Back in the Office? Here Are Three Rules to Keep the
Peace
As team
members stream back to the workplace, don't expect life to resume where it left
off two years ago.
BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN
There are probably at least a dozen good
reasons for folks to look forward to getting out of their houses, off the Zoom
calls, and back to the office. But none will be more important than the
long-awaited return to those time-honored and ritualistic
"watercooler" conversations. These critical daily pipelines for the
most current, direct and valuable dissemination of the gospel, gossip, and
goings-on of any business are, without question, the most effective purveyors
of connection, engagement and company culture ever invented. In most companies,
more substantive and actionable information generally flows back and forth
during such sessions than in any formally organized meetings -- where no one
wants to be too outspoken, too woke or not woke enough, or too far ahead of the
pack. Meetings these days make mainly for consensus, wasted time and mediocrity.
Forget about Teams and Slack as well. They may
be handy for real-time messaging and short alerts, but they're sterile, noisy
and cluttered environments largely drained of real interpersonal connection and
emotional engagement. These uncontrolled channels quickly turn into sewers of
specious sentiment, woke wars, and podiums for the loudest, most voluminous,
and most pedantic voices in the conversation.
There's simply no good alternative to getting
the juicy tidbits directly and personally right from the horse's mouth. That's
why word of mouth (WOM) is still the most credible, authentic, and valuable
endorsement and recommendation vehicle that businesses can employ to get their
messages to their employees and out to the marketplace. In a word, WOM works
best at work.
While millions of Americans have largely given
up on the mainstream media as a source of objective truth (thanks to Trump and
his misfit minions) we still basically want to trust the folks we work with
every day to give us the straight scoop. Pre-pandemic, the peer-to-peer,
face-to-face workplace was the best place to be - and to be seen and heard -
because we trust the people that we know and with whom we spend most of our
daily waking hours. Even more importantly, the work environment serves a
curatorial and collective function for us. We know where our friends,
peers and others are bound to be found, and we know when they'll be there and how
to readily access them. All of this reliable regularity, of course, is now
entirely up for grabs.
It's already clear that the office environment
will be considerably different than our fond and nostalgic memories of the
places we left. One thing for sure: discussing politics in the office is a no-win proposition,
a waste of breath, and bad for the business as well.
Given the substantial time that we've all been
homebound and imprisoned in carefully filtered online information bubbles,
we're going to find it challenging, upsetting and highly revelatory when we
leave our own little echo chambers and Covid-19 clans to get back to the work
world. We'll reacquaint ourselves with seriously changed old friends and
somewhat unknown new ones; and immediately get a strong dose of the new
realities. As much as we all think we've just been cooped up in suspended
animation for two years, we've all had very different experiences - mostly bad
- and they've left scars, sour spots and a lot of tender sensibilities.
The common ground, the shared views, and even
the water cooler conversations simply aren't going to provide the safe spaces
they once did. Word of mouth is going to have to work even harder and in
dramatically circumscribed circumstances. Management is going to have to
quickly and clearly set out some new keys, rules of the road, and frankly some
limitations (freedom of speech notwithstanding) on what are going to be genial conversations in the
"new" world of work.
I'm not simply talking about pronouns although, even there, most of
the world doesn't understand or appreciate what the constantly shifting
appropriate protocols are and why, apparently, it's no longer proper to even
ask. In a world of pronoun-denominated name tags, the next step may have to be
warning signs we all wear (like convention badges) outlining the matters and
topics we'd be pleased to never discuss at the office. This
turn of events may be good for sports fans (arguably still a safe topic), but
it's gonna be hard on most other day-to-day social chatter.
We're going to have to carefully rebuild and
restructure the water cooler conversations because they're the heart of the
information sharing systems, and those informal sharing systems are how we
develop, build, and sustain our trust in and comfort with our peers and others.
Ultimately, it's that basic trust that's the fundamental foundation of all the
commercial interactions we have with - and all the business we do with - each
other. If simple trust and social sharing disappears, there's very little left
upon which to form the common bonds and connections we need to make our
commerce systems and our society work.
So, the question really is what should the new
rules of the road be and how should they be implemented in a way that doesn't
simply cause new and different problems? If you're a business aggressively
trying to (a) get your people back to business and (b) trying to keep them from
spending inordinate amounts of time every day arguing with each other about
things that don't mean a hill of beans to the business, here are a few thoughts
and suggestions.
First and foremost, focus on the few. Only
about 10% of your team members are the most active sharers - they're
well-intentioned, think they're being additive and helpful, and they can't
really help themselves. These are the folks who make it their business to mind
other people's business and they're the ones that need to be reminded that the
office is no longer the place for too much chatter about sensitive subjects.
Second, create a better, structured and finite
outlet for the discussions. In the hybrid world we're looking at, it's not
enough to say that we need your body at the office three days a week, rain or
shine (or something like that), because that doesn't really make much sense to
anyone. It's much better to offer a concrete reason to return and to say
something like we're having a regularly scheduled "educational" event
- every week or every other week - and we want you there to listen and learn.
You don't have to agree with the speaker, you don't have to participate in the
discussion, and you don't have to be convinced of anything. But this is
the exclusive forum, time and place in which we are now addressing many of
these kinds of complicated and contested concerns. Take it or leave it.
Finally, and this is the hardest question,
decide whether, why and how your company is going to express a position on some
or any of these hot-button issues given that you can be absolutely certain that
there is ZERO unanimity across your entire workforce on any of these matters.
If Disney still can't figure out how to do these kinds of things, maybe
discretion is the better part of valor for you and your business - at least for
the moment.
APR 12, 2022
The
opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of
Inc.com.