A comment someone left on one of my LinkedIn posts earlier this month ago caused me to reach out with a private message to them. That in turn led to an interesting hour-long Zoom call with the person a couple of days later.
They told me that they had been on a new job for about three months at a Fortune 500 company. As a senior project manager, this person loves the work and the pay. But a recent new directive from the company’s top management started giving them cause for concern.
They wanted everyone to return to the office.
While I can understand the rational for not having a remote work option available for some job situations, this is not the case with this particular organization. The company does not manufacture a physical product that needs people to be on a production line.
When the pandemic came, almost everyone in the organization worked remotely. But by the beginning of 2022, when public transmissions of COVID were still high, they started asking some people to return to the office.
The result? Many employees who preferred remote work began looking for options. Within months, majority of those people left. Two years later, the person I spoke to informed me of how so much institutional knowledge had been lost as a result. Another friend who works in the same organization informed me of multiple project delays due to lack of qualified resources.
Given this situation, a rational person would be inclined to ask, “why?” For what reasons would such a reputable organization continue to shoot itself in the foot after seeing the initial backlash to its initial return to office directive?
Considering the potential dire consequences, it doesn’t seem to make sense for leadership to double down on the need for employees to return. A casual observer would find it difficult to believe that the top leadership didn’t see this backlash coming.
But it’s most likely they did. In fact, they may be expecting it.
Someone has posited one guess for this approach. In order to trim their payrolls and force attrition without the need for severance packages, some companies may be instituting these return to the office policies. In an op-ed last year, one CEO argued that leaders have an ulterior motive for forcing out-of-market employees to return to the office. He suggested that the main issue is passivity and lack of transparency.
But I don’t think this reason applies to this particular Fortune 500 organization. This is because the company is on a hiring binge. They’re feverishly bringing on new employees to replace those who are quitting as a result of the new policies.
So, for this organization, another reason must be in play.
I have heard of cities that are offering some organizations huge incentives to make a minimum percentage of their employees return to the office. Why do the cities care, you may ask. With many organizations reducing their physical office footprint as a result of remote work, many office buildings are becoming vacant.
The resulting losses in rent revenue from the building owners have caused them to put pressure on their local politicians, who in turn started offering incentives to leaders in organization to bring their people back to the office.
Personally, I have no beef with companies receiving incentives from the cities in which they operate. What I have a problem with is the lack of transparency form organizational leadership.
Some people in leadership tend to forget that being vulnerable and transparent are key powerful leadership traits. Rather than make up reasons that don’t hold water for why they want people to return to the office, they ought to be clear in communicating what’s going on for every employee to understand.
In this scenario, I thought the leadership could have informed their employees about the incentives from the city that are geared towards people returning to the office. Then, instead of mandating everyone to return, they could make it voluntary and provide incentives for those employees willing to return to the office.
Cash incentives can work wonders. After all, the company is getting monetary incentives from the city. So, why not pass on the incentives to the employees to help them cover the additional cost (to the employees) of returning to the office?
Some may think there won’t have any takers but I would disagree. Firstly, there are employees who prefer to work in the office even without any incentives. Throw in a good enough incentive along with a honest appeal and you’d find enough people willing to return.
When you approach it this way, I believe people would respond positively especially if there has been a culture of openness and transparency within the organization. On the other hand, a long-term erosion in trust can lead to a workforce full of employees with one foot out the door.
What are your thought on this? If you were working with the organization I referenced, what would you do? What trends are you seeing within your organization as it relates to this return to office saga.