The Traditional Workplace Is Dead: How to Adapt To The Digital World

I don’t know where or who I ‘borrowed’ the phrase from, but one of my go to thoughts for leaders and businesses is “in a high tech world, high touch is everything”. 

Of course, it’s not everything, nothing is ‘everything’.  

Aren’t you pleased I’m not going to go anywhere with that last statement? 

The point for leaders is that the faster we digitise, the deeper we have to connect. If we start from the McKinsey finding that ‘not feeling valued by the organisation’ was the most important reason people had for switching jobs (followed by not feeling valued by my manager), we can see that the very human desires to connect and belong are still part of why people work.  

The combination of lockdown and technology has hastened the process of dehumanising the workplace. Corporates in the US are looking to use AI to create a coach that ‘feels like’ a person (albeit one that is entirely predictable).  

And remote working can dehumanise the workplace too, by literally taking the humans out.  

I’m going to add my view to the remote working debate: we need to get back to the office. Not every day, but at least 3. And those days need to be mandated – these are the office days, those are the remote days. Again, this is not an everybody everything statement – some jobs and people are perfectly suited to high levels of remote work, including – ahem – yours truly. 

But for organisations that want to go far or fast, there needs to be energy and synergy, and that only comes from having people in the office. 

We need to change the office: if it’s just a place where people come and tap on keyboards, they would be better off at home. And that’s especially the case for leaders: if you’re not interacting with people F2F on office days, they may as well be at home.  

The office itself needs to change. One of our clients is working on becoming a high performance organisation. They’re spending thousands on creating an environment that presents an attractive alternative to the convenience of home. That’s because they know that they can’t get there if people are working remotely and alone. There is not high performance organisation that does not have high performing teams. 

It's the challenge of our times: there are people working now who have never known anything but hybrid or remote working. Working remotely has a lot of convenience benefits. It involves less effort, it’s a whole lot easier. 

But as an author whose name I do remember said, “easier, not better”.