Does Organizational Culture Really Need Physical Presence?
As 2022 comes to a close, return to office policies are being increasingly pursued in knowledge-working industries that don’t physically require the presence of their employees in a central location to get work done, as was made clear by the relatively seamless continuity in knowledge work that followed the Covid-19 Stay at Home orders issued in March of 2020.
In our neighborhoods, most of us can still see businesses that required the physical presence of employees, especially in the service industry, that were shuttered by the 2020 orders. But a great number of computer-centered jobs across the economy simply moved out of corporate offices and into homes.
So what is the need to have these employees now return to offices? The common explanation for why presence in an office is required for work that has been and could still be accomplished from anywhere is the noble sounding intention to “reestablish company culture”.
Evaluating this intention requires a look at the idea of “culture”. (I knew my undergrad Cultural Studies concentration would come in handy sometime!) Put simply, culture — in any sized social collective or structure — is the observed set of shared and practiced beliefs, norms and behaviors belonging to that social collective or structure.
Developing Culture vs. Instilling Values
The discipline of Cultural Studies sees cultures as developing and establishing themselves in a “bottom-up” process by which a group arrives at an understanding and regular expression of its own shared beliefs, norms and behaviors. In that light, let’s consider the somewhat upside-down idea of an organization making the effort to establish or reestablish what it wants to call its culture.
An organization that wishes to establish or reestablish culture beginning with a clearly pre-established central value like “presenteeism” (being present in the office is inherently important), is stating outright that it wishes to (re)build a set of shared beliefs, norms and behaviors for its employees based on values that originated at the top of the organization and in social and economic circumstances and contexts of the past.
The intent to instill beliefs, values and norms from the top down is the antithesis of how real culture develops from the shared commonalities of any group’s interests and actions. The effort to instill beliefs that shape behaviors from the central values of high-level leaders is in fact the textbook definition of indoctrination. “Re-establishing culture” certainly sounds better than “re-indoctrinating employees with values of presenteeism and managerial observation”.
The presently existing new culture of work that apparently needs to be disestablished actually developed from the bottom-up through the way company employees found to continue to work together and produce results remotely through Covid. So it would seem it is not a stretch to reinterpret the aim of “re-establishing culture” as actually the aim of dismantling the new work culture that grew in the last few years, and re-establishing the structure of order and formal power in the organization that existed before the organization’s culture changed organically, in the way cultures do.
Organizational Character
There is plenty of current research showing that employees are not excited about re-establishing office-based cultures. The Future Forum organized itself (initially out of the Slack technology company) in September 2020 as a think tank about the future of work, and its most recent survey research of 10,646 knowledge workers in May of 2022 shows that “fully in-office workers report significantly lower employee experience scores compared to employees with flexibility, most notably for work-life balance and work-related stress and anxiety”.
Do companies requiring return to office for their employees believe that the culture they want to establish in the office will make employees’ feelings change from those captured in the survey cited above? Is the return to office and the purported benefit of re-establishing culture really meant to benefit employees?
Let’s consider not the ultimate intended culture but instead the underlying common character traits of an organization (or person) whose behavior toward others is centered around their expected compliance with top-down mandates. To be fair, we must consider the intent of the mandate. Some mandates from organizations to their employees (or parents toward their children) are truly related to ensuring the safety and well-being of those to whom the mandate is given.
But this is not clearly true of a return to office mandate. The effort of commuting is hardly good for anyone’s well-being and may create safety challenges (on crowded roads or in crowded public transit). When it comes to driving, it also reduces the well-being of our collective environment by increasing the carbon footprint of work. And then there’s the cited recent survey showing much higher levels of anxiety and stress for fully in-office workers than for those with flexibility.
So if (re)establishing culture is really meant for the benefit of employees, is the potentially lessened safety and well-being of employees (and the increased time and financial costs of commuting again) brought about by the mandated commuting behavior offset by some other greater value to the employee on whom the mandate is placed? After all, the character of the organization, like the character of an individual, resides in the impact of its behavior on others.
What is the organization doing to improve the life (and work-life balance) of employees through its mandate for presenteeism as the center of its envisioned culture? Can it clearly explain how it is improving things for employees with its mandates on how to work? And if improving the life of employees is not evidently central to the enforced behavior, then what is the defining character of the organization behaving toward employees with this requirement for their compliance with the presenteeism value?
As this post is running long, it seems best to try and answer this question in a second post, perhaps with some perspective gained from comments to this post if I’m lucky enough to hear from anyone who’s read this far (and thanks for that)!
My thesis at the moment is that the predominant company character — the actual behaviors a company (and its preferred/promoted variant of manager) takes toward its employees — is becoming and will remain much more critical to attracting and retaining talent than anything the company tries to establish/impose from the top down as its desired sense of “company culture”. In fact, the extent of a company’s effort to impose values, norms and behaviors through managerial mandate — and the clarity and quality of reasoning for what is being imposed — is the actual main feature of the company’s character, and is the driver for the actual bottom-up (not the attempted top-down) culture that develops around the ratification and promotion of certain values and norms.
