Coming Back to the Office
COVID-19 has brought unprecedented challenges for the workplace. Many companies around the world have risen to the occasion, acting swiftly to safeguard employees and migrate to a new way of working. Remote has become far less taboo for even the most conventional industries. Offices who did not have the skillset to go digital, or flexibility to get creative are now apart of a full-blown global experiment.
Attitudes are changing on the role of the office, so what’s next for the workplace?
INFORMATION PULLED FROM MCKINSEY’S ANALYSIS OF 2,000 JOBS AND 9 COUNTRIES
Before the pandemic, the conventional wisdom had been that offices were critical to productivity, culture, and winning the war for talent. Companies competed intensely for prime office space and best-in-class amenities.
According to McKinsey research, 80 percent of people questioned report that they enjoy working from home.
Forty-one percent say that they are more productive than they had been before and 28 percent that they are as productive. Many employees liberated from long commutes and travel have found more productive ways to spend that time and decided that they prefer to work from home rather than the office. Many organizations think they can access new pools of talent with fewer locational constraints, adopt innovative processes to boost productivity, create an even stronger culture, and significantly reduce real-estate costs.
But what is the cost of a fully remote culture?
Is it possible that the satisfaction and productivity people experience working from homes is the product of the social capital built up through countless hours of water-cooler conversations, meetings, and social engagements before the onset of the crisis? Will corporate cultures and communities erode over time without physical interaction? Will planned and unplanned moments of collaboration become impaired? Will there be less mentorship and talent development? Has working from home succeeded only because it is viewed as temporary, not permanent?
Along with social isolation, the clouding of work-family boundaries is a significant challenge for remote employees. The blurring of such boundaries causes remote workers to associate their homes with their work roles as work obligations repeatedly intrude upon family time.
Organizations should identify the most important processes for each major business, geography, and function, and reenvision them completely, often with involvement by employees. This effort should examine their professional-development journeys (for instance, being physically present in the office at the start and working remotely later) and the different stages of projects (such as being physically co-located for initial planning and working remotely for execution).
Previously, for example, organizations may have generated ideas by convening a meeting, brainstorming on a physical or digital whiteboard, and assigning someone to refine the resulting ideas.