Are We Perpetuating an Urban Myth?
How are leaders measuring the impact of the return to the office — or lack thereof?
I hear a lot about the negative impact of remote work on culture. People say innovation is slower, knowledge sharing has been impacted, or younger workers can’t easily find camaraderie and connection. But I am left to wonder: How are leaders actually measuring this?
How does someone measure culture and determine whether it is better or worse due to people not being in a physical office? How do we tie spontaneous hallway “sparks” to better outcomes?
Are we just perpetuating an urban myth?
I started to search for information on this and came across a mid-March article that was an honest look at the return to the office and provided different points of view on the topic. Our own research showed that our industry’s upper management was more eager for a return to the office last year than the team members who were asked to return. The statistics are eerily similar to broader workplace studies, one of which is cited in this article.
In the hundreds of conversations I’ve had on this topic, I found only one leader who measured impact. He said that before the pandemic, a large majority of his company’s product innovation efforts, if not all, came out on time — like clockwork. Now, a measurable percentage are late, and development times have gone off the rails. He had more specific stats on this, and hooray that he did: It’s tangible when it can be measured.
If leaders want people back without cajoling them or delivering ultimatums — not the way to win friends and influence others — then it would help if they had more tangible metrics for why coming back is so important. Here are some hypothetical examples of findings that could be persuasive:
- 75% of employees who’ve been with us less than a year feel little to no connectedness.
- 60% feel that coordinating cross-team meetings takes five times longer to schedule and 25% say three times longer than when we were in an office.
- Fully 40% of our product development efforts are late, and team members cite varying schedules as a major inhibitor.
- People think our culture stinks; our satisfaction rating is down 35 percentage points from pre-pandemic cultural health metrics.
- When we were in an office, our employees rated their happiness as an average of 5 on a scale of 1 to 6, and now it’s dropped to 2.
You would still be hard-pressed to draw causation to physical workspaces, but having data would still look and feel more meaningful than citing culture or knowledge sharing and having nothing to point to except a view from the corner office — which, in most settings, is pretty rarified air. That view cannot possibly be mainstream, so why would anyone listen and be compelled to return?
Point to something that affects teams and then do what’s possible to measure it. There’s a lot of hand-wringing going on out there, so let’s demystify what we can and try to keep it real.
It can’t be true that physical offices are what will heal so many workplace wounds. Yes, we are social animals, but there are a lot of ways to be social in this day and age. Forcing people back to offices isn’t one of them.