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Five years ago, it was common for an employee to formally file a flexible working request. Today, work is not only flexible, but also remote and hybrid.
But what do these terms really mean on a human level? It seems that an entire generation no longer considers work as a place of productivity but as a place of morality. For Gen Z, a generation in their early 20s and entering the workforce for the first time, they expect their employer to meet them on their terms, and those terms may include working from home from from time to time, possibly. all the time. The question is: how can this affect all other employees as well as the employer?
John Dore is Program Director at London Business School. His new book, Glue, begins to answer that question. As its name suggests, it is concerned with maintaining the humanity of an organization in the age of technological progress. Technologies that give us more freedom to work where we prefer could also destroy the working relationships that productivity ultimately relies on.
He defines glue as “the powerful dynamic of talented, highly committed people that allows the organization to grow and prosper” and he goes on to suggest that glue should be the primary concern of today’s leaders.
He noticed during the pandemic how difficult it was to create the right kind of collaborative environment. “It suddenly became impossible, the hoops and hoops you had to jump through to make something work seemed insurmountable,” he told me. So the stories in the book bring to life real cases where people found new and exciting ways to connect and collaborate successfully. “I used these stories to reassure myself, and then hopefully reassure others who read the book, that there are strategies and techniques that a leader can use to create cohesion, whatever the circumstances.”
The cover of the book GLUE by John Dore. Published by Routledge, 2024.
The book contains a large number of useful examples and Dore draws meaning from these case studies within industries around the world. Interestingly, what we learn is that the glue does not necessarily lie in brilliant innovative practices, but more often in those parts of organizations that are in some way functional or mundane, the areas that actually make a workplace work, but are often taken for granted. .
The AI automation trend is often touted as a boon for productivity, but as Dore points out, most of the time people really want to work with other people, they want to know who their boss is by as a human being and grasp its real meaning. of corporate culture. Automation often gets in the way of that goal, he says. “There’s not really a discussion about what an interface actually does and how it changes the way you converse with someone.” He worries that no amount of artificial software innovation can really make up for the fact that it’s difficult to engage and empathize with another human being through a machine.
One could make the counterargument that automation at least increases much-needed productivity. However, according to Dore, personal productivity has stagnated in recent years, when hybrid and remote working have been most popular.
In a recent Live LinkedIn session, Dore cited a large study by Microsoft which found that 87% of people believe that on a personal level, they are more productive and that they now determine their own way of working. But Dore says other study data shows that personal productivity has actually stagnated. Additionally, employee engagement was negatively affected, reducing from the peak in 2018. Even more intriguing, disengagement increased by 3%. This all seems counterintuitive given that people have the ability to choose where they work. More bad news comes to us via Gallup data on the propensity to stay employed for 12 months. Although hybrid working is considered the best of both worlds, 58% of those who work in a hybrid environment will likely leave their job within 12 months.
Dore is at pains to point out that while we think of hybrid work or decentralization of work as fairly normal today, a sea change has taken place, citing the work of Nick Bloom of Stanford University. Bloom previously shared a graphic illustrating that the propensity of American employees to work from home has been relatively stable over the past sixty years. Only in 2020 did it go from a fairly stable figure to a whopping 65% of the US population. Some time later, it stabilized at around 29%. This increase is so disproportionate compared to the last six decades that it shows the scale of the upheavals we are going through, even if we may find it natural, personally, that each of us works from home.
What is Dore’s prediction for creating more glue in the future?
The main message of the book seems to be that we need to find new ways to live our working lives. One way or another, new types of connections need to be formed between people in order to improve organizations, customer experiences, and supplier relationships, and these new methods, these innovations, are coming to an end. account and entirely extremely human.
It certainly cannot be about working in smaller and smaller groups until you end up working alone, atomized and disconnected from the larger context. Glue is an invitation to leaders to experiment and explore these new ways of working so that people can work well together again.
Glue: Transforming leadership in a hybrid world by John Dore is published by Routledge and available from Amazon and other booksellers.