Why does your organization care about the Future of Work?

For the past several months, I've been speaking to Future of Work leaders around the globe.

Two motivations emerged:

(1) There are those organizations who care about the FoW to:

• Save real estate costs. “If people work from home, we need less office space.” ??
• Gain a competitive advantage in the talent market. “Power has shifted to employees; we need to do this, else we will get left behind.” ??
• The needs of the business/management only. “We need to bring everybody back to the office; else, we don't know how to manage them. But we need to do it intelligently, so they don’t notice.” ??

These companies are likely to apply a more top-down, standardized approach, issuing formal policies about the rules of work, when to come to the office, how much time employees are allowed to work from home, etc.

(2) Then there are those who genuinely care about engagement, creating communities, and enabling people to do their best work.

These organizations want to drive innovation, business agility, and customer focus.

Because they have understood that work is not working and that better ways are required to remain successful in the future.

These companies apply a bottom-up approach, allowing every team to define how to align best the needs of the business with those of the team and individual team members. They don’t issue policies, but rather guidelines, while offering support to teams to figure out how to best organize their work. They care about autonomy and flexibility.

In these organizations, the Future of Work is also seen as a CEO topic. FoW leaders and teams tend to report directly to the CEO or be part of the CEO office.

(Some of you might be thinking, “All good for a small company, we are large, we are global, we need standards,” but there are also large companies with 100s of thousands of people taking this approach. For example, just yesterday, Deutsche Bahn CHRO Martin Seiler announced that they won’t make top-down policy announcements but instead give teams the flexibility to decide for themselves what’s best for them. A company with more than 300k employees worldwide…OK…a significant portion of them will probably have a job that does not work from home – which would have been an excellent excuse to make everybody come back to the office – but still.)

Of course, these better ways of working will also benefit the business. And employees. And managers.

(BTW: these companies might also save real estate costs, but they are more likely to reinvest the money into redesigning their office space for activity-based work or for employees to beef up their home offices.)

I call the first approach "company-focused" and the second one "employee-focused." (No rocket science here, really.)

While on the surface, they might look very similar. The devil is in the details.

My take:

• The company-focused approach will only bring short-term benefits. Maybe you can get a huge decrease in cost savings from real estate, but it will be a one-off. Perhaps you can bring in new talent, but once they are there, they will notice that it was only marketing BS.
• The employee-focused approach might take a little longer to show its benefits, but you will be able to profit for the long haul. Your people and teams will be capable of driving innovation, being customer-focused, and being adaptable. Today and in the future.
• Then, of course, you can also combine the two. Nothing wrong with saving some costs.
• While it might not be a black or white choice, there are tendencies that I believe will have an impact on the success of your FoW strategy and initiatives (a hypothesis to be tested…)

What’s your organization’s motivation?

That’s it for this week. As always, I hope I was able to add some value to your thinking. If so, please like, comment, and share.

If you‘re a Future of Work / New Ways of Working Leader, please reach out…I‘m interested in talking to you!

If you’d like to learn more about how new ways of working can help your team and organization be more successful, consider signing up for my new online program “Better Business Results through Better Ways of Working.” Link is in the comments below ??

See you inside.

– Marc