8 Biases + Heuristics Impacting the Return to Office

In the spring of 2020, employees around the world were sent home. If they were lucky, they could continue to work, connecting with colleagues, managers, and clients through their laptops via video meetings and emails. Many organizations had their IT departments scrambling to quickly transform their companies into ones with remote capabilities despite many not having believed that work could be accomplished at home in the past. As employees worked from home, they worked longer hours and reported higher productivity levels. Yet, as the risk of transmission subsided, employers started asking their people to return to the office. Academic researchers have been studying knowledge workers since the mid-20th century and have understood the value of being collocated with peers. Spatial proximity with peers makes it easier to build trust and share knowledge which are mediators for innovation and growth. When employees don’t feel a sense of community or strong social ties with people at work, they are more likely to consider leaving the organization. For organizations to transition to hybrid work, the leaders need to understand the behavioral biases that may make it harder for employees to leave the comfort of their homes.?

Over the last few years, many people may feel like they have lost a lot of their personal freedoms. Working from home, learning new technologies, wearing masks, and distancing from friends and community were mandates in many regions. Not choices. This led to many employees making choices where they could: whether to work in their pajamas or get dressed, whether to work from the sofa or the kitchen table, whether to start work at 7 am or 9 am, etc. These decisions each day gave people a sense of freedom in a world where choices had been taken away. As organizations ask their employees to come back to the office, employees still want choice and control over how and where they work. The difficulty is that employees are experiencing the endowment effect. Having acquired this freedom of working from home, they place greater value on it without recognizing the opportunity costs. Employees are focused on what they may lose when they are no longer able to work from home 100% of the time rather than on what they might gain from returning to the office a portion of the time. Not only are they focused on the perceived losses, but they are also inflating the value of the losses over the potential gains of returning.?

Research has shown us that we gain immense value when collocated with teammates. We build social capital, build trust, and share knowledge and ideas. Many of which then mediate innovation which is necessary for growth in our fast-paced, ever-changing world. An intervention to overcome the strength of the endowment effect would be to have all employees come together for an offsite multi-day gathering. This meeting would allow employees to reconnect to the sense of community and belonging that occurs when spending time face to face with peers. Eventisation occurs when people are in spatial proximity and a novel space for a temporary period – it creates a buzz and energy of sharing ideas and building trust (Wagner & Growe, 2020). This experience would reframe the value of being collocated to allow them to make an informed decision about returning to the office to continue that experience. When the salience of collocation benefits is high, employees can more rationally compare the value gained from returning to the office to the value of working from home.?

Unfortunately, the media is complicating the decision-making as well. It seems that the articles that get the most visibility are the ones from organizations telling their employees that they can “work from anywhere” or the articles villainizing organizations mandating that their employees return to the office, leading to the “Great Resignation” (a new phrase that has over two billion Google search results). The constant stream of fresh media articles touting the benefits of working from home feeds the availability heuristic of employees and often the confirmation bias as they select which articles to read. The availability heuristic leads to decision-making based on readily available or salient information, which is currently skewed towards working at home and complete freedom over choosing where and how to work. Often, when people are already leaning towards a decision, they will select to read the information that supports their position rather than understand all potential choices. Confirmation bias distorts our evidence collecting to confirm our existing beliefs rather than collecting unbiased information.

As employees have started trickling back to the office, they have found that they are returning to an office with a very low social density. If the value of the office is spending time with other people, we need to ensure that there will be other people there. Two commitment strategies that could help revolve around financial incentives and social pressure. The number one reason employees say they would prefer to work from home is the commute. If the home becomes the default place to work, employers may consider compensating employees to drive to the office, especially with our current soaring gas prices. Employees would need to commit to a certain number of days per week each quarter, and they would receive an upfront stipend to cover the cost of those trips. However, if they deviated from their attendance plan by more than 20% at the end of the quarter, they would have to pay back 50% of the stipend (deviations over 50% need to pay it back entirely). This commitment strategy directly ties into the tendency toward loss aversion, where employees won’t want to lose the monetary reward that they have already received.?

The second commitment strategy involves social pressure, which would come with how knowledge is shared around who is in the office and when. Employees could see the quarterly plan for their peers and plan to show up on days when most of their team is in the office. They would also be encouraged to have an office buddy that they overlap with at least one day each week. Studies have shown that having strong social ties with a colleague leads to greater employee retention. Retaining employees is critical during this time of the ‘Great Resignation.’ Each employee would also be encouraged to create the habit of updating their calendars at the beginning of each month with anticipated dates in the office and again each Friday afternoon for the following week. Employees come to the office to be around other people, so knowing when others will be there will facilitate more attendance.

Once people are returning to the office, another method of addressing the ‘home is freedom’ endowment effect is to provide choice and control over where and how people work?within?the office. There should be spaces for collaboration work with collocated colleagues, spaces to collaborate with remote colleagues, social spaces, focus spaces for both heads-down work and private enclaves for virtual meetings, and rejuvenation spaces. The office needs to be compelling – they can’t just be returning to the office they left before the pandemic.?

Something else that needs to change as we return to a flexible working arrangement is how management is executed. Managers who have only managed employees within spatial proximity struggled during the work from home mandate. As managers return to the office, both proximity bias and in-group bias may impact how they treat their employees. They may provide preferential treatment to the employees within their shared proximity. If a group of employees spend more time in the office, the manager may identify as part of that group, whereas employees who choose to spend more time at home would be in the out-group. This in-group bias could happen in reverse for a manager who works from home and sees the employees who work from home as their ‘in-group’. When we self-identify as being part of a group, we treat people in that group better than others.?

A simple intervention to overcome the in-group bias is a linguistic one. Employees are told that they all have ‘flexible working arrangements' and that nobody is an ‘in office employee’ or a ‘work-from-home employee’. In addition to the working arrangements, the organization can invest in their company culture to have everyone identify with the organization, increasing their sense of belonging to a single group. Many organizations do this by labeling their employees with some cutesy term (‘googlers,’ ‘metamates,’ ‘amazonians,’ etc.). Belonging is a fundamental human need and one of the reasons why people say that they will want the office as a place to gather.?

Like managers, employees may also be feeling a binary bias between working from home and returning to the office. These feelings are connected to the ambiguity of the hybrid work environment. When an option is unknown or uncertain, we tend not to consider it because of the ambiguity effect. Employees have been working from home for two years. This is an experience they feel that they understand. They may have been working from the office for decades before that – another experience that they know the outcomes of. However, the idea of hybrid working is a novel experience for many people. One that employees are uncertain how it will work or what the outcomes will be. This uncertainty prevents employees from giving equal weight to the options when deciding between working from home 100% and hybrid working.?

Understanding the biases and heuristics that subconsciously impact our decision-making helps us address them. One way to do this would be to organize training workshops for employees to learn about decision-making and the shortcuts our brains make. However, most often, just having the awareness isn’t enough to overcome the availability and confirmation biases. Employees would also be encouraged to find articles opposing their views and discuss them with their team. The organization could select change champions who are well versed in the benefits of being collocated on each team to make sure diverse views are shared. Managers would be encouraged to buddy up with another manager who has more experience managing a dispersed team. Managers’ touch base habits that previously needed proximity would also need to be reimagined. Both managers and employees will need to be more thoughtful and considerate in how and where they work for their organization.

We are steeped in a time of great uncertainty. Yet organizations are feeling the pressure to make a decision about encouraging their employees to return to an office, either full or flextime, or whether they get rid of their lease altogether. Many organizations succumb to status quo bias by defaulting to what they were doing before the pandemic and bounded rationality by choosing an option that is ‘good enough’ for right now. As organizations select the hybrid approach to return to work as a ‘good enough’ or middle ground, they must address the many biases and heuristics that prevent this change for their employees and the management team. When the organizations can find a balance between flexible working arrangements and intentional gathering, they may find the sweet spot that allows them to gain the benefits of a global team with the deep trust, culture, and knowledge sharing of a hometown office.?

References

Wagner, M., & Growe, A. (2020). Creativity-enhancing work environments: Eventisation through an inspiring work atmosphere in temporary proximity. Raumforschung Und Raumordnung | Spatial Research and Planning, 78(1), 53–70.?