07 Jul
There is no turning the clock back on hybrid workplaces. Many of our people have spent the last two years working from home, letting go of their heels, taking breaks in the middle of the day to walk, gym or surf and dressing up from the waist up. They don’t want to let this go.
There is a lot of excitement about what this future world of work will hold however at the same time there is also a lot of trepidation.
Will it shock you to know that over the coming months my team and I want to create a model where we move to a 9-day fortnight? Why am I doing this? Because we can and it’s about creating workplace stickiness and becoming more competitive in a tight labour market.
There is no one size fits all and there are specific challenges we do need to consider as we move towards this model.
Culture
I found that at the start of the pandemic our people focused on getting the work done, connecting with each other and doing the best we could to move our in-office culture to our new virtual world. However as lockdowns dragged on, it became harder and harder to stay positive and connected via little screens on laptops where invariably one of us was always shouting…. You are on mute.
Productivity started to suffer, as did the mental health of our people and we were not able to provide any physical support.
When we bought on new recruits it was difficult to embed them in our culture – how we do things around here. Mentoring was impossible as was the organic transfer of knowledge when you are physically in the office.
Regardless of how hard we worked to bring the team back together like many businesses we too suffered from the great resignation toll.
Moving forward we are re-imagining how we work, and this in turn will have an impact on the culture we evolve into. The importance of collaboration days is now critical, we cannot come together just for meetings and re-designing the physical space of work to somewhere where people want to come becomes critical.
Connection
As I leader I like to walk the floor, I can tell how a person is doing by talking to them. It is something I do every morning. Virtual connection takes much of this away and it becomes a guessing game. Giving immediate feedback becomes impossible because you don’t hear or see interactions. Team connection can deteriorate where you run the danger of being ships in the night and never seeing each other physically.
There can be Increasing fault lines between those who are at work and those who choose to work from home. Sharing of information, and small conversations get missed by those who are working from home.
Don’t discount the time we spend chit-chatting while making coffee or just before a meeting. This is the stuff that builds connections.
Without a strong sense of connection or belonging and more choices being available to them when location is taken out of consideration it does make it easier to leave an organisation and the people you work with.
As leaders we need to ensure that we work on this piece the most, building bespoke hybrid workplaces must take into account how your people connect with each other and the business.
Wellness
As an industry, we have done wellness poorly. We burn the candle at both ends, eat poorly, drink a lot and rarely exercise. Add to these high levels of stress and we have the perfect ingredients for burnout.
The wellness of our people needs to become a business pillar, part of your business and people plan. Talk to the team about wellness days where you come together to meditate, do yoga, train on how to live a healthy life, manage stress, and breathing techniques. Should the executive or leadership do a wellness retreat vs one where there are copious amounts of alcohol and lack of sleep?
Checking in our people where we ask if they are ok more than once needs to become part of our conversations. Our people need to know that it is ok not to be ok and we need to create safe spaces for our people to be able to speak up, seek help and share.
A great check-in with the team on a weekly basis is to ask them to rate their energy levels and if their rating is low find out why and how you can help change this.
Business Stickiness
As you build your wellness program in your business, consider how you can add other incentives that your people will value. Build a stickiness with your business so it becomes harder to leave. Some of the areas I am working on or have already implemented are
- Free gym
- Wellness retreats
- Membership in an industry-specific wellness app
- Day off on their birthdays
- Adding in additional leave rather than a pay rise
- 3 flexi days a year on top of their annual leave
- Early Friday finish
- Shorter working weeks – 9-day fortnight
Each employee also has a bonus structure. Our KPI’s are simple and easy to measure. Our goal was to create a balance between business and wellness specific to the individual which when packaged up makes us more competitive in the current marketplace.
I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers, and this new world of work is challenging for leaders. However, despite the challenges, we cannot choose to walk away from them. What we should be doing right now is sharing ideas and collaborating with each other on how we keep and attract great people into our businesses.
We have seen a loss of over 23% of property managers from our industry, and re-employment time frames are blowing out putting pressure on existing teams, clients and business. It is also costing us significantly more in recruitment fees.
How we managed our people pre-March 2020 is not how we can manage them moving forward. Everything has changed, and the balance of power has shifted. The issues we face today are not COVID issues, they are leadership issues, COVID created the perfect storm and we have simply got here faster than we would have done if we didn’t face a global pandemic.
My suggestion to leaders is to do what I am doing. Re-imagining our workplace, finding out how my people like to work, helping them understand what the business needs are and then finding a win-win place for all of us to land.
