It’s been a wild 12-months of changeless (but) radical change.
While you were living out Groundhog Day every weekend, what happened beneath the repetitive rhythm of your life has been nothing short of extraordinary. Aside from busting your bandwidth while Netflix binging, adjusting to zoom calls, buying sweatpants, and perfecting your banana bread, you also changed your work -not just where you work- but how you think about work.
But it’s not merely what happened to us that should get our attention, it’s how “what happened” forever alters our work-lives moving forward.
Take a quick-glance back: Prior to 2020, workplace flexibility was the number one requested benefit by employees, outranking even salary. Back then, in the war for talent, organizations were scrambling to accommodate flexible lifestyles for employees. Since flexibility was the most coveted benefit, those who aligned their organizations to accommodate this demand would become a magnet for talent.
Then the pandemic hit.
We suddenly lived out the old adage, “necessity is the mother of all inventions.” What we thought was difficult to do -adjust to the virtual office- fell together quickly as we were all forced to make workplace flexibility a reality, fast.
Back then, most of us thought these were temporary measures. When we activated Zoom, Slack, commonsku -whatever tools were essential for remote work- we thought that “waiting it out” would be a patch job and that “by summer, maybe fall, we’d be back to normal.”
It’s now a year later and what began as a temporary band-aid due to the pandemic has become more than an experiment, it is a permanent reality. Before 2020, 3% of the U.S. labor force worked remotely, now it’s 42%, and that change is here to stay.
More startling stats:
68% of employees said that work culture improved after going remote.
83% of employees report they’re more productive working from home.
62% of employees now expect that their employers will allow them to work remotely moving forward.
The vast majority (¾) of organizations plan to permanently shift to more remote work after COVID19 recovery, in fact …
In one study of HR leaders, 90% of them will allow employees to work remotely even after COVID-19.
According to Gartner, the research firm that authored the above studies, “The paradigm of in-office work has been shattered as a result of COVID-19. Remote work, once a consideration for many organizations but rarely a priority, became a health and safety imperative. But even as organizations plan their recovery strategies, remote work will remain a cornerstone of the post-pandemic future of work.”
While some of us decided that the new work-from-home model is not for us (that we work better in-person and face-to-face) what the stats above show is that the world no longer thinks about work in mere binary ways: it’s no longer a battle of either working remote vs. working in-office, it’s about giving employees options.
What we now know is that prior to the pandemic, employees didn’t want just “balance” in their work lives, they didn’t want equal parts work and equal parts life -which is what the in-office structure afforded- they wanted harmony: a new way that would allow work life and home life to blend according to their needs.
As we celebrated International Women’s Day on Monday this week, it serves as just one example of how important it is for us to consider the implications of how we work and the opportunities we can create for others by abandoning the strictures of our work-life. The pandemic -for all its calamity and heartache- made new problems our new opportunity and in this series, we’ll explore:
What the new hybrid workforce means to us now
How the new hybrid workforce opens the door for unparalleled talent
How leaders can adopt a hybrid mindset in order to manage their teams more effectively
The new “collaboration equity” and how to maximize it
Plus, how to develop a new skill set to manage your teams and maximize your potential whether you are fully remote or partially remote
Google recently stated that the hybrid blend of at-home and in-office work will become the norm for many businesses and the new model “enables a hybrid work experience that enhances collaboration, strengthens the human connection, and increases wellbeing for people—wherever they are and however they work.” They call this new paradigm “collaboration equity,” or, “the ability to contribute equally, regardless of location, role, experience level, language, and device preference.”
Join us in this series as we explore how we, too, can create a culture of collaboration equity by optimizing our energy and improving our employees’ lives through the new world of the hybrid workforce.