Hey Tiger! Sometimes you gotta be up to be down. Sometimes you gotta flip the narrative. How can you do more by doing less? Less scrolling negative social feeds, more nourishing the mind. Less procrastination, more creative inspiration. Take a quick prowl through our curated jungle of positive news bites. They say a Tiger can’t change its stripes, but it can read between the lines.
Working from home? Or shirking from home? The debate is firmly on the agenda with bosses like Elon Musk ordering people back to the office clashing with recent surveys showing that 91% of remote employees would like to continue their hybrid or remote working. It feels as though we are being asked to pick sides, when clearly a middle ground offers the most fertile soil to balance productivity with a future-focused culture. Given this debate is most relevant to the knowledge economy, do we know who’s driving which agenda and why?
Home is where the heart is, so if we can master the art of loving our work, we can do our best work from anywhere. Enjoy the weekend prowl, Tigers.
hybrid /ˈhʌɪbrɪd/
noun
a thing made by combining different elements.
Listen: The do’s vs the don’ts of hybrid. It’s been two years since offices around the world were thrown into virtual environments to do their jobs, and now many leaders are itching to get everyone back in the office. But new evidence demonstrates that hybrid work can be good for people and organisations. Adam brings an economist and a management expert to weigh in on the science of hybrid work, and make a road map to success in the modern (sometimes virtual) workplace.
Read: Atlassian’s Dom Price thinks the WFH debate is missing the point. He asks, ‘Should we pine for the good old days of working 9-5, or do we invest in creating tomorrow’s good old days?’ While the great debate between working from home or working in the office wages on, fuelled by bold declarations from some of the world’s most influential leaders, Dom says it’s hard to understand why we’re so stuck on picking a winner from an otherwise pointless binary.
Watch: Flatten The Curve is a compilation video embracing the positive side of working from home, with animators from around the world contributing over 90 uplifting clips based on their time in lockdown. The project was initiated by London-based animators Kathrin Steinbacher and Emily Downe, who asked animators to submit a clip that would “highlight something positive they had experienced”. The animations are a reminder of the benefits that come with staying at home – from devoting energy to creative projects to spending time with pets (and, every now and then, a giraffe).
Read: Love working from home? Adam Schwab, CEO of Luxury Escapes questions whether ‘maybe you’re a ‘task filler’’ if you prefer WFH and warns that if your job can be done from Brighton or Parramatta or Chatswood, it can probably also be done from Bangalore or Johannesburg, for a lot less cost. He says the unsustainable nature of WFH has been the sleeper issue since the pandemic has drawn to an end; a privileged element of society decides whether it wants to return to normality. This article is hitting the mark with CEOs and executive teams who see great advantages in bringing people back to the office.
Listen: Will working from home work forever? The pandemic may be winding down, but that doesn’t mean we’ll return to full-time commuting and packed office buildings. Some believe working from home is the inevitable future, others believe ‘shirking’ from home has to stop. Either way, the greatest accidental experiment in the history of labour has lessons to teach us about productivity, flexibility, and even reversing the brain drain. But the team at Freakonomics tell us not to buy another dozen pairs of trackie-dacks (aka sweatpants) just yet.
Read: Research shows working from home is making us more productive. Stanford University professor Nicholas Bloom has been working with academics from the University of Chicago, ITAM, and MIT to conduct a large ongoing poll on employees' work arrangements and attitudes toward remote work. Self-reporting data shows that employees believe they are 9 per cent more productive working from home than they were in the office. Overlaid with objective data, research shows that engineers submitted more changes to code, call centre workers attended more calls per minute, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded data on growing output per hours worked. Are employers missing out by forcing people back to the office?
Listen: Does working from home work better for the environment? We would think so, but maybe not. It turns out sharing is caring when it comes to the office environment (and the kitchenette sandwich press). The way many of us work has changed forever following the pandemic, but it might surprise us to learn that the big shift to hybrid and remote work has spelled disaster for the environment. This episode looks at why that is, as well as some ways we and our employers can take control of our work-related environmental impact.
Quiz: How productive are you? Productivity is a measure of how much you accomplish – not how busy you are. Take the test and explore the tools.
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