Peter Drucker first observed in a 1992 essay for Harvard Business Review that our great transformation to a society of knowledge workers would be completed by 2010 or 2020. Unfortunately organisations still struggle to optimise performance by recognising and enabling the key requirements of knowledge work laid out by Drucker 25 years ago:
![“It is the knowledge worker’s decision what he or she should be held accountable for in terms of quality and quantity with respect to time and with respect to cost. Knowledge workers have to have autonomy and that entails responsibility. Continuous innovation has to be built into the knowledge worker’s job…[as does] continuous learning and continuous teaching.”Peter Drucker, Knowledge-Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge, California Management Review 1999](https://staging.carolinemburns.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/knowledge-worker-performance-1-940x528.png)
“It is the knowledge worker’s decision what he or she should be held accountable for in terms of quality and quantity with respect to time and with respect to cost. Knowledge workers have to have autonomy and that entails responsibility. Continuous innovation has to be built into the knowledge worker’s job…[as does] continuous learning and continuous teaching.”
Peter Drucker, Knowledge-Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge, California Management Review 1999
People experienced a new freedom – to personalise their workstyle to optimise their efficiency, effectiveness, experience and their wellbeing.
More like knowledge workers than office workers.
Three years later, we can look back and evaluate the assumptions we had about how the pandemic was going to change the way work and what ‘the new normal’ has evolved into.
In the post-pandemic era of Industry 4.0, what we do we now define as successful performance for individuals, teams and organisations?
I discussed these questions with my colleague and co-presenter Dr Richard Claydon from EQ Lab at Worktech EMEA and APEC in October 2020. Richard was a partner in Phrasia’s global “Voice of the Crowd” research into the work from home experience. Their deep AI analysis of open-ended responses revealed strong narratives within shared themes and highlighted the complexity of knowledge-driven work and the individuality of the experience.
Our experience of the pandemic lockdowns has been an intensely personal one based on a unique contextual mix involving location, living conditions, family situation, employment situation, physical and mental health, and personal attributes; the N=1 of the workplace (adapted from a comment by Professor Lynda Gratton at Worktech 2020).
This great WFH experiment provides a unique opportunity to redefine what successful knowledge worker performance looks like at an individual and team level.
So the ‘new normal’ (or “next normal” as I heard more appropriately from Vaughan Klein at Cisco during Worktech EMEA) should not be about whether this means the death of the office, nor should it be about premature trade-offs such as WFH versus the office, socially-distanced design versus saving significant dollars, sharing or not sharing desks.
This is the wrong conversation!
Covid-19 has revealed the fragility of many of our organisational and institutional systems which were built for efficiency rather than for adaptive performance, so in planning for the “next normal” workplace we recommend the following approach:
What ‘the office’ may look like in future must be driven by what we redefine as successful performance – and what the enablers of that performance need to do over time.
1.Listen to your employees
They have a newfound awareness around how they work best and what ‘effective performance’ now means for them.
Organisations are increasingly faced with customer and employee segmentation into smaller and smaller clusters, a fact touched upon by a number of corporate real estate leaders at Worktech EMEA 2020. Sharing responsibility for optimising the workplace experience at the N=1 level between organisations and individuals is likely to yield significant benefits for both.
Global research by ServiceNow revealed 92% of executives acknowledge they were forced to rethink how they worked during lockdown and 87% of employees said this new way of thinking about business was an improvement.
People have been ‘forced’ to learn new skills in terms of technology and – more importantly for the future – develop new capabilities including learning and experimenting ‘as-you-go’, problem solving, decision-making, conscious communication, empathy, self-motivation and prioritisation, and leadership (at all levels and in many guises).
These are the critical skills widely acknowledged before the pandemic to be essential for knowledge work in the digital age. Industry must invest in uplifting knowledge worker performance to improve productivity at organisational and national levels and stave off the stagnation that has encouraged cost-cutting and share buybacks to boost profitability.
These future of work skills are immensely valuable to individuals in terms of job security and to organisations seeking the optimum balance between humans and machines to be more insightful, more innovative, faster and more sustainable.
However in the relentless drive towards efficiency many organisations have sacrificed knowledge worker performance and the ability to respond adequately to VUCA events such as the Covid-19 pandemic. As Professor Lynda Gratton noted in her interview for Worktech 2020, we need to “listen to the job” and create environments that support the jobs of the future, not the jobs of the past.
If your organisation has been reluctant to engage and seek feedback from your employees until you ‘are ready’, you are probably going to be waiting a long time. Seeking qualitative, anecdotal feedback is just as valuable as company-wide surveys. Ask what’s working and not working, not just when or how many days employees want to come back to the office (the responses to these questions can be very misleading – buts that’s a whole other article!). If you are looking for ideas and tips on employee engagement check out this 4-minute video.
2.Enable performance instead of driving productivity
Knowledge work enablers
From our research we gained some unexpected (as well as expected) insights into performance under lockdown. The initial period was for the most part highly engaging and highly productive, however as time passed and WFH continued we found strong correlations between space, ergonomics and technology with whether people are thriving or barely surviving.
If you only measure what happens in offices, it will be difficult drive a broader approach to supporting people’s best work anywhere. Ask HR if they are reviewing performance measurement, reward, and recognition policies to effectively support remote as well as ‘in-office’ work. Instead of measuring increases in office productivity resulting from engagement-seeking perks, organisations need to move forward and support key cultural, digital, and physical performance enablers and critical success factors.
This will require a joint recognition by real estate, human resources, and technology that the cultural, digital, and physical work environments are intertwined in employee perceptions of performance and satisfaction
The results of the Phrasia and other research such as Leesman’s H-Lmi surveys underscore the individual complexity of employee experience, and highlight the interrelatedness of these workplace enablers.
Leaders must seek to optimise how these three dimensions interact to reinforce or undermine the entire performance environment. They must also be more conscious about the risks of driving efficiency in one enabler – such as increase in desk sharing ratios – and undermining the effectiveness of another enabler – such as lack of investment in a booking and wayfinding app. The optimal balance will be unique to every organisation (this is also a whole other subject, which I explored in my PhD thesis).
3.Accept (or embrace) autonomy and accountability
By regarding the workplace as a system comprised of cultural, digital and physical enablers, our team have been able to reframe the criteria for a “good” workplace experience that supports individual and team performance.
We refer to this approach as creating a personalised adaptive workplace system.
4.Optimise the enabling infrastructure
Successful and sustainable organisations are built for destabilisation and organised for innovation and change.
To achieve the resilience needed to respond to change, we must also be prepared for the “systematic abandonment of whatever is established.” C-19 reminded us that our environment, our cities, our communities, and our organisations are complex systems – and in that complexity lies both unpredictability and volatility but also agility and resilience.
The global pandemic has revealed the risks of engineering the **** out of corporate real estate portfolios in pursuit of efficiency.
It has also provided us with the opportunity, fueled by a period of prolonged and intense volatility and uncertainty, to abandon 19th century concepts of office and office work.
To transform knowledge worker performance, accept that you do not have all the answers and probably never will. Instead consider the workplace to be a critical part of an adaptive system of physical, digital, and cultural performance enablers.
Ask, experiment, learn, tweak, and monitor to constantly fine-tune the system and maintain its robustness. Look for unforeseen consequences of workplace initiatives – both positive and negative – as this is where we often find hidden opportunity and strategic value.
It is high time leaders started acting like the clock is running out and embraced the momentum of this great WFH experiment to propel themselves, their people and their workplaces into the digital age by transforming office work into knowledge work.
