People are tired
Last week I was leading a webinar about the 12 Design Principles of Telework. The webinar was aimed at HR professionals. And this is what they told me:
People are getting tired. People miss the fun part of work. People feel emotionally depleted. People are losing their attachment to the organization they work for. Leaders cannot compensate the lack of connection.
Many people have been out of the office for months. And they can only return on a limited scale or when they really need to. Some organizations are prolonging telework or are making it the standard mode of work. And I get that. I totally get that. It’s probably the right thing to do in a world that is taken hostage by this virus. But it is not sustainable.
The shift towards 100% Telework is not sustainable.
Not only people are tired, they even start to resist the corona rules. In France 26% of workers refuse to wear masks, even when it is obligatory. People seem to be less concerned by the risks and want to go on with their lives. Only 30% of Belgians are motivated to respect the corona rules. One of the reasons is that corona rules have been imposed in an inconsistent way. Companies have done a better job by having clear rules within the walls of the organization. But outside of the organization there has been a lot of confusion, inconsistent application of the rules, bad examples of senior members of society. This, in combination with the duration of the pandemic leads towards a decrease of intrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation is dwindling.
The Lost year?
I have called 2020 a lost year because many organizations cannot compensate for the losses. And many will go bankrupt. It’s not clear when the economy can bounce up, probably in a different shape. And so leaders have to navigate a wild sea full of icebergs without knowing exactly the course. This is truly VUCA.
Do I exaggerate? I don’t think so. Sectors like tourism, events, culture, … are suffering. TUI reported a loss of 1,4 billion Euros. Even the digital giants like booking.com who announced a 25% staff reduction, and Airbnb who did the same, are heavily affected by this unprecedented crisis and seem to struggle for survival. Other organizations are not affected at all. If the organization is in the right corner of the ring, it might grow through the crisis. Apple’s value has exploded and is now worth 2 Trillion dollars. Stock exchanges react to every good or bad news about the corona crisis and its holy grail (the vaccine).
What we do know is that unemployment is going to soar. As governments are sliding into the deepest debt crisis ever, they will need to change spending patterns ending furloughs and temporary unemployment schemes. Organizations will have a harder time to make ends meet and the need to reduce costs will hit the workforce. And maybe governments should stop that support sooner rather than later. Because the more we protect the workforce from the inevitable consequences of economic turmoil, the less they will take responsibility and learn how to survive and thrive in a hybrid world. We know that people hang on to what they have and do not take action.
The UK is not prepared for this, as The Economist writes. In Germany there are 10 to 20% fewer new companies. We know that new companies create the employment of the future. Corona has stopped that. The world of work has been shaken up, as the ILO states. The new labor market will look like the old one, but three trends will be reinforced: (1) an increased digitization, (2) and increased flexibility and (3) an increased inequality as a consequence of (1) and (2). The future of work is hybrid and agile.
Hybrid & Agile?
The future of work is hybrid and agile. There is not one answer. There are no clear lines. We will have to organize ourselves in a blurry, fuzzy context. And leaders are torn between caring for the safety and health of people, and bringing results to the table, between kindness and compassion and the hard laws of economic survival. These paradoxes have always been there, but in relatively stable environments they are easier to handle. The world has changed overnight and many organizations are running on borrowed time.
Hybrid and agile also means nobody can stay passive. McKinsey depicts 5 bold moves for consumer companies to survive in this crisis. Courage is needed. Waiting and hoping that this thing will pass is not the right move. Many companies have to reinvent there processes and the successful ones are doing it. Tinkering will not suffice. We are standing before a period of massive exploration that questions the foundations of our economy and society. Companies are going to go in warp-speed to be able to survive. And of course, organizations that practiced the idea of constant change have an advantage. They have rejected bad habits, fought the fossilization of structures and any complacent behavior of their leaders.
Companies are going to go in warp-speed to be able to survive.
The acceleration of change poses threats to the one and only true asset of a company, its trustworthiness. As AirBnB’s founder, Brian Chesky, announced the layoffs, he was crying. He showed that he was personally touched by what has happened to his start-up travel company that has disrupted both the incumbents and the disruptors in the hotel and travel business. Companies that have been able to build a family like culture will suffer the most because they are learning now how to survive in a world where there is no cash to burn, no hockystick growth, no customers like before and no hope of a speedy recovery.
Both organizations and their employees need to cope with the apparent contrasts, the conflicts, the collusions between values and money, trustworthiness and decisiveness. They have to become ambidextrous, in more than one way. And this is also the case for the employees, freelancers and other people who are fidgeting in a temporarily overcrowded labor market.
Ambidextrous Behavior
Hybrid and agile means that we need to be able to shift the mode of operation between physical and digital, between home and the office, between online and off-line, between caring and saving. The ambidexterity and the speed that comes with it is something we are not prepared for.
We need to be effective in all the extreme positions of the spectrum of behavior and choose the behavior mode that serves the purpose best. That alone, is kind of schizophrenic and might arouse feelings of uncertainty, confusion and despair. Gone is what’s left of the predictability, the certainties.
An example. When even leaving the house to go to a customer becomes a risky business, people will need to decide what to do. An online sales pitch is not the same as a sales pitch in the office. Sales people will have to be able to do both. And when unexpected events happen, they need to be able to shift from physical to digital and vice versa. A good salesperson might become a mediocre one, because of that shift that requires flexibility in a hybrid world.
We could think that this will make people become aware and alive. It also makes them anxious and tired. Being ambidextrous is much more energy consuming if you’re not used to it.
We must come to terms that we have lost a lot of our survival skills after having been pampered for more than a century in the collective work houses (factories and offices) where autonomy and independent decision making were skillfully eradicated. Scientific management and other monstrous approaches have not helped to prepare humanity for global calamities.
All this will impact the strategies of organizations. People who have to contribute will have to be able to cope with autonomy, take more initiatives and carry more responsibility. Leaders will need to abdicate and give more space to the people who are scattered around the organization. Their role changes fundamentally. Leadership does not disappear but its quality will need to change, shifting towards more supportive, servant, sustainable behavior.
All this is more than reskilling. This is a complete makeover of the workforce.
The question remains if we are up to that. Most people were or still are not prepared for this. We need to design the solutions to help them cope with the transitions in both a strategic and an empathic way.
And there’s always one golden rule:
If there’s humanity in business, there is business in humanity.
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David Ducheyne is the founder of Otolith. Otolith helps leaders and organizations deal with change by focusing on human behavior. One of the observations that David made is that strategies never fail, but people do. When dealing with this crisis organizations have to rethink many aspects of business. Tinkering at the surface will make it worse. Rethinking the organization is what needs to be done. Otoliths proprietary change approach Audeio helps doing just that. You can contact David via mail or through the website.
