Making Remote Work Good Work | RSA Replay

good afternoon everyone i'm alexa clay i'm the rsa's u.s director and it's my great pleasure to welcome you all to today's event the latest in our series exploring good work in and beyond the pandemic i'm delighted to have the chance to talk today to bruce daisley bruce is one of the smartest most respected and best connected thinkers around today on the topic of work and how it's changing and how we can make it better bruce has held top jobs at youtube and twitter he wrote the uk's best-selling business book of 2019 the joy of work and he's the creator of the chart-topping podcast eat sleep work repeat if you're not signed up to bruce's newsletter i suggest you remedy that immediately his weekly bulletins are an essential guide to the forces and trends shaping our working lives it's an absolute pleasure to have you with us today bruce the pandemic has catalyzed unprecedented upheaval in the world of work turbo charging pre-existing trends and for many of us disrupting the office nine to five in profound and in many cases what looks likely to be permanent ways you've joined us today to help us take stock of what we've been through to reflect on what we've learned and to get ready for what comes next there's so much to cover and i'm really looking forward to having a chance to unpack things following your opening remarks but for now thanks so much again for being with us today to talk about making remote work good work and i'll turn it over to you bruce thank you so much i'm so grateful to to get the opportunity to talk here i think probably we found ourselves in 2020 in this extraordinary disrupted year where a lot of us have tried to make sense of what's going on and to some extent we've been forced into something of a false opposition a lot of us have found that there's actually been moments of productivity enjoyment from the strange working from home situation that we've found ourselves in and we find to some extent that we're being forced to consider that dichotomously versus the return to the office to a lot to a large extent a lot of us want the best of both worlds and we recognize there's something good to both we don't want to be forced into that that forced choice between the two things broadly i think before we consider the impact that working from home and remote working has had on all of us it's worth just taking stock of what we've learned in this in this 12 month period broadly the office has got a number of things that it served to function for the office was really good for meeting people by appointment it was really good for meeting people by accident it was a wonderful workshop anyone who if you work with videographers if you i've chatted this summer to architects to to artists to people who musicians whose workspace was a really important part of how they fulfilled their job the our office could be our workshop and finally the office was really good for building a cohesive team environment and i think when we reflect on what we've been able to replace this year we've most certainly been able to replace replace the fact that the office was good for meeting people by appointment whether it's exactly the same or just an approximation but we've learned that zoom calls and and online meeting teams meetings have been a decent approximation for what we were trying to do but i think what we've struggled with is some of the other aspects of the way that the office worked the office we found it much harder to read a room we found that we've struggled to have those moments of serendipitous encounters and and bumping into people we've we've found that the the office was really good for making us feel part of something bigger than ourselves and those things are probably why a lot of us even if we're imagining that there's going to be a way of working that does involve us working from home want to to some extent have a degree of the productivity we've um we've had from home combined with working in an office around colleagues but also it's worth us reflecting if we know what the office was good for what has the the home working environment been good for i think compared to open offices open plan environments the working from home has enabled us to be much more productive a lot of us empathize with that feeling where we used to wander around our offices looking for a quiet space to make a phone call or to get some work done and to a large extent even if we've we've been dealing with sub-optimal situation of maybe dealing with child care or a house that's busier than normal we've found space to to have that productivity a lot of people have talked about how the working from home atmosphere the remote working has has broken down some barriers we've seen inside each other's households we've maybe for the first time seen children come into meetings without the stigma that that once used to hold we've seen each other in our finest and our least fine collections of loungewear and it's broken down these barriers where we see each other more humanly but i think what the remote working experience seems to have done is it seems to have solidified some aspects that we would consider to be slightly sub-optimal people have told me that they find themselves talking to the same groups of people all the time but the the ways that an office used to break through hierarchy has been lost from us the ceo no longer has an encounter with the new starter who started last week we're no longer finding that people who work in different departments are able to chat with us for for 10 15 minutes and those conversations that often maybe if we're rose tinting it or if we're recollecting with a bit of fondness actually those conversations seem to be part of the way that we got our mojo from the office i think you know it's really fascinating to delve into some of the the evidence that's um really come around from these things i i always return to the work of sandy pentland from the massachusetts institute of technology so andy pentland is a great person to find yourself going down a youtube black hole on because some of his work really just tries to dissect how we used our offices our offices were this apparatus were a big part of our life but very few of us actually dissected what went on what sandy pentland found himself doing was saying by tracking what went on in an office almost like we might with a football field or a sports pitch but he found himself saying that the face-to-face conversations that we used to have in offices seemed to be where all the goodness lay and the reason why he went on to to explain is he said these are often the conversations we have without the artifice of meetings without our boss overlooking us we often try and work out how we can make our bosses wishes happen when we find ourselves in those those uh conversations waiting for the coffee machine or or waiting to to leave the building and so those accidental functions of the office are probably the sort of things that we will we will reflect and wonder how we can try to to replicate and reproduce them i think one of the things that the rsa has been inspiring about is he's setting an agenda for good work and trying to to to set a level of expectation about what good work and good employment looks like and there's a number of things that i just want to to maybe just uh draw on and think about because i think they help us have a consideration for the version of work in whatever for hybrid form is going to take the version of work we want to create there's a number of things in the the rsa's most recent work that talks about uh the importance of three elements i want to call out well-being growth and um and nurture the the the elements that they talk about and well-being i think is something that we can easily lose right now in the midst of statistical overload we find ourselves seeing that 85 90 of people have enjoyed the homeworking experience it broadly seems to be the same across age age demographics although younger people are i think a touch fonder about returning to the office than than older workers but what we we are recognizing is that hidden in all of that data 10 of the workforce say their mental health has got significantly worse and in an environment where we know that loneliness is something that characterizes modern life not just of of older people but of all of us actually the the combination of loneliness plus people may be feeling disconnected i think is a potentially uh huge consequence of of what we're doing there's another couple of parts the uh one of the elements that the rsa talks about in terms of our jobs being good jobs are about growth and that's about us improving our capability now what we discover is that of course much of the way we used to work before our growth was a casual process it was it was a process of of lay learning from some of the most experienced people in the office we would we would witness things and by by being witness to to work taking place around us we would learn and we would grow and what we are witnessing is that some of that casual learning has been lost from us right now a lot of us are finding that we're in a state of perpetual busyness perpetual digital demands upon us and that cortisol-infused environment that we're finding ourselves in is not suited for learning and actually doesn't have that that element of self-improvement and growth and then the the the final thing that the the rsa's model about good work talks about i think is relevant to the the way that we're working right now is the no notion of nurturing us and allowing uh our working identity to to develop similar to uh growth in terms of capability but this is about enriching our experience enriching our understanding and our identity as it it forges through work and i think what we are witnessing in a time when this awareness that this there's not an even distribution of opportunity that we are witnessing that being out of sight right now for minority groups or for for groups who maybe haven't always had the the best advantages could be turning what is a short-term transitory experience into something that is really baked into the whole experience of work if if minority groups are less visible than ever before then i think that will have an impact on their experience of of work and their ability to feel like they are they are performing a job that is enriching for them so most definitely i think in aggregate this year has been good for for just demonstrating to us that we can do far more things than we maybe were told were impossible we've been really held back in the way that we've regarded the possibility of of taking advantage of the way that the internet has transformed communication and for the first time now i think that's inarguable any workplace that finds itself an office-based environment going back to the office five days a week knows that they're making that as a conscious decision rather than because of necessity so it's moved the argument on but i think it's a really important consideration for all of us that we really reflect on what good work looks like and how we can create jobs that feel sustainable the essence of all of this but as my sort of final comment is trust i think what we've learned throughout is that one of the reasons that held us back from taking advantage of this innovation that was sitting right before us was that we didn't trust our fellow workers we didn't trust the system for people to get their jobs done and it was only through necessity that we've recognized where there was no choice that in fact the elements of trust were really a flaw in our own approach rather than a flaw in the the people we were working with and that's where we sit right now we we we see occasional horror stories of bosses in checking in on on colleagues all the time or wanting the green light slack or google messaging or microsoft teams to be on all the time to demonstrate that their workers are working and i think what we strongly know is that where people feel that they are unable to assert their own autonomy their own control on the job that they are doing that's where a job ceases to be a good job good work but goes into something that feels far more of a a prison for us and far more of a a prohibition on our talents and abilities so i think there's a big opportunity i think the spirit of this year is strongly that when we lean into trust it seems to yield back and it seems to create something that maybe can astonish us with our own capabilities and that really needs to be the spirit going forward we've got a huge opportunity to capitalize on this i suspect it's going to be unevenly distributed there's going to be some workforces that really recognize that if they can empower and inspire the autonomy in their workers that great results will follow and there will no doubt be plenty of workplaces where there's an absence of that trust and that no doubt will be the challenge that presents us uh presents itself to us next year great thank you bruce fascinating cultural commentating on the moment that we're living in now and some of the implications for how how this pandemic is just completely opening up the door on work and what becomes possible and remote working i want to pick up on a few of your points and just get into a bit more detail here um i know one of the challenges that you laid out is you know this this trend around loneliness and i think for so many workers um work provides that subjective nurture that affirming identity um a sense of belonging and so with everyone displaced working in a more distributed fashion how are you seeing folks access that sense of belonging that sense of community what can workplaces do to better create that sense of community while folks are you know working from home yeah i've been really inspired with trying to understand um i think how the experts in this field have learned about this so i saw a really interesting piece of commentary in july i think we've gone through various stages of trying to assimilate what's happening to us i think you know when a lot of us first left the the office when we first left our workplaces we by the the cognitive flaws that we fall into we thought this was a short term excursion we thought we'd be back in three weeks maybe a month and you know the pessimists amongst us conceived of six weeks and so i always think of all of the the desk plants who've unfortunately paid them paid the price of that mistake but a lot of us found ourselves then a few weeks later recognizing that something fundamental and probably enduring had changed um and so i was really struck by a post by a former executive at google uh one called sarah drinkwater wrote a post in the summer and she was hired by google to help build their connection into the london startup community so she's a supreme community organizer and she wrote a post in the summer about how every organization will be looking to hire community managers and she meant it holistically she meant it communities uh and and these are discreet communities but communities have their customers communities of their employees communities of their stakeholders because there seems to be something about when we can connect these individuals it seems to to turbo charge what we're trying to do and i was really inspired by that and over the summer over the last few weeks i found myself talking to community managers who've been hired into firms i've been talking to community managers who've built communities in places like manhattan in in uh in in very different places across the world and i think i'm really struck by a number of things firstly the skill of building a community um seems to be something that is going to be incredibly valuable to firms how can they make individuals working through screens feel connected to each other but i think to to a large extent it's going to be a skill that if we don't give it due consideration um it might be something that comes back to haunt us now i worked the last 12 years first at youtube and then at twitter and i think one of the learnings that i had through that time is the way that we connect to each other through screens can be incredibly powerful but it's not a direct um donut no not not a direct comparison for the analog way that we connect face to face big differences are when we connect to other human beings through screens if we share a sense of affinity with that other person we we tend to find that the bond is incredibly powerful and you meet up cultures are incredibly strong your witness the the fans of youtubers gather together and these really effervescent excitable events or twitter meetups people getting together if they feel affinity it's incredibly powerful but one of the things we notice is that when there's abs there's the absence of that affinity when i feel some enmity to the person i'm communicating to through the screen there's a real absence of empathy and so how that might manifest itself if we don't think about fostering communities and we don't think about fostering um a sense of shared identity and belonging to to people working remotely through screens is that we may well get some of the things that we're starting to witness about different identity groups feeling more connected to themselves than to uh to their colleagues we might find that there's a schism that forms in different firms now i'm i'm not saying that that's definitely the case but i think we've we've observed in organizations that are probably slightly higher profile there's been there's been episodes that have happened in the guardian in the new york times in google largely because these the the businesses that are in the spotlight of attention not necessarily because uh of the area they're in but that have shown these patterns of of people um coalescing around their identity but sometimes at the expense of them not always feeling connected to colleagues so look you know caution we know i think the more that we can foster a sense of shared community amongst uh colleagues in organizations and celebrate individuals identities at the same time i don't see them as inconsistent i see them as as part of one big process then it can be incredibly helpful so for me you know one of the community managers i spoke to her first act i said how did you start forging a community it was a 500 strong organization how did you start firing the community and she says first thing is about celebrating diversity and inclusion it's about making sure the employees who feel like they're part of a an identity group feel that their identities are celebrated and feel safe and rewarded in this organization and as long as then people feel that these elements of their their personality their identity are recognized and rewarded they feel that the organization is respectful and safe so it's really interesting i i don't think there's any easy answers to this but i do think the the internet has some really strong lessons that it's telling us about the prior experience of some of the businesses that really have seen the worst side of people online thank you yeah i mean i i you mentioned this and i've noticed this but definitely just being able to take off that mask that work mask that so much so many of us wear and i think that's you know historically been a problem where you know you conform to a job description and and so many people feel like they lose a bit of themselves at work or they end up developing a sort of workplace alter ego that is a bit disjointed from the person they are at home and so i think in some ways this crisis has all has also given us the opportunity to see people a bit more deeply you know in their home surroundings and kind of understanding you know what makes them tick and what they're about and so it creates those con conditions for intimacy um that maybe kind of offset the loneliness that happens from not being in an office um i've done a little bit of research on intentional communities and i know you know before the pandemic hit there was this move by the big kind of tech giants to create these campuses that you know almost functioned like intentional communities looking at facebook's headquarters or google's headquarters um you know trying to get folks to to employees to stay there you know as long as possible and participate um in what almost felt like cultish work practice you know people there for 12 hours a day there being gyms and and it becoming a part of your social life and i think for a lot of people that you know struck a chord of a bit you know a bit of fear where we're asked to be giving more and more to our workplace um and i'm just wondering if you have any you know thinking on that on ways in which companies are maybe trying to um you know move away from that trend around kind of the stickiness of creating you know a place-based intentional community around work versus actually creating much more creative freedom for employees um which feels like it could be a nice ingredient for innovation and creativity and um not to be part of a kind of homogenous corporate culture in the ways that we often associated with some of these tech giants yeah absolutely i mean you raised some some really critical and and brilliant points there i think one of the things that a lot of us found over the last few years is that we found if anyone asked you what was the element of your life that you felt that you had an unhealthy relationship with you'd probably hold up your mobile device and you'd say you know i know that this is the problem i think the the interesting thing that a lot of us were confronted with when we found ourselves in in lockdown and sheltering at home we found that actually the thing that we were most vividly reminded that we had an unhealthy relationship with was our work we found that having evening meals with the people that we shared a space with was actually incredibly agreeable agreeable and how on earth have this been something that we'd we'd expelled and we were from our lives and we weren't regularly doing it so i i think the the degree of us allowing ourselves to exhale and and maybe feeling that we weren't in this almost inexplicable dash to commute to a different place 10 20 30 miles away every morning in this precipitous hurry the fact that we were suddenly alleviated from that allowed us to look at it and go oh in the same way that my relationship with my device is unhealthy actually my relationship with the place that i go to is unhealthy as well so i think we've been confronted with a lot of those things it's really interesting uh the point you make about these campuses because i think you know most definitely i think the objective of those campuses was to try and ensure that rather than individual identity that we we were largely assimilating into feeling the same and these mixed signals i think you know first thing we can often find ourselves thinking just to pause for a second because i think that point you make is huge the fact that so much of our work environment was set around one common emotional currency right that when you're all in the office together there's there's kind of an emotional heartbeat um and you know for a lot of people i think that can feel very colonizing and exhausting yeah most definitely you know one of the the leading researchers uh on understanding our relationship with work is amy edmondson of course and and she talks about how psychological safety means that for fear of appearing ignorant we don't raise objections uh for fear of appearing obstructive we we don't uh we ignorant we we don't ask questions we and we we moderate the impression that we give to others because for fear of judgment and i think a lot of us can recognize that we had that work face we had that that way that we we put our persona on one of the interesting things that we saw when lockdown first happened was that spotify reported that listening had initially dipped by 15 20 but it was almost like the compression and decompression that people would put themselves through as they became that different persona as you know they'd put their performative clothes done they were going to enact this performance and of course if we can get this get this right all of those aspects of performance generally are in service of us not saying what we honestly think and if you work on the basis that if we're now going to liberate ourselves to say something closer to what we genuinely think then um what we should find is is better communication more transparency and better ideas so most definitely i think it's it's really interesting because effectively we've renegotiated our relationship with work and again this isn't evenly distributed i think some people are finding that they can they can access this freedom more easily than others and this sense of liberation more easily than others but i think it is if we get this if we get this right and it would be tragic if we didn't get this right but if we get this right this is one of the things that fortunately we've been gifted through this process that people can remove the performance the artifacts that some of the the things that most definitely made work into something of a burden yeah i mean it's it's fascinating and maybe we zoom in a little bit on this you know uneven distribution because i think for so many people this moment has brought about that liberation narrative that you've you've said it's been almost utopian and being able to sort of leave the city and work from more remote sort of pastoral horizons and it's it's kind of um the romantic dream that even i think the great industrialists imagine the future of work being about more leisure time more time with family um and yet on the other hand there's this sort of kind of shadow economy which is you know the service economy where work for a lot of people has gotten you know a lot worse a lot more precarious um and i think i think you know a lot of people do have a bit of guilt or hang up um that feel like they have been liberated in some ways by the pandemic and yet others who are you know bearing the burden of the pandemic more directly and don't have that same kind of economic opportunity and so how would you how would you get us to think about this like is this is this polarization polarization just gonna be increasing as as we see kind of inequality increasing or there are things that we can do um from you know the the sort of privilege of you know the digital nomad identity to to support different kinds of work and make that less precarious for others i think privilege is the important thing to call out there i had someone who contacted me in the very start of lockdown and he was um a telephone call center worker and he said my job was it was something that i was very comfortable doing because i was able to compartmentalize the the if not trauma certainly the unpleasantness of what i used to experience he said he said i used to go to a place i used to receive seven or eight hours of quite um injurious phone calls every day he said now i'm in a situation where i'm taking those calls from home and as i sit down at the end of the day to watch netflix as i sit down at the end of the day to have a meal i'm in the same room where i've spent their whole day arguing and he said i have to tell you it's having an impact on me i i don't feel that i'm okay and i guess you know it just reminds us when i heard that of course i'd i empathize with the blue collar workers the shop workers the retail workers who were who were having to work in a way that maybe we weren't you know someone last week said that uh there hasn't been a lockdown there's just been middle class people have been staying at home and working-class people have bring bringing things to them and actually it's you know tragically it's a pretty accurate representation of of what we've witnessed um but i think you know having an awareness that this is an opportunity for for all of us but that we we need to distribute the benefits of it evenly i think at the very least if some of us are privileged then you know having an awareness of that an uneven distribution is incredibly important i think yeah thank you and i know that same point has come up you know in terms of feminist arguments where you know women who are working from home now also feel unduly burdened by the sort of joint um requirements of child care and managing a household and and feel that uneven division of labor is that something that you've seen the sort of gendered impacts of remote working yeah most definitely i was on a call with someone at the um the two month mark three month mark and you know it's very simple to find yourself and it's a it's a flaw of looking at data to find yourself and thinking well oh okay i see that two-thirds of people are celebrating what this has done and then of course you're missing the story and the narrative of the people who sit in that that one-third and one woman said to me she said you know i'm finding myself i'm cooking three meals a day i'm cleaning the house more than ever before she said i used to be able to go out the house in the morning and know that when i returned effectively the house was as i left it and of course you know we we know the tragedy of contemporary society is that while we might construe that these things are more evenly distributed that's definitely not the case and that's not the reality of the situation and that gender imbalances are still very much uh shaping the experience of a lot of the workforce so i think most definitely um i think the the least we can do is have an awareness on these things of course the other imbalance that exists is the age imbalance and um broadly when we look into the statistics of the satisfaction of how of how this situation has played out there is an age skew on it i mentioned that every group is happier um working from home than they were in open plan offices but what we witnessed is older older cohorts of people who've maybe got spare rooms or maybe got home offices are reporting feeling significantly happier than younger correspondents who might be finding themselves working from the kitchen or working from the sofa or whose back has just had the the hardest six months of their life as they work from bed so you know they're finding themselves witnessing other colleagues and you know one of those things that was the advantage earlier on that we're seeing inside each other's households of course if we're seeing that these an inequity of the way that we're working if as if i'm dialing in from uh next to the the cooker and i'm dialing into you in your and your capacious home study then actually you're cementing some of those those challenges that i mentioned earlier on that you know identity groups might find themselves not coalescing around a shared sense of community but more feeling this doesn't feel equitable and it doesn't feel fair so i think you know we are witnessing that this is very heavily and uneven in the way it's distributed and i think some people too hold the promise um of of deep work and actually that with this time away there can be more intentional and reflective work i saw a ton of posts early on in the pandemic um about isaac newton you know escaping the plague and writing all about you know gravity and and how you know this time can actually be a tremendous source of productivity and and so what would you say to this idea that in some ways remote work actually allows us to settle into these kind of deeper rhythms that can be a wellspring of creativity have you seen that sort of cut both ways or do you think it offers some promise there as well yeah and arguably that's the the dividend that we're we're reaping from working from home the in the in the old way that we would find ourselves beset with interruptions struggling to get anything done we found by the very nature of it that our job sort of became just managing air traffic control of emails coming in and out and you know increasingly if someone asked you what is your job well my job is emails and meetings and we sort of was taken a step from trying to deconstruct what we were charged with doing and it rather became my job is just to manage inputs and outputs it's uh you know managing sort of the the intra and the outrage of the the metaphor and of course um most definitely i think the reason why a lot of people are feeling that they're able to work more productively is because when we are able to to silence those noises for the first time we do feel the opportunity of getting into a state of flow the opportunity of getting into a state of deep work again this isn't isn't fully evenly distributed i think you know cal newport this sort of the originator the person who coins the the phrase deep work and talks very easily about being able to turn off notifications and and putting himself into a monk mode and getting a lot of work done but you know back to the experience of these things is isn't evenly distributed um one of my my famous favorite business writers is uh is carrie coop professor carrie cooper and and he talks all the time about the line manager lottery and if we've got a boss who wants us to be online all the time then even that escape of getting into a a moment where we're thinking we're getting work done just isn't an easily accessible thing for us so most definitely i think the the thing that a lot of us will want to preserve is this sense that we can get work done it is worth giving it's like cautionary note because um if we if we do want to preserve a hybrid nature of the way that we're working i think it's very easy that we could find ourselves making some of the mistakes that some of the the originators of remote working first discovered so you know as the technology has been around for us to work remotely for 10-15 years there are some firms who really sort of laid the foundations for that and what they often discovered is that they didn't intentionally set about having no office but they just permitted their workers to work from home whenever they wanted work remotely whenever they wanted and so the the freedom that that gave was of course incredibly inspiring if you were trying to attract new talent but what they discovered very quickly is that they'd kept the office for some of those other functions that are talked about before meeting people by accident the the moments where we we want to bring a sense of team cohesion and when their colleagues made journeys into those offices what they discovered was that without a plan the office is robbed of one of its secret superpowers which is that it's a network and it has a network effect and so if i venture into the office and i know that three-quarters of my most intelligent most creative colleagues are going to be there around me it's just this incredible resource to plug into suddenly i'm taking advantage of all of this power of my colleagues and of course if we go down a completely autonomous route if we allow people to work from home whenever they want work remotely unshackled of course what we're doing then is we're removing the power to plug into that um that main frame of a collective brain so i think we are going to find ourselves in a situation where we maybe construct our offices in a different way they're constructed around more communal meeting spaces more opportunities for us to gather and just spontaneously and talk more probably performative meeting spaces to bring outside customers and and business partners in but we'll probably have uh and it might feel counter-cultural but we'll probably have some rules where we say we want everyone in the office on tuesday or we want all of the uh all of the events team in on thursday we want all of the new business team in on wednesday and then people can plug into those networks whenever they want so i do think we're probably going to migrate to a different version if if there is a scenario where some firms go back to working five days a week i suspect it's because they'll go into this interim stage which is deeply dissatisfying for them where no one feels part of anything anymore it feels like it's got the worst aspect of working from home and the worst aspect to the office and i think probably it might seem against the spirit of the moment we're in but whenever we get out of this creating some intentional rules and some some rules of engagement quite often restrictions lead to better creativity and i think that's what we're going to find ourselves doing i love that and i know in your podcast you've been talking about rituals a bit and and maybe to bring this we don't have a ton of time left but as a final question for those who are listening and who might have some some of those elements of the surveillance boss or you know the employee looking to sort of access a bit more creativity during this moment what what kinds of advice would you have for them or practices or rituals that they could start incorporating into their remote work life that might you know help them um you know have that liberation moment or you know have access to kind of that deep work that we were talking about earlier yeah i mean there's multiple things there one thing that i encountered when i was talking to people about community was that someone said increasingly the role of a community leader is thinking about moments that create energy and and thinking about what you can do with them and um and i think that was really instructive for me because it evolves the way that we think about leaders full stop if our leaders jobs are going to be whether it's we're working remotely or we're working in a hybrid model but if our job if our leaders are going to try and create moments of energy where we feel part of something or moments of energy that are filled with ideation then the the leader becomes a conductor of those moments and i think very easily we can find ourselves otherwise again back to that managing air traffic control of inputs and outputs for me like the idea that a leader is the conductor of moments of energy is something that bridges between this this liminal interim space that we're in right now and something that's maybe a touch more enduring and permanent so i think reframing those things rituals are a really important part of that so there might be times where there's these rituals about celebration these rituals about togetherness you know i think more than anything what every team is going to benefit from when we get out of this is getting everyone together for a great meal eating together can be a massively transformational moment so i think those rituals i think the more we try and frame them in our minds they can be these moments of forging togetherness and building the trust that we've we've spoken about being so important wonderful thank you i'm afraid that's all the time we have but really appreciate you joining today bruce and just giving space and time to unpack this really important trend that we're seeing around remote work um you've brought so much insight and just practical guidance to the conversation today so i'm definitely um you know leaving with ideas for how we can create some serendipity for at the rsa with our teams and fellows and even thinking about you know the conductor and harnessing some of that energy for you know remote christmas parties and holiday parties and what that could look like um so to everyone watching i hope this has given you a flavor of the information and inspiration you can find bruce's book the joy of work and on the eat sleep work repeat podcast both of which i highly recommend links to buy and subscribe will be in the sidebar chat here and across rsa events social media do you keep up with the rsa's channels for news of upcoming events in our good works series as well as information on how you can get involved with the work of our growing global fellowship plus all the latest insights from our policy and research teams including a brand new report from the rsa future of workcenter who is at risk work and automation in a time of covid19 all that's left for me is to say thank you again to bruce stasley and thank you all for watching take care you

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Length: 42min 24sec (2544 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020