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Managing Diverse Collaboration in a Virtual Environment When Leading Innovation

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Managing Diverse Collaboration in a Virtual Environment When Leading Innovation

Adam Kingl

A plethora of collaboration dysfunctions can easily derail innovation conversations.  I began conducting a number of experiments ten years ago to explore virtual and face to face dynamics, and which may be optimal, when holding conversations requiring creative inputs from a team.  These experiments demonstrated that team leaders should consider continuing to hold at least some of their innovation discussions on virtual platforms, even if the pandemic would technically allow the team to meet in person.  There are two important reasons for this recommendation.  

First, charisma or extraversion, a traditional leadership trait, is often disintermediated in a virtual environment.  The extrovert jumps in with their contribution first and often, while the introvert is still processing options and responses.  But on an asynchronous, virtual discussion platform like a discussion board, team members cannot rely on force of personality to push solutions, but on the clarity and quality of their ideas.  Introverts, and those who are less confident working in a second language, may actually thrive more in a virtual team.

Second, merit has more power than familiarity or hierarchy in virtual teams.  We have all experienced how factors such as cultural norms, gender, career levels and reporting lines contribute to only a few voices, sometimes only one voice, dominating in a room.  Most of our organisations’ architectures are predicated on a pyramidal hierarchy, which for centuries has suggested a tacit dogma of the manager’s infallibility.  This canon has ruined many millions of meetings, where idea creation gives way to waiting for the leader to contribute, and then the rest of the team either agreeing or remaining silent.  

In a virtual, asynchronous environment, team members scan reflect before answering, the less confident can reply thoughtfully and bravely.  Adding anonymity to contributions reduces the senior voices from owning the lion’s share of the conversation.  The best ideas rise to the top instead of those which happen to be from the most senior.  Therefore, if an important objective of any leader is to bring out the best in everyone, then he or she should consider utilising a virtual forum for at least some discussions and particularly if managing a very diverse team.  

Two important points to remember when considering virtual teamwork:

First, technology does not solve every problem.  Virtual teamwork can fail if leaders do not attend to the fundamental problems of coordinating, engaging, and motivating individuals, particularly across time zones.  It’s easy for team members to disengage when they’re not face-to-face, so the leader must convey a high degree of enthusiasm and clarity and agree on who is accountable for what from the start. 

Second, it is dangerous to assume everyone has the same understanding of how the virtual team with work together.  For example, will everyone be in one virtual ‘place’ at the same time, or will they contribute on their own time?  To lead a virtual team, the leader must focus more on team maintenance (‘How are we going to work together?’) before task maintenance (‘’What is the creative solution to the problem or opportunity?’).  

When to Leverage the Expert or the Crowd

I am mindful that the expert in the team must still be given his or her due in creative conversations, particularly when understanding technical issues or opportunities would be key.  I would argue that the smaller the team, the more this lesson is true.  On the other hand, a possibly negative team dynamic that could occur is that the expert is used to being right and may win a debate just through the power of his or her own confidence and of having more data to hand.  With larger teams, I recommend a balance between considering the expert view and leveraging the collective wisdom inherent in diversity and large groups.  The following table is a short-hand guide suggesting when to utilise the expert and when the ‘crowd’ in a given team.

Size of Team

Use of Experts

Use of Diverse Group

Small (seven or fewer people)

Experts are more likely to provide some of the best answers

May not have powerful diversity in a small number so the ‘crowd’ is less likely to provide the best answers

Medium (eight to twenty people)

Solicit the experts’ opinions separately from the group to avoid rushing to an answer

Discuss with the team before bringing the experts back into the dialogue

Large (twenty-one plus people)

Solicit the experts’ opinions; test the team’s collective view of those opinions 

Survey the team’s views and look for trends and averages

Organisation-wide

Gather a group of experts with diverse views to test the emerging views of the wider organisation for rigour and/or to ask follow-up questions

Consider using an internal company platform or social media to collect large samples, votes and discussion boards to test ideas

Another solution may be to consider the views of the crowd and the expert separately, so that one view does not influence or anchor the other, and then share for discussion.  A final recommendation is to find ways in which the emerging collective view is not a victim of groupthink.  

A diverse group’s mosaic of different views can balance the important but perhaps narrower view of the expert. The challenge for the manager of such a team or organisation is to find incentives and create cultural norms that make the soliciting of views a regular occurrence, while identifying patterns, averages and trends in those views, and then encouraging rigorous debate.  Instead of following the cliché of ‘agreeing to disagree,’ perhaps embracing multiple and diverse points of view could lead to the stronger though less intuitive paradigm of ‘disagreement to convergence.’  

Adam Kingl (www.adamkingl.com) is an Associate of the Moller Institute, Churchill College, University of Cambridge.  He is the author of the book Next Generation Leadership and an educator and adviser.  Formerly, Adam was the Regional Managing Director, Europe, of Duke Corporate Education and the Executive Director of Thought Leadership at London Business School.  

https://indd.adobe.com/view/bb16cf03-6c8a-4d66-8ae3-90c406118980

Inspire Magazine, The Møller Institute at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, Issue 4, Leadership Mindsets, pp.32-33

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Inspire Magazine: Next Generation Leadership Book Launch

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Inspire Magazine, The Møller Institute: Issue 4, Leadership Mindsets, p. 16

Book Launches

Next Generation Leadership: How To Ensure Young Talent Will Thrive With Your Organisation

  • Adam Kingl

We are on the verge of a seismic shift in a world of work.  Why are we toil, the employer-employee social contract, leadership, retirement and the nature of business itself are changing before our eyes in ways as least as significant as what humanity and served in the early days of the industrial revolution. And it all starts with understanding Generation Y.

Generation Ys (or Millennials), are youngest workers have been slandered for a decade. You’ve heard the accusations before: Gen Ys are indolent, spoiled, coddled, uninterested in climbing the corporate ladder, ever texting, indifferent about what it takes to succeed. Those who aren’t quite so critical merely laugh off these generalisations saying, ‘Oh we were like them when we were young too.’

In reality, to be so dismissive us to ignore macro-trends that have forever altered fundamental models of work and employment.

These trends include insecure retirement, the failures of shareholder capitalism and longer lifespans. What we observe in Generation Y is merely the first, widely shared rejection of their inheritance—the world as we know it.

This rejection manifested itself in what confounds, annoys and terrifies human resources department the world over: scarce loyalty to one’s employer, a trivialising of financial benefits, a hue and cry for work-life balance, a craving for constant development, and an insistence on a powerful, shared, authentic corporate purpose. Kingl’s research in his new book Next Generation Leadership explores what’s behind these shifts in the character of the emerging workforce and the implications for how we might need to manage and lead differently today. How might we recruit, retain and develop top talent?

Most importantly, if Gen Y indeed requires a different style of leadership, then as Gen Y assumes managerial positions themselves, then the nature of leadership and of business itself will also change over the next few decades in irrevocable and profound ways.

“Nuggets of gold which challenge the way we should lead our multi generational teams / organisations.”

https://indd.adobe.com/view/bb16cf03-6c8a-4d66-8ae3-90c406118980

UCLSOM

The Cost of the Global Resignation Crisis

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UCL School of Management

20 JANUARY 2022

THE COST OF THE GLOBAL RESIGNATION CRISIS

Notebook with the title "the great resignation' clipped to an arrow pointing left.

Recent studies indicate that almost 55% of the global workforce are considering resigning from their current role. Adam Kingl has been discussing the innovation and finance implications of the current resigning crisis. 

Adam’s research indicated that the “great resignation” phenomenon was already growing before the pandemic when he found that 90% of millennials (who compose about 60% of the global workforce) do not plan to stay with their employers for more than five years, and over a third plan to leave within two years.

Replacing an employee can be costly for organisations, averaging around half to two times their annual salary. Adam explains the implications can be more severe for professional services firms, such as law firms and consultancies where a partnership model is most common, but that it has drastic implications for all organisations.

He advises that to keep employees engaged and reduce the high levels of resignations employers must focus on; development, organisational culture and purpose. He says organisations must “reconsider the models in our organisations and think about how we can still imbue people with purpose and values so that they will stay a little bit longer, but also create those organisational designs that are not necessarily ‘up or out’.”

Read the full article

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Putting a price tag on the Great Resignation

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While we’ve been talking about the global resignation crisis anecdotally, we now have figures that reveal the scale of the emergency.

A Microsoft study indicated that 41% of the global workforce are considering resigning within one year, and a Fast Company article suggested that this number may actually be as high as 55%. As many as one in four employees may be considering leaving their roles within six to 12 months.

My own research indicated that this phenomenon was already growing before the pandemic when l learned 90% of millennials (who compose about 60% of the global workforce) do not plan to stay with their employers for more than five years, and over a third plan to leave within two years.

To put a price tag on the problem, if the average cost of replacing an employee is between one half to two times their annual salary, then a 100-person company with an average salary of £60,000 could be facing replacement costs in 2022 of between £750,000 and £3,000,000.

The implications of the resignation crisis are especially dire for professional services firms. I’m thinking of management consultancies, accounting and law firms that have a partnership model in particular.

Initially, this model only worked if graduates knew they were on an 10-year journey to make partner, but what if those graduates don’t care about becoming partners anymore? Then the social architecture of the venerable ‘firm’ would crumble.

But in just about any type of organisation, the life-long corporate citizen is going the way of the dodo. As a result, a number of long-held assumptions around how to retain talent are being overthrown.

Since pensions aren’t what they used to be, with the inevitable transition from final salary to defined contribution schemes, and average salaries have not grown concomitantly with inflation over the last 30 years, salaries and pensions are just not serving as the ‘golden handcuffs’ of yesteryear.

Instead, my research indicates that the top factors at employee engagement today are development, culture and purpose:

  • Development can no longer be a reward for tenure since top talent won’t wait for up to 10 years for that management development programme. Upskilling and continuous, rather than intermittent, development is the new norm.
  • Organisational culture has to be visible in shared behaviours and actions, not values and platitudes in the annual shareholder reports and on colourful posters in the lifts.
  • Purpose must be lived and companies must be curious about each colleague’s own choices in their professional lives and why they choose to work here.

I frequently talk to firms who are seriously questioning their philosophy of work and the architecture of how they are composed.

We have to reconsider the models in our organisations and think about how we can still imbue people with purpose and values so that they will stay a little bit longer, but also create those organisational designs that are not necessarily ‘up or out’.

That aspiration must involve working on purpose and legacy, particularly with senior executives, those in the last trimester of their careers, who might otherwise be thinking, ‘Well, there’s very little else that you can teach me’.

I would want to get this stakeholder group together and ask them to think about the type of firm that they wish to leave for their successors. How might it be possible to have more fluid movement in and out of the organisation?

In that way, top talent might include those who are en route to becoming enterprise leaders, or might become future clients, or might become suppliers or partners, or might ultimately want to work on a contractor basis. After all, over 60% of the world’s work is now organised according to projects.

Top young talent might even want to return as senior executives later in your company’s life. In other words, they might join a firm two or three times during their careers, coming in and out of the organisation with greater dexterity than most companies would currently tolerate.

It really involves rethinking how you work and how you are structured, but those difficult conversations have to begin now.

Adam Kingl is the author of Next Generation Leadership and an adjunct lecturer at the UCL School of Management

HR Magazine, Published: 19 Jan 2022

https://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/content/comment/putting-a-price-tag-on-the-great-resignation

1553167122028

The Great Resignation and What We Can Do About It

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The press has recently been discussing what appears to be a resignation crisis that we’re facing globally. After all, there are four million people who quit their jobs in April 2021 in the U.S., a twenty-year high. There were a record ten million job vacancies in June. A Microsoft study indicated that 41 percent of the global workforce are considering resigning within one year, and a Fast Company article suggested that number may be as high as 55 percent.

The implications of the resignation crisis are especially dire for professional services firms. I’m thinking of management consultancies, accounting, and law firms that have a partnership model in particular. Initially, the partnership model only worked if graduates knew they were on an eight to twelve-year journey to make partner, but what if those graduates don’t care about making partner anymore? The social architecture of the venerable ‘firm’ is crumbling.

But in just about any type of organization, the life-long corporate citizen is going the way of the dodo. Research from my book, Next Generation Leadership, has shown that Generation Y (or the Millennial generation) is considering leaving any given employer on average every two to five years. As a result, a number of long-held assumptions around how to retain talent are being overthrown. Since pensions aren’t what they used to be, with the inevitable transition from final salary to defined contribution schemes, and average salaries not growing concomitantly with inflation over the last thirty years, salaries and pensions are just not serving as the ‘golden handcuffs’ of yesteryear. Instead, my research indicates that the top factors at employee engagement today are development, culture, and purpose:

  • Development can no longer be a reward for tenure since top talent won’t wait for five to ten years for that management development program. Upskilling and continuous, rather than intermittent, development is the new norm.
  • Organizational culture has to be visible in shared behaviors and actions, not values and platitudes in the annual shareholder reports and on colorful posters in the lifts.
  • Purpose must be lived and companies must be curious about each colleague’s own choices in their professional lives and why they choose to work here.

I frequently talk to firms who are seriously questioning their philosophy of work and the architecture of how they are composed. We have to reconsider the models in our organizations and think about how we can still imbue people with purpose and values so that they will stay a little bit longer, but also create those organizational designs that are not necessarily ‘up or out’. That aspiration must involve working on purpose and legacy, particularly with senior executives, those in the last trimester of their careers, who might otherwise be thinking, ‘Well, there’s very little else that you can teach me.’

I would want to get this stakeholder group together ask them to think about the type of firm that they wish to leave for their successors. How might it be possible to have more fluid movement in and out of the organization? In that way, top talent might include those who are en route to becoming enterprise leaders, or might become future clients, or might become suppliers or partners, or might ultimately want to work on a contractor basis. After all, over sixty percent of the world’s work is now organized according to projects.

Top young talent might even want to return as senior executives later in your company’s life. In other words, they might join two or three times during the course of their careers, coming in and out of your organization with greater dexterity than most companies would currently tolerate. It really involves rethinking how you work and how you are structured, but those difficult conversations have to begin now.

Adam Kingl is an Adjunct Professor at Hult International Business School, www.adamkingl.com

Leon VbxyFxlgpjM Unsplash

Empowerment and Delegation

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I’ve been asked recently by a number of clients to explore empowerment and delegation with them, particularly in the age of working from home, and the more I thought about it the more I consider that empowerment isn’t a technical or tactical challenge.

There aren’t many specific suggestions or behaviours to master in order to be better at delegation and empowerment. Instead, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s more of a psychological barrier if we find that our organisations and leaders struggle with empowerment. Namely, the issue is what Carol Dweck referred to as ‘The Growth Mindset’ – that leaders must role model challenge and experimentation as a springboard for growth, stretch and fulfilment. 

Therefore, I challenge leaders to ask themselves, ‘Do I rely on my expertise and experience to give me answers to future challenges?  Do I need my people to do things in exactly the way that I would do it?  Or am I willing to give up that control to say that my team may come up with solutions that I wouldn’t have come up with, that could be just as good or better, but that requires the confidence to let go?’

If we really want our people ultimately to grow, to be the leaders that they want to be, and that we would wish them to be, we have to cease relying so much on instructing people how they should do the job.  In being clear about the outcomes that we require, we have to be open to the possibility that our team will adapt, evolve, and figure out new solutions themselves. In so doing, leaders facilitate the capability of autonomic or evolutionary adaptability, one of the most critical new norms that organisations would like to practice but struggle to embed. 

Contemporary Interior Meeting Room Design

Professional Services and the Resignation Crisis

/in /by

The press has recently been discussing what appears to be a resignation crisis that we’re facing globally.  After all, there are four million people who quit their jobs in April in the U.S., a 20-year high. There were a record 10 million job vacancies in June. A Microsoft study indicated that 41 percent of the global workforce are considering resigning within one year, and a Fast Company article suggested that number may be as high as 55 percent.

 

The implications of the resignation crisis are especially dire for professional services firms. I’m thinking of management consultancies and law firms who have a partnership model in particular. Initially, the partnership model only worked if graduates knew they were on an 8-12 year journey to make partner, but what if those graduates don’t care about making partner anymore?

 

This is a potential existential crisis if that young talent is considering leaving every two to five years, which research for my book, Next Generation Leadership, has shown. I talk to firms all the time who are seriously questioning their philosophy of work and the architecture of how they are composed. We have to reconsider the models in our organisations, particularly in partnership models, and think about how can we still imbue people with purpose and values so that they will stay a little bit longer, but also create those organisational designs that are not necessarily ‘up or out’.  That must involve working on purpose and legacy, particularly with senior partners, those in the last trimester of their careers, who might otherwise be thinking, ‘Well, there’s very little else that you can teach me.’

 

I would want to get this stakeholder group together ask them to think about the type of firm that they wish to leave for their successors.  How might it be possible to have more fluid movement in and out of the firm? In that way, top talent might include those who are en route to becoming partners, or might become future clients, or might become suppliers or partners, or might ultimately want to work with you on a contractor basis. After all, over sixty percent of the world’s work is now organised according to projects.

Top talent might even want to return as senior executives later on in your company’s life. In other words, you might get two, three bites of the cherry from that same person who might come in and out of your organisation with greater dexterity that most companies currently would tolerate. It really involves rethinking how you work, but I do think that it is necessary to have that conversation now.

 

 

 

 

Matt Palmer IPum7Ket2jo Unsplash

What Is Strategic Innovation?

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When I talk to executives about innovation, they generally go right to products and services.  In other words, their default is to explore those innovation questions that everyone asks themselves.  But what questions are neglected as a result?

If you are a senior executive, what are the things that you can affect, that you can change, that no one else in your organisation can change? And generally the answer to that question ultimately is strategic or business model innovation, challenging assumptions implicit in the questions: who are your customers, what are you offering them and how are you offering it.

If you can change the assumptions in those questions you are playing a different game from your competitors and you are giving yourself an inimitable competitive advantage.

Take for example Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Enterprise decided to play in a  completely different sphere. Rather than primarily trying to serve air travellers, they served customers who were suffering from car breakdowns. Now, that implied that they would be putting their depots and their offices in residential areas rather than in expensive airports, so now all of a sudden, they were competing in an area that for a long time had no competitors and offered them cost advantages.

So do consider, when you can think about innovation and if you are a senior leader, what are the business model innovation questions that you can ask yourself so that you can claim advantages that would take many, many years for your competitors to imitate? And in so doing, you truly become a game-changing innovator in your industry.

Adam Kingl is Adjunct Faculty at the UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge International Business School, an Associate of the Moller Institute at Cambridge University, and the author of Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins 2020).  www.adamkingl.com 

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Transitioning from hierarchical to a network-based organisational structure: 4 key points for leaders

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Networks are powerful systems. While the networked-based structure seems to be the way forward to many teams, leaders need to be aware of issues related to the flow of decision making, talent retention and purpose.

by

Thiago Kiwi

 Jun 23, 2021

The covid-19 pandemic and subsequent acceleration of digital transformation have forced organisations to innovate rapidly, change their products and services, and remain flexible to adapt to an ever-changing landscape. These significant changes have prompted a resurgence of the debate about the optimal organisational structure.

Over the past few years, there has been a welcome shift toward client-centricity with organisations adopting more agile structures – centred on products, teams, and projects – and forming both internal and external networks of teams that are generally empowered to communicate, coordinate, and make decisions.

Yet, given the volatility of our times and challenges related to digital communications and employee wellbeing, there are certain limitations to the model. A recent study, for example, found that “network centric organisation does not necessarily lead to higher perceived situation awareness or better understanding of the situation”.

We asked three experts from our global educator network to share their advice on the key points to be aware of when adopting a new organisational structure. Their answers reveal that while the networked-based structure seems to be the way forward to many teams, leaders need to be aware of issues related to the flow of decision making, talent retention and purpose.

1. The rise of ‘extreme teaming’

The move towards network-based structures is a recent evolution, according to author and thought leader Peter Fisk.  “A decade ago, around 80 percent of employees had functional roles, the rest seconded to ad-hoc projects. Today, that ratio is reversed. Few employees now have fixed roles. Formal job titles in outdated organisational charts have given way to a more fluid deployment of talent, by project, to manage constant change”, says Fisk.

In a recent article, Fisk states: “Networks, whether organisational or social, are powerful systems. “Every additional participant creates new connections, capable of driving the exponential growth of today’s network-based start-ups.”

At the heart of these network structures is the concept of “extreme teaming”, Fisk continues. “They assemble the best people for the job, energised by customers not managers, building psychological safety, and a collective commitment to deliver excellent, innovative results.”

In his recent book Next Generation Leadership, business educator and adviser Adam Kingl explores how organisations can enable younger talent to thrive. He sees the shift toward networked structures as a competitive advantage:

“Companies that reimagine how work is organised around projects and freelance experts will be sailing on a rising tide”, said Kingl.  “The volume and strategic importance of projects is growing.  About one-fifth of the world’s economic activity per year – $12 trillion – is now organised around projects.”

Over the next decade, Kingl says, “companies are expected to experience over two-thirds’ increase in project work”.  “As the operating environment becomes more volatile and complex, businesses need a new playbook to seize opportunities faster, an adaptive approach to talent and the skillsets that one might need at any point in time.  Organising company structure around project work may make more sense.”

2. Leaders become decision aggregators

Joe DiVanna is a Cambridge-based management consultant and author. As well as working regularly with Headspring clients on custom programmes, he runs his own innovation think-tank providing research and advisory services to the financial services industry. He says that the transition from a hierarchical to a network-based structure is essentially a change in how decisions are made. More traditional structures were based on the assumption that upper levels had “more collective knowledge and experience than the level beneath it” and therefore decision-making flowed up and down the pyramid. In network-based structures, this changes completely.

“This evolution strives to push decision making close to the action where the decision is needed”, says DiVanna. “As each node on the network becomes more and more empowered the entire role of senior leadership changes from a control point to approve or disapprove issues to a consultative resource to be consumed by the organisation”.

Yet, he argues, this change in organisational structure does not relinquish decision making of the senior leadership to the business unit: “What has changed is the parameters of what decisions can be used to empower people at all levels of the organisation”, he said.

As organisations go through this transition, DiVanna continues, “decision making often becomes fragmented. Not all decisions can be handled by the business unit. As a result, exceptions which need decisions become the underlying challenge (which is also an opportunity) for senior management to act as a decision aggregator.”

3. Mind the generational gap

While the network-based structure can help organisations move faster, Kingl warns that there is a significant generational gap when it comes to the acceptance of change and the adoption of networked structures.

“When I ask audiences to consider a world where companies comprise just a dozen or so executives and hundreds of freelance project directors and contractors under them – the gig economy writ large – Baby Boomers and older Gen Xs in the room appear ashen-faced and horrified, while the Gen Ys beam with optimism”, Kingl said.

In Kingl’s opinion, employers will have three possible responses to the inconstant tides of their younger workforce:

  1. Fight it and do everything in one’s power, spending whatever money is necessary, to keep talent,
  2. Embrace it and create the twenty-first century community of (mostly) freelancers,
  3. Select a hybrid path, distinguishing between talent that the company must keep at all costs and employees who one is prepared to let go, because their knowledge or expertise is replicable, or their functions may be completed more efficiently by contractors or business partners.

4. Your structure defines your culture

“Organisation structures define companies – culturally and innovatively, revealing both opportunities and limitations”, concludes Peter Fisk. “Henry Ford’s hierarchical business model that produced low-cost cars a century ago no longer reflects today’s organisational needs: to be fast and agile, human and technological, collaborative and creative, personal and global.”

According to Kingl, as the operating environment becomes more volatile and complex, “enterprises may choose to organise themselves differently, to be able to deliver more and more complex projects and initiatives in this dynamic operating environment.”

Thiago Kiwi

Head of Marketing & Communications at Headspring

Thiago is an award-winning marketing and communications leader with over 10 years of experience in the global higher and executive education sector. He holds a Bachelors in Communications and a Masters in Political Communications & Marketing from the University of London, as well as multiple executive and leadership development certifications. When he’s not busy studying for a new course, he’s growing vegetables in his allotment or training for his next marathon.
Virtual Team Cloud

Considering the End of Lockdown

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What should companies be thinking about regarding their talent as we (possibly?) near the end of lockdown?

First, think about the physical space of your company office.  A lot of organisations are shedding commercial real estate.  The implication is that employees returning to the office are going to be smooshed together in ever more constricted open plans.  Well, that may work for some people but not for others, so do consider also providing flexible, private space.  You have introverts; you have neurodiverse colleagues.  They will, at some points in the workday, need time to themselves.

Second, think about how you may extend flexible work, giving people the opportunity to continue to work from home at least part of the time.  For many industries and functions, an option to work from home is never going to go away now and in fact will be expected from many if not most employees.  For example, over half of the U.S. workforce was already working from home at least part of the time before lockdown happened.  Most companies have already demonstrated that it can and does work.

Third, when your colleagues are back in the workplace, you now have the opportunity to socialise again.  You probably have many employees (hundreds or thousands in some cases) who joined your company during lockdown and have never yet had the opportunity really to get to know their colleagues in social situations.  To do so build trust, and that helps to reinforce culture.

This brings me to my fourth point.  If you want to build a stronger culture post-lockdown, create opportunities for your people to observe important meetings with important clients and customers.  And in that way, they start to understand how you work when it really matters, which is the true test of organisational authenticity.  This initiative can be easier when you are physically co-located, so seize the opportunity to demonstrate that being the office does have its advantages.  Get people together to observe the behaviours you desire and need for a culture that wins and has fun together, where people would not wish to be anywhere else.             

Adam Kingl is Adjunct Faculty at the UCL School of Management, Ashridge-Hult International Business School, an Associate of the Moller Institute at Cambridge University, and the author of Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins 2020).  www.adamkingl.com