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Designing the Post-COVID Future of Work

How the next six months could shape the next six decades

The world is at a pivotal moment with regards to flexible work and work-life balance. In March 2020, companies that previously insisted on the essential nature of daily commutes and butts-in-seats were forced to become flexible and remote-friendly, virtually overnight. They had no choice in the matter and little time to prepare. Nonetheless, everyone adapted in one way or another. For many companies, remote / work-from-home / lower commute / other flexible working arrangements worked out surprisingly well for everyone.

But in Summer 2021, as vaccines are now widely available in the US for anyone ages 12+, companies now have to make optional, unforced decisions about how much of that flexibility to retain, and how much to revert. As a result, we believe that the intercompany variance in workplace flexibility is about to become the widest it's been in decades.

Without intervention, most of the gains in flexibility are likely to disappear in the next few years. ^{[1] [2] [3]}

If we want to keep these gains in workplace flexibility, we need to communicate with each other about what it's like at different companies, because by the end of this year some companies are going to be dramatically more flexible than others.

Preferences are Personal

The past year has given everyone an opportunity to practice self-awareness: the opportunity to experiment with designing your own work-from-home situation, and to learn what works and what doesn't work for you personally. With some luck, you can carry those learnings forward.

It's not just about remote work. During the pandemic, employees faced non-work-related life stressors like caring for children and vulnerable family members. This has already nudged companies to become more flexible in terms of how teams collaborate, when work gets done, and to what degree employees are able to take care of needs and wants in their personal life. More than ever before, there is compassion and support for a more holistic approach to employee wellness and happiness.

For many, the past year has been a reminder that life is short and we should look to maximize our total happiness, not just total compensation. The two may be correlated, but the workplace setup that makes you happiest is unique to you, your personality, and your life situation. It's up to you, and flexibility is optionality because the preferences you have today may not be the same as you'll have five years from now.

Your Voice Matters

The new policies that your company chooses to adopt may or may not be the best fit for you. (The reality is that we probably won't know until later this year.) Nevertheless, this is a unique moment in time for employees to be able to shape those policies.

Collectively, we can shape the future of work if we collaborate to freely and anonymously share information about the degrees of workplace flexibility that each employer offers.

Flexibility serves leadership, managers, and individual contributors both personally (for their own sense of job satisfaction and work-life balance), as well as professionally, by reducing turnover ^[4] (and associated recruiting, training, information-loss, and opportunity costs) that comes from losing your most experienced employees who leave to find more flexible arrangements elsewhere as their needs and wants change.

In the survey below, we aim to capture both the policies of what degrees of flexibility are officially permitted, as well as the reality of how much people are able to take advantage of that flexibility in practice.

The questions were designed to address two goals:

1. Improving your experience at work
2. Improving your work-life balance

How to Take Action

Step 1: Speak up within your company about what's important to you. It's your manager's job to make the company policy reflect the employees' preferences.

Step 2: Share this page with any colleagues who you think might also care about work-life balance and the future of work.

Step 3: Help us gather anonymous data about what things look like at your company.

By collecting and publishing this dataset on an ongoing basis, in the long term, companies will set workplace policies knowing that future employees may evaluate them on these dimensions, and current employees can discover if a different company's policies might be a better fit for them. In the short term, you can use data about what other companies are doing to help advocate for similar flexibility at your current workplace.

Please take a few minutes to complete the survey below. By contributing, you'll receive a private link with a secret token allowing you to view the anonymized, aggregated results, broken down by company, once we reach a critical mass of submissions.

The next few generations of employees are counting on us.