The Value of the Office
“This won’t shock you at all, but I’m 10x more valuable to my company when I actually come to work and engage than when I’m at home.” As I have shared “Making Flex Work” over the last year, I’ve had the opportunity to have conversations about work effectiveness with people of all backgrounds and career stages, so when I got this text, it wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary, but it still caught me off guard.
I tell every group that I speak to that I'm not against in-person office work, as a matter of fact, I support it for lots of reasons. As I see it, flexibility is not a single path, it is not remote work and it is not in-person work, it is the balance between the two that serves as the secret ingredient.
Many people find that hard to believe. They think I am advocating for everyone to be able to work at home. The reality is that sometimes work is more effective in one place versus the other, and what is necessary is the need to evaluate the work and the culture and how it is working for the team.
What struck me with this specific text was that this person already knows all of this. He is someone who has been in my life throughout this entire flexible work journey and even before it. He has heard me speak, he has read my book, he and I have talked about his company’s return to work policies and why they have been so challenging for him, and yet, this week, after going back into the office for over six months, he discovered the power of being in the office.
Up until that point, he had been a good soldier and had been going to work because he was supposed (aka told) to. He had a mandate that required him to be in the office a certain number of days a week and he complied (even if it didn’t make any sense to him), but when he found himself actively engaged in community and discussion with people he was in the physical presence of, he saw for himself why being in the office is important. As a matter of fact, he shared that he is now considering going into the office more than what is required.
No, I am not writing this as an announcement that I am now embarking on a crusade to send everyone back to office, but I share this story as a word of caution to leaders. Simply telling people they need to go back to the office is not enough (even sharing “the why” is not enough), they need to feel it for themselves. So wherever you are on the return to work journey, know that it is critically important to create opportunities for the team to feel the power of being together. We are all learning together, but you have the power to impact the path to success.