When I worked at design firm IDEO, periodically a client would ask for a replica of their physical product, but digital. We’d gently reframe the question, noting that the benefit of digital is that it can do things differently. If you’ve ever shopped at a digital supermarket, you know what I mean. Walking the aisles online would be a nightmare, but being able to populate a cart from your previous order is a benefit that wouldn’t emerge from a copy of the bricks-and-mortar store.
More impactful questions are: What are the customer needs we’re trying to solve? And, how might we use physical and digital components to create the best solution?
We ‘office’ workers face a similar opportunity now, in this amorphous time before we go back to our campuses. We’ve experienced extremes on either end of the pandemic: spending all our working time in the office, and all our time out of it.
Leadership teams are asking themselves whether to go completely remote, full-time in the office, or hybrid. Like “how do we make this digital” begins with the solution instead of human needs, so too does the question of “remote, full-time, or hybrid.”
Instead, we might ourselves: What are the needs we’re trying to design for as we work? How might we use physical spaces and digital tools to create the best solutions for each need? In other words, why (for what purpose) are we opening the office doors, and how will we function when we’re together and apart?
To answer this, let’s look at what we’ve gained over the past year. I work with teams to weave wellbeing into the workplace. Questions I’ve been asking clients are: As we’ve been working from home, what’s improved in your work life? What’s gotten worse?
While it varies by home setup, a lot has improved, including:
focusing without the distractions of office buzz
blending home chores and work together, so the end of the day doesn’t feel like a laundry list (no pun... who am I kidding, pun intended)
being able to work from anywhere (one client has spent a month each in New England, in Colorado, and on Hawaii)
These perks don’t just benefit individuals, but also the company: uninterrupted quiet time can support a flow state; doing chores can allow the mind to rest, unsticking tricky problems; and working from anywhere can help employees to literally see things differently. In fact, the traveler above reported an increase in the quality of her work when she was in a shifted timezone and had mornings to get outside or immerse in her work, before her colleagues came online.
As for what’s gotten worse, a lot of it comes down to social connection, transitions and collaboration: casual interactions in the hallway boost not only our relationships but our energy, commuting bookends a workday, and some types of collaboration work better in person.
Knowing there are tangible advantages to both modes, we have the opportunity to create a far better working environment than the one we left in early 2020.
Below are six ways to do that:
1. Identify our goals and design the best solution for each
For most, doing our work well requires a mix of collaboration and heads-down time. But this year has reminded us that getting work done extends beyond that. Building relationships with our colleagues makes it easier to navigate sticky situations. Socializing in the cafeteria or hallway rejuvenates us. Seeing new things inspires us.
Our employees will flourish if we consider all of these needs and design to maximize the conditions for each.
Maybe we intersperse periods of time together with swaths of work-from-anywhere time: one week per month in the office to foster relationships and kick off collaborative projects, followed by three weeks where employees choose their own adventures.
Or, perhaps some teams have weekly rhythms, meeting in the office on Mondays for a debrief of the week’s sales data and planning changes, then decamping home to get on with it.
Ask: What are the needs we’re designing for, and how might we gather appropriately for each?
2. Balance physical safety with other human needs
Another lesson from the design world: many times new products fall flat because their architects have only considered functional needs, not emotional ones.
I once saw an ad asking “Did you know people spend more time on Facebook than on planning for retirement?” Well, duh. Retirement planning is complex and terrifying, bringing up emotions around ageing and how far (or not far) we’ve gotten in our careers. To engage in retirement planning, you have to first face your dread, then deal with the unfamiliarity of choosing investment vehicles. Facebook is pure distraction and thoughtless scrolling. Companies hook us (for better or worse) by designing for our emotional needs.
From what I hear of back-to-office plans, a lot of them skew practical: what safety barriers are in place and how people need to behave. While a whole article could be written (and has been) on the opportunities to change physical spaces as we return, here we focus on the other side of it.
We’ll get a lot more out of re-entering the office if we consider emotional needs: excitement over seeing our colleagues again; fear over being so close to other people; a desire to celebrate what we’ve accomplished in our virtual bubbles; grief at losing the cocoons of our pandemic lives, and more.
What if re-entering felt like an offsite, but onsite, where we played into these feelings? As an example, when we merged two business units at IDEO, the “first day at work” was not about work at all, but about finding ways to embody our values. As the business units were very hands-on, the day centered on building things, with the pinnacle being a co-created miniature golf-course that the team then played through. This turned a period of uncertainty into a moment of celebration, connection, and shared values.
Ask: As we return to work, what might we do to create permission to transition emotionally?
3. Design guardrails over mandates
As we saw above, different teams will have different needs at different times. This will be true across but also within companies. Put bluntly, there is no one size fits all solution.
At a fashion retailer, maybe the design and production team will spend a month together to create the next collection, while finance will stay at home to close end-of-year books. Once a quarter, all employees will be on campus for relationship-building. Because those overlap days are relatively rare, they’re special, filled with social activities and work shares.
As needs vary based on the team and its activities, companies will do well to institute guardrails rather than mandates. Rather than saying “we all work Tuesdays to Thursdays in the office and at home Mondays and Fridays,” we might say “each team should design for regular in-person and out of office times depending on their objectives, and plan on being in the office for two all-company onsites annually.”
Ask: What guardrails might we create and how might we support teams in designing to them?
4. Prepare to iterate
No matter how clever our guardrails, we are not going to get it right on the first try. None of us have been here before. Let’s relieve ourselves of the pressure to have all the answers.
Instead, let’s design for iteration. At IDEO, we used the word prototype for most everything, signaling permission to note what worked and to change what didn’t. For example, IDEOers are fanatical about their snacks (ah, office snacks, remember those?!). When we changed snack vendors, the experience team first introduced new snacks as a prototype, noting that feedback was welcome, but unproductive complaints could only be proffered while wearing a special crown (yes, they procured a crown). That signaling encouraged a lot more openness than would be the norm when faced with change: I believe the crown went unused!
Same here: how we talk about change will signal how people receive it. Using open language like prototyping, experimentation and iteration will encourage a sense of shared possibility.
To that end, we’ll be wise to constrain how much we invest in the going-back environment. The more we invest, the less open we’ll be to iterations. Designers always start with the flimsiest of prototypes, not because we’re lazy but because we don’t want to get too wedded to our ideas. While some investments will be required to meet health guidelines, for the most part, let’s make changes light: e.g., how can we reuse what we already have rather than buy new? And how might we be intentional about which employees we invite back first, designing for a breadth of job types as well as for those most likely to help the operations team evolve and improve the experience?
Ask: How might we make this feel like a prototype and encourage our employees to iterate?
5. Allow for a spectrum of engagement styles
There’s not a person on this planet above the age of two who has not had a disagreement about how to manage social interactions during the pandemic. We’ve learned, painfully, that there are many ways of approaching it.
Going back to the office will be the same. While some folks are looking forward to an era of bacchanalia, others are experiencing high social anxiety as a result of the pandemic. The opportunity: to empower people to comfortably move forward at their own pace.
One way to do this: make hybrid meetings (with some people in person, some online) the norm and allow people to choose how they engage.
Ask: How might we create a sense of empowerment for our employees as we return?
6. Think equity, not equality
As a result of the above, we’ll be moving not from virtual to in-person, but from virtual to “the right mode for the right moment.” Without thoughtful design, however, we could unintentionally disadvantage those out of the office.
Much as we’ve learned that leveling the playing field for the traditionally disadvantaged is about equity not equality, so too should we design for equity in a fluid workplace world.
Designing equitably means more support for whomever is likely to be disadvantaged: if half a team is remote, in-person attendees might join meetings from cubicles with screens to create a sense that we’re all in it together. Or, better, we might make our meetings audio-only, which can change the nature of a conversation.
It also means recognizing access gaps: perhaps a company’s senior leadership can afford to live and work from a country house, but entry-level folks, with little privacy at home and fewer relationships built up, crave more time in the office. In that case, maybe we redirect some of our saved corporate rent to supporting employees in creating healthier work-from-home environments and on satellite offices as our employees decamp from high-priced cities.
Ask: How might we ensure equity in different modes of working?
Would it be simpler to go back to the way things were? Absolutely. But now that we’ve proven we can do our jobs without the office, we can’t unsee it. Nor should we. A more fluid model is creating employer cost benefits in real estate and lightening the burden on our cities, reducing population crunch and decreasing congestion.
Perhaps most compelling, now that employees have tasted the other side, many are keen not to return. One study shows 29% of employees would quit if they were required to go back to the office. And with a growing number of companies offering flexibility not to, they’ll have plenty of options if they do quit.
Let’s meet our teams where they’re at. Much like the average consumer can now browse the supermarket aisles to discover new foods while also ordering their regular staples with a click, so too can we allow our teams to choose the best environment for the task at hand. Instead of asking “in-person, fully remote, or hybrid?” let’s instead ask: What are our needs, and why (for what purpose) should we be in the office, and how will we gather?