Return to office: Employees more likely to work in-person than executives

A new report found that employees are much more likely to return to in-person work than their bosses, and that work-related stress is at its highest since summer 2020.

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- Offices across the country, they are open and getting employees just like us here at Yahoo Finance have returned to work. But some have noticed that certain coworkers are still missing from the workplace. And that happens to be their bosses. So here to let us in on some of these return to office trends, we want to bring in Kerry Hannon. And, Kerry, I know you were looking into this. What's going on?

KERRY HANNON: Well, I tell you it just might not be the boss who's showing up five days a week for full-time work. In a recent study, a new report by the Future Forum of 10,000 workers globally, it showed that twice as many non-executives are showing up to work each day. So, I mean, this is a bit of a disconnect. And I'm telling you what, they're not happy about it.

People are saying that it is creating so much stress and anxiety for them. I mean, in fact, they're saying it's worse than it was in 2020. So, I mean, this is significant. And the thing is the buzzword is it's not like they don't want to go to work or they never want to go to work. It's just they want this, this one thing. They want flexibility. Flexibility.

And they're not talking so much about where they work, which everyone gets hung up on location, but it's really when they work. People really want to have some control over their schedules. And I think that's critical coming out of the pandemic. They've really had a lot of time to figure this out. And they feel like they have absolutely no control of adjusting their schedules. So it's a really important issue to think about because we think it's remote work, but it's really having control of your schedule.

- When you think about that in a tight labor market, I mean, what do these findings then mean for employers?

KERRY HANNON: Well, that's a great question because it has a huge impact because about a big portion of these workers say that they're going to start looking for a new job in the next year. And, oh my gosh, if you just look at the jobs numbers that came out this week, there were 4.5 million people who quit their jobs in March. So this is not stopping. And it's something that employers really need to pay attention to what they can do to retain these great workers they have.

- All right. Kerry, thanks so much for joining us. Kerry Hannon.