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.

Three Areas Companies Should Consider When Adapting Their Workplaces To Covid-19

When 2020 started the word pandemic was something you would only hear in blockbuster movies, video games, and TV shows. Where we are now doesn’t feel nearly as exciting but is equally as frightening as some of those films. However, even as many people have begun to settle into the routine of working from home (or wherever they happened to be when the shelter in places went into affect ) there’s thousands of people trying to figure out what Workplaces will look like when we finally go back to them. We think some (not all) of the adaptations we will see can be broken down into three categories; construction, culture, and operational adaptations. We have left architectural planning out of this post as that is not our field of expertise.

Construction

As we begin the slow ramp up to being back in the workplace we can expect many of the projects that were halted to begin their process of moving towards construction. When they do they should expect extended time frames for the construction of their spaces. General contractors need to adapt to the new social distancing rules and we have already seen multiple guides from contractors requiring more stringent check in processes, health checks, and applying rules limiting the number of people on a job site. All of this will result in safer conditions, but also in tasks taking more time. Teams that manage construction will need to advise their clients closely on this to avoid issues with the delivery of spaces.

Additionally we can expect to see longer lead times for furniture and other manufactured goods. Many of the factories that make these goods have had to shut down, but there will be a pent up demand from many projects ramping back up at the same time. We believe there should be an expectation as well for there to be a desire to use new types of materials like copper.

Culture

Many companies have shied away from allowing employees to work from home. The argument has been that it would not work, or that it’s just not right for their culture and employees become disengaged. We believe many companies will realize that many more people than they thought could, can work from home. Companies will need to set a strategy for who can continue to work from home, how many people can come back to the office as currently designed, and how they will handle requests to not come back to the office. They will need to do this before the doors open again.

More employees working from home, coupled with new social distancing guidelines, will result in the de-densification of the workplace. Over the past 10 years companies have squeezed in ever smaller desks into the open office. They have moved from the individual to the communal. Unfortunately this will have to adjust to the new health information we have available and the norms of the company along with it. It may be commonplace for even people who currently shared private offices, to request that they have individual offices for health reasons.

Companies will also have to decide how they handle HR policies such as sick leave moving forward. If employees come to the office sick, should they be sent home immediately? How does the company enforce this policy without violating privacy? There are many questions to answer.

Operations

The way workplace teams operate their spaces will have to adapt alongside the culture of the office. Some of the changes we may see within the way we operate our spaces may include requests such as on-demand cleaning of desks. Any office with communal space will need to be cleaning more actively and more frequently to prevent the spread of germs.

Savvy operations managers will likely also look at how people enter into and move around their spaces. Automatic door openers and closers, infared temperature sensors, touchless security readers, and even self cleaning surfaces will likely come into the forefront of solutions.

It has been a blessing for employees that many technology companies and companies that have been influenced by the “Google effect” of the past 20 years, now operate cafeterias. These beautiful spaces promote culture and also are a heavy piece of operations teams workload. However, communal troughs of food, with common utensils might be a nightmare for people returning to work in a Covid-19 era. These programs will need to adapt and operate akin to restaurants (if not more stringently) in order to survive within workplaces. Every program will have to work to regain employees trust by informing them about their response and teaching new habits to current employees.

So What Is There To Be Excited About?

This sounds like…a lot, doesn’t it? Yet when writing this, we are not downtrodden. We are hopeful. Over the past 20 years there has been a very disjointed effort for improvement and many times too much focus on the glitz and glam of spaces. For the first time in this century, we have a problem that all of us in Workplace Experience are trying to adapt too. We are all working on the same problem and trying to solve it. This is why you see so many people (now myself included) pontificating on the internet about what comes next.

This is an extremely encouraging fact to me. We believe that if we are willing to share what we find, what we learn, and what we enact as a response to this issue - then we will all be able to overcome it. We will be able to bring our employees back to workplaces that they enjoy, at least the ones that don’t work from home now.