A world-renowned thought leader in future-proofing, decision making, and cognitive bias risk management in the future of work, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is a behavioral scientist and CEO of the future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. He’s the global best-selling author of Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019) and Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage (Intentional Insights, 2021), and he was featured in over 550 articles and 450 interviews in Fortune, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Fast Company, and elsewhere.
Forward-looking organizations use hybrid and remote mentoring to solve one of the biggest challenges in hybrid and remote work: on-the-job training and integration of junior employees. Yet despite solving this major problem, such mentoring programs pairing recently-hired staff with senior employees are all-too-rare.
Imagine you’re driving along the highway, and see an electric sign saying “79 traffic deaths this year.” Would this make you less likely to crash your car shortly after seeing the sign? Perhaps you think it would have no effect?
Elon Musk recently demanded that all Tesla staff return to the office full-time or “pretend to work somewhere else.” This authoritarian, top-down approach rooted in mistrust and false assumptions goes against best practices reflects an illusion of control that will undermine employee productivity, engagement, innovation, retention, and recruitment at Tesla.
Google recently announced its new post-pandemic work policy, requiring employees work in the office for at least three days a week. A survey of over 1,000 Google employees showed that two-thirds feel unhappy with being forced to be in the office three days a week, and many intend to leave.
Organizations will need to pivot their team culture if they wish to survive and thrive in the world of virtual collaboration after the pandemic. The most important changes will stem from the wide-scale and permanent shift to hybrid and fully-remote modes of working.
Why Did Corporate Culture Suffer During the Pandemic?
Fear of losing their innovative edge pushes many leaders to reject hybrid and virtual work arrangements. Yet extensive research shows that hybrid and remote teams can gain an innovation advantage and outcompete in-person teams by adopting best practices for innovation, such as virtual brainstorming. What explains this discrepancy between leadership beliefs and scientific evidence?
With vaccine effectiveness against the Delta variant dropping to 39%, it is absurd to pursue a normal office return. Make no mistake about the danger: the Delta surge is forecast to grow much worse in the next few months. Indeed, the CDC is considering asking vaccinated people to wear masks and moving toward recommending booster shots.
