Will productivity and performance be maintained when working from home becomes business as usual?
Over the past few months, I have had many conversations with senior leaders in some of the largest sales and service businesses in Australia. What has amazed me is the speed with which businesses have been able to transform into a work from home model and keep servicing their customers.
Highlighting this point, in a recent conversation with a senior leader from a big four bank, he told me he had wanted to have people working from home for the last ten years but they could never work out how to get it done. They got it done in one week when COVID19 hit. The size of this achievement needs to be recognised, and all those involved should give themselves a huge pat on the back. When the pressure was on, everyone stood up.
The performance of those working from home has been another interesting outcome. The majority of organisations, much to their surprise, have found that productivity has improved and staff are reporting that they value the increased flexibility that comes with working from home. So much so, that every organisation I have spoken to intends to maintain some form of working from home after we reach a new normal (whatever that is). Will productivity and performance be maintained when working from home becomes business as usual (BAU)? This is the million-dollar question. At GRIST, we believe the answer is yes, BUT (there is always a but) only if organisations adapt their culture and manage their people differently.
Let me explain. After 30 years of running change management programs in sales and service organisations, we know that results achieved by sales and service teams is largely based on the way teams behave (what they choose to do or not do). The way people behave is based on their beliefs about the right thing to do at any point in time, and these beliefs are the result of experiences people have every day. Seemingly unimportant, but high-frequency, experiences shape beliefs and behaviours more than most organisations recognise. When people are working in an office, hundreds of these little experiences add up every day and drive beliefs, behaviours and results. Chit chat in the lift, corridor conversations, over-hearing/observing peers, watercooler scuttlebutt, watching leaders: these are all examples of small daily experiences that ultimately drive outcomes.
Don’t get me wrong, many times these experiences can be misaligned with an organisation’s aspirations; however, every successful organisation we have worked with has used these small daily experiences as the foundation for change and sustainable success. So what happens when all these daily experiences disappear or, at the very least, change? You guessed it, the culture will change. Now, for organisations who have a poor culture, maybe this is a good thing. However, changing from a bad culture to a different one that just happens because people are working from home will not drive success. Successful cultures bring people together around a shared purpose; they unite the clans. Hundreds of seemingly unimportant daily experiences are the basis of successful cultures.
There is no question that for many people working home enables them to find a better work-life balance that is good for them, their families and their communities. For employers, lower employment costs and the ability to hire from a much larger talent pool are extremely attractive. So we need to make it work.
The trick is to understand some key points. As we move to working from home as BAU, we need to recognise that:
1. It will change your culture whether you like it or not.
2. It will require you to change your culture. Simply trying to recreate your old office-based culture will not support a new way of working.
3. It will require you to define the new culture and then be deliberate and intentional about bringing it to life by creating daily experiences that drive different beliefs, behaviours and results.
[Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash]
