DECODING THE TOP PRIORITIES FACING HR LEADERS TODAY

The pandemic has made one thing clear: work and location are not as tightly connected as we once thought. People can be productive outside of the office and working from anywhere is becoming the norm, especially for young people. By 2025, the workplace will look profoundly different as flexible work arrangements give rise to the “economy of individuals”. That leads to a world of opportunity where HR leaders can source talent globally.

But it also raises concerns: Who are the employees most likely to thrive in this new environment and how can you help others catch up? How can you measure outcomes instead of presence and working hours? It is time to design what your post-pandemic workplace will look like.

With the advance of mobile technologies, how people live and work has changed dramatically over the past decade. The ability to be connected regardless of location has opened new ways to work and collaborate with colleagues no matter where they are. And while we might think that the pandemic brought a fundamental change in employee expectations, the opposite is true: well before 2020, employees expressed the wish for more flexibility.

When I ran the HR2025 survey in the fall of 2019, around 65% of global respondents

0.3%

Do not know

0.8%

Other

4.1% Only work at an office

6.8% Only work from home/remotely

23.1%% Work anywhere in the world

WHAT WORKING ARRANGEMENT WOULD YOU PREFER? (NOV 2019)

64.8% Flexibility to combine home and office

expressed a need for more flexibility in working location. The same was true for working hours: just 12% wanted to stick to traditional office hours. More than 50% of respondents were looking for flexible working hours. They wanted a better work/ life balance, more in line with their personal needs.

Interestingly enough, those numbers have not changed. Most of the research that was published in 2021 shows numbers that are close to what we found back in 2019. The biggest change: what people wished to achieve by 2025 became reality in 2020.

Being able to decide when and where you work is a strong motivator for productivity, engagement, recruitment and retention. Reverting back to being told to work in the office 9-5 will not go over well, especially not as employees held off on switching jobs. You cannot return to the way it was before the pandemic. Your employees will not accept it. Once economies rebound, we will see employees jump on the opportunity to accept a new job that fits their new lifestyle.

Now that companies are reopening physical locations, the challenge is to carefully think through what this means: for the workforce, for individual employees and for your culture. The rapid transition to remote work was made possible by a digital transformation that was already underway, based on technological advances like mobile, cloud, cybersecurity and devices. There was no time to think beyond supporting employees to remain productive while working from home.

But now it is time to deal with the challenges of remote work. Employees feel overwhelmed, isolated, and out of sight. They miss in-person interaction and collaboration. Managers struggle to lead virtually, keep their teams motivated and employees productive. Which means you need to define your post-pandemic approach to work, including new behaviors, guidelines, and policies. What are your strategies to improve productivity, communication, and collaboration? When do employees need to be in the office (if at all)?

HERE ARE THREE IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED:

• Design for flexibility. Your workforce is not looking for either/or: they want a healthy balance. Use this opportunity to design a workforce approach that combines the best of both worlds: remote and inperson, onsite and offsite, with business resilience in mind (because this pandemic will not be the last). • Apply a working from anywhere mindset and let the activity determine the location of work. Develop a work style in which employees can use different locations related to the various tasks they need to complete throughout the day. • And, especially important, engage your workforce.

Ask your employees and managers to participate. You gave them the responsibility to organise their work from home and trusted them to perform. It would be detrimental to their satisfaction if you took that away. Invite them to share what works and what does not and let them propose solutions. I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the results.

About the Author

ANITA LETTINK is Advisor, Future of Work Speaker and Founder of HRTechRadar.com. She will be making the closing keynote at HR Tech Fest Connect 2021 on May 27 at 3.50pm (SGT).

Technocracy: Leaving no employee behind

Many of us are guilty of thinking the whole world stopped when the pandemic first hit. We all went home, built flatpack desks, cleaned out the coffee machine, and jumped on our first 9am video call of many to come. That is simply not the case.

Singapore recently announced that 75% of staff can return to the workplace at any one time from 5 April 2021 onwards. This signals an inevitable migration back to offices for many, while for others, it will simply be another day at work.

People’s labour is the business – and that business needs to continue in a postCOVID world. Consultancy, social care, and construction are very different industries, but all depend on personal relationships and interactions. But how can this continue, with employees working from everywhere?

People leaders continue to face a big challenge: ensuring employees are working in a way that is safe and successful. Desk or no desk, success hinges on one thing: leaving no one behind technologically.

Bidding farewell to the old way of working

In the old world, rolling out new technology in phases reduced risk in the short term. It also led to dragged out, siloed projects that failed to make an impact. When a business has to move and change fast, we can see what speed is really possible. Now, the question is why we ever wanted phased implementations in the first place. From now on, it is an all-in effort.

However, it is not just speed that will change. The number and seniority of staff with access to new technologies will change too. When a whole workforce needs certain tools immediately, we can see that there is no value in being selective. If only a small number of workers get the goods, we only know how a small part of the workforce can be transformed. The pandemic showed us that technology has to fill in the gaps between people – that means between everyone.

“PEOPLE LEADERS CONTINUE TO FACE A BIG CHALLENGE: ENSURING EMPLOYEES ARE WORKING IN A WAY THAT IS SAFE AND SUCCESSFUL. ”

Creating a technocracy

To work better together, we need democracy in technology. All workers should have access to the same pool of insights, technology and resources. While we can all agree that investment in automation and artificial intelligence (AI) will be key to recovery, we will only see success when these tools are available to all.

Achieving this level of integration, and at speed, will not be easy. But it can be done. Even as the pandemic hit, Fujifilm Business Innovation, the world’s leading provider of document services and printing technologies was digitally ready for the global health crisis. With Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud established across nine markets in Asia Pacific, they were able to lead their way out of the crisis by investing in the tech, the data and processes to enable faster, better decisions. By moving staff data, HR applications, and localised policies into a single, digital platform, the organisation allowed 14,000 employees across the region access to standardised HR processes, and real-time insights into the workforce.

Within Oracle Fusion HCM Cloud, we have also recently introduced Oracle Journeys, designed to help organisations create a one-stop shop for employees as they navigate all aspects of work and complete complex tasks.

As ever, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. However, it is important to start with making the most of the tools and systems you have already. Not all frontline workers will have the same technologies, but almost everyone will carry a smartphone. Think about all the systems they could access from this single device alone – many of us do much of our dayto-day jobs on our phones anyway, from calling clients to paying for goods.

Moving forward together

We are all on our own path. While one business shifts towards a working model that is almost entirely remote, another is readying itself for employee-centric hybrid working, and another focused on bottling up the office atmosphere to take anywhere. Each of these scenarios relies on employees to see success. It is employees who have the potential to innovate and discover a better way of doing things. But to unlock that potential, they need equal access to new technologies, and they need it fast. In the new world of work, there will be no waiting around.

About the Author

DIANA SPALDING is Head of Apps, Oracle Singapore. Join Oracle at HR Tech Fest Connect 2021, which will look to define emerging HR trends and priorities in 2021.