The recent fast-paced change in modern workplaces has put pressure on those called to work from home now daily.
Relationships, connections, and interactions have been reconfigured in the span of a few hours, and everyone had to face new dilemmas with higher autonomy, perhaps on their own, sometimes with a strong sense of urgency.
A webinar attended by colleagues from different organizations has tried to take a closer look at what companies have been trying to do to gather helpful insights for the future.
Motivational drivers
- Relation
- New communication and collaboration channels have opened up and generated flexible networking scenarios.
- Hierarchical interactions are struggling in the face of contingent events.
- Autonomy
- The ability to generate ideas, reflections, and perspective solutions has become an asset available at different organizations' levels.
- Some professionals have shown regressive movements due to the current uncertainty, even on once consolidated activities.
- Competence
- Competencies, aptitudes, and abilities that were not valued have now been activated in a new, unplanned organizational context.
- The need to manage contingencies and the current emergency has downplayed the possibility of treasuring future learning.
Companies can become communities
In a phase where daily interactions have been reduced to home and work environments, organizations are called to enhance a sense of belonging by opening moments of sharing discoveries and innovations of the past few weeks, both at operating and personal levels.
Empowerment and recognition
Distance interactions challenge professionals to see and recognize the importance of an emotional connection among people, even as the possibility to share what an individual is going through, as well as the ability of many collaborators to provide insights and solutions to manage what is happening and anticipate recovery.
Broadening the vision
«Compulsory» home-working has meant broadening the gaze towards colleagues. It requires us to look at people’s work in a broader context for everyone, especially considering the physicality of time and place, which blurs the lines between personal and professional lives.
Risk factors
It is crucial not to ignore the risks of pre-existing professional habits that might surface again in a phase of discontinuity as an immediate solution for their value of familiarity and reassuring routine.
- Control - even uninterrupted (via calls, emails, etc.) replaces an on-sight check that is no longer viable.
- Censoring aspects of personal lives (even hardships) that have a specific impact and used to be «left at home».
- Decision-making processes in the hands of individuals in formal organizational processes in the current scenario show the individual's limits before complex problems.
- The «invisibility» of acted competencies at this stage, which are put aside by the contingent need to guarantee business continuity, can be seen and recognized to turn them into future learning.
