Together At Last

Return-to-office mandates are deeply unpopular, in part because by themselves they don’t solve any obvious problems. Here’s how to do it right.

By Patrick E. Sharbaugh

This summer, Zoom — the tech company that became virtually synonymous with the? switch to working from home during the Covid pandemic — began requiring its 7400 employees to once again begin showing up at the office. In what the company calls a “structured hybrid” approach, all workers within 50 miles of a Zoom office are now expected to spend at least two days per week on site, working shoulder-to-shoulder with other Zoomers.?

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan justified the company’s about-face by observing that working exclusively via video calls and other remote technologies has stifled innovation at the company and made it more difficult for teams to build trust and deeper connections. That explanation has not resonated with Zoom employees, who, like millions of others, have found much to like in working from home, freed of a daily commute. And as with innumerable other companies who’ve begun implementing so-called “return-to-office” (RTO) policies, Zoom is facing fierce resistance as they call people back to the workplace, even for just a few days a week.?

In my work as a design strategist, design educator, and a design community leader, I've worked closely with enterprises of every size and shape, both before and through the pandemic. I’ve had conversations with scores of senior leaders across industries from finance and tech to retail, manufacturing, and government, and have spent hundreds of hours working directly with their teams. I took a designer’s interest in observing how, at the start of the pandemic, the world threw itself into the challenge of a suddenly fully remote workforce with a fervor. The internet was awash in strategies and advice for optimizing remote work for individuals and teams, with tricks and tips, research and data, all aimed at making this sudden shift as seamless and productive a transition as possible. And I’ve watched with a similar curiosity as thousands of organizations now attempt to bring their workforces back to the office without any acknowledgement that this shift is just as disruptive for workers as the first one was, requiring no less careful attention to how we work together in person.?

It appears to me that many leaders and managers are imagining, mistakenly, that their teams can simply return to operating just as they did prior to the pandemic. As a result, the great majority of RTO strategies, if they can be called such, rely almost exclusively on persuasion — calibrating the precise combination of carrots and sticks they believe will get butts back in ergonomic seats.

But too much has changed for that kind of time travel to be possible, or for persuasion alone to fix this $1.3 trillion problem. Employees spent three years relearning how to work together and adopting new tools; expecting them to unlearn all of that, to discard the technologies and processes and workarounds they developed as part of fully distributed teams and pick up where they left off in early 2020, is both futile and counterproductive.

While executives like Zoom’s Yuan extol the many benefits of in-person work, few are taking concrete steps to assure that teams actually realize those benefits when they are together. As a result, workers spend precious time commuting into half-empty offices only so that they can sit in front of a laptop Zooming with their colleagues, just as they could have done from home. It’s no wonder they’re not keen to return.?

I am not advocating for or against either remote work or RTO. I work remotely myself. But If executives are going to insist that their workforces spend some time working together in person, and cite the benefits of in-person work as justification for doing so, then I feel strongly that “time together” for workers must be considered with care and thoughtful intent, not simply left to chance.?

Three years of our global experiment in WFH has revealed that there are in fact a variety of distinct benefits to being in an office, or at least to being together. The leaders with whom I’ve spoken have mentioned table-stakes outcomes that include professional growth and mentorship, team trust and belonging, creativity and innovation, and employees’ connection to company purpose and mission — all aspects of the employee-worker relationship leaders say they’ve seen ebb for remote-only teams. In order to make the best use of in-person time, it behooves us all to agree on exactly which of those benefits, or others, we expect to achieve (there’s clearly much more than productivity at stake), and design the hours our teams’ have together to optimize that precious time for those outcomes.

Viewing this challenge as merely an HR or facilities problem misses the point. This is an era-defining opportunity to reimagine engaging, fit-to-purpose office experiences that make the best use of collaborative, synchronous, in-person time. It’s also a compelling design problem, and a productive path forward requires approaching it as such, with a human-centered approach that considers the lived experience of those involved and takes into account the needs of all stakeholders.

That means organizations must start this process with real conversations, not just with mandates. Like all good conversations, these should involve as much (or more) listening as talking. They should acknowledge the many ways traditional knowledge work has changed in the past three years, as well as the fact that individual productivity is only one of many kinds of value exchanges both employers and workers have an interest in seeing. And perhaps most importantly, any return-to-office policy must be crafted with thoughtful intent, taking into account the way that work, and the tools we use to do it, have changed and making sure that what happens in person (wherever that may be) is worth the commute.

Starting with Conversations

Perhaps the most significant challenge of returning to the office is the fact that not every team has the same needs when it comes to being together in person. Service innovation teams exploring unknown territory and considering the nuances of human-to-human interactions, for example, may understand working together in person as a necessity for prototyping and testing new concepts. Individual contributors who may not be deeply connected to any one team (e.g. accountants, data analysts), however, may find few reasons to gather together in person multiple times per week, at least for the purposes of collaboration.?

Any blanket policy such as “3 days/wk” at the office therefore runs the risk of alienating groups unlikely to benefit significantly from the change, or worse, triggering an avalanche of departures (as companies like Grindr learned the hard way). This is especially true of policies that have been handed down as edicts from on high, absent any input from those with the greatest stake in the outcome.?

As my colleague Daniel Stillman, the author of Good Talk, often observes, conversations can be designed just as products and services can. And important conversations should be designed. Well managed conversations between stakeholders can be the difference between success and failure on any project.

This is, of course, what an experienced facilitator does. Anyone who’s been in a smartly facilitated meeting or design session knows that it can make the difference between a one-sided conversation that escalates to unproductive, heated confrontation and one that feels balanced, inclusive, and results in productive alignment. Structured interaction, thoughtful prompts, and collaborative tools can make difficult conversations easy and even fun. They help teams arrive at clear outcomes and obvious next steps.?

As a designer, I know well the profound advantages of solutions that have been co-created with those they impact, not just for them. Leaders and managers need to make space to articulate the thinking behind RTO, allow employees to surface concerns, and together discuss the possibilities of what could or might be, thereby elevating the issue from one biased toward the status quo to one of optimism and possibility.

Indeed, companies who have so far successfully navigated this challenge have one thing in common: they approach it with an inclusive and empathy-first mindset, involving employees to design a flexible work experience together, and collectively imagining with them how to best reap the benefits from in-person time together based on what matters to them.

After encountering initial pushback when they floated a partial RTO in 2021, for example, EY switched its efforts to focus on better understanding employees’ reluctance to come into the office. One common objection stood out: Employees weren’t sure what to do about pet care or child care. While both are issues that workers have no doubt struggled with since time immemorial, EY nevertheless announced a fund in February 2022 to reimburse up to $800 per year for commuting, pet care, and dependent care costs for each of its 55,000-plus U.S. employees. Since the rollout, EY has seen a 150% uptick in office attendance across the U.S.?

An EY leader observed, “We just needed to listen to our people and understand what, specifically, was problematic for them, and offer resources to address that.”

Tools for Talking

I have been designing products, services, and conversations for well over 15 years, and I use a variety of tried-and-tested methods and structured activities to facilitate collaborative work on them all. In my experience, the tools that work best in all instances are those that encourage objectively innovative behaviors: namely, working in ways that are collaborative, visual, empathic, imaginative, questioning, and iterative. I have seen firsthand how these behaviors help people in all sorts of disciplines, (even those who don’t have the word design or innovation in their job title or description) work more effectively together and more easily generate breakthrough ideas.

What might this look like in practice? In recent months I’ve facilitated several such conversations with senior leaders at some of the nation’s most recognizable brands and, in some cases, with their teams. One tool I’ve used to guide these conversations has been a participatory research method known as What’s On Your Radar?. In this exercise, participants plot items visually on a sectioned radar-display-like template according to personal significance. Our radar template was divided into six sections or “slices,” each representing one category of benefit that in-person work could conceivably bring about. (These categories were based on in-person “outcomes” participants themselves had generated in a previous brainstorming activity: Professional Growth, Focus and Productivity, Trust and Belonging, Creativity and Experimentation, Mental Wellness and Focus, and so on).?

This method of conversation involves much more than people simply talking at one another, as you might guess. It begins with heads-down time and gives everyone the same number of Post-its to begin with, which encourages contribution from everyone, even the quiet types. Once participants have plotted their own interests and observations, they pair up for discussions and comparisons of each others’ thinking.?The results make priorities obvious and stimulate real conversations around interests and needs.

The mechanics of What’s On Your Radar? make the conversation visible and documents thinking it as it happens, creating a sort of heat map that speaks for itself. This approach asks participants themselves to imagine what benefits, if any, there might be to being side by side at times. It steers the conversation away from an exclusive focus on productivity, which can as easily monopolize such discussions. It generates a wide, divergent set of thoughts around the office environment and what happens there, and almost always reveals unexpected points and outcomes. It centers the lived experience of stakeholders, and makes it easy to empathize with all those involved.?

With good facilitation, a single session of this sort can be had in an hour, or with a large group perhaps 2-3 hours. This is time very well spent, resulting in understanding, insight, ownership, engagement, and alignment among those participating — all valuable outcomes that top-down mandates and ironclad ultimatums from HR cannot hope to achieve.?

Gaining a clear understanding of what outcomes of in-person work might best benefit employees and the company as a whole allows us to then leverage similar tools to consider, for example, how we might optimize in-person time in an office (or elsewhere) specifically for those outcomes. Perhaps it becomes clear that not all teams need the same kind of time together; maybe we discover that for certain roles, commuting to the office once a week, or once a month for focused ‘on-sites’, is more appropriate. And knowing not just when teams will meet but what, exactly, they will do when on site together?

Much has been said about the impact that RTO-by-fiat may be having on employee satisfaction, hiring and retention. Indeed, nearly half (42%) of companies with return-to-office mandates have witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated. Almost a third (29%) of companies enforcing office returns are struggling with recruitment. And three quarters (76%) of employees say they’re inclined to leave if their companies decide to pull the plug on flexible work schedules.?

Most of these impacts can be reduced or eliminated by taking a conversation-driven, bottom-up approach that makes employees partners in understanding what problem is being solved and centers their own needs and experiences in solving it. Workers don’t necessarily hate the office; what they hate is having to go into an office for no good reason.

The goal, therefore, should not simply be to compel people into the office again. The real goal is to make being together — that is, working synchronously and in proximity with one another — genuinely worthwhile for workers and for the enterprise. Focusing exclusively on “the office” misses this truth and feeds into the sinister narrative many employees have that they’re being forced back simply to justify costly capital expenditures. (If, as an executive, this is actually what’s driving your RTO policy, I urge you to think more expansively.)?

A more useful framing for this topic might be one of ‘togetherness’. A corresponding open-ended prompt such as “How might we assure that synchronous in-person time be used for outcomes that can’t be achieved any other way?” leads to optimistic, inspiring, and innovative thinking that embraces this moment as a lever for creating the future of work.?

And while any team should decide for itself how much ‘togetherness’ they need, there are some strong arguments for any team to spend at least some time shoulder-to-shoulder to advance their goals and the organization as a whole.

Solving the right problem

All too often, in the rush to mitigate a pressing problem, we see smart people jump to the first or most obvious solution that springs to mind and urge haste in implementing it. Later, when the solution has failed, they chalk it up to poor execution. But most solutions fail not because the solution was poorly executed (and, incidentally, this is also true of most new businesses) but because nobody had taken the time to truly understand what problem they were solving.?

I’ve seen this mistake happening at a staggering scale over the past year. After all, people not coming into the office is, by itself, no more a problem than people not going to the North Pole is a problem. In other words, we should not be solving for people not being in the office; we should be solving for the specific detrimental impacts that accrue to a fully distributed workforce that never meets in person — if such impacts exist. Otherwise, executives are merely mandating tortuous commutes and crossing their fingers that the root problems solve themselves.?

In fact there’s good evidence of a host of actual problems with remote work that employers can focus on to craft a far better hybrid or distributed experience. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, for example, noted that innovation at the company had declined in the absence of informal interactions between employees, which are notably difficult for distributed teams. Many leaders we’ve spoken to have made similar observations. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has pointed to the hit that mentorship and regular feedback remote team members have traditionally received from their colleagues and supervisors. One much-referenced report from 2022 found that workers who rub elbows regularly spend 25% more time in informal career-development activities than their fully distributed counterparts.?

There are tensions and contradictions aplenty here. Those advocating for fully remote work, for example, say they want independence, freedom, and autonomy. Yet the American Psychiatric Association has found that the majority of employees working from home have experienced negative mental health impacts including isolation, loneliness, and an inability to separate work from home life. Given this paradox, instead of asking, How do we make our employees return to the office?, wouldn’t it be smarter to ask, How might we make the office a sanctuary for mental wellbeing and social connection??

Forcing employees back to the office is a magic bullet for nothing at all. Yet there are genuine problems with fully remote work that can be addressed with targeted, innovative solutions crafted with intent. And many of those solutions may indeed involve an office, or something like it. But intent must start with a deep understanding of the human experiences underlying any problem. And that understanding must start, at least, with conversations and real empathy.

It’s unlikely that a shared physical workplace as we know it is going to disappear anytime soon. There’s too much cultural and, yes, economic investment in the spaces we call offices for them to simply go away in a hurry. But nor can we expect tens of millions of workers — including many who joined the workforce for the first time during the pandemic and know nothing else — to simply blink away the lessons of the past three years and return to the modus operandi of the Before Times.?

Businesses have almost universally accepted that to remain competitive in today’s dynamic marketplace, they must consistently innovate around changing customer needs and expectations. Why should they imagine that innovating around the evolving needs of their employees — current and future — should be any different?

The current debate represents a once-in-a-century opportunity to address some of the most important issues facing employees everywhere — and in the process to discover how we might improve what “work” means for generations to come. Let’s not squander it.?