The past year has been like no other. All of us have been impacted in some way by the COVID. I am luckier than most, my life has hardly changed. One thing is different though, this year, a third of my work has been evaluating the impact of the pandemic on employees.
Thinking about the research I’ve done, and the research I’ve seen, these are my conclusions:
In general, office-based desk workers enjoy working from home. In a post-COVID world, they want to work from home more often than they did before. But, this doesn’t mean they want to work mostly, or solely, from home. People miss face to face interactions with their colleagues and the social aspects of the workplace. But, in every piece of research I’ve done (and most of the research I’ve seen), there are two groups of employees:
- A majority who want to spend most of their time working from home. Commute time is one big factor for this group.
- A significant minority who want to spend most of their time working from an office. Social isolation is a big factor for this group.
I have no doubt flexible working is here to stay. It was already gathering pace before COVID.
We have all experienced long-term home working during the pandemic and it’s different from employer defined ‘flexible working’ of the past. The new definition of flexible working is wide and it varies from person to person. This will be a challenge for employers. I’m glad to be freelance and not managing a team with different expectations of what ‘back to work’ means. I predict a complicated transition to a new way of working. I think the most successful employers will be the ones who design a future workplace to meet the changed needs, wants and expectations of all their employees.
Will ‘employee experience’ become as important for companies as ‘customer experience’ is for retailers? I think it might.
