An awareness of the wellbeing of others in the workplace is a skill that can be taught and learned but environmental factors can most certainly make this practice easier or harder. Since the pandemic some companies realised, they didn’t need an office at all and stuck with a fully remote model, others got people back into their offices as soon as possible and the rest moved to a hybrid working environment where people could have the flexibility of both options during the week. For those who had worked before the pandemic the readjustment to office-working was relatively familiar, where the challenges lie is in the apparent uncertainty of those who joined the workforce during or after Covid-19 with no prior structure to rely on and hence those within their early-career.
The first years of an individual’s career in a new company, or perhaps their first company, are crucial, it is within this time that they will understand the culture of the business and determine if that is aligned to their preferences. Something that will perhaps be noticed on a more subconscious level but is crucially important nonetheless is to what extent does the company acknowledge and nurture the wellbeing of its employees. There’s an element of proportionality in supporting employees and as such, the culture of wellbeing in a workplace is noticed much more significantly if we move from “what are the company doing to make me feel better” to “what is the company doing to avoid me feeling worse in the first place”.
Employee engagement is particularly challenging in hybrid and remote models, individuals may work for hours at a time in an environment where their only physical company is a brightly lit laptop screen and an errant household pet, informal chats with coworkers are reduced the level of emotion that can be portrayed by a collection of gifs sent across Google Chat and getting to know other people within their office can turn into a treasure hunt across intranet sites, employee handbooks and inevitably your companies LinkedIn page. Here we arrive at wellbeing challenge number one - how do you meaningfully engage with remote individuals in a way that allows them to feel valued and integrated into the wider office community?
Hybrid working spaces don’t necessarily solve all these difficulties either, the sporadic appearance of individuals in an office on different days can make the task of matching faces with names; more of a game of ‘Guess Who’ than a meaningful team building exercise. Getting to a stage of having a more in-depth conversation with a colleague might take months or even years of building the required relationship. The ability to network well is incredibly challenging when the hierarchies of leadership are much more poignant across video calls and emails as opposed to engaging in a light-hearted chat at the coffee machine with that nice chap who just so happens to be the CEO. Hereby enters the second key challenge - how do you understand the needs of individuals whose ability to network and communicate across levels of leadership is hampered by the nature of their working location.
In a physical office space social events can foster an environment whereby people converse more like friends than like colleagues, the jovial nature opens the floor for more relaxed conversations and allows for individuals to express much more of themselves. It is through these kinds of interactions where people feel noticed, empathised with and comforted. Fast-forward to our hybrid era and any kind of office event must be added to calendars well in advance, not to mention that you’re then faced with a host of new difficulties – ‘this wouldn’t normally be my office day’ and ‘I don’t know who else from my team will even be there’ to list but a few. Uptake of these events which create a social locus has surely dwindled in recent years and with that, so does the efficacy of the event itself. Unfortunately, this trend can only continue to head in a negative direction as the organisers witness a much-reduced ROI for these initiatives and struggle to see the continued benefit of such an activity. As such we arrive at our third challenge - how do we create meaningful events and social spaces within our workplace that attract a sufficient populous to facilitate informal discourse.
It’s of course one thing to identify the challenges, another to seek to address them. The truth is that the solutions to those issues I’ve raised will depend entirely on the company, its size, its people and its current working style. Personally however, I believe that in all instances the simple answer in understanding how to overcome such a situation is taking it back to basics. We live within a new working paradigm and mustn’t run before we can walk. Before we can address the issues of those in our company, we must first understand from them what those issues truly are. We may need to remember how to have those conversations and realise that the environment we began our career in is vastly different to these environments now.
When entering meaningful discussion, I’ve often applied the following anadiplosis.
• Ask with the intent to listen.
• Listen with the intent to empathise.
• Empathise with the intent to support.
If you’re going to have the conversation, have the conversation. Don’t take 5 minutes and spend half of it with one hand scrolling through your phone, actively listen and take the time that is needed. When you’re listening, don’t presume and don’t judge, establish the feelings that are being reflected and seek to engage on an emotional level. Remember the purpose, you are engaging with the goal of learning and working out what can be done to help.