It started as a trickle, but has turned into a stream. Organizations have called employees back into the office or have announced their intended plans to do so. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic – where safety was found in social distancing – forced companies to quickly find ways to make remote work a reality for a large majority of the workforce.

Now in some cases, the decision to return to the workplace is being made just as quickly. We believe that this is a time to reimagine work. It’s time to think about:

● What worked well during remote work? What didn’t?

● What have you learned about your business, your workplace and your employee needs?

● How does your return to work decision impact employee engagement?

● Is your current workplace plan also your future of work plan? Is it temporary or long-term?

No matter where you stand on returning employees to the workplace, now is the time to think about a plan for the future which could involve a greater shift in how you best collaborate and work together toward success.

As it typically does, planning for the future means a full assessment of conditions internally and externally, including research and then decision-making based on insights.

At Talmetrix, we use a 4W Insight Framework to help clients think through and reimagine their future workplace. This model is unique in that it considers how all needs – individual and collective – intersect and contribute to a better decision for a brighter future workplace.

Let’s look at how the model can help you reimagine your workplace.

Worker

The first dimension considers employees’ needs and preferences.

Individual Needs

An increasingly important guiding principle in organizational design is to expand thinking beyond just the workplace to the other aspects of what is important to workers. Employees thrive at organizations that are holistic in considering a workers’ individual needs. For example, for working parents, how do workplace and caregiving responsibilities intersect? When planning deliverables and events, are you aware of the school schedules that may impact employees with school-aged children?

Physical & Psychological Safety

With increased incidence of workplace violence, it’s not surprising that another worker need, safety, is rife with concern. Physical safety is not the only consideration – psychological safety is also critical. Psychological safety is voicing opinion without fear of retaliation. It starts with a feeling of belonging, but from there, it impacts a worker’s every decision.

As we consider the future of work, which may involve hybrid models with more remote work, psychological safety becomes more nuanced. In addition to the normal challenges managers face, they will have to create a culture of psychological safety across the varied ways employees work.¹

Career

Proximity at work impacts the time spent with your manager and other colleagues, what you learn in the hallways or overhear at the water cooler, impromptu opportunities and even recognition. Increased remote work can negatively impact the ability for workers to manage and progress in their career, and that will be felt more acutely for certain groups: women and people of color.

Workforce

The workforce dimension has us consider how all of the people and roles that make up an organization work collaboratively. Though working across locations, time zones and even countries isn’t a new concept for most companies, the pandemic caused a new evaluation of how to make disparate groups work together effectively when the “ritual” of going into the office was no longer a guarantee for most or all employees.

Collective Needs

Companies should work to balance individual employee needs with those of the collective workforce. Thinking about the collective needs of your workforce remains central to the employee experience. If your employee population has been working from home for an extended period, work preferences and styles have shifted. As a result, it is not safe to assume that employees will show up to the office and immediately be emotionally and psychologically ready to thrive in a new context – even if that new context matches the former ritual of reporting to the office each day.

It will be essential to be intentional as you reintegrate your workforce. Ensuring a smooth transition involves preparing leaders, managers and colleagues on the new way to work with each other. You may even need to reorient your workforce to your culture. Accordingly, it will be important to think about your leaders’ ability to drive engagement and performance through effective communication tactics and strategy.

Some questions to consider:

● How do we build a winning and/or innovative culture?

● How do managers check in on employee sentiment and resilience?

● How can we ensure that employees are productive?

● How can we informally build relationships when employees have their own work styles and preferences around teambuilding?

● What’s the most effective way for us to cascade communication?

● How do we keep employees connected to the vision and purpose of the organization?

Connection & Collaboration

Continuing on the theme of connection and collaboration, expectations and preferences have evolved in a post-pandemic world. Now that we understand more that being co-located had essentially been a proxy for connection (and collaboration), some attitudes have shifted regarding how important connection is. What now requires more exploration is how the changing norms will impact performance and growth opportunities. Some questions include:

● What are the most effective ways to collaborate when we aren’t co-located?

● How do we create informal moments where we can build relationships and recognition?

● How can we build manager confidence for those who are not accustomed to managing a virtual workforce?

Whether you fully return to the office, implement a hybrid model or remain virtual, connection and collaboration will occur under a different employee mindset. Old beliefs and behaviors will need to evolve to acclimate your workforce to this new reality. Measuring engagement can provide insight into the sentiment of your workforce, and using the data can help you measure effectiveness and adjust your efforts.

Ways of Working

Culture

Culture is an underlying factor that runs through how organizations work today and tomorrow. The context starts broad – i.e., how is work done? And, it enters the fiber of every decision – i.e., how does it relate to diversity and inclusion?

When determining the workplace model, considering culture means asking: what are the reasons that people come into the office? Every organization has a different reason to bring people together in person.

Adjusting working models impacts the culture. During the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations were forced to adjust to new working models to survive. Now, as new decisions are being made about future working models, leaders should first take the opportunity to determine how each decision will impact the culture.

Consider whether your return to work model will change or align with your culture. If it changes, recognize that will require an adjustment. Depending on the extent to which it’s out of alignment with the previous culture, that adjustment could impact retention and productivity.

Technology

Meetings used to just require a conference room and the time to get there. As we work under different models, the technology needs have increased. And, those needs are present at the workplace, and for most working models today, in employee’s homes as well.

Technology forces people to connect in new and different ways. Are all employees equipped with the resources to succeed with these tools? How effective are your systems at supporting collaboration and engagement?

Workplace

Remote, Hybrid, Onsite

The workplace more often will now span locations under different models. The most common models include:

● Remote – Employees have the opportunity to choose where to work, including never coming into an office

● Hybrid – Employees can work remotely, but there’s some expectation to work in the office

● On-Site – Employees are expected to work fully onsite at the office

Office Space Design

Social distancing is now a part of new norms. Office space designs are changing to accommodate that. That could mean more distance between workspaces to adding partitions to eating areas to moving away from open space designs.

The way conference rooms are used will change as well. With onsite work reduced, there’s opportunity to rethink how conference rooms and collaboration spaces are used.

Location Footprint

Companies can reconsider the amount of office space they need and the number of office locations. And, if fewer employees will be working in the office, it’s time to think about the ideal location for the office space.

The Foundation for These Dimensions

We have covered the four dimensions of the 4W Insight Framework, but there’s a prerequisite foundation to support all of these pillars. That foundation includes:

● Change management

● Communication

● Diversity and inclusion

● Employee engagement

Change management and communication consider how to engage employees around expressing their needs and later working within your organization’s chosen model. It’s giving people the skills around how to navigate the “new office” and respond to the different elements.

Diversity and inclusion matters here, too. Varied voices and points of view should be factored into the decision-making in order to create and sustain an equitable working model. Care should be taken to ensure that the model you create doesn’t fairly disadvantage some employees. For example, if you implement to a model where employees are fully remote and can live anywhere, will that disadvantage some existing employees who reside in more expensive markets?

Inequity can occur from uninformed decision-making from leadership. That is, a decision made solely on leader preference with no tie to the business or employee needs will be problematically inequitable.

And finally, employee engagement must be considered.

Employee engagement is a factor in both retention and performance. If other employers offer a different policy and it’s more in line with workers’ needs, those organizations may be able to recruit away your top talent. Even if employees are unhappy but choose to stay, any impact to their performance can negatively affect your business’ bottom line.

Driving Workforce Engagement Through Insights

When we work with clients to use this framework in their decision-making about the future of their workplace, insights and data are the driving factors to help them make a sound and equitable decision. We work with clients through three essential steps: gathering insights, making decisions, then equipping managers.

1. Insights

Capture feedback in order to gain insight from your workforce on their perceptions, attitudes and sentiments around these topics. You may not be able to make a decision that meets the needs of the entire workforce, but by collecting and using as much data and insights as possible, you’ll be able to make a favorable decision.

Use Case: Talmetrix Provides a Combination of Quantitative and Qualitative Methods to Gain Deep Insights

2. Fact-Based Decision-Making

Considering the varying sentiments, solutions and potential impact of your decisions is the best way to avoid a negative impact to your employee engagement and business performance.

Take time as a leadership team to explore expectations, philosophy and perceptions around work. Some leaders believe that an organization is only collaborative if everybody is together.

But is that really true for your organization?

Leadership should have a reckoning around their own perceptions and beliefs prior to making an authentic decision. There’s no right answer – just a best answer for your organization. Keep in mind that the solution you choose may require an investment. When rethinking the physical workplace, there are tools that promote more effective remote work and collaboration. You may want to invest in technology that helps you measure the effectiveness of remote work to determine if you need to adjust a model that is not working.

3. Equipped Managers

Finally, managers are the key to an effective work environment and that is not an exception here. As shown in the results of our research and published in The Diversity X-Factor: Managers, managers will need tools to effectively guide their teams, including understanding how to interpret business indicators: is collaboration happening where it needs to? Are we being productive? How effectively are products being launched remotely versus in person?

Finally, you will need strong feedback mechanisms in place in order to stay on track – and the willingness to shift your decision if you find that the model you chose is not working.

Need support to reimage your workplace? Contact Us.

¹ What Psychological Safety Looks Like in a Hybrid Workplace. Harvard Business Review. 4/19/2021.

https://hbr.org/2021/04/what-psychological-safety-looks-like-in-a-hybrid-workplace