After three years of pandemic-enforced remote work, many large employers are itching to get employees back into the office (for those who still have offices). And it’s true that there’s ample research indicating that people and teams perform better, overall, when they encounter each other IRL regularly. Whether it’s wholesale returns to 5-day workweeks in the office (rare) or hybrid arrangements in which workers are asked to come in a few days per week (much more common), the pressure is on to make commuting cool again.

Yet after living three years free of cubicles and community coffee pots, many employees are pushing back strongly on return-to-office mandates of any kind, and executives are struggling to justify the need for them to be in the office at all, even for a few days a week. 

As a result, design leaders are having to think carefully about something that generations of managers before them never had to ponder: What are offices actually good for, and for which kinds of work is being together in person indispensable? How do we make sure that our teams are coming in — and doing so when we actually need them for business-critical face-to-face work?

Join us on March 28 when we introduce a brand-new InsideOut program format — a Jam Session. We’ll come together as a group and get hands-on with the challenge of sorting out just what kind of work is best done by design teams sitting eyeball-to-eyeball, and what can safely be relegated to the tools and techniques of virtual connections.

Unlike a typical roundtable, this Jam Session will be a collaborative working session where we’ll leverage MURAL, breakout rooms and a series of facilitated design methods to create a tangible outcome: an artifact that will illuminate for everyone WHEN and WHY to put real butts in real seats together.

After three years of pandemic-enforced remote work, many large employers are itching to get employees back into the office (for those who still have offices). And it’s true that there’s ample research indicating that people and teams perform better, overall, when they encounter each other IRL regularly. Whether it’s wholesale returns to 5-day workweeks in the office (rare) or hybrid arrangements in which workers are asked to come in a few days per week (much more common), the pressure is on to make commuting cool again.

Yet many employees are pushing back strongly on return-to-office mandates of any kind, and executives are struggling to justify the need for them to be in the office at all, even for a few days a week. 

As a result, design leaders are having to think carefully about something that generations of managers before them never had to ponder: What are offices actually good for, and for which kinds of work is being together in person indispensable? How do we make sure that our teams are coming in — and doing so when we actually need them for business-critical face-to-face work?

Join us on March 28 when we introduce a brand-new InsideOut program format — a Jam Session. We’ll get hands-on with the challenge of sorting out just what kind of work is best done by design teams sitting eyeball-to-eyeball, and what can safely be relegated to the tools and techniques of virtual and asynchronous connections.

Unlike a typical roundtable, this Jam Session will be a collaborative working session where we’ll leverage Mural, breakout rooms and a series of facilitated design methods to create a tangible outcome: an artifact that will illuminate for everyone WHEN and WHY to put real butts in real seats together.