When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that staff must return to the office five days a week starting next year, he joined the growing ranks of executive leaders advocating for a full return to the office, signaling yet another blow to hybrid and remote work.
“Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward,” Jassy wrote in a staff memo in September. “We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective.”
The news was met with strong resistance, as hundreds of employees voiced their displeasure. Last year, staff at its Seattle headquarters staged a protest when Amazon tightened the fully remote work allowance that was put in place during COVID-19.
However, Amazon’s mandate comes at a critical time when social connections in organizations are eroding. Despite the benefits of hybrid and remote work, creativity and collaboration between colleagues are declining.
Post-COVID offices were designed to accommodate fewer employees on-site at the same time, but now people find they cannot even sit with their teams, and people cannot have a sense of identity in their workspace by personalizing their environment.
Companies are told to create cultures where employees feel a sense of trust and belonging, but this is challenging to do when half the office is not physically there. Or, when they are there, they find themselves on video calls to colleagues dialing in from other locations. This is why a return to the office might not be so bad, particularly if it helps to rebuild the social connections that have been lost over the past few years.
Remote teams were found to be less likely to make breakthrough discoveries compared to those who work on-site, according to research led by the universities of Oxford and Pittsburgh into the rise of remote collaborations among scientists and inventors across the world.
The researchers’ key finding was that, while remote collaboration has the potential to deliver new and creative scientific ideas through easier access to a global knowledge pool, it is harder for such teams to integrate effectively to deliver breakthroughs.
We know that creativity, collaboration, and innovation have a home place, yet while there are lots of jobs you can do from home, it is hard to imagine that this sort of work is optimally collaborative.
Post-COVID offices were designed to accommodate fewer employees on-site at the same time, but now people find they cannot even sit with their teams, and people cannot have a sense of identity in their workspace by personalizing their environment.
The real tragedy is that these environments are often isolating for young professionals, leaving them feeling lonely and disheartened. In doing so, we risk failing the next generation of workers. Whilst it is comfortable for many people to work from home, there is a two-tier system at play. There must be a collective commitment to the next generation of workers. Otherwise, we are doing our young people a huge disservice.
“An organization is, after all, in a nutshell, a village. If the village is not talking to itself, or its members are not talking to themselves positively, the organization will not run effectively.”
Interestingly, many organizations shy away from encouraging workplace friendships, assuming they add little value. Yet, in our research for our book The Social Brain, we found that when space is created for connection and to build friendships, it’s very efficient. What we see is huge increases in performance and a sense of well-being. Well-being does not just mean physical or mental health, but social health, which has largely been neglected over the past few decades.
If companies want to create better work cultures – and better organizations – they need to understand how friendships and relationships work in the social world, focusing on the power and benefits of social health in organizations. This comes through relationships and friendships.
An organization is, after all, in a nutshell, a village. If the village is not talking to itself, or its members are not talking to themselves positively, the organization will not run effectively. Therefore, if you do want to have an efficient and long-lasting organization, you need to see it as a village in which friendships and relationships need nurturing.
Over the last three decades, businesses and organizations have been suffering from a pandemic of loneliness, particularly among 20-somethings in their first job, who, after experiencing school and university where their social world is constructed for them, find themselves in situations where they’re alone in a big city, with no idea where to go to meet people.
Often, colleagues have pre-existing commitments – whether children, established friendships, or evening activities – leaving younger employees further disconnected from workplace-based social opportunities.
The consequences of loneliness are massive, including both physical and psychological ill health. This triggers a whole bunch of consequences, such as sick leave and absenteeism. The knock-on effect of that is also significant because it means your colleagues must pick up the work not being done, and everything becomes increasingly dysfunctional. So how do you solve that?
Our simple answer is to create organizations with social and friendly environments to encourage workplace relationships. Oftentimes, companies will spend a lot of money on providing counselors and therapists, but you can solve a lot of these problems simply by providing a more social environment.
We can see this in the UK with social prescribing, a new approach of its National Health Service to connect activities, groups, and services within communities to meet the practical, social, and emotional needs that affect their health and well-being.
Designing a social strategy means encouraging opportunities for connection. That can mean having a meal the evening before a difficult meeting or gossiping around the water cooler. Oftentimes, when we are on video calls, there is no opportunity to have an offline discussion, which you can do in real life to encourage conversations and ideas.
These are the things that people feel enjoyment from, and the connection of being with others. The size of teams matters, because creating psychological safety requires thinking about a sense of the numbers that work and when people start to feel left out.
It is about being thoughtful in the design of your social strategy, and it goes back to the very human principles. How do we know how humans thrive and flourish in social groups? We need to design that into organizations. Because for some reason, it has all been factored out.
Another point to think about is how you have something like infectious inclusivity, which is a term used by one of our associates. These aspects contribute to this environment, but the key point is that it is a thoughtful exploration of what it means for your organization. That cannot happen virtually. You need to have eye contact and a flow of endorphins between each other.
It is important to note that there is no magic bullet that will do this for everybody. You must look very carefully at the cultural context of what people are interested in.
In the 1800s, companies like Cadbury’s would build a social club at the side of the factory, because they seemed to intuitively understand that if you have any kind of socially integrated, cohesive workforce, things just work better on the factory floor.
Another example is the railway clubs built at every plant that made railway engines, carriages, and rolling stock. Every railway station had a club all over the world, and they were incredibly successful because they created this sense of belonging. You must tailor it to local culture and people’s interests in the 21st century. But some things do seem to work incredibly well.
If you offer the opportunity, the space, and the context in which to meet and connect, then people can learn about each other and find out that people in different business functions don’t have horns and might be quite nice.
One thing that works universally is when people sing together. In a study that we conducted at the Workers’ Educational Association, we followed several classes for seven months, which included hobby clubs but also singing classes. They were not necessarily good singers, but the effect of the classes where people sang together in choruses was dramatic. None of these people knew each other, but after the first hour of singing together, they engaged as if they had known each other since childhood.
With the other clubs, it took much longer and never quite reached the same level. Whilst people did engage with each other and chatted, somehow activities like singing – or something that involved laughter – made these groups gel in a way that would not have happened if they had been left to make formal introductions. So, there is a sense that while a lot of these social things do work, they must be spontaneous. You cannot force it. It is about creating the circumstances in which these kinds of organic processes take off.
Whilst we know you cannot force friendships, we believe that if you offer the opportunity, the space, and the context in which to meet and connect, then people can learn about each other and find out that people in different business functions don’t have horns and might be quite nice. The result then is that you are prepared to put yourself out for them. You start to see the purpose of the organization as a big story, rather than just seeing it from your own perspective.
It is important to note there can be downsides to office friendships. The idea is that we tend to be more forgiving of people that we have a relationship with can extend into the workplace. The downside is that you are more likely to try and protect close office friends in the same way you protect family, no matter how bad their misdemeanor is. Your first instinct with family and close friends is to try and protect them, in the face of whatever they have done, so there is always that risk.
However, most organizations are proficient at implementing checks and balances through performance management systems and processes that can highlight such issues. If you belong to the village, you develop a certain sense of obligation towards the wider community, which counterbalances the tendency to be protective of your close friends. There is a wider sense in which the community has a moral weight in making us obliged to know the limits, which is why in small, remote communities, for example, people do not lock their doors. There is no need, as everybody trusts everybody else in the community. If somebody falls out of line, the community polices itself, and because it is an integrated community, people feel morally bound to behave well.
“Although the push to return to the office may face resistance, it presents a crucial opportunity to restore the social connections eroded by remote and hybrid work.”
Note that the benefits of these processes are difficult to quantify in a spreadsheet. You must be able to step back and take a longer-term view because the alternative can be a vicious downward spiral.
Companies can end up with a high turnover of staff because they are dissatisfied, and existing staff will continue to be increasingly dissatisfied and leave, and the cycle continues. Whereas if you look at the research by Alex Hill in his book Centennials, the organizations that have been around for more than 100 years have vastly different characters. They have more of a sense of family. They have CEOs who are in posts for much longer. There is a sense of continuity and public good, and a shared view that the organization is there to benefit society in some way rather than just making money for shareholders. Rationally, shareholders should be interested in longevity because they are going to make more money, yet there is a mental attitude these days to take the money and run, and do it as quickly as possible, which is inevitably going to cause destabilization.
Creativity, collaboration, and innovation flourish in environments where relationships are fostered, and workplace friendships can dramatically enhance both performance and well-being. Although the push to return to the office may face resistance, it presents a crucial opportunity to restore the social connections eroded by remote and hybrid work.
To achieve this, companies should take actionable steps:
By taking these steps, organizations can build lasting cultures that support both individual well-being and collective success.
Robin Dunbar will be discussing ‘Managerial insights from the social sciences’ on a panel at this year’s Global Peter Drucker Forum on 14 November in Vienna. This year’s theme is ‘The Next Knowledge Work. Managing For New Levels of Value Creation and Innovation.’
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