HOW TO LEVEL UP OUR WORK EFFICIENCY: NEW RULES FOR THE POST PANDEMIC BUSINESS WORLD

With almost 9 months of the pandemic, the business world has divided into two parts: the pre-COVID nostalgists and the post-COVID future builders. The ones who can’t wait for things to “get back to normal” and the ones who understand they never will. 

By today, all the companies have already adjusted to the pandemic work mode: introducing remote work, flexible schedules, and adopting new online collaboration tools. However, not for all whom the pandemic had forced into a remote work experiment, it turned out to be a success. 

Many reports like this one suggest a massive productivity drop across industries and sectors. The main productivity barrier for many people considering “remote work” as equal to “work from home” is multiple home distractions: kids, pets, family members, or roommates. The other companies, like BBC, or the ones that were part of this research study, are reporting productivity boost, and are already making remote work a new norm for the post-covid era. 

Numerous research studies have shown that the two main conditions for individual productivity peaks are high focus and low distraction. Simply working from home or office or any other location is not enough.  

Many have to admit that, hitting the health and lives of plenty of people, the pandemic has already brought numerous benefits to millions of office employees around the world. 

Among other advantages of the new norm, flexibility, in all probability, comes first. One year ago the main role of all offices was to provide physical meeting hubs for colleagues, partners, and clients. During the last nine months, we realized that 99% of the meetings can be held online as efficiently, or at times even more efficiently, as they used to be held offline. The second important role of an office – being the place where the work desks are located – can easily be replicated at home or at a coworking space. 

The flexibility advantage also shows in the way we choose our home location. In the pre-covid era, most employees needed to stick around their company offices. This means they had to choose neighborhoods for their houses, schools for their kids, and other life-important elements accordingly. Now that they are not, and most probably will never be required to show up at an office every day, many of them are likely to relocate to cozy suburban areas, giving preference to an extra room or a private garden over a tight downtown apartment for the same price.

As many of us have realized it already, working remotely saves us tons of time every month on commuting and dressing up for work. The time we used to spend in the subway or cabs can be effectively “reinvested” into doing more work for the company, or progressing on personal development, or simply getting additional hours of rest and mind refreshment. In all of the above cases, the overall productivity is much likely to grow. 

The main beneficiaries of the new work mode are the youngest generations, most of whom are still single and not tied by family obligations. For them, the remote work opens a new world of extensive low-cost traveling, in which they can enjoy new locations and cultures while sticking to their corporate duties and virtual meeting schedules.

Providing flexibility, the remote work mode has also made all of us much more punctual. Today, 5-minute lateness to a virtual meeting is a rather big thing, while in the pre-covid times it was practically no problem even in those countries where punctuality was at the core of the culture.

Now that most of the offline meetings have been abolished, we enter into a new level of personal freedom. Millions of office employees around the world have suddenly got the chance to work from wherever they feel most efficient and productive. 

Being a big advocate of remote work, I have to admit it is yet not an ideal solution for everyone. Many people object to this transformation for various reasons. 

The main complaint about remote work we receive today is that it creates a lack of socialization. For many employees their corporate offices serve as emotion release centers, where they can share personal life stories with colleagues, easing their pain after a conflict with a partner or a difficult family situation. Gossiping about colleagues and bosses is also an important part of every big company culture and has proved to be a permanent need for many employees. 

Even more, for some, a live corporate environment is an escape from an unhealthy psychological environment at home. Without such an asylum, many marriages and relationships under COVID-19 have already gone through some painful tests leading to divorces or, even worse, aggravating mental health problems. 

Even if the family relationships are doing fine, working from home for most family people has become a game of compromise with their spouses, kids, roommates, and pets. To ease the problem, companies who are already saving huge on office rent can effectively reinvest those savings into buying their employees home desk equipment or renting coworking desks near their homes. Even if there are no rent savings, taking care of people’s remote desks is also a must. Big corporations like Microsoft, Google, and others are very good examples to follow. 

Apart from the equipment, the most important element of any brain work is a non-distracting environment. For some people, who cannot afford to have quiet time at home, a coworking space or a nearby cafe can become that promised land. Being a proponent of officeless work, I do admit that corporate offices can still boost employees’ efficiency by becoming more spatial, less crowded, and combining meeting spaces with quiet areas for individual work with better concentration. 

99% of the meetings can be held online as efficiently, or at times even more efficiently, as they used to be held offline.

The other problem many corporations are facing is that remote work requires much better self-discipline, a greater ability to stay focused, and more advanced planning skills. Not every individual has those abilities by nature, and, more importantly, not every employee is motivated to develop them.

Being digitally connected, even with all non-distracting work conditions created, some employees still tend to un-stimulate their own focus by regularly checking their social media accounts or keeping their phones in the “non-silent” mode. 

Such low focus is mostly observed in employees who lack motivation, which is the most essential problem corporations need to deal with. 

Remote work has revealed motivation problems for many corporate employees and their bosses. Those who explain their lack of motivation by being away from their colleagues are most likely lying to themselves. If not seeing colleagues demotivates someone, then seeing colleagues was probably the main reason why that someone used to go to work, not for the sake of work itself. 

Operating remotely, corporations are coming to the necessity of taking their employees’ motivation to a completely new level, both financially and non-financially.

Despite all the societal pressure exerted upon modern corporations, generating profit is still the main goal many of them are trying to hit. For many corporate managers, financial compensation is also the most important motivation factor. But, pressured by the public, many corporations tend to overlook the importance of fair performance-based financial compensation, leaving many decision-makers with no interest in increasing the company’s financial results.

The problem is that the commonly used “salary + yearly bonus” system is very outdated. Corporate yearly bonuses are usually distributed in a non-transparent manner, given by a unilateral decision of the direct supervisor or a small group of them, without a clear correlation to an employee’s KPIs, which, in turn, in many cases are also hardly measurable. 

In these conditions, the “yearly bonus” incentive is perceived by most employees as a New Year gift rather than a part of their fair work compensation. 

The solution to this problem can be this: more profit and revenue sharing packages for all ranks of employees in a model which allows to immediately adjust employee’s payment depending on their performance evaluation. Combined with clear promotion policies and career growth incentives, which I am going to describe in detail in one of the next articles, they can open a new efficiency era in corporate history.

Now that most of the offline meetings have been abolished, we enter into a new level of personal freedom.

Regardless of how hard the pandemic has hit our businesses, the ones who survive it will come out of it much stronger. The game winners will be those companies who’d enable their employees to perform their best, thrive, and be happy not when the pandemic goes away but even on the condition that the pandemic never goes away. 

Establishing new rules of flexibility, freedom, personal responsibility, and higher motivation will create a new cohort of global pandemic winners, whose examples will be followed by the rest.