According to Mercer’s Global Talent Trends study, we are living important changes in remote work formats where, strangely enough, and even with the incursion of AI “the technological sector leads the transition toward increasingly presential work.” This change has a significant impact on the employee’s experience, and it is expected to provide a positive boost to productivity; nevertheless, according to this same study, “64% of workers say that they are more productive when working remotely.”
On the other hand, the latest Deloitte Gen Z and Millennial Survey states that “while hybrid and remote work are much more common today, there is still a gap between those who wish to have this modality and those who actually get it 61% (…) of Gen Zs and 55% of millennials report working in remote schemes versus 65% of Gen Zs and 64% of millennials who would like to work remotely.”
Being, then, such a valued component of employees’ value proposition, it is interesting to analyze the causes behind this phenomenon of returning which, even though it could be considered as a step back, will still leave us with changes in culture.
In this sense, we identify three arguments posed by the organizations that are leading the return to presential work:
1. Seeing one another in order to connect
Organizations are social spaces and, therefore, the distance generated by remote work can have an impact on the quality of the relationship between employees.
In this sense, companies not only have the challenge of convincing their employees to return to the offices, they must now be much more innovative in order to make work environments more attractive and add value to the change in work modality.
This means that the employee experience must be transformed in order to ensure that the time that they currently invest in the presential modality turns into a better way of performing their work. It is not just about returning, it is about returning in a better way.
2. Together, we are more innovative
It is also posed that interaction among people, particularly in informal settings, opens up the possibility of new ideas. In this sense, companies that are returning to presential work need to ensure that employees have the necessary tools, skills and motivation for the development of creative solutions.
This also creates the need of strengthening leadership, so that it is able to effectively create these spaces. It is not enough for people to be sitting close to each other, an environment of collaboration, trust and a sense of a purpose in common must be created for the emergence of disruptive initiatives that “pay” for the cost of returning.
3. We are more productive when we are present
The accelerated way in which hybrid work started in 2020 had, as a consequence, that the schemes to ensure the maximum potential of this modality were not developed properly. This is why many leaders argue today that there is a lack of control over the performance of the people in their charge, thinking that presential work will solve this problem.
In this sense, the task that organizations will face will be even more challenging, as bringing people back into the office does not guarantee a better result and, therefore, leaders will have to be prepared with new ways of supervision, be capable of generating accountability in their teams; otherwise, a micromanagement effect may arise as a result of having people close by and wanting to control their activities. This shows that we have not evolved much in the measurement of results, beyond “desk” time.
In the abovementioned Mercer study, the Firm points out that “an overwhelming majority of respondents wants some degree of social contact, and 46% prefers working face-to-face most or all of the time, even if their work can be conducted remotely, while 27% states that a 50/50 hybrid modality would be ideal. Only 10% wishes to work in a completely remote scheme, and this is consistent across all geographic areas, generations and genders.”
Thus, and even though home office will probably continue to be a popular work modality, presential work is expected to grow once more, to return to physical workspaces. Therefore, organizations must be prepared to ensure that they have cultures that are open to hybrid teams, with robust and reliable infrastructures, with proper collaboration platforms, with better work-life balance strategies, with clear labor policies for maintaining equity among teams and, last and most importantly, with the proper leadership model for guaranteeing a balance between productivity and well-being.
