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Dan Markovitz identifies issues that may arise in the workplace when some remote employees return to the office and others don’t. He also provides a few key tips to help maintain team cohesion.

A client of mine has started to bring some of their employees back into the office. They’re not ending their work from home policies, but increasingly higher ranking staff are coming back to the mothership, particularly for important meetings. 

This shift makes sense for many reasons, but it’s having three unfortunate side effects. First, the work from home employees are beginning to have middle school flashbacks, where they’re definitely not part of the cool crowd, and they have to eat lunch at the cafeteria table with the dweebs. Second, they are, in fact, being left out of many discussions and decisions — not out of malice, but simply out of benign neglect. When everyone is working from home and meetings are conducted by Zoom it’s easy to remember to bring everyone to the virtual table. But when you’re in the office, it’s even easier to forget your cohorts who are laboring at home and just have the meeting with the people who are physically present. Third, the remaining work from home employees are missing out on the incipient burbling of water cooler conversations. This is bad for morale and bad for business. 

Key points include:

• Team alignment
• Team morale
• Visual tools to help engage remote employees

Read the full blog post, Don’t Let this Happen to Your Work from Home Colleagues, on the Markovitz Consulting website.