It’s a new year, but old arguments are still playing out—perhaps even more so now as the majority of people are once again returning to work after a break for the holidays. The question still under debate by employers and employees is what exactly does a return to work look like? Is it a return to the office, or just a return to logging on?
Maybe it’s both. According to Linkedin, hybrid work is not only here to stay but is on the rise in 2024, with half of job listings in the U.K. advertising for hybrid positions, up from a third in August 2022.
In the U.S., new data from Chekr, reported by Fortune’s Chloe Berger, suggests that managers are actually more in favor of remote work than employees, with 68% wanting remote work to continue in the year ahead (versus 48% of employees). Typically, it’s the very top tier of management that is demanding returns to office environments.
Before the holiday, I asked Sheila Heen, the Beal professor of practice at Harvard Law School and deputy director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, how tensions over where employees spend their days relate to levels of trust between staff and employers.
Heen said that when staff feel resentful about being forced back to the office, they can find it hard to articulate why, but it often “comes out in the language of trust”—this idea that their employer doesn’t trust them to get work done.
Data from the Chekr survey supports the idea that managers want staff in the office because work is easier to supervise there, with 70% of surveyed managers agreeing they would like a return to the office simply for the sake of overseeing employees easily. But close surveillance doesn’t make staff feel trusted.
“For employers, that means they have to think explicitly about what it is they’re trusting employees to do, and that the answer has to be more task-focused than time-focused,” Heen says.
It also means being more intentional with communication among team members. When everyone is in the office, a lot of information can be transferred at an ad hoc rate. If you need to know if someone is busy, it’s easy to look over and see. With remote teams, that information more often needs to be volunteered.
Within Heen’s team, they resolved this issue by having each member post a list of tasks on their agenda for the week to a shared group, so that each member of the team could see what issues were at hand. The practice had two benefits: First, it allowed each member to feel their work was being appreciated by showcasing the volume of their own workload; second, it allowed other members to ease off on nagging one another about whether vital work was getting done because they could see it on the agenda.
As more remote work technologies are developed, the ability for teams to function at a distance is improving. In a Fortune op-ed, business consultant Gleb Tsipursky argues that while remote work used to be a drain on innovation and productivity, it has actually become a boon over the last decade as tech has evolved. Still, choosing which tech is the right tool for each problem is an increasing challenge for managers of remote teams.
“One of the things that we talk about is that Slack, text, email, et cetera, is not dialogue: It's serial monologue,” Heen says. “If you're going to tackle something important, where you know there's disagreement, those are not the right channels. You need to actually pick up the phone, or at least get on Zoom.”
Facilitating those real-voice conversations is one way being in an office together trumps working remotely. Follow-ups on disagreements and points of tension are easier to broach in person than online, where calls have to be scheduled in advance. Chekr also revealed that the youngest workforce generation, Gen Z, actually does value the networking opportunities that in-office experiences offer—just as managers have argued the past year.
Ultimately, if you are a manager pushing for a return to office and want to do so without causing a breakdown in trust between yourself and employees, it’s important to be clear and honest about why you’re insisting on the policy, and how that serves everyone involved.
“A manager should ask if there is a purpose [to being in the office] that everybody agrees is actually important, so staff see why they have to be there,” Heen says.
What better time than the new year to restate your team’s purpose.
Eamon Barrett
eamon.barrett@fortune.com
