4 ways to make return-to-work a success 

Trying to figure out how best to get your employees back to the office? Instead of issuing blanket return-to-office policies, managers should co-create ways of working with their teams, said a blog from Harvard Business Review. 

Companies continue to struggle to design and implement a post-COVID return-to-office strategy that works for employees. To find the most workable model, employers should focus on four factors: the needs of the people, the needs of the work, how the work gets done, and if any new managerial muscle is required to manage a hybrid workforce. 

Needs of the people 

In a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) survey of more than 1,500 office-based workers, roughly 90% of employees who identify as female, caregivers, LGBTQ+ or as having a disability consider flexible work options an important factor when deciding whether to stay with a company, or leave their job.  

“That’s 30% higher than employees who did not identify with these categories,” BCG managing director Deborah Lovich and BCG project leader Rosie Sargeant wrote in the Oct. 2 blog, Does Your Hybrid Strategy Need to Change? “If you care about diversity, equity and inclusion, you need to get your working model right.” 

Women employees were also 1.5 times more likely than their male counterparts to prioritize flexibility. “And this is not just a working-mom phenomenon. We found only a marginal difference (3%) among women when comparing caregivers with non-caregivers.” 

Leaders should also consider the cognitive profiles of their workers, as some work preferences are likely linked to introversion or extroversion. As a generalization, software engineers tend to be “analytical/tough-minded” and might work best when allowed to maintain focus and prefer to adopt day-to-day work routines, the blog authors wrote. On the other hand, team members with cognitive diversity will need more options to maintain optimum performance and happiness. 

Needs of the work 

BCG found workers want to come to the office to do tasks and activities they consider best done there.  

For example, survey participants were eight times more likely to prefer being in-person for affiliation and development, compared with doing work that requires focus or tackling administrative tasks, which are better done remotely. 

There is a gap among workers and management, though. Individual contributors spent 37% of their time on work they believe is done most effectively in person; for managers and executives, this jumps to 49%. 

How the work gets done 

About six in ten (62%) of BCG survey respondents reported not having a say in their work-model policy, which was dictated either by company-wide guidelines or managers. The closer to the executors of the work the policy gets set, the more satisfied employees are. 

Redesigned work models could include scheduling 25- or 50-minute meetings with a five- or 10-minute lagged start time to give people breathing room. Or replacing some meetings with asynchronous modes of work, like email, chat, shared documents or offline review, and clarifying required and optional meetings. 

“In our experiments, 90% of participants reported overall meeting effectiveness had improved and 78% felt they wasted less time sitting in meetings where their live participation wasn’t required.”

New managerial muscles 

Orchestration of work-from-home policies needs two new “managerial muscles.” Managers now need to facilitate discussions with and align their teams on where, when and how work gets done. They also need to hold weekly retrospectives on what worked, what didn’t, and what to change in how they work the next week. 

The second muscle is building an ability to create connection and culture as well as develop, inspire, mentor and coach across distributed and hybrid teams. They must also meet employees’ emotional as well as functional needs. 

“Building these new managerial skills requires work, but the rewards are worth it: better performance, engagement, and retention,” the blog said. “And just like any muscle, it needs investment of time and practice to strengthen.” 

Employers should identify their best managers — the ones who are already doing some of these things. Then follow a “best teach the rest” approach to help others learn how to develop similar capabilities.

“Instead of setting top-down mandates and expecting frontline managers to enforce them, leaders ought to focus on empowering those managers to co-create ways of working with their teams that are best suited to the needs of the people and the work they do, as well as the digital and [generative AI] tools at their disposal,” the authors wrote.

“While it may be easier to follow the crowd and issue blanket return-to-office policies, the potential upside of implementing thoughtful changes based on the four categories above is not only worth it — it will soon become an imperative for businesses that want to create and sustain work and talent advantages into the future.” 

Feature image by iStock.com/Kateryna Onyshchuk