Is the office not up to par with the home office?

How to lay the foundation for a happy office

Working from home is here to stay. There's no doubt about it. Both large and small companies around the world have embraced working from home.

One of the first companies to choose remote work as standard, before it was fashionable, is the IT company Zapier (super successful API automation platform). Here, all 350+ employees are without a physical office. The advantage for Zapier is that remote work is deeply embedded  in their culture and has been from the start.

The company has never known anything else and has also published the ultimate guide to remote work (👈 read it and be inspired by the best).

Don't let the office become a ghost town

We recently spoke to a major bank. The main challenge here is that new employees feel that their new workplace has become a ghost town.

This makes it difficult for the bank to create the welcoming and intuitive team spirit that is so important for new colleagues to quickly feel at home.

You can almost picture it:

A new employee arrives on their first day to a half-empty open plan office where there is no team to feel part of.

“Hello, is there anyone there… anyone… anyone?”

It can be hard for new employees to feel welcome if your new colleagues aren't physically present. You risk not being properly introduced to everyone as it can take a long time to actually meet them in person.

Working from home is a management challenge

Zapier's handbook makes it pretty clear that managing employees remotely requires knowledge, skill and a focused effort.

When people work together physically, it’s easier to maintain:

• Social connection

• Shared understanding of priorities

• A common sense of culture and values

Experts therefore recommend that "traditional companies" provide clear agreements and frameworks for who can work from home. There is also value in classifying which tasks can be done at home. All in all, just a good old-fashioned expectation alignment.

So should the office throw in the towel? (No!)

In our work with over 300 small and large companies in Denmark, it's clear that many companies have cracked the code to making the office a place that employees want to come to.

The companies that are most successful in creating a workplace that employees prefer over the home office are all actively working to make the office live up to a goal. However, before the goal is established, the following prerequisites must be in place:

1. Responsibility for the office must be placed.

Either with one Office Manager or a workplace team, where one person is responsible for lunch, fruit and snacks and another for cleaning etc. Day-to-day coordination with suppliers and appointments should of course be in one place (wink wink 😉 ).

2. Budgets should be linked to employee satisfaction.

Take all costs associated with running the office, broken down by category, and divide them per employee. This number, along with your employee satisfaction/pulse measurement in the office (which I hope you have), will be your baseline for cost per satisfaction.

3. HR and management should evaluate the office as you would evaluate an employee.

The office should be the “colleague” that makes employees better at their jobs.  Therefore, think of the office as an employee and treat it as such. Employees should deliver based on expectations and ambition, and so should the office. The best companies have an annual performance review where goals and ambitions are evaluated.

The good office is part of the company's conscious actions to create good results. The office is more than the interior. It's also the opportunity to ensure the retention of talented employees. In practical terms, the office can allow employees to take home dinner, exercise or practice yoga, hold productive workshops, have lunch with business partners or produce a podcast with professional equipment.

Successful companies think about the whole office experience rather than just looking at it as an expense.