You want employees together again. Some don’t want to come back to the office. How can you meet in the middle?
HR can make coming back to the office worth it for employees, but it might not be easy. And here’s why: About 60% of employees want to work remotely all the time. About 35% want a hybrid work situation, according to research from FlexJobs. Nearly 70% of employees say the prospect to work remotely will be a major factor in their decisions to keep current jobs or accept new jobs.
On the other side, about 30% of employers plan to have employees return full time to the office, according to the Littler Annual Employer Survey Report. About half will offer a hybrid model.
“Employers are eager to bring their teams back together in person, but {they} are hearing from employees and applicants who value the option to work remotely, and {those people} feel they have shown they can be productive while doing so,” says Devjani Mishra, a leader of Littler’s COVID-19 Task Force and Return-to-Work Team.
So it’s essential to make coming back to the office an engaging, motivating and safe experience for employees. Here are six strategies to help:
Create a value proposition
Gallup researchers suggest companies that plan to bring employees back on-site create a workplace value proposition. It’s a “why we come to work” document, highlighting the culture, benefits and positive interactions employees have when on-site.
Make sure yours addresses these four important areas:
- Connection: How will employees connect professionally and personally? Plan to provide opportunities for structured and unstructured time to engage, share and discuss life and work.
- Collaboration: How will employees collaborate effectively? It’s important because working together boosts productivity and fosters and sustains trust – a critical element in a hybrid workplace. So schedule carefully. Plan tasks that need team collaboration and interdependent work while people are on-site. Let them do less collaborative tasks when they’re home.
- Creativity: How will employees become collaboratively creative and how will the organization capture it? When people are physically together, they brainstorm more ideas and generate more creative solutions. Encourage employees to safely take informal breaks and meet more formally to discuss challenges, new ideas and lessons learned.
- Culture. How will you build or maintain company culture post-COVID? Ask employees to help redefine what makes your culture unique, how they can work together and where ideals and goals are rooted.
Step back before springing forward
You want to make employees feel cared for and appreciated when they get back. So acknowledge each one’s experiences.
Encourage front-line managers to honor and recognize the challenges of the past year – personal sacrifices and triumphs. Then, in one-on-one conversations, ask employees:
- What do you like most and least about working remotely?
- What did you like most about working in the office – and what do you look forward to again?
- How do you think we can make working on-site better?
- What do you need to succeed in our new work environment?
Be efficient
One effective way to entice employees to want to be in the office is to promise – and deliver on – efficiency.
Employees will be engaged if they know they can come to work, accomplish everything they must (and possibly more) and walk away, solely focused on life again.
To help with that, Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economics professor and codirector of the Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, suggests that managers set the hybrid schedule.
Before you say, “What? Employees want flexibility!” hear him out: He researched this, and found managers can increase employee satisfaction and improve productivity when teams work together on-site at the same time. His research found it eliminates biases, improves career and promotion equity, and promotes diversity.
Offer timely training
Work has changed. How we work continues to change. And employees need – crave – training that allows them to work with agility.
Almost half of companies in the Littler survey are building internal training programs to help employees adapt to working from different places.
Work with leaders in your company across groups – especially within IT, front-line management and Purchasing – to find the tools employees need. Then work together on training that helps them adopt and master those.
“The pandemic was a wake-up call to employers that the future of work is not the future any longer – it has arrived. It is encouraging, then, to see employers taking steps to provide workers with the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in the new world of work,” says Michael Lotito, a founding member of Littler’s Global Workplace Transformation Initiative.
Make resources handy
Employees likely have new or different needs for mental and physical well-being. And the easier it is for them to explore and access what they need while on-site, the more likely they will want to be on-site.
Many companies offer more mental and behavioral benefits, such as counseling, telehealth, coping and prevention. The majority also offer guided well-being, such as yoga, and physical fitness benefits.
These are all helpful – as long as employees know about them, are educated on how to access them and encouraged to use them.
That’s HR’s job: Make it easier through a marketing plan (go to your internal marketers for help!), education (go to your best trainers for help) and encouragement (get C-suite to lead by example and participation).
Continue with compassion
Despite the past 18 months of turmoil, employee satisfaction is up, according to The Conference Board’s Job Satisfaction survey.
“The compassion, flexibility, and support shown by companies in 2020 played a large role in this increased job satisfaction,” says Amy Lui Abel, PhD, a VP at The Conference Board. “Companies will need to continue this support if they hope to maintain this upward trend.”
Encourage front-line managers to get feedback and share news at the same cadence they did when employees were off site.