If your policy on the days people need to be in the office isn’t working, here’s why.

In the book “Four Levers of Corporate Change” (Brill & Worth) a chapter describes six forms of power in the workplace. The forms of power are:

Formal: The authority that comes with your position in the organisation such as CEO.
Coercive: The authority to bring people into line through negative means such as the authority to fire people.
Expert: The power that comes from having a particular expertise that is valued.
Referent: The power that you give someone because they are valued by people you respect, such as accepting that someone is a good leader on the recommendations of others.
Moral: The power that comes from a greater imperative such as providing the best customer service.
Relationship: The power of choosing to do things for our friends and the colleagues with whom we have, or wish to build good relationships.

One of the critical points about these forms of power is whether they align people to produce organisational change, and if they don’t, alignment for change becomes difficult. Policies on days of work and sanctions happen to sit within formal and coercive power and of the six forms it is these that do not align people for change.

While formal power is essential for some things in a business, it only creates alignment if it can be shown to serve people’s interests and produce impressive results. That provides one major insight into why formal policies alone are not working to bring people back into the office — people feel their interests are better served working from home especially if working from home is producing those impressive results in productivity.

Using coercive power to encourage people to come in (a threat, passive or active, of adverse consequences for not doing so) can make matters worse — producing resistance — the opposite of alignment. If equivalent organisations have greater flexibility the threat to the organisation of losing people in these circumstances becomes real.

So just depending on those is likely to leave you in a sticky situation.

The other forms of power are more successful in creating alignment for change. For example, the expert power of epidemiologists and doctors as well as the moral power of caring for the greater good of society have been essential and highly effective in aligning populations to change their day-to-day behaviour during the pandemic.

If you think about your organisation’s informal, rather than formal organisational chart, you will see more of the cohesive culture that the four other forms of power can create. Positive relationships, people feeling appreciated and respected for what they bring, and being part of something they value, allow your organisation to change and develop. This informal organisational chart is created by getting to know each other, laughing together, learning from other’s expertise, knowing who to refer to for what skill that may have little to do with the formal organisational chart (e.g. who is best at fixing the printer without calling IT). From these forms of power, organisations have the networks and trust that enable development and change. Without these, work becomes a purely transactional relationship and turnover tends to be high.

I have seen teams in the new normal who are going into the office five days a week because they enjoy being together — relationship power. But that nevertheless is not enough to keep people in the office.

In a previous article on medium.com, Shifting Not Drifting Into Hybrid Working, I wrote that once research has shown that productivity has not dropped while working from home, leaders and managers need to articulate the purpose for being in the office in ways they have never had to do previously. The team just mentioned are coming in every day because they “want to do great work together”. Their purpose is clear. They want to do great work (purpose) and they want to do it together (use the power of their positive relationships to achieve).

This is why putting on lunch or activations that do not have a particular meaning aren’t the answer. These are thoughtful activities but may only bring employees on the days these activities are offered without creating an ongoing ripple effect into the workplace if they are unrelated to organisational purpose.

During the ongoing emergent changes that COVID is bringing, the purpose of being in the office needs to be clear and articulated in two ways.

The first is purpose for coming into the office in relation to the goal of productivity. This may vary according to the role of individuals and teams, or the needs of the particular project being undertaken. From this perspective the number of days in the office may be different across the organisation and even within each team or project depending on the nature of the work.

The second is the purpose of coming into the office to create the cohesive culture which leads to success as an emergent by-product.

Here, in terms of hybrid working we are in unchartered territory. During COVID lockdowns, the most successful organisations were those that put effort into maintaining a cohesive culture remotely by bringing teams together, ensuring that managers and employees were chatting, encouraging employees to be in touch with each other, and having the IT that made this very easy. They worked hard on the four forms of power that align people during change. But our “experiments” weren’t long enough to know how well this could be maintained in the long-term, especially when the mind and soul of the organisation is now likely to have moved back to the office as people have returned to it.

It is therefore easy to see why the leaders of many organisations see a purpose in employees coming into the office at least three days a week to maintain a cohesive culture even if they could meet productivity goals at home. We don’t yet have the research to know how many days in the office are required to achieve a cohesive culture but trying to achieve it remotely and centrally at the same time will be a hard ask.

What we do know is that during COVID lockdowns, employees who had been part of the corporate culture for a long time had the cultural understandings and established networks and relationships that transferred to remote working. However for new employees this was not the case. For managers, on-boarding and integrating employees into a culture is harder to achieve remotely. For employees too, they lose the capacity to meet and greet and simply absorb the culture by being present in the office environment. It is the informal organisational chart that makes us feel at home.

We also know it takes a lot of effort to maintain a corporate culture remotely over time. This is evidenced by the challenge of keeping remote working teams (e.g. surveyors), and more remote offices aligned with corporate culture. The difficulties of this become apparent when change is required. At this point the different perspectives that have grown over time become more obvious and more difficult to align.

We are currently in shifting sands, with employees now legitimately questioning the need to be in the office when productivity is high and work-life balance improved at home. What remains critical, is for organisations and their employees to shift their approach to hybrid working in considered ways, relating their decisions to each aspect of organisational purpose — the internal need for a cohesive culture as well as meeting productivity goals. The advantages of this will be manifold, driving your company forward in a COVID and very new post-COVID world.

Carey Glass is an expert in change with ease. Her work is based on the simple reality that change happens all the time and is not new to organisations or their employees. She works with individuals, teams and organisations to harness their own capacity for change rather than impose change upon them. Her coaching has been cited by Harvard University’s Institute of Coaching and is particularly effective in limiting the number of sessions required. She is co-editor of the international journal InterAction, devoted to adaptable and flexible approaches to individual, team and organisational change in complex environments.