If your office is seriously considering the shift to hybrid work, then it’s time to start thinking seriously about the aspects of working from home that are not all wine and roses.
While hybrid work undoubtedly comes with potential benefits and the work-from-home bit likely appeals to many, there are few leaders who are actively planning for the changes this will mean. The key considerations should be:
Security measures:
– cybersecurity; how well can the business expect its network to be protected if people are working from home, and what steps are you taking?
– physical world security; is your private phone number, your address and the names and even faces of your loved ones in any way exposed?
– how is the business protected from mistakes by senders (if you are dealing with any kind of goods) and misuse of data by unscrupulous employees?
– how are you addressing, monitoring and preventing bullying? Considering that the bullies may have an easy way to not only observe, but potentially also visit and get to know the private location of the victim?
– how are you protecting the private time of all involved, and how are you ensuring the privacy of anyone who lives with the employees, minors or otherwise? Are the employees pushed to sharing more about themselves?
Identity measures:
– working from home has begun to evolve into a non-stop schedule; that erases other-than-work identity of the employees, is often contrary to the law (eg only a set number of hours allowed to work per week, legal demands re unpaid labour, etc; Europe seems to be bringing on board laws to allow employees to be unreachable (see right to disconnect) in their spare time), and causes burnout and related mental and physical health issues. How are you preventing this at your office, and what plans do you have in place against overzealousness and abuse of power?
– working from home may create situations where members of minorities are going to be uneasy about exposing their personal spaces or may be fully pushed into covering behaviours because of either their colleagues or broader social behaviours and expectations around them. In extreme cases, that can create actual danger for them, or merely leads to mental health deterioration. How are you planning to work against that?
Privacy and self:
– part of the whole debate should be how far we are allowed to demand people to change their spaces. Often, hybrid work comes with unreasonable demands for top-of-the-line tech (which is not provided by the company), along with very specific work spaces, living spaces and interpersonal situations (eg care of the elderly parents or young children, pets, and their presence). These should be considered as unacceptable conditions to set for one’s employees. Instead, leaders should embrace diversity, but also be realistic about the cost, build and distribution of “ideal” vs general living spaces. Any behaviour to the contrary needs to be identified as discriminatory.
– As part of that, create an office policy that is clear that prying further than already given access to, disparaging and similar behaviour are not going to be tolerated; support curiosity, celebration of diversity and respect towards others as multifaceted human beings.
Maladaptive change management:
-the pandemic has brought on more maladaptive behaviours than before. Often, employees and management both fall into the “what if we’re just not doing it hard enough” routine, entrenching bad responses and thus endangering successful solutions to problems. Hybrid work can potentially make that worse. It’s high time to consider discussing this and finding solutions – including by talking to a professional.
These are the key problems that occur regularly where work from home is concerned. Likely, as hybrid office becomes a real deal, there will be more that pop up. None of this means that hybrid work is essentially bad – it merely means that if you are serious about it, you need to plan ahead.