Experiences: Pandemic will reshape the workplace
Now that Covid-19 vaccines are finally here, employers have begun looking ahead to an eventual full return to the workplace in the coming months. But even though their offices may look exactly as they did last spring, they will find that things will be very different.
The pandemic has sped up macro trends in consumer behavior, business management, and hiring. That, along with insights gained by months of adjustments to work roles, schedules, routines, and priorities, have prompted employers and employees to reconsider many default assumptions about what they do along with how and why they do it.
Predict flexibility and safety
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Experts predict flexibility and safety will be top priorities that could bring, for instance, a rethinking of the five-day work week and the way employees earn and spend vacation time. And organizations will likely give more attention to employees’ mental health care, getting a closer look at the daily personal pressures their staffs face.
“It’s the Next Normal we’re headed to, not ‘back to normal,’ and that, for a lot of companies, is going to feature changes in work practices, changes in employee expectations of their employer, and companies learning from this duress about what they can do to be more effective and efficient and attractive employers,” said Joseph B. Fuller, professor of management practice and co-founder of Managing the Future of Work project at HBS.
One year into the pandemic, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the federal regulatory agency that oversees private sector workplace safety in all 50 states, had not established national COVID safety standards, leaving individual companies and industries to set their own protocols and policies.
Ashley V. Whillans, a behavioral psychologist at HBS who recently surveyed 44,000 remote workers in 44 U.S. states and 88 countries to study how the pandemic is affecting workplace attitudes and behaviors. That’s just the beginning, the pandemic has jolted the foundation of a workplace model that had been relatively unchanged since the late 1920s: employees traveling from home to a workplace five days a week, between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., to complete their obligations.
Organizations that offer employees the ability to work flexible workday schedules, to choose when and how they come into the office, and that have adopted increased COVID safety precautions score highest with their own workers, Whillans said her COVID survey data shows. So as employers prepare to reopen, they would be wise to maintain and emphasize work flexibility and safety regulations and allow staff to come back to the workplace at their own discretion.
Mental health
One effect of the pandemic that will persist long after businesses reopen is employees’ mental health, Whillans and Fuller say. “We are observing high levels of burnout and stress,” even among workers who still appear to be high functioning, said Whillans. With the current economic recession, employees are “disincentivized to speak openly and honestly about their stress and frustration” out of fear, or they cope by minimizing its effect with comparisons with others who seem to be worse off.
“Organizations are likely to miss thinking about well-being as one of the decision-making factors that goes into whether they open and how they open,” Whillans said. “I would really underscore the importance of organizations not overlooking employees’ health and safety concerns because burnt-out employees are going to be less productive and more likely to quit.”
Pandemic experiences will reshape the workplace. Bulwark Hero can lower anxiety if employers don’t mandate vaccines.
