Leading in the New “Pandemic” Normal.

The coronavirus pandemic in America has become a delta pandemic. This surprising viral explosion has left scientists nervous about what the virus will do next and has made executives uncertain about what they need to do next. In a few short weeks, the delta variant changed the calculations for what it will take to end the pandemic and postponed return-to-the-office plans. Back to the office after Labor Day? Not so fast.?

As COIVD surges back (again), CDC advice is changing daily. Cases are rising by the day. And, once again the pandemic has upended back-to-work plans and caused corporate leaders to rip up playbooks. For months, the mantra has been “See you in September”. Now, maybe October? January? Suddenly, it’s becoming “See you in…who knows?”?

Recently, Amazon joined a growing list of companies, including Apple, Google, Netflix, and Facebook, that are delaying their reopening, but has pushed its return date further than most, tentatively to 2022. Wasn’t it the FAANG that were among the first to send employees home in early March 2020? Is this a foretelling of what to expect over the next couple of weeks?

This is an unwelcomed?deja?vu?and?feels reminiscent of February 2020. Just as we thought we were beginning to exit the grand experiment in remote working, we’re confronted with a new wave of uncertainty. It’s a good time to also pause and answer a pressing question:?Knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently in March 2020?

11 Lessons learned for the new “pandemic” normal

In early 2020 with adrenaline flowing, we packed up our offices to create makeshift, temporary home offices. While trying to make the best of it, we learned:

1. Busyness doesn’t equal productivity.?

On average, from home employees, worked 10%-30% more hours than they did in the office, often long into the night. And this created a false perception. Mainstream media is filled with stories of employees working more than ever, and how the transition to remote working has been surprisingly smooth. But that’s not the full picture.

At home, employees achieved the same output, only less productively. They worked longer hours, but all that means is that they put in more effort to handle the same workload that would be on their desk back in the office. They think they are performing more productively – they probably feel it too, as endless screen time takes its toll on body and mind – but perceptions can be far removed from reality.?

What the data shows is quite the opposite: productivity dropped visibly during WFH. enaible’s study and leading academic research revealed that productivity fell by an average of 7% for remote workers.?

This sizeable decrease in productivity was driven by changes in work habits. Allowing it to continue in the pro-longed remote reality or the hybrid future will come at a high cost for businesses, pressuring SG&A, dealing a blow to margins and earnings per share.

2. Without measuring productivity, you can’t know for sure.?

The dramatic shift to remote work made executives ask a question that should’ve been top of mind long ago: Are our employees working productively? It suddenly became clear that leaders didn’t have a common, objective way to measure productivity and had instead been relying on a butts-on-seats approach. With that no longer an option, managers far and wide felt uncomfortable – left in the dark while trying to stay up to date.?

Results from surveys asking employees about their productivity misrepresent reality. Without actually measuring productivity, they amount to nothing more than opinion. Of course, employees say they were more productive because they worked more hours. But self-perception is self-deception.?

How do you know how productive your employees are if you don’t measure it? It’s like saying you run faster but don’t have any data to support it. How accurate do you think that answer is?

3. It’s possible to measure knowledge worker productivity.

At the start of the pandemic, executives?had no idea who their most productive employees were, regardless of where they worked. Are in-office employees more productive than at-home employees? Or vice versa? Or are hybrid employees most productive? Nobody knew because both employers and employees lacked the data to answer those vital questions.

AI–specifically the next generation of Human Activity Recognition machine learning–made it possible to?effectively measure productivity.?AI is now analyzing worker behavior in the same way it analyzes the way we shop, travel, learn, and consume entertainment. For example, the next generation of Human Activity Recognition machine learning uses signals from systems employees work in every day, to automatically recognize what they’re working on, when and then learns how they work, measures productivity, and provides recommendations to build new work habits.

Companies can know and do what was previously impossible: know the true drivers of productivity, turn insights into actions that help executives, business and functional leaders, and front-line employees achieve more with less to drive profitable growth.

4. Employee exhaustion, annoyance, activism, and attrition.

Employees have been through a lot in the past year. They’ve experienced unprecedented uncertainty and anxiety. They aren’t fully reenergized, they still feel tired, and they still carry uncertainty and unresolved grief.

In the past year, there was a shift in focus from what employees can do for their companies to what their companies can do for them. This trend is taking the form of all-out activism related to the when, where, and how of work. Employees are calling out leaders who policies that when they deem policies as unfavorable.

Armed with perceived power, social media, and the rampant “YOLO” philosophy, employees are saying “screw you” to their leaders. They’ve simply had enough. Wages have been stagnant for decades.?Confident they have optionality, combined with a greater disconnect between personal lives and work obligations,?employees are speaking up—even quitting their jobs—in record numbers.?Today, this process of reevaluation is surfacing discordant views on returning to work. Tomorrow, it may well surface reduced engagement, greater unwillingness to work longer hours, and attrition. Executives who don’t expect more waves of attrition may well be kidding themselves.?They are voting with their feet.

5. Where will employees’ work? is the wrong question to ask.

Only focusing on “where” employees will work–office, home, or hybrid–is gravely underestimating the significance of the pandemic. Hybrid work isn’t just a new way to work, it’s the rewiring of how things get done. Instead of asking “where are they working?” be able to answer, “how are they working?”

6. Managers need to have a handle on the fast-changing ways we work.?

While uncertainty still abounds, what’s clear is that managers need help. Only 20% of managers rate their virtual leadership skills as ‘good’. More than two-fifths of employees also say their managers need new skills to manage employees remotely. With all this in mind, there’s a good chance that the job of a front-line manager is about to get harder than it’s ever been before.

Companies are becoming more flexible about when and where their employees can work, but it’s the direct managers who really set the tone for their teams – and right now, stress levels are high. In a survey from Gartner, 40% of managers said they’d been feeling higher levels of stress and were logging more hours than before the pandemic. It’s not hard to understand why; remote and hybrid working is piling pressure on managers who are forced to spend more time discovering and keeping track of what’s going on with their teams. Instead of one work environment, many will have two. And therein lies a new challenge.

7. Executives are worried about a potential dip in performance.?

Approximately 90% of C-level executives say that productivity is a top concern in the hybrid future. Make no mistake about it, work from home over the last year has been based on a response to the pandemic, not because we believed it was optimal for business.?

Many companies?jury-rigged?operating models in a rush to meet the constant challenges and uncertainty of the pandemic. COVID-19 was the unknown of unknowns. And now we’re facing known unknowns: the spread of the delta variant, temporal (or sustained) inflation, potential resignations if employees don’t get their way, rising wages, margin pressure, and how shareholders will react. Suddenly, we’re in the midst of more uncertain times and surrounded by unknowns.

8. Companies that acted, got results.?

The COVID-19 pandemic sped up digitization by three to seven years. Digitally enabled productivity gains are accelerating a once-in-a-century disruption to the way we work. This digitization will be everywhere, and it will be critical to both productivity and the success of companies.?

Forward-leaning CEOs seized the opportunities created by the pandemic to get a jump on their competition. Rather than waiting for a return to normal or even the emergence of a new normal, companies that adopted AI Productivity Platforms report much higher productivity than do those that didn’t. Others are just beginning to absorb this change, which will be an essential feature of the way work gets done.

9. The “finish line” of the pandemic is a mirage.

Every time we think some magical finish line is just around the corner, it comes with a dozen asterisks. The new normal has become a?living with-the-pandemic normal. The variant battles of 2021 are part of a longer war, one that is far from over. The uncertainty about breakthrough infections “is disconcerting, and I think the reality is it’s humbling as a medical community,” said William G. Morice II, chair of the department of laboratory medicine and pathology at the Mayo Clinic. “Even with the whole world being focused on covid, we still don’t truly understand the intricacies of the virus and its interplay with the immune system.”

10. Hybrid will be a reality.

A hybrid model where employees split their week between the office and wherever else their laptops take them, is a fait accompli. After a year of remote working, the genie is out of the bottle and there’s no squeezing him back in.?

It unexpectedly and suddenly propelled us into the greatest change to the way we work since Scientific Management arrived on the scene a century ago, and there’s no turning back. A hybrid model is more complicated than is a fully remote one. At scale, using it will be an unprecedented event in which all kinds of norms that have been accepted practice for decades will be put to the test. Leaders are a long way from knowing how it will work.?

Hybrid productivity, meanwhile, is a top priority, and one that needs to happen fast. Undoubtedly, hybrid working presents its fair share of challenges, but with AI and autonomous leadership, we’re also entering an era of new possibilities.?

11. This is a once-in-a-century disruption.

“The debate over remote work vs. hybrid vs. back to the office is only part of the picture. It’s interesting and it matters to employees, but it’s not where the focus should be.” According to Stephen Sinofsky, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) board member. Implementing remote work policies, creating a hybrid game plan, and hiring a Chief Remote Work Officer isn’t enough to cover the bases. It is the biggest shift in work in a century.?

Many companies spend far too little time acknowledging that this is a disruption, not least because they are still learning what it means in reality. Executives know the pandemic is only the beginning, according to McKinsey research only 11 percent of executives believe that their current business models would be economically viable through 2023, and almost two-thirds said their companies needed to invest in digital technologies to adapt.

The arrival of hybrid working is a once-in-a-century change, and you face a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get it right. Inevitably, there will be winners and there will be losers, and those who will prevail are the ones who embrace the power of AI to measure and grow productivity.

We’ve reached a level of technological progress in which data is the solution. Actionable data gives a more in-depth look at employee productivity and reveals everything you need to know about the progress, quality, and output of each individual. Mastering productivity through data and AI is not an opportunity to pass up.

The delta variant’s rapid ascendancy to total domination is real-world proof that this variant is different. The seven-day rolling average of cases was about 13,000 new cases a day on July 1.?According to data from Johns Hopkins University,?last week that figure topped 100,000–nearly 3x the number of cases in April 2020. And there is no sign of the curve flattening.?

For virologists studying the coronavirus up close, that difference remains somewhat mysterious. What’s most sobering to scientists is how the coronavirus keeps getting better at jumping from person to person.?

We all hope that this will be over soon and that a?magical finish line is just around the corner. Right now, this may be wishful thinking. With the delta variant wreaking havoc, we’re back to the same level of uncertainty we had a year ago.?Knowing what you know now, what are you going to do differently?

With more unprecedented uncertainty right around the corner, the lessons learned during the pandemic can help leaders address the next great experiment: hybrid working. A hybrid model will be more complicated than is a fully remote one and all kinds of norms that have been accepted practice for decades will be put to the test. The question of how many days to spend in the office per week is the most obvious one to answer, but it isn’t the only question, and it may not even be the right one to answer first.?

How are you embracing this singular opportunity for change to grow productivity and improve the outcomes that matter most to your business?

AI-powered productivity platforms–like enaible’s–might be new, but they are proving a disruptive force in the market. Harnessing data you already have, they learn how employees work, discover the patterns of the top performers, and motivate everyone to?achieve transformative, sustainable productivity improvements. Already, there is evidence to support the impact we are having on business, with Fortune 500 companies that use enaible to measure productivity, experiencing double-digit productivity growth.

In other words, enaible makes what’s unknown–what employees do, how they work, and what to do to be more productive–known. What if you could better identify the unknown unknowns–like how to increase sales rep quota attainment or drive down SG&A expenses? What if you could not only understand and act on what you know today but get answers to the questions you never knew you should ask in the first place?

“[Employees] tend to perceive technological analysis as valuable information–something that can help them do their jobs better,” according to a new study from researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Southern California. It enhances their sense of autonomy and motivation and makes them less likely to quit. “We have access to all kinds of tracking devices at the moment, and our companies are investing in these types of tracking technologies, so why not empower people to actually look at their own data?” Read more in the?Wall Street Journal?article “Why Employees Prefer to Be Tracked by Machines Rather Than Humans .”

enaible is a productivity infrastructure for enterprise companies and welcomed by employees, enhancing their sense of autonomy and motivation. And making them less likely to quit. enaible helps make employees feel better about their work and take because they trust the data. Employee productivity infrastructures will continue to gain momentum in post-pandemic work environments.

Companies that continue the remote status quo will feel the pinch long after the pandemic is over, whenever that may be. During the pandemic, we learned that with an AI Productivity Platform it’s possible to make intentional decisions with a clear, evidence-based rationale, and power a customer-focused and employee-led operating model designed for today—and tomorrow.

With the rapidly spreading delta variant, you’re being called upon–yet again– to manage uncertainty and respond with flexibility.?Wherever employees work, whatever they do, whatever time of day, enaible’s AI is helping companies get better, work smarter, and achieve more.

enaible is good for employees. Great for business.