Should employees be required to return to the office?

Abstract

Expectations for where and when work should take place changed radically for workers through the COVID-19 global pandemic. Now that COVID-19 no longer poses a significant safety threat for the typical worker, executives at many organizations are now expecting their employees to return to the office. The issues seem to revolve around perceived barriers to culture, collaboration, and innovation when employees are not present together in the office. Yet, many employees strongly resist a return to the office. They have experienced well-being, productivity, and autonomy benefits from a remote and hybrid work arrangement. Rigid return to office rules feel outdated, manipulative, and controlling to many employees. In the current article we explore expert opinion on the issues of culture, collaboration, and innovation. Specifically, we ask whether a return to office will improve these aspects of organizational functioning and we outline evidence that leads us to provide an answer these questions. Executives and managers may find these expert opinions useful in their consideration of workplace policies and guidelines for the use of remote, hybrid, and in office work arrangements in their organizations.

Expectations for where and when work should take place changed radically for workers through the COVID-19 global pandemic. Whereas prior to the pandemic, few employees questioned the five-day in-person work week, long commutes to the office, and suboptimal office environments, perspectives held by both management and employees have now significantly changed. One view is that employees proved they could effectively perform their jobs from home during the pandemic. Given this, why should they return to the office instead of maintaining their flexibility? Indeed, many employees report that remote work offers better work-life balance, more flexible schedules, along with improved mental health and well-being. These factors have increased importance to modern workers, especially younger generations, who have as a generation valued sustainability, balance, and well-being. Parents and people in various caregiving roles, as well as those with disabilities and members of marginalized groups, also report benefits from remote work.

During the pandemic, people had an opportunity to adjust to remote work and, psychologically, re-evaluate the role of work in their lives. Was their work purposeful, values-consistent, and meaningful? Why should they spend a significant portion of their lives commuting to and from an office when it is a detriment to their well-being and livelihood, particularly when they might be able to do better work more efficiently away from the office? This dramatic mindset shift across the workforce has generated a strong resistance to return to the office (note: not return to work, which is an activity not a place) and, ultimately, these tensions led to what has been dubbed the Great Resignation, which was fueled by many employees realizing that their current employment situation was a mismatch for their personal values and how they wanted to spend their time on this planet.

Now that COVID-19 no longer poses a significant safety threat for the typical worker, executives at many organizations are now expecting their employees to return to the office. This includes many organizations that previously stated during the pandemic that remote work would be made permanent. This isn’t new. Many remote and hybrid “teleworkers” had been called back to the office before the pandemic. For example, Marissa Mayer, former CEO of Yahoo!, came under fire when she called employees back to the office en masse in 2013 because “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together,” having the “interactions and experiences that are only possible face-to-face” such as “hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings.” HP made a similar move around that time. Post-pandemic, we are hearing very comparable sentiments from many executives. The issues seem to revolve around perceived barriers to culture, collaboration, and innovation when employees are not present together in the office.

Consider these quotes:

“We’re encouraging our people to get back to the offices. We think that’s important to our culture. From everyone I’ve talked to at EY over the past several weeks, the culture is drying up, and firm leadership is desperately scrambling to hold it together.” -EY Global Chairman and CEO Carmine Di Sibio

“Teams tend to be better connected when they see each other in person more frequently. There is something about being face-to-face with somebody, looking them in the eye, and seeing they are fully immersed in whatever you’re discussing that bonds people together. Teams tend to find ways to work through hard and complex trade-offs faster when they get together and map it out in a room.” -Andy Jassey, Amazon’s CEO

“In a creative business like ours, nothing can replace the ability to connect, observe, and create with peers that comes from being physically together, nor the opportunity to grow professionally by learning from leaders and mentors.” -Disney CEO Bob Iger

The above quotes represent a perception that remote work interferes with culture, collaboration, and innovation. They are not an isolated set of quotes. Technology, finance, and consulting firms are often in the media for their concerns about remote work: Amazon, Apple, Citigroup, DoorDash, Goldman Sachs, Google, JP Morgan, Lyft, Salesforce, Starbucks, Twitter, Uber E&Y, KPMG, and Twitter. However, the trend touches other industries, such as entertainment (Disney), law firms (Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP), insurance (e.g., Intact Insurance), education (post-secondary institutions in particular), and governments (Canadian Federal Government) – none of which have been immune to executive pressure to return to the office.

Clearly there is a diversity of views about returning to the office. Views are rooted in highly personalized preferences, experiences, and career and life circumstances. Executives are not the only ones encouraging a return to the office. Many employees (and their leaders) also desire a degree of in-person work depending on a myriad of combinations of personalities, work styles, family situations, commutes, values, beliefs, job duties, and so on. Yet many employees do not want to suffer a commute only to return to the office to sit in eight hours of online meetings (i.e., the “Zoom cage”) that could have been attended from almost anywhere. Many do want meaningful, engaging in-person experiences during some in-office days along with the ability to work remotely/online on days when being in the office is not necessary for successfully completing their work tasks. How to craft hybrid work policies, develop guiding principles that are actionable, and manage the trade-offs of a one-size-fits-all work location policy versus empowering work teams to set their own standards has become a puzzle without a clear answer. As a result, a major concern is that biases, such as proximity bias created by “how good it was when we were all together”, will dominate the thinking and decision-making of those in power to make decisions (i.e., executives and management).

In light of the current debate about returning to the office, this article addresses what appears to be three common areas of concern among many executives related to remote work and their stated motivations for calling employees back to the office. We present these concerns from two viewpoints – the extremes – for contrast purposes. On the one hand, do organizations need to mandate in person interactions to maintain the desired culture, enable collaboration, and support innovation? At the other extreme, does remote work prevent or even represent a real risk to organizations regarding culture, collaboration, and innovation?

We bring together four experts in the area of hybrid and remote work to deliver an evidence-based response to each question. Dr. Cristina Gibson, University Professor and Dean’s Distinguished Professor of Management at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School, is an expert in inclusion, community, collaboration, and remote work. Dr. Lucy Gilson, Dean of the Paul College of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire, is an expert on team creativity and virtual teams. Dr. Terri Griffith, Keith Beedie Chair of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, is an expert in how people come to understand, design, and apply technology in their work, including remote work and teams. Finally, Dr. Tom O’Neill, Professor of Industrial and Organizational Psychology at the University of Calgary, is an expert in organizational culture, hybrid and remote work, virtual teams and leadership, and collaborative intelligent computerized agents. His role is to comment on each topic after the three experts have shared their expertise and to offer a summary response to each of the three questions. Given the myriad of opinions among the public, the over-arching goal of this article is to bring forward evidence-grounded considerations of culture, collaboration, and innovation as it relates to favoring or not favoring hybrid and remote work.

• 1.CULTURE: Do organizations need to mandate in person interactions to develop, maintain, and nurture their desired culture? Does remote work prevent the development, maintenance, and nurturing of an organization’s desired culture?

  Cristina Gibson: Concern over developing and maintaining organizational culture is certainly not new. Scholars have been debating this for decades. It might be useful to stop and consider, what exactly is organizational culture? The leading scholar of organizational culture, Edgar Schein wrote in 1990 that culture is “a pattern of shared basic assumptions invented, discovered or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore is taught to new members of the group as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems.”

  There are some important components of the above definition to note as they relate to the question posed above. First is the emphasis on ‘shared basic assumptions.’ Next, that these correspond to the way people ‘perceive, think and feel’ in the organization. Notice there is no mention of bricks and mortar, physical space, office lay out, or even the proverbial water cooler. Consider also the hundreds of studies that have examined key means of establishing and nurturing culture. One major review of this research classified five approaches to creating an organizational culture (values, stories, frames, toolkits, and categories). For each, the scholars traced answers to the question ‘where does culture come from?’ These answers provide clues as to how culture might be maintained in the face of remote work.

  For example, from a values perspective, culture emerges as founders and executives instill their personal values into the organization. Rituals, practices and artifacts play a significant role too. As an example, Kaiser Permanente Health Care promotes ‘Live Well and Thrive’ for both participating members and employees, and during the pandemic focused on everyday practices at home that addressed personal thriving. The origin of stories tend to be shared experiences, history, and collective memory. The many legends regarding how start ups got their start based on a boy genius are examples of how organizational culture is promoted through stories. Culture as frames emphasizes its origins in ideological traditions such as environmentalism or civil rights, that offer ideas, traditions, and vocabularies. Ben and Jerry’s and Whole Foods are both known for their social advocacy, and this remains true in a virtual environment. A toolkit approach focuses on building culture through particular tactics such as communication strategy or measurement standards. Professional services firms such as McKenzie and Deloitte are experts as using communication tools to promote their culture internally and externally. Finally approaches that focus on culture as categories, emphasize the importance of identity construction, and differentiating one organizational culture from another by constructing a unique identity. The fashion industry is replete with many examples of entrepreneurial efforts that succeed purely based on the identity created, often tied to a particular celebrity personality.

  It is striking that none of these means of developing and maintaining organizational culture mention anything about physical space. This coincides with the view of many enlightened executives, such as Evan Sidall, the CEO of AIMco one of Canada’s largest institutional investors, who stated, “Where you do this work doesn’t matter. There’s some orthodoxies around culture, where people say, ‘you can only preserve a culture if people are in the office full-time.’ I just don’t agree with that.” AIMCo has $163.8 billion of assets under management as of the end of last year, and employees spread across offices in Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, London, U.K., and Luxembourg.

  Yet others are saying that they need everybody back in the office to preserve their culture. But forcing employees back to the office is risky, as CEOs including Elon Musk and Jamie Dimon have discovered firsthand, given the backlash demonstrated when such mandates were put in place. Given the research on the origins and maintenance of organizational culture (focusing on basic assumptions and values, reinforced through stories, frames, and toolkits and identity), is it really surprising that remote work may have no effect on culture? And that eliminating it may indeed backfire?

  It certainly can’t hurt for corporate leaders to pause a moment and consider the impact of remote work on their culture. But based on prior research there is simply little reason to believe that in-person interactions are necessary for building and maintaining organizational culture. In fact, a Gartner survey of more than 4500 employees and 200 HR leaders showed that in- office mandates drove connectedness to culture sharply down. Among employees with “radical flexibility” (defined as considerable freedom over location, schedule, work volume, team, and projects), 53% reported a high degree of connectedness, whereas just 18% of those with low flexibility did so. Alexia Cambon, a principal author of the Gartner study said, “I find it ironic when leaders say they need to bring workers back to the office because of culture. They’re going to get the opposite of what they hope for. Instead of viewing hybrid work as a disruption to the cultural experience, leaders should see it as an opportunity to build culture differently.”

  So rather than mandating a return to work, perhaps this pause for executives should consist of reflecting on how their organization can more effectively shape and communicate organizational culture through values, stories, frames or categories and toolkits to best meet challenges of adaptation and integration? Based on my research, I would offer two recommendations.

  The first pertains to identity. At the crux of cultural origins is identity -- establishing it and sharing it. To be sure, the remote environment could make the culture less obvious (not always a bad thing – it may mute undesirable aspects of your culture!). But that doesn’t have to be the case. Research shows that a clearly articulated identity is defining and directional, helping to reduce uncertainty and increase a sense of purpose. Identities are portable and can be inferred, and strengthened, using a wide range of communication technologies. It is not necessary to share it around a physical water cooler or break room. As an example, although nearly 80% of Salesforce’s 70,000 employees work remotely, they have a strong connection with the Trailblazer culture, instilled through iconic graphic characters that have a rich online biography, each having a special competency that maps onto components of the firm’s identity. Even without a graphic artist on staff, identity can be communicated through meeting rituals, and reinforced through recognition and reward programs.

  A second recommendation pertains to technological agility. My own research indicates that a key for maintaining culture is for remote workers to develop a technology repertoire (e.g., consisting of email, social media, meeting platforms, chat, file repositories), and the agility to shift across these technologies in order to maximize their uses, or affordances. In-person opportunities for interaction are a part of this repertoire but can be used sparingly and strategically to occur at key junctures such as team formation, launch of an initiative, quarterly meetings or gatherings, or at organizational transitions such following a merger or acquisition. During remote work, inventive use of social media such as Slack or platforms such as Teams, are means of helping to embody the desired culture in individual work contexts and behaviors, irrespective of geographic location. For example, Slack can provide ‘pings’ (reminders) to get up from the screen and move in order to improve concentration, circulation, and general well-being in those organizations that value these. Remote work does not prevent the development and maintenance of organizational culture, rather with agile use of technology tools, it may even enhance it.

  Lucy Gilson: At the heart of what is missing in many of the conversations about organizational culture and whether it matters if employees work remotely or in person is the notion of trust. If we trust our employees to produce high quality work, in a timely manner, that meets customer needs, and organizational goals, why should it matter where this work is conducted?

  Recently the CEO of Citigroup (Jane Fraser) announced that the bank monitors worker productivity “and if they’re not being productive, we bring them back to the office.” This is a trust issue. However, it is more than that, underlying this sentiment is the notion of being in the office as a punishment not a means to build a stronger culture. Will bringing those employees who are not productive at home back into the office make Citigroup a better place to work and build a stronger culture? Doubtful!

  What I hear often when remote or hybrid work is discussed is something along the lines of, “everyone is going to want to work from home on Friday.” My response always is, why does that matter? Either you trust your employees are working or you don’t and, if you don’t, you have a culture issue that is far bigger than the question of virtual work.

  How do you know your employees are working when they are in the office – do you monitor who leaves their computer on but takes a 2-hour lunch, is watching TikTok videos on their phone while sitting at their desk, or the proverbial jacket left on the back of the office chair, so it looks like they have just stepped out? What is at issue is a culture of trust. And, while trust can be harder to develop in a virtual setting, there are many examples of organizations and teams that have high levels of trust but have rarely, if ever worked in a face-to-face setting (see examples on what is done at Automattic in the next section by Terri Griffith).

  Interestingly, a recent survey by Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford Economist, found that almost half of the hour a day that employees gained back by not commuting was spent on work related tasks. Furthermore, this time was often spent on planning – a task that is critical to effective performance. This finding runs counter to what many fear will happen when employees are not in the office, i.e. time will be used on non-work tasks, whereas in fact more time is being allocated to work and to a crucial function at that.

  My point is that culture is formed in many different ways – how people address each other, the speed with which emails are responded to, empathy, kindness, the quality of work that gets delivered, and general civility. None of these are in person or face-to-face specific. Making sure that employees spend time together, discuss expectations, plan, and get to know one another are the key ingredients of culture. The takeaway here is that leadership needs dedicated time, leaders need to learn some new skills, and they must be commitment to building a strong culture in the new virtual/hybrid work world.

  Lastly, while I am not worried about sustaining company culture in a virtual context, I am worried about the effects of virtual work on employee well being and on societal culture. Many employees working completely remotely are struggling with fulfilling their relationship needs and feel lonely, and these struggles can have a negative effect on their mental health. When this happens, they are less likely to engage or interact with others in their organizations and, consequently, company culture, the sharing of ideas, stories, and willingness to help and share will suffer. Similarly, at a societal level when employees stop commuting to the downtown areas’ coffee shops, hotels, restaurants, museums, shops, and other businesses close down. With them gone, the downtown social culture evaporates. This culture was what many employees enjoyed about going to work at a physical location – meeting friends for lunch, after work at a bar, comedy club, or museum. So while the organizations work might not be negatively affected by the move to virtual work, the associated social effects are potentially huge and these will ultimately have a negative impact on company culture.

  Terri Griffith: Organizational leaders face tumultuous times. Especially for knowledge workers, shifts in employee expectations, availability of artificial intelligence, layoffs, and other turnover require constant adjustment. As Christina Gibson writes above, maintaining culture requires agility in working with one another. We need to know what the shared expectations are – the target culture – and then be intensely focused on doing whatever it takes to support those shared expectations in our current work location’s context.

  Some fiercely face-to-face organizations found ways to maintain their cultures during the tightest periods of the pandemic shutdown. Major league sports teams supported their team and fan culture through innovations like simulated games and increased communications. Just as top teams adapt their set plays to their opponent’s strengths, these organizations adapted to the shutdown setting while maintaining their focus on culture.

  Dr. Jennifer Chatman and her colleagues found that the value of strong consensus around cultural norms depends on the setting and whether adaptability is an aspect of the culture. Studying a volatile high-tech setting, their research shows greater financial performance in organizations with a strong cultural consensus that includes intense adaptability as a piece of that culture. In cases where adaptability is not an intense focus, firms have higher performance with weaker overall cultures --- though lower than in high adaptability + strong culture firms. My takeaway from these examples is you need to focus on what the culture is or ought to be and that then there are many ways to support that culture and its dynamics.

  Don’t use culture as a scapegoat for dealing with today’s challenges. It’s easy to point to culture as a reason to stay on a given or fondly remembered path. Few organizations have hard metrics for what they mean by culture, so culture offers an easy argument. However, we are all learning better and worse ways to work, and adaptability is more likely where we have meaningful gains to make.

  Be specific about your culture. It’s unlikely that the culture itself hinges only on face-to-face work. Instead, focus intensely on adapting to meet your goals, regardless of your setting, the speed of technological change, or whatever else is thrown at us next.

  Tom O’Neill: At the heart of culture, in its simplest form, is a particular behavior exhibited at a particular moment in time. Behaviors are contagious and serve modeling functions. As behaviors are repeated across people time and space, they spiral into an emerged culture and working within the culture becomes adaptive to the individual players even if the emerged culture is maladaptive and even toxic. Obviously, behaviors happen any place in which an employee works, whether remotely or in person. In fact, choosing a place to work is a behavior in itself – and so is mandating a place to work. Therefore, if executives are finding it difficult to mold the desired culture, my research convinces me that this has less to do with their ability to control physical spaces (which were not ideal work spaces for most employees to begin with) or timing of work (which reduces employee autonomy, ownership, and well-being), and much more to do with not knowing how to mold the culture of the organization through appropriate combinations of in person and virtual values sharing, story-telling, culture building toolkits, culture champions, culture models, culture assessment, etc. At times, maybe they hope for A while rewarding B. In this case, B behaviors become the culture…not A behaviors. For example, by calling folks back into the office they may hope for higher productivity through direct supervisory oversight while actually obtaining presenteeism behaviors that take hold on the culture. A better idea would be to use evidence-supported principles of goal setting (similar to SMART goals). In sum, the simplest of solutions will always appear to be a return to the old ways of doing things (“remember the good old days?”). Unfortunately, this is in fact the opposite of what will likely create the ideal culture that most of us idealize, are drawn to, and want to be a part of.

  Based on the evidence we have seen and created ourselves we conclude the question of Do organizations need to mandate in person interactions in order develop, maintain, and nurture their desired culture can be answered as a definitive “No.” Cultures can be good or bad, alive or dead, safe or toxic whether the workforce has access to hybrid and remote work or not. No return to office is needed in order to create a positive culture.

• 2.Do organizations need to mandate in person interactions to enable collaboration, relationships, and connection? Does remote work prevent collaboration, relationships, and connection?

  Terri Griffith: Silver bullets don’t work. Mandating any particular work arrangement limits success. Collaboration, relationships, and connections are complex interactions with many moving parts. We must acknowledge this complexity and help people (individuals and formal leaders) design work effectively across the available talent, technology, and technique.

  Matt Mullenweg, founder and CEO of Automattic, responded to the question of whether “it’s easier to collaborate and cultivate relationships if you’re physically together” with:

  “I do think the No. 1 tool that people need in 2022 is the ability for people to get together in person. I actually love being in person. I really enjoy it. Meet-ups are a key part of Automattic’s culture. But we’ve found even one week per year of people getting together would sustain them and improve their trust and connection to their colleagues.”

  What’s distinctive about this answer is that he notes that Automattic’s success is not just about being remote – the company has been remote since its founding in 2005. Its main product, WordPress.com, is behind 42% of the web. Automattic’s success is also about being together. Collaboration is a way to reach your target. The most effective collaboration is a combination of choices across talent, technology, and technique, all aligned to the target and the times.

  “Thinking in 5 T” is the term my colleagues and I developed for this combination of choices. Where our talent includes experience with remote collaboration and our technologies support work-anywhere techniques, we have a good start on hybrid and remote work. Challenges arise when the Ts are not aligned with one another. Silver bullets (a change in just one T, no matter how powerful) don’t work as a change in one T needs supporting adjustments across the others.

  Face-to-face collaboration is intuitive for most of us. We have millions of years of experience with face-to-face work and effective combinations of talent, technology, and technique. For many, the capability of full-scale virtual collaboration with real-time document editing, shared calendars, and video-conferencing with colleagues arrived only with the COVID-19 shutdown. We must learn and teach more about how people choose where, when, or how they collaborate. While people are “onboarded” when they join an organization, I find little research about organizations supporting individuals and teams to make remote and hybrid collaboration decisions across the 5Ts. With the pandemic, we had a COF (crisis online format). Now, we have time to offer evidence-based guidance.

  Some organizations are starting this process. Mark Zuckerberg recently posted on the Meta site:

  “Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively.

  As part of our Year of Efficiency, we’re focusing on understanding this further and finding ways to ensure people build the necessary connections to work effectively. In the meantime, I encourage all of you to find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person.”

  I appreciate that Meta tracks its results and treats the issues as hypotheses. However, it would be more helpful to other managers seeking to address these same issues if the statement acknowledged that there are dimensions of collaboration other than physical proximity. Even hospitals and customer service organizations with significant face-to-face requirements are finding ways to collaborate remotely. They do so by thoughtfully considering the target of the work and its context/times (e.g., rural with limited access to specialists, the staffing needs for hands-on work versus administration) as they adjust with fine-grained decisions weaving together talent, technology, and technique. Training, communication platforms, and mindful collaboration decisions are at the heart of successful remote work programs.

  Again, consider Automattic: Automattic is notable in its effort to support collaboration through focused travel and individual blogs that keep colleagues in the loop even though people work apart. Automattic successfully manages onboarding, collaborations, and brainstorming across talent, technology, and technique through these practices.

  Salesforce also demonstrates what I expect is an approach touching on all of the 5Ts. Brent Hyder, President and Chief People Officer shares the following:

  “An immersive workspace is no longer limited to a desk in our Towers; the 9-to-5 workday is dead….we are giving employees flexibility in how, when and where they work…. Our employees are the architects of this strategy, and flexibility will be key going forward. It’s our responsibility as employers to empower our people to get the job done during the schedule that works best for them and their teams, and provide flexible options to help make them even more productive.”

  From his focus on flexibility, architecture, and responsibility, I see his perspective on collaboration as richer than a Silver Bullet.

  Many organizations have the data to help us better understand the right work design for collaboration. For example, in 2021, a team from Microsoft, UC Berkeley, and MIT looked at the anonymized emails, calendars, instant messages, video/audio calls, and workweek hours of 61,182 US Microsoft employees – data available through Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics platform (now Viva Insights). The research team compared collaboration patterns three months before and after the COVID-19 shutdown. The researchers concluded that collaboration became more static and siloed when most workers moved to remote work (before the pandemic, 18% of Microsoft employees worked remotely). Broadly, the researchers found that after the shift to remote work, people increased their collaboration time spent with others in their business groups and reduced the collaboration time spent with others outside their groups. Unfortunately, longer-term follow-on data wasn’t available and therefore it is uncertain how collaboration adapted outside of the first few months of the onset of the pandemic.

  I also miss in this analysis whether the teams had proactive collaboration support. Work design training or suggestions for reflection about continuous improvement in their collaborations would keep options across talent, technology, and technique in mind. If teams were instead left to sort things out independently, it would be easier to understand how teams become inward-focused during this challenging time.

  Copilot, the application of artificial intelligence Microsoft announced as forthcoming within Microsoft 365 and broader Microsoft enterprise systems, may enable individuals and teams to develop their own evidence-based collaboration practices. The Copilot bots may be able to integrate information across skillsets, team calendars, communications, engagement, and location and performance data. If so, we will be better able to draw on data rather than intuition to answer questions like, “given our project requirements, vacation schedules, and team charter, when should our team next get together?” or “given my calendar and team projects for this week, where should I work to be most productive?”

  To enhance collaboration, we should combine empowerment and flexible options with training and background information to support individuals as they decide how best to work. The 5Ts can help by reminding us to evaluate and adjust our collaboration plans given our and others’ talent and the richness of the organization’s technology and technique as we strive to reach our target in the context of our times.

  A closing thought from Automattic’s Mullenberg, “You need great clarity on what your workers are expected to accomplish, and you’ll probably be humbled and surprised by how they accomplish it, in ways that you couldn’t imagine.” By embracing the complexity of work arrangements, organizations can create an environment conducive to collaboration, trust, and success, regardless of location.

  Cristina Gibson: As Terri notes, the operative word across all of these thought-provoking questions about remote work is ‘mandate.’ When it comes to designing work, mandates are rarely optimal and even more rare is the mandate that is successful across all contexts, time frames, and employees.

  A key learning from the pandemic is that when designing remote work, managers need to recognize the variety that exists among their workforce in terms of personal preferences, home lives, and career stages. As documented in my Guidepost piece in Academy of Management Discoveries, the narratives shared with me early in 2020, demonstrated this important element of remote work: there is no such thing as one size fits all.

  Many managers are continuing to support (and even increase) opportunities to work from home. Yet for certain workers, this option creates even more stress and consternation, and has detrimental effects on workplace collaboration. For example, research by Mona Zanhour and Dana Sumpter reports on the particular challenges being remote created for some of the working moms in their sample. But for some employees, and certain forms of collaboration, working from home is an epiphany!

  Truly understanding and embracing the variety of employee needs within the organization’s workforce, and allowing for greater customization and crafting of work is likely going to be an important differentiator in the future.

  Lucy Gilson: When we talk about collaboration and virtual work, we are in part discussing familiarity and that individuals share more information and integrate diverse information more fully when they are familiar with those with whom they are working. Familiarity means knowing things about others’ prior work experiences, work styles, and work strengths and weaknesses (professional familiarity) as well as their outside of work interests, hobbies, and interests (personal familiarity).

  When working in person, familiarity can often times develop organically. We see peoples’ pictures on their desk and know that they went sky diving or have a dog. A comment on a picture can lead to bonding over a common hobby or a shared experience. Similarly, we might see that someone has a notebook from a conference or a certificate on the wall suggesting that person attended a training program or is experienced in a coding language or accounting procedure. What this information does is to extend our off-task knowledge base and gives us a data point on who to reach out to with a specific question. Similarly, while having the same pet poodle might not say anything about how one likes to work, the common bond facilitates asking a question, help seeking, and help giving which all ultimately roll up to collaboration.

  In a virtual context these ‘office’ cues can be less obvious, even more so now that so many of us use virtual backgrounds. Furthermore, we know that virtual work tends to be more task focused meaning we don’t chit-chat, but rather get down to business more quickly. While this is good for simple tasks, it does mean that as work becomes more complex and collaboration more important – in a virtual context – managers need to be very intentional in building levels of familiarity between team members.

  What this means is that virtual coffee breaks, or cocktail hours, are a good thing. They help team members get to know one another, share non-work or prior-work information, and build a shared understating of who knows what. According to SHRM (Society of Human Resource Managers) many organizations started using virtual happy hours to help employees feel connected during stressful times, and quickly found that people not only liked them but that they helped foster a strong sense of togetherness and understanding that results in strong long-term working relationships.

  Where mandating people back to work might help with both strengthening culture and collaboration is when the in-office face-to-face time is actually used for the non-work tasks that build familiarity. We are starting to hear about companies having people back into the office for a shared lunch or a game day. The sole purpose is really to build familiarity, have a shared experience, and not spend the time in the office isolated in one’s cubicle on calls or doing work that could be conducted just as effectively from a remote location.

  What is often mistaken for collaboration is camaraderie, and, yes, while this is harder to develop in a purely virtual environment, it is not impossible. By harder I mean it has to be more intentional. This is one area where my research has led me to conclude that hybrid work is the answer. We have always known that at least one face-to-face meeting helps virtual team performance because team members get to know each other on a deeper level. Hybrid work may well be the best way to build the needed camaraderie. Having all team members in the office at one time but not all the time can be an answer.

  Lastly let me add that when we are worried about company culture in addition to trust, what we are also referencing is how work is structured and jobs are designed. At issue is that many of our jobs were designed to be performed while working in a co-located space. What we are finding however, is that when employees are working from home, free from co-located distractions, many types of tasks get done more quickly.

  Tom O’Neill: I am familiar with a large media corporation operating virtually in the US that is doing “Leader Days.” These days involve bringing leaders together in person on a quarterly basis for events, training, keynote speakers, and side time for ad-hoc meetings (almost like a conference). Less frequently the entire company is brought together in person. Literature on virtual work has ALWAYS advocated for in-person touch points, even if they are rare. As well as for in person team launches. These leader days have been instrumental in keeping leadership in tune with corporate strategy and initiatives even though they don’t require that much in person time.

  Obviously face-to-face work is intuitive for us – we evolved as a face-to-face species. And so it is not surprising that when we are stressed, we might have a knee-jerk reaction and jump to conclusions about the value of face to face interactions. If executives and managers are stressed…a fair response to the stress is to return to old habits – i.e., everyone in the office all the time.

  Also important to realize, although a bit further out than the imminent decisions around hybrid work policies today, is the increasing role of AI in the workplace. Make no mistake - We will be doing our jobs with AI partners as fully-fledged team members as much or more than with humans in the not so distant future. These are and will be computer-based entities – sometimes robotic but often not. Think of ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Microsoft Copilot, etc. We won’t need the physical co-located office to interact with these collaborators. Instead we will just need a computerized device. So thinking a bit longer term, really the co-located office is becoming a thing of the past, and there’s no denying that on a 20–50 year time horizon we will all work in different, most likely non office, locations. Innovative companies and countries will be getting ahead of this curve now, rather than waiting for the competition to capitalize first.

  Finally, although most work was done in office prior to the pandemic and continues to be done that way, there have been many multinational organizations working effectively through virtual means for decades. Academic scientists have been collaborating across geographies and institutions for a very long time – and they have been leveraging electronic communications really since the beginning of E-mail itself. It is important to remember that what happened during the pandemic with respect to working virtually wasn’t new and unexplored wild territory. All that was new was how widespread and quickly it was adopted. Many people and organizations have worked effectively from a distance for decades and it’s not likely to go away. It seems equally likely that fighting it will be an unwinnable and poorly selected battle. When you look at long term trends it is extremely clear that resisting flexible work is just putting off the inevitable.

  In summary, the question of Do organizations need to mandate in person interactions in order to enable collaboration, relationships, and connection can be answered mostly in the negative. Mandating in person office days won’t by itself create an interpersonally-positive environment and many teams collaborate and bond well in remote work arrangement. However, there is no doubt that occasional in person gatherings (even if only quarterly, semi-annually, or annually) can have relational and trust benefits. Multiple days per week in the office, of course, will quickly show diminishing returns and is overkill for most jobs.

• 3.Do organizations need to mandate in person interactions to innovate and generate value from spontaneous encounters (e.g., the “so-called” water cooler issue). Does remote work prevent innovation and value creation from spontaneous encounters (e.g., the “so-called” water cooler issue).

Lucy Gilson: Creativity and innovation are frequently described as key ingredients necessary for organizational success and survival. And while the movies and the media continue to perpetuate the myth of the lone creative genius developing revolutionary ideas – within organizational settings, most creative ideas are generated by groups of people working closely together using an iterative process. But importantly, there is no part of this process that suggests a physical or locational presence is required, needed, or even beneficial for creativity.

Let’s start with the definition of organizational creativity as the generation of ideas that are both novel and useful. Idea generation often starts with brainstorming. Over the last few months, we have all heard managers and executives lament how brainstorming cannot take place because no one is in the office. This is ironic given that getting people together in one room has never been at the heart of how creativity idea generation unfolds. Results from brainstorming studies have consistently shown that while people like generating ideas in a group setting, the most creative ideas do not emerge in live group discussions. In fact, having people generate ideas on their own or using a technology mediated platform results in a greater number of more creative ideas. Why? Because people are often nervous to break with the status quo and propose something that might be perceived as radically different, in-person groups often get dominated by the few with the loudest voices, and convergence to the mean results in everyone agreeing upon the most widely held view (i.e., opposite of creativity). Also, people in groups are notoriously bad at sharing all their unique bits of knowledge and information, deferring instead to hierarchy, personality, and a focus on commonly held/shared beliefs and information (sometimes bias).

Another way that creative ideas are generated at work is through interactions and interruptions. Yet, we are holding onto the belief that interactions and interruptions can only happen in physical locations when we work together in person. Indeed, there is a long-held notion that the proverbial ‘water-cooler’ conversations result in fortuitous interactions that lead to creative idea generation. Framed a different way, what is being purported is that unplanned conversations or interruptions result in creativity. The creativity research literature has provided supports for this, as interruptions can result in linking divergent ideas and bringing together topics that are not usually thought of together, thereby resulting in creative idea generation. The downside to this of course is that no one likes being interrupted at work and in fact most people find interruptions annoying. But why do interruptions only have to happen when we are in the office? Similarly, why does water cooler talk, or ‘chit-chat’ only have to happen in person?

Pre-COVID, water cooler talk and interruptions did only happen in person. But that has all changed with the advent of better communication technology and increased interpersonal comfort with using technology for non-work purposes. Today, one in four marriages happen between people who have met online. Obviously, people are comfortable with engaging via technology!.

From a management perspective, leading virtual teams online is different from in office groupings. While there is a great deal of training on how to use various technologies, there still is limited development of evidence-based training on how to lead a team or an organization in a virtual or hybrid world. Here is where the crux of the matter resides. At their core, water cooler conversations are non-task talk where members can build levels of interpersonal familiarity. To duplicate this for virtual teams, managers need to find ways to schedule these into meeting times and set up opportunities for people to just talk. Similarly, they need to role-model interruptions. Just because you are working off site does not mean I cannot call, text, or reach out and interrupt you. As in person, these impromptu “pings” will not always be well received, but if interruptions result in fortuitous information exchange and creative ideas, then managers needs to simply make them happen.

Terri Griffith: It is fortunate that innovation comes third in our consideration. Culture and collaboration, covered earlier, are foundational to innovation, regardless of location. Lucy Gilson reflects on the mechanics of some of our most iconic innovation actions: effective collaborations at the “watercooler,” in a brainstorming session, or when grabbing feedback from a colleague.

Each activity requires psychological safety to get the expected benefits. For people to make connections, share ideas, and give honest feedback, they must trust that they won’t be punished for their ideas or ridiculed for their questions when collaborating with colleagues.

Psychological safety, a concept developed by Dr. Amy Edmondson at Harvard in 1999 (and "re-discovered” in Google’s Project Aristotle 15 years later), speaks to the need to admit to and call out mistakes for our best collaborations and to take risks as we strive for innovation. Following a rigorous independent assessment, Google listed psychological safety first in its findings of what “makes a Google team effective.” Like each question we’ve addressed so far, location is not a limitation on psychological safety – though psychological safety may take more mindful development in remote settings if people have less history with one another.

Drs. Alexandra Lechner and Jutta Mortlock’s analysis of 16 virtual team members and their leaders highlighted that remote settings were less likely to develop psychological safety organically. As noted in my earlier discussion of collaboration, humans are new to remote work. We still have much learning to do, though one of Lencher & Mortlock’s respondents seems to have nailed it:

“Don't try to imitate normal teams. Instead, be very prepared of [sic] the limitations you have as a virtual team and proactively work on them. What worked well in my last company is that people recognized: while we are all apart, […] we are also all in the same boat.”

Innovation has much to gain from remote work as co-location restricts the talent you have access to. We can increase innovation by building organizations that can leverage the best talent, wherever they are, using technologies and techniques tuned to the target and times. The mix across the 5Ts and a culture of adaptability are the keys.

The phrase, “work is something you do, not somewhere you go,” is often top of mind for me. As I think about watercooler conversations (I can’t recall the last time I saw one) and hallway check-ins, I wonder how our language will change as we build the adaptability for our most productive, powerful work. As individuals and organizations, we need to craft our work from the top down, bottom up, and all around. How will our language adjust to incorporate our innovative work practices?

Cristina Gibson: The evidence clearly and importantly shows that creativity and innovation can and do occur during remote work. One of the earliest observations regarding the benefits of what we then called ‘virtuality’ (i.e., being remote) is that it allows organizations to bring together the best (and most creative minds) regardless of location. This is still true today.

Yet, Terri is absolutely correct that psychological safety is key. Within aerospace teams working remotely on cross-organizational design collaborations, my research with Dr. Jennifer Gibbs found that communication climates (the degree of openness in sharing ideas or views and interacting collectively) within virtual teams made all the difference as to whether diversity across a variety of demographics could be leveraged for innovation. When team members felt comfortable speaking their minds and taking risks in conversation, diversity was positively related to aerospace innovation. The opposite was true when they did not have such a communication climate – the teams were unable to harness the creative power of diversity.

Nearly two decades later, together with our colleagues, Jennifer and I examined global virtual teams in the resource industry that were charged with innovation for operational efficiencies across geographic locations. We found that certain practices resulted in more equitable distribution of ‘air time’ (i.e., turns at talk in online meetings). For example, concerted effort at cross-site relationship building (fostering connections among individuals residing at dispersed sites) ensured that even initially reluctant team members (perhaps due to cultural norms, lack of seniority, or being new to the team), became engaged, and this in turn resulted in more idea generation and overall effectiveness.

This brings us back to where we started – an inclusive culture is critical – and can be built online as well as face to face. Doing so has real benefits for innovation and creativity. As Lucy and Terri both note, it is not where you work, but how well you work together.

Tom O’Neill: Here is a question: how many times did you walk down the hall to a water cooler only for NOTHING to have happened? Or, how many times did you walk to the water cooler only to be drawn into a time-wasting conversation about nothing (rather than being productive at your work station). Anyone working back in the 1980 s or 1990 s tells that story – “I ran into Bob and we discovered a shared interest in X that led to Y.” These salient stories stand out much more than the 1000 s of times we went to the water cooler and nothing happened or time was wasted. Given the data, the water cooler argument for requiring people to be in the office has little merit. Yes, spontaneous encounters occur when people are working in a single location and some portion of those are good. No, it is not impossible to re-create such encounters virtually, with less wasted time in fruitless encounters. Also, this is an imperative per my earlier comments – you’re living in the dark ages if you don’t understand that remote and hybrid work through technology is the future (e.g., integration of AI in work processes and interactions with other humans), and as a result you will fall behind the competition by ignoring this fact.

When we talk about innovation we are talking about solving increasingly complicated problems in a VUCA world: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. Practically, this means that solutions to modern and future problems are more and more opaque. It means specializations become increasingly deep. This calls for communications and knowledge exchanges across disciplines and experience. It should go without saying that doing this will require new ways to bring the best most specialized minds together to solve problems. Since these minds will be increasingly hard to find, they will necessarily be geographically dispersed. Companies at the forefront of problem solving, innovation, and generating valued-services with a future market will almost by definition need to be largely virtual. As such, as a competitive innovation advantage virtuality will increasingly become not just a luxury or privilege but a necessity. What astounds me is there is nothing stopping organizations from experimenting and preparing for this future now.

Based on our own research and research we have seen, we conclude by answering the question Do organizations need to mandate in person interactions in order to innovate and generate value from spontaneous encounters (e.g., the “so-called” water cooler issue) as a “No.” Innovation happens across time and space everywhere and with increased specialization, access to expertise will in fact hinge on remote connectivity. We do agree that we need better technologies, systems, and cultures that help generate valuable spontaneous encounters for remote and hybrid workers. But we anticipate this will be resolved in the near future.

Conclusion

In the current article we bring together four experts to comment on the question of whether bringing employees back to the office will improve culture, collaboration, and innovation. This question was inspired by many articles in the mainstream media citing executives who viewed a return to office as a solution to complex issues. We conclude, broadly, that culture, collaboration, and innovation are only at best weakly correlated with the place of work (and probably not correlated at all). Therefore, the place in which work activities are completed should not be considered in isolation of the larger socio-technical system in which an employee is embedded. Whereas there can be good contexts to do work in a co-located work arrangement part or all of the time, there can be good contexts for remote and hybrid work arrangements. Changing the work arrangement alone is not a panacea for solving an organization’s problems. A broad, coherent, strategic approach to talent management and human resource management using a systems view will yield much more valuable insights into the optimal design for work performance, including its location.

Further Readings

Allen, T. D., Golden, T. D., & Shockley, K. M. (2015). How effective is telecommuting? Assessing the status of our scientific findings. Psychological science in the public interest, 16(2), 40-68.

Gibson, C.B., Dunlop, P., Majchrzak, A., & Chia, T. (2022). Sustaining effectiveness in global teams: The co-evolution of knowledge management activities and technology affordances. Organization Science. 33:3, 1018-1048.

Gibbs, J.L., Gibson, C.B., Grushina Y., Dunlop, P. (2021). Understanding orientations to participation: Overcoming status differences to foster engagement in global teams. European Journal of Work and Psychology, 8: 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2020.1844796.

Gilson, L. L., Maynard, M. T., Jones Young, N. C., Vartiainen, M., & Hakonen, M. (2015). Virtual teams research: 10 years, 10 themes, and 10 opportunities. Journal of Management, 41(5), 1313-1337.

Gilson, L., O’Neill, T. A., & Maynard, M. T. (in press). Handbook of Virtual Work. Edward Elgar Publishing, UK.

Griffith, T.L. & Alpert, D. (2022) Creating concrete visions with augmented reality, Research-Technology Management, 65(5), 34-43, DOI: 10.1080/08956308.2022.2093081.

Griffith, T.L. & Mangla, U. (in press). Virtual collaboration: Human foundations augmented by intelligent technology. In L.L. Gilson, T. A. O’Neill, & M. T. Maynard (Eds.), Handbook of Virtual Work. Edward Elgar Publishing.

O’Neill, T. A., Hambley, L. H., & Bercovich, A. (2014). Prediction of cyberslacking when employees are working away from the office. Computers in Human Behavior, 34, 291-298.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors have no conflicts of interest associated with the current manuscript.