Study: Vaccines & Hybrid Work in the COVID Era

The COVID-19 pandemic knocked the entire globe back on our heels over the past year, but thanks to the widespread availability of multiple vaccines in the U.S. there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel. Even with that glimmer of hope, experts have recently said that “reaching herd immunity is unlikely” given the widely circulating coronavirus variants and vaccine hesitancy. Instead, it would be a manageable threat for years to come. With the virus here to stay, what we thought of for decades as “normal work” may look a little different.

Should workplaces enforce a vaccine policy before employees can return to work? How have employers handled the transition to remote and hybrid work? Has working from home had a positive effect on workers that they now prefer a permanent policy in place that allows more flexibility?

As we come out of this monumental time in history, Comparably aimed to take the temperature of workers on these specific topics. More than 3,500 employees were surveyed timed to the one-year anniversary of the COVID pandemic in the U.S. (Feb. 26, 2021 through March 26, 2021). We discovered that if the old normal is restored, it will be a rather divided workforce returning to their desks and tchotchkes they haven’t seen in over a year. Any forced policy of a COVID vaccination before a return to the office will be met with some potentially serious pushback from those less concerned about catching and spreading the virus, and seemingly more concerned about the potential ill effects of the vaccination itself. The divide can be seen across lines of ethnicity, age, and region.

Many approve of the jobs their companies have done in transitioning to remote or hybrid work (tech more so than other industries), with most employees seeing the flexibility that often comes with it as essential to how they plan to work moving forward. If anything, this proves that humans can adapt fast in a crisis. As long as that light at the end of the tunnel isn’t another train, people seem to be solidifying their own ideas of what the “new normal” is as the pandemic starts to break.

Respondents were asked:

• Should workplaces enforce a COVID vaccine policy before employees can return to the office?
• On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your organization’s transition to a remote or hybrid work culture?
• How important is it for you to have the flexibility of working remotely?

The results:

• Asian/Pacific Islander respondents were more than twice as likely to say a COVID vaccine policy was necessary as African-American/Black respondents, 83% to 34%. The range of responses along ethnicity lines suggests the kind of deep divide on opinion fomented by over a year of immersion into the most fraught political environment this country has arguably faced since the late 1960s. Falling in between Asians/Pacific Islander and African-American/Black were Hispanic/Latino respondents, with two-thirds of that group saying a COVID vaccine policy at work was necessary; and both the Caucasian and “Other” respondents, which fell close to the 50% mark.

• The younger the employee, the more likely the response was affirmative to the COVID vaccine question. The lowest amount of affirmative responses came from the 51-55 age group. This flies in the face of science, which puts older workers at much greater risk of facing serious complications from contracting the virus. Results here may indeed be again of a political nature, with the split between older and younger workers indicative of the heightened tension between generations. Major differences in the ways that younger and older people consume media in 2021 are also surely to blame for the nature of some of the responses.

• The more educated the respondent, the more likely the response that a COVID vaccine policy is necessary. This is what one might expect to see, with those who have reached higher levels of education increasingly concerned about the practical necessity for a vaccine policy, and less-educated individuals seemingly less informed or concerned about contracting or spreading the virus.

• Entry-level employees are slightly more convinced that a COVID vaccine policy at work is a good idea.While all responses were within a 10-point range, again we see that the people who are presumably the least susceptible to grave complications from the virus are the most positive about a COVID policy before a return to office work. There also may be a chance that entry-level workers have less of a sense of the landscape at their office and have been working remotely this far, and therefore are more hesitant about moving to an office model.

• Respondents in cities like Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco were nearly twice as likely to say a workplace COVID vaccine policy was necessary than respondents from Denver and the south like Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. Here we see some of the same extremity of variance to responses that we saw among ethnicity groups, once again underlining the increasingly deeply-drawn battle lines that currently exist across the vast American landscape.

 

Four Out of Five Respondents Approve of the Job their Company Did in Transitioning to a Remote or Hybrid Work Model. 

• Four out of five respondents approved of the job their company did in transitioning to a remote or hybrid model. Since most people do not have a similar transitional work experience to compare to, some of the positivity here may be attributable to the initial experience of remote work itself as opposed to office work.

• Responses broken down by ethnicity groups show a range of just 10 points in responses, underlining that – in general – most approve of their company’s remote or hybrid transition. It is worth noting that the same two groups – Asian/Pacific Islanders and African-American/Black – again served as bookends, with the former group more positive about the transition. The largest gulf in responses exists between African-American/Black responses (72% positive) and the next most positive group, Hispanics/Latinos (77% positive).

• Workers in their late 50s and early 60s were most pleased with their company’s transition to a remote or hybrid culture. Among other reasons, workers in this range have surely been commuting to work for decades and relish that element of the change at the very least.

• Employees in Seattle were the least pleased with how their company handled the transition, at just over two-thirds approval. This is in fairly stark contrast with Boston, Chicago, New York, and other major metros where approval was closer to the 80% mark.

After a Year Under the Pandemic, 80% of Workers are Sold on the Necessity of a More Flexible Remote Work Schedule. Women, Gen Z’ers, and Gen X’ers saying it’s extremely important.

• More than three-quarters of respondents indicate that this is an extremely important element of their working life. That’s far more than the percentage of all other responses put together. Before March 2020, when the pandemic began to disrupt nearly all walks of life in North America in earnest, 34 percent of respondents stated that work-life balance was the most important professional benefit for them at this stage in their careers (more important than other options such as compensation, advancement, and stability). This applied to both tech and non-tech workers, as well as different demographics including ethnicity, gender, department, age, and years of experience.
• Female workers were upwards of 10 percentage points more likely than males to say that a flexible remote option was of utmost importance (86% vs. 75%.) More male employees instead chose the “somewhat important” option. Responses indicating that a flexible remote schedule was either “not that important” or “not important at all” were negligible among either gender at about the same rates.

• When responses are sorted by ethnicity, we see that Asian/Pacific Islanders chose “extremely important” the most often, at 84%. Hispanic/Latinos (74%), Caucasian (79%), and “Other” (75%) with “extremely important” responses were all within range of Asian/Pacific Islander answers. However, African-American/Black responses were much lower “for extremely important,” with just 55% choosing that preference. As with the responses to the above question about a COVID-19 vaccine policy in the office, responses from the African-American/Black community were significantly less positive than other ethnicity groups, suggesting a disenfranchisement within that group on this issue.

• The 18-25 and 46-50 age groups were the most likely to answer “extremely important” to the question about the value of a flexible remote schedule. With 95% of respondents from the 18-25 group giving the “extremely important” response, it’s clear that the youngest respondents – also the newest to the workforce – are very married to the idea of a flexible remote schedule becoming a regular part of working, and will seemingly be hard to convince otherwise. Numbers dip significantly into the 70^th percentile for the next three older age groups (which includes the Millennials), with another spike in “extremely important” responses coming the 46-50 age group – perhaps the age of people most likely to have school-age children. It’s worth noting that neither of these groups are at particular risk for serious complications from COVID infections themselves.

Methodology

Three survey questions were asked in Yes/No and multiple-choice format:

1. Should workplaces enforce a COVID vaccine policy before employees can return to the office?
2. On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your organization’s transition to a remote or hybrid work culture?
3. How important is it for you to hove the flexibility of working remotely?

• Results are based on 3,539 responses.
• Data was collected between February 26, 2021 and March 26, 2021.
• Employees hail from small, mid-size, and large companies (VC-funded, privately-held, and public to household brands like Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber, etc.)

About Comparably

Comparably (www.comparably.com) is a leading workplace culture and compensation monitoring site that provides the most comprehensive and accurate representation of what it’s like to work at companies. Employees can access salary data and anonymously rate their workplaces in 20 different culture categories, providing the public a transparent and in-depth look at the experiences workers have based on their gender, ethnicity, age, tenure, industry, location, and education. Since launching in 2016, Comparably has accumulated 10 million ratings from employees across 60,000 North American companies. It has become one of the most used SaaS solutions for employer branding and one of the most trusted third party sites for salary and workplace culture data. For highly-cited workplace culture and compensation studies, including Comparably’s annual Workplace Culture Awards: www.comparably.com/news.