In the pandemic, the working style changed at a pace like never before. Within weeks, companies had to adjust to a completely different working model and had to empower their employees to work from home. While working from home or video conferences were an exception before Covid, they became part of everyday working life for many information workers. People’s homes became small office spaces and the borders between private and business life started to blur. Traditional work styles were questioned and people changed their thoughts about business trips, in-person meetings and after-work events. But in many companies, there still seems to be uncertainty, or at least caution, whether employees are capable of satisfying productivity expectations at home.
How can we overcome this uncertainty, start to respect and trust our employees, and transform from new normal into a healthy and sustainable new work?
New Work
Let’s create a common understanding of what new work really is. It’s more than just fancy office furniture, donuts and healthy smoothies. It’s not just working remotely instead of traditionally in the office. It’s about a radical change of our working culture, the way we understand work and the definition of good work. Creating an environment where we work together more productively and let work strengthen people, aligning work with private life, breaking up knowledge silos, freedom of the workspace, a learning culture and digitalization itself are important aspects of new work. The quality of work shouldn’t be measured by time spent but by the results delivered, and flexibility in time management and working location should be achieved.
At parti studios, we understand new work as a range of different values and provide a framework for a healthy work environment to achieve the best possible transformation.
Culture
It all starts with openness. The starting point for openness varies at each company, but it has been proven that psychological safety successfully supports openness. Providing a safe space for employees amplifies openness to change. Comparing start-ups to traditional mid-size companies, start-ups are more likely to try new things and live with the uncertainty of the outcome. This is widely known as a trial-and-error approach. Trial and error delivers fast results by investing just as much as needed to generate a measurable outcome. Several ideas can be tested and the best one can evolve into a product, while all errors generate lessons learned. Empowering employees to interpret errors positively, and to see value in constructive criticism in any direction, creates a safe space for change. Seeing change as an opportunity can arise from a safe space where the working culture accepts errors. Organizations that support psychological safety will foster trust.
To encourage organizations to start changing their culture, a common method is to reflect on what has been achieved over the last years and how the company behaved during crises like the pandemic. Get a comprehensive picture of lessons learned, solutions implemented, constraints and impacts in your organization. The learning experiences of the last months or even years are valuable and should be used systematically. The employees are the experts in your working environment — mobilize and use their knowledge to advance the cultural transformation. With a systematic reflection framework, the intrinsic motivation of each and every one thrives towards a continuously learning and improving organization.
This leads to the next important value organizations need: time to learn. Every change takes time, and even with the pandemic accelerating some changes, people need space to learn, adopt and create their own path to overcome their individual hurdles. At first it sounds obvious, but it’s not as easy as it seems. As markets changed over the last years, companies face more uncertain and challenging competition, which demands a lot of speed and agility to remain competitive. Most companies translate that into high efforts of the employees along the value chain and downgrade the need for internal learning and transformation. As long as the operating model of the organization remains the same, speed and agility can’t rise — they remain equal unless more effort is invested. By changing the operating model and providing time for the learning and adoption journey, the organization gains the agility and speed to fulfill market needs and follow trends.
“The organization can only transform if each individual works on themselves.”
Companies need to concentrate on individuals to succeed with the transformation. While historically management teams, team leads or project leads felt a need for control, new work shifts the responsibility from a single person to the whole team. People share the responsibility and should be empowered to use this newly granted responsibility to work self-determined. Strict rules and responsibilities from past centuries hinder employees from exploring and using their strengths and developing themselves to gain even better results. At the same time, it’s management’s responsibility to create possibilities for those employees who need more guidance and help mastering the change. By composing diverse teams with various interdisciplinary skills, team members will benefit and learn from each other. These skills should complement each other to unlock hidden potential. Encourage employees to enhance their interdisciplinary skills to foster a continuous learning and development approach.
Technology
Having the individuals in mind, companies need to create a technological framework to work in and to collaborate with colleagues. Technology itself is seen as one of the key drivers of new work. A good framework of tools to handle the tasks all information workers face is one key aspect of succeeding with a new work transformation. It’s not necessarily important to have all the fancy collaboration tools with the latest features, but to have a toolset capable of serving the needs of the employees. It’s common to see technology as a chance, but don’t underestimate the risks. If the toolset is new or not well defined, it can become a hurdle the organization needs to overcome. The company needs to understand the degree of adoption of the framework within the organization and plan how to achieve a good adoption level. With diverse teams, reverse mentoring can be a chance to connect employees of different ages and create the benefit of learning from each other. Use best practices to provide value that can be reused across the whole organization and establish a learning platform with tailor-made content for the company.
With a framework of tools and a strong definition of the use cases for each tool, companies benefit from a technological basis to support the transformation. It’s also necessary to have the courage to shut down tools if they don’t fit the organization anymore.
“There is no one-size-fits-all model.”
Conclusion
Every organization has to deal with its individual challenges in the market and, above all, its own level of maturity within new work. There is no one-size-fits-all model, so organizations must respond to the needs of all types of workers. The transformation to a new work model enhances the commitment of employees and promotes self-determination and a sustainable, holistic learning culture. A balance between innovation and efficiency must be found in the company. Free spaces must be available and room for innovation, suggestions and solutions must be created.
Without the technical possibilities, new work quickly reaches its limits: collaboration, networking and agile project development can only be accelerated by suitable tools and technical foundations. From social media and collaboration tools to project management solutions and financial software, digitization empowers employees to network, relieves them of administrative work and thus creates time, flexibility and freedom to focus on the tasks that really lead to success. New work and technology belong together: collaboration and networking for digital, effective, time- and location-independent work design.