Building the ‘guiding principles’ for the future world of work

The London Work, Travel, Convene Coalition is helping to lay the blueprint for businesses to restructure and reshape.

It’s not news that COVID-19 has been and continues to be an accelerator for the future world of work. No one expects a return to how many businesses – particularly white-collar operations – worked before the pandemic. But that doesn’t mean there is an easy, off the shelf solution for organisations to follow as they restructure and reshape for the challenges ahead. A concept of a one size fits all approach for organisations, roles and employees should not be the way we view the future world of work. If the pandemic has taught us anything it is that different people thrive in different environments; requiring different structures, different levels of flexibility.

How, then, should businesses respond? Finding answers to the challenges laid down by COVID-19 is the key motivation behind the London Work, Travel, Convene Coalition – a group of leading London-based businesses that will develop a series of guiding principles, or lenses through which businesses can develop their own approach established against a baseline of best practice.

Virtual working; good for some less good for others

As part of the coalition, we’re trying to work out together what the future should look like and understand if others have already experimented or trialled certain approaches. A particular focus of course is around virtual working. It’s easy to say that virtual working is a big experiment we’re going through that seems to be successful with everyone proving they can work from home where that’s possible. But those generalisations miss the point.

From our experience and what we’ve seen with clients, virtual working works very well for certain types of jobs such as white-collar roles, but less so for others, and it often advantages groupings in society that have a better office set-up at home for example.

Speaking to organisations and asking questions like “what have productivity levels been like?”, the vast majority have said that productivity hasn’t been affected. When digging deeper, however, and asking about specific roles, we start to see differences. It’s becoming clear that some work better in a virtual work environment than others. For example, we know that some specific contact centre roles have struggled. And while other roles seemed to transition effectively in the short term, some have now become less productive over the longer-term. This could be explained by thinking about the behavioural traits needed to be successful in a virtual office setting; self-motivation for example is easier for employees in the short term but becomes more challenging to sustain in the long term.

Don’t be lured back

A common theme is that many businesses want young people back in the office for five days a week because that’s where they learn and where they develop an attachment to the organisation and the culture. But if they’re back in the office five days a week, then more senior people will be needed back in the office and very quickly we’re back to the old way of doing things. So, when thinking about organisational culture, collaboration, and people development, we need to think about how we effectively deliver it in a virtual environment. That opportunity to permanently reinvent what we all do is here right now.

Guiding principles for a ‘new better’

To help us answer these questions, what we’re able to get from the coalition is the concept of guiding principles that we can apply to what our new better as an organisation might look like. It could be very different from other coalition members but we can start thinking about similar principles whether it’s for virtual working, leadership, or the role of the office in the future.

What leadership skills do we need?

Take leadership: do we expect something different from our leaders? They are now managing remote workforces so do they have the right skills to do that properly? In the past they were used to being able to walk to someone’s desk, have a chat, and build relationships that way. How do they do that now? How do they go through the process of goal setting and performance management in a virtual setting where face to face interaction has fallen away?

What’s the purpose of the office?

Another guiding principle could focus on the purpose of the office going forward. Does it become simply a place of collaboration? But we know the office is more than that – it’s the place where you can drive your organisational culture and develop that emotional attachment to your company. It used to be the place where we learned best.

Aside from the purpose of the office, the coalition can also help us all think through some of the basic design requirements – ventilation, occupancy rates, meeting spaces – to make the office space safer in a future pandemic.

Resilience matched with agility

Of course, the coalition’s guiding principles can only point organisations in the direction of travel. Businesses have already shown immense levels of resilience in weathering the storm of the pandemic. But now they need to match that resilience with agility.

A recent Aon Global COVID-19 HR Pulse Survey found that 98% of employers rated workforce agility – the ability to adjust at speed to support changing business needs – as important to the future success of their organisation. It’s clear that businesses will need to adopt the coalition’s principles with agility in order to successfully adapt to changing circumstances and to secure a successful and sustainable future.