As more companies ask employees to return to the office, it's becoming clear which approaches to the in-person transition work — and which could have been better. Though the strategy should be tailored to an organization's individual needs, a few key methods can be used so that the shift is not just tolerated, but embraced.
When Zoominfo, a software and data company, began orchestrating their plan to have workers in-person one day a week for team collaboration after years of pandemic-induced remote work, it was based on research, observation and most importantly,
"What is the best way to do this for employees?" This was the big question that CHRO Chad Herring sought to answer before implementing the return to office (RTO) plan for Zoominfo's U.S. workforce, which makes up the majority of its 3,600+ global workers. "We gathered intelligence," he says, "and heard some really consistent themes from employees that helped inform the decision we came up with."
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If businesses have learned one thing over the past few years, it is that doing right by their employees translates to major benefits for individuals and organizations How they achieve this looks a lot like what Zoominfo has done: by sitting down with employees in listening sessions, which helped Herring and his team identify the best RTO practice for their workplace.
Herring spoke with EBN and shared his strategy for creating a new policy built around the heart of the company: its people.
When developing your return to office plan, you employed listening sessions that engaged your employees. Why did you choose this as a way to gauge employees' wants and needs?
We had done some internal surveys to get information about how employees viewed work, how many days a week they would like to be in the office and what sort of stipulations they had, but you can't discuss things with a survey. In September we made the decision to take it a step further, and we interviewed close to 75 employees at all levels of the company so all functions had representation. It was a fairly structured approach; we did the interviews in small groups as well as one-on-one to get the nuances you don't get from a survey about return to office.
The consistent themes we got back from employees were flexibility — meaning not five days in the office — as well as some structured approach to their time in the office. We needed to be intentional about when we brought people back, and we needed to be thoughtful about their personal situations. COVID has been a paradigm shift for a generation of people in the workplace, impacting their professional and personal lives. Childcare, elder care — things like this have changed over the past few years, and people did not want to have to completely revert back to how they were operating before COVID hit the U.S.
From a
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Up until now, what has the post-COVID work arrangement been? Were you seeing people return to the office voluntarily?
I would say it varied by geography. Our locations in India and Israel, where remote is less common, have about 80% of their populations back in office. Both offices do a great job of making it worth it for people to be there — outside speakers, opportunities, team events. It's not just coming in and sitting at a desk. In the U.S. it was a bit different; on any given day we probably had 10% of our population who were within reasonable commuting distance, which we consider to be a 30 mile radius, in person. The utilization was very low and the days of the week people were coming in were inconsistent.
Why did you choose listening sessions as your method for employee feedback?
We picked a proportional representation from each team, meaning our sales and market teams, which are the biggest portion of our 3,600+ employee headcount, had the most representation in the selected employee group. We also wanted composition that reflects the diversity of our workforce in terms of gender, but also race and age. We find that the different demographics sometimes inform what people are looking for and what is optimal for them, so we had a very diverse group of people in that group of 75.
The largest group we had in a session at any given time was six people, and we didn't put all the people from the same team together — let's call it random selection done deliberately — but the questions we asked each group and each individual were the same, because we wanted to be consistent with the information we were asking for.
My team led the discussions, and then we summarized and anonymized that feedback because we wanted people to speak with courage and conviction, and say exactly how they felt about returning to the office, about their commute, or about their child care situation with the understanding that no one would see it. People spoke very freely, and we got pages and pages of feedback that we've summarized for the team.
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There has been a lot of recent research and feedback from HR professionals on the importance of face-to-face collaboration. How did you decide on one day in the office to start with, and will there be an increase from here?
It's easier to add than to take away, and so once employees feel the value of that one day and we prove that it is working, then we can say hey, we'd like to go to two days for people that are within the reasonable distance rule. You've effectively created the demand among your employees for that extra day if you decide to do it. It's harder to walk back when you start with three to four days a week, which is also much more disruptive when you've gone from zero days in the office. Our view was, let's try the one day for a period of time, and after we feel like we've established a good operating cadence we'll have good proof points for ourselves and our employees to be able to add on later.
How is the upcoming schedule organized, and how does this fall in line with Zoominfo's focus on work-life balance for its employees?
We let each team pick their day. My method was an advisory vote, and my team selected Thursday because other teams we work with a lot would also be in on that day. We published each team's selected day to the company, and it's transparent for everyone so that they can plan their schedule accordingly. Once we establish an operating rhythm, we'll get feedback from employees to find out how this is working, and what the next step should be.
How does this fit into Zoominfo's approach to wellness and the importance of work-life balance within its workforce?
When you think of employee wellness, mental health is one of the key things that falls under that. Our benefits programs in the U.S. are top quartile in the tech industry in terms of breadth of offering and how cost-friendly they are to employees. We actually have a carve-out mental health benefit that we offer to all our employees, irrespective of whether or not they participate in our actual major benefits plans. When it comes to the RTO, we're not looking at hours in the office, so if people have child care arrangements or they take care of a parent, that is completely fine. We view this as more of getting some in-person engagement overlap, how you manage your hours is entirely up to you, and it should fit within the life you have today. The goal is to not be disruptive to employees, but in fact to compliment the way they're living their personal lives by supporting wellness, flexibility, and giving them the latitude they need to be able to take care of themselves and their families.
