Redesigning work: how the employee-employer relationship is changing

The pan­dem­ic forced the hand of many busi­ness­es – dur­ing the first lock­downs, the options were to adapt or go bust. But as Covid restric­tions have been lift­ed, com­pa­nies have been left won­der­ing what comes next.

For some firms, the answer has been to slip back into old habits. Orders to return to the office were issued by banks and insur­ers, includ­ing Gold­man Sachs, HSBC and Stan­dard Char­tered, short­ly after the gov­ern­ment scrapped its work-from-home guid­ance. 

How­ev­er, Lon­don Busi­ness School pro­fes­sor of man­age­ment prac­tice Lyn­da Grat­ton believes that return­ing to our old ways would be to miss out on a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to redesign the way we work. “Our ideas of how work should be per­formed were formed dur­ing the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion and we haven’t real­ly moved on since then, so this is a fan­tas­tic chance to revise that,” she says.

Grat­ton, whose new book Redesign­ing Work pro­vides a frame­work for busi­ness­es look­ing to adapt to the new world of work, claims that busi­ness­es have become more exper­i­men­tal in response to the fun­da­men­tal shifts we expe­ri­enced dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. Over this peri­od, the work­force has devel­oped new skills, assump­tions about work have changed and our habits have changed too – such as spend­ing more time with friends and fam­i­ly and ditch­ing the dai­ly com­mute.

“This com­bi­na­tion of habits, skills, aspi­ra­tions and chang­ing net­works means that we won’t return to pre-pan­dem­ic ways of work­ing,” she says. “We’re going to see greater vari­ety in the deals that employ­ers offer their employ­ees.”

The great res­ig­na­tion is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of this. Peo­ple expect more from their employ­ers, so busi­ness­es must improve their offer­ing to fill increas­ing vacan­cies. These improved employ­er-employ­ee deals can be seen in the grow­ing num­ber of ben­e­fits offered to staff, flex­i­ble work­ing prac­tices and adop­tion of the four-day week at some organ­i­sa­tions.

It’s some­thing that Grat­ton describes as work’s T‑Ford moment – where there was once only one mod­el of car, when the mar­ket explod­ed addi­tion­al mod­els were devel­oped and cus­tomers had a choice of three vehi­cles. In the same way, the pan­dem­ic has spurred mar­ket forces into increas­ing the lev­el of com­pe­ti­tion between busi­ness­es, pro­vid­ing peo­ple with greater options when it comes to where and how they’re expect­ed to work.

So, while cer­tain banks are ask­ing peo­ple to work from the office full time, oth­er com­pa­nies are allow­ing peo­ple to work from wher­ev­er they want for three months a year or offer­ing sab­bat­i­cals. “Peo­ple now have a choice about where they work, which is absolute­ly bril­liant,” Grat­ton says. 

Flexibility equals autonomy

Busi­ness­es are rewrit­ing their deals with employ­ees and Grat­ton encour­ages employ­ers to be as imag­i­na­tive as pos­si­ble about what they can offer. She gives the exam­ple of Unilever’s new­ly devised U‑Work pol­i­cy, which allows employ­ees to adjust their work­ing hours to fit in with their lives.

Under the per­son­alised work mod­el, staff earn a month­ly retain­er and can improve their earn­ings by tak­ing on assign­ments. Cru­cial­ly, whether or not they are work­ing on an assign­ment, staff con­tin­ue to have access to all their usu­al ben­e­fits such as pen­sion pro­vi­sion, health­care insur­ance and train­ing.

Flex­i­ble work­ing mod­els are prov­ing increas­ing­ly attrac­tive for employ­ees. “An organ­i­sa­tion offers flex­i­bil­i­ty and what the indi­vid­ual gets in return is auton­o­my,” Grat­ton explains. “It pro­vides peo­ple with the capac­i­ty to make their own choic­es about how, when and where they work and it is a major dri­ver of employ­ee moti­va­tion and engage­ment.”

Tra­di­tion­al­ly, employ­ers might have looked to improve pay to attract tal­ent but Grat­ton thinks organ­i­sa­tions over rely on this. She says: “It’s inter­est­ing that invest­ment bank­ing and legal firms – two sec­tors that have asked peo­ple to come back to the office full time – have had to increase their salaries as a result. 

“Although mon­ey will always be impor­tant, if flex­i­ble deals are avail­able then mon­ey won’t be the main point of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion.”

This demand for flex­i­bil­i­ty can also be seen in the push for a four-day week. Although Grat­ton thinks more busi­ness­es need to think more cre­ative­ly about how they struc­ture their work­ing hours, the intro­duc­tion of a three-day week­end may be too pro­scrip­tive. 

“In a way, the most unimag­i­na­tive way to intro­duce flex­i­bil­i­ty to your work­ing hours is to bring in a four-day week,” she says. “It can be a great start­ing point, because there’s a big advan­tage to hav­ing agreed days off. But there are ways for employ­ers to pro­vide more auton­o­my.”

For work­ers where there is not an option to work from home, offer­ing flex­i­bil­i­ty in terms of time will be even more appeal­ing. Grat­ton sug­gests this could involve offer­ing com­pressed hours or a short­er week. “We’ve got to be more cre­ative about time for peo­ple who don’t have auton­o­my over their place of work,” she says.

The end of the office?

While we’ve gone through changes to when and where we work, what has suf­fered con­se­quent­ly is cor­po­rate cul­ture. Many CEOs have lament­ed that the switch to work­ing from home has caused the loss of the so-called water cool­er moment and lim­it­ed inter­ac­tions between col­leagues.

Although Grat­ton under­stands why organ­i­sa­tions are wor­ried about cul­ture, she believes that after two years of being away from the office we’ve devel­oped an unre­al­is­tic view of the work that used to be done there. 

Grat­ton points to research pri­or to the pan­dem­ic, which tracked the move­ments of people’s eyes while work­ing in an open-plan office. “They found that peo­ple walked to their desk, switched on the com­put­er, plugged in their head­phones and worked through their emails. The idea that peo­ple were hav­ing spon­ta­neous dis­cus­sions wasn’t the real­i­ty,” she says. 

This means that the office is yet anoth­er aspect of our work­ing lives that needs to be reimag­ined. “If you do a lot of focused work, much of it can be done from home,” Grat­ton adds. “So the office should become a place for col­lab­o­ra­tion and impor­tant dis­cus­sion. Com­pa­nies need to think care­ful­ly about what they want peo­ple to do in the office, and then to inten­tion­al­ly design for those expe­ri­ences.”

She also pre­dicts that a string of new time-man­age­ment tools will be cre­at­ed to help facil­i­tate bet­ter coor­di­na­tion between mul­ti­ple peo­ple with con­flict­ing sched­ules. “New apps will allow you to say who’s going to be in the office and when,” Grat­ton con­tin­ues. “Just as we had to learn how to work from home, now we need to relearn how to work in the office and that will require new skills, new habits, and new tech­nolo­gies.”

Above all, Grat­ton hopes that organ­i­sa­tions will embrace these changes and cap­i­talise on the unique oppor­tu­ni­ty they now have to reimag­ine the way we work.