Culture

Building a safe, dynamic, and productive company culture that attracts, inspires, and retains the next generation of talent

Culture

Building a safe, dynamic, and productive company culture that attracts,
inspires, and retains the next generation of talent

Throughout this paper, we have focused on the importance of maintaining the human touch, even when face-to-face contact has not been available. But customer interactions are just one side of this coin. For hybrid working to succeed, organisations must closely examine their company culture, and ensure business growth does not come at the expense of employee wellbeing.

There’s no doubt the entire workforce has been challenged by social distancing requirements, with 74% of staff across surveyed organisations citing mental health as a serious concern throughout the past year . However, the issue becomes more complex when we consider that 74% of professionals also expect remote working to become the norm, and 97% do not want to return to an office full-time.

The question then, is how organisations balance this apparent contradiction, providing both office space and remote working capabilities in a way that remains scalable and cost-effective, without compromising either QoS or employee wellbeing.

A changing view of the physical workplace

A critical part of all organisations’ compliance requirements is their duty of care to their employees, including the provision of a safe, secure workplace. While HR departments will already have policies in place to safeguard employee wellbeing in the office, it’s important to be mindful of all possible future scenarios -from a full or partial return to the office, to another COVID-scale lockdown. HR policies and physical workspaces must evolve with this in mind, ensuring office and homeworkers are treated with equal consideration.

To this end, even though some organisations are in the process of reducing fixed office space, other companies are taking a more flexible approach, utilising shared spaces and hotdesking rather than maintaining dedicated premises, with such facilities expanding at an average rate of 23% per year since 2010 . But, as we touched on above, while most employees enthusiastically embrace a certain degree of remote working, the expectation is that they will still return to a dedicated workspace when necessary. This means that in spite of certain organisations’ pledging to allow full-time home working, office space is not likely to be completely eliminated, but evolve to better support a safe, productive hybrid working model.

Meeting the workforce’s shifting expectations

With the workforce adopting an increasingly ‘liquid footprint’, and top talent expecting a higher degree of flexibility in working practices, it is time to rethink our workplaces, ensuring they can be adapted to suit future working models, rather than the other way round. Beyond simply providing desks and meeting rooms, the modern workplace should be designed with hybrid working in mind, with a highly resilient network and Cloud security ecosystem already in place, in addition to the familiar physical security measures.

This will not only support cross-site collaboration and customer communication via the newest generation of UC platforms, but also put organisations in a strong position when it comes to attracting and retaining new talent, with organisations that offer flexible working options already reporting a 25% reduction in employee turnover.

Being prepared for whatever the future holds

These shifts will require close collaboration between building owners, organisations, and technology partners, but the potential rewards are great. Extending the Cloud computing philosophy to the workplace, with the intelligent application of technology driving remote collaboration, will create a healthy, supportive working environment that enables employees to deliver their best.