New ways of working - some crucial questions

Organisations will be facing decisions about ways of working as offices are available to use again. A few have announced that they will stick entirely to home-working, many will look to a blended approach and some will go back to the way things were before as much as they can.

There is a great window of opportunity for leaders to review the way people work. Many have discovered, through the experience of the last few months, that flexible ways of working don’t impact on productivity in ways they might have anticipated. And there will be many leaders attracted to the cost savings they can see through not populating a big office again.

But it is a complex situation and there are many questions leaders need to consider. Here are just a few:

· What do we need to consider differently for people’s health and wellbeing? Physical and emotional? How do we manage different levels of anxiety about returning to the workplace? How can we ensure people have healthy working conditions in their homes?

· What changes are we seeing in our culture? What is better? How might we take the opportunity to change an undesirable culture? What has been lost? How do we achieve and sustain the culture we’d like?

· How can we ensure that ad-hoc, informal conversations can still take place? How can we sustain high-performing teams who may not be in the same physical space? How will we build rapport?

· How do we keep each other informed? Which channels are best for what messages? What happens to frequency? What will be our good practice?

· How do we work together as a senior team? What commitments do we need to make to each other? How will we remain visible to our people?

When people are responding to crisis, they will tend to knuckle down and do what’s necessary to get through it. Successful working practices over the last few months may not be sustainable in business as usual. I hope senior teams will get around the table (or at least on a screen together) to sound out the challenges, risks, benefits and approaches to changing working practices. I’m hoping I’ll be able to facilitate a few of these discussions to help leaders navigate the option they face and make informed and inclusive decisions.