RTO or Promotion?

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Happy Thursday Office Partiers! 🎉

We got some good ones for y’all this afternoon!

PARTY PLAN đźŽ‰

🙅‍♂️ RTO for a promotion? Workers say no thanks!

🦾 Study: GenAI unlikely to replace jobs

🍴 Bite-size news stories from the labor market

And, of course, MEMES!

MEME OF THE DAY

Return To Office

Workers would pass on promotions to WFH

In case anyone needed proof that workers really like the flexibility of remote work, Glassdoor has it. They also took it a step further to explore how remote work impacts growth opportunities. Over 3,000 workers were surveyed, and Glassdoor released the results this week. Here are some key takeaways:

  • 67% of workers would pass on a promotion to continue working remotely.

  • 49% would accept up to a 20% pay cut if they could work from home whenever they wanted.

  • The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research found that full-time remote work results in 10-20% lower productivity than working fully in person, so the pay cut actually makes sense. Important note: these types of “studies” are often funded by commercial real estate companies that stand to benefit from employees being in the office.

  • Employees who mention remote work in company reviews rate their career opportunities significantly lower than their peers who don’t mention remote work.

  • Quotes from employees in the survey:

    • “Does the promotion come with a 30-50% pay increase and better work-life balance? If not, I’ll stick with WFH.”

    • “I would work in the office for an extra $100k per year but if not, WFH all day.”

AI

Study: GenAI is more likely to support workers than replace them

The Indeed Hiring Lab just dropped another banger. If you’re worried about AI negatively affecting your job security, you’ll like the results of this study. Indeed identified and addressed nearly 3,000 unique work skills; here are the study’s results:

  • The Indeed Hiring Lab assessed the ability of GPT-4o to perform more than 2,800 job skills and found that NONE are “very likely” to be replaced by generative artificial intelligence.

  • Out of five possible outcomes (very unlikely, unlikely, possible, likely, very likely), the majority (68.7%) of skills assessed were “very unlikely” or “unlikely” to be replaced by GenAI.

  • Roughly a quarter of skills (28.5%) could possibly be replaced by GenAI in the future if businesses change some practices and the tools improve.

  • “The distribution of skills at which GenAI is potentially better or worse is not equal across the thousands of occupations performed by millions of workers every day. Many tech roles, for example, require a greater proportion of digital skills that require limited hands-on execution and that are more likely to be able to be done at a high level by a GenAI model.”

  • The occupations with the highest probability of being replaced by AI (”possible” or “likely”) were Accounting (76%), Marketing & Advertising (74%), and Software Development (71%).

chart showing jobs most likely to be replaced by AI

QUICK HITS

Bite-size stories from the week

Here are the most interesting stories from this week, summarized in 1-2 sentences.

Employee sentiment about AI is split along demographic lines. Most are excited about the opportunity to help boost their own productivity, some are worried about it’s impact on job security, and some have “ethical concerns.”

Last week, the CEO of Amazon announced the complete end of remote and hybrid work, ordering all employees back to the office 5 days a week. Now, Hundreds or even thousands of workers are fighting back.

The Department of Labor just released an AI and Inclusive Hiring Framework with the goal of “addressing compliance issues and barriers to accessibility as employers use AI to hire.”

Dozens of Fortune 100 organizations have inadvertently hired workers from North Korea applying for remote jobs. IT workers operating as plants for North Korea’s government are posing as non-North Korean nationals to gain employment with Western companies, according to Mandiant, a threat intelligence and incident response firm.

No need to elaborate on this one… seems like a hard problem to fix!

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