Split graphic with half showing a student employee workspace and the other half filled with a question mark. PJ Heusted // AS Review
By Caylee Caldwell
Travel, social interactions and even education all changed when the COVID-19 pandemic began almost one year ago, and even now, life still changes every day. The workplace is an ever evolving setting in a normal year, but COVID-19 has changed it almost beyond recognition for both good and bad.
On Friday, March 5, the College of Business and Economics hosted a meeting to discuss how the workplace is changing with the pandemic and how it will continue to change as vaccines are released and people learn more about the virus.
The meeting hosted Dennis Dashiell, head of organizational and talent development for Western, Christy Johnson, a course facilitator at Stanford Graduate School of Business and adjunct faculty at Western, Carol Olsby, managing director of Carol Olsby Associates Inc., a consulting firm. Dr. Dawna Drum, an associate professor in the College of Business and Economics at Western, moderated the discussion.
There are many changes that have come about for the workplace due to the pandemic, many of which Dashiell, Johnson and Olsby discussed, ranging from topics of emerging forms of professionalism to issues of discrimination.
While a large range of changes have been made to various workplaces, the negative impact has made quite a difference for employers and employees everywhere.
“This has not been just a pivot to remote. We have to keep in mind this was a pandemic and so there are all kinds of things going on with people feeling cut off from their usual self care and community resources,” Dashiell said.
Behind the scenes, a lot of companies and organizations are struggling with the financial side of the current workspaces, the university itself is in a hiring freeze, while other organizations have had to lay off employees as individual employees take on the work of multiple people.
“We are compromising that trio of cost, quality and speed, and if we don’t have more money, then we’re going to compromise quality and speed and there’s a lot of difficult conversations about what we do get done and we don’t get done,” Dashiell said.
While the pandemic has affected all people in workplaces in different ways, it has severely affected women, people of color and people in the LGBTQ+ community, according to the presentation.
The loss of jobs for women in the workplace may not get better as work starts its journey back to normal as many companies are investing in the use of machinery rather than rehiring workers. Johnson said that labor force participation dropped drastically, and about 2 million women have left the workforce due to the pandemic.
With this change for women, along with the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Dashiell believes that all people should be taking a step back and looking at the training they have or maybe have not been exposed to in this time.
“I think in a remote environment I mentioned intentionality, the intentionality of making sure that we have everyone at the table that we have equity of voice and participation is going to have to really be something that we demand and we, we do on purpose,” Dashiell said.
While the negative side of the pandemic had a major effect on the workplace, it wasn’t all bad for workers.
One of the biggest surprises of the new workplace was an increase in productivity despite the initial fear that it would drop drastically. Employers found that the flexibility was helpful for employees and many of them took on more hours in lue of the pandemic and the free time that it brought with it. Even though employees are missing the opportunity to run into coworkers in parking lots or at coffee shops, they are learning to interact and connect with each other on much deeper levels.
This idea of relationships and connection was a prominent change and focus in many work areas, no matter how prepared companies were for the changes of the pandemic. For Olsby, who works on the tech side of the workforce, remote working was no issue, but the company made an active shift to be more caring towards their employees and their needs.
“Every single person, no matter what their situation, had a story,” Olsby said.
As employers learn new empathy and understanding, employees are also trying to find a balance between old standards and new types of professionalism, taking these changing ideals of professionalism from their homes and back to the workplace as companies begin to return back to some semblance of normal. This negotiation starts with knowing your own productivity and what employers are looking for.
“The world’s really dynamic and so is work and so is life and they are never going to reach this static point where it’s in balance, and so accepting the fact that work life integration is here and it’s been very visible in the last year is actually a very positive trend,” Johnson said.
For workers without this flexibility or ease in the new workplace, one of the biggest lessons for workers during the pandemic is learning how to negotiate positions based on emergency needs. Johnson believes the most crucial part of this negotiation is keeping track of productivity with that flexibility
Along with the changes being made to an already existing workplace, there was also a change for those trying to get jobs as new graduates. Depending on what industry they’re going into and their own personalities or work style, making friends and connections in the workplace may be more difficult than it used to be.
“My advice is to say, I think you’re going to need to be a lot more intentional, you need to make a plan and do it on purpose, rather than letting it happen by accident in the break room,” Dashiell said.
Dashiell also talked about the big pivot that Western made as the pandemic initially struck. Faculty and staff had to figure out how to take their interactive classes to an online environment, while also wondering what the future might look like in its acceptance of remote working.
The initial, rushed changes to remote learning eventually became a more extended solution as the pandemic worsened, no matter what the future of the workplace looks like.
“I know folks that were sitting on crates with, you know, computers on boxes and sitting in cold garages and thought, ‘Oh, This is a couple weeks,’” Dashiell said. “A couple of weeks turned into a month and a month turned into a year and people started, you know, creating permanent work stations at home.”
Along with other changes happening to the workplace, it’s looking more and more likely that there will be a continued hybrid workspace even after the pandemic starts coming to an end.
The future of the corporate workplace is an evolving and changing space as employees and employers look at new standards and new problems that come with the pandemic.