Stepping Back into the Future of Work

As we are emerging from the crisis, there is this strange feeling that the world is not the same as it was just a few months ago. Whether it is the new normal or just new reality, we are not stepping back to the life as we had it, we are stepping back into the future. There is a lot of things that have changed and probably will never be the same, neither the way we perceive them or the way we respond to them. Since June 22nd, I have a choice of going back to the office or working from home for now. As I have been assessing my options, I have been thinking about how the concept of the workplace has changed. I think there are five fundamental changes that will influence how we think about the future of work:

1. COVID-19 expedited the trend for remote workplaces by 10-15 years. Less than 20 years ago, Agile Manifest stated that "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.” For many years, many of us were advocating for co-located teams. Now the concept of co-location advanced to the next level. On Zoom, we feel more co-located than in a large office where we were jumping between floors from meeting to meeting and taking an extra effort to incorporate remote meeting participants into our meetings. Now we connect in one click, see and hear each other irrespective of our location. We see everyone on the same screen, scale facial expressions, assess the level of interest, and are able to respond immediately to non-verbal feedback that we receive during meetings. We also know from Gartner polls that 84% of companies will allow their employees to work remotely for some foreseeable future. Some companies have gone completely virtual. Our perception of remote work has changed - it is becoming the new norm.

Recently, I got a question about how to make people pay attention during online meetings, which enable them to look at their screens or phones for other information and not being present. I loved the question because it immediately reminded me of a recent meeting where I was not needed nor expected to contribute but was a required attendant. It was a meeting called by executive stakeholders so I did not feel comfortable leaving, so I felt like a prisoner, not being able to contribute or leave. This could be communicated by e-mail after the meeting and would save me 30 minutes of my life. Since then, I've developed my own strategy: I am either present and fully participating - learning new information, contributing, building relationships with other participants, or I politely excuse myself and go back to the things where my input matters. This "take no prisoners" approach to remote meetings is very beneficial to my professional well-being. It won't be as natural or easy for me if we were in a physical room. So my advice to the colleague who asked the question was:

"If people are not present in your meeting, assess their non-verbal clues, try to understand whether the meeting is not relevant to them, or they do not feel engaged because of the style, pace, or opportunity to contribute. Ask them this question if the answer is not obvious, take corrective action (make it more inclusive, relevant, action-oriented, move faster - whatever it is that prevents them from being fully present) and if it does not help, give them a chance to leave gracefully. Do not hold them prisoners."

2. The culture of remote work has changed. Previously, we were talking about work-life balance. Now, it is a blended work-life reality. I remember seven years ago when I had a four-hour daily commute (nothing out of the ordinary for a New Jersey resident working in New York), I submitted a request to HR to work from home one day a week. I was working as a PMO director for an educational company and I was not involved in face-to-face customer interaction or anything that would require my physical presence in the office. It was a big deal. I had to get my manager's approval, then the management took three months to review my request and approve it as an exception. I was excited to get Fridays to work from home and see my kids in the mornings and evenings, which was a special luxury for me those days. Those Fridays turned into a challenge almost immediately because my manager was constantly pinging me and if I did not respond right away, following up with e-mails. This is how it looked like in my Skype IM:

9:00 am Hi Mariya

9:01 am Mariya, good morning

9:03 am Mariya, are you there?

9:05 am Hey, have you started your work day?

9:10 am Mariya, I still have not heard back from you. Is everything ok?

9:15 am Ok, please call me as soon as you are at your computer

I was asked to turn on my camera throughout the day so that my manager could ensure that I was in front of my computer, and I had to send a formal message when I was taking a break. I remember that day when my son came over to wave at the camera during a meeting and then an hour later my connection got interrupted during another meeting. My manager told me that if it ever happens again, I will lose my remote workday privilege.

Well, this is not a special privilege anymore. Our work-life blend allows for tolerance, it allows us to bring our holistic selves to work. Kids are no longer a distraction, they make us smile, they help us build great relationships, they are part of our lives.

Communication expectations are also different. We are slowly arriving at the understanding of the importance of using multiple, frequently asynchronous communication methods - and it helps us live our lives and it helps distributed teams spread across time zones to be effective.

Not everything has to be a meeting.

Some time in March, we jumped into meetings as soon as we got our online meeting accounts. I remember the day when I had a continuous 12 hours of zoom meetings, starting with a team in India and ending with participants on the West Coast. Then, we slowly saw the value of asynchronous communication and started creating working agreements around communication: we IM when something is urgent or before calling someone - online or via landline, we collaborate on Confluence when we create documents, norms, or describe processes, we manage ongoing work in Jira, and we use our persistent messenger for communities of practice, remote team interactions throughout the day, or to ask questions across teams and divisions. E-mails are the last resort, and we take time to set up e-mail rules to declutter our mailboxes.

Working agreement (implicit or explicit) to use multiple means of communication for different purposes allows for better productivity, more inclusivity, and more efficient time management. Meetings are getting replaced with asynchronous communication, which is frequently more effective and more inclusive than face-to-face.

3. This brings me to the topic of outcome vs. work hours. Many colleagues now have their own schedules that work for them, some start early and take time around lunch to spend with their kids or finish the day early to split responsibilities over kids with their spouse, and this is ok, as long as they create a blend with their professional life that works for them and their teams. Employers are not looking for a 9-5 workforce anymore, they are looking for leaders at any level of org hierarchy who drive outcomes.

Surprisingly for many employers, people are not working less remotely, they work more productively and have higher job satisfaction.

This creates a need for many employees to be disciplined about their work schedules. Otherwise, workdays extend themselves to ten and more hours. At that pace, as numerous studies show, we actually become less productive than if we worked up to 8 hours. The law of diminishing returns turns into the rule of declining value. Outcomes become error-prone, risk increases. We slowly started to realize this and build breaks throughout the day. It took me two months to arrive at the schedule that works for me: a walk in the morning, swim during lunchtime and learning time after 7 pm when I get a chance to attend meetups on multiple professional topics of interest and join people around the world in learning and sharing. I still get time to spend with my family and for my household chores - not sure how. Sometimes I think that the day just became elastic for me. My husband rightfully stated yesterday that all of it is possible due to elimination of our four-hour commutes. Every evening, we sit outside for about half an hour, look at the stars, and talk - I do not remember last time we were able to do so given then we've been married for 27 years now.

As a positive by-product, we are now valuing data-driven transparency more than ever. Employers look for ways to measure and assess outcomes and impacts, through workplace and solution delivery tools, BI reporting tools, documenting their outcomes, visualizing their work, thus moving their shift from working harder to working smarter. This is another tendency that always existed but was rapidly expedited by COVID-19.

There are new tools and frameworks emerging from it or becoming more popular than ever. One of those frameworks is Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

While this framework has been around for almost half a century and has been widely shared by Google for the last 20 years, now the interest and level of adoption is higher than ever. Having shared organizational objectives and aligning on measurable key results helps remote groups and organizations deliver in unison against shared outcomes. Some popular work management tools, such as Asana and Jira Align are now providing OKR functionality, which was not available in their MVPs.

4. The way we are looking at learning is different. Learning is available via multiple free courses - on meetup, on MOOCs, in multiple online forms. Employability is a major concern for many people who lost their job, and many of them have to turn to different industries and different skillsets given the disruption to many industries and professions. Google launched a set of high-demand courses in partnership with Coursera, being offered for free to those who need it. There are no prior educational or previous work experience requirements. Google's statement of value is that higher education is not required if people master those skills, and they are giving out 100,000 for these six-month classes to those who need it. There are many people who will benefit. These scholarships and online certificates come at a time when more than 40 million Americans have applied for unemployment benefits in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

I see this trend expediting the so-needed reform of higher education by making it more inclusive, more affordable, and better geared towards each student's needs and opportunities. When higher education diploma stops being a pre-requisite for successful employment and the market opens, the quality of education will solely define employability. MOOCs were not able to compete with traditional education in a way Uber replaced cabs for many of us - by providing more convenient, affordable, faster, and customer-oriented service, but now we see all signs of this disruption coming soon.

Another learning trend is the obvious trend for lifelong learning, not just to boost existing skills, but in new areas - artificial intelligence and machine learning, personal finance, art, and many others, whether it is for employment or for personal education purposes. Employers are also understanding that learning is time-consuming, and it is now perceived as normal to dedicate a portion of worktime for learning, as long as it is applicable to our professional growth and the job we are doing.

Finally, communities of practice are growing and becoming a great source of learning. There are more meetups than ever, and their online nature makes them truly global - a great opportunity to share and learn from others, as well as find the next workplace or the area of professional interest.

Learning is seen as the major driver of employability, which itself is being revisited as a set of lifelong relationship and knowledge-building skills.

5. And finally, I want to mention something that I personally find most important these days, in or outside of the workplace. It is empathy. Empathy is one of the most important human qualities and, as Liz Wiseman has shown us in Multipliers, one of the most crucial soft skills in a modern workplace.

People who succeed in a workplace, leaders who have shown their superb leadership skills during the crisis all have one quality in common - their empathy towards those around them.

I hope that this trend will not just make our workplace more respectful, understanding, collaborative, it will make the world a better place. If there is anything we learned from the last few months, it is that life is fragile, our world is fragile, and our actionable understanding of others, their unique pains, plans, needs, goals, our tolerance towards those will allow us to collaborate better, support each other better, and be better people.

So what does it all mean to us? From my perspective as an enterprise agile coach and mentor, it is important to be cognizant of the new workplace we are coming back to. The way we see many familiar and basic things, respond to them, interact with each other and shape the future of knowledge work is different, and it is in our power to make it more empathetic, tolerant, collaborative, impactful, and professionally rewarding - in a new way we haven't thought about before.