Lower than half of UK employees would adjust to full-time return-to-office mandates finds new analysis from King’s School London. Regardless of plenty of headlines from organisations demanding a return the examine, by researchers on the World Institute for Ladies’s Management at King’s School London and King’s Enterprise Faculty, discovered that work-from-home charges have been unchanged since 2022.
Key factors from the analysis:
-
42% of UK employees would adjust to a five-day mandate (down from 54% in 2022)
-
The share of employees who say they’d resign instantly has risen from 5% to 10%
-
Ladies are probably the most resistant – 64% saying they’d search one other job or resign immediately
-
53% of fathers with college age youngsters (aged 6-17) mentioned they’d give up or begin on the lookout for a brand new job
Learn the complete report: Return to workplace mandates: what’s at stake for employees, firms, and gender equality?


-
I liked this TikTok about how M&S received hacked (destroying 10% of the agency’s worth up to now). It was human engineering (pretending that somebody had locked out of the system) moderately than refined hacking
-
Another excuse why I like TikTok, this consumer goes deep on a paper that asks ‘how a lot financial progress can be required for everybody on earth to have a great way of life’ (with stunning outcomes)
-
Priya Parker (creator of The Artwork of Gathering) was on the work podcast Fixable this week speaking about fixing conferences. Parker has a captivating concept of beginning conferences with a magical query (‘what was your first ever live performance and who took you?’, host Anne Morriss provides her personal magical query, ‘inform me a few favorite pair of sneakers’). I like the spirit behind this however I’m simply unconvinced that this strategy works when we’ve got 25 hours of conferences within the diary every week. In my expertise fluffy content material when mixed with calendar overwhelm could make some individuals take a deep breath (and marvel why that is taking place to them). Perhaps I’m completely flawed, perhaps that’s why it really works. Give it a pay attention let me know your ideas within the feedback under
-
Are you able to run an organization like a gig financial system market? I liked this longread about Disco Corp a $20 billion Japanese manufacturing enterprise. It sounds attention-grabbing at first however shortly turns into fairly dystopian
Telle Whitney on constructing inclusive tech in turbulent occasions
I spoke to Telle Whitney who has a brand new e-book Rebooting Tech Tradition (out on twenty seventh Could). Telle Whitney is a uncommon factor – a veteran feminine laptop scientist – and he or she acted as a trailblazer in a much less enlightened period. She went on to cofound the Grace Hopper Celebration of Ladies in Computing. I wished to ask her what she thought of the present retrenchment of DEI applications inside tech companies.
‘We’re going by means of a correction,’ she bluntly acknowledged to me, referencing the political pushback in opposition to variety efforts, however her take is that these initiative received a bit of too broad. ‘At occasions, I really feel just like the give attention to variety went sideways from many firms as a result of it grew to become the top, not the means.’
She argues that the error many organisations made was setting targets for variety. ‘They have been doing these checklists about monitoring the variety of hires, however they weren’t essentially giving all these folks an opportunity to tackle actually necessary initiatives.’
She says tech tradition is rooted in being curious and artistic, a perception that I wished to problem her on, that is steadily nearer to advertising and marketing than actuality. I do know lots of people who work in tech companies and their jobs are extremely bureaucratic. The engineers I do know in large tech companies battle to ship product, in actuality they’re something however modern. We’re typically offered the story that Satya Nadella is an icon of cultural change. Perhaps that’s true however his masterstroke was shifting Microsoft’s enterprise mannequin from a licence (for Workplace or Home windows) right into a recurring subscription mannequin.
Telle recognises these cultural challenges are a actuality of companies getting greater, ‘Firms transfer on in time and sustaining that form of creativity is de facto exhausting.’ She is aware of how fragile progress will be: ‘Tech cultures change over time. They are not stagnant.’
I hoped the e-book can be a name to arms for cultures to be daring and adventurous however the push again in opposition to setting targets for variety gave the impression to be deeply misguided. Certainly I hoped that chatting with Telle she’d be eager to touch upon the adjustments since she wrote the e-book and the withering of tech leaders’ ideas. I used to be sadly disillusioned, I can’t suggest this one.
Rebooting Tech Tradition by Telle Whitney out on twenty second Could 2025

