The Need for Corporate Habits
The last few years saw all of us, professionals, operate from a new context. We worked from home, dealt with technology, and rarely met our colleagues. In fact, I managed to transition from one role to another without ever meeting my previous manager face to face. As weird as it may sound, it worked!
As the pandemic eases, we know that these new ways of working, for example, hybrid operation with few days of work from home – are here to stay.
What does that mean for companies? Firstly, it means dealing with new realities. As the pandemic comes to an end, I have been reflecting on how the corporate working environment will change. For instance:
We will work from home at least a couple of days per week. According to a McKinsey survey, 42% employees in the US want flexible working to continue.
The teams will become more distributed. Instead of meeting/seeing each other daily, managers will get to see their team members/colleagues only a few times every year. Loose bonds will govern team dynamics than hard-wired corporate structures.
Increased dissatisfaction and distance from workplace will lead to employees changing jobs faster. The Great Resignation will most likely continue into the near future. Employee retention will therefore be a key challenge for managers.
Business results will continue to matter in this new reality.
As a result, the role of corporate managers will become even more challenging. They will have to manage the teams, deliver on the results while struggling with forming strong bonds with their team members. Managers will have to work extra hard to sense the employees – how they are feeling and sniff out dissatisfaction in good time.
Post-Covid manager 2.0 will therefore have a task at hand. That’s where I believe in this new reality - establishing foundational corporate habits will become key.
Habits have become the cornerstone of how we perform and improve ourselves in our personal lives. Through positive habits, we carry out self-improvement while keeping negative tendencies in check. Habits put a structure to manage the entropy.
That’s why I believe that the science of forming habits will spill over into the corporate environment as well. These ‘corporate habits’, as I call them, will be necessary for both the managers and employees. Some examples of these corporate habits could be:
Having a routine check in. Forget about bumping into each other at the coffee machine. These discussions and 1:1 check-in will need to become more organised
Occasionally moving away from Slack/Teams to simple phone calls
Habits that help set boundaries between personal and professional lives. For example, encouraging a culture of announcing when you stop working for the day – with the manager leading this initiative and asking all the team members to join
Habits that bring in a human angle into the work relationships, which can otherwise easily dissipate. For example, once in a month, meeting outside workspace to build camaraderie
Creating shared goals will become even more important than tactics. Managers will need to be more like hedgehogs (and look at the bigger picture) and team members like foxes (keep the tactics solid by reading the immediate context)
Move away from slide production to allow space for deep work to ensure less employee exhaustion and to create opportunities for delivering results. Managers will therefore need to create more meaningful chunks of work, ensuring less oversight and keep employee motivation up and allow for deep work
The corporate habits need not be top down but will need to be jointly agreed with the team members. The habits may be divided into work-related habits and relationship-building habits for example, depending on where the team identifies the key challenges lie.
The question is who in the organisation should be responsible for driving this conversation. The instinctive answer is HR, however, I believe the managers will have to take this responsibility on themselves. The habits a team cultivates are not generic but will vary from one team to another. Therefore, the managers will have to take the lead. Doing so would, of course, mean that the managers need to learn the science of how to build better habits.
Next few years will put several new demands on the post-Covid manager including learning about how to build better habits in their teams.
