Returning to the Office Is The Epitome of Organizational Change. Communicate It That Way.

Back-to-the-office communication is shaping up to be one of the most challenging undertakings ever for internal communicators, far more complex and fraught with peril than most are prepared for.

(Before we go any farther, let's agree right now to not call it "return to work." Employees have been working. They have been working hard, in many cases harder than they did when they commuted to the office.)

The best way to approach back-to-the-office is through the lens of organizational change. After all, for those employees who have been working remotely for the past 15 months, whatever their employer’s new policy is, it will represent a significant change from the way things have been; not just a change from the recent remote-work arrangements but also from pre-pandemic work.

While there are unknowns in any change effort, in this case, there is a lot we do know. Surveys and analyses conducted by a variety of organizations in recent months have painted a clear picture.

Chief among these are studies that have revealed that a jaw-dropping number of employees are thinking about leaving their jobs, so many that it has been dubbed “The Great Resignation.” A Microsoft study has found that 41 percent of the American workforce may leave their current positions. A Bloomberg News survey put the number at 39 percent. Another pegged the number at 25 percent, which is still a worrisome number. Imagine a quarter of your current headcount deciding to up and leave.

According to Shahar Erez, CEO of a freelance talent platform called Stoke (quoted in a FastCompany article), three forces are driving this great resignation:

• The changing generation
• The economic crisis
• The realization people have had that they can have a different social contract, spending more time with family when they work remote and skip the commute

Workers are also looking for more rewarding work, one of the reasons so many people are not returning to low-wage jobs. “During the pandemic, many employees reassessed what they want from their personal and work lives,” the FastCompany piece asserts.

What Employees Want

There are, no doubt, employees who truly cannot wait to get back to the office. Among these are those with no dedicated office space at home, forcing them to work from the kitchen table, often alongside partners in the same boat while the kids and pets present distractions and challenges. Younger workers are also jonesing for the office, but for different reasons that we will examine later in this post.

Most employees, though, have indicated a preference for working at home at least part of the time. In one survey, 25 percent of employees said they could quit after the pandemic just to find a job with greater work-from-home flexibility. Another study found some employees were willing to take a nearly 10-percent reduction in pay to work from home two or three days a week.

Recognizing that many employees delivered high productivity numbers while working remotely, a lot of companies are implementing a hybrid model under which employees would work some days at the office and some days at home. The idea is that having regular time at home will improve work-life balance and produce a happier crop of employees.

Even though employees like the idea of a hybrid approach, many are not impressed with the configurations offered by their employers. In most organizations, the model is simple: You will work three days in the office and two days at home. The question is, which days?

Companies are working to ensure there is balance, a roughly even number of employees at the office on any given day. But if you spend your three office days with your door closed while pounding away at the keyboard, rarely speaking to another person, why, exactly, was it so important to make the commute on that particular day?

Some companies are taking a different approach that requires greater levels of trust in their employees. Employee engagement firm Reward Gateway, for example, devised a matrix designed to help employees decide whether to work in the office or home on any given day:

The chart was the result of “many weeks of reflection, research, listening, and learning,” according to Catrin Lewis, head of Global Engagement and Internal Communications. In a LinkedIn post, Lewis wrote…

The main thing that’s struck me with the simplified approach of ‘You’re either at home or in the office’ is that it doesn’t acknowledge the task at hand and help employees understand where you’re most likely to be productive, supported and able to work best.

What Reward Gateway has done is what a lot of employees want. Look at Apple, for instance, where CEO Tim Cook asked employees to begin working in the office three days a week starting in September. Shortly after the announcement, a group of employees sent Cook a letter asking Apple’s leadership team to consider revising the policy. The letter asked for more freedom and flexibility on schedules that work best for employees.

“The last year has felt like we have truly been able to do the best work of our lives for the first time,” the letter read, “unconstrained by the challenges that daily commutes to offices and in-person co-located offices themselves inevitably impose; all while still being able to take better care of ourselves and the people around us.”

Cook’s and Apple’s misstep was in assuming they understood what employees wanted without actually asking and listening to them. “Over the last year, we often felt not just unheard, but at times largely ignored,” according to the letter. That included receiving messages that assumed employees were anxious to reconnect with colleagues back in the office when that contradicted what many employees felt.

Apple employees listed a number of requests, including calling for an employee survey that would give employees a greater voice.

The letter from Apple employees raises another concern: employee activism. A growing number of companies have faced blowback from employees who disagree with a host of company policies. Companies affected include Wayfair, Amazon, WalMart, American Eagle, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Shopify, and BHP. Employee activism is on the rise and a tone-deaf approach to reopening offices could well be the spark that lights the activism fuse. It could be even worse in companies that won’t even consider the hybrid model, insisting all employees come back to the office. Only about 31.5 percent of employees have returned to the office throughout the U.S., according to data assessed by Kastle Systems, a Virginia-based building management company. Where I work, in the Bay Area, that number is only about 19 percent.

The disconnect between leaders and employees when it comes to returning to the workplace is striking. According to data compiled by the UK publication, the Daily Mail, 83 percent of CEOs want to see staff back in the office full time compared to only 17 percent of staff.

The Communicator’s Role: If your organization has not solicited feedback from employees, opting instead to make decisions based on assumptions and gut instincts, convince leaders that listening is critical. Whether you conduct a survey or construct a series of listening sessions, finding out what employees really want will inform policies and head off everything from employee dissent to a debilitating exodus of workers.

In communicating the company’s policies, be sure to acknowledge employees’ concerns and preferences and convey the rationale for the approach the organization is taking, especially those that diverge from employees’ preferences. Identify all the various reasons employees may object to the policies and address them proactively.

One issue we can anticipate is concern about contracting the virus. Communicate clearly the actions the company is taking to ensure employees will stay safe and healthy. Another issue will be ongoing care needs for children or elderly parents. Make sure your company’s policy accommodates them and that all employees know about the policy and understand and respect those who continue to work from home for that reason.

Skeptics Abound

Apple employees adopted a friendly style in their letter to CEO Cook. Not everyone is so sanguine. On his blog, Ed Zitron, founder of the media relations firm EZPR, wrote this in his Substack newsletter:

I am not suggesting that a team never meets and never does anything together, but I think the requirement of X days in the office is ridiculous without an actual impetus to do so. Arbitrarily saying “oh you have to be in three days a week” based on the idea that something might happen is generally something (they) tell firefighters, because things get put on fire all the time. When it comes to doing coding or writing stuff, what’s the point? Am I waiting around hoping that Steve the CS rep will hear me complaining about something and come up with a magical solution? Or that talking with my friends by the water cooler is going to change my life?

That’s the kind of skepticism you’re likely to hear from a lot of employees who did just fine working remote for the last 15 months. They believe they had plenty of interaction with colleagues over Zoom or Teams or whatever.

But Zitron is wrong about the serendipity of chance encounters with colleagues with whom employees don’t usually (or ever) interact.

When I worked at Allergan in Irvine, California (1990-1993), the company build a new, costly, three-story R&D facility. One of the innovations introduced by the company’s Chief Science Officer was walls covered in dry erase board material. The idea was that any two researchers who bumped into each other in the hall and started a conversation could grab a dry erase marker and begin diagraming right there. It was a feature of the building that paid off.

Another example: Several years ago, I interviewed the CEO of a large Silicon Valley company for which I was conducting an internal communications audit. “How does information move through your organization?” I asked. He thought about it for a minute then said, “You want to know how information moves through this company? Step outside and hang out with the smokers.”

Whom you interacted with when you stepped outside for a smoke was unpredictable and fluid. In both the Allergan and the smoker examples, you wind up talking with people you will never see on a Zoom call. Serendipity is a real thing that requires a critical mass of people working in the same place at the same time.

The Communicator’s Role: Set expectations for employees about what the return to the office means to them and the company. Don’t leave it hanging at “You need to be here X days” without explaining what the company expects of them on those in-the-office days, what tools and resources exist to support those activities, and why those activities matter. Among those reasons, be sure to emphasize the issue of new hires, who have no established relationships and can find themselves feeling completely detached from the company if few people join them at the office (or if they are told to start working from home). It is important for new hires to get to know other people, meaning managers and coworkers need to plan meetings and work sessions that engage new employees.

Collaboration, Innovation, and Connection Hubs

When we all worked at the office all the time, we grew accustomed to offices for higher-ups and cubes or open-space configurations for everyone else. We came in, we did some socializing, we attended meetings and lunched with colleagues, but mostly we sat at our desks and did our work.

In the post-pandemic workplace, this workflow configuration won’t cut it. If employees work from home on the days they need to do mostly focus work and solitary tasks, the office needs to be rethought to accommodate collaboration, meetings, and socializing. A workplace technologist told CNBC that the office should be configured as a gathering space for meetings but, more importantly, for employee wellbeing and social engagement.

This could mean offering multiple dining options that allow workers to connect with colleagues over lunch, along with informal meeting areas for various kinds of get-togethers, from one-on-one conversations to mentoring sessions. Training and learning are also activities to offer at the office. According to Michael Smets, a management professor at Oxford’s Sa?d Business School quoted in a .Business Standard article, “If we think that coming to the office is about learning, we need not everyone but people who want to learn and those they want to learn from in the office at the same time.”

The Communicator’s Role: A company’s culture derives from five factors, one of which is “place,” the environment in which people work. If no plans have been made to adjust your company’s places to account for a hybrid workforce, start the conversation (or insert yourself in a conversation already going on). Use the information you gleaned from your listening sessions to support your case for an office reconfiguration that is more focused on interaction than solitary work.

Burnout at the Office

Working from home for 15 months introduced employees to far more flexibility around how their workday is structured, according to Yu Tse Heng, a management researcher at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, who was quoted in a CNBC article. “For example,” she said, “employees could take short breaks or a power nap during the day when they felt exhausted.”

That flexibility will mostly vanish once employees are back at the office. (Can you imagine leaders’ reactions to seeing an employee sleeping at his desk in an open-office environment?) This lack of flexibility can lead to burnout, though rigid office schedules will not be the only cause of burnout. For some, worry about the potential for exposure to COVID-19 could be another source of exhaustion.

Every employee’s burnout is unique to them; do not assume all employees will experience burnout at the same levels and for the same reasons. According to a Harvard Business Review article, “Our recent research suggests that when you’re feeling burned out, the best person to help you recover may be yourself.”

Thus, companies need to give employees agency to assess their burnout and determine the best way for them to maintain their mental wellbeing, to “feel empowered in navigating their own recovery,” according to Heng.

The Communicator’s Role: Raise the issue with Human Resources (or the appropriate team in your organization) and work with them to establish and communicate policies and resources that offer employees “the flexibility and tools to navigate their own recovery,” which, Heng says, “will definitely go a long way in helping employees protect their mental health as they head back to the office.”

To help employees address their own burnout, make sure they know all the resources available to them. It’s also critical that the managers of these employees are on board and ready to help.

Burnout At Home

Productivity may have improved as employees worked remotely but often at a cost. Research has found that the amount of time people spent communicating each day through email, text messages, and the phone rose by a significant amount. Response times were compressed and the weekends were not off-limits for messaging.

Without a commute, employees often started working earlier and knocked off later than usual, working through the time they previously spent getting to and from the office. A Harvard Business Review article suggests the burnout employees have experienced while working from home is a factor in the “great resignation.”

Working mothers in particular have experienced this burnout; they are 28 percent more likely to experience it than working fathers. According to the HBR article, “While research shows that nearly 100 percent of managers rate themselves as supportive of employees with families, only half of their subordinates agree.” This is fueling a COVID-related exodus of women from the workforce.

There are other perils to continued remote work. In a Microsoft survey found 54 percent of remote workers globally said they were overworked and 39 percent said they were exhausted.

The Communicator’s Role: Work with HR and leadership to reset and communicate boundaries. When should employees be working and when they should be immersed in the “life” part of work-life balance? Should there be a time of day when they should not be checking email? Should a day be designated for no Zoom meetings?

Based on your listening exercises, propose solutions that will go a long way toward easing employees through the transition. Microsoft, for example, informed employees they can take an extra five paid days off “to ease stress and anxiety during the Covid pandemic,” according to one report:

Microsoft HR chief Kathleen Hogan said in an email to the company’s employees its senior leadership team is concerned about reports of increased “stress, uncertainty, exhaustion (and) in some cases grief” among the Redmond company"s employees. “We know…things remain tough due to the ongoing pandemic,” Hogan said in the email, which was obtained by the Business Journal. “Work and life continue to blend, with daily tradeoffs, opportunities, and challenges.”

Microsoft was able to arrive at its time-off solution based on extensive listening to assess how employees have fared during the pandemic, such as all-hands meetings, Yammer groups, a daily pulse survey, inquiries to the HR department, and responses to Covid-related emails from company leaders. Your listening processes should uncover information to help you advise your leadership on programs and processes to ease the transition for your employees.

(Microsoft has also issued a guide for business leaders filled with recommendations for accommodating a hybrid workforce

Generations

While research finds most employees want to work remotely at least part of the time, well over half of employees aged 21-30 responding to a survey said that working in a modern, collegial office environment is more important to them than it was a year ago. While a majority did say they were more productive working remotely, more than half from the same demographic expressed anxiety over the lack of training and career opportunities remote work has imposed on them.

Younger workers worry about other drawbacks to remote work. As a Bloomberg article notes, “While experienced employees often have established professional networks and dedicated home offices, younger staff say the pandemic has left them under-informed and cut off from their teams.”

The Communicator’s Role: Make sure company leaders are aware of this demographic and their concerns. Managers should also get up to speed in order to take steps within departments and teams to reassure younger workers and provide them access to career development resources. It may also be important, as these employees return to the office, to take steps to ensure other employees are at the office for them to interact with (while also avoiding the “be in the office because we said so regardless of the nature of the work you will do today” requirement).

Employee Castes

All this focus on remote workers can leave the rest of the workforce feeling fairly forlorn. During the pandemic, it was easy to understand that some workers needed to be present on the job while others could work remotely. Firefighters and police, EMTs and emergency room personnel, the people who work in power plants and oil refineries, and (in my company) foremen and superintendents building high-rise structures cannot do their work remotely. Assuming you were communicating effectively, these employees understood the emergency requirements designed to slow the spread of the virus meant a lot of their colleagues would be working from home.

With the pandemic (I hope) in retreat, though, employees who cannot work remotely will view those who can differently than they did during the lockdowns. “Hybrid work could even effectively create a subcaste of employees,” a CBS News report suggests. Depending on your organization and its situation, it could be the remote workers who are treated like second-class employees “because they lose a lot in being unable to be present in the workplace,” according to Columbia Business School Profesor Dan Wang. For them, ties and relationships will weaken and people’s networks will shrink.

According to CBS, “An analysis of remote work in the U.K. from 2011 to 2020 found that employees who worked from home were less than half as likely to be promoted compared to all other employees.” They were also 38 percent less likely to get bonuses compared to those who spent every day at the office.

Or it could be those who need to be on-site who feel marginalized, since they may well resent their inability to achieve the same kind of work-life balance as those who can spend some of their workdays working from home.

The Communicator’s Role: Help remote workers stand out from home. Recommend policies that will ensure work-life balance can be achieved by on-site workers. Find meaningful ways for employees in all work configurations to interact. Get managers on board to support these best practices.

The Transition

Leaders and employees will both have expectations linked to the return to the office. When it comes to leaders, Ng told Recode, “At best, with the return to the office, you can expect productivity to return to pre-pandemic levels, while you can actually get greater productivity out of working from home.”

Confusion and uncertainty are just a few of the feelings employees will experience when returning to the office, which can be a jarring ordeal for many.

The Communicator’s Role: Based on the information you glean from listening to employees, develop a deliberate plan for greeting employees back to the workplace. One idea is to hold a “reorientation” to ease employees’ re-entry. These sessions can signal to employees that changes have taken place and people are not expected to simply pick up where they left off. You can cover details of office life in the post-pandemic world and address mental health resources. “Reorientation is also a good time to remind your workforce to focus on respect and empathy as employees come back to work,” according to a post on the Zenefits blog.

Zenefits also urges companies to support employees who feel anxious, whether it’s over the potential for exposure to the virus or worries about child care at home. Managers should connect with each direct report individually before they come back to the office, touching on issues that may be affecting employees. For the first few weeks at work, frequent check-ins will help reveal any challenges employees are facing. Managers should be acquainted with the resources available to employees experiencing these problems, such as the Employee Assistance Program. Even after those first few weeks, managers need to keep the conversations going with their people.

Internal communicators should begin planning now to encourage and support managers in these behaviors.

Not every employee will be comfortable sharing with their manager. One psychologist suggests that “businesses create a safe and anonymous system of communication for employees to provide feedback to management about return-to-work concerns,” according to the Zenefits article. “This emotional space will go far to give employees a much-needed sense of comfort that employers care and want to respond in supportive ways,” says Allison Lobel.

Communicators should also stress the availability of emotional support and resources that will ease the transition.

What Else?

The issues listed in this post, along with the roles internal communicators should play, are by no means comprehensive. Every organization is unique, from the nature of its business to its culture. The approach to welcoming employees back to the office needs to align with the uniqueness of each organization.

In every case, though, viewing return to work as an organizational change will go a long way to avoiding the consequences of simply throwing employees into the deep end of the new-normal pool. Every employee communications team should be working right now on a strategic back-to-the-office plan that goes far beyond articles and text messages. Listening is the most important activity to build into the plan, along with ways to operationalize the messages the plan includes (including recruiting managers to be part of the solution).

Finally, be flexible (and encourage leaders to be flexible, too), since the configurations on which your company has settled may not work, in which case they are likely to change. If you treat this as a change effort, you will be prepared.

Best of luck!