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- Herausgeber: Die Keure Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Give yourself every chance of success!
"This booklet is a message of hope. Hope that Covid-19 also brought beauty." Isabel De Clercq's manifesto about hybrid work will soon be published in English, after the very appreciated edition in Dutch. Are you looking forward to get yours first? Register now and you'll receive your copy as soon as available. A little treasure for keeps. Beautifully styled and playfully cunning. A headstrong conviction brought to you with grace and glee.Author Isabel De Clercq talks to you about Hybrid Work. She speaks out the hope within her. Hope for a better future. The future of the knowledge worker.Not only does she take you into her own dreams, but also crystallises the future with seven careful suggestions. Let yourself be carried away with Isabel’s magnetising prose, sharp pen and refreshing insights.Isabel hopes you do not read this book in one sitting. Read a suggestion. Close the book. Let the words reverberate.
A much needed reflexion on how to bring your effectiveness, creativity, and well-being at work to the next level!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Isabel De Clercq (1968) was born and raised in a town in East Flanders and now lives in Antwerp. As a child, every Saturday she would pay a visit to the local library, where she fell in love with language. Isabel is the author of the management book
Social Technologies in Business and the short story compilation
Gekruld. In your hands lies her third book.
Isabel is a lover of Hybrid Work because it brings all her favourite topics together. Lifelong learning through asynchronous knowledge sharing, productivity through focus and technology, digital language and enganced self-consciousness. It's all there.
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Seitenzahl: 59
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Couverture
Page de titre
Hybrid Work
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Forced home working
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A chain of hybrid meetings
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Endless flexibility for the individual
What it is, you will discover in this booklet.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Critical thinking without hope is cynicism.
Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.
Maria Popova
PRELUDE
Steak with fries and homemade mayonnaise. One of the family’s favourite meals. When my husband comes home from work, he swaps his neat suit for a more comfortable outfit and gets to work in the kitchen. He is an excellent cook. A dominant cook, who simply cannot tolerate the presence of others in his culinary kingdom.
Still, there is one thing we do do together. Together, we whisk mayonnaise. My limited role consists of pouring the oil into the mixture, following his strict instructions. This is our Friday evening ritual.
It’s Friday, 6 March 2020. Covid-19 overshadows all conversations.
“Isabel, the lockdown is approaching. That beast about to kidnap our social lives, does it affect your work and shouldn’t you be writing an article about it?”
Calmly but decidedly, my husband eases out the egg yolks from the egg whites. Me, I freeze to the spot. Four weeks earlier I had started to write a new book about the power of lifelong learning, a sequel to Social Technologies in Business. Was Covid-19 throwing a spanner in the works?
I unconsciously stop pouring the oil.
“Of course, but I’m on another track right now”, I say, hesitantly.
“Then it’s time to change tracks”, my husband answers back, while he adds egg, mustard and salt and starts whisking. “Aren’t you the one evangelising agility? By the way, will you please carry on pouring the oil?”
And that’s when I see it, laid before me. All ingredients come together: working from home; asynchronous collaboration through digital tools; enhanced self-consciousness because the routines structuring our working days disappeared; more self-leadership; less acquired helplessness and, therefore, more proactivity and thinking about how to create added value.
Long live Covid, I am thinking.
And presto! Steady and slow, a perfectly whisked mayonnaise.
That same evening, I launch the following question on LinkedIn: does the breakout of the coronavirus lead to the breakthrough of the digital workplace? My blog1 is filled with optimism and hope for change. The concluding words leave no room for doubt: digital tools have an emancipating effect. They free us from time and place, discharging us from old rules and habits.
Hope
It is now April 2021.
Was I naïve one year ago? Are we really going back to old habits? And, are we going to classify last year as a ‘bad dream’?
Yes, there are people eager to go back to the office. There are even voices that look down upon digital work as if it were some kind of mistake. Still, I do hope that something has changed for good, and that the fear of Paolo Giordano, author of Covid booklet HowContagionWorks, is thus ungrounded: “I’m afraid (…) that this wave of fear is all for nothing, that it will pass without leaving any change in its wake.”2
Where does this hope come from? I see some signs here and there indicating that it will never be as it was before.
One of the signs can be found in recent research carried out by Nicolas Bloom, professor at Stanford University, who, in 2014, was the first to explore the effects of working from home. In one of his latest works, WhyWorkingfromHomeWillStick3 published in December 2020, Nicolas Bloom speaks of a permanent shift.
The Harvard Business Review also grants its attention to the topic. On the cover of the May-June edition there is a man half in pyjamas, half suited. A stereotypical image, alas, but it does look good supporting the headline, DoingHybridRight4. The section about Hybrid Work is written by Professor Lynda Gratton of the London Business School, an authority in the field of the future of work.
And then, in Belgium, you have the BaanbrekendeWerkgever movement (Pioneering Employee movement), an initiative of three organisations: a business school, a media group, and a public transport company. The BaanbrekendeWerkgever movement has already brought together 158 organisations – all eager to shape Hybrid Work by sharing knowledge, interesting insights and lessons learned.
So yes, something is moving. There is hope.
From hope to doubt
Even so, there is a certain doubt slithering around in me. A fear when I see how organisations are frenetically trying to formalise work after Covid-19 by imposing strict rules. I witnessed it again quite recently: “We expect everyone to come to our offices in Brussels two days a week. Plus, teams must gather in the office twice a month.”
These kinds of rules might have perverse side effects. You see, many among us are members of different teams. So don’t you think that we will – rather sooner than later – all be back at the office on a fulltime basis?
From hope to doubt and back again
At the same time, I am convinced that we find ourselves at a turning point. The ideal trigger to change. Yes, this is a now-of-never moment. With this booklet I hope to provide you with a few insights, insights that will help give Hybrid Work every chance of success.
Time will tell what the perfect recipe for Hybrid Work will be.
1. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leve-het-coronavirus-isabel-de-clercq
2. Paolo Giordano, In tijden van besmetting, De Bezige Bij, 2020.
3. https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/why-working-from-home-will-stick: ‘We provide evidence on five mechanisms behind this persistent shift to working from home: diminished stigma, better-than-expected experiences working from home, investments in physical and human capital enabling working from home, reluctance to return to pre-pandemic activities, and innovation supporting working from home.’
4. https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-to-do-hybrid-right
SUGGESTION 1
Forget about working anytime, anywhere
The term ‘working anytime, anywhere’ has always made me twitch. It brings to mind an air of indifference, carelessness and nonchalance. I tend to associate it with the image of the uber-hip hipster writing code in the late hours of the night on a state-of-theart, top-of-the-notch Mac. Not exactly an idea that will seduce corporate leaders.
