13 Oct The Future Of Work Is The Best of Both Worlds

“The office block is dead”
 “Work from home is the new normal”
“No one wants to come back to the office”

 
This chorus of news headlines has been bellowed since April 2020.
 
All these statements were true… in April 2020. We locked down and socially distanced.

But now in October 2020 a new and slightly nuanced view is emerging. Some surveys are showing a smaller percentage of people want to stay home than they did in April and an increasing number are desperate to come back to the office.
 
Even though we are all experiencing the same event (the pandemic, social distancing, recession) we are each experiencing this situation differently.

Back in March 2020, Gram Consulting introduced our Covid Roadmap.

We felt people needed to have some sense of what timeline we might use when thinking about our human responses to Covid. Psychological responses, team responses, leadership responses and more.

We also recognised that the ‘integrating back’ stage marked the greatest opportunity for EVERYONE to create the best of both worlds; identifying the best of lockdown work practices and the best of our pre-pandemic work life.

The disappearance of work place communities is of concern. A comprehensive study by University of Sydney’s Dr Sean O’Connor and Dr Anthony Grant proved that the environment in which we work was critical to both the performance and wellbeing of individuals and teams in the workplace.

With this in mind I invited Balder Tol, Australian General Manager at WeWork, to be on the FastTrack podcast to share his insights on the future of work and how important the environment is to our work performance and happiness.