Agile working: What does the future hold?

Since the advent of the global pandemic there has been an undeniable and irreversible restructuring of management styles as a product of the working-from-home (WFH) and agile working systems implemented by companies across the globe. These agile working practices that are now at the forefront of many workforces have been accelerated through their evolutionary stages as a result of necessity during these times, with many companies reporting the benefits of agile working on both employee engagement and overall productivity. However, with the dust now settling on the meteoric impact of the pandemic there now emerges some unanswered questions and obstacles about the true efficacy of agile working and whether it is truly the best method going forward for both employees and employers.

The issues facing employment at this moment in time

An Article from Everest (2022) highlights key 2 issues facing the implementation of agile working:

1. The towering crisis of employee skilling: The number of next-generation roles has risen substantially in the last 4-5 years, not just due to agile working but due to other incoming future technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and
   web3. With the addition of low-code platforms, blockchain, decentralised finance, and virtual reality to the technology space, companies are looking to fill these gaps through internal training initiatives. Should the necessity for these types of roles continue to rise, industries may struggle to keep up with the reskilling programmes.
2. Digital augmentation of the workforce and the workplace: One thing that is not in any dispute is that the pandemic kicked off a digital revolution within the workplace. Many companies are now adopting a digital-first approach to working, creating a necessity to re-imagine and re-engineer their processes. Mass restructurings of this nature are never without their cost and risk

The Demand for Agile Working and WFH Employment and the impact this could have

According to a US academic study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (How agile working from home works out, 2022) offering WFH as an option led to a 35% drop in attrition rates and improved self-satisfaction scores. Self-satisfaction scores are important as they highlight the value that employees place on WFH set-ups, with previous studies (Mas and Pallais 2017 and 2018, Maestas 2018 and Barrero et al. 2021) finding that employees value WFH at the equivalent of about a 4% to 8% wage increase.

With employers that offer agile working and WFH options currently being in high demand in the employment market, there will be many people looking to change jobs or even change industries in pursuit of this. In fact, the demand for WFH and agile working positions has been so high that we have seen a boom in recruitment websites dedicated to finding exclusively remote working positions (Flexjobs, Arc, Remote.co, Just Remote, Virtual Vocations). With this demand, combined with post-pandemic graduates entering the industry for the first time, there is now a large new wave of employees who will only know agile working and WFH set-ups, having never experienced full-time office work set ups prior to the pandemic. It is also important to be aware that many recently published studies that look favourably on agile working are based on data collected from that initial generation of employees (2019-2021). It is yet to be seen if this new, digital-generation workforce will be able to effectively operate under a agile working or WFH system with the same efficacy as those who have experienced work life both pre-pandemic and post-pandemic.

What does this mean for employee engagement and what can be done?

In this new technological age of agile working, managers are now faced with new challenges and obstacles to keep their employees engaged. How do managers promote autonomy and flexibility while also maintaining effective team cohesion? An article published by Harvard Business Review (2022) highlighted and explored this dilemma, offering some ideas and solutions:

• Realise the importance of one-to-one interactions: Effective and positive employee experience is largely impacted by leadership team’s air-game (one-to-many interaction, i.e. corporate brand, culture, values and policies) and a leadership team’s ground game (one-to-one/one-to-few interactions, i.e. conversations with the manager, direct reports, small meetings & briefings). In the current climate whereby agile working is at the forefront of many workforces, it is paramount for management teams to implement good and effective ground game to drive employee experience, engagement and ultimately loyalty.
• Managers themselves need support to successfully implement an effective agile working system: The difference between a failed agile working system and a successful one bares enormously on the  ability of management to maintain positive employee relationships to drive engagement levels under these agile working conditions. Therefore, it is highly important that company leaders and HR teams support managers with specialised and appropriate training. There is a large emphasis on adopting a dynamic management style, and so managers should ideally be autonomous enough to forego some degree of bureaucracy in order to keep communication and collaboration effective within their own team and subsequently throughout the company.

Managers can keep teams engaged in a agile environment by:

• Having a shared commitment and mutual respect
• Checking-in often
• Meeting in person regularly
• Showing appreciation frequently in large and small ways
• Finding a way to be together while apart

To sum up what this all means for the future of agile working in relation to employee engagement is a difficult thing. Unpredictability has been the only predictable characteristic of the last half-decade and so we are still waiting to see the long-term effects and outcomes of agile working. One thing that we can be certain of is that if management teams are not putting employee experience at the forefront when implementing agile working or WFH systems a steady but detrimental decline in employee engagement can be expected.