WFH One Year In
Last February 26, my blog post was about the Houston Astros scandal. What a quaint idea that is now. After that, it was directly into the pandemic and the communication challenges that presented. Since then, the pandemic has dominated our lives, when racial divisions or the 2020 election didn’t.
One year in, people are being vaccinated. A return to normal is on its way. Of course, no one thinks "normal” means “like it was before.” We won’t say “new normal” because it’s been said too much already. (As they said in Ragtime, “You can never go back to before.”
Perhaps the most visible issue that will need to be resolved is how people will work. Work from Home (WFH) has had an interesting story arc over the last year. It happened fast and without much warning, so everyone was digging in and making the best of it and focused on the day-to-day. Initially, it seemed as if productivity stayed consistent, leading many companies to wonder if they would ever need offices again. Big tech companies definitely feel that way. Less so for littler companies, but I know some who have ditched the workplace.
It’s amazing when you think about the money some companies put into designing their workspace and how much bragging they do on them and then something like this happens and they’re out faster than the Roadrunner (meep, meep).
When The Laughter Turned to Sadness
Once the initial sugar high crashed, things came back to reality. Laszlo Bock, a former HR Director at Google told the Wall Street Journal that those early productivity gains were largely built on frantic workers afraid of losing their job. “Fear-driven productivity is not sustainable,” he said. (Note: fear-driven anything is not sustainable).
The WFH spool continued to unravel. People’s homes were usually crappy workplaces, with home-schooled children, cludgy internet, uncomfortable chairs and endless blood-shot-eye inducing Zoom calls punctuated by a Zoom Happy Hour to build morale. The Harvard Business Review wrote recently that WFH was undermining trust in organizations. Specifically, managers wonder how much people are working out there. So do co-workers. One in five companies are electronically monitoring their WFH employees, sometimes by taking pictures of them at random intervals.
Many companies are ready to bring back the office. Many employees aren’t so sure they are, and we’re now in an environment of decreased trust, which will make everything harder.
Here are three things communicators can do to help lay the foundation for the next steps.
Don’t Plan Too Far Ahead
You might be surveying your employees to find out how they are feeling about returning to work, say, in September. Josh Bersin suggests that probably is not a good idea. Sure, you’d like to know, but it is tough to ask employees to predict how they will feel. All you will find out is how they feel now. Once people are vaccinated and the public health orders are rescinded and people get their masks off and do a couple of “normal” things, say go to the movies or out to dinner and then they see infections not going up, human nature would suggest that they will reacclimate quickly. The answer to September would be no today but it might be “why not now” in August.
Communicate the Why
Throughout this past year, survey after survey has shown that employees want to understand why certain things are being done. In this case, why are we returning to the office. Managers need to explain why the company’s interests and the worker’s economic security/bonus structure is best achieved in an office environment. As this post suggests, the best way to do that (and regain trust) is to be raw and unscripted with employees. Discuss why an office environment is better—in as specific terms as possible. Tell stories. Give examples. And (hopefully this goes without saying) don’t say it’s because you suspect they weren’t working at home.
Lean on Ambivalence
Dr. Yongchuan "Kevin" Bao of the University of Alabama-Huntsville has some interesting research about ambivalence in business. We typically associate ambivalence with being wishy-washy, but increasingly it has become a survival tool. Simply put, two things can be true at the same time. In the zeal to restore the workplace the way it was, leaders should not forget about the workplace as it could be. What did we learn from the last year? Is there a hybrid model that can maximize parts of both models and be better?
As communicators, we were center-stage. We learned that people do care about internal comms. We learned they want to know why. How can we continue to be relevant even as the attention-whore threat passes away?