So joining me now to discuss is Andrew Challenger,
he's the senior vice president over at outplacement firm Challenger
Gray and christmas good to have you here. Thanks
so much for joining us. So what companies are
we sort of most concerned with right now? Are
there certain industries less impacted than others when it comes
to these sort of directives? Well, clearly in
the industries like tech finance, these areas where employees
have had a lot of power over the last two
years, but we're seeing a real contraction. We're
seeing a slowdown in the labor market in some of
those areas. That's where you're seeing, employers may
be starting to get a touch of their leverage back
and asking people to come back into the office or
at least info forcing some of the hybrid policies they've
had over the last year or two. Okay,
so Andrew how will this maybe shift bring more workers
back into the office? Could this potentially impact the
overall labor market and the economy when you have a
lot of people who are maybe on the fence,
the great resignation people who are leaving because they wanted
more of these hybrid jobs, Could this actually affect
the labor market? Yeah, I think it might
be the other way around. I think the labor
market might affect the way companies are able to bring
people back. There's this real tug of war like
you set up top it seems to be the biggest
divide between employers and employees right now in the country
. Is this desire for employees to continue working from
home at least some of the time, if not
completely remotely and employers more and more are saying,
we really feel like something's missing, we want people
back, employees have been in the driver's seat for
a year and a half. Uh companies put their
line in the sand of when they expect people to
be back in the office and it comes and goes
over and over again because they're so worried people quit
if the economy and the labor market really start to
cool down significantly, I think we can start seeing
people shifting. Look, you know, gone I
think are the days of like the sort of perks
that you saw employers doing within the office sort of
keep a lot of those employees in the office,
you know, from food to to entertainment to massage
chairs to all those things. It's sort of now
the flexibility was sort of the perk for a lot
of these employees. But is there a world here
maybe where everybody wins? Is it the hybrid model
and how to sort of employers sort of get into
that? Yeah, I think that's an interesting point
. Right? Like a lot of these tech companies
that built these multimillion dollar willy Wonka style facilities that
were supposed to attract employees into the office for long
hours are now the ones that are saying when we
ask our employees what they really want, it's to
stay home and work from their bedroom. And so
that is in some ways maybe the way forward companies
could save money and instead of building these huge castles
to bring people into instead allow people to work from
home and really give them what they want at a
cheaper price. Okay, so how do you,
what's your sort of prediction here for how this is
gonna maybe turnout? Are you expecting a majority of
the U. S. Workforce to be mandated back
to the office by the end of the year or
you're gonna see more companies than stick maybe with you
only have to come in three or four days a
week. Maybe you get Fridays off and that's gonna
be basically the new standard norm here. Yeah,
I think a lot of employees and the employers,
the people that are working the top like the hybrid
model, It's nice to work from home a couple
of days a week while also recognizing there's some benefit
to being in the office. I think we're going
to see a shift back towards the office as the
labor market cools. And we start to see uh
employers get a little bit more power back in the
, I think that's almost inevitable. Okay, but
on the flip side, do you see maybe remote
work growing even further? I mean, look,
there's an incentive for maybe these employers to have more
of these remote workers, Maybe they're freelance or their
Perma Lance and you don't have to pay them sort
of the benefits and all those other things that you
would a regular employee. So do you maybe see
remote work increasing? We've seen it increase a lot
. We saw like this huge increase over the last
two years where the entire workforce remotely so in some
ways can't grow much bigger than it's been. It's
been coming down slowly. I think it will come
down a little bit faster over the next year.
It's not going away though. It's a permanent part
of american workforce going forward. Almost certainly. Uh
I don't think it'll probably grow too much from where
it is now, but we don't know how far
it's gonna drink. Alright. Andrew, Challenger,
Senior vice president at Challenger Gray and christmas Andrew,
thank you so much for joining us. Happy New 00:04:32.259 --> Year.