Amidst the global struggle to control the Coronavirus, the vast majority of us continued to collaborate with our organizations from home, trying to reconcile personal shifts in our scale of values with efforts to maintain family order, work productivity, and team leadership, in which each individual was just one of millions living through such an extraordinary situation.
In that particularly challenging context for Employee Experience (EX), many of us were surprised by how the transition was easier than we had anticipated, deeply permeating our organizations and bringing unexpected benefits to our personal and family lives. Consequently, we quickly began to hear predictions about the future of work and the great growth of hybrid formats (76% of companies will adopt a hybrid work modality starting in 2021 [American Retail], and 75% of executives surveyed by Randstad plan to maintain telework).
Forgive the cliché, but “remote/hybrid/telework is here to stay.” However, it is not without challenges in implementing new ways of working that allow for the optimal and sustainable development of our organization.
While we stopped spending that immense amount of time commuting to the office, those of us who have entered hybrid regimes today, for better or worse, carry the office with us wherever we go. Every time we connect to work from home or choose to set up in a coworking space, we are making “work” cease to be a physical place. It is no longer about “going to work,” but about entering a state or mode from which I am collaborating with my organization. This last point is especially challenging, given that these conditions require each of us to have the conviction and will to enter this mindset—which is only a click away—and manage to remain motivated and satisfied with our work life in that environment.
This is a major challenge for Employee Experience and goes beyond the legal minimums that different countries are implementing, as we must create a new way of relating to work, purposefully constructing a new way of conceiving labor and inviting our collaborators to be a part of it, based also on what they expect from us.
How to improve the employee experience?
Based on the experience we have accumulated at BBK working with diverse clients throughout this year, I would like to highlight two points for reflection to begin developing new ways of working within our organization, whether in hybrid or 100% remote formats:
1. Purpose and Meaning
There is universal agreement that the main success factor for any work strategy—especially one with these characteristics—is having collaborators who are strongly committed to the organization’s purpose.
A collaborator who believes in and is mobilized by the organization’s raison d’être will be able to give meaning to their work, will be able to navigate high levels of uncertainty, and will align their efforts with the highest-value activities.
Finally, they will be able to enter the necessary work mindset without facing major barriers. Are we clear on our purpose? Have we transmitted it to our collaborators? Does it make sense to them?
2. Culture and Rituals
We must review whether the culture we have built possesses the values, rituals, and dynamics that succeed in connecting collaborators with this purpose and with each other, so that the environment we have built is what drives everyone to work toward the objectives we want to achieve together.
It is especially relevant to think about which instances of bonding and interactions between collaborators we want to promote, so that hybrid dynamics can be sustained without being based on distrust and control over those who must contribute from other locations.
In this task, technology will be our best ally, connecting and visualizing the people and the work that we no longer see in the office space.
The challenge has only just begun, but let us not forget that this path has already been traveled by many pioneering companies that have made Employee Experience a strategic priority, successfully creating workspaces that combine performance with the quality of life of their collaborators. The invitation is to stop improvising.