What companies will expect from their corporate communicators as employees return to the workplace: part 1, the executive team

For the rest of this year – and likely for a good part of next year — one of the priority issues corporate communicators will contend with is the return of employees to their workplaces from the home offices they used during the pandemic.  Having learned to live through one “new normal” – remote work – employees will be asked to learn a second new normal – the return to the workplace, most often in some hybrid form.  Much of the job of helping employees make this cultural and behavioral shift will fall to corporate communicators as they work with three primary internal clients in this situation: the executive team, human resources, and information technology.  In this two-part white paper, we lay out what these internal clients will most likely expect of corporate communicators and what communicators can do to meet those expectations.  In part 1, we look at the expectations of the executive team.

The work of the executive team

The major task for the executive team in this situation is providing guidelines for who to bring back to the workplace as well as when and how to bring them back.  For some organizations, the “who” is everyone in the workforce. About 20 percent of organizations plan to bring all workers back to their physical workplaces and have them work there all of the time (Deloitte, April 2021).

For most organizations, the “who” is more complicated.  About two-thirds of organizations say they will use a hybrid model for their workforces.  Some employees will work at least some of the time remotely (Deloitte, April 2021).   The executive team will need to promulgate the rules for who will work remotely all or some of the time, who will need to be on-site all of the time, and how frequently those who mix on-site and remote work need to be on-site.

In developing these rules, the executive team will need to consider the needs of the business as well as the needs of employees.  As Amy Edmonson of the Harvard Business School (HBS) points out, remote work makes sense to the business for independent tasks where “knowledge is codified and can be easily shared from a distance.”  Remote work does not make sense when “tasks are interdependent … require sharing tacit knowledge in fluid ways” and when “coordinating the tasks is not scripted and predictable” (Gerdeman, March 8, 2021).

Along with the company’s needs, the executive team has to consider employee needs to safeguard their health and well-being.  HBS’s Joseph Fuller puts it this way:  employees will “expect not only the right to determine the adequacy of workplace safety measures, but also expect employers to consider their individual circumstances, like caregiving obligations, when designing their roles and evaluating their performance” (Gerdeman, March 8, 2021).

In balancing company needs and employee needs, the executive team should articulate clear, fair standards that middle management can implement and employees accept. Devising strategies to gain employee understanding and acceptance of the standards and rules will be one of the most important jobs of corporate communicators.

So far, that job has not been going well.  According to a McKinsey survey, 40 percent of employees surveyed say they haven’t heard any detailed vision from senior management about what post-pandemic work will be like, and 28 percent say what they’ve heard is vague.

Effective communication makes a difference.   When employees believe their management team has communicated its vision well for a post-pandemic workplace, they report being nearly twice as productive as employees who don’t believe the vision has been communicated well.  Moreover, employees who believe management has communicated remote-relevant policies well say they are nearly five times more productive.  Lack of communication has other negative consequences: it is causing anxiety in half of workers surveyed, a well-known drag on work performance; and it is contributing to employee burnout (Alexander et al., April 1, 2021).

Concerns that senior executives and employees share

When senior executives think about who they are bringing back, they also worry about their employees’ continuing relationship with the organization in a hybrid structure:

• Will they stay connected to the company’s culture? That’s a concern of 32 percent of executives in a DeLoitte survey
• Will they maintain high performance? That concerns 26 percent of executives
• Will they collaborate effectively? That’s a worry among 19 percent of executives surveyed
• Will they feel they are treated fairly? That worries 13 percent of executives (Deloitte, April 2021).

Employees share a number of these concerns.  For example, while nearly half of employees in a recent survey say they do feel connected to their company while working remotely, 45 percent report that they feel disconnected.  The good news is that 70 percent of employees – including remote workers – think management is doing a good job of maintaining the company culture during the pandemic, giving management an A or a B.  But workers also believe managers can do more to strengthen the culture, which they see as management’s job.  In fact, most remote workers – 85 percent — believe their managers are responsible for connecting them to the company culture, while 80 percent see that as a specific responsibility of senior management (“American Workers Survey,” March 2021).

To carry out that job, management can:

• Provide more remote-work resources to employees (42 percent)
• Update policies to match the new realities of work (33 percent)
• Increase communications from senior leaders (30 percent) – a task that will involve communication leaders in devising the right strategies to do that.

At the same time that senior management is figuring out who to bring back, management will also have to determine when and how to bring them back.  For the roughly 20 percent of companies that are bringing all of their employees back to the workplace, the “when” means as soon as early summer, though fall may be more likely, and the “how” can mean everybody back at once (Maheshwari, May 19, 2021, updated June 1, 2021).

While the communications under an “everybody back now” scenario might seem simple, research results suggest they are not.  Kimberly Merriman, along with her colleagues David Greenway and Tamara Montag-Smit, found that employees need to know more than where and what time to show up.  They expect a compelling, clarifying rationale for the decision.  So far, many of them say they are not getting such a rationale.  And when they do get a rationale, the “explanations sometimes felt confusing or insulting” (Merriman et al., May 24, 2021).

The more likely return scenario, especially for companies following a hybrid model, has employees coming back in waves.  In fact, one group of advisors suggests that senior managers be prepared to develop a number of scenarios for returns “based on where mission-critical work takes place” (Moats and DeNicola, N.D.)  That dictum, of course, implies that senior managers need to figure out what their mission-critical work is and then be able to communicate to their employees their reasoning for selecting some jobs and tasks as mission-critical and others as not mission-critical.  As we often hear from employees and clients, it is not enough to tell workers the “what”; they also need to know the “why.”

Communications under the wave scenario become even more complex because, within each wave, employees go through different psychological phases, each of which has its own communication needs.  While there are a number of ways to model these psychological phases, a Middle Eastern company used a simple three-part structure when returning employees to their workplaces at the close of the pandemic.  Employees first experience “endings” of their current way of working (because working remotely had become normalized), then a “neutral zone” between the old and the new, and then “new beginnings” as they adapt to new ways of working when they return to their workplaces (Joni, April 23, 2021).  Each phase has a different communication objective, set of messages, and tactics with the overall goal of helping employees feel safe (and productive) about going back to their workplace.

If all that sounds too complicated for an internal communications program, consider the results of this case compared to the survey results cited above.  Ninety-six percent of employees (and the company has more than 50,000) feel well informed about the company’s Covid-19 protocols and measures, while 99 percent feel that the company’s response to the pandemic demonstrates the company’s values.

After all, as Moats and De Nicola observe, “Re-acclimating an onsite workforce will present an enormous change management challenge for executives, who will need a communication strategy that can help employees who are returning to the workplace, as well as those who continue to work remotely, embrace a shared vision of what comes next.”

Next: communication needs of the HR team and IT team

References

Alexander, Andrea, De Smet, Aaron, Langstaff, Meredith, and Ravid, Dan.  April 1, 2021. What employees are saying about the future of remote work. McKinsey & Company.

Deloitte. April 2021. 2021 Return to Workplaces Survey.

Gerdeman, Dina. March 8, 2021. COVID Killed the Traditional Workplace.  What Should Companies Do Now?  Working Knowledge: Business Research for Business Leaders, Harvard Business School.

Prudential Financial. March 2021. Is this Working? Pulse of the American Worker Survey: Special Report.

Judge, Coni, PhD.  April 23, 2021. The Psychology of Communicating COVID-19 Throughout the Pandemic and During Return to Office/Site and Future of Work. Case Study.

Maheshwari, Sapna. May 19, 2021, updated June 1, 2021. Back to Office at Saks Means Mandatory Vaccines, Optional Manicures.  The New York Times.

Merriman, Kimberly, Greenway, David, and Montag-Smit, Tamara. May 24, 2021. Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office. Fast Company.

Moats, Maria Castañón and DeNicola, Paul. N.D.  Returning to the workplace after COVID-19:  What boards should be thinking about. PwC.com.

Vasel, Kathryn. May 17, 2021. Why some companies want everyone back in the office. CNN Business.