Let’s not rest on our laurels

We started our Fluxx Exchange events back in 2019. Our aim? Bring together a community of cross-industry leaders and experts to talk openly about the opportunities and challenges we all face, irrespective of industry or sector.

We saw the value in creating a space to purposefully discuss what the future looked liked, and to generate and share ideas on how to best face it. In the past 12 months we’ve had some brilliant conversations; from a new era of retail, Transport to Business Resilience, D&I and the Future of Work with over 500 leaders in industries from Financial Services and Banking to Healthcare, Retail and Transport.

Our latest exchange — the final one of the year — rounded off a brilliant series of events and proved something much more prevalent. 2020 has been a year of stress, uncertainty and at some points, outright panic. But we’ve also seen incredible innovation and creative problem solving; businesses that have rapidly pivoted, inspiring efforts as communities come together to support one another, and new products and services popping up almost overnight to cater to customer’s changing needs. Our Exchange events have helped us make sense of all of this uncertainty, together, as a community.

Naturally, the final event of the year was all about the hybrid future of work. Here’s a round up of the conversation:

• What can we expect in 2021? Well, many of the themes aren’t unfamiliar. Whenever we talk about the Future of Work we always come back to five core areas that businesses need to address; leadership, communication, collaboration, skills and wellbeing. These complex elements are entwined with one another — all equally important — but subtly different depending on the industry, location, company size and culture.
• Getting flexible working right will attract and retain talent in any organisation. Flexible working brings many benefits to businesses and employees. It’s consistently cited as the #1 rated job benefit and research shows that only 9% of employees in the UK want to go back to the office post Covid. Making it work effectively is a must, especially when employees also cite the lack of boundaries between work and home life. Always feeling the need to be ‘on’ for work is often amplified when a flexibly working team doesn’t have the balance right.

Fluxx Top Tips:

The Fluxxers that work flexible have core hours, we’re also trialing ‘office hours’ when other team members can drop in — when time is precious we have to be more targeted about how we spend it.

To create distance between work life and home life, have a conversation with your team about when you’ll respond to messages. Give yourself permission to ignore a message if it comes through outside of your ‘office hours’. Communicating this as a team helps each employee define their own boundaries.

• Businesses are hiring Remote Working Managers. The move to wfh/wfa has opened up opportunities to mobilise talent regionally and across borders giving access to talent or employment from around the country. However, it’s not without its challenges. Having a dedicated quiet place to work (which for many is still a luxury) has been shown by a number of credible global surveys to be one of the major factors in WFH productivity and satisfaction.
• Ambient working, open office hours and zoom roulette — we still haven’t got the basics right. There’s a tendency to recreate f2f activities online — this doesn’t work! Digital experiences have to be considered as their own unique domain. Whether it’s for business or pleasure, online experiences must be engaging, authentic and purposeful. We use our own agile design thinking method to curate ours. Drop Annabel.Staib@fluxx.uk.com a note if you want to swap notes on how to create award winning digital experiences.

• Where does employer responsibility stop when it comes to their staff’s mental health and wellbeing? With homes transformed into our offices, and a lockdown winter looming, businesses have been forced to deeply consider their employees’ mental health and wellbeing, but to what degree are businesses responsible? Whilst zoom yoga and a corporate subscription to Headspace might be useful to some, it’s really just scratching the surface of a huge unknown that many business leaders are still unsure of how to tackle.
• We’ve broken down barriers and red tape and now the lines are being crossed. According to a recent study, we’re using more profanities at work. Perhaps this is due to the familiarity of our own homes, but this could have a serious impact on company culture. The Head of Compliance at Fidelity International highlighted that if we’re getting lax with language, there could be even bigger implications; a false sense of security of being at home might mean more corners are cut. A physical office offers guidance about how we conduct ourselves and perform as well as a space to connect — our homes are, well, our homes.
• By 2025 75% of our conversations will be recorded and analysed. This is one of many predictions from Gartner. They highlight that every piece of technology, from smart speakers to virtual meetings to messaging platforms, now records conversations. Privacy is an illusion. There’s a need to collect and analyse this data to improve the employee experience and balance it with considerations of the risks of data collection. Data needs to be collected and used responsibly while protecting employee privacy and maintaining trust. Scary, huh?
• ‘We need Leaders to create the guardrails’. As expected the dawn of a new era of leadership was a big part of the discussion. From unpacking ‘authentic leadership’- “I’ve seen good leaders’ veils fall, and expose sides of their character they have tried to hold back. Some people become great leaders despite their natural tendencies” said one Head of Research at a Design Company — to the benefit of having a single locus of decision making during the crisis. A point that all Exchangers agreed on was that ‘freedom is a framework’. When faced with ambiguity we respond best to certainty, and leaders that offer boundaries and the freedom to roam within them, will ultimately be the most effective.

The immediate overnight shift to remote working was in many ways a success. It offered the opportunity to identify more efficient ways of operating, cutting out unnecessary bureaucracy and re-injecting empathy and compassion into our working environments.

As we take time to reflect on the lessons learnt, it’s become obvious that we’re at a crossroads. Now is the time to listen to what works and what doesn’t, and choose what areas are most important to our organisation. Which practices and behaviours do we want to take forward into the new hybrid era of work. How do we deal with socio-economic inequality that’s present in our national workforce? What’s the best way to collaborate as a future team when they are split between the office and home? What does it mean for the next generation of leaders, when they’ve potentially never worked side by side with their own bosses?

We’ve done well over the last six months, but we haven’t cracked it. Needs of our employees, and customers will continue to evolve as the world around us changes. To assume that we’ve got remote/flexible working right is at best ignorant, and at worst dangerous. There are still huge unknowns that need to be addressed, and we will all need to continue to iterate our practices.

We don’t have all the answers — we’re enablers, accelerators. Coming together at the Exchange series over the last year has been invaluable. We’ve learnt from one another, challenged ideas and conceptions, laughed and even felt like crying at some points! Thank you to everyone for being part of our Fluxx Exchange community. You’ve helped move our thinking forward (we hope we’ve moved yours too), and no matter what future challenges we face, we look forward to facing them together.

Jassi Porteous is Marketing Lead at Fluxx. Get in touch at jassi@fluxx.uk.com to chat about this article, or check out any of these links to find out more about the company.