“HR must reassess workplace utilisation beyond hot desking”
The future of work arrived on the back of the Covid-19 pandemic, catapulting work-from-home and technology journeys years into the future. Successfully returning to the physical workplace is now a priority for all leaders. But this recovery is also an opportunity to reframe your organisation’s future. The pandemic has provided HR leaders with an opportunity to reset the workforce and the workplace experience, shifting from ‘return to office’ to ‘reimagining work’.
As HR leaders plan this physical return to work, our advice is to switch between two gears — ‘transition’ and ‘transformation’. Here are four prominent areas to reimagine the future:
* Reimagine physical workspace: Supporters of offices still argue that this is the place where we solve problems, build relationships and experience culture. Others believe that there is no need to return to the rigours and expenses of commuting to an office. While the debate is still on, organisations are redesigning the office for social distancing and restricting movements in congested areas. However, if the primary purpose of the office in the future will be to accommodate teaming, learning and solving problems, shouldn’t 75% of the space be designed for collaboration?
While many organisations are expected to reduce their office space by 15-30%, some that are ready to go completely remote may give it up entirely. Instead of only resizing the current office space for the future, organisations need to reimagine the office footprint in 3 buckets — ‘owned/leased space’, ‘flex/co-working space’ and ‘remote work’. Co-working spaces spread across large cities can be a great alternative for providing mini teams the opportunity to work together without the need for long-duration commutes.
* Reimagine operating models: Organisations seamlessly moved to remote working with minimal drop in productivity. As they plan a physical return to work, many organisations are currently struggling to estimate the percentage of remote work that can be institutionalised. The transformation opportunity here is to objectively design a new operating model based on what percentage of workforce returns to work, what percentage of work can be partly done remotely and what percentage can continue to be executed remotely for sustainable benefits. Organisations need to think of every job as ‘100% remote’, ‘hybrid’ or ‘100% office’. This will be core to forecasting and recalibrating workforce planning models for continued operations (including rostering), infrastructure, facilities, and services planning. Organisations can compute the remote working propensity for every role based on factors such as tools and technology required for executing the role, data privacy considerations, communication requirement, decision-making, knowledge-sharing, etc. Such an objective role-based evaluation approach is helpful for building a sustainable hybrid operating model for the future.
* Rethink employee experience: Employee experience is no longer limited to the physical office buildings, it has expanded to an individual’s home. It is impacted by the workplace design, ambient lighting, noise and infrastructure at the place of remote work. Some organisations have rolled out new policies and allowances to take care of infrastructure & ergonomics (chairs, table, etc), and connectivity (broadband, etc). The focus is on enabling something close to the ‘employee experience’ provided in the office. However, the employee experience in office also included softer benefits like creche, gym, meals, transportation, etc. So, the question is, how does HR address these elements in a remote working scenario? Overall, the HR model needs to be reimagined through the employee experience lens of a hybrid workforce. Are there any HR processes that still need employees to be at the workplace? Can they be rapidly digitised? How can we improve our employee experience across HR processes using technology (AI screening, chat bots, zero touch on boarding, etc)?
* Reimagine workforce models: The pandemic has accelerated ‘talent liquidity’, a new definition for remote-working talent that is not limited by geographical boundaries. If the location of a role does not matter, organisations can rapidly reduce the costs of resourcing through moving roles to low-cost locations or looking at alternate resourcing pools. As organisations around the world adopt hybrid workplace models, many are primarily focusing on cost savings linked to real estate. However, the transformational opportunity is to reimagine resourcing and employment models. HR leaders need to explore increasing the use of alternative talent pools and more holistically re-thinking the composition and size of the workforce of the future (for example, gig workers, contractors, vendors). The long-term cost advantage that talent liquidity provides can far outweigh the temporary benefits from real estate cost reductions.
(The writer is partner – people advisory services, EY India)
