Two years in, how are organisations navigating the pandemic from a people perspective?

In the old world, alongside multiple in-person meetings, driving to the office was integral to how people worked. That was until the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world and upended this.

In the “new” world, for knowledge workers especially, work is not a place you go to, it is something that you do, and it can mostly be done anytime from anywhere. This means, as an article by the Harvard Business School has found, the traditional workplace as we know it is dead.

Managing the transition
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies have had to rely on their HR functions to manage the transition to the new world of work. Efforts to manage the pandemic have consequently propelled HR to the centre as it continues to play a catalytic role in capacitating organisations to adapt. Besides all the trauma it has caused, COVID-19 has been the most transformative thing to have happened to people management.

When COVID-19 spread to South Africa two years ago, companies moved swiftly to accommodate working from home. HR professionals played a key role in this, quickly adapting internal policies to align them with the regulations to enable working from home and making office work safe.

The Professional Provident Society (PPS), a financial services company that provides a comprehensive suite of financial and healthcare solutions exclusively to graduate professionals, was one of those companies that changed its internal company policies. All staff were provided with resources that enabled them to work from home seamlessly. We also put in place hybrid work guidelines to help staff through this change.

We relied on our organisational values. Staff needed to take extreme ownership, continue being eternally curious and doing the right thing – these became our anchor as we navigated various situations and many questions that needed to be answered.

Hybrid world of work
The hybrid working model – where employees come to the office on some days and work remotely other days – has gained popularity. As COVID-19 restrictions are being eased, many employers are in a predicament - Do they continue with the work from home approach or compel employees to return to the office full-time? Or is the answer somewhere in between – a hybrid model? What happens to the lessons we have learnt? Do we adapt, or do we go back to the way things were and risk becoming irrelevant, thus losing existing and potential talent? The last two years have proven that autonomy and flexibility enhance the productivity and well-being of talent. Systems built for the first industrial revolution are no longer relevant during this fourth industrial revolution.

In essence, the role of the office is being questioned, and employers are wondering what to do with the skyscrapers they built. It looks like going forward, companies will use offices mainly for collaborative work and brainstorming sessions.

Caring for employees
COVID-19 has caused emotional pain, mental trauma and many other difficulties employers cannot ignore. It has brought the subject of mortality closer and has become a crucial part of our daily conversations. So, guided by HR, employers have had to create a caring environment by providing counselling services and giving employees time to grieve and recover. In the last two years, mental health issues have taken centre stage.

It might be tempting to default back to old working ways, in which case, we would have completely missed the lessons and opportunities presented in the last two years. Employees tell us they have become better parents through work from home – that they are more present (literally!). Good parenting leads to great societies. May we not lose that.

Managing high-performance culture
Another area that has changed is organisational culture. How do you maintain a single culture with people in different locations? The truth is that organisational culture is dynamic. It is gradually adapting to the new world of work. It is forcing employers to trust employees and supervisors to entrench organisational values.

Unlike some other companies who decided to use technology to monitor employees’ work remotely by using metrics such as keystrokes and amount of time spent online, PPS realised that it is best to trust its employees to do the right thing. Employees do not want paternalistic employers.

The bottom line is that companies want to drive productivity. Economists at the University of Warwick in the UK conducted several experiments to test the idea that happy employees work harder. In the laboratory, they found that happiness made people around 12% more productive.

Interestingly, PPS employee satisfaction surveys from 2019 show that the satisfaction levels grew by almost 10% in the last two years. During a pandemic!

Company targets are being met and, in certain areas, exceeded. It shows that PPS’s decision to not police productivity but give managers the latitude to supervise their direct reports has paid off and produced the desired results.

HR leading the change
HR is leading the adaptation and change into the new world of work. Organisations that tap into HR’s change management knowledge and experience to adapt to the new world of work are positioned to see higher levels of employee satisfaction and productivity.

The pandemic has ushered in a new world of humanisation of work – and one where employers are compelled to look at people holistically. A world where employers realise that the old ‘one size fits all’ model to run organisations is not ideal, but that we must consider that everyone has their own set of unique circumstances – and that therein lies the answer to what is the best model for the future.