Business Analyst - September 16

Thursday, September 16, 2021
THE WORK PLACE
How companies around the world
are shifting the way they work
The pandemic has
triggered seismic shifts
in how we work, causing
many companies to
transition from an
office-centric culture to
more flexible ways of
working. This shift is
largely still in the
experimental phase, as
businesses try to
conceive of and test
effective post-pandemic
working models for
their operations and
staff.
OF course, no one knows what
the ‘right’ answer is. What
works for one company may
not work for another; business
needs will vary depending on
sector, size and structure. Many
organisations, however, are doing their best
to make working more flexible – as well as
less burnout-prone, thanks to recent
conversations about mental health, work-life
balance and burnout.
some companies are going fully remote,
while others are opting for different visions
hybrid work environments. Here’s what four
companies in four different countries are
choosing to do.
Chargebee: Switching to
fully remote
Before the pandemic, Chargebee, an
India-founded subscription-management
company, used to have offices in san
Francisco, amsterdam and Chennai. today,
it’s gone fully remote with a completely
decentralised work structure that allows
employees to live and work where they
want.
Chargebee had been moving toward an
asynchronous working model before the
pandemic, anyway – meaning the focus
wasn’t on everyone working the same hours,
but on having teammates overlap a few
hours to facilitate communication. But “like
every other company during the pandemic,
we had to adapt to the realities of the world
and shift to a fully distributed model faster
and more completely than we had originally
planned”, says founder and CeO Krish
subramanian.
With meetings kept largely to
overlapping hours among teammates,
employees have a lot of flexibility around
when they work – though meetings, of
course, still need to happen. to help reduce
Zoom fatigue, on ‘Focus Wednesdays’
meetings are kept to a minimum so staff
can attend to their to-do list. In case projects
are staggered across time zones, the
company has an intranet that’s “up to date
on all activities”, with conversations,
meetings, documentation, meeting notes
and decisions open to everyone. there are
also apps, including Wingman, where
employees can access customer calls and
channels on slack where employees can post
questions – making “as much information
as possible accessible to our employees”.
subramanian says that giving
employees the freedom to manage their
time is aimed at reducing remote-work
stress and helping them disconnect from
work. But with no set hours comes the
possibility that people will have a hard time
logging off, too.
“We found that many employees weren’t
taking advantage of the unlimited PtO [paid
time off] programme we offer, especially
during the pandemic, but no one should stay
plugged in all the time – even if they are just
taking a ‘staycation’,” says subramanian. to
help protect wellbeing, employees get the
first Friday of each month off to recharge,
and there’s a mandatory two weeks of PtO
each year.
the company is sticking to a fully
remote work model for the foreseeable
future, now that it’s their standard operating
procedure. “With this transition, [upper
management has] learned a lot about the
value of empowering our employees,” says
subramanian. “the more traditional model
of having an HQ and a manager who works
in the same office as employees and having
set hours and a lot of meetings just isn’t the
most efficient model for most people.”
Instead, “as we have allowed our
employees more freedom to work when it is
says
that giving employees
the “subramanian
freedom to
manage their time is
aimed at reducing
remote-work stress
and helping them
disconnect from work.
But with no set hours
comes the possibility
that people will have
a hard time logging
off, too.
optimal for them and reduced the number of
meetings, we have found that their
productivity has grown exponentially,” he
says. “additionally, people are generally
happier and more motivated because they
have more control on how work fits around
their personal lives.”
Codility: Mostly remote, with hybrid
hubs and sponsored workspaces
Based in Warsaw, but with major hubs at
WeWork spaces in san Francisco, London
and Berlin, Codility, which helps
engineering firms hire talent, has more than
150 employees in 30 countries. Before the
pandemic, the company was already flexible
with structure: employees could rotate
among these hubs and work from home
when needed. Others were already hired to
work remotely, and even CeO Natalia
Panowicz was splitting time between the
Bay area and the offices in europe. But in
March 2020, Panowicz made the final shift to
a remote structure.
as the company transitioned, Panowicz
and her team “simply asked” employees
what they wanted to do their best at work
and tailored policies accordingly. Using their
feedback, the company has adopted a work
structure that’s both completely remote and
gives employees the chance to work in a
hybrid format.
some staff, for example, decided to move
cities or even countries. so, to facilitate their
free movement and help them remain
productive, the company gave all employees
WeWork access to any location of the coworking
company’s 800-plus outposts, so
they can have a desk to work at anywhere.
“We're monitoring closely how our team
uses the dedicated office space so that we
can scale up or down accordingly,” says
Panowicz. “In the cities where we have a
high concentration of people, 30% of staff
would come to the office each week (but not
each day), and the rest occasionally for
workshops and get-togethers.”
the company has also chosen to set
salaries across one salary band, so what
you’re paid is based on the role versus your
location. In the Us, all employees are paid a
“san Francisco salary”, while UK and eU
employees are paid at a London scale.
“It's up to the individual to decide where
to live for their best life,” says Panowicz.
“With freedom comes choice, this
immediately opens our talent pool to a
much wider net and more importantly, gives
our existing talent more freedom. We focus
on performance and output – the talent
creates the lifestyle and structure that works
for them.”
TomTom: Activity-based
working
When the pandemic hit, tomtom’s
leadership made a conscious decision to
reshape how their 4,500-plus employees
worked, rather than just copy-and-pasting
the workflow to a virtual setup. By October,
the location-technology company gave its
W@tt programme a test run – a model that
places the focus on the actual activity of
work and not where it’s done. By January
2021, its new hybrid-work structure, in
which employees decide if they want to
work in an office or home office, officially
launched.
“a lot of companies are mandating how
many days an employee is allowed to work
from home, while others have decided fully
remote is the way to go; we believe that
decision is best left up to our employees,”
says arne-Christian van der tang, tomtom’s
chief Hr officer. He says this “complete
flexibility” is the most important part of the
new working model. to that extent, the
physical offices are still part of the company,
though they’re being transformed or
rebranded into “hosting centres”, where
employees can collaborate and surroundings
are designed to support how they’re
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