Your Return to Office Strategy is Destined to Fail Without These 4 Steps
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The decision on long-term return to office and hybrid work arrangements is no small matter. It’s like choosing between a thrilling roller coaster ride and a serene Ferris wheel experience — there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. As a leader, making the right choice for your organization is crucial, but haste makes waste. That’s why you need a thorough, transparent and evidence-driven process to avoid potential pitfalls and ensure success.
The perils of impatience: Why rushing is a recipe for disaster
Imagine throwing a dart at a dartboard, blindfolded, while standing on a skateboard. This is what making a rushed decision on office and hybrid work arrangements looks like. You might hit the bullseye, but chances are, you’ll miss the mark. A hurried decision can lead to a myriad of problems, including undermining retention, recruitment, engagement, productivity, development of junior staff, innovation, collaboration and culture. That’s what I tell the leaders of companies I’m helping determine and implement their return to office and hybrid work arrangements who, in my experience, invariably try to rush the process. An important part of my role is holding them back from making snap judgments and following their gut intuitions, which can lead to a biased decision.
And even if they make the right decision, but skip the process in doing so, they will lack buy-in from their staff. While making the right decision on long-term return to office and hybrid work arrangements is, of course, essential, securing employee buy-in is critically important. In other words, the right decision-making is necessary, but not sufficient: the perfect policy means little if your employees aren’t onboard. Rushing to judgment and ignoring the voices of your workforce can lead to staff resistance, attrition, disengagement and harm to morale. This is why following the process outlined in this article is crucial.
Picture your organization as a symphony orchestra. Each employee is a musician, and their buy-in is the harmony that brings the performance to life. Without that harmony, the music is disjointed, and the audience — your clients and stakeholders —will notice. By involving your employees in the decision-making process, you create a sense of ownership and commitment that paves the way for a successful transition.
For example, a regional insurance company I worked with once rushed into a decision on hybrid work without consulting its employees. The result? A sharp decline in employee morale, a surge in turnover, and a loss of potential talent to competitors. The company was left scrambling to remedy the situation. Don’t let this be you.
Surveys and focus groups for information gathering and buy-in
To avoid the pitfalls of impatience, your organization must embrace a thorough, transparent and evidence-driven process. Picture it as constructing a sturdy bridge to cross the turbulent waters of change. This process involves four essential components.
Your first step should be conducting a survey of your employees to gather their perspectives on return to office and hybrid work arrangements. It’s like asking a room full of moviegoers whether they prefer popcorn or candy — everyone’s preferences matter. This invaluable data will provide a solid foundation for informed decision-making. And it will help your employees feel heard and listened to, which is an essential part of the process.
Next, conduct focus groups to dive deeper into the survey findings. This will help you understand the motivations and reasons behind your employees’ responses, and will also build further buy-in.
Sure, focus groups can be quite a bit of work, and are best done with an external facilitator. However, focus groups will provide valuable information you might not have considered or received from the survey. Case in point, one of my clients — a professional services company with about 100 staff — found that their employees were divided over remote and office-based work. Through focus groups, they discovered that employees with young children preferred remote work for flexibility, while junior staff wanted more office-based work to get mentoring. Understanding these motivations helped the company create tailored solutions for different employee groups.
While doing the focus groups, make sure to experiment with getting employee feedback on a variety of options you might be considering. That will lay the groundwork for the eventual option you choose, both from having gotten feedback from the focus groups and through the focus group participants spreading the information about the options through the grapevine.
Yes, of course, the ground rules of the focus groups require employees to keep what happens in the focus group inside…
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