Fine-Tuning Return to Office Policies to Achieve Innovation
By Laura Gramling, President, EnSpark Consulting
The impact of remote work on day-to-day productivity is relatively easy to measure and explain to employees. Everyone knows that organizations that can’t get the work done can’t survive.
But as organizations fine-tune their post-pandemic return-to-office policies, the title of a recent Wall Street Journal article captures a lurking worry felt by many leaders: “Why Remote Work Could Lead to Less Innovation.” Innovation is the lifeblood of long-term success. Yet establishing an environment that supports innovation is difficult, and can be undermined by the wrong return-to-office policies.
At EnSpark Consulting, we emphasize the importance of generating organizational alignment through data-driven conversations. This strategy highlights the particular matrix of pressures and opportunities faced by the organization. In the case of the return-to-office policies, these conversations give leaders a chance to explain how innovation is essential to achieving employee work/life balance. At the same time, these data-driven conversations give employees an opportunity to explain how the organization can better support their contributions to innovation. The result of this process will be a return-to-office policy that supports both organizational goals and employees’ lives.
How It Works
Return-to-office policies are both a human resources question and an organizational strategy issue. The human resources aspect is obvious, but the organizational strategy angle is emerging. Can employees and teams be as innovative when most people are working remotely most of the time? What’s the real advantage to innovation when people are working together in-person? Is it enough that people come into the office 2-3 times per week, or is more face-to-face time needed?
There are no cookie-cutter answers to these questions. Finding the path that generates the innovation that the company needs while supporting human values requires a process of alignment on how work is done. We work with a cross-section of employees and managers to achieve alignment on values and innovation goals. The outcome may not be what you expect, but it will be the result of a systematic process of value alignment.
In our previous blog, we described a 5-step process for working with leaders, managers, and employees to craft an appropriate return-to-office policy.
To center innovation in the policy, we start the data collection with structured conversations to mine past successes: how innovation has functioned in the past, why it worked, and what created the conditions for success. We also seek to understand the current state: what your employees and managers care about in terms of innovation, collaboration and how work gets done.
We then map that data with your company’s innovation goals. With this composite picture, discussions are facilitated to create solutions that generate alignment on values and what’s needed for success.
The final step is to draft the policy and then implement, evaluate and iterate. Your organization’s innovation goals will change, so should how the work gets done.
This systematic process creates solutions that empower employees, aligns organizational goals and generates high-performance and innovation. Interested in a customized process for your organization’s specific set of circumstances? Contact us for a complimentary consult.