Work will never be the same after this. The coronavirus pandemic is challenging what we know about how, when and where work happens. Why organizations exist and what companies produce is being questioned, too. We have an opportunity to use this crisis to transform work into a more equitable, satisfying and trusting experience for everyone. Here are three workplace trends to watch because of the global pandemic.
Productivity re-imagined
We’ve all had bosses who measured productivity and results by how long people could sit in a chair in front of a screen. Early in my career a mentor provided me with the hot tip that successive promotions came their way because they were always the first one in the office and the last one to leave. One of the least productive people I’ve ever managed spent the most time in front of her screen. My former mentor was let go because they weren’t really that great at leading teams.
It’s exciting to see how organizations have been forced to trust people to do good work, figure out how to measure value-creation (not time-at-desk), and empower employees to create schedules that work for them. Consequently, productivity is being understood and measured in different and compelling ways. Caring and serving communities is a unique example from The New Republic’s Nick Martin. The hallmark of modern work, lengthy meetings, are being revealed as less essential than once imagined. The New York Times’s David Gelles argues that employers are realizing the productivity gains of this newly remote workforce, even if there is growing concern of people burning out.
We are exposing the fallacy of what HBR’s Joan C. Williams calls the “ideal worker” and doing so will enhance equity and satisfaction for workers everywhere: “COVID has made visible the conflict between an older generation of ideal workers and younger men who see the good father as someone who is involved in his children’s daily care.” I am enthusiastically here for this.
The purpose of offices
I ride my bike to work. It takes about 20 minutes. I don’t ride to work when there are pandemics because I work from home and I won’t ride to work when it snows (this ranges from about an afternoon to a week in Vancouver). The handful of times I had to drive or take transit to work always made me frustrated, sad and confused because of the unnecessary bottleneck of people churning through what have become arbitrary 9-5 office hours. The nine-to-five workday will change. We are getting back millions of minutes of lost productivity and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by working with more flexibility and without the gravity of the office pulling us into work.
So, what purpose do offices serve when we’re not going to them?
HBR’s Gretchen Gavett wrote one of the best pieces I’ve seen detailing what working from home amidst the pandemic will mean for offices around the world. According to Jennifer Magnofli Astill, one of the leading researchers on how workplaces are evolving, offices will become spaces to solve complex problems in teams and foster human-machine collaboration:
First, organizations will need space for teams and leaders to make sense of complexity, distill a course of action, and make decisions together. And just as in our current context, they will rely on machines to help do this. Think of the daily briefings of governors during the pandemic. The public press conferences are points of synthesis; what they don’t show is the work done by teams of humans and machines that analyze large data sets to cast a view of the coronavirus and model possible scenarios and outcomes. Spaces for this type of work need to deliver simultaneous access to the big picture and specialized, machine learning–driven data. Think of war rooms in defense work. Or mission control rooms at NASA, or an operations center for weather monitoring.
The other type of space will be for specialized learning. The ability to absorb and operationalize new knowledge to meet a changing context has been critical in surviving the pandemic. This type of change readiness in teams is native to young startups, but it is cultivated over time in a more experienced workforce and at scale through ongoing learning and reskilling.
For these and other reasons, offices of all kinds won’t go away any time soon.
Humanizing work
This experience is accelerating vulnerability, trust, realness, and psychological safety on my team, which all require inherently human traits to be on full display. People are working with more humanity because of kids crashing Zoom meetings, breakdowns due to social isolation, and finding creative solutions for everything from schedules to training an entire organization to work remotely. All of this amidst an existential crisis that will forever change our world. Every day we are blending work and life in real time, without rehearsal in front of our colleagues and families (sometimes with them).
It would be weird if we didn’t emerge from this crisis as incisively more human.
The humanization of work will serve organizations well in the future. “Humans must be augmented by robots and AI to focus more on the creative and strategic aspect of work – not pitted against technology,” says futurist Jacob Morgan. In addition to creating value by leaning into our humanity with robo-colleagues, organizations that take care of their people and elevate the employee experience during the coronavirus pandemic will be remembered by clients, employees and their communities. Work is a notably human pursuit and the best organizations should aspire to make these uncertain times feel as connective and social as possible.