'I'll Quit If They Make Me Go Back': The Real Stakes of the 'Future of Work' Debate As companies decide how, when and where they should work in a post-pandemic world, it's essential to keep an emphasis on company culture.

We had a group of friends over for dinner the other day, and the conversation turned to work, as it sometimes does. "I can't wait to go back to the office," said one friend, who works at a technology company. "No way," said another, who works at a midsize law firm. "I'll quit if they make me go back."

"Well," piped in a friend who leads a customer experience team, "I think what we really need is flexibility. I'm exhausted. My team is exhausted. I know our customers can tell, and it's starting to hurt the business."

Our friends around the table nodded. This, we realized, was the real stakes of the debate. People have spent the past year and a half arguing over whether remote work would remain permanent, but that has largely ignored a more existential question. This isn't just an issue of how people work — it's that the way people work impacts their customers, and whether those customers stay loyal.

Related: How the Legacy of the Pandemic Will Reshape the Future of Work

We are two former CMOs for very different organizations — Eric has overseen marketing at consumer-facing companies such as Bonobos, and Cathy for localities such as the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. We understand the complexity that surrounds brand perception, and we believe that the health of a company's internal culture is one of the most important factors. This should add a new dynamic to the conversation we're all having about work — because the decisions companies make today will define their culture, and therefore their relationship with their customers, for years to come.

This is a delicate moment. Businesses are deciding how their teams should operate and interact, including whether or how often employees must be in their physical offices, and they're making it up as they go. Some, like Twitter and Shopify, are allowing employees to work from anywhere indefinitely (at least at the time of this publication). Others, like Nike or Google, are investing in reengineered office spaces. Whatever happens, no one seems to think work will return to its pre-COVID form, with people stuck in a physical building nine to five, Monday through Friday. McKinsey Global Institute's The Future of Work after COVID-19 report estimates that 20 to 25 percent of the workforces in advanced economies could work from home between three and five days a week — without a loss of productivity.

As all this happens, we couldn't stop thinking about the comment our customer service friend made at dinner. When teams are exhausted, customers notice and the business suffers. We wondered: As work cultures continue to shift, how will consumers' perception of brands shift along with it? When we raised this with our extended network of acquaintances, colleagues, and friends, we found few people thinking about the question. But once we brought it up, everyone wanted answers.

Related: How to Prevent a Toxic Post-Pandemic Workplace

To get out of our own heads, we contacted several of our colleagues who serve in various senior or C-suite leadership roles. That included the former CMO of OpenTable, a managing director at Google, the CEO of H&R Block, the CMO of Penguin Random House, and the CEO of Bonobos. We spoke to them about what specific cultural changes they're seeing at their company and how those changes might influence perceptions of their brand. While no one has definitive answers, they helped us identify key things for leaders to consider as they strike the balance between what employees say they want and what will be felt by their customers.

This is an issue every leader should be thinking about. There are no right answers, but there is a right outcome. Everything may ride on it.

It may be hard to see a direct line from corporate culture to consumer perception. So let's start with two examples.

First, there is the most obvious arena: retail. Employees who meet with customers are also responsible for representing a brand's values, and unhappy employees will deliver unpleasant experiences. At H&R Block, for example, CEO Jeff Jones became worried that after a year of not directly interacting with people, his staff "may have lost some of those skills." It's why he now thinks a lot about "the basic human things" he needs to foster among his team to ensure that his tax professionals live up to consumers' expectations.

The same holds true in nonretail environments — because while these workers may not directly interact with consumers, they do make products that consumers use. At Google Travel, which is the department that builds the search giant's travel tools, managing director Rob Torres always believed that Google's workplace experience is key to its success. People from different teams interact and inspire each other, feeding off their shared mission to make users' lives easier. "How do you re-create that in the "new normal' if people don't come back?" he asked. Sure, his team members will be able to execute on ideas, but will they be as inspired to identify new opportunities? Or will stagnation develop inside the company, and then be felt outside it?

Related: The Future Of Work Is From Anywhere, at Anytime

These two examples raise questions about the way we work, and for many people, that's defined entirely by where and how we work. Should we work in an office? Are we on fixed hours? In Iceland, researchers recently shortened people's workweeks to 35 or 36 hours — and found that they were happier and more productive as a result. Maybe that's our future?

But hold up. Before we start building the structure of work, we have to understand the foundation — and the foundation is not about hours or offices. It is about people. Business leaders must first build, rebuild, or preserve human relationships.

This might be like saying water is wet, but consider what we've collectively been through. Over the course of the pandemic, we discovered what Zoom was good (and not so good) for. It turns out that many meetings could be conducted remotely, instead of requiring cross-country flights, and well-functioning teams could stay in touch easily and enjoy added flexibility. But new connections sometimes became harder to make. Interviewing or starting new jobs was awkward. Corporate team-building exercises were dicey at best.

As a result, HR experts told us, work culture has changed. Many employees feel disconnected from their employers and colleagues. Now companies are making policies that apply to both new and existing employees — without always thinking about how to strengthen the weak ties in their organization and ensure that the next wave of new hires feels connected.

Solving this problem requires new work models, with an intentional focus on collaboration and spontaneous discovery, and in alignment with the greater vision, mission, and values of the organization at large. Some of the most impactful customer innovations have happened during "watercooler" moments, when people have stepped away from their workspace and are able to interact with others. Purposely re-creating the space for those random interactions can be accomplished by creating shared organizational goals fueled by opportunities to interact with various team members. Lunchroom interactions with other teams is what has led to some of the Google Travel team's success, Torres said, and finding ways to continue those random interactions is important to continued innovation.

Related: 4 Work Models that Will Define the Post-Pandemic World

But the solution must also come from something more fundamental: This is a prime time for brands to strengthen their vision and mission, and to make sure that everyone at the company feels connected to it. "People are looking for that North Star," Bonobos CEO Micky Onvural told us. "Brands have a responsibility to use their voice, and this is truly an opportunistic moment. I think this is the time to double down on your brand story and your brand message."

A brand's mission is ultimately the thing that ties its people together, and it will be crucial as companies renew the emotional connections with their employees and their customers. Together, organizations must understand the heart of who they are — along with their end goal (vision), approach to reaching that end goal (mission), beliefs and behaviors (values), and how these elements influence the way they communicate with people, employees, and customers alike.

This goes beyond trotting out an old mission statement. Values have changed in the past year and a half; what mattered to employees and consumers in early 2020 may not match late 2021. Instead of simply giving them a statement of values, bring them in on the conversation so that, together, your entire team can create buy-in for a renewed mission.

Recently, we spoke with a friend who did just that. She spent the past year and a half trying to keep her company afloat, and she and her team were exhausted. As she began to look toward the future, she surveyed employees on what mattered to them most now. She was surprised by one of the top new needs: People wanted the company to provide pet care, like daycare, to address the separation anxiety pets are feeling. At first, she thought this sounded ridiculous. What do pets have to do with the company's values? Then she understood it: Many of her employees spent a year at home caring for their pets (and acquiring new ones), so a company that cares about them is now also one that cares about whatever they care about. The pet care issue also reveals how, since March 2020, different employees developed vastly different needs. Many corporate leaders scrambled to keep their business operating, while employees may have hunkered down in new surroundings with family or friends, or suffered personal traumas and loss. A leader cannot ignore this reality, or else these teams will feel disconnected from each other. Instead, everyone must be brought together with a set of values that acknowledges everyone.

If this sounds like hard and complicated work, that's because it is. But the leaders we spoke to kept emphasizing a simple starting point: listening. Listening to employees will require those in leadership to put aside their own biases and to open themselves to new ways of achieving overall company success. The path to brand health and ultimately brand growth rests in the hands of the very people who are responsible for it on a daily basis. Building and sustaining the link between what employees need and what a company can truly offer requires curiosity and willingness to view employee culture through a brand lens. Brands are, after all, built from the inside out.

Now that we've looked internally, let's look externally. What are our customers experiencing? Jessica Jensen, former CMO of OpenTable, shared a helpful way to look at it: emotional distance.

This is a concept she used to think about a lot. "OpenTable," she said, "is really based on relationships. People are emotionally connected to the brand, and we have a close tie with restaurants and their customers." But OpenTable is owned by Booking Holdings, which historically does not work with small businesses on the ground. This may put them further away from their customers, emotionally speaking. "I think that emotional distance from the customer matters," Jensen continued. "The closer the internal emotion is to the end user or customer, the greater the impact."

What a powerful idea. Customers can feel emotionally invested or emotionally distant — and the difference has nothing to do with marketing or product. This is precisely where the connection point is between internal employee morale and customer brand perception. Strong teams, who feel supported by their organization and inspired by a shared mission, will connect better with customers and solve their problems through innovative products and services. When those customers feel supported, their emotional distance shrinks.

Think about it like a journey that employees and customers take together; we like calling it the brand relationship arc. All relationships begin with acknowledgement: Customers and employees see each other and say, "I know you exist." The relationship then moves up the arc to understanding: A company's employees understand their customers' needs, and customers are aware of (or better yet, care about) the company's solutions. From there the relationship can deepen more — to the point where it becomes a core part of people's identities. This is when passionate employees stick around for decades, and when customers champion a brand the way, say, Nike fans proudly wear giant swooshes on their shirts.

Related: What Is the Real Future of Work?

How can leaders move everyone along that arc now? The answer is ever evolving. Customers, especially younger ones, may care more about what a brand stands for than what it actually sells. Customers (and employees!) are no longer the same people they were in early March 2020. Above all, leaders must respond to this by being flexible and creating a trusted environment.

Sound unpredictable? Many of the leaders we spoke to said it sounds liberating. "Our future has to move in waves," Penguin Random House CMO Sanyu Dillon told us. "The opportunity for redesign and reimagination has never been greater than it is now."

What was once thought impossible may now be possible. We can reimagine how a company functions, how it creates a work-life balance for its employees, and how it becomes meaningful to its consumers. This cannot simply be a conversation about where and when we work, because that will take us nowhere. This is a conversation about relationships. It starts with people.