232: The Return to Office Debate with Aoife O’Brien

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:07]:

You will have heard all of the return to office mandates. There’s lots going on in the media, but if you’re wondering, well, what does this really mean for me and my organization? Then today’s episode of the happier at work podcast is just for you. The Happier at Work podcast is a career and culture podcast for people first leaders. In today’s episode, I’m gonna talk about this really hot topic of return to office or RTO, as we say in Ireland or RTO if you’re outside of Ireland. If you’re on my email list, you will have received my thoughts on this already. I shared the kind of the for and the against and what does this mean? How can I make better decisions as a leader when it comes to the return to office? If you’re not on my email list, my email newsletter is called Talent Transformers. If you’re not on my email list, I will put a link below so you can join my email list. I’d love to have you on there.

Aoife O’Brien [00:01:11]:

I share insights on a weekly basis all about topics relating to career and culture. Now back to the main task at hand, what we’re talking today about is the RTO debate. So when we see big companies like Amazon, like Dell, like JPMorgan mandating that their their employees return to the office, the question then springs up, well, should we be doing the same? So I’m putting together, I suppose, my own thoughts on, well, what does this actually mean? So there is a case for the return to office, and this will be why a lot of those organizations have made this decision already. And one of those areas is around collaboration, innovation, those water cooler chats. So the kind of information that you pick up just by chance, just from happening to run into someone and having a very specific conversation. Sometimes you can call this learning by osmosis as well. So just by being in the office, from hearing people in conversation, from hearing people dealing with clients on the phone, I know certainly that is a lot of the way that I learned when I was quite early career as well. We could also build much stronger relationships when we meet people in person rather than relying on Zoom.

Aoife O’Brien [00:02:43]:

So if I think back to my corporate days, and this would have been before Zoom as well, which is which seems really strange to say, but I think a lot of the time we would have been mostly speaking on Skype. So it was more on voice rather than on video. So you can’t necessarily gauge people’s reactions. But I know certainly for me if I was dealing with someone over email and then we had a phone conversation, the the way that the relationship really flourished and developed was when we met in person. So then there’s a human behind that email that you’re receiving. There’s a human behind that phone call. So it made such a difference to me. Then there’s the workplace culture.

Aoife O’Brien [00:03:23]:

So making sure that we can maintain the same type of culture that we had at work, the positive workplace culture that we had when we’re working in that remote environment. And it can be much harder to maintain that because you don’t have visibility of people. You don’t see how people are behaving necessarily. It’s much much easier to see that and maybe to control and to to take measures to address where where the culture is kind of going a little bit off. So that’s another reason to bring people back into the office to have a greater visibility on the culture and and how people are actually behaving. The, another way to think about this is the fairness of it all. So the organizations that I deal with, they are mostly office based knowledge type businesses, but there are other businesses out there. And I have come from an agency background, so I was always working in professional services, but my clients would have had people in their organizations who worked in factories, for example, there are other people who work in labs.

Aoife O’Brien [00:04:37]:

So the kind of people that can’t perform their job from home. And if I think to my own dad, my dad was a pilot for years, you can’t fly a plane from home. You have to physically be in the plane. So there’s all of these scenarios where people have to be there. And then does it mean that it’s unfair that they don’t get to spend that time working from home because they can’t actually do their job from home? It’s another way of thinking about it. Another thing to consider as well is, and you have to be honest here, do you do your best work at home, or do you do your best work when you’re with other people, when there’s that energy around? How do you perform at your best? And this is gonna be a personal thing for each individual as well. Now the cynic cynical people among us might say that this is a really great way for the likes of those big companies to get rid of the deadwood, as it’s called. So cutting people and having people opt out because they want to get rid of people.

Aoife O’Brien [00:05:47]:

And the you know, if if you’re to be really cynical you could say that that could be a way that they are doing that. So they’re trying to cut down staff without actually having to to necessarily make layoffs as such. But from their perspective so if they’re a big household name, JPMorgan, Amazon, Dell, they won’t have too much trouble replacing the people who have left the organization. So from their perspective, maybe that’s seen as a positive, and we only want people who want to work here. And we and these are the rules for working in our organization. You have to be here 5 days a week. Now talking about the the arguments against RTO then, so it has been shown that productivity is the same or better over the last few years when people are working in this remote hybrid type of model. So it hasn’t impacted on productivity.

Aoife O’Brien [00:06:47]:

Now I’ll remind you that productivity is not about the number of hours, it’s about the quality of the output that you deliver in the amount of time that you’re working. So it’s not to do with the number of hours that you’re working. It’s to do with what you’ve achieved in the amount of time that you have to achieve it as well. So it’s a quality measure rather than a a quantity measure. You could also say that we have much better balance. Being able to manage our own time, we have much better flexibility and this elusive sense of work life balance that everyone is looking for. If you’re a long time listener of the podcast, you will know that I talk about work life integration, work life work life harmony, work life fit rather than work life balance. I think balance, you know, and I’ve talked about this before with various different guests as well, we’re never gonna get to that sense of balance and it’s more about integration.

Aoife O’Brien [00:07:39]:

But it’s more commonly referred to as balance, so I will often refer to it as work life balance. We also save time. We save money. We save energy. It’s better for the environment. There are so many things that we could say about the travel time that we save from not having to commute to an office. And it depends, I suppose, on how much time it takes to get there, your mode of transportation, do you arrive feeling really stressed because you’re in a traffic jam. There’s so many different contributing factors here.

Aoife O’Brien [00:08:08]:

I want to also talk about this sense of autonomy. So if you again, if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you will have heard me speak about my my, happier at work framework, and a core part of that is need satisfaction at work. And one of our core psychological needs is the need for autonomy. And overnight, all of a sudden, when the pandemic first happened, we had autonomy. Now I’ll put a caveat here. The important thing is to balance out autonomy with really strong expectation setting. So you need to set really clear expectations around time, around quality for someone to really excel when they have autonomy. But all of a sudden, during the pandemic, we had all of this autonomy, and it’s one of our core psychological needs.

Aoife O’Brien [00:08:57]:

And to make a mandate to request someone to return to the office full time is like sweeping the carpet from under them. Suddenly, they’ve lost all their autonomy. Our autonomy is a sense of choice and control over what we do and how we do it. So if you mandate someone to work in a specific place, it’s taking away their autonomy, it’s taking away their choice and control over how they work. Another really positive thing for working from home, again tied in with this idea of the commute time, tied in with driving to work or getting really stressed on a packed commuter bus or whatever it might be is our mental health and the greater flexibility that we have now, which has a knock on impact on our mental health and our relationships with our loved ones as well. Another consideration is that work has evolved. So it’s like if we had a look behind the curtain and we’ve seen what the possibilities are. There’s no way to unsee what we’ve already seen, and so the expectation, the baseline expectation is that we will have some degree of flexibility in the work that we do.

Aoife O’Brien [00:10:20]:

So what whatever that means, whatever that looks like for your specific organization, it might be different to the one across the street, down the road, whatever, but we cannot unsee this. We’ve seen that this is something that really, really works, and, therefore, the baseline expectation becomes flexibility is the new norm of work, and I want to be able to choose where I work and when I work. And then the last point I’m going to share against the OTO is about talent attraction, so your ability to attract. We often talk about the best. I always talk about the right people for your organization rather than the best because the best might not be the right ones for you. It’s all about how you fit in into that organizational culture. So making sure that you are attracting the right people for your organization. And typically, the people who are the best talent will have their pick, of the organizations that they work in.

Aoife O’Brien [00:11:24]:

And given my previous point that this is now the new baseline, this is the standard that has been set, they will most likely be looking for an organization that has a a great deal of flexibility. So what does this actually mean for you? So the considerations as a leader, you need to consider how am I going to balance having this cohesive culture with the employee’s preference for flexible working. So if the general preference is to have flexible working, how am I gonna make sure that our culture it may remains the same so that we can evolve, so that we can maintain this positive culture that we have rather than it being impeded by the fact that people are not working in the same location. Think about, as an individual, what are your personal preferences? So do you prefer to be in the office, or do you prefer remote? And, certainly, I know when I was early career and flexibility or remote working wasn’t even a consideration. It wasn’t flexibility or remote working wasn’t even a consideration. It wasn’t even a thought. I don’t think the I was gonna say I don’t think the thought the the term even existed. I’m sure it existed.

Aoife O’Brien [00:12:38]:

I just had no idea about it. But I personally loved going into the office, and I loved being able to interact with my coworkers. I loved the sense of camaraderie. I loved going for lunch, going for drinks after work, all of that kind of thing. But what is your own personal preference for the stage that you’re at in your career, for the lifestyle that you want to have, what is your personal preference, and can the organization that you’re working in support you with that personal preference that you have? Another consideration is how is my career going to be impacted by this? So if I’m mostly working remotely, if I’m mostly working from home, if I’m not in the office, how does that impact on my visibility to the more senior leaders, the people who need to know who I am and the impact that I’m having on that organization? And based on those three considerations, my recommendations are, number 1, listen to your employees. All of the organizations that I work for or that I work with, they all have the same question. What’s you know, what are they doing down the road or what’s working well in other places? There’s always this question of what’s working elsewhere so that we can copy it and we can apply it here. That is absolutely the wrong approach to take.

Aoife O’Brien [00:13:55]:

You always have to consider the context in which you’re working. So what is it that your employees work? Why don’t we try something? Why don’t we experiment? Why don’t we listen for feedback? Let us know what’s happening, what’s working well, what needs to be tweaked, and con constantly listen and have that agility to be able to make the changes that you need to make. But it’s not about copying what’s happening somewhere else or what seems to be working for another organization. It’s about listening to your own employees to see how can we serve our employees better. Number 2 then is don’t let your personal preferences dictate what you do with the team. So if you have a personal preference to be in the office all the time, don’t mandate that your employees all come to the office just because it’s your personal preference. And similarly, if your preference is to work from home all the time, don’t mandate that people have to work from home. Understand what your personal preference is.

Aoife O’Brien [00:14:56]:

Again, going back to point number 1, listen to the team about what is working well, what’s working not so well, and adjust accordingly. It’s really about what’s best for the team and what’s best for the organization as opposed to what’s best for the individual. And then the last point around this is that leaders should ensure that those not in the office have equal opportunities. And if you are one of those people who’s not necessarily getting the level of visibility that you would like, you need to take some actions to change that. So leaders can put in place things to make sure that people get visibility. They can talk about people. They can say their names in the rooms where they are not. They can put them onto high profile projects.

Aoife O’Brien [00:15:39]:

They can connect them with senior leaders that they need to really need to know in order to progress their career. And as an as an individual, if this is not happening for you, you can request these kinds of things to make sure that you’re not getting left behind, to make sure that you know what needs to happen if you are so inclined, if you do want to progress your career and you’re afraid of being left behind because you’re not getting that level of visibility. Get a really clear understanding of what it is that you need in order to progress to the next level. Surround yourself with people who can support you to get to that next level and get the support of your manager as well. So I really hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you took some insights away, I’d love to know what is one thing that you’re going to do differently. As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, this is based on an email that I sent out to my email list a number of weeks ago all about this RTO debate. And if you want to join my email list, I will put a link down below for how you can join my email list, the Talent Transformers, and get weekly insights about topics relating to career and culture.