Now showing items tagged work from home

Across the board, organisations are changing. Post-pandemic workplace practices, changing tech trends and generational shifts are impacting the way organisations must run and respond to the world. Local governments are not exempt from the trends dominating the workplace and the world at large, which represent a whole new set of opportunities, or threats, for those paying attention.

Here are 5 trends local governments need to watch.

Hybrid work is underway. Incentivising the return to workplaces has been a struggle for leaders as, for many workers, the freedom and flexibility offered by remote work makes it a high priority. The set of challenges that faces leaders, however, is not simply finding the right incentive to get workers back to the office. Rather, the hybrid work world has created a new set of priorities in employees regarding both their teams and their leaders.

Microsoft recently released a trends report, highlighting the statistics and numbers that emerged from research into workplace relations within hybrid work models[1].

Here are 3 key insights from their findings.

The last couple of years have seen the sharp rise of a very welcome idea: working less. With trends like working from home and the Great Resignation, our collective mentality towards work has undergone significant change. One of the ways we are now seeing this manifest is in the four-day workweek, which is increasingly looking like it’s here to stay.

Many of us assume the idea of a Monday to Friday working week is something that humans have always done – that it reflects some unspoken law about how the nature of work should be. And yet the notion of working five days per week is actually a relatively new concept. In fact, it was stonemasons in Melbourne, Australia, who were the first to achieve an eight-hour, five-day workweek back in 1856.

Working from home raised a range of challenges, but as life continues getting back to normal post-Covid, it is the return to work that might pose the most difficulty. Clashes between the expectations of employees and employers are becoming more frequent, as are debates surrounding how work should function in the post-Covid world.

Here are 3 questions surrounding the nature of work that are now unavoidable in our post-Covid world.

If we have learned anything in the last year, it is that the only certain thing is uncertainty. Businesses have felt this too, with lockdowns, virus variants and financial instability sending consumer confidence plummeting. This is in line with trends that were already at play as a series of scandals, ethical missteps and moral failures in public organisations drove home the undeniable message that businesses and institutions cannot be trusted.

For this reason, building trust should be one of the central priorities for all companies in today’s world. Especially post-pandemic, much of this trust needs to be built through consistency. For all the pivoting we have done during COVID, there is much to be said for the value of consistency in the face of uncertainty.

Among the most significant and lasting changes created by COVID last year was the sudden shift to remote work. Return to offices this year have been varied, and where we will collectively end up in our work life in years to come is proving difficult to predict.