Kristin Rivera and Bhushan Sethi examine how to reimagine a workplace that's evolved for the first time in generations.
Kristin Rivera:
Welcome to our podcast series, Emerge stronger through disruption. I'm Kristin Rivera and I lead PwC’s Global Forensics practice and our Global Crisis Centre. In each episode of this series, we talk with global colleagues about the challenges facing business leaders as they navigate disruption. Today, I'm joined by Bhushan Sethi, our Global People and Organization leader.
Bhushan, you and I have worked very closely together throughout the early days of the pandemic. And so it's a real pleasure for me, personally, to be here with you today, as we discuss how companies are now emerging from the pandemic. For the benefit of the audience, take a minute to just tell us a bit about yourself.
Bhushan:
Sure. Thanks, Kristin. Great to be with you today. I am based in New York City, I have been in the US for 20 years, originally from the UK via India. I work with businesses across different industries, helping them think through their workforce strategies that could be anything to do with skills, culture, and recently it's all about: How do we execute this hybrid workforce concept. I'm really looking forward to bringing that to life today.
Kristin Rivera:
Bhushan, during the past several months, we've seen a shift back to the workplace in many parts of the world. Of course, like everything with this pandemic, the return to work is unfolding at different paces around the globe.
In some places workers are back in the office. In others, they're just beginning to talk about how to phase their reopening, and in other places still, some are experiencing new surges of the pandemic and remain in lockdown. Despite where you are on this journey. one thing is clear: the workplace and the workforce are going to be very different than they were pre-pandemic, and by extension different from how they've been, quite frankly, for the past 50 years.
So Bhushan, I'm curious, given your work with companies around the globe over the past year, what permanent changes do you predict for the workforce and by extension the workplace?
Bhushan:
Well, one thing we've learned together, Kristin, is predictions are always risky. I think what we would highlight is businesses have different starting points.
So whether you're a human contact business and having to deal with in-person customers and have to accelerate your digital journey, or whether you're in a part of the world, like say Australia or Hong Kong and China that have reopened much more quickly than our colleagues in say the US or Europe ...
But what we see as kind of permanent is this focus on safety and well being, safety for customers, safety for employees. Now, increasingly, that's focused on mental health and burnout. The other piece is whether it's going to be one day or four days in the office. This concept of hybrid work and how we bring everyone along in an inclusive way and how leaders design work for that, how we bring technology to help with that, how we redesign work schedules for hybrid work ...
This is going to be a capability that firms are going to have to build. And we've never done this before. We've never led in a hybrid environment, and that's really going to be an important capability that's led with leaders and culture, and also the right investment in tools for a lot of businesses.
Kristin Rivera:
Bhushan, you've mentioned the concept of hybrid work. Could you dig into that a bit more?
Bhushan:
Yeah. Hybrid work in its simplest form is the concept that people will return to a physical workplace maybe once a month, maybe two to three days a week, but it will be done in a deliberate way based on either individual preferences or certain roles or certain teams.
What's for sure going to be happening over the next six to 12 months is a number of businesses will be implementing experiments, in which they will learn: What is the right schedule for hybrid work? Do we go in together as teams? How do we think about having an agile plan so that we can pivot quickly, if there are increased cases or increased variances or other unforeseen events? But this concept of hybrid work is: we will be going back to a physical workplace, but not on a completely permanent basis.
Kristin Rivera:
So, you know, we've been talking about these new ways of working for some time. I mean, even at the beginning of the pandemic, I can recall you and I talking about how this would impact the workforce. But back then the conversations were relatively binary. They were sort of black or white. They were, you know, you can work from home if you're not an essential worker, or if you are essential, you know, finding ways to send workers back into the workplace while remaining safe.
But today, I think, as you're raising with this concept, the choices are far more nuanced and more personal. Early in the pandemic, again, it was about keeping people safe. It was about getting technology into their hands, for those who had to be remote. But it seems like what you're suggesting is we're now at a point where sort of the hard work maybe is beginning -- that we need to create a new culture of work.
Maybe start thinking about work as an experience. Is that where you're focused, Bhushan?
Bhushan:
Yeah. And I would say the first part of that, Kristin, is to have a plan. Have a plan, a starting point in which you can over-communicate to your different stakeholders. So, for the hospitality industry, it may be, how do we safely reopen?
How do we make customers and employees feel safe? How are we going to flex that plan over time so that we can scale a reopening? For knowledge-based businesses, it might be based on roles and security, and also preferences and other factors such as commutes and schools. So different businesses are gonna be deliberate.
How do we plan for return to the workplace and reopening? How do we bring all of our stakeholders along, and what are the triggers by which we need to refine that plan -- either scaling up rapidly or scaling back? And again, that's a new concept for a lot of businesses because shifting to remote work was a quick exit and it was all about safety and security and well being, and “can we work remotely?” This return is going to be slow, steady, experiment-driven, and we're going to have to have an agile plan.
Kristin Rivera:
So, we see in our crisis management work the critical importance of making plans and being deliberate. It can be very easy to slip into the mode of sort of just going back to normal; human nature sort of often drives us in that direction.
But one thing that we see through our crisis research is how critical it is to really take stock of what you've just been through, to find the silver linings and to make those permanent, to learn from them. And that's ultimately through our research, what predicts whether or not a company will emerge stronger from, you know, a strategic inflection point, like we've just experienced.
I'm wondering if you can talk a bit about the human side of work, because I think one thing we've realized is that the one-size-fits-all model that we've been operating under for the last one, two, maybe even three generations of workers is outdated.
Bhushan:
Yeah. So Kristin, we polled 2000 us workers in January of 2021 and asked them that question. We said, “What's worked well that you want to sustain, and what do we need to do differently?” So, the pieces that worked well were the sense of caring from employers, the fact that there was flexibility to work from different locations and there was flexible schedules. The things that haven't worked so well is worker burnout and the continuing mental health strain.
So, as firms look to redesign work and execute a hybrid workplace, those areas are going to have to be addressed. And what's really important to understand is we asked the same question last June, and we asked the same question in January, and the results are very similar. So similar to what we see in lots of areas, the workforce has flatlined.
The workers have plateaued in terms of their level of confidence around some of these areas. So, firms need to do something that's very different in terms of how they redesign work. How do we bring back spontaneity and fun? If you're going to come back to the office, it needs to be a very different, collaborative experience.
It can’t simply be going to an office with everyone performing heads- down work, on conference calls. It needs to be something different, obviously with safety at the core. But it needs to be something fun. We need to think about how do we redesign social interactions, build employee confidence, and also for those that are going to be working hybridor remote, how do we bring spontaneity and fun, and give people what they need? People may need compressed schedules. They may need sabbaticals, vacations, investments in their own physical well-being or in their own learning. What we're seeing right now is people want the currency of time.
They want some control and agency over their own schedule. So the more firms think about how they redesign the work, this concept of mental health and giving people back some control of their schedules and time and investments in their well-being and learning is going to be critical to both engagement and productivity.
Kristin Rivera:
I think almost all of us have experienced this personally. You know, we've seen benefits from working from home. The fact that I don't have to set my alarm for an hour to an hour and a half earlier each day to get up, take a shower, get dressed, get my kids off to school, commute to the office, and then work for eight hours and then reverse the commute.
It's delightful to be able to get that time back, but there are things that I really miss. Seeing my colleagues in the office, having those lunches together, being able to zip out for a coffee and catch up on what's going on in each other's lives. Bringing these experiences back while retaining some of those benefits that I gained, I think would really enrich my life personally.
And I'm sure many of our listeners have had similar experiences. What else, Bhushan, are you seeing in terms of shifts that we can expect to be coming?
Bhushan:
Yeah. So one of the shifts, or maybe it's just been more amplified, to your point, is the segmentation of different workers based on their needs. So, younger people, interns, or new recruits in their first job -- from our data and our experience, want to be in the office.
They want to be in that learning environment. We've all learned so much on how we learn in the workplace and socializing outside of work in our first job. And so there's a need for kind of younger people to come back. People that are worried about their own health or they have caregiving responsibilities may be feeling differently.
People who need to travel in terms of their roles, whether that's domestic or internationally, there's a need to kind of think about safety there. Those individuals who are dealing with customers in person, and we're seeing all kinds of factors to say certain human contact businesses are now potentially gonna mandate vaccinations and mandate contact tracing and workplace tracking, tracing tools.
So safety protocols are so important as well. So the more that firms can actually segment their employees based on their needs of their role and their preferences, and design around those sets of outcomes, which obviously drives more complexity -- that's going to be a critical part of confidence and productivity.
And also as firms want to emerge stronger and grow revenue, your revenue is dependent on consumer demand. Consumers are going to want safety and potentially pay premium pricing for that. That's going to be an important part of your growth strategy.
Kristin Rivera:
And I think that point really underscores this concept of being deliberate as we emerge from the pandemic and begin to shape how we will work in the future.
So if we look back at the pandemic, there are many companies who experienced what I call happy accidents. Who, you know, stumbled on new innovations, new business models that they never would have, but for the crisis that we've all been through. Other companies have experienced innovation at an extraordinarily rapid pace.
This concept of “we've been through a decade in a single year” in terms of digital transformation, and I think in many ways, workforce transformation as well. And again, from our research, we know that companies that emerge stronger from crisis or other strategic inflection points are very deliberate about how they capture those learnings and institutionalize them going forward. So, one thing that we know for sure is that this pandemic has impacted different people in different ways. Some people are better off on the whole than they were before. And some are really, really struggling. So, I think one of the points that you're raising is how important it is, how much this pandemic has highlighted the need for employers to be really aware -- cognizant of those differences -- and to be deliberate in how they respond to those individuals’ specific needs as it relates to work and the workplace.
So, what are you seeing in this regard, Bhushan? What are some of the leading practices that companies are exhibiting in terms of how to be inclusive?
Bhushan:
One of the biggest there's around inclusion starts with inclusive leadership. In a hybrid workplace. Leaders are going to have to be vulnerable and kind of make sure that they are demonstrating all of the inclusive behaviors themselves, that they're investing in their own well-being, that they're also taking a lead in re-engineering work, and also making sure that people are investing in their own coaching and their own mental health. And this really shows up, Kristin, when you run global teams. So in our Global Hopes and Fears Survey across 32,000 workers across 19 countries, it highlighted that there's different levels of confidence around the world. India and China and parts of the Middle East skew higher than parts of Europe and the UK.
We saw that re-skilling opportunities were uneven across generations and across industries. We also saw that in a number of countries, workers experienced prejudice, which was different. Some was based on age, some was based on class, some was based on gender and race. So as a leader, you've really gotta be very deliberate about this, design for this, understand kind of different challenges people are having, and have zero tolerance around some of these inclusion, and make sure that re-skilling opportunities are available to everyone.
Kristin Rivera:
Bhushan, I think you're raising a really interesting concept that's fairly new, and it's this idea that work can be personalized to the individual. Again, looking back over how we've worked over the past 50 years, for a long time, there was really only one model of work.
You woke up every day and you commuted to your workplace. You did your eight hours and you commuted home. Over the past one to two decades, there's been maybe two options: You either commute into the office, or perhaps you get a flexible work arrangement, which was a relatively formal thing, and you get permission to work remotely.
But now we're in a really new world and uncharted waters, where we are able and perhaps obligated to provide multiple options and to allow our workers to customize where and when and how they work to their personal desires and their personal situation.
Bhushan:
Yeah, the personalization we see in a couple of forms. One is around how work gets redesigned and how do we make sure asynchronous work doesn't all have to be done at the same time in the same physical location.
So people can actually manage schedules in a different way. The other personalization piece, and I think we're going to see much more of this as we start to reopen,is: How do we personalize it based on people's place and location? So the extent that we can actually design work so that individuals can execute that work in the physical workplace as they start maybe going back to an office, but also link it to whatever else is going on in their community.
What we're seeing Kristin is a lot more focus on the role of community as we think about reopening. So, maybe volunteering, maybe linking it to school reopenings, and linking that maybe to your return to the workplace. So we don't see that work from everywhere, work from anywhere as being a sustainable place.
Location's really going to matter. It's going to matter in a way that we think about work and the role of employers in their community, and the different stakeholders that need to be managed.
Kristin Rivera:
So, Bhushan, it's clear that we are at an inflection point triggered by this pandemic. What's your big piece of advice to companies as they think through how they will support their workforce and evolve their workplace in the months and years to come?
Bhushan:
So, the first thing is, how do we make hybrid work work for organizations? Many companies also have a broader future of work agenda, which includes some of the very same things we've been talking about: Where the work gets done, how the work gets done with technology, how do we bring people along, where do we need to rescale or redeploy people … So driving an integration between your current workforce plans and your future of work plan is a really important task because there will be lots of reuse for the work that you're doing right now. And these things have to intersect.
The other piece that I would just highlight is, and we're seeing this in many different places, I think one of the permanent changes that we'll see, Kristin, is the concept of what we value as investors, as employers, as employees, as different stakeholders, has really changed on a semi-permanent basis. So we value our safety and we value our well-being.
Investors are valuing ESG in a very different way. Stakeholder capitalism has gone from theory to reality, if we think about some of the disclosures businesses are making, especially around the social agenda with diversity and inclusion. So, the more businesses can think about: how will we measure our success, how we will measure some of the nonfinancial success that we've talked about today in terms of the ability to provide safe and meaningful and purpose-led employment, and developing in the skills of our people -- not just for your current roles in your company, but also for society and within your community. I think that's something that business leaders really will be focused on and are starting to be focused on right now.
Kristin Rivera:
I agree, Bhushan. Leaders and their teams, as well as individual contributors, have more choices today than they've ever had before. I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that this change was already bubbling below the surface before the pandemic. But I don't think anyone would disagree that the last year or more has turbo-charged that change.
And as we emerge, it's all about finding what's right for your organization and your people. We'll talk more about specific tactics, about how companies can do this, in the next episode of our series, when we talk with Patrick Welsh about the personalization of work and specific strategies companies can employ to help people in your workforce regain what they may have lost over the past year.
I think that's a good place to wrap up today's conversation. So, thank you so much, Bhushan, for joining me today.
Bhushan:
Thank you, Kristin.
Kristin Rivera:
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