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It was easy to get home because we had to. How do we make people want to come back?
2019, less than 6% of US employees primarily worked from home. Then COVID hit and in May 2020, 35% of employees were fully remote working, even 57% among professional and management occupations.
Now business leaders want people back at the office. Without personal interactions in the workplace, leaders see missing workers on building vital connections that enable collaboration and innovation and on the soft skills gained from interacting with people at different levels within the company.
But according to Pew research, 61% of home workers say they work from home because they prefer to do so. Of those knowledge workers who are dissatisfied with their current workplace flexibility, 71% said they are open to finding another job in the next year. Demanding employees who come back will increase attrition rates and reject new talent.
The best way to bring employees back to the office is to invite them and make it an inviting place where people want and need to be.
Related: Should You Bring Employees Back to the Office?
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Community involvement is a good start.
A 2022 Workplace Trends study found that 77% of responding organizations had adopted a hybrid model and most had a “random” office visit policy. To encourage people to return, 88% use incentives to lure people into the office, including excessive effortsuch as Microsoft’s beer and wine tastings, Qualcomm’s group fitness classes, and Google’s private concert with Lizzo.
Many companies have made similar, less extravagant attempts to lure people back with promises of food and social activities, which is a great place to start. According to the 2022 Microsoft Work Trend Index, 85% of employees said restoring team bonds would motivate them to return to the office. Other Surveys for 2022 also found face-to-face collaboration and socialization to be the main draws of office time.
Having worked out of the office for almost two years, focus on building social capital is important, but the office isn’t all about partying. The benefits of improved collaboration and innovation come from a healthy culture where people are free to bring themselves to work. Socialization can get that ball rolling and be a major pull to get people back into the office, but more efforts are needed to make it a necessary workplace.
Related: The Case of Going Back to the Office
Build an inviting space
Invest in creating a physical environment conducive to a hybrid world where people need and want to be to get their best work done. Renovate office spaces to match changing intentions. In a Envoy workplace survey of 800 employees, 61% said their company had changed their physical workplace to make way for a hybrid model. Leaders at Marriot, Capital One and Spotify are prioritize comfortcommon areas and more meeting rooms for collaboration and dialogue.
People don’t come back to the office to work in a cube. They come back to sit together and collaborate with others in ways Zoom is less effective. At Clearfield, we’re creating the image of what we want our home base, the mothership (and we call it the “mothership”) to become an office in this hybrid world, starting with major renovations. We’ve kept the bright, open, well-lit space and we’ve eliminated most of the aisles from cube farms. We built meeting rooms and many training rooms.
Related: Going back to the office can be a business-ending mistake
Invite them to learn and grow more
In our shift to hybrid, one of our strongest considerations is a focus on training. By building dedicated training rooms, we support internal growth opportunities and encourage people to be in the office to learn more and grow. It also introduces social opportunities to hold recognition ceremonies in the office as people get promoted.
Our sales organization’s interaction was mostly with customers, not each other, so when we were sent home, they felt the benefits of working remotely full-time. But as we got bigger and started educating and promoting people from the inside out, the salespeople who became leads and supervisors suddenly realized the need to engage and train their teams. From the leadership position of a growing company, it becomes easier to see what makes it so crucial to come together to learn and progress.
Attract people to the office with training and opportunities to do their jobs better, and show them room for growth within the company. I believe that people want to do their job well and have access to information that can help them do that. Our new in-office training rooms give employees access to resources to improve their hard and soft skills. We are also investing in a learning management system to track all of our training opportunities and get them to more of our employees.
Invite with expectations
Invite people back, but with expectations. Some leaders are moving into a hybrid or work-from-home model and remain unclear in their expectations. They want people in the office, but let the “hybrid” level of team members be user-led. The trend of companies allowing unlimited PTO, for example, allows people to individually define the total time they take off. But unless everyone really believes they can and should take six or seven weeks of vacation, they probably would never try to push those boundaries. Without expectations, so much autonomy exists in a cloud of uncertainty.
Leaders should also set expectations around meetings and plan them with intention. Our design engineers run our product innovation programs and typically host weekly product reviews, but post-COVID we had to start doing them through Zoom. As soon as we could, these meetings were the first thing we brought back. Chief engineers needed their colleagues to touch the prototypes and experience them firsthand with a full range of senses, including the sixth sense – intuition – which was lost on a Zoom call.
Inviting people back to the office is much more powerful than requiring them to come back, but that invitation needs to come with more than free food and parties — it needs to come with planning and clear expectations. Turn the office into a place where people want and need to go and draw them there in a way that encourages them to be more productive.
Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.