What companies are doing wrong with RTO, according to a former Google leader

This year has brought a strong return to the office, with companies across industries now ending work away from the majority of workers. The likes of Amazon, UPS, and Boeing now require workers to be in the office five days a week, as do several banks and financial firms. Walmart requires corporate employees not only to return to the office, but also to relocate to the retail giant’s headquarters in Arkansas.

These laws have faced a huge backlash from workers, some of whom have threatened to quit their jobs. Many workers are frustrated by the loss of flexibility they have enjoyed since the pandemic upended the way we work. But one recurring complaint has been that companies often give little explanation—and are conscious, in some cases—about their decision to bring people back to the office.

It’s an issue that AJ Thomas often raises when advising startups and other companies. Thomas—who was head of talent at Google’s “moonshot factory” and continues to advise there—has worked across skills, products, and teams and now owns his own training company. (He’s also the CXO in residence at tech startup A. Team and founder of venture capital fund, Good Trouble Ventures.)

In interview no Fast company, Thomas talked about which companies are getting their messaging around the RTO wrong and what they should consider before issuing a strong workplace mandate—including the impact on disadvantaged workers. This discussion has been edited for clarity and length.

The push to return to the office is obviously not new. But there’s been a shift in the types of orders we’re seeing, with companies asking people to come into the office full time. What do you do with this change and pushing companies to get to the employees?

Now it’s a pull, not a push. I think we are actually focusing on the wrong thing. It is not for going back to the office. It’s about, What job are you going back to that requires you to be in the office? During my time in the moonshot industry, we had robots and hardware and testing and water labs—and all these spaces where we needed people to come in.

Just for me, What work is needed? I don’t think organizations have gotten very good at communicating that, and that’s why they get solace. Companies [think]Well, this is how we should work.

My perspective on it—mentoring different CEOs, startups, and teams, and coaching people as they work on this—is really finding the problem in the problem they’re solving. It should be based on the principles of what that organization is trying to do.

The blanket messages are really helpful. Companies—especially HR and C-suite leaders—must do better at personalizing the message and making it both engaging and accessible. Integration, to me, means: Here are the principles by which we decided this. Here are the priorities we have. Based on these priorities, here are the skills and areas where we will need in-office, remote, or hybrid people. You create the infrastructure for that. And then say, OK, let’s communicate this to make sure people understand it.

Are there any companies that you think have articulated their reason for returning to the office more clearly? 

Roblox did a great job in the way they talked about bringing everyone back to the office. What they did was say, Hey, look, this is our authority. We want people to stay together and be in the office most of the time. Everyone out there—we want to give you an option. If you want to move, we will pay for it. If you don’t want to stay, we will give you two parts to find a new role and quit.

They had a comprehensive policy and process to ensure it was an inclusive decision. What was important to them was the culture they were trying to preserve. So it wasn’t: Do it, or else. It was, Look, we need to do this. This is the goal. To think about the workplace culture we’re trying to embody, we’ve brought you these options.

You don’t want someone to come in because they feel obligated. [And] You don’t want someone because you have to. He wants someone because he wants to. And the companies I see doing this well are projecting the work.

We have an idea of ​​what makes the decision to return to the office full time. But it appears to be a real risk, especially for companies trying to retain top performers or employees who need more flexibility. What do you think the impact of these powers would be?

As a profession, you will pull out weeds when it is convenient for you. And as an employer, you’re going to weed out if you actually have people who stay and quit—[people who say,] Okay, I need a paycheck, so I’m back five days a week.

Something will give – and it will give performance. There will be a decline in performance due to mental and physical health [and] the emotional trauma experienced by the workers. And you will run the risk that the top players may leave because it is not what they want. You want to look at your system architecture. What does the data say? If [of] the top 10% of the company, 8% are already working remotely, maybe there is something there. [If your] The policy says they need to go back to the office five days a week, which is completely inconsistent.

A broad-brush policy—everyone returns or we’ll track all your badges—just instills fear that’s unnecessary. As an organization, I have to take into account the personality of my customer. My customer is an employee who wakes up every day, chooses my company to do the work I need [them] to do. So I think we need to think about that organizationally as leaders of people. We always say that people are the biggest cost and expense we have. But they are also our customers.

What do you think is being left out of the discussion about return-to-work orders?

What we don’t focus enough on is the part of the population that now has access to this flexibility because of this pandemic. People with different strengths [who] thrive in the virtual world. Working mothers or single working parents have to juggle many different things.

I don’t think we’ve had enough conversations around: What are the new ways work is being done? Because now we are more aware that people live without work. Who are the most disadvantaged workers when it comes to this type of policy? What are their needs, and how do you design for them?

Is there any other advice you can give to companies looking to bring full-time employees back to the office?

Is going back to the office really the problem you’re solving? Or is it high performance? Because those are two different things. As long as it’s back to the office, you’ll be fine with 100% back to the office but 52% engagement. But if it’s about peak performance, you’re going to have to reprogram your systems to get to whatever that goal is. Do you mind going back to the office? You can get the effect of going back to the office, but you [will] get a completely different barometer of impact if you’re not clear on what you’re promoting.

I’ll leave you with this. Thinking about culture as a product: In a technology space, like analog, there’s often a technology stack you’re working with. There is an operating system, an application layer, and a feature layer. When you think about these layers, the operating system is an analog to your mission, vision, and values ​​as an organization.

The application layer is the teams that need to use it to make the operating system live, and the features are things like RTO, policies, revenue, OKRs, etc. I find most good teams debug at the operating system layer. If you just go in and click another feature on top of a broken operating system, your application layer will be compromised 100% of the time because teams won’t understand what command to issue to it. Just us [have to] debug in that operating system layer.