Don’t force people back to the office
Omicron has now surpassed delta as the most widespread coronavirus variant in the United States. That’s because, as research shows, it’s much more infectious than delta and our vaccines offer much less protection against this new variant.
As a huge surge in omicron infections continues sweeping its way across the U.S., the only silver lining is that omicron, so far, may cause a milder illness than delta. Yet, due to the much higher infectiousness and vaccine escape, hospitals likely will be overwhelmed in many areas of the U.S., as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned.
Unfortunately, most companies are not pivoting effectively to meet omicron, just as they failed to read the tea leaves on delta before it.
From the start of the pandemic, many leaders have been insisting on a return to a “normal” office-centric culture. That’s despite the fact that a large majority of employees express a strong desire for a flexible schedule instead of being forced back into the office. Moreover, research shows that remote employees are on average 10%-15% more productive than inoffice employees.
And yet, despite plenty of warnings from future-proofing and cognitive bias experts like myself (including in this newspaper), top leaders have tried to force their employees back to the office after vaccines became widely available. This coercion resulted in numerous employees quitting because of the compulsive plans of their employers to get them back to the office — culminating in the ongoing Great Resignation of employees choosing to stay home rather than take available jobs that don’t fit their needs.
And yet companies continue to press on with back-to-office plans like COVID never happened.
Yes, the deadly delta surge caused many companies to delay their plans by a few months. Yet, despite the clear threat of the emergency of new and dangerous variants, and repeated warnings from experts, the companies kept their overall plans the same.
Now, in response to omicron, companies are bringing out the same old “delay the office reopening” play. For example, Google, Uber and Ford, along with many others, have delayed the return to the office for several months.
You probably heard the quote “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Workers never wanted a return to a “normal” office-centric culture, and omicron just helps illustrate how counterproductive it is to try to turn back the clock to January 2020.
What explains this puzzling leadership behavior?
Leaders — and all of us — are prone to falling for dangerous judgment errors called cognitive biases. Rooted in wishful thinking, these mental blind spots lead to poor strategic and financial decisions when evaluating choices.
One of the biggest challenges relevant to omicron is the cognitive bias known as the ostrich effect. Named after the myth that ostriches stick their heads into the sand when they fear danger, it refers to people denying negative reality. Delta illustrated the high likelihood of additional dangerous variants, yet the leadership at many of our biggest companies denied the reality of this risk.
Now they are reaping the whirlwind.
When we learn one way of functioning in any area, we tend to stick to that way of functioning. You might have heard of this as the hammernail syndrome; when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That syndrome is called functional fixedness. This cognitive bias causes leaders used to office-centric culture and ways of collaborating to reject any alternatives.
The way forward is to defeat cognitive biases and avoid denying reality by rethinking our approach to the future of work. Instead of dictating a top-down approach to how employees collaborate, companies need to adopt a decentralized team-led approach.
Each individual team leader of a rank-and-file employee team should determine what works best for the team. After all, team leaders tend to know much more of what their teams need. Moreover, they can respond to local emergencies like COVID surges.
At the same time, team leaders need to be trained to integrate best practices for hybrid and remote team leadership. These practices involve facilitating innovation in hybrid and remote teams through techniques such as virtual asynchronous brainstorming and serendipitous idea generation. To improve collaboration and team bonding for hybrid and remote teams, team leaders need to integrate virtual water cooler discussions, virtual co-working, and virtual mentoring. Finally, team leaders need to adjust performance evaluations to adapt to the needs of hybrid and remote teams.
In short, instead of trying to turn back the clock to the lost world of January 2020, consider how we might create competitive advantage in our new future. COVID will never go away; we need to learn to live with it. That means reacting appropriately and thoughtfully to new variants and being intentional about our trade-offs.
Leaders keep sticking their heads into the sand of reality on COVID-19. Unless they take needed steps, the results may be catastrophic for their companies.