The battle between Productivity, Safety, and Comfort.
The coronavirus has forced American businesses to face challenges they did not expect and, in many cases, were not prepared for. With quarantines and stay-at-home orders beginning in March of 2020 and creeping into the third and fourth quarters of 2020, businesses have had to quickly shift much of their operations from conference rooms to conference calls and cooperate offices to living rooms. As the CDC, WHO, and other health organizations provide guidelines for when and how workers that need to return to the office can safely do so, businesses may not stop to consider the benefits of waiting until safety measures have been lifted completely to bring their employees back.
This article was written from a mix of personal observation, research, and training. If your employees sit at the computer more than they interact with customers or perform physical tasks, this article is for you. It is my hope that this information will help inform the decisions of business leaders, managers, and employees leading them to choices that prioritize what matters most.
A Simple Solution
As business leaders, it is our responsibility to champion the safety of our employees and protect the operational integrity of our business.
The more people an individual comes in contact with, the higher their risk for infection is. By requiring employees who are not negatively impacted by remote work to be in the office, we are unnecessarily exposing critical employees to health risks, and the entire business to the significant impact that would occur if our onsite workers were to become ill.
Grouping employees into the following three classifications will help us to minimize these risks:
In order to protect the safety of those in the Green group, Yellow employees should only be permitted to work on-site with their manager’s permission, and the Blue group should continue working from home.
Remote work Journey Part 1: Transition to Remote Work
I, like many others, began working remotely last March. While there were some bumps along the way, once a week or two passed and the dust settled a bit, we started to see an unexpected trend: Workers were more productive while working remotely than they were in the office.
My role in the organization provided me the ability to see this trend play out in real-time. My team is responsible for the business application tools used by the organization to automate and manage their activities. In the 24 months prior to 2020, we had migrated most of our workforce to an ERP solution, automating and simplifying our workflow as we went. Our Business Architecture goals were the same as most organizations:
- Consolidate tools
- Simplify workflows
- Reduce errors
- Make data easy to access
When those objectives are accomplished, the company saves time and money while making customers happy. It sounds straightforward, but it is hard to know for sure if the true value of these activities was clearly understood until our workforce had to make the abrupt shift to working from home. In the first weeks of remote work, we had quantified an average increase in output of 15% across all teams. Almost all business frameworks (ITIL, SixSigma, Cobalt) direct their practitioners to ensure that goals can be measured and tracked. The productivity increase that was observed was seen in the metrics used to track those goals. Support tickets were resolved in less time, with a lower recurrence; complex quotes were prepared and returned to sales in shorter time intervals; more follow-ups for customer service requests occurred per day; less time was needed to configure equipment when engineers were off-site; this list continues.
There were of course outliers in both directions of that average. Some employees slowing to crawl in their remote space, while some more than doubled what they were able to accomplish in the office. Since quarantine began many large operations and research groups have tasked their teams to determine how remote work affects their businesses, employees, and customers. This new effort, along with more than a decade of existing studies unrelated to Covid, has come up with many different theories as to why some employees are successful at home while others thrive in an office, but a few facts seem to remain true across the board.
- If the required tools are unavailable, work will suffer or stop.
- Productivity goes up when an employee is comfortable and down when they are stressed.
These may seem like obvious statements, but in the world of PPE, mandatory wipe downs, and school closures, ensuring access to tools and keeping employees comfortable is no easy task. Managers and employees must learn how to balance their personal and professional responsibilities in an entirely new way. My team observed that those who were not able to use or unwilling to embrace the productivity tools, such as EPR and CRM suits, seemed frantic and disconnected. There was a disconnection between the perceived reality of our operating capabilities and how well we were doing. For individuals who rely upon the ability to observe their employees directly, remote work was a disaster. Many executives who thrived in boardrooms and face-to-face interactions, were now struggling to use remote collaboration tools. In contrast, those who were confident with these tools praised their capability and even said they felt closer to their teams. This gap grew quickly as days turned to weeks and weeks to months.
Remote work Journey Part 2: A Short-Lived Return to the Office
Many organizations marched to the beat set by the CDC and WHO, lifting work from home orders as state recommendations changed. HR teams worked fervently with facilities management and leadership to create new shift schedules and seating charts while also purchasing masks, thermometers, and installing hand sensitizer dispensers. Daily check-in sheets were created, and signs were hung on walls reminding everyone to stay 6-feet apart and wash their hands. With mask requirements in place and protocols clearly communicated, employees returned to the office at the end of July. The work done by those who executed this change was impressive. In our business, the guidelines for safety returning office were followed to the letter, and in the three weeks offices were open, we did not have a single case of Covid in our offices. What we did have, however, was a drop in productivity that could be felt across the business. The 15% increase in productivity we saw when working remotely turned into a 40% decrease from our original baseline.
This attempt to return to normality crushed many businesses’ ability to be successful. For most, this impact was short-lived due to the large spikes in cases that occurred in the second half of July 2020. Those spikes ultimately lead to a decision to send workers home again but left many leaders wondering where they went wrong if they followed all the rules. What was missing from the rule books and guidance was a recommendation to consider the positive impact of re-opening vs the potential negative impact of continuing to work remotely. The CDC Decision tree for re-opening does not include a recommendation to perform a Cost/Benefit analysis it operates from the viewpoint, that your business will fail unless employees return to the office. For many businesses, this may not be true. Certainly, bars, barbershops, and grocery stores will struggle to survive without face-to-face interactions, but what about office workers. In one report, The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that 30% of U.S. employees were able to work from home in 2018, and a Stanford economist found that number had increased to 45% by the end of June 2020.
Remote work Journey Part 3: Finding Balance
It is important that we understand what happened in those weeks that we attempted to go back to the office so that we can make better decisions when we do this again. Earlier in this article, we said that access to tools and being comfortable were major elements of productivity and success.
The guidelines set for a return to work vary by state and organization, but the following recommendations are the most common:
- PPE (masks) must be worn in common spaces and for many in open workspaces, all-day
- Shifts should be staggered, and hours should be reduced if possible
- 6-feet of distance should be maintained whenever possible especially when in closed spaces like meeting rooms and offices
With these rules in place, we can take a closer look at the benefits of returning to the office vs remote work.
Reasons to bring your information works back to the office:
Collaboration
The ability to hold a meeting with a project team and run through action items or ask your coworker a question over the wall is the type of normal business practice that builds comradery and makes companies strong. When evaluating a return to the office, collaboration is often held as a principal need, but when we take a deeper look into how offices function with health precautions in place a different picture takes shape. With staggered shifts, empty conference rooms, and masks on, we are simply not able to collaborate the way we need to. A logical next step might be that some collaboration is better than none, but the idea that we are not able to collaborate while working remotely does not hold much water. In 2020 we able to hold meetings with webcams and shared desktops. Distance is no longer a limiting factor. With team chats, video conferences, and a well-built set of collaboration tools, it is not hard to get the sense you are more connected to your team from home than you ever were in the office. When push comes to shove, remote work will hold the collaboration crown until safety precautions can be revoked.
Comfort
How stressed or comfortable your employees are will impact their performance. You don’t have to be a seasoned manager or expert to know that people do better work when they can focus on the task at hand. Both working in the office and working from home present unique stressors to employees. As a Microsoft Researcher published, a lack of casual office interactions, left employees feeling overworked and isolated. For many working from home means clearing off a dining room table or picking which member of the household must go outside for their next overlapping conference call. It is easy to say that for most of us, working from home in these conditions is not the ideal. Does that mean going back to the office will be less stressful than staying home? Probably not. When we reintroduce office life into the mix, employees are faced with an entirely new set of stress factors. Many who, have remained relatively isolated to help protect themselves and their loved ones will now worry about the potential of contracting this illness or passing it unknowingly to someone else. The monotony of remaining home for days on end is absolutely a challenge, but that does not necessarily mean a tentative work schedule is preferred. With scheduling changes and the risk of being sent home should an employee get sick, a return to the office replaces stability with uncertainty for many employees. Finally, we get to one of the most glaring points in the conversation about comfort, the steps we’re taking to protect ourselves aren’t pleasant. Masks are generally uncomfortable. Hand sanitizer dries out the skin. Constantly having to wipe down surfaces is frustrating. The largest stress factor here may not be the actions we take to stay safe, but the position we are placed in when others choose not to follow these rules. I have spoken to many friends and family members who have described the panic they felt when leaders in their organization chose to go without a mask or dip a water cup in an ice cooler without cleaning it. This action, while troubling under any circumstances, is currently dangerous. I do not envy anyone who must make a choice about whether they will confront their boss, call HR, or simply keep quiet when they see things like this. There are certainly situations where working from the office is preferred to being home, but, during this pandemic, I am giving the prize for comfort to Remote work.
Access to Tools
This one is a bit more challenging. To put it bluntly, making your business flexible enough to support remote work does not happen overnight or by accident. If you are reading this article and know that you could not work from home, because you need your desktop computer that lives under the desk in your office to be connected to the office network in order to work, well, you’re not alone. A Mercer study published earlier this year found, there are many organizations that have not invested in Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity Plans. There are many more who never imagined a virus would be the reason they would need to enact them and are realizing that the power outage scenario they had envisioned may not be enough. This type of planning is part of Business Architecture. If you are unfamiliar with the term, Business Architecture is the practice of planning and building all aspects of a business in a way that will facilitate success. If you struggling right now to figure out the next steps for your business, I encourage you to consider the guidance of a business architect. If you would like help, I would be happy to help you find someone qualified for your needs or personally assist.
Conclusion
As we move through the month of October and look forward to next year, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about when and how we will be able to return to normal life. For business leaders, I would challenge you to look at this situation as an opportunity to redefine your business for the better. Make it clear to your employees that you value their health and safety. You can do this by ensuring that non-essential office staff can continue working remotely. This action protects those who need to be in the office and those who can stay home. Invest in actions that allow your team to come together with the need to sit next to each other. The same tools and planning that will make your employees ready for remote work, will reduce your operating costs and improve quality. It is difficult to find opportunity in times of uncertainty, but the choice between employee safety, comfort, and productivity does not have to be a compromise. Let those who need the office use it and those who don’t stay home. This will keep your teams as safe and comfortable as they can be during a difficult time and in doing so, provide the stability that your business needs.
Additional Reading
All opinions expressed in this article are solely my own and do not represent the views of any organization to which I may be affiliated.