PODCAST: The Danger of Forcing Employees Back to the Office | Andy Golding, Employee Experience Sp.

Absolutely, Bruce. And by 'hot and heavy,' we're actually seeing companies sending out company-wide memos to all employees saying, 'Right, it's time everybody back in the office,' which is somewhat mind-boggling given where we are and everything we've come through in the last 12-ish months. But that's what we're seeing: companies mandating that employees come back to the office.

Well, I think it's short-sighted. I really do think it's short-sighted. I mean, despite the obvious health risks and health concerns, by mandating that people come back into the office, I think what companies are missing out on is a huge opportunity to leap forward as organizations. You know, in March, give or take March of 2020, companies were kind of forced into this remote working experiment where they had so much opportunity to fundamentally change up the way we work, how we work, how we get work done, our organizational operating system, if you will. And employees went away, they went home, they made it work. Yeah, a lot of us, a lot of companies, a lot of employees wobbled a little bit in the transition to remote, but for the most part, everybody made it, everybody made it work. And in this time, employees have learned so much about themselves, their work styles, how they work best, that I think for companies to suddenly send out company-wide memos and say, 'Right, everybody back in the office,' it's short-sighted because you're going to be bringing people back into the office who don't want to be there, who are scared for their health, who don't actually need to work in the office full-time anymore. And I think the opportunity cost is huge because people are going to become switched off, frustrated, disengaged by now being forced back in when we said to them, 'Please just help us work, help us work with this in 2020 when we went remote.' It was this implicit question or explicit question for different companies of, 'Let's figure this out together.' We made it work, and now suddenly companies are turning around going, 'Cool, well that was irrelevant, now we're just going to go back to the way we always used to do things.'

So Bruce, I could hypothesize on a number of things that that could be, but in a lot of ways I think you've answered your own question there when you spoke about control. And I think that there are two driving forces for companies behind this forcing people back into the office. The one is: we've got leases that were, you know, we're paying our rent every month for offices and desks to stand empty, and it's really expensive and it's hurting the bottom line. So it would be a lot better if we just had warm bodies to fill those spaces, which on paper maybe makes sense, but it actually doesn't at all because you can have warm bodies coming in to fill those spaces, but if those people are frustrated, don't want to be there, angry, if they're spending their time and energy on being upset about having to be at the office rather than having the freedom to work wherever, you're not actually benefiting from having warm bodies in the space. And the other side of it is you spoke about control. Sorry, I'll make my point to the secretary. I think that a lot of leaders haven't taken the opportunity to learn how to lead remotely, and if we're still resting on the excuse that it's just not possible to have a good company culture when everybody's remote, we're missing a trick, missing a massive check because you don't — if you need to, if you, as you said rightly, if you feel the need to control every moment and every movement of your employees' days, there's problems there. Perhaps the problem is not them and maybe the problem is you. But clearly it's not working for some companies. Some companies feel the need to get people in to get people engaged, feel that there is a greater spark, a greater sense of creativity and teamwork, a greater sense of collaboration in the physical work, and they want to reignite that. And I, you know, those companies should be, I suppose, allowed to work that way. What's going to differentiate, I suppose, companies of the present with companies of the future is those that offer flexible work arrangements. Surely they become the most desirable companies to work for. When those companies who treat their employees like adults rather than, I don't know, hamsters on a wheel, we'll become more desirable employers into the future.

But to speak to the flexible work arrangements that you mentioned, I think the best analogy that I can give for this is: have you ever had an old computer or an old device of some sort and you try and install a new operating system onto this hardware, and the hardware simply does not support the operating system? And unfortunately, I think that's where a lot of businesses are finding themselves with their business models. Their business model, that hardware model, does not support this new operating system, and that's a tough thing to grapple with.