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Every time another major employer changes course on their return-to-office policies, the same question seems to surface: Are we getting this right?
I understand the desire for a clear answer. Employees have grown accustomed to greater flexibility in where and how they work, while many executives are pushing for more time in the office. After looking closely at the research, I’m convinced there’s no across-the-board policy that will work for every organization.
The better question for leaders is: What problem are we trying to solve?
It’s easy to start with a solution, but before deciding where people should work, leaders need to be clear about what they are trying to accomplish.
Is productivity suffering? Are teams struggling to collaborate? Are client requirements harder to meet? Does the work itself require more face-to-face interaction?
Those are business problems, and a workplace location policy is only one possible response.
That distinction matters because the right answer may differ by organization, team, or even role. Some work requires employees to be physically present, while other work can be done effectively from almost anywhere. The experience of the past several years has given us plenty of evidence of both.
HR can help leaders separate assumptions about where work should happen from evidence about where it works best.
One of the hardest parts of developing workplace policies is the desire to make them feel fair. A single rule for everyone can seem like the simplest way to accomplish that, but treating every employee or role identically doesn’t necessarily produce the fairest or most effective outcome.
A customer-facing team may have different needs from a group of employees doing highly independent work. New employees may benefit from more in-person interaction than experienced colleagues. Some teams may genuinely collaborate better together, while others have developed effective ways to work across locations.
The goal is to understand what the work requires and build policies around those requirements.
Today’s remote and hybrid arrangements were born during the pandemic because organizations had little choice, but what we learned from that shouldn’t be discarded.
We discovered that many jobs can be performed effectively outside a traditional office. We also learned that remote work can introduce challenges around connection and culture. Some employees gained flexibility that made work more manageable alongside childcare, caregiving, and other responsibilities, while others missed the structure and interaction of an office.
There isn’t one lesson from that experience. There are many. Rather than trying to recreate the workplace of 2019 or preserve every practice that emerged during the pandemic, organizations can ask what worked, what didn’t, and what those experiences tell them about how work should be structured today.
Once you’ve identified the problem you’re trying to solve and developed an approach, it’s important to evaluate whether the policy is having the intended effect.
That means looking at the outcomes that prompted the decision in the first place. If productivity was a concern, has it improved? If the goal was better collaboration, are teams working together more effectively? Organizations can also look at retention, recruiting, employee feedback, client requirements, and other measures relevant to their business to understand how well the policy is working.
This is particularly important because workplace needs don’t stay the same. Business priorities and employee expectations change, and laws and regulations around flexible work continue to develop in different parts of the world. Organizations are also relying on a broader mix of employees, contractors, consultants, and seasonal workers, adding another consideration to decisions about where and how work gets done.
Organizations should revisit their policies periodically and be willing to make changes when the evidence supports doing so.
HR brings together perspectives that might otherwise be considered separately: what employees are experiencing, what managers need, what the data show, what the business is trying to accomplish, and what legal and workforce considerations need to be addressed.
Our new report, Managing the Changing Workplace: A Framework for HR, is designed to help HR professionals put that thinking into practice. It lays out five steps for developing evidence-based workplace policies, beginning with the business problem you’re trying to solve and continuing through testing, measurement, and reevaluation.
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