The world is now mostly two years beyond the end of almost all COVID-era restrictions. A “New Normal” has been established through intentional action or unintentional patterns forming. Headlines that continue to talk about Return to Office or Return to Work (with Amazon causing the most recent ruckus) are missing the point about how people work. It is past the opportunity for the carrot or stick, and time to accept where things are.
Every week I see someone new going on about RTO, RTW, or the definition of Hybrid. The unstated context of these conversations is always “not enough people are in the office often enough.” The fear about productivity and control has not disappeared in our new normal. As a collective, most organizations have not spent as much time teaching how to manage in a hybrid world as we spent talking about how important the concept was going to be in 2021 and 2022. It is therefore not an option now to point the finger at managers struggling with how people work today.
Humans are creatures of habit. When we find an effective rhythm, we will put effort into sticking to that rhythm. From an office standpoint, that means that quite a lot of people have built up a multi-year rhythm that does not have them in an office every single week, let alone three days a week. But somehow, most companies have maintained or improved their pre-COVID productivity (as measured by profits or revenue per employee or total compensation). There are few top-level indicators that the current ways of working are not effective, yet the fear from managers continues.
Some of that fear may be due to a growing idea that there is a need for fewer managers and more trust. If people can work effectively without a manager over their shoulders in the office, does the entire concept of how management works need reconsideration? Therefore, some of this fear is less about productivity and more about job protection. There are valid questions to ask about how work should be getting done in our new post-COVID world, but the questions are not about returning to the office.