Page 14 - RC21 EDGE Summer Issue

Business Solutions
FIVE KEY CONSIDERATIONS
FOR A HYBRID WORKPLACE TRANSFORMATION
JENN SHELTON
Product Manager, Innovation Team IBI Group, Inc.
Two things have become abundantly clear since COVID-19 became a public health emergency: organizations cannot work entirely remotely, nor can they expect a return
to the pre-pandemic state. The new normal will be a hybrid workforce of on-site and remote personnel, and
a multipurpose workspace catering to both permanent occupants and large cohorts of occasional visitors. The journey through this workplace transformation will be an exercise in agile change management.
The question of whether remote working will continue once mass vaccination achieves herd immunity has been settled. According to a survey by PwC, 55% of executives expect that most of their employees will work remotely after the pandemic subsides. Furthermore, recent research suggests that the option of remote work has become a strong factor in employee satisfaction and talent retention. In a study released by McKinsey & Company, 30% of respondents said they would switch jobs if they were forced to return
to full-time on-site work. Working from home may have gained widespread acceptance as an emergency response protocol, but it has since become a de facto operating model for many organizations, particularly those with a large complement of knowledge workers.
Even so, eulogies for the “death of the office” are premature. Granted, many organizations are planning to reduce their corporate real estate footprint in the wake of the economic contraction that accompanied the pandemic. Nevertheless, some employees are compelled to work on-site because of the nature of their jobs and the constraints of home
office environments: they either need resources that are restricted to office use, or they find it challenging to work from locations where private, Wi-Fi enabled, camera-ready space is limited, and distractions are rife. Moreover, even tech-savvy Microsoft staff found that team connectedness suffered when employees labored in virtual silos. How can organizations manage these competing tensions? What does it mean for the future of the office?
The future of the workforce will be hybrid
A hybrid workforce model is an arrangement whereby some employees work in a fixed corporate location, others work remotely, and the remainder alternate between office and remote work, as the situation requires. There are a number of advantages to this model:
• Reducedcorporaterealestatecosts
• Improvedenvironmentalsustainability—decreased carbon footprint
• Accesstoexpandedtalentpool
• Compensationadjustedtolocalcostofliving
• Increasedemployeesatisfactionandretention
• Improvedorganizationalflexibilityandresilienceto future disruption
The hybrid workforce model has numerous proponents including BCG, Cisco, Gartner, Google, IDC, Microsoft, PwC, and Salesforce. Even so, most organizations were not set up for a hybrid arrangement—so how do we get there from here?
Agile change management
Agile began as an iterative approach to managing software development projects, and as an alternative to
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