Waiting for the Minister of Health’s daily briefing has become part of day to day routine as the number of people infected with COVID-19 continues to surge. With the advent of the pandemic, many Zambian businesses have notably adopted a work from home (WFH) strategy in order to ensure business continuity. This is despite government easing some of the restrictions that came with the first lock down albeit with spike of inflections being recorded in the southern hemisphere’s winter season.
From time in a memorial, many local businesses had adopted to the traditional way of working that saw in bustling workforce report for work in the morning and exit in the evening. Supervisors were accustomed to measuring performance based on the number of hours, as one of the parameters, their charges are available in the office. For production type industries, clocking systems were put in place to ensure that the prescribed 8 hour work day was adhered to.
However, COVID 19 has flipped this model on its head. Businesses were initially forced to discontinue offering their services from what had become their fixed abodes to providing the same service from various homes dotted all over the place. Thanks to technology, this was made possible. However, it also birthed a new working culture that many supervisors are now beginning to realise may be here to stay for some time.
The are two sides of the work from home culture that have been birthed as a result of COVID-19. One the one side, there is the business owners with their human resource departments that have had to put in place measures to ensure their companies employees are able to continue work productively through this crisis. On the other hand, employees have had to rearrange their home environment to accommodate being able to deliver the work tasks but also manage the other counterparties in their personal lives that have been impacted by the pandemic: family.
From the business’s perspective, WFH has meant equipping their employees with the necessary tools such as mobile devices that ensure connectivity and productivity. This has meant that budgets have had to be re-arranged to accommodate this new operating and capital expenditure. In addition, a skillset that requires supervisors to be benign leaders has now been awoken. WFH demands that supervisors trust their charges to deliver on assignments as they have provided all the necessary tools to the execution of the job. So they believe.
However, from the employee’s perspective, rearranging one’s life at home to accommodate the very thing that one believed they left behind when they left the office at close of business has presented some interesting dynamics. For small and medium sized families for example, employees have had to accommodate not only their office work when working from home but have also had to adopt teaching skills to ensure their kids who are stuck at home are able to continue learning.
This presents a very testing situation for supervisors as their soft skills are tested. For example, a supervisor can not be expected to make a demand for a subordinate to deliver a report “asap” without enquiring how their day is looking. Ignoring this could be the difference between quality work being delivered or substandard and incomplete work being delivered.
Observations made thus far indicate that the work force has actually evolved and are able to deliver quality work because of soft skills such as trust from a supervisor. This has no doubt presented a possibility that the office work culture which is currently under threat may be finding a replacement after all. This presents a compiling argument as to whether going back to the old normal is really worth it. Make no mistake, traditional jobs that require one to be on the factory floor will still be required but even that may be under threat with the advent of automation and robotics. Elon Musk for example spent sleepless nights in his Telsa factory and can now boast of a highly automated factory which interestingly faced minimal disturbance when COVID-19 broke.
At the end of Q2 2020, many businesses will be assessing the impact that COVID-19 and the working from home has had. For those that have successfully shipped work tasks to the homes of their employees and been able to continue to provide a service, they will ask the question of why go back? This could present an opportunity for their Human Resource departments to remodel how execution of work in this “new normal” should be done going forward.
But whatever decision companies make going forward, they should not ignore the fact that a hybrid culture that has employees working both from home and work will be the most likely outcome. This is because COVID-19 has impacted every aspect of both professional and family lives of employees.