ADNOC leaders used behavioral science models to help workers feel secure about the return to the office, and are now looking at how its culture may evolve long term

• ADNOC started bringing workers back to the office in June, 2020.
• Behaviorial science models have helped ADNOC's leaders make employees feel safe at work.
• ADNOC is now doing a culture assessment to see what positive changes can come from this experience.

Business leaders at companies in the US and other regions that are starting to normalize might find the next phase in pandemic management to be the most difficult yet.

"The real work starts after you bring the people back," said Dr. Coni Judge, senior advisor of culture and employee engagement at Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). "That's when the harder part of the work begins. Because you've got people in so many different places - not just physical places. But you have people in different mindsets, they've had different experiences, they have different concerns. They are all coming from a unique place."

Judge, who is an organizational psychologist and expert on employee communications and change and performance psychology, had been working with ADNOC's leaders on employee engagement strategy since just before the pandemic. Since then, her focus has been on helping the company bring its 50,000 employees back to the workplace.

ADNOC has been bringing people back to the office in incremental waves since back in June 2020 and at one point was close to having the entire workforce in situ, except for those with medical exemptions. Last February, as cases in the region spiked, the company rolled back to 30% capacity and has since then been building back up to about 60% capacity now.

Two steps forward, one step back

The route back to office working is not linear, or easy. "It's two steps forward and one step back, and leaders need to be prepared to think of it as an iterative process," she said. "Communications needs to be transparent, it needs to be authentic, empathetic, and optimistic."

The leadership team has drawn on behavioral science models, including "nudge" theory, to frame communications and policies with employees, to help them feel safe going back to the office, and to reinforce the ongoing safety measures that workers are expected to maintain. They also looked back at how companies managed through the 2003 SARS crisis for insights on how to help reduce anxiety among less resilient employees.

The research and behavioral science approach influenced every aspect of communications, from the color palette to the messaging, to the use of an AI-driven bot for employees to easily access answers to their questions.

ADNOC's leadership communications style also evolved throughout this challenging period. ADNOC's CEO Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber has engaged with employees through recorded video and virtual town hall meetings, a style of communication that had not previously been the norm.

"One thing we saw with our leaders was a pivot to a more participative and affiliative leadership style, one that was more about creating harmony and building commitment and consensus, which is quite different from the leadership style that is usually applied in a non-issue or non-crisis situation," said Omar Zaafrani, ADNOC's senior vice president of group communications.

ADNOC started its return-to-office before vaccines were on the horizon. Even as more and more people have been vaccinated, ADNOC has continued to require employees to wear masks and maintain social distance. "It's not possible to tell who is vaccinated and who isn't -and the experts advise that COVID can still be potentially transmitted even if someone is vaccinated - so keeping this guideline and reinforcing it has been a key part of our strategy to safely return staff to offices."

But it is, as Judge says, an "agile topic," and yet another aspect of office life today that requires ongoing monitoring and flexibility.

Opportunity for a culture reset

Regardless of how successful remote working has been, often surpassing expectations, it's clear that many CEOs see the return to office life as critical for their business culture and growth.

Some CEOs, like JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon, have spoken openly about the business benefits to in-person working. But Judge said focusing on business benefits to employees is not the best path forward, not least because both studies and anecdotal experiences have shown that in many companies, productivity actually increased during the pandemic. "People don't want to feel forced. As soon as you start going down that path, it doesn't go anywhere positive," Judge said.

Even as employees do return, however, company culture will be changed fundamentally by the experiences of the past 18 months - and that might be a good thing. Successful teams during COVID-19 have had to be more agile and flexible, work more cross-functionally, and move more quickly. These new productivity pathways might find a home in a post-COVID world, if companies can make the most of this exceptional moment in time.

The pandemic has provided a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a leader to experience so much change and disruption, that it allows you to reshape things fundamentally," Judge said, adding that ADNOC is undertaking a full culture assessment.

"This is the time to test the health of the organization and the culture," Judge said. "In terms of embedding innovation in the cultural DNA of an organization, there will definitely be a pre-and post-COVID way of doing things."