Does your boss let you decide where you work? 33% of employees say no

“You can’t stay home in your pajamas all day.” 

New York City mayor Eric Adams made headlines about a year ago with that blunt message to municipal employees. His goal: to make sure everyone knew about his plans to wind down work-from-home arrangements in favor of a large-scale return to the office.

Or maybe not. More recently, Adams has shown greater tolerance — and perhaps even appreciation — of municipal workers’ preference for hybrid work schedules. Now Adams is telling city agencies to “come up with creative ways of having flexibility.”

New York’s city government isn’t the only place struggling to find consensus about the relative merits of working onsite, remotely or in a hybrid blend. All across the United States, workers and employers are still jostling about where everyone’s work ought to be done.

Vivid evidence of this split emerges in a new edition of LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index which surveyed 18,558 professionals in the U.S. from Dec. 3, 2022 to Feb. 10, 2023. As the table below shows, 33% of U.S. professionals disagree with the statement that “my manager lets me decide where to work.” 

Tensions are especially intense for part-time employees, with 40% of them indicating that they don’t get to decide their work setting. Many full-time employees are chafing, too, with 36% of them indicating that they can’t pick where they work, either.

By contrast, people with looser ties to their employers feel they have more control over where they work. Specifically, smaller numbers of contractors (21%), freelancers (19%) and the self-employed (11%) say they’re in the unpleasant situation of not being able to choose their positions on the remote/hybrid/onsite spectrum.

What types of workplaces are most prone to these sorts of tensions? Media coverage lately has focused on giant enterprises where chief executives are pushing hard for a return to the office — only to meet resistance from employees.

At Disney, for example, chief executive Robert Iger ignited controversy when he told employees to be in the office four days a week starting next month. That didn’t sit well with at least 2,300 employees, who signed a petition opposing a forced return to the office.

As The Washington Post recently reported, Disney’s petitioners argued that loss of choice would lead to “forced resignations among some of our most hard-to-replace talent and vulnerable communities” while “dramatically reducing productivity, output, and efficiency.”

Despite such high-profile examples at giant companies, LinkedIn survey data shows that  people working at mid-market employers (with 201 to 1,000 total employees) actually feel most put upon.

The Workforce Confidence survey found that 36% of mid-market employees disagree that their manager lets them decide where they work. That was the highest showing by company size, ahead of 33% for small businesses (200 or fewer employees) and 33% for large enterprises (more than 1,000 employees).

Take a close look at executives’ announcements concerning a return to the office, and you’ll see a steady belief that more gets accomplished when everyone is onsite. As Amazon CEO Andy Jassy put it: “When you’re in-person, people tend to be more engaged, observant, and attuned to what’s happening in the meetings and the cultural clues being communicated.”

Employees agree on the power of “being there,” although they express this concept in quite different language. Some 58% of respondents to the Workforce Confidence survey agreed with the statement: “It is important to be seen in person by my company’s leadership team.”

Belief in the importance of being seen in person was especially high among full-time workers (61%). It was lowest among freelancers (44%). 

Methodology

LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index is based on a quantitative online survey distributed to members via email every two weeks. Roughly 3,000 to 5,000 U.S.-based members respond to each wave. Members are randomly sampled and must be opted into research to participate. Students, stay-at-home partners and retirees are excluded from analysis so we can get an accurate representation of those currently active in the workforce. We analyze data in aggregate and will always respect member privacy. Data is weighted by engagement level to ensure fair representation of various activity levels on the platform. The results represent the world as seen through the lens of LinkedIn’s membership; variances between LinkedIn’s membership and the overall market population are not accounted for.

Allison Lewis and Sharon Resheff from LinkedIn Market Research contributed to this article