The Future of Work: My take as a scientist and an employee
By Dr. Meera Paleja
In 2013, China’s largest travel agency, CTrip, was dealing with soaring costs of commercial real estate in Shanghai in addition to a high attrition rate of its employees. Senior management at the company started to think about their options- could a work from home model work for their call centre employees? On one hand they may save on costs of office space and their employees may be happier to avoid a lengthy commute. On the other hand, employees may lack motivation to work productively without direct interaction with management. What CTrip decided to do to help answer this question was innovative; They decided to run an experiment, complete with a control and treatment group, over a period of 9 months. Employees that showed an interest in working from home were randomly assigned to a treatment working from home group, or a control in the office group. The results were striking. The work from home group showed a 13% increase in productivity, fewer breaks and sick days, and an increased number of calls answered. These employees reported higher work satisfaction and experienced less turnover. Any doubt about this arrangement was diminished and the work from home option was extended to the remaining employees.
The Pandemic and Our Way of Life
The pandemic fundamentally changed the world, including the working world. We were forced to dismantle various structures, challenge ideas about what productive work means, and keep the world functioning despite a global crisis that threatened our way of life. A way of life and work, the status quo, that many of us had previously accepted as an unquestioned normal.
This crisis has created an opportunity we’ve never seen before. To build from scratch the working world we want, without a status quo to anchor and limit our imagination of the possibilities.
As a behavioural scientist people often ask me what we should do- what changes should we make to an HR program or process? I respond as a scientist: I don’t know, but I know how to get you the answer. The answer is testing and experimenting. So, like CTrip, we should pilot potential solutions and see what happens to figure out what works and what doesn’t. If we want to know whether two days or three days in the office is optimal for a hybrid work model, we should experiment to figure it out. Testing will also allow us to have a better understanding of the unintended consequences of a certain path of decision making. For instance, does the three day in the office model negatively impact a certain group more than others?
From a scientist’s perspective, the future of work is data-driven, evidence-informed, and human centred. The uncertainty we have experienced over the last year has created an opportunity to leverage experimentation and evidence-informed design in all facets of processes, decisions, programs, and policies to drive the outcomes we, as employees, want.
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