There was no precedent to the speed and scale of workplace transformation that was brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic across the world, forcing the largest work from home operation in history. Workplaces became virtual overnight as companies implemented flexible, innovative, and pragmatic solutions to enable business continuity. Remote working became a norm, with a recent survey on Service and Support functions* showing almost 90% of service leaders forecasting 20% – 80% of their workforce will be working from home two years from now.
The sudden embrace of remote working – with both its pros and cons – has made businesses more open to collaborate over distance, creating the opportunity to extend networks and nurture new customer relationships on a global scale. Time-zone sensitivities have been minimized, with video conferencing and virtual meetings bridging the gap to meet business urgencies. Technology companies are now more than ever equipped to anticipate and respond to seismic shocks across global markets by successfully balancing employee wellbeing and client data security. Working from home is not a continuity plan anymore – it is a business model.
So as we settle into alternative remote working and on-site shift arrangements, we are also becoming more aware of how employees are adjusting to their new work environment. There is a growing void in the workplace culture that companies have painstakingly nurtured over the past few decades. White board sessions and coffee breaks are not the same; we are missing out on casual, unplanned, yet important conversations with colleagues that add great depth to our workplace relationships. While pre-pandemic bias against remote working models seems to be unfounded given that business performance has mostly remained consistent, emerging gaps in basic physical, mental, and relational needs of employees are challenging the sustainability of this new, virtual workplace.
Making the work you do more visible Employees strive to feel engaged, connected, and most importantly, appreciated for the work they do remotely. Beyond investing in the right ‘intelligent workplace’ technologies, companies are also investing more time to discover new ways of recognizing work and re-building relationships. Workplace culture must evolve through a new employee value proposition to make the remote working experience thrive. Companies cannot simply ‘recover’ – they must seize the opportunity to do things differently and transform into a future-ready workplace.
Virtusa is an early adopter of Working Out Loud (WOL) – a method of sharing work, building relationships and networking with a purpose. Having carried out a number of WOL sessions with both potential and existing Virtusa employees as far back as 2016, we have enabled our teams to be more receptive to new channels of collaboration and feedback. While maintaining the highest security protocols to ensure intellectual property protection and client data safety, we are breaking with orthodoxies of how a ‘workplace’ is perceived beyond its physical infrastructure, and changing the way we work overall – moving from a hierarchy to a wire-archy.
WOL encourages individuals to make their work more visible to peers and teams, nurturing an environment of open communication, trust, early feedback, recognition and visibility. For companies, it means that employees can tap into what a company collectively knows at speed and at scale. It unlocks access to expertise and ideas, creates a much larger network, and expands employee potential by developing habits and a mindset that can be applied to any goal. This leads to making better decisions, avoiding the same mistakes and most importantly, innovating more quickly.
The role of adaptive leadership during this challenging transition becomes crucial. The need of the hour is the ability to achieve a level of healthy and honest openness across the company, nurturing a culture of candor, truth and transparency – all overarching behaviors of a team, rather than siloed groups of individuals. The radical transparency in business decisions and direction that we have adopted is helping to build lasting trust among teams, and once we move beyond the fear of transparency, it truly becomes a powerful tool to unify and increase speed of operations.
Leaders must exemplify, instill and navigate behavioral changes while continuing to monitor employee sentiment and satisfaction in the new hybrid workplace. Articulating and listening is the foundation to transparency, and leaders must sharpen their sensitivity to behavioral signals in realtime to meet new workplace realities. Candor plays an important role in ensuring employees can communicate with leadership, and are able to do so honestly, while also constructively challenging each other openly. We must reimagine our organizational architecture and enable multichannel engagement for employees to rebuild such social ties.
The right balance of visibility, transparency, candor coupled with modern work practices such as WOL can set the foundations of a new, virtual workplace which is ultra-connected and high performing at scale in the face of the new normal.
*Future of Work From Home for Service and Support Employees, Gartner, February 2021
