Your Employees Will Resign Unless Your First Meeting Back at the Office Does This...

After two fitful years of starts and stops, you’ve announced that you’re bringing your employees back to the office. Seriously, you mean it this time. They did extraordinary work under trying circumstances but you fear that culture and innovation have both suffered.

But you’ve also read too much about “The Great Resignation” not to worry about a return to the office triggering an exodus from it. You’re not wrong – but allow me to let you in on a secret. The Great Resignation is not an inexorable process but is the outcome of poor choices in the face of what’s actually going on, what Mike Clementi, Unilever’s executive vice president of human resources calls “The Great Exploration.”

The pandemic forced everyone to rethink their priorities and work-life balance. They’re exploring their options and resigning if their current job doesn’t offer what they’re looking for. This is only a crisis for leaders who misread or mismanage the moment. For everyone else, it’s an opportunity.

You should use your first meeting back in the office to signal that you get it, that you’re ready to embrace the occasion and rethink what being in the office actually means. The good news is that you don’t have to answer that conundrum yourself – in fact, you shouldn’t try. Before you even gather your team, open the questions to them: What worked when we were remote? What didn’t? What should we keep from the last two years, what can we improve and what should we toss? As importantly, since meeting in person is an option again, how do we want to use that??

Start a MURAL virtual collaboration board allowing everyone on your team to weigh in. Open up the possibility that the in-person meeting can be fundamentally different from anything pre-pandemic. Counterintuitively, starting asynchronously will afford a broader (because you can include more people) and deeper (because everyone can be heard) exchange of opinions, leading to a quicker and firmer consensus. Your team will produce a multitude of suggestions for how they can leverage being face to face to do things that they could not do as easily remotely and what they want to continue to do remotely.?

Not every idea will be implemented, but, importantly, everyone will be given the chance to be heard and valued. We are all looking for that kind of inclusivity, flexibility, and openness to co-create our own futures. If our associates find it and even help define it, where they already are, they won’t have to seek it elsewhere.?

You won’t be alone in embracing the Great Exploration. Some of the most innovative companies, such as GitLab and Dropbox, know to lead with asynchronous collaboration in order to discourage needless meetings, for example. Indeed, we’ve been studying high-performing teams’ best practices throughout the pandemic as part of the Go Forward to Work project and collected them in a step-by-step “how-to” book called “Competing in the New World of Work.” Smart executives – the ones who aren’t suffering the Great Resignation – are rethinking and co-creating their team’s work futures. “I knew that once we finally had the team together in person we couldn't just do what we used to do or what we have been doing for two years on WebEx,” George Fisher, senior vice president for sales at T-Mobile, told me. “We had to up our game and get to know each other more deeply to kick things into a higher gear.”?

Your message will be that you and your team will engage in a great co-creation, with all aspects of work on the table. Let them know you probably didn’t even scratch the surface of what’s possible with today’s remote and hybrid tools but that’s what you’re aiming to do going forward. As a leader, your post-pandemic role should be one of openness and questioning. It’s not about dictating policy, it’s about curiosity. Understanding that will enable you to embrace the Great Exploration and engage your team where they are professionally and personally.?

By collaborating with your team about what your future of work will look like, you’re empowering them and they’re helping you make the office a place they will welcome going back to. And it has the added advantage of sending a clear signal about the kind of collaboration you expect going forward.

And now you can get to the actual meeting.

In-person meetings should be about connection. Done right, they can be the social-chemical team-building event you hope for. But that requires deliberate engineering on your part: Start with a conversation that connects people and arouses empathetic feelings. One method I use is asking everyone to share something sweet and something sour in their lives. That kind of sharing, often involving vulnerability and empathy, will help bond your team and open new levels of trust and acceptance. To borrow the quote often misattributed to the great poet Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

So just two simple rules of thumb to remember.??

• The future needs to be about co-creation, not policy or dictation. Open that door to your associates to be a part of creating their own future.??
• And now that we are going to be back together, don't just have the same transactional meeting you had remotely (which you shouldn't have anyway), but go deeper, and take advantage of what we call social-chemical bonding to build real connectedness levels higher than you did previously.??

It's your choice. You can go forward to work, exploring the future together – or you can drag them back to work and face the Great Resignation.?

If you want best practices on how to lead in this new era, go to radicallyadapt.com to access a free video course based on our research from the last two years.