Why Your Office Became a Deserted Campfire And How To Repopulate It
Hurry! You must fill up your office as quickly as possible, before the fire goes out.
Dear Human Resources or Facility decision maker, it is no news that, in this hybrid work era, if you are lucky, your office occupancy rate is around 13–15%.
And it is also known why: people don’t want to incur the cost of commuting for an uncertain return.
While a Microsoft Research validates everyone’s hunches by unveiling that people don’t want to go to the office because there aren’t colleagues they need, there is a serious shortage of solutions to healthily balance the trade-off between:
- Saving remarkable Real Estate cost (the second largest cost category in any organization) by downsizing the office footprint,
and
- Fostering the desired company culture throughout the workforce (the largest cost of any organization), thus maximizing its productive output.
Why is your office a campfire?
There was a time when people used to go to the office to work. But today, employees discovered they are more comfortable and productive at home, and most of them have no intention to go back, at least not every day.
Since home is where the heavy lifting happens, why do you still need an office in the first place?
In order to make your human resources productive, they need to be aligned, both culturally and in terms of goals.
Having people at the office has many benefits for the organization (including employees), among which:
- Fast ramp up — New hires can reach proficiency faster by learning from others, while developing precious relationships.
- Career bost — High performers have the chance to make their extra effort noticed, and be motivated by meeting the bosses that matter to them.
- Alignment — leaders may spread their messages effectively, establishing relationships with more people, and directing their efforts towards the desired goal.
Given the fact the heavy lifting is happening from home, your office assumed the function of a campfire; it is the place where young tribe members get to know the leaders and gurus, they make themselves known, they understand what is right or wrong, they understand what is happening in their world and how the tribe will react to environmental changes — whether by “hunting, fishing or farming”.
Is it the place where you celebrate achievements together and comfort each other in times of trouble, strengthening bonds and mutual trust, which is key to success.
It is the place where your company culture is shaped faster and more effectively than anywhere else.
Cost of not knowing
With the 2020 pandemic, the occasions of meeting a wide variety of folks at the office reduced to nearly zero, focusing people’s interactions on their own team, which sometimes branched off its own subculture, reducing cross-pollination of ideas, and awareness of what is going on in the rest of the organization.
“Not knowing” the organizational context and other teams did not help with motivation, and made people belong to a small part of the organization, rather than a cohesive whole.
For the above reasons, the consequences of having empty offices are harsh, especially for a large enterprise. For example, I bet you heard about “quiet quitting”.
How to make sure people go back to the office?
Where free lunch days fall short
Are you afraid of making it mandatory to go to the office 2-3 days a week, because people would leave the company?
If the answer is yes, you probably don’t work for the largest tech giants that can afford paying a premium to retain their workforce.
So, you decided to empower employees to make their own choice to go or not to go, and you tried to entice them to return to the office with all sorts of perks, among which are the very popular free lunch days.
However, you have learned that perks are not enough to compel employees to take action, because it’s not guaranteed the people they need to talk to will be at the office on the same day. To make the decision to go, your employees need:
- Precision
They need to exactly know who will be at the office on a certain date, and possibly even at a certain time. Today, the only common way to do so is by chatting/talking with everyone you would potentially be interested in meeting. How long would it take to assess other people’s presence “manually” on a weekly basis? One full workday perhaps? People will never do it. - Certainty
Hearing statements like “I usually go to the office Tuesdays and Thursdays” is not enough. There is still a considerable risk of going to the office and not finding the person you need. The more explicit the commitment to go, the better. - Critical mass
There are certain colleagues for whom a motivated employee would go to the office in a heartbeat (e.g., a top manager). However, for the large majority of people one or two relevant colleagues are not enough to beat the convenience of staying home. So, the more people at the office, the higher the likelihood others will go — it’s a positive feedback loop.
Roadmap to repopulation
Reaching office critical mass and triggering a self sustaining reinforcement loop will require precision, certainty and low-to-no additional cost for the employee to obtain the information needed to decide whether it is worth going to the office on a certain day.
Step 1: Stop wasting money on free lunches!
You already know that, after the initial hype, free launch days don’t work. The value of a $15 meal is an order of magnitude lower than the perceived cost of commuting.
I suggest repurposing the lunch budget and use it to acquire information technologies that would increase the employee’s perceived Return on Commute (RoC).
Step 2: Embrace Workplace Management Technologies
How much Real Estate money can you save without affecting employee productivity? What kind of layout and space mix would maximize savings while accommodating collaboration needs? How do I accurately know if someone will be at the office on a certain day?
These are just three of the many questions a Workplace Management solution is able to answer.
The more pervasive the Workplace Management solution, the more actionable data available to make decisions.
Particularly valuable are desk and room reservations, because they contain the information that certain people will be at the office on a certain day, satisfying the precision and certainty requirements.
However, Workplace Management technologies alone are not enough because they are not designed to deliver precision and certainty to an employee, right at the moment when a decision to go to the office should be made.
Step 3: Adopt an AI-driven Digital Serendipity solution
How can you deliver precision and certainty about relevant colleagues going to the office, with low-to-no additional cost for the employee making the decision to go or not to go?
According to Google’s dictionary, serendipity is “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way”.
We define Digital Serendipity as “the occurrence and development of events by apparent chance, engineered by leveraging actionable user and telemetry data, in a happy or beneficial way”.
By leveraging on Workplace data (e.g., reservations), complemented by the intention to communicate with someone, it is possible to effectively engineer serendipity.
Very simplistically, when Alice expresses the need to talk to Bob next week, the workplace management system provides Bob’s upcoming space reservations for next week and the AI suggests Alice to go to the office on certain days for a better in-person experience.
AI-based Digital Serendipity tools are better than classic collaboration tools to capture the intention of communicating with someone, and present proactive serendipitous suggestions at the most appropriate moment, to maximize the value for the end user.
Why Artificial Intelligence is better than your current tools
You might be thinking: “ok, proposing someone to book a desk is a dumb use case, why do I need AI for it?”.
The reason lies behind the following question: “Through which application and when would you deliver a serendipitous suggestion to go to the office?”.
Let’s start by looking at common ways to figure out the intention of an employee to talk to a colleague, and see if the related tools are suitable to serve our target use case — proactive suggestion to go to the office based on someone else’s planned attendance:
- Sending an email or an instant message (IM)
Very often, emails or IMs are used to coordinate availability for a live conversation. It is a viable channel to intercept the need to communicate and proactively suggest going to the office. However, you need Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is AI, to be able to extract the user intent and act on it.
- Scheduling a meeting or a call
When someone is scheduling a meeting or a call, it is feasible to suggest going to the office and have that meeting in person. However, the experience is far from optimal and adds complexity to an already clunky process. Imagine Alice spent time chatting with Bob and agreed on meeting on a certain day/time; then, she created a new invitation, set date and time, wrote title and body, added a virtual meeting link, and only at the end of the process she added the recipient. At that point, the email client knows who the recipient is and could look up possible space reservations, suggesting to have the meeting in person and perhaps finding a suitable room. Now, if Alice agrees on booking a desk near Bob’s, the scheduling workflow would digress to perform the reservation. Once the latter will go through, Alice would probably have to edit her invitation to reflect the in-person meeting— which means she would have to waste more time. It’s a non-linear error-prone experience that leverages on a well known tool (calendar), and disrupts its well-rooted core scheduling workflow. People, already tired of scheduling, would see the proactive suggestion as a time-consuming distraction. - Calling
While it is hard to imagine how a proactive suggestion to book a desk would be injected in the process of making a regular phone call to someone’s number, it is easier to envision how it would work during point to point calls through soft clients or collaboration devices with high resolution soft interfaces.
Making a call is a clear indication of the need to talk to someone, however, it usually indicates the need to talk right now, rather than in the future. With calls being disconnected from future time frames, it is impossible to plan office visits based on them.
The ideal Digital Serendipity experience
It is a known fact that the Virtual Collaboration industry is converging on leveraging AI to automate tedious tasks such as scheduling meetings or focus time.
An AI that reshuffles your calendar, books time for you to work on a task, and notifies you about focusing on that task when the time comes, provides a serendipitous experience.
However, many of the currently available AI solutions fall short for the following reasons:
- Calendars have been proven to hinder collaboration, especially in a hybrid work setting. Too many meetings limit productivity and push people to work overtime.
- Workers manually book focus time and AI calendar management tools can’t reshuffle events effectively.
The best serendipitous approach that would allow capturing the intent to talk does not rely on the obsolete concept of “calendar”, instead, it makes the latter useless — as it should be.
For many calendaring tools, AI is just an afterthought. But when the AI captures someone’s wish to talk to someone else as the core input, then the expectation is for the AI to fulfill that wish in an automated fashion, outside of any traditional “scheduling” workflow. At that point, the experience becomes linear, because the AI itself drives it along the most appropriate “line” (or workflow), without digressing from legacy use cases such as scheduling a meeting through your calendaring application.
I know you may argue that complementing Outlook with Digital Serendipity would offer a lower resistance path for your employees, who already spend a great deal of time in that application.
However, imagine what productivity boost you would get from eliminating much of the scheduling (and scheduled meetings) from every employee’s life, in favor of faster impromptu communications happening at the right moment, with the huge side benefit of driving people back to the office.
Isn’t it worth a shot?
