Christopher is the co-founder, head strategist and CEO of The Go! Agency, a full-service digital marketing agency.
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After a long year filled with adjustments made by employers and their staff, the working world is ready to consider whether it’s time to call our teams back to the office. But even as the pandemic is slowly getting under control, things aren’t going to reset back to the way they were. To thrive, businesses will have to define their “new normal.”
The new normal probably isn’t going to be a choice between remaining fully virtual or returning to the traditional 9-to-5 Monday-through-Friday grind. More likely the result will lie somewhere in between. The advantage is that we have time to figure out what point in between works best for our companies. Remember, you’ve been holding it together for a year now working remotely; don’t be afraid to keep that going a little while longer as you sort out the most suitable pathway to bring your group back together.
Here are four considerations on my mind as I decide when and how I’m going to bring my team back into our offices this year:
Measure productivity.
Is your team still getting the same amount of work done from home as they were in the office? More? Less? Come up with a metric for productivity (tasks completed per week, hours devoted to tasks, how much back and forth is going on with a client) and compare to any data you have from before your team went remote in 2020. This is important because it might slow down your decision to move employees back to the office so quickly.
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Obviously, if your productivity has been downsloping since last March, then it is a wise decision to gather back together at the office and see if that improves things. But many studies of remote workers have shown that they tend to be more productive at home because they have more freedom over their schedule and also don’t spend an hour or more of their day commuting to the office, instead opting to use that time to work.
Moving back to the office doesn’t need to be an all-or-nothing transition either. You could have your employees come in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and work from home the rest of the week — or any other compromise that works for you and your employees. After all, if their productivity level has maintained, is there a need for a drastic, all-at-once change in the way they’re working?
Understand any changes to the quality of your product.
Are you and your team still delivering? I don’t just mean whether you’re getting materials to your clients by a deadline, although that’s certainly important. I mean: Is your product still being developed to the standard that you had when everybody was in the office? Or has the quality gotten a little lax? Unlike the last section, the answer to this question should make your decision to go back to the office black and white: if you’re not delivering, it’s time for a change.
Your product is everything. It’s your reputation, it’s the purpose of your company, and to some extent, it’s the morale of your employees. If they don’t feel like the content is as good as it used to be, they’ll likely get discouraged and lose the passion for their work that you’re relying on to put a quality product in the hands of your clients.
Consider team morale.
How does your team feel about working remotely? Are they isolated or thriving? Just because studies suggest that more employees do well working from home doesn’t mean that applies to every individual. If the majority of your team feels like they’ve lost the sense of community that your workplace used to have and they aren’t making enough of a contribution, then your choice of whether to fully return to the office seems pretty clear.
If you know your team well enough, you might be able to gather how they feel through the limited day-to-day interactions with them. I’ve realized that, even while working remotely, my team has excelled at completing projects on time and maintaining the quality I expect from them. But our campaign strategy meetings, which used to be the creative highlight of our week, have suffered a bit of a slump. Without the distance and technical hiccups of using Zoom for all of our communications, I believe I’d be getting a lot more out of my employees creatively.
Get your team’s input.
Perhaps the most important thing: Talk to your team about the decision to go back to the office. People are going to have concerns, even ones that aren’t specific to the pandemic. Ask. Don’t assume.
Ultimately, the decision lies with you, but if you want to keep your team happy, you will have to make some small concessions during this time of transition. Some of your employees are just going to be happier and more productive with a more fluid schedule and no commute. At the same time, at least going by my own experience, having my team working face to face would eliminate a lot of petty conflicts that have arisen while working virtually.
Again, ask yourself: Do I need to rush this? The answer is probably no. Set up a few dates for team get-togethers just to ease everybody back into the feeling of community that your team used to have, but avoid making sweeping, needlessly stressful mandates about “getting back to work.”
Your company has been online for a year now — you can afford yourself time to be strategic, test the waters and map out the future of how your company works.
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Author: Christopher Tompkins, Forbes Councils Member
