The news is full of examples of CEOs trying to lure, coerce, or herd workers back into the office. There are a few carrots but even more sticks. This is important to improve productivity – right? Wrong! The data has shown just the opposite. Productivity tends to trend down when people come back to the office. (here’s a full article – https://fortune.com/2023/02/16/return-office-real-reason-slump-productivity-data-careers-gleb-tsipursky/)
I do a lot of work in the government space and the same trend shows up in participation in various federal programs. During Covid, many programs that required face-to-face participation eliminated that requirement. What happened? Participation went up. When the powers that be declared the health emergency over and got people back into the offices, program participation went down. The only thing that went up was staff attrition.
This is often a surprise even to leaders of organizations. It seems obvious that people would be more productive with face-to-face interaction. While there are some examples where this is true, overall it is not. Know your organization’s numbers before making arbitrary decisions on return to the office for both staff and customers. Imagine being able to serve more people, and happier workers, without the cost of your current office. So do your research.
Having a Strategy
The time we spent away from the office as a result of Covid-19 was different than dealing with a long snowstorm. We didn’t just hit pause, we found new ways of working. Over time those became habits and we rearranged our lives. We got to a new normal. And then leaders said to get back to the office. People aren’t just returning to the way things were. They need to find a new normal again if the office is going to be a part of their work.
The problem is that many companies are requiring people to come back to the office without much of a strategy. They aren’t addressing the people who are still working remotely or the patterns that people come into the office. The regular patterns of interaction are regularly interrupted because the return-to-office instructions don’t take into account how people work as a team.
Companies need to relook at all their policies and procedures and make sure they work for the people not in the building as well as those that are. When you can get to a point where it doesn’t matter where people are working, the office becomes a place of collaboration.
By relooking at how they work, leaders often realize that the office they have isn’t the office they need. Companies on average can save between $10,000-16,000 per employee annually, by not providing regular office space to work in. They in turn can keep the profits or reinvest in intentional retreats and gatherings. These tend to have a dramatic increase in retention, productivity, and overall cultural wellness.
Want More Productivity?
Start with a clean slate. Look at the data and the lessons from the past three years and start rebuilding. When you were a kid you probably played with Legos. You would make something cool, look at it for a while, and then dismantle it and put it back in the container. You still had the same building blocks, you could just put them together in new and different ways. This is not that different but we often look at offices and organizational structures as carved in stone.
Figure out what your customers want and what your workers need to be most productive. There may be more than one answer for different circumstances. Maybe you have different teams in the office on different days. Maybe you have no office at all and bring everyone together in a different country twice a year. There is no wrong answer, and there are lots of possibilities. You don’t have to play the hand you are dealt. You can start over and do something that makes sense.
