RTO
So much to write about this week and so little time. Do I write about the emergence of new titles in our industry, like CPTO? Cracks in the seams or catastrophic meltdown in the scholarly communications sector after three disparate items crossed my inbox this week? Or my take on Thomson Reuters’ expensive acquisition of Casetext for a whopping $650 million. I’ll save my two cents since our analyst chimed in this week.
And so, I am returning to a familiar topic that isn’t going away — RTO and our industry’s practices. We still get questions on the topic and there is still a lot of handwringing. Why? I cannot say, but common sense and good business discipline can go out the window in corporate settings; we don’t have to look any further than our recent research updating the state of the product function in our industry (coming out soon) showing roles and responsibilities for the function still aren’t clear and are often misunderstood. And so, it seems CEOs across the land, in companies of all stripes, continue to create toxic waste in their physical and virtual walls by insisting people come back to the office, no ifs, ands, or buts.
I get that it’s their call. The role of a leader is to make unpopular decisions sometimes. And we aren’t perfect, and we make the wrong ones too. But this article yesterday made me shudder citing multiple studies and the negative impact RTO mandates are having. I read another article. The leader said RTO: His people walked.
I have been writing about virtual cultures for years, and I wrote about RTO about six months ago. It works. It has its drawbacks, but so does being in an office every day forcing people to wear clothes that must be dry cleaned and who must spew massive amounts of CO2 on clogged highways on top of wasting time and money commuting. Time that is lost, never to be regained. It’s not spent with family, with coworkers, or dare I say, at the gym or walking the dog so we can feel more fit and spiritually lifted. Ack!
Our informal survey of leaders in our own industry is pointing to some great practices. It, too, is coming out soon:
• Mandating a few days back in the office — some setting the days and some leaving it up to teams. Those who left it entirely up to individuals pointed to shortcomings in this approach.
• Specifying which jobs are in office, which can be remote and which require hybrid, and tying that to offer letters.
• Explaining the approach and rationale for the business and for team members.
• Ensuring systems and process are in place to support success, including training; remote work, after all, is a skill.
• Paying particular attention to culture and nurturing mission and purpose.
In a meeting a few weeks ago the speaker asked why trust has gone down among employees by some public metrics? It was a group of female CEOs from different industries. Our general consensus? Because we treated folks like adults during Covid; we sent them home, looked out for them and their families and society’s well-being, trusted them to do the right thing, and were all “in it together.” And instead of keeping that goodwill, some CEOs burn it by a “my way or the highway” approach to mandates “just because.” They can’t point to improvements in metrics. They can’t point to happier culture. They can’t point to better productivity in any measurable way but insist it’s better for culture and innovation.
I’ve worked in some type of remote setting since 1995 when the world was on dial-up. Some of my readers won’t even know what that was. It was long before 5G or LTE; it was long before the internet and certainly before the likes of Zoom or Teams at scale. But we got it done. Life doesn’t happen in 9 to 5 boxes and that construct went out the window with the end of the Industrial era and certainly with a worldwide pandemic.
We need to do the right thing. Trust our team to do it too, and make sure that we keep our environments flexible. Humane. Fun. Where the whole individual and their family and our companies and our cultures are all fostered. We call it win-win-win. Otherwise, maybe this is why there are still quiet quitters. Maybe they were always there. But we have to make sure our corporate cultures aren’t soul-crushing and end mandates that are so either/or.