In this 2022 photo, 3M employees gather at the Maplewood headquarters for the announcement the health care division will be spun off into its own company. 3M's "Work Your Way" policy allows workers who are able to do their jobs remotely to work remotely as often as they like, while encouraging but not mandating employees come in for "moments that matter" when many colleagues will be on-site. That's a break from many major corporations that are trying to shepherd employees back into the office. (Submitted/3M)

As more Minnesota companies require employees to come into the office at least a few days a week — or every few months — 3M remains all-in on allowing many staffers to work from home full time.

While thousands of 3M manufacturing employees and researchers need to work on-site, for those who can do their jobs remotely, the Maplewood-based company says don’t worry about coming into the office. Though it’s here if you need it.

“What we heard from our employees was a real desire to maintain some of that flexibility that they were able to achieve during the pandemic, and a real concern that they may not be able to,” said Beth Lokken, 3M’s Future of Work manager.

“We continue to see this as a real talent differentiator” to attract and retain employees, she said.

3M may be an outlier among major corporations by the end of the year, according to surveys that show a majority will have some sort of return-to-office requirement in place by Christmas if they don’t already.

The work-from-home narrative has swung dramatically in corporate America over the last four years. Companies in 2020 and 2021 touted their flexibility and support for remote work, with many promising never to force employees back to the office. Several big firms have since recanted those guarantees.

“In a marked shift from last year, nearly twice as many CEOs would like to see their office workers return to the office over the next three years, and they plan to reward those who do with favorable assignments, raises and promotions,” according to a survey last year from professional services firm KPMG.

At the same time, however, many companies are finding it’s the work that matters, not the workplace.

“How their teams collaborate is more of a pressing problem than where they work,” according to a survey of Fortune 500 executives by Atlassian, a “team collaboration” software company.

The world of hybrid work and measuring employee performance still has some kinks to work out, and it’s not about getting folks to unmute on Zoom, the survey showed.

“Despite the fact that almost half of executives assess productivity by tracking office attendance, only one in three think that their return-to-office policy has had any impact on performance,” according to Atlassian.

For 3M, a materials science company that depends on collaboration to succeed, the move to hybrid work was already happening before the pandemic — a third of managers had a direct report in other countries. Getting together at the office is still encouraged, but it has to be worthwhile.

“Managers can certainly ask teams to come on site, but it needs to be purposeful, moments that matter,” said Lokken, who works out of the Maplewood headquarters a few times a week.

The “moments that matter” language is used by General Mills and other companies that want workers in an office buzzing with activity rather than sitting in a quiet cubicle just to meet an in-office quota.

Tech company Cisco had a similar finding in a study of its workplace policies over three years, declaring that “the office should be a magnet, not a mandate.”

“Innovation requires time, not a specific location,” the company wrote in a summary of the report last month. “To support this, we must shift our cultural mindset.”

Lokken’s job was created in 2022 as the corporate world was going in multiple directions on work-from-home policies. It remains an ongoing experiment, one that 3M intends to track and measure.

“We’re learning from each other, we’re trying new things, we’re sharing with different parts of the company about what’s working and what’s not, and we’re measuring results,” Lokken said. “And it’s kind of exciting, but it’s a lot.”

One worry among remote workers has been at the center of a corporate controversy lately — whether telecommuters will be passed over for promotions.

Dell recently told employees they can’t get promoted if they don’t come into the office sometimes, according to Business Insider, a major about-face from a CEO who openly embraced remote work not long ago.

Even without an official policy, there is concern that “proximity bias” can cause managers to inadvertently pass over folks they don’t physically interact with as often.

Remote workers were 31% less likely to be promoted over the past year, according to Live Data Technologies, and 35% more likely to be laid off compared to their in-office counterparts.

Lokken said she thinks about this issue often.

“We have looked at whether there’s any relationship between your performance rating and remote/hybrid/on-site status, and we’re really not finding any trends there that are of concern, which is encouraging,” she said. “I think there’s more we could do to be looking at that, in terms of promotions.”

Lokken, who majored in anthropology before getting her MBA at the University of Minnesota, says she has a “fascination with how people think and what people want,” which gives her a wide lens on approaching how people work and managing change.

When asked what the future of work is, Lokken said: “We’re learning, and we’re never done changing.”