Redefining what employee engagement is post pandemic.
The pandemic continues to remind us how important mental health and digital detoxing is. As a company that advocates people powered performance, we are making moves to get behind our people and give them the support they need to just breathe. Since 2020, the pandemic has continued to redefine what productivity and performance looks like in terms of how we work. Global Workplace Analytics believes that 25-30% of the workforce will be working remotely by 2021. In May 2021, a Mercer study found that 70% of companies said they were planning to adopt the hybrid model. Many companies have already made the switch, including prominent brands such as Adobe, Salesforce, Spotify, and Twitter. And Microsoft’s Work Trend Index (published in March 2021) found that 66% of employers around the world are redesigning their workplaces to accommodate hybrid work arrangements.
The bottom line is that companies have realized that physically being at the office full-time isn’t necessary to produce great results.
However, the advantages of remote working have come at a price, mental health, digital fatigue, burnout and longer working hours. Through our own work at Sandbox working with company cultures, our surveys have seen a rise in
employee burnout and requests for respect for working/off time hours. Many citing that boundaries for weekends, personal time are no longer respected. Digital fatigue also ranks high with the ever-increasing time spent on meetings and remote interactions, with lesser and lesser time to focus on work.
Take a look at these shocking meeting stats from otter.co
We've been hard at work for 2 of the most challenging years any company has faced in the last decade. We have, as a team and entrepreneurial company faced tremendous disappointment and felt unappreciated as we continued to go above and beyond often with no reciprocity or thanks. Clients with whom we've worked since our inception 7 years ago have barely checked in on us. Yet our team and our partners have shown up 100% every day without break. So, in appreciation of everyone we decided to give everyone the best employee engagement of all. NO ENAGEMENT for 3 days. No phones, emails or screen time. Not a whisper from the office, unless someone's house is on fire, which it won't be. We planned it that way. Ongoing Projects
Ongoing projects will be well looked after and can withstand a few days rest for the teams behind it. Essential touchpoints have been arranged on staggered roster. Further, the sandbox senior management has stepped up to cover for their teams during their break, ensuring some quality recharge time for the life blood of the company.
We plan on having more of these built-in breaks for our team as it offers our people the opportunity to rest. We believe that dialling it down to about 20% every once in a while, is the only way we'll have the capacity to be a 100% when we need to. When we take those much-needed moments to rest and recover, we can do more with less. When we take a moment to absorb how we’ve gotten to where we are, we create space for innovation and experimentation.
On that note, have a productive week and we'll see you on the other side!