Return-to-office mandates: Didn’t we already fight this war?

“Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the 7th grade.” — Source unknown

To understand what’s going on right now, a short history of corporate attitudes about remote work might be helpful:

• 2009: Working remotely (“Telecommuting”) is a bad thing.
• 2020: Working remotely (“Virtual Workforce”) saved the world economy.
• 2023: Working remotely (“Hybrid Workforce”) turns out to work quite well and is a win/win, thank you very much.
• 2025: Working remotely (“GET BACK TO YOUR DESK!”) is Satan’s tool!

More history can lead to more insights into why business leaders are doing what they’re doing, to whit what follows.

CRM vs. SFA: A comparative study of productive outcomes

If you prefer your history lessons less bulletized but still metaphorically relevant, try this: Back in the 1990s IT was called on to implement customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

CRM was the supersized heir to what were called sales force automation (SFA) systems. Architecturally, the main difference was that CRM systems kept customer information in a centralized database, whereas SFA systems kept it on each sales representative’s personal hard drive.

But that difference was malleable: Most SFA systems could be pointed to a centralized database; CRM systems could mostly make where customer data were stored irrelevant.

The more interesting difference when it came to implementing CRM versus SFA was that a typical CRM implementation was geared toward helping sales managers manage, as opposed to typical SFA implementations, which were focused on helping sales reps sell.

Also, according to my informal polling, implementations that focused on helping sales reps sell succeeded, while those aimed primarily at helping sales managers manage were, at best, disappointing.

What, you might be wondering, does this have to do with the price of eggs? Just this: From what I’m reading in both the business and technology press, companies whose management most emphatically insist that employees need to return to their cubicles want this because an in-person workforce is easier to manage than a virtual workforce.

It’s all about managing, not about facilitating employees’ ability to do their jobs.

Yes, but what kind of relationships?

Beyond the CRM vs. SFA metaphor there’s also an irony in all this. Were Sherman to set Mr. Peabody’s Wayback machine to the early 1970s, we’d see both business management and employees thinking they had a mutual obligation, where employees were loyal to their employers and employers were just as loyal to their employees. It was an environment in which employees would retire after 50 years of service and get a gold watch from their employers as tokens of appreciation.

American employers, that is, respected and valued their mutual relationships with employees.

Then Toyota discovered it could sell cars in the US, and American automakers discovered they had to compete with Toyota to sell their cars in the US.

As part of this voyage of discovery, American employers figured out that they didn’t have to care about their relationship with employees. Employees existed to perform tasks, and their connection to management was purely transactional.

Now, proponents of back-to-the-cubicle management are extolling the virtues of the relationships they can only have with employees through face-to-face encounters. It’s their employees who are pointing out, with no little justice, that they can perform their tasks at home just as well as they can in the office. Relationships? What does management think … that this is the 1950s?

What’s needed to succeed

There’s a big missing piece of this puzzle. It isn’t how to best encourage — “coerce” is a more accurate verb — employees to come back into the office, so as to restore the manager/employee relationship, which is how the dialog is usually crafted.

The missing piece is educating business leaders and managers in the fine arts of leading and managing employees electronically and at a distance. It’s all well and good to want employees back in their cube farms, but then, just because I want an Easy Bake Oven doesn’t mean Santa is going to put one under my tree.

Nope. It’s Vuja De all over again. Just as enlightened sales managers might have wanted a CRM system that helped them manage, but only succeeded in increasing revenue through SFA implementations that helped their sales reps sell, so managers outside of Sales need to stop thinking about what they want and instead need to discover ways to create work environments that help make employees as effective as possible.

What do work environments like this look like?

That depends on the work that needs to be done and the tools available to help do it.

More important, it depends on leaders and managers who have been educated in the fine but hard-to-define art of leading and managing employees who do their work wherever they happen to be.

Most important is whether a company’s executive management wants a business culture in which the connection between management and employees is transactional or relational.

Then they need to convince employees that they truly want a relationship and are interested in doing their part to make it real.