Desperation vs inspiration: office vs home working
History shows us there are two areas that influence people to make changes: inspiration and desperation. We can look back at different milestones and see inspirational leaders that have effected positive change. Martin Luther King through his efforts on civil rights, that forever changed America, Mother Teresa’s commitment to help the world’s poorest, and Nelson Mandela who stood up for freedom and racial equality. All inspirational leaders. However, you can see that their inspiration came out of a place of desperation.
In March 2020, through desperation the world went into lockdown, companies from across the country were forced to shut and workers told to work from home, as the Covid-19 pandemic caused havoc. Through desperate measures, company owners and employers were forced to make a change. Home working for the next 18 months has become the new normal.
At its peak, experts say that up to 60% of the UK workforce was working from home. It was only 10 years ago that under one million workers were regularly working from their homes. Fast forward to the present and it’s estimated up to 23 million workers have regularly been working from home over the past 12-18 months. You can carry out searches across a range of online articles, which highlight a core of employers will continue with some element of home or agile working.
For many decision makers over the past 18 months, they have been forced to make change after change. Many out of desperation, in order to simply stay afloat. Researchers have highlighted to us that working from home has enabled us to be more effective and efficient, it’s helped us reduce our CO2 emissions and allow us to make significant cost savings. Surely only positives?
However, what about loneliness? What about those little conversations when you walk out of a meeting with a colleague?… you grab a coffee and then just like that, the creative ideas flow, the solutions come, that collaboration across departments, the energy you get when you come together. All vital parts in the life of a thriving organisation and the development of the individual.
Having worked with many organisations and individuals over the past 12 months in this area, here are some common questions that have arisen:
How do I keep my staff focused on the vision when we’re no longer in the same room?
How do we collaborate effectively? - online has been helpful though it doesn’t fuel the same energy you bring when you’re together.
We’ve worked so hard on creating and developing a healthy culture, how do we continue this from home or across a blend of the office and home?
How do we know our staff are living out our agreed values at home? Should they be?
What does winning look like when home working?
Maybe you can relate to these questions. Maybe you and your leadership team are asking yourself the same questions in this moment of time. The truth is you will always get a mixed response when it comes to home vs office working. For Generation X, home working wasn’t or hasn’t been an option for the majority of their working life, however for millennials and Generation Z they are used to flexibility and appreciate the opportunity to work anywhere. We can’t control what year we were born and our experiences to date, however what we can control is the experience and the leadership we provide for the future.
Yes, working from home was maybe a change we didn’t want to make and maybe it was forced through desperate times. Today though you have a choice: will you choose to go and inspire your employees, your staff, your team? Unite them around the vision. You may feel your pen got taken from you over this past year, but today you need to pick it up, take control and start shaping the next chapter of your story.
There are positives to both home and office working, and at Firstfruits we can help you develop your agile working plan. Simply get in touch and we would love to inspire you so you can inspire others.
Be on the front foot, now is the time to lead your team through inspiration. Lead from the front and shape working rhythms for you and your team that will see you win, and win in a healthy and consistent manner.
