What to solve for before you start the RTO conversation

And what we want to do first is make sure we are solving for the real problems in a way that will work no matter where people are located, so that when we get people together, they wanna show up. Because how many of us right now we’re in a situation or know somebody that they are going into the office and they’re showing up at least over the last year or so. And nobody else was there and they feel like the idiot that drove 50 miles and like showed up and the lights are still off in the building.

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Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go. Go. Welcome back to the show. Today I wanna talk about a highly contentious topic. Return to office r t o. Now this is top of mind, across companies, big and small. And even if you’re a small business owner, you might be thinking about, well, should I bring people together? Do I wanna have four remote, whatever it is. And in the corporate world, in big companies, this is definitely the issue of the moment.

And with all complicated issues, hate to say it, but there’s not one size fits all answers. There’s not one solution that is going to be work for every single person, for every single situation. So let’s throw out the idea of thinking we’re gonna figure it all out and it’s gonna be the solution forever. Because even when people were mostly in the office before the pandemic, it wasn’t really working for everybody either, right? So this is actually an opportunity to be more thoughtful about how we wanna come together, when and what that looks like.

That’s really the mindset I want us to be thinking about as we talk about this topic today. Is, this is about really being thoughtful about maybe experimenting with something for the next few months or a year, and then collecting feedback and adjusting. So when we talk about return to office, a lot of the reasons for returning to office, in my opinion, they’re pointing to different issues and we’re actually solving for something else by just bringing people together.

The three issues that I hear most come up are, you know, we want community and connection and collaboration. So we want sharing of ideas. We want that spontaneous communication. We want people to be, you know, that meeting after the meeting’s actually pretty valuable where people kind of debrief and share what they actually thought or build relationships. Maybe we get a little bit of time with an executive that we maybe wouldn’t have seen or we break down the walls of, of having that formal meeting.

And as we’re walking to the lunchroom or just chatting casually in the office, we realize like, Hey, there’s all these opportunities to, to do more, more cool stuff. So there’s a lot of value in that spontaneous communication, and that is something that I think return to office is, is striving to solve for. Now, the second thing that’s talked a lot about is productivity and efficiency. This is where things like, well, I want people to be in the office because I wanna know that they’re actually working, that they’re not on a zoom, on a ski lift.

Because all these things that people were putting on TikTok over the last three years did so much more harm than good. That’s my stance. Hot takes, sorry. That’s what I feel like, that we’ve been oversharing about not doing anything and now people think, well, when you’re at home, you’re not really working. Thank you, but no thank you. People that post on social media that you know, I do barely and no work and I’m actually working from a pool or a lounge chair because this has created a fear, I think, across managers and leaders and companies and stakeholders and investors that people aren’t really doing shit when they go to work.

And that’s not true and it’s not a good thing. So quick PSA to stop oversharing about not working and actually share about how much you are working and we can turn that narrative around, but. The reason, a reason many people want to be bringing people back to the office is that productivity, that efficiency, believing that when you’re in the office, more work gets done because you’re physically there. You can’t actually be leaving to do other things, and so that is a belief that RTO will solve, that we will create a higher output of work.

Now the last thing that I hear talked about a lot with return to office is, Ramping up into the company culture and into the new role. And I think there is a lot of value, obviously for when we’re new in a company, to be able to turn to your colleague and be like, Hey, like how does this thing work? And, and having those casual communications be a lot easier where you can just turn to somebody and, and get a question answered, you get a lot more feedback real time.

And that’s another thing that r t o is, is really aiming to solve. But I wanna tell you something, you don’t actually need return to office in order to solve for these things. Return to office can actually, can can facilitate these things, but I believe that you actually have to solve these things first before you figure out when and how to bring people together. Take for example, community connection. Collaboration. Just because you have a bunch of people sitting in the same office does not mean they’re gonna be talking to each other.

Facilitating communication and collaboration that’s done through building relationships, by doing team building, by making forum where people can share about themselves, their personal lives. Be vulnerable, build trust. Hey. That’s how you build that. Just putting people together in an office. When nobody likes each other and nobody has ever gotten to know each other, that’s not gonna fix it. To solve for this first issue, we wanna be putting in deliberate work around building a cohesive team culture, and that often starts from the top.

That means leaders are transparent. They show up for people. They share about themselves personally. They create a welcoming environment. They show support. They recognize great work. They amplify the accomplishments of team members. All the stuff that I’ve talked about on past episodes around recognition and positive feedback and all that good stuff. That’s what we wanna be doing as leaders to cultivate more community and connection. We wanna pair people up on projects. We want to make sure we’re, we’re giving a lot of thank yous, that we’re giving people opportunity to mentor other people or coach so that you’re building relationships across teams.

All of that is going to facilitate that connection so that if you do come together, now you have people that are excited to come in and be around each other. If I have never met anybody and I don’t like anybody, I’m not gonna be excited to come in and drive on that commute. But if I’m like, oh my God, yes, I could see Joe and Sarah and Steve and and and, and, and Stacy and whatever, like all my people that I’ve built this relationship with, now I’m going into the office.

Next thing we talked about productivity and efficiency. And hey, as a career process builder, team, operations person, I’m gonna tell you something. Physically getting people sitting next together in the office that doesn’t make processes go smoother, what makes processes go smoother? Productivity increase is by simplifying the complicated, okay? Removing steps, bringing more clarity into communication, really fostering an ownership mindset on your team. Connecting the dots between here’s our priorities, here’s the expectations here, here’s is how your specific work fits exactly within that thing.

That is how we start to have more productivity and efficiency, and if we are worried that when someone’s not sitting in the office, they’re not doing any work. That’s not an RTO issue, that’s an expectations issue. That’s a feedback issue that you haven’t set the the expectation for people like, Hey, you know, regardless of like wherever you are, we have a 3:00 PM standup where we share status on our work. Or at the end of the week, every Friday we do IT newsletter where we talk about what we got done, or we’re all tracking our work in Asana or click up and every week by Thursday at five, we have to have the weekly status in there.

When you set expectations like that, it doesn’t matter if people are sitting together in the same office or across seven different continents, right? Because you’re, you’re creating the situation where people understand, this is how I show what I’ve been working on. When people just kind of begrudgingly coming into the office because they’ve been forced to, it doesn’t mean they’re getting more work done because we already know that a lot of people are commuting over long distances and things like that.

They may actually get less done. Folks may be distracted by other people. They may be having more downtime because they can’t find a conference room, or they’re on video conference anyway all day with team members all over the world when it would’ve been easier for that person to have their whole setup, maybe at home with multiple monitors or whatever. Solving for productivity and efficiency is not just done because you showed up in the office together. It’s done through simplifying processes, creating more clear lines of communications, and setting those clear expectations, which I talked about last week on the podcast.

Last thing, integration into the team culture ramp up. This is not just solved by being in the office, although I will say it does help to kind of see the vibe be on campus if that’s the situation to, you know, be able to like experience the, the ether of the company culture that can be helpful. But ramping up is solved through an effective onboarding program. By pairing someone up with a buddy when they first joined the company and saying, Hey, this is gonna be your person to ask any questions to.

There’s no stupid questions. Maybe having a onboarding cohort, you know, you have everybody that joined in the last month that has a little chat room, then they can ask each other questions, giving people a starter project where they get to learn kind of the ins and outs of the company. I have a client that when when someone starts in her company, she gives them a project to fix something that’s not working in the company. So they actually have the opportunity to really learn about some aspect of the business, explore what’s there before, and propose an idea and solution so they kind of clean up something that wasn’t working and are able to add value and impact right away.

I absolutely loved that idea as an onboarding project, and this is a remote company because right away you can see, ooh, okay, this is how things work, and I can share my ideas at the outset. We can build community and culture by creating forms where people connect formally, informally, do virtual socials exercises like Journey Lines is one I love, or Life Path. There’s a ton of really awesome team building activities that I, I often bring to teams around.

How do you build that psychological safety? How do you show people, here’s how to work with me, here’s things that I’m working on. There’s tools where people write their own user manual, how to work with me. I would keep that to one page, but I’ve seen people go pretty deep into those things We can solve. Ramping into company culture also first before we default to return to office. Once we have solved for things like creating forms for community and collaboration, productivity and efficiency, and created better onboarding systems.

Now we wanna figure out what are the right moments to bring people together? What is the frequency of that? What budgets do we have as a company to be able to facilitate this? I work with a lot of teams that want to come together more, but they actually don’t have budget to do so, and I work with other teams that actually they’re trying to get everybody to come together and nobody wants to show up. We’re all wrestling with this in very different ways, and there’s a lot of considerations, time and money and, and different things that weigh into the equation.

It’s really important to remember the realities that exist now. There is not enough childcare for folks. Childcare does is too expensive and goes the hours often do not cover to be able to commute a long distance and be back in time for things like pickup, this creates an equity issue, often falling more on women than men who are often in more primary care. Taking roles, return to office can exacerbate other issues that exist. A lot of folks cannot live near the office that they work at because rent and home prices are too high, so they have to live farther away.

Creating a really long commute. I think we realized in the pandemic that we actually really valued the time we had for ourselves, that we didn’t have enough, that we’re making a trade that we do not wanna make for the rest of our lives. And that realization that I actually could have more time than I ever thought I had. People are not really willing to get that back without really having a reason to come together. Now, I’ll say some of the best teams I’ve ever been on, the best work I’ve done personally, the best work I’ve been ever facilitate through working team operations was with teams that were in person.

I think there is so much value of being in person, but I don’t think it needs to be all of the time. I don’t think it necessarily has to be every single week, and I don’t think it’s the same for every single company. When I was in a product team many years ago that was working on. Building a huge demo that was gonna unveil this product to the world for the very first time we worked weekends.

We even pulled an all-nighter leading up to that and that feeling of the team, all of us staying there, whether your job like necessarily had to be there or not. Every single person, 12 o’clock 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM 3:00 AM for all the way to 6:00 AM till we finally got that demo working. Everybody cheering that, hugging the enthusiasm like we did this. That feeling of being in person. It’s one of my greatest memories that I’ll ever have.

That was all together, pulling through to make this thing happen. There are magical moments when we come together and there’s also things that we miss out on. There’s also this, like I mentioned, there’s inequity that a lot of times women have to miss out on things more so than men or the activities are not conducive to folks that have families to come home to. Things like after work shows, happy hours, team events, maybe things have alcohol and that’s not something you’re comfortable with.

I think what we’re actually dealing with with the RT O conversation, Is more of a reckoning around, well, how do we want to spend time physically together versus virtually what makes sense for our company? What makes sense for the composition of our team members? And really taking a thoughtful approach in an inclusive approach to make sure we’re deciding isn’t just something that works for only the senior leadership who maybe has more support with things like childcare or home responsibilities, or can live closer.

These are the things that we wanna make sure being thoughtful about. Because your team members are looking to you right now to make a decision that makes sure that they feel supported for the long haul. There’s a lot of data coming out from Gen Z and folks entering the workforce. They actually don’t wanna be fully remote all the time, but they wanna have that flexibility. Flexibility is something we’re all gonna have to figure out what that means for our companies, for our teams.

But these really firm lines on get back into the office or you’re fired, or you don’t have a career path. Or we’ll find someone else. It may work right now when we’re in this recession, when there’s been a lot of layoffs, there’s a lot of folks looking for jobs. So there’s a big talent pool. But I gotta say, I don’t think that’s gonna work forever. And I think we’re entering a moment where we’re all going to have to really lead with flexibility and these hard lines of do this or else just not gonna last.

And what we wanna do first is make sure we are solving for the real problems in a way that will work no matter where people are located so that when we get people together, they wanna show up because how many of us right now were in a situation or know somebody that they are going into the office and they’re showing up at least over the last year or so and nobody else was there and they feel like the idiot that drove 50 miles and like showed up and the lights are still off in the building.

I know I went into the office a couple years ago and I went to go to the bathroom and like I was the only person that’d been on that floor. It was 11 in the morning. Like, where is everybody? And this means we have not yet created a reason for people to come back together. And I believe it’s because we haven’t done that work to really re re-engage people, re-energize people around the work. And we’re saying, go back in the office or else’s.

Yeah, maybe people will go for a little while. But we are seeing people resist in higher numbers than I think any corporate company ever thought was gonna happen. And we’re in this transition moment right now, and if we lead with supporting people with engaging them with, with figuring out how to make sure they feel that connection to their work, how to make sure they are clear on expectations, we hold that high standard of that great work and we show them we are there to support them when we do that.

I just gotta say, I think people will come back together in those moments that are deliberate, intentional, and are meaningful. That’s my hot take on rt. O I told you I wasn’t gonna solve it, but I was gonna give you some things to think about so that you can solve it for your business. And again, I would say to please approach this as an experiment. We are still in the thick of it. We, we don’t know what’s gonna happen in the next few years.

Treat it as something you’re gonna try for a quarter or six months or a year. Have an open line of feedback, letting people chime in with how is it working, what do they need, what, what would be something to fine tune. Treat it like an experiment or pilot, and that gets everybody on board and knowing, okay, this is not the final solution. I can try something for three to six months because I know if something’s not working.

I can share feedback and then make sure to actually collect that feedback. Don’t just say you’re asking for feedback and then not doing anything with it. Talk about it. What did you learn, share out, and then what are you gonna do in phase two and phase three and beyond? This is how we’re gonna get through this. Being a little bit more agile, a little bit more experimentational, and just seeing what happens. See you next time. That’s all I have for today.

Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple Podcast where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. I always love to hear from you, so please reach out at liagarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn. See you next time.