Homing In
In April 2020, when the world was coming to grips with the pandemic, those in charge of the Oxford English Dictionary were being kept on their toes. Among the slew of words that found official entries in that period was an acronym that had existed colloquially for a long time: Work From Home (WFH).
Zoom — and its domain — zoomed during that time. An app that had been in Google’s software portfolio for four years was baptised again. And it became as commonplace in daily conversations as Maps and GPay. Even stationary bicycles somehow trickled into those exchanges.
The semblance of normalcy over the past few months — Zoom isn’t zooming any more, and those cycles are going back to Spin classes — notwithstanding, employees world over have started embracing an inevitable professional shift that the pandemic set in motion: the Hybrid Workplace.
Making It Work
As a concept, the Hybrid Workplace isn’t exactly new. It’s been around for nearly 50 years. Before the turn of the last millennium, the likes of AT&T and IBM were a few among the first to embrace a certain degree of unorthodoxy in their workplace policies and structure, meant to supplement their traditional streamlining. More recently flexibility was the buzz word.
In tandem with recent digital shifts in the professional domain — the Hybrid Workplace too has gained an increased relevance. As per Google Workspace’s collaborative, global survey with The Economist on “Making Hybrid Work Human” — released last October —three-fourths of its respondents believed that a Hybrid Workplace would become a norm within the next three years.
Now, view the above statistic in this context: 70 per cent of that survey’s respondents had never worked remotely before the pandemic. In simple words, employees will have to future-proof their profile by arming themselves with the knowhow of functioning in a Hybrid Workspace.
Getting Personnel
From a broad perspective, an employee should be adept on these three fronts to perform in a Hybrid Workplace:
1) Agility: Since the Hybrid Workplace depends on smaller, autonomous teams functioning in sync with each other, it’s imperative for employees to be able to adapt their approach to work to fit into such structures.
2) Technology: Technological tools are the bedrock for any Hybrid Workplace. Hence it goes without saying that employees need to be well-versed with the platforms and applications that they will need to use while working in such a set-up.
3) Social Intelligence: Even before the pandemic, Inclusion and Social Acceptance were being considered as key drivers of the professional landscape. These elements contribute to Social Intelligence, which in turn can reflect in improved internal communication and agility.
The Balancing Act
While much research and data indicate that WFH is the next rung of organic growth in workspace evolution, the other side of the coin paints a hazy picture. LinkedIn says that one in three Indian professionals has experienced a stress-related burnout, and nearly half of them want to go back to their offices. But there are others who seem to think that WFH is key to solving one of the biggest professional dilemmas that the US is facing at the moment.
All said and done, the Hybrid Workplace is here to stay. But the real need of the hour is a middle path, one that lets employees feel at home in the workplace, whether they’re working from home or not.