Locatores Caveant! (Employers, beware!)

Here’s a quick link to my recent post on LinkedIn, cautioning about the effects of deteriorating morale on scheduling as the pandemic wanes.

Is it really the case that a 3:2 office-home hybrid schedule for a typical white-collar job produces the best amount of productivity and morale? An HR professional would be in a better position to answer that question than me, but it’s not hard to imagine that it might be so, at least with a lot of people. The real concern, as always, is morale. An employee may well be willing to put up with an actual employment tort if their morale is otherwise high. Take away enough happiness and suddenly a tort they were otherwise willing to put up with becomes a reason for litigation.

In my experience, a very frequent catalyst for morale decline is a new first-line supervisor. Losing the ability to do work at home after two or more years of the pandemic could become another such risk.