Most of you who have been working from home for the past year and a half have experienced 3 distinct phases in your journey.
At first, you experienced uncertainty and stress about the changing landscape. Would remote work change your role? When would you see your colleagues again? Was your job at risk?
Then, once the reality became cemented, you experienced joy and satisfaction. You started to reap the benefits of working from home: no commute, more time to spend with family, and flexibility in your environment (re: those mid-day coffee runs).
Enter: the third and (for many) current phase. What many employees are experiencing now has been coined, by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the ‘Hybrid Work Paradox.’
The paradox is the fact that most employees want to maintain the benefits of remote work, yet deeply crave in-person interaction with their team.
Even though people are tired of online interaction, in person interaction is less likely with evolving variants. In this climate, it is a great challenge to craft a hybrid environment that carefully balances social contact with the safety of remote work.
Tackling the challenge
These are not simply sentiments expressed by a few people. In Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, a survey of employees across 100 different countries, 70% cited collaboration with coworkers as a reason to return to the office. 61% cited social interaction as a reason to return.
Yet, 59% cited work-life balance and 61% cited commuting as a reason to work from home. And this is the paradox explained statistically. So how will business leaders accommodate these contradictory needs?
The majority of leaders are in favor of embracing flexibility. In a LinkedIn survey of 500 C-level executives across the U.K. and U.S, 87% said they would prefer to stay remote. 81% are already changing their policies to enable flexibility. LinkedIn has coined this ‘the Great Reshuffle.’
While executives are optimistic about this change, they do recognize that it will require a lot of work. 72% believe training specifically for building skills required to work in new hybrid environments is needed.
The Point
Succeeding in this new world requires productive and happy employees, which requires consideration of their preferences. Organizations that thrive will be those that embrace flexibility through hybrid specific training and data backed policies.
Beyond technology and data, it will require genuine consideration of conflicting preferences and a desire to truly accommodate these in order to create a flexible and adaptive environment.
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