Reimagining Workplaces

For the past 6 months people's emotions have gone topsy turvy. I know so many people who were earlier fond of working from home but are now bubbling to return to their office workstations. Nothing is permanent and humans need change. But it's proven that remote work can happen with few changes, and a big change in mindset - rethink, redesign, and reimagine workplaces for the future growth

New normal, New model?

Namaste - the way of folding hands and greeting others is now accepted universal. Well it's not bad, in fact felling of gratitude will emerge in your being.

Virtual evolution - there will be more big screens in offices where you can see your colleagues who are located elsewhere in realtime. Looks like fun with video on!

Hub and Spoke office model - reimagine workplaces with smaller offices in smaller cities and main office in a metro. Voila, and employees can potentially work from their hometowns. Great combination of remote and in office work close to home. What does it offer?

• Drastic reduction in costs
• Happier employees because now they are working from their hometowns (or close to hometowns)
• Less time spent on travelling, which also means less stress .....

This is an evolution where physical boundaries are collapsed.

Breeding empathy

It so happened that Mr. Ghungroo was taking a virtual interview and the internet connection of the candidate kept on flickering. Mr. Ghungroo disconnected the call. Later, he got an email from the candidate apologizing and requesting for another time. But Ghungroo was really upset and didn’t even bother to revert. Few days later when Mr. Ghungroo was delivering a presentation to a client, his internet flickered and the client got really upset. The client said, “If you can’t keep your internet solid while giving your presentation, how can I trust your company for a good delivery?”

This lost business kept Mr. Ghunghroo from sleeping for many nights. Through all this restless tossing and turning, he also realized and felt sorry about what he had done with the candidate who had a flickering internet connection. After certain pangs of guilt, he replied to the candidate and fixed a fresh interview time. Okay, karma does come back, but the point is that this remote working is undoubtedly breeding empathy in us.

The world is going to be different and we can reimagine our co-workers and leaders being more virtuous than before, be it at workplace or at home, with higher quotient of empathy.

Digital processes - What worked then and will not work now?

In the future, it seems that all organizations will have processes starkly different from now. Let’s call them digitized processes. Recall those meetings when difficult concepts were explained on the whiteboard and even major decisions were taken in 30 minutes.

In contrast to this, think of your current situation and also consider a glimpse of your future - thousands of emails, several excel sheets, and uncountable back and forth calls later, you are still in dilemma, with no concrete decision in hand.

Hence, we can’t just transport the current processes online. We must redesign them too.

Companies will have to rethink about such digitized processes, frequent collaboration, standups, meetings, townhalls and reduce them drastically so there will be more working and less planning. By delegating tasks and giving the employees some liberty to work on their own, companies will have more productive employees. Too many online meetings takes a toll on our physical as well as mental health.

With reduced online collaboration, we will be much better communicators.

The art of communication

Too many virtual meetings can be really tiring - I am not talking about the type of tiredness you feel after an intense workout - but the tiredness and fatigue your mind feels after the inability to communicate properly. It can be so draining that even 3-4 hours of work seem like a real uphill battle. Now there can be two reasons for this -

1. You are on a call and your team members are trying to explain their idea, but failing miserably. This is because you are unable to understand the origin of their ideologies.

2. Reversing the situation - you are constantly trying to explain your ideas to your team members but are not able to convey what really needs to be done. So, no matter how hard you try, there is always some communication gap.

Not much gets done because half of the time goes into explaining and understanding each other’s ideas on call. However, once we learn when and how to communicate, our new working styles will force us to become better communicators and better listeners. We are already learning (even if subconsciously) when to email or when to call, and most importantly when to just keep quiet and listen.

WEEK (will never) END…(It’s time to unite work and life)

Earlier work was considered to be a part of life, but now when our lives are becoming a part of our work, these lines between work and life are getting more and more blurred day by day.

 Does this also mean that the dreadful (for most) 9-5 regime is becoming passe? If there are no fixed numbers of hours, how will organizations measure employee performance? The simple answer to this is - more and more organizations have started evaluating employees based on their results than time spent working. Isn’t it like a win-win solution?

Now that life has become a major part of people’s work, working weekends is also trending. It just means spreading your work in a way that it does not become hectic and you can take care of your other activities during the weekdays too.

Becomes all the more important to understand the difference between responsibility and accountability