As offices slowly reopen, much of the discussion about the “new normal” centres around the rise of the hybrid workplace. A recent Microsoft/Edelman Data & Intelligence survey found that 73% of employees wanted flexible remote work options to stay, while 66% of leaders said they were redesigning office space for hybrid work.
Flexible and hybrid working combines the freedom of remote work with the benefits of the office. Handled well, the transition to hybrid working can also be an opportunity to reimagine roles in a way that makes them more fulfilling and rewarding. But structuring a successful hybrid workplace is surprisingly complicated and goes much further than just saying: “You can do three days a week at home.”
“Based on the work we’ve been doing, we think there are about 10 different factors that control an organisation’s ability to allow people to split their roles between the office and home,” says Ian Gooden, CEO of the HR consultancy Chiumento. “To take a simple example, if you’re a hairdresser, you nearly always have to be wherever the customer is. This obviously limits your ability to work from home, although you can visit the customer in their home – or even cut hair in your garage.”
According to a recent McKinsey study, more than half of jobs have little or little or no opportunity for remote working. However, more than 20% of the workforce could work remotely three to five days a week as effectively as they could if working from an office. Done collectively, this could translate into three to four times as many people working from home compared with pre-pandemic levels.
Gooden says that when considering whether jobs can be partly done at home, companies need to look at issues ranging from the need for special equipment and face-to-face meetings to technology and security. A job requiring high levels of security clearance may not be suitable for home working, even if in all other respects, it’s ideal.
However, it’s also a mistake to treat jobs as monolithic. This gets really interesting when you start “unbundling” jobs into individual tasks in order to make them more flexible and rewarding.
At its simplest, this may just involve looking at when people need to be in the office (for meetings, ideas sessions and appraisals) and when they don’t (research or writing reports). From there, a more nuanced set of complexities must be considered. How do one person’s needs fit in with the team’s needs and how do factors such as trust and managerial preference feed into this? It is a matrix that will differ significantly from one organisation to the next.
Lewis Barker, senior manager, EMEA, workplace and real estate at ServiceNow, says he’s seeing his company’s offices become more centred around “hospitality” – whether it’s for client meetings or team meetings. “We now view our own office space as much more about collaboration and innovative thinking as well as for tasks in areas where technology doesn’t yet allow effective home working.” It is, he explains, becoming a case of staff going into the office because there is a reason to be there, rather than going in by default.
Key to making this new arrangement work, he adds, is using the company’s workflow software to connect people in a way that facilitates communication and resolution of any conflicts that might arise. Then there’s the issue of how best to spread office-based tasks throughout the entire week despite many people’s preference for working from home on Mondays and Fridays. “We’re already seeing what we call ‘midweek mountains’ and we’re looking at data to see how people might resolve that.” He adds: “You might also receive notifications when people on your team come in – that’s very easy to do.”
If you can unbundle roles into their constituent tasks, you can also put many of the tasks into a kind of team pool – allowing managers to reapportion tasks in a way that lets people work more as they wish. This can lead to more fulfilling and empowering work. Again, it can be quite complex and so workflow software, data analytics and AI can help. Many jobs have elements – mainly menial, repetitive tasks – that lend themselves to automation. So unbundling roles into their constituent tasks might give you three buckets – work you need to be in the office for, work better done at home and tasks that can easily be offloaded to a machine. By automating the latter, employees have more time to focus on the former.
Another way technology can help redefine roles is by giving employees new tools that allow them to be more autonomous. For instance, low-code platforms are giving more and more teams the ability to create applications that solve their own unique problems as they see fit. Low-code solutions like ServiceNow’s Creator Workflows offer pre-built templates and tools that enable users to customise their own systems and apps. Low-code platforms can be a more empowering – and, ultimately, more effective – alternative to adopting standardised solutions dispensed by the IT department.
The use of empowering technology and the unbundling of roles are likely to have significant upsides for companies as well as for their staff – from lower real estate costs to the ability to access more talent. Gooden notes that being able to offer flexible working will make employers more attractive and expand the pool of good candidates. “If you need to hire a lawyer but they can work anywhere in the UK most of the time, you’re likely to get more applications.”
The pandemic cracked open the foundation of the traditional workplace – a foundation largely put in place before we had the technologies to work from anywhere. So, for those ready to reinvent the way work is done, whether you’re an individual or the CEO of a multinational, now is the time to ask – because the appetite for change will not last.
“Right now, everyone is seeing ways to do things differently,” says Barker. “There’s a real willingness to ask: ‘Why don’t we try something new?’”
The way we work is changing. Find out more at servicenow.com/uk
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