Former EY leader warns against office attendance monitoring
Nahla Khaddage Bou-Diab believes the methods EY has adopted to encourage people back to the office are symptomatic of a wider cultural issue in global business
Former EY leader and CEO of AMBank, Nahla Khaddage Bou-Diab, has warned that the Big Four risk increasing their employee turnover this year if they continue monitoring office attendance.
The intervention from the culture and leadership expert follows reports in the Financial Times, The Telegraph and The Times that EY has been monitoring UK staff’s office attendance.
According to a report released last year, the UK has also been dubbed the “work from home capital of Europe”, with UK employees working from their homes 1.5 days a week – 0.6 more than the international average.
Khaddage Bou-Diab believes the methods EY has adopted to encourage people back to the office are symptomatic of a wider cultural issue in global business.
Khaddage Bou-Diab said: “Right now, through their attendance monitoring, EY is showcasing exactly why people don’t want to return to the office. At the end of the day, monitoring turnstile data doesn’t create an environment employees would gravitate towards – and, because of it, these large firms, like EY, risk losing staff for good.
“The ‘Work from Home’ policy has spiralled out of control. And, given the knock-on effects of empty offices, namely decreased cross-department collaboration, productivity, innovation, and execution of deliverables, the C-suite needs to now take hold of the situation.”
She added: “While HR managers are responsible for the overarching employee life cycle, the reputation of the organisation is dictated by the C-suite. Their influence over the operations of the business means it’s in their job description to create an organisation their employees want to be a part of. But atmospheres dominated by control don’t quite fit that – they push staff into survival mode. C-suite leaders need to rethink their approach.”
With job security a legitimate concern, Khaddage Bou-Diab believes applicants are less likely to submit their resumes – and the cultural knock-on effects of attendance monitoring are only going to turn more people off.
