While many people do thrive in an in-office setting, and there are instances where it is indeed beneficial to have in-person, face-to-face contact (tricky professional conversations, career coaching), forcing a “clocking in,” or “butt-in-seat” mentality can do more harm than good to your organization.
One clear reason for this is that many workforces have figured out how to successfully manage their tasks from the home office. The global pandemic put the phrase “where there’s a will, there’s a way” to the test, and showed us that people are not only willing to work remotely, but many are also more productive when working this way.
Read on to learn why you might consider avoiding this “butt-in-seat” (or for our UK readers, a bums-on-seats) mentality.
“Butts in seats” doesn’t equal productivity, here’s why
When an organization operates with a butts-in-seats culture, it’s subconsciously telling employees that “it’s not what you achieve but how long you sit in front of your computer that matters.”
The truth is, this butt-in-seat mentality does not necessarily equal productivity. The reality is that if you want employees to be productive and creative, they need to be balanced and content. For many people, especially after having gotten a taste of it in 2020 and now 2021, this means working more flexibly, following a schedule that best suits them.
While many people – and organizations – believe that the typical 9-to-5 workdays are over, what with remote working allowing for more flexibility around work schedules, there are a few companies planning for physical office re-entry.
Take Google, for example; this spring, it told its staffers that it’s accelerating plans to get people back in the office ahead of its initial September 1 return deadline.
If the hopes are that we will all get back to the way things were, the fact of the matter is that employees and companies alike know that remote work does indeed work, and there is no going back to the way things were before the pandemic.
Here are the reasons why getting “bums on seats” w on’t guarantee productivity in the office.
1. “Butts in seats” interferes with work/life balance
The pandemic irrevocably changed the way that we all live and work (and learn!), and all these things are frequently happening simultaneously. Employees with children, pets or aging loved ones (or, in too many cases during the last year and a half, a sick family member) are obligated to take care of these dependents – feed, entertain and even educate them, in the case of needing to homeschool kids.
Oftentimes, a dependents’ need arises during traditional work hours (a pet needs to be walked, a child needs to be fed or tutored).
And while schools, daycares and nursing homes might soon open up again, as vaccinations are rolled out and the world (hopefully) returns to a bit of pre-pandemic normalcy, it’s likely this won’t happen overnight. Furthermore, a lot of people – worldwide – have become accustomed to being able to do sports, take walks (a lot of us at Speexx are fans of the “fake commute”), and spend time eating breakfast and lunch – not just dinner anymore – with their families during the workday.
And when people feel that work and life is properly balanced, this leads to increased job satisfaction and from there, greater employee retention.
2. Trusting employees in the remote working age
Requiring that employees come into the office – especially when some of them might prefer to do remote work, for childcare, health, or other personal reasons – might lead to resentment. Your employees are adults; unless there’s a critical meeting that has to be face-to-face, or if one of them has done something to call your trust into question, then there’s no reason to monitor where they are, and when.
Most of today’s workers are set up for success from home, thanks to the pandemic and stay-at-home mandates – and chances are, you’re an organization who has, to some degree, embraced digital transformation. Therefore, you’re likely to be able to rest easy leaving it up to your employees to decide whether it’s best for them to come (or not) into the office on a given day. Trust their judgement until they give you a reason not to; in that case, it’s certainly acceptable to ask them to check in, in-person, once in a while.
Giving an employee autonomy to manage his or her own schedule is freeing and leads to better, more inspired output and work satisfaction. Nobody likes to feel as if they’re being micromanaged!
3. Why butts in seats culture doesn’t work
Extending this notion a bit further – we know that unhappy, dissatisfied people don’t produce their best work. Happy people who feel both autonomy and support drive better results.
If, even subconsciously, you’re delivering the message that time matters more than outcome (i.e., scrutinizing the hours they’ve clocked, or commenting on the amount of times you’ve literally “seen” them at the office), you risk creating colleagues and employees that are frustrated, uninspired, and more likely to physically, but not mentally, show up at work just to meet an arbitrary, outdated notion of the 9-5 workday.
The whole idea of “clocking in” not only sounds unappealing to the modern workforce, but it doesn’t incentivize your workforce to produce the best results. Instead, they are more concerned about what hours their management might see.
4. Finding a balance in the remote working age
HR and L&D managers worry that this “always on” anxiety might be at an all-time high in a post-pandemic world. After more than a year of working, exercising, schooling, living entire lives at home, we’ve gotten quite used to work and play hours blending together.
A lot of parents shoot off work emails after kids have gone to bed; sometimes, work is picked up on the weekends, when children don’t need to be homeschooled.
In a world where offices might, to some degree, open back up again, setting the expectation that employees need always physically show up at their place of work puts undue pressure on people who might have found that a bit more flexibility than the traditional 9-to-5 works better for them.
Some people might enjoy the separation from home, and find that they’re really productive at the office, away from household chores, family and quotidian temptations like TV or gardening. But I think the majority of us realize that the option to choose is the key thing here – some days, a change of scenery (from home to the office) helps inspire us; on other days, we might work better when we can spend our lunch break doing an at home-yoga workout with family members.
5. “Butts in seats” culture doesn’t always provide much-needed work breaks
While we all agree that today’s software tools add a lot of positive benefits to the way we work – Teams, Slack, Zoom, Google Hangouts all let us work remotely; effective work while social distancing wouldn’t have been possible with them! – we can also agree that they pressure us to be available, always.
Even pre-pandemic, many of us were getting emails, texts, calls – interruptions, distractions! – constantly. This has only been made worse in a world where entire organizations are working remotely; especially when we’re working across different time zones. How many of us have been woken up by a work email, or a personal call?
Organizations need to allow and encourage their employees to take necessary breaks – literally be “offline” for large portions of time to recharge. It’s a bit harder to enforce this when people in the office; you can’t help but feel like you need to work – or appear to be working – when you’re at your actual, physical place of work.
Chances are, if people are doing some portion of their work at home, they’ll have an easier time taking a break. Again, they won’t feel “always on,” or like a Big Brother-esque employer is monitoring them.
The problem with at-home “butts-in-seats”: “webcams on”
Don’t make the mistake of replacing the butt-in-seat notion with the at-home version of it: Requiring employees to always turn their webcams on when working remotely.
At Speexx, where we help organizations with language learning, we know the same goes for virtual classrooms: That it doesn’t always do to require language learners (our users) to have their webcams on.
Sure, it’s nice to “see” each other in the virtual world, the way you would in a classroom. No doubt that seeing another human face is pleasant, often heartwarming, and makes us feel a little less alone. Especially for the instructor or language coach or facilitator – we don’t get the sense that we’re just “talking at” a computer screen. It’s nice to see one another laugh at the same time, or share in looks of puzzlement or confusion. Virtual classroom expert Jo Cook explores this in a recent Speexx webinar.
But to force a webcam to be turned on not only raises potential technical issues – bandwidth reducing the quality of the audio or video, for instance; quality being so poor that no one takes anything away – it also is a personal choice for a learner or worker, whether or not he or she is comfortable sharing him- or herself digitally (and therefore potentially the household, kids in the background, and so on).
Flexibility in the new remote working age
Again, it strips away potential flexibility. We want to be sensitive to people’s personal spaces, especially at the moment, when everyone is working and learning at home. We have to respect people’s choices.
When coaches or organizations insist on webcam use, it’s basically the same, digital equivalent of the butt-in-seat notion. Basically, webcam usage just becomes an attendance register to let people know we’re there, when we might be totally mentally checked out.
Furthermore, overusing this “face-to-face” option (webcams on) is merely a poor replication of the physical experience, without taking away the best bits of tech uniting and connecting us.
A forced webcam experience is really the new “butts-in-seats,” the most basic form of engagement without allowing for real productivity.
How to move past the “butts in seats” culture
The answer here clearly lies in trust. Giving your workforce the ability to schedule their tasks accordingly, adhering to deadlines and communicating their progress is the best way for employees to be as productive as possible.
Of course, there needs to be clear guidelines for remote work. This needs to come from management and company policy and here is where L&D can step in and lead the example for successful remote work.
Ultimately, what you want is a successful business. Putting butts in seats is an outdated approach to achieving this. Put the responsibility in your employees’ hands and focus on the end result- creating a healthy work environment that focuses on business goals.
Want to learn more about moving from face-to-face to digital? Download our eBook here: Moving from F2F to Digital Learning
