Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration says only the best leaders will break out of silos and improve workplace culture post covid-19.
It’s said that fortune favors the prepared mind. Fortune certainly favors companies with broad concern for all stakeholders and good workplace practices. They are better prepared to deal with and mitigate crisis, like the current coronavirus pandemic.
If there were ever a time to “think outside the building” and be more aware of the wider system, it’s now. Operating in silos and paying attention only to a few stakeholders leads to vulnerabilities. Companies are dependent not only on global supply chains and what might be happening in other countries, but also on the state of institutions in their own communities. The ecosystems in which companies operate mean that a disruption to one industry or set of activities ripples to others.
Companies with the strongest stakeholder and partner orientations are best able to survive and transcend crises, because they can plan together, gain local knowledge from each other, and draw on good will to get back to business quickly when the crisis abates.
Civic engagement and social responsibility can go from nice-to-have to essential. Encouraging the growth of local and regional suppliers through regional economic development and job training strategies enriches the local ecosystem. A pandemic makes clear that there is a business interest in contributing to solving problems, such as the adequacy of the public health system, disparities in access to health care, availability of emergency child care, universal broadband and Internet access, or educating people in life skills such as resiliency and adaptability as well as tech skills.
Thinking outside traditional structures also helps within a company. Just about every classic reason that people dislike change under normal circumstances are exacerbated by this crisis: loss of control, excess uncertainty, surprises, too much difference from normal routines, concerns about competence with new technology, ripple effects from someone else’s disruption, threats to future plans.
It’s important that people feel that there is something positive they can do to be useful and regain some control over routines and skills. Renewing and reinforcing good workplace practices can make a big difference to productivity as well as well-being. For example:
Abundant communication. Regular briefings, communication from many levels, town hall dialogues.
Cross-training, so people can fill in for one another.
Flexible work schedules, start and stop times that fit life needs.
Goal clarity. Measurement of results and impact, not simply time spent.
Empowerment of people at lower levels to make quick decisions.
Broad purpose. An emphasis on mission and values that drive the company and how employees can contribute.
One way to accomplish both “outside the building” and within the company goals is to empower teams to spend some of their time brainstorming about how they can help make a difference to their communities, now and for times to come. This can unite and inspire people, and it might create good ideas for innovation when attention turns to the business future.
Meanwhile, John Macomber, a senior lecturer of business administration in the Finance Unit believes that Employees and buildings will be healthier after the Covid-19 era.
COVID-19 will change the nature of our offices, apartments, hospitals, schools, and government buildings. Concern about the spread of this and other communicable diseases might fade after this contagion, but there will probably be more outbreaks in the decades to come. This means that we can expect our physical structures to change, too.
Think of the extension of today’s airport and courthouse security screening: not just what weapons you may be carrying, but also what infections you may be carrying. Many of us have experienced health screening in Asian airports for years as technicians viewed our facial temperatures, checked our passports and vaccination histories, and asked questions. This will become a more permanent component of entry to office buildings, schools, and transit hubs.
Physical components of buildings and public spaces will change, too—in subtle ways. We are the indoor generation; we spend 90 percent of our time inside. (This means that by the time you are 60 years old, you will have spent 54 years indoors). Organizations will realize that indoor air quality—notably involving fresh air and filtration—directly impacts productivity of healthy people and helps mitigate the onset of sick people.
As Dr. Joseph Allen of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and I argue in our forthcoming book, Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity, more money will be spent and should be spent on fans, filters, ductwork, chillers, heat exchangers, and dehumidifiers—and on the energy to run them.
The next wave of intervention will be in the collection of population information regarding who enters the building and when. With facial recognition and infrared cameras, there can be time series data collected from your temperature and probably what was in the breaths you exhaled, captured over weeks and years, as you enter vestibules and ride elevators.Further, apartment dwellers, office workers, and hospital patients alike will be able to track and share air quality analytics in a very democratized way from their handheld sensors connected to their mobile phones and organized and served up by third-party rating databases like the future Morningstars, Yelps, Glassdoors, TripAdvisors, and others.
Building owners (and their investors and lenders) in all sectors will have to both outfit their buildings to measure components of public health and also respond to their occupants doing their own assessments. This might be disconcerting, and the rollout will be uneven, but we all will be collectively safer.
On his part, Jeffrey T. Polzer, the UPS Foundation Professor of Human Resource Management, opines that Employees will take stock of their new work priorities after the pandemic.
As this crisis unfolds, you may find your workdays following a very different cadence. Normal work activities will get disrupted and then blended with your personal life as you begin working from home. The colleagues you usually run into at the office will no longer be down the hall, and the normal meetings and email threads that occupy your days may get shuffled in unexpected ways, depending in part on whether the crisis cripples or amplifies the demand for your work. In either case, this is a good time to take stock of your priorities and rethink your patterns of collaboration.
By auditing your work responsibilities and project commitments, along with all the meetings, emails, and other tools you use to collaborate, you can become more focused and intentional about how you spend your time. Before this crisis, you may have felt overloaded with too many meetings and relentless emails, making it seem like you never had time to do your actual work. The shift to working from home, despite all of its inherent challenges, can also be an opportunity to reflect on your priorities and design your new schedule to accomplish them.
What are your most important goals, especially during this crisis? For you, your team, and your organization, which items on your to-do list should take priority, and which should be pruned altogether? Where do you add the most value to collective goals that you care about, whether that is through performing specialized individual tasks, managing projects, inspiring people through your leadership, or building community and camaraderie in difficult times?
Talk to your colleagues about the roles you are best equipped to play in the new work-from-home landscape, and figure out how they fit with others’ roles to make sure you stay aligned.
Then design your collaborative activities—your video and audio meetings along with all forms of text-based communication—to fit your role, while giving you time for focused individual work along with family and personal activities. Clarify and, if needed, negotiate your commitments to teams and colleagues throughout your network, given the new and emerging organizational realities, and be intentional about the meetings you organize and the invitations you accept. There still may not be enough time to go around, but by resetting your collaboration patterns, you can make the most of the time you spend ‘at work.’
Source: Harvard Business School
