How we will work, collaborate and lead after the CoVid-19 pandemic

Bill Gates said in a TED Talk in 2015, long before the CoVid-19 pandemic started, the following: “If something kills in the next few decades, it will likely be a highly contagious virus rather than a war”, “Very little has been invested in a system to stop epidemics” and, above all, “We are not ready”.

He said that the greatest risk today of global catastrophe, which could kill over 10 million people, is an epidemic. We were not ready in 2015, and unfortunately we have already realised he was right. He urged governments, companies and individuals to prepare for this. He even raised the idea of joining the army and medical forces for a prompt response.

The question now in 2020 and after the premonition occurred is: Are you ready?

If yes, meaning you have everything under control, you know what you will do and how you will live in the next years, that’s great. Probably you are one of the only living creatures on Earth who knows it, so please tell me your secret!

If not ready, or only partly ready, rest assure that you are part of the vast majority of the global population, therefore, don’t worry, you are not alone.

Doing “business as unusual”

We hear every day the acronym BAU, stating for Business-As-Usual, but what we need to embrace and do now is rather business “as unusual”.

We are all recovering from a shock, that impacted how we work, how we live, how will be the future. Our priorities suddenly changed: The day before the crisis started, we were worried about the next deadline we could miss in our project. The day later, about how many packs of canned food we were going to buy, so we could survive the next few weeks or months.

There is a lot of negative on this crisis: Lots of fear among us, our routines have been disrupted, anxiety… At the same time, we can say that there are lots of positive, especially for people who are able to work from home: We are not losing time on commuting, we have more time to reconnect with our families, even reconnect with our neighbours and communities, and some had the chance to slow down and think, very useful for people who tend to rush from one place to another, never having time for anything outside work.

There are two relevant questions on the race to the “new normal”: how and when it will happen. At the beginning we thought it was going to be a matter of a few weeks, now we think that it will be a few months, but in reality, nobody is certain when the “new normal” will be in place.

An adequate balance of patience, agility and technology is needed to guarantee operational and business continuity in crisis management mode. Patience, because we really don’t know when and how all this will end. Agility, because we live in an uncertain world, need to make decisions quickly, be adaptive and embrace change. Technology because it mitigates the effects of Covid-19. Several studies suggest that if this same pandemic happened 30 years ago, without the technology and the collaboration tools we have today, the consequences would have been much worse.

Two words define the “today”: Uncertainty and volatility. We need to take decisions in an environment in which we don’t have all the information. We need, more than ever, leadership.

We need leaders, not managers. The difference between them is that managers have people who work for them. Leaders have people follow them and believe in them, build teams and are trusted.

The leader of tomorrow needs to lead in times when not everything is well defined. Times of uncertainty, volatility and ambiguity. Now, is when a real leader is really needed.

Doing things right around the coronavirus

First of all, we need to challenge the existing beliefs which constrain us in some way.

Many of us strongly believed that the best, most effective, and almost only way to communicate, was face to face. Many believed that the best way to work together was face to face too. Most employees never worked from home, ever. Most corporations were spending a lot on flights in order to have face to face meetings with customers. And suddenly, CoVid-19 came and turned everything upside down, but life went on and these beliefs felt down in some way or another.

We need to embrace change, be open-minded and look for new habits. Instead to fiercely looking to come back to the “old normal”, let take this situation as is an opportunity. Let’s do things that before were unimaginable.

We tend to hear the following questions: When are we coming back to work?. In my humble opinion, this is not a right question, as we are in reality, intrinsically asking when are we coming back to the “old normal”?.

Right questions should be rather the following ones: Who should come back to the office? How can we come back? What does it look like? Where can I and my team add the most value, considering the current situation? or what are the future opportunities?

The need for a Remote Work policy

According to a report from EAE Business School, entitled ‘Work productivity and work-life balance, 2020’, companies with staff working from home raised to 88% compared to 4% before the crisis. This is data for Spain but very aligned with the average for the European Union.

Some other studies or predictions say that after coming to the “new normal”, more than half the workforce will be remote by the end of 2021. The workforce means both white-collar or office workers, but also blue-collar workers, who are manual workers and services professionals.

The benefits of remote work are many and too great: It enables to hire the best employees globally, rather than local talent pool. It places employees closer to customers and partners, wherever they are. It reduces commute time, one of the main reasons of quitting/changing a job. Besides, it is much more environmentally friendly, reducing greenhouse effect gases, a very important trend for the next years.

Putting it simply, remote work is far more efficient, as it reduces time and money spent on working. The company and the employee could split those savings to mutual benefit.

Therefore, remote work is here to stay. It will surely continue growing, and nobody can, nor should, stop it.

Most corporations already let employees work from home. In the imaginary corporate world, regular employees work in a physically secure office where all tools are vetted and approved by IT, but at the same time, they let you take a device to your home and work from outside the IT secured office.

The problem with this policy is that the company can’t assume a correct use of their devices outside the office, for example, connecting to non-safe networks, using a personal USB drive, logging to non-trusted websites, etc. In the real world, none of this can be assumed.

All this causes headaches to IT and security leads in companies. The reality of remote work demands, rather, systematic thinking, clear communication and comprehensive remote work policy.

The future remote work policy

There are many problems to solve before implementing a proper remote work policy, such as acquiring the proper technology, educating the employees on how to work effectively from outside the office, or to enable remote work at scale.

The future remote work policy means an extension of the acceptable computer and systems use policy an organization already has in place. It’s an agreement that outlines when and how employees can work from somewhere other than their traditional office. And it’s a way to ensure company guidelines are being adhered to while remaining as productive as possible. They include best practices, legal rights, and specific expectations surrounding working outside of an office setting.

Remote work drives up demands on infrastructure, communications and collaboration tools. It requires an investment in security, compliance, or even on employee consciousness. It needs to provide clarity about the company's responsibility for protecting data and other business assets, clear responsibility on GDPR and other regulatory compliance for the data you house on their systems or securing the data used by you.

The policy is actually a representation of a culture shift: We need to forget about a whole office working at “normal business hours” from 9 am to 5 pm. Instead, the trend is to work on smaller teams using team-centric communications tools to do work on a project basis.

This is a tremendous work that cannot be accomplished in one day. The creation and maintenance of a comprehensive remote work policy involve lots of conversations and communication. We need to know what the current status is and what the next goals are. 

The future belongs to remote working, but to enable this, the time to create and embrace a remote work policy.

Conclusion

• BC (Before Coronavirus) times are in the past and most probable, they will never come back.
• The “new normal” is actually appealing if we shape it well.
• There will be an increasing demand for leaders. We need to embrace change and be key players in this transformation.
• The businesses and companies need to evolve to a comprehensive, widely accepted and clear remote work policy.