Going Back To The Office, Can I Bring My Pet?

Hello, everybody! Jody Ann Johnson, People Strategist and Champion here with the 96th episode of “Coffee with Jody”. Today, I’m going to share with you about Going Back To The Office. Can I bring my dog with me?  

During the Pandemic, a very short period of time people had to adjust to remote working. I mean, it was actually quite remarkable that people could get on Microsoft Teams and get on Zoom and actually find ways to be able to work remotely when our communities and our country were in shutdown. 

While we were home finding a rhythm and routine to be working from home with kids, with pets and maybe elderly parents, like I have, we sorted it out. Many months later, a lot of companies are saying, Hey, it’s time to return to work. Only 4% of business owners believe that their employees want to come back to work, 74% of them believe that their employees would like some kind of a hybrid, however, 28% of them are going to bring them back anyway.  

Why is this important? Well, as I said, we created routines where we got used to, how do I work from home with kids, my partner or my spouse who is also working from home. I have pets! Well, a large percent of people who have pets are saying, you know, what? If I can’t bring my pet back to the office with me or work remotely so that I can stay home with my pet, then I’m willing to look for another job. That’s a pretty strong statement.  

If you’re somebody who wants to hang on to great talent and in this really tough recruitment and retention market, you probably do. You might want to consider what it will take to have a pet friendly work environment so that I can have my team members come back and be happy,  engaged and stay with me. There’s a number of companies that are doing just that.  

Obviously when you read that Purina and Petco allow people to bring their pets to work like, yeah, well they’re pet companies, but Google, Amazon, Salesforce, Glassdoor, Ben and Jerry’s. I mean, these are just to name a few that are letting people bring their pets to work. So the article that I was reading about it was saying that they’ve created these gates around people’s desks so that they could bring their pets with them and have them be in a contained space. So they’re not like running around all over the office, right?  

That’s one thing you can do to create flexibility where maybe they’re not out of the house for 8 or 10 or sometimes 12 hours with commutes and leaving the pets alone. So if you’re creative about it and get into a dialogue with your team members about what their needs are, you can go a really long way to having it all and being able to retain this kind of top talent. 

So for dog lovers, being able to bring their pet into work is a huge perk. And where five years ago, only 5% of businesses that allowed people to bring their dogs into the office with them, that’s increasing and likely to increase even further as we migrate back into the office. So the bottom line is for retention, for engagement, for happy work-life balance for your team. 

If you have team members that have pets and they want to bring them in, explore ways that you can get that done. And I would love to hear from you if you have that in place already, and if you’re open to it.

So if you enjoyed this video, please like it, subscribe to my YouTube channel and share it. And if you’d like to find out more about this concept and or business coaching and how it can make a difference in your business, please schedule a discovery call with me and the calendar link below.  

https://mybiz.coach/jodycall

That’s it for today. Make it a great one.