Employees prefer ‘plain vanilla version’ to work on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays
Companies are worried about the number of working days and work content
editorial comment[찐비트]is an abbreviation of ‘Jung Hyun-jin’s business trend’ and ‘real business trend’, which shows the changing trend of work. ‘Office Shift’, a corner in Chinbit, is a content that carefully examines the changes in the office that started with the COVID-19 pandemic and lays the groundwork for finding answers in the form of work through experiments we have been doing together. will be We visit you every Saturday and Sunday morning. After the 40th series, we plan to make it available as a book.
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Jjamjjamyeon and Chapaguri are famous ‘hybrid dishes’. In fact, the expression ‘fusion cuisine’ would be more appropriate, but to explain ‘hybrid work’, I applied a new word, hybrid, which has a meaning that is in line with fusion. Given that the two dishes have been merged into one menu, it seems that the meaning of fusion dishes and hybrid dishes will not change significantly.
Then, this time, I’m going to think about the difference between jjamjjamyeon and jjapaguri. For jjamjjamyeon, you can enjoy sweet and salty jajangmyeon and spicy jjamppong, respectively, but for jjapaguri, jajangmyeon-flavored jjapagetti and salty and spicy ramen nuguri are mixed to create a new taste like Sichuan jjajang. The two dishes are distinctly different in terms of whether each retains its original taste or whether it is recreated with a new taste through combination. A bowl of jjamjjamyeon has a partition between the two dishes, but chapaguri is placed on one plate.
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▲ Nongshim Chapagetti and Neoguri products
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Does hybrid work fall under jjamjjamyeon or jjapaguri? I think it would be appropriate to see it as close to jjamjjamyeon at this point. This is because the two working spaces, telecommuting and office commuting, remain at the level of dividing and attaching them to the working period of a week. It seems that there are still several partitions left in the combination of the two work forms to create a complete work form.
There are steps to be taken in order for the hybrid work to be properly integrated into one cuisine rather than a separate one. Several experiments are needed to create a successful flavor that combines as well as Chapaguri.
◆ ‘First cubicle’: How many days a week do you go to the office and what day of the week do you go out?
The first thing companies worry about in the process of introducing a hybrid work system is the number of working days at the office. When this shift system is applied collectively to all employees, it is common to announce a fixed number of days to go to the office during the working day. Disney is 4 out of 5 days a week, Amazon and Starbucks are 3 days. Most of the companies that are currently adopting the hybrid work system have returned to the site for reasons such as productivity and cooperation after working entirely from home, so they gradually increased the number of days they worked in the office from 1 to 2 or 3 days a week.
If so, let’s think about it. Is it appropriate to be in the office for a few days out of a 5-day work week? Is there really an answer to this question? According to a survey conducted by Scoop, a US software company that helps with hybrid work schedules, of 334 companies that have introduced hybrid work in the US, 46% of companies require at least 3 out of 5 days to go to the office, followed by 2 days at 41%. is said to have followed Days 1 and 4 of the week were counted at 7% and 5%, respectively, showing a large difference. On average, this is 2.49 days, which is exactly half of all working days. In terms of working days, the two systems are exactly half-and-half combined, as if they had been put together.
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As the conflict between the company and the employees over the issue of returning to the office is sharp, there is a slight difference in the preferred number of working days during the week. According to the results of a survey of 200,000 US employees by WFH Research, a non-profit research organization, office workers wanted 2.73 days a week (as of last February), but employers planned 2.20 days. Even at the beginning of the pandemic (global pandemic), employers said they would not introduce telecommuting for even two days a week, but they slowly changed their minds, and from the October 2021 survey, it was shown to exceed two days. On the other hand, employees wanted more than 2.5 days from the beginning of the Corona 19 crisis. Through this process, the gap between management and employees was narrowed from January 1.38, 2021 to the current 0.5 day.
The number of days you go to the office is also an issue, but it is also important what day of the week you come to the office. The day of the week also affects the productivity of employees to the extent that the symptom of not wanting to go to work on Monday after the weekend is called ‘Monday disease’.
Currently, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are the trend. Professor Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University, who has been researching telecommuting for nearly 20 years, recently expressed on his Twitter that the combination of working at the office on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday is the “plain vanilla version” that people are looking for most at ice cream parlors. Only 6% of people asked to go to the office on Friday, which is adjacent to the weekend, less than one tenth of Tuesday (72%) or Wednesday (66%).
However, this trend is not the answer. It is the answer that companies that have entered the experimentation stage have come up with a compromise between the needs of management and employees. It remains to be seen what this combination yields in terms of productivity and efficiency. Some say that it is inappropriate to fix some of the working days and have them come to the office.
◆ ‘Second cubicle’: Is there a set of tasks suitable for office/home?
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One of the things that needs to be solved to go to a work system in which the way of working from home and going to the office naturally melts is that you need to separate the work space that suits your work. If you are writing a project report, it is efficient to work with increased concentration in a quiet space without ambient noise. If 10 people need to have a meeting to come up with a project, it is productive to gather and discuss in one space called a conference room. The characteristics of work and work space must be well matched to bring out the highest efficiency, but the factors that affect this are complex.
According to the Daily Guardian, a research team led by Professor Jonathan Trevor of Oxford University interviewed executives of 20 global companies in an article published in the management journal MIT Sloan Management Review last December and found that work is classified into four categories.
① Tasks that require focus on oneself to enhance creativity, such as designing a booklet
②Tasks that individuals must solve procedurally, such as data entry
③Group tasks that require collaboration, such as everyday projects
④ Tasks that require everyone to cooperate and mobilize creativity, such as product development
Professor Trevor evaluated No. ① as the most advantageous job to convert to video among the four jobs because there is little collaboration and support is possible with technology. On the other hand, in case ④, he explained that if there were a lot of these tasks, he would have to spend more time in the office, as team members had to gather in one space to pour out their knowledge and opinions without hesitation, and gather collective intelligence.
For this reason, there are cases in which the right to decide the details of the hybrid work system is handed over to ‘bubabu (department by department)’ or ‘team by team’ rather than a lump sum application of ‘all employees go to the office X days a week’. Quite a lot. Both terms come from the English adjective expression case by case, which means ‘at the time’. According to the characteristics of each department and team, it is a way to see the work characteristics that employees mainly have to do and to configure a hybrid work system either directly or in the company.
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Kakao, a representative IT company in Korea, has also introduced ‘Kakao ON’, which prioritizes going to the office, from March, and has decided and submits the number of days to work from home or the office for each organization. Oracle, an American cloud company, recently ordered the return to the office and divided the roles of employees into three categories: ▲required to go to the office 5 days a week ▲allowed to work flexibly and ▲suitable for working from home, and announced that the company would notify them within 30 days, according to Business Insider, a US economic media outlet. also reported.
Experiments are being conducted on the hybrid work system by dividing tasks and applying different systems for each team, but it has not yet been clarified which method is more productive and efficient. In some cases, if there is a difference between teams or tasks, controversy over equity among employees may arise. Employees who refuse to return to the office and see working from home as a perk feel this way, which can take a toll on the culture of the organization as a whole. In addition, even if you go to the office, there is a problem that you cannot collaborate as the systems are different for each team or department.
Martin Haas, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said in January that managers and employees are doing their best to find their own rhythm in the ‘new normal’ of hybrid work. She said she also faces fairness issues when there are teams within a company that cannot work from home. Professor Haas emphasized that it is time for companies to create customized policies suitable for their respective businesses.
Reporter Jeong Hyun-jin [email protected]