INDUSTRY OPINION
Future of Work: Unscrambling the hybrid working puzzle Uncertainty has been a defining characteristic of the past 18 or so months. Now, as the move to hybrid working gathers pace, what the future of work looks like in South Africa is equally uncertain. It’s a puzzle every business needs to solve. Dr Nicola Millard, Principal Innovation Partner, BT, shares insights on making hybrid working, work.
W
hile some offices have remained open at varying levels of capacity in response to the ups and downs of lockdown levels since March 2020, many of us have spent the past year working remotely. Now, as South Africa’s vaccine rollout gathers speed, the possibility of face-to-face contact, of real-life meeting rooms, of desks in a shared space, becomes increasingly viable. If you’re a business leader, you’re almost certainly asking: What does the new way of working look like? How does it function? What’s it likely to cost? “Everyone’s talking about hybrid,” says Dr Millard. “But most people who speak about hybrid mean flexible working, which is absolutely nothing new. We’ve been working flexibly for years.” “My favourite analogy around hybrid is the zedonk – half donkey and half zebra. The zedonk doesn’t spend three days
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a week as a donkey and two days as a zebra. It’s a completely different breed, all the time. And that’s what hybrid is: a completely different breed of work. It isn’t about how many days a week you are in the office – it’s all about the work, rather than where and when you do the work,” continues Dr Millard. It’s a fact that organisations the world over are coming to accept. More than 60% of business executives now believe offices will be very different postpandemic [1], as hybrid heralds a new era for work. The trouble is, ‘very different’ feels a bit vague when defining the future of your business. To get more specific about the features and challenges that characterise hybrid working, Dr Millard suggests a few key questions that leaders should ask themselves. 1. How do you ensure that ‘horrible hybrids’ aren’t created, particularly when people who are remote in meetings are ignored by people who are
physically together in a room? 2. How do you manage a two-speed company, where the office and the remote workspace operate on different timetables? 3. How do you balance overloading in the office midweek, and underloading on Mondays and Fridays? 4. What strategies should you put in place to ensure that people switch off from work when boundaries have blurred? This isn’t just a problem for home workers – our smart phones tether us back to the office, even if we leave it at the end of a day. Boundaries tend to be more blurred for home workers because they are literally living at work. 5. How do you overcome proximity bias? If people who are seen to be in the office seem to get more chance of promotion and a good appraisal, how do you ensure that ‘invisible’ work done away from the office is more visible to everyone?
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