As Covid-19 increasingly retreats into history, it’s striking to see business leaders, politicians and commentators of all stripes getting to grips with, and in many cases decrying, the long-term impacts of lockdown. Nearly two years on, in many ways Covid is still with us.
The human cost of the pandemic was massive, something many of us never expected to experience in our lifetimes, and many families even now are coming to terms with the loss of loved ones. And the pandemic gave us something else, of course, something whose impact we’re also still coming to terms with: the imposition of lockdowns across huge swathes of the world, in some instances lasting for months on end.
One of the most visible and dramatic consequences of lockdown was the movement, literally overnight, of millions of people from office-based working to working from their own homes. Remote working was nothing new, of course, and in the UK pre-Covid all employees enjoyed the legal right to request flexible working, including the right to work from home. All the same, it went from being something most people would barely have considered to their working reality. Many people struggled with it; many found they rather liked it.
When lockdowns ended, for many organisations the requirement to send employers home to work gradually transitioned into a variety of remote or hybrid models. Remote or hybrid working have for many people become the norm.
Now, there’s a palpable effort from politicians, some corners of the media and commentators on social media to encourage people back to the office. Playtime’s over, the argument goes – time to go back. And in the UK, at least, the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggest that at least some people are indeed returning to the workplace, a trend that’s being driven by students and people aged between 50 and 64, in particular.
Nevertheless, it looks like hybrid working is here to stay in one form or another and many leadership teams are still wrestling with its operational implications.
Design
I’ve spent much of my working life in London, and as an art and design graduate my first reaction when coming into an unfamiliar workplace for the first time is an aesthetic one.
Over the years I’ve seen some absolutely awful workplaces, the kind that leave you gasping for air (in one notorious case, quite literally), fearful you’ll never see the light of day again. I’ve also seen some absolutely lovely ones, gorgeous, visionary spaces that have made me think, “Wow!” And I’ve seen more than a fair few that fall somewhere in the middle.
But invariably, that aesthetic response is swiftly followed by more pragmatic ones: “What’s it really like to work here? Would I want to work in a place like this?”
These are questions many leadership teams have been wrestling with over the past two years especially, as employee expectations have changed post-lockdown. I’m not aware of many organisations who haven’t been having very challenging conversations about the design of their working spaces. And when I say “design”, I don’t mean the colour of the office carpet, or whether desks should be L-shaped, V-shaped or circular. I mean, thinking hard about how and why the office is used, what that means in terms of employee wellbeing, layout and IT, and if/how it all relates to operational efficiency, or even to strategy.
There’s no blueprint to follow on this. Organisations have been feeling their way in a lot of instances, drawing upon what guidance they can, experimenting and learning from peers.
Happily, there’s a growing body of resources available to support them. Gartner, for instance, have developed what they call a 12-month “roadmap” for chief human resource officers and leadership teams to reshape culture and leadership for a sustainable hybrid workspace. There’s also Accenture, whose report, Remote Work Life, looks at the hybrid workforce and asks, what does a productive, working-from-home environment look like for them? The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), too, also issued some useful guidance in August last year, Planning for hybrid working.
In the post-Covid era, the message seems to be settling in that good workplace design is not about creating aesthetic perfection. It’s about thinking through what it is staff use the office for, about fostering effective collaboration, and linking those who are in the office with those who are not. It’s about making a realistic assessment of how much space you really need (and, yes, balancing that with some of the practical issues around, say, rental agreements), thinking how people benefit from being in the office – and understanding why some don’t.
Above all, it’s about having the courage and the vision to reshape the working environment and setting aside the time and the budget to do it.
Learning
There’s an interesting question in here, too, about how employers view the relationship between workspace design and organisational learning and development.
The point is made time and time again by leadership teams that, apart from the management challenge, one of the biggest downsides to the shift to remote or hybrid working is the loss of opportunities for colleagues to learn from one another. L&D experts will tell you there’s lots of interesting thinking to draw upon – thinking about social and peer-to-peer learning, for example, or learning in the flow of work. Yet employers seem to be slow in catching on to the implications for workplace design.
In a piece published back in April 2022, KPMG’s Mike Zealley, Managing Director of KPMG Learning Solutions, previewed the findings of a survey into how workforce learning and development requirements were being factored into hybrid working plans and the design of new hybrid workspaces.
The survey of more than 200 HR, L&D and people management professionals found, he wrote, that L&D experts were having only a modest input into the discussions around hybrid working. Their skills were being brought into the discussions around the use of formal learning channels, with a particular focus on opening up opportunities for online learning. But that suggested, he cautioned, that post-lockdown employers were viewing learning as something that happened elsewhere, outside the office.
That’s a shame. Workplace learning should be about much more than how an employer recreates a formal learning model in the hybrid environment.
The 70–20–10 model is a learning and development framework designed to help senior leaders manage employee output efficiently and increase performance. The model assumes that 70% of learning is achieved by work itself or by on-the-job training – completing tasks, taking on particular roles and responsibilities, and problem-solving. A further 20% is achieved by working with others, through collaboration, giving and receiving feedback, networking and action learning. Just 10% is learning through training or other formal interventions such as e-learning, workshops, seminars and the like.
70–20–10 is just one model, of course, there are plenty of others. It does suggest, however, that if leadership teams are trying to recreate workplace learning largely through formal interventions, e-learning, virtual workshops etc, they may be missing the point.
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These are complicated issues, and for organisations navigating their way through the hybrid environment, there’s no comprehensive routemap. Every organisation, every employee, is different. Some have found their way quickly and are moving ahead with confidence, some are struggling – and some will get it wrong before they start getting it right.
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