Biggest Change

More than a month after the biggest change to our way of life and our way of working in recent history, we can now say with certainty that many companies are having to embrace new methods and solutions to remote working whether they wanted to or not.

Until recently, home working was seen as a refuge for the companies that were headed by either pioneers or hippies (depending which side you were on). Recently, however, more and more bosses started asking workplace consultants and IT advisors about how they could meet the challenge of moving most, if not all, their operations into the homes of their staff.

Ready or Not…

Depending on which industry you are in, chances are your company already had some sort of home working arrangements, at least for some of it staff. After all, if you are a senior executive, a sales professional or an account manager, you already had to spend some of your time working in the field, so accessing resources that are needed by staff who already work away from the office regularly should not really be an issue.

The issues arise when more of your other staff now need to work from home: will they have access to the tools they need in order to their jobs remotely? Can your IT infrastructure be scaled enough to enable most of your staff to work remotely?

In the “old days” the number of people not in the office was somewhere between 10 and 20% of the company. So, were all the IT departments prepared to enable 80% of their staff to work remotely all at any given time? More importantly, were the staff and managers ready for this change or did it catch them by surprise?

Regardless, all of the preparations (or lack of them) were put to the test and we ended up with something workable from which senior managers can draw some conclusions. As a result, I believe office working will never be the same again.

Let’s look at some of the ways this is likely to happen:

Physical Presence

Culturally, physical presence in the office has been, for a long time, considered a requirement and a sign of a good employee. Those who were working from home 1 or 2 days a week were viewed with suspicion, sometimes ever referred to as “part-timers” and “slackers” with the latter term facetiously deemed to be a synonym of the former one.

In most of the companies I have worked, remote working was never a real option, even for staff in the IT department. Even where it was theoretically allowed, it was often actively discouraged. I remember one particular case, where I (at the time already a somewhat senior manager) was encouraged to work from home by an executive, yet my direct boss explicitly forbade it. These attitudes have now been been forcibly put to test. If there is no reason why a substantial amount of time cannot be spent working from home, why drag people into work adding several hours to the person’s day through commuting when that time could be used to improve productivity and positively contribute to the work-life balance.

Many “old school” managers believe that in order to manage your team effectively, you need to be seen, and employees who are not at their desks are bad employees (even if they work in the field). To be frank, when I took my first management role, I was “taught” something not overly dissimilar. The current situation should teach us a few lessons: you do not have to be in the office physically in order to be productive (and conversely, being present does not equal high productivity) and you can manage employees without being in the same place as them.

The takeaway from this is trust your employees. Enable them to work effectively. Don’t chain them to their desks. Manage their work through objective performance measurements instead.

Will the way we manage presence change as a result of this? I think so! With the newly discovered digital skills, we will be able to manage the workload of ourselves and our staff more efficiently, making “management by presence” a refuge of companies that ignore change.

Meetings

Many companies insisted on face-to-face meetings for various reasons. It is usually explained by the need to see non-verbal cues as part of the communication process. This is absolutely crucial but video is here to help. It is no surprise that Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Cisco Webex saw surges of people joining them, both in terms of corporate accounts, shadow IT and for personal use. Video chat has now been taken up both for work and personal reasons and it is not going back to its box after the end of this.

The pandemic also forced even the most reluctant people to join the online communication world – after all, when it’s the only way you can get something done, you will do it in this way.

As a result, meetings will not be the same again. Companies will work on moving to video conferences at a much higher pace, upgrading their current systems and, I imagine, will encourage virtual meetings in order to improve productivity and reduce travel-related costs.

Corporate Travel

With pretty much all flights grounded, the travel industry has taken a substantial hit. Does it mean we have stopped dealing with people from across the globe? Absolutely not. In addition to telecommuting, companies introduced video “drop ins” and “virtual trips” where we use technology to our advantage, even sometimes working in a different time zone from where we physically reside, to ensure that critical communication link.

The end result of this is reduction in corporate travel. Great news for the environment, isn’t it?! However, does this mean will we stop travelling for business altogether? I doubt it. But I do believe the amount of corporate travel will reduce due to an increased understanding that sometimes it is not really as required as we once thought and other options for effective communication are available.

Office Space

During the “lockdown”, we discovered that the majority of “office-based” roles do not really need to be based in an office! Save for the roles that really require physical contact (service and hospitality industry, shops, health, deliveries etc.), many office-based jobs can actually be done from home.

Companies will be reviewing their office footprint carefully and looking into making savings by moving into smaller offices. Perhaps they will also be encouraging their staff to work from home on a more permanent basis.

Home Space

Finally, now that we have all been working from home, some with our other halves and some with children, we will be re-evaluating the needs of our home office. I was lucky to have a fairly decent set up at home, but is it really adequate long-term?

I think if the these predictions are at least partially correct, we will be reviewing our private accommodation needs also and seeing whether we need more “home office” space after all! Whether this is going to have an effect on the property market is a different conversation.