I still remember vividly the first day of my career in the late 90s. Walking into the marble entrance hall of my accounting firm employer, fountains tinkling, receptionists immaculately dressed. I ascended in the glass elevator and entered a panelled room to join my ten fellow graduates for our induction briefing. We were given laptops of course—huge, heavy paving slabs—but it’s the physical sensation of walking into that hallowed office that sticks most in my memory.
And so it has been through the rest of my working life: my career marked indelibly by memories of a series of glass-and-steel offices. Until now.
Like so many of us, I have been largely working from home since late March. During that time we have won and delivered client engagements without ever setting foot in client premises. We have new team members who have never been in person to a physical RSM office. Our office is beginning to feel curiously foreign, even to me, when I do go in.
And yet business carries on. We continue to function effectively as a company. We win work, we deliver client engagements, we collaborate and work together. Except of course we aren’t physically together. This has led me to ask myself questions about the basic experience of work in the age of coronavirus, and the crucial role technology plays in forging that experience.
Hybrid working
The sudden surge in home working that came with the first coronavirus lockdown shattered pre-conceptions that home working is either practically impossible or unproductive. Remote working tools and collaboration software have shown those ideas to be simply false. And thousands of commuters have discovered the family life benefits of home working too, reclaiming hours per week from time previously spent squeezed onto a train or in the car. Many of those workers have no intention of ever returning to five-day per week commute.
And yet—as I have personally discovered—home working is fine for a few weeks or a few months at most. Then you begin to realise that you are missing the social element of office life, the team-building element. The so-called “water cooler” moments. Teams and Zoom are useful, but they don’t work well for informal, impromptu interactions. They force you back onto the meeting topic and constrain the dialogue. That is why I believe that for many office workers, “hybrid” working across home and office will become the new norm once a vaccine removes the need for further national lockdowns.
As IT and HR leaders we need to be thinking through the consequences of hybrid working now, to find new ways to deploy technology that re-forge that old sense of belonging when workers are split between home and office. It is likely that many businesses will never again return to the old ways of working, with swathes of desks and cubicles occupying large open-plan office spaces. New uses for those spaces need to be found, ones which encourage remote collaboration and innovation and foster a new sense of connection with co-workers. We need to think beyond Teams and Zoom to technologies such as digital interactive whiteboards, augmented reality and collaboration zones.
Providing the right software and digital solutions to enable colleagues to work as virtual teams and build camaraderie within a hybrid working environment is fast becoming an essential part of creating a positive workplace culture. And it can have a huge impact on staff welfare and business efficiency.
Technology, people and culture
How we relate to the organisations that employ us is fundamentally changing as a result of the remote working forced upon us by the coronavirus lockdown. Up until just a few months ago, many employees would have still identified with physical offices not just as one element of their sense of corporate belonging, but perhaps as the very cornerstone of it.
That way of thinking has changed, permanently. We now realise that businesses are not defined by their bricks and mortar, but by their human relationships, interactions and processes. Those relationships are now intermediated largely through technology. It is no longer just a supporting tool, an afterthought in our corporate strategy. Rather it is the very essence of how we work, and defines how we think about our jobs and our employers.
Technology solutions that can help to re-create this sense of belonging and corporate culture are available, but need thinking through not just from a technology perspective, but from a people and culture perspective too. Clear guidance for colleagues on the right tools is essential, or businesses risk staff adopting their own tools to fill the vacuum, with the chaos and security risks this can entail. This is why collaboration between CIOs and HR directors is so important now, before staff take things into their own hands and “shadow IT” emerges.
Colleague satisfaction surveys have demonstrated time and again that a sense of belonging is what employees value most, particularly among younger generations—the millennials and Generation Z. Collaboration is vital between HR and IT on how the employer brand and corporate ethos should be reflected in, and enabled by, remote technology and collaboration solutions.
It needs careful reflection on the organisation’s ethos to put an appropriate technology rollout and training/skills plan in place, to ensure that the sense of belonging we once had in the office is reproduced for this new era of remote and hybrid working. CIOs and HR directors need to be alive to this and working together on the right answer for their business.
Chris Knowles is chief digital officer at audit and consultancy firm RSM UK.