Striking the Right Balance for Your Team

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You’re probably thinking, “No, sometimes I cook, and sometimes I go out to eat.” Which makes sense. There are advantages and trade-offs to both choices. Restaurants are delicious. But they are more expensive, and home cooking can be a much healthier option. Indeed, some people live fully on one end or the other of the spectrum, but it is more likely for someone to practice a balance between the two. Each of us finds our way to a balance that suits our household and respective resources and priorities.

Despite the way we talk about work (“I’m going to work.“), work is not a place. It’s an activity. For an increasing number of jobs, the activity is not tied to place out of physical necessity but rather to organizational or management preference. We can work in one fixed office, but we don’t have to.

This point presents a serious opportunity. We can choose how much we should work in an office.

Like an expertly made meal, offices are exceptional in many ways. They offer higher-quality social bonding and are superior for collaborative work. But office work is also more costly. Professionals spend an average of seven hours per week commuting and almost $500 a month in added expenses (to say nothing of the organization’s costs). Offices are also busy and often noisy. The most rigorous study of remote work, conducted in a controlled trial with identical work tasks, found that independent productivity was 13% higher for remote workers than their on-site counterparts.

It isn’t just about productivity. Employees say they would choose remote work over a portion of their salary (10% or more) or in place of a sizable pay raise. Even facing remote work challenges while isolated or without schooling and childcare in 2020, 97% of professionals reported at least one meaningful benefit from their working remotely. Dozens of studies conducted in 2020 found that between 62-80% of workers wanted to work remotely at least part-time post-pandemic.

Focus is essential to completing independent work, yet the office environment can be actively disruptive to this. But interaction is essential to achieving cooperative work, for which the office environment can be exceptional. That’s why the path forward isn’t black-and-white. Part-time remote work is a more popular option with professionals than full-time remote work. It’s also more popular than being in a shared office full-time.

You understand the trade-offs between round-the-clock working from home and full-time work in an office. Your next step is to consider organizational priorities and culture, the types of work activities, and different departments’ needs.

Here is a simplified example of how you might apply the Balanced Work Framework to help determine remote days for members of your team or organization:

Yes, that is a critical piece of the puzzle. We call that Rebalancing Where You Work.

There is more to consider, though. Where people work connects directly to when they work. And when people work also relates to how they get to work when they are on-site. The well-known discomfort of crowding on roads and parking decks will feel even worse in elevators and lobbies.

Striking the right balance for your organization is a process. We’re sharing this Balanced Work Framework to help you craft a work environment suitable to your business needs. You know your organization and your people, but you don’t have to start from scratch or navigate each junction solo.

This Rebalancing.Work website is a home for curated information and resources built on a decade of remote work and mobility advising for organizations of all types—from small offices to Fortune 500 firms. You can tap into that experience for your organization and engage us as a no-cost advisor to provide guidance and connect you with national best practices and local peers.

To learn more, download our free Balanced Work Framework slide deck below. Use this deck to introduce your colleagues to our framework and spur discussion on the interconnected topics that will be part of rebalancing work throughout 2021.

We are here to help with free, personalized services, including connecting you with other local organizations tackling similar challenges. Click here to explore the ways we can help.

Check out these popular Balanced Work resources.