When pro-RTOs and pro-WFHs collide
The clamour of the return to the office (RTO) mandates is growing. KPMG’s 2024 CEO outlook found that 83% of CEOs (1300+, minimum turnover £500m) are expecting a full return to the office within the next three years.
Amazon is demanding five days a week in the office. It’s not popular with employees, and the data tells us that hybrid working, works.
Recent conversations with clients are a study in cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) – when people’s beliefs, or attitudes don’t align with their behaviour. Communication professionals are being asked ‘get people back to the office’ but are acutely aware that the data doesn’t stack up. And they don’t necessarily want to ‘get back to the office’. It’s emotive.
I reckon there are three ways to approach this request, and not one involves a creative campaign to ‘encourage people back to the office’…
1. A directive
A direct shot across the bows at employee autonomy. A classic case of old-school didactic leadership, but clear and unambiguous (with the possibility of a noisy backlash).
2. Understand why
Understand why employees are WFH/aren’t RTO
Why aren’t people working in the office as much as senior leadership would like? Has anyone asked? And – more to the point, has anyone asked the revealing questions shaped by a psychological theory like the Theory of Planned behaviour (Ajzen, 1991) – i.e., what role are attitudes, norms, and perceived behavioural control having? Asking better questions like ‘How often do your colleagues expect you to work in the office?’, or ‘Are there tasks you need to do that you find difficult to do in the office?’ will give you some interesting data to work with.
Understand why leadership wants people in the office more
Why do senior leaders want people back in the office? What’s driving it? Have they got the data that shows that hybrid isn’t working? If so – brilliant. For one client (without any data) the aha moment came when it was mentioned that senior leaders don’t like going to offices and no-one being there. Do they want to chat to their employees in offices? If so, make sure colleagues know when senior leaders will be visiting, and make sure that leader is not just visible, but accessible for conversations. That just requires local communications, not a blanket return to the office order. If they don’t want to chat to their employees – why do they need them in the office when they visit? Just good old fashioned presenteeism?
3. Ditch the one size fits all policy and devolve the question to your people.
What works for a team will depend on what they do, and how they need to work. A one size fits all policy is a blunt instrument, and because it is being shaped by a few, will miss any empathy for the many. It’s understood that different roles have different working patterns and locations. It’s always been the way.
So, can you delegate the decision, and if so, how will you? Is it by manager, by team, by function, or by region? Or something else entirely? Although a decision at a functional or regional level is getting close to blunt instrument territory if you’re in a large organisation. How will you facilitate conversations between teams to discuss and agree an approach that will work? Developing and sharing a structured session to identify when face-to-face is necessary, versus identifying the tasks that don’t need physical presence could start a productive conversation to bridge the divide between the pro-RTOs and the pro-WFHs.
It’s focusing on the wrong thing
If the market is tough, or business isn’t going well, the knee jerk reaction is that it must be where people are working. Not what work is being done, or how people are doing that work. It’s what psychologists call ‘bike shedding’ – when people spend a significant amount of time on smaller, known, issues (in this case, where people work), rather than focusing on more complex issues (for example, your strategy, your offer, or your capabilities). People focus on the WFH/RTO debate because everyone understands it and has an opinion on it. Even my mum has an opinion on WFH; she’s 81 and hasn’t set foot in an office for over 25 years!
Whatever you do, commit to it
Whatever you choose to do about any hybrid working challenges you have, commit to it.
If you want people in the office a certain number of days, be explicit about that. Be clear about how you will be policing it, who will be policing it, and the consequences of not doing it. Because if you’re not going to police it, and there are no consequences, why bother saying anything at all?
But, be prepared for unintended fallout – like the global bank that now has the intriguing practice of ‘swipe days’ where people head into the office for a quick swipe, so that data is recorded. A shed load of bright people, and this is where they’ve got to? Madness.
If you’re happy with a local leader-led approach, then give explicit permission to local leaders, and be clear that a one-size-fits all doesn’t fit your organisation.
But above all, don’t spend money on a creative campaign to ‘encourage people back to the office’ without first finding out and understanding why it’s not happening, and why it’s being requested.