There will inevitably be employees who reject their employersâ arguments. The extent to which organizations then implement their approach â and whether it is phased in or enforced swiftly as a crackdown â will depend on a range of factors. Employers who are confident of the quality of the general working conditions, compensation, and range of benefits that they offer their employees will feel more confident about insisting on a certain amount of office time. Those who perceive themselves to be on shakier ground in this respect may feel they need to tread more warily in order to safeguard their recruitment and retention power.Â
Some organizations have invested significant resources in becoming more inclusive and collaborative. Forcing staff back to the office, even in the name of strengthening corporate culture, will be self-defeating if it contradicts the values to which the employee originally signed up.Â
Judging the advantages of a new modelÂ
The second challenge is to consider the details of the new arrangements. For example, if staff are required to work in the office for three days a week, can those be any three days or will they be set days, a rotating schedule, etc.?Â
Employersâ priorities, as well as employee preferences, will inform this debate. Some organizations see remote working as an opportunity to reduce their real-estate footprint: if more people are working remotely, they could move to a smaller workplace, lowering overheads. However, employers who believe getting staff back to the office is important for the purposes of collaboration and innovation will naturally want people to come in together; this model will require the business to retain significant workspace capacity.Â
Employers will need to judge these trade-offs carefully. Does an employerâs ambition for real-estate savings trump its cultural agenda? Is the desire to get staff back into the office according to a strict timetable so strong that individual flexibility must be limited?Â
Some employers are tackling this at team or function level. It could make sense to have finance, say, in the office from Monday to Wednesday, with sales expected to attend Wednesday to Friday. Such a system would mean close colleagues would know they will be in together to collaborate and consult one another as required, while allowing some overlap with the other team for personal contact, where necessary. However, many employers are still wedded to the concept of allowing spontaneous contact between employees across the business â a chance meeting between a finance executive and their opposite number in sales, for example. Those meetings will become less likely if different teams are in the office at different times.Â
What does todayâs office look like?Â
A related issue here is the nature of the office to which staff are returning. Employers who are still thinking along traditional lines of keeping their staff under direct supervision, where they can ensure that they are working hard, may see no reason to change the office environment, and seek simply to repopulate it. However, for those employers who want to revitalize the office environment as a center for collaboration and innovation, there will be an imperative to rethink the physical space to support this. If the future of work looks just like its past, with individual workers stuck in isolation in their cubicles, there can be little hope of progress.Â