How Technology Platforms like WorkCtrl are addressing hybrid work challenges

I was recently reminded of a call with a close friend who is an old hand in Commercial Real Estate and leads the CRE function in Asia for a large global IT services company. We were trading notes on our everyday job challenges. I ranted about building a startup and finding the right people and the importance of finding early wins through quick iterative product-market fit experiments. He listened patiently and given his early and?very successful?background in building a startup, gave me valuable insights. He then started speaking about his challenges. It became increasingly obvious to me that the reticence of his company’s employees to return to work was on top of his mind.?And why shouldn't it?be??

According to the Morning Consult “, About?6 in 10 Employed Adults Say They're More Likely to Apply for a Job with a Remote Work Option”?

They, like many other companies who made news headlines, had also unsuccessfully tried many times to cajole their people to come back to work. All this in the middle of the ‘great resignation’.?Their HR was being pulled in all directions and morale was taking a hit. He was sitting on a huge amount of expensive office real estate and his management was asking – for how long? Who would decide how much office space was needed, where, for who and when? No one was willing to stick their neck out and everyone was?passing the buck.?The financial hit was millions of dollars, but the cost of a wrong decision would be even more expensive. If they shed too much office space, and more workers came back or wanted to come back, to work, where would they find more office space? What about optics, efficiency, hiring, collaboration?etc. Who could possibly guess at this and even if the initial guess was accurate, what if things changed? He almost broke down! (I exaggerate) but you get the point.?

A recent survey covering 51 Indian organisations employing more than seven lakh employees revelled the following:

·?????Over one in two employees are?currently working remotely or in a hybrid setup, up from just 7% three years ago

·?????Around 47% of employees are expected to be in the remote-hybrid setup for three more years

·?????The majority of companies haven’t found a stable working model even after two years of the pandemic

·?????Talent attraction and retention continue to be key challenges for companies

·?????Another?report?says 77% of Indian companies are ready to offer a hybrid work model

·?????Only a little over 5% of companies are willing to shift to a virtual-only model

We both agreed that the crux of the problem was the lack of data. Who knew how people wanted to work? There was a ton of literature out there with expert views, but the only consistent opinion was that work would become hybrid and would stay that way. This change was a one-way street. But how hybrid? How much hybrid was good? Who chooses how hybrid to go? Would it be employers who would decide this in isolation, or would employees get to voice their views? And even if they did, how would the effectiveness of the hybrid strategy be measured? After all, every company is a snowflake.??

These were all good questions, but where does one get started? We agreed that the best way to settle on an optimum strategy was to get started and then change course as the data came in. We decided to deploy the?WorkCtrl?hybrid work platform and do a POC with 3 departments: Sales, Technology and Operations.?

Step 1: We rolled out surveys, all through the?WorkCtrl?platform with a pre-formatted question bank to get the opinions of top management, managers, team leaders and a random sampling of the team members themselves. We asked them how they wanted to work?

Step 2: We compiled the data which gave us some early insights on how the 3 teams ‘thought’ they wanted to work?

Step 3: We used the?WorkCtrl?platform to customize different strategies for different teams and gave control to various levels within the organization hierarchy?

Step 4: We deployed these strategies to the various teams and their members through the?WorkCtrl?app?

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It has been 3 months since the platform is deployed and we have already tweaked around a lot. Employee feedback is collected regularly along with targeted questions to the team leaders and managers. So far, we have noticed some very interesting things:?

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1. Employees seem to think that they know how they want to work but behave very differently?e.g.?In some?cases,?they claimed they wanted to collaborate in the office on certain days, but the fact was that these meetings were quite hybrid in nature?
2. The space optimization opportunity is real, and early data across the 3 departments seem to point towards a range of 35%-40%?
3. Collaboration is top of mind when employees choose to come into the office and making that easier through solutions like hot-desking and meeting room booking tools was a priority?
4. The employee-employer feedback loop was broken, and closing that was increasing the ‘happiness’ quotient of employees and they gave back to their company by being more productive?

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It's early days but I can already see my friend excited about the possibilities and we are already ramping the platform across more teams in his organization.?I'll?be reporting our findings here as we travel this journey, but one thing is clear – this is a journey that cannot be avoided, and the cost of getting it wrong could be disastrous. Watch this space for more metrics and data!?