How our Working World has changed
I was invited to a call with a consumer research organisation last week who shared some findings from their regular polling through the crisis. Among other things, they reported what I think are some significant things for how we think about organising businesses as we emerge blinking into the light of post-lockdown.
I was particularly interested in how our values have been impacted by the crisis and, by my inference, what we expect from our workplace in the immediate and perhaps longer term future.
Negatively impacted values, in some cases by a huge margin, are as follows:
Sense of freedom & choice, Feeling safe and secure, A sense of happiness,
Well-being, Peace of mind
And positively impacted values are as follows:
Healthy, Caring for future generations, A sense of pride in my community
Smart employers will be the ones that recognise these values and take positive steps to reflect them in how they organise themselves.
Freedom and Choice, expressed as autonomy by Dan Pink, are long-standing keys to engagement but are clearly taking on a greater emphasis here. Individual choice over what working patterns are adopted on a return to an office environment, or not, the safety and security in those offices and sensitivity over the commuting required to get there seems like a no-brainer.
Happiness, well-being, peace of mind and emphasising personal health sound like an area of special interest for individual leaders. Keeping close to people and demonstrably caring for them, rather than just their productivity, have always been what good leaders do and helping not-so-good-leaders to do them too sounds wise.
Perhaps senior leadership should pay particular attention to the last two values on the list – pride in the community that is the workplace and demonstrably shifting the priority to care for future generations. For me, that means actively getting younger people into the workplace or at least equipped for it when their time comes because the current end- school/join-university/end-university age groups have surely been the most dramatically disrupted through the last few months. And it means, as we’ve seen from plenty of other research, investing in the things we know younger people regard as priorities: stepping up action on environment issues and creating socially just and inclusive workplaces sound like good places to start.
The days are gone when organisations, particularly those with scale, can avoid responsibility for social issues in the communities they create as perhaps Facebook are most graphically illustrating right now. This is the enduring change in our workplaces that we need to grasp. Working from home is the least of it.