The theme of this episode highlights the key psychological factors influencing employees' motivation to return to the office post-pandemic. Tristan Kelly and Mike Galea engage in a thorough examination of the concepts of belonging, connection, and performance, positing that organisations must transcend mere mandates to return by fostering environments that genuinely resonate with their employees’ intrinsic motivations. They articulate that individuals seek purpose and a sense of community in their professional spaces, and those companies that successfully cultivate these attributes can attract employees back rather than compel them through obligation. This fundamental shift in perspective is portrayed as a crucial strategy for enhancing workplace culture and fostering a loyal, motivated workforce.

As the conversation unfolds, Mike and Tristan reflect on their own experiences during the pandemic, where many of the usual workplace interactions were disrupted. They share how the absence of these social rituals contributed to feelings of disconnection and diminished belonging within their organisations. Their discussions highlight the profound impact that social interactions have on creativity and collaboration, underscoring the need for organisations to intentionally design workspaces that facilitate these interactions in a hybrid work model. The speakers assert that hybrid work represents not a compromise but an opportunity to redefine how teams connect, collaborate, and create value together.

The episode concludes with a profound realisation that successful workplaces are those that prioritise belonging and autonomy, ultimately leading to higher job satisfaction and performance. The speakers encourage leaders to embrace a transformative approach to workplace culture, one that prioritises the psychological well-being of employees and recognizes the multifaceted nature of modern work. This episode serves as a critical resource for organisations aiming to thrive in an evolving work landscape, emphasising the necessity of empathy and strategic insight in fostering a culture that resonates with today’s workforce.

Takeaways:

1. In the contemporary workplace, organizations face the pressing challenge of fostering belonging, connection, and performance among employees.
2. The psychological impact of hybrid working arrangements has fundamentally altered employees' perceptions of productivity and engagement in the workplace.
3. High levels of belonging within an organization have been statistically correlated with enhanced job performance and reduced absenteeism.
4. Successful companies are now attracting employees back to the office by creating environments that prioritize purpose, connection, and community.
5. The rationale behind return-to-office mandates must be transparent and clearly communicated to ensure employee trust and engagement.
6. Organizations that fail to adapt their workplace strategies to meet employees' evolving needs risk significant turnover and a decline in workplace morale.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

1. trip.com
2. Starbucks

Welcome to High Five, where insight meets empathy. I'm Tristan Kelly.

And I'm Mike Galea. And together we explore the ideas, experiences and behaviours that make workplaces thrive.

In every episode, we'll dig into the human side of work. What energizes people, what connects teams and what elevates everyday moments.

So let's get into today's conversation.

Most companies are asking people to return to the office. But here's the real question. What makes people want to come back? Today we're diving into the psychology behind belonging, connection and performance.

And why they matter more now than ever.

Mike Hybrid Working has rewritten the rulebook and now everyone's asking the same question, why should people bother coming back to the office at all?

Yeah, and the old answers just don't cut it anymore because we said so isn't a strategy. You know, what we find is people want purpose, connection and a place where they actually feel they belong to.

Today we're breaking down the psychology behind all of this. What the research tells us about belonging, motivation and performance and why some return to office strategies are failing spectacularly.

And more importantly, what the successful companies are doing differently. Because organisations who crack this aren't forcing people back, they're attracting them back.

So buckle up. This one's about behavior, belonging and the future of work. And it's going to challenge a few assumptions.

What was the one thing you looked forward to post Covid, when you returned to working in the office? For me, it was all about engaging with my team, visiting our clients and site based colleagues across the uk.

I wanted to feel connected again with our communities and to feel energized by our shared purpose. I'd also missed out on some of those usual work rituals.

You know, picking up a coffee en route to the office, popping out to prep at lunchtime, grabbing a drink with a colleague after work. What were the things you were looking forward to, Mike?

I think largely the same, but really it is about re establishing those connections. I think I was most looking forward to spending time with my team, spending time with my manager.

Manager.

Understanding where they are in life and, and generally just seeing that office as, as somewhere socially where I can collaborate, especially on some big projects where you're so used to being on camera, you're so used to being on teams, being in a room together and feeding off that energy just helped propel some things we were doing really, really quickly. That was a standout moment for me.

Well, Covid compelled us to work from home, which was excellent for, for reconnecting with the More essential aspects of life, such as hanging out with our families and friends, and for concentrating much, much more on our health and well being. My cooking skills truly improved during that period. And that was partly out of necessity and partly as a way of establishing new routines.

During COVID we lost all of those usual work routines, you know, the commute and the sort of social engagement interaction with our colleagues. So trying to replicate some of that at home was. Was quite important.

You know, when I closed my laptop at the end of each day, I would walk to my local supermarket, getting some steps in, pick up some groceries and then go back home and cook a meal. And it gave a sense of closing the work day and shifting into the personal part of the evening.

I think the downside for me was that working from home lessened my sense of belonging with my employer. You know, I did struggle to connect with the values and the shared goals of the organization.

Most companies during that period were very much making things up as they went along while developing new ways of working.

And the somewhat chaotic communication that stemmed from that increased the levels of uncertainty and disconnection that myself and I think many other people felt. As humans. We're fundamentally social animals, and working together increases that level of trust, creativity and cooperation.

So I was glad when restrictions were removed and we could finally settle on a new normal way of working, which I think for most people is a hybrid system. How was your sense of belonging affected during the mandated work from home period?

Well, I had a very interesting experience during them because we, we were office based. I led a global learning and organizational development department and we worked alongside, you know, like call centers and stuff.

So we very quickly, within, within a few days had to figure out how we got, you know, 150 people, all at different various stages of their training, working for energy companies which were, you know, one of those kind of protected roles. How do we do that when we don't have the technology? We don't have anything. So for me, the biggest change was suddenly the school stopped.

I had a very young son. I'm trying to balance work with him sitting next to me. I'm working out of a dining room. We're trying to solve problems.

It was really chaotic, but really energetic. But what it did do was give me insights into how people working, and not just working in this country, but culturally too.

So one of the big problems that we had was for our teams in India, for instance, and our teams in Africa.

We had teams where they shared, lots of family members, shared that space, and we expected them to work from their table in the kitchen with a whole hub of activity happening around them. And again, that was just another problem that we had to solve.

Phasing out of that and then stepping back into the workplace again, there was that question of do we go back, do we stay with where we're at right now or do we drive that forward? And I was lucky enough to actually leave the organization and enter a. The experiment on what the future of workplace should look like for a bank.

And that's where we set up these labs.

And that gave us an opportunity to really understand kind of space alignment, working practices and all that stuff that came with it, including technology.

Wow. So you've got some great insight into the whole workplace psychology.

We really try to understand what the drivers would be going forward and projecting forward into, you know, far into the future in terms of, okay, okay, work in practice.

And I think this organization was really quick to connect to the fact that the world has changed, it's not going back, we have to go forward with it or we'll get left behind. And that was a really exciting time to step into that, that activity. And we set up in total 6 what we called labs all across the world.

And we had executive coaches and we had workplace hosts and we looked at that to say, how do we attract people back in? And then what are they doing when they come back in after all of that? And we, and we did that for about two years.

I think the research is clear though, that belonging has one of the strongest measurable impacts on performance. High belonging leads to 56% higher job performance and 75% fewer sick days. I was quite surprised when I came across that stat.

And then I looked into it a bit more. And within the UK alone, the cost of employers each year is approximately 85 billion. That's a huge number.

And that includes direct sick pay, occupational sick pay, lost output, reduced productivity, also known, or we call it today, presenteeism, staff turnover and recruitment costs. So creating an environment where people have a real sense of belonging has huge financial implications.

Did that form any part of your study looking specifically into how people belong to an organisation?

That was the very core of the study.

We really wanted to understand all the way from leadership down to management and then down to the kind of core operators, what that working dynamic is, what, what's, what's the ideology of that? How present is the leader? And that even comes down to, you know, when you're not. When you don't have an understanding of what days we should be in.

Are you choosing days when Your leader or managers there or are you not? And what we found actually, and we have big, large spaces to play with, was people didn't want to sit with their leaders.

They wanted to be about as far away from them as you could possibly get in order to, to do their work.

They wanted to choose when they interacted with those leaders and managers and, and the same with the leaders and managers who have their own kind of space and their own ideal, you know, their own, their own tasks and objectives. They wanted to pick and choose when they were with the troop, so to speak.

So we saw a lot of that in terms of, oh, I'm now back in this space, you know, my director is sitting over there, is my director watching me? And then we, you know, we laid it up even one more. We, we, we gamified our space.

So we had, you know, VR headsets, we had gaming consoles, we had arcade machines, all these different things, and no one used them. And when we asked, why don't you use them? The response was, because my manager is in, and my manager will see me and think I'm not productive.

So again, these were all the things that we were exploring when it came to that.

Certainly during COVID you know, there was a lot of fear and concern that allowing people to continue working from home would lead to a reduction in productivity. Because of that, if you're not being seen, are you actually working?

During COVID there was a lot of uncertainty around job security, so people really focused their energies on being seen to and actually delivering.

But I think there was a fear that would that continue once we were into a more hybrid way of working with some office days and some days working from home. Now, what concerns were you hearing, Mike, from other managers on productivity post Covid?

Productivity fundamentally has changed. Our understanding of productivity has changed. You know, input versus output, you know, task completion, whichever way you want to cut it.

The productivity is the work that you do and how you spend your day. But what we found was people have more choice when they work from home. And their productivity is different because they work longer hours.

And that's the fact when you're at home, you start a bit early because you don't have the commute you choose when you want to have lunch, you can do the school run or whatever, you know, you know, whatever responsibilities you have that day, and you can choose to work a little bit later. And then, you know, we, we and we started to explore actually, does it matter where you work?

Then could you be, you know, next to a pool in Spain doing the Same level of work. Does it matter that you're there at that pool, you know, or on the beach or somewhere, you know.

And there was a lot of, I suppose, traditional mindset that says no, no, no, you shouldn't be doing that, you shouldn't be there, you know. But then when we found people going back into the office and we asked them about, we got the same answers over and over again.

I am less productive when I come into the office.

And there's an interesting study from Stanford which looked into this specific issue.

So they were software engineers, they were marketeers, they were in financing, in accounting, et cetera. And the design was a randomized control trial known as an RCT and is often called the gold standard in social science research.

And the outcomes, which were performance, retention and promotions were tracked for two years following the test.

In the hybrid group, employees worked two days a week from home, specifically Wednesday and Friday and they came into the office the other three days and group where they came into the office every day. So all five days. Now why is this particular study important?

Well, previous research on remote work was often focused on call center data entry or other non creative roles. Whereas this trial targeted knowledge work roles. So engineering, marketing, finance.

And that's much more representative of post pandemic white collar work. Because of random assignment and longer follow up, the study can credibly show causal effects as opposed to just correlations.

Any initial thoughts Mike, on what the study may have uncovered?

I am very excited to hear from from you and your example of what of what that uncovered and then of course compare it to my own experiences.

Well, let's look at the main findings of the Stanford study. Primarily there was no loss in performance or productivity.

So among the software engineer employees, analysis of lines of code written, so that's quite a specific data set, found that there was no statistical difference between hybrid and fully in office groups.

Promotion rates over the two years were also indistinguishable between the hybrid and office only workers overall and across subgroups there was a large reduction in attrition. So people quitting the hybrid group saw resignations drop by 1/3 compared with full time office peers.

And I think that's something we hear a lot about in the news in the sense when people are mandated, they're like, no, I'd rather go and work somewhere else. So we're seeing that as actual data. And the effect was especially strong among non managers, women and employees with long commutes.

And I'm hearing that a lot in the research that I've been looking into is that non managers are much more engaged with hybrid working systems.

And the authors estimated that the reduced attrition translated to significant cost savings for trip.com you know, on, on recruitment, training and replacement. Attitudes change from skepticism to approval.

So prior to the trial, managers surveyed on hybrid work estimated it would reduce productivity by about 2.6% on average. Whereas after the trial their average estimate shifted to a plus 1% perceived gain.

You know, they'd gone from thinking it would have a negative effect to understanding that actually it had a positive effect. This matters for organizational buy in. You know, skepticism about hybrid seems driven more by belief than evidence.

And clearly when you've got a study like this, it's providing evidence to offset that. Well, I just believe that they're not going to be as productive. There was high job satisfaction and life balance.

You know, these are kind of soft outcomes, but equally important to employees. Hybrid workers reported improved job satisfaction and life satisfaction compared to office only colleagues.

And I think that mirrors quite a lot with a study that was printed in the Guardian where they looked at increased percentages in health and well being from hybrid workers. In summary, the author's bottom line is that hybrid work is a win, win, win for employee productivity, performance and retention.

So what catches your eye, Mike? Have you seen any of those outcomes yourself?

100%. It's the freedom of choice that people have and with a large value system wrapped around it.

And that's generated from the leadership and management that we trust you to do your work. We don't need to be worried that you're going to go home and play video games all day or walk your dog or whatever is the trust to get the work done.

But also from, from the individual's point of view, that's the freedom of choice. I choose when I decide to work, I choose when I start, I choose when I finish. That is not being enforced on me against the deadlines.

And I will deliver against those deadlines. And I think in the round we have, you know, we're in that space now culturally that's where we're at.

But you've also got to think about the fact that so much changed, people's lifestyles changed during lockdown.

People had children or they, they, you know, they got pets or they, they change something about themselves which wasn't adaptable to the five day working week anymore.

And I think largely we've done well to, to adapt to all of that and adapt our understanding, our traditionalist views are, are evolving as we go on and you know, and when it, when we comes down to productivity and this is controversial and I'm just going to say it because I do believe it, this whole idea about work life balance which is part of this study that you're talking about, that people felt more happier. Well, work life balance by itself doesn't exist. It's a myth, it's not real. Because work life balance in essence is negotiation.

And you are negotiating with yourself of how much time effort you put into your work versus your life.

And the higher up the food chain you go, the higher you, your ambitions go, the higher you get promoted, the more you take from life to feed into work because the more responsibility, accountability you have. And that's the fact. And we're not very good at letting go of things. So I'm not surprised that study said that actually my well being has improved.

I want to stay with this company because I feel trusted and I feel that I contribute meaningful work to this particular company. But I might still be working the same level as I was before. I've just repurposed the time I have.

So mandated or not though, Tristan, a return to office policy needs to be absolutely transparent. And it's the overarching question why? And I think that's the bit that's missing from a lot of mandate companies.

I am mandating to you that you will return four days a week. Now, as an individual, I'm asking why.

Now if the business is transparent about that, say we have to fill our real estate up, it costs us such a large amount of money to, to run and maintain these offices.

We want to fill them up and we feel that you would be much more productive normalizing back in our environment and it will help you across a myriad of different things and ways. Then yeah, that's a bit more palatable. But I think work company, some companies have got it wrong.

They never actually explained their rationale behind the decision itself.

I think the challenge with that is that just because an organization's paying lots of money, I mean there are lots of execs that are paid lots of money that many people lower down the food chain think aren't necessary and actually, if you're putting a lot of money on an office that isn't necessary, well, downsize. It's not as if there aren't other offices that you can move into.

We work in real estate and we see so many times, you know, a client will have three or four floors, but they're sublet in two or they're sublet in half. A floor that goes on all the time.

So I don't think that should be put on the employees, because it's the employees that do the work, it's not the office that does the work. The office is just a physical space we go to. And clearly, if that office is energized, then we are going to do great work when we're there.

But I think, I just think it's so hard from a mental point of view to go back. We can't, we can't just say, well, Covid, never happened.

Get in the office 9 to 5, sit on trains that are overcrowded and late and dirty and all the other things and just come into the office because, hey, well, you know, we're all going to have fun. When we sat next to each other looking the same way down the corridor, that just doesn't work.

And so you've got to, you, you can't just say, well, we're spending a lot of money on real estate. It's not my problem. I never asked you to. You know, that's the kind of petulant answer you get from a child. Well, I didn't ask to be born.

So you have to overcome that somehow. And you can't just say, well, we're paying. Look, we're spending a lot of money on real estate. And so you have to come into the office.

Who wants to work for a company that says that? It isn't an argument that you can position to a human being and expect a human response, certainly not an emotional response.

And what you've just discussed there, what you've just said, is the complexity of hybrid and mandation or optional. It is complex.

I do start, and you're right to challenge me on the rationale I gave in that example, but my point stands is transparency and honesty, because the trust goes both ways. If a company absolutely feels it necessary to mandate those days, they should be open and upfront about why.

Now, the final bit I'll say on this is if you get it wrong. What would you say, Tristan, is the generational work life cycle of an individual in the company.

Are you asking me how.

Yeah, how many years the Lifespan on average. Yeah. How many years on average would someone work for an organization?

I think I have seen this recently and if you look at sort of my area of expertise, sort of CMO level, the average is five years, four to five years within an organization. Yeah. Because at that level you're burnt out and so, and creatively that you kind of need a new cycle, you need to sort of regenerate that.

And, and, and so yeah, about five. My thinking is about four, four, five years. Is that what the stats are saying? Four years?

Yes. So let's call that a generational life cycle. You get your workplace wrong, you create a hostile environment or you create distance and distrust.

That takes around two generations to cycle that through, not only to, to, to reset but also to renormalize. That's 10 years. That is 10 years. That is, that is a whole new generation of people coming in.

And that, that could be very damaging for a company if you get that wrong because it means you can't attract, because the reputation is already established.

Well, you'll attract, but you'll attract the wrong people. So if we look at, we look at this kind of real drive for expertise within the tech arena. So AI it, you know, there's a real clamor for great people.

If you're an organization like Matter and Amazon, you know, they're pretty tech focused organization. You're mandating people coming to the office five days a week. Well, we're seeing that as you mentioned, generationally people don't want to do that.

So you're precluding yourself from hiring what could be the best talent for what? Where's the data that backs up why you need those individuals five days in the week?

If you can show that data, well then yeah, then the argument goes away because once you've got the evidence to say working in the office five days a week is way more productive than working at home two days a week and in the office three days a week.

And people know that because they're factoring in not just the productivity for the company, but if you like the well being that they benefit from themselves by working from home. And that's, they're the factors that they're putting in.

They're not just putting in how great my manager is, what my career prospects are, what's the main objectives of the, of the organization I'm working for.

It is can I exercise in the morning, can I, you know, can I cook at home, can I do my washing throughout the day, can I nip off to the dentist when I need to, can I be flexible? They're all the factors that they're weighing in. And that's probably why they won't work for an organization if those things are important to them.

That's why they won't work for an organization that says you have to be in the office five days a week.

I completely agree, Tristan.

You know, we, we need to move past the idea of COVID Covid was a once in a lifetime situation that we found our, you know, we're still connected to that, we're still transitioning. As you said, we're still changing. But look, belonging will be engineered into the system.

You know, from the onboarding to rituals to environmental design, neurodivergent offices, you know, to tailor to a varying degree of needs and requirements will become front and center when it comes to interior design. And I do think technology does play a large part in the future in terms of where we're going. Oh, that's, that is the future.

Design led, psychologically informed and you know what absolutely centered on human potential. I'm gonna give you a real life did, you know, but I'm gonna back it up with, with some stats as well.

And I know you've covered some stats, so it's a quite a nice summary into that one.

But you know, when it comes to kind of key global trends on return to office policies, because we're not calling it mandating, it's RTO return to office. 59 of companies worldwide are encouraging more in office time, with 55% of global companies planning to do so in the next six months.

And you know, like marginally on that one, around 61 to 70% of those hundreds of thousands of businesses do have formal return to office policies. And they do require employees to be on site a certain number of days each week. And that is around two to three days in the office.

That's the standard and that's the norm. But we've seen that anyway because we know Tuesday to Thursdays are busy stays.

And you know, 32% of companies globally do require employees to be in the office five days a week. Now that all depends on the type of work they do as well.

So we look at public sector, there's a high degree of yes, you need to be there in order to do your job. But I'm going to go through, we talked about getting it wrong and getting it right.

And I'm going to talk about a large corporation that just this year got it wrong. And this is Starbucks. Did you hear about this, Tristan?

No, but I do like a horror story, right?

You know, for all the controversy around Starbucks and stuff, they did mandate just this year their CEO Brian Nicholl introduced a stricter return to office policy for corporate and people manager roles. So specific to them. And what he did is he increased it from three to four days in the office per week, Monday to Thursday.

But even, even bigger than that, they'd hide quite a lot of people who were really remote through Covid and, and who wasn't close to an office. And in those cases they were expected to relocate to Seattle or Toronto within a 12 month period.

Now if you work somewhere else and you've been hired on the basis of doing this job and suddenly you're told, oh, you need to relocate hundreds or thousands of miles to a different location in order to continue working for us. That's a lot to take on. And that's what happened this year. And what do you think the reaction to that was?

I can imagine it was shocking. But my memory has kicked in a little bit. Now. Wasn't the CEO flying into the office each week?

I believe he was, yeah.

So there's some double standards there, isn't there? That is definitely an us versus them. And that's what I was kind of alluded to earlier.

If you're mandated to come into the office and you're in the office and yet your boss is working from home, that's going to get really get up your nose, isn't it? And it sounds like that's what the CEO was doing at Starbucks.

Do as I say, not as I do. But you know, what really happened was there was a massive employee backlash. It actually made the news globally.

There were flyers protesting the directive appeared in the Seattle headquarters citing the erosion of company culture. Employees expressed fear that the originally touted partner first culture that Starbucks has was being undermined.

And over a thousand baristas had previously already been on strike early in the year over unrelated workplace grievances. And that just compounded cultural tensions. Now any employees that were unwilling to comply were given an actual ultimatum.

Either return under this mandate or take a voluntarily of a voluntary separation package. And that depended on the role.

So when we talked about business generations and how, you know, how we then, you know, heal that dissidents, well, you know, for, for Starbucks, it's been called out actually an erosion of company culture. Our partner first model is being undermined. We don't feel that this is a conducive and future orientated place to work.

And that comes down to those points of why it failed. Culture clash. The top down approach contradicted Starbucks self style partner first values which undermined trust. There was a mismatch incentive.

So linking the return to office with executive bonuses and cost containment sent a conflicting business narrative. And it, it did. And then employee unrest. So there were protests and flyers and voluntary exits underscored with their strong dissatisfaction.

Now their RTO mandate absolutely backfired because of a misalignment between strategy, cultural narrative, narrative and genuine employee inclusion. And that reduced morale.

And I think you can sum that up in two words. It's something I've been battling with recently with the cricket in, in Australia with the Ashes and England's mentality.

And so the two words are group think.

So people within the organization at Starbucks would have thought, and they probably had a lot of consultants confirm this, that if you force people into the office, you'll get X, Y and Z from it. And so that's what they did.

They probably didn't involve the people team who would have provided some insight into the potential downsides and they didn't involve their PR team who would have said actually the kind of fallout from this globally is going to be crap. And that's group thing. And so many organizations suffer from that. I'd love for us to do an episode just on groupthink.

There's some amazing stories in Built to Last and various other books that look at organizations that have just died because they've got caught up in their own hubris and hyperbole and thought this is what we're doing, this is going to be great. And then they go to the market and the mark's like, what on earth you on about? You guys are idiots. And it's all failed.

So yeah, I would suggest that there's a lot of group think there. It's like, well this is what we're going to do, we don't care. And clearly they've, they've faced a backlash from that. Perfect. Well, that was great.

Did you know I really enjoyed that.

Well, I think it's in keeping with the episode.

Look, every, every, you know, publicized bad news story, there is a hundred good news stories out there and there is some great organizations doing some wonderful things in terms of changing their thinking, changing their approach. But of course we always go and pull out something just to revalidate the conversation that we've had.

So I don't want to lean too much into the negative. That example was how sometimes if we don't think it through and we don't operate by the idea of inclusion, it could go WR and it could backfire.

So what have we learned today? People don't return because they're told to. They return because the experience enriches their work and their lives.

Belonging, autonomy and purpose are the foundations. Get those right and people choose the workplace. Get them wrong and no mandate will fix it.

And hybrid isn't a compromise. It's an opportunity to intentionally design how we connect, how we create and how we collaborate together.

Thanks for joining us as we explored the psychology of the workplace. Now, if you're thinking about how to design a culture, people want to return to. Start with belonging.

And remember, workplaces aren't just where work happens. They're where community, creativity and purpose take shape.

We'll see you in the next episode.

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