It feels like everyday life has been abruptly turned upside down and inside out. We find ourselves in unfamiliar and uncertain times, having to deal with a new way of living, working and communicating with each other. Yet despite it all, it also feels like collectively, we’re doing what humans arguably do best - adapting, helping each other out and even thriving in the face of a crisis.
As lockdown began, we started to hear stories from colleagues across our own organisation and also through our social media channels about how teams are adapting, breaking down barriers and developing new skills. So, two weeks ago we hosted a Twitter chat on the subject of ‘collaborating in physically distant workplaces’. We heard from people both inside and outside of our organisation, sharing stories about finding new and innovative ways to communicate with each other, socialise with each other and get work done, despite being located in fragmented workspaces. Whilst there have been obvious challenges, in some cases, the sudden move to remote working has also resulted in some unexpected positive outcomes; some things we didn’t think would be possible just three weeks ago simply happened overnight and are actually continuing to work pretty well, whereas some tools we thought would work quite well have ultimately found themselves sidelined for new tools we’ve only just discovered.
From what we’ve learned over the past three weeks, it seems clear that the next challenge for organisations is to find a way of capturing, curating and sharing all of this rich experiential insight so that we might build useful points of reference for when we all move forward into a post-pandemic world. Whilst it’s unlikely things will go back to exactly how they were before, we will find a new normal.
Our Director of Relationships shared her own observations as a comment on our Twitter chat round-up post. It feels like Helen’s comments could be a conversation starter to help us design a new set of organisational working principles to guide the way we work moving forward. One of the best sets of principles I’ve seen recently are those published by Coop digital as part of their new rules for unprecedented times blog post. We’ve seen many other examples over the past few weeks of just how quickly teams can pull together and make changes to the way they work in the face of a crisis. Whichever way we choose to apply our learning in the long-term, it’s clear that the only failure for organisations at this point would be to do nothing. It’s much better to work with what we know today and institute a state of dynamic improvements, rather than delay in the pursuit of perfection.
Last week we kicked off a piece of work to carry on our conversations with colleagues. We’ve already started meeting with colleagues and over the next three weeks we’ll continue to drop into (virtual) team meetings to chat with teams about their remote working strategies; the challenges they’ve faced, the opportunities they grasped and the tools they’ve been using to deliver their services remotely across distributed workplaces. Prior to the pandemic, we already had an organisation-wide project focused on developing our new workspaces strategy, so importantly, we’ve ensured that what we are learning here can be fed into that project in order to help inform the strategy moving forward.
As Paul Taylor pointed out in his recent blog post, we should be careful not to confuse enforced home working during an international lockdown with flexible working. We must also keep in mind that at a time of crisis there is little opportunity to collaborate with stakeholders in the creation of new operating models and services. To ensure long-term sustainability we must revisit this in the post-crisis retrospectives which will form an integral part of designing the ‘new normal’. But, we can’t deny that right here and now, the COVID19 pandemic has kickstarted the world’s largest workplace experiment in history; it would be remiss of Innovation and Design not to make use of that opportunity and attempt to take something positive from such an adverse set of circumstances.
If you are interested in this work, please keep an eye on the blog for updates, or subscribe to our newsletter to receive our latest blog posts direct to your inbox. We’re keen to share what we’re learning. If you are too, please drop us a line!
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Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash