Navigating Return-to-Office Strategies in the U.S. and Europe

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Marisa Eikenberry
Welcome back to Long Distance Work, where we help you meet, work and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Marissa Eikenberry, a fellow remote worker. And joining me is my co-host and remote work expert, Wayne Trammell. Hi, Wayne.

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Wayne Turmel
Hello, Marissa. How are you?

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Marisa Eikenberry
I'm great. How are you?

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Wayne Turmel
I am very well, and I'm actually kind of geeked about the show this week.

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Marisa Eikenberry
As you should be. So listeners, we are actually we're talking about Return to Office, which is not the first time that we've ever talked about this before. However, the spin that we're doing today is that we're talking about the differences between how the US handled it and how Europe has handled it or is handling it now. So, Wayne, I want to start off with, by what are the main differences that you've already observed between the U.S. and European countries and how they're handling return to office?

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Wayne Turmel
Yeah, it's interesting because you can kind of get stuck in. And Americans in particular are really bad about this, where, you know, if it doesn't center around the Statue of Liberty, it didn't happen right here, right.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Eastern time zone or bust. Right?

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Wayne Turmel
Right, exactly. And so I've been writing for management issues out of the U.K. for a billion years. It feels like. And I was doing some work for them and some research. And I was fascinated to find that return to office is much more prevalent in Europe and in a lot of other countries. Matter of fact, the US is severely different.

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Wayne Turmel
Okay, in the, number of people, just as a rough number, 70% of people in the UK have gone back to predominantly return to office or not in the UK, but in Europe. Okay, going back to 70% return to office basically full time in the US it's more like 50%.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

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Wayne Turmel
and we're talking about those obviously who can work remotely, of course. Right. I mean, there was this whole thing everybody went home during Covid. Well, no, it was about a third of the population.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right. It feels like a lot more people.

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Wayne Turmel
It feels like a lot more than that because we hang with who we hang with.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

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Wayne Turmel
but 70 to 50 is a pretty significant difference. And so I being me, you know, I remember at five, my grandmother actually stopped babysitting me for a while because I wouldn't stop asking why.

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Marisa Eikenberry
I could act like I'm surprised.

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Wayne Turmel
And I still to this day.

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Wayne Turmel
And for those of you listening in audio only, it is a very short face. Oh.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Absolutely.

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Wayne Turmel
So anyway, I started geeking out and going down the rabbit hole and I figured this was a worthy discussion.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Absolutely. So, okay, we've already discussed 70 to 50. Like that's a really big deal. So why is it that Europe seems to be having way more return to office people than we have? I mean, is it just people fighting back and be like, no, I want to work from home? Or is there something else?

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Wayne Turmel
No, I think there are. I'm going to say three because I'm doing this off the top of my head, okay? B and there are sub reasons to those three reasons, but there are three things that strike me as most obvious. Number one is that most people in European cities live much closer to where they work. Europeans in general do not commute long distances to go to work.

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Wayne Turmel
And by the way, when we talk about the European numbers, there's a giant asterix there that says everywhere but London, right.

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Marisa Eikenberry
You and I have talked about this offline.

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Wayne Turmel
Yeah. Well, we'll we'll talk about why London is the outlier in a moment. But the fact is that most people in Europe do not have the hellish commutes that Americans have. and they are much more willing to use public transportation and all kinds of things. So as a result, the commute isn't as onerous as it is for North Americans.

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Marisa Eikenberry
That makes sense.

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Wayne Turmel
So, you know, the number one reason Americans give for why do I want flexible with because the traffic is killing me, and getting to work makes me miserable. And grumpy and grumpy before I get there. And by the way, when I was home with Covid, I was saving $5,000 a year. And that's a real number for a lot of people.

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Wayne Turmel
So the commute is a big part of that. So the commute comes out of the equation. The second thing, and this is very controversial, and I just talked about this at a conference this week and got some I got some hallelujahs and a lot of uncomfortable squirming in seats.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Oh, I can't wait for the podcast comments on this one. Then.

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Wayne Turmel
Well, it basically comes down to Americans view hybrid work in particular, and the right to work from home as a perk. Okay, it's a perk. It's something they want. And the reason is Americans in particular do not get a lot of perks in terms of work. That is, if you think about the average European worker, their health care is paid for, their education is essentially paid for or extremely cheap.

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Wayne Turmel
there are laws about how many hours you can work and not work much longer.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Vacation time, you.

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Wayne Turmel
Know, more vacation time. All of those things are if you get them through an American company, you get them through negotiation and then bargaining and threatening to quit and all kinds of stuff. Right?

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, they aren't inherently there.

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Wayne Turmel
So there is. Whereas companies are willing to say, yeah, you know what? We're not going to give you health care or, do any of that other cool stuff. But if you want to work in your jammies a couple of days a week, we're good with that, right? And so that's part of it. Right? and that goes to the fact that the work life balance in Europe is generally better.

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Wayne Turmel
People are better at I go to work and I work, and when I leave work, I leave work, and I don't think about it so that they tend to enjoy the time they're there. They take that eight hours and they work, and they get their social contact with their friends, and they work hard and they do their jobs and then it's done.

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Marisa Eikenberry
And then they go home and do it all.

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Wayne Turmel
Over, and then they go, so, you know, the ability to do that is already there. They don't put the same value on it that American workers have put on it.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. We're it's almost like our, our identity and our careers sometimes become our identity in many ways.

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Wayne Turmel
Well it does and you know, we can get deeper into that. But the third reason I'm trying to stick to three, because I said I would, I remembered the third reason as we were just talking, which is the infrastructure for working from home doesn't exist in a lot of places. And I noticed this at the beginning of Covid, where it was really problematic getting people in Asia, for example, to work from home.

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Wayne Turmel
And then I realized why, if you live in Tokyo, you're living in an apartment the size of my garage with no distinct room to work in. Right? You're trying to cut million dollar sales deals on the end of your bed, and that doesn't really work. And it's the same thing. Housing in Europe, especially in the cities, tends to be smaller apartments.

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Wayne Turmel
Even the houses are smaller than we're traditionally used to here in America. And so the idea of having a home office is just physically not possible.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, no, that makes for a.

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Wayne Turmel
Lot of people.

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Marisa Eikenberry
I thought about that.

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Wayne Turmel
I hadn't either. This is why we go down rabbit holes. Because we learn stuff right? so if you think about just those three things, right, the, the structure of the commute going to work, isn't that bad. Well, okay. You know, it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. It ceases to become a bargaining chip when you're talking to your boss.

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Wayne Turmel
You know, if you don't have a lot of perks, it this has become. And by the way, flexible work is the number one thing people are asking for when they apply for jobs. Yeah. So this is far more important here. There is a value on flexible work that just hasn't caught on in much of the rest of the world.

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Wayne Turmel
Well, and then the third thing is, even if I am working from home, can I be as productive? Can I do the same job? And the answer is maybe not. It's not quite as convenient and simple as it is in North America. So those are kind of the obvious things. And there are some really interesting long term impacts on this which we can get to in a moment.

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Wayne Turmel
I did mention that the outlier is London.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right. Well, and I did want to go into something robust before you get into London. So and unfortunately I don't have the data with me right this second. But wasn't there something I want to say? Switzerland, maybe Sweden, that it was like work from home was like a protected thing. Like it was like you had a right to work from home.

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Marisa Eikenberry
How is that different than some of the other stuff that we're seeing?

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Wayne Turmel
Well, what's happening is that as a result of Covid, there was a big rush to codify things like how many hours can your boss expect you to work when you're not in the office? Do the same labor laws that protect you in the workplace. Protect you when you work from home? there was all kinds of that stuff that was kind of rushing to judgment on a lot of that.

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Wayne Turmel
And this the countries that you would expect to do that, right. The companies, the countries that put a large value on work as part of the social experiment. Right. Switzerland. Okay, Sweden, the Nordic countries, you would expect that that's where the first of this would come. I think a lot of that has kind of come to nothing, because so relatively few people are taking advantage of it now.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Or.

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Wayne Turmel
When they do, when they do, they're kind of going along with the stealth work thing, which is going to work for a short period of time. Eventually, people will start running afoul of labor laws and and things, and, you know, somebody will always ruin it for everybody else.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right? Like that happens all the time.

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Wayne Turmel
You know, it's important to remember that every law was put in place, and it made sense to the person who wrote it because they were trying to solve a specific problem. Right, right. so it's interesting to see where it's going to shake out.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right. And so going back to your thing about London, so how was London different?

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Wayne Turmel
London is really expensive and really big. And as a result the commutes are basically London as a work environment is much more like New York or Chicago.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Okay.

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Wayne Turmel
Than it is Amsterdam or Paris.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Okay, that makes sense.

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Wayne Turmel
the problems that you've got with stupid expensive housing and, you know, and you can't even drive your city, your car into the City of London without paying an entry fee every day. It's the only city that has a coverage charge.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Oh my gosh.

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Wayne Turmel
you know, which again, was instituted to solve a specific problem. But there are unintended consequences to this. But basically, London doesn't fit into the European model. the third reason, which also makes sense in London, is that there are so many international companies headquartered there.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

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Wayne Turmel
That.

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Marisa Eikenberry
They're already doing.

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Wayne Turmel
More working. Yeah, well, they're doing flexible work in times of hours and and whatever. And if I have to be in the office at 9:00, I don't want to still be there for the 9:00 at night. Call with the team in Singapore.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Absolutely. And I don't blame them for that right now.

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Wayne Turmel
The impact of all this is really interesting. One of the things is that European cities are already built.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yes.

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Wayne Turmel
They've been there a long time. The footprint of the city is what it is, and as a result, there is less, building going on all the time in these places. And the, the if you look at the square footage of business properties available again, it is something like it's a vacancy rate of somewhere between 7 and 10% versus some American cities, and London, where it's getting close to 50.

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Wayne Turmel
Like even if there are people in a building, they there may not be people on all floors because businesses have kind of shrunk. And some of that is remote work and people not coming in. Frankly, some of it is automation, and we need less people than we needed ten years ago to do the same job.

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Marisa Eikenberry
That makes sense too.

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Wayne Turmel
So all of these factors I found absolutely fascinating. and if you are the CEO of a company, if you're thinking about how do we come up with a policy that makes sense? If we are an international company, how do we come up with a policy that makes sense?

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

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Wayne Turmel
This is all stuff we have to take into consideration. And one of the things I wanted to do was just bring those facts out there and throw them on the table and go, I don't know what you all are going to do with this, but there you are.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right? So with all of this, like looking forward, what trends do you predict will emerge in the workplace because of this? Like, do you think that we're going to continue to see more return to office in Europe? Do you think that we're going to stay about the same in the US?

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Wayne Turmel
I think we will gradually see a rise in remote work, at least part time. We're going to see a rise in hybrid work, in, in all corners of the world. I think we're going to see that, but it's going to be more gradual. It wasn't like the sudden boom in remote. Right? Right.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

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Wayne Turmel
I think we're going to see that. I think we're still seeing attention in North America. And I said this and got more hallelujahs than not the other day when I said, you know, in America, because of this idea of using it as a perk instead of looking at it from the standpoint of the business sense, saying what's best for the business, it's kind of it's not so much a strategy as it is a hostage negotiation.

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Wayne Turmel
Okay. Where the where the company says, how much can we make them come into the office before they quit or won't come work for us? And the workers are going, how much can I avoid going into the office and still draw a paycheck? And they've kind of settled on whatever formula two days, three days a week that they've settled on, which is not really sustainable.

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Wayne Turmel
And more importantly, it's not strategic.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right? Yeah. There's no rhyme for it.

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Wayne Turmel
Well, there's a rhyme and a reason. It's just, you know, it's it's vulgar on poetry, which means nothing to anybody who hasn't read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But it is poetry, and it is the worst poetry in the universe. So that's really where we are. I think we've hit this compromise and we're kind of dealing with it, and long term it's not going to progress and improve.

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Wayne Turmel
until we get strategic about what's going to happen is and somebody actually said this, I can't remember who said it, but it was a quote and it hit all the business papers said this whole return to office remote work, hybrid work thing would just go away. What we need is 20% unemployment, okay? Because then people will be so darn glad to have a job, they'll just shut up and show up.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, I feel like I've also heard that quote before or something like it.

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Wayne Turmel
Yeah. So yeah, that's that's where we are. And and I thought this was a worthy discussion. Right. It's like you will there be kind of a growing acceptance of hybrid work when people realize they aren't going to have to spend all day in their 500 square foot flat? Probably.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

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Wayne Turmel
Right. will Americans get the hang of it and figure it out? Maybe. but their conversations worth having, and you can't make those decisions without context. Absolutely. So that's what we hope. That's what we hope we did today was give you some context.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Absolutely. And I'll make sure to link to your management issues. article inside of our show notes. So for people who want to read even more about this, it will be there. And listeners, thank you so much for listening to the long distance work life or show notes, transcripts, and other resources. Make sure to visit Long Distance Work-Life dot com.

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Marisa Eikenberry
If you haven't yet, subscribe to the podcast so you won't miss any future episodes. And while you're there, be sure to like and review. This helps us know what you love about our show. Feel free to contact us via email or LinkedIn with the links in our show notes, and let us know that you listen to this episode, or suggest another topic for Wayne and I to tackle in a future episode.

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Marisa Eikenberry
We'd love to hear from you.

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Wayne Turmel
Well, and one of the things, if you're kind of asking these questions about what's it like leading remotely, how is leading a hybrid team different? We would urge you to take advantage of our open enrollment programs. The long Distance Leadership Series runs a couple of times a year. You can find out more on the Kevin eikenberry.com site. We would love to have you or talk to you about delivering that content inside your organization.

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Wayne Turmel
Or it's a bring us home.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Absolutely. And you can learn more about that at Kevin eikenberry.com/ldl s. Thank you so much for joining us, Wayne. Thank you for saving me for a second right there. And as Wayne likes to say, don't let police escort you down. Hey.

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Marisa Eikenberry
You.