📋 Tender Overview
The catch phrase of the post-quarantined workforce seems to be work where you are most effective meaning effectiveness can happen anywhere whether the employee is working from home a coffee shop or the office.This phrase perfectly captures the value Americans place on individualistic culture over the collective culture. Replace the word you with your organization and you get work where your organization is most effective. Individual effectiveness should not be at the expense of the organization. Organizations are a collective culture a team of teams. Greater value should always be placed on the teams effectiveness over the individuals.However the American workforce is changing. And it was happening well before the pandemic. The pandemic just magnified an already changing dynamic in the way Americans work. Even before COVIDs Great Resignation there was the rise of the Gig Economy triggered by declining dynamism is the U.S. labor market. People are fundamentally thinking differently about how they want to manage their lives schedules and work.According to a study by McKinsey approximately 20 of the workforce could work remotely three to five days a week as effectively as they could if working from an office. The study goes on to analyze work production by the activities with the highest potential for remote work and the lowest potential for remote work. Not surprisingly the tasks with the highest potential for remote work included online seminars and interaction with computers whereas jobs requiring collaboration with physical products and people offered the least opportunity for remote work.Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats. In business school we are taught to turn weaknesses into strengths and threats into opportunities. The pandemic has certainly provided a serious threat to Business As Usual but it has also granted businesses the opportunity to quantifiably measure team productivity in a way that is unbiased by a mere physical presence at an office. Measuring organizational effectiveness often comes down to production. What is effectiveness if not the ability to successfully produceAuthenticity. Businesses should not lament the perceived loss of team culture in a virtualized environment. The pandemic has given teams a truer view into the individuals authentic selves thereby increasing our empathy and willingness to support the greater team. There are many best practices available for building remote teams for a distributed workforce.A great equalizer. Remote work has become a great equalizer in some ways because now both organizational and individual effectiveness are measured by productivity. Work is about production. Employees cannot hide a lack of productivity behind the water cooler anymore. Unconscious biases age gender race attractiveness or even perceived dedication that may arise merely from an employees physical presence at work are minimized in a virtual environment.Right size team efforts. A remote workforce allows leaders to focus the team on what is strategically important. We have the opportunity to rebalance the 20 of the workforce who perform 80 of the effort and have fair production across the team.
