Managing to the Next Normal

June 28, 2021

COVID and shifts between in-person and remote work have presented a number of challenges to executives and leaders over the past year. Recently, I gathered with panelists from Toronto, Montreal, and Oregon to discuss those challenges and how to adapt to our “next normal”. This blog post summarizes the highlights of that presentation and provides guidance to those leading firms and companies large and small.

What might the “next normal” look like and how do employees feel about it?

Research tells us that a significant percentage (some say 70%) of firms and companies are moving to some form of hybrid work. Not all employees have the same reaction to that news. One survey of 30,000 Americans found that:

“32% of employees say they never want to return to working in the office. These are often employees with young kids, who live in the suburbs, for whom the commute is painful and home can be rather pleasant. At the other extreme, 21% tell us they never want to spend another day working from home. These are often young single employees or empty nesters in city center apartments.”

An Australian study also found significant demographic differences in people’s opinions:

Women were far more likely to value the flexibility of working both at home and the office than men.
Managers were more likely to want to return to the office “as it was” than individual contributors.
Young people were more open to remote work than older employees.

Whatever is coming, how we handle the next phase – not just the model we choose, but how we get there – will have a major impact on whether we retain our best people.

Our choices and plans need to be informed not only by the preferences of our employees, but also by human rights considerations. As the statistics above show, people’s responses to changes in how they work are informed by several protected grounds, including family status and disability. The duty to accommodate and the benefits of running an inclusive workplace require and encourage us to make plans that are alive to demographic differences and individual needs, especially those tied to protected grounds of discrimination. (See https://mathersmchenryandco.com/managing-remote-work-human-rights-considerations/)

With that in mind, what are the options? Daniel Davis, a researcher focused on the future of the workplace, identifies five potential models:

“As it was: Employees return to the office and resume a regular nine-to-five routine. The office might be a bit more hygienic and flexible, but mostly this is the centralized office as it was before the pandemic.
Clubhouse: A hybrid model where employees visit the office when they need to collaborate and return home to do their focused work. The office serves as a social hub — the place people go to meet, socialize, and work together.
Activity-based working: Employees work from an office but don’t have an assigned desk. Instead, they spend their day moving between a variety of workspaces, such as meeting rooms, phone booths, hot desks, and lounges. Prior to the pandemic, most Australian activity-based offices had approximately eight desks for every 10 people (since people often worked elsewhere in the office). After the pandemic, firms are looking to shrink this as low as five desks between 10 people, anticipating that many of their employees will be out of the office, working from home a couple of days per week.
Hub and spoke: Rather than traveling to a large office in the central business district, employees work from smaller satellite offices in the suburbs and neighborhoods closer to where they live. This saves them the commute to a central office while still providing the benefits of face-to-face interaction with colleagues.
Fully virtual: Employees work from home — or anywhere else they like — allowing companies to ditch expensive leases and build on what they started during the pandemic.”

How do we get from here to there?

People have been surprisingly resilient and have adapted as the pandemic progressed, but according to some reports “languishing” may well be “the dominant emotion of 2021”. Anxiety, not knowing what comes next, social isolation, and growing isolation from coworkers hurt employees and management alike and impede productivity.

The rules of good leadership haven’t changed, even though it may seem like everything else has. Lead with empathy, make a good plan, communicate it clearly, and hold people accountable for working together to deliver on the plan. None of this will be easy, even if people trust the leadership team. Gallup (First, break all the rules), advises leaders to “Make few promises to your people and keep them all.” This is difficult advice to follow over the course of a multi-year pandemic requiring us to adapt and phase our planning. Generally, trust can be built through regular communication, acknowledging uncertainty, promising only what you can deliver, and explaining changes in your response to an evolving situation.

We know that people do their best work when they feel connected to their workplace, its values, and their coworkers. If your company or firm hasn’t done the work to articulate your values, now is the time. Values aren’t magic or elusive. Look back on the last few major decisions or changes you made and ask yourself why they were made. Your values are in the “why”. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras explain that values are “inherent and sacrosanct; they can never be compromised, either for convenience or short-term economic gain.”. Values are touchstones that help us evaluate the ways of working that fit with our culture. If your employees understand and believe in your company’s values, they will understand the limits on how your workplace will evolve, and this can provide comfort and security in a time when both are lacking.

Even on the strongest teams, some people, especially new hires, can experience social isolation and breakdowns in trust between teammates. It’s important to deliberately create opportunities for collaboration and trust building. Set regular meetings where people can discuss issues and problems with a small group. Celebrate wins and share information when people have figured out how to deliver results in a new environment. Pair people up or strike small working groups to adapt processes, find solutions to problems, and improve workflow. Giving people opportunities not just to socialize, but to work together in a solution-oriented way is a great way to built trust and strengthen relationships among team members. Training, a shared experience even when done remotely, brings people together. Applying what was learned in the training gives people another opportunity to come together and work collaboratively while reducing social isolation.

If your team has done well over the past year, someone is making that happen. Whether it’s your official leadership team, frontline managers, or colleagues holding the team together, you need to check on them because they may be running out of steam. The better they have been managing their teams, the more exhausted they may be. Gallup (First, break all the rules), has identified a number of things companies need to provide to keep the most talented employees. Among these:

People need to know what’s expected of them
People need to have what they need to do their jobs
People need to be recognized or praised for good work
People need to know someone at work cares about them as a person
People need to feel supported and have what they need to learn and grow.

If you haven’t already, look at your team and figure out who is doing this work on your team. Check in with them and see how you can support them in this essential work.

Planning for your “next normal”

The first question you should ask is what models might work for your business? There are different sources of information to inform that decision:

History – pre-pandemic, how did you work? What was good? What was bad?
Pandemic period – what changed? What was better? What was worse?
Survey and interview your staff. They are invested in the success of the business and they see it from different perspectives.

Once you have gathered information and done a real assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of your COVID and pre-COVID models, assess the risks and rewards of various scenarios, and then make a plan that gets you closer to your ideal state.

The model you select has to be tied to your business goals. If the model doesn’t serve your business, it won’t work. Some analysis now will help you avoid having to walk back significant (and usually expensive) changes to how people work. It will also help you provide certainty and clarity to employees. At a minimum, it’s time to sort through the limits of what you are willing to facilitate long term. Before you make that determination, you need good information about where your people are at. Your leadership team may really want everyone in the office full time but not if it means people will hand in their resignation. This is the time to consider human rights obligations as well, and to ensure that changes you are making won’t have unintended consequences. For example, you want to consider whether any proposed changes will have a disparate impact on certain groups of employees and reconsider if your plans fail to be inclusive or open your organization up to claims of discrimination.

Given the results of the surveys that we opened with, you may do well to remember that one size may not fit all – some people want to be in the office full time, others never want to go back. Consider whether you can be flexible and how you can achieve flexibility in a principled manner. Once you get a sense of your end goal or potential range of options, you can start to communicate that and set expectations with staff. Even while we are living in this temporary situation, its helpful to provide as much clarity as we can to employees about what they can expect longer term.

As with any change, you should plan for a transition period. A gentle or staged re-entry to the workforce is going to be easier to manage and more successful than trying to flip a switch and return to the pre-pandemic times. If you are trying to get people back to the office, start with those who want to go back. Let people who are enthusiastic about a return to the office start and build from there.

We all have to be a little brave to navigate this successfully. As Davis points out, “it seems likely that firms won’t converge on a single workplace model but will instead go in many different directions as they seek out models that are tuned into their business needs.” How we structure our work – and where we let people do it – may evolve as a significant differentiator between firms and companies. If we choose wisely, our model will help us attract employees who share our values and style of working. If we try to be all things to all people, or worse yet fail to adapt, there is a risk that our ability to attract and maintain talent will suffer, along with our business.