‘Workers have tasted flexibility’ and now they’re demanding it, Workhuman CEO explains

Workhuman CEO Eric Mosley joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss how the pandemic and the Great Resignation have affected work habits and how greater flexibility has given people a variety of opportunities in the way they work.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: The future of work and what the new normal is going to look like. Eric Mosley is the CEO at Workhuman. Good to have you back. And one of the things you like to point out is that the future of work is hybrid, agile, and interdependent. Help us understand what that really looks like in the real world.

ERIC MOSLEY: Well, to be honest, I think it's-- when we talk about the hybrid workplace, we've been talking about that for two years now. This pandemic has caused the world's workers to retreat into their basement and work from home over video conference for two years. And we've been talking since then about what it'll be like to return and that the return will be some sort of hybrid work environment, where you go in two days a week, three days a week, or four days a week, and work from home the rest of the week.

But at the moment, what it's looking like is just a completely different environment. It feels like, as we come out of the pandemic, workers have tasted flexibility. They've tasted a different form of working, and they're starting to demand that, demand that kind of flexibility and an agile kind of work-life relationship. So HR leaders are trying to design new modes of working that are much more agile and flexible, that have more empathy for the home life of employees, and try to motivate them to do the best work of their lives but do it in a way that's not tied to a desk in an office environment five days a week.

EMILY MCCORMICK: And, Eric, this is Emily here. When we talk about the Great Resignation at a record four and 1/2 million Americans quitting their jobs in November alone, how much-- if you can quantify-- is work from home flexibility a factor in how willing people are to take and stay at a job?

ERIC MOSLEY: Well, the Great Resignation is real. It's a massive, massive disruption to the world of work. And normally in pre-pandemic times, we would have had six million resignations a year. And we saw many months last year where there was between four and five million resignations in a single month.

So we're seeing unprecedented levels of churn in the workforce. There's research that shows 65% of workers are actively looking for a new job. That is a change in working life for VPs of HR, for leaders of companies, that they've never had to grapple with in the past. It's a real, real problem.

And so what's happening is that people, as they work from home for such prolonged periods of time, they're becoming disconnected from their companies, from their colleagues. They're suffering from isolation. There is record levels of mental health issues, as people become disconnected from each other.

There's no community anymore in work. You know, people used to be a part of a community and a culture in work. They used to have a friend at work.

Now after two years of working from home in a much more transactional way, they just don't have that connection anymore. And so they feel isolated, and they start to look for something new. They start to think that the grass is greener on the other side. Maybe a new start will help them build a better sense of belonging.

ADAM SHAPIRO: So did you just make the argument, though-- and I don't want to say the name of the CEO but a conversation I had two months ago, in which this individual said, I want to get my people back to the office for what you just said. Isn't that the argument as to why? We may have this hybrid model but that people should be betting on the office playing a bigger role than perhaps they are right now. I throw that out at you because we saw the leasing report for Manhattan. And you'd think it would have been devastated, and it is actually quite good.

ERIC MOSLEY: Yeah, well, I think the role of the office is going to change. So companies will need offices. But will they be-- will they act like they used to, which is a place where people go in and sit at a desk for five days a week? Not really.

In the future, the office environment will morph into a place where people come together and share their work and their lives. And the office has to become a draw. It has to actually draw people in. In many ways, it's quite like what's happened to malls over the last couple of decades, where in the past you used to go and shop.

Now malls need to draw people in, to give them experiences. The work office now has to take on that task, of drawing people in and getting them to mix and have interaction, which will result in deeper relationships. That's ultimately what the office has to do.

So, yes, every company will have an office. It'll have a place where people can interact. But they'll have to think about what that interaction will be, and it won't just be going to meeting after meeting and doing work. It'll be more than that. It'll be more human than that.

EMILY MCCORMICK: Do you have a sense of who, as workers, want to be working primarily from home or who want to be working primarily from the office, in terms of age group demographics, in terms of industry or job function demographics?

ERIC MOSLEY: Yeah, I think it's all over the map. And we see younger people, for example, will want much more flexibility. They'll want a kind of an agile work-home relationship. And, ultimately, though, we've seen that change over the last two years.

At the start, everybody in the first couple of months-- productivity was high. Workers felt that they were doing an adequate to good job from home, and yet they had all this flexibility. Over time, what most people have seen is that there is a benefit to being around colleagues. You know, creativity, innovation, it thrives when people get together.

That's where the sparks fly. That's where the energy comes from, human beings interacting with other human beings. And so most workers have felt that that's been a deficit in their lives over the past two years and that they don't have the connection that they used to have. So as they go through life, whether they have families, they might have young children, therefore, they might have a greater need to have more flexibility. Or maybe they're just missing their colleagues, everyone is different. Everyone has a different approach to this.

But what most people want is flexibility to design the work experience that suits them. And what companies need to do is to create an environment and create flexibility that works for the company. The company has to thrive as well as the workers, or it's not going to work for anyone.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Eric Mosley is the CEO of Workhuman. We look forward to you coming back because there's so much more to talk about as we go into 2022, diversity and inclusion, women coming back slower, and how do we meet those goals. But, unfortunately, we have to say thank you. Have a wonderful new year.