Remote-working not working? Managing the tricky return to the office
Remote working: employees love it, yet, increasingly, it seems business owners hate it. Stories of organisations taking a hard line and forcing their staff back into the office are everywhere. We’ve heard of employees being told they’ll lose their jobs if they don’t return five days a week or being mandated to go in three days, commuting for an hour each way, only to find they spend their entire day sitting on video calls. Look online, too, and you’ll find hundreds of similar cases, with HR and Internal Comms specialists worried about the impact on staff morale.
Getting employees to happily return to the office is a tricky thing to manage. The loss of family time, the cost of the commute – some resistance is almost inevitable. But if your leaders are set on bringing people back into work, how can you help make the process a smooth(er) one?
Start with communicating the WHY
We can’t stress enough the importance of communicating WHY when you’re asking people to make a big change to their working lives. Miss this step and you’re almost guaranteed to have a resentful workforce. Employees who understand are far more likely to accept any changes and be willing to discuss what could make the transition easier.
Each business will have its own reasons for reinstituting office working (reasons which will, hopefully, not just be about assuaging the boss’s fear that working from home means slacking off). You obviously need to explain these, but you could also consider addressing some of the more widely perceived positives and negatives of remote working in your messaging.
To help you out, this is what people who responded to one recent survey said working from home made easier:
Concentration: 55%
Punctuality: 38%
Reading: 3%
Technical tasks: 26%
Attendance:26%
Yet it made these tasks harder:
Collaboration: 46%
Communication: 34%
Meeting: 32%
Practical tasks: 26%
Presentations: 24%
In an ideal world (and this does depend on what your leaders have mandated) you want people to see that it’s possible to have the best of both: a great brainstorming session together in the office to get the creative juices flowing one day, then quiet time at home to write that big report the next.
You’ll also want to tailor your messaging according to employee groups, as people will have different reasons for wanting to continue working from home. For example, how can you persuade your higher paid, more senior colleagues, who have nice, comfortable offices at home, that a return to the office is of benefit to them? What about those with young families who might have to completely change their childcare arrangements if you want them to come back? And then there’s your younger team members; if they’ve never had to work in an office before they perhaps won’t appreciate the benefits – the social interaction, the opportunity to learn by osmosis from colleagues or the importance of being seen by the boss.
Carrot rather than stick
We hope you’re working in a place where a return to the office is being encouraged not forced. But even if some sort of return has been mandated there are things you can do to make it feel less jarring.
We know from our clients that the things that seem to work well are those which focus on wellbeing and team building. It’s definitely not ‘come into the office and we’ll give you free pizza,’ (a perk that sadly won’t cover the cost of most people’s daily commute), it’s about adding a different type of value. Lunch and Learns, for example. Team-building activities. Or training and development sessions. People want to know where they fit into a business and how they can progress with it.
It's also thinking carefully about how to make people’s days in the office productive and rewarding. Advise managers to fill those in-office days with meetings and sessions that are difficult to do virtually and add on social events at the end of the day, to ensure office days are worth commuting for.
Other options to discuss with managers could be improving at-work childcare or even allowing dogs at work. It could be being flexible with ‘office hours,’ allowing people to come in after they’ve dropped the kids at school or letting them leave before the start of the rush hour.
As you can see, in many cases, enticing people back may come down to working things out on a case-by-case basis. So when you communicate with staff make sure they know the business is trying to accommodate their needs, as this will go a long way to ensuring their goodwill in return. The business is setting boundaries, yes, but it is doing so in a way that is fair and well thought through.
The return to the office is undoubtedly one of our biggest workforce issues right now. Ensuring staff feel like they have a say in how it’ll work out and creating value for the days they are in the office will be crucial to making the transition a success. This isn’t just an internal comms concern. It’s for HR and the whole business too. And we’re happy to help. If you need a hand to talk through your remote working challenges, we’d love to have a chat!
