And more importantly, how does an organisation successfully encourage its staff back to the office without being misconstrued as overbearing, dogmatic and uncompromising?
As with all aspects of business life in the 2020s, there’s no one simple answer. The complexity of hyperconnected globalised markets has given rise to very different attitudes towards work, most of which are highly individualistic. We’re at the end of one-size-fits-all employment.
On the other hand, those employers willing to adapt to the new world of work will yield significant gains in the near term. By committing to the delivery of a richer employee experience and leaning in to decentralised planning, ambitious firms will naturally attract higher quality talent, avoid unnecessary and costly staff churn and enjoy the benefit of highly motivated teams.
And it’s this holy grail of high staff engagement that will augment business resilience. Committed co-workers will naturally leverage their collaboration skills to collectively problem-solve the many thorny market challenges that the 21st Century presents.
Reaching a state of optimal hybrid is the first step on the pathway to organisational agility and business sustainability within the future work landscape. All agile success is, of course, contingent on the readiness of those involved to shift activity fluidly and adaptively. It relies on engagement and motivation.
Creating working conditions that help staff successfully manage their boundaries when working remotely, while curating compelling in-office experiences that underscore team effectiveness, is the new leadership prerequisite.
In the post-pandemic world, we need to think differently about the office and what we do when we convene there. Leveraging the best of recent discoveries in the fields of psychology, neuroscience and behavioural economics, we need to redesign work so that it works for the many, rather than the few.
In a Times article published in February 2023, London Business School Professor of Management Practice Lynda Gratton shared her thoughts for organisations struggling to adapt to the hybrid work era[iii]. Having studied the future of work for at least a decade, her advice was straightforward – to focus on what motivates people.
This is a much-studied area in psychology. In the 1980s, US academics Edward Deci and Richard Ryan published their theory of human motivation and presented three commonalities. In essence, humans want three things to feel effective and that they’re achieved something. They want a sense of autonomy – to feel they’re in control of their surroundings. They want mastery – to feel a sense of becoming more skilled or competent over time. And finally, they want relatedness – to feel a sense of belonging and connectedness with others.
In the context of hybrid work, this means feeling able to choose how best to deliver one’s work, feeling one’s career pathway is progressing, regardless of the location of work, and feeling a sense of community with one’s co-workers.