Many months on from the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic, there are visible tensions between what workers want and what many leaders think is good for them. There’s a clear disconnect.
As an observer with a ring-side seat and a neuroscience perspective, I’ve been pondering what’s really going on under the hood and this is my best shot at explaining it.
It’s a sort of addiction problem, but the addicts don’t want to go to rehab.
Leader’s view
Today, many senior leaders want to get their people back into the office and return to old ways of managing, fearful that business performance may dip if they can no longer monitor work and lead through the Ricky Gervaisian theatre of ‘the office’. According to KPMG’s 2023 Global CEO outlook ,64% of CEO’s are expecting a full return to pre-pandemic working arrangements within 3 years and nearly 90% will incentivize their employees to do so.
Many leaders believe productivity is down, but did they measure it before the pandemic and how are they measuring it now? Studies suggest productivity has actually gone up since the pandemic, with one survey by Airtasker finding 85% of American workers feel more productive at home.
The bigger and more successful the company, the more leadership seems to demand a return to as close to a pre-pandemic model of the world as possible. It’s as if hybrid working is a challenge to their power. Interestingly, a Stanford Study found that larger, older American companies with well-established cultures were less likely to embrace remote work than younger, smaller firms.
The people
But, office workers don’t want to give up the freedom they gained through the pandemic. They have grown in confidence in negotiating when, where and how they work, having tasted home-working and the trust that comes with it. The prevailing economic circumstances are mostly working in their favor, too, as unemployment in the US and many developed economies is at record low levels; and even though economies are cooling, in many sectors, organizations continue to battle for the best talent, giving workers a strong negotiating position.
Mandates for three or four office days, regardless of role and circumstances, are seen as parental and patronizing. Employees are openly saying that if their employers demand they return to the drag of the daily commute, they will leave and find another job. A recent Owl Labs survey found that 82% of American workers would turn down a job that didn’t offer work from home flexibility.
So, what’s really going on?
As humans, we learn quickly how to behave to maximize our status in the tribes we join. Our brains are wired for social and physical safety. Over time the daily exposure to the organization’s culture and rituals subconsciously hard-wires our behaviors and thought processes to create a mental model of the world in the brain of every employee. The more exposure, the deeper the hard-wiring. This model becomes the basis for all our judgements and decisions.
Pre-pandemic, most leaders and employees were hard-wired to show up at the office where there was a parent-child, command-and-control relationship between the organization and the employee, the fundamentals of which being steeped in the notion that employees can’t be trusted and therefore need to be monitored.
Leaders for whom this system worked, were often hard-working extraverts who had found out how to present themselves as achievers, fitting in with culture, keeping their noses clean and developing warm relationships with the right people. They were rewarded by promotion and rose to the top. Their world was office-centric (see diagram) with the organizational pyramid anchored to ‘presence’.
Then came the pandemic
Decent leaders got closer to their people, listened, empathized and supported them. Children, partners and family pets showed up on Zoom calls and life’s artefacts — books, guitars, and football memorabilia — provided new talking points. Leaders were human after all.
Gifted leaders flourished. Those that were more ‘supervisory’ and transactional styles struggled. They couldn’t simply bark out orders. They had to learn how to lead. Some were successful, others hankered for a bygone world. But at least everyone was in the same work-from-home boat (as shown in the graphic below).
Employees had to be trusted to work while being out of management eye-shot. Performance didn’t dip and many workers reported an increase in their personal productivity because they didn’t have the distraction and interruptions that were associated with working in the office. People began to question the value of the grind, commute time and cost.
Two years of repeated behavior and thinking had created new habits and ways of thinking about the world. New neural pathways had been created. Employees saw a fresh set of options and priorities. Brains had literally been re-configured.
The here and now
Today, HR leaders find themselves caught between two worlds. One where leaders want command, control and everybody back in the office and another where employees want support, coaching, purpose, flexibility and trust. Two very different ideologies, like tectonic plates grinding against each other and creating an unstable terrain. Almost religious.
The addiction problem
The accepted norms of leadership behavior, practice and attitudes for many of today’s senior leaders, had become deeply engrained through daily repetition over many years. Their experiences programming them and shaping the way they think. Now we have returned to ‘normal,’ they want to return to their usual way of leading. They want to go back to what’s safe for them and because they think they can call all the shots. They don’t see that they need to make changes themselves.
Meanwhile, two years of virtual, trusted work existence has created a new mental model of the world in the minds of most workers who want to retain their freedom and see few reasons to attend a physical office. They have found new work habits and their brains are telling them to stick to them.
Some employees are not going back to the office even for special team meetings and for social gatherings. Considering that the development of social cohesion is crucial for hybrid team success, this habit is unhelpful.
The truth is that both leaders and workers need to learn new tricks and bend a little.
Leaders need to re-think the way they manage to create more supportive, trusting workplaces, easy to say, but difficult to achieve when your beliefs and organizational model is based on an old model.
Workers, for their part, need to recognize they have some new responsibilities if they are to be successful individually and collectively. They must demonstrate trustworthiness while visibly delivering on promises, pro-actively building and maintaining relationships, making sure they are clear about tasks and objectives and how they relate to the organization’s vision. They need to take care of themselves and manage their capacity and the expectations they set for others. Hybrid working is a game for grown-ups.
The grind will no doubt continue in the coming years but hopefully the friction from these two different cultural tectonic plates will gradually work its way out of the system, as leaders and their people make choices about the sort of organizations that best suit their ways of leading and living and leaders wake up to the need for change.
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