Employee flexibility and the return-to-office conundrum

I have written extensively on the workforce topics of attrition and retention, employee well-being, and how to help employees thrive in a new world of work. Our research results have led me to encourage employers to embrace flexibility as a critical element of how to drive employee well-being and productivity.

You might assume that I wouldn’t recommend policy changes to get people back into the office full-time. On the contrary: If it’s done right, I am in favor of it. ?It is less important whether the expectation is to be in the office four versus five days a week. What is more important is how the policy is applied—if it is done with consistency, following common-sense principles, and with appropriate exceptions using sound judgment, it can work.

Here are four reasons why I would back such a policy, with a few caveats:

Accountability and performance matter

The need for individual well-being and flexibility must be balanced with the need for accountability, productivity, innovation, and results. In the long run, well-being and flexibility ?can help facilitate better business results, rather than achieving an objective at the expense of performance. No one wants to run the risk of happy employees in a poorly performing business.

Focusing on employee happiness alone is unsustainable

If you optimize for employee happiness at the expense of productivity and performance, as business performance declines, employees will remain happy (and gainfully employed) for only so long. As our research shows, some of the drivers of employee well-being and flexibility include the automation of routine work, the pace of change, and the need for more innovative and collaborative solutions. These are also the drivers of the need for more in-person collaboration with colleagues.

In other words, you could make people happy by paying them a lot, demanding little, and offering rich perks and benefits, but that doesn’t work. The same is true with flexibility: If it is out of balance with a performance imperative, it cannot be sustained because poor performance will doom the company and its employees. So the point is not to get people back into the office for its own sake, but to get people collaborating, innovating, and building connections with colleagues in person because those interactions create a healthier and higher performing organization.

A reset of the default model to full-time in office should include thoughtful exceptions

If the new return to default of five days per week in the office is fully and strictly enforced with no exceptions, it will be problematic—particularly if it is simply to give senior leaders a stronger sense of control.

Even before the pandemic, when five days a week in the office was the norm, data I’ve analyzed at multiple companies suggested that leaders were already using their discretion to allow for remote work on a regular basis, approved for employees on an individual basis.?

Badge-in data showed that for many employers, a fairly significant number of employees (perhaps not the majority, but a substantial minority) were already coming into the office only 3-4 days per week. A draconian shift to five days in the office per week for everyone with no exceptions could reduce flexibility far more than even pre-pandemic work norms.?If these new policies work, the key is not to be rigid about it, but instead to signal a shift of the default model.

If one of the main reasons to get people into the office is to facilitate more in-person interactions (see exhibit), that works only if everyone in an organization or on a team is there at the same time. If someone wants to come in to collaborate or socialize but the rest of the team is remote that day, this model doesn’t work. The default of “be in person” can be a helpful starting point, and it does not have to come at the expense of flexibility.?

I find it interesting that some recent policy announcements include fine print along the lines of: “We will continue to honor various extenuating circumstances (e.g., caring for a sick child)” and “We will still allow pre-approved work-from-home and/or hybrid arrangements.” This indicates that people managers will have some degree of autonomy in approving thoughtful requests by employees to work a more flexible schedule.

A reset of the in-office model can augment feelings of fairness

Shifting back to in-the-office full time can lead to a greater sense of fairness, especially for those employees who by the nature of their work must come in every day, such as manufacturing employees.?If done well, the default allows for more thoughtful exception-based approvals that enable appropriate flexibility but still retain a sense of both procedural fairness and a sense of equity. ?Everyone is held to a reasonably well-calibrated performance standard, with no free riders.

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The question I am left with is whether we have equipped our leaders with the tools and skills to do this well at scale.

Leaders must find ways to facilitate flexibility so that it supports and reinforces accountability, productivity, and performance rather than undermining it. When it comes to employee flexibility and well-being versus productivity and performance, it is easy to optimize in the short run for one at the expense of the other. But either course is perilous in the long run—the trick is to optimize for both.

While exceptions should be granted to allow flexibility, people leaders will need to be thoughtful about how to manage not only what people do, but also where and when they do it, and with whom.?This is a somewhat new muscle that is still being built. If leaders and managers learn to use it wisely, back-to-office policies do not have to come at the expense of appropriate flexibility. In fact, they might create a more sustainable form of it that optimizes business results at the same time.?