Given the challenges of the last two years, the days of the 9-5 office day might seem like a distant memory. Nobody could have predicted back in 2019 that we’d see such an increase in working-from-home, video conferencing, selling remotely, and leading virtual teams.
But that’s where we are now. The big question is where will be in another few years?
The Centre for Cities Think Tank suggests it is likely that we’ll all be back to normal within a couple of years. The five-day a week, 9 to 5 work schedule and the routines of commuters will become the way business is done once more, just as it had been for decades previously.
However, this goes against what a lot of clients are telling me. A lot of people have started to see the benefits of a hybrid approach where their people work partly in the office and partly at home. Some clients have even suggested that they would rather people not coming back to the office at all.
The Hybrid Approach
While the latter scenario is unlikely due to practicality, the hybrid working scenario is one that many may, and perhaps should, explore. Working from home has a number of benefits. For starters, we don’t live in a 9 to 5 world anymore. Technology has changed the way we think, and it has started to change the way we work. There are advantages to embracing these changes, from being able to connect and engage with customers on their terms and not yours, to ensuring that the potential of the early birds and night owls in your team is fully maximised.
While there are many who prefer the office environment for various reasons – they feel it adds structure, or it properly demarcates the lines between work and home life – others are more comfortable working from home. There is no long commute in the morning, which may give them a vital extra hour in bed or more time with the family before the day starts. The stresses and strains of rush hour traffic or crowded public transport are eliminated, which results in a more positive mindset from the get-go.
Home workers can make their environment more comfortable – they get the coffee they like or can listen to the music that best boosts their productivity. They can set up their workspace the way they like it, rather than feel like they need to go along with the rest of the crowd. Many will even save money working from home, as they can cut down on childcare costs, train fares, and other not insignificant expenses that mount up over the standard work week. Let’s be brutally honest, when people have more money, they’re generally happier and happy people are more productive and motivated people.
The Generational Divide
There is also a strong sense that demanding people return to the office is demonstrating a lack of trust. Not everyone can work from home all the time, but in our constantly connected, always-on world, there isn’t as clear a need to make people sit at a desk in one particular place, when they could be sitting at a desk elsewhere and still do the work. Apple asked its employees to come back to work three days a week, and the response was far from positive.
In some respects, the pandemic has highlighted a generational divide in attitudes. Managers from the Baby Boomer and Generation X cohorts, who developed their skills and techniques in the earliest years of the Information Age didn’t originally live in a world where half your life sits on a handheld device in your pocket. The idea of being always-on and constantly reachable is a relatively new one for many of them. Meanwhile, Millennials and Zoomers have largely grown up in that world. Even the oldest Millennials were no older than teenagers when the World Wide Web became public knowledge.
Consequently, whereas previous generations may be wedded to the idea of the 9-to-5, Monday to Friday work week, many of their younger employees are not, and don’t see a benefit to that mindset. Leaders will need to balance their expectations with those of their people, or they risk demotivating their people by making it look like they don’t trust them.
The Importance of Trust
In my leadership programmes, I regularly highlight the importance of trust. If you trust your people, they will trust you, they will respect you, and the overwhelming majority of them will endeavour to reward your trust with fantastic performances. For many, it’s a case of remembering that every single person wants to succeed. There are those who need a more hands-on approach to management, who don’t work particularly well unsupervised, and may not be ideal candidates for flexible working.
However, there are many who will thrive in such an environment because it is simply what they are used to, and when organisations refuse to demonstrate trust, refuse to be flexible, and make demands of them, there is a real chance they will start to look elsewhere to find an employer that is more flexible.
The best way to discover whether a hybrid approach to the workplace is right for your business is to simply talk to your people and ask them what they want, and if your people have shown the same dedication to their work over the past couple of years, maybe it is time to consider cutting the leash?
