Hi Amy,

We expect to see lots more research coming post-covid, but there are quite a few examples in our longer webinar ‘Changing Workplace’ about how companies are planning to work differently but hold on to their culture and innovation etc.

Two additional examples here around encouraging collaboration and connectivity:

– The Chief Heart Officer, Claude Silver  at VaynerMedia holds online sessions that they call ’12 at 12′. It’s a way to bring together people from around the world to honestly speak about how they were feeling and doing and just doing fun activities such as ice breakers to get to know each other. No other agenda! You can hear more on our podcast with Claude.

– Ericsson is taking a personalised approach to their future of work approach. They are creating personas to understand employee needs and wants and also to understand how to connect people in the future. They did a detailed study of 21 different activities that people performed during the workday and found that individually driven activities functioned well when working from home. Whereas activities that required innovation and creativity worked better from an office/team working perspective. So when they think of their future workplace design it will be more around those activities that are difficult to translate virtually for example collaboration, shared learning etc.

– An interesting stat from the Remote Employee Experience Index–

The interactions that have the most significant impact on workers’ sense of belonging are:

·        Biweekly team celebrations to recognise team members or achievements (+9.9)

·        Monthly team-building activities (+9.7)

·        Monthly games or unstructured group social activities (+8.1)

Also here are a few links to external research that might be helpful:

– A study from Quartz and Qualtrics to understand how culture has changed since the pandemic began

– A Deloitte report titled Delve deeper into changing organisational culture and mindset Learnings from COVID-19

– The World of Work in 2021 

– MIT SMR/Glassdoor Culture 500 annual index

Hope this helps.

Best wishes,

Disruptive HR Team

This response is incredibly helpful – thank you Karen and thank you @Amy Brand for asking the question initially.  Three months on and the discussions about post pandemic working and the impact for our culture are continuing!