3 words on the future of work? Quit -Bias — Flexible — Alex Ahom
By: Alex Ahom
Tags: Coworking, Community, Future Of Work, Leadership, Growth

Now is a great time to share some insights from my travels. Over the last 8 weeks I’ve been in Germany, Austria, England, Montenegro and Dubai but what have I been up to you ask… I’ve been speaking about and supporting people with diversity & inclusion, change, community building and future of work projects. All areas I’m not only super passionate about but I’ve been committed to for over 10 years.

While in London, I came across some stats about how and where people are working. Less than a third of employees said their job could not be done from home. 42% said they would like to work partly from home, 16% favoured working fully from home and only 8% said they would not want to work from home at all. Of those working partly from home, more than 80% said they wanted to continue that arrangement. The experts I’ve been talking to believe this trend has been a long time coming. The pandemic has merely highlighted a problem.

At the Expo in Dubai topics like talent acquisition, coworking, 15 minute cities and migration came up many times. However, what many people in the conversations were really talking about was flexibility. We exchanged stories of rigid structures or leadership, unhappy employees and a reality that valued talent, community, inclusivity and credibility over location.

Community is not just a buzzword (that was part of my keynote in Montenegro) it is something very real. A tangible thing many people desire and need to be fulfilled. I count myself lucky to be raised in a living community and I’ve experienced it in my professional life too (in two businesses I’ve worked for and when I founded one of North Germany’s first community focused coworking spaces). However, that’s not enough for me. After stepping outside of my comfort zone and moving from London almost 10 years ago, I met way too many people who were working in toxic environments. My long term mission is still to, ‘make the world of work a better place for all’ and I started to do that by building community on and offline.

I spoke with an Austrian lady who was doing amazing things at work, I mean really rocking it but there was a big problem. She was experiencing prejudice and some biases at work. Her story amazed me because her company thought they were doing everything right. They had ERGs, they were asking how people felt at work, hiring talented people of colour/women/people with disabilities/people without university degrees etc, they let people work remotely (she was working at home 400km from the office) — the list goes on. The problem is with new ways of work, organisations need new ways of thinking and operating.

How we measure success has changed. Hard work and productivity are very different things. I’d like to remind anybody out there who sees themselves or their organisation as a leader to consider this;

People want a sense of purpose and belonging from what they do and their environment. How sustainable are our spaces if they don’t nourish us?

Commitment over compliance. Force isn’t always the answer, especially when it comes to how people want to be treated.

The full time people in your office aren’t always the most skilled, enthusiastic or dedicated. Look into the term proximity bias.

I haven’t done one of these for a while so I’ll leave it there. If you found this useful in anyway or you’d like to talk. Just reach out… I’m trying to be as available as possible.

Thanks for being there,

Alex Ahom

#leadership #community #humanresources #futureofwork #people #growth