Companies with return-to-office mandates are hemorrhaging female talent

Then there’s what we’re learning: No single company can escape the impacts of eschewing distributed work and expect to maintain their entire staff. Upwork, a freelancing platform connecting companies with freelancers, recently released a string of reports finding the outsize effect return-to-office mandates have had on women in the workforce. The TL;DR version: It’s been awful for them.

“The system is not working for women, so they’re opting out” in favor of alternative, flexible career paths, Kelly Monahan, the managing director of Upwork’s research institute, told Fortune. 

Indeed, per Upwork’s new research, nearly two-thirds (63%) of C-suite leaders whose companies have mandated an office return of some sort say the policy has led to a disproportionate number of women to quit. 

About the same share of executives told Upwork they’re struggling to fill those vacant roles—and more than half agree that their hemorrhaging of women employees tanked company productivity. (They surveyed 2,500 global workers, including over 1,500 C-level executives.) 

The problem didn’t begin with the remote-work revolution of the 2020s. “We’ve lost decades of female workforce participation leading up to the pandemic,” Monahan, who holds a PhD in organizational leadership, said. The U.S. lags behind other major economies in creating a workforce that actually works for women at all. “We still have a culture that favors the people who built it originally.”

America’s working-women problem

Don’t let the news of Vice President Kamala Harris’ candidacy for president distract you from the underwhelming state of women’s power in U.S. workplaces. Per the Center for American Progress, over the past 30 years, every G7 nation saw at least 10% growth in working women. The same metric remained mostly flat in the U.S., which CAP estimated will cost the U.S. 5% of potential GDP growth.

So the problem predates the Industrial Revolution, but today’s state of affairs—namely, an across-the-board office return—is still disproportionately hurting women. “I’m very bullish on alternative career paths, because we don’t have the same social safety nets of other G7 countries,” Monahan said.

Searching for avenues of greater career control, many women (over half, in Upwork’s survey sample) have taken to freelancing; nearly 30% of those women said no amount of money would lure them back to full-time work. (To be sure, Upwork itself is a freelancing marketplace, which relies on a steady stream of new freelancers seeking contract work to remain profitable.)

The productivity paradox remains, despite years of evidence

While conducting her research, Monahan sought to determine whether flexibility is “a perk or table stakes in job design” and whether “remote work is a perk or just how we work now.” Both are still paramount questions, even as we near the five-year mark since the world locked down due to COVID.

“There’s nothing that correlates higher in-office time with better performance; in fact it’s the opposite,” she said. “That doesn’t mean you have to be 100% remote—and women aren’t always asking for that—just time for life outside of work.”

Workers’ desire for trust underpins all the new findings, Monahan said. “Our data has found that leaders who enable a level of flexibility—give people hybrid options—are way likelier to trust their people more.” (After all, the best companies to work for have happy employees due to the emphasis on trust and wellbeing, more so than pay or benefits.)

Monahan encourages leaders to consider whether their hesitance to embrace more flexible, distributed ways of working are, at the core, issues of trust. “You can’t lead the same way as when we were all in-person,” she hopes bosses realize. “I encourage people in that gray space to have conversations with their teams and figure out how asynchronous work might enable better work.” 

Indeed, a 2023 Upwork report found that high-performing companies actually had a wide variance for asking people back to the office—but they stood out among their peers in their commitment to flexibility and trust: 62% of those companies worked remotely at least one to two days per week. 

Research published by software firm Atlassian earlier this year echoed Upwork’s report, finding that 1 in 3 Fortune 500 and 1000 bosses whose companies mandate some amount of in-person work say they’ve seen zero productivity change as a result. Those same execs also overwhelmingly agreed that how work is done far outweighs the significance of where it happens. 

Generally, today’s approach to performance management and measurement is “all very transactional,” Monahan said, with bosses focusing on what they can see. Often, measurable performance benchmarks have no column for where the work was carried out. “Those are very butts-in-seats, micromanaging philosophies.” 

And workers notice. The majority of them told Upwork that their employer doesn’t have an accurate understanding of their productivity; most say they’d be more satisfied and productive if they had more of a say in how they’re assessed. 

But at companies that embrace flexibility, performance measurement includes columns like creativity, innovation, customer-relationship building, adaptability, and contribution to company strategy. “It’s much more about human-centric, relationship-oriented measures at the forefront; that’s the reality today,” she said. “We don’t work—anymore—in isolation.”