Target and Starbucks follow Amazon in making move people hate | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

The Covid pandemic showed Americans that work-life balance was actually possible. You can still work really hard and have time to see your family, maybe take a vacation, and sleep somewhat close to eight hours a night.

That was aided by many companies allowing people to work from home. When you take away the daily commute, people get that time added back to their lives.

It’s a move that makes workers happy and binds them to the company. People are much less likely to leave a job that gives them location flexibility.

Even just offering a hybrid, flexible work environment removes stress. If you have the option to work from home, it’s not a big deal if your kid is sick, or you’re getting a new appliance delivered.

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In the past, those events would have required using paid time off for something that does not really require being off.

If you let workers work remotely, it saves that an average of 26 minutes each way (the average daily American commute time). That’s nearly an hour a day they can spend not being in their car, or on a train, subway, or bus.

Starbucks, Target, and Amazon pick the wrong hill to die on

CEOs love to make people come back to the office. In some cases, like with Amazon, this has seemed like a pretty easy way to conduct a layoff without actually having a layoff.

Some workers moved away from the expensive places where Amazon has offices. CEO Andy Jassy knows that at least some of those people will opt to quit rather than come back.

It’s likely that Starbucks and Target, two companies that recently stepped up their return-to-office policies, have used a similar math.

The problem is that while there are positives to being in an office, just as there are positives to working from home, having a strict policy hurts your company in multiple ways.

First, you lose some really good talent. Some people, during the pandemic, just lost their taste for city life. It seems silly to take those people out of your potential hiring pool or actually throw them off your workforce simply because they don’t want to come into an office.

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Yes, someone who wants to be fully remote is likely sacrificing certain opportunities, but they can still clearly offer value.

In addition to limiting your workforce and quite possibly getting rid of some very good people, companies making workers fully return to the office risk building ill will.

People like flexibility. Workers like to be able to make choices about how to best use their time.

Angry employees don’t help any company

Hybrid work situations tend to be the compromise, and that does fix a lot of problems. Even someone who lives fairly far away can probably come into the office for a day or two.

There might even be employees willing to fly from a remote location if they only have to do it on a limited basis.

In the current job market, companies probably have the upper hand. They can use that to install policies that are about control and not truly about collaboration.

It hurts company morale when a good worker leaves because they want a flexible working environment. It’s also not great when the hiring pool limit itself to people willing to commute into an office.

Starbucks has not stumbled because its corporate employees work from home. CEO Brian Niccol correctly identified that the chain’s problems come from its lack of focus on coffee and its willingness to give up being a third place for people.

Target’s problems are little more complicated, but it’s hard to imagine that the “woke” backlash the company has been dealing with has anything to do with corporate employees getting to work from home.

When companies have leverage over employees, they tend to use it. That’s probably good for the startup community and rising companies that are willing to be more flexible.

But Target, Starbucks, and Amazon aren’t doing themselves or their customers any favors by making workers return to the office.

There’s no blanket, correct answer. People working on the product tasting team at Starbucks probably have to be in a room together. Other teams, for whom work is more individual, don’t need to sit near each other just to fulfill a corporate mandate or make a CEO look tough.

It’s not a bad thing to give workers more of what they want. In fact, it will likely save money, since companies that offer flexible situations may very well be able to pay less based on where the worker lives.