COMPANIES are urging their staff to return to office after almost two years of working from home necessitated by Covid-19, employers said.

They said offices had not become a thing of the past and were still relevant and important to many companies.

Organisations craved heading back to the “old normal” after the unprofitable “new normal” working style, they said.

However, they also admitted that the period in which management was forced to experiment with work-from-home (WFH) arrangements and adopt technology tools did augur well for company growth.

Malaysian Employers Federation (MEF) president Syed Hussain Syed Husman said that business recovery was the main focus for many companies now.

He said many firms turned to WFH during the epidemic as it was the “only option available”.

Syed Hussain said the gradual resumption of physical operations seen today has yet to be full-blown amid fears of an Omicron variant spread.

A return to office has been further restrained with the devastating floods last month in several states, Syed Hussain said.

“With the return of employees to workplaces, employers would expect employees to perform their tasks and collaborate as a team, to bring the business to at least pre-pandemic levels,” Syed Hussain said.

And while a return to the office brings back the stress of commuting, it also removes some remote working challenges.

These include issues of poor internet connectivity at home, and helping employees who felt there was no clear separation between work and private life during a WFH situation.

“Employees themselves prefer to work from the office,” he told The Malaysian Insight.

“Having stayed at home for almost 18 months, many felt locked up and experienced many issues with social interactions and stress.

“It was also harder for young workers to gain experience from more experienced colleagues without face-to-face interactions.”

Syed Hussain said that WFH could be successful if employees were comfortable, organised and healthy to maintain their productivity at companies’ acceptable levels.

Leaderonomics co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Roshan Thiran agreed with Syed Hussain that many employees have been cooped up at home for an extended time.

“There is a rush to get away and be at the office where there is comradeship and connection.

“There is some benefit to having people meet face-to-face, but not necessarily daily,” he told The Malaysian Insight.

Roshan believed that an ideal “new normal” for employees was where they get to WFH or at the office on specific days.

Traditional bosses

Having said so, Roshan did not rule out that many chief executive officers in organisations were still traditional in their work etiquette and style.

“And there are some employees who prefer to be at the office full-time, with fewer distractions and less of a need to be self-disciplined,” Roshan said.

As for what begets productivity, he said it was when there was less time wasted travelling to office and meeting, while continuing to have people engagements.

“And technology has to be fully leveraged to enable and optimise productivity while WFH,” he said.

Roshan also shared the ritual and bonding digital tools built by his social enterprise such as Budaya.app, Happily and necole.tech that could help with company engagements.

Recruitment firm Hiredly’s founder and CEO Derek Toh believed that WFH is not yet dead in the water.

“Companies are now swinging back and forth between policies to figure out how best to balance productivity and employee retention,” he told The Malaysian Insight.

He agreed with MEF’s point of view that a vast majority of industries are now eager to recover their severely or mildly declined businesses during the pandemic.

“This is what drives a lot of the companies to call for employees to return to the office, in an effort to get back to the ‘old normal’ as closely as possible,” Toh said.

Most companies that allowed WFH practices even before the pandemic had navigated the lockdowns much better than those doing it for the first time, he said.

“So the effects on productivity are mixed, depending on the management’s approach to handling how employees WFH,” Toh said.

Productivity results were also based on the nature of business where the obvious ones that experienced growth included internet-based companies, he added.

“Jobs that rely heavily on human interaction, such as sales (apart from telesales) and marketing, should ideally not be done from home.

“Many non-executive or service-based jobs, such as food and beverage and retail, mechanics and plumbers, also require employees to be physically present in the workplace,” Toh said.

According to the Statistics Department’s findings in a special survey on Covid-19 effects on economy and companies, 33.5% of employees were working from home.

About 44.2% took full-time or half paid leave, 19% had to reduce their working hours, 16.5% took unpaid leave and 3.8% faced termination.

At the same time, 67.8% of firms stated there were no sales or revenue during the movement-control order.

About 42.5% of companies also said to require more than six months to recover, while 1.9% said they are expected to close down.

The special survey was done among 4,094 companies from April 10 till May 1 last year, at various stages of the national recovery plan. – January 11, 2022.