How to Preserve WFH Benefits When it’s Time to Go Back to the Office

COVID-19 has forced many of us into working from home (WFH). Some of us have simply tried to survive this unexpected shift…but others have taken advantage of the change, and by adjusting to it discovered that WFH has its benefits.

According to some recent research, most employees report being more productive from home than in the office, and most employees prefer working from home.

As some organizations prepare to bring employees back to the office, a 2nd big change, let’s try and take some of those WFH advantages with us. As change agents and supporters of continuous improvement — you’ll want to push your teams towards improvement. How can you do this?

Old Habits

There are a ton of old office habits that WFH has helped us break, like:

• Long ineffective meetings
• Finding the right room for a meeting
• Long email threads
• Too many disturbances during the day

As we get back into the office ask yourself and your teams — what is possible now that wasn’t before? What’s better now?
Here are some examples to help get you started:

• Using online tools — new tools, or increased usage of tools (Video conference, chat, whiteboards, etc.)
• Having effective meetings — start and finish on time — keep them short and efficient
• Ensuring active participating in meetings — with hybrid meetings, remote participants miss out or feel like they have less impact. All of the remote meetings we’ve had this year has hopefully trained us to be more mindful and allow everyone the opportunity to participate.
• Accessible micro meetings — it’s easier to have a short talk with someone rather than physically entering their office\cubicle
• Finding a “room” for a meeting easily
• Leveraging large group meetings
• Having less disturbances during the day

How can you make sure these benefits do not get lost? Let’s find out.

Stop, Reflect, Think

I’d like to suggest using agile tools to focus on the advantages that are relevant to your team.

Set some time with your team to stop and reflect, by having a special retrospective session. I will refrain from telling you here what to change in your processes. Each team and each organization are different and so will need a custom-made solution that you’ll be able to figure out on your own.

One of the outputs of this session should be an experiment where you attempt to use these advantages when part of your team goes back to the office.

How should you plan such a session?

Be Prepared

Mindset

Make sure to prepare yourself and your team in advance so that you can set the right mindset and avoid it becoming another low-value routine meeting.

• Preserve over improve — In this process, unlike most types of retrospectives you’re familiar with, you’ll need to focus more on what to preserve over what to improve. This requires a change of mindset for finding exactly what it is about WFH that introduced these advantages.
• Anything is possible — You may need to repeatedly emphasize to your team that in this session you have no limits. You should think as if you’re the executive team of your organization.

Time-box

Set a 1-hour session (remote, face-to-face or hybrid) with your team, and ask them to think of all the great things they experienced when working from home.

Visualize

Prepare a board (virtual or physical) like the one below:

Session Guidelines

In this special retrospective you should ask your team the following questions to focus and be effective:

1. What was better during WFH?
2. Which advantage should we focus on? Why is it so important?
3. Why was it better? What are the main WFH components we couldn’t have in the office before?
4. What can we do now to keep enjoying both the advantages of WFH and the office?
5. How can we know and measure if we’ve succeeded in recreating the WFH advantages?

Now that you have an idea, try and design an experiment that will test to see if the WFH advantages you want to preserve can work in the office.

Here is an example of the flow of this kind of session. Here we chose the “large group meeting” as the subject we would like to focus on and chose “mute all” as the main component we’d like to create under the new-old conditions.

Feedback

Ask the participants: “Who’d like to have another session to tackle another component\reason or preserve another advantage?” This way you can have feedback about the effectiveness of the session.

What now?

If your team can make the experiment happen — do it ASAP, measure, meet again to analyze the results and adjust it.

In case your experiment requires a change in your organization’s policy, you may need decision makers to allow this experiment — but it will be worth it.

I encourage you to try this framework with your team. Comment on this post with your experiments that came out of this session or problems you’re having with any of the guidelines.