It is still a competitive labor market, especially for top talent who consistently identify a flexible work environment as a priority when selecting an employer. Yet CEOs, managers, and experts agree there is a significant productivity benefit from in-office collaboration and spontaneity, as well as the long-term benefits from developing and maintaining a consistent company culture.
So how do you balance in-office collaboration with the intense, clear preference among top talent for remote work?
As a workplace, HR, or real estate leader, it is incumbent on you to have a value proposition for your employees to return to the office. Just as you must differentiate your products in a competitive marketplace, you must do the same for your workplace. The office’s clear advantage over working from home is the in-person opportunity to learn from peers and mentors, socialize with co-workers, and connect to the company culture.
A successful return-to-office strategy anchors on these social benefits to the workplace, and a workplace app is a critical engagement tool to help employees make the connection.
Labor market remains competitive, especially for top talent.
The current unemployment rate for college graduates remains at the pre-pandemic, all-time-low level of 2%. While many prestigious employers such as Google, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey have had well-publicized layoffs, their overall employment levels remain higher than in December 2021.
During this ongoing talent war, promoting a flexible workplace is a key attribute by which companies can differentiate themselves to attract top candidates. A McKinsey survey found that 32% of people who left a job in 2021 without another job in hand cited a lack of workplace flexibility as a top reason for leaving. Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed asserted a preference for full-time remote work.
Your competition is compromising to accommodate employees’ wishes.
The same McKinsey survey found that most knowledge workers are given remote work options by their current employers. For example, among professionals with computer / mathematical roles, 52% can work remotely full-time, and 37% can work remotely part-time.
Startups, fintechs, and most tech companies that are your primary competition were born remote and have set the expectation among younger workers that work should be flexible.
But at the same time, we know that full-time remote work reduces certain elements of collaboration and productivity.
It is not surprising to see CEOs push against remote work. Large companies that embraced full-time remote work have seen drastic reductions in cross-functional collaboration and increased risk of burnout and alienation, especially among employees who joined during a remote-first or remote-only environment. A recent MIT and University of California economists survey found that fully remote new hires were 18% less productive than those in the office.
Nonetheless, the burden is on you, the employer, to persuade your people to return to the office.
How to bring employees back to the office to be more productive and keep them happy.
The 2022 Microsoft Work Trend Index reports that 84% of employees would be motivated to return to the office by the promise of socializing with coworkers, while 85% would be inspired by rebuilding team bonds. Employees also report they would go to the office more frequently if they knew their direct team members would be there (73%) or if their work friends were there (74%).
Gen Z and Millennials are especially keen to use the office to establish themselves as part of their workplace community and feel more connected to their co-workers. The Microsoft report found that 78% want to connect with senior leadership, and 80% want to engage with their direct managers in person.
Modo’s customers across industries have made impressive investments in their physical spaces to facilitate human bonding and connection. These investments include open, light-filled workspaces conducive to creative collaboration, world-class corporate cafeterias for casual meet-ups, and outdoor spaces and fitness amenities to encourage holistic well-being.
But the key driver is to bring people together, whether for team meetings, company-wide town halls, or on-site special events like a pop-up retailer visit or an evening party.
A workplace app can support the return to the office.
A workplace app like Modo Workplace enables workers to know with the tap of a smartphone button who will be in the office that day, what events are happening, and that they will have the dedicated space they desire to be productive in the office.
For companies, a workplace app has become vital for supporting collaboration, nurturing company culture, and enticing employees to return to the office by promoting all the amenities the real estate and workplace teams have invested in. Furthermore, a workplace app is an opportunity to provide a unified digital experience, consolidating a fragmented corporate app landscape. Your employees do not want a dining app, facilities app, digital ID app, and space booking app. Rather, they want those capabilities within one seamless app.
Tim Cook, VP of Digital Buildings at Goldman Sachs, recognized the need to create a unified experience focused on the user instead of single-function platforms when his team developed its workplace app, Canopy.
“It’s really one app to facilitate or to enhance all of the different experiences that are happening at a workplace,” shared Cook. “It’s less about being a dominating force, but rather that all of the aspects of the experience are easily accessible in one working place.”
Citigroup’s app was built with a similar goal in mind. At a recent Worktech event, Rosamond Cosentino, COO of Citigroup Location and Realty Services, shared that a workplace app enables Citigroup to bundle fragmented services into a unified experience.
In addition to building a unified user experience, Modo customers use their workplace apps to send push notifications with important news and exciting in-office happenings. The feature generates much higher response rates than text messages and engages employees far better than email.
In many cases, a fully functioning app with critical features such as space booking, facilities ticketing, and digital credentials is a prerequisite to asking employees to return to the office. But like any enterprise technology implementation, a workplace app requires thoughtful planning to enable the desired outcomes.
How to deploy a workplace app in days, not months.
Over the last three years, Modo has worked with several Fortune 500 companies across different industries on their global workplace app rollouts. While staying true to our identity as a software company, we have also developed strong implementation and support capabilities to ensure our customers get the full value of their technology investments.
We have learned much about managing the trade-offs between speed and functionality and taking a measured, phased approach. We have found our greatest success by starting small. Our goal is to develop a minimal viable product within 30 days. Some integrations are more complicated and take longer, but on average we can deploy a full-featured app in three months.
For example, when Goldman Sachs needed to add a health attestation module to its existing Modo-powered Canopy app, the module was quickly built and deployed to 75 global locations in less than 60 days.
Throughout the journey, we help our customer stakeholders align with cross-functional peers across real estate, facilities, corporate services, IT, security, corporate communications, and HR. This alignment helps achieve a successful app rollout that meets corporate objectives, such as adherence to office attendance policies and engagement with on-site events.
Final thoughts…
Given the current environment, employers must invest in their workplaces to “earn the commute” from reluctant workers. Surveys show that employees want in-person collaboration and opportunities to forge connections with coworkers and the company. Enterprise workplace apps are an essential technology to help foster employee engagement and make coming into the office more productive and frictionless.
If you would like to learn more about how your peers have partnered with Modo Labs to build, deploy, and scale workplace apps, please reach out to schedule a meeting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Umans
VP of Strategy & Partnerships, Modo Labs
Andy leads strategic projects and develops and manages Modo’s partner ecosystem. Prior to Modo, Andy managed partnerships with global system integrators, boutique consultants, and the major cloud platforms for Unqork.