Is Your Business Passing Hidden Costs of Returning-To-Office (RTO) to Employees?

Written by Geoff Kreller, CRCM, CERP

While some companies have remained fully remote employee environments, many businesses have moved back to a physical office in the spirit of fostering innovation, collaboration and/or productivity. There are significant benefits from working in a physical office environment, including participation in live observation and training, mentorship opportunities, and being able to pick up on non-verbal cues often missed online[1]. However, the costs of realizing these benefits cannot be paid solely by employees in the form of longer commutes and shifting work-life balances. To reduce resistance to this significant change, businesses should consider the following sections to facilitate the innovative, collaborative office culture they desire.

1.       Employees need efficient systems and infrastructure.

While remote and hybrid work can improve work-life balance, it can mean working without the proper equipment or resources deployed for workstation setups[2]. Similarly, attempts to mandate return-to-office (RTO) without maintaining vital office services and resources on-site will cut deeply into potential innovation and collaboration benefits.

 Physical and systems infrastructure considerations include:

• Secure internet services that support the entire office without lagging or interruption

• Meeting rooms that support large, medium, and small sessions (including “phone booths” when someone needs to take a private call)

• On-site IT services to support new hires, troubleshooting, and patch deployment

• Kitchen, bathroom, and lunch areas that easily accommodate the volume of employees

• Access to drinkable water, coffee, and tea

• Maintenance services, including waste and shredding disposal

• Physical security measures

There can be comically bad decisions made in infrastructure and office design. A normal home refrigerator cannot support 50 people, and there needs to be a process for cleaning it out. When there aren’t enough meeting rooms (or not enough room for all the people attending said meetings), it causes people to take meetings from improvised locations or their desk. Perhaps just as importantly, the office should have access to parking and public transportation options that meet the needs of its employees. If you have five employees who need assisted parking and only three such spots designated, that can create significant compliance, legal, and operational risk.

Some employees are not fond of widespread “hotel desks” – office workspaces that aren’t assigned to anyone specifically – if you’re asking your workforce to come into the office, they should have a space to call home and make their own. It takes a surprising amount of time to adjust an office chair, fix the monitors, marry them to your laptop array, and connect to start your day. It’s the last thing an employee wants to do, especially when they just want to get started after spending hours in the car due to bad weather, an accident, or road construction.

2.       On-site Human Resources (HR) is vital to a physical office’s success.

Many companies have outsourced their HR functions to companies like TriNet, Workday and ADP. While companies such as these offer material benefits to onboarding, offboarding, payroll, and training, having a dedicated HR resource is invaluable to maintaining the company’s values and mission (and sanity) amongst its employees. Your HR leader should reasonably have enough experience, time and energy to dedicate to this function if they wear multiple hats in the organization.

HR events come up all the time in physical environments where having immediately available live support and context is invaluable:

• Responding to sexual harassment and hostile workplace environment claims

• Enforcing dress code and office decorum policies

• Ensuring equal and fair distribution of common area maintenance

• Providing mental health and counseling needs

• Maintaining consistency in approvals to work remotely

3.       Executive leadership needs to lead by example to create the right office dynamic.

It’s a recipe for disaster when executive leadership is governed by a different set of rules than the general staff. Beyond maintaining a consistent policy on workplace attendance, there are other dynamics where your company’s leadership should lead by example. Meeting and office dynamics have the capacity to enhance or wreak havoc on your company’s culture.

Early and late meetings (meaning just before, during, and after usual commute times) need to be planned well in advance and there should be an urgent or important reason for that occurrence. It could be a quarterly all-hands call, a celebration of a major milestone, or a yearly holiday party – the key is that there should be a very specific reason why the meeting needs to disrupt the employee’s normal commute and work-life balance, especially if that causes employees to face additional traffic or cancel scheduled plans with friends or family. Urgent meetings will arise – be mindful on who needs to attend these late night sessions and follow up with the broader staff during normal working hours.

Executives and senior leadership should be held to a higher standard than the general staff. Start wrapping up meetings five minutes before the scheduled end time – not only might employees have another meeting to get to, there’s a high likelihood that another set of employees are waiting for the meeting room currently being occupied.

If you don’t have an office manager (and honestly, even if you do), everyone needs to chip in to clean dirty dishes, remove trash from the conference areas, wipe down the strategy boards and water the plants. Employees lose respect for leaders who leave their used dishes in the sink or 10-day old Chinese food in the refrigerator and expect their staff to pick up after them.

4.       Employees can’t be “always on,” especially in the car.

Mercedes is building Microsoft Teams functionality into vehicles, and we may be going the wrong way with employee accessibility[3]. I doubt that high-end manufacturers are the only car companies looking at installing this “feature.”

Employers can’t have it both ways – companies cannot reasonably expect employees to travel to the office while also being “always on” before, during or after their commutes. Working from home enabled employees to be available for their families and to keep extended hours to accommodate potential time zone differences with offices, partners or vendors. Working in an office, preparing dinner and other nightly responsibilities must wait until after the evening’s commute has ended, and off-hour emails, texts and messages should be reserved for urgent occasions.

A hard 60-minute commute in high-volume traffic (and really any commute) does not lend itself to being mindful of both the business’s needs and drivers weaving through lanes, tailgating, brake checking, and running red lights. Even after a commute, it’s hard to turn your work intensity back on – commutes are exhausting. Companies can set themselves apart by empathizing with the difficulties of commuting; institutions can even consider small perks like providing access to audiobooks, podcasts or XM/Sirius radio[4].

5.       Companies need a flexible and consistent leave and work-from-home (WFH) policy

Employees will naturally be happier when they can be both available and mindful for quality time with their family. Life feels better when you get to watch your daughter’s 2:30 soccer game or having the opportunity to pick up your son from school or playing with your newborn on your lunch break. There’s almost pure joy going to the grocery store during your lunch break when compared to the chaos during nights and weekends at Wegman’s, Giant, or Weis. 

It’s much easier to balance work and family needs from the comfort of your own home. Some employees may certainly abuse this benefit – mouse jigglers wouldn’t exist (and have a top ten list for this year) if that weren’t the case[5]. It’s true there are people who cannot reasonably function and actively meet their goals in an unsupervised, work-from-home setting.

HR teams should make a policy to define the days that employees are expected to work from the office, and also to articulate the benefits and consequences of reaching (or missing) expectations related to employee’s job responsibilities or availability when offering hybrid or remote environments. It’s not enough to say, “You must be here two days a week,” partly because there are almost always exceptions to that rule. Not all employees are the same and they shouldn’t be treated as such. Some are new, some are on probation, and some may be coming back from short-term disability leave.

A WFH benefit is a matter of trust that should be earned and maintained – the ways in which trust is individually earned and lost (and the benefit that goes with it) should be documented. If your manager sees your Skype or Slack status as “available,” and yet you don’t respond to their message (or any message) for three hours, a reduction in that flexibility should be forthcoming. If you’re supposed to be in Maryland and your IP signal or social media feed is coming from Portugal (and/or your internet connection is spotty), it seems reasonable that you might receive a call back to the office environment.

The policy is needed because it must also be consistently applied – make the qualitative “quantitative” and applicable to the entire company. Otherwise, some managers may be more strict or lenient in applying that subjective policy based on their own experiences or biases with remote employees, and that inconsistency will create internal tension, operational risks, and potential employment lawsuits for discriminatory treatment when it’s across a prohibited basis such as race, ethnicity or gender.

Summary

While complex, dynamic office policies related to hybrid and remote work require oversight to maintain, they help to mitigate the operational, talent, and employee costs created by requiring a full or partial return to office.  Rigid, narrowly defined, and shortsighted policies that pass the full costs of returning to an office environment to its employees can derail the innovation and culture of even the largest of institutions through employee depression, burnout, and attrition. Created and deployed effectively, workforce policies can cultivate environments for employees to maximize their productivity, increase innovation, and continue maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

Follow NAQF and Geoff Kreller on LinkedIn for additional insights. For more information on how NAQF can help your organization with office management, remote employee efficiency, or hybrid work environments, contact us at contact@naqf.org.

Article References

[1] https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/2023/12/26/18-overlooked-benefits-of-returning-to-the-office-for-work/

[2] https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/2023/12/26/18-overlooked-benefits-of-returning-to-the-office-for-work/

[3] https://www.pcworld.com/article/2850680/copilot-is-coming-to-cars-and-so-are-teams-calls-on-the-road.html

[4] https://resources.workable.com/stories-and-insights/psychological-impact-of-difficult-commutes

[5] https://reviews.oneclearwinner.com/product/laptop-mouse-jiggler