 

Gensler conducted an anonymous, online survey from April 16 to May 4 of Americans working full time for companies with 100 or more people, who had worked in an office prior to the pandemic who are currently working at home. Respondents represented a variety of industries, geographies, and seniority levels. 

The experience of working at home has, by and large, been a culture shock. Prior to COVID-19, only one in 10 US office workers had regularly worked from home and fewer than a third had flexibility to work from home. Respondents overwhelmingly said that their coworkers were the driving force behind their desire to return to the office: 74% said that people were what they missed most about the office.

“Despite the rapid adoption of virtual collaboration technologies, people still clearly value face-to-face interactions over virtual ones, in many cases, and miss the company of their coworkers,” the report said. But the report continues that for “people to feel comfortable coming back to the office, a combination of more space, more cleaning, and stricter sick policies is required.”

“Broadly, workers are very receptive to a wide swath of both policy and design changes.

Not only do workers want their employers to adopt social distancing practices, they are also open to adopting a shift schedule or a wider variety of working hours,” the report said. “While workers expect less sharing of workstations, they feel less positively about reduced investment in shared amenities and are also wary of being discouraged from using public transit.”