The festive period is often a time of reflection. As December rolls around, we're sometimes haunted by the ghosts of Christmasses past. Of years when the office was festooned with tinsel and the wistful tones of Mariah Carey echoed around the departmental kitchen. This can go either way, of course. You might feel a touch of nostalgia for the years when reindeer sweaters were de rigueur at your Friday morning accounts meeting. You may, on the other hand, shudder at the memory of an office Christmas lunch of lukewarm turkey and soggy sprouts. Either way, this time of year has a habit of focussing the mind on the issue of RTO - the "Return To The Office".
At 9-2-3, we've long expounded the benefits of hybrid working - enough quiet time to get your head down and make real progress on a project, but enough communal time in the office to ensure that you can bounce ideas off colleagues. It's how we've chosen to work ourselves; we've loved wrapping up warmly and gathering from all corners of the country this week in Regent's Park for a walking meeting in the fresh air. But as you probably know, not everyone feels that they've found the right balance. Many larger corporations have in the last couple of years ramped up the pressure on their people to return to the office for an increasing number of days, or even full-time. Their argument is often that in-person working is important for creativity and team building. That it's necessary in order to make sure that teams work together effectively to deliver their services or drive their organisations forward.
A new study released last month, however, might make for uncomfortable reading for some management teams. Research from Gartner has shown that, far from encouraging co-operation between employees, increased in-person working may actually have damaged it. The proportion of employees who were satisfied with collaboration in their workplace has in fact fallen from 36% to 29% since companies started the push to return to the office. Moreover, data collected by Gartner shows that "hybrid and remote workers are consistently more satisfied with collaboration than their fully on-site peers". Why might this be? And does it matter?
Well, there's evidence to suggest that employees who are satisfied with their collaboration with colleagues achieve better work outcomes on average. At a basic human level, relationships, including working relationships, are vitally important to all of us. A metaphorical cheer for a job well done, or a helpful suggestion from a friendly colleague can brighten our day. A meeting where people go off on unhelpful tangents can, conversely, leave the most patient of us gritting our teeth. We spend a huge proportion of our waking hours at work, and it can be tricky if we're feeling ... well, at best, a bit lonely at work and, at worst, frustrated by difficulties in connecting with our co-workers. It's easy to see how a lack of rewarding collaboration might leave workers feeling dispirited and unhappy.
Perhaps the secret is not that we need to create a greater number of in-person interactions with our colleagues, but that we need to focus more on making those transactions meaningful. Maybe we should be working towards high-quality communications, which make our professional lives better, rather than just mundane face-to-face contact. We've all found ourselves on occasion trapped by the water cooler, unable to extricate ourselves politely from a conversation about someone else's weekend of trainspotting. We'd like to pretend that these dealings are bathing us all in a warm glow of endorphins and contributing to team solidarity. The reality, however, is that getting under one another's feet during the working day, when we're all trying to move our own projects forwards, might actually reduce productivity and in the worst cases, actually increase levels of mutual irritation. Once we've set this ball in motion on a wet Tuesday morning, it can be really quite difficult to focus our minds on team collaboration once again.
An off-site team building day or activity, on the other hand, can generate real connections between our team members as individuals, as well as simply co-workers, and can lead to real improvements in workplace co-operation. We've always known this really. Our greatest meetings of minds and best professional partnerships - even pre-pandemic - were rarely built in the lift to the third floor. They often arose from conferences, off-sites and designated team meetings - all things that don't require us to return to the office full time. Let's be absolutely honest with ourselves: the opportunity to build a rapport with your colleagues is likely to be much more effective when you're not simultaneously trying to finalise a client spreadsheet and make reassuring noises to your manager about how you have everything under control. Once we realise that we're optimising for actual relationships, rather than simply contact, we realise that we don't need to be in the same building all week, every week; these connective experiences are much more powerful when they're planned and given protected space in your work calendar. It's unlikely that we'll meet our career-changing professional match whilst trying to un-jam the photocopier. But with a little bit of thought, we're confident that you will meet them. And once you've found the missing piece in your professional jigsaw - the Jobs to your Wozniak, the Watson to your Crick, or indeed, the French to your Saunders - it won't matter where you are.