Attention, Facility Manager! This is How You Lure Employees Back to the Office
Emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for communications, integrated with Workplace Management solutions, create the right incentives that outweigh the forces that keep people home.
According to a Microsoft Hybrid Work research [Sep 22, 2022], which investigated the controversial topic of the “return to office”, employees don’t have enough incentives to justify going back to their physical workplace:
- 73% of them say they need a better reason to go into the office than just company expectations.
- 84% of employees would be motivated by the promise of socializing with coworkers.
- 85% would be motivated by rebuilding team bonds.
- 73% would go to the office more frequently if they knew their direct team members would be there.
- 74% would go to the office more frequently if they knew their work friends would be there.
Doesn’t it make perfect sense? In the end…
Why would you go to the office if no one is there?
Why should you incur the cost of waking up earlier, feeling miserable while stuck in traffic, refueling at outrageous gas prices, etc., only to go to a semi-desert office and join the same video calls you would have joined from your comfortable home?
Sounds familiar, right? I thought so.
A dilemma and a challenge
If you are a Real Estate or Facility Manager at a large corporation, chances are, even before 2020, you were already exploring the opportunity to reduce the office footprint up to 40% by embracing new promising workplace experiences such as Hot Desking and Hoteling, thus generating considerable savings for your company.
In the end, your office spaces were already running at 60% (or less) occupancy, especially if you work for a large corporation in the US West Coast.
Hybrid or not hybrid?
However, what is preventing the adoption of Hot Desking and Hoteling at a large scale throughout your office spaces?
- Uncertain results
Will the employees accept the new ways of working? Will I — Facility Manager — look bad in front of my management if the new workplace fails to deliver on their expectations? - Company culture
You might be lucky to work for a company that has virtual interactions and people empowerment in its DNA, and therefore have a smoother path to implement the latest hybrid work technologies; or you might be working for a more conservative controlling company that would like to see everyone back to the office asap. - Too many technologies
There are several tens of companies offering workplace management technologies that promise to solve the hardest hybrid work problems; each of these technologies has its own architecture enabling slightly different use cases, workflows and integrations. Which one is the right one for your company?
As a Facility Manager, you probably share the decision to adopt a new workplace technology and related workflows with Human Resources and IT. Do these functions share your same view on what is the right thing to do for your organization, in terms of workplaces?
Should you take the risk and push for adopting a new hybrid work paradigm, or play safe and conservatively push for a return to office, with an eye on operational expense optimization?
Back to the office, in any case
No matter your company’s approach to work, your current challenge is getting people back to the office, because:
- If you decide to adopt hybrid work and the latest workplace technologies, you need people to be back to the office to justify the investment.
- If you decide to support a massive return to the office, people must go back to the office or you are not delivering enough value through the workplaces you manage.
What’s missing today?
Let’s go back to the Microsoft research results.
What I believe the problem boils down to is lack of information:
- I don’t know if a colleague I need to interact with is at, or plans to go to, the office on certain days.
- I don’t know if a work buddy is at, or plans to go to, the office on certain days.
- I don’t know if a boss is at, or plans to go to, the office on certain days.
- I don’t know if someone I want to talk to would be happy to do so in person at the office, if we both knew we would be available to go on a certain day.
You might be thinking: “this doesn’t make sense: people already talk to each other virtually and can organize days at the office easily”.
Have you factored in costs and habits before making that statement?
- Employees don’t think about meeting in person at the office
They have been forced to work from home, change and adapt to a new norm. Most of them won’t take any action to meet at the office, because they are change-averse or simply don’t think about it. - Discovering if someone is going to the office is costly
In the last 2 years, people have been scheduling virtual meetings for almost every interaction they had, and that is already very expensive in terms of time: agreeing on a meeting, coordinating availability, sending an invite with a join link, etc. This happens multiple times a day. Now, imagine adding on top of that more chat messages to figure out if someone will possibly be at the office on a certain day (long shot nowadays), plus figuring out a physical room to book. Too much effort and it simply does not happen.
Intelligent nudging needed
Let’s summarize the job to be done as follows:
Give employees enough incentives to make days at the office more productive than staying home.
Which means the value of going to the office must be higher than the time, money and happiness wasted to commute, plus the comfort of being home with all its perks.
Microsoft told us that social interactions are our best bet to re-populate workplaces.
However, today, knowing whether someone of interest is going to the office, or would be willing to go at the right conditions, is far too expensive.
Problem 1
Since people don’t ask their colleagues whether and when they will be at the office, how can you, as a Facility Manager, inject that actionable information in the employee’s life, so that you create a very inexpensive occasion to make the meaningful decision of joining that colleague at the office?
Problem 2
As a Facility Manager, how do you bootstrap your way into building enough office presence — critical mass — so that people will start redeveloping the habit of going to the office, because there will be guaranteed meaningful social interactions?
Adding workplace data to intelligent social tools
What if you could leverage workplace information when people are expressing their willingness to get in contact?
Imagine Alice suddenly realizes she needs to talk to Bob tomorrow before the end of the day. She opens her messaging tool and writes a message to Bob to give him a heads up on the upcoming meeting. Bob agrees on scheduling, so Alice opens her email client, creates a new event, opens the scheduling assistant to see Bob’s availability. His schedule appears to be completely busy. In fact, Bob blocked all empty slots in his calendar to be able to work on some important tasks. After a few texts, alternated with glances at their own calendars, the coworkers verbally agree on talking at a specific time, despite Bob’s calendar unavailability. Alice can finally prepare an invitation, add a virtual meeting bridge and get a proactive notification: “Bob is going to be at the office tomorrow and has booked a desk in Building 12, 3rd floor. Would you like to also book a desk near Bob and meet in person?”.
Alice clicks and reserves a desk, as well as adds a meeting room to the invitation. Then, she talks to Bob and tells him that the meeting will be in person instead of virtual.
What does this interaction feel like? I agree with you: it sucks! If you don’t think so, you are probably so used to it that you feel it’s the norm to be treated that way in life… But, let me tell you, you don’t need to.
The problem is not the proactive notification — which is per se a good idea — rather, the convoluted non-linear experience of scheduling a virtual meeting to then, towards the end, after several app switches and texting back and forth, turn it into a scheduled meeting at the office. Let alone the amount of time and mental effort you incur every time you need to talk to someone.
Furthermore, this model becomes a real nightmare when Alice starts changing some of the event parameters: date, time, location, etc. For instance, imagine she booked a desk near Bob, then changed the meeting day. What happens to the desk reservation? And the room added to the invitation? Is Bob going to be at the office on the new date?
In order to avoid getting caught into a convoluted workflow, the proactive information that Bob will be at the office tomorrow has to be injected earlier in the process to set the right expectations as early as possible. However, the earlier in the process Alice books a desk, the higher the probability the event parameters will change before hitting send, thus creating confusion and complexity.
Now, let’s see how things become more linear when we throw Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the mix.
Solving Problem 1
Instead of scheduling, Alice starts an interaction with her Virtual Assistant and makes a wish to talk to Bob for the following day. At that point, the AI replies: “Bob is going to be at the office tomorrow and has booked a desk in Building 12, 3rd floor. Would you like to also book a desk near Bob and meet in person?”.
Alice says “yes” and the AI books a desk for the following day.
Wait… what happens to the appointment and the room? The short answer is: you don’t need them. The following day, the AI will connect Alice and Bob at the right moment for both, and will tell them to go meet at the closest available room.
What if you don’t fully trust the AI and want to schedule everything to make sure you end up talking to Bob in a comfortable room? I would not do it, but you can. And it’s better than the previous case, because Alice is now leading the conversation with Bob having the physical meeting in mind right from the start of their interaction.
Solving Problem 2
Imagine Alice wants to talk to Bob and Charles, Bob wants to talk to Donna and Charles, Charles with Ethan, and Ethan with Bob and Alice. Each of them receives a notification stating that “several other people (listed) are likely to go to the office on a certain day”. The notification invites the receiver to book a desk. Bob takes on the suggestion and books a desk, then the others are notified of Bob’s booking and invited to reserve a desk, too.
Isn’t this a faster and cheaper way to build critical mass than offering free lunch on certain days. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that is advantageous for all the parties involved, as it delivers on their most important need: knowing if someone of interest will be at the office, or willing to meet there.
This is a certainty that free lunch days are not able to provide.
Your best choice
In conclusion, should you reduce the footprint, implement Hot Desking and Hoteling and incentivize people to go back to the office, or should you stick to a conservative approach whereby you just incentivize people without messing up with their workplaces?
If you paid attention to what we have discussed, the answer should be obvious.
In order for the AI to proactively propose workers to book workplace resources based on planned presence, planning capabilities must be offered by the return-to-office solution. In other words, if Bob is not able to book a desk, the solution won’t have the data needed to proactively suggest Alice to also make a reservation.
With old-style workplaces, you can’t extensively capture the employee’s intention to go to the office. Likely, you only have room reservation data, which is not enough.
How many free meals and other office perks do you need to provide to foster an uncertain inefficient return to office? Plus, once the employees will get used to the perks, won’t they pretend them forever?
I have a feeling that embracing innovation will be cheaper and much more effective, as always!
