Go Office or Go Home: Austin Companies Reject Hybrid Work Setups

[TexasTowelie]

Managers in the Texas capital are less likely to favor hybrid work than other U.S. cities, a survey found.


In Texas’s growing tech capital, companies are rejecting hybrid work schedules — but not necessarily for the reasons you’d think.

Just 13% of senior managers in Austin favor a mix of office and remote work, according to a survey from staffing agency Robert Half, the lowest among 28 U.S. cities surveyed between June 4 and July 1. That’s surprising at first glance, given the growing popularity of hybrid setups and the city’s preponderance of technology companies, where remote working was commonplace even before the pandemic.

But according to Thomas Vick, a regional director at Robert Half who oversees the Austin market, it’s actually a sign that many firms have chosen one extreme or the other instead of a hybrid model: They’ve either gone fully remote, or they prefer a full-time return to office to life.

“It’s counterintuitive at first, because how could progressive Austin not be open to hybrid?” said Vick. “But it’s because Austin was already very much fully remote. Also, there’s been a lot of cranes here finishing expensive new buildings, and companies want to utilize that money spent. They have buy-in from employees to go back on site because they have this luxurious new office to go to.”

Austin, along with Dallas and Houston, has one of the highest rates of office occupancy, according to data from security company Kastle Systems.

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/where-managers-are-least-likely-to-embrace-hybrid-work