Thank you Hitendra for a warm welcome and introduction. I really appreciate being here.

Yeah. In some ways, we are going through an unprecedented phenomenon. But imagine if you had one recollection of last year. Around this time, you would have gone to sleep and woken up. We have had a battering from the pandemic. Our roads are empty, offices and schools are empty. People are doubling down on working from home. From that point of view, working from home had suddenly shifted. It used to be a benefit that could have been retracted any time. And if your leaders did that, Marissa Mayer famously retracted this benefit in 2013, though it's continuing to grow as a preference, especially among the younger generation. But it was a benefit. However, the pandemic has made a huge shift. It became a business continuative contingency arrangement. It is now viewed as a productivity initiative. And it could be something that could be here for a long time or perhaps changes forever. So given this transition, I was intrigued to study the phenomenon.

It's a mixed method study. The study itself was about one of the factors influencing employees and managers in working from home during the transition because of COVID 19. That was the topic. We had a quantitative side to it, and they had about five hundred and eighty responses from people across the world, across age groups, across industries and across types of organizations. Once we had that data and analyzed it for its salient insights, we then had focus groups from among the participants to give us some other details. We want to not only to look at the data, but also to understand one level deeper in terms of human stories that people attach to the data. We asked people to explain to us why they said that managers experience more stress and anxiety during such times. Then we did an open the study on a group of senior managers. We asked how they make decisions for your organization? That was the journey we went through over a period of three months.

It was an extremely interesting three months, because even during this time, people started settling down. We did the survey in April, and at that time, people were still negotiating their equation with working from home as an organizational initiated drive, as opposed to benefit. And now people have settled down. I think we are now in a different phase in the first phase. What I found was that organizations felt it was not as bad as they thought it would be, but employees thought it was not as good an arrangement as they thought it would be. We are now in some cases six months into the journey, and if organizations are not wanting to go back to office space, people are saying no. So, we are still in a gridlock with many organizations still figuring out what is the new equation going forward. The study is not over. We have an early glimpse of what people are thinking, but I do believe that this is going to be a longitudinal study which is trying to see the evolution of people's framing of the issue over a period of time.

I think the first one is a great collage of people's perspectives. And I think it got reinforced in my study as well. I would say the key findings from the study were as follows. Firstly, most people felt that they were pretty effective in working from home. However, if you look at the independent variables such as communication, technology, behavior and psychology. communication was not a problem; technology was not a problem. Technology is so important, if you didn't have it, people felt disoriented. In terms of the psychological aspect such as managing schedules, isolation, managing the children, and dividing the work between yourself and your spouse, those were things you are not ready for, and that happened suddenly. So, people are having some difficulty navigating through that. The task itself was not an issue. Yeah, people are experiencing a little more comfort because they have worked out the kinks in their life, but I think there's still some work to be done. What it tells you is that people have actually settled down. And I think that's a good place to be if you are put up in front of an organization. The challenge for them to think through is, how am I going to get people back to office?

Let me share this with you. Suppose you are a mom with a couple of small kids and you're a manager with a globally distributed team. This lady shared with me that she gets up the morning at 5:30 and starts getting on calls with Asia in the morning, Europe in the afternoon or 10 o'clock in the evening. She gets on the American workforce. While she's doing that, she also has to take care of kids who are now at home. That's really tough on her, because she had to make some tradeoffs between work and her children. The fact that she was finding it difficult to juggle with all that.

Another is of a young man who was working in Bangalore. He was staying in a paying-guest accommodation as he is originally from a village. This person is saying that "I don't have a desk; I don't have a chair. I'm sitting on my bed working for 12 hours. The restrooms are closed outside and depend on my landlord to get me a sandwich. I'm Muslim, so I'm fasting as well. And I can only connect with my parents at 10:30 in the night." He says he is really struggling by, like being locked in a situation. "I feel I'm actually at the end, and I don't know how to work my way out of this captivity."

Another person said, "I actually feel the need to go out and hug somebody. Forget social distancing. Forget physical distancing. I need that human connection." And we now know that the absence of human connection is as dangerous as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. There is medical evidence about isolation, creating the same dynamic as a health hazard as smoking cigarettes a day. It's something tangible for us to really think about as people navigate their way through a very difficult period. So, you not only have to look at the common step, but there are different personas involved that we need to factor into account here.

I think one of the things that it tells us is we had become dependent on external stimuli for such a long time. And, even if you are not staying at home, most of the stimuli you're getting is from the news. The news is as much of a health hazard these days as the pandemic because it drives you up. I think the profound comment that you make is very important, because I do believe as people start thinking about mental health and well-being, you're starting to see the fact that people are gravitating more towards the internal part of the equation. Meditation, gratitude and so on and so forth. And I heard a comment from somebody the other day, a CEO, saying that I've been using Headspace for the last couple of years. Maybe like fitness was, say fifteen, twenty years ago. Mental wellbeing is going to become mainstream, and I hope it does.

The big question that we need to think through is, "are we working from home, or are we living at work?" That's the question. And from that point of view, I'm even wondering. One of the participants pointed out maybe it's not work-life balance, maybe we should think about this as a work-life conflict because we are not in balance. Another person said, we need to think about it differently yet again, because when we are talking about work-life balance at work, it was about life intruding into work. I used to go to the office, and I had to go and attend my daughter's basketball game or a music concert. And life was to improve. And to what? While you're at home at work, work is intruding into your life. We've got children to take care of. You got health care issues and your parents to take care of. And therefore, that conflict is inevitable. Some people know how to manage it. It raises the question, how are people managing it? And the ostensible way people seem to be managing it, I need to take care of myself- Nutrition, exercise, sleep, gratitude. Those are important. We have forgotten a very important part in this equation, and that's the work. If you're taking care of your physical self and mental self, what you're saying is I'm trying to attend to the balance part of my life in my spare time. But you're still spending bulk of your time in work. If the work itself is not enriching, you're still going to have that imbalance.

So, I'm thinking about a new phrase. It's not what life-balance should be, but work-life enrichment, where work itself is a source of nourishment and enrichment. And we are discounting that. I believe for me, that points to a few things. One is organizations look at work-life balance as a benefit issue- let's outsource it, do employee assistance program. Let's talk about childcare, let's talk about time off or sick leave. That is one part of the equation. But if organizations say, okay, I am not just going to adopt my people for their skills, but for their potential and dreams, I'm going to create an organizational culture that allows people to grow, that allows the managers to be supportive of their employees and the co-workers to be supportive, those are the three dimensions. In my research, I found organizational culture, manager and the co-worker. These three are key drivers of work. So work moves from just a job to something that's more profound, say a calling. You are then able to take the positive energy from work and transfer it to life. If work is not a calling, then it becomes a drain. So, I believe work needs to be energizing. And for that, we need to think about purpose in the workplace. Love in the workplace and socialization in the workplace. I do believe the energies that we talk about in Minnesota become a real muscle in making sure that the work part is enriching as well. If you don't have that, you're not going to be able to find equilibrium in this life.

Look at that. It tells you, if a leader is looking at this, they need to change the perspective of how they think about office. Firstly, the good news, it's not binary. It's not either or, it's both. Secondly, Siemens has done a phenomenal job when the CEO said, listen, in future, you decide where you want to work, you decide where you're going to be most productive. And productivity doesn't mean present for me. And that shift is a very progressive shift organizations are making. And a lot of organizations are saying, OK, this is no more a contingency arrangement. This is a future of work reset. And in this, we said we're going to think about the worker and look at this very differently. A progressive organization would say, okay, I'm going to empower employees to determine where they want to work, when they want to work, and then create the environment to do so.

I think it's a big realization, just like when we now know, at least in the US, there's so much debate about children going back to school. When the child comes to school, you're not just talking about the brain coming to the school, you're talking about the child coming here, the baggage of issues around nutrition issues, around health issues, around domestic violence and so on. You're bringing the whole child to the school, not just the brain. In the same way, organizations need to realize that they're bringing the whole person, not just the skills, not just the ends. If you ask the question, my study reveals a couple of things. When you ask the employees what training they think they need to have? They talk about having training on work, home standards, work-life balance and management. But when you ask the question, what training would they like their leaders to have? They responded trust, empathy, emotional intelligence comes through as the top three, which tells you what they need from the organization.

I shared with you a story I heard from one of the focus group participants, and this person was on the autistic spectrum. He shared with me the fact that he really struggled in terms of picking up cues when we went to work from home. He was interrupting people when he should not be interrupting. He was silent when he needed to speak because he was missing all the cues. He said, my manager listened with her eyes, and she called me up and said, what's wrong? Help me understand. You don't seem to be where you should be. And is there something I can do to help you? Now, he was so grateful for that conversation. He said, listen, I'm on the spectrum, though. I'm really struggling to figure it out, the normal cues that I would get under such circumstances. The lady then said, OK, I've figured out a protocol. In the beginning, she explained to them that one of the colleagues is finding it difficult to follow everybody. And therefore, she's instituting these rules to make sure that the person is not left behind. Can you imagine the motivation this individual feel about the fact that the group and the manager was particularly sensitive to the needs that he had?

I can talk about the fact that the managers have a responsibility of listening with their eyes and providing emotional first aid when it's required. It's not what we normally do as managers. However, in a trusting relationship when you feel your managers arms around you saying that I'm here for you, you feel the sense of balance. Five relationships that have all been upended right now, person-family, person- boss, person-subordinate and person-client. In one organization, they found that the salespeople had higher blood pressure over the last three, four months because they could not interact with the clients the way they used to. And finally, person-occupation. How are you? How is your career going to be affected? What does it mean enough? So, all five of them have gone through a disruption. The one that fills the gap the most is person-manager. The second is person-family, you feel is within your control. But the manager is not so. How organizations train their managers to listen, to create trust, to be empathetic, to have the right amount of emotional intelligence in nurturing in times like this are some key competencies that are starting to emerge that you wouldn't have found in a normal face-to-face moment.

Honestly, there is some really good thinking going on in technology. Technologies to connect, collaborate. Is still more of an issue. So how do you collaborate, literally? How do you connect virtually? It's still evolving. So, there are some new technologies that are starting to appear. You can do a collaborative meeting very well. What I'm sensing is managers that spend time with their teams and say, how do we do this? What protocols do we need to establish? How do I check in with you? Because initially some people said many of the check-ins appeared as checkups. People are checking up on me as opposed to checking in on me, which is a trust equation. But if you did just like this lady with this autistic. But how do I relate with you? How do I create the environment? That's a good way of not waiting for the technological solutions, but we're allowing for the group itself to come up with appropriate vehicles through which they would collaborate.

Those boundary settings are very important. I think what becomes very clear is as we go back, you got to keep in mind, our entire work design is based on physical work that's been so embedded into our consciousness over the last couple hundred years. Now we must consciously transfer that to do work, both virtual work design and virtual work experience, that it comes from very different ways of figuring out how you connected with each other. We have to consciously switch over to think about the virtual space as the primary space, not the physical space. So, you've got to designing virtual workspaces, designing virtual employee experience, and creating virtual intelligence competencies - three important barometers of the future of work.

Absolutely. I think from my point of view, if we did not view this moment as a transformational opportunity, we would be missing the point. It's never become more important that what we found out is that is an employee is the sum of his contributions on the part of those contributions are related to tasks. Much of the contributions are related to good organization's citizenship. It's no different in society right now, realizing that we are citizens of society, we have more than our family to take care of. Therefore, those connections as organization's citizens must be really strong for us to also find meaning and wisdom. Unless you are in a position to share and expand, you're not going to get much from the outer world or from the context. Everybody has to do it. And that's when organizations and institutions find purpose, meaning and relevance in society of today.

Yeah, I think there are a couple of surprises in my study. One was managers were facing more stress than employees. I think organizations would be better served to rethink some of their processes. Goal setting, performance management, KPIs. I think they need to be rethought and simplified in this environment. The second thing we found was that younger workers wanted to come back to office more than older workers. Likewise, startup workers wanted to come back to office space more than workers in major position. And the point behind that to be explored was that younger workers haven't yet got the relationships and therefore have a stronger affinity distance. They are not operationally distant or technologically distant but there is a sizable affinity distance that they want to bridge by coming back to the office. The second thing is on startups is that unfortunately, their processes are not yet robust. That's shared understanding of the context. So. for them, it creates a lot of confusion if they are not putting their mind in terms of evolving that process. So, people in startups also find it difficult in terms of working from home. Those are some unique elements of my research that I thought I should share with you.

Look at that. Developing strong bonds with my colleagues, meeting the demands of my work in public. It shows you how important your connection with your colleagues is. At the end of the day, what comes through for me is that life working from home does help on self-interest. But working from the office or in a shared space helps in common interest. People want both to take care of their self-interest, but also want to address the common interests. And common interest is what's our meaningful purpose. How can we grow together through compassion and love and empathy? Those are very real human motivators. So, I think this discussion of future of work is less about technology and more about humanity.

An important lesson is that this attention gives energy, not just time. So that's why when somebody calls you and says, how are you doing? Demonstrating that attention charges people, energizes people, and it's an important leadership tool to help.

It is so true. I can tell you personally of a recent introduction. I'm so grateful for a young lady, a colleague of mine, that reached out to me and my wife saying, "hey, I know that you're over 60. I know you may find it difficult to go outside and buy groceries. Any time you need anything, please ask us. We will be very happy to help you. Write your groceries. Take up your medicines." And that one small email has stood with me over the last four months as a symbol of this person reaching out to me and wanting to help. We have not had the opportunity of taking a anything, but that human worker has called my heart, so to speak. And I believe that if you all can do that once a day or once a week even, I think the world is going to be much better, not let alone your workplace. It is a very important time for us to do that in full display.

As we're coming close of our time here together, I think what has emerged for me as the most important here is that we need to be conscious. We need to have this intentionality so that we are not just blindly adhering to certain traditions and norms of our culture, our workplace, or how we have done things until now. But each of us must take responsibility as being co-creators of a new world. We have to discover the future of the future. We cannot just assume that it will just like come here on its own. As each of us is going through that discovery and learning and experimentation, any final thoughts or words to advise and guide each on actions that we can take on in the next few days to accelerate and deepen that discovery in our great conversion experience? This is when we know of what the gaps are on. For me, that would be three things, empathetic listening, giving emotional first aid and forging connections. On the personal side, finding purpose at work, finding, giving love and compassion at work, and finding growth at work. In some ways, what we are talking about is how can we use this as an opportunity to grow as human beings.

Thank you for the opportunity.