The Great Returnship, or What’s a Leader to Do to About It?

Issue 182 — October 25, 2021

The buzz is everywhere. Are you in the office yet? As if we didn’t have enough to worry about with the Shecession and the Great Resignation, now comes the Great Returnship.

And since women have lost or left more jobs than men and have been slower to return, special emphasis must be placed on Take The Lead’s goal to #putwomenatthecenter of the recovery. There are so many questions.

Is your workplace ready? Does your boss want you to come back to work in person but you aren’t so sure you are ready? Are you anxious about getting back among larger groups of people?

I’ll admit that I rarely go to my coworking space, which I love. If I can do the work from home, I still do even though I’m triple vaccinated and starting to go more frequently to restaurants and cultural venues.

[So great to see the Carnegie Hall returnship.]

There is also the more mundane question of whether we want to go back to dressing for the workplace, not to mention spending time and gas money on the commute. Morra Aarons-Mele, executive Vice President of Geben Communications, kicked up a good bit of dust on LinkedIn by posting asking if we were ready to start wearing Spanx and heels again.

Managers and employees have differing views.

Research finds that the majority of managers want people back in the office, whereas many more employees want to continue working remotely. The Future Forum Pulse survey of over 10,000 workers found that executives were nearly three times as likely as employees to want everyone back in the office. At the same time, 76% of employees don’t want to return to the office full time and a similar percentage want flexibility in where they work.

Remote work has helped provide opportunities for people with disabilities, enabled people of color and women to avoid workplace microaggressions, and afforded all workers flexibility. These are not benefits to be overridden lightly. But the downside is reduced proximity to decision makers and less opportunity for serendipitous creative sparks around the water cooler or at happy hour.

Especially for younger people, missing opportunities for spontaneous learning and connecting with peers and more seasoned colleagues can deter career advancement. Homophily — social connections with people we are near or similar to — is the single greatest predictor of what happens to us in life, including career trajectories.

The pandemic has changed the workplace already. So what are the best solutions?

Hybrid working arrangements are likely to prevail indefinitely.

[Every day is likely to be flex day from now on.]

That, for the most part, is a good thing because it is likely to give all workers more flexibility. But it also adds to the complexity for managers seeking to create a level playing field for a diverse workforce, and it can impede opportunities for employees to make their accomplishments visible to decision makers in the organization. And for women who are less apt to self-advocate than men even in the traditional workplace, it is especially fraught with the likelihood that they will be passed over for promotion.

The solutions will need to come both from leaders who create processes for employees to get visibly recognized for their work and from teaching the employees themselves how and why to self-advocate in the virtual or hybrid world. This will require using our powers of “intentioning” I write about in my book of that name. One of the Leadership Intentioning Tools is “Build social capital first.” Leaders can help employees create relationship maps that make transparent who has the most impact on their careers; they can then use the map to develop intentional plans. These plans nurture those relationships that can enable employees to achieve their career goals using a combination of face to face and virtual communications.

[Thanks, ChedHER for having me on to discuss women in the workplace — click to see the interview.]

Leaders can also be thoughtful about providing visibility in meetings for their employees, making sure everyone gets an assignment to present about from time to time for example. In the remote or hybrid world, it will be necessary to be much more intentional about nurturing relationships and making our own opportunities for visibility; managers can encourage even the most introverted of employees to step up to visibility.

Curating small accountability pods of people in like roles or projects with a structured process to check in and support one another in their career growth strategies can be of significant help in keeping people connected and providing opportunities for innovation. And there is always the old fashioned potluck meal — whether in real life or virtual, where people bring or show their favorite foods, share, and tell about them. Breaking bread remains my personal favorite way to foster those informal touch points that make the world go around.

From the bigger systemic point of view, companies and individuals can support public policies that are moving to support caregiving as part of the human infrastructure that is as important to the nation’s prosperity as roads and bridges.

Duke University behavioral economics and psychology professor Dan Ariely predicts that once back in the office, people will remember how much they like to be together in person. I don’t doubt that is true. But when it comes to the everyday working conditions, I believe that there will be much more tolerance for flexibility in where and when people work, so long as the work gets done. And in that framework, the organizations that pay most attention to fostering vibrant human relationships and purposeful interactions will be the most successful.

GLORIA FELDT is the Cofounder and President of Take The Lead, a motivational speaker and expert women’s leadership developer for companies that want to build gender balance, and a bestselling author of five books, most recently Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take The Lead for (Everyone’s) Good. Former President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she teaches “Women, Power, and Leadership” at Arizona State University and is a frequent media commentator. Learn more at www.gloriafeldt.com and www.taketheleadwomen.com. Tweet Gloria Feldt.