Are we doing return-to-the-office all wrong?

You know what the world doesn’t need? Another article hand-wringing its way through the pros and cons of making people return to the office. Companies mostly like it. Employees mostly don’t. And the jury still seems way out on what the return-to-the-office will look like in the long run.

The reality is many of us are going back to the office a day or two each week for the foreseeable future. So the question isn’t, “Should we?” It ought to be, “Are we doing this right?”

Spoiler alert: No.

Take the all-too-typical case of Matt. When the pandemic and lockdown were in full swing, Matt moved his family to the outskirts of the city where he could afford a larger home with a separate home office and a yard for his newly acquired dog. It was truly making the best of a bad situation, and Matt and his family have grown to love their new neighborhood.

Then the major, major tech firm where Matt works insisted everyone come back into the office three days a week. So now he spends about five hours a week in a hypertension-inducing commute, while laying out $170 a week for parking, coffee, and lunch. That’s harsh, but the truly sad part of this story is what Matt does when he gets to the office — in his words, “pretty much exactly the same thing I was doing at home.”

Indeed, Matt spends the better (or worse, actually) part of his day on Zoom calls, meeting with colleagues who work in different cities, who are immunocompromised, or who have just decided not to come in despite the employer mandates. 

Since return-to-the-office requirements became commonplace, the use of video conferencing platforms has actually experienced an uptick according to Calendly.  In April 2023, 64 percent of meetings set up through the appointment scheduling software included videoconferencing or phone details, compared with 48 percent a year earlier.

Having people do in an office what they could do at home — especially an office that’s not all that easy or affordable to get to — makes as little sense as it sounds. And, yet, this is the M.O. in countless firms.

We recently fielded a survey asking if workers felt their team was taking advantage of their time together under the same roof. More than two-thirds — 69 percent — said they’re basically doing what they used to do remotely before return-to-the-office, while the remaining third felt their teams were, in fact, taking advantage of their proximity.

Is your team taking good advantage of your return to the office or are you pretty much doing what you used to do remotely?

Doing what we used to do 69%

Taking advantage of proximity 31%

If you’re going to ask people to do something they regard skeptically, shouldn’t you at least gain some benefit — and shouldn’t they? In other words, if you’re going to bring people into the office, doesn’t it make sense to very intentionally plan to have them do productive things together they can’t do nearly as easily via Zoom?

One of those activities that would take advantage of employees’ proximity would be in-person, interactive training sessions where the members of the team can collaborate, role-play, practice, and learn in the same cross-functional ways they’re doing their work. 

Learning how to apply a design thinking approach to brainstorming and vetting solutions is possible remotely thanks to tools like Mural and Figjam. But “possible” isn’t the same as “desirable.” And those digital whiteboards are no substitute for sitting around a table with your colleagues, jotting ideas down on Post-It Notes, and building rough prototypes out of Legos, modeling clay, and other dimensional, very real-world materials. 

Adding some fuel to this fire is a 2022 article from Insights, the online magazine of the Stanford Business School. An article subtitled, Why Virtual Meetings Generate Fewer Ideas,” references a study done at Stanford that showed in-person teams generated 15 to 20 percent more ideas than their virtual counterparts working on the same problem. The article explains, “People who meet in person get creative stimulation by visually wandering around the space they’re in, which makes them more likely to cognitively wander as well.”

Another learning situation where it makes sense to bring people together in the same space are training sessions designed to help team members become better presenters. Unless you imagine every presentation going forward will be on Zoom, and not in a conference room, there’s a lot lost when you can’t practice and observe each other in an in-person environment.

A final advantage of spending time together learning in person is vividly demonstrated during every Zoom meeting or workshop. At the beginning, everyone waits till the last possible second to sign on. At the end, they disappear just as fast. The point, it seems, of a Zoom session is to end the Zoom session. 

When you’re assembled in a room to learn something new, the tendency is just the opposite. People hang around, talk about the new skills they just picked up, and — on occasion — use their enhanced knowledge to start throwing out possible solutions to projects in the works.

Brainstorming, learning, learning to brainstorm, and the indefinable benefit of face-to-face social interaction are all advanced when you do them during your return-to-the-office time. That’s when to focus on the collegial parts of your work life, and save the more isolated, one-on-one action for those work-from-home hours.

Here’s an intriguing way to test this concept. Schedule an in-person workshop where the facilitator will introduce you to the methods of conducting a design sprint. Then use that session to come up with ideas for how you can maximize your time under the same roof. 

Being more intentional about what you all do when you’re together, and taking advantage of the power of proximity, could actually win some people over to the value of coming into the office. Let them Zoom from home. But let them excel together when at work.

Larry Asher is the director of the School of Visual Concepts, a professional development training center that's been helping designers and marketers advance in their careers for more than 50 years. SVC has led in-person and remote team training sessions on design thinking methods, presentation skills, creative brief writing, and copywriting for Amazon, Nestle, Starbucks, Brooks Running, Zillow, Microsoft, the University of Washington, T-Mobile, and many others.