How to Give Your Employees a Voice in Shaping the Hybrid Future of Work
Today we are going through a pivotal moment that will amount to a huge shift in organizational structure for every business. With a clever and intentional approach to new work policy design leaders can use this unique opportunity to reset corporate culture and values. Aligning new work policy with people’s personal values and individual situations gives companies a perfect vehicle to achieve diversity and inclusion goals.
Co-Designed Hybrid Workplaces
The future of the workplace has to be co-developed closely with employees. We have enough evidence on what happens when leaders simply announce their decisions on new work policies, assuming that the employees are now expected to follow them.
Apple’s prominent case is only one of numerous collective pushbacks to the management’s top down decisions of such kind. Days after Tim Cook sent out a note to Apple employees saying that they would need to return to office on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, a collective response followed.
These are the specific requests from employees:
Such lessons are really worth taking note of before making one-sided decisions…
However, for those who decide to take a more democratic approach to creating new workplace policy, there are still more questions than answers. How can we actually instrument the voice-sharing process? And how can we set it up in a non-distracting format? Finally, how can we ensure that the findings are unbiased and policy makers can execute upon them with confidence?
Why Surveys Are Not Enough
To this day, surveys are the most common and pretty much the only available way to enable employees to communicate their concerns and expectations to the leadership at scale. However, surveys often result in surfacing large amounts of disperse sentiment snapshots, which might be contradictory. Consider the below example – key findings from a survey done by Owl Labs and Global Workplace Analytics:
Full Report Source – https://globalworkplaceanalytics.com/whitepapers
Each of these findings on its own is of great value for policy makers. However, all together, they do not really convey the employees’ common voice on specific needs and expectations. Neither they deliver a solid basis for drafting a hybrid roadmap. There is a lot to be unpacked within each of these statements.
The Power of Combining Survey Data and Digital Data
Over the past year we became equipped with very powerful tools, which really enable us to double down on collecting feedback and understanding it. We can arrive at a very fine grained picture of how things are going, one much more precise than the one we can obtain from asking employees about their experience over the past few days, weeks or even months.
When we pull together self-reported results and algorithmically derived ones, the picture becomes much more cohesive. We get the employees to draw their own workday journey without having to distract from core tasks or having to dedicate extra time to it. Within a matter of a few weeks or even less, management can arrive at a set of personas or employee segments based on the repeatedly spotted patterns around the effects of remote vs on-site work. On that stage, they could really move to the next level of exploration involving more discussion and applying human judgments on delivered insights.
Overcoming Mistrust by Engaging Employees
If the discovery process around the hybrid workplace is set up in such an inclusive and transparent way, it delivers a great basis for conversation among all stakeholders. Fast feedback gives employees encouragement and a sense of being heard right here right now. More than that, in this way the management transmits that they are acting upon the findings straight away, while being extremely transparent with all kinds of internal (or in some cases even external) stakeholders involved.
There is a lot of controversy about privacy and ethics when it comes to collecting employees’ digital data. The reason for such concerns is almost always the same: the data gets to be read by someone other than the employees who actually produce that data. Employees would naturally be opposed to such a big-brother approach. They would also be reluctant to buy into any workplace decisions or solutions driven by data acquired in such non-cooperative way. People would not necessarily know what kind of data has been tracked, who got to analyze this data, if there was any initial hypothesis that analysts were trying to prove with that data and whether the whole research setup was designed in congruence with employees’ individual priorities.
A wiser and more friendly move on this collective path of discovery could be engaging a number of employees from each segment into a more detailed exploration of their specific digital and physical work journey. A workday timeline could be recorded during one or several workdays, and then brought up to display for an open discussion. Such evidence-based debrief would allow companies to empirically evaluate whether the delivered insights make sense.