Back to Work with Attitude
As the virus subsides in the face of vaccines and our great desire to return to normalcy, millions of Americans are facing a return to work. More likely than not, they will experience a new version of normalcy as to what it means to “go to work”.
Many organizations found they could get their work done without having employees physically together all the time in an office setting. Employees produced quite ably from home, and some even found happiness with being able to work from there, or at least under the circumstances of a pandemic.
Now, some companies and staff have begun to transition back to their former office centric world. But many have begun to conceive of a new workplace, one where “work at home” has a more central place in a new order. Some because of employee happiness, some because of the realization that expensive offices can be downsized or re-conceptualized, and others for their own reasons.
The notion of working from home or flexible hours or the like is not really a new idea. Many organizations began to walk this road well before the pandemic, even decades ago. Many have found it to be a worthy experiment.
The Washington Health Foundation was among those entities. We grew out of a flexible and positive workplace culture within the Washington State Hospital Association. As we grew and became independent, at one point to over 50 employees and in a downtown Seattle office, we realized that the nature of our work allowed us to think more creatively about how to structure it on a day to day basis.
We never entirely nixed the office, keeping it in place for team or other meetings and for those staff members who preferred the structure of an office setting, or whose work required it. But we began to shrink its size and rethink its role in our approach. Individual offices got much smaller, and sharing was common, even for the CEO. We invested in technology that let staff work from wherever.
It wasn’t as simple as just sending people off to work at home. We strengthened our coordination of work even as we freed up how staff might engage in the work. We designated a day a week as “office day”- in our case it was Wednesday- when staff were expected to be in the office for much of the day to build teamwork and relations with their colleagues. This was a day when we would do our work closely together, and tie emotional and intellectual bonds to the collective work of the organization.
There were doubters about this approach- then and now. An essential rationale for us was that it was a positive approach for our staff. It allowed us to attract and retain top shelf talent, even when in our later years, it became more difficult for us to compete on the basis of compensation. Our premise was also that this approach, when done right, would not just maintain our high productivity, but increase it. I hoped with more home runs than singles or doubles. It did.
The most important element underlying the approach, though, was the value of “trust”. That is, rather than continue the centuries long tradition of management theory that presumed workers could not be trusted, we believed that they could and should be. Our thinking was that they were our most important asset, and if liberated with a belief that they can find their best selves with a flexible work approach, they will do even better.
Every once in awhile, we found some one who didn’t fit with this approach. When we experienced this, some managers would suggest we needed to change our approach and watch our staff more closely and add controls. My view was that this was the real test- and that we should ignore the marginal downsides of an occasional bad fit. Never did I feel this was a bad choice.
I later took this management approach to the setting of a state hospital association in Arizona. Again I encountered skeptics, but stuck to the philosophy and program. It was one of the essential ingredients to a successful turn around of this organization.
All to say that I think organizations should now embrace the opportunity that Covid has provided them. Now, of course, this doesn’t work for all companies, or staff. It is hard to imagine a hospital, for example, being able to provide patient care without staff on site to provide care to their patients. There are many other such examples, and some people who need more structure in an office setting because of their home environment or how they are wired.
These other factors don’t take away from the most essential need for the modern workplace- to value trust. It is a head scratcher to me when I still see some companies assuming the worst of their people. There have been recents reports that this is indeed the underlying belief of some who created the largest companies in the world. One can only assume that they expect the worst of their customers or clients too.
We see this conflict in belief in the rest of our world- a sea of information that reinforces negative views of our fellow humans. Perhaps crashing through the distrust assumption within organizations can not only unlock companies that have been held back, but also the negative world about us. It would be nice to look back someday at Covid19 and see some essential good that has come from it. We are not finding it in the political reaction to the pandemic. Perhaps how we work and value each other at the workplace will be it.