With fewer employees attending their offices on a daily basis, many organizations are reconfiguring … [+]
Now that economic uncertainty has followed the pandemic, it’s not really clear what work will look like in the months and years ahead. While many people think that “the genie is out of the bottle” and that office-based workers (who make up an ever-increasing proportion of the total) will never go back to their old ways, there are others who insist that the deteriorating economic environment is already bringing about a hardening of attitudes among employers, so that workers return to something like they worked before for fear of losing their jobs.
Brad Harris, a professor in the department of management and human resources at HEC Paris, studies and works with human resource leaders in fast-growing companies. Noting recent layoffs by major tech companies, he says the trend to stop hiring or even downsize is likely to become more widespread. Along with that, he predicts that employers who feel under more pressure if a recession is looming, “will pull back on employee-friendly policies and add teeth to the return to work.” As a result, he says he is “really, really skeptical” of the new ways of working that continue to be a feature.
There are still others who refuse to take sides, stressing that it is too early to tell how things will play out and noting that there are many complications and nuances. And, of course, “hybrid work”—the idea that employees work remotely at home or elsewhere most of the time and attend their workplaces for tasks that are better done face-to-face, such as certain types of meetings and collaboration—is itself a compromise.
To get an idea of how complicated it is, just consider for a moment the effects of the inflation that has been raging in the UK, US and elsewhere in recent months. On the one hand, there’s an argument that increasing the cost of commuting—rising fuel costs, more expensive food, and the like—would make people more inclined to continue working from home. On the other hand, there is a view that rising energy costs that are part of that inflation would win and encourage workers to move to a place where their employer paid the heating bills.
However, such practical considerations are only one aspect of the soul-searching that continues as employers seek to find how they can best use the opportunities opened up by a combination of technology and changing attitudes about how and where work is done.
Lynda Gratton, a London Business School professor and author of many books on the future of work, is one of those who seems most enthusiastic about how things are shaping up. Her consultancy HSM has held various webinars reaching managers around the world exploring the role of the office and she has said that “covid has been the most important catalyst for change [in the workplace] since the Taylorism of the 1860s. Asserting that “the role of the office is the hottest topic in the world,” she points to four key insights she and her colleagues have gained from their extensive discussions with practitioners. They are:
- Reframe the office as a tool in the workplace ecosystem. With the proliferation of hybrid work, there is an opportunity to make the office a desirable destination rather than a place where employees have to go.
- Think about the purpose of the office. Recognizing that what the office is for will depend on individual circumstances, Gratton’s team believes that for most it will combine the four themes of driving sustainable high performance, making culture visible by showing how organizational goals align and individual, building social capital or the positive results of “human moments at work” and promoting well-being.
- Design the office with your people in mind. By providing opportunities for employees to connect, employers can move away from focusing on the physical aspects of an office to focusing on the behaviors, feelings, and sentiment they want the office to evoke.
- Think about cognitive, behavioral and emotional skills. Achieving defined outcomes requires thinking about how people experience work through things like having the right tools to enable a seamless hybrid experience, how people interact with the workplace and each other, and how people feel In work.
Some of these address the concerns most often raised by those worried about the move to remote or hybrid working – the lack of community and reduced opportunities for those early in their careers to learn and develop. But it is clear that, even for those who see changing working practices as a positive effect of advances in technology, much work will need to be done to ensure that employers can meet workers’ expectations as well as targets. their business. .
Mike Morini is the CEO of Workforce Management, a software company that helps organizations manage their employees wherever they are. It shows how the much-discussed new generations of employees’ and their employers’ expectations for work require managers to adapt to accommodate workers’ conflicting demands on their time. Even with the worsening economic outlook, he maintains that companies will still be determined to retain their best people and will therefore need to be proactive in ensuring they are engaged. This is a challenge when a growing number of workers rarely visit their workplaces. One of the ways such software provided by his company can help is by alerting line managers to the workload of their subordinates. If, say, a single mom is assigned extra shifts, he or she might check to make sure they’re happy with that because they need the money or if it’s burdening them and they’d rather another deal. The advantage of this is that it also provides an opportunity for the manager to generally check in on the employee and provide the feedback and evaluation that is seen as so vital today.
But Morini also points out that it’s not just executives who need to adapt to new approaches in the wake of what he calls the rapid escalation of digitization in the wake of the pandemic. Employees at all levels will need to take more responsibility for themselves when working from home. “You have to be a self-starter,” he says.
