Return-to-Work Strategy
Aligned & motivated leadership team for people-first approach
Commissioning client
CEO
Industry
Professional services
Business type
Ownership model
Growth marketing agency
Private
No. of employees
Phase
37
Post-Covid
MEB category
People, Strategy, Influence, Impact
(un)Common Logic
Organization
Year founded
2005
2021
Year of collaboration
Leadership strategy & alignment
Function
Return-to-work plan
Focus
Capabilities
Executive counsel
Leadership development
Leadership alignment
Consensus building
Emotional intelligence expansion
Stakeholder focus
Values alignment
Executive communications
Internal communications
Team motivation & activation
Commissioned by CEO to design and facilitate workshop for leadership team to regroup and realign post-COVID. The objectives were three-fold:
Design a return-to-work exploration with all-staff +
Deliberate the return-to-work strategy, and
Outline a change management-focused roll-out plan.
In the wake of pandemic office closures and remote work, the leadership team must deliberate the mother of all decisions plaguing executives worldwide:
How do we get our employees back in the office to stabilize our turnover and protect our capacity for growth?
Step 1: Return to values
Even when everything turns upside down and inside out, their truth is steadfast - their magic is the potent combination of radical transparency, radical honesty, and radical inclusivity.
Two Birds. One big boulder.
This change point is a defining moment. Office policies the size of Encyclopedias are necessary and functional work products. How they determine the needs of their post-pandemic workforce and what it takes to meet them is far more important than the policies themselves. This is a golden opportunity to affect positive change at scale and create a more cohesive team, through
An inclusive process (the boulder) to create a
1.
People-focused, return-to-work strategy (a bird), that
2.
Dovetails with defining the next-generation company culture, including business critical policies (the other bird).
3.
The return-to-work s(h)ituation is a universal pain point worsened by zero proven solutions.
The client’s short answer: Do what (un)Common Logic does best - buck convention. We’ll get nowhere if we present a return-to-work strategy with authoritative broad strokes because embracing the nuances was too uncomfortable.
The client’s long answer in short form: Reconsider the question, then shift the focus of the question altogether.
The leadership team agreed to pursue a staff exploration and then roll-out a strategy that aligns to business priorities and reflects and honors their team members’ realities.
But first - they needed to reconnect.
To game out the staff exploration, we started with a macro perspective. We embraced this pain point as an unprecedented but narrowing window of opportunity to create a positive impact on purpose, and with purpose. Then we hit “reset” by exploring their own experiences and expectations:
Change fatigue is real. The pandemic continues to wreak havoc through reluctance to change again…again.
Heels are dug in. Knowledge workers everywhere got a taste of autonomy, and now the mean bosses want to take away the “sugar candy” of freedom.
Needs change. The client’s business continuity through a pandemic is proof that what they’re doing works, even when people self-selected out based on changing needs and preferences.
Attrition happens. But it’s done. We must work with who and what we have now and move on.
Psychological safety is paramount. Their ability to effectively extract helpful insights from the team while gaining buy-in and consensus along the way depends on their ability to create a psychologically safe environment and exploration process.
Through this discussion, the leadership team determined their intentions for the staff exploration:
Turn garbage into a gift
Reframe the original question
Assess need states
Align expectations on office time
Foster a “gotta show to know” mindset
Turned garbage into a gift
This tire-fire-in-a-dumpster pandemic is almost worse than steaming hot, Manhattan garbage on Labor Day weekend. Embrace the apocalyptic COVID garbage as a gift in the form of a culture mulligan.
Trash-tag blessed!
That’s not to say we need to burn everything down and start over. Au contraire, ma soeur! Everything we built and earned pre-pandemic still matters, as evidenced by their die-hard employees, clients, and their enduring values.
At its most powerful, the culture mulligan is a pause to determine what their folks need to be successful now (not only what it takes to get them at a desk) vis a vis the needs of the business strategy. At it’s prettiest, it is sprinkled with magical pixie dust collected from their pre-pandemic culture.
Reframed the question
Two things hold true:
Our collective taste of the future was the exception, not the rule. The clients could technically adapt and be a successful remote organization forever. (If forced. By Kim Jong-un. And the North Korean army. Flanked by feral snow leopards.) However, it would not be sustainable.
1.
If they focus their return-to-work strategy on the wellbeing of the business first and by the standards of pre-COVID “normal” - they are doomed to fail.
2.
Return-to-work is not about their ability to be fully remote. It’s also less about business stability. This effort is about pragmatic course correction and moving toward a remote workforce in the future, progressively over time. Consider this reframed question:
How do we set our people up for success - and, by extension, our clients and ultimately our business - in “The After?”
We are people first.
Workplace culture - much less a return-to-work strategy - is all about the people. We do not exist without their big, bold, beautiful brains and all of the genius IP they contain.
The client’s business and organizational success relies on their authentic belief in their people as their product. They must exist for their team, and next-level their culture to support the team, so the team will bring out the best results for the clients.
Assessed need states
It is illogical to expect “The Before” to make sense in “The After.”
When we peeled back the layers of the return-to-work dilemma, we landed on a reality much more complex than counting peeps in seats and “returning to business as usual.”
Their policies and culture were defined in a pre-COVID world. But the pandemic fundamentally changed all of us. Their workplaces no longer meet or even align with post-pandemic needs.
1.
Everything they considered normal or “business as usual” changed. Normal no longer exists until they redefine it within the context of (un)Common Logic now.
2.
A successful approach to creating an invaluable workplace for the here and now, one folks wont’ want to leave, demands buy-in and required office time for a critical effort:
Needs assessment before policy change & enforcement
People stay where they feel considered
Contrary to popular belief, we don’t always recognize how our intangible needs are met until someone shows us.
If someone feels more productive at home, it would be most interesting to understand how and why (i.e. increased self agency, autonomy, personal space, controlled sensory environment, freedom from the perception of policing, etc.), and then explore how to help them identify similar moments at the office and within their role.
We cannot discount the power of removing latent stressors that threaten our potential to thrive. A critical need state might even appear as a preference for remote work to avoid the “performative experience” of dressing for the workplace.
Aligned expectations on office time
Few things are more powerful than seeing your needs reflected in a policy.
The client cannot truly identify and understand individual needs at work - or reclassify “business as usual” - until they are back in the office and figuring it out as a team, together.
An office time requirement for purposeful connection is both promise and proof of inclusion in the process to modernize policies.
Fostered a “gotta show to know” mindset
The client deployed a Q4 program - a once-in-a-career office experiment - to collectively determine their ideal culture based on post-pandemic needs. Through required office time - meaningful quality time within a shared environment - the team returned to the office for different methodologies such as small groups, 1:1s, brainstorms, and guided exercises. This effort ultimately reconnected the workforce and establishing net new habits and expectations - and even anticipation! - for regular office time.
Earned a collective curiosity
Once a need is met, it is no longer a need…
…until the next one appears like Whack-a-Mole at an arcade.
Continuing their explorations during required office time naturally fostered a people-first perspective leading to a collective comfort with purposeful change. The more they pursued Intentional and strategic change, they’ll become a more agile and adaptive workplace.
Since rolling out the official return-to-work strategy, the client established fresh, people-first workplace policies around culture, dress code, and office time. They hired to new standards, stabilized their client service teams and eventually expanded their brainshare and capacity for new business.
work products
work products