Can We Beat The Great Gloom? It’s Going To Take A Lot More Than Cushy Office Perks

• There is a trend in Texas real estate events where there’s a strong emphasis on improving office amenities to encourage employees to return to the office. 
• Attributing reluctance to commute as the primary reason for avoiding office work oversimplifies the issue, ignoring the more complex factors such as lack of trust, recognition, and purpose at work. 
• No amount of luxurious office perks can solve these fundamental problems; leaders with cultural intelligence who understand the needs of both their company and consumers, rather than focusing solely on short-term financial goals, can fix this.

Over the past month or so I have been attending a variety of real estate events here in Texas in Austin, Houston, and Dallas. At each event I am hearing more or less the same message: The way to lure employees back to the office is with elaborate amenities and the flight to quality. 

Whether pimping out existing buildings with over-the-top amenities — gyms, spa facilities, upscale eateries, laundry services, hair salons, car cleaning services, Japanese gardens — or relocating to A++ buildings, it is the same thing. It is assumed that the built-environment, alone, can get people to leave their couch, put on adult clothes, and venture out to the office full of motivation.

A Tired Old Song

As Dr. Gleb Tsipursky brilliantly argues in his recent article, bungling the RTO dynamic can have deleterious effects on a company’s leadership bench over the long term. So, as we hear incessantly in the news, companies continue to thread the needle between their desires and their (talent) needs.

In steps the CRE industry (and their architecture and design and furniture partners) to assist in the fishing expedition. If we make the office SO plush and velvety, surely the people will come?

But this is the same old song in a different key.

Blaming the Commute

At a couple events the speakers suggested that the number one reason employees don’t want to go to the office is the commute. Impressive statistics were presented to show that over a certain length, people were hesitant to drive to the office. (Yes, drive…this is Texas.) This is reasonable enough. No one likes sitting in the car for long periods when they could be getting valuable work done.

But such a simple explanation masks the complexity behind employees’ desires to work from home (or other place of their own choosing). Even before the pandemic, but especially since then, employee gloom over their organizational experience was a problem.

Can’t Hide the Gloom

In her recent Fast Company article, “If you hate your job, you’re not alone. Everyone is experiencing the ‘Great Gloom,’” Julia Herbst suggests that employees’ dissatisfaction at work runs much deeper than we might want to think. The Great Resignation, she argues, is being replaced by The Great Gloom — a more long-term and troubling development. 

The issues pertain to the basic social contract of work in our companies. Chief among these are very human concerns: trust and psychological safety; transparent information sharing; feeling valued and recognized; lack of a sense of organizational/personal purpose; honest and caring feedback, among others.

No on-site spa or fancy gym or 4-star restaurant will address these human issues. None of them can hide the gloom.

Rewiring Management

Let’s be frank here. What we are missing are leaders fit for this moment. In my book The Open Culture Handbook, I argue that the most effective leaders are those who fully understand the moment in which they lead. This means understanding, culturally, what is going on both inside the company and in the world of consumers, and navigating the alignment between the two. 

The idea of cultural intelligence, generally used as a shorthand for cross-cultural understanding, but equally applicable to understanding the cultural dynamics here at home, seems to be in seriously short supply. So focused are leaders on short-term financial goals, egged on by analysts and activist investors, that anything beyond that has become a luxury.

What gets lost in the shuffle are the everyday experiences of employees. The source of the gloom that Herbst talks about does not derive solely from long commutes, shoddy chairs and desks, bad food, or sub-par workout facilities. It runs much deeper than that. No amount of fancy buildings or over-the-top amenities will change that.