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When the pandemic began, it took most workers a surprisingly short time to get used to working remotely. But the next return to the office proved to be a little different. A key goal at the forefront of the minds of many business leaders is how to maintain the level of productivity dividends that have occurred widely. Workers, with less disruption and more control over their work environment, have consistently more productive in most cases.
But for the other IT, HR, and business executives I’ve talked to over the past few months, the focus now is on how to close the ongoing gap. The divide between those who return and those who remain far. Strategic concerns: How to sustain a distinct culture of well-engaged workers. It’s also tactical: How to ensure a more distributed workforce remains productive while still being treated fairly.
One of the most consistent lamentations I hear is worry that many new hires over the past few years have never been in the office or never met their co-workers. While this may indeed soon become an outdated concept, the reality is that even the advanced technological world has yet to find a way to replace the face-to-face connection between people.
Until that happens, organizations and their employees will have to work to ensure a more decentralized model to work in able to maintain close teamwork. A job that not only attracts and retains the best workers, but fully engages them and realizes their potential, wherever they are. A detractor might say that lower engagement and retention of remote employees is just inevitable, but in my research that wasn’t necessarily the case, and it certainly isn’t. is a fair and equitable model for post-pandemic employment.
Putting offices and remote workers on equal footing
Another approach is to do what’s best – and it will never be perfect – to ensure remote workers generally share the same views on accessibility, support, and empowerment as in-office employees do. easier access to shared physical spaces. While it’s easy to place this as a reasonable bar, it also takes real effort to achieve. However, I also believe that workplaces that aspire to attract the best talent will have a hard time doing so, and this is where discussions about matching work begin in earnest.
At its core, the function of businesses is to bring workers together to collaborate to achieve business goals. Collaboration is the core vehicle through which organizations can successfully accomplish grand goals or serve millions of customers. Over time, collaboration has been increasingly facilitated and enhanced by technology, first by compacting time and space, and now to do a lot of other things.
But in hybrid organizations, which I would loosely define as those with substantial groups of employees both in the office and remotely, collaboration becomes more fragmented across locations ( virtual or in-office.) Silos have long been a hindrance to effective collaboration, and hybrid work adds a major edge between the two teams. However, it’s not exactly a new one, just one that stands out a lot more than before.
So what is the prescription then, for better and improved hybrid work? How do we bridging the gap, creating equal access, usability and support for both groups of workers? There are two ways to answer these questions. One is in terms of analytics, and that’s certainly where most organizations will start in 2022. The second is to find out what organizations are actually doing to enable hybrid work in action. and capture what they’re doing, then combine directly into their digital employee experience.
Set Hybrid Location as Default for Collaboration
The short analytical answer in my research is that organizations can focus on making a simple change to ensure more collaboration is done in a hybrid work-friendly way. Specifically, make it seamless and automated to work as a team and communicate as much as possible in a hybrid location (see diagram above), i.e. one that tries to blend seamlessly. Circuit live locations like offices and meeting rooms with virtual locations like Call Zoom or Teams sessions. The key is to make it as painless and frictionless as possible.
However, this is a fragile bridge. That’s a lot of my discussion about my experience connecting at the office with remote workers, I’m often told stories of experiments trying to do this where a virtual meeting is set up for people in person, but people at one end of the room can’t be heard. Or every face-to-face participant is also asked to participate in a virtual call, creating a ton of buzz in the virtual meeting.
The reality is that these early frictions are the inevitable result of those early newborn steps and growing pains, not significant shortcomings that keep us from cooperating. better. Technology will get better at connecting these audiences and establishing connections between them. Our collaborative techniques and behaviors for collaborative work will also get better. The key, even if it is sometimes difficult in the short term, is to be fair and equal to workers and the tasks in progress, and not to maintain or enforce (not even intentionally), division between them.
Because I’ve been regularly consulted in conversations with the digital workplace and the experiences of employees from some of the world’s top organizations: Businesses have discovered that workers have talent High capacity can be searched from anywhere, especially from a distance. And with today’s digital tools and collaboration practices, we now know we can bring them into our organization from anywhere as productive individuals. Not only were we able to make them work, but we also helped make them some of our best collaborators. But not by making them second-class citizens in the new mixed-labor regime.
(That also won’t be bad for in-office employees, who will now be able to interact much more effectively with the rest of the workforce.)
Discover the best approach for matching work
The second way is to actively look for the best new avenues in the future – which will surely reveal many techniques, magical new technologies and hopefully some real breakthroughs – to really find the best ways. Other conveniences exist that the business world is hitting on as they find their own way through trends. So I’ll be surveying my advisory board of the top digital workgroups from around the world over the next year to find out what works and what doesn’t. As always, open collaboration allows us to learn deeply from each other and that is the goal here.
Ultimately, the transition to hybrid work is a great once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform our workplace. It’s also one of those things that we can’t be sure we’ll get back to after a while. Our organizations will experience one of the biggest changes ever (since the early days of the pandemic) next year as some workers return to the office and others remain. in us figure out how to work effectively with them. I hope you will help me capture and share this knowledge.
Note: If you would like to participate in my new combined work study as an institution and agree to be surveyed anonymously, please submit a request to be included. this. You will get early profit from the data. Your security is guaranteed. I will publish the results here and elsewhere.
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