According to Harvard research, one to two days in the office is the ideal setup. This is a brand new study that's just been completed, and I'm going to share with you everything I know about it.
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According to Harvard research, one to two days in the office is the ideal setup. Now for hybrid work. This is a brand new study that's just been completed, and I'm going to share with you all about it. Hi, my name is Pete Moriarty, We help business owners systemize, organize and scale using Google workspace. And in this video, I'm talking about a study that Harvard recently did, as the likes of companies like Apple Bank of America, alphabet, Google, everyone are starting to bring employees back into the office after the pandemic, you know, potentially not understanding the productivity gains or losses with shifting work culture and their workforces. Now, we've been running a remote team for over six years now was actually before the pandemic happened, we had every single person in our organization working at home now group of over 60 employees. And we've learned a lot along the way of how to get teams working productively in a completely remote setting. Now with remote work, there's there's different kinds of stages that business typically go through, you'll have businesses that start right on the scale of everybody working in one place, and in one office right along to, you know, hybrid setups, where maybe some people are working in a co working space, or they're working at home a couple of days a week, and like kind of hybrid setup, right to the very end of the scale being fully remote work where every single person is working from a remote location, whether that's home, or maybe, you know, a mix of digital nomads in there as well. And here in Australia, there's quite a number of businesses that have actually embraced remote work right across the world. We've seen examples like Zapier and GitHub, that were recently acquired by Microsoft, as large organizations that have completely scaled at workforces. And locally here in Australia, one of the companies based out of Sydney called Atlassian, which makes tools for developers have a number of remote workers that make up a pretty large part of their workforce, I actually attended a presentation where their head of people said that in their top five offices, number one was their Sydney office number two is their LA office, or maybe it was San Francisco, I think. And number three was actually their army of remote workers who work from home all over the world. And this is an organization's with 1000s and 1000s of employees. And so this experiment was done by Harvard. And what they basically did was they took 130 administrative workers, so you know, information workers, I guess, and they put them into three groups, one group was less than 25% of their workdays in the office, one group was more than 40% of their work days in the office. And number three was like a day or two in the office, they were kind of like, in the middle there, they had some pretty interesting findings. Number one finding was that intermediate hybrid work is most likely to be the sweet spot where workers have the opportunity to have some flexibility in their work, yet, they're not going to feel completely isolated to peers who are predominantly, you know, working from home, or completely 100% working from the office. And so this is effectively, you know, what our experience has been is that flexible work, and allowing people to work where they want to work and when they want to work works the best. Now, we have a business where most people are working at home 99% of the time, from time to time, our team will get together and they'll have like a co working day, maybe they work in a co working space, or we'll have people fly into one city and have like a working catch up working hang out. And that tends to work well. But many businesses now in large cities where they've invested in office space, are taking the opportunity to create that office space as a work hub, which is a pleasurable place for the team to actually go into and want to work out. Because you can't deny the advantages of having watercooler conversations and natural collaboration that happens when you have human to human contact. There's also the social aspect as well. And we've seen this really, really obviously in our team too, is one of the challenges with everybody working completely remotely, is making sure that you keep these social engagements up with between your team members means they're going to build better working relationships and better bonds. And eventually, that's going to turn into better productivity as they build more trust with each other as colleagues and teammates. So a bit from our experience in running our remote team completely remotely 100%. I do know that our team loves working at home, so they can be closer to their family, they can have flexibility in their workday. They can, you know, feel close and connected to their home space. Obviously, that comes with some of its challenges and downsides as well. You got to make sure that you don't end up in their little bubble of your home and you know, get out and go for a walk and that kind of thing. There are also the distractions of working at home as well, and particularly if you're working at home full of your week. So all of your workweek, if that's five days, or whatever that looks like being there are many distractions at home, maybe it's the washing, maybe it's doing longer lunches, because you've got more food to cook, maybe it's snacking, but those kinds of distractions can pop up and become a challenge apart from the immediate isolation. Also, you know, kind of getting stuck in a funk of being in one place all the time can really creep up on you pretty quickly. Number two biggest challenge for us is when we have team members working at home 100%. Well, we can sometimes have team members Moonlighting, and moonlighting means someone who's taken up a second job, or a side gig, or something else, that's going to distract them in a cognitive work type scenario. And it's actually going to take away from the primary work that they're supposed to be doing for our business in our company. And unfortunately, that's very hard to track, you know, you can go down the road of installing monitoring software to monitor people's computers, and you know, like, kind of see what they're up to, and track their activity and that kind of thing. But we've never gone down that road as a business, because we try and approach the challenge through culture, and through motivation, and through good leadership and engagement with our team, rather than fear and control. And my opinion is, is that you know, computer tracking software as a fear and control strategy. And if someone really wants to, you know, work from home, they can buy a second computer that's not tracked, and, you know, have their second gig kind of running on that. So, once you've got all these kind of like pieces of the puzzle of working remotely or working in a hybrid scenario, I guess, you've got to then decide, well, you know how the logistics is going to actually work for your team. Some companies we've seen do a successful hybrid arrangement is they might say, well, on a certain day of the week, everybody comes into the office and one of the companies in our group, that's the norm. So everybody comes into the office on a Monday. And that's the office day where everyone gets an opportunity to spend time together, they'll often grab lunch together. And everyone has an opportunity to have the social experience of being in an office, if you're a business, and you've got the opportunity to bring everyone in on just one day of the week. But you've got less need for the office on the other days of the week, I'm assuming that many different business models and flexible office models are going to begin emerging, where different companies might choose to share an office space, because otherwise you're gonna have an asset in the office rent, they're just kind of sitting under utilized quite often. But thankfully, there are places like co working spaces, which will sometimes give you a day pass for your team will give you a flexible arrangement where you can bring team in on a regular basis on just one day a week. And that might be a good option for you if you're looking for a place to go. Or if you currently have an office and you're realizing you're going to need it a whole lot less. But there are many places for you to connect with other business owners through networking events, and you may be able to find flexible arrangements for you. But I would say for one thing we've learned in managing and dealing with a team that's completely remote over many years is there are additional overheads required. And those overheads required to make sure the team are performing well, even when they are remote, are very important to make sure that you get right so your team can remain productive and remain engaged in their work. Now I'd say the first one is additional HR. Additional HR really means that additional support for your team additional reaching out and making sure everyone has things like wellness checks happening, ensuring that there's proper processes in place for your managers to be doing one on one with their team members and coaching with their team members just to do their chickens are we do a quarterly happiness survey as well, which is a big, big, deep dive in and check into our team on everything that we track, you know, with the metrics with? Are they happy with their manager? Are they happy with their work? Do they feel engaged in their work, they feel supported in their work, do they feel like they have a great career path? Do they feel like they're aligned with the company's purpose and mission. And that's really our KPI and our track to see that how our team are going if we need to, you know, work on our culture or not. Secondly, I'll say the culture overall of the business is very important. If you've not already developed a culture, which is built around values and mission and purpose inside your business, well, you're going to find it pretty hard for people to be working remotely and still feel a part of a team and part of an important mission. If you've got team members who are dispersed, and they just see your gig as just another gig, you're not going to be able to break through that barrier of isolation for them. Whereas if you have a business and a team that feel aligned to purpose and aligned to mission, well, then they're more likely to be a lot more motivated, even while working remotely. And so the ways that we do that, obviously, we have a business that is led from the top with mission and vision and values as our shining, you know, North Star that helps us to guide the business and how we, you know, do all of our strategy and everything else in the business. But also importantly, we make sure that we spend lots of time building the culture and building the relationships about team members remotely. Now I've got other videos on remote games that you can play and other ways that you can manage a remote team. But that's all about making the remote team feel like they are connected team no matter where they are working. So I'd love to know what do you think about this is hybrid work the future of work? Are you planning on having all of your staff in one place in an office still after the pandemic has been finished up in your particular country that you're working in? Or are you completely remote many of our customers have said they've just gone completely remote, got rid of the office and now they're navigating how to run a remote team drop me comments below. I'd love to know what you think. And if you just joined our channel, make sure you hit the subscribe button. Give me a thumbs up if you'd like This content. And if you're a subscriber to Google workspace, we've got a pretty tremendous offer. We have a boot camp coming up soon. If you've not already checked that out, click on the link below and you'll be able to access that. But if there's no boot camps coming up scheduled soon, you can always take advantage of our transfer in offer, which gives business owners a bunch of perks for transferring your licenses to us in Google workspace doesn't cost you any extra. But you get a bunch of advantages like some free training a free account, free account check. You get support from our team as well. And then we are on hand for any thing you need in the workspace world. Alright, until the next video, I'll catch you later. Have a good one.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
