The 'Return to Office’ conundrum - a square filter in a round hole?
Maybe it's because of all the amazing Perseverance footage coming from Mars but I watched Apollo 13 (agaaain!) last night.
I love the tense 'We need to fit this into the hole for this using nothing but that' scene where the engineer team are faced with saving the lives of the Apollo 13 crew. Spoiler alert - they do it!
The scene got me thinking about high functioning teams - or as the grandfather of group psychodynamics, Wilfred Bion, called Work Groups.
These are defined as having the clarity of role, task, authority, boundary and resources required to meet their objective.
The NASA engineers had all these in that moment =====>
But I wonder how fast they'd have found a solution without all of these elements.
Say it was a 'practise' emergency - so no real time boundary. Or say the Chief Flight Director was a control freak who required them to check in with him every 5 minutes. Or say no one knew exactly how big the square filter was anyway.
Or, say that half of the engineers were at NASA in Houston and half were in their home offices using Zoom to take part. Then what?
When the UK went into lockdown on 23rd March 2020, leadership teams were like the NASA engineers in Apollo 13. There was a clear task with clear time and location boundaries - everyone out of the office and working from home in 48 hours.
Sure there were challenges but predominantly the task was achieved.
Why? Because the team had clarity.
But what about when lockdown ends and businesses start the task of returning to office working. Is there clarity in each area then?
What's the task? Get everyone back? Get some back, some times? Let everyone choose?
Where are the boundaries? How long are you giving yourselves? Do the same rules apply to everyone, or are some teams exempt or mandated?
Where does the authority sit? As a leadership team how much are you prepared to mandate? How much authority do you delegate - to department heads or team leaders or individuals? How do you encourage people back without creating a Presenteeism culture?
It's tempting to think that the hard work is behind us - that the crisis was met. But now is the time to figure out how to bring that same clarity and purpose to this next part of the Covid journey - the creation of an entirely new way of working.
