How is working from home changing your organization?

Voice, Information, Belonging and Mission

With lock-downs in effect around most of the globe, work-from-home and WFH have irrevocably entered our vocabularies. Even after strict curbs of movement are relaxed, we are likely to think twice before rushing into a full or even substantial reversion to pre-COVID ways. After all, we are still many, many months away from a working vaccine, so why risk frequent contact unless absolutely required?

There is lots of advice to be had about WFH, in many flavours — how to stay sane, how to stay efficient, tips and tricks of video calling and so on. There is also a lot being said about how fundamental changes in the post-COVID work-life will throw open myriad opportunities (e.g. for digital marketing as outreach goes almost exclusively online, or for tech-enabled education). Less has been said about how a change in form (moving exclusively to WFH) may fundamentally change who you are as an organization — the behaviours and cultural tenets you value, the way decisions are made, and the organization’s relationship with its employees.

It may be useful to look at four areas for signs of a more lasting impact on your organization — voice, information processing, belonging, and mission-orientation. Before diving into each of these, it is worth keeping in mind that the effect of WFH on these areas are unlikely to be the same, or even in the same direction, across organizations or even across teams. Also, this may be a good time to briefly pause and consider the mechanistic changes you see in the way your organization/team operates as a result of WFH. For instance:

• What form of interaction has replaced physical meetings — video conferencing, conference calls, one-on-one voice/video calls, email, or messaging?
• Which types of interactions have been lost and not replaced in any form (e.g. spontaneous brainstorming sessions, happy hour)?
• Who sets the agenda for interactions? Has agenda setting become more centralized or decentralized?
• Has information sharing become more deliberate or more spontaneous in nature?

Now consider four ways in which your organization itself may be impacted because of these mechanistic changes:

1. Voice: Are there any voices that are being systematically undermined or amplified as a result of WFH? For instance, do those with children at home, or who are otherwise unable to find a “quiet spot” find it difficult to contribute during video-calls? Or perhaps some voices are being completely shut out (not even ‘in the room’ so to speak) because certain ‘broad’ team meetings have been replaced with 1-on-1 calls with narrower agendas, limiting the opportunity for those not directly involved in a decision to contribute information? Conversely, perhaps the more ‘personality-neutral’ medium of email is allowing for facts and information to speak for themselves, regardless of who is providing them, leading to a more open and engaged exchange of views?

2. Information processing: An organization is defined by the way it makes decisions. Decision-making, in turn, is predicated largely by how information is processed. As we move out of conference rooms with expansive whiteboards on to circumscribed screens, how does the way we process information change? At a typical physical meeting, information is processed visually (with a point of common focus) and concurrently by all participants. Clarifications can be sought, assumptions challenged, and hypotheses posited in the context of processing new information together. Body language provides important cues. In a video or conference call however, information is processed largely auditorily rather than visually. It is more difficult to “go back” through the logic of the argument or clarify a finer point without very consciously disrupting the flow of the conversation. The linear ‘one-person-at-a-time’ flow of the conversation makes quick exchanges cumbersome. With a person’s face occupying a screen or a person’s voice occupying the ‘channel’, challenging a position possibly becomes more directly personal, as opposed to challenging a position that is simply ‘out on the table’ to be challenged. Participants are also likely to be processing information separately, rather than together, formulating their thoughts completely independently of others (which may be neither better or worse, but different). On a video/voice call, participants may be more conscious of the allocated time and the focused agenda of the call which may make proceedings more efficient and therefore effective, or cause thoughts to be left undeveloped and therefore less effective.

3. Belonging: Without shared physical rituals, what happens to a sense of belonging to the team or the organization? How can the effects of shared rituals/experiences be translated, without directly (but meaninglessly) transliterating shared experiences into the virtual word? How are relationships evolving without physical proximity? For instance, especially in a time of uncertainty, do individuals tend to automatically rely on the judgement of those with which they have a deep shared history, putting newcomers (to a team or organization) at a disadvantage?

4. Mission-orientation: The unprecedented, prolonged, and uncertain nature of the crisis can lead to a sense of disorientation, one that may be exacerbated by the physical isolation of WFH. Ironically, organizations with a highly engaged workforce, with employees who understand the mission well and are used to acting proactively and with agency to connect their own actions and roles to that broader mission, are likely to feel this disorientation most acutely. It may be useful for leadership to be explicit about this disorientation and address it head-on. For instance, they may choose to tell employees to be in a ‘stand-by’ / reactive mode for a period of time, until the leadership interprets the new reality — contributing with specific initiative, insight and information, but only when asked. Alternatively, leadership could reorient the entire organization towards a new short term mission, in order to channel the same energy and agency productively — say to understand the impact of the pandemic on the behaviours and needs of existing customers under different possible scenarios or to find new applications of in-house IP for a post-pandemic world.

These are just four areas in which work-from-home and other mechanistic changes can have more lasting impacts on who you are as an organization. The goal is not to immediately counter these changes, but to start paying attention to what they may be. So that when we eventually arrive at a new normal, you can more consciously choose to cultivate or reject them, based on whether they are useful and authentic to the organization, or merely a passive accident of circumstance.

First published as perspective from Ka Partners