1.2 Leaders need to raise the bar

The COVID-19 pandemic gave us the opportunity to ‘raise the bar’ (Gratton, 2022, p. 6) and ‘lift up’, and it removed the delays and dragging of feet that were previously happening in organisations and the functions within them. Business leaders started to listen to their teams, sound more empathetic, and truly understand their employees’ situations. Many leaders up to that point had just not been aware of the realities of their employees’ domestic situations, but video calls revealed that workers were not just employees, but parents with children, or young lonely professionals with limited facilities to work from home, or multi-generational families sharing spaces so cramped people had to work on beds to complete their tasks. The pandemic served to ‘Lift the veil of ignorance’ (philosopher John Rawls, 1970, quoted in Gratton, 2022, p. 6) as leaders faced similar difficulties to their employees; this brought about a much deeper empathy very quickly, something that had, up to this point, been difficult to re-enact in training courses.

In 2020 Hiroki Hiramatsu, Global Head of HR at Fujitsu, moved 80,000 of their team to work at home and it wasn’t long before they started to feel the benefits, with 55% of them favouring a mix of home and office – a hybrid model. In September 2021 he declared that ‘we are not going back’ and that ‘two hours many people spend commuting is wasted – we can use that time for education, training, time with our family’ (Gratton, 2021).

If leaders and managers want to make this transition successfully, however, they’ll need to do something they’re not accustomed to doing: designing hybrid work arrangements with individual human concerns in mind, not just institutional ones.

In the following video, Jacob Morgan talks about what leaders need to consider around flexibility in the workplace, and how to manage employee expectations of this.

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Transcript

JACOB MORGAN:

Some people will come in to an office and other people won't. It depends on the work that you're doing. If you're working in a manufacturing facility, if you're working in retail, if you're working in a particular role where you need to be seeing your customers, chances are, yeah, you're not going to be working in a virtual world. You are going to be working in person.

But if you're doing things that don't require that, then sure, you may have that luxury and ability to work in a virtual world. So it really depends on the function that you have. But we need to remember that it's not about working in a virtual environment just for the sake of being in a virtual environment. If the role that you are performing, if your job is not conducive to working in a virtual world, then you're not going to be working in a virtual world. I mean, that's how it works.

So I think there is this misconception that it's just about, oh, let's work virtually because we can. No. I mean, you're still ultimately a part of a business. You still are ultimately a part of a team, a part of an organisation, and you still have your roles that you need to fulfil. You still have a job that you need to get done.

And if you're leaders and if there is data and evidence and something that supports where you are not as effective in a virtual world, then, of course, the organisation is going to ask for you to perform the things that you are doing in person and coming to the office.

Now, however, I do think there is still room for flexibility there because a leader might say, hey, look, I understand that you have some peers, and you know that there are some employees at this company who are working virtually. And you might think that it is a little bit unfair that you need to come into the office. Here's what we can do.

Why don't we figure out the things that you need to perform that are requiring you to come in and which things that you can perform in a virtual world. In other words, if you are meeting with customers, if you are going to be a part of any kind of sales meetings, things like that, I would like for you to come in. But if you have a day or several days during the week where you're not performing those functions and you're doing other things, it's totally fine for you to work from home.

That's where the flexibility comes into play. And I think a big part of what's required is having that dialogue between leaders and between teams. I think it is a little ignorant just to say, oh, you got to come into the office full time. Well, what if I don't have any meetings that day? What if the stuff that I'm doing that particular day is just answering a bunch of emails or working on a presentation?

So there does need to be that dialogue, that flexibility, that open two-way conversation between leaders and employees to see what makes sense and what doesn't. This is, again, going back to the theme of flexibility and hybrid work. I'm not a fan of any kind of blanket statements, of any kind of general rules, everybody has to do this, everybody has to do that. I think it really does need to be more of that conversation.

I think there's kind of this balance that organisations are trying to strive between convenience and what is effective for the business because just because something is convenient-- I mean, I have a lot of friends, for example, who work in a virtual environment, and it's just convenient. You don't have to drive. It's convenient for your kids. You're near your fridge, which I personally love being near my refrigerator. I have two dogs at home. I love hanging out with my dogs. I like going for walks during the day.

It's convenient. And it's convenient for a lot of people out there. But is it also the best thing for the business? And that's kind of the balance that we need to be focusing on all the time. In other words, it can't just be about the convenience for the people. It can't just be about what's good for the business.

There needs to be a balance between the two. So how do we figure out what is convenient for employees and also good for the business? And that is, I think, the dialogue that we need to be spending more time having, where is that overlap between the two?

End transcript

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