What will the workplace look like now that the pandemic is shifting to the endemic stage and employees have proven they can be productive working from home — and many prefer doing so?
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Lea Eriksen, director of technology and innovation for Long Beach, said her city moved quickly to purchase more software and hardware once it became apparent that droves of employees would be working from home.
“Pre-COVID, we had Webex accounts for virtual meetings,” Eriksen said. “With COVID, we rolled out Webex for every employee, so that tool just blew up. Then we started rolling out [Microsoft] Teams.”
Eriksen said Long Beach also purchased Microsoft Azure application proxy. She and other tech leaders say they moved quickly to scale up their computer systems to accommodate the shift, enhancing security in some cases and expanding cloud services.
The city of Long Beach adopted its hybrid work policy in the fall of 2021, Eriksen said, giving department managers a wide berth in determining who could work remotely. In the Department of Technology and Innovation, managers look at the nature of the job, employee preference and city needs in determining who may work from home and how often.
“We have about two-thirds of our employees teleworking on any given day and a third on-site,” she said. “In some cases, our programmers, development team, project managers are able to work 100 percent from home. They had to fill out an application to work remotely and the supervisor reviewed it.
“In other cases, the nature of the work really is on-site. For instance, our desktop teams have to go and touch computers. In those cases, they are approved to work one day remotely. The other days, they have to work on-site,” she continued.
Remote work can often help to build a stronger work-life balance and eliminate long, stressful commutes. Worker burnout from lack of delineation between home and work can, however, be a problem. Managers say most employees prefer to work remotely at least for part of the week, although not all do. But remote work can pose challenges as managers work to build collaboration. The shift to remote work has made many work more intentionally on building teams.
Eriksen said many Long Beach employees report that they endure fewer disruptions when working from home, but some find it harder to collaborate and feel connected in a remote environment.
“When people aren’t getting together physically, some feel disconnected,” she said. “You don’t have the same opportunity for water cooler chats, for getting together in the lunchroom or going on walks.”
Eriksen says that during the height of COVID-19, her office worked to develop virtual events to bring team members together. Recently, they held an optional spring office cleanup and ice cream social.
“It gave employees an opportunity to come to City Hall and clean out their desks,” she said. “The ice cream social was outside, and it was a really fun event.”
While building teams virtually requires more intentionality, the virtual environment does offer advantages in that larger meetings are easier to organize, as are trainings, managers report.
“It used to be such a challenge to get all employees all together. We would have all-hands meetings every couple of years,” Eriksen said. “Now, they are held a couple of times a month and are recorded for people who miss them.”
She reported that about 15 people used to attend the department’s data learning events, but now that they are virtual and recorded for later viewing, up to 80 people can attend.
The full version of this story is available on the Government Technology website.
