Fathom this if you can...

The loud promises of a new workplace order are suddenly being drowned by the noise around mass-vaccination programmes soon restoring normality. For many it seems, the pre-COVID dream of working from home has morphed into something much more like living at work and for them, normality means rushing back to their familiar office.

Familiar offices, because when all’s said and done, in workplace a lot more gets said than often gets done. And for many, not much will have changed in the year or more they were away.

So, my workplace friends you have a very limited window of opportunity – just six months perhaps - before those employees flock back. Workplace is being discussed in places you once only dreamed of - broadsheet economics articles, radio documentaries, government corridors of power, even in board rooms. Hub’n’spoke and blended working are now part of the corporate lexicon. Your time is now.

So, act. Develop plans. Vision the future. Resource for it and build it. We are supporting some brilliant action-oriented workplace leaders fathom their future workplace path and the data we have gathered for them from 150,000+ employees since March has shone a glaring light on the factors impacting employees the most.

It has told us that the setting an employee has at home is crucial to their experience. So too is the complexity of their role and the extent to which they need to collaborate. But we have also uncovered the blindingly obvious – the better the corporate workplace supports the employee in their role, the more time they want to spend there post-pandemic. Our four-point action plan, built on these key variables, hands you the data and feeds models that show the scale of opportunity and the scale of risk – especially of doing nothing.

Those clients have also shown great humility - recognising that it is simply not acceptable that homes designed for living are supporting some work activities better than even the best workplaces designed for working. These enlightened clients recognise that the post-pandemic workplace should be different.

Thank you to those clients. You've pushed us hard in 2020 to develop these insights. The tools, models and services we’ve responded with are now helping others fathom their workplace futures.

I leave you with this: the word fathom is used as a verb to describe getting to the bottom of a complex problem. As a noun it is a nautical unit of measure loosely equivalent to the distance between the middle fingers of your outstretched arms. It is derived from Old English or perhaps even the Viking word ‘fæþm’ for a wide opened-arm greeting before a bearhug-like embrace. The very thing social distancing is stopping us doing.

The post-pandemic view of where work happens will be different to that pre-pandemic. The role corporate workplace plays in your organisation might also be different. It could be different in a good way. A better way that supports employees across the full spectrum of their work activities. You now have the best opportunity to develop a workplace experience programme that gives every employee a bear-hug embrace.

Don’t waste it.

https://www.leesmanindex.com/your-workplace-of-the-future/