Future of Work

Hello everyone,

This article is somehow my open letter to invite everyone to start thinking about the future of work. That's right, by the time we cross over into 2021 the way we see office work would have drastically changed. While we wait for a vaccine to rid us of this COVID-19 virus, we must all move forward and not just merely accept the new normal, but embrace it as the only normal.

This topic is a burning issue in the HR industry as organizations pressure us to find ways to make remote work viable in the long run. Enablement is not the problem and to be honest, I think it's the easiest problem to solve. Allowing people to take their laptops home, enforcing the use of VPN if you run a secured network, and providing internet subsidy is a reasonable solution to move your workforce into their homes. However, this isn't the root problem we need to be solving. Engagement, more than enablement, is much harder to move from the office to people's homes... and we have proof.

We see employees wanting to go back to the office after they experience difficulty focusing at home. Bad internet, no airconditioning, laptops overheating, no access to printers, noisy backgrounds, zoom meeting exhaustion, and the morning holler of your neighbor's rooster are among the many reasons why people want to get back to the office. Kidding aside a distributed workforce, who once came from a close-knit office setup, when left unchecked can kill their company culture faster than the pandemic. When people start working in silos, become less responsive allowing their relationships to erode, and begin treating people indifferently due to the effects of isolation, you'll begin to see that a once lively, highly collaborative company can quickly devolve into a horde of zoombies with no energy and no life.

The fine line between work and life is no longer just blurred, it's fundamentally broken. When you're in the middle of a meeting and your baby cries, you are not afforded the time to stop the meeting so you can cuddle your child. You immediately turn your video off and turn mute on and rush to your baby's rescue - leading you to lose important updates in those minutes you weren't glued to the call. There is no line. So let's not pretend there is one.

So what is the solution? A recent survey in my company shows some people want to work from home 1-2 times a week and spend a good portion of the week collaborating with people in the office. A bigger group prefers to work 3-4 days a week remotely and perhaps enjoy a day or 2 at home to take care of personal errands or skip their color-coding. While a small percentage wants to work remotely full-time especially. Only a handful of people actually want to work in the office full-time. What does this result tell me? It means all our current policies, perks, benefits, and programs that were designed for a full onsite office setup went straight out the window. We need to rethink what is still applicable, what needs changing, and what needs to be retired. I've already rewritten a lot of our local policies to accommodate changes in how we work, from attendance policies to sick leave mechanics, from how team celebrations work to modifying the coverage of our reimbursable benefits. I've also suspended some policies because they make no sense especially when people are more focused on safe and survival over productivity and performance. This process of re-inventing the workplace will be different for every organization with some companies needing to change 90% of their processes, while some only need to change 10%. No matter how much change we need to do, everyone will have to change whether we like it or not.

So I'd like to end this post with a question: If you're an HR Professional or Business Leader tasked to rethink how your organization will evolve in 2021 to:

1. Maintain a strong company culture despite working distributedly
2. Revise your policies and programs to make them more supportive and applicable to a remote workforce
3. Strengthen HR's role despite losing line of sight on the people you take care of

What are you going to do? What have you started doing? What are your challenges? Let's talk and maybe together, we can brainstorm great ideas that can help our organizations, and others alike.

Connect with me at [email protected] or DM me here on Linkedin if you want to start a conversation.

Take care everyone and good luck on the week ahead.