Change is hard, whether it’s for better or for worse. The global pandemic has fundamentally shifted our perspective of on-site working hours, remote work, as well as how “necessary” it is to commute every day. Employees around the world still struggle with adapting to the “old-new”, or the fact that traditional workflow is slowly being restored.
To make the transition easier, you can adopt an adaptive workforce model with your employees. You don’t have to force everyone to work on-site or to mandate that everyone spends some time in the office without a good reason. Here’s how you can help struggling employees become better at their jobs so that you can move on to new workflow standards more smoothly.
Adaptive Workforce and Its Role in Project Management
To understand how you can make your employees’ work easier, you first need to understand what an adaptive workforce is. In practice, it translates to a “flexible” or “dynamic” workforce (i.e. a project team), with fluid duties and work methodologies.
For example, if your team consists of five people, two might work from home better one week and three might want to work in the office. The second week, you might need everyone in the office for brainstorming or a hackathon. The third week you might not need anyone in the office and you can all work remotely, and so on.
An adaptive workforce takes full advantage of the new COVID-19 work methodologies while still not neglecting what came before. Relying on both remote and in-office work can make your projects more successful and your employees more satisfied with their workload. There are several distinct benefits to choosing an adaptive workforce over relying solely on a single work methodology:
- Create an agile workforce environment
- Increase your team’s productivity and engagement
- Help team members socialize while still giving them personal space
- Facilitate natural learning, bonding, and teamwork development
- Increase the quality of the final products your team produces for clients
- Learn more about what works and doesn’t work for each team member
Ways to Facilitate an Adaptive Workforce
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Introduce Protective Social Distancing Measures
Firstly, you should take the current global pandemic situation into account when developing your adaptive workforce model. Many of your staff will be either vaccinated or unvaccinated, past their COVID-19 illness or still waiting for it. Many will also be scared about their family’s wellbeing seeing that they’ll commute to work at least occasionally. Mitigate this by introducing several simple but important safety elements into your office environment:
- Provide your staff with hand sanitizers, especially in bathrooms
- Consider the fact that everyone should wear a mask in the office
- Install protective see-through barriers between desks
- Ask your staff for rapid tests at least once a week
- Clean your office environment periodically to keep things bacteria-free
Introducing these measures into your office will ensure that when people visit their work, they can focus on their tasks instead of being afraid of getting sick. Moreover, you’ll earn their favor as someone willing to go out of their way to ensure everyone’s health and safety.
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Utilize Remote Workflow Platforms
As your team moves in and out of the office, it will become difficult to track what work was done and on which platform. This can be fixed by introducing a joint remote work platform for everyone to use moving forward. Project management platforms are dime a dozen on the web and many of them are friendly toward hybrid, adaptive work environments. Here are some of the best examples you should check out with your team:
- Slack
- Basecamp
- Asana
- Trello
- Todoist
- Zoom
- Skype
Make sure that everyone is “on the same page” with these platforms. Everyone should use the same tools so that everyone else can easily access older files or communicate their progress or findings. Centralizing your work will help your teamwork as a single hive mind and help save precious time you’d otherwise lose on backtracking.
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Make Time for Workflow Personalization
People who work remotely can often feel disassociated from their coworkers which can make it difficult for them to focus on their tasks. As a project manager, you can help these team members by introducing coaching into your workflow. Make time for each of your coworkers and talk to them one-on-one at least once a month.
Ask them about their experience with your adaptive workflow, what they’d change, and how it affects their productivity. You can also set up personalized KPIs and professional goals for each person to track between coaching meetings. The KPIs you set with them can either be closely related to their job descriptions or challenge them to help colleagues, learn new professional skills, etc. This is an amazing way to give each person on your team a sense of belonging while also helping them adjust to the new hybrid workflow.
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Be Flexible in Terms of Remote/In-Office Work
Your team members’ productivity will naturally fluctuate on a day-to-day basis and they might want to work from home or the office. Be open to their suggestions and feedback in terms of adaptive workforce implementation. Just because you’ve decided that Fridays are in-office days doesn’t mean that it should be the law.
Instead, adopt a more collegial, friendly stance toward your coworkers. If someone prefers to work from home that day, let them. As long as the work is done, there’s no reason to micromanage or oversee anyone as if they were a junior intern. This will gain you a lot of favor with your team and ensure that they give it their all in the future. Failing to showcase flexibility and understanding may have the opposite effect – be reasonable and discuss things with your colleagues as the equal professionals you are.
Facilitating an Adaptive Workforce
To facilitate a more adaptive, inclusive workforce, you’ll need to rethink how you manage your team. Whether you rely on waterfall, scrum, agile, or other project management methodologies, you’ll need to take your employees’ wants and needs into consideration.
Some of your team members will organically gravitate toward remote work and you should look for ways to facilitate that. Similarly, some will want to work on software development more than on copywriting, customer support, or content marketing – do what you can to help them. By doing so, you’ll gain their favor and the whole team, as well as the projects you’re working on, will benefit from your foresight.