--- title: Execs Want You to Return to the Office — Even if They Get to Stay Home description: Most company executives are still working from home — even those asking their employees to return to the office. authors: - name: Adam Hardy role: Lead Data Reporter url: https://money.com/author/adam-hardy/ bio: Adam Hardy is a lead data journalist at Money, where he frequently reports on financial barriers that affect low-income Americans. Adam’s work has also appeared in Business Insider, Forbes, Nasdaq, The Penny Hoarder, Yahoo! Finance and more than a dozen local and regional newspapers. education: University of South Florida, BA, Magazine Journalism at_money_since: 2021 articles: 497 covers: - Business - Banking - Career Advice - Credit - Credit Cards - Debt - Economy and Politics - Education - Health and Wellness - Housing - Identity Theft - Insurance - Investing - Lifestyle - Loans - Mortgages - Personal Finance - Pets - Professional Services - Retirement - Shopping - Taxes - Technology also_seen_in: - The Penny Hoarder - Forbes Advisor - Creative Loafing - The New York Times - The Washington Post - Bloomberg - Harvard Law School - The Federal Register - National Consumer Law Center - CBS News - Becker's Hospital Review - Business Insider - Mother Jones - The Week - Fortune - The Philadelphia Inquirer - National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NAFSAA) - Education Advisory Board (EAB) - The Institute for College Access & Success (TICAS) - This Morning with Gordon Deal - Empower - Reddit social: - https://www.x.com/hardyjournalism - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hardyjournalism/ editors: - name: Kristen Bahler role: Managing Editor url: https://money.com/author/kristen-bahler/ bio: Kristen Bahler has spent more than a decade turning culture, work and consumer spending trends into conversation-driving stories. Today, she leads Money's sponsored content channel and reader-favorite franchises like Best Places to Live and Best Places to Travel. education: Northeastern University, MA Journalism at_money_since: 2016 articles: 52 covers: - Business - Banking - Career Advice - Credit - Credit Cards - Economy and Politics - Education - Health and Wellness - Housing - Identity Theft - Insurance - Investing - Lifestyle - Loans - Mortgages - Personal Finance - Pets - Professional Services - Retirement - Shopping - Taxes - Technology social: - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristen-bahler/ published: '2022-04-25T18:31:42.000Z' modified: '2024-02-18T13:29:45.000Z' section: Business tags: - c-suite - CEO - employees - Executives - News - return to office - Telecommute - WFH word_count: 534 canonical: https://money.com/return-to-office-stay-home/ type: NewsArticle source: structured-blocks --- > **Disclosure:** We research all brands listed and may earn a fee from our partners. Research and financial considerations may influence how brands are displayed. Not all brands are included. [Learn more](https://money.com/page/disclaimer/). ![Mature man talking on his mobile phone, while working from home](https://img.money.com/2022/04/News-CEO-Work-From-Home1.jpg?crop=0px%2C208px%2C2005px%2C1127px&quality=85) Executives and managers want you to come back to the office, but they’re just fine phoning it in from the couch, thank you very much. As calls for [returning to the office intensify](https://money.com/managers-survey-workers-refuse-return-office/), new research suggests that the C-suite might not be practicing what they're preaching. A new study from [Future Forum](https://futureforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Future-Forum-Pulse-Report-April-2022.pdf), a research group run by the workplace messaging app Slack, found that non-executive employees are nearly twice as likely to be working in the office five days a week compared to the executives who oversee them. Surveying more than 10,000 so-called knowledge workers across the U.S., Japan, Australia, the U.K. and Germany, Future Forum found a “troubling double standard:” 35% of non-executive workers are commuting to the office five days a week, compared to only 19% of executives. This is in spite of only 21% of both groups saying they want to work in the office full-time. “Executives say they want to work from the office — but it’s their employees who are being told to show up,” the report states. Future Forum defines “knowledge workers” as full-timers whose work deals with creativity, analysis, data or a combination of the three. Unlike service work or manual labor, these jobs can be performed fully remotely. And by "executives," Future Forum means anyone either in the C-suite (like a CEO or CFO) or with a high-ranking title like president or partner. The report joins a growing body of new research that suggests the return-to-work attitudes among employees and higher-ups are grossly misaligned. In a recent [survey](https://www.goodhire.com/resources/articles/the-great-return-manager-survey/) from the employment-verification company GoodHire, 75% of 3,500 managers polled said they want workers back in the office full-time, citing the distractions of working from home as well as a loss of company culture and productivity. Yet in the same poll, nearly the same percentage of managers (73%) conceded that worker productivity and engagement stayed the same or even improved while working remotely. Last month, job satisfaction fell to [the lowest level](https://money.com/job-satisfaction-all-time-low/) ever recorded by the financial services firm MetLife. Similarly, in the Future Forum study, fully in-office workers were found to be the least happy when compared to hybrid and fully remote workers. What’s more, their work-life balance declined at twice the rate of their partial or fully remote counterparts, and they also reported higher levels of work-related stress and anxiety. Overall, this has resulted in the highest levels of work-related anxiety since the organization launched its first employee survey in the summer of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, with non-executives suffering twice the levels of anxiety stemming from their jobs than executives. Future Forum says that workers who are dissatisfied with their working location and schedule are three times as likely as satisfied workers to say they’ll “definitely” search for a [new gig this year](https://money.com/workers-quitting-no-job-lined-up/). “Leaders need to move away from dictating days in the office and rigid 9-to-5 schedules,” Brian Elliott, executive leader of Future Forum, said in the report, “and focus instead on aligning their teams around a common purpose and leading by example.” ```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://money.com/return-to-office-stay-home/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://money.com" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Business", "item": "https://money.com/business/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Remote Work", "item": "https://money.com/remote-work/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 4, "name": "Execs Want You to Return to the Office — Even if They Get to Stay Home" } ] }, { "@type": "WebSite", "@id": "https://money.com/#website", "url": "https://money.com", "name": "Money", "publisher": { "@id": "https://money.com/#organization" } }, { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": "https://money.com/return-to-office-stay-home/#webpage", "url": "https://money.com/return-to-office-stay-home/", "name": "Execs Want You to Return to the Office — Even if They Get to Stay Home", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://money.com/#website" }, "datePublished": "2022-04-25T18:31:42.000Z", "mainEntity": { "@id": "https://money.com/return-to-office-stay-home/" }, "inLanguage": "en-US", "breadcrumb": { "@id": "https://money.com/return-to-office-stay-home/#breadcrumb" }, "dateModified": "2024-02-18T13:29:45.000Z" }, { "@type": "NewsArticle", "headline": "Execs Want You to Return to the Office — Even if They Get to Stay Home", "articleSection": "Business", "image": [ { "@type": "ImageObject", "url": "https://img.money.com/2022/04/News-CEO-Work-From-Home1.jpg?crop=0px%2C208px%2C2005px%2C1127px&quality=85", "width": 1012, "height": 569, "caption": "News-CEO-Work-From-Home" } ], "author": [ { "@type": "Person", "name": "Adam Hardy", "url": "https://money.com/author/adam-hardy/", "@id": "https://money.com/author/adam-hardy/#author", "description": "Adam Hardy is a lead data journalist at Money, where he frequently reports on financial barriers that affect low-income Americans. 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