WTF are RTO shadow policies?
Your company’s return-to-office mandate is in place, so why isn’t everyone in the office?
It’s likely because companies or individual managers have come to understand that there isn’t an easy one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to managing people who have become accustomed to a certain amount of autonomy and flexibility. So many managers are disregarding the company’s official policy and allowing employees to work remotely. This practice has been happening over the last few months and now has been dubbed “shadow policies.”
We spoke with managers to learn more about shadow policies and the impact they might have on the workplace. Here’s a primer.
What is a shadow policy?
Shadow policies follow the “coffee badging,” trend when employees would show up to the office for enough time to have a cup of coffee, show their face and get a “badge swipe.” So the official record would show they’d been in the office and had some face-to-face time with colleagues, but on their terms, and certainly not for a full day.
While many large companies have RTO mandates in place, many managers also know that it’s simply not worth the risk of valuable employees quitting to work somewhere with a more flexible policy. So that manager says they are OK with them working from home occasionally, or even frequently.
It makes sense. Owl Labs’ recent State of Hybrid Work Report found that if the option to work in a hybrid or remote environment were removed, 42% of workers would look for another job with more flexibility. And 90% of hybrid workers said they feel equally or more productive when working in a hybrid format anyway.
Managers see the same thing, with 79% saying that they feel their team is more productive when working remotely or hybrid. That’s why some of them are saying they don’t really mind if some of their employees work from home.
“Policies started to come down from above, but it wasn’t a clear ‘be in the office Monday through Friday,’” said Frank Weishaupt, CEO of Owl Labs, which a smart video conferencing platform. “It was ‘be in the office a few days a week.’ I think there became the practical management of those corporate policies, and that’s really where shadow policies came into play. It’s handling the gray area right now.”
So, some managers are letting select employees work from home?
Yes.
“As a manager, I have to have the autonomy to run the team the way I see fit,” said Cliff Jurkiewicz, vp of global strategy and general manager of the customer advisory board at Phenom, who has a vp and director-level team of six. “My first priority is to extract the most capability out of my team so that we can meet the goals of the business and I can help individuals grow in their chosen career.”
Similarly, Bruno Rodriguez, head of organic search at Orange Line, an Australian-based digital consultancy company, says he has had to make exceptions to the official company policy that requires two days in the office per week.
“With such a tight talent market, it’s common that we need to be flexible about the employment conditions for our teams and account for the benefits and pitfalls that come with the flexibility,” said Rodriguez.
But that doesn’t mean that those who are allowed to work from home more often get to skip out on important in-office time entirely. The Owl Labs report also showed that the office does work better for meeting new people, team meetings, and collaborating.
Jurkiewicz agrees in-person time is a vital part of the mix. “In-person collaboration absolutely yields the most innovation,” he said. “So when I do ask for people to come in person, we have very specific goals to make the most out of our time together.”
Will this lead to conflict among workers?
Who “deserves” to not have the RTO mandate apply to them? That’s a tricky question. In Rodriguez’s case, he allowed one lead on his team to work completely remotely, to allow that employee to get married to someone in the army and move. In another situation, a lead moved to Perth due to rental stress in Sydney.
Similarly, Kristen Fowler, vp of HR and practice lead at executive search firm Clarke Caniff Strategic Search, says that she’s had a couple of employees relocate away from office locations who couldn’t hit the one day a week in-office protocol anymore but kept them employed.
“They are valued employees who have maintained a high level of work, so we have allowed them to stay fully remote, as they have proven their work quality has not suffered for it,” said Fowler. “If an employee’s work product starts to slip or we feel they need additional development, then we have them come in more frequently for support.”
However, it’s not so straightforward. Weishaupt warns that having a policy impact workers close to the office, but not others, isn’t entirely fair.
“I have a marketing team where some people are local and some people are spread throughout the country. Why would I put a policy in place that penalizes the people that are local to the office, when the people that are far away from the office are obviously not going to comply with that policy?,” said Weishaupt. “There’s an inadequacy there that would rear its head if those folks that are local didn’t have the same flexibility.”
That’s one way that Weishaupt suspects shadow policies can lead to conflict in the workplace, but there are others, including employees wondering why RTO policies don’t apply to everyone and why there is no accountability for the manager who decides to make their own decisions.
“It will cause issues,” said Weishaupt. “But this is a relatively new phase of this, so I don’t think a lot of this has come to pass yet.”
He says that until there is more accountability between the manager level and corporate level, things will remain in this in-between state. “Until that starts to become more clear, shadow policies will exist, but there will be questions about it,” added Weishaupt.