There’s a fundamental misunderstanding between employees and employers regarding return-to-office mandates: It isn’t actually about remote work at all. It’s about personal autonomy and employees’ desire to be trusted to choose the schedule and location that work best for them personally.
In Times of Disruption, People Seek Control
Interest rates are rising, the market is a mess, and many things increasingly seem out of control. So, what do we do when life feels out of control? I, for one, organize, clean, play sports, and seek to control the things I can to make myself feel less at the mercy of the world’s whims. That’s my coping mechanism. In the past, when I’ve been upset about work, one pressure release valve in my arsenal was putting my résumé out there and looking for alternative jobs. I’m not alone in this.
Improve Outcomes by Listening and Providing Choice
Our evolutionary lizard brains are wired to control what we can to protect ourselves. We see it in children, too—they lack control and do everything they can to seize it. If we want to get kids to eat their vegetables, what’s more effective? Telling them to do it because we said so or asking them to choose between two options: broccoli or green beans? What if you also offer them yummy frozen berries for dessert but only if they eat all their veggies?
From watching my son, I’ve learned that if we want to understand human behavior in times of stress and disruption, we need look no further than children, as they are just little adults without any of the mechanisms we’ve developed to hide our most base selves. People seek control and choice—they provide us with a sense of safety and calm. When we don’t have them, we find ways to act out. With the world in a state of unrest and choice being stripped away, is it any wonder employees disengage?
Return-to-Office Mandates Impinge Upon Employee Autonomy
Who among us hasn’t at some point felt like they needed to clone themselves or wished for more hours in the day so they could get everything done and still be present for loved ones? Everyone has unique personal and professional needs and obligations, and employers can’t be reasonably expected to fully understand and come up with a solution that meets everyone’s needs, unless they leave that determination to the employees themselves.
As a leader, I put together unique surveys designed to tease out the true “why” underlying my employees’ needs, blockers, frustrations, and more at the individual level. These surveys are intended to uncover each employee’s preferred communication styles and channels and what they need to feel empowered to be present in all aspects of their lives to better understand what they need to be their best selves, which, in turn, maximizes their personal productivity. It won’t be the same for everyone, and that’s OK. The point is to give employees a forum to be heard and then, based on that, create choice.
By mandating a return to office, employers are effectively treating employees like children and saying, “No, we don’t trust you to self-regulate and determine the work schedule and location that maximize your productivity. We know best.” It impinges on their autonomy.
How does it feel when your (though potentially well-meaning) partner tries to explain to you what’s best for you and what you need and why? When they do that, they speak for us, as if they understand us better than we know ourselves. Whether or not they’re right, it’s grating.
Do you think it feels better or worse when an employer, someone who knows us even less well, effectively does the same and tells us what’s best for us and that we have no choice in the matter? Return-to-office mandates impinge on employees’ autonomy and, in so doing, their ability to be their best selves.
Remote Work Isn’t for Everyone, But Choice Is Critical
There are many benefits of remote work, but it’s not feasible or optimally productive for everyone. Not everyone actually can, or wants to, work remotely. Some are uncomfortable working remotely due to their living arrangements. Others may fear selective reprisal, layoffs, difficulty onboarding, or limited growth trajectory due to performance and promotion practices that they feel encourage employers to “ding” remote employees because they are “out of sight, out of mind.”
For some, those challenges outweigh the benefits of remote work for both the employer and the employee. Benefits like these can include enhanced productivity, reduced attrition and access to a wider talent pool, reduced costs ($10,000 to $30,000+ per employee per year, $300 billion/year nationwide), fewer unscheduled absences, and less burnout, as well as improved employee satisfaction, work/life balance, and overall health.
To each their own. The most telling statistic I’ve seen is that a whopping 97% of employees desire to work remotely at least some of the time and would like to do so for the remainder of their careers. They want the choice to do what’s best for them.
Nurture Mutual Trust and Provide Choices to Accelerate Success
Time and time again, studies have shown that trust is the single biggest reason employees stay at or leave an organization. Cultivating mutual trust requires a mindset shift for both employers and employees. Employers need to trust their remote employees to be productive on their own terms, and to foster this trust, employees must be self-directed and produce high-quality deliverables on time.
Employees need to trust their leaders to support them and their career development, irrespective of their work location. To develop this trust in their employees, managers and leaders throughout the organization need explicit best practices, systems, and processes in place to ensure parity and be trained accordingly.
Systems and processes for feedback should ensure everyone is on an equal playing field come review and promotion time, eliminating concerns that remote workers could be “out of sight, out of mind.” I’ve found that cultivating this trust works best when organizations adopt an “autonomy-first” mentality that commits to an environment of transparency, parity, equity, consistency, and effective asynchronous collaboration. This enables employees to choose the work environment they feel maximizes their productivity, with the employer providing clear guardrails and performance expectations required to enable employees to keep the privilege of choosing the work environment they feel is best.
With clarity and upfront expectations comes employee ownership and “loss aversion” working in the employer’s favor, motivating employees to prove they actually do know what’s best for them and can be trusted to deliver. This enables people to be the best versions of themselves, engage, and more rapidly innovate.
Empower Employees to Bring Their Best Selves to Work
While this challenge may seem new due to all the disruption around COVID-19, there are fully remote or “remote first” organizations that have been doing this successfully and, in so doing, have enjoyed a quiet competitive advantage for decades. Many were built this way from their founding, whereas others embraced it later in their evolution. A few examples of companies that have successfully developed mutual trust and worker autonomy include the owners of WordPress (Automattic), Zapier, GitLab, InVision, and Basecamp, among others.
Employees at all levels of an organization are most effective when they have flexibility and feel heard, understood, trusted, and empowered to choose the schedule and work location that work best for them. While these policies pose challenges like management’s mistrust and remote workers’ concerns about career impact, they are all mitigatable, and the advantages far outweigh the risks.
The data shows that mutual trust unleashes employee potential, improves productivity, speeds innovation, enhances talent retention, and reduces costs. Creating a culture of trust requires a shift in mindset, but when companies get this right, they see that they and their people truly can have it all: accelerated success, engaged and motivated employees, and work/life balance, with only minor modifications in how they operate. With flexibility and autonomy, organizations encourage their people to deliver transformational value, and the best versions of everyone show up to work.
Keryn Gold, PhD, is an award-winning business and consulting leader, scientist, and executive strategist who empowers organizations to achieve the seemingly impossible: improved profits without layoffs, faster innovation, and more engaged employees with superior work/life balance without having to clone anyone. She has served as CEO and COO of start-ups and led data science and product strategy divisions at multiple Fortune 50 and FAANG companies and has a career history delivering 50x+ first-year return on investment in less than 3 months to her clients.