The Future Workplace: Getting It Right

As the world of work evolves, leaders must decide on workplace design and implement creative strategies around managing people and talent in what, for many companies, is likely to be some form of hybrid model of remote and in-person work involving permanent employees, on-demand resources and digital capabilities. While learning from the past, leaders should look forward when formulating their future workplace vision, building the foundation for their communications, strategy-setting, talent management, and metrics, measures and monitoring. These considerations are ultimately a branding play. An engaged workforce with a strong customer focus and culture that attracts and retains talent provides a powerful foundation for delivering on the organization’s brand promise.

In articulating a compelling future workplace vision, leaders should:

• Define the return on expectation. Address the results that the organization desires based on the transformation investments it intends to make. Teaming and collaboration efficiencies, decision-making velocity, innovation speed-to-market, and customer-facing empowerment are examples.
• Define the structure of the workplace. Focus on questions around structure will help company leaders provide clarity to employees about the evolving workplace and their role in making it successful.
• Understand and sustain corporate culture. Understand the impact of the redesigned workplace on the organization’s culture and determine what must be done to sustain the desired attributes of that culture.
• Focus on the customer experience. Evaluate the experience customers have when they interact with the organization. Understand what customers value most.
• Deliver on shared values. Define the human capital and talent management required to support and ensure the strongest employee experience consistent with the company’s core values.

Effective leaders know that to earn respect, they must give it. If companies are going to come together in the post-pandemic era and be ready for any change that comes their way, their leaders must practice RESPECT each day setting the example.

RESPECT consists of Resilience, Energy, Support, Patience, Ethics, Courage and Trust. The change process is often derailed because one or more of these elements are not given sufficient consideration. Patience is a classic example. Patience is warranted during the change process because it takes time for individuals to gain awareness of and assimilate vision, understand how it impacts them and appreciate how to make a difference given their respective roles. Often, this awareness and understanding — and the resulting buy-in — are only achieved after many iterations of communication and reinforcement efforts.