'You don't want everyone working in their own silos where no one is communicating with each other'
With the huge rise of a distributed workforce, employers have worried about the impact on productivity, collaboration, innovation and culture — while employees have embraced the improved work-life balance and lower costs.
It’s a balancing act that continues today — borne out in a survey that finds in-office policies bode well for innovation while work from anywhere boosts job satisfaction.
Encouragingly, the hybrid model seems like a promising compromise.
20-country survey
In surveying 5,300 HR, IT and business decision-makers from nearly 20 countries (including Canada), cloud computing company VMware found that 87 per cent of respondents who can work anywhere and 88 per cent who work in the hybrid model say they have higher job satisfaction — compared to 56 per cent of those working only at the office.
“A lot of employees realize that they can get a lot of their work done from home. So if organizations want them to sit in the hour-long traffic every day, there should be a better reason than ‘Please come sit at your desk and answer emails and do video calls’ — because you can do that quite as easily from home,” says Lindsay Coffin, interim associate director of human capital at the Conference Board of Canada.
On the other hand, nearly two-thirds think that their organization is more innovative when people are in the office.
This is even more true for fully remote or “anywhere-work” respondents, with 75 per cent saying in-person time leads to more innovation, compared to 64 per cent of hybrid employers and 69 per cent of office-only respondents.
But there is a noticeable difference in perception based on a person’s role: 69 per cent of decision-makers think their organization is more innovative if employees are in the office, compared to 56 per cent of employees, finds the VMware report The Distributed Workforce Dilemma: When Innovation and Job Satisfaction Compete.
In July, Canadian HR Reporter announced the Innovative HR Teams for 2022.
In-person time
For many employers that have gone fully remote, they’ve taken a very thoughtful approach to using that valuable in-office time, says Renu Upadhyay, vice president of product and technical marketing, end user computing, at VMware.
“They are a lot more process-driven in terms of the in-person meetings. So, they're very firm about ‘OK, we meet every quarter, these are the kinds of teams that meet,” she says.
“It's very intentional… which means they're aware of what that in-person time can result in, the benefits of that in-person time.”
A successful transition to hybrid involves a deep look into all facets of the business, according to a report from the Leeds University Business School in U.K.
Collaborative efforts
As a result, the hybrid model looks to be the best of both worlds: 28 per cent of respondents to the VMware survey say a hybrid policy has a positive impact on innovation, compared to 20 per cent of those fully in the office and 18 per cent of those fully out of the office.
So what is about in-person time that’s so valuable? Collaboration.
“You don't want everyone working in their own silos where no one is communicating with each other. And having that collaboration across the organization is incredibly important, especially in getting new initiatives off the ground, and sparking those innovative conversations where you can pull ideas from various teams,” says Coffin.
Innovation may be about a creative spark, but it’s also about systems and process, says Upadhyay.
“You also need innovation that can sustain, that can not just revolutionize your business but it can also sustain it... You need your team to make that happen,” she says.
“The collaboration aspect is extremely critical to understand all the aspects that the innovation touches and can improve and potentially disrupt, and how would you implement that change inside of your organization?”
Happiness has been linked to greater innovation because it helps people be more creative and to communicate more effectively, says one expert.
If organizations are looking to bring people back to the office, they should focus on a collaborative environment, says Coffin. But how often you need to do that should really depend on project goals and the type of work that organizations are doing.
“It needs to be something that makes sense for your organization,” she says, and “make sure that an entire team is in the office on the same day.”
If it’s a hybrid model where people can pick whatever day they want to come into the office, and then they sit in a closed office on video calls, says Coffin, “that's not about sparking innovation — you can do that from home. But if you have everyone come in for an in-person brainstorming session or team meeting or to get that opportunity to work across teams or see other people in an environment, it does spark that innovation that companies and leaders have perceived as lacking over the past two years.”
Embracing tech for good
One of the best tools to help with the hybrid model is collaborative software, which allows a group of people to work on the same document at the same time, as opposed to sitting around a boardroom table going through a report line by line, says Coffin.
“Everyone has access to the same report, and they can all add comments and chat back and forth, and then everyone gets a turn to comment in their own time. So that is a way that you can collaborate virtually, that may be more beneficial than collaborating in person while writing a report.”
This kind of technology was there before the pandemic, but with shutdowns and a huge rise in remote work, it was much more apparent the tools allowed people to be productive wherever they were located, says Upadhyay.
However, “if you don't have the norms around how you leverage that technology, to invite the participation, then the technology is just technology,” she says.
“It's [about] how you use the technology: What kind of culture do you create around the technology?”
But in the end, there’s still the in-person advantage of those organic conversations that happen on-site, says
“I mean, that's just human, the way we connect, and that you can’t replace on technology, the face to face.”
