5 Ways the Australian Workforce is Changing for the Better

The COVID-19 global pandemic hit us like a truck. We heard the brakes screech from afar, the noise got closer and closer, then suddenly everything around us stopped. When we dared to open our eyes to assess the damage, everything looked different. Lives, jobs and businesses were lost.

While there has been much pain endured through 2020, I believe Australian businesses can learn from our recent experiences, becoming more robust and, more importantly, more human going forward.

Here are five ways I believe the Australian workforce is changing for the better.

1.    Flexible workforces do work!

COVID forced many of us to participate in what has been described as the world’s biggest work from home experiment and guess what, it worked. Even those who have previously dismissed the concept of working from home because they didn’t believe staff could be productive, have been proven wrong. Businesses kept functioning, some even thriving.

I’m not saying that it wasn’t without its challenges, but all in all, I think we have to say it was a success because, thanks to advancements in technology and telecommunications, we are now able to work from just about anywhere. In fact, had the pandemic hit just five years ago, the impact on business would have been a lot worse, as then we did not have the tools needed for people and businesses to work virtually on such a mass scale.

 Research from the US is telling us that 74 percent of businesses want some workers to permanently work remotely and that many organisations are already looking to downsize office space, a trend that no doubt will be mirrored in Australia.

However, to me this concept of flexible working brings with it bigger and brighter ideas that will only benefit us in the long-term. While so many of us worked from home, we also saw university and older high school students learn from home. I will admit that homeschooling for countless Australian families was extremely challenging. It pushed many people with primary school aged children to despair. I am also not saying remote learning can fully replace face to face teaching, but for those of us with older children, it opened our eyes to the fact that perhaps schooling doesn’t need to be all delivered in the classroom. Conceivably our children may be able to take advantage of leading global university level opportunities without having to travel halfway across the world to do it. Could secondary school students living in Australia’s regional and rural areas attend school lessons in major city locations? And could city-based students learn from their fellow country-based classmates in return? If we remove the barrier of distance, we open ourselves up to so many more opportunities.

The ability to work flexibility also opens us up to broader and more diverse talent pools when recruiting, which can only be a positive thing.

2.    Innovation, change and agility will be encouraged with open arms

As the economic impacts from the pandemic spread through Australian industries, we saw an enormous amount of loss, and for a period it all seemed completely hopeless. It wasn’t long however, before many businesses began to pivot and reshape how they operate. Suddenly that voice in the office who had always directed things to be done a certain way, ‘because that’s how we’ve always done it’ drew silent. Work in Australia had to change. People became willing to try out new ideas, quickly. It was literally a case of pivot or perish.

3.    Resilience will be key

COVID was an enormous test on so many Australian business models. For example, some companies whose revenues increased during the pandemic didn’t make an extra dollar in profit. It sounds crazy, but these businesses just weren’t set up for increased scale and hence their costs went up at the same rate that their revenues increased.

Retailers who had the ability to flip their operations online quickly continued to operate and those who did it successfully had the opportunity to take market share from their competitors.

Supply chain’s in Australia were put under huge pressure. With many of our industries sourcing large percentages of goods from overseas, it meant that when other countries including China, went into lockdown we started to see retailers faced with a shortage of goods. I don’t think I will ever forget the sight of empty shelves at Kmart.

Our own supply chain networks within Australia were also tested to the limit. State border closures meant supermarkets struggled to receive stock from interstate (and not aided in the least by consumer panic buying of items such as toilet paper – now we’ve seen it all!).

The business lessons learned from the pandemic have been big and have since resulted in organisation’s looking to introduce multi-jurisdictional sourcing strategies. We all need to think bigger. Contingencies must be in place. Entire industries were exposed and in turn are now looking for ways to find new levels of resilience.

4.    More human, less hierarchy

For many, it was one of the first things we noticed when working from home. Our bosses were real people, with families that interrupted and pets that barked when the postman delivered their latest online purchase to the front door. Just like us, they couldn’t get haircuts and sometimes wore activewear. We are all just human. They are just like us.

Seeing our leaders in this new light broke down some of the traditional hierarchical barriers, levelling the playing field somewhat and reducing some of the anxiety that many people feel when interacting or presenting new ideas to someone more senior.

On the other hand, leaders learned even more about individual teams members and the team as a whole. They also began to see how important quality time and guidance is for more junior or even new members of the group. Investment and understanding of individuals became make or break and fundamentally affected the success of the team as a whole. After all, we really are the sum total of all parts.

5.    Workplaces that care

I think this one goes without saying. In times of hardship the human spirit shines through., especially here in Australia. People were asking each other, ‘are you ok?’ It was the one time that we were all going through challenges together on a large scale and our empathy showed.

I am based in Melbourne and have regular calls with colleagues in Sydney. I was surprised that during Melbourne’s second wave lockdown that people from Sydney were thanking me for what I was doing in terms of staying at home / working from home. It came as a huge surprise to me, but the empathy was real.

This to me was the greatest lesson of all to come out of the COVID pandemic. We are all just human and I hope we never forget that. Long may it continue!

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