The Human Factor: Is Working from Home Working?

This week, I had the privilege of facilitating a discussion amongst international communications experts, Chief Communication Officers, agency leaders, and academic leaders in our profession—all members of the Page Society. The intent was to shed some light on the human experience of working from home (or WFH, otherwise known as "sleeping at your office") and take a moment to understand what works and what doesn't, taking a human perspective first. 

Before COVID-19 (our modern version of “BC”), remote work was provided as a perk, to the point that employees might forgo vacation for WFH flexibility. While evidence shows that WFH helps employee retention and contributes to employee happiness, only 44% of U.S. employers allowed their employees to work from home, and only 10% actually took advantage of that option.

Many of us have managed teams in different locations and communicated with a remote workforce or audiences in the past. However, things look different when that's the only option, and it comes with an increased level of stress around economic and health-related concerns. 

Organizations had to respond quickly, but top-down, compliance-driven solutions leave little time to understand what people want when it comes to their workplace. Coming from the office furniture world, this reminds me of how the office cubicle had good intentions to provide privacy but instead ending up caging a generation of workers. Open-plan offices and hot desking were similarly well-intentioned ideas to allow flexibility, but they soon became a catch-all solution to cut facility costs during the financial crisis in 2008/09.

We can see the first signs of a similar pattern when looking at the recent data from architecture, design, or corporate real estate firms. Before we take one side or the other, we want to learn what worked for us in the last four months to provide the best conditions for the future.

As a passionate design thinker with over 30 years in the office design industry, I’ve learned that people thrive at work when they can connect with other people (social connection), with spaces (spatial connection) and with information (informational connection). Regardless of whether you work alone or with a team, face-to-face or virtual, understanding the value of these three dimensions are crucial to understanding how humans feel at work.

In our discussion, Steve Cody, CEO and Founder of Peppercomm, shared that recent research conducted by Peppercomm and IPR showed that productivity has declined since before COVID and that health and well-being have become an increasingly important issue. 

To address this decline, Peppercomm is trying things like a "12@12", a daily staff meeting during which anyone can share something interesting they’re working on, how they’re spending their time in lockdown, or trends in the profession, as well as a "Gone Fishing" program that lets employees do whatever they want for 90 minutes each day to refresh themselves or get inspired.

Dominic Keogh, GM of Ricoh based in Tokyo, Japan, shared that people are also experiencing different anxieties at different times. As economies begin to reopen and people return to work, new concerns are emerging. His team produced video walk-throughs of their offices to acquaint people with what's been done to assuage concerns about returning to physical workspaces.

Dominic shared how Japan, as a high-context, trust-based culture, used to depend heavily on face-to-face interaction. But every week since the pandemic began, employees got more and more accustomed to working from home. The cultural shift is happening at a fundamental level. One can see the same phenomenon happening across Europe and in other parts of the world as well.

Another agency member on the call argued the shift to remote work will require massive long-term changes that can only be built by leadership. He observed that the stress over working from home has taken its toll very rapidly, with the transition to WFH becoming a stressor instead of a solution. Some employees have spent careers cultivating their professional persona and may now be feeling that it was stripped from them by being suddenly forced to work in their kitchen.

Younger generations seem to struggle more than others with the shift to working remotely. One of our academic members mentioned that more youthful generations have to make different decisions and balance against their careers. For some, there are differential impacts of working from home, like taking care of elderly parents or siblings while sharing their work locations, factors that disproportionately affect women.

Work in the future will very likely happen in many places. Ideally, employees will be allowed to choose where they work based on the context of their individual situation and what task they have at hand.

We concluded that in the current moment, CCOs must play a mission-critical role, listening to employees in balance with broadcasting content, helping organizations build a corporate brand experience as well as a culture with more virtual connections. For the last four months, CCOs have seen more new changes and challenges than many of us will see in any other individual season of our careers. 

As we cast a vision for the coming chapter of work for our organizations from kitchen tables and basement offices, the need to focus on our people first has never been more pressing. What comes next is to build on what we learn from this experience—building on what works, moving away from what doesn’t, and ensuring that no one is left behind.