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The coronavirus pandemic has led to a costly realization for many employers: Employee burnout is real and needs to be addressed.
That’s why employers should rethink how they run their organizations post-pandemic, according to Arianna Huffington, CEO of consulting agency Thrive Global, and Nickle LaMoreaux, senior vice president and chief human resources officer at IBM. They boiled the changes down to two things: being more flexible with not just where employees work but also when they work, and giving workers the opportunity to gain new skills.
“Not since the Industrial Revolution have we really rethought work,” Huffington said during Fortune’s Reimagine Work Summit on Wednesday. “We are now beginning to realize that the human operating system is different. Downtime for the human operating system is not a bug, it’s a feature.”
The pandemic has completely changed how many people work. Many employers decided to let their employees work from home because of the coronavirus. But the pandemic also blurred the lines between home and work life, leading to burnout as employees juggled their workload with other challenges like childcare.
But Huffington and LaMoreaux said the situation gives employers the opportunity to create new policies to help promote the well-being of their workers in a post-pandemic world. That means realizing that humans work better and are more productive when they have time to recharge and recover.
“This is completely different from the way we’ve run workplaces and what we celebrate,” Huffington said. “You celebrate people who work 24/7, who are always available, even though all the data shows that if you’re always available, you are not going to be operating at your best.”
In two years, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. workdays will be a thing of the past, LaMoreaux said. She also said employers must change how they think about work to focus more on the end result. “If you can start thinking about work as an outcome—what is that team really trying to drive versus managing all the small tasks that lead up to it—you can also fundamentally bring some flexibility,” she said.
Employers also have “a responsibility” to provide robust learning opportunities that will let people advance within the organization, LaMoreaux said. She also suggested employers reevaluate the qualifications they require for certain positions. “We cannot put artificial barriers into who can have jobs in our workplace,” she said.
Addressing employees’ well-being should be high on employers’ priority list because it’s a business imperative, Huffington suggested. “Everybody understands that the well-being of employees is central to the bottom line,” she said.
