Three key components you need to ensure success.
The one thing I get asked by every client who visits us at #AccentureNYC is:
“How have you been so successful at getting this many people into the office?”
They ask that question and sit there with their notebook waiting to hear the single answer, the secret, the silver bullet they can buy or encouraging language they can replicate to help them achieve what we’ve achieved so far.
I tell them all the same thing: People + Place + Technology.
People — Every survey out there has listed the desire to be around others as the main reason people will come back to the office. They want a place that’s active, welcoming, buzzing. They want a place where people are happy to see them and want to help them do whatever it is they choose to come to the office to do that day. They want to feel the workplace is there to support them to be their best and do their best work.
Place- They want a space that’s inspiring, enables them to see and interact with others, supports collaboration with the people they’ve come to see (both formally and informally). They want to feel energized, activated and inspired.
Technology — COVID forced a rapid adoption of technology in everything we do, and we’ve gotten pretty good at it working at home. The office environment needs to, at the bare minimum, meet but realistically exceed, the capabilities and quality of experience people have set up in their home environments. Most offices today fall far short of this bar as was well documented by Leesman.
None of these things on their own will work for you. Providing your workforce with an office environment they want to come back to is part art, part science.
It requires CRE, Facilities, IT, HR and local office leaders to work together on a single vision and plan and to be adaptable at a local level as you move forward in implementation. Working on plans in traditional towers is a recipe for failure.
Free food, a gym, and a new café won’t work.
A hybrid policy that talks about flexibility and how much you care about people and company culture won’t work.
Telling them it’s for ‘productivity’ without any metrics behind your claims to back it up, won't work.
More of the clunky video conferencing tech you deployed in 2016, won’t work.
The workplace is about people.
To be successful at getting people back into the workplace, you need to stop operating in silos and focus together on who your people are now.
You need to work together on creating them the spaces they want to be in. With the services they can’t easily replicate elsewhere. A workplace that makes them feel they can perform their work better, faster or more efficiently than they can in the places they’ve been working for the last three+ years.
Get this recipe right, then nurture it like a great Chinese master stock, you’ll have your future workplace buzzing with the volumes of people your executive teams are hoping for.
