Employers need to stop treating workers like 7th graders, says ADP's talent chief

• Too often, employers treat workers like schoolchildren, ADP's Amy Leschke-Kahle told Insider.
• Debates over working from home are just one example, Leschke-Kahle said. 
• Employers need to experiment to learn what's best for their workers and businesses, she said.

Middle school can be brutal.

Kids are often caught in a pubescent tractor beam between childhood and young adulthood. And many hapless tweens, eager to be seen as older than they are, try to wring new freedoms from skeptical parents and teachers.

It's a period few of us would want to repeat. Yet workplace expert Amy Leschke-Kahle thinks many fully formed adults are, in essence, forced to relive school-age indignities when they're given too little say over things like how they get their job done.

"Work is very much like seventh grade," Leschke-Kahle, vice president of talent insights and innovation at ADP, told Insider. "Return-to-office is an example of that."

The fights over where, how, and when we work aren't likely to be resolved, Leschke-Kahle said, unless employers become more willing to experiment and learn what makes workers perform best. For org chart bigwigs, that will mean digging harder to find a balance between workers' desire for flexibility and the needs of the business.

To Leschke-Kahle, the task is clear: "We gotta figure out how to make work suck less for people," she said.

It's time to experiment

Leschke-Kahle said more data is needed to better understand the levers that move key business inputs like worker productivity.

"A lot of organizations don't really know. We have some data during the pandemic about productivity, but it's not really a great measure of productivity," she said.

"There's still a lot of question marks out there. And there's a lot more opportunity for us to get more data, better data, more frequent data around how people are experiencing work in different contexts," Leschke-Kahle said.

She said employers have a right to demand workers show up at a certain place and time but that bosses would be well served to see how they might make jobs better for their people.

Leschke-Kahle pointed to hourly workers, many of whom often aren't allowed to take off for less than four-hour or eight-hour blocks. Giving them shorter time off would almost certainly present scheduling headaches though injecting more flexibility into workers' hours might also help employers hang onto their most valuable contributors, she said.

"Organizations don't have to have all the answers. They can run an experiment," Leschke-Kahle said. "Pick a team. Pick a business unit. Say, 'Hey, we're going to experiment for three months.'"

That might look like having workers on the job for fewer than five days a week — an idea that's been drawing more attention — or some other take on how employees can have more say over their how their work unfolds.

It's not a free-for-all

Leschke-Kahle cautioned that bosses have the ultimate say on things like working from home and flexible schedules.

"That's totally their purview," she said, noting that employees can go elsewhere. "We have choice in this matter. Yeah, it may not be an easy choice, but we have choice."

Choice seems to be what many workers want. In October and November 2022, ADP's research arm surveyed nearly 33,000 workers globally and found that six in 10 who spent part of the week at the office and the rest at home reported being satisfied with the setup. Contentment among those workers outpaced that of people who were in the office full time and, by a narrower margin, those whose jobs were fully remote.

"We're making a ton of assumptions"

Even though we have some datapoints and surveys, employers need to learn more about how workers best interact, Leschke-Kahle said.

"There's a lot that we don't know and we're making a ton of assumptions about how people connect, and what's the most effective and efficient way for people to connect at work and share things at work. We assume that you've got to be in office for that to happen. And maybe — for some people. For others, absolutely not," she said.

"I connect with more people now than I did when I was in office, for sure, Leschke-Kahle said. "People are incredibly accessible."