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Why This Leadership Expert Says Flexibility On Time Is The Future Of Work

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“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. An optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

That pearl of wisdom, generally attributed to Winston Churchill, aptly describes the mindset choices available to businesspeople facing the disruption and chaos caused by the Covid pandemic. Some adopt a woe-is-us mindset and hunker down in their fraidy holes to wait out the storm. Others meet the moment head-on and rethink virtually everything in their lives—including how, where, when, and even why they work.

Rethinking work, in fact, seems to invigorate the imagination of people everywhere.

No one understands this better than Lynda Gratton, one of the foremost global thought leaders on the future of work. A management professor at the London School of Business, Lynda draws on more than 30 years of research into the technological, demographics, cultural, and societal trends that shape the way people work. Her books have sold more than a million copies and been translated into more than 15 languages.

Her latest book is Redesigning Work: How to Transform Your Organization & Make Hybrid Work for Everyone.

Rodger Dean Duncan: There’s no doubt that the Covid pandemic shocked a lot of people into challenging old assumptions about their working lives. What have you seen as the biggest changes spawned by all that reimagining?

Lynda Gratton: We find ourselves in a very exciting moment. We’ve been wanting to redesign the way we work, and the pandemic—alongside advancements in technology—opened a door to make it possible.

My initial question is, “Couldn’t work be more humane?” It’s a question I’ve been asking for many years, and the pandemic is a break with the past. We’ve formed new habits as a result of it, and we’ve begun to see that there are other ways of working. The challenge now is these new ways of working need to be integrated effectively. There’s no doubt that our collective experience of the pandemic has created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rethink what we want from our working lives. We’ve had a chance to question many fundamental assumptions, adopt new habits and form new narratives around “how work gets done.” For someone who has been studying organizations for over 30 years, this collective “unfreeze” from bureaucratic rigidity is the most significant phenomenon I’ve experienced. Across industries, there’s massive experimentation going on—and it’s been embraced with open arms by workers.

Leaders are saying, “I know there’s this amazing opportunity, but I feel worried about what’s going to happen to my organization.” It seems to me that it’s possible to find new ways of working that will really help organizations be more productive. The challenge is that the normal ways of working are easy. You don’t have to design work when everyone is in the same place at the same time. As soon as it gets more complicated, it requires more thought. The challenge for leaders now is to consciously design work.

Duncan: You mention psychologist Kurt Lewin’s “freeze-unfreeze-refreeze” model that represents institutional change. After the workplace experience of the past couple of years, will we ever really have a “refreeze” phase, or have we learned to be more flexible and creative?

Gratton: In March 2020, the pandemic initiated a global “unfreeze” on an unimaginable scale. As countries all over the world entered lockdown, experiments in time and place were played out in real time. Suddenly, every executive team was faced with a new reality. Could they extend their ideas of place to include working from anywhere? Could they extend their ideas of time from 9-5 to something more flexible, based on individual need? And what role could technology play in boosting virtual connectivity in a world that was becoming less physically connected by the day?

Duncan: What has all the change in work routines taught us about the importance of human connections?

Gratton: We learned early in the pandemic that our networks changed. We spent more time with people we already knew well, and less time with those associates we would normally bump into over the course of a day in the office. While some people got closer to their families and neighbors, others (especially young people) really missed the pleasure of having close friends. So, as we move out of the pandemic, we’ve learned just how important connections are—not just bumping into people, but also putting time into building real friendships. Remember that one of the survey items that best predicts whether someone stays in their job is “I have a friend at work.” So, as we move into more hybrid ways of working, questions about how the office can be reconfigured to become a place that enables and reinforces connection will be top of the agenda.

Duncan: What must leaders deeply understand in order to succeed in redesigning the work in their organizations?

Gratton: My team and I studied 30 leading companies during the pandemic. It seems to me that there are four crucial steps that leaders need to go through as they redesign work—understand people, networks and jobs; reimagine work; model and test ideas; and act on the new models to create new ways of working.

The first step is especially crucial. Leaders must understand the jobs and the sources of productivity. They must understand the networks involved in completing that work. For example, who are people reaching out to and collaborating with? And they need to understand their people—what is their experience of work, both in terms of pain points and what they gain from being there? Then comes the exiting step of reimagining work. To do this they have many experiments.

Approaching this as a design exercise is important because a “one-size-fits-all” approach will not work. Leaders have an opportunity to create a way of working that reflects their organization’s unique purpose and values, that acknowledges the capabilities and motivations of different employees, and that ultimately increases productivity and fulfillment.

Duncan: In reimagining the future of work, what old paradigms seem to be the most difficult for people to jettison?

Gratton: Many companies are stuck in the re-imagination stage. They see the redesign of work as a set of binary decisions—home versus office, synchronous time versus asynchronous time. To move beyond these binary questions, they need to stand back and ask themselves some crucial questions. For example, the leaders of one company told me they are reimagining work along three principles—how can they get closer to their customers, how can people cooperate more, and how do they ensure that what they do is fair and just? That’s going to take real imagination and out-of-the-box thinking.

Duncan: How can an individual make the most of a WFH (work from home) model in terms of both work productivity and quality of family life?

Gratton: For many knowledge workers, some form of hybrid work (taking place in the office and in the home) will become the norm. That brings to the fore a whole set of new hybrid skills like creating “team agreements” with colleagues about how to best create workflows. It’s also about how to maximize working time. In many companies the number of meetings has doubled. So, one crucial skill will be how to create schedules time in a way that minimizes the time spent in meetings and maximizes the time spent on focused, highly valuable work.

Duncan: How can leaders most effectively model the behaviors that make work redesign produce intended outcomes?

Gratton: When it comes to the redesign of work there are three important groups—leaders, managers, and employees. Each has a crucial role to play. For leaders, this means two things—role modelling the new ways of working and creating a positive narrative about the future that emphasizes the purpose of the company and aligns this with the way people work. For example, hybrid working will not be embraced unless leaders themselves also work this way.

Duncan: Teamwork and collaboration are critical ingredients to success in most organizations. How can work redesign best reinforce those relationships?

Gratton: It’s crucial that leaders and managers think deeply about the form that teamwork takes. Many job tasks are achieved through effective coordination with others. These include checking in with others, getting in-the-moment feedback, finding out if things are on track in terms of project management, and identifying where the problems are. When coordination is working well, people are fluidly aligning with each other and focusing on a shared goal. When coordination breaks down, it’s not long before the teams become divided and disjointed and the project begins to flounder. During the pandemic, many companies doubled the number of virtual meetings. So, important questions to ask are ”What coordination tasks can be done asynchronously? and “How much needs to be done synchronously?”

Duncan: When we finally get to what can be called a post-pandemic world, what do you expect to be our most important lessons learned about work?

Gratton: The biggest lesson will be the need to build more resilient organizations. The main reason I’m so keen on shifting to work flexibility around when and where work gets done is that it provides people with much more autonomy. Employees will be able to make choices for themselves. In terms of improvements to wellbeing and retention, this can be seen as a way to future-proof your organization.

We have also learned a lot about how to embrace AI and other technologies. Already, there is much excitement about the possibilities of virtual and augmented reality in building and supporting networks. Take firms such as PwC and Accenture who on-boarded many of their new joiners using virtual reality, creating a virtual space where new employees could move around a virtual conference venue, “bumping into” each other, attending presentations by senior people, even going on a virtual speedboat trip.

In the end, increasing flexibility around time and place and subsequently having more time for ourselves, our families and our communities is really about one thing: getting back to being more human. We have an opportunity to create a future where we are not only more productive in our work, but also more fulfilled as human beings.

Duncan: What has happened to working women and mothers during the pandemic?

Gratton: It was mothers who continued to take the lion’s share of domestic work (looking after the children, running home schooling and so on). We also know that as the pandemic eases, it’s mothers with young children who are not coming back to work. It seems to me that companies cannot remain on the sidelines about these issues of parental responsibilities. The intervention that makes the biggest impact is encouraging and supporting fathers to take paternity leave. Those who have done so tend to get closer to their children and are more willing and able to share equally with parental responsibilities.

This is why I’m so very passionate about companies not simply snapping back to what was. I believe we have a real opportunity as we come out of the pandemic to redesign work in ways that are more flexible and provide men and women with the choices to have more autonomy about how they live their lives—just when their children are young but also across the whole of their working lives.

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