The Return to the Office: Boom or Bust?
After almost two years of the working from home scenario imposed by the pandemic, we’re only now truly seeing what hybrid working actually looks like in practice as employees are being actively encouraged to return to the office.
This push to return to physical workspaces has obvious benefits for the economy, city centres with vacant office blocks, shuttered businesses and empty streets are an eerie dystopian spectacle. But — if organisations get their approach right — culture, collaboration and connection should also be the big winners here.
While productivity has been maintained, collaboration and innovation have been stymied by a lack of in-person interaction. Reduced connection and sense of belonging, coupled with no or little separation between work and homelife, has also seen burnout and anxiety increase.
And there’s another compelling reason to return: many people have missed being at work! They’ve missed being in a routine, having a reason to get dressed, the rituals of the commute and the sense of participation that in-person provides. The incidental social interactions. The chance to read the room, lunches out with colleagues and after work drinks. The pleasure of returning home, knowing the working day is done and no more emails have to be read.
Returning to a (safe and clean) office is a positive sign that we are moving through the pandemic. It’s not a return to ‘business as usual’ because the working world has changed irrevocably and there is no going back. We now know remote work is possible and that dispersed teams can get things done. Organisations learned a lot and behavioural barriers to change were removed when they were forced overnight to rethink how work happens. Now organisations have a unique opportunity to use those learnings to set up their offices and work cultures for successful hybrid working.
But, and it’s a very big but, only if they handle it in the right way and let’s be honest here, most don’t have a good track record of communicating with empathy and understanding. Not to mention creating an environment that is both welcoming AND productive.
There needs to be an acknowledgement that staff aren’t prepared to accept poor working conditions and practices that were prevalent in offices around the world pre-pandemic, nor are they expecting to be there 5 days-a-week from 9am to 5pm.
Recent research in the UK by the Chartered Institute of Management found that 84% of respondents expected to work in a hybrid model, which the Institute called a ‘best practice’ approach, while those not seeing the correlation were ‘short-sighted’.
US-based Pew Research Center found that working from home is now more likely to be done by choice than necessity, which is the very essence of hybrid. Where previous research found reluctance to return to the office was due to the virus, respondents now indicated reasons to return including re-building connections with colleagues and career opportunities. Hybrid is being hailed as the best of both worlds but it will only succeed if it’s planned and managed effectively.
Organisations, leaders and managers have no more time to waste in creating a culture that supports hybrid working. I’m running workshops with many leadership teams on how to do hybrid well as it’s apparent that many are just not ready for this fundamental change in working practices.
They have not thought about how to mix locations, provide space for effective collaboration, or how to structure the working week so that flexibility and productivity are both optimised in a vibrant, safe culture that people want to belong to.
In short, if organisations aren’t offering an office environment (and I don’t mean open plan, hot desks and ping-pong) that people want to come to and where great work can regularly occur, then they simply won’t do it.
Some things that every organisation should be thinking of right now, include:
- Defining what hybrid means for every level of employee
- Redefining the culture to ensure that safety, connection, collaboration and innovation are all maintained regardless of where people work
- Engaging with employees on how the working week will look for them and ensuring they have trust and autonomy over their working week
- Make the office a place where people want to be and reminding teams what’s good about being together
- Resetting expectations. Recognise that getting hybrid right will take time, trial and error.
The great return to the office can be a huge success if organisations engage with staff and make it a place where belonging and productivity thrive. What are you doing to turn your physical space into a productive space?
