The ongoing debate about work from home and flexibility continues to capture global attention.

Here in Australia, more and more business leaders are announcing office mandates, with some going as far to link office attendance with bonuses, pay and promotions. While the benefits of having teams in person together are numerous, it’s important to consider the knock-on effect of such mandates.

As the Global CEO for Talent, a recruitment and consultancy business specializing in tech, transformation and beyond, I’ve seen countless organizations grapple with this issue.

Talent has offices in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and India. We employ more than 300 team members across these offices and I’m proud to say that our employee engagement rate sits at 90 percent, which is world class.

This doesn’t happen by accident though; a great culture takes a great amount of work, understanding and above all, listening to your people. You also have the responsibility to create an environment where people want to come into the office.

From our own firsthand flexibility journey, and through talking with fellow CEOs, one thing is clear to me: you can’t mandate a great culture. In fact, having no policy can be a game-changing policy.

The Big Picture

Many leaders think flexible work is just working from home, but flex is so much more than that. It’s not one-size fits all. It’s job sharing, flexible hours, flexible start and end times, compressed work weeks and a whole heap more.

We are in a world now where diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) is an unquestioned business priority, and being inclusive absolutely involves accommodating different needs around flexibility. I have team members who work from home, work from the local café, or sometimes even work from the hair salon chair.

It’s all about results, not where you’re located to do it. It’s all about seeing the bigger picture.

I’ve been on quite a journey personally when it comes to where and when employees work. Having always been a vocal advocate for high office participation, COVID-19 knocked me for six. Like all organizations, Talent had to quickly pivot to accommodate working from home, and I’ll admit, I was very concerned about the impact this would have on our culture, productivity and employee engagement.

As it turns out, culture is something that extends far beyond four walls. It is a living, breathing organism that exists within each and every person who represents your brand, wherever they may be.

It’s how people talk about their job at a barbecue on the weekend. It’s how people interact with one another. It’s how they feel when they go to bed on a Sunday night. It’s how much they feel their company values and supports them. This is something that can’t be mandated or enforced.

Our culture not only survived the pandemic but emerged stronger. We coined a new term, #OneTeam, to represent the psychological circle of safety we wrapped around our people. It’s a term that has since evolved to represent our culture and mindset.

As a result of everything we did to support our people during COVID-19, we emerged with a higher employee engagement rate and Talent became the only recruitment company based in Asia–Pacific to report increased profits at that time.

Now that we are outside of the COVID-19 bubble, we can find a happy medium. Rather than focus on the binary of work from home versus office, we should bring it back to the bigger picture of culture, engagement and what makes somewhere a great place to work.

There is a large amount of training that does happen in an office, as well as face-to-face interactions with your team and your stakeholders, that could be hard to replace virtually.

You don’t need to go into the office every day or attend every event, but you should go try to go to some of those events to establish connections and build relationships. Relationships are everything and a key part of growing your career.

Growth and Learning

Growth and learning happens in many ways, but a part of it does happen by spending time with your team and your stakeholders. If you’re a new team member, how you want to shape your career at that company might very well be building and maintaining stakeholder relationships – and some would say it’s a crucial part.

So much so, that statistics state around about 70 percent of learning happens from real experiences, 20 percent happens through interactions and exchanges with colleagues or others and the final 10 percent comes from courses, workshops and so on – it’s the 70:20:10 model.

Research from Forbes early on in the pandemic showed that non-verbal communication has been shown to carry between 65 percent and 93 percent more impact than the actual words spoken. It’s hard to pick up on non-verbal cues virtually or over the phone. With that being said though, the overall message for leaders is still around what environment are you creating to make it appealing to be in the office.

According to Gallup research, there are 12 factors that make up employee engagement. These range from recognition and praise, opportunities, tools and materials, growth and development and a heap more. The goal of this is to start a conversation between a leader and their team member. Communication is everything when it comes to meeting people where they are and is a core part to creating that unicorn environment.

I always find that forcing team members to do something never works out long term. It’s like forced fun at parties; tolerable but nobody leaves the party really feeling like they had a great time. Policies can be stifling and restrictive. A rule that people begin to dislike.

By giving people the option and not enforcing a policy, you’ll more likely than not see people change their tune on it.

Ultimately, when you invest in your team members, listen to their needs, bring them on your journey, and put feedback into action, the results are endless. I challenge every leader out there to give this policy a go and watch the results. You might be surprised with what you find.