Welcome back to OrgBites! This week, I wanted to share what I think could be a clever solution—lacking a better term—to sum up the challenges involving return-to-office mandates and organizations allowing people to continue working remotely or in a hybrid fashion.
One of the challenges for organizations is that when you mandate a return to the office, the people most likely to leave your company are your top performers. A great Gartner survey that came out earlier this year found that, by far, the group most likely to say, "I'm looking for another job," were the people you really want to stay. This was compared across different roles, generations of employees, and other segments of the workforce.
So, it can be a bit risky to mandate people to come back in the name of their individual and, ultimately, company-wide performance if those people are just going to walk out the door.
We also found some really interesting data this past week—it might have been a little older, but I just came across it. It was the result of a study done in the UK on remote work, which found that remote workers got an average of 24 minutes more sleep per day and exercised for 15 minutes more per day. Obviously, that's probably due to not having to commute. There’s just extra time to stay in bed or take a workout that goes a little longer.
That’s great! Those health benefits of greater sleep and physical exercise are likely to have huge impacts on individuals—not only their job satisfaction but probably their performance as well. There are some bona fide research links showing that increases in physical health translate to better employee performance and productivity.
So, my thinking is: what if organizations allowed people to work more remote hours in exchange for committing to a highly measured corporate fitness and wellness program? What you could do is, using various devices and trackers, monitor their actual amount of exercise. Of course, there are some risks, and employees might not want to opt into this. In certain places, you just can’t do this. But for employees who opt-in, they could commit to doing a certain amount of exercise for themselves in exchange for being allowed to work more remotely.
This seems like an excellent trade-off because nobody would be forced to do this. But employees who wanted to stay remote—presumably because one of the reasons they want to do so is to get more time for exercise or even better sleep—could benefit. And when they do that, their performance on the job during the hours they are working is probably going to improve.
Now, there are obviously data privacy and sharing concerns and all that good stuff. But it does seem like some sort of exchange—where employees commit to exercise in a way that's monitored (not just self-reported)—in return for more hybrid or remote workdays, might be a really interesting way to improve both individual well-being and organizational performance.
Surely, this could be an interesting pilot program for some organizations. If you know of anything like this happening, please let me know.
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