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As more companies ask employees to return to the office, it’s becoming clear which approaches to personal transition are working—and which could have been better. Although the strategy must be tailored to the individual needs of the organization, several key methods can be used so that change is not just tolerated, but embraced.
When Zoominfo, a software and data company, began orchestrating its 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, observations and, most importantly, employee feedback.
“What’s the best way to do this for employees?” That was the big question CHRO Chad Herring tried to answer before implementing the return-to-the-office (RTO) plan for Zoominfo’s US workforce, which consists of 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 made.”
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If businesses have learned one thing over the past few years, it’s that getting their employees right leads to big benefits for individuals and organizations. How they achieve this is very similar to what Zoominfo did: 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 back-to-the-office plan, you used listening sessions that engaged your employees. Why did you choose this as a way to gauge employee wants and needs?
We had done some internal research to get information about how employees view work, how many days a week they would like to be in the office and what conditions they have, but you can’t discuss things with a survey. In September, we decided to take it a step further and interviewed nearly 75 employees at all levels of the company so that all functions were represented. It was quite a 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 return-to-work survey.
The consistent themes we got from employees were flexibility—meaning not five days in the office—as well as some structured approach to their time in the office. We had to be intentional when we sent people back, and we had to be mindful of their personal situations. COVID is a paradigm shift for a generation of people in the workplace, impacting their professional and personal lives. Child care, elder care – things like that have changed in the last few years and people didn’t want to go completely back to the way they worked before COVID hit the US
From management From a perspective, we wanted to respect the feedback we got in the structured interviews, because if you’re not going to do something with the feedback, there’s no point in asking, and in fact it can have a negative impact. We approached it with a message to employees that this is not an order, this is a living plan. We will continue to refine it once we release it and see how it works. What we really want to get out of the plan, apart from universal acceptance and as seamless a return as possible, is for people to get something out of it. By curating the in-person experience with events like team meetings and development opportunities on the days people are in the office, we want them to feel like, “It was worth it for me to come in.”
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What has the post-Covid work arrangement been like so far? Have you seen people voluntarily return to the office?
I would say it varies by geography. Our locations in India and Israel, where remoteness is less common, have about 80% of the population back in the offices. Both offices do a great job of making it worthwhile for people to be there – external speakers, opportunities, team events. It’s not just walking in and sitting at a desk. In the US it was a little different; on any given day, we probably had 10% of our population within a reasonable commuting distance of what we consider a 30-mile radius, personally. Usage was very low and the days of the week people came were inconsistent.
Why did you choose listening sessions as a method of employee feedback?
We selected proportional representation from each team, meaning that our sales and marketing teams, which are the largest of our 3,600+ employees, had the largest representation in the selected employee pool. We also wanted a composition that reflected the diversity of our workforce in terms of gender, but also race and age. We find that different demographics sometimes inform what people are looking for and what’s 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 one time was six people, and we didn’t put all the people from the same team together—let’s call it a random selection done on purpose—but the questions we asked each group and each individual were the same because we wanted to be consistent with the information we wanted.
My team led the discussions, and then we aggregated and anonymized that feedback because we wanted people to speak up with courage and conviction and say exactly how they felt about going back to the office, about their commute, or about their childcare situation, with the understanding that no one has to see him. People spoke very freely and we received pages and pages of feedback which we summarized for the team.
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There is a lot of recent research and feedback from HR professionals about the importance of face-to-face collaboration. How did you decide to start with one day in the office and will there be an increase from here?
It’s easier to add than to take away, and once employees feel the value of that one day and we prove that it works, then we can say, hey, we’d like to go to two days for people who are within of the reasonable distance rule. You have effectively created a demand among your employees for that extra day if you choose to do so. It’s harder to go 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 thinking was, let’s try one day for a period of time and once we feel like we’ve established a good working rhythm, we’ll have good proof points for ourselves and our employees to add to later.
How is the upcoming schedule organized and how does it align with Zoominfo’s focus on employee work-life balance?
We let each team choose their day. My method was advisory voting and my team chose Thursday because other teams we work with a lot would also be participating that day. We’ve published each team’s chosen company day and it’s transparent to everyone so they can plan their schedule accordingly. Once we establish a working rhythm, we will get feedback from employees to understand how this is working and what the next step should be.
How does this fit into Zoominfo’s approach to health and the importance of work-life balance in the workforce?
When you think about employee health, mental health is one of the key things that comes into it. Our U.S. benefits programs are in the top quartile in the technology industry in terms of the breadth of offerings and how favorable they are to employees. We actually have separate mental health benefits that we offer to all of our employees, whether or not they participate in our actual core benefit plans. As for the RTO, we don’t look at office hours, so if people have babysitting arrangements or are looking after a parent, that’s perfectly fine. We see it as more of an overlap of personal commitments, how you manage your hours is entirely up to you and should fit into the life you have today. The goal is not to be disruptive to employees, but to actually compliment the way they live their personal lives by maintaining health, flexibility and giving them the freedom they need to take care of themselves and their families you are
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