4 observations that are going to have a lasting impact on the way we work

The way we work has suddenly been turned completely upside down in recent months. In the first weeks, it was mainly getting used to new digital tools, creating a nice workplace at home and also balancing work and private life. Now more time for reflection is starting to come and we are starting to think about the longer term. While working entirely from home has certainly taken some getting used to, we have also experienced benefits over the past few weeks that have made us at Elemental decide that going back to the old is no longer an option. We share 4 observations we expect to see in future ways of working.

The new working week is a combination of working from home and in the office. 

Working from home has quickly become the new normal and existing assumptions about working from home have suddenly disappeared. We expect people to become much more discerning about when it adds value to come to the office. Twitter already announced that its employees will be allowed to work from home forever from now on. The government's advice is to work from home as much as possible until 1 September. This week, the planning agencies in a advice to the cabinet that crowding on public transport will remain manageable if everyone commutes to the office a maximum of one day a week. But this call for change in our commuting goes back further than the corona crisis: already since 2015, the Anders Reizen coalition, consisting of 50 large companies, has been working hard to halve CO2 emissions from business travel in the Netherlands. In their recent press release they argue that "now is the time to follow through and embed work independent of place and time into the new sustainable normal".

The number of physical meetings is falling, but their quality is going up.

There certainly remains value in physically getting together with your team or department. A certain energy is created when people get together, brainstorm together, and have seen each other again for a while. Ever heard of serendipity heard? The chance encounters and conversations at the coffee machine provide inspiration and new ideas. And one of the major disadvantages of working from home is the loneliness workers sometimes feel. Also the opinion of the planning agencies advocates partial home working, to reduce the negative effects of full home working. So the moments of physical meetings are still badly needed, but their quantity will decrease. This gives room to improve the quality of the meetings and sessions you do have together. This creates new needs for other types of workspaces in the office. Instead of individual workspaces, the office should be designed to accommodate social meetings, creative sessions and, for example, team offsites. No more office gardens with individual workstations, but spaces geared towards meeting, working, brainstorming together.

Digital collaboration requires a different interpretation than a physical working day. 

With a large proportion of people continuing to work (partly) from home for the time being, this means that almost all meetings, updates and other gatherings will have a digital component. Fully replicating our days at home as if we were in the office, logging in from one video call to the next is tiring and totally inefficient. It takes attention and practice to keep everyone involved even in a digital meeting. If a meeting has some people sitting at home and the rest in the office, there is a high risk that they get a feeling of 'hanging out'. The microphone does not work well, not everyone fits on camera and the non-verbal nods that are shared in a room you just cannot see as a digital participant. Due to bandwidth, cameras are often turned off and everyone is on mute by default. For all these issues, organisations need to develop new ways of working and new digital standards with each other.

The benefits of working from home can be further enhanced if we learn to work asynchronously. 

At a study by Stanford University is shown that working from home has a positive effect on productivity. For as cosy as an office garden is (making silly jokes at home is different anyway), very nice for your productivity and focus they are not. Productivity when working from home increases even further when people experience autonomy and freedom to organise their own working day. There is still a lot of potential in this area to reduce the number of online meetings and interruptions during a working day, giving people more space to organise their day themselves. Organisations that put this into practice collaborate more asynchronously. Organisations that work asynchronously have fewer meetings and do not expect each other to respond immediately to e-mails or instant messages. Also read Mark's blog in which he explains what asynchronous working means and how we are experimenting with it within Elemental. Asynchronous working is not settled overnight and requires us to let go of many expectations and assumptions about existing ways of working. At the same time, it does reduce the need to all be in the office from 9 to 5. In a recent interview, Minister van Nieuwenhuizen already indicated that this is the only way to avoid traffic jams on the roads. The think tank's advice from the SER also stresses that spreading working hours is necessary to reduce the pressure on public transport.

So although our way of working has already been completely turned upside down, we also see that this is only the beginning. Organisations need to find a new balance between working from home and meeting in the office. While they certainly see value in physical meetings, they will become more critical when and how these are organised. In addition, a new way of working needs to be developed that takes digital collaboration into account. And finally, organisations can make a move towards an asynchronous way of working, allowing employees to work in a focused way while reducing pressure on public transport and roads.