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Your return-to-office announcements are missing the mark: Here’s how to get them right
While there is no singular right way to communicate return-to-office announcements, there are many wrong ways. We’ve seen five strategies work effectively.
October 25, 2021Communication is the key to success as leaders navigate the unsteady return-to-office phase. We recommend that leaders have a thoughtful, open, and two-way dialogue with employees to help collectively shape the solution, but there’s more to it. While leaders are starting to have these conversations, we have also seen return-to-office announcements that entirely missed the mark.
Many announcements to date have been rule based, inflexible, and have treated remote work as a perk, rather than a pandemic necessity that proved to be quite successful for many. The rigidity of communications anchored in policies can feel highly transactional and undermine employees’ sense of being valued—one of the primary factors driving 40 percent of employees to report being at least somewhat likely to leave their current positions in the next 3-6 months. Indeed, we heard from several executives that, within a couple weeks of their announcements, they were seeing increasing rates of attrition, particularly amongst new parents and BIPOC employees.
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Four ways communications can engage employees on the return to workplace journey
Talk the walk, and walk the talk.