Coronavirus: Our big new jobs adventure

The unemployment figures are devastating but some companies are looking beyond 2020 and the chance to redesign andrevolutionise the workforce.

Experts predict the changes that up-ended workplaces have only just started, with the lockdown reshaping organisations and jobs so profoundly many could be virtually unrecognisable if they survive. Illustration: Steven Moore

If you are still hanging on to your job and managing to survive working from the kitchen table then take a bow. But don’t be lulled into thinking your job in the new world of work will snap back to business as usual.

Experts predict the changes that up-ended workplaces have only just started, with the lockdown reshaping organisations and jobs so profoundly many could be virtually unrecognisable if they survive. That may sound like bad news. But there’s some cautious optimism that redesigning not only where but also how and when we work could be just what is needed for a battered business sector and productivity levels.

Employers and employees have been discovering they can quickly adapt, trim excess meetings and admin from their schedule, prioritise what needs to be done, set different working hours, re-skill and retrain teams to meet new demands. Some employers are making these adjustments to jobs in the short term, but more formal redesign is likely in the longer term, says consultant Victoria Stuart, who set up flexible work firm Beam Australia with Stephanie Reuss in 2016.

Most of the businesses they work with have been seeing priorities shift around three preoccupations: what work they were still doing, and the resources needed to do it; rescheduling hours of work and meetings; and dealing with some reduced capacity as employees struggle to work from home plus manage other care demands such as home schooling.

“As we’ve been having conversations with the public service and private companies it’s clear this isn’t just a new thing but ongoing and about becoming more adaptable, which is critical,” Reuss says. Some immediate role changes include moving from full to part time, setting new role expectations for employees, ensuring the most critical elements of a job are prioritised, and cutting back on a “culture of meetings”.

Meeting mania

Research shows US managers can spend up to eight hours a day in meetings, says Stuart, leaving them no time to do their actual job. And the initial stage of a lockdown has not yet changed meeting mania.

“We’ve heard that what is happening is people are being drawn into more video meetings,” she adds. Anecdotal evidence even suggests some bosses are taking their “check in” responsibilities with the team a little too seriously and have been told to ease off as the lockdown continues.

Another revelation to emerge from working from home has been the need to redesign roles to cull unnecessary admin that stops people from getting their job done. Economist and Deloitte Access Economics associate director Jessica Mizrahi says research on routine tasks and how they affect people shows, unsurprisingly, “we do a lot of work we should not be doing such as pointless admin”.

“During this time we can say ‘what are the things which are important and what is the junk?’ There are benefits from getting rid of that stuff. Of course, directly it increases productivity. But also, people are happier: everyone who does pointless paperwork feels their energy drain and it negatively impacts on engagement.”

The results of refocusing people on more productive tasks will show up on the bottom line because highly engaged employees tend to perform better, she adds. Think about the skills people have and don’t get too caught up in old measures she says, while predicting that flex will be just too hard to roll back.

For some organisations the work on job redesign (and the impact of automation and artificial intelligence) began well before the lockdown.

Beam Australia has worked for more than a year with Woolworths on providing a toolkit to redesign roles and upskill teams, and with the NSW Public Service Commission’s flexible work strategy team.

A hallmark of taking a serious approach to new working norms is when flexibility (which is more than part-time hours) is applied to all roles.

Says Reuss: “Most organisations haven’t taken the next step to provide alternatives to senior levels — only 6 per cent of managers in Australia work part time and that hasn’t changed in six years. Until organisations provide different work options at this level we will not see change.”

Doing things differently

Of course job redesign has been a necessity in an emergency but may not be a longer-term priority for many businesses struggling to survive.

There’s a reason we worked the way we did before, says Jon Williams, co-founder of consultancy Fifth Frame and former global leader for people and organisation at PricewaterhouseCoopers. And he’s not sure the switch to remote working will have lasting effects.

“Everyone is great in a crisis; people have done amazing things, some stuff they have always wanted to do. But I’m not sure it will go for long enough to change people’s belief they need to be seen in the office. This could be seen as an impetus for cost cutting.”

People will have to lean in to do things differently, Williams says, but the biggest changes to work will result from organisations that survive the shutdown trying to re-establish.

“It’s more likely the redesigning will be of organisations and as a consequence jobs might change. I’d say 80 per cent of our clients tell us they are building up a stack of debt and are going to have to reinvent themselves, they are asking us about how to manage the exit (from the lockdown). We’re working faster, there’s a sense of urgency and clear demands, but how do we maintain that once you go back?”

In crisis conditions the same rules apply to everyone but managing the re-entry will not have the same imperatives and will be really hard, he adds.

After recessions we usually see workforce participation rates decline and it takes economies years to get more people back into the workforce, says Mizrahi. This era could be different, however. “There’s a shining light if we are able to embed some of the WFH habits, and see the potential it could help to encourage some of those people and make the participation slump less large than we have seen in previous recessions. The economist in me sees the increased flexibility we have today as a potential boon in coming years.”

So far, employers’ reactions to the crisis have ranged from cutting executive pay to widespread lay-offs. “The businesses which are most able to navigate these times are the businesses able to tap into their people,” she says, as the shift from the “hand to head to heart” in skills and knowledge intensifies during an era dubbed the fourth industrial revolution. “We have to make the most of what we are learning and not treat it all like a bad dream,” she says. “We’ve been struggling with lacklustre productivity growth and we have the opportunity to create something better.”

Opportunity is emerging from a catastrophic situation, Reuss agrees: “We would love organisations to use this time to see the productivity gains from workforces in Australia from redesigning jobs.”