Whats The Purpose In Returning To Work?
Travel broadens the mind but so, weve learned, does staying at home. Cast your mind back to the first round of lockdown, when businesses were scrambling to enable employees to work from home (WFH). But even when work resumed, we changed. Many workers discovered other, more meaningful joys in life, from being able to read our children bedtime stories, to the greater productivity and satisfaction of working to our own rhythms. Workers now face the prospect of the long-delayed return to the office, with researchers finding that three quarters of businesses expect to have employees back by the beginning of September. We cant imagine how profoundly or in what ways our absence from the workplace has changed us, but we do know that team leaders and HR face a formidable challenge in motivating employees who have fallen in love with their new lives. The truth is, there is no rulebook for managing the transition back to the office, just as we had no guide to the sudden shift to WFH in lockdown. That might seem bewildering for team leaders, but theres no reason it cannot be a joyous process of discovery for both employers and employees - as long as its foundation rests on renewing and strengthening teams and individuals sense of purpose. Life can never be the same... The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. And the biggest mistake employers can make is to think that offices and working practices will return to the same pre-pandemic routines. Some of the reasons are practical: for example, while Covid-19 remains a risk, employees may not be able to eat together, making team bonding sessions or lunch-and-learn nearly impossible. But the psychological effects are arguably more important. The biggest is that many employees simply wont wish to return to the office at all, while even those who miss the camaraderie and teamwork may want a truncated office week, say from Tuesday to Thursday. Similarly, its unquestionable that at least some of your employees have got into bad habits or attitudes over the last 18 months, and these need to be ironed out if they are not to be ingrained or, worse, spread to other members of the team. But perhaps the biggest worry for HR is the most prosaic: that the long-anticipated return to the office does not deliver the emotional hit people were expecting, especially once they lose the benefits of a life theyve come to take for granted. ...but it can be better  There are two models for managing the transition back to the workplace. Leaders can of course demand workers adhere to the same rules and expectations that existed before the pandemic. Perhaps employees will gripe and grumble for a bit before resigning themselves to the return of the status quo. Lets face it, though: unless every competitor in your industry follows suit, workers will look longingly at friends and former colleagues at companies that continue to trust employees with the freedoms and privileges conferred during lockdown. To avoid a costly brain drain and a stagnant, unmotivated workforce, leaders need to reconcile themselves to providing a much more flexible and bespoke approach to employee engagement. They must recognise that there can be no return to the days of rigidly-enforced rules for every worker. But they must also see this as a chance to build something better. To do that, they need to concentrate on recreating employees sense of purpose. First, leaders must admit that for many people, the office is no longer the primary arena of achievement. Yes, our careers will always be important, but lockdown has forced us to reconsider what truly matters in life, whether its our interests, families or physical and mental wellbeing. We used to talk about bringing our whole selves to work; now that work has mingled so irrevocably with the personal, were about to realize what this really means in practice. So, we need to think smart about what purpose really means. Ive written before about the importance of aligning all team members towards the win, but we cant expect everybody to be equally driven by work-based goals. Remember, purpose is the why that lies at the core of each and every one of us; the thing that generates our motivation and accelerates our desire to achieve. And just because employees are more motivated by personal factors is no reason for leaders to ignore them. Consider the classic interview question: Where do you want to be in 10 years time? It seems to demand a career-focused answer. Im not going to pretend this will be easy for team leaders or HR, or that theres a single roadmap to follow. But the difficulty is chiefly about mindset and changing leaders expectations of what purpose really entails. And I can say with absolute confidence that leaders who allow individuals and teams to figure out their own way to contribute to the win will find the process more rewarding, energising - and even mind-expanding - than they ever thought possible.