MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–As more companies return their workforces to the physical workplace, there’s a high likelihood many will get it wrong in terms of both culture and the viability of the hybrid-work environment, according to one respected expert on work.
Laszlo Bock, the CEO of Humu, which focuses on workplace behavioral change, and former senior vice president of people operations at Google and author of the book “Work Rules,” told Charterworks.com he has numerous concerns over how companies are handling the return to work.
“The principal ones are the very real physical and psychological and emotional exhaustion people are feeling,” said Bock, who spoke to credit unions during a CO-OP THINK Conference in 2017. “Number two, the conflation of the pandemic experience with the work experience. So many people are going to switch it up just because they're like, 'This last year sucked. And I can't move my house. I can't change my family. God forbid—I don't want to make light of it—but I can't resurrect the dead. So, what can I change? Well, I'm going to click on this new job and apply.'
What the Data Reveal
“And then over time, what our data at Humu shows is that one-and-a-half to two days per week from home is optimal for productivity and happiness,” Bock continued in his interview with Charterworks.com. “And that's sustainable over time, like over years. When you vary from that, you end up in bad states where either people get burnt out or they get forgotten or they stop being productive. So, the third thing is companies not being able to actually strike that right balance of how much should people do and not being intentional enough about when they're together and how they use that time. That's why I think two years from now, 80% of this is going to snap back to the office. What I mean is 80% of the large companies that are saying they're going to hybrid and remote will be largely abandoning those policies in two years.”
How to Respond
To respond to the challenge, Bock suggested, will require an understanding of what the individual needs and what that team needs. Many leaders are unskilled and unprepared for the psychological challenges ahead, he said.
“You have some managers who can make it work. Most are just average. And so, you need coaching, or some kind of technology saying, 'Actually, this team really needs to work on meaning. No, this team actually now needs to work on transparency. No, they need to work on authenticity climate or allyship.' All that changes dynamically,” Bock told the publication. “And it's just too much to ask for most managers. So, companies two years from now are going to throw up their hands, just like Yahoo did when Marissa Mayer became CEO, just like IBM did a number of years ago when they were like, 'Yeah, half of the people are working remotely. It doesn't work.' In other words, companies that have tried to be remote in the past, or hybrid, almost all concluded it doesn't work. Any company with more than a thousand people has concluded it doesn't work. Companies are not doing anything fundamentally differently today than they did five and 10 and 20 years ago in terms of how they manage teams. And therefore, it's likely not going to work.”