New ways of working: a hot topic!

As a result of the health crisis we have been experiencing for almost two years now, most organisations have been forced to rethink their work organisation by at least introducing teleworking.

Teleworking has become a widespread practice overnight. Although it is nothing new (teleworking dates back to the 1980s and became popular in the 2000s), the intensity with which we now practice it is unprecedented.

This shift from the workplace to the home, whether formal or informal, has been accompanied by other changes: the need for greater digitisation of work tools, a change in working and collaborative methods, a reflection on the most appropriate management style, etc. These changes are characteristic of the workplace. These changes are characteristic of the new ways of working (NWoW). NWoW, popularised by Microsoft some 15 years ago, is a combination of flexible time and space practices, collaborative work forms, and more participative management styles; a combination made possible by the increased use of new technologies.

While the health crisis does not de facto imply a transition to these new ways of working, it does point the way. Many organisations have already anticipated a "next world of work" and are beginning to think about optimising the workspace, teleworking over the long term, introducing management based on trust (as opposed to management based on control), etc.

The questions that now arise are: "What to do with unoccupied space in the future", "How to maintain remote team cohesion", "How many days of telework to maintain in the future", "How to transform the workplace into a meeting place", etc.

In this context, IDEA Consult is called upon to provide its expertise on these topics and to support the institutions (mainly in Brussels) in these considerations. One such project is the study conducted by IDEA Consult in 2020 for talent.brussels on the experiences of teleworking in the Brussels public services (the report is available here in French). IDEA Consult is currently accompanying the COCOF in a participatory process aimed at mobilising the collective intelligence of the actors to think about the new post-covid work organisation. More recently, IDEA has been commissioned by urban.brussels to help this institution identify its needs in terms of designing workspaces. This last project is also the opportunity to combine for the first time our expertise in new forms of work organisation and in the field of design.