How we thrive vs. where we work
The current workplace transition, often described as revolutionary, is framed as a tug of war between work from home (WFH) and return to the office (RTO).
But that’s a false dichotomy. Fixating on where employees work is missing the point.
The point is the long-simmering worker dissatisfaction unleashed at the end of the pandemic, sometimes called the “great resignation.”
What’s common to work from home, return to office and hybrid workplaces is continued managerial deficiency in nurturing the employee satisfaction that boosts productivity.
Regardless of where they work, employees report a lack of clarity on what is expected of them. Starved of positive reinforcement, they feel out of the loop.
In their return-to-office advice to managers in the Harvard Business Review, management experts Constance Dierickx and Dorie Clark suggest that “offering specific, sincere praise is a powerful way to allay employees’ concerns about whether you or other colleagues remember the value they bring.”
Many employees suffer a lack of respect from both managers and certain co-workers. Those “energy drainers” make work difficult or even toxic with their abusive language, gossip and shunning of fellow employees.
Failure to remove such people or to upskill them in decency accounts for the morale-sapping distrust evident in most workplaces.
The manager’s job hasn’t changed in this new era. It is to prove management guru Peter Drucker wrong when he said that “so much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.”
WFH is here to stay. The time savings in commuting alone are simply too compelling for employees to ignore.
“The pandemic revealed what a colossal waste of time and disruption commuting in America is,” New York fund manager Barry Ritholtz wrote recently on his popular blog, “the Big Picture.”
And WFH benefited the many employers that posted significant gains in productivity and profits during the peak years of the WFH pandemic.
But WFH also risks social isolation and a lack of boundaries around work. And so, traditional offices in Toronto have already won back about 50 per cent of their prepandemic populations. That’s a respectable number given that we are only 14 months removed from the last COVID-19 wave.
Studies have consistently shown that traditional office workers have a better chance at promotion, at upgrading their skills through inperson teamwork, and more mentoring opportunities than their WFH counterparts.
No longer the exclusive realm of industrial psychologists, maintaining a workplace free of harm is now a widely shared responsibility, though it needs leaders to create and sustain.
“A psychologically safe workplace is one where it’s OK to make mistakes, it’s OK to not be OK, and it’s OK to speak up and disagree with a superior or other members of your team,” say Dayna Lee-Baggley and Shannan M. Grant, of Dalhousie University and Mount Saint Vincent University respectively, in a recent workplace report.
Rates of burnout, quitting and job-hopping have all hit record levels in the post-pandemic economy.
Those factors, and not WFH, have reduced productivity growth rates to historic lows.
Long-term fixes for that worker discontent include more experiments with four-day work weeks. And closing the gender pay gap.
In Ontario, women on average are paid just 87 cents on every dollar earned by men for comparable work, according to a report this month by the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario.
We needn’t wait for those remedies to get started now on improvements to working life.
In a healthy workplace, managers measure outputs, especially work well done. For now, though, managers are mistakenly obsessed with inputs like hours worked and emails sent. That only encourages “performance work,” the mere appearance of working.
In ideal offices, respectful managers extend to employees the kind of autonomy they had while working from home.
Offices are equipped with discreet lounges for impromptu employee chats and timeouts from stress. There is an employer-provided psychologist available to both returnto-office and WFH employees.
And there are office events, including guest speakers, panel discussions and celebrations. Events enliven office life and draw WFH employees into the office.
Those methods promote employee engagement, or commitment to the job.
Engagement is a key to productivity gains.
Gallup, the polling firm, estimates that below-average employee engagement cost employers worldwide $7.8 trillion (U.S.) in 2022, a sum equal to about seven per cent of global GDP.
The most successful employers use constant feedback to promptly identify problems and opportunities.
“Organizations could reach their highest levels of productivity ever if they have managers who are upskilled to have the right kinds of ongoing conversations with people so that they’re in touch with them on a regular basis,” says Jim Harter, chief scientist of workplace management at Gallup.
What has been lost so far in the workplace transition is a focus on the basic questions: “Do you value your job? And does your employer value you?”
Fixating on where employees do their job is missing the point.
The point is the longsimmering worker dissatisfaction unleashed at the end of the pandemic