What will make people return to offices?

Employers and employees are at loggerheads about returning to the office with some companies mandating office days while employees threaten to quit as a result. What can be done?

Recently, Disney, Starbucks and Twitter announced plans to mandate office days for their employees in 2023. Goldman Sachs and Netflix have already outlined their office-first strategy, while others have gone almost all-in on remote-first, including Deloitte, Dropbox and Slack.

While the majority of companies have developed and rolled out hybrid working policies, giving people flexibility as to when and where they work, we continue to see headlines about the pressure from companies to bring their employees back to the office.

“Nothing can replace the ability to connect, observe and create with peers that comes from being physically together” — Bob Iger, Disney CEO.

Head back to the office? For THIS? REALLY?! (Photo from PxHere)

Back to the office? I quit.

• A study by McKinsey in 2021 said that 29% of people would switch their jobs if they were required to be exclusively onsite, while a March 2022 study by Gallup said more than half of employees working full time from home would look elsewhere.
• 38% of hybrid workers said the same. A report by Monster in September 2022 went so far as to say that more than a quarter of U.S. workers would rather get a root canal than work five days in the office.
• A 2023 report by Monster said that a fifth of U.S. employers still do not believe that remote work is good for productivity and more than a third said they wanted employees fully in the office.
• While Gallup’s June 2022 study of more than 8,000 hybrid workers said that employees believe their hybrid working arrangements actually improved their productivity at work (as well as personal wellbeing).

There’s clearly a huge divide.

So what can be done? It has to be a compromise.

Disney CEO Bob Iger had the right intentions when he mandated 4 days per week for all employees, starting March 2023: “Creativity is the heart and soul of who we are and what we do at Disney,” he wrote. “And in a creative business like ours, nothing can replace the ability to connect, observe and create with peers that comes from being physically together, nor the opportunity to grow professionally by learning from leaders and mentors.”

We need to be around a variety of people, not just our family (Pic from PxHere.)

Selling the benefits of being around colleagues (in the office or otherwise) is a good start — and there are many of them, both personal and professional:

• Career and personal development — learning from others, networking with stakeholders and senior leaders, learning by eavesdropping, etc.
• Develop better work relationships — there’s only so much we can achieve over email and phone/video calls. Face-to-face interaction will always win over virtual.
• Sharing talents — “solving problems and using our talents are sources of happiness and fulfilment,” as Dr. Tracy Brower wrote in Forbes, and this also drives a sense of self-worth and achievement. This also helps develop others on the team as they learn from more experienced team members.
• Social development and mental wellbeing — “your brain releases oxytocin, the feel-good chemical in our brains” when we’re together, according to Dr. Brower. Also, interacting (talking, socialising) with others improves mental function, according to a UMich 2008 study, because of the mental processes involved in listening, empathising, thinking and responding, which are elements of discussion or conversation. “No amount of email, even ‘instant messaging,’ can supplement face-to-face interaction, as it does not have the same computational demands,” commented the researchers.
• Physical wellbeing and longevity — research demonstrates that lack of face-to-face interaction causes a decline in wellbeing, increases in disease and reduced lifespans.
• Sense of belonging — humans crave community, connections, physical engagement and having a shared sense of social identity. The concept of being in a tribe and identifying with those around us are central to our social wellbeing too.

But if you’re going to take away people’s choice regarding when, where and how they work, reversing the progress we’ve made since the explosion of remote working during the pandemic and mandating work patterns, these benefits aren’t going to be enough.

(There is a side conversation here about how you can make people care about their jobs more. The fact that such a high percentage of people would quit if companies mandated a return to the office would indicate that there’s a serious disconnect between those people and their company’s mission and purpose.)

The compromise?

• Employers need to be flexible within a framework or a set of guidelines and take personal circumstances into account.
• If there’s an ‘X days per week’ mandate, employers need to have a bullet-proof set of reasons as to why that’s required.
• Conversely, if it’s about the benefit to the individual, the team and the company overall, make that part very clear up front. People don’t like rules but they can understand reasoning.
• Most importantly, employers need to equip and empower their people managers with the tools and authority to made team-level and individual decisions to come to a mutually beneficial agreement.

Conclusion

By having a negotiation between people manager and team member — at all levels of the organisation — employees can continue to have flexibility over their location and work schedule, people managers can build trust in their team members to do the job from wherever they choose, and employers can reap the benefits of a happy, productive and trustworthy workforce, without imposing mandates.

Most people will be reasonable about coming into the office — but there has to be a good enough reason, so making sure it’s not just to sit at a desk with headphones on all day taking calls is paramount.

Make social interactions social: if you’re going to get people together face to face, make sure that’s the focus and make it worthwhile for those people who have made the effort to come into the office.

I blog weekly about the plight of the people manager (see publication), corporate life, communications and more. To get these epistles into your inbox as they’re published, head to https://sinamor.medium.com/ and hit the button with the envelope and plus sign on it.