How to lead people back to the office

Back to work. I’m not suggesting people have had an 18 month holiday. Yet returning to the office might feel like stepping back in time. A familiar old workspace and a familiar daily grind.

I was talking with a participant after a leadership workshop last week who was curious about what she could do as a Leader to get her people back into the office and more importantly engaged and energized to be there.  

 Together we came up with 5 Ideas which, although simple, I’d like to share with you. I’m curious to hear if you think they might be useful in your world.

 1. Talk about it (!)

Obvious I hear you say. But has anyone yet, in your office, gathered you together to have a face to face chat about being back? Why not make time for your team to talk, and you to listen. What’s good about being back in the office, what’s not good. What will help moving forward and what won’t.

2. Best of Home Office

A team chat is a great chance to also discover what people found good about working from home. An open discussion could easily identify a few sensible ideas that could help enhance your office environment. Perhaps, at home it was actually easier to focus uninterrupted when working on important things. Could a team create ‘focus zones’ at work – conditions where people can, for a time, more easily complete important work?

3. Accentuate the positives

Let the team share views on what is good about being back in the office and by association, what was not so good about being at home. Let people speak out loud the positives that the workplace offers. Contrasting this with the impact of not-so-good aspects of home office can help people to adopt more helpful and empowering beliefs about re-adjusting back to office-based life. Many of us experienced too many video conferences leading us to work more hours finishing other work.  We can all do with a bit less of that.

4. State the Imperative

There is much to gain for a team of people working together to actually work together, under one roof, for at least some of the time.  Leaders, make your case. You have perspectives and priorities in addition to what your people may identify as good about being in the office. It might be that you emphasise that, together in one space we more easily intuit when each other are in need of help and can more easily and quickly support one another.

5. Talk about it. Again!

After a while, get back together and reflect! At edge2 we call this reflection „Win, Learn, Change“. What is working so far – are any of the new ideas for office based work-life helping? I am sure there will be some things to applaud (Wins). What could yet be better? (Learns). And therefore what specific action would make it so? (Change)

Oh, and perhaps you want to also say thanks. Thanks to the team for their effort to adjust to working from home. And thanks to the team for their efforts to re-adjust to being back in the office.

How does this all sound to you? Do you agree with direct and open discussion? What do you like from our 5 Ideas? And what would you do differently?

Who knows, perhaps you can ensure this period of being forced to work from home helps re-shape how your team works in the office and end up creating better environments, enabling better work, producing better results delivered by energetic and self-satisfied people.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

edge2

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