Why Hauling Everyone Back To The Office Doesn’t Make Them More Productive

Do you know what everyone on your team is working on right now?  

It’s easy to keep workers engaged when they’re toiling away just down the hall. There’s the general thrum of office productivity, the inspirational posters here and there, and the firm’s core values prominently displayed in the conference room. And if all that doesn’t do the trick, there’s always the drop-by visit to check in and boost morale.

But when your employee is working in the everywhere office — tapping away in bed, in their study, at a noisy cafe, on a lovely beach or on a train slicing across Europe — keeping them focused and aligned is a much taller task.

I’m Shane Spraggs, CEO of Virtira. We’ve helped organizations accelerate remote performance for more than a decade. My Forbes book, The Power of Remote, co-authored by Virtira Executive Chair Cynthia Watson, lays out the best ways to create a deeply connected and highly productive distributed workforce.

Countless companies are still just at the starting line when it comes to an understanding and addressing the complexities of increased virtual work. The fact is, the more remote your workforce, the more you need to do to keep them engaged.

And don’t think you’ll sidestep this shift with an Elon Musk-like diktat that all staff must work 40 hours in-office every week. That no longer flies, as 97 percent of workers seek some form of remote, and nearly half of Gen Z and Millennial workers say they’d quit if their employer offered no remote options. “Extreme flexibility and hybrid work will define the post-pandemic workplace,” declared a major Microsoft study published last year.

In this next series of articles, I go into best practices you can use to make sure your employees – whether they are in the office or in some other part of the world – are aligned, engaged and super productive.

1. Four Keys To Onboarding Ultra-Productive Remote Employees
2. How to Align New Remote Employees to Company Culture
3. Three Ways to Build a Productivity-Driven Remote Culture
4. The Power of Annual Planning to Align Remote Employees
5. Why You Need to Assume That No One is Listening