Should we return to the office?

The emerging image of a new boss: the employee

BY CAROLINA ORDEIX

“If a year ago you were to tell people, ‘When you’re in a Zoom meeting with work, you’re going to see children jumping in on the computer to say hello. The dog is going to come and bark. Whatever service is going to knock on the door. And everyone is going to think that is normal.’ You would have told me, ‘You’re crazy,’ ” said Carolina Valencia, 43, still teleworking from her home.

The COVID-19 pandemic sent the majority of white-collar workers fleeing downtown offices for home. Companies of every industry needed to adjust their operations online. According to figures published by the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics in June 2020, 37 percent of jobs in the U.S can be performed entirely at home, which represents a higher percentage than what the Bureau estimated in 2018. The study showed that workers in telework-capable occupations earn more. The 37 percent of US jobs that can be performed at home account for 46 percent of all wages.

When Martha Larrazabal, 38, a Change Management Specialist working for Dovel Technologies, started her new job at the beginning of the pandemic, she believed that it was going to be more difficult to get used to a new company and culture. But because everyone was online, it was not as challenging as she thought. For her, life couldn’t be better. 

“It has been actually like a miracle for me,” Larrazabal said. “I was hesitant to take the new job because it was so far away from me. But I started during the pandemic, so that meant I didn’t need to commute at all. That was an actual blessing and I am even happier than the previous job.”

She is not alone in the feeling. Many employees are getting used to the perks of working remotely. And after a year of enjoying the advantages of working from home, this group of former commuters is wondering why they should return to the office at all.  

“I haven’t been to the office, not even once. That means that if we go back to the office, I won’t even know where the bathroom is or the water fountain.”

Martha Larrazabal, Change Management Specialist, Dovel Technologies

A change of mindset: Working from home or working at home

“The problem is what is happening is that many people are not working from home; they are working at home. They are trying to meet their schedule and the philosophy of working from the office, but in the house,” explains Rafael Polonia, 48, an Engineer and Product Manager at Verizon. 

Polonia used to drive one hour to the Ashburn Virginia Verizon offices, a place that previously drew up to 4000 employees. His company was semi-remote before the pandemic, but since March last year, he and his team went fully remote. He explains that working from home is a mindset and for him, the switch is more related to how companies contribute to this cultural change.

“I think the company has to create policies that allow people to feel comfortable and not feel guilty, because if I have to leave, I have to go and pick up my kids at three o’clock, come back and work a little bit later, it’s not a problem. And that’s a cultural shift,” said Polonia. 

Part of changing the mindset is changing how we understand the concept of work. The idea of going to a certain place to do the work was inherited from the Industrial Revolution Era when everyone needed to show up in the factory. And presenteeism was the yardstick to measure our productivity. 

While productivity was the main concern companies had when the pandemic started, employee burnout and wellbeing are what they are focusing on right now.

“How do we prevent employees from burning out?” The belief is that people are working so hard and being so productive because they don’t want to lose their jobs in a time where the economy is under stress,” said Carolina Valencia, part of the HR practice at Gartner. Her job is leading a research team to find answers to these and other questions. 

“At the beginning, I was happy because I used to commute a lot of hours and I was happy that I was able to be here, not commuting that much. But the problem now is that I cannot stop; what is family time and work time.  I’m not able to do that.”

Rafael Polonia, Senior Product Manager at Verizon

Some companies have invested in efforts to guide their workforce during the pandemic and have shared ways of dealing with this new reality, finding solutions for this new work-life balance. Larrazabal explained that her company, Dovel Technologies, has been very supportive during the pandemic. 

“They have these policies that if you need to take time off because you are suffering from COVID or any of your family members is and you need to take care of them, they would give you up to 30 days paid just to be able to take care of yourself or your family, which I think is fantastic,” Larrazabal said. “And that is not PTO. That is just COVID time that you may take to get better. Again, they are always encouraging us to take breaks. They have been providing these meditation activities.” 

For Larrazabal, the change of mindset comes from understanding that your family is not interrupting your work, your work is interrupting your family; the work is in your home now.

Martha Larrazabal, Change Management Specialist at Dovel Technologies, working from her home when the pandemic started. PHOTO COURTESY OF MARTHA LARRAZABAL.

A new boss: the employee

Alejandra González, 24, lives and works in North Bethesda, Maryland. She is an executive realtor administrator working for RLAH Real Estate. She worked from her home for the first three months of the pandemic, but she was really missing her office. 

“It was hard for me to separate my personal life from my work because I was just always in my room. I would wake up and work and then go to sleep and it will be like the same cycle every day. So I did get tired of that pretty quickly,” González said. “And that’s why as soon as the restrictions lifted, I asked Amalia [her boss] if I could come back and, she was like, ‘Of course, whatever you want.’ And I decided to come back and it’s been great from here.”

For González, it is important that companies give their employees the opportunity to choose. “I feel like if you are given the opportunity to either go to the office or stay at home, I think that would be great. That would be ideal for everybody,” she said.

Responding to people like González, some employers have taken the pandemic as a chance to empower their employees and offer greater flexibility.  Julia Hobsbawm addresses it in her paper as “The Empathy Economy.” It’s about making the shift from seeing people as numbers, to treating them more as human beings. From just posting a job to co-creating work experiences with the employee at the center.

Some have set out to measure this kind of corporate empathy. According to the Harvard Business Review and the 2016 Empathy Index, which ranked 100 companies analyzing fields like culture, ethics, brand perception, and leadership performance, the top 3 most empathetic companies in 2016 were Facebook, Alphabet (Google), and Linkedin.

Employee Experience design or EX is used in many HR departments to retain talent and boost productivity. Designing new experiences for employees may be very important for companies in a post-Covid world. A new study from Gartner, a leading research and advisory company, set out to understand why employees work for specific companies. One of their findings was that putting people first really matters in the value proposition. 

“Rather than thinking of employees as workers, you need to think of them as people. And like people, they have family connections, they have hobbies, etc. So it’s not about balancing work and life. It’s that work is a subset of life, and life is bigger, and then you need to design around life, not just work. It is about how you make employees feel, not the features that you give them.”, said Carolina Valencia, Ph.D. at Gartner.

Who will have the last word: the old boss vs. the new boss

Carolina Valencia is trying to help companies in their journey for answers. 

“Do we move to a hybrid world? Do we let people work remote, or do we ask people to come back? And then, if we’re going to move to a hybrid world, what are the policies and practices that we need to change? The remote work solution resulted from reacting to a situation, a human crisis. But no Human Resource department nor company had the time to design work to work from home. “People basically took the way we worked in the office to working via a computer”, said Valencia.

What comes next, Valencia says, will depend on each company. The COVID-19 crisis just accelerated some processes that were already starting for some. Companies that were already thinking about these topics are more prepared to make the shift. Given there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, Valencia is advising her clients to think about the easy wins they can find to show employees that they are going in the right direction. She explained the importance of designing employee journey maps and identifying the milestones their employees need to accomplish.

“Think about the experience of the employee. If you’re virtual, what does that experience look like? What would you need to do differently? And design for that rather than try to adapt an old model to a new reality,” Valencia said.

Miguel Guevara, 30, a product manager at Google, explains that his experience hasn’t changed a lot because he was already video conferencing with many people. But he acknowledges that in his company, a lot of people do enjoy going to the office. Still, other people have said, “I’m way more productive at home.”

“So, I think that there are these different constituencies that have different opinions. And I guess the challenge is how to make sure that everyone can bring their best to work without killing the innovation that happens at the company.” Guevara said.

Google was one of the first companies in the past weeks to share their plans to bring employees back to the office. Guevara is not sure why his company took the decision. His hypothesis is that even though Google is an innovative company, it is still a large organization. “At the moment, one of the challenges with Google is that it’s very big. So we have many different functions that have many different needs. They’re trying to find this sort of middle ground that works for the majority of the company. But I would expect that there would be some experimenting going forward. There will be some flexibility based on types of job functions,” Guevara said.

For Kinley Salmon, who is an Economist, Journalist, and Author, his vision is more cautious. He acknowledged that employees would demand more things than before because they now know what it is possible and they know what remote work actually looks like; but for him, it could be quite disruptive for workers and rich countries.

“If you are allowing people to not go to the office, that could mean more people living in West Virginia, rather than  New York,  and maybe you’re hiring more of them in India or Bangladesh, rather than in the US.,” Salmon said.

Salmon expects to see changes and more demands from employees, but from an economic standpoint, it’s important to remember that the labor market is still down and people are still struggling, he says.  

“With a low unemployment rate, it is easier for a worker to make demands. We’re bouncing back, but there is still high unemployment in a lot of countries and I’m not sure that many employees are actually in a position to demand too much from their employers because there are a lot of people out of work,” Salmon said. He sees companies keeping offices, keeping a hub for events, for team building, for in-person meetings and he thinks this will help to make the information exchange easier.  But he concludes: “That kind of requirement to be there, five days a week, nine to five, I hope and expect will be a lot less.”

“…it is going to take more than rearranging the chairs of a virtual office to make change happen. I think many of us are ready to make that change, and it does have to be ‘us’ and not ‘them.”

Julia Hobsbawn, The Nowhere Office.

From an employee angle, most surveys seem to agree: employees who can work from home will choose to do their work remotely, at least one day per week. According to a Gartner survey of 4257 employees worldwide, 36% responded they preferred going to the office two to four days per week and 17% answered they would never want to go back.

Besides the differences of opinion on how many days or what the best setup is, employees are voicing one common thing: most employees want to return to a very different workplace. There will not be an easy answer. We are entering a new era of tailored, employee-centered, more flexible workplaces, with a need for decisive leadership. Leaders themselves will have to focus more on people and the necessities of their teams. And one thing is clear: working life “won’t be the old normal”, as Hobsbawm explains in her paper The Nowhere Office.

As an employee, Carolina Valencia says she loves her office. “I love my teammates, I love the people that I work with. Do I love going to work every day? No. I love I’m in bed, I get out of bed, I’m in a meeting immediately. It takes me five minutes.” So would she give that up? “No. But do I want to see my colleagues every now and then? Do I want to be able to maybe grab a coffee, grab lunch? Yes. And do I miss it? Yes.”, said Valencia.

For companies, the trick will be finding that sweet spot that lets each individual feel at home — whether they’re in their own home or in the office once again.-