“The pandemic has highlighted an extreme shift in what we are all looking for from work experience,” says Jacky Cohen, Topia’s VP of people and culture. “It’s an opportunity to rethink the term ‘benefits’ in general and think about what companies offer to their employees in the new world of the distributed workforce.”
A few weeks ago, many companies held out hope that some percentage of their large workforce would be able to return in fall. Now, firms are returning their focus on those workers who have to be in the office.
Good news: many companies founded that much of their work could be done from home without a big hit to productivity.
While this work from home shift may seem sudden, the trajectory toward more remote work for knowledge workers has been accelerating for years. People already working with globally distributed teams, as in my case, realize that being at the office is not always convenient or needed. I used to work from home every Friday and many of my colleagues in the global headquarters.
Analysts say the plans to cut back on real estate are likely the first wave of cost-cutting measures to hit office workers as companies try to maintain margins going into what may be a prolonged recession.
Is this the end of being at the office to be seen or not going home before the boss?. More and more companies are signing up to fully distributed models, to provide their workers with the right conditions to be productive from wherever they see fit, and to be able to attract and retain talent without geographical constraints.
The evidence is mounting, making it clear that distributed work environments are the future. It started with companies like Square or Twitter, which soon after lockdown announced that their workforce would not have to return to the office unless they expressly want to do so, and now giants like Google, Facebook, or Apple do not expect the situation to return to normal until mid-2021.
These are some of the most innovative companies in the world, which set management trends: working from home requires a rethinking of many of the fringe offered to distributed workers, redesign of the onboarding processes, repurposing office space, and especially, rethinking policies and business culture.
In Novartis, the underway unbossed cultural change that our CEO started two years ago catalyzed by the pandemic, and we witnessed how the transition into the distributed model has already accelerated.
Do we need the office? If so, they will have a completely different role, not focused on being places where people do the bulk of their work, but rather areas of interaction and socialization to strengthen corporate culture.
I would like to know your experience and perspective. Does your company have a long term plan to evolve into a distributed company? Or do you still think things will go back to the way they were last year? W
hat an office is genuinely for and what we may lose if they go away?
Read more:
- Tech companies’ work from home plans due to the pandemic http://ow.ly/NAcU30r2chF
- The new normal of workplace perks http://ow.ly/6ZAD30r2chP
- Who still needs the office? U.S. companies start cutting space http://ow.ly/fpem30r2cjg
- Do We Really Need the Office? http://ow.ly/xwjV30r2cni
