What if your employees don't want to come back to the office?

Reading time: 15 min

We have spent the past few years telecommuting en masse, with the accompanying creativity to keep employees engaged and connected. Now it seems we need to start using our creativity to make the return to the office smooth and meaningful. After all, do all employees still want to return to the office?

2022 could well be the year of reversal, and it certainly pays to think as an employer about how to make your employees feel that coming to the office is a good idea. What if you turned this challenge into an opportunity to create a "Workplace Value Proposition" that increases employee engagement and motivation?

Make returning to the office worthwhile

A unique value proposition is a powerful statement that stipulates why the target audience should do something. It should convince the target audience why it brings added value.

A Workplace Value Proposition gives employees all the arguments they need to come back to the office with full enthusiasm to work together again!

A well-defined "workplace value proposition" represents the company culture and makes employees feel the benefits of working together in the office. It answers the question "why we come to the office".

To make the return to the workplace as smooth as possible, there are actually 3 key questions to answer:

1. How can we get our people to return safely?

Are sufficient procedures established for all possible scenarios: interactions between different groups, decontamination, ventilation, quarantines, etc.?

Do the office spaces still meet today's requirements? Can everyone feel safe, can distance be kept, are there sufficient facilities for videoconferencing with home workers?

2. Are we going for a hybrid work model and what will that look like practically?

Who comes to the office when? Who does telecommuting? How many days a week do employees come to the office? Do they come on fixed days or is their hybrid work schedule flexible? What about reservations of spots in the office? Are there restrictions on how many employees can be in the office at a time?, ....

3. What is our Workplace Value Proposition?

How do we make people want to come to the office? What do we have to offer as an employer in the workplace? What is the added value for our employees to come to the office? How do we deploy to optimize our employees' work experience?

Obviously, arguing that "it is necessary for business continuity" will not ensure that employees enjoy coming back to the workplace. It is important that employers provide an irresistible environment so that employees have a good reason to move to the workplace and physically collaborate again in the same space.

A good, inspiring Workplace Value Proposition can ensure that you can get the most out of your organization's new values and structure, while ensuring that remote workers feel fully valued and engaged.

This goes beyond the cuddly office dog, safe sports facilities and spaces to unwind, healthy snacks in the office, ...

It establishes a set of values, behaviors and expectations that truly make your workplace the place to be!

Let the 4 C’s help you

Use the 4 C's to create your Workplace Value Proposition. We list them again for you with their challenges and opportunities!

1. Connection

With full time working from home, not only commuting disappeared. Unfortunately, the time for colleagues to interact informally with each other also dropped below zero. And even though working from home also has its advantages, people remain social beings. We need positive moments of contact with others in order to thrive.

Even though business continuity could be ensured thanks to online collaboration tools and countless digital meetings, many employees felt exhausted and socially disconnected after a full day of video calls over time.

Many companies have made great efforts to maintain connection with their employees in the past few months of full time home-based work, and now they must ask themselves how they are going to address that connection in a hybrid work culture.

Working in the office provides many opportunities for interpersonal interaction, and this can certainly recharge your team's social batteries. But make sure that those who work from home continue to feel equally connected as well!

• Encourage your employees to connect with each other and discuss work-related as well as, most importantly, other topics. Not every meeting has to be work-related all the time.
• Create an environment that welcomes social connection! Let your employees feel that social interaction and work friendships are highly valued.
• Come up with creative ways to spice up your 1-1 conversations: walking meetings, reserve timeslots in your calendar for spontaneous conversations, hold a healthy and active break with your team members, ...
• Encourage your employees to talk to each other about their hybrid schedules. Find a day (or 2) when most people work in the office and encourage employees to prioritize office work on those days.
• Encourage your employees to have lunch together and enjoy a healthy break together when in the office. These informal moments are invaluable!

2. Collaboration

TToday, very few jobs exist entirely on their own and employees, organizations and customers reap the benefits of collaboration. Collaboration gives teams the opportunity to capitalize on the strengths and contributions of each individual on the team to achieve better performance, higher productivity and better results than the mere sum of individual performance.

We didn't stop collaborating when the world suddenly needed to work en masse from home, but the way we did changed.

Many teams collided with the challenges of fully virtual collaboration: limited opportunities for informal, spontaneous communication, the limitations of screen sharing and limited interaction.

Returning to the office will improve teamwork and increase efficiency, especially in the case of highly interdependent tasks. But working together not only increases productivity, it also creates and maintains the team's trust in each other.

Working together physically creates visibility of everyone's performance and contribution. And this reinforces trust in each other, even at times when the team is not together.

With a hybrid collaboration model also comes the challenge of not losing sight of the employees who work remotely, especially at key decision moments.

For those employees who physically work together in the office, it is easy to find a moment to collaborate in a shared space, to spontaneously ask each other questions and offer feedback or help when they sense someone needs it. Home workers can easily miss such key moments for collaboration and development, which can have a negative impact on their career development.

Therefore, it is important for managers to create standards and procedures around this so that homeworkers become and remain actively and intentionally involved in these key moments of collaboration.

• Collaborative sessions around tasks that really work better with physical collaboration are best planned intentionally when most employees are in the office
• Learn to use new collaboration platforms and techniques together as a team
• Actively involve teleworkers in discussions and decisions during collaboration meetings: actively solicit input from those participating in the meeting via video or phone.
• Establish solid procedures around development and coaching so that teleworkers have the same opportunities. In fact, development and coaching occurs more smoothly and naturally when the coach and coaches work together physically.

3. Creativity

Without creativity and innovation, a business remains on the spot. To grow and improve, both are essential.

Creativity at work often arises through spontaneous discovery combined with planned collaboration. Social distancing and remote working have made it improbably difficult for spontaneous creativity to emerge because there was no longer an opportunity for informal, unexpected conversations in the corridors or during a healthy break.

These informal meeting moments are very difficult to replicate in a digital context.

During physical meetings in the office, it is much easier to freewheel and brainstorm and turn those ideas into something concrete and new!

Returning to the office will once again enable these spontaneous and planned creative moments! Provide unplanned creative time: go for a team meeting without a set agenda or set topics and just talk to each other or fun topics!

The challenge lies in fitting this into the hybrid work model.

It is important that the creative input from home workers is not lost in the process!

To rekindle creativity as well as sufficiently involve the homeworkers, it is a good idea to encourage people to take their breaks together and to invite the homeworkers to participate. You can do this, for example, by sending them a snack box with the same healthy snacks as your office colleagues and enjoy them together.

4. Culture

Corporate culture reflects 'how we do things'. It is the set of values and norms that determine why a company exists and how it wants to present itself to the outside world.

Working together physically in the office creates connection and a sense of being part of something, belonging to something. It helps employees more easily see the effect their efforts have on the company and its customers.

By bringing employees back to the office and actively fostering the company culture, they can once again feel a stronger connection to the company.

This is the perfect time to once again make the company culture more visible to everyone and adapt to the current model of collaboration. How does hybrid working affect your corporate culture?

And now get to work!

As a company, do you want to respond fully to change and make the most of the momentum? This is the time to rethink and fine-tune!

Create a roadmap of the return to the office: determine together how you will work together, define your new goals, discuss in detail and openly what you expect from each other, determine what the ideal time division between office and home looks like, decide if you are going to try to deploy fixed moments together in the office, .... ?

It is the role of managers and leaders to work out an irresistible Workplace Value Proposition:

• By creating procedures and policies based on these 4 Cs
• By setting a good example and consistently applying the defined behavior.
• By encouraging managers and team leaders to customize the Workplace Value Proposition to the individual needs of their team
• By engaging employees in the conversation about what the return to the office might look like and doing so as authentically and openly as possible
• By considering your employees as individuals. Take into account their personal life situation and work role. Ask them what they like and dislike about working in the office. Refresh their memory about what they loved about working together in the office. Cite only real, undisguised benefits of physically working together.
• By acknowledging your employees' efforts and sacrifices over the past challenging months of full time remote work.
• By also verifying that your shared spaces still meet today's demands. Can everyone feel safe, can distance be kept, are there adequate facilities for videoconferencing with the home workers, ... ?

Conclusion

After months of working full time from home and the potential anxiety surrounding Covid, some employees may have become a bit hesitant about returning to the office. A good Workplace Value Proposition can help employees discover what works best for them and how to make the transition in a way that feels comfortable for them.

Create a work environment that your employees won't find anywhere else.

 Create an irresistible company culture that respects your employees as individuals. Make sure you know what moments are most important to your employees and put full effort into employee wellbeing. Make your employees' lives as pleasant as possible!

So bring that office dog back to the office, fill the snack machine with irresistible and especially healthy snacks, bring the fun back to the office and go for informal moments!

We're not going back to the old "normal," but is that really so bad? This is our chance to create a new, even much better (work) reality!