Return-to-office (RTO) mandates are increasing and predicted to continue to escalate well into next year. A recent study by Resume Builder found that half of the companies surveyed require workers to be in-office four or more days per week. Plus, one in four companies plan to increase required in-office days in 2025, despite the majority of them losing talent due to the RTO policy.
Since the pandemic and the surge of hybrid work, employees aren’t used to working in close quarters anymore, and in some cases, they’re butting heads. That can put worker morale as well as company productivity on the line. If the whole point of RTO is to boost productivity, it’s an urgent matter that businesses need to fix to make an office return worthwhile.
As workers return to their offices, Joseph Grenny, best-selling author of Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, notices they’ve lost interpersonal social skills. In some cases, this is similar to the initial transition to remote work in 2020 in the reverse. During the pandemic, workers had to learn how to communicate virtually (which caused a lot of stress). Now, they must relearn how to do so in person (which is causing an equal amount of stress).
I spoke by email with Grenny, co-founder of Crucial Learning, a workforce training company that trains teams on leadership and management topics. He addressed three important questions that leaders must answer to mitigate the RTO problems.
1. Having gotten used to a degree of remote working, has there been a decline in interpersonal communications skills? How is this impacting workers/organizations?
“Our research at Crucial Learning indicates that while work-from-home may have boosted employee satisfaction, it has also negatively and significantly impacted communication,” Grenny states. “For example, people say they are more than twice as likely to avoid speaking up about concerns with colleagues and managers virtually than when they worked together in person. This lack of communication can erode social capital, making it harder for employees to build trust and maintain strong relationships. This in turn affects organizations’ innovation and productivity.”
Grenny adds that leaders can improve social capital by establishing a culture of dialogue, ensuring employees feel able to address and solve individual, cultural and organizational challenges. He lists five strategies leaders can employ to offset potential downsides of working from home:
- Investing in virtual training
- Implementing new tools and technology to facilitate connection
- Ensuring communication via video call
- Asking for input on needs in company-wide and one-to-one meetings
- Making time for non-work-related conversations for team members to simply connect
“When leaders proactively build a sense of connection, our research shows that workers will be 60% more likely to respond quickly to requests from each other, are nearly three times more likely to give one another the benefit of the doubt rather than taking offense, are nearly three times more likely to sacrifice their own needs to serve a larger team goal and over twice as likely to take initiative to solve problems rather than waiting to be told,” he cites.
2. How can a return-to-office cause issues related to workplace conflict/toxicity? How can these issues be resolved?
Grenny finds that RTO mandates can trigger workplace conflicts, especially when employees have grown accustomed to the flexibility of remote work, noting that this shift can lead to resentment and stress and exacerbate existing tensions.
“To resolve these issues, organizations should prioritize open communication, provide support for the transition and foster an inclusive culture that values employee well-being,” he advises. “Offering training in crucial conversations and conflict resolution can also equip employees with the skills needed to navigate these changes effectively.”
3. RTO mandates often prompt negative reactions. Are employers communicating RTO mandates appropriately? Can RTO mandates be introduced in a way that prompts less conflict?
Grenny informed me that many employers struggle with communicating RTO mandates effectively, often leading to negative reactions. He added that their findings suggest that mandates introduced with empathy, transparency and a clear rationale tend to be better received. “First, leaders should get opinion leaders on board first,” he points out. “Engage a handful of respected people from a representative set of departments and locations in studying the issue. Expose them to the problems you’re trying to solve and be open to their suggestions about reasonable ways of solving it.” He recommends that if the culture, customers, employee turnover or innovation suffers—because of working from home—allow them to see the data and experience the problems firsthand. He continues that if they are persuaded that RTO is essential to achieving results, they should be included in the announcement.
“Future pain is easier to accept than present pain,” Grenny concludes. “Give people as much notice as possible and ease into the new policy. And make sure to give the ‘why,’ not just the ‘what.’ Share both objective evidence and compelling stories that support the rationale for RTO.”
Forbes