From “Now the spook will finally be over soon and everything will go back to the way it used to be” to “I hope I can continue to work flexibly at home whenever it suits me”. Managers and executives are confronted with this range of opinions and the question of how to deal with this situation. What concepts are there to shape the New Normal? Some company-wide regulations are necessary, but the essential negotiation processes of what the New Normal can look like must be moderated at the team level.
By Hans Gärtner,
Partner Radical Inclusion
I’ve stopped counting. Blog post articles, surveys, conferences about what work will look like in the post-Covid-19 era are now booming. And I’m putting in my two cents now, too. Recent customer inquiries prompt me to do so.
Things will never be the same again
Somehow it has become evident in the meantime that it will probably not be possible to go back to the way things used to be. I argued at the beginning of the pandemic that the likelihood of a fundamental change in attitude towards digital work and collaboration would depend on how long the pressure to work differently than before would persist. I’ve been a professional virtual worker and consultant for 11 years. Since that time, we have seen an annual steady but slow increase in the use of virtual work tools and models. The reasons have been discussed widely: A mix of hesitant development of nationwide broadband connections, a lack of appreciation by many corporate IT departments for collaboration solutions, and the usual resistance from managers and employees that we encounter time and again in change processes.
However, the duration of the pandemic, now over a year, has led to a Sense of Urgency and a compulsion to act that is now driving real change. A leverage effect for rethinking arises from several sources at simultaneously: the experience that some things are possible virtually, which one had not thought possible before. The advantages of the home office, which many have experienced personally, the potential for productivity gains, and the opportunities to meet with customers and suppliers easily and more frequently. As a result, businesses are already taking resolutions: Saving office space, new travel policies, virtual large-scale events instead of pulling people together worldwide. Works councils have now also found a new field of activity. Regulations for the new home office use have to be negotiated; the time of accepting exceptions is now coming to an end. As consultants, we are currently receiving inquiries from company management and internal managers about how to deal with the New Normal. Do we already have some examples, what tips do we have for managers who will be leading a team of employees in the future, some of whom would like to work flexibly from home on a daily or weekly basis? And how do you organize the onboarding of new employees and ensure overall team cohesion, how do you recognize conflicts and deal with them? These are the main questions.
The new normal goes beyond virtual meetings
In the meantime, it’s also obvious that it’s no longer just about somehow getting a few MS Teams/Zoom meetings over and done with, or opening cool Miro/Mural boards, or adding a mentimeter query to the virtual event. (Sorry, but that had to be said).
Organizations for which virtual work has been a longstanding practice have gained expertise on what it takes to establish virtual and hybrid work in a sustainable way that is profitable and meaningful for employers and employees. The isolated digital nomads of the past decade and one-man/one-woman startups have now developed into veritable medium-sized companies that have already gone through several phases of organizational development and growth with internal differentiation, experiences of success and failure, conflicts and conflict resolution. They are geographically dispersed, work mainly virtually and hybrid. And, most importantly, they work asynchronously on a large scale. The much-cited “zoom fatigue” is primarily a phenomenon for virtual newbees, for whom collaboration is synonymous with meeting in real time in digital spaces. Experienced virtual workers have learned how to do it better. What can you learn from virtual work pros for designing your own concept for the post-Covid-19 era?
Our own experience is that there is no blueprint for rulebooks and concrete tips for how-to-do. Neither are there the best tools for synchronous or asynchronous working, nor are there clear advantages to be derived from whether to meet on one or several fixed days a week, whether to be available in a regulated way or to work freely, online infrequently or all the time. There are differing experiences on the question of how often one needs to meet face-to-face or whether this is even necessary to ensure team cohesion in the long term. “It depends” is the clear answer to these questions.
Pulse check with your team
What does exist, however, is a common mindset of successful virtual and hybrid workers for approaching this challenge: “Pulse check with your team” is what I would call it. Ask your team how they want to work and collaborate, then make a plan, stay in touch with your people, and adjust the approach if necessary. That’s the bottom line.
Most of our consulting clients are not startups, but companies and organizations that come predominantly from a face-to-face logic, even if the organizational units that collaborate are spread across locations and time zones. They have now gained a lot of their own new experience in the pandemic phase and have further ramped up their technical capabilities. Among their employees, the entire spectrum of attitudes is represented, from “Now the spook will finally be over soon and everything will go back to the way it used to be” to “Hopefully, I will still be allowed to flexibly do home office whenever it suits me.” Responsible managers and executives are confronted with the question (apart from their own beliefs on the mentioned spectrum) of how to deal with this situation now.
Some company-level regulations are needed
What is certain is that there must be some clarifications and regulations at corporate level. This applies to technical and logistical equipment issues for workplaces and work processes. This also applies to working hours and compensation & benefits. Now is a good time to sit down at management level and draw up a draft picture of what the New Normal should look like. Essential, however, is the recognition that this new picture cannot be mandated “from above.” Greater home office use in the enterprise and ‘work from anywhere’ are leading to even greater individualization than has already been seen in recent years. On the measures side, stronger individual needs and work situations lead as a consequence to even greater differentiation in the in-depth application of general guidelines. This need to address the individual work situations of employees must be addressed at the team level, not at the overall company level. The question that every manager must answer with the team is: How do we want to work and how do we want to work together? How do we organize ourselves to do this? Above all, how do we organize asynchronous collaboration in the new distribution of face-to-face and virtual workplaces? Equal opportunities for access to formal and informal information for all team members, building and maintaining trust within the team, that there is no mistrust in the use of flexible working hours and reachability: All of this can only be negotiated in the small unit and is a prerequisite for exploiting the new potential.
The New Normal is therefore the result of very individual negotiation processes and not a uniform new model imposed from above for the organization in its entirety. This negotiation involves facilitation, for which managers must, however, be trained. If they were able to get by without this competence in the pure face-to-face work situation before Covid-19, it is a must in the New Normal.