Returning to the office

This week our company start a gradual “returning to the office” process, where we will bring everyone from your homes for a Hybrid situation where we will keep working at home twice a week and three times at office.

I know there are a lot of articles, texts, concepts about this process out there, but I really want to share my personal experience and thoughts after these first days.

These first days brought to my attention a few topics witch I want to reflect and see your opinion for that as leaders and part of this process.

?Even though we are returning to the office Hybrid meetings and interactions will remain, and we need to adapt to have part of people during a meeting for example, on-line and part presential. What per se is a very hard technical and social challenge as we will need to combine our two interactions skills at one, interacting with people at a screen and f2f.

Most likely a great majority will have a home sick after a few weeks or month on this returning process, for that we will need to keep vigilant on the mental health of our people, in a much more complex environment.

We need to align expectations of the executives and the employees around returning to the office.

Social skills and behavior will be needed for training and awareness again, and why not in some cases adapted.

Pandemic demonstrate to us we can do our jobs from everywhere, and we shouldn’t forget this learning, not only to retain people, but also to bring more lightness, flexibility, and possibilities for our organizations. For example, we can hire people from basically everywhere.

Energy will be high at the beginning, but we need to keep vigilant after a few months.

Feelings around the returning will be mixed depending how was the experience during the home office period, this brings even more complexity when we are analyzing the set ups possibilities for this new phase.

?We have started with a probation period where we will be testing the models to adopt, however this understanding and analysis must come bottom/up and not top/down, we need to engage all levels of the organization in this discussion.

Different generations also looks to face-to-face interactions differently then old executives, this must be taken into consideration when companies impose rules or quantity of days to be at office, more flexibility is much better to accommodate all this generational differences, even I understand is not so simple.

Talking about flexibility, I read somewhere humans like to be at control, so we need to understand people want to control, much more know after the pandemic, how, here, and when they will work.

On the nutshell this is a trial period and we need to evaluate and reevaluate very often our decisions , impositions, bias, prejudices, set-ups, office infrastructure, in order to have, at the end(if this is going to have an end) , have the better environment to realize our work and brings the results our shareholders, owners, partners, expect to.