Change for good
While tech companies like Google and Meta are famous for their innovative approaches to workplace dynamics, more and more companies are facing the problem of how to adapt to flexible working and how to encourage employees back to the office.
The following steps summarise Pragma's approach in helping companies communicate and deal with the recent changes in office working.
What is changing?
First, businesses need to understand what changes are taking place within their workforce and how they may need to implement hybrid working. For example, non-assigned seating with multiple space types (fewer desks, more sofas, plants and places to actually communicate with each other) is becoming the new norm. Now people spend far less time in the office so seas of open plan desks are redundant and kill the office buzz. But every company is different, and our first step is to gather data on how the office is currently being used (such as through current and historical attendee data), assess what the leadership's vision is to its future use, and understand employee sentiment (through surveys and focus groups).
The insight from this data will show the right balance between home and office working and the number of days (and which days) employees will want to come in. It will also show why they need to come in: informal collaboration, access to physical equipment and IT services, mentoring and brainstorming, or simply just to see their friends. COVID taught us that socialising is a huge part of the office experience and new office designs are reflecting this.
Getting buy-in
Once a bespoke strategy has been developed after analysing the data and the organisational culture, the next step is getting buy-in from the company leadership.
Getting feedback and buy-in on the back to office work strategy is a key component of a successful execution, without which most change management processes often lead to an imperfect implementation.
If you change from a fixed desk in an open plan office to something completely different, leadership need to understand why before announcing it to staff. Senior executives are just like anyone else, they need to feel that what is changing will be good for business but also themselves personally and their staff. Presenting a new strategy needs to speak to what matters to them as people, such as health and wellbeing, sustainability and the ability to connect with others.
Communicating to the wider team
This is perhaps the most important step in the process. Once the strategy has buy-in from company leadership, it is time to communicate this to the wider team, getting them excited about this new approach, and at the same time allaying any fears or uncertainties they have regarding the logistics of the new set up. Some examples of getting employees excited for working back in the office include providing a range of social activities from office bake-offs to charity fundraising events, sports days and many more. These can be curated according to the organisational culture.
Once acceptance has been achieved, and excitement built you need to gradually implement the back to office programme, giving necessary support and guidance to the employees.
Follow up
Any successful workplace transition programme needs to be monitored and regularly followed up by running additional surveys or checking in with your change champions. Subsequent tweaks to the strategy will focus on providing the optimum workplace environment that people feel is worth the commute.
The advantage of running a workplace change programme is that the level of engagement from other support teams such as HR, internal comms and IT is far higher. Likewise, recognise every organisation is going through the same challenges. The power of having an experienced consultant on your side is that they have seen before every level of resistance, enthusiasm and bewilderment and can help you navigate to a happy, healthy and productive workforce.
Mohamed Hisham