Returning to the office has not been smooth.

The return to the office (RTO) road has been bumpy, to say the least.

Early on in the pandemic, many leaders were itching to get back to normal. In their eyes, “normal” meant getting their employees to work in the office full-time again. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, was one of the most outspoken critics of remote work. Dimon said that working from home “doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation. It doesn’t work for culture.” Apple’s CEO Tim Cook held a similar view at the time. “Innovation isn't always a planned activity," Cook shared. "It's bumping into each other over the course of the day and advancing an idea that you just had. And you really need to be together to do that."

On the surface, this argument sounds compelling. After all, if people bump into each other at the water cooler, they’re going to talk. However, as Harvard Business School professor Ethan S. Bernstein shared, “Is that conversation likely to be helpful for innovation, creativity, or useful at all for what an organization hopes people would talk about? There, there is almost no data whatsoever.”

If this is true, what’s really the motivating force behind leaders’ desire to get people back in the office? Dr. David Rock, co-founder of the Neuroleadership Institute, suggests it all has to do with our hard-wired human desire to maximize rewards and minimize threats.

In 2008, Dr. Rock developed the SCARF Model which identifies five social drivers of human behavior:

From a leader’s personal perspective, getting everyone back in the office ticks a lot of the SCARF reward boxes at the same time:

However, if you view the decision to return to the office through the employee’s eyes, you get a very different picture. Many of the SCARF threats are activated:

No wonder the employee backlash to RTO is so strong. Data from WFH Research shows 22% of workers never want to return to the office, 31% want to go back full-time, and 46% want a mix of hybrid options. 15% of global employees would quit or start looking for a WFH job if their employer announced that all employees must return to the worksite 5+ days a week.

Dimon and Cook’s desire to ‘return to normal’ has met with serious resistance. A survey conducted this past April found that 76% of Apple workers said they were dissatisfied with Apple’s return-to-office policy. In JPMorgan’s annual report, Dimon conceded that “it’s clear that working from home will become more permanent in American business”, and announced that 40% of employees will work in a hybrid model, and 10% will work from home full time.

Dr. Rock believes that “’How do we force people back in the office?’ is the wrong question for leaders to ask. A much better question is, ‘How do we maximize people’s feeling of connection while maximizing productivity and performance?’”

Rock shares, “People’s feeling of control is a big stress factor. Don’t force people to do anything. Productivity bumps up when people have a choice. Some people are more productive at the office, and some at home. Give each team autonomy to decide how many days per month their team should spend in the office. Try to minimize that number, and use those days for work that you can only do in person together. Getting together with your peers can generate a lot of benefits and connection. Just don’t force them to be together.”

Another big opportunity to simultaneously maximize connection and productivity is meeting hygiene. Rock explains, “A lot of organizations have fallen into bad habits with platforms. We’ve multiplied the number of meetings people have, with even less space to decompress and manage biology. People are overwhelmed. If you’re mentally overloaded, you’re likely to keep cameras off, disconnect and check out.”

Rock suggests carving out no-meeting mornings and no-meeting Mondays. Rock explains that once you set up this cadence, “You look forward to these times, to get your own work done.” This structure frees up cognitive bandwidth to be more present for when you do hold meetings.

We continue to live in challenging times. After dealing with so much uncertainty for so long, it’s understanable that leaders want simple answers to questions like, “How will we return to the office?” Unfortunately, the answers are not so easy. However, by understanding the neuroscientific drivers of human behavior, leaders can be better equipped to navigate the complexity of returning to the office.