Humanizing the workplace

Every year I assemble a photo collage to honor my daughters’ birthdays. As I browsed through photos the other day, I noticed many happy moments together—even more so than in previous years. I wasn’t expecting such a positive byproduct from the pandemic: working from home in 2020 meant more time with my family, and I value that deeply. While I’ll eventually return to the office, I won’t be headed in five days a week. And I’m not alone.

Data shows that in 2021 and beyond, employees will gain greater flexibility, not just because it benefits employees but because it benefits companies. In Gartner’s 2020 ReimagineHR Employee Survey, companies with a standard, in-office 40-hour workweek reported 36% of their employees were high performers. Organizations that offer employees flexibility regarding where they work reported 43% of employees were high performers. That number jumps to 46% when employers add flexibility in terms of when employees work and up to 55% when employers allow employees to choose the amount they work, for example, working 80% time and receiving 80% of a full-time salary.

Geographic shifts

Workers are making all sorts of lifestyle changes, including moving to different areas of the country. Some U.S. states are going above and beyond to attract talent. Fledgling programs in cities like Topeka, Kansas and Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, now offer remote employees up to $15,000 to move.

People are opting to move even without incentive, as evidenced by mass migration from places like New York City and Silicon Valley. According to the Wall Street Journal, five metropolitan areas (Boston, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and San Jose) accounted for 90% of all U.S. tech job growth between 2005 and 2017. These areas have become among the most expensive cities to live in in the U.S., exacerbating gentrification and neighborhood segregation. In San Francisco, the Black population declined from 13% of the total population in 1970 to 8% in 2015. The geographic shift happening now may increase talent diversity because it reverses a key trend where geographic hubs of tech have become less diverse as they've become more expensive.

Not everyone benefits

Unfortunately, not everyone benefits. While theoretically increasing the flexibility of work options across geographic location, time and amount of work may make the workplace more inclusive for some employees, the trend is mostly limited to higher-wage workers. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2018 (pre-pandemic statistics though still indicative of a trend), 61.5% of people earning greater than the 75th percentile were able to work remotely versus 9.2% of those earning less than or equal to the 25th percentile.

Not all populations have internet connectivity either. According to a McKinsey report, a researcher at Stanford University found that only 65% of Americans surveyed said they had fast enough internet service to support video calls.

Getting greater access to digital

Digital technologies like cloud play a significant role in workplace shifts happening now, and equitable access will be critical to making deeper changes in our workforce. Digital solutions have become critical to commerce, education and healthcare among other industries and the infrastructure, platforms and applications that are fueling the digital age depend on reliable, continuous and convenient connectivity. This is as true for connectivity at the office as it is in our homes, kitchens, bedrooms and even our back pockets.

The shift toward equitable access starts with empowering more people with high-speed internet connectivity. A few local outages over the last 12 months showed me just how much we need to push for universal access as a starting point in the digital world. A backbone of connectivity is essential not only for collaboration tools but also some of the more exciting innovations emerging for remote workers, including distributed edge hubs, which give remote workers greater computing power, and on-demand services. Critical infrastructure and services like cloud and mobile connectivity will play a huge role in enabling our entire workforce to move forward, whether we’re gaining new skills, collaborating with colleagues or accessing healthcare online.

On being human

Gartner notes that in addition to a movement toward “radical flexibility,” we’ll see organizations creating deeper connections with employees, given the clear performance payoffs of humanizing the workplace. Leaders will begin to think differently about engaging and working with employees, asking questions like, “What do we need to do to support our employees and their communities beyond what we’ve done before?” 

I know my own experience of working from home and sharing more time with my family has made me more likely to see my colleagues as people with full lives beyond work—and to appreciate the contribution of their extended communities to our company’s diversity and creativity. I hope this effort, in addition to greater flexibility and more equitable access to connectivity, will help us all humanize our work.