'The next three to five years are going to be very messy'
In the post-pandemic world, most office-based organizations should be filled with a mix of in-person, hybrid and remote employees, that much is clear.
But are employers and HR doing a good job at bridging the gap between the various groups? Not always, according to a study by Avanade, a digital, cloud and advisory services firm.
Sixty per cent of respondents said they were not given a true choice about when and where they worked, and 62 per cent did not receive technological tools to support them working from anywhere.
“Workers were actually being let down by the fact that there was a lack of technology, lack of security; workplaces weren’t necessarily being flexible, they were mandating people come back to work,” says Andrea Richardson, director of business HR for Canada at Avanade in Toronto.
Most organizations were not “making sure that they have a proper workplace set-up, making sure that if they are doing hybrid meetings, that the meeting room [is] actually set up to do a good hybrid meeting because that’s the most frustrating thing,” she says.
The research heard from 2,100 global senior decision-makers in IT, business, HR and training between October 2021 and January 2022. Organizations surveyed had 1,000 or more employees and more than US$500 million in yearly revenue, from Canada, U.S., France, Germany, Spain, Italy, U.K., Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Netherlands, Japan, Australia and Brazil.
Old school approach
Those leaders who are insisting that workers return to the office full-time are going about it the wrong way, says Richardson.
“It’s just old school mistrust maybe of employers: ‘Are they actually working while they’re at home?’ when in fact, they’re actually working harder, and it’s an old-school mentality that people need to be in the office all the time,” says Richardson.
That outdated way of doing things wasn’t working even before COVID, according to Sophie Wade, founder of Flexcel Network, an advisory services company in New York.
“Things were getting pretty uncomfortable before the pandemic but we were very used to doing things in a certain way,” she says. “Those ways of doing business, and ways of operating, ways of working, weren’t flexible enough, never mind work arrangements but the ways weren’t flexible enough and adaptive enough for how business was changing because of technology.”
A “fixed mindset" does not augur well in coming up with a solution, she says.
“Historically… the people who are trying to bring them back into the office are the ones who are pushing the other people’s backs up against the wall, and they’re going to get people to be defensive.”
By continuing with an uncertain plan for the future, and not coming up with good plans to address the new reality, workers will notice, says Richardson.
“Employees know that there’s a lot of options out there. Right now, we have a very low unemployment rate in Canada, especially in the tech industry, especially in the consulting tech industry — if they can’t find [flexibility] with their current employer, they’re going to go out there and look somewhere else for it.”
Bridging the divide
Encouragingly, 98 per cent of respondents to the Avanade survey said their companies were attempting to improve the daily workplace experience. Another 85 per cent said their employers had either piloted programs or shown support for hybrid and remote options.
“There’s one unifying factor between them, which is that they do want what’s good for the business, they don’t want to do anything that’s bad for the business,” says Wade. “Everybody wants what’s best for the business because that’s actually what’s best for us all as well, and we all want to give our best work.”
“So in some sense, that is a positive actually, they are the same side of that coin,” she says.
For those organizations that do adopt more flexible strategies to benefit all workers, productivity has risen by an average of 6.83 per cent, and this translates to a 6.7-per-cent average increase in employee retention, found the survey.
“Myself, when I’m at home, I’m getting way more work done just because I don’t have to commute and I’m not having people coming in and out of my office,” says Richardson.
To find out what might work for the organization, look to other businesses in the same industry, says Wade.
“How are our competitors doing? Do we know anything about their turnover results and how people are responding? What are the work arrangements? These are things that can be persuasive.”
‘Very messy’
One thing that is certain, is change is coming and it won’t be pretty, says Wade.
“The next three to five years are going to be very messy, as we all try to make it work for our company because… there are all going to be different sets of people who work together in different ways, who have their own quirks and obligations, personal and professional.”
For HR, it’s about not being too myopic in your thinking, says Richardson.
“You have to look at the journey as a long-term journey: we’re not going to solve all the pieces of the puzzle right now but from an HR perspective, [it’s about] encouraging our leaders to role-model the behaviours that we want our employees to see. If you’re encouraging wellbeing in your organization, make sure that your executives are taking that vacation time.”
Asking employees what they want can also go a long to satisfying both sides, says Wade.
“It takes some of the weight off HR and they can also be seeing what’s going on, seeing what people are asking for, which can calm executives down in terms of: ‘How does measurement work… how can we be measuring this?’”
