Scroll through LinkedIn or read any article that interviews employees and their opinions are clear: The vast majority of employees prefer working at home to working in the office. One recent survey revealed that 98% of employees want to work at home at least part of the time, and another shows that over half of those currently working from home say they are willing to take a pay cut to keep things that way.
Even though workers have made their position clear, the number of return to office mandates continues to increase as more business leaders say remote and hybrid models are eroding culture and making collaboration more difficult, causing a decline in innovation and productivity . So it’s no surprise many leaders feel the best way to fix these problems is to cut back on remote work opportunities.
Some recent media reports suggest that workers are winning the return-to-office fight, but I disagree with that idea. The current trend is toward calling people back to the office, at least for a certain number of days per week. For example, Zoom just joined the list of companies issuing return to office mandates. When the king of remote work enablement is calling employees back to the office, something is afoot.
If you’re a business pushing to get workers back into the office, then make sure you’re putting an equal amount of “push” into the employee experience. It’s a complex issue where the wants and needs of employers and employees seem to be at odds with one another, but perhaps your extra attention to a meaningful employee experience will act as a sign of good faith.
Here are some important points to recognize:
Employers want people in seats
On one hand, organizations have historically required “people in seats” to make up for poor management skills, styles, and processes. The thought is that if an employee was at a desk for enough hours, they were doing their job and being productive. More visionary and enlightened companies realized face time didn’t equal productivity and offered more flexibility, even before the pandemic, to improve the employee experience.
During the pandemic, “people in seats” wasn’t an option — companies were forced to think about productivity differently, and many have since made huge strides in this area. They have adjusted their understanding of what it means to do your job and adopted processes that manage to the result rather than to the time clock.
In some cases, however, the shift went too far. If you look closely at the layoffs that happened in early 2023 , it seems that many of them were the result of companies trimming out employees who were not being managed well and, consequently, were not able to contribute enough value. How can Twitter continue to function well with less than 20% of its normal staff? It begs the question of what the 80% who were let go were doing with their time.
The current wave of return to office mandates is, in many cases, an effort to revert to the “people in seats” model. They are motivated by the belief that things have gotten out of hand and need to be reined in.
Employees are wired to be social
People learn better in social environments and innovate faster through the cross-pollination of ideas that can be shared spontaneously. People absorb more information from their surroundings than they do in isolation which, in a remote work environment, makes it far more challenging for organizations to benefit from these truths.
There are mental health problems associated with working from home and the isolation it causes. The U.S. Surgeon General has identified “Social Connection” as a current priority for his administration, saying, “Social connection is as essential to our long-term survival as food and water. But today, loneliness is more widespread than other major health issues in the U.S. Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation is a major public health concern.”
There’s no question that being isolated has an impact on how people feel and therefore their performance, and both employers and employees should recognize that.
Engineering a model that works
Although every company will have its own version of “return-to-office” models that work best for them, it seems to me that a happy medium is as easy as a flexible work environment. Just allow people to be together multiple times per week and give them the flexibility to set their own schedules. This brings people back to the office without implementing a “people in seats” model, allowing managers to engage tactics that prioritize results and enablement.
Organizations that pursue this return-to-office model should also pay attention to people’s need to be connected and invest accordingly. Caring for the employee experience means investing in processes and technologies that support (not require) relationships that go beyond the workplace. Creating a community and culture that people want to be proactively involved with will help overcome some of the pushback associated with returning to the office.
For companies seeking to implement their own return-to-office model, creating a sense of community at work will require more than free company hats or trophies. It flows from the sense of connection people have for their work environment, how valued they feel on a daily basis, and how inspiring the company’s mission and values are to them. Every company should have a backbone technology that reinforces these concepts to the frontline in a very non-top-down way.
For the business world at large, it’s time to focus on engineering a return-to-office model that works. I believe workers can loosen their grip on some of their post-pandemic flexibility and still have a great employee experience, but to make that happen, organizations must find a way to take advantage of the best of both worlds.
— Logan Mallory is the Vice President of Marketing at the leading employee engagement and recognition software, Motivosity. Mallory is a public speaker, professor, and thought leader on culture and leadership in the workplace to achieve employee retention. Motivosity helps companies promote gratitude and connection in today’s digital era of work.
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