Guest blog: Getting 'wise' to the future of work: creating humane workplaces after the pandemic - By Dr Harriet Shortt, Associate Professor of Organisation Studies - Bristol Business School

When Work Wise UK asked me to write a blog for this year’s Work Wise Week, it got me thinking about what the word ‘wise’ might mean in the context of work in the current climate – what does it mean to be ‘wise’ about work as we in the UK emerge from the pandemic? Broadly, we know the word wise suggests some level of knowledge, understanding, and to be wise is to have the ability to analyse your experiences and gain insight. So, to be ‘work wise’ right now could not be more important. But what work-based insights have we gained over the course of the last 12 months?

Despite the blur of the last year and all the challenges so many of us have had to juggle – turning our dining rooms into offices, home schooling, and the ongoing concerns for friends and family – we have certainly gained great insight into home-based working. This has, of course, not been a ‘normal’ period of time to be working at home – it’s been a sort of forced social experiment. But it has encouraged all sorts of organisations and knowledge workers to see and understand how working from home works, and for many leadership teams to see that office based work is not always necessary, or indeed, productive.

However, as we move out of the crisis, have we really thought about what positive changes we can make in the workplace (wherever that workplace might be!), and have we really stopped to think about the lessons we have learned that might make life better for our employees? If organisations have spent time meaningfully reflecting on what a better workplace looks like post-Covid, and they’ve consulted their staff on how working practices have changed whilst working at home, then great! And I hope these stories of change and re-organising are shared far and wide. If organisations have not yet pressed paused to think about these things, then now is the time.

One of my concerns about ‘what next’/ ‘post-pandemic’ is that organisations are blindly moving towards hybrid ways of working without thinking about the lived experiences of their workers. In much of my research and consultancy work I focus on helping organisations understand their employee’s lived experiences of space and place at work. I’m a sociologist, and business and management workspace specialist and I help companies think differently and creatively about their spatial change projects. So often I see top-down decisions getting made that lack the authentic staff engagement needed to make long-lasting, impactful change.

It seems to me that what matters now is the power of reflection – organisations and leadership teams, and employees themselves, taking some time out to celebrate achievements over the past year, as well as asking themselves – how has the pandemic changed the way we work? What positives can we take from these new ways of working? What have the challenges been? What have we learned about others and ourselves? Taking the time to re-evaluate and re-frame our thinking about the spaces and places of work, and how these impact working practices and working life will be a valuable part of how we effectively move forward.  

It is important that organisations avoid simplifying the next steps in how and where we work. It is not just about creating a culture that embraces hybrid working practices and expecting employees to split their time between the office and home-based/ remote working. Key to thinking about where we work most effectively (and happily) includes genuine conversations about health (mental and physical), a sense of professional identity, a sense of connection to the organisation, and how we might manage boundaries and negotiate complex family lives. Whether we are working in the office, at home, or in another ‘remote’ working space like a co-working hub, we need to be thinking about making all workplaces humane.

There are lots of conversations about going back to the office and ‘getting back to normal’, and naturally the focus of going back to the office has focussed on a health and safety narrative, but there is a great deal of emphasis in the emerging literature that advocates the dominance of collaborative spaces. Increasingly we are seeing reports of companies ‘losing desks’ and creating far more open, collaborative, fluid spaces for teamwork and creative thinking – and there is great value in this. But what thought have we given to how this might be received by employees? How will these spaces be experienced by people who have got used to working at home alone? What impact will the sensory overload of the busy, united office have on people? How will introverts experience shared spaces, where quiet, separate desks and corners have been removed? Going back to the office should be a transitory process – one that carefully acknowledges our different experiences of the pandemic and the different ways we’re emerging from it. 

There are, of course, lots of conversations about working from home. There is a broad assumption that we have ‘proved’ we can all work from home over the past year, so we are now well equipped to continue to do so. And some great things have happened – not least a positive impact on the environment with far less commuting. But as organisations hastily get rid of desks and office buildings, we might want to consider the complexities of working at home – the experience of which warrants much closer scrutiny. The pandemic has usefully brought into acute focus the various organisational responses to working at home – some have shifted from a ‘presenteeism’ culture, to one of trust and accommodation (great!), whereas others have, unfortunately, increased remote oversight with limited or no sensitivity. The crisis has also highlighted how the mythical balance of work and life is, well, a bit of a myth! Work life balance suggests we are balancing two separate entities, but as we have known for some time, and have certainly seen over the past year, work and life have melded together and can no longer be clearly separated. Largely, now, it is down to us, as individuals to create the physical or mental boundaries between work and life – and at home, this is a complex task! The public nature of work being played out in the private space of home is one that takes managing – just look at how we have crafted (or not) our Teams and Zoom backgrounds to ‘fit’ the audiences we talk to everyday. Working from home means our homes are now ‘contested’ – they have multiple meanings in which competing interests play out – and managing our boundaries between work and life can be exhausting. Organisations will do well to ask how workers’ make and break boundaries between work and life when working at home. How can organisations do more to support working practices in the home? And here I’m not talking about just providing a sit-stand desk and a printer, I’m talking about emotional and considerate support. What practices might we put in place to help us manage those fluid boundaries between work and home more effectively? These are some of the things we should be thinking about. As we head towards National Work from Home Day on Friday the 14th May it would be great to think that organisations could use this day to capture the voices of their staff and, as a workplace community, open up a conversation to talk about what works and what doesn’t when we’re working at home. Using this dialogue could really help to make healthy change so we can all work at home and be compassionate about how we do so.

Being alert to some of the complexities I’ve noted above, I believe, is key to an organisation’s corporate responsibility and their ability to remain people centric. Undoubtedly things have changed over the past year and there have been some important shifts in our thinking about work, workplace, and working lives. Over the coming months I anticipate the many conversations I have had with organisations about how, where, and why they are re-organising will only continue. And at the centre of those conversations will be ‘work wise’ – to work with fresh insight and use the new knowledge and understanding we have gained over the past year to create and maintain more humane workplaces, be they in the office, or at home.

For more on insights from lockdown, see Harriet Shortt and Michal Izak (2020) The Contested Home, in Martin Parker’s edited collection ‘Life After Covid-19 – the other side of the crisis’, published by Bristol University Press.

Harriet can be contacted by email: harriet.shortt@uwe.ac.uk LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Her website is: https://harrietshortt.wordpress.com/about-me/