What works- Work from office , hybrid work or asynchronous work?

As the business world recovers, there has been constant discussion on whether companies should resort to work from office, work from home, or hybrid work. After two years of working from home and kids taking classes from home, the world is finally opening up. Kids are back in schools and firms have started asking their people to come back to their physical offices. However, the debate continues and we see that employees and managements continue to have differing views. Based on my discussions with senior management people across companies and what I have been reading about the global ecosystem, it is my understanding that companies want their employees back in office in some form. Many employees are questioning this.?They argue that the productivity of their firms not only did not get impacted, but it went up in the work from home situation!! So why should they be forced to come back to work? The attrition rates across industries and especially in tech and services companies have gone up to about 30-35% . Lot of people are attributing the highly inflated employee attrition levels to the loss of organization culture experienced in the remote working times. Organizations, especially the tech and IT services firms, are faced with a big dilemma.

Navikenz is a young company. Having started during covid times last year, most of our people?have joined us virtually and have?been working remotely so far. As a consulting led Artificial Intelligence and machine learning services firm, our people, whom we call Kenziens, have been supporting our international clients remotely - consulting around strategy, technology architecture and data analytics & AI. As we start to set our people practices, it is a unique opportunity for us to experiment and figure out what is the best approach we should follow.

Work from home has been great for the tech people. They have been living it for the past 2 years. We all understand work from office. Hybrid work has been practised in many firms in the past. Post covid, as firms get people back to offices, most firms are thinking about adopting a hybrid work culture, where employees are expected to be in office for 2-3 days a week, while they work from home for the rest of the week.

And then there is asynchronous work. Which is work from anywhere ?with a flexible day schedule; where people are driven mostly by goals.

So, does it require everyone to work synchronously in office or even remotely 9-5 or 10-6 in a primarily consulting, tech product or tech services company?

We had gone asynchronous with our ways of working ?a long time back, at tech services firms or MNC R&D centers in India. Global teams would work distributed, very efficiently across time zones, to complete the same project. Given this, my question is , why do we need to work in offices and synchronously all together ?

Asynchronous work models allow people to design their work hours and work location/environment, factoring in different constraints they may have on their time as well as what gets the best work out of them . If the goals are met and their completion gets done effectively, companies should not have any problem.

In addition, opting for asynchronous work will ensure a larger talent pool to hire from, keep people happy ?and?therefore result in better productivity.

What are the challenges to operating asynchronously?

·???????Passing the updates of work done with clarity of writing and appropriate knowledge management. In the absence of that, people will take long time to understand what others have done and to get every one on the same page. It is therefore important for an asynchronous organisation to invest in updating work through synchronous writing and use of technology like SharePoint etc. to enable that.

·???????One thing we have heard during the pandemic and the remote work from home situation is that the much desired boundaries of work and life had completely blurred and the rest of personal time was not respected. People worked continuously. This is where the companies must lead from the top, driving the culture of respecting personal time and ensuring that people take adequate time offs. At Navikenz we have a broad open leave policy.

Finally, what about loss of company culture?

The other critical issue of asynchronous working is that people do not meet and it is difficult to build a bond. They do not get exposed to the company culture. This is the hardest part. It would require setting up of rituals like:

·???????have some common time for Video calls,

·???????mandating camera is on for all video chats between team members,

·???????event based physical meetings in an office location or any?common convenient location.

My experience has been that when people meet at off-sites as a team, travel, and spend time together , the bond is strengthened. For example quarterly meeting for the whole team at a common location for collaborating, brainstorming, training, celebrating, and team building will go a long way to build strong bonds and strengthen the company culture.

In addition, having new hires spend a couple of weeks in a physical location where the unit’s senior people are based can also help to get the cultural elements indoctrinated early.

When companies are small, having one week per year of people getting together would improve trust and build connections with colleagues across the organization. When companies become large, the same can be tried across different lines of business.

There would however be some people who might want to work from office more regularly. Companies can plan to have some physical offices or co working spaces in a few cities and can allow people to work from these places.

At Navikenz, we are currently talking to our people across levels, understanding what they would like the culture here to be, what they did not like at other places, and what they enjoyed. We are also discussing their preference for synchronous and asynchronous ways of working. We continue to be remote today, giving people flexibility. As we move forward on our journey of co-creating Navikenz culture, we will decide whether we will be primarily a hybrid?or asynchronous organisation. One thing which will continue to drive us is one of our core values- Celebrate differences . We believe every stakeholder, be it our customer, investor, or our people , is different . We need to understand the differences, their requirements and create value for them in a unique way.?