No business risk management plan could have envisaged how quickly and brutally the workplace would have needed to adapt over the last six months in response to COVID-19.
Post COVID-19, leaders around the world are working with their people to transition them in support of a blended workplace, quickly trying to re-establish the role of the bricks and mortar office.
Before the pandemic, an office headquarters was a significant part in the stature and culture of a business. It helped leaders within an organisation attract talent, project an image and promote the organisational brand externally. Internally it was an area where we promoted collaboration, communication and connection, working shoulder-to-shoulder to deliver on strategy.
During the crisis, many people were forced to work from home and according to recent research, up to 80% of people actually enjoyed it (depending on the industry). Employees were relieved of long commutes to and from work and enjoyed greater flexibility in how they did their work, allowing a better balance and integration between work and home life.
However, working from home is not without its challenges.
Allocating seperate blocks of time for work and home duties has required many people to develop new routines to manage their time effectively. When speaking with my clients and leaders, the overriding consensus is that we’ll see a blended way of working from this point forward, with large numbers of the population working from home. Whilst this has leaders around the world grappling with how to to support new ways of working and communicating, I believe there’s a challenge on the horizon that we haven’t yet addressed that relates to performance.
I believe the success, productivity and effectiveness of people working from home at the moment is a results of the countless hours they’ve spent working together in their offices, built up over time. Pre-COVID-19, they enjoyed conversations, impromptu meetings, social engagements, corridor chats, coffee shop trips, water bubbler talk, interactions in the lunchr oom and drinks after work. These tiny interactions, over time, build up our emotional bank accounts which drives us to go the extra mila.
Teams that go the extra mile for each other win the day.
In high-pressure, high-expectation corporate environments, teams are responsible for driving innovation and success in a competitive market.
If you’re a leader responsible for designing new ways of working, consider this:
What performance cues within our corporate cultures and communities, will we miss and risk eroding over time, as a result of working from home?
With a significant reduction in social interaction and unplanned collaboration, less coaching and mentorship, and decreased connection to the vibrancy of a social hub, how will we build on our emotional bank accounts? Will we still go the extra mile for our teammates?
Good leaders will take advantage of what we’ve learned from working from home, whilst also maintaining the important connection to a brick-and-mortar workplace. We have learned that great doesn’t need to be done in the office. But we also know, that the emotional bank account driving collaboration is necessary for team excellence and is very hard to manufacture in a virtual environment.
Some tough decisions are on the horizon for many leaders.
Outlined below are some broad areas to explore, where current performance cues essential to driving team performance, can drive a new outstanding workplace:
FOCUS on how the work is done
Organisations and their leaders need to be able to identify essential systems and processes, for each of their major business components, to rework what’s more important and ideally,
should be completed together with the involvement of employees on the ground. This process should ensure you look at the learning and development of both the individual and the team/s required to implement new ways of working, with new tools. This may identify the need for changes in relation to mindset and key behaviours – how we interact, rituals and habits that manifest the culture.
These changes will not be easy and will require purposeful effort to rework and construct new systems and processes. New practices together with behaviours that support them will need to be dropped into a new operating models, as part of ensuring your best chance of success.
How to blend
Teams within organisations will need to work together to identify what tasks can be completed remotely and what needs to be completed in the workplace. They will also need to make decisions about accountabilities and ways of working. Who relies on who and accountabilities between each other need to be clearer than ever and as roles get reclassified, people will need to understand how best to integrate and perform as a team and/or expectations change.
Many businesses will opt for a hybrid working environment, where team members will spend a certain number of days in office for key meetings and/or collaboration pieces, with the remainder of work completed individually from home or remotely, using virtual tools to stay connected.
I believe this approach to be a winning proposition for both employees and employers. It offers the perfect balance between people returning to the workplace and working from home. It also allows employers to attract and retain geographically challenged talent.
Set up the physical environment
Workplaces need to be adjusted to ensure they act as a hub for social interaction and collaboration on key projects and connection for teams. Team meeting rooms, eating areas and collaboration centres will take precedence over individual cubicles.
The key focus of office work spaces in the future should be productivity driven, supporting both collaboration and learning from each other where we’ve collapse physical boundaries. In addition to this, the provision of closed team rooms should also be considered as a means of driving more effective discussion across shorter periods of time, with team members to return back to their home offices to complete assigned work.
Of course the key to this will be the availability of seamless video conferencing capabilities between home offices and head offices, as well as the tech that supports this.
Reshape your presence
To centralise or decentralise – why does it need to be one or the other?
How much space and where offices should be located will be important questions for large business leaders into the future. Some organisations will maintain a presence in larger cities, whilst others will focus on smaller spaces, located regionally, to allow them to secure talent without the need for long commutes.
There is a view in the market that there will be a significant decline in the demand for office space in large cities and the amount of time workers will spend in these offices. Making difficult, but firm decisions on the structure of your business now, could lead to massive cost savings. It could also be strategically smart, allowing you to drive performance through a hybrid workforce that supports flexibility.
If you need help in driving performance and maintaining a competitive advantage within your market, we have a process that re-establishes ways of working, performance standards and habits for the blended working environment.
Contact us today for more information.
