TeamLease, India’s leading people supply chain company, recently launched the results of a survey conducted to understand the readiness of 300+ organizations for adopting hybrid or virtual work models, in a post-pandemic era. The survey titled ‘Future-readiness of Organizations for a Hybrid World’ has been administered to large organizations (53.87%), startups (20.54%), and SMBs (25.59%) from industries ranging from technology to manufacturing to BFSI to FMCG to retail to health to automobile.
According to the survey findings, 58.04% of responding organizations think 2022 is the year offices will become completely in-office. Additionally, although 43.46% of HR leaders conceded that their employees want to return to work, ~76.78% of organizations said they will give their employees the preference to choose their work model. As far as the state of workspaces goes, 36.61% of respondents claimed they had office space on lease pre-pandemic but moved to co-working spaces afterward with an almost equal number of organizations (36.92%) saying they had office space on lease pre-pandemic but moved to fully-remote work settings without an operational office. While 21.42% of organizations didn’t see any change in their workspace status quo, 5.05% said they intend to stay a virtual-only organization for the foreseeable future.
The survey further deep-dives into the challenges associated with experimentation of various work models in an ever-increasing dominion of remote work preference and finding a balance of suitability for employees and companies alike. About 40.77% of respondents find employee performance management and productivity measurement as a significant challenge in virtual work settings followed by strategy implementation to motivate, engage, and retain employees (18.45%) and planning for office workspaces, e.g whether or not to lease fully-operational physical offices or to leverage co-working spaces (18.15%).
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The survey also speaks about how organizations are planning to build organizational resilience, business sustainability, and workforce health security by devising new strategies and evolving methodologies. 50.29% of respondents agreed to increasing their L&D (Learning and Development) budget by 15-25% in 2022 with 25.59% saying their margin will be anywhere between 25-50%. The business resilience isn’t just limited to an increase in L&D budget but also encompasses mental health-related initiatives to increase by 10-20% for 46.42% of the participating companies with 29.76% saying it will be 20-30% for them. Onboarding and implementation of new tools is also a top-order priority with organizations with 26.48% planning to employ remote employee performance apps. Remote engagement and remote monitoring systems are other tools as per 18.75% and 17.26% of organizations respectively, which they want to adopt to better streamline their hybrid workforce.
“As the economy is slowly opening up and organizations are looking to welcome their employees back, they want to foolproof their workspaces and environment to accommodate the employee preferences in a way that also aligns with business sustainability and growth. Both can be balanced in the best way possible by redefining what productivity looks like, how it’s measured, and how employees are being engaged and retained in the long term. The survey observes all such nuances and captures future-readiness of companies to adopt hybrid or virtual work settings as the case may be“, said Ajoy Thomas, VP & Business Head for Retail, E-Commerce, Logistics & Transportation (RELT) Vertical at TeamLease.
To sort out their current challenges such as planning for a hybrid work environment and infrastructure (38.09%) and planning L&D initiatives in alignment with in-demand skills and increased business risks (32.73%), companies are contemplating devising strategic approaches to mitigate them. Bringing in new skill proximity and learning agility metrics to quickly map the future skill needs (33.43%) and designing talent development programs that are flexible, personalized, modular, and recognize individualistic learning patterns (30.44%) are a few of them.
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