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Are return to the office mandates a management abuse of power?
Business leaders would say, “of course not.”
Employees, on the other hand, might say, “not so fast. Don’t you trust us?”
Today’s episode explores that tension and whether return to office mandates are done because management can or because management should.
What You’ll Discover About Return to the Office Mandates:
* Why working remotely is here to stay, regardless of return to the office mandates.
* 3 reasons why return to the office mandates are a misguided management entitlement.
* Tips for how to get the productivity management needs without resorting to return to the office mandates.
* And much more.
Your Host: Hanna Hasl-Kelchner
Hanna’s mission is to help you access the business information you need to succeed, especially those pesky issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.
As a trusted advisor she’s worked with companies that were growing, shrinking, merging, winning, struggling, private, public, large, and small during her international business and legal career. Those experiences have given her a unique insider perspective into diverse workplace cultures, values, and leadership styles.
It’s the lessons learned in the trenches and supported by research that Hanna shares through public speaking, writing, and the Business Confidential Now podcast to help executives, managers, and entrepreneurs enhance their leadership skills and improve their organization’s culture.
Hanna makes learning simple, easy, and fun. She’s taught at two top tier MBA programs (Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and the University of Virginia’s Darden School) and is on the editorial board of The Journal of Business Ethics Education.
As an acclaimed speaker and media source, Hanna has been appeared on radio and TV, including Moving America Forward, hosted by William Shatner. Her articles have appeared in various print media, and she’s been recognized by Dun and Bradstreet as a Twitter #BizInfluencer in the Specialty Strategy category.
She is currently in over-drive writing her next book, Seeking Fairness at Work, expected in 2024. Everyone starts a new job with the highest level of engagement and then stuff happens to dampen their enthusiasm. THAT’s what she explores in her no nonsense style, the STUFF, the nexus between management’s use of power, employee engagement and retention. It also includes a practical 5-part solution for raising employees’ game instead of their defenses. To learn more and get on her early-bird book launch date list visit ______
Guest Appearances by: Tom Libelt, Barbara Mitchell, and Hannah Genton
Tom Libelt is in beautiful Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Tom has had a number of international escapades, he’s a little bit like a “Marketing James Bond” in that as a child he learned how to sell and negotiate through getting haggled by Russian vendors. His family left Poland to escape communism and came to the US. And as immigrants searching for the American Dream he watched them take any job they could just to survive. As a young man that struggle instilled in him a deep desire to never want a traditional job and it led him to forge his own path as an entrepreneur, publisher, salesman, and one of the top Polish hip hop artists.
Today, from his perch in Thailand he runs Smart Brand Marketing and We Market Online Courses. He has published around 5000 Kindle books, built a successful SEO & online course marketing business, and succeeded in numerous other ventures. And what’s remarkable about his successes is that all of these ventures were bootstrapped. His entire operation relies on remote workers.
Barbara Mitchell is the co-author of The Big Book of HR, which is celebrating it’s 10th Anniversary Edition.
In addition she has cowritten five other books: The Essential Workplace Conflict Handbook, The Conflict Resolution Phrase Book, the award-winning The Manager’s Answer Book, They Did What? Unbelievable Tales from the Workplace, and The Essential HR Handbook.
She is enthusiastic about helping organizations find, hire, engage and retain the best available talent. That’s why she began consulting after working as an HR Executive in corporations.
She’s the founder and Managing Partner of The Mitchell Group, a management consulting practice that helps a wide variety of clients with people and talent management issues.
Hannah Genton is the co-founder of CGL LLP.
She wanted to reimagine the legal workspace and give freedom, flexibility and autonomy to her staff after years of toiling at Big Law firms where attorneys were constantly overworked in tight, rigid office environments.
So what she created is a fully distributed transactional law firm that provides clients Big Law quality legal services at competitive rates while at the same time delivering a greater work/life balance for their attorneys and staff.
The result is a vibrant, successful law firm that provides high quality legal services in an environment that meets the varying needs of their employees.
Related Resources:
If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Leadership and Management episodes.
Sign up for the early bird, Seeking Fairness at Work, book launch list to be first in line for Hanna’s 2024 release.
Hanna’s earlier best-selling book The Business Guide to Legal Literacy: What Every Manager Should Know About the Law.
Contact Hanna and connect with her on LinkedIn, Facebook, and X formerly known as Twitter.
SPECIAL GUEST APPEARANCES INFO
Learn more about Tom Libelt and listen to his full interview: How to Make Managing a Remote Workforce Easier on Yourself
Learn more about Barbara Mitchell and listen to her full interview: Effective Employee Retention Strategies to Stay Afloat in Uncertain Times
Learn more about Hannah Genton, Esq. and listen to her full interview: Could Hiring Autonomous Workers be Smart for Your Business?
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ARE “RETURN TO OFFICE” MANDATES A MANAGEMENT ABUSE OF POWER?
Are return to office mandates a management abuse of power? Business leaders would say, of course not.
Employees, on the other hand, might say, not so fast. Don’t you trust us?
When we come back, we’re going to explore that tension and whether return to office mandates are done because management can or because management should.
This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now. I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner. And today, instead of interviewing a guest, I’m going to share with you some of my thoughts about management’s exercise of power with the return to office mandates.
The subject struck a chord with me in connection with research I’m doing for my next book about management, abuse of power and its impact on employee engagement.
You know, all too often, executives, managers and entrepreneurs don’t realize how they may be misusing or abusing their power. Sure, they have the positional power to issue whatever mandate they want, provided they don’t violate the law. And I’m assuming you don’t. And a return to work mandate is certainly not illegal.
People were working in offices long before Covid, but is it the smartest thing to do to issue an edict, a blanket executive order?
That’s what I want to talk about and explore with you in the next few minutes.
But first, let’s get clear about what management responsibilities are. And I know this may sound obvious because your job is to keep the business running, to support the delivery of goods and services, depending on your industry and of your title, to do it in a way that protects profits and to get it done through other people. In other words, to inspire and motivate your employees to get the work done.
Of that list, many managers are keenly aware of their role and the responsibility to support the bottom line. And unfortunately, that intense focus on finances can lead to subordinating the importance of their business culture and their duty to support the needs of their employees.
And on that front, the old command and control leadership style just isn’t what it used to be, but it’s still the default mode in many organizations, and that’s where the misuse and abuse of power can come to play.
And an example of that are these return to office mandates where a one size fits all solution is being imposed on a more complex set of circumstances.
Now, please don’t get me wrong. I totally understand management’s desire to return to “normal,” to a workplace buzzing with activity where you can see things being done. You can feel the energy in the room.
You know, I remember my first year as an associate at a law firm, and one of the name partners was always happiest when he heard all those typewriters clacking away. It translated into productivity for him in his mind, into billable hours. And I get that.
I also get how feeling the energy in the room appeals to the traditional command and control leadership style. And the comfort of this is the way we’ve always done it. Check.
But just as technology has come a long way from the Selectric typewriters and telex machines that occupied offices when I first started my career and yes, I’m dating myself. In case you’re listening and you’ve never heard of a telex machine. It’s what predated fax machines.
With a telex, you actually had to type in your messages. Faxes, of course, let you scan a document and it was a huge leap forward because you could also scan pictures, drawings and avoid those dreaded typos, which wasn’t possible with a telex. But I digress.
Technology has really come a long way in all those decades and given us powerful tools to work from anywhere but the expectation of reporting to an office and being glued to a desk for knowledge workers hasn’t changed.
I appreciate there are many jobs that can’t be done remotely, and I’m going to come back to that before we wrap, because the divide between those for whom technology affords the flexibility to work remote and those whose jobs don’t creates its own set of issues with respect to what employees need on the flexibility front. So more on that in a bit.
Either way, today’s workforce demands flexibility. It’s not that earlier generations didn’t prize it, believe me, we did. We wanted it. But it took a while for technology to catch up and make it affordable and accessible in a way that made sense.
During Covid, knowledge workers were functioning remotely because it became a necessity to keep business afloat. Remote work existed pre-COVID, but back then it was viewed as something of a perk. It wasn’t mainstream. Only a handful of organizations entertained it, but Covid changed that.
More workers got a taste of the greater work life balance and the benefits of being remote. They realized that being tied to a daily commute and a desk, and what it was really costing them in terms of time, relief from daily office dramas and maybe microaggressions and overall work life balance.
Going back to the way things were would be a huge loss for them. A takeaway and takeaways never go down well with employees, especially when they’re not accompanied by a solid explanation or a compelling reason. And “I said so” doesn’t cut it.
Now, that’s not to say all remote work was rainbows and roses. It wasn’t perfect. Setting healthy boundaries can be an issue when there’s no physical separation between a workplace and a private residence. There were Zoom calls being interrupted by kids wandering in the room, dogs barking, doorbells going off, cramped apartments had limited room to work, and sometimes it collided with a spouse’s or roommates use of the same space.
Occasionally we just got too much information. We got to see more of a kitchen, a bedroom, or piled up laundry than we wanted. Or take for example, the time the door to the bathroom was open in the background and you could see someone stepping out of the shower. Yeah, Big Oopsie.
And you probably have examples of other embarrassing moments that you’ve witnessed. I appreciate that some people miss the camaraderie of a workplace and sometimes preferred being able to go to a remote office instead of working from home. One person I know whose father in law moved in with him and his wife actually looked for volunteer opportunities to give him an excuse to get out of the house.
But most people found remote work to be a good thing. Overall, the pluses outweighed the minuses, and that’s why return to office mandates are receiving pushback from employees.
Surveys show that more than 90% of those who can work remotely want some kind of flexibility. That’s a serious number. Now, with Covid restrictions having eased, employers sometimes offer hybrid options to come to the office a few days a week. That’s fine.
But now companies have increasingly been backpedaling. They’re taking a much harder stance on office attendance with return to office mandates, even though they know employees want and oftentimes need more flexibility.
All right. So how are these office mandates, these return to office mandates, a misuse of power? Well, it’s a misguided sense of management entitlement for three big reasons. And they all tie back to the leadership responsibility and some would say the most important responsibility, which is to get work done through others.
Number one, forcing people to go to the office who don’t want to be there means they’re going to bring their frustration and resentment with them. Using a stick instead of a carrot isn’t motivating. It doesn’t translate to high productivity.
Think about it. Just because you see people behind a desk in an office space doesn’t mean they’re productive. They could be surfing the web for all, you know, checking their personal emails.
The belief that they’re being productive when you see them is a command and control leadership bias based on the assumption that you can’t trust your employees to do their job unless you’re watching over them or somehow quietly micromanaging them, that your presence has magical powers to compel productivity rather than their own self-interest in being recognized for a job well done is what will get you what you really want.
Now, I understand that that kind of belief may feed management’s ego, but it’s just a sugar high that comes crashing down when faced with reality.
And that leads me to reason number two, why return to office mandates are a misuse or abuse of management power. It’s because you’re going to have an enforcement problem. High level performers who’ve actually shown you that they can be productive remotely are going to resist your return to work mandates because their chances of being fired are low.
According to a 2022 survey from Gartner, only 3% of companies said they’d fire those who didn’t comply. But all right, maybe you’re part of that 3% who’s willing to pull the trigger. Okay.
Even if you’re willing to lose those employees who brazenly challenge your authority of making them come back to the office full time. The third reason, in my humble opinion, that return to office mandates are an abuse is because employees surveys show two thirds of them say they’ll look for another job if forced back full time. In other words, they’re not going to push their luck with you and risk firing, they’ll just push the send resume button. They’re going to fire you as their boss.
And another employee poll says 40% of workers say they’d quit their jobs. They’ll make the jump without the safety net of another offer in hand. It’s just hasta la vista, baby, right off the bat.
Now, that leaves you with a hollowed out workforce and a disengaged one. How are you going to get stuff done now?
Oh, you’ll hire, great. But remember that 90% of employees who can do their jobs remotely want flexibility. And if you’re not willing to provide it, you’re left with 10% of the talent pool. How many of those are best in their field? Your choice.
But good asset stewardship requires managers to protect the assets entrusted to their leadership and sadly, return to work mandates don’t protect assets represented by human capital if they create disgruntled employees, reduce employee engagement, and decimate employee retention. You’re going to spend more time rebuilding your business than moving it forward. Now, what a waste of time and resources.
Oh, I know. It’s so frustrating. I get it. What are you supposed to do when you feel teamwork, mentorship and productivity is suffering because of remote work. But that genie is out of the bottle. It’s granted employees wishes and it won’t get stuffed back into the bottle anymore.
My research suggests it’s time to rethink the nature of work itself and the role of the office as a centralized place of all activity and to question whether facetime is the best way to get all work done or whether it’s best suited for some activities and not others.
In other words, get more granular. It’s one way to figure out whether being in the office is a “nice to have” or a “got to have” practice across the board. Once you start sorting that out, you can use that information to create a culture and an environment that motivates employees to do their best work.
Companies that have done that have found that productivity goes up in addition to customer satisfaction and profits because it improves morale, it increases employee loyalty and retention, it drives down recruitment costs as well as reducing absences and sick time. So improving your culture is, in essence, improving your bottom line. Wow, That’s a win all the way around.
Now, we know employees need for flexibility and control over their time is a top priority for them. And when it comes to productivity, which is what you want, the key to providing them with flexibility is knowing what deliverables you need, what exactly that work product is, the resources that need to be brought to bear and being crystal clear about deadlines.
You can then collaborate with your employees about how best to get it done, how much can be mediated by technology, how much by schedule adjustments, how much by facetime so that customer needs continue to be met and quality isn’t sacrificed. That’s how you can optimize the value of your human capital, because even back in the office environment, expectations are not always clearly expressed. They get assumed and are often left unmet because of that poor communication.
You know, I think we can learn a great deal from organizations that have been successful at managing remote teams, and especially those whose entire business model is centered on remote work. They never struggled with a central office because they never had one.
I had the privilege to speak with Tom Libelt a while back. He runs Smart Brand Marketing and We Market Online Courses from Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Tom has had a number of international escapades. You might say he’s a little bit of a marketing James Bond in that as a child he learned how to sell and negotiate through getting haggled by Russian vendors. His family left Poland to escape communism, and he came to the United States as immigrants searching for the American Dream.
He watched them take any job just to survive, and it instilled in him a deep desire to never want a traditional job. It led him to forge his own path as an entrepreneur, a publisher, salesperson and one of the top Polish hip hop artists, which might surprise you.
His business is staffed through a network of remote workers. And in our interview, he shared some important lessons about his secret for making it work.
And he’s also pretty direct about addressing some of the fears you might have. Here’s that portion of our conversation.
Tom, let’s talk about managing a remote workforce. You know, one fear that old school managers have about remote employees is that somehow they’re goofing off and only spending half the time they should on what they’re getting paid to do.
Well, what would you tell executives or managers who feel that way?
Well, some are. Some are. So that comment is halfway correct. You know, it depends on your employees too. Look, remote employees are a challenge. Finding the group for your business will take a while. And I went from, you know, micromanaging to almost zero managing and in between. Everywhere in between.
So what I found with the businesses and Covid, especially, the ones that started initially, people get super excited. They get to work from home, and then the productivity drops off. A lot. Some take on multiple jobs because the business will never know.
And this is more of a character problem than an employee problem. So when initially we were hiring the remote employees, this was like maybe ten years ago. My main focus was, do they have the skills? Right. So if we need writers do they, can be write. If we need coding. Are they good coders?
Right.
That was very mixed when it came to productivity. Recently what we’ve done is we give them a personality test and we give them test jobs to do so. Skills are maybe 30-40% of the hiring process. Everything else is more of a personality test. Will they be able to (1) overcome obstacles? Right. That’s the results we’re looking for in this whole test, because it’s geared towards remote workers, the test that we compiled.
And (2) are they OK to kind of talk back in a way? Do they have the confidence? What happens with a lot of workers, especially if you start hiring in Asian countries, they will disappear because they just don’t want the conflict. And that’s what it kind of goes down to.
They’d rather just not do anything and not say anything and get a different job than argue with you a little bit. And that’s a trait you actually want because since you don’t get to sit around, not everyone’s very comfortable, and people are scared for their jobs because . . . you don’t pay them, you get upset, they’re fired . . . they often tend to shut down when something bad happens. And bad things happen all the time in business. Right? We have ups and downs. We have to put out fires constantly. Right?
So what we look for in employees is (1) a bit of a drive and self-confidence for one to be able to solve these problems, address them. And if they don’t like something you said, to tell you why and maybe give you a better option, but (2) to what the main thing is, you don’t want to have a big obstacle, to actually go and try to overcome it, instead of just being like this job sucks, which, you know, is a normal thing.
As to team building, which is kind of important to learn remotely since you don’t have the morning roll call like you do in a lot of businesses, like, oh, gather around and let’s see how many things you sold today or, you know, we have a meeting or team building and let’s throw the ball and call your name. Like all this stuff I’ve seen in companies I worked on before.
What I’ve found is having the manager be more of an organizer, think like Obama, like a very good organizer, community builder, that’s what you’re kind of looking for. And their job is more to create a friendly environment than being someone like, and these are not really known figures, but someone that’s pretty much whose only job is to make sure that people are working with a whip, which is like a supervisor.
And the thing we’ve done in our business, which helped this a lot, is we let employees write their own culture. Right? Obviously the team builder, the manager was driving it, but we let them draft those documents. It wasn’t me writing what kind of company we have, what we expect, what sort of environment we’re looking for, when people will get fired, I let all the employees come together and write that themselves. So they own it. They own the environment, like they wrote down exactly what they want and what they don’t want.
So now if someone messes up and I gave some constraints. Right. I told them, let’s make it a place that you want to work in, but we still need to make money. So some of the things I want you to address in these documents is what happens when one of you is sick? One wants to go on leave, when can’t work you. Things still need to get done.
So they wrote all these things in. And now if someone doesn’t follow it, I’m like, well, you’re not following your own rules that you guys wrote down. And the next step is also written in the document. So this is what’s going to happen. So there are not really questions or bad feelings towards me about any of this. It’s like, well, you guys came up with it, you know, and it becomes easier.
My takeaways from that discussion are that you want to be clear about making sure your employees have the right mindset and skill set to handle remote work. It’s not for everybody, that’s fair, and enlist them to craft the rules of engagement. People support what they create, so let them create the rules with an eye toward how best to get the work done. That’s always front and center.
It’s not about how can I make the softball game for my kids, it’s about getting the work done and being able to attend not one or the other. And if their work requires teamwork and creative brainstorming, let them decide how best to do it, whether they want to use technology or whether they want to get together in a room.
I totally appreciate how some meetings are really better in person. You can write on a whiteboard; you can move Post-it notes around. There’s an energy and a momentum with brainstorming in person that’s difficult if not impossible, to duplicate in a video conference with more than two people because you’re missing out on all those nonverbal cues.
Your computer screen only captures a small part of the action. Things could be happening off the screen, but you’d be aware of it if you were physically in the same room. Creative Jobs in the arts, for example, people writing for television shows and others who need to collaborate in the moment to generate ideas and riff off each other, do better and are more productive meeting in person.
But does that need to be an everyday occurrence? It depends on the job. In person can be a richer experience if managed well, but I’m sure you’ve also seen that tool misused.
My job description when I worked in corporate one time actually said must be able to sit through interminable meetings. That should have been a red flag for me. But what can I say?
I’m sure you’ve been called into meetings where an email or a memo would have been faster, more effective, better use of your time. Being more strategic about how and when we utilize all these tools available to us can make us use our time better and be more productive.
One size solutions don’t fit all. Like spending a day in meetings, is just one example of that one-size-fits-all approach. Back to work mandates suffer from the same problem. It’s using a hammer and treating everything as a nail.
Now, before you think having employees with the right mindset and skill set in a job, turning them loose, set their own schedules within the parameters of performance you establish is all you need to make remote work successful. I’d also like to share with you the thoughts of another guest previously on the show, Hannah Genton. She’s an attorney and the co-founder of Siegl LLP. She wanted to reimagine the legal workspace and give freedom, flexibility, and autonomy to her staff.
So what she created is a fully distributed transactional law firm that provides clients Big Law quality legal services at competitive rates, while at the same time delivering a great work life balance for the attorneys and their staff.
Hannah distinguishes her employees from remote workers, whom she says means they’re away from headquarters, from the fully distributed employees she has, which means they have no office anywhere. There never was one. So there’s nowhere for her workers to be remote from. Everyone is autonomous in the sense of who they are and how they work. (And I think Tom Libelt’s employees would also be considered autonomous.) But either way, you get the idea. No Office.
The culture of autonomy and independence Hannah has created for employees aligns with the flexibility employees pushing back on return to office mandates say they crave. In looking back at my interview with Hannah, I realized she builds on what Tom said for what managers need to do to make remote or autonomous work more successful. Here’s what she says.
First piece of advice would be that they’d have to really be passionate about wanting to do it. It’s certainly not easy to figure out, and it’s something that requires dedication and commitment. So first and foremost, just ensuring that they have the appetite for that and tackling that kind of problem and going into it.
If it’s some kind of clear or some kind of practical tips, I would say in kind of, the first one is on that you’ve got to go all in. You’ve got to commit to providing a culture of autonomous workers. It’s really important to set clear expectations with your team. I cannot emphasize that enough, communication and setting expectations.
Yes, that’s fine if you want to work from a coffee shop or the beach. But the deliverable is in this form and is expected on this date, or whatever it is that the client needs. So being very clear about expectations there. Other leaders, I’d say, really ensuring that you research and find out the technology and tools that set your organization and set your team up for success.
So you can’t just throw your workers out there and say, OK, be autonomous and I hope for the best. It requires a very engaged leader. It requires a very thoughtful process where we don’t micromanage our team. I’m constantly checking in. How are you doing? Do you have the tools that you need to succeed? How can we be helping you? You know, it takes real commitment from the employer, I think, to focus on those folks and make sure that they have the tools that they need.
As I mentioned before, really defining and having, defining and communicating, very clear processes about how things are handled that helps reduce a lot of friction. It also helps manage expectations and kind of clarify how things are run. So you don’t have kind of things lost in the ether.
This one and I kind of hesitate to do this one, but checking in with your people, just because you’re not all working in an office space doesn’t mean you’re not communicating regularly, understanding the best way to get in touch with your team. I have some team members that we text regularly. I have others that we just have a formal weekly check and call. Both work.
It just depends on, like, what is the best for the project, what is the best for that type of the work that you’re doing together and that team member. And so just, you know, it requires flexibility as a leader to identify and kind of meet your people where there at.
And then this one is the lawyer in me, but really taking it seriously and ensuring you’re compliant from an employment law perspective, especially if you’ve got employees across different states. There are plenty, whether you’re using a law firm that’s helping you kind of manage that piece. . . . There are people and organizations that help businesses kind of manage this, but really taking seriously how you manage the fact that you have workers that might be moving around safer in different locations.
So they’re kind of some tips, I’d say are two things to advise others considering doing an autonomous workplace.
In a nutshell, my takeaway from her comments are that managing a remote or autonomous team successfully requires a different leadership style, and it will also be a continuous work in progress. It requires some commitment on your part.
Before we wrap up, I’d like to go back to something that I touched on earlier in the program about what flexibility organizations could possibly give to people on the front line forward facing service jobs that must interact with customers, clients, guests or patients face-to-face, whose jobs can’t be called in by phone or with a Zoom call.
Allowing some workers to work from home isn’t fair to those who can’t. The restaurant workers, manufacturing jobs, truckers, medical service providers. The list goes on and on. These are important jobs. And these individuals, they’re humans. They have a need for flexibility as much as anybody else. But their jobs require a physical presence.
And what about those smaller organizations where there are fewer employees than are available to cross train or fill in when somebody’s out?
Well, the answer is it may be harder, but it’s not impossible.
Those are some of the very questions I asked Barbara Mitchell, an HR guru and author of The Big Book of HR and The Manager’s Answer Book during one of our interviews here on Business Confidential Now. And here’s what she had to say.
I think the unfortunate people that are suffering so much with the turnover and retention are the restaurants and warehouses, and places where they do not have the ability to have any kind of flexibility. The work has to be done on site, has to be done in these hours, has to be done by this particular person and that’s just the way it is. Those are tough situations.
Oh well, let’s get into some of those tough situations. I love tough situations. Let’s say I’m running a warehouse and yeah, product has to come in, has to go out. And you’re also dependent on when these items get delivered, when they get picked up and it could be in all kinds of crazy hours.
So, I think people who do that kind of work recognize some of that, but they still have needs. And what kind of flexibility could they be offered in an effective and as part of an effective employee retention strategy?
Well, I do not ever like to be negative, but I’m going to say that that may not be possible in some situations where the work has to be done in a certain schedule and a certain – by a certain person with a certain expertise. But maybe there are other things that that organization could do to offer that employee perhaps a different kind of work schedule where it’s not five days a week.
Maybe they work some sort of a flexible schedule where the person has the entire day off or a three-day weekend from time to time. Something like that where there is an acknowledgment that we know that your job is very difficult and it’s very time constrained and it’s very – it has a rigidity to it that perhaps a knowledge working job does not have, but we’re going to honor that and give you perhaps a once a month you get a four-day workweek or just being as open and as creative as possible.
And here’s the key, Hanna, I believe and I know this is hard for some organizations, and that is ask people what would work for them. And I know you might get a whole bunch of different kinds of requests, but then can you synthesize those, put them together in some way where you say for them, “Majority of our employees, if we made this kind of a tweak to our schedule, we would have at least some people that would be delighted by it and others who would also acknowledge what at least the company heard us and they’re trying,” and that’ll go a long way.
And that, my friends, sums it up well. Doubling down instead of backing down on return to work mandates will backfire on you. Imposing that one size fits all solution to a complex set of issues says, “I don’t care what you think. You don’t have a choice.”
But the reality is employees do have a choice. They always do. And in today’s War for Talent they’re really in the driver’s seat and listening to their ideas to find new ways to work effectively, differently than before that meet the organization’s need while simultaneously meeting theirs is a win-win.
What all this means for you is that with some empathy, you can be the hero of this story. Now, I appreciate that return to work mandates and the management abuse of power are difficult topics, and I thank you for listening.
If you’d like to hear the rest of the interviews I’ve excerpted in this episode, the ones with Tom Libelt, Hannah Genton, and Barbara Mitchell. There are links to them in the show notes along with a transcript of today’s program.
I’d like to take this opportunity to also announce a change in programing of Business Confidential Now since I’m busy writing my next book on management abuse of power. I’ll be back in two weeks, not one two weeks with another episode. I apologize for the change, but I really need blocks of time to write. And if you’d like to be among the first to be notified of the book’s launch, which I expect to be in April 2024, please visit BusinessConfidentialRadio.com/SeekingFairnessatWork. I’m starting an early bird list and I’d love for you to be on it. I will not spam you with emails, I promise. It’s it’s just to let me know that you want to know more when it’s ready.
Thanks so much for listening. Please be sure to tell your friends about the show and leave a positive review. As I said, we’ll be back in two weeks with another episode of Business Confidential Now.
So until then, have a great day and an even better tomorrow.
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