As employees return to the office, the much-hyped hybrid model faces acid test: does it work?

As former office dwellers make a return to their workplaces, employers and workers are having to navigate exactly what the new normal of work is going to look like.

The subject of heading back to the office after years of working from home is an especially thorny one. In a recent poll by the Angus Reid Institute conducted in partnership with CBC News, when asked what they would do if their employer mandated them back to the office full time, more than half of those surveyed said they would probably start looking for somewhere else to work.

Between March 1 and 4 of this year, the polling firm asked 2,550 Canadian adults what they would do if given such an ultimatum. (A probability sample of this size would carry a margin of error of +/- 2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.)

A third (33 per cent) said they would begrudgingly do it, but start looking for another job. Almost a quarter (23 per cent) said they would quit on the spot. Twenty-nine per cent said they would be fine with it. The rest weren't sure.

Professor Linda Duxbury, who teaches at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University in Ottawa, says the answer to the question of what a normal working arrangement will look like from now on is far from clear. 

"I'd like to be able to give you one answer … but it's much more nuanced than that," she said.

Duxbury has been researching remote work during the pandemic, and after poring over data from 26,000 Canadian workers, she said a few broad trends can be gleaned from the data. Roughly one quarter of workers, she said, want to go back to the office full time, while about the same proportion would rather never set foot in the office if they don't have to.

A complex split like that reinforces why flexibility is the name of the game for office work from now on. Outside of a few industries, the days of mandating 40 hours a week worth of face time in the office are over.

A little under half of Canadian workers are theoretically able to do all or part of their job from home, Duxbury said, but that's not to suggest all of them want to all the time, or produce their best work when they do. Smart organizations, she said, will be flexible and based on individuals' needs.

"You've got to ... actually start talking to your people [and] stop pretending ... that there is some magical plan you can implement it and it'll be a miracle," she said.

"People are not willing to sacrifice their soul any more for their organization and the privilege of working for you," she said, citing an ongoing war for talent that has given workers an edge they didn't use to have.

It's why her advice to employers is blunt.

"If you get it wrong, you might not have a business two or three years from now even to deal with."

Hannah Gold, a recruitment consultant with staffing firm TDS Personnel, agrees that flexibility is the name of the game, for both workers and the people looking to hire them.