What is best for your workplace? Remote, on-site or hybrid?

A new survey is providing some intriguing insight into what works best. After speaking with 5,300 HR, IT and business decision-makers from nearly 20 countries, cloud computing company VMware found that 87% of respondents who can work anywhere and 88% who work in the hybrid model say they have higher job satisfaction — compared to 56% of those working only at the office.

“A lot of employees realize that they can get a lot of their work done from home. So, if organizations want them to sit in the hour-long traffic every day, there should be a better reason than ‘Please come sit at your desk and answer emails and do video calls’ — because you can do that quite as easily from home,” said Lindsay Coffin, interim associate director of human capital at the Conference Board of Canada.

On the other hand, nearly two-thirds think that their organization is more innovative when people are in the office.

This is even more true for fully remote or “anywhere-work” respondents, with 75% saying in-person time leads to more innovation, compared to 64% of hybrid employers and 69% of office-only respondents.

The wrong way

But another survey from Australia is showing forcing workers back in won’t fly. Research from Future X Collective found that one in two Australians (54%) don’t intend to return to the office full-time, with almost a quarter (24%) reporting that they’d actively seek out another job if their employer insisted on an in-office return.