People & Culture

Ready for things to get back to normal? You're not alone, but the leaders who force a full return to the office may create the very "Turnover Tsunami" they fear. With Wollard and Shuck's antecedents of engagement, GM's "Work Appropriately" policy under Mary Barra, and Bob Dylan's reminder that the times they are a-changin', this article makes the research case for remote-work flexibility and the leadership posture required to retain talent on the other side of the pandemic.

A third of workers believe their jobs are meaningless, and the disconnection between individual effort and organizational outcomes costs firms $125 to $190 billion a year in lost productivity and turnover. William Forster Lloyd named the pattern in 1833 as the Tragedy of the Commons. No leader can eliminate it, but every leader can narrow it, through mission clarity, compelling vision, identifiable contribution, and the systems that tie each person's work to the firm's outcom

ROI is the hammer in every leader's toolbox. Applied to executive coaching and employee development, it becomes the wrong tool. Andrews and Laing documented a case where training ran negative for three years before producing a 30% return by year five. A meta-analysis by De Meuse, Dai, and Lee found 70 to 94% of coaching recipients sustained real behavior change. The returns are real. The finance department's ruler just can't measure them. A better question: return on induing.

Culture isn't what a firm says it believes. It is the stories people keep telling each other. Myths are humanity's oldest tool for transmitting values, and the same mechanism operates in every organization whether leaders notice or not. The war stories, origin tales, and hero accounts that circulate teach new members what matters here. The pandemic will become your company's lore. Leaders decide now what version gets remembered, or accept the one that forms by default.

Leaders get pulled between two supposedly opposing goals: engage people harder or protect their work-life balance. A September 2020 meta-analysis in Human Resource Development Review synthesized 37 studies and found engagement and work-life balance are not opposites at all, they are reciprocal. High engagement raises work-life balance; high work-life balance raises engagement. The leadership task is not choosing one. It is designing the conditions that let both compound.

When 44.4% of newly remote workers reported declining mental health, the culprit wasn't distance, it was cadence. Wilson, O'Leary, and colleagues call it the "perceived proximity paradox": geographic closeness doesn't guarantee connection, and miles apart doesn't guarantee isolation. What actually binds remote teams is the rhythm of contact leaders set. Frequency without meaning feels like surveillance. Meaning without frequency feels like abandonment. Leaders are now digital

Leaders spend enormous energy on mission, vision, and values, and then wonder why their employees still feel disconnected from the work. The missing link is relationships. Research shows that meaningful work depends less on what leaders say about it and more on the social networks surrounding employees while they do it. In a post-proximity world, great leaders have to build those networks on purpose. Chance encounters are no longer going to do the job for them.

Nearly half the US workforce went home in 2020, and the digital transition was easier than anyone expected. Preserving trust turned out to be the hard part. As surveillance software ("tattleware," "nanny-ware," "spyware") flooded into remote workplaces, leaders had to decide what they actually wanted employees to believe about their organization. The technology answers whether you can monitor every keystroke. Leadership asks whether you should, and what you lose when you do.

You rarely turn to the children's section for business insight. But reading The Velveteen Rabbit to my daughter this week, the Skin Horse's monologue about becoming 'Real' stopped me cold — and it reframed everything I've been thinking about this summer. Not about scaling businesses. About what we owe each other. Whether to duck and cover or jump into the current. As for me and my house, we're paddling like mad.