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You Think Your Staff Wants to Go Back to the Office? Think Again.

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As we look to a post-COVID work environment, there are pros and cons to having staff back in the office. Scott Ambler examines why some employees want to return to the office, why others don’t and how to reimagine the physical office space to create a new way of working that allows teams to work smarter.

Many organizations around the world are developing plans to start bringing their staff back into the office. To be fair, they've been making these plans since the early days of the pandemic, and have continued to push back the return date as the situation became clearer to your executive leadership. And in many cases those dates will slip yet again, but eventually you'll get to the point where it becomes viable to return to your office. In the majority of cases, it still won't work out as hoped for. Let’s examine why.

First, let's start with why some people are still motivated to go back to the office:

  1. Some people don't have home office space. Not everyone has a home office that they can work from, but instead have to make do with the kitchen table or a tiny computer table in some corner. That's not fun. Or they don't have good connectivity, making it hard to collaborate remotely.  
  2. It's nice to get away. Although they love their families dearly, it is nice to get away from them from time to time.  
  3. Some people want to return to the office for companionship. Our workplaces are social places where we catch up with friends and colleagues, we share together, we eat and drink together, and where we have fun together. This is important and desirable.
  4. Some work is best done face-to-face (F2F). Strategizing, planning and designing are all activities that are best done collaboratively. Ideally these are done F2F in large Obeya rooms that have whiteboard walls and little or no furniture. Such rooms enable and motivate you to move around and work together, rather than sit around and talk at each other. More on this below.
  5. Remote working has extended the work day. An unfortunate side effect of remote work is that you're seen as always available, a problem that is exacerbated when you work with people in other time zones. Some people may believe that this will change once you're back in the office. It won't.

 

Now let's examine why many people want to continue working from home:

  1. Many people have learned that they prefer to work from home. Although it was a bit rough at first for people who weren't used to remote work, many have now come to appreciate the benefits of working from home. Greater flexibility in your work schedule, more comfortable surroundings, flexibility of dress code (I'm wearing sweatpants as I write this), a quieter work environment and a commute time measured in seconds are all very attractive benefits.
  2. Remote teams are more diverse and inclusive. When teams are capable of working remotely they are also able to include people from a greater range of locations, a greater range of abilities and a greater range of cultures. Although this may be uncomfortable for some at first, the opportunities to learn and to grow as a result soon prove to be enjoyable. 
  3. Many people have invested in their home office. How many people do you know who have bought an ergonomic chair? Or a standing table? Or have reworked their guest room into a home office? Anyone who has made this sort of investment is going to be very reticent to come back into your office any time soon.
  4. Everyone will soon remember the joys of commuting. The allure of returning to the office to see your friends and colleagues quickly pales in comparison to the 45-minute commute each way to do so. Granted, the savings from reduced commuting are often taken back by more collaboration calls or a greater range of timing of such calls throughout the day. Having said that, a return to the office very likely means you'll have both a commute plus the additional range of meeting times.
  5. Everyone has a voice, not just the people in the office. Remember when you would have meetings where a few people would dial in? Remember how they were often forgotten by the people in the room, or had to struggle to have a voice in the conversation? When everyone is calling in via video conference it's a level playing field, and you have the opportunity for a more diverse conversation.
  6. Convincing people to work a few days a week in the office is harder to pull off than you think. In the past it was important to allow some people to work from home one or two days a week, particularly if they have family members who need medical support. This strategy works well when only a handful of people are doing it, but quickly falls apart when everyone does it. Think of the chaos when one person on your team works from home on Monday and Thursday, someone else on Tuesday, someone else on Monday and Friday, someone else on Wednesday and Thursday and so on. The entire team is never really in the office all at once, so why come in for that? Bottom line is that three days in the office will soon turn to two, then to one then to whenever it makes sense to come in.

In short, most of your staff don't want to return to the office, and I highly suspect that a large percentage of those who think they want to return will soon change their minds after a few weeks of being back. The benefits of remote working will prove far more compelling than the benefits of returning to the office. 

 

There are several important implications of this:

  1. You need to start having forthright conversations with your staff now. Find out what your staff are thinking, what they would like to do, and build a culture of trust. Work through several scenarios and focus on how people are likely to react, not on how you want them to react. Most importantly, your leadership team needs to have an honest conversation amongst themselves about whether they want to come into the office—if leadership is reluctant to return why would your staff be any different?
  2. If you try to force people to come back to the office, you'll likely lose a lot of your best people. People will vote with their feet, and anyone willing to work remotely can effectively search for work anywhere in the world. The employment environment now favors individuals over employers, deny that at your peril.
  3. You need a lot less office space. Accept the fact that a large percentage of your staff simply isn't going to come back into the office any time soon, if ever. The bad news is that it will be very difficult to sublet your extra space because everyone else is in this position too.  
  4. You need to rethink how you use the office space that you have. This is great news if you're willing to take advantage of this opportunity. As I mentioned earlier, convert some of your space into Obeya rooms so that teams have the option to use them for the occasions when they do need to. This is a big topic that I'll write about in a future blog. Bottom line is that in the "new normal" your office space needs to reflect the needs of your new ways of working (WoW). Very few organizations, if any, will go back to their former WoW. Nor should they go back to their former office space. 

I appreciate that for some of you this isn't what you wanted to hear. This is a time of change, and change can be uncomfortable. I recommend that you take this opportunity to choose a new WoW, to choose a new way to use your office space, and thereby work smarter.

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