Opinion: Remote working ... what’s next?
Many of our municipal clients sent staff to work from home in mid-March. It was a Herculean task to get people equipped and technology in place to support this move. We are impressed and massive kudos to everyone involved.
While we know that not everyone was happy, we have heard that many people began to realize that they actually quite liked working from home. Productivity in teams has undeniably gone up and staff have clearly enjoyed the flexibility that home working has brought.
6 months later with lots learned, what does the future hold for municipal working environments? When COVID-19 finally retreats, as we all hope it does sooner rather than later, is everyone going to head back to the office like nothing happened? Or have we crossed a point of no return from which we will never go back?
A recent stat from Google employees caught our eye. You know Google, that company famous for the foosball tables, onsite restaurant quality cafeterias, at-desk-massages and dry cleaning pickups. Yes, that Google. The Google with perhaps the best offices in the world.
When asked recently, 92% of Google staff indicated that they would prefer to continue to work from home in future rather than return to the office.
Municipalities certainly don’t provide office space or working conditions that rival Google's, and while municipal employees are not Googlers, you can imagine that a similar sentiment to that held by Googlers will exist across all industries.
In fact many companies are already asking employees to move into more permanent home working arrangements; remote working is becoming more widely a standard in the tech world - with companies like DropBox and Twitter becoming remote-first working companies.
Around the GTA, home sales in cottage country are booming as people look to leave their City homes and move to the country where they can work remotely. All they need is an internet connection.
While many are already deep into a second wave with new restrictions coming,, which will inevitably delay return to work plans, Leadership teams that we’ve been talking to are thinking hard about their options and their approach to return to work.
Of course, the potential to work remotely represents many opportunities for employees and their employers.
For the employer, attracting the most talented employees from across Canada, instead of within 30km of your office is a massive opportunity to hire the best talent. Retaining your best employees by offering a more flexible, life-friendly working environment, and defending against other companies that do, and of course, reducing office space costs are other attractions.
For the employee, work life balance, a recovery of time previously taken up with long commutes, and a more humane way of working with an increased ability to focus is something that many staff are clearly enjoying. There are also questions and challenges ahead which will need to be tackled.
Do we go fully remote, or do staff work a few days in the office and a few from home each week? For those that provide face to face service, how do we handle the equity of that? How do we manage flexible and personal space in such an arrangement? We will need to digitize our business processes, eliminating paper based processes, introducing digital signatures, approvals and payments.
We will need to learn how to manage remote teams, and how to measure productivity in non-invasive, respectful ways - surveilling your staff is disrespectful and inappropriate. We will need to work out how to collaborate asynchronously and how to share knowledge more effectively (good documentation, at which we have been collectively terrible at, is going to be key).
Some roles will obviously need more together and face time in the real, not virtual world than others. Dealing with the ergonomics issues of home workspaces will be key (sore necks, backs and eyes are becoming a bigger and bigger thing) and should be the responsibility of the employer, as will dealing with situations where staff don’t have suitable home working conditions.
We will have to get better at managing mental health, isolation and our apparent tendency to overwork (not, shockingly, to spend our work days on the sofa in front of Netflix). Burnout is real and no joking matter - we will need to figure out how to deal with this. Managing or recreating effective watercooler moments, serendipitous work connections and team building are other new challenges to be faced.
All of these questions notwithstanding, it is our strong belief that, although unfortunately under terrible circumstances, remote and flexible working is finally having its mainstream moment. It’s here to stay and progressive organizations should embrace this way of working in a curious, open and learning fashion.
Just as Covid presented us with new reality challenges to deal with, so too will post-covid.
We’re going to be watching closely to see how municipalities respond to this opportunity. We’ll be hoping they will be progressive, looking to the future and embracing change, not regressively looking to the comforts of the past and a return to the office as normal.
We are a remote-first company and unsurprisingly are unabashed fans and proponents of remote working. We wrote about our remote working experiences in a previous post which you can read here