David Austin: The second episode of the Asia Thinker Series: Talkback was titled, "After the Pandemic: A Test of Resilience: Workplace Innovation & Strategies". It featured Jane Lim of Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority, Shirin Hamid of the Asian Development Bank, and was moderated by Assistant Professor Taha Hameduddin from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and can be viewed on the school's Facebook page.
After the panel, there were still some unanswered questions from several viewers. So, we caught up with Professor Hameduddin to give him a chance to respond. I started by asking him what were his key takeaways from the panel?
Prof Hameduddin: Managers need to have empathy, especially because this is a difficult time. They get to know their employees and their subordinates, their colleagues, much more closely compared to the past. Because you can see into someone's house and you can see that there are disparities and differences in the way in which people live.
They come from different socioeconomic status. That kind of, I think, humanises the workplace a little bit more. Which is probably an unanticipated, unforeseen result of having to work from home and telecommuting like this in the way that we're doing it now.
David Austin: How should we be looking at the workplace and how should leaders plan and execute to be effective?
Prof Hameduddin: It really is dependent on the social sort of environment and the political environment. As countries get out of this lockdown or circuit breaker, as restrictions are lifted, there will have to be some sort of conversation about to what extent will they be working from home.
Maybe organisations might take surveys to kind of determine, just like we did on the Facebook page of the Lee Kuan Yew School, to determine whether people prefer working from home rather than going into the workplace. But I think there will be a lot more acceptance, a lot more perhaps even preference for working a few days at the house compared to having to come into work every single workday of the week.
One of the reasons why this would probably be popular is because offices cost a lot of money. So, having to rent out that space, if it's vacant, you don't have to have so much space and you can actually get rid of quite a lot of square footage when you don't need it.
I think there's probably going to be some change fundamentally in the way in which we approach the space in which we work, especially now that we have all these tools for connecting online. There'll probably be some innovations there too. I think one of the things we got from the discussion was that in doing creative work, you have to kind of be in the same room together.
David Austin: Yes.
Prof Hameduddin: That may not be facilitated very well. I'm sure there's tools and stuff like that out there where you can, even on Zoom, you can annotate, you have a virtual whiteboard and all that kind of stuff. But I think maybe for traditionalist [jobs], maybe for lack of a better term, it may be very difficult to do that.
So, for some things that may be very difficult to mimic the actual experiences you get.
David Austin: What type of knowledge sharing is more difficult in the virtual space? You've mentioned things like creative work, but are there some other things that are going to suffer as far as knowledge sharing in an institution organisation because of this new work arrangement?
Prof Hameduddin: Honestly, I think the biggest thing is by sharing emotions. How do you tell someone that they're not getting a promotion or a raise or they are being let go from such a distance? Even though those are difficult conversations to have. Or how do you discipline someone?
And if they did something that was sort of out of the line? Or how do you congratulate someone for something, right? I mean, yeah, you can have a virtual party, but conveying those kinds of emotions over the web it really isn't the same, you know?
So that kind of knowledge sharing, which I know is kind of sidestepping the question, I think the question is more in terms of knowledge related to the work output, which probably would be creative knowledge. Written reports and these kinds of things and emails and all these kinds of things.
These were already the norm in the workplace. But the knowledge of emotions, of connecting with people at that level, having informal conversations, getting to know people, building rapport. That's going to be a challenge, especially as countries come out of lockdowns and we start to hire a new people.
When you're hiring someone new, how do you onboard them when you can't even see the person in person? That's going to be an adjustment, some rethinking. That's not how we do that. How do we do annual reviews online, sit down with your boss and talk about your performance from a distance? Those are generally fraught conversations anyway. Doing it online will probably exacerbate some existing issues.
David Austin: And that leads to the next question that another audience member had, which is how do you think assessments of workplace behaviours and performance will evolve?
And I'm curious now that you've mentioned it, those conversations that were already difficult, like if someone's going to be let go, or they're not getting the promotion that they want, those things are already very difficult for HR managers or managers to deal with, what do you foresee happening? Is there any knowledge or studies that can help guide people at this point?
Prof Hameduddin: I think from an HR perspective, it's usually just risk mitigation. It’s kind of dehumanised in that way, wherein you don't want the person to kind of go get angry or destroy the property in the workplace.
So, you want to make sure that you have all the protocols down, that they leave the office and security will escort them and all these kinds of things to make sure that they are able to process that information. It sounds awful but it's probably easier to do it online, over Zoom rather than in person. But in terms of workplace behaviours, I think I'll go back to what Jane Lim said. She said that you need empathy.
Understand that people may not work as well. Some people may adapt better than others. So, taking into account the changes in performance, the kinds of goals you can set, I think that needs to be sort of a broader conversation. And that's where those disparities between people will come into play.
One of the big conversations that are happening sort of around the world is the state of schools, right? If children have to work, have to study from home, they need to have their parents to help them do that, but [the parents] are required to work at the same time.
Those are the things that are outside the control of the employing organisation or the firm or the business or the government. But they still need to sort of take that into account that if this is a single parent or this is a parent that has kids who go to school on Zoom, you'd have to kind of bring in some humanity into how you approach performance, not purely just, those key performance indicators but behaviours that will eventually lead to those.
The short answer to the question is just to be flexible, and just to have some empathy for people working from home.
David Austin: And empathy and flexibility, those are some of the kinds of soft skills that experts have been talking about for a while now, you know, as being an important part of industry 4.0?
Prof Hameduddin: And the other thing is, for a long time, people studying HR or even the top leaders, they've been sort of saying that doing yearly reviews is really quite redundant, because how do you sum up the whole year? One of the points that I think, Shirin or Jane mentioned was that doing regular communication with the people that you're working with.
So, doing monthly sort of goals for small projects, doing check-ins, having small meetings, so that it's not all the way piled at the end where your performance is kind of discussed. For a long time, people have been kind of mentioning this, but I think this practice should become part of the organisation's culture.
Just because it helps employees adjust their performance. It also helps them adjust their expectations and gives them clear signals from their leaders about, “How do I approach my work, how many hours should I put in and what constitutes good performance?” All those questions have become a lot more ambiguous when you have such distance between.
David Austin: How should physical workplaces be redefined for businesses to still make sense? How do you see that changing?
Prof Hameduddin: Well probably I think a lot of the shared spaces will be able to be gone, right? Especially because of requirements for distancing. You’ll have a lot more walls and barriers and plexiglass, I think, in the new office. Physical interaction will probably be limited until we find a vaccine, until health authorities in whatever jurisdiction deem that it's okay to do it.
But I think, firms, it would behove them to kind of rethink how much they're spending on real estate. Because they've already been battered by the lack of demand or the lack of supply and all sorts of things. Their businesses have been upended.
So, one way they can save is not having such a large office. Beyond that, I actually, I don't know how it will change, apart from the downsizing in that sense. You could have offices that are shared between people. So, I come in three days a week or two days a week and then that office is given to someone else the other few days, and then there's a cleaning in the middle in between. So, we're basically sharing the space, but never at the same time. I think that would be one way to sort of accommodate that.
David Austin: Here's another question from the audience. What do you do in an organisation when you have a mix of both blue- and white-collar workers and you have some workers that were not desk-bound before? And you may have colleagues who don't have the same sort of computer equipment at home or are not as connected. How can an organisation cope with this right now?
Prof Hameduddin: It's sort of the divide between the professionals, managers, that sort of a class of people compared to the people, your custodians and people working in security, so on and so forth. Those were already kind of divided employees. So probably having, again, communication from leadership, having places where people can see each other, I think that is an important sort of consideration, whether it's online or in person.
David Austin: It seems like a lot of the same tips that you're giving are the importance of flexibility and empathy. What else are you taking away from this whole situation as you watch it? Are there certain data points that you're looking at as you monitor it, that you find important?
Prof Hameduddin: That's an interesting question. I work a lot with employee attitudes and motivation and behaviour. I would be very interested, although I don't have the data — I might collect it at some point — I'd be very interested to see what effects this has had on people's satisfaction with their work, their engagement levels and motivation and their performance.
Those are the things that I think would be important considerations as far as approaching the workplace in a different way. So, if we find that employees are actually more satisfied consistently, I think the data we have right now is very much, a product of just now. For a few months, people might be more productive working at home.
But if you're to continue this for years and years on end, will that be sustainable? I don't know that would be sustainable. So yeah, over the years, probably observing whether people are satisfied with their jobs, their changes to performance management systems, all these kinds of things, will determine whether there is a return to the office and the usual way.
The pre-COVID sort of, working at the office, I would look at that sort of data points.
David Austin: What are the top three things the organisation leaders can do to create a good company culture while telecommuting?
Prof Hameduddin: I think communicating, having different channels of communication. It doesn't have to be memos or formal emails, it can be informal things. Having some events, touch points that help. Discussing performance regularly, having more empathy, having flexibility for people, and setting a vision for what we are going forward.
I think for a lot of businesses that have struggled at this time; they're doing a fundamental rethink of their business models. And how do we approach the customer in this COVID kind of world? So, leaders have a large part in communicating that, articulating a vision to motivate individuals.
Those three things. They do revolve around a lot on communication. Those would be the things that I would say are important going forward.
David Austin: And lastly, what has this been like for you personally? Can you share a bit about the way your work has changed?
Prof Hameduddin: I've been going twice a week to the office. It's interesting. Like, at the beginning, it was a big adjustment to work from home, especially because I didn't have a home office set up. It took a little bit to get set up so that it worked for me. I got used to it. And then I started, when the lockdown kind of lifted, the circuit breaker got lifted, was able to go once a week and twice a week.
And now it takes me a day to get used to working productively at the office. And then when I come back to the home office, I have to get used to working at the home office. So, it takes me about a day to really get up to that when you're in the groove and you're able to, you know, a lot of what I do has to do with writing. So, it's a bit of an adjustment. I’m not going to lie.
I don't know if I prefer working from home, it's just that going to the office, it takes me about half an hour.
So to me, it seems kind of wasted, because I could roll out of bed, have breakfast, take a shower and start working in the next room. That's quite quick and easy. Having to get dressed, then going out in the heat, waiting for the bus, taking the bus, having to wear a mask.
I think that that's the big thing. You have to wear a mask outside. Sometimes you just want to stay at home instead. But we'll see, I think, we're adaptable creatures and I think we've done well so far.
David Austin: Is there anything else you'd like to comment on? Do you have a closing thought?
Prof Hameduddin: I think, just be patient and just be empathetic. Approach people with kindness, because you know, this is a difficult time for everyone.
I think one of the important things to realise is to not think in terms of the way things used to be, because, business has fundamentally changed.
Customers have fundamentally changed. Our work has changed too. I think a very frequent go-to, cognitive kind of trick where we think about how things were and how amazing things were before, COVID-19. I think, things will not go back to the same way.
So, we just have to adapt, be flexible, be agile in how we approach our work in the future.
Photo by Tina Witherspoon on Unsplash