What Businesses Need to Piece Together the Jigsaw of Returning to the Workplace

If leaving the office was hard to do, returning will be fraught with more difficulty. Just like a champagne cork once removed expands and does not fit, it will be hard to put work back in the office. Both the decision on what a return to the office means and how that decision is made and conveyed are likely to have as great an impact on the culture and competitiveness of a firm in the next few years, just like any corporate or product strategy. What a firm decides will at minimum impact its ability to attract and retain talent; cost structure; culture; client and customer service levels; and ability to innovate. A way forward After an initial burst of non-nuanced, tone-deaf, future-fearing decision-making about the end of Zoom meetings, the implication that those who hustle and care are the ones who want to return. With laying down the law of how many days everyone needs to come back, the opposition of an empowered workforce alive to new possibilities requires rethinking. It's not going to be as easy as issuing blanket edicts. Instead, it will be a jigsaw puzzle of different approaches for different people, roles and markets, and it will be a work in progress with many benefits and challenges. The smartest firms and leaders are approaching these key decisions with a combination of these best principles: Communicating an understanding that going back to March 2020 makes zero sense unless one wants to go out of business.Recognizing that hybrid is really a spectrum.Sharing key principles and beliefs driving the thinking.Following a software model of decision-making. Going back to March 2020 makes no sense for most industries and firms The past year has surprised everybody about the many myriad benefits of distributed work. For employers, these have included: No significant drop in productivity.The ability to combine teams from all over the world to increase collaboration and work product.Attract a far more diverse work force.Significant savings through reductions in travel, real estate and sometimes talent costs.Progress toward their green goals as they reduce their carbon footprint. For employees, the benefits have included: More flexibility to be with family and live in different places.Significant reduction in wasted time traveling to work or between client meetings.Ability to see senior management and have their voice heard.Savings from reduced transportation and other work-related costs.Ability to have global demand for their time and a wider swath of opportunities. While there have been significant benefits, there have also been several challenges where employers have some worries: How to build a culture, onboard and train folks.How to maintain the creativity and relationship building that often needs the electrifying connection of people interacting in-person or coming together in unplanned encounters.How to ensure a work-life balance. Employees want to get back with other folks for various reasons: Leave the narrow confines and loneliness of home.Meet new people and build relationships.Learn from the observations and interactions that only real interactions make possible. Most smart companies want to find a way to preserve as many benefits as possible of past models of working full time in an office and this past year’s working from home world while also solving for the drawbacks and challenges of each. Thus, a key for every firm and leader is to stop using the words "going back" and instead use "moving forward"; replace the mindset of returning to that of starting anew. Any company starting fresh today would never be set up like companies at the end of 2019 were and still hope to compete from a cost, agility and talent perspective. Recognizing hybrid is a spectrum There is now a new emerging mindset that hybrid is not as simple as some days at the office and some days at home. Instead, one needs to think about how to put the pieces of the unbundled workplace together. The unbundled workplace will combine four spaces: Home: The safety, flexibility, ability to focus (especially if school resumes and children are not underfoot) and cost and time savings of not having to travel to work will ensure the home office becomes a foundational space where most people will spend significant time getting work done. Distributed work pod: Either to enable gathering teams or the option to work outside the home, many companies will sublease space near where clusters of employees live. This will enable teamwork and getting away from home with a far more time- and carbon-friendly footprint. Periodic events/experiences: Automattic is an 1,800-person global company where everyone works distributed but teams get together at a location of the team’s choice for a few days every quarter to collaborate, build relationships and learn from each other. Every year for one week, the entire company gets together for education, inspiration and bonding. Increasingly, companies will create periodic events and experiences to offset the downsides of working in a distributed model, such as difficulty in establishing and building relationships, culture sculpting and skill enhancement. There is no reason that this needs to be done in the offices left behind or a large capital expenditure needs to be allocated to reconfigure spaces when far more impactful and cost effective external options are available. The legacy office (aka the museum): The old central office or headquarters will remain but will be significantly downsized and become more of a gathering space for key training or client meetings, a roosting place for senior management and a museum of relics and artifacts that are the key to the storytelling and culture of the company. Most employees will likely spend less than a third of their working year at this office. Sharing key principles and beliefs driving the thinking Once companies remind people they are not trying to go back to the past and recognize that the future of work will incorporate a spectrum of locations, they need to lay down certain beliefs and principles that they are basing future workspace plans on. We believe that in our creative industry, it is key that people get together occasionally to collaborate, connect and build on ideas. Thus, we are going to ask people to come to a common location X days a month.Our legal and other constraints imply that our offices and employees need to work in these states. While we will work to expand these today, we need to work within these and other legal constraints.We serve clients who expect a certain level of service, which will include a certain number of in-person interactions. We need to make sure we remain competitive.In certain markets people do not have the space to work from home. We need to ensure we have a space for them to work every day.While we believe in flexibility, we also need to have some firm guidelines and expectations for everybody to ensure fairness and clarity. For instance, we want to ensure that someone who works primarily remote does not get penalized regarding promotions versus someone who works in-person. The idea here is to treat everyone like adults and share both the first principles and constraints that one is working with. This will help people understand why certain decisions are made. Some basic rules and minimum expectations offer greater clarity than anything else. Companies cannot be managed by commune. To have flexibility, one needs to have a framework. It is likely people will challenge and provide improvements to the framework. This is part of the process and indicates clarity and listening. Following a software model for decision-making There is never going to be a solution(s) that will make everybody happy. The jigsaw of return cannot be solved elegantly with every piece fitting, but if people see the big picture you are trying to solve for, they are more likely to accept the decisions being made. How the decisions are made may be as important as what decisions are made. The reality is no one has really done this before and there will be much learning along the way. For instance, many companies are not going to have fixed spaces for teams to sit in anymore. They will follow a hotel concept where one checks in and gets assigned a desk. On paper this sounds cool, however, if the reason you want people to be at work is to have teams work together how is it better than operating from home in the first place if they can sit anywhere? Unless teams are in the office together and co-located to some degree, one gets all the downsides of an office with none of the upsides of working from home. We will all make mistakes like this. Consider a software release mindset where the first guideline is an alpha followed by a beta then a 1.0. Maybe in six to nine months there will be a working process that can be modified every six months to a year. Build in room for continuous learning and improvement. Communicate that the return is a journey in which we are all travelers and the terrain is different than when everyone departed the office 15 months ago. We are all going to solve the puzzle together. Subscribe to Rishad's Substack newsletter The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past here.