Culture eats strategy for breakfast, so the quote goes. It’s a management cliche now, but the importance of culture to an organisation’s health remains true. Without it, productivity can fall prey to ennui and disengagement and often, by the time you’ve identified the problem, it can be too late to turn the ship around.
What does this mean for a virtual workplace? Or a hybrid one? The journey to remote working was unexpectedly quick due to COVID-19. More than a year on, it seems likely that organisations will embrace a hybrid future, utilising different spaces for different kinds of work, and less certain that all workers will return to the office, or stay away completely. While most organisations are getting a handle on the technology they need to allow for productive employees at home, fewer are addressing the cultural, experiential aspects of such ways of working.
Such questions resonated with the team responsible for PwC Australia’s ‘Pulse’ app. Pulse, an anonymous micro-survey application that drives behavioural change to improve team experiences, wasn’t created for virtual work — indeed, it comes into its own when empowering teams to have meaningful conversations that improve their working experiences — but in a hybrid landscape, its importance has taken on new meaning.
Mountains climbed
Since 2018, when Digital Pulse first wrote about Pulse, the app has gone from strength to strength. Survey results from high-performing teams have helped to define what experiences people needed to feel satisfied and be productive. Knowing, with statistical surety, what works, means findings can be applied to teams and projects where things aren’t quite gelling.
Speaking on the Pulse journey, PwC Partner Justin Homer says, “We expected that Pulse would identify problem areas in team experience, finite things that we could improve. And while it certainly did do that, it was the ecosystem surrounding the survey tool that turned out to be the key.”
“While the surveys indicated problems teams might be experiencing, for example, a lack of communication or feeling displaced, addressing that within the experience ecosystem meant teams could act on that feedback,” says Homer.
“What became clear was how powerful work team rituals were. Teams having agency over their ways of working, by identifying and then having systems for actioning change, made all the difference.”
In the last article, the team likened Pulse to a fitness tracker for work, and like a fitness tracker, unless an overall health goal and interventions are wrapped around it, it’s just a piece of tech, a set of counted steps. The system of interventions, team rituals, processes and behavioural nudges needed to effect change were critical to making the survey worth doing.
Jane Cronin, a PwC New Ways of Working lead, elaborates. “The tool itself intrinsically has to be linked to people who are in charge of changing experience. Call them morale advocates, culture carriers, influencers, change agents or anything in between — we call them Chief Experience Officers (CXOs) — an individual (not the boss) who is advocating for the health and rhythms of the team.”
“Without that layer of action, all you have is data.”
COVID-19’s consolidating role
Pulse’s role as a team enabler, rather than just a survey tool, came into stark relief when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Alongside many workforces around the globe, parts of Australia went into lockdown. PwC Australia was no exception and workers went from enjoying its colourful office spaces to their spare bedrooms in just two weeks. Pulse was about to have its moment to shine.
One week in, leaders and team managers were worried about morale, and checked in with the circulating Pulse surveys. The results weren’t good. Only 18 percent of teams felt that they were working well virtually.
While such a low result was not a huge surprise given the emotional circumstances of the pandemic, it highlighted an urgent need. Knowing that the stakes were high, the teams in charge of new ways of working lept into action. To redirect, a digital concierge was set up to connect teams to the tools they would need while working virtually, as well as better communications, mini learnings and coaching. In just three weeks, the next Pulse survey showed that an astounding 70 percent believed they were now working well in the online environment.
“The constant monitoring of the heartbeat allows you to see when the organisation is dipping, ask ‘what does that mean?’ and then literally see how your interventions have an effect in almost real time,” Cronin says.
“While the app was designed to empower teams and CXOs, it also generates aggregate insights that allow an organisation to respond rapidly when necessary. In this instance, it was better remote working at a time where that was critical for business continuity.”
The implications of such data and interventions to the productivity and culture of an organisation operating in a hybrid way of working is enormous. With team members in multiple locations, the ability to understand when things are going wrong, identify the ‘what’ and have a meaningful conversation to drive action is crucial to helping isolated individuals feel empowered to change their experience.
Going from insight to action
Pulse, and the employee experience system it sits within, could be a critical component to new ways of working. While still performing the micro-surveys it was built upon, the tool has been updated and further integrates the actions it needs to spur, nudging CXOs when a team is returning statistically important changes — such as a dip in communications levels — with proposed interventions and activities that could help.
Far from being a pretence for actual change or a ‘fluffy’ culture activity, it empowers users with the opportunity to change things in ways that are statistically proven will improve their way of work. For employees struggling to understand how they fit within a hybrid workplace or dispersed team it is an actionable insight that will help them be happier, feel connected and critically, positively affect their work output and quality.
For businesses concerned with how the new landscape will play out, the constant thump of their employees' heartbeat will no doubt be a welcome reassurance.
