A new year brings a lot of changes. One is that more companies have decided to go back to the office and reduce the amount of remote or hybrid work. While there are some solid arguments to be made for this, there are questions that need to be addressed if it’s to succeed in 2025.
Here are four questions that need to be answered with more than, “because we said so.”
1. Is this really a new policy, or simply pretending it’s 2019? New times call for new ways of working and incorporating lessons learned. Too many of the RTO mandates are calling for setting the clock back to pre-covid policies and rules. The same physical setups, the same policies for clocking in and out, and reducing flexibility in the name of collaboration and culture. Does anyone remember the culture in their office in 2019? I’m going to go out on a limb and say it wasn’t an idyllic time of nought but peace and love. It likely could have been better in a number of ways. Pretending the last five years hasn’t happened and that we’ve learned nothing about work, productivity or ourselves is probably not a recipe for progress.
2. Do you have a compelling case for returning to the office and can you explain how things will be better? Any time you ask someone to go through a change, there is one thing that will increase the odds of success or failure: is there a compelling argument in favor of the new thing that the person making the change will accept? They don’t have to like it, necessarily, but it should make sense and offer a chance that something will be better (for everyone, ideally) than the status quo.
Complaining about all the money the company spends on offices and infrastructure only to have nobody use it may be legitimate, but is that the staff’s problem? They didn’t negotiate the lease or guess wrong at how many people would be in a given location. It will be interesting to see what happens to RTO policies when leases negotiated in 2019 are up for renewal. Will there be more changes?
Leaders making the argument that corporate culture is better when people are physically together but don’t take into account the negative impact of locking surly people who feel insulted for eight hours a day in a confined space are going to get an identifiable culture, but it may not be the one they expect or want. Insisting that productivity is better in close quarters but ignoring problems like too many meetings, constant interruptions due to a lack of quiet or privacy, and poor ergonomics may undermine whatever positive outcomes you hope for.
Ignoring this can sound an awful lot like, “thanks for upending your life years ago while maintaining your productivity, and we know it’s going to cost you more money and inconvenience to come back to work, but rules are rules.”
3. How has technology changed how you work in the last 5 years? It is staggering to think that five years ago, Zoom was a free tool that few companies used, and Microsoft Teams was still Skype for Business, when it was used at all. The way we collaborate, communicate, and share information has changed, likely forever. Will the new RTO policy take that into account, or will you have the same problem we had when email was our main tool: people sitting two desks away, starting at their screens communicating electronically rather than face to face? How is that improving the culture or creating innovation? AI will likely reduce head count in at least some departments, will you really need all that space and what will you do then?
4. What does the new policy say about trust, communication and employee empowerment? Employees have grown accustomed to managing their own schedules and priorities. Micromanagement erodes trust and morale. Studies have shown that allowing flexibility in work schedules leads to higher employee engagement. (To be fair, employees that have proven they can’t be left unsupervised or are deeply disengaged aren’t getting the job done remotely and may do better in an in-person environment. Maybe.) There are ways to negotiate flexibility or employee autonomy but many of these new policies don’t even attempt to make it a conversation. This, of course, assumes that this is an important consideration for the employer.
All of this presumes that things like employee attraction, retention, and satisfaction are important to employers. Some have shown they are more concerned with compliance than buy-in, and in fact are counting on those employees who don’t like the new rules to self-select out and save the employers the headaches of firing them or dealing with severance packages.
None of this means there aren’t legitimate reasons to bring people back, at least to a degree. But ignoring the problems with culture, productivity, and collaboration that existed before “everyone went home,” will likely not be a long-term solution.
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