On the 26th of january Epicenter hosted ‘Mastering the hybrid workplace’ – an event about the massive change in every aspect of our work-life and how we can face the future so our companies can keep up with the change.
We need to talk about how to optimize the hybrid workplace and strategy – Not about if we are going to work from home, because we talk a lot about that already.
“We need to talk about other aspects of hybrid everyday life. So what is really hybrid? It’s about companies reaching new goals and ambitions. It’s about our employees and colleagues mastering their new tasks and work situations. It’s also about our leaders, trying to motivate their team in other work situations than they are used to”, says Mathias Willumsen, Head of Community at Epicenter Oslo.
Everything is behaving differently. We are changing and our customers are changing. Therefore maybe our strategies and the way we are interacting with people also should be working differently.
Stine Rømmen Anderssen, is Associate Partner at Mckinsey and Anderssen is very passionate about helping her clients navigate through large transformations as improvement programs, operating models and re-designing implementations of agile thinking. Anderssen has great insight into how our work-life has changed and how we need to adjust.
The pandemic is one of the biggest things that have happened to us in our living age and it has changed the world we live in, in so many ways, Anderssen points out.
“One thing that has significantly changed and is a bit of a revolution, is how our work-life has changed. Before the pandemic everyone was working on site. It wasn’t even a question, everyone went to the office everyday and that’s how our work-life worked” – Anderssen says.
With the pandemic the world changed overnight. In 2021 we started slightly getting back to the new normal. And now we are trying to figure out what that looks like. Some companies are leading the way, making moves and decisions to work in a hybrid way. And some headed right back into the old ways – back to the office. And we can finally slightly see the aftermath of how this affects the companies and its people.
“What we see is employees are actually quite conflicted about how they feel about this. On one hand they really appreciate the flexibility, but at the same time they are also worried about the work-life balance and setting boundaries for themselves” – Anderssen.
There are also many employees who are waiting for the company to find the hybrid solution. Looking for answers and unsure about what direction the company is headed for. A report by Mckinsey shows that a huge amount of people are thinking about leaving their job. With that in mind Mckinsey started to understand that employers and employees have a very different perspective on what’s driving the shift.
“For the employees it’s about being seen, people actually caring about them, getting feedback and variation in their everyday life. It’s much more about leadership and having good leaders. That’s the one of the core things, and drivers why people are leaving, and not the salary and such as the employers are thinking” – Anderssen says.
Mckinsey discovered that the companies that did well had implemented a lot of leadership initiatives as part of the solution to the hybrid future and it’s leading to better financial results as well. Anderssen asks the question: What is the silver bullet for leaders, what is it that they need to do? In this post-pandemic and future hybrid world, a leader needs to solve it’s work very differently.
“Strategic development is not something you do once a year anymore, but something that you need to keep live and update all the time. On business performance you need to be much closer than before because people are so spread out” – Anderssen underlines.
This is just a few of the dimensions that are changing. The other thing that Anderssen sees impacting leaders specifically, is that behavior actually matters. You still need to be challenging and manage consequences, but there is also behavior that is shifting.
“It’s about being supportive, caring, and having focus on the whole person. Being creative and entrepreneurial in the setting” – Anderssen says.
Watch the slides from Stine’s presentation here
