The Coronavirus Pandemic as New Work Boost?
How the disruption caused by the pandemic could have been a wake-up call for leadership.
One can speculate much about this astonishing inertia in transforming organizations and leadership culture towards a more “species-appropriate keeping” of knowledge workers. The pressure of suffering was not significant enough, or it increased so slowly, similar to the water temperature of the finally cooked frog.
The singularity of the coronavirus pandemic abruptly changed this in the spring of 2020 and opened up entirely new perspectives for many knowledge workers and organizations. The uncertainty and confusion led to a significant rethink and reorientation, reflected in what economist Anthony Klotz finally called “The Great Resignation” in 2021.1
Employees in the US have been quitting their jobs at an unusually high rate since the second half of 2021. Although some of those resignations were postponed because, at the start of the pandemic, everyone was happy to have a secure job, this explains the increase only partly. Even though the situation seems to be stabilizing again, as the results of JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) from October 20242 show, the pandemic has given many people a moment to pause and reflect.
The pandemic, with its drastic countermeasures, the politically fueled and massively media-amplified fear, and, last but not least, the experience of illness or death, has prompted many to reflect on their own lives and career choices. Everyone has those moments at the major crossroads of one's life. However, the pandemic hit the whole world simultaneously; thus, those individual moments of recollection manifest as a global trend.
In addition to this psychological burden, working changed for most knowledge workers abruptly and fundamentally. And that was a revelation for many. Knowledge work was finally freed from time and space and became fully digital. One may quipingly conclude that digitalization has been driven much more by COVID-19 than by CDOs, CIOs, or CEOs in the last decade. “A crisis is a productive state. You simply have to eliminate its aftertaste of catastrophe”. This bon mot by Max Frisch also applies to this crisis. To contain the spread of the coronavirus, we were forced to learn distributed digital collaboration in virtual space at a previously unimaginable speed. The pandemic has triggered much reflection on the future of work, and at the same time, it forced us to find creative solutions.
This Manifesto for Humane Leadership was initially motivated by the question of how leadership must change in transitioning from a more traditional to a more agile organization. Ultimately, it is irrelevant where the impetus to rethink the role of management and turn to a more humane form of leadership comes from. Be it, as for Peter Drucker, the profound realization that knowledge workers need to be managed radically differently (see “Species Appropriate Keeping of Knowledge Workers”) or whether it is an agile transformation that raises this question of new leadership again. Or be it the pressure caused by the disruption of collaboration triggered by a global pandemic and what we have experienced and learned along the way.
For example, I have learned much about the value of time flexibility and autonomy. My wife and I have three children, and even with our two elder daughters, Marie and Ella, I have always tried to spend a lot of time with the family (parental leave, less traveling, reducing evening events, careful balancing of extra miles, etc.). Compared to our youngest, however, I didn't get to see much of their early years: Valentin was born in January 2020, and I was in the home office a lot during his first three years. In addition, our eldest daughter started school in 2020, and I have always been able to help her with homework and homeschooling and give her moral support. I've also never been as fit as during this time because it was so easy to squeeze a short run somewhere into my schedule. This seamless integration of work and private life led to a better balance and less stress for me—and ultimately to better performance.
Unlike many others, I knew the value of autonomy and being fully in charge of my time already before the pandemic, as I had taken the unsatisfactory step from abundant time flexibility in our start-up to a classic presence culture with 8 hours or more in the office in the BMW Group IT (see Chapter 1). Our small consulting firm initially had no office at all and later only a small one where we met once a week as a management team. We were at the client's premises or working from home most of the time. After all, a consultant needs to work with a customer instead of sitting in our office to earn money. That was common sense back then.
Part of my pain of adaptation when I moved to BMW in 2015 stemmed from the corporate world's rigidity regarding where and when work is done. My pain was undoubtedly exacerbated by the fact that I would have liked to spend more time with my family after the birth of our first daughter in 2014.
The pandemic has shown many people how fulfilling it can be to integrate work and private life flexibly. This certainly has a local aspect because this “work-life integration” can only occur at the employee's residence. However, local flexibility alone is of little use if constant availability is expected and the work is packed so tightly that it boils down to the tiring pattern of “eat, sleep, zoom, repeat” many of us experienced in the first year during the pandemic.
Remote work, therefore, is a misnomer. Its primary benefit is time flexibility rather than the ability to work from anywhere. We should remember that when imposing return-to-office orders, as so many companies have done now after the pandemic. The issue is not that people have to be physically in an office again but rather that being in the office at certain fixed hours reduces their ability to integrate life and work flexibly. That's a deal breaker for many.
Leadership at a Distance
As we all have witnessed, the collaboration between knowledge workers can be moved into virtual space overnight. Unfortunately, leadership culture and managerial practices cannot be changed at the push of a button. The question often asked at the beginning of the pandemic, “How do I check whether my employees are doing their work from home?” is an unintended oath of disclosure of the manager. The micromanager had already been obsolete for quite a while, but he is finally bankrupt in the era of distributed collaboration.
As remote work became the new normal, trust issues became evident. The health crisis led to a confidence crisis. Remote leadership worked well for leaders who relied more on purpose and trust and less on command and control. Where this was not the case, many managers unintentionally revealed their questionable image of humanity while secretly hoping for an imminent return to the previous culture of presence.
The past years of enforced distributed working could also have been an opportunity to switch from input to impact. After all, the correlation of presence in the office with performance had never been very high. In knowledge work, the results count. When, how, and where those are achieved doesn't matter. This realization has long existed in companies such as Basecamp3 or Red Hat4, which are primarily distributed and organized according to this principle of meritocracy. Some other organizations had this insight during the pandemic and switched entirely to remote5. However, most companies have miserably missed this unique opportunity.
The famous poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost ends with these lines6: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” In the same way, managers and their organizations are faced with the choice between the overgrown path towards leadership based on meaning, trust, and self-organization on the one hand and the well-trodden path of classic hierarchical management with command and control on the other.
This choice has been there forever, but in this global crisis, it has become even more dramatic, and it no longer seems to be a decision between good and better but rather a question of whether to be or not to be.
Last week I published the first part of the second chapter of my book; check it out here:
Persistent in Efforts, Modest in Expectations
The yearning for a new and better form of cooperation where we can create value not just despite but because of valuing people is greater than ever. Taylorism and industrialization have degraded people to resources. Back then, only the labor of the unskilled worker was in demand, and Henry Ford once complained that he always got a brain when asking just…
The next chapter will follow next Friday. In case you want to read on as soon as possible, the book is available on Amazon in many countries as hardcover, paperback, and for your Kindle. (also on Leanpub). And all my German readers can get the German edition in every book store.
Arianne Cohen, “How to Quit Your Job in the Great Post-Pandemic Resignation Boom,” Bloomberg Businessweek, May 10, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-10/quit-your-job-how-to-resign-after-covid-pandemic.
“JOLTS,” Economic Policy Institute, accessed October 3, 2024, https://www.epi.org/indicators/jolts/.
Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, and David Heinemeier Hansson, ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever (London: Vermilion, 2010).
Jim Whitehurst, The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance (Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press, 2015).
Kathryn Vasel, “These Companies Decided to Go Fully Remote -- Permanently | CNN Business,” CNN, January 27, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/27/success/full-time-remote-decision-pandemic/index.html.
Robert Frost, “A Group of Poems,” The Atlantic, August 1, 1915, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1915/08/a-group-of-poems/306620/