Feature
The return-to-office tug of war continues.
On one side, there's the appeal of flexibility and work-life balance offered by remote work; on the other, the undeniable benefits of in-person collaboration and company culture fostered in an office environment. And employers are caught square in the middle.
In 2023, we saw major companies mandating in-office presence for part or all of the workweek. While some handled the decision smoothly, plenty more were met with frustration and skepticism from employees. Make no mistake: employers who have instituted top-down mandates with little flexibility, or botched the messaging, faced swift and brutal backlash.
Yet decisions must be made. So how is a company supposed to make the difficult, and often unpopular, choice to bring employees back into the office without alienating them or jeopardizing their broader reputation? Amy Casciotti, VP of human resources at Lansing, Mich.-based TechSmith shared how the company made the decision to start requiring office time, and how they came to a policy that worked best for everyone.
How I Decided on Our Return to Office Policy
Casciotti's story, as told to Reworked, has been edited for clarity.
As some background, before COVID-19 hit, we were actually in five different buildings, and our staff was all spread out and it wasn't working for us, so we were working to pull us all back together into one building. We also had employees asking about being able to work remotely. While we had flexibility, they wanted the ability to work a lot more remote than what we were allowing up to that point.
Then COVID-19 happened and our entire company other than a few employees went completely remote for over a year. We saw some negative sides of that as time went on, as it related to our culture and even when employees needed to play across our product line — things that used to get figured out weren't getting figured out.
So as a senior leadership team, we got together to talk and actually had a conversation about whether we still needed a building. We thankfully hadn't signed all of the paperwork, so we still had flexibility, and after discussions our senior leadership team decided we did need one.
We did think that some amount of time in office is essential for culture and cross-team collaboration, but it was pretty clear we don't need to be here five days a week like we were before the pandemic. So we ended up building a smaller building, and then went in the process of figuring out how much time we need in the office.
A few factors influenced the decision to bring employees back. You always have some amount of interpersonal issues within teams and across teams, but the amount that my team was becoming involved in was skyrocketing.These were things where managers had tried to handle them and they just kept escalating.In addition to just dealing with pandemic related issues, It was a lot on our HR team. We were seeing firsthand some of the erosion of trust. There was no grace happening…everybody had their blinders on and was only seeing their perspective.
We also had a third of our company that was new during the pandemic, and sure, there's a lot of onboarding you can do remotely but there's some things that just are very different than when you can only see what they're doing on the screen.
In terms of who we got involved in the initial stages, when we were figuring out where we were still going to build the building and/or allow remote work, our CEO Wendy Hamilton and I led those conversations, but it was with our entire senior leadership team.
Once we made the decision, we had to start the process of developing our policy. Wendy and I put together a pretty robust survey that we sent out to all of our staff, one which asked them what their own personal preferences were but also about working relationships across teams and which days in the office would be preferable. Once we got the results from that back and went over it with our senior leadership team, then we had a follow-up survey from that because there were still some more questions or things that weren't making sense to us. We wanted to make sure we were very transparent and included our employees in as much as we could.
In addition, as a senior leadership team, we also looked at what we ourselves had been observing about what our customers need. If we're not making the best software for our customers because we're not talking like we should, or issues aren't making it back to the team and getting addressed, those are problems. So as we talked through all of that we decided to start out with the 20%. We’d done all in-person and we've all-remote, and neither one seemed to be the perfect thing for us.
Most of our staff wanted some amount of in-office time – one to two days. And so our thought was, let's require a day in office and then allow flexibility. So we do have about 15% of our employees who actually come in three or more days a week and have an assigned office space, while the rest of our employees hotel when they come into the office.
We definitely were open to revisiting our decision if needed. After the first three months, We surveyed the staff just to see if the majority of our staff really liked what we were doing, and we were finding that some teams would come in more than the 20% at that point because it made sense to them. I think we did one more survey after that, and again, about 80% of our staff said this feels right. So for the past year and a half, We've been on this 20% schedule.
There are some issues that became a challenge along the way. Because this was experimental, there were still a lot of employees that weren't sure what they could and couldn't do at the beginning. We have a lot of engineers that are used to the black and white — a lot of this is kind of gray because we're trying to be flexible.
I think the gray areas were hard for managers as well, because their teams were pushing them to see what the boundaries were. It was a little bit harder for our managers to truly understand where it was flexible or not, but they did have input and I think they appreciated that. They do sometimes have to make the hard calls, but it seems like they've also kind of evolved and learned what works best for their teams.
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My big thing is that I don't want to write us into a corner if I don't have to, because I never know what situations our employees are going to have in the future, and we want to be able to accommodate them as much as we can. So we try not to be very strict on policies.
