I dislike the term hybrid. It is binary.  It is the office or somewhere else which is generally home.

Future work models should not be binary. They should allow employees to work where they want, when they want, and how they want. This may or may not include the traditional office.

The employees, their team, and their leader must decide when it makes sense to co-locate, which could be in the office or a coworking space. At all other times, I locate myself where I do my best work, whether in a café, library, home office, hired workspace, etc. It is not a binary solution.

A future working model must provide employees autonomy and flexibility to choose where they work.

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A few weeks ago, my newsletter was about Giving Feedback. I planned to follow up with this newsletter, but I got interrupted by the mixed messages being sent out by PwC. So, we are now back on track, and I want to explore why we, particularly leaders, must ask for feedback.

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Last month (September 2024), PwC UK mandated employees to return to the office or be with clients 60% of the time (up from 40% currently). Their attendance will be tracked to check adherence to the new rules. Reviews of the data pertaining to each individual employee will take place every month.

In the same month, PwC released the PwC’s 2024 Workforce Radar Report. The report states that return-to-office mandates have, in many cases, failed. It says that flexibility is about providing an employee experience that’s as right for employees as it is for the organisation.

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“Feedback is the breakfast of champions” is a quote by Ken Blanchard, author, consultant, and speaker.

I love this quote because, as we all know, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. As the name suggests, it breaks the overnight fasting period. It replenishes your supply of glucose to boost your energy levels and alertness.

The same applies to your organisation. Without feedback, it will starve. It cannot learn, change, improve, adapt or evolve.

Feedback is not an option – it is a necessity – at every level of the organisation. It is how you build great people, great teams, and a great business.

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According to Harvard Business Publishing, five foundational capabilities are important for all people managers, but especially for those in frontline leader roles. They formulated the five based on insights from authors, leaders, and researchers. 

1. Develops others

2. Leads teams that deliver

3. Leads authentically

4. Communicates for influence and impact

5. Champions inclusion

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I will unpack the last five of the qualities in the hope that you may be galvanised into buying the book to dive in deeper, or at least acknowledge that you must learn-unlearn- relearn. You must let go of things that may have worked well for you in the past. You must challenge your long-held assumptions and be open to changing your mindset. It is about the courage to change and the humility to admit that what you knew yesterday may no longer be relevant. Unlearning is a process of questioning the validity of what you believe in.

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My eighth book was inspired by my observation of many leaders, from novice to veteran, who firmly believed that what stood them in good stead as leaders yesterday would continue to do so tomorrow. There was a dangerous lack of comprehension that when the world around you changes, you must change too. Otherwise, you become irrelevant.

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PwC have released the key findings from their 2024 trust survey.

93% of business executives agree that building and maintaining trust improves the bottom line.

This is trust from both consumers and employees.

We often think of the moral case for building trust – but there is a real business case, too.

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Randstad recently released their Employer Brand Research Global Report 2024. The survey had over 170,000 respondents and included 6,084 companies worldwide. It aims to help employers shape their brand to attract and retain talent.

The data revealed that 17% of respondents globally switched jobs in the last six months of 2023, and 26% intended to change in the first six months of 2024. This highlights the need for employers to address the challenge of talent attraction and retention amidst the rising levels of labour turnover.

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Productivity anxiety used to be a fear of not being enough when it comes to being productive. It could arise when you feel you are not progressing or getting through your to-do list.

It has now taken on a new meaning. It is the fear that despite how hard you work, your manager will not perceive you as productive.

The productivity paranoia of bad managers and supervisors is driving productivity anxiety.

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BambooHR has just released a report, “The New Surveillance Era: Visibility Beats Productivity for RTO & Remote,” that contains damning results for many organisations.

The report released in June 2024 contains the results from a survey of 1,504 full-time US employees, including 504 human resources professionals, which set out to understand what they think about return-to-office (RTO) mandates, working-from-home, and hybrid/flexible models.

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HR know there is a problem with the RTO mandate. They know they will lose employees including their top talent and be unable to replace them.

One critical step HR can take to get the C-suite to alter course is to show leaders the costs of current practices and illustrate the value of human capital.

This article crunches the number$.

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Adding the “B” to DEIB recognised that a sense of belonging improves employees’ personal feelings of positivity.

Belonging must be part of an overall strategy to deepen inclusion, diversity and equity. Whilst belonging has always been the end goal of the DEI movement, many organisations have fallen short. Therefore, B was added to spell it out and emphasise the importance of DEIB values within an organisational culture.

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The next grey swan could be right around the corner. We know what it could be, we just don’t know when. It could be a black swan, and we have no idea what that could be. Are you prepared? We need to have resilience as individuals and as leaders.

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Those who say that employees working remotely are not connected to their colleagues and experience long periods of loneliness do not have a remote problem. They have a leadership problem. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how leadership needs to evolve to have a thriving remote culture.

Connection must be intentional. I could go into a busy office, surrounded by people, and feel isolated, lonely and certainly not connected.

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Many things influence your organisational culture. A return to the office is not one of them.

You can only have a thriving culture when you hire for culture add, have excellent onboarding methods that make everyone feel a sense of inclusivity and belonging, and provide growth and learning opportunities for all employees.

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You can only have a thriving culture if you have good leadership.

Those citing a loss of culture if employees do not return to the office do not have a remote problem; they have a leadership problem.

The world of work is fundamentally different today than it was before March 2020. Leaders must have the courage to unlearn and relearn to embrace what the future holds. I have often said that we are being presented with the greatest opportunity to rethink the way we work we may ever get. Leaders with the courage to unlearn and the integrity to admit they were wrong will be our organisations' victors, frontrunners, and heroes

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There is much debate about where the workforce should be located. Unless achieving business goals requires a certain location, you should be able to work where you get your best work done.

Work is what we do, not where we go 

There are so many benefits to both the employer and the employee. At Atlassian, employees saved ten days per year in time they would have previously commuted. That’s nearly half a billion minutes of saved time for the entire workforce since 2020.

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There is a Culture Club forming that cites culture as the reason people need to work in a building. I challenge every member of this club to find a definition of culture that refers to a location, a building, or an office. You won’t find one.

This will be a Culture Club series of newsletters as we explore what needs to be eradicated and replaced to build a thriving culture in a distributed workforce.

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There is a 39% increased likelihood of outperformance for those in the top quartile of ethnic and gender representation versus the bottom quartile.

 Despite the resounding business case and many organisations attempting to improve DEI, there has not been much progress.

The problem is mistrust, fear and a lack of education.

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