In my previous post, I made the case that we’re thoroughly messing up the effort to get employees to return to the office. Managers are arguing that remote work hurts productivity when there are now plenty of data to show that productivity doesn’t decline (and might even increase).
While managers and employees debate productivity, the real fight is about control. Employees have been able to build work environments that suit their styles, meet their needs, and incorporate their personal lives. So, it’s no surprise that they aren’t keen to give power back to their managers, especially because managers don’t seem to appreciate the magnitude of the sacrifice it will require. They’re offering no better rationale for the return than “because it’s your job!”
The scales are tipped in the remote work direction, and since productivity doesn’t tip the scales, remote work is still winning. Some high-profile CEOs such as Elon Musk, David Solomon, and Bob Iger are putting their fingers on the other side of the scale, telling people to return to the office “or else….”
You won’t be surprised to hear that the threats and ultimatums approach is not good for engagement and that most employees forced against their will to return to the office full-time report that they will search for alternate employment. I’m with them. I’m an office advocate, but even I think requiring five days in the office is ridiculous, short-sighted, and unjustifiable for most knowledge-worker jobs.
So, if claims of enhanced productivity aren’t convincing and threats and consequences aren’t wise, where do we take the return-to-office conversation? I think the answer is to community.
We’re Missing the Value of Community
In creating our remote work routines—honing our schedules, workspaces, and Zoom backgrounds—we’ve created tighter and tighter cocoons around ourselves. But, unfortunately, we’ve disconnected from our teammates, coworkers, and neighbors in the process. Research is only starting to measure the cost of this shift, but the early signs are alarming.
Strong Ties are Weakening
At the start of the pandemic, many employees counted on their teammates to help them endure a highly stressful time. I saw wonderful examples where remote coworkers accommodated each other when personal responsibilities interrupted work tasks. Many more people took time at the start of their video meetings to ask, “how are you?” and then listen empathetically to answers that were often emotionally fraught. It was an impressive display of the value of a strong team, and it showed in an 8% increase in belonging indices in 2020.
Three years later, those strong teams have weakened. The players have changed. I’ve worked with many teams where the members have never met each other in person. They don’t know much about one another other than what they glean from a few hours of Zoom calls each week. There isn’t the same “got your back” feeling. Relationships are more transactional, trust is eroding, and we’re paying the price of isolation.
It’s not just my hunch. Gallup’s research shows that fewer employees report having a best friend at work, which has been demonstrated over decades of research to predict many important outcomes for the individual and the business. Glint’s 2021 study showed that disconnection from colleagues was the most cited cause of burnout, and their 2022 research shows that 35% of employees who work in a hybrid model feel even less connected to their teammates than they did in 2021.
We need to share this research. We need to show how isolation is affecting mental health. We need to make changes to allow individuals more control of their environment. We need to revamp our meetings and office days. We need to help individuals overcome the social anxieties built up over three years. We need to help them reconnect with their colleagues.
Teams Are in Trouble
Remote work hasn’t just impacted us as individuals; we also see a hit to team trust. Not being physically together robs us of many opportunities for communication, and we miss essential content and context. I wrote about the importance of mutual knowledge and the unflattering judgments we make without it here. (The article includes a link to exercises I created to help you bolster mutual knowledge on your team.)
Teams will feel the impact of waning trust in myriad ways. Trust predicts team performance because it supports effective communication, productive conflict, creative contributions, willingness to seek and offer help and to move beyond a strict economic relationship toward proactively contributing to the team’s success. Trust makes it safe to be vulnerable in ways that contribute to a more productive, innovative, and efficient team.
Redefining Contribution
As long as we measure people’s performance based on how many lines of code they write or how many reports they produce, we’ve got no leg to stand on in encouraging them back to the office. They will write more code if you leave them be.
Only once we define people’s roles as contributors to healthy, productive teams with clearly articulated expectations for responsibilities beyond their individual tasks (such as supporting people who are developing, contributing to others’ ideas, and identifying risks and assumptions in plans) will we have the data to justify returning to the office. The ball is in management’s court.
Weak Ties are Missing
Eroding our strong ties will profoundly affect our individual quality of life, career development, and team performance, but strong ties aren’t all that’s at stake. Weak ties—those casual acquaintances who are the background performers in our lives—are being lost rapidly.
Gillian Sandstrom estimates that in pre-pandemic times, we interacted with between 11 and 16 casual acquaintances like the barista, security guard, or receptionist each day. When we work remotely, we drastically reduce the number of interactions we have with our weak ties. Sandstrom’s research shows that these interactions make us happier, helping our emotional and social well-being.
When Bob from Sesame Street sang about the people in your neighborhood, he was on to something. We’re better off being a part of something.
Now pivot your perspective and think about how many people in your neighborhood (or your city’s downtown) are unemployed or underemployed because you don’t go to the office. How many small businesses are suffering? How many students can’t find a job to pay for their tuition because cafes and restaurants are half-full? How many actors, artists, and musicians can’t make ends meet without the serving jobs that get them from gig to gig? What happens to your city if the downtown hollows out?
In my city, foot traffic downtown is down 46% from pre-pandemic levels. Interestingly, this contrasts with increased foot traffic in smaller cities and towns. Recent surveys show that the resistance to returning to the office is more of a big-city phenomenon. But what does the world look like if Toronto, New York, San Francisco, and London have hollow centers? Is that what we want?
And if not, are we hoping that other people will leave their comfy cocoons and keep our cities vibrant and healthy so that we don’t have to?
Balancing Control and Community
Being a part of a healthy community, whether that’s a team, an organization, or a city, requires trade-offs, compromises, and sometimes discomfort. It’s not as easy as hiving yourself off in your home office. It means standing beside a stinky person on the subway, tolerating distractions and close talkers, or suffering micro-aggressions from ignorant or awful people.
Being a part of a community requires you to put yourself out there and be vulnerable in ways big and small. But we are wired for connection, and the longer we ignore that fact, the more lonely, isolated, unwell, and entrenched we’ll become.
If most of us don’t return to the office a few days a week, we will end up with the communities we deserve. I suspect we won’t like what we become.
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More on This: Return-to-Office Miniseries
We are botching the return-to-office transition. We need to talk less about individual productivity and talk more about the obligation to contribute to healthy teams and organizations. But leaders, the price of admission to that conversation is to give up some control so employees can optimize their experience and to reset how the workweek is used so we have less overflow into personal time.
Further Reading
Guide: Adapting to a Hybrid Workplace
Reset Your Remote Management Approach
Video: Hybrid Work Strategies – Deciding What’s ‘Office Worthy’
Sources Cited:
[1] 64% of workers would consider quitting if asked to return to the office full-time – Morgan Smith | CNBC Make It
[2] LinkedIn Employee Well-Being Report – LinkedIn + Glint
[3] Is remote working fuelling a loneliness epidemic? – Scarlet Lewitt | HRD
[4] Employee Well-Being Report (2021) – Glint
[5] Employee Well-Being Report (2022) – Glint
[6] Challenges and barriers in virtual teams: a literature review – Sarah Morrison-Smith & Jamie Ruiz | SN Applied Sciences
[7] Why You Miss Those Casual Friends So Much – Gillian Sandstrom & Ashley Whillans | HBR
[8] Sesame Street: People in Your Neighborhood with Bob
[9] Canada’s New Workplace Mobility Trends – Business Data Lab; Canadian Chamber of Commerce
[10] Goldman Sachs’ CEO called on all employees to return full-time to the office a year ago. Many still aren’t showing up – Geoff Colvin | Fortune
[11] The Loneliest Employees – Jim Harter | Gallup
Absolutely excellent Liane, couldn’t agree more
Cindy, I’m so glad that the article resonated with you!! I’m so worried about what’s happening as we make short-term choices to increase our control and comfort. I fear we’re going to get into a vicious cycle.
I agree strongly that how we speak to people can postively or negatively impact their choices. Trust can be created or eroded. Collaboration, resolving HR issues, creative sharing all happen more quickly in person. Most importantly the soft skills that employers are yearning for grow more quickly in person.
I spent the morning at an in-person meeting of a team that normally works remotely across three different countries and multiple time zones. I feel like they made so much progress in person that they weren’t making having zoom meeting after zoom meeting. Some things really are better in person.
Hi Liane, the first part of this discussion resonated with me a lot more. This second part has me disagreeing, strongly. The issue of control is huge. The remote/hybrid discussion came and should be about individuals having more opportunities to control and choose. Those who are much less ‘wired for connection’ such as introverts, and those with disabilities, immuno-compromised, (and even people with difficult and/or abusive workplace leaders/coworkers) have all had little-to-no choice about in person work at a serious cost to their well-being. Control and choice should now become THE option available for employees in post-pandemic work environments. The argument for community isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s just not fair to a lot of people and we can facilitate change. The community/downtown/office environment needs to adapt to changing needs.
Hi Debra, thanks so much for weighing in! I don’t think of the two parts of the conversation as separate. We’re desperate to get people back investing in healthy communities (whether teams, organizations, or communities in the cities where we live). The best way to get people back to focusing on their communities is by better understanding, empathizing with, and making accommodations for the type of needs that you’re talking about. We need better answers for people who have significant family needs, people with neurodiversity, and introverts. I agree completely. I just don’t think the pendulum should swing all the way to employees optimizing everything for themselves and not contributing to healthy communities.
I agree with your comment about not having the pendulum swing to employees only optimizing everything for themselves. I read a LI post recently from someone who said something to the effect of: I don’t work overtime, I took a nap on Friday, etc. but I’m still achieving my goals. My reaction was that if we all only focus on our own goals we will not achieve what we need to as a team, an org, or a society. My daughter’s soccer team doesn’t run without volunteers – so I coach, the highschool can’t run their lunch program without volunteers to keep costs low for students, we need to not just focus on our own goals but help others achieve theirs as well – without of course burning out. But if we don’t lift our eyes up, build connections, and help those who are less inclined to build connections (but who also need them), we all lose as you say.
Jen, I think that’s exactly the issue. I see a lot of self-centred behaviour where people have their heads down and think that if they’ve crossed off the tasks on their own lists, then they’re “done.” I have some empathy for the fact that people are overwhelmed and just trying to protect themselves from organizations that would bleed them dry if given the chance. I’d rather fight to address the unreasonable workload and then ask people to reinvest in their teams and communities. That’s next week’s post… addressing the ridiculous, unmanageable workload.
Thanks for this Liane, I’m glad to see an article thoughtfully written with some insight added, and not just the “because I said so” arguments of either side!
I get the part about trust with colleagues and Team trust declining, I see how that is different since the start of the pandemic. Although, with a bit of effort I believe leaders and employees can still get that team connection, maybe not as strong as previously but interactions don’t have to be only transactional.
Community in New/Different Places – While I so agree that isolation is dangerous and connections, both strong and weak, are important; I wonder if we could look at changing who we connect with and where? (And for context, this is coming from an extrovert who gets super energized having a great conversation with someone, but also finds themselves far happier working from home.) The downtowns are empty and foot traffic is up in neighbourhoods which makes me think that closer to home is where we should/could be looking to make new connections. I can still have a casual chat with my barrista, but now it’s the one near my house instead of in the office tower, I’m also seeing my grocery store folks a lot more often lately since I can easily run there for something I need instead of having to plan one big shop per week.
Strong & weak ties – I’ve been lucky to have some pretty awesome people that I’ve worked with over the years, and those that became true friends, I still interact with outside of work. Also, having recently made the jump from employee to consultant, I’ve found myself happy to interact with the “work people” I chose to interact with, and not having to be “forced” to interact with Larry the close talker. Building out my network of professionals that I admire and can learn from has been really lovely.
I just wonder if we look in new places for connection and community could we get the same sense of fulfillment as we did when those things were in an office? We could maybe look to the networks that stay-at-home parents have built as an example.
Lisa, thank you so much for your wonderful contribution to the conversation. I agree with you that we can find community in so many places and that our neighbourhoods are among the beneficiaries of remote work. Now we just need work teams to forge stronger connections, hopefully with some time together in person, but also from wherever they happen to be.
Fantastic piece – I was referred to you by a friend and neighbour (!) Liz Gildner, a Change Management consultant who follows your work, and i’m so glad she pointed this out. I lead Canada’s Urban Institute, and we are seeing a myriad of challenges in Canada’s cities connected to the diminishment of social – and economic – capital, as you point out both – in cities and neighbourhoods. Cities and their regions are ecosystems and dependent on complex weaves of connection – physical, virtual, spiritual even. All these forms of ‘connective tissue’ are essential to a healthy system, and my concern mirrors what you so succinctly outline here- empathy has to be a core urban value, and when we’re as fragmented as disconnected as we are now (whither transit…?) , its really hard to cultivate that. A completely self-curated life isn’t going to be as interesting, challenging, or rewarding as one where serendipity and chance and necessity are enabled through proximity and adjacency (and good urban form). Surely to goodness we need to remember we are together much much more than our individual parts.
Mary, I am with you on that. And I love how you have articulated the ecosystem aspect of communities. They are indeed complex weaves of connection. I think communities are worth fighting for!