Links to references

           Food Mag. (2018, April 09). The cost of absenteeism. Retrieved December 10, 2020, from FoodMag: https://foodmag.com.au/the-cost-of-absenteeism/#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20Australian%20employees%20take,%2444%20billion%20per%20year2.
           
             Oswald, A. J., Proto, E., & Sgroi, D. (2015). Happiness and productivity. Journal of Labor Economics, 33(4), 789-822.

           Tay, L., & Diener, E. (2011). Needs and subjective wellbeing around the world. Journal of personality and social psychology, 101(2), 354

           Wu, H., Sears, L. E., Coberley, C. R., & Pope, J. E. (2016). Overall wellbeing and supervisor ratings of employee performance, accountability, customer service, innovation, prosocial behavior, and selfdevelopment. Journal of occupational and environmental medicine, 58(1), 35.
​

Whilst workplace wellbeing has always played a pivotal role in ensuring optimal utilisation of human resources (Nordea, 2020), its importance since  the 2020 pandemic cannot be overlooked.
​
How we invest in human capital at this time may prove the difference between businesses that stand the test of time and those that do not. Our people survived through 2020, holding on to optimism that things will eventually return to normal. As 2021 is upon us, and a new normal emerges, are we prepared to
help our employees thrive in this new world?​

Collagis is committed to helping businesses like yours to optimise workforce and organisational effectiveness.
We'd love to share with you how we can help you address workplace wellbeing. 

COVID-19 has accelerated the transition to remote working, forcing companies to adapt or die. Those companies not re-imagining the way they do business in a digital world, will not find a place in this new reality. The office, customer events, the boardroom and the commute have all changed forever.

As with all things, there are pros and cons of this new way of working, prompting many to ask not when should we go back, but if we should?

Here’s a quick synopsis of how the argument is currently shaping up:
 
The Highs:

1. Losing the commute: If time is our most precious resource, finding another 1-2 hours a day has been a tremendous gift of the pandemic. Giving time back for balancing family and home life, or extra productive work time, is a big advantage. The consequence of no “workplace” to go to means work changes from somewhere you go to something that you do. The boss must trust that you are working (a difficult transition for some) and the focus must shift to outcome rather than face time.

 

1. Employee Productivity: According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR), researchers studied knowledge workers in 2013 and again during the 2020 pandemic lockdown and found significant changes in how they are working. They learned that lockdown helps people focus on the tasks that really matter. They spent 12% less time drawn into large meetings and 9% more time interacting with customers and external partners. Lockdown also helped people take responsibility for their own schedules. They did 50% more activities through personal choice and half as many because someone else asked them to. Finally, during lockdown, people viewed their work as more worthwhile.  The number of tasks rated as tiresome dropped from 27% to 12%, and the number we could readily offload to others dropped from 41% to 27%.

 

1. Bottom Line savings: Dynamic office spaces such as hot-desking (pioneered by IBM) focused on maximising office utility (read reducing office footprint cost) rather than employee well-being. Employee reception to this was luke-warm. On the contrary, working remotely (especially from home) has the potential to be the single biggest impact on the cost of corporate spaces. The company benefits from a massively reduced costs in office space whilst at the same time can address the problems of dislocation, disconnection and privacy concerns cited by employees as their main concern with hot-desk environments.

 

1. Acceleration to Digital: The pandemic has forced a rapid and accelerated shift to many superior digital ways of working. Corporate travel whilst not possible right now, will never be the same again. Companies have learned, through necessity, new ways of working, and the reduced travel bills and non-productive travel time are now pains of a by-gone era. Companies are re-imagining the old ways of doing things and recreating processes to operate more efficiently and effectively in the new world.

For example:

• Sales calls replaced by video calls (Zoom, Teams, etc) and physical marketing events being replaced by virtual conferences (e.g.: CES 2021, Amazon’s AWS, Adobe Summit, etc), webinars and contextualised one-to-one marketing.
• Virtual Workshops enabled through virtual whiteboards, post its to support interactive brainstorming (with a digital record to enable effective post workshop action planning!)
• Digital Signatures replacing slow and arduous paper sign off processes.
• A “truly” digital first mindset to customer journey design.

 
Enterprises are compelled to accelerate investment in contactless technology as well as re-engineer processes for the digital world. Whilst before it was a customer expectation now it is a customer necessity. Those that are doing it well are mindful to transform in the move to digital, not just shift and lift, to improve the outcome from the digital experience for both the business and the customer.
 
The Lows:

1. Impacts to Employee Wellbeing:  The feeling of burn-out and being always on has been accelerated by remote working. Research is showing that employees are struggling to switch off and create boundaries between personal and office spaces, as well as experiencing increased mental anxiety and increased financial security concerns in the face of the pandemic. As a consequence, employee wellbeing needs to be an ever-present consideration in the current environment, and companies need to be mindful that the transition to remote working is still a work in progress.

 

1. Employee Social Activity and Collaboration: The social life of employees is radically altered in remote working, creating a void that remains unfilled. This is in part due to COVID lockdown restrictions but also because the opportunity for employees to establish friendships at the office has not yet been effectively replaced in remote working. Employees working in the same office also had the greatest potential for collaboration and creativity due to constant proximity. As a result, many companies are exploring how we leverage existing office space to provide these social and collaboration opportunities in the new world. Organisations into the future will need to consider how to embed and manage culture with remote working, to ensure a company’s culture can continue to be experienced in our home offices and digital interactions. In particular, Companies will need to consider how to manage new staff/ inductions, to help onboard a new employee and make them feel part of the organisation when they may not visit a physical location or meet anyone face-to-face.

 

1. Work from Home Office Environment: We have spent decades crafting our offices spaces to be ergonomic and optimised towards productivity and well-being. Due to the sudden nature of the pandemic, organisations are still discovering how to enable employees to set up an optimised home office space. This can be anything from ventilation and natural lighting, to the right seating, screens, hardware and software to do their job effectively. And even more so, how to ensure safety, security and work/home balance, to create an environment conducive to wellbeing.

 
 
As the effects of the pandemic continue to change the way we work forever, putting people at the heart of what we do today is even more crucial. Whilst we move to a digital, always on environment, we need to find new ways to build human connections and provide new tools and processes that allow people to continue to perform at their best – efficiently and effectively in the new world.
 
 
Links to reference
 
Hot Desking
 
The Psychological Impact of Hot Desking
 
https://www.opensourcedworkplace.com/news/psychological-impact-of-hot-desking#:~:text=Positive%20Psychological%20Impact%20of%20Hot,and%20communication%20in%20the%20workplace.&text=%2D%20Can%20lead%20to%20quicker%20employee,with%20employees%20outside%20their%20team
 
Hot desking affects wellbeing for eight in 10 office workers
 
https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/hot-desking-affects-wellbeing-for-eight-in-10-office-workers/
 
Working from home
 
Working From Home Increases Productivity
 
https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15259-working-from-home-more-productive.html#:~:text=The%20study%20found%20that%20working,of%20their%20work%2Dlife%20balance
 
Why working from home is bad for productivity
 
https://www.smh.com.au/business/small-business/why-working-from-home-is-bad-for-productivity-20200618-p553wn.html
 
Australians more productive working from home
 
https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2020/australians-more-productive-working-from-home-.html
 
Research: Knowledge Workers Are More Productive from Home
 
https://hbr.org/2020/08/research-knowledge-workers-are-more-productive-from-home
 
 
Connecting with Customers in a COVID world
 
Connecting with customers in times of crisis (McKinsey)
 
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/connecting-with-customers-in-times-of-crisis#
 
4 Ways to Reconfigure Your Sales Strategy During the Pandemic (HBR)
 
https://hbr.org/2020/10/4-ways-to-reconfigure-your-sales-strategy-during-the-pandemic
 
Eight ways to keep up with your customers during and after COVID-19
 
https://www.ey.com/en_gl/consumer-products-retail/changing-customer-behavior-growth-strategy

As seen in the Australian Financial Review 

The “new normal” of work is more a work in progress than a done deal but there’s no doubt
that the momentum for change is unstoppable. A survey of 2,500 “working professionals” by recruitment firm Hays in November found that 61 per cent believe that a hybrid working model – part-remote and part-office working – is the most productive.

Hays managing director Nick Deligiannis says the rapid shift to working from home necessitated by the lockdown and social distancing requirements established that “a large percentage of the workforce can work productively and successfully from home”.

Hays research has also discovered that 47 per cent of employers, noting that productivity and
business continuity were not adversely affected by having employees working remotely, are open
to retaining working from home as part of their workplace mix. For many employees, according to Hays, overall performance, job satisfaction and work-life balance improved as less time was spent commuting or dealing with the distractions of office working.

The challenge for employers as the economy reopens is to strike a balance between the work
preferences of employees and the needs of the organisation. This is particularly a consideration
for business leaders who believe that having staff working in a central office has cultural, creativity
and collaboration benefits.

“Employers are looking to the future and how they and their staff can benefit most effectively
from this new way of technology-enabled working,’’ Deligiannis says. ‘‘Organisations everywhere will be going through this process ... [A] hybrid working model could be the ideal middle ground that allows
employees to work flexibly on certain days of the week then come together with colleagues in a
central workplace on others.”

The boon to employee productivity and job satisfaction has been one of the big surprises of
what has been widely dubbed “the great working from-home experiment”. A survey of 2800 knowledge workers in the UK, the US, Canada and Australia found that Australians were more productive working from home than their overseas peers. The survey by business transformation and managed services company Adaptavist found that 85 per cent of Australians, compared with the global average of 82 per cent, reported being equally or more productive when working from home. One-third of respondents said they were more productive than being at the office.

But there were also some downsides to digitally-enabled working from home: one-third of
Australian respondents reported stress arising from being “always on”. “An overnight transition has been forced upon the business world and companies have had to rise to the challenge by doing whatever seems to work immediately,” Adaptavist CEO Simon Haighton-Williams told the Australian Computer
Society’s Information Age.

“Now it’s time to reflect and analyse this, to see what positive patterns have arisen that we need
to reinforce and what negative patterns we see that need to be changed.”

Paul Ventura, managing director of management consulting firm Collagis, which specialises in
workforce and organisational effectiveness, says “everybody is trying to get their head around what
the new reality is going to look like”. “I don’t think there’s been a bigger or more profound adjustment, certainly not since the industrial revolution,” Ventura says.

“What’s happening now has been possible for a long time in terms of available technology but
what’s changed is the mindset around the workplace and employee wellbeing.”

Ventura says the “nature of work” has changed and “remote working is here, and here to stay”. “For many workers the commute will no longer be part of their daily life. For them, work has changed from somewhere you go to something that you do.”

While most employers are satisfied that the working-from-home experiment has been
successful, that recognition is just the beginning of the business transformation that needs to
occur as the economy reopens.

“Dealing with change, navigating the uncertainty and striking the right balance between the benefits of a flexible workplace and the needs of the organisation are the challenges
that now face businesses,” Ventura says.

“The working-from-home experience has created the momentum for change but organisations can’t afford to be too aggressive in pursuing new ways of working. “Changes have to be balanced, reflecting the
needs of employees, the needs of the business and the needs of the customer.”

For many organisations the transformations they embark on will not be limited to the workplace.
“There will be opportunities to grow and expand that weren’t there previously. Equally,
products and services that were a solid basis for growth in the past may no longer be relevant or
sustainable or may be subject to supply-chain disruptions,” Ventura says. “Some organisations will need to consider a change of business model.” Although questions about the future shape of organisations will be more complex for larger organisations, Ventura cautions that “fundamental change is important whatever the size of the organisation”.

The good news, he says, is that whatever form the “new normal” takes, the end result will be
“more efficient and more productive” businesses.