In-office and distributed working are worlds apart

Peter du ToitI'm the founder of FutureWork IQ where I spend my time assisting businesses to improve their climate literacy so as to understand the projected impacts from the expanding climate crisis and how to adapt their workplaces in the face of these impacts.

At the core of failures to be experienced by companies as they attempt work-from-anywhere arrangements (including “hybrid” work models) will be a continuation of this situation described by Steve Glaveski in his piece entitled Remote Work Should Be (Mostly) Asynchronous:

The pandemic accelerated many trends, from streaming, e-commerce, and food delivery platforms to the widespread adoption of remote work. But instead of taking advantage of this opportunity to improve how we work, most organizations simply took their offices online, along with the bad habits that permeated them. Instead of back-to-back meetings, people got back-to-back Zoom calls. Instead of physical interruptions, they got more interruptions via Slack or Teams.

The truth is unless a leadership team takes the time to understand the work-from-anywhere “operating system” they are bound to fail.

Synchronous and asynchronous ways of working are quite literally worlds apart.