As employees are increasingly called back to the office, some may be wondering: Why are we here?
It’s a great question—so great that workplace strategist Jennifer Moss wrote a book to help leaders and HR teams answer it.
Moss, the author of Why Are We Here?: Creating a Work Culture Everyone Wants, shared with HR Brew how companies can create workspaces that employees actually want to be in.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are some HR takeaways from your book?
The big existential question in the title of the book is that we are just in a complete mindset shift. And, a lot of what I’ve been seeing over the last few years is just this desire to move back to normal, or even calling it a new normal, But we’re still using old frameworks and trying to solve a very big, and nuanced, and complex, and novel problem with existing tools and strategies.
For HR leaders, they’re feeling this continued frustration around doing the best effort that they can, and helping leaders to be able to do the best efforts that they can. But then it still continues to end up with the highest disengagement we’ve seen, lower productivity, lots of attrition, quiet quitting. So, my goal with this book is to provide research and data and evidence-backed solutions for HR leaders and leaders to be able to then understand what is new that they need to rethink, and also how to operationalize this new strategy inside of this world that has completely turned upside down.
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What does that strategy look like?
When we’re trying to get people back into the office, we still are executing the office in the same way that it used to be…First, we need to reconsider if a [RTO] may make sense for us, and not just be doing it because we think that it’s going to improve cohesion, it’s going to improve relational energy, we’re going to be more productive, because the data actually shows that that’s not the case. And, the reason for that is that office experience remains the same…You’re coming into the office, and you’re still on Zoom, and you’re still spending your day doing the exact same things you could be doing at home. It feels very arbitrary. So, we need to rethink the office.
How can leaders rethink the office?
In one of the chapters, I suggested thinking of it, like Starbucks did, [as] the third place. And it’s a place where you have challenging discussions, where you learn to network, develop soft skills, be able to have team building, build up that social energy and that cohesion. Leave room for downtime in spaces that provide for that, and that could be remotely or in spaces within the office that is created for that. But, people coming into the office, they should be, we should be focusing on community building and building up those relationships that we’ve lost because of the pandemic.