The Top 3 Thought Leadership Reports about the Post-Covid Return to the Workplace
Best of Thought Leadership Newsletter, Issue 1, April 2021
Welcome to the first issue of The Best of Thought Leadership (BoTL), a newsletter for content creators who want to stay ahead of the curve. In each issue we discuss a trending topic, and we present the top must-read thought leadership pieces that move the conversation forward. Think of it as a competitive landscape analysis with a POV.
Led by Kasia Moreno, a veteran of Forbes magazine and thought leadership creation for Forbes Insights, BoTL’s editorial board is composed of thought leadership editors and writers, business journalists and marketers. We pore over hundreds of thought-provoking articles, journals. reports and videos every day to bring you what’s new and noteworthy. (Yes, we are real people not algorithms.) We also crowdsource opinions from readers to make sure that we do not miss any incredible thought leadership out there. So give us your thoughts!
Our criteria for inclusion of a thought leadership piece in the BoTL newsletter are:
Tells us something we don’t know
Makes us think
Changes our perspective
In this issue: Noteworthy Reports on the Return to the Workplace
As businesses are beginning to consider if and how to go back to the workplace, a recent report by McKinsey estimates that 20%-25% of workers in the developed economies could work from home three to five days a week. That is four times more people working remotely than before the pandemic.
Are companies and employees ready? How will it work? And how will it affect innovation, motivation, career advancement and the mental health of employees? This is just a sample of questions brought about by the new normal of work.
Here are the top 3 ideas and developments we gleaned from current thought leadership about returning to the workplace and hybrid work:
IDEA 1: CHANGE OF TONE
From silver linings to a hybrid approach to the devil is in the details
Top TL piece:
2021 Work Trend Index: Annual Report
The Next Great Disruption is Hybrid Work – Are We Ready?
Microsoft, 2021
Microsoft’s study of more than 30,000 people in 31 countries presents the true conundrum of balancing hybrid work: A majority of employees (73%) want flexible work-from-home policies to stay, while 65% want more in-person time with their team after the pandemic. You may call it a hybrid approach to working, or you may call it having your cake and eating it too.
Earlier on in the pandemic the focus was on the silver linings offered by visual technologies and the increases in productivity thanks to the removal of lengthy commutes. The tone has since shifted to figuring out what exactly the post-pandemic normal should be and will be like, and even more important, how to make to happen. A Wall Street Journal article shows that opinions about the future of work are divided, even among CEOs from the same industry:
Jane Fraser, CEO of Citigroup: “I certainly imagine everyone back in [the office]. I do think from a cultural point of view—apprenticeship, the sense of belonging—you are better together.”
Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock Inc: “I don’t believe BlackRock will be ever 100% back in office. I actually believe maybe 60% or 70%, and maybe that’s a rotation of people, but I don’t believe we’ll ever have a full cadre of people in [the] office.”
Even if companies decide to offer a mix of flex, fully in-office and fully remote work options, they still need to figure out how to make sure that all employees don’t decide to work from home on Mondays and Fridays, or that those working remotely are not short-changed in terms of networking and professional advancement, or that lack of random interactions will not erode innovation—the proverbial devil in the details. Expect more thought leadership on how to make work work in the context of technologies enabling hybrid work, the length of the workweek, talent management and human resources’ role in this new world.
IDEA 2: THE BIG SHIFT
How we work will create new personas and divisions within companies and society
Top TL piece:
The Nowhere Office, by Julia Hobsbawm
Demos, 2021
In The Nowhere Office, Julia Hobsbawm puts forth the Big Shift happening as a result of the hybrid work model: “Our working identities, rather like the shifts happening within wider culture around gender and sex, are going to become infinitely more varied and more personalized.”
In other words, employees’ classification by how they work puts them in a specific affinity group, either within their corporation based on rank and tasks and/or within the society at large based on profession and skills. Microsoft’s study already reveals rifts depending on employee rank, with 61% of leaders saying they’re “thriving” right now—23 percentage points higher than those without decision-making authority.
In the face of this new perspective on how different types of work create different social groups, the hybrid work model requires new approaches, with specific focus on:
Different demographics of employees, such as Learners (under 35) and Leavers (over 35). The Learner is new to work and will need in-person training. The Leaver lives the work-life merge, by placing equal and divided priorities on both professional life and family responsibilities.
The challenge: As it stands now, the Nowhere Office is much more of a friendly place for Leavers than it is for Learners.
The need to think differently about time itself, by moving from thinking about time as linear to lateral. “To see time as in blocks or zones, side-by-side, in which we do different things in different ways. We will have the same amount of time of course, but we will use it very differently,” writes Hobsbawm.
The complication: Applying this concept of lateral time to teams rather than individuals, as productivity is not personal but connected.
Social health, which addresses how we use all forms of connection and communication to look after our individual and organizational health. Writes Hobsbawm: “Paying attention to the social self in the Nowhere Office era is going to be as crucial as paying attention to our physical and mental health.”
The issue: Who is going to oversee social health and how, considering that the human resources folks are getting overwhelmed by the number of technology solutions they need to deal with?
IDEA 3: UPDATE
The death of work life-balance, the dawn of well-being
Top TL piece:
The social enterprise in a world disrupted
Leading the shift from survive to thrive
2021 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends
Deloitte makes a decisive move by officially declaring the end of work-life balance with the following headline: “Designing work for well-being: The end of work/life balance.” While the term “employee well-being” has been cropping up for several years now, when employees are back in the workplace, human resources professionals may be more focused on their well-being rather than their work-life balance (or lack of it). High time, considering that the term work-life balance was first used in the 1980s in Great Britain as a plank in the Women's Liberation Movement.
Other major thought leaders embracing well-being include:
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who also stays clear of mentioning work-life balance when he talks about the future of working: “Employee expectations are changing, and we will need to define productivity much more broadly—inclusive of collaboration, learning, and well-being to drive career advancement for every worker…”
McKinsey agrees with this headline: “The priority for workplaces in the new normal? Well-being.”
What is well-being? Every organization seems to have its own take on what it means by well-being, but all seem to agree that well-being is a deeper and broader idea than work-life balance. Deloitte, for instance, describes it as: “…taking well-being beyond work/life balance by starting to design well-being into work and life itself.” (Hopefully the definition of well-being also includes the idea of social health advocated by Julia Hobsbawm in The Nowhere Office.) Simply put, having balance does not help if employees are stressed by either work or life.
Why the focus on well-being now? Covid-19 has intensified the focus on employee physical and mental health, which are key to well-being. As such, well-being has often been discussed in the context of health. In HBR’s report, for example, the authors discuss well-being in the context of health operating systems. From this health-related view, well-being took off to become an all-encompassing term replacing work-life balance.