How to Return to Office With Ease? My Three Recommendations

In several recent return-to-office pushes, executives publicly blame employees who work from home as being unproductive, uncreative, and not loyal to their employers. Managers argue that return to office mandates would improve productivity and firm performance. However, my coauthored study does not find that return to office mandates improve firm performance or stock market valuations.[1] Also, we find employees become more unsatisfied with their jobs when they are being forced to go back to the office. Blaming employees who work from home and forcing them back to the office is clearly a losing strategy for companies and have already resulted in?crises at most firms with return to office mandates. Instead of forcing employees to go back to the office, firms should embrace flexible work and turn this crisis into an opportunity to develop a long-term flexible workplace strategy that can encourage high employee performance, increase employee creativity, and foster employee loyalty. In this article, I provide three recommendations on how firms can develop such a strategy.

Allow Team Choice and Employee Choice

Instead of imposing across-the-board and one-size-fit-all return to office mandates, firms should allow teams to decide their work schedule. Teams should figure out days when they need to meet in the office or at a convenient offsite location for tasks that need in-person interactions. Expect for these intentional team meetings, employees who have enough working experience in a company and can do their work outside the office should be allowed to decide whether they want to go to the office by themselves based on their preferences and their teams’ needs as long as their performance is satisfactory. If some employees decide to work in the office for more days, they can inform their employers ahead of time. Thus, companies should optimize their office utilization based on employees’ preferences and minimize spending for empty office spaces.

Flexible work is a strong incentive for workers as many people suggest that they would be willing to even accept lower pay to have greater flexibility. To retain flexibility, employees should be motivated to deliver high performance. Also, flexible work is an extremely cost-efficient way for employers to incentivize employees, because firms don't need to pay cash or stock bonuses as they do traditionally in employee incentive plans. Over the long-term, firms can save a lot of costs due to lower spending for office leases and other perks. Adopting this incentive benefits everyone and is a win-win for both firms and employees.?Further, periodic team meetings can both help maintain corporate culture and boost employee creativity. Creativity needs both deep thinking and exchange of ideas from different perspective. Deep thinking is harder after spending an hour commuting, which significantly contributes to employee burnout over the long-term. Working from home could simulate deep thinking by reducing burnout and reducing interruptions that often exist in large offices. In person events could further facilitate exchange of ideas and thus increase creativity. Meanwhile, these events can also help team building and are less likely to create frictions/politics.

Provide Mentorship to New Employees

A valid and common concern about work from home is the training of new employees. Surveys find that relative to experienced workers, a higher percentage of young and new employees want to work in the office and learn more about their jobs from mentors.[2] So, firms may require all/most of these new workers to work in the office and get trained for a reasonable time period. Meanwhile, the firm can assign certain senior employees as their mentors who will also go to the office and help these young workers. Importantly, appropriate incentives should be provided to these mentors. Naturally, the next question is how firms could find these mentors. A good solution is to pair senior employees who are heads of empty nested families and new workers. Many empty nesters want to downsize their home and live in apartments or smaller houses in convenient locations, which are usually close to downtown areas and relatively easy to commute to offices. Thus, compare to middle-aged employees who face a greater responsibility to take care of their families. Thus, empty nesters are likely more willing to become mentors when they are provided the appropriate incentives.

Promote Flexible Team Leaders and Avoid Proximity Bias

Many firms suggest that they would not promote flexible workers. It is important to notice that high performing employees are more likely to leave a firm not only when they are being forced back to the office,[3] but also when their performance is not rewarded through promotions. Threatening high performing workers by using “sticks” rarely works because it is not difficult for them to find other jobs at companies that offer flexibility. In good times or bad times, firms need to compete for talent. Such proximity bias in promotion decisions should be recognized and avoided by corporate management. ?Instead, firms should promote flexible team leaders and provide training for leading flexible teams. Flexible leaders should be responsible for communicating and connecting with flexible employees. The promotion of flexible leaders would also ensure that flexible employees can see a clear career path in the firm, further strengthening employee productivity and loyalty.?

In conclusion, there are better ways to move forward for both employees and employers in the future of workplace. Managers should stop viewing flexible work as a threat, and smart leaders will be able to quickly adapt themselves to the work environment that has fundamentally changed after the Pandemic.?

[1] Ding, Yuye and Ma, Mark (Shuai), Return-to-Office Mandates (December 25, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4675401

[2] https://fortune.com/2022/06/22/gen-z-dismisses-remote-work-sick-of-zoom/

[3] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-01-30-gartner-hr-research-finds-high-performers-women-millennials-are-greatest-flight-risks