NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

So Your Team Is Back in the Office. Now What?

The reason behind the return-to-office movement is simple: you can’t build culture in the cloud.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

Jan 26, 2026

 

As the business world becomes increasingly virtual, with an estimated 35 million folks working from home, it’s critical to make sure that whatever in-office interactions still do take place are meaningful and effective. This applies not simply to customers, clients, partners and other visitors, but—even more importantly—to your own team members as well. In addition to being offered a good reason and a compelling explanation as to why they need to be physically in the office to get their jobs done, your employees need to find an active and alive operation going on and a powerful and positive environment rather than the quasi-morgues and silent shells which too many offices have become. Ordering your people back to the half-empty office so they can sit at their desks all day staring at their screens and doing Zooms is a culture and morale killer.

To be clear, there are plenty of good reasons why the troops (especially the younger employees) should be present more often than not. You simply can’t build a sustainable culture or a committed community online and you can’t replicate the serendipitous collisions, watercooler conversations, and other synergies that are a crucial part of the day-to-day activities, and which form a significant and informal portion of any organization’s internal communication channels. You can’t build culture in the cloud.

While Zoom and Teams teleconferences may get the job done in terms of distributing updates, facts and figures, no one would claim that they’re anything more than sterile and mechanical forums where there’s nothing in the way of actual, person-to-person, emotional connection or empathetic communication. The fact is that the more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate. Even the best tech distances us instead of bringing us closer together. In fact, on a remote call, you can’t even be sure that all the folks “attending” are even working full-time for your business. You might just as well be talking back to the radio or TV.

Staring for any significant period of time at a digital checkerboard of tiny faces or profile pictures is a painful and soul-sucking experience. You can’t generate any passion, energy or even see any clear audience reaction, so there’s absolutely no feedback loop or way to determine whether your jokes are landing, your arguments are hitting home and resonating with the group, or frankly whether anyone is even paying attention.

All of which simply demonstrates the criticality and importance of absolutely optimizing and maximizing the in-office experiences for everyone for whatever periods of time they may be physically present. Your team isn’t exactly a family, but to whatever extent you can make them into a tribe with some memorable shared experiences, the more likely they are to bond and stay together especially in these very precarious and politicized times when many of the traditional structures, behaviors, frameworks, and foundational beliefs are being challenged and imperiled.

Every business and every team (like every family) will be happy and unhappy in their own ways, but certain strategies can help almost every organization if taken as advice and conformed and applied in a manner appropriate to your shop. Here are several critical ideas to keep in mind.

Make it matter. Don’t bring people in for B.S. reasons or make-work projects. Education, special speakers, training to upskill your folks—all make sense—and you can always throw in a charity project or community event as well. Anyone in an environment that is not preparing him or her with new skills and tools to face a tougher and more competitive future should move out fast. And anyone who can’t get with the program should find another job. Our motto was always that our average workers now work elsewhere.

Take your team’s temperature. Get them to enlist or re-enlist in the company’s mission and vision which you may have to clearly and regularly reiterate. If people don’t want to be there and buy in, that’s fine. “Whatever” is not a word you want to hear from anyone. Slackers and straddlers need to leave. Some people cause happiness wherever they go and others whenever they leave. Don’t let anyone talk you out of your future.

Have senior management get out and about in the office. Do some of what Tom Peters used to call “management by walking around” where you actually have some conversations with employees you’ve never met before regardless of how long they may have worked for the business. You’ll never appreciate how much of a positive impact small gestures like this can have on your people. Ask people how they are and what’s new in their lives outside the office. People need to know you care. They know you love the business, but you’ve got to show you care about the employees as well. Culture isn’t what you say, it’s what you do. Seeing is believing.

Accept the fact that you can’t “create” high morale in your business—just like you can’t chase after happiness. I don’t believe in happiness that isn’t based on effort, pain and work. High morale, deep commitment and job satisfaction are all outgrowths and byproducts of the team doing worthwhile and important activities well and together. Excellence in a business is born from observation – when newbies enter an environment with a strong work ethic, they’re like sponges – and that ethic becomes their own. Great morale comes from shared values and a coherent moral culture (which may be especially needed these days) where the members aspire to succeed in order to earn each other’s respect. We want talented and motivated people who take their satisfaction from achievement.

Remember that pre-pandemic, most of your employees spent as many of their waking hours at work as they did at home with their families. The office was a second home, a nest of friends who “understood”, a refuge for some to leave the outside world behind, and a place where their efforts were recognized, valued and appreciated. COVID took a great deal of this warmth, comfort, camaraderie and support away from millions of us and it’s nearly impossible to rebuild it remotely. You have a chance—face-to-face—to undertake that serious effort and important challenge every day when your people return to the office.

It’s on you to make it happen. It’s not ever easy to build your future on the fly and in terribly uncertain times, but that’s the leader’s job. The future isn’t a gift—it’s an achievement that you work hard toward every day.

 

NEW INC. Magazine column from Howard Tullman

Serious Management Advice from Mel Brooks

Dealing with a hybrid office? In his autobiography, the comic genius behind The Producers discusses the benefits of building a team by gathering them in one place for a concentrated period of time. It applies to the workplace, too.

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

I just finished reading Mel Brooks’ autobiography, All About Me!, (now that’s truth in advertising) which charts his remarkable life in show business and his amazing and unbelievably successful career in so many different parts of the entertainment industry. Writer, producer, actor, director, composer, and entrepreneur are roles he has played in a 75-year career, which includes memorable films such as The Producers, Young Frankenstein, and Blazing Saddles. The book is filled with touching and nostalgic reflections and, of course, jokes. Not all the jokes are fabulous. Asked whether he wore briefs or boxer shorts, the now 96-year Brooks answered, “Depends.” That groaner is exactly what you’d expect from a guy who started in the Borscht Belt in the 1940s. But the book is also a thoughtful, instructive, and educational compilation in unexpected ways, which I found to be of great value. 

One part of his Broadway adventures struck me as especially relevant for new business builders, as well as executives at established companies who are all trying to deal with the questions and concerns around creating and maintaining a company culture in a hybrid world. It’s the best and shortest rationale for getting folks back to the office that I’ve heard from anyone. 

While we hear from time to time that it’s the commute that we’ve come to recognize we hate, not the office per se, millions of senior managers – especially white-collar knowledge workers – have decided that there’s simply no good reason to return to the noise, interruptions, irritations, and unproductive meetings that are an unavoidable part of the 9-to-5 office grind. The fact that, by not showing up in person, they’re leaving the younger workers and new hires at their businesses completely in the lurch, with little or no mentoring, story sharing, supervision, or hands-on guidance, doesn’t seem to be of much concern to them.  

Safe to say that no one has figured out an effective solution, and even the best attempts seem entirely one-off and dependent on the special circumstances of a particular business or situation. I’m seeing sales organizations demonstrate convincingly that having the team in a single space works wonders and produces concrete results even if the room’s not ruled by an Alec Baldwin-like character. Competition, camaraderie, commiseration, and shared misery are all important emotional drivers that just don’t translate through a video screen. There’s a reason many of these places are called boiler rooms – it’s about heat – in the moment and here and now. Passion, energy and commitment are all contagious in a good way.

At the same time, it’s highly likely that no one will devise a “one-size fits all” answer any time soon and that trying to force a return solution on your team members without a sound reason is doomed to fail as we’ve already seen in large and small companies nationwide. Bribes and bonuses, spiffs and special incentives, perks and special provisions are all temporary Band-Aids at best. They’re not cures because they’re not really targeted at cultivating and communicating the company’s culture.

Making it about the money is the worst thing you can do. It sends a signal that you can buy your way to a committed workforce, to a community with a shared goal, and to a sustainable culture that binds the business. Even in these tough times, if your happiness depends on money rather than the satisfaction of getting the job done and done well and on being there for your team, you’ll never end up being happy with yourself.

What I learned from Mel Brooks was all about the importance of the out-of-town, pre-Broadway, performances for a new show. Timing is adjusted, songs are added or dropped, blocking and choreography are cleaned up and tightened, and even cast members may be changed. But none of those efforts is what’s most valuable and additive to the ultimate success of the show. What’s most critical about having out-of-town tryouts is that they’re out of town.  Not because the audiences there are less knowledgeable, critical, or even more forgiving, which they probably are. But because it’s not about the audiences at all – it’s about the actors and bringing the team together.

Taking the team on the road separates them from everything familiar, typical, and ordinary and, in such an environment, they quickly learn that whatever support, comfort and appreciation they’re likely to get will come from their team members who they’ll need to count on and rely upon in the “wilderness.”

A great team isn’t simply a bunch of people who work together. It’s a group that has learned to trust each other and nothing in acting or business is more important than trusting the people you work with. These remote retreats are forced bonding environments – they create their own “culture” on the fly - and they turn relative and wary strangers into a family and a unit with shared interests, emotions, and concerns.

The process works almost every time. Eventually the mess becomes a timely vision. The players turn to and learn from each other because they don’t have their family, friends, followers, or functionaries to fall back on. It’s just like your first trip to an overnight camp without the bugs and bad food. You will remember those days forever. It turns out that - even before the pandemic - the office provided a very similar kind of refuge and development space - away from friends and family - in which to cultivate a company's culture. Now it's actually also an increasingly attractive, chore-free and kid-free place to get some work done.  

The trick for business owners and operators now is to figure out how to make all these ongoing WFH conversations less place-based, less financially focused, and more about how their businesses are going to (1) successfully rebuild or replace what they previously had and grow from there; (2) integrate, educate, and indoctrinate new members of the team and immerse them deeply and successfully into the company’s culture; and (3) reactivate and re-engage their more senior managers and executives personally in the entire process.

Just to be clear, mandatory days in the office for junior staff when the folks who should be there acting as mentors are sitting at home makes no sense. Getting the team right and back together is an essential prerequisite to getting the business back on track.

Here again, this is about coming to work because you care about and are enthusiastic about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And because you understand that these things don’t happen by themselves or in the absence of proximity, serendipitous collisions, and constant informal contact. The watercooler conversations and after-hours beers are still the very best source of company communication and connection. The war stories told by the old timers and veterans are still the best vehicles for sharing and reinforcing the company’s culture and values.

Great teams don’t come together in an instant by design; they’re built over time and especially in tough times because the members went through the ringer and the hardships together and survived. They learned that no one does these things successfully by themselves and that they needed to count on their peers and partners to get the hardest jobs done.

Bringing your people back doesn’t necessarily or exclusively mean back to the office because it’s likely that some of the key folks will never sign up for that again. They may have moved far away, they may be without critical childcare or reliable transportation, or they may just have concluded that they have nothing incrementally to add by their in-office presence. But the fact is that they do. You need to bring them to the realization that they’ve all got to pitch in and make the new normal and the new workforce work. Real bonding and business building doesn’t happen remotely and, even if it requires some levels of individual sacrifice, ultimately being in a shared space with your team members for significant periods of time is the only realistic way forward for most businesses.

Mentoring – whether it’s in person, at a small offsite gathering, or on the road to a sales call – is now an even bigger part of everyone’s job. Make sure, before you ask anyone to come into the office, that you’ve got a plan and purpose for the visit, a clear objective, and a solid explanation for the request. Asking people to spend two hours commuting to the office so they can sit at their desks for Zoom calls is criminally stupid. Finally, invest the time and preparation necessary to make the office time educational, valuable, and clearly productive for the attendees. More structure, more content, and more personal interaction at all levels will make all the difference.

Forty years after Peters’ and Waterman’s pronouncements, we’re back to “management by walking around” being one of the best ways to see your business and your people. And if you can’t “see” and direct your business, you won’t have it for much longer.