Doug Claffey, the founder of Energage, has been following workplace trends for two decades as the company has surveyed more than 2 million workers at 7,000-plus organizations in 56 media markets. Energage has administered The Dallas Morning News’ Top 100 Places to Work competition since its inception in 2009.
But Claffey will tell you that 2020 brought the most dramatic shift ever in what our sense of a workplace means.
Here are some of his takeaways.
“Historically, people’s sense of the workplace was a combination of people and physical place. When I would go to work, I would get in my car and drive to a building, and part of my workplace was the building and the location. The pandemic has challenged that sense of workplace profoundly.”
And although work has always been about the place, it’s also about interactions, he said. “I think the thing that people have lost are those casual collisions.
“I think the new workplace has been, by and large, a negative for extroverts who get their energy from other people, and a boon for introverts who like their peace and quiet and like to turn things off and get stuff done.”
The changes in how managers do their jobs also have been profound. “It has forced managers to really manage outcomes more than looking over their shoulder to see that people are in their seats,” Claffey said. “It has created an environment where you can’t manage by looking over your shoulder, and now, you have to manage by what employees are producing, what their metrics are, what their output is, what their outcomes are.”
But the pandemic also has ushered in more flexibility.
“There’s a lot more flexibility around getting the job done in a schedule that works for you,” Claffey said. “If you want to take two hours off in the middle of the day to help your kids with school, and work that part of the job later, you can do that. Before, you didn’t have the opportunity to do that.”
