To RTO (return to office) or not to RTO? While that’s still the question for some companies, most have settled at this point into one of three camps: a strictly implemented policy that requires some number of weekly days in the office, a true embrace of remote work that lets employees work from their desired location, or something in between (see: those policies that involve semi-frequent in-person gatherings).
My team has the benefit of analyzing work data for all of these types of companies — and it’s been fascinating to see, not just where collaboration patterns diverge, but where work looks similar regardless of modality.
One such commonality involves what we’re calling “Manager Facetime,” which we define to include days when in-person interactions with one’s manager would have been possible.
Before we dive in, it’s worth noting that our team is agnostic about whether a company should have in-office requirements, as this varies by organization and depends on many factors. But based on our research, we do believe that going a very long time (think: 8-12+ months) without seeing one’s manager face-to-face is less than ideal.
Why Facetime Matters
We’ve posted before about the importance of the manager in the context of work satisfaction and mitigation of trends like quiet quitting. And new research suggests that facetime, too, is critical to perceptions of one’s manager.
Specifically, employees that saw their manager in-person more recently reported higher levels of satisfaction with the amount of coaching and support that their manager provides.
What’s more, Manager Facetime matters to all types of organizations – not just those that require employees to regularly visit an office.
Estimating Manager Facetime
If you currently have access to both manager-to-direct report mappings and badge data, you’re in luck (if you don’t, pseudonymization can help!), as these are the key inputs for the analysis detailed above.
Using these two data sources, we can first determine the dates on which both members of a manager-direct report pair badge into the same office on the same day.
Next, to determine how long it’s been since facetime has been possible, we calculate the difference in weeks between the current date and the date when we last saw an instance of facetime.
Is it possible to badge into the same office as your manager and still not see them? Of course. For that reason, we recommend thinking about this metric as an upper bound on how recently facetime could have occurred. In reality, it may be less frequent than badge-ins suggest.
It’s also possible to mitigate false positives by adding an analysis step to ensure a meeting between the manager and the individual contributor happened on the day in question. And team-wide offsites or known company gatherings can be incorporated on an ad hoc basis into this calculation.
How to Take Action
So how might you use this data to improve how teams work together?
Two of my favorite ways involve org design and travel/offsite planning. And both start by viewing this metric from the department, office, or other team-related lens.
1) Org Design
As it relates to org design, the infrequent Manager Facetime we see in the example above among Engineering and Product employees may hint at an underlying problem with how these orgs are structured. For this reason, we recommend doing some digging into how distributed these teams are and whether this inherently creates an environment of low facetime. If the answer is “yes,” consider reducing team size for affected orgs or otherwise reorganizing teams to be in closer proximity.
2) Travel & Offsite Planning
Big reorg not in the cards? There’s an even easier way to improve facetime, and that’s with policy around in-person gatherings.
Generally, we recommend 2-3x per year as the right minimum cadence for in-person interaction with one’s manager if possible. The good news is that this can be achieved in many ways, including having the manager travel to meet with their teams.
Alternatively, if I were planning an offsite for this company or allocating budget for team-specific meet-ups, I would prioritize Engineering and Product to get together in-person.
And this all starts with knowing what facetime looks like at the org and team level.
Want to see what this looks like for your company? Feel free to shoot me a note at catherine@worklytics.co.
