To build resilient and inclusive hybrid organisations, leaders must grow from the challenges of the past year.
As organisations continue to navigate the landscape of hybrid work and maybe even re-evaluate their employee hybrid work strategy in 2024, here are 3 core truths about remote working to consider.
Truth #1: Knowledge workers can be just as productive remotely, but for some tasks more than others
When workers were forced to work from home in an almost overnight transition, leaders worried about the potential impacts on productivity. But research has shown that knowledge workers have actually been more productive at home during the pandemic.
The change in work environment essentially allowed workers to focus on the individual work that really mattered, spend more time interacting with clients and business partners, and get drawn into fewer large meetings.
Data shows that employees equally prefer to work from home and the office when it comes to individual tasks such as concentration, creative thinking, and administrative work.
However, when it comes to more collaborative, socially oriented tasks such as training new team members and presenting material, they prefer the office space. Encourage your employees to consider how their tasks align with the spaces to which they have access and support them with the right tools to be productive in those spaces.
Truth #2: Physical presence should not be used to evaluate an employee’s performance to the organisation.
Studies have shown that in-office employees are more likely to receive a promotion than remote employees. This is because when employees are in the office, it’s easy for managers to observe their engagement in work and culture – engagement which often informs, whether intentionally or unintentionally, an employee’s performance evaluation.
But the remote work experiment of the pandemic has forced us to rethink these types of biases. As employees now see a hybrid future where they’ll work in multiple locations, 69% say they would rather managers focus on their output – that is, the actual work they deliver – over time spent in the office.
Moving forward, it’s critical that leaders decouple performance from presence to ensure fair opportunities for all employees, based solely on their performance and work outputs. They must find strategies to ensure fair evaluation and recognition, regardless of location.
Truth #3: Technology is central to the experience
During the pandemic, technology has enabled us to remain safe and productive from wherever we are. But at a more fundamental level, it has also given us the opportunity to revisit how we regard our work life and the possibilities of how work could be arranged in the longer term.
With the rise of platforms like Microsoft Teams or Zoom and emerging channels of both synchronous and asynchronous work, we now have many more options for how we can execute tasks and optimise our time.
As 80% of knowledge workers say that they would rather work for a company that invests in technology to better connect the workplace in a hybrid working future, managers have the added responsibility to explore the different tools available and how they can give the best work experience possible to their employees.
Without a robust and easy-to-use tech ecosystem in place, true flexibility will be difficult to achieve, and productivity will be sub-optimal.
To learn more about connecting people no matter where they are, download the below Jabra whitepaper, Why Video is the Foundation of Hybrid Work.