Tim Oldman looks at employee experience data during the initial lockdown period.
As we settle into nationwide lockdown it’s important to reflect on what has rapidly turned into a mass homeworking experiment. Failure to analyse both the success stories and shortcomings will leave us wide open to misinterpretation when people return to work.
Covid-19 is forcing us to rethink work. For instance, should the least-productive employees working from home go back to the office first? Or do we allow the business divisions that have the least technology and lower connectivity at home return before anyone else? And how do the employees feel about returning to physical workspaces? An inability to answer these questions risks applying more pressure on an already anxious workforce.
Leesman has begun crunching the numbers with new data from employees sent to work from home, providing an opportunity to compare that with the existing 740,000-plus employee experience responses gathered during a 10-year mission to statistically map office-based working. Clients using our homeworking assessment tool who have worked with us before will be able to compare an employee’s perception of their temporary home workplace with their office.
Initial findings suggest that businesses have done better than expected to ensure that their employees are able to work effectively from home.
Early data suggests that the biggest pressure points relate to social connectivity and, employee ability to maintain a healthy work-life balance – the one thing that homeworking is widely trumpeted to aid.
The first phase of the data has just been released and it provides insight into the tasks that are suffering and those that might improve. Only with this type of data will we have sufficient understanding of who should go back to work and when. Learning how effective we have been will enable us to know how effective we can be in future.
Tim Oldman is CEO at Leesman
