Why return-to-office mandates don’t guarantee more collaboration

Originally posted on The Horizons Tracker.

There’s a strong sense that the high profile calls back into the office have given the impression that the Covid remote work boom has ended, and while remote work isn’t anywhere near the levels seen during the pandemic, the hybrid work that many employers are settling on is an attempt to strike a balance between the autonomy that employees crave and what employers believe are the benefits of on-premise work.

What are those benefits? For many, things like collaboration and other forms of human-to-human interaction have been cited as the key factors behind the return to office calls. Research¹ from INSEAD explores whether simply being in the same physical space is sufficient to support these things. Indeed, it questions whether employees even know how much or how well they interact with colleagues.

Types of relationships

The researchers explain that most of the relationships we have at work are aptly described as acquaintances. They’re not our friends, but we engage with them sufficiently often to have forged a certain kind of relationship. While these may be thought of as weak ties, and therefore less important, they have actually been shown to power collaboration and innovation.

This power is because they give us access to ideas, knowledge, and networks that we might not ordinarily have. This has obvious benefits in a work context, especially as such ties don’t require as much time and effort to maintain as close relationships.

Such weak ties are characterized by more random encounters, such as the ubiquitous water cooler moments, where we unexpectedly bump into colleagues. They don’t tend to be relationships we actively seek out or block time for. The very nature of these unexpected encounters can make it hard for us to truly appreciate their value, or indeed, understand how often they occur.

The INSEAD research shows that we often fall into the trap of believing that these encounters are far more frequent than they actually are. It’s a finding that the researchers believe may undermine employers’ return-to-office mandates, as we believe interactions happen more often than they do.

Small world

It’s a phenomenon the researcher refers to as the “small world illusion”, which he explored via a number of experiments to better understand how accurate our perceptions of encounters with acquaintances actually are.

Participants were asked to name the acquaintances and close connections they had at work, before then estimating how often they saw them in a typical week. The results show that we consistently overestimate how often we see people we know at work, but, importantly, this is far more likely with acquaintances than it is with close connections.

The researcher then looked at the dynamics in the typical workplace. Volunteers were asked to list the colleagues they regularly interacted with. Each person was then categorized as either a stranger, an acquaintance, or a close friend, with the number of interactions per week with each person also included.

Lack of connections

Interestingly, people generally don’t have many close connections at work, and certainly significantly fewer than they do outside of work. As before, people also regularly saw their weak ties less frequently than they imagined they did.

Subsequent experiments suggest this could be due to the availability bias, which is when we assume something is more common when we can readily recall examples of it. In other words, when we think about encounters with colleagues, we’re more inclined to remember the times we did see them than we are the (more frequent) times we did not. This also meant that we’re more inclined to overestimate the likelihood of getting support from our colleagues.

The results provide a timely reminder that simply initiating a return-to-office mandate isn’t going to magically improve collaboration or company culture. Organizations need to be far more intentional than that if those ends are to be achieved. What’s more, without meaningful changes, those lacklustre returns will sit alongside the very real harm return-to-office mandates cause among a workforce that generally dislikes them.

What to do

What should organizations do to overcome this? The results clearly show that managers need to be intentional in terms of providing employees with opportunities to mingle, whether that’s through overt exercises that bring people together or the provision of more informal opportunities to engage with colleagues.

Culture is also going to play a big role, as employees need to feel comfortable in asking for help from others, while also being rewarded for giving it.

When we overestimate how often we interact with acquaintances, we can develop a false sense of security about the strength of those ties. This can result in a lack of effort made in sustaining those relationships. It’s a situation that’s compounded when both sides feel the same way, resulting in a gradual withering of the bond, even when both parties want to maintain it.

The importance of casual interactions and weak ties is well established, so it matters when they aren’t maintained. The INSEAD results highlight that while return-to-office mandates are designed to ensure this doesn’t happen, it’s a process that is unlikely to achieve those results unless managers take active steps to help people connect more effectively. If we leave it to chance, we may fail to achieve the gains that face-to-face working can bring while also baking in the harms that come from removing people’s autonomy over where they work.

Article source: Why Return-To-Office Mandates Don’t Guarantee More Collaboration.

Header image source: Created by Bruce Boyes with Microsoft Designer Image Creator.

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