In-person collaboration has been linked to high performance and job satisfaction, but these benefits don’t increase with more days spent in the office.
An oft-cited reason for in-person work mandates is that they help drive connection among a team. As more employers push for four and five days in the office, rhetoric has focused on the importance of collaboration and a sense of belonging that some leaders believe can only be fostered in a shared physical environment.
Yet some data shows the number of days people attend the office doesn’t directly correlate to that sense of connection. In fact, there’s only a 1% difference in the number of employees who say they feel connected to their organisation working four or five days a week as compared to those working two or three days on site. That slim leading edge went to the latter group, at 60%, according to a global survey of 1,115 employees by London-based workplace insights firm Leesman, seen by the BBC.
“There just doesn’t seem to be huge gains from the number of days people are in the office,” says Allison English, deputy CEO of Leesman. “It’s about the quality, not quantity, of time that matters. In fact, we see that the greater the number of in-person days, the less the worker is generally satisfied with work-life balance, impacting engagement and their connection to the organisation.”
The bullshit is that managers don’t understand why RTO is valuable.
The best thing to do is to let the groups that need face time to choose the days they come in and focus only on facilitating that time. If the group isn’t there at one time, RTO is worthless.
My team has one day per week where we have our regular team meetings and the expectation is we are usually in the office on that day. Outside of that, we all set our own schedules based on our needs. Some people just like being in the office or have job duties that necessitate it. Others like me have little reason to be in the office other than specific meetings so I WFH 4 days most weeks, coming in on those if needed.
It’s the best work setup I’ve had so far, and a lot of that is because our manager is actually great at her job.
Exactly right. We came back to the office 1 day a week and moved every zoom/TeAmS meeting put of that day so we could focus on “in person” work…
My wife’s team on the other hand, were told to come back 2 days a week, they chose whichever building from a few available and whatever day. The result is that she goes to an office to sit around strangers and do, uncomfortably, the same tasks she would do from home.