Business community in consensus that work should be hybrid going forward

• Says employee should be given more flexibility for hybrid model to become a success 

As the country gets gradually and safely reopened after months of mobility and other restrictions, the broader business community is of the view that the office-based work must stay hybrid going forward, after seeing the positive results during the 20-month long experiment forced upon by the pandemic.

Sri Lanka’s office-based workers, who mostly worked from home, are now returning to their offices but the employers say they should be given the choice to decide when they want to work in office and when they want to work from home, as increased flexibility has strongly corresponded with higher productivity. 

“We are in the next normal and we have little choice in the matter but to adopt. We need to be flexible and we need to continue with that, instead of trying to change,” said Murali Prakash, a top corporate leader and a Past President of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and The Management Club (TMC), speaking at a webinar organised by the TMC together with CMI and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA). 
“If somebody has that flexibility, he becomes more productive,” he added.

Speaking further, Prakash said it is high time for the management moved away from the practice of measuring performance based on the time over task.  “You don’t need to do that. If you tell them that this is the task that you need to do, does it matter to us where he is working from, whether he is working two hours or whether he is working at 2:00 in the morning or 10:00 in the night. It doesn’t matter,” he added.

Speaking at the same forum Unilever Sri Lanka Country HR Director Ananya Sabharwal said, for the hybrid work arrangement to become really successful, the employee should be given the chance to decide when he wants to come to the office and when he wants to work from home in a five-day work week. 

“I think the first thing that will define the success of hybrid is actually a pull approach rather than a push approach. The organisation saying these many days you have to come and it’s a mandate and otherwise you will have to leave the company and that kind of approach will definitely not work,” Sabharwal said, adding that it must be more about the employee choice than the company’s. 

At Unilever Sri Lanka she said they have told their office-based staff that two days a week at office for everyone in a week is good enough for collaboration while the balance three days they can opt to work from home.

According to CIMA Country Manager Zahara Ansary, the combination of working from home and office will also enable to overcome the issues such as social isolation, which some staff may have suffered during the complete work from home setting, due to the loss of social interactions and the typical camaraderie found in an office environment. 

Speaking at the forum John Keells Holdings PLC Chief People Officer Isuru Gunasekara said that companies might have to relook at their employee policies to incorporate new developments such as crowdsourcing and gig working, as workers may want to engage in more than one employment in the current context. 

“We also need to be cognizant of the fact that with the new generation that is coming in, we may need to relook at our job policies and things like that, as it is a mindset change for us as well,” Gunasekara said, 
“With crowdsourcing and gig workers coming into play, we might have to be flexible even with our contracts and engagements because the young generation wants to have more experiential employment rather than the loyalty for 15-20 years,” he added.