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Tell us more about you!

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START HERE - Welcome to this space & community guidelines

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START HERE - Welcome to this space & community guidelines

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This is a discussion forum and crowdsourcing space to gather info about what's going on in the UN system around future of work/return to office/navigating in times of COVID-19 and to share documents, articles, ideas, good practices and status of return to office in your organization. It is open to anyone in the UN system and was initiated by a group of interested colleagues across the UN system.

Community guidelines

This is a safe space intended for collaboration among colleagues in the UN system. You can post anonymously or with your name by logging in or including your name when writing your post. Please share any comments or feedback to improve this platform by replying to this post.

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What are our expectations: for ourselves, at work and to society at large? And what does that mean for how we need to work?

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What are our expectations: for ourselves, at work and to society at large? And what does that mean for how we need to work?

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An interesting take - again US centric - based on a survey of 750 business leaders, HR and knowledge workers on the Future Workplace. What's important to workers is well-being, trust in their employer and making a positive impact on society.

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What's the status of return to office in your org? 

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What's the status of return to office in your org? 

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Interesting read.

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Key Takeaways

Hybrid working arrangements balance the benefits of being in the office with the benefits of working from home.

Before implementing hybrid policies, executives and managers need to think through the implications of how and when employees work remotely.

Issues of equity and equal treatment need to be carefully considered in a hybrid work arrangement.

As businesses and everyday life slowly return to pre-pandemic activity, one point is becoming clear: The home office isn't about to shut down. In my research and discussions with hundreds of managers across different industries, I'm finding that about 70 percent of firms - from tiny companies to massive multinationals like Apple, Google, Citi and HSBC - plan to implement some form of hybrid working arrangements so their employees can divide their time between collaborating with colleagues on site and working from home.

Hybrid arrangements balance the benefits of being in the office in person - greater ability to collaborate, innovate and build culture - with the benefits of quiet and the lack of commuting that come from working from home. Firms often suggest employees work two days a week at home, focusing on individual tasks or small meetings, and three days a week in the office, for larger meetings, training and social events.

That chimes with the recent evidence from my research with Paul Mizen and Shivani Taneja that small meetings can be as efficient by video call as in person. In-person meetings are typically easier for communicating by visual cues and gestures. But video calls save the travel time required to meet in person. And since video calls for two to four people mean everyone occupies a large box on a Zoom screen, it is easy to be seen.

In contrast, almost half of respondents to our research survey reported large meetings of 10 or more people were worse by video call. People are allocated to smaller boxes in these situations so it is hard to see the faces and gestures of participants. And attendees normally have to mute, leading to stilted conversations.

Figure 1: Small meetings can work by video conference; large meetings are best in person.

Question: "How do meetings compare by video call (Zoom, Teams, etc.) versus in person in terms of how efficient the meetings turn out to be?"

A matter of choice?

But another question is controversial: How much choice should workers have in the days they work from home?

On the one hand, many managers are passionate that their employees should determine their own schedule. In my research with Jose Barrero and Steve Davis we surveyed more than 35,000 Americans since May 2020 and our research data show that post-pandemic 32 percent of employees say they never want to return to working in the office.

These are often employees with young kids who live in the suburbs and for whom the commute to work is painful. At the other extreme, 21 percent tell us they never want to spend another day working from home. These are often young, single employees or empty nesters in city-center apartments.

Figure 2: Employees are hugely varied in how many days per week they want to WFH.

Response to: "In 2022+ (after COVID) how often would you like to have paid work-days at home?"

Given such radically different views, it seems natural to let them choose. One manager told me, "I treat my team like adults. They get to decide when and where they work, as long as they get their jobs done."

But I have three concerns - concerns, which after talking to hundreds of firms over the last year, have led me to change my advice from supporting to being against employees' choosing their own WFH days.

A management nightmare?

One concern is managing a hybrid team, where some people are at home and others are at the office. Many workers are expressing anxiety about this generating an office in-group and a home out-group. For example, employees at home can see glances or whispering in the office conference room but can't tell exactly what is going on. Even when firms try to avoid this by requiring office employees to take video calls from their desks, home employees have told me that they can still feel excluded. They know after the meeting ends the folks in the office may chat in the corridor or go grab a coffee together.

The second concern is what every firm has been fearing:That given a choice, most employees will take Monday and Friday off. Indeed, only 36 percent of employees would choose to come in on Friday compared with 82 percent on Wednesday. This highlights the severe problems firms could face over effective use of office space if they let employees pick their days to work from home. Providing enough desks for every employee coming in on Wednesday would leave half of these desks empty on Monday and Friday.

Figure 3: Efficient use of office space will require central coordination.

Question: "If you got to work from home for two days per week which two days would you choose?"

The third concern is the risk to diversity in the workplace. It turns out that who wants to work from home after the pandemic is not random. In our research we find, for example, that among college graduates with young children, women want to work from home full time almost 50 percent more than men.

Figure 4: College-educated women and men with younger children differ in the number of days they want to WFH post-pandemic.

Response to: "In 2022+ (after COVID) how often would you like to have paid work-days at home?"

Note: College educated employees with children under 12.

This is worrying given the evidence that working from home while your colleagues are in the office can be highly damaging to your career.

In a 2015 study I conducted with a large multinational company based in China, my colleagues and I randomized 250 volunteers into a group that worked remotely for four days a week and another group that remained in the office full time. We found that WFH employees had a 50 percent lower rate of promotion after 21 months compared with their office colleagues. This huge WFH promotion penalty chimes with comments I've heard over the years from managers that home-based employees often get passed over on promotions.

Adding this up, you can see how allowing employees to choose their WFH schedules could exacerbate the lack of workplace diversity. Single young men could all choose to come into the office five days a week and rocket up the firm, while employees who live far from the office or have young children and choose to WFH most days are held back. This would be both a diversity loss and a legal time bomb for companies.

I changed my mind

Based on this evidence I changed my mind and started advising firms that managers should decide which days their team should WFH. For example, if the manager decides WFH days are going to be Wednesday and Friday, everyone should work from home on those days and everyone should come to the office on the other days. Importantly, this should apply to the CEO downwards. If the top managers start coming in on extra days, then the managers one level below start coming in on extra days to curry favor with their bosses, and then managers two levels down start coming in on extra days to curry favor with their bosses, and so on until the system will collapse.

The pandemic has started a revolution in how we work, and our research shows working from home can make firms more productive and employees happier. But like all revolutions, this is difficult to navigate. Firms need leadership from the top to ensure their work force remains diverse and truly inclusive.

Footnotes

1 "Empty offices on Monday and Friday spell trouble," Financial Times, May 15, 2021, Pilita Clark.

References

Barrero, Jose, Nicholas Bloom and Steve Davis. "Why working from home will stick," National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 28731, April 2021.

Bloom, Nicholas, Paul Mizen and Shivani Taneja. "Returning to the office will be hard," CEPR VOXEU, June 2021.

Bloom, Nicholas, James Liang, John Roberts and Zhichun Jenny Ying. "Does working from home work? Evidence from a Chinese experiment," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2015.

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Key Takeaways Hybrid working arrangements balance the benefits of being in the office with the benefits of working from home. Before implementing hybrid policies, executives and managers need to think through the implications of how and when employees work remotely. Issues of equity and equal treatment need to be carefully considered in a hybrid work arrangement.

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🎬 For all those heading back to the office...

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🎬 For all those heading back to the office...

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Marijn Markus on LinkedIn: In support of all the brave adults heading back to office! | 2345 comments

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In support of all the brave adults heading back to office!... 2345 comments on LinkedIn

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"Don't Force People to Come Back to the Office Full Time"

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"Don't Force People to Come Back to the Office Full Time"

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A few firms, most notably Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, have recently moved to return their employees to the office full-time. Their stated reasons are that face-to-face interactions are better for collaboration and that employees are less productive at home. Perhaps a darker rationale is to purge nonconformists, with one senior manager declaring "Goldman does not want to hire people for whom the most important thing is how many days they have to spend in the office."

Companies that take this route could become the next Yahoo, which received a media roasting in 2013 after famously banning working from home and then quietly relenting.

A big challenge for firms that want a full-time return to the office is the extraordinary tightness of labor markets. Hiring and retention are incredibly hard. Talented workers can collect multiple offers if they want to switch jobs. And many people really like working from home.

Employees want to work from home 2.5 days a week on average, according to our monthly survey of 5,000 Americans. Desires to work from home and cut commuting have strengthened as the pandemic has lingered, and many of us have become increasingly comfortable with remote human interactions. The rapid spread of the Delta variant is also undercutting the drive for a full-time return to the office any time soon.

Indeed, our June and July surveys revealed that more than 40% of U.S. employees would start looking for another job or quit immediately if ordered to return to the office full time. Not surprisingly then, Goldman Sachs just announced big salary increases of 30% for new hires. If you want employees back in the office full time in 2021, you have to pay for it.

A subtler issue lurks in workforce diversity. Our survey data show that people of color and highly educated women with young children place especially high value on the ability to work from home part of the week. A ban on working from home risks a rush to the exit by these employees. That would exacerbate an already pressing problem in many organizations that struggle to hire and retain talented women and minority managers.

What to do? Our advice is for leaders to recognize the reality of the new labor market and adapt. Working from home is here to stay: Among the millions of firms that tried remote work since the pandemic struck, fewer than 20% plan to have them return to the office full time after the pandemic ends. Requiring a full-time office presence was easy in 2019 when other firms did the same. In 2021, ordering employees back to the office full time risks a stampede of top talent to rivals that offer hybrid working arrangements.

Under one hybrid model, employees come to the office three days a week - say Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, as in the Apple plan - and work two days from home. Office days are packed with meetings, client events, training, and socializing. Home days are for quiet work, data analysis, reading, and video meetings. Other hybrid models are possible. The challenge for managers is to find the right hybrid model for their organization, and make it work.

So, think twice before ordering employees back to the office five days a week. Don't be the next Harvard Business School case study of a managerial disaster.

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Don't Force People to Come Back to the Office Full Time

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A few firms, most notably Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, have recently moved to return their employees to the office full-time. Their stated reasons are that face-to-face interactions are better for collaboration and that employees are less productive at home.

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"Perhaps the greatest shift from in-person to remote work has been the need to re-evaluate how to measure performance. Historically, while managers have often associated physical presence or “butts in seats” with high performance, this isn’t a true measure of productivity. Unfortunately, presence is often the easiest thing to measure—which may be why the switch to remote work also led to a boom in technology that monitors employee behavior at home. Surveilling employees not only raises ethical issues, though, it also demoralizes employees and decreases both trust and productivity."

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Perhaps the greatest shift from in-person to remote work has been the need to re-evaluate how to measure performance. Historically, while managers have often associated physical presence or "butts in seats" with high performance, this isn't a true measure of productivity. Unfortunately, presence is often the easiest thing to measure-which may be why the switch to remote work also led to a boom in technology that monitors employee behavior at home. Surveilling employees not only raises ethical issues, though, it also demoralizes employees and decreases both trust and productivity.

So how can leaders effectively assess team performance? Rethink measurement, regardless of where or how individuals do their work:

Focus on outcomes, not outputs. Make sure you're using the right metrics: that is, measurements focused on outcomes (results) not outputs (the tasks you do to hopefully achieve those desired outcomes). Getting specific about what you want to achieve will help you identify the right measurements. For example, output might be "Spend two hours building a new feature on the website." But the desired result-the outcome-might be "Reduce calls to the Call Center by allowing Clients to find information for themselves."

Keep an eye out for equity. When developing metrics, make sure they can be delivered regardless of the location of the employee. For instance, if assignments have historically been distributed based on conversations after a meeting, it's easy to overlook those working from home.

Consider different domains. Employee performance is rarely based on one metric-instead, it's a combination of metrics across varying domains, such as "how many units have I produced?" and "how well do I collaborate with my team?" Review metrics to make sure you're assessing all aspects of your reports' responsibilities.

Set expectations up front. Once you've established the appropriate metrics, share with each member of your team and make sure they understand how their performance will be evaluated. Then, work with them to develop a plan if they're concerned about hitting their targets.

Hold frequent performance conversations. Again, the 1:1 is key: make sure you are discussing their performance on a regular basis and adjusting as necessary-no one wants to be surprised at their annual review by the fact that they've been under-performing for months. At the same time, be realistic about the timeline to avoid micromanagement; some metrics will simply take longer than others to record and change.

Celebrate milestones. If possible, set milestones with employees and publicly recognize them when they've achieved their goals. Giving people a sense of progress helps them stay motivated, and serves as a useful reminder to others that change is happening.

Assess metrics for relevance. Approximately every quarter or half-year, review metrics with your direct reports to make sure they are still an accurate reflection of their work. Given how fast customer needs change, objectives and goals have probably also shifted (potentially several times) due to COVID.

Published September 26, 2021

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How to Adapt Performance Management for Remote and Hybrid Workplaces

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Perhaps the greatest shift from in-person to remote work has been the need to re-evaluate how to measure performance. Historically, while managers have often associated physical presence or "butts in seats" with high performance, this isn't a true measure of productivity.

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"A successful shift to hybrid work will depend on embracing the “hybrid paradox,” in which people want the flexibility to work from anywhere, but simultaneously crave more in-person connection."

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To Thrive in Hybrid Work, Build a Culture of Trust and Flexibility

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Microsoft employee survey data shows the importance of embracing different work styles-and the power of simple conversations.

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"40% of employees stated that they are at least somewhat likely to leave their current job in the next 3-6 months...CEOs may be tempted to take solace in the fact that 60 percent of the employees in our survey said they were not at all likely to quit in the next three to six months. But employers shouldn’t consider this 60 percent “safe” from the prospect of attrition either. Options are increasing, and with more and more employers offering remote-work choices for hard-to-source talent, these employees could change their intentions."

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'Great Attrition' or 'Great Attraction'? The choice is yours

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More than 15 million US workers- and counting-have quit their jobs since April 2021, a record pace disrupting businesses everywhere. Companies are struggling to address the problem, and many will continue to struggle for one simple reason: they don't really understand why their employees are leaving in the first place.