An office is an important place or section or an area for the conduct of any works, jobs, businesses, or transactions. The office is the center of an organization where various departments such as financial, production, clerical, technical, personnel, managerial, manufacturing, advertising, marketing, sales, training, and so forth. Before the pandemic, the conventional wisdom was that office was critical to productivity, culture, and winning the war for talent.
Reimagining the Office
Covid-19 has shaken up a lot of our lives the past year and many have made the abrupt shift to working from home. Amid the upheaval, many companies have been forced to make the shift from traditional operating methods to full or partial WFH. Firms like Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, Shopify, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Capital One, Slack, Amazon, PayPal, and Salesforce, were amongst the first to enable long-term WFH environments. Working in virtual teams comes with challenges like managing the separation of work and home life, handling the sense of isolation that might arise from the lack of everyday face-to-face interactions, and countering potential conflict that could result from misunderstanding and miscommunication.
We all know the challenges of the remote workforce but what could be the top three challenges that employers face. People often focus on how workers contemplate the various challenges of working from home, but we must also place our focus on how employers find solutions for the challenges that have surfaced during the crisis. This is to make sure employees still feel connected to the organization.
How Employers Face the Unknowns of The Pandemic
1. Performing Remote Supervision
How do you reintegrate furloughed workers while keeping your workplace free of a COVID-19 outbreak? Due to limited transparency, both managers and their employees regularly express worries about the absence of face-to-face interaction. Managers may be concerned that employees won’t work as hard or as effectively as they do when working in the office. Some employees also struggle with more limited access to managerial support and communication.
Many employees simply need the social interaction and direct communication the workplace provides under normal circumstances. For example, some employees working remotely may find the email convenient but imperfect, inadequate for an effective work environment. The supervision can be performed using many collaborative or employee engagement tools such as our in-house solution, Feet's, or work tech like Skype, Zoom, LARK.
2. Sustaining Organization’s Culture
Corporate culture is very powerful, but it’s a really difficult thing to build and it’s also very easy to lose. Working from home does not create corporate culture, in fact, that’s how you lose it. People become narrow-focused, they focus purely on the job in front of them, on the screen, but their role and responsibility are actually way more than that.
The first step is to acknowledge that the old, office-centric ways of reinforcing culture won’t work. Then, be intentional about establishing more touchpoints with remote employees, reimagining onboarding processes, and fostering inclusive ways of communicating. Adapting to a hybrid environment will require some trial and error, but companies that invest time and resources into new processes will be able to thrive in a new era of work.
3. Drop in Productivity
Working from home comes with a "productivity tax." With all the modern comforts of home beckoning for our attention, it would be understandable if employers saw a dip in productivity. It stands to reason, that employees with a more positive outlook who are more satisfied with their work, would tend to be more productive.
However, it does not mean that employers who offer work-life balance to their employees could simply improve productivity. Remember that we still could not avoid a negative mood, stress, and anger which are hazardous to performance especially when dealing with the WFH environment. They undermine attention, close off the big picture, and keep minds ruminating off-topic from the task at hand.
Don’t Take WFH Freedom for Granted
Flexible working opportunities can benefit everyone: employers, employees, and their families. Most employers now recognize that it makes good business sense to provide flexible working opportunities for their staff. As it is here to stay during the pandemic, employees should be grateful and take advantage of the freedom and flexibility afforded by remote work to reinvent their careers. To keep everyone at your agency up to date and working as a team, employers are to ensure that your home-working recruiters can dial into every in-office (and remote) meeting, or to start the day and is effective at motivating your team whether they’re at home or in the office.
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