A sentiment survey shows a clear intent by regional management in various industries to return to legacy work models. Are they right to do so? finews.asia takes a look.

Management in Asia seems intent on getting rid of the digital nomad. At least that seems to be one of the main messages from a survey by global commercial real estate management company CBRE released on Monday.

Its 2023 Asia Pacific Officer Occupier Sentiment survey led with a stark finding. Corporate management wants higher office attendance. They initially coaxed it using the relatively reasonable rationale that office work boosts collaboration and engagement but that was somewhat belied by a different justification shortly later.

«Several global firms have announced tighter policies covering hybrid working in recent months. As the economy and job market weaken, some firms will see this an opportune moment to crank up pressure on staff to return to the office,» CBRE wrote.

Significant Discrepancies

At face value, it looks like they are trying to put a positive spin on what are clearly negative underlying drivers. Looking more closely at the percentages and comparing them between different regions also provides interesting similarities – and significant discrepancies.

The percentage of managers trying to get more employees to return to offices for all regions was roughly similar, with almost half of the respondents in Asia (48 percent) putting more focus on achieving that, followed by Europe at 43 percent and the US at 40 percent.

After that, the numbers differed markedly. Regarding the quotient of managers who were not intent on changing worker attendance, the US led with almost half (also 48 percent), followed by Europe at 43 percent. Where was Asia? At only 14 percent.

New Working Norms

The key difference here is that the level of remote work in the US is already exceedingly high. And even though it is - almost half of managers still don’t see a need to go and change anything at all.

Moreover, those numbers are supported by a 2022 McKinsey survey that shows in the US, 35 percent of all respondents said they had the option to work from home five days a week, with 58 percent, or a clear majority, being able to do so at least one day a week.

More importantly, it said that 87 percent of those offered the choice took it. That does indeed seem to be pointing to some kind of new working norm, as McKinsey then indicated.

Post-Pandemic Trend

That begs the question as to whether managers in Asia are simply trying to do little more than return to obsolete ways of working.

Another more recent survey conducted by Gallup in March 2023 seems to undercut their thinking and back up the McKinsey view. In it, 82 percent of companies polled indicated they offered remote work. 

Given it was only 57 percent in 2021, it appears to be a trend that has continued to grow strongly well after the pandemic. Putting people back into offices, as regional management is apparently intent on doing, seems to be missing the point.

Possible Inflection Point

As finews.asia has recently argued, something strange seems to be happening in cities across Asia. Before the pandemic, dense, highly urbanized cities marked by the world’s tallest skyscrapers were signs of unfettered, ascendent regional economic progress.

But times have since changed and investment in real estate has fallen to levels not seen since the early 2010s while flagship buildings in places like Hong Kong remain empty or underused.

As we indicated then, larger forces that we can't yet fully understand might be at play.

Questioning the Model

We could be at an inflection point, with many instinctively simply starting to question the typical Asia-based model of high-rise offices and apartments linked up to mass transit stations and malls.

In other words, the main question seems to be whether the digital nomad will outlive the Asian skyscraper - or vice versa.