The Future Of Work Requires Three Critical Steps First

The pandemic has forced senior leaders worldwide to rethink how—and equally important—where work is performed. Newsflash: the future of work is now, not in the future.

If you and your organization are not making plans this week for a post-pandemic workplace, I’m afraid you will wind up with both plummeting employee engagement and a mass exodus of high performers by the fall.

It will be like a carnival without any games or cotton candy in an arena half-full of crying children. In sum? It won’t be pretty.

The smart leaders are planning. They know that the pandemic will eventually end. Despite the horror of the past 12 months, these leaders are strategically plotting how to reset the new world of work. Of course, they’re doing this while spinning on their Peloton at home, but that’s another story.

The where and how of work will shift to become a hybrid model. Many employees will no longer be required to be in the office 100 percent of the time. In fact, some employees may not be required to be in the office much at all.

With this in mind, including the factors of employee engagement, productivity, customer satisfaction, in addition to hiring and attrition issues, the first two steps leader are taking come down to defining and then classifying these hybrid work roles.

Define the Hybrid Work Role Options

The first step these leaders are taking is to define their organization’s hybrid work role options. I recommend using these four classifications:

• Office-Based: for those required to be in the building, 80-90 percent of the time to perform their job thoroughly.
• Mobile-Based: for those that can operate anywhere, be it the office, home, the road, etc. It might be a 50-50 split or 60-40 of being in the office versus elsewhere.
• Home-Based: for employees who can smoothly perform in their roles at home for the predominant portion of the workweek. But they should be coming into the office one to four days a month to maintain connections, conduct training, and so on.
• Remote-Based: for team members who are part of a team that operate out of one office or city, yet they are located in a different city entirely. (If there is no office in their city, they are thus a remote-based home-based employee. If there is an office, they may become a remote-based employee with an additional distinction, be it office, mobile or home-based.)

Classify Employees With Their New Hybrid Work Role

The second step these leaders are then taking is to classify each team member in their organization. What work style classification should each team member be given? It’s a painful task—akin to watching a filibuster on C-Span—but it’s a necessary and critical step. Team camaraderie and organizational engagement—let alone productivity—hinges on this step.

The key is to conduct an honest conversation with each employee first. Individually ask how the pandemic has changed their viewpoint. Perhaps working from home is horrible. Or maybe it’s allowed them to become far more productive and less anxious. Their commute is now zero, but there may be a chance that they enjoyed the drive while listening to podcasts. Who knows.

Whatever the case, the smart leaders are having these conversations right now with their team members. They know the pandemic is going to end. They want to be prepared for a hybrid work model.

But that’s not the end of the line. The train hasn’t arrived just yet. And these smart leaders know it.

Conduct Team Discussions About The Hybrid Model

The next step is to have several team chats about how the team ought to operate going forward. Knowing some roles may be suitable for working outside the office, yet others may not, how will the team function post-pandemic? How will it collaborate, communicate, ideate, brainstorm, cajole, learn, and even have fun?

During the pandemic, we were all at home. But post-pandemic, we’re scattered between home, the office, and even other cities. What to do?

The smart leaders know that buy-in is vital. They know that having open, collaborative discussions guided to define the new rules of engagement will further bolster how successful the team will be post-pandemic.

These leaders know that it’s vital to have face-to-face time as an entire team (both formally and informally), and there need to be set days of the month when that occurs. A thousand other questions have to be answered as the team shifts to hybrid working.

I’m watching the great, caring leaders right now. Those are the ones planning for a post-pandemic world, and they’re currently enacting steps one, two and three from above.

Original Article: (https://www.forbes.com/sites/danpontefract/2021/02/02/the-future-of-work-requires-three-critical-steps-first/?ss=futureofwork&sh=2a0b3e6011dc)