When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in Spring 2020, everything changed. As entire workforces shifted from office buildings to remote working environments, all the ways, we defined work transformed, too. Gone were morning commutes, impromptu conversations around the coffee pot, and casual check-ins after running into somebody in the hallway or cafeteria.


Many miss the camaraderie and conversation that came with being in the office; there are benefits to working remotely. Now the old rules have been thrown away, and the playbook is being re-written during this seismic shift.
 

• The New Rules

The workplace’s future will be about more than changing where employees sit, determining if temporary stations will be necessary. It will require a change in employee behaviors and an understanding of the rules that need to be followed.

New employees are strategically invited to meetings to get introduced to key staff. Leadership teams consider what interactions are necessary and how to enable them digitally, resulting in a new way of working together. The tools that were once prioritized in terms of onboarding now have become secondary to introductions and relationship-building. The first considerations are the interactions necessary to do so, then determining the physical and digital tools needed to make that happen.

• Thinking creatively

Managers and leaders must ask themselves what employee experiences they are looking to create. And look at creative ways to employ digital technology to achieve those. Certain professions require an in-person presence to complete work, but are specific components that can be automated? If you translate that to other jobs, what are the highly collaborative tasks? How can these be translated digitally, or should they be done in person? Each role in an organization may have a different digital experience, but not everything translates perfectly in a digital space.

Employees in an office bond over shared experiences creating both opportunities and distractions. Yet, working remotely has eliminated many of those shared experiences and distractions, so leaders must ask themselves: How do employees keep themselves motivated without them? How are they reaching out to recreate them?

• Redefining leadership

Managers and leaders face new challenges with keeping teams engaged, connected, and motivated in remote working environments. Decision making is being distributed to individual groups, providing autonomy bringing up questions of morality and ethics.

• Re-orienting for the future

For many companies with strict measures of success, creating space to accommodate the new way of work will require flexibility from many people. Leaders should demonstrate that flexibility and problems, as well as measures of success, should be reframed. Consider:

• Managing by the outcome, not time or measure of a single task
   
• Defining new rhythms that enable collaboration and creativity
   
• New considerations of people’s well-being. A measure of “are they working right now” should give way to “how are they contributing” pushes on our expectations of an 8-5 job.
   

Employees across the world have proven that they can be productive working from home. We have seen that processes that were in place actually slowed employees down, and when they were dropped out of necessity, employees could move faster.

Source: Forbes