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  Today in health it we're gonna take a look at an article from the Harvard Business Review contributor Network. And the title is Full Return to the Office is A Bad Idea and we're gonna look at that with a critical eye and see what we think. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this Week in Health it a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged.

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Subscribe on our website this week, health.com. Just click on the subscribe button and while you're at it, have your team subscribe and get the discussion started on the right foot. Alright, today's article is Don't force people to come back to the office. . Full-time, and this is in the Harvard Business Review their contributor network.

Lemme give you a couple of excerpts. I wanna be critical as we go along here just because I think it's important to be critical of some of these stories, especially when they are as one-sided as this one. Let's go into it. A few firms, most notably Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have recently moved to return their employees to the office full time.

Which is true, and we've talked about that on the show, their stated reasons, our face-to-face interactions are better for collaboration and that employees are less productive at home. Also true. That is exactly what Jamie Dimon the head of JP Morgan said in their annual letter to their shareholders.

Perhaps a darker rationale is the purge of non-conformist with one senior manager declaring Goldman does not want to hire people for whom the most important thing. Is how many days they have to spend in the office. Okay? That's an anecdote, and I just throw that out because you can find someone who's upset at every organization.

Yahoo had many more problems than this. Yahoo had a slow decision making process. They had a bad business model. That's really what . Killed Yahoo at the end. The reality is you're not gonna face that much scrutiny as a health system bringing people back to work, because better than 70% of your workers have to be on site anyway.

It's a service business. We do face-to-face meetings with people to provide care, and if that much of your staff has to be on site, really all we're talking about is 30% that could potentially work from home. It goes on a big challenge for firms that want . To return to the office. Full-time is the extraordinary tightness of labor markets.

Hiring and retention are incredibly hard. Talented workers can collect multiple offers if they want to switch jobs, and many people really like working from home. Okay. Talented workers can collect multiple offers if they wanna switch jobs. Of course they can. They can. If they work from the office, they can if they work from home.

And quite frankly, it's easier to search for a job if you're working from home. So I don't put much stock in that because that is the case. At all times. If you have a group of talented workers, you, you need to really understand who they are, be connected with them, understand what makes them tick, and it can be things like the flexibility of their work schedule, but it can also be the challenge of the work.

It can be a commitment to mission that healthcare offers that other industries don't. There's a lot of reasons why people are committed to the employer that they're at, and they say hiring and retention are incredibly hard. They are always incredibly hard. , especially in it. So they talk about this tight labor market.

It has had a tight labor market, I don't know, for the last 30 years. So quite frankly, none of those statements really resonate with me. It goes on. Employees want to work from home two and a half days a week on average. According to our monthly survey of 5,000 Americans desires to work from home and cut.

Commuting has strengthened as the pandemic has lingered, and many of us have become increasingly comfortable with remote human interactions. I like the survey. The survey data is kind of helpful. They ask, how many days a week would you like to work? 33% said five days per week, 7.1%, four days, 13%, three days, 13.9%, two days, 8.3% one day.

And there's your number, 24.5% said, rarely or never. I wanna go back to the office, essentially, is what they're saying. It goes on another survey here. Indeed, our June and July surveys revealed that more than 40% of US employees would start looking for another job or quit immediately if ordered to return to the office full time.

I think the nature of that sentence is pretty interesting. Ordered to return to work, it sets the tone for the relationship between the employer and the employee. You shouldn't have that relationship. Really ever ordering your employees. That's not the nature of hiring high tech workers in healthcare. Uh, they go on to talk about cases.

Educated women with young children place a high value on the ability to work from home. And I believe there are going to be cases that you need to be and remain very flexible around your remote work situation. So it goes on to say what to do. Our advice is for leaders to recognize the reality of the new labor market and adapt.

Ordering employees. Back to the office, full-time risks a stampede of top talent to rivals that offer hybrid working arrangements. And they go on to talk about different hybrid environments. So that is, that's that article. I'm gonna come back to the so what here, why does this matter? Why are we reading this article in this way, and why am I being so critical?

Some comments just strike me as poor thinking, first of all, and I highlighted them as we went through it. I think there's a lack of balance in this article. And they make conclusions that aren't based on the the facts per se, and it wouldn't even matter if they did. No one knows what the real impact of making people return to work is going to be.

It's a risk, it's a gamble. It's also irrelevant if the job requires people to be on site. So when I talk to people, I, I ask them about categorizing your jobs, examine your culture. What characteristics do you want to have in your work environment? Is that possible with a remote work environment? Can the work get done remotely?

You have to ask these questions. On this one though, I would say the only stats that matter are your personal employee surveys. Again, we don't know who the 5,000 people are that they're talking to. You should be doing employee surveys. What are they telling you? Part of me feels like it's a no-win scenario for health.

It, there's a bunch of jobs that will have to be on site. It's just the nature of the jobs that we do. We have a service business where people are on site to deliver care, and we're gonna have to have people on site to support them. There's also a bunch of jobs that really never have to be on site if we're honest with ourselves.

They never have to be on site. These two sides will never meet and will likely resent each other either way, unless you handle it correctly. How are you gonna create a strong, cohesive team? And there's a whole bunch of little things that happen that matter. When we have meals together, when we have lunches together, those matter.

When we celebrate birthdays, those matter as well. We can build communities online for sure, but can we do that when 50 to 70% of the rest of the organization has to be on site, will the 30% really be connected in the same way? I know this may not be a popular opinion, but I'm really a fan of bringing people back into the office.

But remaining, extremely flexible, very flexible. The expectation is that you'll be in the office when your work requires you to be in the office, and we trust you to make that decision. There's a surge in some parts of the country, so again, being very flexible means understanding the environment you live in.

People have personal situations where they will need to work from home for a period of time. Be flexible, but make the expectation clearer. When your job requires, we expect you to be in the office. Why? Because healthcare is primarily an onsite service business. You may work from home, but we work from the office in solidarity with our healthcare workers.

We work from the office in order to be close to our customers and understand their needs. We work from the office because we are part of a community, a community of people that are collaborating on building a better healthcare system for the people that we serve. People innovate better in the same room with each other.

Again, being very flexible, but very clear as well when you can be in the office. I know this isn't a popular sentiment, and it may cost you some money and retention and salaries, but in the end, your team will build a better culture and be more productive over time. That can make the argument in the other direction as well.

But I choose this direction to show that there is no wrong answer in this. Just the best answer for your team, your community, and your hospital system. There is a popular answer, but if you as a leader are swayed by stories like this and social media posts, you are missing the boat. Don't be swayed.

Search for the best solution. For your community. And in order to do that, you have to be listening to your people. That's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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