It’s time to get back to the office – or at least so your boss thinks. As the worst of the pandemic is hopefully behind us, many employers feel it’s time to get everyone back to the office. Returning to a shared physical space would re-establish culture and drive productivity by creating an environment where employees can focus and problem solve together – in the same room.

Yet, employers keep slipping up on the right way to inspire people to return to the office. Witness the editor of the Washingtonian magazine announcing an abrupt return to the office in an oped without first notifying staff. Jamie Dimon told reporters that it’s harder for employees working from home to clock a full 80-hour workweek. Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, said that he doesn’t see “any positives” for working from home. “Not being able to get together in person, particularly internationally, is a pure negative,” he told the Wall Street Journal. The struggle is real.

Pro-tip: When trying to inspire and motivate people around a return to the office avoid broad strokes statements. Definitely don’t share your plans with the media before your staff. We can all agree no one deserves to be treated that way, particularly your most important stakeholders – your people.

The Covid-19 pandemic was a once-in-a-century public health crisis that forced a fundamental shift in how we work. The rapid rise of communication technologies over the past two decades enabled a surprisingly smooth transition to work from home for most companies. But don’t let the power of our technology fool you into thinking there isn’t a much deeper crisis taking place inside workplaces. 

The pandemic was a catalyst for a broad shift in competing visions for the future of the workplace. Generational attitudes about what a workplace should be and what a company should stand for are changing. Animated with a new commitment to use their careers to transform society, millennial and Gen Z bring a new perspective on office culture and mission-driven work. Running through it all is a renewed focus on justice, diversity, equity and inclusion, and social impact in the workplace and society at large. Research suggests that this generation of workers may often care even less about compensation than they do about their ability to advance progress. Moreover, these same employees have a new taste for freedom and flexibility after a year of working from home. The same could be said for many veteran Gen Xers and Boomers too.

On the other side of this divide are senior executives eager to get their teams back into the office as a business imperative. While there might have been an initial spike in productivity when the pandemic began – for many, hyper-productivity was a coping mechanism for the uncertainty of those early Covid days – the reality is now one of burnout and Zoom fatigue. CEOs and other leaders understand the need to move past this burnout and get back to some semblance of normality as it existed before the pandemic.

Bringing both sides of the divide together has proven elusive. It’s like an endless game of tug of war with no winners or losers – only rope burns. Instead of focusing solely on the short-term goal of getting workers back in the office, it’s time to think about the bigger picture. There are no easy answers but communication is key.

The power of communication, particularly in times of crisis or intense transformation, cannot be understated or ignored. Building the best version of your business means communicating and sharing more openly regarding your business imperatives.

Communicating effectively starts with a deep understanding of your people – what are their perspectives; how are they feeling; what motivates or drives them? Quantitative and qualitative research are complementary methods that you can combine to get results that are both wide-reaching and deep. Consider starting with the quantitative by developing and deploying tools like employee surveys, to uncover problems and opportunities your teams might be thinking about. Then coordinate intimate focus groups or 1:1 employee interviews, using the power of the qualitative data to confirm or validate survey findings and obtain a deeper understanding of your people. And make a habit of checking in regularly, not just around your return to work plans.

More broadly, Bridging the workplace generational divide requires not just a deeper understanding of employees but an appreciation of the changing nature of leadership. Gone are the days when an old-school hierarchy (often controlled by an “old boys” network) can run a business from the top down. Succeeding as a business leader now requires a new emphasis on transparency and engagement with all stakeholders, employees foremost among them. This is a more fundamental shift than the usual jargon around empathy or impact – important as those ought to be to any business. Rather this is a new way of conceiving your leadership team as an inclusive community that empowers everyone to perform and take accountability for the organization as a whole. As the pandemic comes to a close, let us not simply return to the office but revitalise it.