Arrogant CEOs face pushback over return to the office
“Go with your gut.” Isn’t that what they say?
Well it turns out your gut might not be the best decision maker as quite a lot of managers are finding out.
You may have missed a story this week about how well (or otherwise) companies and their managers had handled the process of getting employees to return to work.
We all know what a great job technology, vendors and partners did in helping companies shift to working from home during the pandemic but it seems the attempt to reverse that trend might not be going quite so smoothly.
According to a report from a company called Envoy, 80% of bosses regretted how they had handled their return-to-office decisions and would have done it differently if they had access to workplace data to help their decision making.
Which, I suppose, shows some measure of self-reflection, even if it is quite some time after the fact. Turns out that if you listen to your gut you might end up with something more difficult to digest and more painful.
As Envoy CEO and founder Larry Gadea told CNBC: “Many companies are realising they could have been a lot more measured in their approach, rather than making big, bold, very controversial decisions based on executives’ opinions rather than employee data.”
Executive opinion over employee data. Interesting. Not quite as revolutionary as it might first appear though because he’s not advocating paying attention to employees as such, more the data about them.
Still it’s always refreshing to hear that executive opinion should not be treated as sacrosanct.
In the same CNBC story, Kathy Kacher, president of Career/Life Alliance Services who advises executives on return-to-office plans, didn’t pull any punches. “Many organisations that attempted to force a return to the office have had to retract or change their plans because of employee pushback, and now, they don’t look strong,” she said. “A lot of executives have egg on their faces and they’re sad about that.”
Hopefully, the egg on their faces wasn’t one they’d eaten earlier but one they were in the process of eating.
In any case, however sad they are it’s not quite as unhappy as the employees who were under pressure to return to work because of those decisions when they didn’t want to and knew, deep down in their gut, that it didn’t make sense.
No doubt bosses were nonplussed that employee resistance to their return to office policies was far more intense than expected. While pausing briefly to observe that it’s amazing how often that happens with the decisions made by bosses, it’s clear there’s a benefit of giving them better information to base their decisions on.
They could just ask, of course. But the story alludes to another factor that may have stimulated companies to try and force employees back to work: the cost of the office space they were renting but not using because their people were working from home.
Turns out some businesses would rather fill their offices with unhappy workers to justify the cost of renting those offices than let employees work from home. They didn’t ask because if they had, they might have heard employees telling them that they were happier working from home.
Maybe those bosses and companies were so busy listening to what their gut said because they didn’t want to hear what their employees might tell them.
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