Organizations across the globe are already, or will be, grappling with a common dilemma: How to handle remote work post-pandemic. Employers are asking:
- Should we bring workers back to the office?
- If yes, which workers, how often, and how flexible is this to change?
- And, perhaps most important, who decides—HR, the manager, the employee?
There is a lot of advice and there are many cross-organizational studies that speak to the benefits and perils of remote work. But there are limits to the insights that external experts and research can provide. Philip Morris International (PMI) is an organization that has moved beyond these limits—using people analytics to answer its questions about remote work. In a recent email interview, I asked PMI’s Organization and Talent Analytics Lead, Tim Peffers, about this approach and how it has yielded insights that are shaping the future of remote work at the organization.
What are some of the decisions that PMI has had to make regarding how employees will work coming out of the pandemic?
The key questions Philip Morris has faced are how do we manage the return to work in a consistent, fair, and smart way. PMI is committed to being an employer that values diversity and inclusion and supports employee wellbeing but also requires employees to collaborate within their local teams, their home countries and globally. Therefore, the questions we have tried to answer are:
- What is the right balance of working from home versus working in the office?
- How do we ensure those working remotely are not excluded or do not feel disconnected from those visible in the office or in the room?
- What are the risks, in particular to wellbeing, that we need to mitigate in our post-pandemic workplace?
The result has been a project called SmartWork which outlines guiding principles for our return to work which managers and employees agree on based on their personal needs. The project recommends that employees who can work from home spend at least 2 days in the office per week where they focus on face-to-face meetings with managers and colleagues and on collaborating together.
Why did PMI turn to people analytics to help make these decisions?
Employee centricity is a key foundation to our people strategy and employee listening is the main source for insights into our employee pain points. Our pulse surveys have shown adjusting to working from home has had a huge impact on employee wellbeing, productivity, and ways of working. Our surveys and analysis have been a pivotal data source to track employee sentiment and understand if the interventions we have put in place have been able to drive the positive changes we were expecting.
Our analysis has tracked the sentiment of employees who are working from the office versus those working from home, on their own or with dependents, and identified key personas who we need to safeguard and focus on.
What is remoteability and why is it an important metric?
Remoteability is a metric that understands which of your weekly tasks:
- Can be performed remotely
- Involve human interactivity
Our research shows that while many tasks that involve human interactivity can be performed remotely, there is a risk associated as digital interactions can lack the impact that a face-to-face interaction can provide. Therefore, remoteability is a metric that shows the opportunities and risks of remote working.
What skills and technology are required to conduct a remoteability analysis?
The metric can be built manually by managers completing a simple role assessment, or by analytics teams leveraging data within HR systems to build task profiles of roles using a technique called skills inference.
Skills inference is a process where we use Natural Language Processing to understand what skills employees have, what tasks they do, or which roles they perform. We can analyze job descriptions, job adverts, objectives, job titles, or team names to help understand what our employees do in a normal week. From this data, we can then understand what skills, roles, or processes can be performed remotely; which tasks might be impacted by technology; and which skills are in short supply or high demand and need to be developed as part of our workforce plan.
If teams would like to do skills inference but don’t have a people analytics team then there are some third parties who can provide this analysis.
You will be speaking on an upcoming APQC webinar. What will attendees learn?
The attendees will learn how HR and business data can:
- Help us to understand how the pandemic has changed the way we work;
- Better plan our return to the office by understanding the risks and opportunities of remote or hybrid working; and
- Build people strategies that will have a competitive edge over companies not making data- driven decisions.
Complimentary webinar is now available on-demand: Remoteability: The Essential Post-Pandemic HR Metric