Tsedal Neeley works as a professor at Harvard Business School and has written an article for WSJ about the biggest mistakes management can make as employees return to offices. In an interview with CNBC, she summarized her basic ideas, noting that the first significant mistake could be the following: Company management will treat those returning from work from home to work at work, like young children.
The professor stated that during the last 18 months or so, the belief that people develop only when they work directly with the employer has been completely refuted. It is now clear that people prefer flexibility and the ability to choose how much time they spend working at home and how much in the office. It is thus a shift from the previous “autocratic environment” to a situation where the employees themselves want to decide on these matters.
Companies such as Lyft and Google have announced that they are postponing their return to office until 2022. CNBC said that the labor market situation in the United States is now skewed in favor of employees and job seekers. Their bargaining position is relatively strong and they may therefore have, inter alia, higher requirements for that flexibility. But can’t that change at a time when the labor market has changed and companies would have a stronger bargaining position?
Neeley says no, because we have entered a new era and structural changes have taken place towards a greater share of work from home. Among other things, digital technologies that reduce “dependence on space and time” contribute to it. So it is not a temporary phenomenon caused by a pandemic, but a change that people have already felt first-hand, which has never happened before and which will last. The professor added that productivity has generally increased and companies should try to adapt instead of fighting these changes.
According to the professor, the described evolution should lead to the functioning of a “hybrid system” that combines “the best of both worlds”. That is, both the benefits of working from home and the benefits of working in the office. CNBC pointed out that some companies may offer work from home, but with lower wages. Neely added that if people work from home, it means, for example, lower costs for traveling to work. On the other hand, the costs associated with this system are rising, for example in the form of higher costs for high-speed internet connection. Which, according to the expert, companies will have to reflect and find a new balance.
According to the professor, the technological sector is best placed with a new situation. Purely because he has the most experience with such things. For example, CiscoHe has been experimenting with work from home since 1993. HubSpot has been a shining example of where to go since January last year. According to the professor, the biggest mistakes that companies could make during the return of people from home include dealing with employees as young children, exhaustion from working with modern technologies, closing the gap between work and personal life, rejecting various experiments and evaluating people. depending on how many hours he sits in the office.
Source: CNBC
