Over the past five years, management concerns around remote and hybrid work have changed.
Understanding how and why this change has occurred may help managers better define the optimal work model for their organizations. In turn, this work model will drive key requirements for your communications and collaboration solutions.
At the start of the pandemic in 2020, essential workers continued with modified work conditions, focused on safety, while non-essential workers shifted to remote work.
As the pandemic and remote work continued, organizations began expressing concerns about the impact of remote work on productivity and business continuity. Prevailing thought was that in-person work led to more efficient and effective work processes. Interestingly, research was indicating that working from home could be boosting productivity, as employees had more time and energy once they were no longer commuting daily.
Understanding the productivity impacts of remote work was difficult as there is rarely a baseline, or regular measurement, of productivity for most knowledge workers. A single universal metric does not exist to measure knowledge worker productivity.
As the pandemic and remote work continued, the narrative of concerns with remote work expanded to include innovation, collaboration, and company culture. Companies argued that in-person interactions fostered a stronger sense of community, leading to crucial elements needs for innovation such as creativity, spontaneous idea-sharing, and stronger team dynamics. Akin to the challenges of measuring productivity, quantitatively determining levels of creativity, collaboration, company culture, and innovation is equally difficult.
Simultaneously, employees continued to prioritize work-life balance and saw remote work as a primary means for maintaining that.
More recently, concerns about continued remote work and reasons cited for mandated in-person work have become multi-faceted and nuanced. Reasons cited include:
This most recent list of concerns is significant because we are finally seeing the emergence of an approach that includes employee-focused interests into the dialogue. Initially, reasons cited for in-office work were solely focused on what was good for the organization. Now, reasons given serve the organization, possibly the employee, and potentially the broader community.
With the inclusion of employee well-being and employee feedback as reasons for return to office announcements, organizations are stepping closer to getting it right. The right work model is one where there is a balance between business needs and employee needs; there needs to be shared value for all stakeholders.
The most straightforward path to success begins with an open and transparent dialogue with employees to find a balance that works for everyone. Each organization has unique needs and contexts. A balanced and flexible approach that considers employee preferences and business needs tends to yield the best results.
Most employees continue to prefer hybrid; the positive impact on the quality of life/work blend cannot be understated. Organizations who wish to attract and retain top talent will be unable to compete without providing what employees want – flexibility and adaptability.
An organization that demonstrates that it is listening and responding accordingly to articulated employee needs leads to higher employee engagement which can lower attrition.
In contrast, some recent announcements on return to office have come across as tone deaf, giving employees the sense that management is not at all aware of what their mandate means, such as changing personal circumstances that can’t necessarily be done quickly: childcare, eldercare, etc. This disconnect could have negative effects among the workforce.
When gathering input from your employees, keep in mind that there will be differences across different employee groups:
Cloud-based UCaaS solutions, aggressively adopted during the initial days of the pandemic, provide location flexibility. Anywhere you have an internet connection you can work effectively, at least technically. This flexibility is key as you sort out your work model, and as that model evolves.
It has become fashionable for technology vendors to talk about being people-centric, or human-centric (especially in this year that is hyper-focused on AI). Employee engagement is the domain of human resource professionals, and not IT professionals.
The challenge for IT professionals is that being employee-centric relies on equal parts of technology skills and people skills. Technically enabling a solution, does not mean the solution will be adopted, understood, or used productively.
With many strong UCaaS offerings, it is less about choosing the right solution, and more about making your choice be the right solution. (Zoom, Cisco, Microsoft, RingCentral, and 8x8 are all in the “leaders quadrant”, scoring high in both completeness of vision and ability to execute.)
Any of the leading UCaaS solutions (+Google Workspace) are viable options for most small, medium, and large companies.
However, enabling employees to be effective using the tools, wherever they work, requires more than technical implementation.
Change management and communication is key to helping employees understand the “what” behind new technology. What value does this bring for the organization? What value does it bring to me?
Effective training is critically important to unlocking the power of increasingly sophisticated communication and collaboration tools, especially with the rise of “AI assistants.” Do not assume that any of these tools is simple enough that no training is required. With every vendor releasing hundreds of new features each year, training needs to be on-going.
Also, for training to be useful, you must create time in employees’ schedules so they can partake of the training. On demand training is often ignored in the world of back-to-back-to-back meetings. Lunch and learn sessions continue to work well and might serve as a valid reason to journey to an office.
Proactive monitoring, especially for meeting rooms and other in-office equipment, helps ensure that those who make the commute are not disappointed.
A support mechanism that is easy to access and responsive is critical for when things go wrong. Some studies have shown that only 16% of users open a ticket when they encounter an issue. This means 84% of users are suffering in silence, and likely not being as effective as they could be.
As organizations mandate or try to “magnet” employees back to the office, different departments have different approaches to luring workers back: facility leaders focus on amenities like “cool” office design and espresso bars, AV professionals focus on multi-camera meeting rooms, ceiling microphones, and video resolution, while IT professionals focus on UC&C platform selection, although these days perhaps being distracted by “all things” AI.
HR professionals are more likely to ask employees what they want (Seinfeld reference). Through an effective combination of employee engagement surveys, recruiting data, and exit interviews, HR professionals can help your organization clearly understand what employees want, and what is a deal breaker.
IT plus HR is a powerul combination.
Deciding the right reasons to encourage or mandate employees to return to your office is complicated. Involving business leaders, technology leaders, and people leaders significantly increases your chances of creating the best blueprint for how work gets done at your company. A solid plan, based on employee feedback, is much more likely to drive wide-scale adoption and positive employee engagement. Adoption and engagement are critical to return on technology investment.
