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5 CRITICAL POST PANDEMIC AREAS TO FOCUS FOR BUSINESS LEADERS
5 CRITICAL POST PANDEMIC AREAS TO FOCUS FOR BUSINESS LEADERS

September 20, 2021

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Leadership is a rare skill. While most of us were still settling with the required skills and polish our leadership qualities, the COVID-19 outbreak changed everything. The newly emerged hybrid workplace or remote work setup demands a more flexible, trustworthy and an agile leader. We are all cognizant that when mass vaccination ends, remote work is not simply going to go away. Instead, we will be entering an era where hybrid work models become the norm. With such a transition approaching us, business leaders have a crucial role to play. They need to ensure that companies keep up the good that they were doing pre-pandemic and eliminate malpractices that 1+ year of remote work has exposed. 

To achieve the same, here are six key areas that leaders need to focus on, as per PERSOLKELLY: - 

 

Personal Space 

Before: Workplaces across the globe embraced handshakes, pats, and hugs as standard non-verbal communication. Even in the most formal business settings, objecting to such interactions would ensue raised eyebrows. 

After: The pandemic has changed us at a fundamental level. It has brazenly exposed our mortality and infused us with fears and inhibitions we did not hold before. Thus, it would be naive to expect that rules concerning workplace boundaries would not undergo an overhaul once the dust settles. In reality, post-pandemic workplaces would house employees with varying conceptions of personal space. Some would be okay with the forms of non-verbal expression we have listed above. However, some would object heavily to all physical contact and prefer to be greeted from a distance. So, it will be essential for leaders to foster an environment where everybody’s boundaries are respected. Exploring creative solutions like color-coded employee tags could be one way to attain this objective. For instance, employee tags with blue strings could signal comfort with handshakes and hugs whereas those with red strings could communicate an aversion to any physical contact. 

 

The shift of focus from workplace to workforce

Before:  Earlier, the pressure to adopt newer, more productive technologies was not as ever-present as the pandemic caused it to be. Though teams were already experimenting with ways to get things done more efficiently, without being present at one place physically, they were not going full throttle with implementing such changes.  

 

After: For business organizations everywhere, surviving so many unexpected changes upped the ante for what it means to be efficient. The threat that remote work initially posed to workplace productivity caused hysteria among high ups as well as entry to mid-level employees. Said hysteria created negative as well as positive outcomes. The negatives include increased employee stress and overblown perceptions of the threat at hand. On the flip side, the positives include a stronger motivation to adopt agile frameworks and acclimate to high degrees of automation. Resultantly, future workplaces are likely to stick to fast-paced innovation and will be more open to incorporating technological advances. Herein, leaders need to lead from the front and keep a keen eye on the well-being of team members.

 

Transparency 

Before: The demand for greater transparency has been causing ripples of change in the business world for a long time. Even before the pandemic hit the shore, companies were doing their bit to increase transparency at the organizational as well as market level. Internally, this meant motivating team members to engage in open communication and increasing the flow of information transfer from top to bottom. At the market level, increased transparency meant exposing customers to more details about internal operations. 

After: The pandemic has not tampered much with trends concerning business transparency. From here on, companies will continue to adopt initiatives aimed at fostering organization-wide transparency. If anything, the pandemic has introduced companies to more tech-savvy ways of keeping everyone in the loop. Increased comfort with project management and goal-tracking tools is a striking example of the same. Thus, leaders need only keep the engine running, and ensure that a shift to greater transparency keeps happening. 

 

Micro-leadership

Before: Before the pandemic, the entire office worked under a shared roof. So, traditional leadership structures worked quite efficiently. However, with remote work becoming the norm, the demand for greater accountability has become undeniable. 

After: Facing the demand for greater accountability during the pandemic, businesses paved the way for micro-leaders. Thus, instead of one individual leading the entire team, a pool of micro leaders led team action across segments. More clearly, leadership roles became more task-oriented instead of cohort-oriented. So, even in a single team, several key players took greater accountability and ensured that everyone kept up with the pace of innovation that remote work demanded. Simply put, micro-leaders led by example. Higher ups need to ensure that this keeps happening. 

 

Focus on productivity

Before: Though workplace distractions existed even before the pandemic, their scale enlarged rapidly when work-from-home realized flexible working hours. Earlier, the worst employees had to contend with were auditory distractions within the workplace and water cooler gossip. However, remote work blurred boundaries between home and work, exposing employees to a hitherto unseen barrage of distractions. 

 

After: Productivity took center-stage when remote work exposed the pull that distractions have on organizational efficacy. However, reinforcing uniform working hours is not a great solution to the problem at hand. That is because doing so poses greater risks like mass burnout. Instead, leaders need to understand their teams better and try to delegate tasks more efficiently. By understanding individual constraints and barriers to productivity, leaders can foster team-wide efficiency by allowing everyone to play to their strengths. 

 

Inclusive work environment 

Before: Just like transparency, inclusivity has also been on the rise long before the pandemic disrupted the business world. From companies becoming queer-friendly to HR managers encouraging empathetic interactions, there is a lot of good that happened on this front. 

After: Though organizations have been trying to embrace inclusivity before COVID’s arrival, the pandemic has accelerated the transition. Apart from uniting us against a common evil, it has also highlighted how different people in a workforce have varying needs concerning their well-being. For instance, it would have been absurd for people living alone to ostracize those living with families for working during flexible hours. Likewise, team members living with kids would not have been justified in underestimating colleagues who lives by themselves for undergoing mental turmoil. Overall, the pandemic allowed team members to understand each other’s individuality, and to cultivate respect for the same. Going forward, good leaders need to foster more of such empathetic intra-workforce interactions and work relentlessly at breeding greater inclusivity for everyone. After all, even remote offices need to make employees feel safe and included.

 

Conclusion

In the face of change, good leadership can often be the difference between thriving and going under. So, we hope that our discussion above gives leaders of tomorrow the foresight to steer towards the former. 

This article was originally published on PERSOLKELLY blog here


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