Forced In-Person at Work?

Is micromanaging employee in person attendance the way to go?

A friend and senior leader in a Fortune 500 company told me about her company's firm decision on which days were 'in person' days. This decision was followed up by attendance monitoring and reporting to HR, since what's the point of saying something if you aren't going to enforce it?

While I'm personally a big fan of working in the same place with other people, workforce control mechanisms like these tempt the modern organization to miss the lessons that sustaining work through a global pandemic provided.

Many companies found capacity they didn't think they had to mount an agile and more person centered response to the cascade of pandemic triggered needs in their workforce. The infrastructure was created and people developed the new skills needed to figure out how to meet organizational goals.

While it was not perfect, it was movement towards a system that tried to listen more deeply and that didn't overthink its response to human needs.

People with marginalized identities and parents of small children reported greater productivity and satisfaction with work while working from home.

Many companies that tried to enforce a return to in-person work in 2022 experienced high turnover and a range of engagement challenges as workers tried to reconcile the increased cost (physical, emotional, relational) of being in person at work.

The way we work, and our relationship to our work, begs for a redesign.

Most business architectures are founded on models of doing work that commoditize human bodies and labor, extract value from people, and, essentially, reduce their life force.

Imagine instead, business and work models that honor human difference, prioritize human needs, commit to work as a source of human nourishment. Such models can increase profitability and productivity (message me for some sources on this). They will also reduce the current, overwhelming levels of people and planet suffering.

Humans are nature and our current focus in healing the planet must integrate healing for people and planet at every level of work and life.

In the mean time, high control never works. Let’s think of another solution to this back to in person work problem.