RTO failing to deliver on boosted collaboration
Corporate leaders’ demands for staff to return to in-person work came with one primary goal — to bring people together and boost collaboration.
But so far that hasn’t been the result. Actually, employees in hybrid and fully on-site arrangements are now having an even harder time effectively working with their colleagues, according to recent data.
Satisfaction with workplace collaboration fell from 36% in 2021 to 29% this year, coinciding with the return to offices, a Gartner survey of over 18,000 employees found. Other data from Gartner shows “hybrid and remote workers are consistently more satisfied with collaboration than their fully on-site peers,” said Jessica Knight, vp, research, at Gartner. “Clearly, physical proximity and co-location is not a silver bullet to solve the collaboration challenge,” Knight said.
Organizations instead need to actively rethink and reform norms around how people interact with each other at work, workplace experts say, but are up against a number of deep and unresolved issues causing this distancing.
To start, the pandemic and remote work made people generally more accustomed to working alone, along with AI technology upending our need to connect with others. “There are opportunities to get something done good enough and faster while leveraging a tool rather than a colleague,” Knight said.
Politics driving colleagues to avoid each other
Another factor in today’s political climate is growing incivility and polarization among colleagues. “Divisions in the workplace, whether it’s national elections or other factors, those definitely continue to plague the quality of workplace interactions,” Knight said.
Gartner found 30% of employees are actually avoiding more people at work than they did two years ago, she said, and “of course that’s not going to have a very positive effect on the quality of collaboration.”
Post-election, HR professionals are now tasked with navigating ongoing disputes and conflicts among staff as politics gets harder and harder to keep out of workplaces.
What’s the office good for?
When it comes to returning to offices in general, “The question that companies got wrong was the question itself,” said Rishad Tobaccowala, author of Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data, and former global strategist and chief growth officer at marketing and business transformation firm Publicis Groupe.
“They asked how do we get people back to the office, and the real question they should have asked is how do we maximize the benefits of in-person interaction,” he said.
According to Tobaccowala, there are four things the office is good for: building relationships, better understanding company culture, learning, and tapping into innovation and creativity. However, throughout most of his career, those moments rarely happened at the office.
Creative brainstorming often took place off-site at a bar or restaurant. Relationship building happened at industry events. And learning happened during dedicated training sessions. “Every single thing that people basically say is done in the office, we never did in the office,” he said. “We always did it outside, which actually benefitted in-person interaction.”
Workers today “come to the office and are doing exactly what they’re doing at home, go to any office, people are basically sitting on their computers with their headphones in not talking to anybody,” he said.
Remaining remote
A number of companies that went remote during the pandemic are staying firm in their commitments to continue allowing staff to work from home. San Francisco-based Yelp is one of them, with nearly 5,000 employees spread across six countries.
Some key policies like core working hours and no meetings Fridays have helped staff maintain work life balance and better understand when they’re expected to collaborate, said Yelp chief people officer Carmen Amara. The company also reworked its learning and development programs, and while entirely remote, still regularly hosts in-person events for teams to intentionally interact with each other in-person.
In an internal survey conducted last year, 90% of employees said they’ve found effective ways to collaborate remotely, and 86% said they’ve found small ways to connect as a team.
“Intentionality has been one of the keys to creating our successful culture,” Amara said. “Organizations looking to boost collaboration can focus on creating intentional opportunities for connection, as physical proximity alone does not create emotional proximity.”
Collaboration needs to be taught
Varying definitions of what it means to actually collaborate, especially across generations, are also at play, Knight said. “But the thing that differentiates organizations that are having more success really has to do with the level of direct guidance they are providing around collaboration.”
Gartner found two thirds of organizations actually provide no formal guidance to employees on what good collaboration looks like, Knight said. “We’re very busy trying to facilitate more connections and more volume, but we have not taken a very active hand in helping our employees understand how to collaborate and what that good collaboration looks like.”
One fix is the idea of guided collaboration — where organizations have clear policies and procedures outlining norms around collaboration at that specific workplace.
“Any organization, regardless of their existing work model, can benefit from guided collaboration and taking a more active role in helping employees identify those needs and understand those norms,” Knight said.
And companies that employ guided collaboration methods outperform those who don’t on retention, profitability and innovation, Gartner found.