The great office experiment begins
As the world returns to the workplace, it is a very different environment to the days before the pandemic — but there won’t be a one-size-fits-all approach to the new order of the office. The word that is about to enter the human resources lexicon, it appears, is experimentation.
“The great hybrid work experiment is about to begin,” says Francine Katsoudas, executive vice-president of Cisco.
“As the world has changed, so too has the importance of empathy and wellbeing,” she says. “We put mental health front and centre at Cisco three years ago, which served us well as our people navigated the challenges and concerns produced by the pandemic. This focus will remain for us in the new world of work, requiring leaders who have empathy, flexibility and proximity top of mind.
“We know that the office has changed forever, and we won’t be returning to the office or using physical space in the same way as before. While about half of our employees were in the office four to five days a week pre-pandemic, less than a quarter want to be in an office three or more days a week when offices reopen.”
She wrote these words this week, prompting Business Times to ask her how well employees respond to experimentation in workplace models.
“A big turning point for us was the realisation that you could and should experiment in this area,” she said. “In the past, people felt that, in the people space, you couldn’t experiment or try things. But now that’s exactly what people want to see, because when you experiment, it makes you so much more open to listening and communicating what worked and didn’t work and, in doing so, you build trust.”
But what about the flip side? In the past, people would feel instability in times of change, and uncertain about where they stand in the organisation. Katsoudas does not avoid the issue. “I think that’s real. As leaders we have to find a balance … change is going to be constant for us, and so the ability for us to prepare our people to help them navigate change, and to the best of our ability to reduce the stress associated with it, is really important.”
The secret, she says, is to build a “co-design mentality around your people practices”, as one would with any technology development. “You’re getting input from the business, and from your clients. I find that, in my role, people are talking to each other more than we ever have before, to support one another. An example of that would be when the pandemic hit India hard. I joined many of my peers talking about what we could do together, and it pushed through the boundaries of the company. From a co-design perspective, being inclusive helps your people to manage the change.”
This also implies more collaborative management. Katsoudas says Cisco has been on this journey for the past three years.
“To change from a top-down to a bottomup approach is better for innovation, it’s better for engagement. When we launched ‘conscious culture’, that was a very deliberate move for us to be more bottomup as an organisation. You have to be bold and to be thoughtful about that as well.
“One thing that I know our CEO Chuck Robbins believes very strongly in is this concept of servant leadership. That belief is that your leaders are in service to your people.”
That leads to another term Katsoudas has introduced to the human resources lexicon: learn as you go. Typically, it is the people lower down the ladder who have to learn new cultures and new ways, but now those in charge have to retrain themselves.
“We all have to learn and be willing to change, and that is an adjustment,” she says. I think in the tech industry and with how the market has been moving over the last five years or so, that’s a concept that was important to our leaders anyway. But we’re now leaning into it and it’s fascinating as it relates to hybrid work.
“If the company said we’re going to work Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, in the office, there’s a subset of leaders that would like that because it’s clear, it’s definitive, and you adjust to it. Instead, we are saying that we expect every leader in the company to work with their team to create the approach that makes the most sense for them. We believe that this is how we will get to the best decisions for our people, and for our business. But it’s the harder path in many ways.”