There’s not much that was good about COVID.  It did, however, force us to address a very different disease that was permeating our working lives: presenteeism.  Suddenly forced to accept home working, bosses realised that it’s not where you work that counts.  You can be idle just as easily when you’re sat at your office desk.  And you can be industrious just as easily when you’re at home.  It’s all about your output.

But five years on, businesses are waking up to the unintended consequences of home-working.  Employees have become increasingly blinkered, focusing on what is right in front of them.  And herein lies the problem: their job is not their “To Do” list; their job is to ensure the success of the business they work for.  Whilst ticking off tasks is certainly an important part of that, it is far from everything, and the more time our attention is focused on our checklist, the less time we spend looking at what else is going, connecting the dots, collaborating, innovating.  Our own effectiveness might drop from 100 to 70 in a noisy office environment, but the act of us being in the office raises everybody else’s, as unplanned serendipitous interactions spark creativity, and rubbing shoulders with colleagues keeps the culture alive.  The office is a living, breathing organism – it needs real-world connections to survive and to thrive.

Little wonder then that businesses are starting to put their foot down, with the big American banks – Goldmans, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley – leading the charge in requiring five days a week in the office.  And now Amazon is following suit, with 2025 heralding in five day-a-week in the office, a policy sweetened by a 10% pay rise.

But there are risks inherent in such an approach.  Bribes may work in the short term but their effectiveness wears off, and threats of pay or promotions freezes feel draconian.  Neither work for those – often women – in search of a better work-life balance, who are increasingly voting with their feet.   And indeed some have little choice, either because the cost of daily commuting plus lunch mounts up, or because they have moved away, and can stomach one night a week in a hotel, but any more just isn’t viable.  A recent Personio survey, based on 2,000 workers and 1,000 HR decision-makers in the UK, reported that 40% of desk-based workers would resign if forced to come in for more than three days a week.

Rather than introducing ‘comply-or-goodbye’ dictates, a better way is to win over hearts and minds.  The starting point is to examine your beliefs around why people need to be in the office.  There are plenty of ‘good’ whys: collegiality, collaboration, culture, creativity, cultivating talent.  But there are more questionable whys, such as ego and status needs, and not wanting to see expensive office space sitting empty.  The worst whys are micromanagement and lack of trust: remember that shirkers are shirkers whether they are in the office or not and, if you don’t trust your people, consider managing them out rather than sitting them on the naughty step.

Then assess what the right number of in-office days is for your business, and Segal’s Work Wheel is a helpful tool.  It considers how well each business-critical task is performed at home versus the office, combining the two to derive the optimal combination.

For example, suppose your business has six dimensions for effectiveness (1). Consider how effectively you operate in each when working entirely from home: you might score the ability to focus uninterrupted on Reading and detailed Spreadsheets very highly, but the scope for Serendipitous Interactions less so.  Mark a dot on each spoke at the appropriate point and join them up to get your Home Work Wheel (2).  Then repeat through the 100% office-based lens (3).  By spending our time at home on those tasks nearest the Home Work Wheel’s rim, and similarly for our office life, we will be very effective indeed (4).

And now it’s easy for a business to design and communicate a logical hybrid policy.   By simply weighting each spoke according to its importance for business success, we can work out the theoretically ‘correct’ number of days to spend in the office.  And this might change as the business, or one’s role in it, evolves.

The beauty of this approach is two-fold.  Firstly, it forces a logical thought process based on the drivers of business success, rather than more emotive factors.  And secondly, its clarity enables the rationale behind the policy to be easily communicated, so important in achieving employee buy-in and winning over the hearts and minds of dissenters.

How We Work – Working Mindfully

Thinking about how our people work as well as where they work is just as important in achieving increased productivity.  Another of COVID’s workplace legacies is that we have got sloppy, particularly around differentiating between jobs that are “urgent” and those that are “important”, as discussed in Stephen Covey’s ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’.  Categorising tasks into quadrants based on their urgency and importance enables us to identify those urgent but unimportant tasks that are diverting us from the important, non-urgent work which drives innovation and takes businesses to the next level.

This lack of discipline has spilled over into meeting culture.  Essential during lockdown, internal meetings have become an ingrained bad habit, draining time and energy.  But the solution is simple with the adoption of three tenets:

Attend Fewer: Limit attendance to essential participants only. Too many attendees dilute the focus, and active participation decreases as more people join.

Make Them Shorter: Be really clear about the purpose of the meeting, with a thoughtful agenda.  If there is a lot to cover, hold two shorter meetings instead.  And finish when you’re done.

Run Them Better: Invest time in really good, crisp pre-reads and allocate time at the start of the meeting to allow people to look over them. Have a strong chair who sticks to the agenda and facilitates everyone’s contributions.  And get the format right: virtual for task-based discussions, in-person for sensitive conversations and avoiding hybrid at all costs: they are notoriously difficult to run and remote joiners do not have an equal footing.

But with much of the urgency around tasks and meetings created by those higher up the organisation, is there enough psychological safety for juniors to challenge the status quo?  That’s where having a great workplace culture comes in.  Respecting our employees as individuals, be it where they work and how they work, will pay dividends in well-being and loyalty, leading to increased productivity and long-term business success, in 2025 and beyond.