How to look after the wellbeing of dispersed teams.
Are dispersed teams the new normal?
There seems to a real mix of approaches about returning to the office, from full return to no return. Then of course there’s the organisations that are happy for employees to pick.
The companies that are enforcing a full return, I have found, are those that had a strong objection to the idea of flexible working before COVID 19, they measured performance through how hard you worked and the time spent at your desk or they had just simply spent a fortune on new offices! The companies continuing to give employees a choice of where they work have embraced flexible working, which can include working from home, seem to be those who are able to measure output, have seen an improvement in inclusion and no change to productivity which makes them question, “what do we need the office for?”
The great experiment we have just been through where we were all forced to work from home where possible, wasn’t flexible working, it was a forced relocation of our office. That necessity mobilised organisations to put in place the tools to make it work so service could be continued. It’s worth bearing in mind the process was rushed, normal checks and procedures were skipped and the solutions weren’t always optimal, so the results and impacts may have been effected. In my last blog I talked about the individual habits we had picked up and were worth reviewing it’s time to do the same at the organisational level.
The wellbeing of employees is one of the areas that organisations just weren’t able to properly plan for, it was a real sink or swim scenario for employees. That shows through in the sentiment we are hearing about some people loving working from home, they enjoy the ability to be productive in their own space, they feel included and able to contribute to team meetings through conferencing tools and the teams they work in are supportive and social. The ones who haven’t liked being made prisoner in their own home have had a very different experience with feeling that work has encroached on their home life, they have struggled with technology and felt isolated by it and have really missed the social element of being in the office. This polarisation shows in the latest AHRI pulse report where 58% of HR practitioners positive about working from home, 20% neutral and 19% negative. There will be a host of reasons sitting behind these scenarios as well as a people sitting at different places on the spectrum of ‘hate it’ to ‘love it’.
The role of leaders and their human resources or people managers now is to review and investigate where their employees are on the spectrum and discover why that is, before they take further action. We need to examine what worked and why, as well as what didn’t. Only then can a strategy be developed for the future way of working for the organisation once we have this in place we can develop our employee mental fitness and wellbeing plan.
