IT workers value flexibility
Ivanti’s survey suggests that IT workers are skeptical of return-to-office (RTO) mandates. Eighty-three percent of IT workers surveyed say flexible work arrangements are either “high value” or “essential,” compared to 73% of office workers.
Meanwhile, IT workers facing work-from-office mandates are two to three times more likely than their counterparts to look for new jobs, according to Metaintro, a search engine that tracks millions of jobs.
IT leaders hiring new employees may also face significant headwinds, with it taking 40% to 50% longer to fill in-person roles than remote jobs, according to Metaintro.
“Some of the challenges CIOs face include losing top-tier talent, limiting the pool of candidates available for hire, and damaging company culture, with a team filled with resentment,” says Lacey Kaelani, CEO and cofounder at Metaintro.
Despite possible resistance, it makes sense for some IT jobs to be tied to an office, says Lena McDearmid, founder and CEO of culture and leadership advisory firm Wryver. Some IT roles, including device provisioning, network operations, and conference room IT support, are better done in person, she notes.
She sees some other benefits in specific situations. “In-person work is genuinely valuable for onboarding and mentoring early-career technologists, especially when learning how the organization actually operates, not just how the codebase works,” McDearmid says. “It’s also powerful when teams need to think together in high-bandwidth ways: whiteboards, war rooms, architecture reviews, incident response, or when solving messy, cross-functional problems.”
