Why Your Employees Don’t Want to Come Back to the Office
A Guide for the Clueless Executive
The “post-COVID” return to work issue is about values: the ones you demonstrate, and the ones you say you have.
Returning to work has introduced a level of distrust and animosity between workers and their employers that I have never witnessed in my working life. While the majority of employees have no desire to ever return to their office full time, the majority of them at least appear to be gearing up to do just that. Let’s take a quick tour of the ways this is being screwed up in offices around the world, and the values conflict it’s introduced.
You Said: “We value diversity and inclusion in our workplace!”
Your Actions Demonstrated: You don’t care about the opinions of anyone except white men, the group most enthusiastic about returning to the office. Coincidentally, this is also the demographic that the majority of CEOs belong to. This difference is reasonably attributable to bias and microaggressions that women and people of color experience in the average office, as well as the unevenly distributed burden of parenting and domestic labor across demographics.
You Said: “We support parents, and we provide a nursing room, as well as generous parental leave!”
Your Actions Demonstrated: You had to comply with the law, and framed it as being progressive. Nothing could offer more comfort or convenience for a new mother than working from home and having a flexible schedule. Nobody wants to use your awkward nursing room, it was an accommodation for the problem of having to be in an office. The problem that you’re now choosing to have, providing a hamfisted solution for, and patting yourself on the back about.
You Said: “Work life balance is important here!”
Your Actions Demonstrated: You don’t care, but you understand that saying that out loud is unacceptable. The willingness to waste as much as two hours of your employees’ time on unpaid commutes, the desire to force them into an office all at the same time, which manufactures a transit or road shortage, wasting your employees’ time even further, demonstrates total disregard for the work-life balance of your staff. Work-life balance is the ability to skip that commute and get an important errand done on a Tuesday.
You Said: “The results you deliver are how your performance will be evaluated.”
Your Actions Demonstrated: Being visible to management is how someone is evaluated at your company. Across industries, “being visible” is how returning to the office is being sold. What this infers is that your coworkers, and your company, default to distrust. If they can’t see you working, they either don’t believe that you’re working, or won’t go out of their way to understand how their business operates, or what the contributions of teams and individuals are. The whole job is reduced to a performance on stage for executives to witness. This is true even for companies with elaborate performance rubrics and levels for roles. This should make you wonder — what were those levels ever about?
You Said: “We’re innovators.”
Your Actions Demonstrated: When squeezed by an uncertain situation, rather than think for yourselves or listen to the voices of those around you, you responded with fear and a desire to control the bodies of your staff. Reacting fearfully to uncertain situations by moving with the inertia of past habits is the opposite of innovation.
You Said: “We give our employees autonomy.”
Your Actions Demonstrated: You don’t, but you recognize that saying so would be unacceptable. Why should an employee who is not trusted to go to the DMV on a Wednesday and work slightly different hours believe that they have any real control over how they deliver work, much less what they deliver?
You Said: “We value collaboration!”
Your Actions Demonstrated: You don’t understand collaboration at all, and you’ve mistaken it for people sitting in a room together. Sometimes that is collaboration. But many of us can point back to a pre-pandemic calendar with 6hrs of meetings that were little more than status updates or conflict. Other than force workers back into your offices at the ordained times, what are you doing about collaboration?
This post could go on ad nauseum — but I think you get the point. When a leader’s actions and behaviors do not align, that dissonance is read as dishonesty and bad character. Humans are programmed to detect even the slightest gap there.
Today’s executives are completely violating that respect by appealing to respectability politics and trying to have it both ways — not confronting the fact that they have a bad idea, and not owning the fact that they are flexing their authority and taking the reputation hit. They are performing a stand-up comedy routine, the audience is not laughing, and they’re not slowing down.
Few of us believe that we don’t need a boss, or that we won’t have to work for a living.We don’t expect to own every hour of our day, to not have to do things we don’t want to, or to face hardship. But we in the non-executive classes have an understanding between us: out of mutual respect, we’ll clearly articulate a very good reason for what we are asking each other to do. We’ll find a way to reach an agreement on why something is happening, acknowledge each other’s views and their divergence, and move on. And when we don’t have time for that, we ask each other to just do it, because I said so.