How to manage the growing paradigm shift to a new way of working

As Covid-19 continues to disrupt the business world, forcing companies to enable remote working, this longstanding conviction is increasingly fading away and leaving room for a new paradigm. Today, corporations must rethink their way of working and their workplace strategies to comply with the thinking of a new generation. “People now prefer a more activity based approach to work and would like to come to the office when it suits them,” says Carsten Scheunemann, Head of Workforce & Delivery Excellence at NTT Data, a multinational IT service provider¹. Tomorrow’s talents put an emphasis on saving commuting time and using office space for socializing activities. This has also been reflected in empirical studies’ findings that 70% of surveyed employees prefer a hybrid working model (i.e., a combination of office and remote work), whereas merely 18% prefer pure office work and 12% pure remote work². If companies want to keep up in the everlasting war for talent, they must realize that workplace strategy has become an important pillar of corporate strategy and an essential building block for employee attraction and retention.

A company’s way of working is deeply embedded in its existing structures, processes and culture, and changing it therefore poses a significant challenge. A successful shift to modern working depends on an integrated workplace strategy with four key pillars: leadership, footprint strategy, office layouts, and infrastructure. Only the skilled combination of these four pillars will enable successful implementation and lead to higher employee satisfaction, talent attraction and flexibility.

• Leadership
  A new workplace strategy will not only change where work is being done, but also how: A transition from rigid organizational structures, processes and rules to more agile, self-managed and multidisciplinary teams can be observed. Therefore, the starting point of any workplace strategy must be leadership and the question of how managers conceive their roles. The new workplace strategy will only be successful if managers become everyday orchestrators of a flexible and dynamic organizational system that is built on trust and unleashes autonomy and initiative.
• Footprint strategy
  Next, the key element of any workplace strategy is the question: “Where to play?” Depending on the company’s business model, suitable footprint strategies vary in their physical presence and flexibility, but a trend toward “asset-light” real estate strategies with more flexible footprints could be seen across all industries even before Covid-19. 
  
  Even though many companies with a historically grown (e.g., due to M&A processes) footprint do not have a footprint strategy at all, one can generally distinguish three evolutionary footprint strategies. 
  
  In a traditional location footprint, companies aim to be present on the ground, and employees are expected to be in the office most of the time. Therefore, their footprints are characterized by large headquarters and a number of regional locations depending on customers’ and suppliers’ proximity. However, in the last decade, companies have increasingly moved toward flexible location footprints characterized by a strategic presence at attractive locations and more flexible contract design. This ensures swift adaptability to changing demands of employees and allows companies to respond to increasing business uncertainty and cost pressure. Such concepts can be complemented by the use of serviced offices (e.g., WeWork, Regus). Today, we can even observe a small but increasing number of companies that have gone to the extreme of successfully adopting a completely virtual location strategy with no permanent physical offices, allowing them to attract the brightest talents from every corner of the world.
• Office layouts
  Regarding new office layouts, a major trend from static layouts with many individual offices to more spacious and activity-based layouts can be identified. Such new layouts allow employees to choose from a variety of settings according to the type of work they are engaged in. This increases productivity, efficiency and collaboration and can also leverage employer branding efforts, as office space communicates a company’s culture. These new office layouts are characterized by an inspirational atmosphere with open space, meeting rooms and break-out as well as recreation areas with amenities for the workforce.
  
  “Today, office space is planned based on completely different requirements compared to earlier days – we realized a significant shift from space purely built to accommodate people to flexible space fostering collaboration and agile working,” states Steven Crabbe, Founder of CMI Workplace, an international architect and workplace design company.³
• Infrastructure
  To implement new workplace strategies, it is essential that companies ensure the availability of optimal working equipment (desk, ergonomic chair, etc.) and IT infrastructures (laptops, mobile phones, collaboration software, data security, etc.). Moreover, they need to evaluate all corporate processes in terms of automation and virtualization potential (e.g., digitalizing interfaces). As previously seen, office utilization is expected to remain volatile. Therefore, it is advisable to support the transformation process through realtime office utilization trackers that help companies to identify unused office space and thus save on “sunk” costs.