Over the last couple of years the enforced shift to remote work and then hybrid work has led many organizations to shift how they work.
One of the most fundamental changes in shifting from office-based to distributed teams is the need to move from synchronous to asynchronous work.
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United Arab Emirates is the first country in the world to adopt a 4½ day workweek across the government. At the same time it switched from a Friday-Saturday weekend, as is common in Muslim countries, to a break extending from Friday afternoon through Sunday, aligning its calendar with Western countries. Private employers are expected to follow suit.
In a country that has a Minister of Happiness, the government emphasised the social as well as economic benefits.
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As we emerge from the pandemic, in most countries office work is resuming at scale, meaning doing hybrid work well is a priority for every organization. This topic currently makes up a considerable portion of my client work.
Many workers and executives have learned to appreciate the many positives of remote work, yet for many reasons very few companies will dispense with offices, since they can play a valuable role in highly productive organizations.
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News that the investment firm of former Facebook VP Sam Lessin, Slow Ventures, has invested $1.7 million in YouTuber Marina Mogilko has reinvigorated the debate over whether investing in individuals is a good idea.
The deal gives Lessin 5% of Mogilko’s creator earnings for the next 30 years, but only if her earnings reach a certain threshold.
I first wrote about this idea in 2010 in a piece Will there be capital markets for people?, in which I looked at what had already happened in the space, and then again in 2012 writing about the startup Upstart, which tried to establish the same model. (Upstart subsdquently reverted to a more traditional personal lending model based on AI predictions, went to IPO last year and is now valued over 10x hgher at more than $20 billion).
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We are at a critical juncture in the evolution of business and work. After almost a year of concerted vaccination programs throughout the developing world, COVID is shifting from a pandemic to being endemic, still likely to be present indefinitely, but contained and allowing us to resume relatively normal lives.
This is leading to a gradual—or sometimes rapid—resumption of office-based work. A minority of organizations appear to be intent on reverting to work structures very similar to those before the pandemic, with standard office hours, five days a week the norm. That is an enormous missed opportunity. This is a time to move forward rather than look back.
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I recently spoke to Steve Poor, chairman of Seyfarth Shaw, one of the world’s top 100 law firms, for his Pioneers and Pathfinders podcast.
I greatly enjoyed our far-ranging conversation, which delved deep into the future of work and as far as the future of society. You can listen to the whole episode below.
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It is clear that many organizations are still grappling with the shift to remote and distributed work, with many leaders hoping that they can before long resume work in the way that it was before.
A little while ago on the Virtual Excellence Show I was delighted to speak with Terri Griffith, currently Keith Beedie Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business, and a deep expert in how organizations accelerate performance as the nature of work changes.
In this brief video Terri gives great perspective on our shift to effective remote work, including the insights from applying her 5T framework.
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‘Hidden workers’ – those unemployed or underemployed seeking work who are not visible because of companies’ hiring processes – are a massive lost opportunity to society as well as business.
An incisive Harvard Business School study points to over 27 million US workers (no doubt the scope is similar in other nations) whose capabilities are underutilized.
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Cisco recently compiled a thought leadership article Employees choose hybrid: A look into the workforce of the future.
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COVID-19 has shifted most organizations in the developed world to predominantly virtual work.
The question is what happens from here.
Of course there many unknowns around how long it takes to resume work practices similar to 2019 and before, the timeline for a potential vaccine or other measures that may support that return, or indeed whether we will ever see the complete easing of today’s social distancing.
Many organizations are explicitly or implicitly waiting for a return to ‘normal’ workplaces, in the meantime doing the best they can while most of their employees are forced to work from home.
However an increasing number of organizations are clearly stating that they expect never to return to work as it was before.
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