What if your employees don't want to come back to the office?

Reading time: 15 min

Over the past few years, we've been teleworking on a massive scale, along with all the creativity that came with it to keep employees engaged and maintain that connection. Now it seems we need to use that same creativity to make the return to the office smooth and meaningful. Because do all employees even want to come back to the office? 

Next year could well be the year of the turnaround, and it's definitely worth it for employers to think about how to make employees feel that coming to the office is a good idea. What if you turned this challenge into an opportunity to create a "Workplace Value Proposition" that boosts your employees' engagement and motivation?

Make the return to the office worthwhile

A unique value proposition is a powerful statement that spells out why the target audience should take action. It needs to convince the target audience why it brings added value.

A Workplace Value Proposition gives employees every reason they need to start heading back to the full of enthusiasm to come to the office to work together!

A well-defined "workplace value proposition" represents the company culture and lets employees feel the benefits of working together in the office. It answers the question "why we come to the office".

To make the return to the workplace go as smooth there are actually 3 key questions to answer:

1. How do we bring our people back safely?

Are there enough procedures in place for every possible scenario: interactions between different groups, disinfection, ventilation, quarantines, …

Do the office spaces still meet today's requirements? Can everyone feel safe, can distance be kept, are there enough facilities for video conferencing with people working from home?

2. Are we going for a hybrid work model, and what will that look like in practice?

Who comes to the office and when? Who's teleworking? How many days a week do employees come to the office? Do they come on fixed days, or is their hybrid work schedule flexible? What about booking desks at the office? Are there limits on how many employees can be in the office at once?, …

3. What's our Workplace Value Proposition?

How do we make sure people want to come to the office? What do we offer as an employer in the workplace? What's the added value for our employees to travel to the office? How do we work on optimising the employee experience of our staff?

It goes without saying that the argument that "it's necessary for business continuity" won't make employees happy to come back to the workplace. It's important that employers offer an irresistible environment, so employees have a good reason to travel to the workplace and physically collaborate together in the same space again. 

A strong, inspiring Workplace Value Proposition can help you get the most out of your organisation's new values and structure, while making sure people working remotely feel fully valued and involved.

This goes beyond the cuddly office dog, safe sports facilities and spaces to unwind, more nutritious snacks in the office, ...

It establishes a set of values, behaviours and expectations that truly make your workplace the place to be create!

Let the 4 C's help you

Use the 4 C's to create your Workplace Value Proposition. We've listed them for you again, along with their challenges and opportunities!

1. Connection (Connection)

With full-time remote work, it wasn't just the commute that disappeared. Unfortunately, the time colleagues spend interacting informally also dropped below zero. And even though remote work has its benefits too, people remain social beings. We need positive moments of contact with others to truly thrive.

Even though business continuity could be guaranteed thanks to online collaboration tools and countless digital meetings, many employees still felt exhausted and socially cut off after a full day of video calls.

Many companies made great efforts in recent months of full-time remote work to maintain their connection with employees, and now they need to ask themselves how to approach that connection in a hybrid work culture.

Working in the office offers plenty of opportunities for interpersonal interaction, and this can definitely recharge your team's social batteries. But make sure the people working from home also keep feeling connected!

• Encourage your employees to connect with each other and discuss work-related topics as well as other subjects. Not every meeting has to be work-related all the time.
• Go for an environment that celebrates social connection! Let your employees feel that social interaction and workplace friendships are truly valued.
• Come up with creative ways to give your 1-1 conversations more punch: walking meetings, reserve time slots in your calendar for spontaneous chats, take a healthier and more active break with your team members, …
• Encourage your employees to talk to each other about their hybrid schedules. Pick a day (or 2) when most people work from the office, and encourage employees to prioritise office work on those days.
• Encourage your employees to have lunch together and enjoy a healthier break together when they're at the office. These informal moments are invaluable! 

2. Collaboration

Nowadays, very few jobs exist entirely on their own, and employees, organisations and clients all reap the benefits of collaboration. Collaboration gives teams the chance to turn each individual's strengths and contributions into better performance, higher productivity and better results than the simple sum of individual efforts.

We didn't stop collaborating when the world suddenly had to work from home en masse, but the way we do it has changed.

Many teams ran into the challenges of fully virtual collaboration: limited opportunities for informal, spontaneous communication, the constraints of screen sharing, and limited interaction.

Returning to the office will improve teamwork and boost efficiency, especially for tasks that heavily depend on each other. But collaboration doesn't just increase productivity — it also builds and maintains the team's trust in each other.

Working together in person creates visibility of everyone's performance and contribution. This strengthens mutual trust, even when the team isn't together.

A hybrid collaboration model also brings the challenge of not losing sight of employees working remotely, especially during important decision-making moments.

For employees who work together in person at the office, it's easy to find a moment to collaborate in a shared space, to ask each other spontaneous questions, and to offer feedback or help when they notice someone needs it. Remote workers can easily miss these key moments for collaboration and development, which can negatively affect their career growth.

That's why it's important for managers to create norms and processes around this, so that remote workers are actively and consciously involved in these key collaboration moments, and stay involved.

• It's best to consciously plan collaboration sessions for tasks that genuinely benefit from in-person teamwork on days when most employees are in the office
• Learn together as a team how to use new collaboration platforms and techniques
• Actively involve remote workers in the discussion and decisions during collaboration meetings: actively ask for input from the people joining the meeting via video or phone.
• Set up solid procedures around development and coaching so remote workers get the same opportunities too. Development and coaching tend to go more smoothly and naturally when coach and coachee work together in person.

3. Creativity

Without creativity and innovation, a business stays stuck in place. Both are essential for growth and improvement. 

Creativity at work often arises from spontaneous discoveries combined with planned collaboration. Social distancing and remote working have made it incredibly hard to spark spontaneous creativity, since there was no more room for informal, unexpected chats in the hallway or during a break.

These informal moments of connection are very hard to recreate in a digital setting.

During in-person meetings at the office, it's much easier to brainstorm freely and turn those ideas into something concrete and new!

Returning to the office will make these spontaneous and planned creative moments possible again! Make room for unplanned creative time: hold a team meeting without a fixed agenda or set topics, and just talk to each other about fun subjects!

The challenge lies in fitting this into the hybrid working model.

It's important that the creative input from remote workers doesn't get lost along the way!

To spark creativity again and properly involve remote workers, it's a great idea to encourage people to take their breaks together and invite remote workers to join in. You could, for example, do this by sending them a to send a snack box with the same nutritious snacks as their colleagues at the office and enjoy them together.

 

4. Culture

Company culture reflects 'how we do things'. It's the whole set of values and standards that determine why a company exists and how it wants to present itself to the outside world.

Working together in person at the office creates connection and a sense of belonging, of being part of something. It helps employees see more easily how their efforts affect the company and its customers.

By bringing employees back to the office and actively boosting company culture, they can feel more strongly connected to the company again.

This is the perfect moment to make company culture more visible for everyone again and adapt it to the current way of working together. What impact does hybrid working have on your company culture? 

Now, let's get to it!

Are you keen, as a business, to fully embrace change and make the most of the momentum? This is the moment to rethink and fine-tune!

Create a roadmap for the return to the office: decide together how you're going to work together, define your new goals, discuss openly and in detail what you expect from each other, determine what the ideal balance between office and home looks like, decide whether you'll aim for fixed days together in the office, and so on?

It's the role of managers and leaders to develop an irresistible Workplace Value Proposition:

• By drawing up procedures and a policy based on these 4 C's
• By always setting a good example yourself and consistently applying the agreed behaviour
• By encouraging managers and team leaders to adapt the Workplace Value Proposition tailored to the individual needs of their team
• By involving employees in the conversation about what the return to the office could look like, and doing so as authentically and openly as possible
• By taking your employees into account as individuals. Consider their personal life situations and work roles. Ask them what they do and don't like about working in the office. Refresh their memory about what they enjoyed about working together in the office. Only mention genuine, honest benefits of working together in person.
• By acknowledging the efforts and sacrifices of your employees over the past challenging months of full-time remote work.
• By checking whether your shared spaces still meet today's requirements. Can everyone feel safe, can distance be maintained, are there enough facilities for video conferencing with remote workers, and so on?

Conclusion

After months of full-time remote working and the possible anxiety around Covid, some employees may have become a bit hesitant about returning to the office. A good Workplace Value Proposition can help employees discover what works best for them and how to make the transition in a way that feels comfortable.

Create a work environment your employees won't find anywhere else.

Create an irresistible company culture with respect for your employees as individuals. Make sure you know which moments matter most to your employees and invest fully in employee well-being. Make your employees' lives as pleasant as possible!

So bring that office dog back to the office, fill the snack machine with irresistible and above all more nutritious snacks, bring the fun back to the office and go all in on informal moments!

We're not going back to the old 'normal', but is that really so bad? This is our chance to create a new, even better (work) reality!