Ask a Trainer: Should My Organization Support Permanent Remote Work?

In this week’s Ask a Trainer guest post, Neha Lagoo Ratnakar offers advice for how organization development professionals can help shape remote workplace culture.

Dear Neha,

My company, like many companies, has been working remotely for more than a year now. Leadership is currently trying to decide whether to allow employees to continue working remotely into the future, even after the pandemic is over. On a personal level, I’d like to be able to work remotely. However, I’m also the organization development manager, so on a professional level, I’m wondering how it will impact company culture if we’re all remote. What considerations should I keep in mind as we make this decision?

You hear a lot of discussions these days around hiring for culture add instead of culture fit. I agree with that approach, because culture is an ever-evolving beast, and every new employee adds to the richness of company culture. But there’s one exception in my mind, and that is the ability to work remotely. Remote work should be seen from the lens of culture fit. It’s something that talent management professionals, and talent acquisition teams especially, can play a major role in. Asking questions about how job candidates stay on top of their work in a remote setting, or what their biggest distractions are when working remotely, can help make sure that anybody you bring on board is a good fit for a remote work environment.

I’m a big believer in hiring the right people and then letting them do their jobs. In this new work world that we’re seeing, there’s no place for micromanagers. If you can’t trust your people to manage their time and have that drive from within to get their work done, it’s not going to work. So, the right hiring is very crucial.

As more and more people are getting vaccinated, many companies will have a choice to either open their offices or continue working remotely. Companies are starting to debate what the right strategy or mix should be, and it all boils down to choice.

I was reading a Harvard study that surveyed 20,000 people around the world, in which they measured the motivation levels of people who work from home versus from the office, and they plotted them in terms of whether they had a choice about where to work from. The most motivated group was the group that worked from the office but had a choice about where they wanted to work from. This was very closely followed by people who worked from home and had a choice to go to the office if they wanted to. Now, these are the people who had a choice. When people had no choice in where they worked, the difference was enormous. The motivation levels of the people who either were stuck at home or were working in the office all the time and did not have a choice were the lowest.

Going forward, if companies want to keep people engaged, they’ll have to let them choose where to work from. It boils down to treating employees like the adults they are and giving them the power to decide. The role that talent development and organization development professionals can play right now is to influence management to create policies that respect this choice. That will help companies maintain their culture and keep employees engaged and motivated.

Learn more from Neha about creating strong organizational cultures on the ATD Accidental Trainer podcast. Her episode will air on April 7, 2021.

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