Photo by Jud Mackrill on Unsplash
 

Many business leaders struggle to get workers back into the office. Many workers, of course, don’t really want to go there. They are happy—or at least not so miserable—sitting home in their sweats working remotely or at least checking in on Slack or Teams to appear to be working.

Before going to a great effort to get employees back into the office, managers should ponder what the return will be on that effort. This is a plain, old-fashioned return on investment problem: what will be the gain from all of the investment of managerial attention and incentives needed to achieve the goal?

Few can quantify the benefits of people returning to the office; some things cannot be easily measured. If the subject is customer service staff helping people over the phone, it’s probably easy to quantify productivity from the office compared to productivity at home. But what about a person developing a  project marketing plan or laying out steps for a complex project or answering unique accounting questions? Productivity is hard to measure in many jobs, but managers should measure it when they can.

Many managers want their workers to get to know each other, helping new employees absorb the culture and cross-pollinating ideas. These are mostly immeasurable, especially regarding the company’s bottom line. In many areas, they may be of substantial benefit though hard to quantify.

But before moving forward with a return-to-work effort, leaders should consider whether the office environment actually fosters that benefit. Many companies shifted to open office arrangements to get more collaboration. They ended up with people distracted from their work by continuous noise. So the workers plugged themselves into headphones in order to concentrate, withdrawing from conversation opportunities.

Human beings are probably wired to better understand one another through face-to-face contact. Video and telephone calls, as well as emails and text messages, can work, but think of those tools like coasting on a bicycle. After the rider has built up speed, coasting is easy. But one cannot get to a destination coasting all the way. The face-to-face relationships are peddling; they have to be renewed periodically, with coasting in between.

With benefits from at least periodic in-person interactions, mandates for office attendance may seem reasonable. But the job market also dictates what rules are feasible or costly. We are in the midst of a decade with incredibly low labor force growth. The decade from 2020 to 2030 will have, according to Census Bureau projections, the lowest growth of the working-age population since the Civil War. Yes, the lowest growth of the working-age population since the Civil War.

On top of the weak population growth, the pandemic led many people to rethink what is important in their lives. Work did not always make the cut between important and not important. So the portion of the working-age population actually working or looking for work is lower than in the past. The upcoming recession will help a little, temporarily, but managers don’t really want employees who hate the rules and will bolt as soon as the job market improves.

Managers must convince employees that they will benefit from being in the office. And the benefit must be substantial. Before the pandemic, the average commute time to work was 27.6 minutes, so about an hour round trip. That’s a substantial price in terms of the person’s time, not to mention the dollar cost of commuting.

Most people enjoy some human interaction, so that’s a benefit. Providing lunch in a social environment may help; sandwiches that people take back to their cubicles probably won’t help.

If the employees are expected to sit quietly, alone, then there’s no benefit to them from being in the office. Managers should keep in mind the variety of tasks that people do. One-size-fits-all policies will result in some people leaving the company because there is little benefit to them from office attendance, while competitors offer remote work as a choice.

Career advancement could be an additional lure. Setting up social interactions across department boundaries and including senior leadership may help.

Training can also be an incentive for ambitious employees. Most training works better in multiple small sessions rather than one long period, and that would bring them into the office for longer periods. For example, a company might offer a one-hour per week in-person training on managing people, aimed at employees who are not currently managers but would like to learn those skills. That might also introduce employees to a more diverse group of co-workers.

Employees can also get together outside the office. A business with employees working remotely might sponsor lunches at convenient locations. One week, perhaps, lunch on the west side of town; the next week lunch on the east side. Or an after-hours beer and wine reception on the north side of town.

Companies can also set up co-working spaces in suburbs that employees can use as drop-in facilities.

The cost of office space will come up in many discussions, such as do we want to have all that office space that’s only needed once a week. For knowledge workers, though, the cost of office space is trivial compared to the productivity of the workers. Even a small benefit to employee retention and creativity will more than pay for the cost of the physical space. Similarly, small perks like lunch or beer after work are small costs relative to the value of engaged employees.

Business leaders trying to get employees back into the office have some valid points, but they must also be wary of their own bias toward “that’s the way we did it back in the old days.” We live in a different world today.

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