Navigating Office Returns: Harmony or Hostage Negotiation?

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Marisa Eikenberry
Welcome back to the Long-Distance Work Life. We help you lead, work and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Marissa Eikenberry, a fellow remote worker. And joining me is my co-host and remote work expert Wayne Turmel. Hi.

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Wayne Turmel
Hello. That would be me. Hi.

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Marisa Eikenberry
So as we're recording this, it's actually early January. This is, you know, our first full week back to work. And something that we're hearing a lot of right now is about return to office. And it's popping back up on the scene and lots of different people are having lots of different conversations around this. And unfortunately, it's not going for the better.

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Marisa Eikenberry
So, Wayne, overall, how is return to office going right now?

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Wayne Turmel
I'm trying to think of the correct word and it's it's on a spectrum. It's not a dumpster fire. It's not quite a car wreck unless you consider a minor fender bender. A car wreck. It's somewhere on that spectrum. We're actually going to have an interview or two about this over the next few weeks. But I think that return to office is going okay and could and should be going a lot better, frankly.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right. I was going to say, I think we can both be in agreement on that. I know one of the things that I keep seeing as I flip around on TikTok or I'm on Instagram or, you know, wherever it is like hangout, that companies are actually starting to increase the number of days per week in the office and up to and including having no remote work days at all, or it's four days a week, which makes some people go, okay, why bother?

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Marisa Eikenberry
And so do you think we're starting to see remote work going to the levels that it was pre 2020?

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Wayne Turmel
It's not quite at those levels. The latest numbers that I've seen is in the industries where remote work is possible, Right. It's about 33% remote work, whereas before the pandemic it was under 25.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Okay.

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Wayne Turmel
So it has at least what we are seeing. And I am desperately trying to rein in my cynicism and also the desire to say, I told you so. What we are seeing is that the return to office was not a plan so much as a hostage negotiation.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right. You had to be like there was no choice.

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Wayne Turmel
Right? They were like the employers were saying, we want you back in. And the employees were saying, you know, if you push too hard, I will quit. And so they kind of negotiated this uneven Stockholm Syndrome thing where it wasn't so much a plan as it was. We can get them in the office so much that they don't quit.

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Wayne Turmel
And that's kind of where it settled.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

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Wayne Turmel
Which which made no side really happy. And time has gone on. And this is the cynical part of me. Not surprisingly, organizations have kind of clawed back the time in the office, you know, until you're down to, well, you can stay home Fridays if you want.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

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Wayne Turmel
Which is not.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Not a.

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Wayne Turmel
Truly effective hybrid work. It's you know, the the the negotiations are going better for one side.

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Marisa Eikenberry
So what do you think is causing this shift to more and more days? I mean, is it just managers being like, I want people in the office and we have a building we're paying for and that's just how it's going to be?

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Wayne Turmel
Yeah, I mean, some of it is. And this is senior leader. It's interesting. It's senior leaders more than it is individual leaders. If you look at the people who want more flexibility, people who are managers in the middle levels were ones to get the benefits of remote work and they saw it and liked it a bunch.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

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Wayne Turmel
And so your middle managers are not exactly leading the charge to come back. As a matter of fact, one of the problems is that the organization and the senior leadership have said, thou shall get your butt back here. And the middle managers are kind of tasked with making that happen, but they're not putting their full back into it.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

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Wayne Turmel
Because they haven't really bought into. Just fascinating to me. So, yeah, I mean, some of this is a desperate desire, partly through just sheer exhaustion and partly because of and the inbred belief that that's the way it is to get things back to as close to the before times as possible.

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Marisa Eikenberry
On this show, we've talked about productivity with remote work a lot, and there are some people that feel like they're way more productive at home and some people that feel like they're more productive in the office. And there's been lots of data and lots of studies that show lots of different things. And you can make the data say whatever you want, but.

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Wayne Turmel
And they do.

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Marisa Eikenberry
And they do. We and we've seen it we've talked about it on the show. But have you have you seen noticeable changes in productivity or employee engagement with this shift back to remote work? I mean, I would think employee engagement might kind of be on the down low if people are mad about it.

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Wayne Turmel
Yeah, it's interesting about that. And, you know, again, where do you get your numbers? Right? So the the best guess is you're looking at the Gartner's, the McKinsey's, the people who are kind of studying this. And you know, McKinsey stuff tends to support the people who are hiring them, which are the managers. But even still, what that is showing is that employee engagement hasn't really shifted.

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Wayne Turmel
And that's because the people who are ticked off about going back to the office are more ticked off. And so they're showing up as less satisfied and less engaged.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

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Wayne Turmel
Percentage of people, it's interesting when they talk about people going back to the office, it's always like, well, they're going to be more productive. What they are is happier because they are extroverts who like having other people around and they're comfortable in that environment. And there's a bunch of people and, you know, the remote work zealots will tell you that they're dinosaurs and will soon be gone.

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Wayne Turmel
And that ain't true. There are people who enjoy working in an office environment and they like work peers, and there is some value to that. Anybody who says there isn't is kind of whistling past the graveyard. There is some benefits to being together. It tends not to be on the productivity side. Right. Unless your work relies on brainstorming and quick problem solving and people coming together, if it's task completion tasks get done and people are left alone to get their tasks done.

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Wayne Turmel
I mean, that evidence was showing up pre-pandemic and it's becoming more and more clear that if you're going to be in an office environment, you still need quiet time protected from, Hey, it's Marissa's birthday, there's cake in the breakroom. We need a break from that.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yes.

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Wayne Turmel
And that has people and this is a whole other show for a whole other day is, you know, if we are going to asses, what should they look like?

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Marisa Eikenberry


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Wayne Turmel
And the cube farm and it as near as we can tell.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right. Well, something else that I've seen, too, is that with some of these companies that are shifting back to, you know, return to office and they might even be doing away with remote work entirely. I know that there was a viral story on Reddit and somebody else does a tech talk about it. And so it's making its rounds again.

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Marisa Eikenberry
But basically their employer had said, you you cannot work from home at all, period. Not the end. And so they were like, okay, well, if I can't work from home, I'm removing teams from my phone and I'm not checking my email or whatever. And then their boss tried to get a hold of them after hours and it was like, Sorry, you told me I wasn't allowed to work from home.

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Marisa Eikenberry
So do you have any thoughts on that? Because I've seen some of this or.

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Wayne Turmel
This gets to something we talked about in the very early days of this podcast, which is this idea of malicious compliance.

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Marisa Eikenberry


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Wayne Turmel
Right. And any time you put a hard and fast rule in especially one that is viewed as punitive.

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Marisa Eikenberry


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Wayne Turmel
Right. And let's keep in mind, we have people who were hired during the pandemic, so they were hired to be remote, and now they're being forced to come in.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Or move.

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Wayne Turmel
Or actually, you know, change their location or whatever. But this idea of if the return to office is seen as a punitive measure, you weren't getting your work done. You were slacking off. You were going to target when you should have been on that conference call. Therefore, we're bringing you in here. You are going to get a negative reaction to that if court move is deemed as punitive.

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Wayne Turmel
The natural response short of actually quitting and, you know, the people that could easily quit and move on have.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, I was gonna say we.

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Wayne Turmel
Can target that initial wave of resignations has has passed and where you are now is people who are complying but darn unhappy about it and therefore will do the bare minimum in order to keep their jobs, which is not what you want. Right. Right. And that wasn't the intent. The idea of return to office is we're going to work together better and we're going to do all this stuff.

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Wayne Turmel
But if the rule is you need to come to the are paying you to be in the office, by definition, you are not paying me to answer calls at my kids soccer game. And so you get what you pay for.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right. Right.

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Wayne Turmel
Now, the other thing that's happening, and this is not a surprise to any rational human being, is that before the pandemic, we had a lot of what I used to call stealth remote. Officially, we were all in the office. But, you know, Lisa's kid is sick, so she's going to take that call from home. I'm working on a project.

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Wayne Turmel
I need to focus. So I'm not going in on Friday. I'm going to stay home and work. And it was never official and it was never blessed. But we know what happened.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, we got like and now going to see a client or whatever, like, yeah. And, you know, even acceptable once we're still.

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Wayne Turmel
Yeah. And now the term that is being and I hate it but nobody invited me to the meeting is what they call backdoor remote. okay. Which is the office has its rules, but if one wants to go work from home, I'm not going to rat on him.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Gotcha. It seems like with middle managers, like they're the ones aren't for employees.

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Wayne Turmel
Yeah, absolutely. And this goes back to the fact that middle managers with a straight face can't look at their employees and say, You have to come into the office because we don't trust you to get your work done when they know that's nonsense. And as a matter of fact, they want to be working from home more often.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right. Yeah, they want. Right.

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Wayne Turmel
And they just can't with a straight face and a clear conscience, enforce these rules. And any time you get unwritten rules, you essentially have no rules. And it's chaos. And dogs and cats sleep there. And, you know, the end is nigh. And this is something that we predicted not. And it doesn't make me Nostradamus. It makes me a cynical studier of human nature.

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Wayne Turmel
There is an obvious overreaction to everything.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

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Wayne Turmel
Right. The overreaction was we have to be in the office. No, I can work from home. I'm not going to office at all. And then there's you have to come into the office and, boy, this feels kind of familiar, and I like it. And it make get my boss off my back. So we're going to have you come back in until they you know, and management doesn't think we notice that that they're doing this and they're wrong.

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Wayne Turmel
So there's a and what we have said all along is that hot work is not simply a compromise. And that's what the next wave is. You have to look at we were not in the office for a long time and now we're back in and some things are better and some things are worse. You know, tasks aren't getting done.

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Wayne Turmel
It's a lot harder to get your focused work done. We have to only hire people who live within 40 minutes of the office, which reduces our talent pool. So as long as we look at return to office as this uneasy compromise and we're just trying to find what's the balance between keeping senior leadership happy and having people not start to quit, it's not going to progress to the next level, which is hybrid work is a different thing.

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Wayne Turmel
And it's not just where people are. It's not just where people work, but when they work. And you have to build in the freedom to have flexibility in your schedule and work when it's most appropriate. And maybe we don't constantly need meetings where people always have to be, Yeah, you can work from home and you can have flexibility over your schedule, but we have four meetings today and you'd better be on them.

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Marisa Eikenberry
All right. And we've talked about asynchronous work before and I'll.

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Wayne Turmel
Be well again. I know we've got interviews coming up to make that, you know, to have that discussion in more depth. So the answer to your question, how's your return to office going is it's going right. I think some organizations are happy with the balance and got all of them. Other organizations understand that we Stacy's, but nobody's really happy and it's probably not the ideal answer.

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Wayne Turmel
And so I'm hopeful that people who are listening to this podcast and and, you know, taking a look at the issue really continuously, continuously and seriously look at how to improve it rather than just going, okay, the bleeding is stopped. And, you know, we like this kind of and think beyond that because that's going to be the next wave.

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Wayne Turmel
And the companies that are successful are the ones who are going to go above and beyond compromise to really thoughtful, intentional hybrid work.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yes, that makes a lot of sense. I know that we're getting close to wrapping up our time and wait. I know that we talked before this, that we wanted to talk about our Long Distance Leadership series. So would you like to take that away before I get into the outro?

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Wayne Turmel
A lot of people think that, you know, we've done remote or we're going back to the office, so we don't need it. But the fact of the matter is that leadership in the age of hybrid work and remote work is mostly the same as it is. Good leaders will find a way to lead, but there are nuances and we have a public enrollment six part workshop that looks at those nuances of remote work.

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Wayne Turmel
I think it's a great idea for individual leaders who want to take the bull by the horns and understand that better as organizations are thinking about how are we going to help prepare our leaders, maybe send somebody from your organization to that to take a look and see if it's appropriate for your team? And I think that it's important and solved built on the cons and the long distance leader, long distance teammate, long distance team that a lot of people on this pod who listen to this show are familiar with.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Thank you so much for sharing that. And listeners, thank you so much for listening to the long distance work life for shownotes transcripts and other resources, Make sure to visit long distance work life Bcom. If you haven't yet, subscribe to the show wherever you're listening so you won't miss any future episodes. And while you're there, be sure to like and review.

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Marisa Eikenberry
This helps us know what you love about our show. Feel free to contact us via email or LinkedIn with the links in our shownotes. And let us know you listen to this episode or even suggest a topic for Wayne and I to tackle in a future episode. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening. As Wayne likes to say, the weasels gets down to.