You want a happy workforce in the office five days a week? Be intentional.

“If you build it, they will come.”

– Field of Dreams

Five years ago tonight, I was at a soccer match in Frisco, Texas, watching the U.S. Women’s National Team beat Japan to claim the 2020 SheBelieves Cup title. Maybe I shouldn’t have been there. Earlier that day, the World Health Organization had formally declared the novel coronavirus – better known as COVID-19 – to be a global pandemic.

The next day, the world began to shut down.

Does this seem like yesterday? For me, it seems like eons ago. You know what they say: Time doesn’t fly when you’re not having fun.

We didn’t know what was going to happen when the world shut down. We just knew we would be working from home for the foreseeable future.

We still, though, had work to do. Communicators were thrust to the forefront, with the need to communicate – no, over-communicate – with employees more critical than ever before. At Unisys, for which I then led global Communications, our nearly 20,000 employees around the world were counting on us to keep them informed. What were the company policies on remote work? Were colleagues infected? What about employees who were working out of client facilities? How was the shutdown affecting business? And, maybe most urgently, how does Zoom work again?

Yes, the internal communications team is responsible for informing employees of company news and information. Yet that is but the tip of the iceberg: It also plays a critical role in engaging employees. While HR typically owns employee engagement, Communications is crafting and distributing the related content. What are the key messages? When and how often does content go out? Through what channels? Does it always come from the CEO? Are employees consuming the content? Is it resonating? Is the Communications team even tracking all of this?

The research on engagement is clear: The more engaged employees are – the happier they are in their job – the more productive they are. The more productive they are, the more successful they are. The more productive and successful they are, the more likely they are to stick around. How much does it cost to replace an employee who quits? According to The Society for Human Resource Management, the answer is six to nine months of an employee’s salary. The higher the attrition rate, the more pressure there is on typically understaffed recruiting teams.

Five years later, the tide has turned: Employers are beyond being over remote work. The U.S. Federal Government has just mandated that its employees return to the office full time. As have countless private-sector companies. Some, like JPMorgan Chase as reported by Fortune, have thought through ways to entice their employees with in-the-office benefits. When employees register for a conference room, for example, their temperature preferences are included, and employee coffee preferences are tracked. But even if companies don’t quite have such wherewithal, they can still bring employees along with some good old-fashioned communications.

The key is this: Be intentional about it. Consider these recommendations for an intentional approach:

·         Develop an internal communications campaign designed specifically to celebrate the benefits of being in the office. This could include, for example, building and promoting a set of in-person activities. People might like their home offices. They also like camaraderie.

·         Deploy a group of employees as culture ambassadors. I have lost track of the times that I have seen a company talk about doing so – and then never do it. I would argue that now is as good a time as ever to get off the schneid. According to Gallup, employee engagement has declined significantly since the outbreak of the pandemic – and has done so even more precipitously for the younger people who are supposed to be tomorrow’s leaders.

·         Measure your progress. Many companies already measure employee engagement, typically doing so on a pre-set schedule. I am talking about measuring the campaign itself. This way you have quantifiable data to leverage in reporting back to leadership. And especially if the data is positive, you can report that to employees as well. You thought COVID-19 was contagious? So is happiness on the job.

Five years later, here we are. The pendulum swung wildly one way. And it has now swung most of the way back.

Not everyone wants to be back in the office, particularly five days a week.

But everyone wants to be on a happy team. And I don’t know of an employer who doesn’t want a productive one.

You don’t have to build a baseball diamond out of a cornfield to create a happy team.

You just have to be intentional about doing so.