For many, working from home couldn’t have come soon enough. The daily commute would take hours out of an already extended week, and then people were expected to do a full day’s work on top – far from productive. Work would often be full of distractions and some organisations resorted to creating quiet rooms, to allow employees to hide away and undertake deep work. With the realisation of how much more productive people have been in recent months, organisations are poised to transform their workplaces, accepting the fact that the way we have been working, hasn’t always worked.
It feels like the world has been part of a huge experiment and as the UK economy continues to grow following the devastation of the pandemic, many organisations are looking to transform the way they operate, allowing employees to continue to work from home, or adopt a more hybrid model. Whilst organisations will be keen to make the most of this opportunity, we need to consider the implications on productivity, performance, wellbeing, employee engagement and organisational culture, to consider the best way to proceed.
There seems to be a broad agreement that working from home improves productivity. Research by Bloom et al from as far back as 2010 demonstrated this through their study with an organisation of 16,000 employees, where working from home resulted in a 13% improvement in performance. As well as improving performance, they saw improvements in productivity with employees taking fewer breaks, less sick days and a 50% reduction in the attrition rate of those who worked from home as part of the experiment. This sounds compelling, and even more so when you factor in researchers found that of those employees who chose to work from home after the experiment was over, they saw over a 20% improvement in performance. The icing on the cake? Employee satisfaction of those working from home increased. So why wouldn’t every organisation immediately make plans to implement hybrid working?
The reality is that working from home has been stressful for many people during the pandemic. We competed with family members to find places in our homes where we could be as productive as possible, despite our homes not being set up for permanent homeworking. A recent survey found that 81% of people working from home suffered from back, neck and shoulder pain following the first lockdown. The stress of adjusting to work from home was primarily driven by the urgency and the uncertainty the pandemic engulfed so many of us in, but we need to consider how many employees have the setup to permanently work from home.
Many organisations have invested considerable time and effort to carve out an identity for their organisation, defining their mission, purpose, culture and values. This clarity helped current and future employees to connect with what the organisation stood for and to better identify with it. With hybrid working, employees are more likely to be away from the physical work environment – so what impact would this have on employees’ ability to feel connected to the organisation, its values and the culture? There’s little research in this area, but Ciampa et al indicated a link between ambivalent organisational identification (feelings of being ‘pulled in different directions’ or ‘mixed feelings’), and employee strain. Being detached from the physical workplace, could lead to feelings of ambivalence towards identifying with the organisation, which in turn could impact on employee experiences and therefore on individual’s effectiveness and impact at work. Many employees often complain about the ineffective communication at work, but with hybrid working, there is a risk that this could be further impacted, leading to employees feeling more detached.
Hybrid working often focuses on providing individuals with the ability to work remotely, but what impact does this have on the rest of the team’s performance who choose to remain in the workplace? Interestingly, research by Lippe and Lippenyi looked into ‘the influence of co-workers working from home on individual and team performance’. Their research involved nine European countries, 259 establishments, 869 teams and a total of 11,011 employees. They found that whilst working from home might benefit some employees, individuals perform better at work when their colleagues do not work from home. They found that the higher the percentage of co-workers working from home, the worse the performance of the individual employee (based in the workplace). For those team members who choose to come to work, there is a risk that their performance could be adversely impacted if most of the team choose to work remotely. They also found that managers rated their team productivity higher when team members worked from home for no more than one day a week.
This does raise an important point about work; work is a collaborative place that involves sharing experiences together, building trust and sharing tacit knowledge. If you are working remotely, are you missing out on those employee experiences which make up those interactions that will build trust and enable people to make connections with colleagues? But more than this – will out of sight also mean out of a mind? Will managers be more likely to promote those employees they interact with and see more often, because they have built up trusting relationships and seen their capabilities first-hand?
So, what can organisations do to ensure successful implementation of work transformation? In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Fayard, Weeks and Khan consider the social functions of the office. What role does the office of the future play? They argue that our cognitive functions depend upon our ability to process information, and this becomes limited when all we have is video screens of each other to interact with. When you ask many people what they miss about the workplace, it’s often the interaction with other colleagues. There’s much that is gained at work from the ability to turn around and ask someone a question as well as observing how others behave, which is all lost in a remote world. They see the office as the place for ‘unstructured collaboration’, and organisations should begin thinking about how the future workplace is designed for this. This has been the huge draw of shared workplaces such as wework, which allow people from different organisations to work under the same roof, allowing for random interactions whilst waiting for a coffee for example. But creating the environment is never in itself enough. Leaders and managers need to create a space to encourage this unstructured interaction and collaboration, so work becomes a place that people ‘connect’ with, and to.
Data will begin to play a more significant role in the workplace. Understanding how people interact with their work environment, will allow organisations to design the workplace to allow for more serendipitous encounters, to make work a social anchor and to better understand the needs of their employees. Examples of AI driven platforms such as Dojo, allow organisations to understand how employees use the space around them, allowing for a better designed environment to support collaboration at work. Data will also be critical in understanding employee experiences. How effective is communication? How many employees choose to come into the workplace each week? Where do they congregate when socialising? What do they say is the best thing about coming to work? Of those leaving the organisation, what are the main reasons? With the workforce no longer visible, analysing people data will become the primary source to support decision-making to shape future strategies. This will mean a review of what measures are in place, and what else is needed, to understand the holistic work experience.
It’s important that the choice for hybrid working is with the individual, rather than being imposed. Whilst there is a huge focus on remote working, we need to remember that for some people, coming to the office or workplace was a welcomed relief to get out of the house. Being together is important for team dynamics and performance, allowing people to have shared experiences at work, allowing for collaboration and sharing tacit knowledge. To support this, coordinating days when the whole team comes in, can mean that for those who choose to work in the workplace, they can benefit from the team interactions, providing certainty of when they can expect to see the whole team, rather than relying on ad hoc schedules. This approach will mean work can become a social anchor, allowing teams to feel connected to one another and the organisation, rather than employees potentially missing each other by coming in on unscheduled days.
Whilst there will be times when managers may not see their teams, ensuring everyone feels connected to the organisation will be important to maintain a degree of social identity. This will help the development of a cohesive team, underpinned by the organisational values and culture. Helping leaders and managers understand the organisational identity and appreciating steps they can take to enhance this through every interaction will be important. We also need to help leaders and managers become comfortable with managing remote and hybrid employees. We need to upskill them in how to manage remotely, how to communicate effectively and how to provide the degree of clarity in work tasks that will allow employees to have a clear line-of-sight of how their work contributes to the strategy and success of the organisation, allowing them to utilise their skills, achieving the work needed, to the standards required, by the timelines set.
We are on the threshold of creating workplaces that truly work for everyone, becoming a social anchor to enhance the organisational culture, values and purpose. Far from detaching employees from the workplace, hybrid working relies on creating trusting and inclusive work environments, providing employees full autonomy to do their work, allowing them to utilise their skills. Unlike the remote working that was forced upon employees during the pandemic, we have an opportunity to implement this in a way that is sustainable and impactful for all, leading to happy employees, delivering great service, the very essence of the service profit chain.
Bloom Nicholas et al. (2015) ‘Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130(1), pp. 165–218
Ciampa, V. et al. (2019) ‘Identity and stress: an application of the expanded model of organisational identification in predicting strain at work’, Work & Stress, 33(4), pp. 351–365. doi: 10.1080/02678373.2018.1521884
Lippe, T. and Lippényi, Z. (2020) ‘Co‐workers working from home and individual and team performance’, New Technology, Work & Employment, 35(1), pp. 60–79. doi: 10.1111/ntwe.12153
