We are disoriented. Due to my work as an Executive Coach and consultant, I speak daily with senior executives and Talent and human development leaders who do not know what to do with the demands of young people who want to work remotely from home every day.
The answers we give to questions about new ways of working are daughters of our previous worldviews, which is why they do not work in part.
A Chinese bat soup forced us to stay indoors to work from home and we hated it at first. We feel suffocated. However, today millions of people around the world demand that we continue to work in our homes.
We are rare human beings. We felt an immense desire to go out two years ago and now we want the opposite. Changing and insatiable beings.
Because it is a time of confusion, it is also a time to think much more. The companies are called companies because there human beings are accompanied. There we are together. Understand well, the home-office is wonderful, it produces enormous comfort, for example, in those of us who are parents: we leave the children at school and return home to work, avoiding traffic. It is adorable.
But it is also true that a company has a meaning that is also given by being together. It is the group of those who compose it that produces an effect. The problem was that a good part of our office life was answering emails. An absurd. An office should be much more than that.
It would have to be a human meeting space in which relevant conversations and deep discussions take place. Offices need to be rethought campfire, like a campfire in which we gather around to talk and tell stories about how we are seeing aspects of the business.
It is very difficult to fight side by side with someone to reach an ambitious goal if I do not count on their closeness, on which we laugh many times in person or have lunch together. High performance teams play on the same playing field. Not virtually. Isn’t working also a physical act?
Obviously, not everything is black and white and hybrid environments can help us to have the good of both formats. Unbeatable option: comfort of home a few days with human connection a few times a week.
24×7 virtuality has its collaterals of which little is said. One of them is the experience of certain individuals who need to interact and without these interactions they feel isolated and even close to depression. Careful with this. It is likely that over time we will see more and more cases of this. Living alone and working can be a risk for some human beings.
Another is an underlying anthropological discussion: do our bodies matter or, as the great Ken Robinson says in his iconic TED talk, are they just the transportation of our heads?