How To Make Your RTO Plan Not Suck

But to us, the "here or there" dichotomy of it all feels like a vestige of a bygone era.  One that fails to see the forest through the trees.  Because the question shouldn't be are my people in or out of the office (or some combination of both), instead it should be:  what are the best solutions to set my business up to thrive and grow?

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If you're looking to answer this question for your company, we've found a few very practical steps can help:

• Define the "why":  Where are you trying to take your business and how do you plan to get there?  Within that, determine the purpose -- and desired outcome -- of people being either in or out of the office.  Your answer to that question becomes the basis of everything -- from when and how you use your space to the behaviors and ways of working that will create your desired outcome to the rituals and tools you need to enable it.  For example, if your business success is dependent on more efficient cross-functional partnerships, you may want to leverage your office space for community-building and networking.  This would look and function very differently from a business focused on improving their client service, which may prioritize its physical space for client working sessions and otherwise encourage its people to work from wherever they can best serve their clients.
• Establish the behaviors:  It's our opinion that far more important than where your people work is how they work; and whether those ways of working enable your business to achieve its objectives.  Your behaviors and ways of working should be explicitly defined based on what is needed to get your business where it needs to go, not unintentionally or haphazardly established based on how the group generally operates.  Depending on your business circumstances, you may need to define new behaviors from scratch or re-define what already exists.  Plus, think about how to embed them as new norms through the rituals and tools needed to make them happen.
• Test and learn:  Many companies are making the mistake of doing their RTO planning behind closed doors and then making big announcements of the final plan to their employees.  This approach is a great way make a lot of people very angry.  A better approach is to test and learn.  Trial your plan with a pilot group of employees, collect their feedback, iterate the plan.  Do this multiple times.  Contrary to popular change management practices, no one is requiring you to have all the answers at once.  In fact, our experience has shown that employees are desperate for the chance to be part of finding the solution with you, even if it means working through ambiguity.  Your employee population is essentially a giant, free focus group.  Use that to your advantage and bring your people along the journey with you -- this will build greater buy-in as you go and result in less friction once the plan is finally established and launched.
• Be prepared to change again:  As the pandemic served to remind us, things change and often in ways we can't control or anticipate.  Whatever your strategy and approach to RTO, don't think of it as a rule set in stone.  Be willing to pivot in ways small or large, depending on any number of factors (business performance, market demands, advances in technology, etc.).  Your RTO plan is not a destination point, but merely a point in time that should reflect your current business needs.  As those needs change, so too can your plan for where, how, when, and why your people do the work they do.

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At the end of the day, there is no "right" or "wrong" answer for RTO planning -- just the answer that's best for your business and your people.  If you need help figuring out what that is at your company, you know where to find us.