“We have to remember that oftentimes it’s not the change that people reject, they are rejecting the fact that they are losing something.“
Firms such as the Royal Bank of Canada, Osler, Hoskins and Harcourt LLP, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Apple and The Globe and Mail have mandated that employees must return to the office between two to four days a week as of last month. Some firms, while choosing not to mandate workers to return to the office have become far less enthusiastic about employees working from home full time.
It’s clear that employers were hoping that their workers would voluntarily opt to return to the office, especially as, in most parts of the country, life has essentially returned to a pre-pandemic state. However, recent data shows that foot traffic in office buildings in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are still 55% below what it was in early March 2020.
The risks far exceed that of the employer’s real estate costs, the lack of foot traffic in these major metropolitan areas are having a significant impact on local small businesses and the economy. Some firms are also arguing that the lack of in-person collaboration has negatively impacted ideation and innovation, justifying the return to office as a means of restoring the “energy, spontaneity, big ideas and a true sense of belonging” that comes from working together in person.
However, we can’t ignore the many benefits (positive risks) associated with allowing employees to continue working from home.
Employees are able to improve work life balance and wellness by skipping their morning and evening commute. Employers are able to expand their talent pool to areas outside their headquartered location. Similarly, employees are able to seek out job opportunities outside their area of residence, including opportunities in different provinces to help alleviate the talent gap that has plagued businesses outside large, metropolitan areas across Canada for years.
In a recent survey, Mercer found that 61% of employees prefer to work from home. While this means that the majority of employees want to continue working remotely, it also means that 39% of employees prefer to work at the office. Is your organization experiencing a similar split?
Surveying your people to gather feedback about their workplace preferences is step one, it will give you a broad sense of the preferences across your organization, but it’s not the end goal.
What we sometimes fail to realize is that change happens one person at a time. Even large, complex organizational changes such as this one. The change is only successful if the impacted individual changes their behaviour and therefore, by extension, the organizational change is only successful if all the impacted individuals change their behaviour. In other words, it’s the cumulation of many individuals changing their behaviour from their current state to the desired future state that leads to a successful change. It’s important to think about any change in terms of the individual and how you can support each person through that change.
While this may sound obvious, it is constantly overlooked. You can see evidence of that in organizations that have issued explicit, overarching work from office mandates. These firms are failing to recognize that change happens at the individual level. The optimal return to office strategy will never be a one-size fits all approach, because your employees are individuals, each with their own reasons why they prefer to return to the office or not.
Employees who prefer not to return to the office may have a spouse who lost their job during the pandemic and the unnecessary expense to commute to and from work is not something they can afford, they may have moved outside a commuting zone during the pandemic and the time and expense of traveling to and from work multiple times a week is not feasible, or a host of other reasons why the individual you are looking to change is resistant. Until you understand what is causing the resistance at the individual level, you are approaching the change blind. This is a recipe for disaster, one that could translate into significant costs to your business, including, but not limited to, regret turnover, decreased productivity and morale, increases in medical leaves and more.
We also have to remember that oftentimes it’s not the change that people reject, they are rejecting the fact that they are losing something.
The change process and mourning process are very similar, if not identical. People go through a denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance phase in loss and change. We are asking people, in some cases forcing people, to incur a second drastic shift (or loss) in their work lives in as many years.
As leaders, you need to recognize that your employees will have varying levels of comfort surrounding this transition. You need to listen to your employees, validate their emotions and act on the input received. Does it make sense for a technical writer, for instance, to come into the office five days a week? Probably not so let’s not force compliance for the sake of it and really open our minds, and our hearts, to what makes the most sense for the business and the answer is always what makes the most sense for each individual employee.
If you are embarking on your future of work strategy, contact us today. We can help position this change for success by developing a customized and scaled approach that garners the commitment necessary to implement this change successfully across your organization.