Why leaders must embrace the new future of work

The last couple of years have certainly been a great leveler of all things related to work and life. With everyone in most businesses and government agencies forced overnight into working from home, gone were cubicles, offices, the physical interactions, and office hierarchy at all levels. All of us had to find new places to work in our homes (kitchen, bedroom, or the basement), and new ways of working together to get things done using more technology. And not only did we have to adapt and reorient our personal lives, our friends and family had to do that while enduring physical and mental health challenges.

The insights I gathered during this process will stay with me forever. The most important was that human ingenuity prevailed as the critical success factor—to not just do things differently, but better. This human ingenuity, combined with technology, has allowed organizations to pivot business models and even start new businesses.

Our teams at Deloitte had access to leading-edge technology such as cloud platforms that enabled us to pivot quickly to remote working, while concurrently helping our clients do the same thing and maintain business continuity. It was the talent and innovation of our teams that helped the business not only persist, but evolve and get better.

As organizations are executing in the next normal and are starting to open physical spaces again, a hybrid work paradox is upon us. While people want the flexibility of remote work, they also want in-person connections. Remote working and virtual collaboration are here to stay; people will work seamlessly from the home, office, and anywhere their duties take them, and returning to the way it used to be is out of the question. But we have to effectively manage this transition to keep people engaged, productive, and happy in their organizations and their homes. That’s the challenge ahead and we are still figuring it out.

Given the tectonic shifts ahead, organizations must place a strong emphasis on continual learning and training, while staying focused on maintaining their sense of purpose.

It is imperative that leaders continue to listen and act on what their teams are telling them. Many do not want to return to full-time office work. Flexibility is the key for many reasons: engagement and inclusion, for example. We each must deal with “reopening” in our own personalized way, as we will face an uneven environment for the next few months. While offices may be open, schools and child care may not be in sync.

Organizations must develop a hybrid-work framework that has the right blend of remote and physical work, and is able to cater to multiple needs and preferences while keeping morale and productivity high.

This is also the time to emphasize workforce experience; that is, focusing more on employees to enhance their satisfaction with work that is stimulating, policies that stress well-being, and management processes and systems that empower them to play to their strengths and be their authentic selves.

A big part of this human-centered strategy should be reimagining and rearchitecting work, where we elevate what humans do best and let technology tackle what it does best. A productive hybrid workplace will need to be data-driven, deploying analytics consciously to understand how and why all employees—including executives and managers—are at their most engaged and productive in which setting. We will see existing technologies (e.g. AI, robotics, hybrid, edge, and multi-cloud environments) being used in new ways, the onset of new technologies (e.g. Web3, the metaverse, quantum), and the arrival of more sophisticated collaboration and communication tools; and all this with improved cyber defenses.

Given the tectonic shifts ahead, organizations must place a strong emphasis on continual learning and training, while staying focused on maintaining their sense of purpose. The triple bottom line has never been more important. At Deloitte, we have already embarked on this sustainability journey, and are thinking constantly about the best future-of-work models for our people.

While there are formidable challenges, the upside is huge. Now is the time, for example, to bake in those sustainability gains made during the lockdowns by rationalizing real estate footprint, permanently reducing business travel, and accelerating on the track to net-zero emissions.

We have a great opportunity to innovate, reimagine and rearchitect work, challenge orthodoxies while building a positive workforce experience—purposeful, with the right physical/digital mix—and significantly leverage technology to bring out the best in human ingenuity.