The Great Re-Set: How the tussle over the return to work is playing out

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What shall we call this phase of the pandemic? We’ve been though The Great Retreat, those months when India locked down in 2020. We’ve had The Great Adjustment, as employees logged in remotely and companies pivoted to keep going. In 2021, we reassessed priorities amid The Great Resignation and charted courses anew in The Great Reshuffle.

The Great Resignation and Great Reshuffle, which Wknd reported on in January, were driven in large part by those wondering if they could have a healthier work-life balance, more meaning in their work, and more say over how they contributed. Now, months since India’s last major wave of Covid-19, as office spaces reopen, many of those that remain in their jobs are asking those questions too.

Our relationships with work have been transformed in the last two years; the old systems just won’t do. But unlike in the lockdowns, and in the time before them, there are no set guidelines. By most accounts, it looks like 2022 will mark the start of The Great Scramble.

“At this point, most human resource teams are hopelessly out of sync with what their staffers want,” says author and business writer Charles Assisi. “Employees are distinguishing between work, money and life. Companies are not prepared for it. They have no new ideas.”

And so, companies are trying, tweaking, experimenting, in some cases pushing back. Here’s how the return to work has looked in the past few months, with hints of how that could shape the corporate workplaces of tomorrow.

Any place can be an office now

“Flexible working arrangements are emerging as the number one priority for professionals and employers in India after Covid-19,” says Ashutosh Gupta, country head for LinkedIn India. Their Global Predictions report, which was released in January and draws on site data, found that an overwhelming majority of business leaders in India have offered or are planning to offer flexible work policies, while many have offered or are planning to allow employees to work from a different country.

Recruitment and staffing platform CIEL HR Services polled 2,000 Indian employees from 620 companies about returning to work last month. Sixty percent indicated they would consider quitting their jobs if there was no work-from-home or hybrid option. Employers are seeing the advantages too. Flexible work policies help “enhance productivity, and strengthen employer brand,” says Gupta.

At Signify Philips Lighting India, which employs 3,000 people in departments ranging from R&D to software, and from sales to manufacturing across India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, about half the workforce is back in the office. Lab workers and manufacturing teams go in to work every day. Some employees go into the office a few days a week. Many continue to work from homes, hometowns and getaways.

“We haven’t gone back to working the way we did before. We’ve done what makes the most sense for a job profile or a location,” says Anusha Suryanarayan, the company’s chief human resources officer.

But, in a bit of a downside, because employees can work from anywhere, everywhere is an office now. Remote workers are squatting in the best seats at local cafés, popping up by resort poolsides and carrying on loud conversations in the supermarket.

There are new manners to mind

Some of the new manners to mind have to do with how one works from anywhere. The roving employee will need to develop a greater sensitivity to local cultures, as well as to other non-residents sharing their space.

Back at the office, no one’s returning to the workplace they left in 2020 either. Human resource teams are grappling with what constitutes normal: How does one address the grief and loss? Should wellness breaks be enforced to minimise burnout? How much sway does an organisation have over the rights of an unvaccinated staffer?

At most offices, the challenge begins with pandemic-era basics such as preventing elevator crowding, discouraging handshakes, and enforcing the continued use of masks in group settings.

The struggle is real

“Before the pandemic, the biggest mental-health issue for companies used to be burnout,” says Dr Vikram Vora, country medical director for International SOS, a corporate consultancy that specialises in employee health and security. “After the pandemic, companies are opening up to the reality that 30% of any workforce, at any point, needs some kind of assistance with well-being.” These aren’t necessarily problems that need counselling or medication. “It’s just life’s stresses that crop up at work and can be managed by peers, family or supervisors.”

To create the balanced environment that will help employees cope, new polices must be visible in practice, Dr Vora adds. “It’s up to employers to commit to the cause and communicate change.” Put simply, groups will take cues from the boss on how to embrace employees with diverse needs and / or work models; team members will take more breaks or schedule visits with the on-site counsellor if they see their leaders do these things too.

Everyone’s questioning something

Across companies, International SOS has found that returning workers are tackling guilt and fear: over mingling with maskless crowds, changes in their routine, meeting many new people at once, abandoning children, pets, ageing parents and domestic responsibilities. “Remote and hybrid workers are worried they might be perceived as less essential or less hard-working” and push themselves harder, Dr Vora says.

At Signify Philips, Suryanarayan says small pre-emptive tweaks aim to make workers feel more included and valued. “Even before the pandemic, we partnered with a company to offer weekly webinars on parenting, bereavement and other issues that workers might grapple with,” she says. The company closely examines employee surveys to determine which issues might need extra attention.

Flexibility can be a two-way trap

There is still no ideal way to keep close tabs on remote employees. Some team leaders mandate that webcams be turned on all day, justifiably sparking outrage. Others monitor the number of times a mouse is clicked or a computer goes idle. Many of these mandates stem from older folks for whom power came from being present and overseeing the people doing the work, says Assisi. “But the pandemic has given workers more autonomy over their schedules. They will follow mutually agreed upon norms as they see fit,” he adds.

Meanwhile, the more stringent measures have spawned a community of people creating and sharing workarounds. You can now buy a jiggler for the mouse to keep your screen active; schedule emails so it seems like you were awake and at work; use increasingly realistic fake-background apps to conceal the fact that you’re at the beach.

Local economies are changing

In the cities, metros are already packed again in peak hours and traffic is back. The TomTom Traffic Index shows that the roads are jamming up too (though not as severely yet). This index measures, as a percentage, how much time traffic jams typically add to a commute in a given city. In Mumbai, the time added went from 65% in 2019 to 53% in 2021. In Delhi, from 56% in 2019 to 48% in 2021. In Bengaluru, jams were adding 71% to normal commute times on average in 2019, and that figure was at 48% in 2021.

As life restarts, restaurants are seeing an uptick over 2020 too. An October 2021 report by the National Restaurant Association of India stated that while the market declined 53% in 2020-21, it was projected to grow by 135% in 2021-22.

In India, more city cafés are putting up signs discouraging customers from holding up tables for long hours as they work. In hill and beach towns, the wi-fi has improved, and homestays and cafés are full and raising their rates. More than 2 million employees across IT, engineering-R&D and business process management now live in the top 15 Tier-II cities, according to a study by management and strategy consulting firm Zinnov.

Around the world, as remote workers escape the high rents of big cities, the economies of smaller towns are changing. In the US, Idaho, Utah and Montana topped the population growth rate charts between 2020 and 2021. The forecasting firm Oxford Economics named Boise, Idaho, the most unaffordable US city relative to local income; remote workers moving there from Seattle and San Francisco have driven prices up.

Location, location

“Productivity reports have been high for the last two years. There’s no need for organisations to have a lack of trust in their people,” says Dr Vora. But despite the surveys and studies, there are indications that remote and hybrid working might only work out temporarily in India.

Several companies, particularly those who have invested in expensive real-estate, are working their way towards having all employees back at their desks.

Last month, Infosys founder Narayana Murthy told the Deccan Herald that working from home was not viable in the long-term. Most Indians live in multi-generational households and do not have dedicated home offices, he said. Poor internet bandwidth might hinder the process too. But even if these were addressed, he said that a remote workforce, connected only virtually, would eventually erode an organisation’s institutional culture. For new businesses, especially, it would be tough to build “a culture of hard work, imagination, excellence, intuition, meritocracy, discussion and debate if people work from home”.

Kunal Shah, founder of the fintech company Cred, believes remote working systems are damaging for the careers of India’s young professionals too. In a Twitter post in February, he likened the state of those working from home to that of “children who study at home”, a situation that created “No real bonds. No real social or network skills” but offered the “Illusion of understanding and learning. No osmosis.”

In the US, a February survey by the Pew Research Center found that not all employees have taken to the idea of plugging in remotely either. Of the respondents who said their job could be done from home all or most of the time, only 59% exercised that option.

For employers, this makes finding the right balance that much more challenging as they juggle office spaces, work culture, motivation, engagement and employee satisfaction.

Old problems persist

In a world where it has now been proven that most jobs can be done just as well remotely, forced returns to the workplace could negatively impact marginalised demographics such as women and the differently abled.

A 2021 research paper by the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University, on the gendered impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, found that women were seven times more likely than men to lose work during the nationwide lockdown. Women were also 11 times more likely to not return to work after the pandemic, either by exercising a remote-working option or quitting.

“Allowing staffers to choose what works best for them is in an organisation’s best interest, particularly if they want to keep women on the rolls,” Suryanarayan says.

It’s a work in progress

“Employers want to be seen as doing right by their workforces, but many don’t know how,” says Dr Vora. “Any change has to be gradual. A sudden switch, if it’s the wrong one, is likely to do more damage.”

One such misguided effort made news last week. Attempting to get employees to pay more attention to their health, Nithin Kamath, founder and CEO of Zerodha, announced that staff members would get additional bonuses if their body-mass-index fell within a prescribed range. The move was widely criticised for being discriminatory, for relying on an outdated metric, and for stigmatising certain body types and health conditions. Kamath has since issued a clarification that the bonuses are “supplemental perks”.

Assisi finds that a conflict is also playing out between workers (remote and otherwise) and employers over what constitutes duties and responsibilities on either side. “We still haven’t hit that rhythm,” he says. “But any hurry to bring back people into the corporate workplace is going to backfire after all the changes of the past two years.”

Suryanarayan agrees. “The intent of the employee is generally not to make life difficult for the organisation,” she says. “But in addition to greater employee trust after the pandemic, there’s a shift among workers too. They like the new flexibility and are looking for ways to hold on to it.” This means that the coming months will constitute a crucial window of opportunity for employees to speak up to make pandemic-era changes permanent.

The lucky ones?

To be able to negotiate terms for a job you have is itself a kind of privilege. The Pew survey (and several others) shows that the ability and desire to work from home, even part-time, leans heavily towards those with college degrees and higher incomes. The educated, financially stable minority generally fare best in a contracting economy, Assisi points out.

“It certainly looks different on the lowest rung,” says Suryanarayan. Many low-wage jobs and service positions, by default, have little to no flexibility.

But, Assisi says, unskilled workers might find new opportunities if not better deals in the coming year, with more gig jobs opening up to tide them over this uncertain time. “All of us are working harder now,” he adds. “Going forward, at all levels, there will be no option but to constantly reskill and readjust. The young generation is set to live to 100, and can expect to transition through at least four careers, learning and unlearning constantly as the world changes. The idea of retiring at 60 is toast, for everyone.”

All the more reason to have more of a say in the future of the workplace.

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