Bayport Financial Services’ CEO Alfred Ramosedi, FCMA, CGMA, explains why having employees return to the office is not enough to improve productivity and why leaders should transparently explain their expectations to workers.
Ramosedi details the benefits for organisations that are intentional about bringing employees back to the office, where morale could be affected by return-to-office policies, and what three things senior leaders can do to drive productivity across all work models and environments.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
- Four reasons companies are asking employees to return to the office.
- Why leaders need to understand and communicate how they intend to measure productivity.
- Three possible advantages for companies’ bringing employees back to the office.
- Morale concerns that could arise from return-to-office policies.
- The importance of rewarding employees with flexible working arrangements.
- Three things leaders can consider to drive productivity across all work models.
— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Steph Brown at Stephanie.Brown@aicpa-cima.com.
Transcript
Steph Brown: Welcome to the FM podcast. I’m Steph Brown. Today’s topic is return-to-office mandates. Speaking on this topic is Alfred Ramosedi. He is the CEO of Bayport Financial Services, an organisation in South Africa that works with employers in the private and public sector to provide financial wellness programmes to employees. Alfred holds the FCMA and CGMA designation and previously served as chairman of CIMA South Africa. We will be discussing the reasons for an increased demand for in-office work, what employees want, some benefits and disadvantages of return-to-office policies, and how senior leaders can navigate different needs and expectations.
Welcome to the podcast, Alfred. Thanks for joining me today.
Alfred Ramosedi: Thank you, Steph. I think it’s a relevant topic, given where we are today.
Brown: In your mind, why are more organisations asking employees to return to the office?
Ramosedi: Steph, there are four things that I’ve been thinking about because I see that more and more. Sometimes I used to think it was locally, and sometimes I used to think it’s only service companies that were asking for this. But I’m beginning to see it globally and in good companies, what you would regard as Blue Chip companies. There are four things that I have noticed in the past. One, companies are unable to account for productivity. They are unable to say, this employee who’s working from home has been productive the whole day.
And by productivity, sometimes they want to see someone doing the work the whole day instead of equating that to the outputs. They just want to say, “Eight hours, were you busy eight hours?” A lot of companies cannot account for that. Then the only way they can account for it is for asking the employee to come back to work. Because now I can see you, you must be busy sitting at your desk. That’s the first thing I’ve seen.
The second one is a lot of companies, including ourselves, when employees have been away for extended periods of time, we worry a lot about cultural affinity to the company. We also worry about the values the person shares and the norms of the company. Typically, those are normally shared norms with teams and people. When people are away, we then worry whether the person is still having an affinity to our cultures and values. Please come back to work so that we can make sure we engender team building and things like that.
Team dynamics seems to be falling away. Normally teams are physical things, warm bodies, where people work together. Team dynamics, where teams are just virtual teams become a bit difficult, because sometimes you need conflict. You need being in a room to be able to build teams to the next level. Team dynamics is another reason why people are being brought back.
Finally, what I’ve also noticed is that some meetings just don’t lend themselves to being online. You have to be in a room, particularly when you’re negotiating big contracts, big deals. You have to be in a room with people.
Those are the four reasons. People can’t account for productivity, so call people back; cultures and values; bringing to bed team dynamics; and big ideas require people to be around.
Brown: From your experience working with teams, do you think a lot of employees want a more structured schedule and environment in their workday?
Ramosedi: I’ve been thinking about this a lot as well here because we’ve been grappling about this issue. Probably maybe towards the end, I may share as to what we’ve been thinking about and what our ideas are, Steph, as to how one deals with this. I think it’s less about the structure but more about how to be measured. I think it’s less about you must wake up in the morning, 10 o’clock is your coffee, 15:00 is your lunch, and whatever it is that you do that you must handle every minute. But it’s more, I think, for me, what employees are looking, I think are less structure, but more around how to be measured.
Let me know what my KPIs are and how I need to deliver. That needs to be predictable before I start, and you need to be intentional about that before the employees start. Then I think it’s important also that we need to understand how people must deliver things. That, I think must also be predictable. The fact that if I’m going to deliver this contract via this, is important because people then know what they are going to get from ourselves.
Finally, the important [thing] for me around this is being able to understand what the reward mechanism is for our employees. For me, it’s less about structure. It’s about being predictable and intentional about the KPIs — key performance indicators that the employees have to deliver and how they deliver that. And also becoming very intentional about how to recognise that good behaviour and rewarding.
Brown: Some corporations have already implemented return-to-office mandates, or they’re planning to in the near future. The role of work design and work models is believed to have an influence on productivity according to some leaders. What are your thoughts on that?
Ramosedi: One, it’s very clear for me that even if employees are at work, if you are not clear about how you measure them, you are not going to be able to know whether they’re productive or not. Simply bringing them back, not being able to be clear around how you measure and how you are very intentional about the measurement, it’s going to be a very difficult thing for the employees.
My view is that companies that are wanting to do this because they want to see productivity will have the same issues if those employees are coming back to the office, and we were not clear about how we measure this, how we manage the productivity, and how we are intentional about what we reward.
What I’ve seen everywhere else is that companies are saying, people are not productive, let’s bring them back to work so that they can become productive. I think it’s just transferring one issue to the other issue.
Brown: What do you think from your perspective are some potential benefits of imposing more return-to-office policies, and what are some possible disadvantages of imposing those mandates as well?
Ramosedi: I can think of three benefits or advantages that will result in bringing people in. One, I think the culture can improve. We can communicate better, and people can be on the same page with everybody else as to what’s required, what we need, and what the norms are. I think the team dynamics will work better. Teams can actually talk to each other. Instead of me trying to get hold of another team member, I can’t get hold of the team member. I can now just walk across because some of the issues can be resolved without setting up meetings. Because work-from-home policies normally were constructed, having a meeting, I must find you and set up an appointment. I can’t just rock up into your space.
Team dynamics will work better and, also, with being back, we are now falling back to the old comfort zone, if you like, for other companies, which is being able to measure productivity in the old way. Because we used to, say, arrive at 8, account for your eight hours, leave at 5, having had an hour work lunch or break. That way, companies used to say, “You have earned your wage by doing that.” One can now go far back and implement the things which were productive.
The disadvantage, for me, what we saw in our company is that when we had COVID, we were forced to implement work from home for everybody because we were not allowed to come to work in 2020, going into 2021. A lot of our employees, because they were not incurring transport costs, saved a lot of money. You have to factor that. Even though you can say it’s a benefit, bringing them back into the office is actually now costly to the employee. You can’t be in the age where you say, “No, it’s their problem, let them solve it.” It’s a reality to them, and a reality to your employee can spill over into morale in the workplace. You need to find a way of being able to explain to yourself that when you come back, even though it’s going to be costly to yourself, what’s it going to do? It’s costly to employees in terms of the money that they’re spending on transport, in terms of the money they’re going to spend on sending their children to classes because they used to have flexibility to staying with them at home.
It definitely will impact on morale. I have seen it. It has impacted on morale, particularly for those employees that are so independent and can actually self-manage themselves. Self-managed teams that are delivering probably more than they were before because of their ability to work beyond the hours, and they’re not even claiming the overtime. This can actually impact on morale because then people think that you are saying, “I don’t trust you to be independent. I don’t trust you.” Normally, when you do that, it does have an impact on your staff, particularly the good staff members, or encouraging staff to operate by themselves. Now, we know that employees that are independent do deliver a lot.
It could lead to lack of cohesion because now people come for the sake of coming to work. You want to implement a day for us to talk about cultures and norms? I’m just going to arrive, tick the box, and go home. You could do the exact opposite of what we don’t want to see. Then this could actually lead to the biggest story, which is no sense of loyalty. If you have that and you have detractors in your company, that could lead to a big problem.
Brown: You mentioned the financial aspect. For some employees and some leaders that maybe need flexible working more, whether they have caring or childcare responsibilities, or perhaps disability requirements. But then there’s also those same employees and leaders that work much better in person and in the office. How can senior leaders navigate these divergent priorities and expectations?
Ramosedi: There’s one thing I think we need to get. Everybody has tasted working from home. Some companies were doing it before COVID. But with the advent of COVID in 2020, everybody had been forced to work from home. We’ve all tasted this. Either you are a knowledge worker working for a consultancy firm could work from home or move from home, have appointments with your clients overseas, and you don’t have to come into the office. We’ve all tested this model. If you’re going to bring people back in the office, then we need to find a way of being able to find flexibility.
What other people have done is they have actually started to look at this as a remuneration or as an incentive. If you deliver what you need to deliver, you earn the right to have a proper flexible working arrangement — two days away — because you have shown that you’ve earned the right to walk away. We start role-modelling, role-profiling what we do, and we then incentivise what is good. So that everybody can see that this is what you could get. There has to be a flexibility.
Some companies work on flexibilities, saying some days you can come into the office, but at least during the week, there’s a specific day, one day that you must be here so that everybody can see each other. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask that all of us must be together on a particular day. But when that happens, do something intentional. Don’t just ask us to be here. Then we’re all huddling, catching up on our stuff at the coffee table and the coffee machine or at the photocopier machine, because that’s where we meet. No, be intentional about what happens on that day, so that people can actually see we came here and this is what we did together in the office, and I can maybe also share some information.
What I’ve also seen is that some people actually try and get the teams to also schedule this themselves. The team has a deliverable. If the team can be able to hold each other accountable and schedule things together, that actually makes the team grow. I met one investment banking team because we are in the business of raising funds. This team had not been in the office for six months, but this team always used to meet regularly agreed deliverables. They themselves were always in each other’s face, and they were managing those, and they were holding each other accountable. Teams should do that. You shouldn’t have a manager telling teams because the teams normally can hold each other to do that.
Lastly, there’s technology out there that can assist a lot of people to do what they need to do. You don’t have to look hard enough to find and subscribe to technology that will enable you to enhance and add to productivity.
Brown: Thank you so much for a great conversation today. Is there anything that we haven’t covered you think is really important to add into this conversation?
Ramosedi: We need to think about three things. Whether you believe in work from home or not working from home, you need to think about [it] because it’s got a bearing on it. Maybe if you are going to get into a flexible policy to accommodate your staff, I think you have to be intentional about three things. Be intentional about what culture you want to drive. Culture this time around is not something that just creates itself; be clear about the culture you want, and you must have specific initiatives that drive that culture.
It’s important to implement the old-style performance management systems that people should be in, and be clear about productivity tools — not just the KPIs, but the productivity. How are you going to measure someone who works in a finance department, such that you know the person is busy without just looking at whether she or he is processing invoices? How are you going to measure a person who’s working in marketing and saying this person works appropriately? Agreeing on those productivity tools, I think, is quite important.
Brown: Thanks so much, Alfred. Thanks for coming on the podcast today.
Ramosedi: Thank you so much, and thanks for having me.
