It’s A Great Big Experiment!
/I believe that anyone who thinks that that there is clarity of choice on how we go back to work now that organizations are coming fully back to life is probably in for surprises along the journey of the next year or two. The impact of choices and decisions will affect full-time employees who are asked to come back to work in an office or other central workplace, people working totally remotely, hybrid work models and even consultants and freelancers. How and where we will be working is likely to be a moving target for the foreseeable future, even without any new waves of Covid-19 and its variants.
The convergence of expectations on productivity, burnout, distractions of working from home, difficulty in setting personal boundaries, meshing co-worker and teammate schedules, and more – it’s head-spinning. Decisions will be necessary of a nature that has never been called for in the past in most organizations in every industry, non-profit and public-sector institution.
And once initial decisions are made on how businesses and other organizations will function, it is likely that many tweaks and course corrections will be called for once people experience the resulting impact of the initial choices. How will individuals and enterprises as a whole be changed for better or worse physically, mentally, culturally and economically, of course?
There are a variety of cross-generational implications in the above.
What if most older generation workers in an organization want to come back to the office but the younger generations don’t?
What if the younger, new workers do want to be in-person to establish relationships and learning from more experienced ones, but the seasoned workers and managers rather work from home?
What if they change their minds on preferences once trying out their initial choice
How will client, customer and other external relationships of different generations be impacted
How will hybrid and other flexible schedules be synchronized with child care situations for people with children at home?
Will workers with dogs, especially ones newly adopted during the pandemic, insist on bringing their pets to the office?
Will demands for differences in technology people have become accustomed to using at home cause tensions?
Will cross-generational conversations and relationships in person be harder to establish after a long pause during the pandemic when many people are out of practice with small talk and water-cooler chat?
· And much more.
Here are two articles to read for insights on problems to anticipate:
Can a hybrid workplace be successful
https://hrexecutive.com/brooks-will-hybrid-work-be-heaven-or-a-horror-show/Don’t reopen your office till you consider this first
“Work design” with the human experience at the center is becoming more of a focus than ever given the surfacing and spotlighting of work/life “truths” from the realities of the pandemic. Let’s do more than hope - and take action- to make the emerging experiments a successful learning experience.
Call to Action: Maintain a mindset of flexibility based on input from those people who will be affected by the choices of work design implemented. Make a choice, do what’s needed to make it work, get input as to whether it’s working, and tweak or modify the details. This applies whether you are the key decision-maker, a team leader or an individual deciding for yourself. And have patience with co-workers!
