How Habits Will Affect Your “Return To Office”

For over two years many knowledge workers have been working from anywhere, but mostly from home. They’ve worked from couches, from kitchen tables, from islands, and in some cases - resorts. Now that the pandemic has begun to wain, employers are finally setting return to office dates again. However, they may hit an unexpected snag in the form of preexisting habits.

How Habits Form

Habits are formed by the repetition of actions over time. A habit is actually a series of actions involving a cue, craving, response, and finally a reward.

Source: James Clear Atomic Habits

A real life example of this can be found in the Cinnabon franchise. They put their stores at the entry / exit of malls. You enter into the smell of Cinnabon and this creates a craving. By the time you’re on your way out the smell hits you again and you respond by just getting a “small” Cinnabon. You are rewarded with gooey goodness and a sugar rush. Unfortunately the more this happens the harder it will be to say NO to the Cinnabon.

Why It’s So Hard To Break Existing Habits?

Existing habits are extremely hard to break. Anyone how’s tried to give up sweet treats, or try dry January knows how hard it is to change the way you do things. This extends to all sorts of habits, including where and how we work. Normally we just call this our “routine.” Over time habits form grooves of sorts in our brains that make them extremely hard to break.

Many of us have been forming a new habit of working from home (or whoever) for the past two years. In habit formation world that’s a very long time. The habit of working from home and not going to the office is carved into our brains.

What To Do About Your “Return To Office” Plans

As James Clear outlines in his recent book “Atomic Habits,” in order to create a new habit you have to make it obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. To break a habit you have to make it invisible, unattractive, difficult, and unsatisfying.

In the context of going to the office, it is not just one habit, but a larger “stack” of habits that take us from getting ready in the morning to getting out the door, and finally into the office setting. Breaking one habit can be hard enough but breaking multiple stacked habits is extremely difficult.

When companies order people back to the office without input and set a “return to office” date it triggers something called reactance. Reactance is a human tendency to react to being told what to do by maintaining our personal freedom by doing the opposite. So you tell someone to return to “work” and they say “I resign.”

Unfortunately, this is likely to put a dent into many companies return to office plans as they exist today. To make working from home unattractive or difficult would quickly create a toxic culture situation on the part of the company. This could create bad feedback if those employees who feel mistreated decide to leave due to a negative culture experience. So, what can employers do to avoid these issues?

Taking a People First Strategy

Companies that want to lead the future of work are better off focusing on building new habits vs breaking existing ones. We encourage companies to engage in feedback sessions with employees before they make any decisions, and then begin planning at business unit levels for how / when they will gather intentionally moving forward. If you intentionally create a habit of bringing people together for a specific reason and slowly repeat over time, employees will naturally form a habit of coming together.

Building new habits is always going to be easier than breaking existing / replacing existing ones. In a world where there’s 3.9 % unemployment and employees largely have the option to walk away into a situation more aligned with their current habits, taking a people first strategy will enable more successful outcomes.

Want to know more? Feel free to reach out to us directly or find us here or on LinkedIn.

How Binary Bias Is Affecting Your Workplace Decisions

It’s us or them. You’re in or you’re out!! You’re smart or you’re dumb. You’re remote or you’re in office. What do all these statements have in common? They’re binary.

Hi! We’re Affordances. An advisory team that uses design thinking to create better outcomes for workplace teams. With this blog post we’re exploring how Binary Bias can have an effect on our Workplace decisions.

Two Kinds

As humans we love to categorize things. It’s a survival instinct that has helped us survive for generations. However, things in life rarely fit into neat buckets or are in fact binary. As Adam Grant points out in his latest book Think Again, “It’s a basic human tendency to seek clarity and closure by simplifying a complex continuum into two categories.” Closure and clarity are great words to focus on for the world of workplace right now. Closure is something all employees and employers could use at this point. The seemingly endless discussions of how to address our responses to covid have grown tiresome. We’re starting to burn out on them, but we should be cautious.

“It’s a basic human tendency to seek clarity and closure by simplifying a complex continuum into two categories.” - Adam Grant, Think Again

Knowing this it should not come as any surprise that in discussions about the future of work and the future of the workplace we can see this bias emerge quite often. Just browse your LinkedIn feed (10 Reasons You’re Wrong About Remote), company newsletters, or even internal company discussions and it is noticeable. We must be vigilant to avoid binary bias. The truth is that there is a wide spectrum of workplace options for any company.

A Spectrum of Workplaces

A logical next step is to ask how we can combat this bias in our internal and public discussions about the future of work/place? In his book Grant points out that the simplest solution for combating this bias is what he calls “complexifying.” By showing the actual range of options that are available we can help ourselves to think differently and avoid this bias.

We’ve sketched a quick view below of what that spectrum might look like from a workplace perspective but even this chart could present as biased. It’s hard to write nuance into a deck / image. Each of these options could then have 100 tweaks / options within them.

We know from recent surveys that opinions on how many days employees want to be in the office varies. More importantly we also know the opinions on the future work also diverge even further when comparing employees vs executives. This highlights that each company needs to openly discuss, define, and discuss again what the future of their work/place is. Acknowledging the complexity is the first step to building a better future.

An Iterative Process

Once you’ve acknowledged that the spectrum of workplace options is broad you can start to think about charting the right path for your team. We suggest beginning by creating common definitions (understanding), assessing your company goals, and then aligning them with an appropriate workplace plan. Moving forward we’d advise all companies to consider creating a unique / bespoke solution for their teams. From here we suggest continuing to improve by doing small tests and iterating continually with your teams. Just like any product, your workplace will get better over time if you take on user feedback.

Having trouble finding open restrooms at your company? You may have a gender diversity issue.

It is well known that many technology companies have struggled and continue to struggle with gender diversity issues.  One of the more peculiar trickle down effects, or indicators of a diversity issue is the complaints you often here in the hallways of many offices. “I had to check three bathrooms just to find one that was open.” “I had to wait for 20 minutes, what are people doing in there!?!” The voice of these complaints in my experience, has most often been men.  Why are there never enough stalls?  Is the company too cheap?  Are people working in there?  The problem is a bit more nuanced than one may think.

How Many Bathrooms Do We Need?

OSHA requires companies to maintain specific numbers of toilets to employees.  Those ratios are then broken down into male and female restrooms, "unless they can be occupied by no more than one person and can be locked from the inside."  At a workplace that is  50 percent female and 50 percent male, this would work.  However, how does this work in the technology world, where companies average between 55-84 percent men? 

This variance is where the law highlights the issue. If you start hearing men grumble about not finding a restroom but you never hear any complaints from women in your office, what does that indicate?  If you have counted the restrooms and you're meeting code requirements, you may need to dig deeper to solve your problem.   In the end, you may find the cause is a gender diversity issue.   Now what can you do about it?

Working Within the Current Law To Improve Experience And Inclusion

The easiest solution is very simple. Within the same OSHA guidelines you’re able to make all restrooms gender neutral and provide a common area sink. Provide full height stalls with individual air feeds / vents, are lockable, and why not some music to improve experience? Your employees will appreciate the privacy and better experience as well. Not only will you have gender neutral restrooms that help show you understand gender is non-binary, but you’ll also be able improve the lives of your teams.

This is a great first step, and it really is a great path forward for showing your employees you care about inclusion.  However, it's really just a bandaid for the larger problem.  If you're a workplace employee (or anyone at a company for that matter) and you see something like this start to occur, maybe you should sit down to talk with your diversity team instead?  You may find you can work together to bring the issue to light internally, and help make some change that lasts. Maybe you can even get the funding to build those nice gender neutral restrooms.  

Alternatively, you can take the advice of a friend of mine when I ran this issue by them:  "People should just stop hiring men until the problem fixes itself. Diversity problem solved.  Bathroom problem solved."  Simple.

Why you never have the right amount of space.

Global Perspective

Since I began my career in workplace, the measurement of rentable square foot (RSF) has always been a guide post measure for our teams. We measure everything from how much space you provide per employee, to calculating how much that space costs to fit-out based on this number.

Once I started doing international work I came to realize that RSF isn't a universal metric. There are two factors that are an issue with using this measurement. The first problem is the lack of a universal measurement system globally. Rentable Sq meters in Europe, Tsubo in Japan, etc are just a few of the measures used. The Second problem is how we calculate those numbers in the first place. Do we include elevators, shafts, stairwells in the number? It's pretty hard to hold a meeting in a shaft, though I've held a few in stairwells.

Unfortunately these systems of measurement are deeply entrenched in brokerage and commercial markets. So in order to provide the right experience for employees we must find a way to work around them. In order to circumvent this inefficient system one must take three steps.

Planning Around A Bad System

First, you must set your RSF and USF per employee early. This should really be among the first metrics you define as a workplace team if you plan to do any scaling. You need RSF to look at market spaces and then you need the USF number for doing test fits of those spaces.

Second, have a space planner or architect you trust on board to do test fits of any space you are seriously considering signing a lease for. Your planner will be able to take away all the space clutter that landlords put in their leasing number to show you how much space you can actually utilize for employees. A space may look great but if it's inefficient, you'll sacrifice a lot of money to the LL for space you can't use and the experience of your employees when you try to cram them into it later.

Third, codify your space planning standards into a living document. By defining the size of meeting rooms, desk areas, offices, kitchens, etc early in the process, you'll have an easier time doing test fits and will be happier with the amount of space you take. However, this shouldn't be a document you just make once to set it on the shelf or carve it on a block in the center of your office for all to see. It should be a living document that you continually update as your company scales and inevitably new spaces get added to the mix. The kitchen / training room / yoga area / speaker series space change all become separate spaces at scale.

Why Starting Early Makes Sense

In the end, I don't see a way for us to move from RSF to USF in every market. However, if you start to think strategically early, using the right methods, you will save yourself and your employees a lot of pain. If you're a 50 person company with plans to grow to 200, 500, etc—then the time to start is now. Your spaces will be more efficient, employees will be happier, and your finance team will appreciate you not spending money on shafts and other unusable spaces.