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The cultural shift toward a hybrid workforce has raised many questions regards HR’s journey in adapting to new ways of working. A key part of this will be around maintaining employee performance and engagement.
It’s obvious that, with such a different landscape in the working world compared to the pre-COVID status quo, employers must seek to recognise the need to empower employees by adjusting the approach to performance management in the digital workplace.
However, whilst it may be presumed that productivity has slumped as a result of the pandemic, a Deloitte study from earlier this year found that a massive 55% of workers believe that their colleagues are actively more productive now than they were before lockdown started.
And whilst this may seem like positive news, it goes hand in hand with research from the ONS, which found that 59% of workers believe their work-life balance has been negatively impacted.
This may be because employees have struggled to switch off and settle into home life, they may have found that demand is higher due to businesses struggling or even because teams have shrunk due to the adverse effects of the pandemic.
So what’s the solution for HR? It’s evident that with these new challenges to overcome, a new performance management strategy that recognises the need for boundaries between working and home life is now essential.
To help with this, OpenBlend have devised a mix of personal and professional drivers that enable employee performance and achievement aimed to help separate our work and home lives. This has been comprised to understand, report and measure tailored approaches to performance management for the new hybrid workforce.
The company believes that the first step in creating this new strategy is accepting that the concept that we have of work-life balance is redundant. Instead, Openblend believes that HR needs to see employees as being motivated by a work-life blend - a mix of personal and professional drivers that enable them to achieve.
Remote working as a result of the pandemic has evidenced that work and home lives are not separate, but intertwined. If HR’s approach to performance management does not include employee work-life blend drivers, it is no longer fit for purpose.
To find out more on this topic, download the whitepaper and discover the productivity drivers required to ensure a increase productivty and work-life balance.
