Work won’t be the same anymore. Return to offices after the pandemic: “ I Don’t Want to Come Back to the Office!”
With vaccination rates rising and infection rates falling in many parts of the world, companies are preparing for life after the pandemic. In many cases, this involves bringing employees back to the offices. However, remote employees do not want to come back to the office.
Remote work is the new norm
As the pandemic slowly subsides in many parts of the world, many employers want their subordinates to return to their offices. However, this contradicts the increasingly popular belief of employees that remote performance of their duties has become the new norm.
And while many companies such as Google, Ford Motor and Citigroup have promised greater flexibility when it comes to working remotely, there is still a large proportion of executives publicly pointing to the need to return to their offices. Many companies complain about remote work, pointing out that it reduces the quality of communication in the team and the corporate culture suffers.
Employees return to the offices, but that doesn’t mean everything will be as it used to be. Many people are convinced of the advantages of working from home, and managers also notice the benefits. Hence the idea for hybrid work, which allows you to combine the advantages of two modes of operation.
Employees don’t want to go back to their offices!
After the lockdown experience, the vast majority of employees would prefer to spend at least part of their working time at home than working 5 days in the office. This leads to the conclusion that hybrid operation would be the most desirable model. This would mean that companies could achieve more benefits by working remotely.
This is also appreciated by many managers. The most obvious advantages of a situation where employees are not in the company are, for example, the smaller need for office sizes. If some employees perform their duties remotely, the office space (often rented) may be smaller, which translates directly into costs. So why, despite such an obvious benefit, many companies refrain from implementing remote or hybrid work?
This is often due to the fear, that the lack of direct relationships between people will lead to a decrease in motivation. At the same time, attempts to control work while it is performed remotely may prove less effective. As a consequence, some managers assume that remote work will have a negative impact on the organizational culture and, possibly, on the company’s professionalism and, finally, on its market position.
Management through goals
The problem in many companies is the lack of proper work planning, and sometimes even the lack of conviction that you need to set specific goals, ways to achieve them, and then establish success measures. If remote or hybrid work is introduced in a company that has never developed unambiguous procedures and in which “micromanagement” operates (the boss decides about every, even the smallest matter), remote or hybrid work is introduced, the result may be chaos.
The second important point is trust. If the management of the company had faith in their employees, and also expected independence and decision-making, then the transition to a partially remote work system will be easier for them.
The biggest challenge concerns helping managers in “setting up” remote work. They are responsible for the implementation, they will have to communicate intensively with employees in order to ensure the maintenance of work efficiency. This assistance should be provided by HR departments, among others through training
The recipe for success may be a combination of a large dose of trust, unambiguous, understandable procedures and efficient communication. It is also important to manage through goals, i.e. to account employees not so much for working time, but primarily for the tasks performed or the results achieved. It is therefore necessary to establish criteria that will be assessed.
Hybrid in many ways
When work is performed only remotely, there is a high risk that the employee will feel isolated and the lack of social contact will negatively affect his well-being. The problem may also be increasing the intensity of work, extending the working time, and the feeling of burden associated with increasing responsibility. Hybrid work can help in avoiding this type of difficulty, i.e. the division of the working week into time spent at home and in the office.
If hybrid work is to be permanently included in the company’s organization, this issue can be solved in many ways.
One possible option is to introduce “shifts” in which people work in the office and which work at home on a given day. Another model assumes full freedom, but in practice it may cause employees to appear in the company only occasionally (in case of an ad hoc need). Yet another solution will be to clearly define how much time an employee is to spend in the office per week, but without imposing specific days or hours on him. The choice of the best solution should depend on the style of work of a specific organization — for example, it would be difficult to introduce full freedom where employees must be physically available to customers in a specific place and time.
You can also make an appropriate division of tasks — those that are better to do in the office, because they require talks, arrangements or mutual exchange of ideas, and those that are easier to carry out at home (e.g. those that require greater concentration). In such a situation, an employee could prepare a report without leaving the office, but he would have to go to the company’s headquarters for the planned meeting. Of course, there are also meetings that can be successfully held remotely.
Conclusion
Everything indicates that remote work will not end with the end of the pandemic, although it is likely to give way to hybrid work in many companies. Therefore, it is worth taking this type of work seriously and in the long term, treating it not only as a temporary element of our reality.
Remote work will stay with us. People return to physical workplaces, but the rules and regulations of remote work will be normal documents in companies. That is why it is important to develop solutions and procedures that will improve remote work as soon as possible.
Consultations with experts specialized in HR, who are also experienced in remote work, can help in this.
Flexibility in terms of place and time of work will increasingly be a bargaining chip in attracting talent to the company. Currently, the possibility of even partial performance of duties from home is becoming an increasingly important argument for candidates applying for a job. So it looks like companies have no choice in the long run — they will have to become more flexible and in many cases allow hybrid operation.
