Why Being ‘People-Focused’ Means More Now Than Ever

1. Be flexible to employee needs

In a global organization it is all-too easy for staff to find themselves covering multiple time zones or working on a geographically dispersed team. Operating in a largely virtual environment makes it harder to log off and walk away than it is in a physical office environment. There is no longer time to decompress during commuting time in the car, train, or on a plane.

My goal has been to help our employees to do their best work. Digital burn-out is a real concern, so we to have continually emphasized the need to work smarter and focus on outputs over inputs. Encouraging balance has helped staff to think creatively about how they approach tasks and understand there is more to peak productivity than just screen time.

Not everyone is productive at the same time of the day, so I am a strong believer of being flexible on when you get your job done whenever possible and schedule your workload accordingly.

Flexibility can also mean where you work from. This year, several colleagues have made personal decisions on moving and relocating within and across countries to be closer to families, in houses with more space, or to their secondary home outside of a city.

3. Be practical about the reintegration process

As we see vaccinations accelerating across the world, I have reflected more lately on what does “back-to-normal” mean, and what does this mean for those of us working remotely?

It is important to recognize that different people have different levels of readiness and/or appetite to go back to an office environment full time. We cannot rush the process, and we need to be prudent in how people get reintroduced, both to shared offices and to external meetings and customer site visits.

Most companies have protocols in place to guide decisions on the cases where it is better for people to work from an office versus working from home, as well as levels of office occupancy. It is likely this will be a staggered process where we combine face-to-face with video conferencing for a significant period as staff reacclimatize to physical interactions and that, as much as possible, people have an option on when and how fast they return.