Return to the office: Keeping staff on side will be a delicate balancing act

Patrick and Jane are both team leaders at a growing multinational IT company in Dublin. It is currently paying high rent on empty offices in the city centre and the powers that be have decided that idle real estate and remote working are bad for business. A staggered return to the office has been flagged for October, and both managers are dreading it.

“We’ve only recently cracked all of the working-from-home glitches and settled everyone into a good routine. Now everything is going to be up in the air again,” says Patrick.

“I have one group who are willing to go back but they’re bitching about having to choose specific days and not having personal desks any more. I have a second group who don’t want to go back – typically those with long commutes – and there’s a third group I’d describe as ‘fragile’. They’re people who have struggled with their mental health during Covid and I’m genuinely fearful for them being thrown back in at the deep end.”

Finian Buckley, professor of work and organisational psychology at DCU's business school, says the burden of getting people successfully back together will fall to middle managers, who will effectively become transition mentors.

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“They are the ones who will have to connect with team members once senior leaders have communicated the overall corporate perspective on return protocols and translate these messages into day-to-day meaning for each employee,” he says. “They’re the ones who will have to answer the questions, deal with the requests and be on high alert for colleagues who may have difficulties navigating the return.

“Where things are not going to plan, it will be important to be flexible rather than dogmatic, as the transition will take longer for some. Employers who expect employees to react and behave as a homogenous unit on their return risk losing their trust.”

Uneven performances

Personal and logistical problems aside, Jane says another unresolved issue is how to deal fairly with the uneven performances that have emerged over the past year.

“I have people who have worked their socks off because they want to stay working from home,” she says. “Then I have those who have done as little as possible and have undercut the effectiveness of the team and have been really difficult to manage. Yet, they expect the same working-from-home courtesy.

“In a third group are the hopelessly disorganised. Letting them stay home indefinitely will be a disaster as they need structure.

“As team leaders we can designate roles as working from home at our discretion. What worries me is that this becomes set in stone and in six months’ time it no longer suits. If this happens, how do you backtrack without ending up with a very unhappy team member and, if you can’t continue to let them work remotely, will they quit?”

According to a growing body of research published over the last few months the short answer to this question is yes.

Employees are well aware that it is fast becoming a candidate’s market in a growing number of sectors. Those who feel strongly about working from home are choosing to change job rather than return to early-morning commutes or risk exposure to Covid.

Employees also cite saving money on transport and lunches, being better able to juggle childcare and simply being in control of their own time as the main reasons they don’t want to go back to the office.

Staffing problems

In short, what’s shaping up is a battle over control. Many employees feel they have amply demonstrated that there are plenty of tasks that can be done productively from home. On the other side are bosses who are uncomfortable with remote working and want their people back where they can see them.

This has the potential to cause real staffing problems. Results from a number of surveys, including a study by Morning Consult for Bloomberg in May, have shown that while about 40 per cent of Generation Y and first cohort millennials would quit their jobs if their employers refused hybrid or remote working, this figure jumps to 50 per cent among later millennials and Generation Z.

At the same time, data from global jobs platform Indeed shows that searches for remote work have increased by more than 500 per cent since February 2020, while job postings that include remote work have increased 180 per cent and now account for about 10 per cent of all jobs posted on the site.

“The reality is that anyone who has not worked co-located with others for over a year will experience a mixture of emotions on return,” says Buckley. “Senior leaders need to be proactive on this and empower middle managers to connect with their reports, not formally but taking time to have one-to-one chats about how they feel about the return to the office, what they expect, what might be different, and what might help their return.

“Leaders and managers should consciously attempt to balance directive communication – this is what we propose to implement and this is why – with employee-considerate communication: your safety and wellbeing are our first concern,” adds Buckley. “This builds trust and confidence and a sense that while most employees are a least a little anxious about the return to the office, this reality is shared by management, and staff will be supported.”