On Friday 7th April we hosted our first Pivoting in a Pandemic webinar. A panel comprising Nick Chiarelli (Head of Trends, Unlimited Group), Shane O’Donoghue (Director, Nelson Bostock Unlimited), Henry Davies (Founder, 106 Comms) and Paul Osgood (Global Head of Internal Communications, Clifford Chance) discussed how the workplace is changing in the light of the Covid-19 outbreak.
How is Coronavirus changing the workplace?
While Covid-19 didn’t create remote working, it has accelerated its adoption, even if only temporarily. Organisations have been forced to work, act and think differently and the new rules of the road are being created “as we go”.
For many, the priority was around ensuring the seamless continuation of functionality but as we’ve moved into weeks 3 & 4 of the new landscape, the emphasis has started to shift to the broader human and societal perspective.
Redefining WFH as Welfare for Humans
It’s vital to recognise that ‘Working from home’ will require employers to show a heightened “Welfare For Humans”.
“For our communications during this pandemic, we have chosen to focus on three key principles. 1 The wellbeing of our people is paramount 2. We have a responsibility to act in ways that do not contribute to the spread of the virus 3. We should continue to deliver high levels of service to our clients. And our priorities are absolutely in that order. Everyone is aware of this. Therefore, they are operating on these principles to take the organisation forwards in a way that is caring and professional.”
– Paul Osgood
Remote working is a change in mindset that is not merely about the location in which we work. One of the major changes underway is a review of the culture of presenteeism. A persistent factor in our working lives. Right now, relatively early on in the Covid-enforced rise of remote working, we are hearing and seeing lots of anecdotes of micro-management of WFH, almost like the remote version of presenteeism, with the inference that employers don’t trust workers to get on with it. Not everyone is acting this way. However, Vodafone’s CEO was cited as saying that they “need to manage by output and not by proxy”. This is surely a sign of changes to come.
We are all getting information from multiple sources. Whether that’s a twitter feed of a virologist fighting the pandemic in a hospital, family WhatsApp groups or government press conferences. Accordingly, we need to ask where our communications fit in and if they add value to target stakeholders. People who could be suffering anxiety caused by message overload. Organisations must also ensure the visibility of their leaders, to both employees and externally. Hence the reason political approval ratings change in a crisis. It is because people want visible leaders.
“I think the availability of leaders is really important to people feeling reassured. The fear is not just of the virus, it’s also around ‘where is this organisation going?’ from a business and economic perspective. Having intentions, even if you don’t have all the answers about what will happen, is important.”
– Henry Davies
The competitive advantage is about being an organisation that works ‘for people’. The challenge is to accommodate people’s different circumstances and be prepared to keep doing this. The business must flex as it goes, identifying issues as they arise and finding solutions that work. For example, there’s the issue of holidays: how do you encourage people to take something akin to a holiday at a time when they can’t go anywhere? It was also discussed whether it might be in an organisation’s interests to legitimise certain counter-intuitive WFH activities. For example, giving people time to work on their own networks to strengthen their mood.
Re-evaluating the workforce
The lockdown has implications for working styles, but Covid-19 has also triggered a reassessment of the workforce. We’ve all become used to the idea of “key workers” and Twitter was awash with tweets on this: traders, bankers, and such may not be our key workers at this time, no matter how much they drive economic growth. Consequently, it is possible that this crisis may introduce changes in how we interact with each other. For example:
- A new respect for public services (health, teaching) and logistics (deliveries, IT infrastructure, etc)?
- New protocols for personal interaction and hygiene institutionalised into the workplace?
- The emphasis on kindness that we are seeing across society right now playing out in the workplace and across corporations generally. Businesses need to display true human kindness, which can be as simple as having your boss saying, it’s ok we have your back. Coming out of this, organisations will be pressured to allow their employees to give more of their time to helping society.
Black Swan events: Crisis as a driver of accelerated change
COVID-19 represents an unprecedented challenge to global governments, health services, corporations and individuals alike. Many have likened the current situation to one of Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan events, something that couldn’t have been foreseen but the truth is that some businesses either had contemplated the possibility of such disruption or were set up in a way that allowed for more fleetness of foot in responding to change.
Anecdotally, there have been some great demonstrations of such agility. We’ve seen 16,000 call centre staff now working from home for one business, Unilever sending laptops and dongles to all staff quickly. But, of course, we’ve also seen some issues like a bank that has to share staff access to systems because they don’t have the capacity for everyone to be on at once. The denial of technology requirements has come home to roost a bit in some organisations.
“The Economist recently described it as a grey rhino, rather than black swan. It’s two tonnes and if you don’t move it’ll gore you! Pandemics happen regularly, with varying severity. We’ve been warned about them and the WEF pandemics on its top 10 risks this year. On the financial side, loose monetary policy has been blowing up a giant stock market bubble. It hasn’t supported the real economy, so anyone saying they couldn’t have predicted this has their head in the sand. We’re also ignoring the obvious danger of climate change and economic inequality. We must be a lot more mindful of grey rhinos. As opposed to looking behind us and saying oh that was a Black Swan, no one can see them coming. We need to hold ourselves, business leaders and politicians accountable for the big things in front of them and what they are doing about them.”
– Shane O’Donoghue
What is certainly clear is that those organisations that didn’t have a degree of flexibility built into their systems and people are struggling now. They will have to catch up quickly, so they aren’t left behind. Yet trying to catch up while in lockdown is difficult, if not impossible. As soon as we come out of lockdown we can surely expect a wave of catch up business activity as those organisations who struggled to adapt to Covid-19 seek to futureproof themselves against any recurrences.
Temporary versus permanent change
Some people have claimed that “the world will never be the same again” after Covid-19. However, others have taken the view that this is temporary. They feel fundamental consumer needs don’t change that much. Within a year or two it’ll be business as usual.
It might be naïve to expect a new reality. But it is reasonable to imagine a post-pandemic working world that has permanently changed in some respects. Here are just a few of the changes our panel feel will “stick”:
- The timeframes within which we now expect things to happen will contract even further – if we could deliver under pressure during the pandemic, why not afterwards? Leaders and their teams will be under pressure to continue to deliver.
- Trust between employers and employees will be strengthened, as employees will be in a more powerful position to ask for things that they’re experiencing now. This will put the onus on organisations to be more agile. Subsequently, they must support ways of working that enable both wellbeing and productivity.
- Leaders must show they’re in it too. Showing real empathy and being transparent, accessible and communicative will be one of the key differentiators of strong leadership.
“I’m of the school that says this has completely changed the game when it comes to WFH and how it could change people’s lives.”
– Paul Osgood
What next?
Technology has been and continues to be, crucial to adapting to the business impact of Covid-19. Explore our second webinar here, looking at the role of tech in connecting individuals with each other and with businesses.
This article was written by Nick Chiarelli, Head of Trends at Unlimited Group, and originally appeared on the Unlimited Group news page.
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Pivoting in Crisis: The role of technology
Pivoting in Crisis: Brand Reputation