How will you work in 2022?

Part 1

The world has changed. And while it is true that it changes everyday, the changes we have experienced since the start of the pandemic are seismic. Will we return to the way things were? No, things will be different, especially in the way we work.

Work from home (WFH), work from anywhere (WFA) remote work, telework, telecommuting. Many terms describe when we are doing are work from a place other than the office. And over the last 12 months, many of us have experienced working from home. And there are good things about it and challenging things about it. But for many reasons, the majority of people will not go back to the office on a full-time basis. We will see more remote workers that live nowhere near the company they work for, or the office they once occupied. We will see more people work remotely the majority of the time and visit the office periodically. We will see more people in a hybrid model where they split their time between the office and working remotely. We will see more people that occasionally work from home, but spend their majority of their time in the office. And we will see people return to the office full time.

There is no doubt in my mind, that the trend for more remote workers and more people working part of the time from home has been greatly accelerated. And the reason is there are many benefits to workers and to the companies. Higher productivity, lower cost, bigger pools of talent to draw from are some of the benefits.

But what about the challenges? There are many. Both challenges for the company and for the individual.

Challenge 1 — Culture

How do you keep and continue to grow the culture when so many people are remote? You will have employees that have never met their colleagues, their boss, the executives, face-to-face. Zoom and all the other video conferencing tools are great, but it doesn’t accomplish the same thing we get out of that casual discussion face-to-face.

The face-to-face interaction, the casual conversations around the office, the ability to ask your colleagues a question when you see them in the hall, or offer help to others as you pass by their desk, all is very different in a virtual world. I believe trying to find a cool new technology to allow you to replicate those experiences at best will be a passing fad, and at worst will be an embarrassing disaster.

You need to step back and understand what the culture is, and what you want it to be. Then find ways to support that culture in the new environment. For example, if servant leadership is an important attribute of your culture, a zoom happy hour isn’t going to help that.

By the way, servant leadership is a leadership philosophy in which the main goal of leaders is to serve others in the organization and to help make them successful. Traditional leadership is where the leader’s perspective is others are there to serve the leader and make the leader successful. Instead of the people working to serve the leader, the leader exists to serve the people.

So if we want to make sure that we continue encouraging servant leadership, we need to make it as easy in a remote environment to serve others in the organization as it is when we are all in the same office. No easy task, but doable.

To Be Continued…