Many companies imagine that forcing people to return to the office will encourage connections between colleaguesand, as a result, strengthen the sense of belonging, collaboration, innovation, productivity and engagement.
On paper, this is understandable and debatable, but in practice, just as I recently said that telecommuting is not the cause of loneliness but rather the indicator of it (What the loneliness of some remote workers really tells us), being in the office doesn’t guarantee anything either.
Connected out of the office, alone in the office
I won’t dwell on what I said in the above-mentioned article: just because you’re teleworking doesn’t mean you’re alone!
You can be connected to your colleagues at a distance in an efficient and convivial way, rethink these moments of conviviality, see your colleagues from time to time in or out of the office (undergone moments vs. chosen moments) and, above all, see people who are not colleagues.
But of course, from a managerial perspective, we don’t care if you have friends, if you see them, and if it’s important for your personal balance, which has a significant impact on your professional balance.
What’s important is that you see your colleagues! Logical, since it’s with them that you’re going to add value to your company.
But does being in the office mean being connected to others? We can’t say there are many examples of people being alone in the office.
Just because you’re in the same place doesn’t mean you talk to each other.
You’ve seen those open spaces where people are lined up like battery hens, and no one talks to each other. Or even talking to each other in teams three meters apart, when the aim is to (re)create a human bond?
Getting people to come back to the office so that they can exchange ideas in teams within the same open space is a fine example of the effectiveness of returning to the office…or proof that connecting people is not the objective.
You also have people who are naturally shy, people who don’t fit in well, people who like peace and quiet and a form of solitude, and quite simply those who prefer to keep their distance and don’t believe in the myth of companies being families (What does Netflix’s culture and management tell us about today’s world?).
Just because we talk doesn’t mean we want to do things together
If putting people in the same room isn’t a guarantee of building relationships, building relationships doesn’t mean you’re going to get anything out of them other than the minimal exchanges necessary to do your job.
Most office exchanges are transactional, and we see our interlocutor in a functional, not human, light.
However, we must not deny the qualitative dimension of exchanges. Even if they’re trivial at the coffee machine, they’re what bind people together, but what they have in common is that they don’t obey any rules other than “people meet in the same place at the same time”. We make them possible, but we can’t organize them.
For some people, this is natural online, but these are the exceptions. But isn’t it possible to provoke these moments without making people come back to the office? It’s the hobbyhorse of companies that have successfully implemented telecommuting: we don’t have to see each other just to work, on the contrary. Here again, it’s a question of chosen vs. endured time.
In fact, even if companies are right to organize meetings and get-togethers, they represent virtually nothing compared to the moments that employees decide to organize informally among themselves.
You can be together without working together
It also happens in large companies, but not exclusively, that people are together in the office but have nothing to say to each other because they don’t work together and sometimes don’t even know each other and have no reason to know each other!
This is the kind of distributed working that companies love for reasons of efficiency and performance, but don’t seem to want to draw all the consequences from.
When a team is made up of 5 people located on 5 different sites, being in the office or not makes no difference to their lives. It’s just frustrating for those who have to endure a 1-hour commute to get to an office where they’ll be working with people hundreds or thousands of kilometers away.
At that point, their first desire is to escape rather than take advantage of this time to reach out to others.
It’s not about where you go, it’s about why you go there.
If creating connections matters, then we understand that bringing people together is only a means to an end, not a substitute for their willingness to create them , and therefore for what they are looking for through these connections.
This is where research conducted by the NeuroLeadership Institute and Akamai comes in, showing what the concept of connection means for employees (What Employers Get Wrong About How People Connect at Work).
In a nutshell, this model identifies four essential types of connection:
Connection with colleagues: These are supportive and collaborative relationships between colleagues. These interactions foster teamwork and create a more supportive, high-performance work environment. A strong connection with colleagues is often associated with increased social support and better collective performance.
Connection with leaders: The relationship between an employee and his or her superiors plays a crucial role in engagement. A good leader offers opportunities, empowers, and provides clear and balanced feedback. Around 70% of the variance in engagement within a team can be attributed to the manager’s behavior, which shows just how important this connection is.
Connection with the employer: This refers to the alignment of the employee’s values with those of the company. A strong sense of connection with the employer can increase motivation and a sense of belonging, while a lack of connection can lead to demotivation and disengagement, or even departure.
Connection with the role: This connection describes the satisfaction employees feel with their work. It is linked to the concept of “flow”, where tasks are so engaging that the rest of the world seems to disappear. A good role connection means that employees clearly understand their responsibilities, are motivated and see prospects for advancement.
Of course, the weighting of each of these forms of connection varies according to the individual and even the context , and this echoes to some extent what an employee is looking for at each point in his or her life cycle with the company and its projects, which will make teleworking more or less desirable, acceptable and impactful (Why does an employee want or need to work remotely?).
The variable impact of the workplace on connections between employees
If creating connections is a prerequisite for many vital things, then it’s important to ask how much presence in the office, whether permanent or occasional, makes these connections possible.
Connecting with colleagues: seeing each other is essential to getting started and maintaining a connection. But doing so on a daily basis transforms a chosen connection into a suffered one.
Working together also helps to create ties, sometimes between people who were content with the bare minimum in terms of interaction, especially when they have gone through and resolved complicated or even crisis situations together. But it’s all very well at a distance too… if anything, it can make people who used to work at a distance want to see each other “in person”.
Connecting with managers: the problem here is that the problem with telecommuting is less the employee’s ability to work remotely than the manager’s ability to manage remotely! It’s easier to call the employee back to the office than to improve managers’ skills (The “remote manager”, weak link in remote work and Management in the future of work: digital leadership and systemic approach to management).
As for the skills of supposed leaders to make their leadership exist at a distance… once again, it’s easier to put the problem on the employee than on the leader.
Connection with the employer: if it were enough for everyone to be in the office to solve problems of motivation and commitment, this would have been known long ago. Here again, the responsibility for age-old dysfunctions is shifted onto the teleworker (Remote work: a mirror of the organizations’ weaknesses.). Worse still, a forced return to the office can even be perceived as a breach of trust between employer and employee.
Connection with the role: this is an “operations”-oriented logic that has nothing to do with the workplace.
Today, the organization of work is at the heart of expectations in terms of the employee experience (The employee experience: a transformation lever at the service of performance), but nobody is asking too many questions about how to improve things (Knowledge workers, the excluded from operational excellence?).
It’s all about the right mix of connections
So, not only is not every employee looking for the same type of connection depending on his or her personal context, but face-to-face contact does not have the same effect depending on the connections you want to activate.
So it’s up to the company to find the right mix – a real challenge when we know that, in addition to having a different impact on each employee, the accumulation of connections can be highly counterproductive.
For example, while returning to the office will stimulate connections with employees, it can create mistrust and disengagement with executives and managers whose presence will be perceived as intrusive, and even with the employer who has broken a relationship of trust by imposing this return to the office.
In other words, the company cannot win on all fronts at once, and the future will tell whether the forced return to the office will not be a demotivating and disengaging machine.
A short-term vision
The upshot of all this is that going back to the office may not have the benefits it is claimed to have, and may even prove highly counterproductive.
Behind the chestnuts of creativity, productivity, commitment and the other arguments cited, we can see an easy way of avoiding tackling the real problems and hiding the dust under the carpet.
I mentioned above the issue of managers unable to manage from a distance, but generally speaking, companies have looked at telecommuting from the angle of distance, hiding the need to rethink work under the carpet (In remote working what counts is…working.).
In the same way, we have missed a unique opportunity to rethink organizations in the light of the demands of today’s world, by taking advantage of the post-COVID dynamic (The post-COVID organization: flatter, agile, flexible, fast, simple).
In short, with the return to the office, the company is punishing its employees for its own lack of courage and vision.
Conclusion
During COVID and even afterwards, I often heard that nothing would ever be the same again, and even if the expression had the gift of irritating me (The world after does not exist), I still thought we’d learn something from it.
Well, no. 4 years later, COVID has never existed, no lessons have been learnt and we’re still making the telecommuting/presenceential distinction, without having learned anything about what one or the other favors or penalizes, and that the question isn’t where a person is working from at any given moment, but what his or her needs are, and what the company’s needs are.
The return to the office is based on the presupposition that everything will be better in the office, and we’ve just had proof to the contrary. To make progress on one dimension, we’ll have to accept that we’ll have to regress on others, and nobody seems to be aware of this.
Image : return to the office by rblfmr via Shutterstock.
