See you at the office?

Senior design leaders in our InsideOut community collaborate on return-to-office strategies and making the most of hybrid.

Patrick Sharbaugh is VP of Community and Customer Engagement at Aquent. He holds a Masters in Communication and Design from the University of South Carolina, and has worked an a design educator, researcher and strategist for the past 14 years.

After three years of pandemic-enforced remote work, many large employers are itching to get employees back into the office (at least, for those who still have offices). There have been a variety of explanations put forward for this — not least the need to justify exorbitant capital expenditures on the offices themselves. But beyond that, leaders have recognized that there are distinct benefits to mixing it up IRL, benefits that don’t necessarily accrue to remote work.

That doesn’t mean remote and hybrid arrangements are without their own merits, of course, both for individuals and the enterprise, just that the advantages of working remotely and being in a room together are rarely the same advantages.

That there’s confusion out there on the relative merits of these two arrangements is made clear by the broad spectrum of approaches to reconsidering working arrangements as the threat of the pandemic fades. Among the senior in-house design leaders in our InsideOut Community, the most common solution has been a hybrid approach, where workers are expected — with varying degrees of insistence — to spend a few days each week in the office. For some, those days are prescribed, and for others, they’re wide open.

But what’s common to nearly all of our leaders is that making the best use of their teams’ in-person time, and remote work, respectively, has presented a conundrum: What are offices actually good for? How do they ensure that their teams are in the office when they’re actually needed for business-critical face-to-face work? And what kind of activities are in-person gatherings best for, anyway?

On March 28, we convened a group of InsideOut leaders from both the Operations world and the Design/Experience side of enterprises for the first of a new live program format we’ve dubbed Jam Sessions: Outcome-based, collaborative working sessions around a specific challenge with relevance to all members. Our objective was to answer three questions:

1. What kinds of benefits are we looking for from in-person work that don’t necessarily accrue to virtual collaboration?
2. For which kinds of work are in-person sessions truly necessary for design/creative teams?
3. What do we prioritize for face-to-face time in the office?

In this article, we’ll examine the first two questions: what benefits have our leaders found to being together in person that have been hard to replicate with fully dispersed teams? In a second follow-up article, we’ll look at how they’ve elected to optimize hybrid work to make the most of those benefits, along with some examples, and how they think about prioritization for the kinds of in-person activities that best realize those benefits.

In our hands-on session, leaders started out by going broad on the key benefits they see when teams have the opportunity to interact together in person — benefits that don’t necessarily accrue to remote work (or at least not as easily). Participants were quick to highlight a host of advantageous outcomes. Those benefits fell into four main categories:

1. Ease of access to team members for informal collaboration and creative problem-solving.
2. Strengthening team bonds and internalizing culture.
3. Separation of home and work, and improved mental health.
4. More intentionality regarding allyship.

Leaders next considered the challenges they’ve encountered with the above. Several of our leaders leading hybrid and fully remote teams noted they’ve found that collaborating creatively to solve big problems can be significantly more difficult in a dispersed work environment. They identified a number of reasons behind this. Among their observations:

• Intentionality takes more effort in a distributed environment and is often missing.
• Big ideas more often come from not being in a laptop — i.e., from the free-ranging mix and tumble of casual and unstructured interactions.
• Collaborative engagement is often low in a remote team and takes on the nature of box-ticking, i.e., going through the motions.
• For some on their teams, a home environment presents real hindrances to creative thinking (or any kind of distraction-free work).

Leaders also pointed out that remote and hybrid work make chance encounters unlikely or impossible, leading to a cascade of bigger problems, including:

• Working relationships are more often superficial and transactional.
• New relationships are not being built or strengthened (see above).
• A loss of serendipitous discussions and a plunge in the cross-pollination of ideas.
• Employees feel like part of a team but not part of the company.
• Individual networks are stunted, and career development lags.

The downstream impact of all this on design teams and their work, leaders observed, is undeniable. We heard that it’s become harder for leaders to know their teams’ (and colleagues’) strengths and collaborative styles. Leaders of fully remote teams have noticed a tendency to rest on historical ways of work instead of exploring and experimenting with new ones. Relatedly, they said, work that does get done often tends toward the transactional instead of the collaborative and truly contributive. Leaders echoed reports of loneliness and apathy among those they manage, and they affirmed a troubling tendency toward career stagnation among team members who work remotely, something many others have reported.

One of the most problematic meta-themes we heard from participants was that, in a fully remote environment, the urgent tends to take priority over the important, which can lead to a stifling of creativity and innovative work. And given the technology required to collaborate remotely, the work itself can take longer than similar work done in person, so there’s a lot more urgent to go around.

And yet remote work clearly has benefits for employers, as our leaders observed. Research from Gallup, Harvard University, Global Workplace Analytics, and Stanford University all points to significantly higher retention for employees who have the choice to work hybrid or remote (a 12% reduction in turnover on average). Many leaders report higher productivity from the teams they manage — which suggests it’s more than just a holdover from the early days of the pandemic when elevated productivity tracked closely with a concerning blurring of work/life boundaries (to say nothing of the inability to leave one’s home). Job satisfaction for those choosing telework has likewise surged — by as much as 20%, one study found.

Still, in-house design leaders manage teams who are responsible for work that’s arguably more creative, and more collaborative, than the typical knowledge worker. To do their jobs well, design teams must work not just within but across silos, and generating innovative new ways of solving problems is a key remit. Productivity is important, as we heard — but creativity is no less so. And the glue that bonds team members to each other, and everyone to the company culture, is not so easily quantified.

The four areas that InsideOut leaders described as being most challenging for them, therefore, also present opportunities to better understand the root problems for their teams — and how they might target particular kinds of outcomes for in-office activities, thereby making the best use of both formats.

Informal collaboration and creative problem-solving

When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy notified Amazon employees last February that the days of unlimited WFH would end in May, he noted that they’d had three years to observe Amazon teams working remotely. And, just as our InsideOut leaders described, Jassy said they’d learned that serendipity and casual encounters are crucial — not only to invention and innovation but to the mentorship and training team members have traditionally received from their colleagues and supervisors. “Invention is often sloppy,” Jassy wrote. “It wanders and meanders and marinates. Serendipitous interactions help it, and there are more of those in person than virtually.”

We heard the design leaders in our Jam Session describe a similar longing for the organic riffing and spitballing around problems and solutions that happens so naturally in an office setting. Remote work has prescribed and confined such interactions to tools like Slack, email, and calendar events, leaders said, which can leach out many of the serendipitous benefits. They cited shared meals, for example, and the ability to connect outside of laptop-bound tech tools via intra-office “stop-bys,” and other informal ways of signaling that one is open to chatting, as vectors for collaboration which may seem incidental but are in fact key to creative problem-solving.

The challenge, in other words, was revealed as finding ways to optimize in-person days at the office for collaboration and creativity around big problems, mentorship and feedback, and the serendipity that remote work makes more difficult.

Bonding and team building

Organizational culture has arguably never been more important to employees than now. Gallup found employees who strongly agree that they feel connected to their culture are 3.7 times as likely to be engaged at work and 5.2 times as likely to recommend their organization as a great place to work. Conversely, disengaged employees are 2.6 times more likely to leave their company for a better culture.

Yet culture is also weirdly resistant to formal statute; it exists more in the interstices of behavior and communication than in the writing on the wall. InsideOut design leaders observed that because of this, many have found it difficult to learn, model, practice, and strengthen their organizations’ cultures when their teams aren’t “together” regularly, interacting and bonding with each other around unspoken and implicit cultural signals and clues. Having more in-person interactions, they said, helps people absorb and reflect the culture better. Equally important, they agreed, is that it helps people feel that they’re part of a company, not just members of a team.

The insight here for our leaders was that extra care is needed to acculturate remote-first workers not just to the team but to the company and its values, which are often less visible in day-to-day remote work for them. How might leaders make the most of in-person days to lean into relationship-building and strengthening cultural connections?

Separation of home and work

“Get me out of my living room!” is how one of our participants expressed her feelings about working from home. While it’s true that many have welcomed the chance to rid themselves of tedious commutes and open office plans for the comfort of their own domiciles, there’s ample evidence that even for those who’ve embraced working from home, it’s not all bunny slippers and midday naps.

Productivity during the pandemic may have soared, but as Forbes has reported, over two-thirds of employees who work from home at least part of the time have reported trouble stepping away from work at the end of the day. The American Psychiatric Association found that the majority of employees working from home say they’ve experienced negative mental health impacts, including isolation, loneliness, and an inability to separate work from home life. Nevertheless, with better processes and systems in place, productivity from remote workers can still be high without jeopardizing their well-being.

That’s not to say that the office is a silver bullet for loneliness, of course. And burnout was a serious problem well before the arrival of Covid-19. Nevertheless, several of our design leaders struggle with apathy and loneliness on the remote and hybrid teams they manage, especially among the creatives who make up the bulk of their teams. They noted sub-par work products are more common now than before the pandemic, personal networks have become stunted, and relationships among team members often feel superficial and transactional.

It’s perhaps unreasonable to expect that a few bouts of office gossip around the Nespresso machine might be a corrective to such trends. But the task for our leaders is to encourage and incentivize in-office days as a balm for those who wrestle with social isolation and the always-on posture that working from home can create for some on their teams.

Intentionality of allyship

On the one hand, there’s good evidence that hybrid work arrangements can be beneficial for DEI initiatives in general. Requiring employees to physically commute to an office excludes many with physical disabilities from jobs they are otherwise able and willing to perform. For those shouldering the bulk of family care responsibilities (hint: still mostly women), the option to work from home has been most welcome. And the ability to hire without regard for geography has opened up millions of BIPOC and other marginalized people for employment without the need to limit recruitment only to a corporate HQ’s immediate location.

Allyship, however, is more personal than corporate DEI initiatives. As individuals, we don’t experience (or foster) inclusion through abstract strategies, but through actual interactions with our colleagues. Some of these interactions are incidental: over lunch, by the microwave, during meetings, waiting for the elevator. And yet interactions that advance allyship can be designed with intent, as well.

Allyship may be strongest, in fact, when it happens shoulder to shoulder. It requires deep and sincere curiosity about others’ experiences in the world; it calls for empathetic engagement, authentic conversations, and vulnerable interactions — which themselves require a firm sense of psychological safety. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen within remote and hybrid teams, just that, as our leaders noted, getting it right requires real intent in both settings.

In coming together for our first Jam Session and articulating their own experiences, frustrations, and lessons learned, InsideOut’s design leaders brought to this vexing issue novel perspectives around these four issues particular to their teams: informal creative collaboration, strengthening ties to the team and to the company, social isolation and the conflating of work-life boundaries, and the intentionality that allyship requires.

In Part 2 of this series, we’ll explore how, in our March working session, leaders also delved into the questions of how best to leverage in-person work to realize critical benefits related to each of the above, and how they prioritized those activities.