Canadian HR Reporter

F E A T U R E S 54 www.hrreporter.com 4 WAYS TO REINVENT THE WORKPLACE The workplace has expanded its frontiers far beyond the walls of corporate offices so instead of talking about the hybrid workplace, employers should be focused on the new frontiers of the employee experience, says Élie Girard of Atos, along with greater inclusivity, new tools and digital security IF there is one notion that the pandemic may have altered forever, it is our idea of the workplace. Even if remote work has been gaining ground for years, the pre-pandemic idea of the workplace still centred on a few designated places of work, such as offices, stores or production sites. Fast forward to 2021 and the workplace has expanded its frontiers far beyond the walls of corporate offices. It is everywhere and anywhere, in bedrooms, living rooms and waiting rooms, trains and cars, cell- phones and laptops. And these changes are here to stay: Today, many companies have no clear plans to bring all employees back to the office, and 55 per cent of employees say that the possibility to work remotely will be a factor in their decision to stay with their current employer, according to Gartner. from one team to the other, very different settings will coexist — going to the office being sometimes the general rule, sometimes the rare exception. And, if the recent period has taught us anything, it may be that organizations should strive for flexibility and read- iness, rather than optimize for one of those scenarios or another. The focus should be making all scenarios equally possible by providing a high-quality, fric tionless employee e xperience from anywhere. As first steps, this means aligning the in-office and out-of-office experience and taking advantage of the cloud to provide access to all applications — including business critical ones. This is an essential endeavour. Working with clients as diverse as Siemens, PwC or the BBC, we have found that addressing the workplace experience Here are four ways that organizations can prepare for the changes to come. Go beyond hybrid work: focus on the employee experience A lot of the recent conversation on the future of work has revolved around hybrid work. We prefer to talk about the new frontiers of employee experience. Why? Primarily because the term hybrid work has come to mean very different things to different people: • For some, it will be the fact that, at a given time, some of the company's employees will work on the premises (such as factory workers), while some are remote. • For others, it's about individual employees who will split their time between office days and work-from- home days. • And for others still, it's the fact that, 2 IN 3 Number of employers that say EX is discussed at the C-suite level 43% Percentage of employers revamping their values and behaviours 1 IN 2 Percentage of employers that have formalized what EX means and how to approach it 40% Percentage of employers implementing a new way of working 60% Percentage of employers with a clear strategy for purpose, culture and vision with EX 37% Percentage of employers leveraging new information and collaboration tools proactively can drive impressive results — boosting employee productivity by as much as 30 per cent while significantly reducing turnover. And it will increas- ingly be a decisive argument to hire and retain talent. The one-size-fits-all workplace is no more Productivity was, of course, a key concern for companies during this pandemic period. And, in many areas, they have found that productivity did not drop during the pandemic. Instead, in a period when employers had to embrace flex- ibility, many found that employees working on their own terms could usher in a new era of productivity — to the point that some have predicted that flexibility could finally solve Solow's productivity paradox. This is a change of paradigm — from the idea that workplace rules are neces- sary to ensure productivity, to the idea that workplace flexibility fosters engagement. When you give people a personal stake in their work, combined with the right tools to accomplish it, they do amazing things. They create, they learn new skills, they adopt new communications Source: Gallagher E M P L O Y E E E X P E R I E N C E EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE (EX) GAINS GROUND GLOBALLY

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