“Everyone is trying to understand the new reality”

After more than a year of uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus, many employers are still struggling to adapt. According to Paul Ventura, CEO of Collagis, the nature of work has changed and organizations that recognize that “remote work is here to stay” will be best prepared to thrive in the new normal.

During the Covid-19 crisis, most employees spent the best part of the year working remotely and virtually as non-essential businesses closed. Over the past year, businesses have been exposed to both the surprising benefits of remote work and the unseen challenges of working from home all the time. Despite this, many businesses are still navigating uncharted territory because they are unclear about how to adapt their long-term business strategies to what they originally thought would be temporary changes.

Summing up the situation, Paul Ventura of Collagis, a consultancy specializing in work and organizational efficiency, recently told the Australian Financial Review: “I don’t think there has been a bigger or deeper adjustment, certainly not since the industrial revolution. … everyone is trying to figure out what the new reality will look like.”

He added that the “nature of work” has changed and “remote work is here and here to stay” – something many employers may still struggle with. According to a leading consultant, most employers are satisfied that the work-from-home experiment has been a success, but they need to move beyond that simple acknowledgment as the economy reopens.

“What’s happening now has been possible for a long time in terms of the technology available, but what has changed is the mindset in the workplace and the well-being of employees,” Ventura explained to the AFR. “For many workers, commuting will no longer be part of their daily lives. For them, work has changed from a place you go to something you do.”

positive

According to Ventura, in a separate article on Collagis’ own blog, there are a number of positive and negative aspects of working from home that businesses will need to consider in their plans for the coming period. First and foremost, the loss of commuting means that both employees and employers can reclaim some of the “most valuable resource” of all: time.

“Finding an extra hour or two a day has been a huge gift of the pandemic,” Ventura said. “The big advantage is to get back time to balance family and home life or extra productive work time. The consequence of not having a workplace to go to is that work changes from a place you go to something you do. The boss has to trust that you are working (a difficult transition for some) and focus on the result, not the time.”

At the same time, it helped increase employee productivity. Initially, many employers feared that telecommuting would lead to a dramatic drop in productivity – but various research has since suggested that thanks to the better work-life balance and extra time for value-added activities that telecommuting has helped employees find, the opposite was the case.

According to the Harvard Business Review, researchers surveyed knowledge workers in 2013 and again during the 2020 pandemic lockdown and found that they spent 12% less time dragged into large meetings and 9% more time interacting with customers, while the number of tasks they rated as tiring dropped from 27% to 12%.

Elsewhere, it allows organizations to make crucial savings – something that could prove crucial as the global economy continues to falter. The company benefits from significantly reduced office space costs and can do without other, less efficient and less popular means of saving space.

Dynamic office spaces and practices such as hot-desking were intended to reduce office costs, but employees often openly disliked such approaches because they allowed less personal space and comfort at work. In contrast, working from home can help counter the issues of dislocation, disconnection, and privacy that employees cite as their main concern in a hot-desk environment.

Finally, Ventura suggested that remote work is helping to accelerate the transition to digital. He added: “The pandemic has forced a rapid and accelerated transition to many excellent digital ways of working. Corporate travel, while not possible now, will never be the same. Companies have learned new ways of working out of necessity, and reduced travel bills and unproductive travel time are now the pains of a bygone era. Companies are reinventing old ways of doing things and re-creating processes to operate more effectively and efficiently in the new world.”

Lows

Of course, there were also impacts on the well-being of employees, which companies have to reckon with. First, not every home is ideal as a workspace, and organizations will need to continue to work with them to adapt in the future. According to Ventura, this can be “anything from ventilation and natural lighting to the right seating, screens, hardware and software to do their jobs effectively. And even more, how to ensure safety, security and balance between work and home, to create an environment conducive to well-being.”

Research shows that employees are struggling to switch off and create boundaries between personal and office spaces, as well as experiencing increased mental anxiety and heightened concerns about financial security in the face of the pandemic. As such, Ventura suggested that employee well-being needs to be an ever-present consideration for bosses in the current environment, and companies need to be aware that the transition to remote working is still a work in progress that requires constant fine-tuning, rather than simply assuming that it can continue indefinitely.

“Employees’ social lives change radically when they work remotely, creating a void that remains unfilled,” he said of one of the ways wellbeing is coming under pressure. “This is partly due to the restrictions of blocking, but also because the opportunity for employees to make friends in the office has not yet been effectively replaced by remote work. Employees working in the same office also had the greatest potential for collaboration and creativity due to constant proximity.”

In response, many companies are exploring how they can use existing office space to provide social and collaborative opportunities in the ‘new world’. Going forward, organizations need to consider how to incorporate and manage remote work culture to ensure that company culture can continue to be used in our home offices and digital interactions – especially with new hires that make employees feel included. organizations when they cannot visit a physical location or meet anyone face-to-face.

Future

Looking ahead, Ventura suggested that the ultimate solution to change lies in finding the right balance between the benefits of a flexible workplace and the needs of the organization. The good news, he believes, is that whatever form the “new normal” takes, the end result will be “more efficient and productive” businesses.

“The experience of working from home has created an impetus for change, but organizations cannot afford to be too aggressive in finding new ways of working,” he concluded.