Culture-Driven Growth Strategist at PROPEL, a coaching and consulting firm helping leaders integrate culture, strategy and execution.
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This year has been all about the contingency plan. We’ve been working for months to figure out when and how we’ll bring our employees back — or more fully back — to the workplace. And then the reality changes (e.g., Delta variant), and we have to modify our plans. That’s OK because if we’ve learned one thing in the past year, it’s agility.
But when it comes to returning to the office, the problem we need to solve goes beyond just agility. To date, our approach has been to attempt to engineer the agility in the form of the perfect “hybrid” workplace plan, where some people come into the office most of the time, some come in less and some not at all. That makes logical sense, of course, but it has led to detailed schedules, with rules like everyone should be in the office three days a week, and the marketing team definitely needs to be there on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and 80% of the management team on every day except Friday, etc. It’s a beautiful plan — but it’s not going to work. At least, it’s not going to work in the way you planned it. Why?
Because the changes that the pandemic brought to the way we work weren’t temporary, they were structural. When most of us went remote, the real change was deeper than merely figuring out video call best practices. We proved that employees could work wherever and whenever they want and still be productive — something management had previously believed was impossible. Now that we know that flexibility, customization and designing around employee needs is possible, we’re not going back to the way it was before.
Rather, that’s a decision that every organization needs to make, explicitly, about their culture. Are you going to revert to the old ways? That’s what most hybrid office plans are doing, by scheduling employees to work in shifts (much like a factory!), replacing customization and flexibility with a traditional, command-and-control approach to scheduling people’s remote work time. That’s a cultural decision, not just a logistical response to the pandemic. If that’s your choice, then own it. Share with your employees how predictability and consistency are the key drivers of your success, and that’s why you’re taking the scheduled, hybrid office approach.
Another alternative, of course, is to make a different cultural decision. You could decide to embrace the structural changes that just happened and reorient your culture toward customization and employee needs. Companies that are doing that aren’t starting with rigid schedules, they’re starting by gathering data. They don’t ask which days people want to come to the office, they simply measure which days people do come to the office, and they find out how and when people do their best collaborative work, rather than assuming that must be done in conference rooms. They use these employee-centric data to develop models for scheduling, but they always have flexibility built into them because this isn’t just about scheduling “telework,” this is about embracing a variably remote workforce.
When you make the cultural decision in favor of flexibility and customization, then you start to build systems that will work with a workforce that’s variably remote rather than predictably remote. And that’s not the only big cultural decision you’ll need to make. Once you make your customization choice, you’ll then encounter three other culture decisions about (a) the true value and purpose of your office space, (b) the way you collaborate and (c) the way you handle supervision and accountability.
For each of these areas, you must choose: Will you revert to the old ways, or will you run with the new changes? The decisions you make will have huge implications for all the logistical challenges we’re facing in your return to work plans, which is why you need to make the culture decisions first. Don’t let the tail wag the dog here by making logistical choices that end up making the culture decisions for you. Take a stand on how your culture will respond to the structural changes we’ve just experienced, and make it clear to your employees exactly what kind of a workplace they’ll be returning to.
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