The language we use for post-pandemic ways of working has been evolving rapidly. Historically dull words like “office” now elicit emotional responses, new terms like “hybrid work” have inconsistent definitions, and many leaders got lost looking for the “metaverse.” The media also revived a phrase that feels highly relevant on the eve of the U.S. presidential election: vote with your feet.
Microsoft’s WorkLab said, “Employees everywhere are rethinking their ‘worth it’ equation and are voting with their feet.” McKinsey & Company invoked the phrase to describe women leaders facing barriers to upward mobility. The New York Times imagined companies sprouting legs when relocating headquarters across state lines.
Most readers will understand the metaphor but may not know its origin and early uses. Mobility matters in the future of work, so understanding the phrase’s history can enable more intentional movement between workplaces.
Because your vote always matters, whether with presence or in politics.
Ancient Empires Vote With Their Feet
“Voting with your feet” originates from two examples in ancient Rome.
The first is the secession of the plebeians, where commoners staged a walkout in protest of unfair treatment by the ruling class. The second involves Roman senators physically moving within the chamber to show support or opposition to proposals.
In modern politics, dissenting from party norms is often called “crossing the aisle,” a movement reminiscent of the Roman practice.
Moving from a senatorial debate to a literal battlefield, the phrase’s contemporary usage is linked to Communist leader Vladimir Lenin’s description of Russian soldiers deserting the Tsar’s army. Years later in 1958, Time magazine facetiously noted, “East Germans…still vote with their feet by fleeing West at the rate of 2,000 a week.”
Back To The Future: Vote With Workplace Presence
In today’s workplace, the concept of voting with presence has been applied in various situations related to workplace flexibility and remote work. However, there have been few overviews on how specific decisions to move between different workplaces—or to stay in one place—can impact company culture.
Here are five such examples.
Vote To Give Two Days, Not Three
According to FlexIndex, approximately one-third of companies operate in a hybrid model, strongly requesting a minimum number of office days per week. A minority of this cohort has specific days in their policy—e.g., Mondays and Wednesdays instead of any two days per week.
In either case, most executives want three days of presence per week, while most workers will only give two.
Many employees feel more productive working from home and see little value in commuting. This choice suggests that the company’s office culture may not be attractive enough to secure attendance for three days each week.
There has been little fear of such autonomy because only a few companies seeking near full-time office presence have threatened to terminate employees who do not comply with new policies. And that brings us to the second category.
Vote To Quit For More Flexibility
Amazon is the most recent and extreme public example of a full-time office mandate, complete with the threat of termination for failure to comply. CEO Andy Jassey enumerated several reasons for this sudden policy change, but it appears to have negatively impacted employee morale and willingness to stay.
Anonymous employee sentiment platform Blind recently reported that 91% of Amazon professionals surveyed are dissatisfied with the recent decision, and 73% are considering leaving the company.
This extension of The Great Resignation, which started early in the pandemic, may be the most extreme version of workers voting with their feet and may send a strong message across industries over time about the sensitivity to changes in flexible work policies. Such a severe cultural disconnect between executives and employees could take years to repair, but how quickly this collective choice impacts the largest and most influential employers remains to be seen.
Vote To Find A Better Seat In The Office
For employees who like their current roles and do commute periodically, the next category of presence-based voting is transforming office design and activation. The increasing prevalence of mobile technologies and desk-sharing programs allows employees to change their work environment throughout the day.
Workers may move into different functional zones in the office to feel more productive, e.g., quiet areas, high-tech meeting rooms, or community spaces. Activity-based office configurations facilitate this flexibility, but companies without modern designs may find employees improvising by, for example, rearrange furniture.
Vote To Seek Out A Third Place
Workers who find their home or office unsuitable for their tasks may seek “third place” options like coworking spaces or local cafés. The availability of these locations has surged since the pandemic, with more companies offering benefits or reimbursements for their use.
By embracing a network of local workspaces, companies can enhance engagement through choice and autonomy while also reducing real estate expenses by decreasing dedicated office space.
Nodding to the political metaphor inherent to voting with one’s feet, allowing your workforce to leverage third-place options is similar to promoting something more inclusive and equitable than a two-party system.
Vote To Lead By Example And Be The Amenity
The final example of demonstrating preference with presence in the workplace is for the leaders and managers, whose footsteps land with outsized cultural impact.
In reimagining the purpose of the office, most companies emphasize the need for employees to be together to do things harder (but not impossible) to achieve well in a distributed environment, e.g., learning, socializing, and feeling connected to a greater vision and mission. Accomplishing these goals requires organizational leaders to be visibily working alongside their teams.
Forbes senior editor Jena McGregor recently confirmed that “one common complaint about hybrid work policies, generally, is that young workers go to the office but find managers don’t attend, meaning they can miss out on in-person mentorship, training or development.”
Organizations that want employees to vote “yes” to the office more often should focus their efforts on the corporate senators, so to speak.
Vote For A Vision Beyond Hybrid Debates
Flexible furniture systems, immersive technologies, and AI-powered, skills-based workforces are accelerating the pace of change in the workplace. Accordingly, the number of “elections” we’ll have to make about our day-to-day work environments will increase exponentially.
Better understanding the history of humans voting with their feet will hopefully inspire leaders and individual contributors alike to be more intentional about where, when and how to work. Presence is an uncommonly powerful vote for culture change.