Insurers must avoid 'supply-side thinking' in returning to office

Insurers and other companies are struggling with their return-to-office plans. Recent articles in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal highlight the actions of major financial and technology firms, along with the impact of these decisions on the value of commercial real estate and the configuration of office space.

Many of our insurer clients are also struggling with their strategies, trying to balance multiple factors, including:

• Old-school executives’ desire to have everyone in the building, often for reasons of “preserving culture”
• Employees’ demand for greater flexibility and the impact on recruiting and retention of supporting remote work
• Creating opportunities for collaboration and co-working

Many companies are taking what is essentially a supply-side approach to creating their strategies, framing it in terms of what percentage of staff will be required to be on site what percentage of time.

While this is an important thing to know for resource planning purposes, it’s a top-down, supply-side approach to the problem that ignores the real question: What are the actual valuable elements of office-based vs. home-based work for both employees and companies?

Companies talk about collaboration, serendipity, team building, and lots of other generic values of co-working, but few have actually been able to specify or quantify what’s been lost in the shift to full remote work or balance that against what’s been gained.

This is a complex exercise. It requires understanding the way staff at all levels spend their time, the kinds of tasks they perform, the relationships and interdependencies that enable those tasks, and the types of communication that best support those relationships and interdependencies. It also requires understanding how being in the office or working remotely makes them feel about their work.

But companies are in the strange position of having a natural assumption (“everyone has to be in the office for the company to function”) completely upended by a year of actual experience. Most companies functioned just fine. Some things were worse, some were better, but basically it worked.

So now the task is to understand what was worse and why, what was better and why, and how to mitigate the former and maximize the latter.

Put another way, companies should re-frame their thinking from, “How much on-site work should we require?” to, “What kind of on-site work should we support, and how much of that is there?”

This blog entry has been reprinted with permission from Novarica.