Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction
00:02:15: Real hybrid working is not this
00:04:17: Evolvement of work in our lives
00:07:50: Future evolvement of work
00:10:32: What should be done: evaluation
00:11:34: What should be done: personalisation
00:12:24: What should be done: Structure
00:15:05: Co-created rules
00:17:55: Communication, conversation
00:20:07: Management: a very different role
00:22:12: Titles are devaluated
00:24:02: Presenteeism
00:28:36: We cannot be open minded
00:30:07: Evaluating upwards and downwards
00:31:42: No hybrid working
00:35:49: Bye for now

Interview Transcription

Helen Tupper: Hi, you're listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly show where we talk about the ups and downs of careers and help you to have that little bit more control over your future at work.  I'm Helen Tupper and today instead of Sarah, my normal co-host, I'm going to be talking to psychologist and author, Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, about the topic of hybrid work, so a bit of a hot topic at the moment. 

I've followed Tomas's work for a really long time, it's always been so relevant to what we do at Amazing if, and I really like his challenging approach which I think comes across in the titles of his multiple TED talks with things like: The Power of Negative Thinking, was the title of one of them; the other one, Why We Should Be More Sexist; and my recent favourite, Why So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders.  He has a really interesting, challenging approach that I'm always ready to hear more about.

Despite that, in this conversation he is, in his own words, a bit more practical than cynical and we touch on how teams can co-create a new set of rules for work, how the role of managers needs to evolve and also how to overcome a new version and a new risk really of progression by presenteeism, the idea that the people that come to the office are the people that are going to succeed at work, which is obviously not what we want to be the future.

There's lots to think on in this discussion, I personally could talk to and listen to Tomas for hours, but we have condensed this conversation into about 30 minutes for you instead.  As ever, you can download the PodSheet to put the insights into action and join PodPlus, which is our live learning session, that Sarah is going to be running this week, as I am on holiday when this episode comes out.  That's great if you want to explore and discuss the episode with a community of like-minded learners.  It's a super positive start to a Thursday.

All the links for the PodSheet and the PodNotes and the PodPlus, all of it, it's all in the show notes and you can always email us at Helen&Sarah@squigglycareers.com if you can't find things.  Let's get started.

Tomas, welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast.

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Thank you very much for inviting me.

Helen Tupper: Before we maybe dive into some of the specific considerations of hybrid working, I thought it might be useful to start at a higher level and get your perspective on, what do you think is the bigger opportunity of getting hybrid working right?  People, organisations, the bigger perspective of doing this right, what do you think that is?

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: If I had to pick one, it would be the opportunity, but also the challenge, in that sense, of actually learning to pay attention to what people contribute to their team, job, organisation; basically to move beyond where most people are today, which is a cultural presenteeism where even if they had some flexibility before, before we used the word "hybrid", you got brownie points for being in the right place at the right time and saying the right thing to the right person.  I think that really needs to stop, there is no reason for that, and true freedom and flexibility will come only when it doesn't matter where you are for how your work is evaluated. 

If people want to see you, that's great, if it contributes to the actual performance and the outcome, that's fine, you decide and you need to probably have some guidance as to where you should be when.  But the most important opportunity, I think, is to move beyond a culture of presenteeism and start to learn what people are actually contributing to their organisation.  That is actually the thing I'm also simultaneously somewhat sceptical and cynical about, because I don't know if most organisations are ready to make that switch, because it's really difficult and we could have done it before.

Helen Tupper: I agree.  I feel like the pandemic has accelerated this conversation and enabled it in some ways because it's forced it, so some of those barriers that people put up before, we've now blocked down and said, "Actually, we can work as a team remotely", but it could have happened before, and it could have happened sooner.  What do you think are some of the reasons that it hasn't?

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: I am going to use this word in a positive sense, even though it's difficult to interpret it that way, but I think just laziness or if you like, efficiencies.  Our brains and our minds and our intelligence evolved through thousands of years to optimise for laziness, when something is easy you don't want to change it.  Even though the world of work has changed dramatically, even in the last 30 or 40 years, which is an eye blink in our long evolutional history, we haven't kept up with it.

We still think in every instance of organisational life, work and management, we still think that we can trust our instincts and that when we see something, we know what's going on.  If I were interviewing you for a job now, I would think or trick myself into thinking, "I know that you're smart, that you're creative, that you're curious", and all of those things are very hard to actually infer.  Equally, it's very hard today especially for the most skilled and most sought-after well-paid professions or jobs, it's very hard to actually know whether someone is doing a good job or not. 

So, because it's very difficult and I would have to actually put in place a complicated system, maybe with the help of a professional, and understand output and actually the connection between your behaviour and that output, we just default to total laziness and say, "Well, if you're in and you're pretending to work and you seem active and you seem talkative in meetings and all of that, then I'm going to assume that you're engaged and you're proactive and you like me, so I'm going to give you a good performance review".

We know that that punishes introverts, it punishes people who are not busy showing off, but busy working, and of course it punishes women compared to men.  Men are much better at self-promoting and mansplaining, we don't have womansplaining as a term and there's a reason for that, which is that most women are not busy mansplaining.

Helen Tupper: My thoughts are, and it would be interesting to see whether you agree, that I think people power is high right now, because there's a lot of people that are saying, "Well, I've been able to design my work around myself for the last 12 months and my children and my family and all those kind of things, and I don't have to commute and do that presenteeism in the office, and I don't intend to go back".  I feel like the people power in having that conversation about what they want their future of work to look like is higher than it's ever been.  Do you see that too?

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: I think that's probably the biggest evolution of the world of work, and you have to really think about 50 years' change or 100 years' change.  100 years ago, you and I would have worked in assembly lines and factories in the UK or the US, even in industrialised and advanced countries, the richest countries in the world and we wouldn't have for a minute, for a single day of our lives, come back home and say, when our partners or our family members asked us, "How was your day today?"  We wouldn't have said, "Today, we experienced a sense of calling or purpose", "I was just moving objects from one place to the other", and that was the norm.

Everything to do with positive and enjoyable aspects of life was confined to the pub, cafes, bar or hobbies or activities, sports, church, reading, arts, television or radio, because I think television was not invented.  Now, you fast forward 100 years, which is still very short in the grand scheme of things, a lot of people want meaning and purpose, and they want consumer-like experience. 

So I think that consumerisation of work and the fact that most organisations know that to compete in the war for talent, they need to have this people-power approach and treat people like the best customers and give them consumer-like experiences, that is the reality; even though it is also true that like everything, the changes happen, start at the far right of the normal distribution or the bear curve.  So, today it is of course the qualified and skilled elite of knowledge workers in the world and a small proportion of that, that are highly skilled and they're in certain sectors that are demanding this.

Even at the beginning of this pandemic, when Facebook and Google and the bit tech companies started to almost signal or advertise, "We're going to let people work from wherever they want until 2023", you're like, "That's odd.  First, why weren't they doing it before; and then what they are trying to tell us is that if you work here, we're going to treat you like a VIP employee", and that hasn't gone away.  And that's why I think, that kind of move to the big bulk of the distribution and more people demand, after having experienced this flexibility, they don't want to lose it.

Hybrid has become a very encompassing and large and obviously almost Squiggly term, if you like, but actually if you think about it from the perspective of flexibility and alternating between months of working, most organisations in the knowledge economy have been hybrid, because ery few have been totally rigid, even pre-COVID, and very few have been totally do whatever you want and totally virtual.

What we're seeing now is that there is pressure to become more flexible in the opportunities and the ways of working that you offer to your employees.  If you revert to what you were before or less flexible, you're going to suffer because people are going to look for employers that give them more choices.  Just like before, organisations would compete on salary titles, prestige, yeah, we have a sushi bar, or somebody will do your laundry, or we have scooters, or we'll find you a date and a husband and a wife; now, it's like you can work from wherever you want.

Helen Tupper: I feel like the conversation about hybrid and the shift to being more flexible, more hybrid will, like it or not employers, be thrust upon them by this increasing people power at probably quite an individual level.  I feel like everybody might want to fight for the flexibility that they feel like they've created for themselves. 

As organisations and managers approach conversations about what does hybrid working look like here and how we make this team work here, what do you think are some of the watchouts as they start having those conversations and putting those inevitable processes and rules and frameworks in place?

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Yes, generally much more interested in the problems than the solutions and the watchouts than how to fix things, but on this occasion I think we can just go to directly to what should be done.  I think first, having the humility and the curious mindset to understand that very few things will work from the very beginning; it's about trial and error, experimenting and that's really important.  That's really I think where most organisations should be today when they truly want to be data driven.  It's like, put something in place and evaluate it, does engagement go up?  Does productivity go up?

With that, asking people what they want to do and personalising that as much as possible, which I think should be done at the level of the manager.  Yes, there can be organisational-wide policies, but I think ultimately you have to trust managers, you have to empower them to manage their teams.  When companies say, "Everyone will do it", it's a problem for hybrid, because even before COVID, if you were a sales and business development person and you're in the office, you're probably wasting your time, at a time when your job was to take people out for lunch and drinks and dinner.  Now, not so much, but it's going to revert back, right, no doubt.  Whereas, if you were in health and safety or admin or an admin person or secretary, you have to be in the office.  You have to personalise, and you can only personalise at the level of managers.

The third one I would say is to remember, this is my last point, that people always need some structure.  I don’t know how it was in your school or where you went to school, but I remember I grew up in Argentina and I went to a school, it was a German school for no reason, but it was kind of very strict.  It was unusual in Argentina even if you were in a private school that you had to wear a uniform.  That was quite interesting because when students were sent from Germany, they were used to the German system and they wore no uniform, but everyone that was enrolled there had to wear uniform. 

Of course, then that's a great opportunity to rebel and I was always not wearing the right things.  Dress code, even if you take that little example of life, which goes from school to work, it's problematic for most people if you tell them either at school or at work, "Dress appropriately or dress in a way you like", because there is no structure.  Then you have to think and then actually you cannot deviate from norms, even if you want to.

In the more recent phase of the pandemic, we've heard when people were talking about what hybrid policies are.  I think it was GM, General Motors say, "Our policy is work appropriately".  It sounds great, it's like, "Wow".  It's like when Netflix says, "Treat people like adults", yes, they are adults, but they want structure.  It is much better if you have certain rules and say, "You've got to be in twice a week [or] you've got to be in three times a week, because we want to see you and we don't want you to disappear.  You've got to live within 60 miles of the office or whatever that is.  You should ideally come in when other people in your team are in, not when you want to watch Netflix, and no one is in".

I'm making these rules up, but what I'm trying to say is that people want some structure, even if it was just the core, you have the basic structure and then you can improvise without that or find some flexibility, because if you don't give people any structure or any idea of what your philosophy is and what your rules are and why you want them to be in, they have to spend a lot of time trying to work it out and then it increases the risk of perceptions of unfairness and equity or why is X person doing that and not this.

Then the fourth, I return to the very first point I said, is improve your ability to evaluate output, performance and what people are contributing.  Do not create a two-tiered system whereby there is an implicit reward for people to be in and you're actually punishing people for not being in, even if you say, "Yeah, it doesn't matter where you are".

Helen Tupper: I'd love to come back to two of those points actually.  The first on that code of work, that idea of there being some sort of rules for engagement, perhaps at a team level.  How important do you think it is that that code of work, those rules, are co-created by the team versus imposed by the manager?

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: I think it's ideal if they can be co-created and I think ultimately there has to be someone making the decision and I think a manager is always a manager.  At the end of the day, if I decide on your salary, your promotion and I can get you fired or not, I am the boss, so I have always been sceptical of the utopian view that it is holacracy.  And I think it's actually Slavoj Žižek that made this point that Silicon Valley has basically made power very informal.  Your boss is wearing a hoodie and they look very young and informal and it's like, "Yeah, what did you do last night?"  But that's the worst form of domination, because you can be fooled into thinking that this is a friend and they're actually in charge.

Sometimes, I think in the liberal and free world it's very hard to actually see power, because we try to diffuse it or mask it.  Having said that, a good manager who will set the rules, creates psychological safety in their teams and learns from their direct reports and understands.  Amy Edmondson makes this point that in the knowledge economy, knowledge is distributed and it's your ability to harness and crowd source it from your teams primarily that makes you an effective leader and makes that team effective.

So, I think it's absolutely sensible for a boss to consult people and to agree on what the team rules are and also what the individual rules are.  If I am a manager, I would say, "Look, let us understand that Helen, because of her situation, will only be coming a couple of days a week but while you're not seeing her, she's working on this, this and that and please, always zoom in when you're meeting in person, etc", so those are ground rules that allow for personalisation. 

Everyone on the team needs to understand what each and every one of the team members' position and situation is.  You have to give people the opportunity to change it if they don't like, if you don't agree with it because they say, "Oh why should I come in just because I don't have kids, I still prefer to be at home".  It's like, "Unfortunately, that's not an argument.  We need to have as many people as possible in and I need you to be in because of this contribution.  If we can test and actually, we see that it makes no difference having no one in for that, then let's evaluate that for a little time and then we can recalibrate".

Helen Tupper: I really like the point of bringing psychological safety in, again it's something we talk about, and Amy's been on the podcast so I'll link to it on the podsheet for everyone that's listening to relisten to that conversation with Amy.  But I think one of the dimensions that she talks about is the importance of tough conversations and I think you need a team to have tough conversations.  To your point, this is not going to be right first time, and it's going to need to keep changing and so what's working, what's not working, what do we need to adapt and adjust, as a regular conversation in a team, I think needs to be the ongoing reality of how that team will connect and evolve together.

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Definitely speak up, "We're dealing now, this is a new challenge or a new phase for our teams.  Great if we were resilient and productive during COVID and now next phase, still somewhat unpredictable and unknown, but we've got to see what we return to and how we construct the new normalcy or the next phase.  By the way, here are the company rules.  Personally I don't agree with this, but I think this is great, but anyway we have to adhere.  Here we have some freedom, what do you think?  What do you want to do?"

Often people think of how managers will look to or evaluate employees who don’t want to return back.  I was reading I think a few days ago my colleague and friend, Dorie Clark, wrote an HBR piece on how you as a manager are evaluated by us if you don’t want to come, which is interesting right, because I know a lot of bosses, not when they're executives in which case they want to be back in the office and away from their families and probably they're expelled by their families to be in the office; but actually a lot of mid-level managers are like ,"You know what?  I don't want to be in, and I never really liked it and I'm productive here.  If my team wants to be in that's fine", but that's a very counterintuitive way of thinking about it. 

The boss is at home and the team is there.  Why shouldn't it work, because at the end of the day as the boss, you shouldn't micromanage, you should give people the tools, the resources and the directive and feedback to do their work.  Teams can function perfectly well, like that.  So I think we're going to work it out and every team needs to work it out and even if it's not totally cross swords or a bottom-up approach, I think it has to be an element of collective decision-making.

Helen Tupper: One of the things that I find concerning, intriguing, I don't know, I don't know what it is quite yet, but the role of the manager, so in ladder-like careers, becoming a manager was like an obvious step to success.  Your team's got bigger and you've got more senior, and your job title reflected that, tick that box.

Then I think the squigglier careers get and the more hybrid working introduces complexities, I think the role of the manager's now very different and actually quite challenging.  I don't think it’s the right job for everybody, because things that we're talking about, creating a culture of psychological safety, personalising your approach to your people, continually adapting to the world of work.  That's really hard and I think you have to really want to develop those skills and be that kind of manager for that to be the right opportunity for you and your development.  I think it's a very different job than it used to be.

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Yes, I think you are right.  If you look at the very old traditional model, you can go to any very hierarchical organisation.  I mean let's take the Army or the military and it's very clear, you start and then you have a path and it's rank and it's seniority and the criteria are very clear and then if you're ambitious, you want to get as far as you can, and the rules are there.

When you start shifting to more modern organisations things becomes generally flatter and then more flexible and you have different career development paths and actually, people are encouraged to rotate through functions and business and P&L and get different experiences.  And I think the next phase of that is what you write about and talk about, which is what if actually you want to change or pivot completely and try something else? 

I think at the individual level, we're much better now at not seeing linear destinations and pathways and understanding that, who cares about being a boss if it means I have to manage more people and actually I don't enjoy that and maybe I'm stressed, and I have a worse work/life balance or life in general, and actually, I don't gain, and I don't develop, etc?  Titles have been devaluated, because they are other things we value more: freedom, growth, flexibility, fun, money, experience, etc.

However, at the organisational level, this still hasn't changed.  I work with a lot of organisations helping them on the high potential identification and it's quite interesting, because with the exception of some very niche technical jobs or roles, high potential is always potential for leadership, and it's quantified in terms of how many people you manage.  There's a fundamental flaw to his logic: why would you take someone who has done a great job as an individual contributor and your reward is to punish them by making them manage a team of 15, and if they do that well, a team of 30?

I think organisations or smart HR people know this, but then they're saying, "What is the development or path or the destination for someone who is really good on strategy or thinking or solving problems and is a key role and key player, but we can't give him a bigger title or a bigger salary if they're not managing this budget or these people.  I think it will change, but it needs to align more with the squiggly approach or multi-layered approach to how we reward talent and performance.

Helen Tupper: I couldn't agree more and I'm very glad that you're on the case, and I will stalk your work whenever it is published.  We have something which we think of as the Squiggly Career Readiness Scale.  We often talk to organisations about where they are on the scale and some of those elements play into how much are people able to squiggle and stay and develop in different directions around here, and some of those old notions of that's what high potential means also kind of goes against that.

I have one other area I'd really like to talk to you about and particularly because it's come up on lots of the questions people wanted me to raise with you, which is about this idea of proximity bias.  So, the risk that progression in our organisation, and that might not just be equalling promotion but opportunities to develop, let's call it that, that that will be limited to those visible people that are showing up and that there'll be almost like a progression penalty for people that choose to retain some of that flexibility that they've had.  I wondered what you thought?  Whether you thought that was a reality and whether you thought there was anything individuals and organisations should be doing to respond to the risk.

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Yes, so again uncharacteristically I start with the solution, but I think the most important thing is that they can measure this impact.  I give you a really super simple example: every large organisation can take a diagnostic measure of, and for instance I'm just going to give one example, how many men and how many women return to the office, or if you want to be more granular, the percentage of time that men are in and the percentage of time women are in, even though we are saying the policy is the same.  Then they can correlate percentage of being in with performance, bonus, etc and also break it down by gender or see whether there is an increase or stability for one sex or the other. 

That is a really simple analysis, right, and so if you want to have fairness and you don't want to have a two-tier system and I only said "gender" but of course it's age, social class, ethnicity, any group, the most important thing is that you can easily measure, and this is a great example of analytics in action, because you can see what's happening beyond the anecdotal.  You can track and measure and if you see an equality or inequality rising, then if you want to address it you can.

Basically, this simple analysis can tell you actually the more you're in, the more you earn or the better you're evaluated.  Then we can discuss why?  Maybe it is the best people that happen to be in and it's not causal, but at least you can detect this, and you can detect changes.  Now, on the first part of the question, unfortunately there's proximal or proximity bias, or presenteeism, it's real.  Even if you're an open-minded, wellbeing, modern, evidenced-based manager or boss, you probably can't control it because there's something inherently human to evaluating.

We don't just see people in two dimensions and over zoom, we value being with others.  And I think even if you're not thinking it, you're probably unconsciously influenced, there's something in your brain that said, "Well, if these people are in and they spend time with me, maybe they like me more, maybe they value me more, maybe they are more engaged".  The representative bias of things that are fresh in your mind get prioritised over the rest; everyone is there.

If I am asked today, who in your team would you promote to this role and I tried to engage an introspection, I will be influenced by the people I've dealt with.  By the way, this translates to the digital world as well, because if you're emailing me every day or you're on WhatsApp, etc, you are being present.  Unfortunately, that's real, and power or one of the aspects or facets and really reasons for power is that it still enables people to act on the basis of their personal or subjective preferences. 

Bureaucracy rules and processes try to sanitise and sterilise that subjective power.  If you want a big example, in a modern organisation in the developed world, I can no longer go for a drink or a coffee with someone and say, "I'm going to hire this person because I really like them", or, "They're my cousin or my nephew".  That doesn't go, because we've been trying to eliminate or reduce nepotism and unfairness, but we are also not at the level that your potential and your performance and your merit is objectively evaluated, and you completely eliminate subjectivity.

I give you a very good example: if you fast forward five or ten years in time to the point that we have, I don't know, artificial intelligence developed in an ethical way and they can really give you a score for someone's job fit, etc, and I am the boss and I interview that person and I really dislike them; I want to see us get to that stage.  When we say cognitive diversity, inclusivity, belonging, I don't think any human with power wants to be forced to work with someone they don't like. 

We've been trying to enable more situations where that happens because if you're telling people, "Be open-minded, it's not just about culture fit, you have to have diversity.  Maybe charisma isn't as important", all the things that I always write about, but it's very utopian to get to a point where these factors are negligent.  Why?  Because we're not robots.  I can have a conversation with you, and I really like you and maybe that will actually enhance our collaboration, but some of that might be based on our bias and maybe some of that is wrong.

In our world, it's the equivalent of asking algorithms on Netflix or Spotify to tell you, "Listen to this song because you're too white in your musical preferences and you're too middle-aged, or you're too middle class and you have to change your taste".  No one wants to do that; I mean Netflix and Spotify would collapse if the algorithms were designed to make us more open minded.

Helen Tupper: It's so interesting that you mentioned utopia, because as we have been talking, I have been thinking about getting hybrid working right is like some kind of unrealistic nirvana state and when we first started talking that was my question, "What's the benefit of getting this right?", and I think it was the wrong question, because I think there is no right.  There may be right for right now, maybe, but to your point, it's very hard; that bias, that power, the individualisation of work, it's very very hard to get it right, even right now.

It's maybe more the aim should not be some nirvana state of work, because work is hard, and people are different, and everything is changing and maybe it's more just about reflecting on the risk of getting it wrong.  The aspiration is not to have some kind of perfect solution for work, but it is to recognise that we have to work towards something better, because if we don't people will leave.  They are more able to leave now than they perhaps ever have been, and they have more power than they have had before that might compel them to do that.

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Exactly, much like now.  You have the power to raise the fact that your boss doesn't listen to you and people have the power and it will continue to increase to actually evaluate their managers.  In the old days, a boss is looking over your shoulder and telling you, "Do this, do that", and they decide.  Now, we will get to a point where actually employees decide on whether the boss is doing a good job or not, because we know that their performance, they engagement determines that.

You make me think of something maybe at the end of the day, the fundamental issue is what problem you are trying to solve, or if you want to use mother engineering, human resources, what are you trying to optimise for?  I think that's the more important philosophical discussion, because hybrid is an approach, it's a philosophy and it's a mould for something, it's a medium for something. 

Where we are today is quite interesting, because the best employers in most organisations often pretend or signal or posture this philosophy that they are really interested in optimising for wellness, wellbeing, engaging, thriving, whatever, but you don't have to be overly cynical to understand that they want these things because that boosts performance.

So, even with the rise now on wellness and happiness, etc, for profit corporations are not in the business of making people happy and they shouldn’t be either.  But I think their assumption is that if you are happier working here, you'll be more productive.  If that is the goal, then fine, but sometimes the means to get there can get a little bit dirty or noisy or contaminated.  For example, I think today what you see in terms of hybrid working claims is influenced by the fear that if we don't pretend to be flexible, people will go somewhere else.  Maybe they're wrong, because maybe too much flexibility is not good, so it depends on what you are optimising for.

It seems like this hybrid age is highlighting a potential difference or decoupling of where you are happier and where you feel more creative and flexible and all of that, and where you are more productive.  When you see Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs, "No, we want people back in the office", this no-nonsense approach is because they are saying, "We care about making money and you need to be making money and this is where you can make us money".  That seems brutal, but then if they're paying a lot, people will still go there.

On the other hand, maybe if they say, "Come and be whatever you want", but if employees at the end of the day find that they're not being stretched or they're not enjoying or leveraging their power of in-person meetings, and I'm not saying there is but maybe for some people there is some value, then you could be optimising for where you are more comfortable, but maybe that's not the best career stretch.

Ultimately, if you want to recover or regain some of the more humanistic approaches to work, maybe we should not obsess so much for where people are most productive and performing, because there has to be a balance.  Maybe it's disadvantageous to, even when you're saying, "Okay, we're going to be hybrid and we're going to see the --" during COVID, this was the conversation at the beginning.  "Okay, we measured teams and they're equally productive when they're not here". 

People were dying and they were very anxious and stressed and you're still honestly worried about productivity or assuming that this is an experiment where the only thing that changed is whether people are in front of their computers in the office?  No, they were in their homes, they were with their kids, friends were dying, everyone was getting sick.

We knew that we could take our laptops home and that's like the office.  So, it is everything else that changes, but with it the main moral ask for organisations is to define what they believe in and what their priority is.  And I think that has to have certain risks and that risk might be not to care so much about short term productivity, because you want to connect with people and gain some loyalty and trust.

Helen Tupper: Thank you for listening to today's episode on hybrid work, I hope you found it interesting, would love your feedback if you have any.  As I said at the start, you can just email us, we're just Helen&Sarah@squigglycareers.com.  Let us know what you liked about this, or you can send us a message on Instagram, we're just @Amazingif there. 

If you would like to find out more about Tomas's work or maybe watch some of those TED talks that I mentioned in the introduction, you can just go to drtomas.com and you'll be able to see all of his work there and the details of all of his books as well.

Thank you again for listening and Sarah and I will be back together next week to speak to you.  Bye, everyone.