4 Leadership Trends In The New World Of Work

Business leaders should be increasingly flexible and agile in managing their workforces

The Covid-19 pandemic upended the corporate world in a matter of weeks last year. Knowledge workers were immediately forced to work remotely. With the pandemic still raging in the US, most large companies haven’t yet asked their employees to come back to work. In fact, most companies have adopted a hybrid work policy and some like Twitter are allowing their workers to work remotely on an indefinite basis. This is a fragile period for most companies as business leaders may make the mistake of operating with a pre-pandemic mentality as opposed to adapting to the reality of a post-pandemic world. This new world requires business leaders to adopt new rules of engagement and leadership skills to interact with their workforce.

Enabling Employee Autonomy

While working from home, workers have enjoyed an unprecedented level of autonomy and flexibility in managing their work.  Business leaders had no choice but to trust employees to do their work in a manner best suited to them. Fortunately, in research conducted by Harvard Business School Professor Tsedal Neely, 70 percent of companies reported higher productivity for workers working in a remote environment during the pandemic. 
 

As companies transition to a hybrid work environment, business leaders will have to adapt their leadership skills to provide employees with considerable autonomy to structure their work and manage their schedules. There will be a temptation to deploy tools that track worker schedules while they are working remotely. This will create a tremendous amount of distrust among employees who are now used to flexible work schedules.

Supporting Work-Life Balance

With remote work and employees’ kids staying at home, maintaining a work-life balance has been a real challenge for many employees. The more empathetic managers have taken steps to ask employees how they are doing coping with the twin challenges of managing their work schedules while balancing their home responsibilities.

Employees have appreciated the candid conversations and, as a result, developed trust that their management really cares for their well-being. With hybrid work schedules becoming the norm, it is critical for leaders to engage with employees in measured disclosures so that they can help their employees deal more effectively with the challenges of working from home.

Managing Through OKRs

OKRs stands for “Objectives and Key Results.” OKRs are an effective goal-setting and leadership tool for communicating your goals and the milestones you’ll need to meet in order to accomplish it. OKRs are used by some of the world’s leading organizations like Google to develop and enact their strategies. OKRs provide many benefits, including clarity, enhanced communication and a coherent, transparent organization-wide strategy. With organizations moving to a hybrid work environment, it has become even more important for leaders to work with their teams to define clear objectives and to manage these objectives and associated key results in an ongoing manner.

Organizational transparency and communication are critical to effectively implementing OKRs in your organization. There are a number of OKR management SaaS solutions in the market including Ally.io (Microsoft), Betterworks and Workboard that organizations can trial and determine which solution best serves their needs.

Driving Digital Transformation

The post-pandemic world has seen significant employee shortages and supply chain disruption. As a result, it has become even more essential for business leaders to drive increased digital transformation of their business to automate tasks and reduce supply chain disruption. It is no longer sufficient for business leaders to task their IT teams to come up with digital transformation initiatives. Business leaders are in the best position to understand the pressures that they face in their business and the processes that could benefit from automation. These leaders should be heavily involved in spearheading digital transformation initiatives with their IT counterparts and in defining the employee and customer interfaces needed to successfully implement these initiatives.

The post-pandemic world provides an opportunity for companies to drive increased growth of their business as customer demand returns and supply chain disruptions get alleviated. To succeed, however, business leaders will need to be increasingly flexible and agile in managing their workforces and motivating them to work more productively in a hybrid work environment.

Shirish Nadkarni is a serial entrepreneur with 25+ years of creating consumer businesses that have scaled to tens of millions of users worldwide. He engineered Microsoft’s $400 million acquisition of Hotmail, launched MSN.com, and founded Livemocha, which pioneered social language learning and was acquired by Rosetta Stone. He is the author of  From Startup to Exit: An Insider’s Guide to Launching and Scaling Your Tech Business. Connect Shirish Nadkarni