On "Freedom Day" in the UK (yes, we are using quotes and yes we're not convinced either), we decided to look back and do a retrospective on the modern workplace in the pandemic. There were no post-it notes involved and thankfully no-one has been assigned a load of tasks to do next but we did talk about:
- What went well
- What went badly
- What should we do more of
- What should we do less of
Below is a list of what we covered but give the show a listen to see what we really thought.
What went well
Work life balance
Travel
New ways proved to work
New ways were found as well
Moving to the cloud - resilience
Resilience of Teams
Metrics from employee experience
Disability - choice
What went badly
Learning from people
Appalling powerpoint - next slide please
Communication - too many different ways of doing things - Zoom, Teams, Webex
Water cooler chat and meetings
Impacts to innovation and creativity
Ability to switch off
More time working and not commuting
Back to back meetings
What should we do more of
Objective driven rather than time driven
Data and being data driven
Async comms
Have a natter
What should we do less of
Less meetings without agendas
Less just saying hello
Being in one place
Being rigid
Big changes - smaller and incremental change instead