Eli Lilly’s CEO pinpoints the 3-pronged problem big execs face with remote work

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But most workers remain resolute: They don’t want to come in every day. And besides, none of the small fixes address the core issue: Managing a distributed workforce is just really hard. What’s a boss to do? Despite the three years of trial and error, the solution remains unknown, David Ricks, chairman and CEO of pharma giant Eli Lilly told Fortune CEO Alan Murray during a virtual roundtable held by Fortune Media and BCG on Thursday. 

Eli Lilly’s employees in China and Japan are in the office every day, Ricks said, because “they live in teeny little apartments, and there’s no culture of work from home” in those countries. A world away, Lilly’s Bay Area-based tech workers have stayed quite comfortable at home, and “it’s somehow appalling to ask them to come to the office, ever,” he went on. Finally, in the third group are Lilly’s manufacturing shift workers who don’t have the option of working from home and are “working literally day and night, all the time.” 

Bringing these three distinct groups together fairly and productively—and cultivating a workplace that appeals to and supports each of them—is what Ricks called “the leadership challenge of our decade.” To do their best work, employees need to feel as though they’re part of something bigger than themselves, he said, and making that case to such a disparate group has proven near-impossible. 

Unpacking the three-pronged dilemma

Ricks, who has been with Lilly for nearly three decades, can only speak to his employee base, but the issues he’s facing are widespread. 

For one thing, the return-to-office debacle in Asia is significantly less fraught, because remote work never really caught on in the first place and certainly didn’t have staying power. Per a 3,000-person survey by Gensler, just 1% of Chinese workers were still working from home by January 2021—less than a year after the earliest lockdowns in the country where COVID-19 originated—thanks to spread control measures and low case counts.

Tokyo-based nonprofit Japan Productivity Center found that about 20% of workers in Japan were working remotely by June 2021—compared to 44% of Americans at the same time. In-office work is a far superior fit for Japanese work processes, which “are based on rigid protocols, personal interaction, constant training on the job, and group communication,” Parissa Haghirian, a management professor at Tokyo’s Sophia University, told Fortune in 2021. As of July 2022, data from a study by Tokyo Shoyo Research found, work from home is no longer an option at nearly three-quarters of Japanese companies. 

Naturally, it’s difficult to appeal to the whims of American workers who insist on staying home when workers overseas have been back in their offices for years. But executives like Ricks are still trying, often touting that workers are more productive in the office (although numerous surveys contradict this). It’s an uphill battle; just 3% of white collar workers want to return to the office full-time. Even threats and force don’t move the needle. 

At this juncture, despite meager stabs at mandate after mandate, most major companies have thrown up their hands, with more than half now offering hybrid work arrangements, according to a new report from remote work platform Scoop. 

“I kind of view it as kind of a truce between employers and employees,” Rob Sadow, Scoop’s CEO and cofounder, told Fortune. “Most companies are expecting employees in two or three days a week…That’s increasingly the bargain that’s being struck.”

Not to be overlooked are workers whose jobs were never remote in the first place, and could not become remote. These “around the clock” in-person workers, as Ricks put it, prove that in-person work isn’t the herculean task some desk workers have suggested. 

It partly explains why, despite so many Americans wanting to hold on to their flexibility, remote work still is the minority in the U.S. As of last month, 59% of full-time employees currently work in-person full-time, according to the latest data from Work From Home Research.  “There are many people in that sample that do frontline jobs, for example in retail, manufacturing, or hotels and restaurants, and they naturally don’t work from home because of the nature of those jobs,” José Maria Barrero, one of the report’s researchers, told Fortune by email last week.

The RTO stress flows upstream

The perennial back-and-forth with employees as execs try to build a united and efficient workplace has been enough to bring them to the end of their rope. More CEOs left their jobs this year than at any point since the pandemic, per a recent Challenger, Gray & Christmas report. Last month, 224 U.S.-based CEOs left their jobs, the executive outplacement and coaching firm found. That’s a 52% month-over-month jump, and 49% year-over-year jump. 

That’s probably because they’re “answering to demands for remote and hybrid work, the effects of worker burnout and talent shortages, calls for increased diversity and mental health support as well as a difficult-to-predict economic picture,” senior vice president Andrew Challenger told Fortune.

It’s hardly just the C-suite in the crossfire. Middle managers, who are faced with the task of executing on executives’ demands while simultaneously fielding the concerns and complaints of the rank-and-file workers, have never been more overloaded, and their burnout and low morale can be much more harmful to the organization than any number of remote workers could be. 

Piecing together the post-pandemic puzzle of the workplace is leaving executives like Ricks, whose organizations run on the backs of workers in different countries, different roles, and with different priorities all facing the question: How do you manage such disparate teams and bring them into a cohesive whole? The answer remains to be seen, despite the millions of dollars and hours companies have spent trying to figure it out. But we do know one thing: Forcing employees’ hands definitely won’t work.