Let me start with a confession: I’m a true believer in working from the office. I know this is a fraught topic with many different viewpoints. Mine is that in-person work is irreplaceable. I’m the CEO who’s known for starting the day by walking through the office and giving every single person a high five. It’s my schtick. It’s who I am.
Let’s be clear, I’m not here to tell every business leader to force their employees back into the office full time. Each person and each organization has their own unique needs, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. What I am here to say is that leaders are still misunderstanding the fundamental difference between remote and in-office work: energy. It is time for us to be honest about the trade-offs.
What’s really lacking in a remote work environment is that same energy I get from walking through the office giving high fives—and it’s hurting both companies and their people.
Leaders at major companies like Meta, Amazon, and Salesforce continue to cite productivity and collaboration as the primary reasons to bring people back to the office. But remote work doesn’t have a collaboration problem. While this was certainly a challenge during the early days of the remote work shift, there are now plenty of tools out there that enable teams to work effectively across locations. Rather, the true challenge is a lack of energy.
Energy is the X factor that rallies teams around a company’s mission. It’s what motivates people to find new ways to solve problems and connects them to their colleagues. And it’s what a lot of teams are missing right now. Amid economic uncertainty and a news cycle focused on negativity, morale is low and, as a result, energy suffers. Low engagement is a consistent factor in employee turnover, and Gallup estimates that lack of employee engagement costs $7.8 trillion in lost productivity worldwide. Business leaders looking to rethink their approach to hybrid work should focus on the energy problem and use that to guide decisions.
Here’s an example: One challenge we’ve run into when holding meetings in the office is that people still join them from their individual laptops instead of in a large conference room, which defeats the purpose of being in person and getting that valuable social time with colleagues. The solution? Buy lunch for everyone and put it in the conference room a half hour before a big group meeting starts. People will start gathering, they’ll start chatting, they’ll laugh with someone they’ve never met before. Immediately, the energy in the room changes, and any hard topics to be covered in the meeting often go more smoothly. You’ve fixed the energy problem, and suddenly people want to stay for the meeting and participate in-person instead of on their laptops. The result is a more connected team of people who are engaged and motivated to solve problems, together.
Another example of the power of in-office energy: Different teams can feed off each other’s energy and ideas to build better products and better solve customer problems. This is especially the case for B2B companies that sell their products to other businesses. What better way is there to understand your end-user’s needs—whether they’re marketers, engineers, salespeople, or enterprise workers more broadly—than by sharing space with them?
At Outreach, our customers are sales teams. When working together in the office, our engineers and product developers get to observe how our own sales reps work, ask them questions about the challenges they face, and get their read on what excites them about a product. It’s free market research. Our engineers, designers, and product leaders can get real-time feedback from our sales team on a new feature by simply walking over to their desks. This immediate feedback and validation loop is rewarding for engineers and ultimately helps us build better products.
Fixing the energy problem also has clear benefits for individuals. People who work from the office are shown to spend 25% more time on career-development activities like mentorship, training and professional development. A separate study suggests that remote employees miss out on crucial feedback from their colleagues. You learn so much just by watching other people do their jobs. There’s a generation of young workers who haven’t benefited from working alongside their teammates, hearing how they speak on the phone to a tough client, or how they make a sales call. In-person observation and interaction is crucial for talent development.
We’re three years into this hybrid-work experiment. We now have enough data and experience to really understand the benefits and drawbacks of remote, hybrid, and in-office work. It’s time to make informed decisions about the future of the workplace. If your organization has an energy problem, it’s time to revisit your approach. You don’t have to take my word for it. See what happens when you take the time to greet everyone in the office, shake their hands, or share a meal together. That kind of energy does not exist when we’re all working from a screen, and it’s what will truly help companies thrive and motivate teams going forward.
Manny Medina is the CEO of Outreach.io.
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