Leaders' Optimism vs. Employees' Reality: The Gap in the five core practices that enhance organizational health for RTO Transition !

📣 All types of working model report mostly similar levels of intent to quit, burnout, effort, and satisfaction !

📌 There are five core practices that research shows spur organizational health and that were the most frequently stated reasons leaders gave for transitioning to RTO.

💡 The policy mandate itself is far less important than the work environment organizations create and the practices that accompany a policy’s implementation

⚠️ Organizations are doing a poor job of supporting five core practices that drive performance and strengthen organizational health: 1️⃣ collaboration, 2️⃣ connectivity, 3️⃣ innovation, 4️⃣ mentorship, and 5️⃣ skill development.

🚩 Leaders have a much more optimistic view of how well their organizations support these five practices, which indicates that they might not be focusing on the core problem.

📉 Both remote and primarily in-person workers report similarly low levels of desire to switch working models, at around 20%. This is significantly lower than hybrid workers, about one-third of whom express a wish to switch.

📈 While employees' satisfaction across working models is generally moderate, their experience and productivity rates tend to be relatively lower, according to a new interesting research published by McKinsey & Company using data 📊 from a new survey of 8,426 employees across 15 industries in the United States, most people in each of the tested models (in person, hybrid, and remote).

✅ The Remarkable Increase in In-Person Work

Researchers observed that the proportion of mostly in-person workers (working in person at least four days a week) doubled between the two samples.

The number of workers in a mostly remote arrangement (working remotely at least four days a week) plunged by more than half to 17%, from 44%, while the number of workers in a hybrid format (working in person two to three days a week) declined to 14%, from 22%.

✅ The working model won’t automatically improve outcomes

Researchers found that in-person, remote, and hybrid workers all report mostly similar levels of intent to quit, burnout, effort, and satisfaction.

This pattern largely holds true regardless of gender, though there are slight differences across generations and caregiving status.

Interestingly, researchers noticed that the amount of effort that employees report putting into their work is similar across hybrid and remote workers and slightly higher for in-person employees: 34 percent of in-person workers strongly agree that they put substantial effort into their work and consistently stay focused while working, whereas 29 percent of remote and 28 percent of hybrid workers say the same.

This pattern holds true across gender, caregiver status, and all generation groups except for Gen Z, a cohort whose hybrid workers report slightly higher effort than the other working models.

✅ Leaders Exhibit Greater Optimism than Employees Regarding the Five Core Practices that Enhance Organizational Health

Researchers tested five core practices that research shows spur organizational health and that were the most frequently stated reasons leaders gave for transitioning to RTO: collaboration, connectivity, innovation, mentorship, and skill development.

📉 The data show that across working models, most employees perceive relatively low organizational maturity across these five key practices (though hybrid models score a little higher).

👉 Aside from connectivity, roughly half or fewer of respondents in each model rate levels of collaboration, innovation, mentorship, and skill development as effective at their organizations, which has both direct and indirect implications for performance .

☝️ This means that changing the working model alone will not resolve or even change the nature of the problem unless organizations address why their employees feel this way.

Finally, researchers noticed that there is a disconnect between leaders and employees when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness and maturity of these five practices in each working model.

📈 Leaders’ views of average maturity across practices are much higher than the views of employees in each model.

Researchers explained this gap by the fact that senior leaders have the skill, experience, strategic perspective, and autonomy to shape their own working model and collaboration pattern in a way that is optimal for them and the senior-executive teams they are a part of. 💪 And at that level, they are not beholden to scalable business processes, management practices, collaboration mechanisms, and enabling technologies to make the model work.

✅ Each working model possesses distinct yet comparable sets of enablers

This research shows that each working practice has behaviors, policies, or norms that contribute to how well it functions. Some of these enablers, as researchers call them, are more important than others, and together they influence the maturity of each practice, regardless of working model.

These enablers reflect the dynamics that are present in each model, including commonalities and differences in experience.

🚀 Overall, each of the five working practices shares at least two enablers across every working model.

• For the in-person working model, the four key enablers are: Skill proficiency, Experimentation/iteration culture, Leadership representation, Key talent stability
• For hybrid working model, the two key enablers are: Work–life balance, Transparency and trust
• For mostly remote, the three key enablers are : Network accessibility, Professional development, Leader support for innovation, Peer support for skill development

These suggest that what organizations need to get right is largely the same, allowing for nuances related to the working model.

📍Finally, researchers recommend specific actions for leaders, managers, and employees, emphasizing their distinct roles and expectations:

• Senior leaders: A primary reason to return to the office is to be together in person doing work that is less effectively done virtually, including certain kinds of collaboration, connectivity, culture building, and skill building.
• People managers: Spend focused time with team members. This is true whether a company’s working model is fully in person, hybrid, or remote. This can be challenging because of the pressure put on managers and may be exacerbated by cuts to management ranks.
• Employees Make the most of in-person time by scheduling regular check-ins with managers, function leaders, and others. Don’t slip into the habit of joining calls by video when everyone is in the building.

These actions are crucial to maximizing the benefits of Return to Office (RTO), ensuring employees perform at their best, and enhancing organizational health.

☝️ 𝙈𝙮 𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙫𝙞𝙚𝙬: I thoroughly enjoyed reading this research, which uses global data to clearly highlight significant findings. In addition to confirming our common observations, it shows a remarkable increase in in-person work over the past two years. Each working model presents interesting benefits, referred to as 'enablers' by researchers, which appear to be particularly important in the in-person working model. Researchers also recommend that all leaders, managers, and employees actively engage to ensure the successful implementation of Return to Office (RTO) strategies.

Thank you 🙏 McKinsey & Company researchers team for these insightful findings: Aaron De Smet , Brooke Weddle Bryan Hancock Marino Mugayar-Baldocchi Taylor Lauricella

Dave Ulrich George Kemish LLM MCMI MIC MIoL

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