Change for good: 10 lessons from the pandemic

Report Summary

The pandemic forced organisations to work remotely on a scale we could never have imagined before. People quickly learned how to use Teams, Zoom and Citrix for their daily communications and realised that for many of their daily tasks commuting to the office on a daily basis wasn’t always necessary.

For the first time, organisations have been able to work and communicate without a required daily presence at a physical location. This has been a profound change. While many of the technologies deployed during the pandemic have been available for many years, take up on them has been slow, with the default position being set to working in the ‘office’. Now people around the world have reset this default attitude to work from anywhere.

Organisations have also learned that given the right competence, leadership and technology, people can be trusted to deliver their output without constant supervision. The pre-pandemic prevailing management myth that people would spend their time at home slacking if working out of sight has been debunked.

It remains to be seen whether leaders will embrace these learnings and evolve their organisations so they are able to adapt to the modern world, or whether they will look to return to the way things were. These decisions will have significant impact for individuals, organisations, cities and societies as a whole.

We’ve outlined 10 lessons from the pandemic that we believe have transformed the world of work for the better. These include new models of working, optimising space and real estate, and a new style of ‘hybrid’ leadership.