<ul><li>Satya Nadella when came in was confused about how to position himself. To be clear what he can bring to the table to a global organisation with superstar founders.&nbsp;</li><li>He applied the first principle thinking to relook at some of the assumptions underlying the business model and ways of working at Microsoft.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Satya Nadella as a refounder to Microsoft

<ul><li>Recent acquisitions of Microsoft has been focused on building capacity and infrastructure in areas where they lacked.&nbsp;</li><li>Microsoft has been traditionally weak in the building of communities of its users as compared to other tech giants like Facebook, google or apple.&nbsp;</li><li>Hence Nadella's interest in acquiring Linkedin, Github and Minecraft has been aimed at that.&nbsp;</li><li>Moving away from the advocates of monopoly in previous decades, Microsoft has learned to embrace the power of communities through its collaboration with the OpenAI movement.</li></ul>

Microsoft learns to use networks and embrace openness

<ul><li>The morale of the business team of 'Bing' the search engine was down because it was a loss-making business. However, Nadella sensed an opportunity.&nbsp;</li><li>He looked at the world-class talent and resources at bing and figured that the same resources could be used at developing similar features for cloud offerings.&nbsp;</li><li>He brought both teams together and worked jointly to create market-leading products in the domain of the cloud.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Leading Emergent Innovation 

<ul><li>Empathy at the core business. He believed understanding customer unmet and uninformed needs required high levels of empathy. The thought the same levels of empathy need to be extended internally to employees as well. This helped Microsoft to transform from a metric-based, process-based organisation to a more humane one.&nbsp;</li><li>He saw performance not as a zero-sum game but a win-win situation for everyone. Thus having a performance management system based on a forced ranking of employees didn't make much sense to him. The overhaul of the same led to the improvement of Microsoft culture.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Correcting the culture

Management

Who are 'refounders' and what do they bring to the table?

<ul><li>The organisation is going to move into working from home from __________ month to _______ month for _______roles. Post that we would be moving into hybrid mode.&nbsp;</li><li>The organisation shall not allow work to be done beyond ____ pm in normal situations.&nbsp;</li><li>The organisation shall gain _______ benefits from _____ways of working.&nbsp;</li><li>This current plan is in experimental mode, we shall iterate as the organisation moves ahead and learns from you, our employees.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Communication template for organisations to bring clarity on virtual working 

<ul><li>I, the employee would like to spend ____ days in a week at home because it makes ______ work activities easier to execute.&nbsp;</li><li>I, the employee has concerns such as _____________ that promts me to opt for _______ way of working.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Data to be collected from employees to bring clarity on virtual working 

Leaders can take proactive steps to make workers feel more comfortable about going back to in-person work.

Remote Working

Leaders can take steps now to make employees feel supported and safe before they resume in-person work.

As more and more people get vaccinated against COVID-19, leaders and employees are starting to look ahead to a potential return to offices. Many organizations are considering a hybrid work model, in which teams come into the office a few days a week or a few key days a month. For employees who have felt isolated and siloed during the pandemic, the return to the workplace will be exciting. For those who have taken to remote work or have lingering health concerns, it will be anxiety-inducing. For many, it will be both. Simply put, the return to offices will be emotional.

As a leader, your role is to give your people as much certainty about the future as possible. And while no one really knows what the world will look like six months from now, there are a few steps you can take today to make your people feel supported and safe ahead of an eventual return to the workplace.

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Be transparent. Don’t wait to communicate what you’re thinking, even if there’s limited information to share. For example, go ahead and say, “We’re definitely going to be working from home through July and are considering shifting to a hybrid work model after that.” Uncertainty breeds anxiety, and saying something is far better than remaining completely silent. Even if you can’t offer a specific answer yet, your teams will feel comforted knowing that you’re not actively ignoring the issue.

As questions come up, answer them as honestly as you can. And once you do have a plan, make sure you fill managers in on all the details so they can communicate expectations clearly and confidently to their teams. Remember: The goal of transparency is to earn trust and reduce unnecessary stress.

Surface concerns early on. To support your people, start by getting a better understanding of where they are. Surfacing preferences and concerns early on can help you pull rather than push your teams back to the office. (After the past year, it will be nearly impossible to use the excuse that your organization is just not set up for remote work and that people need to be back in the office.)

You might send out a survey with questions like these:

<ul><li>How many days a week would you like to work in the office? </li><li>What will make the return to the office easier for you? </li><li>Are there any extenuating circumstances you’re willing to share that might make a return to the office especially hard or scary for you? </li><li>What types of work would you prefer to do from the office — for example, large staff meetings, new team meetings, brainstorming sessions, etc.? </li><li>What types of work would you prefer to do from home? </li> </ul>

Be sure to share the survey results. If you want employees to be in the office five days a week again, and the survey shows that employees want to be in the office two days a week, it’s a bad move to simply ignore that information. Instead, use it as a jumping-off point for honest conversations and productive compromise. Loop employee resource groups into those discussions to make sure any plans you put in place take the needs of all of your employees into consideration.

Discuss expectations. As where you work becomes less important, when you work will take center stage. As part of your hybrid work plan, come up with a list of communication norms that will support productivity and prevent burnout.

When you’re working from home, it’s too easy to just … keep working, all the time. In 2020, <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-new-future-of-work-research-from-microsoft-into-the-pandemics-impact-on-work-practices/">Microsoft found </a>that the number of messages its employees sent after standard work hours doubled, and that people who did not work much on Saturday and Sunday pre-COVID-19 saw their weekend work triple. It’s no wonder that 71% of knowledge workers have <a dir="ltr" href="https://resources.asana.com/rs/784-XZD-582/images/PDF-FY21-Global-EN-Anatomy%20of%20Work%20Report.pdf">experienced burnout </a>over the past year.

Example norms might include the following:

<ul><li>All meetings will have a video link to ensure that remote team members can join. </li><li>For large all-hands meetings where some people will be in the office and some remote, everyone will still call in individually from their computers so those who are remote don’t feel left out. </li><li>Everyone, whether they’re in the office or not, will be expected to be online (within reason) during a subset of normal work hours (for example, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. PST) to have some overlap with all coworkers. </li><li>Everyone will share what they are working on for the week in a group email or Slack thread. </li><li>Leaders will call in to meetings from home at least one day a week to normalize remote work. </li> </ul>

Involve your people. A fresh start is a chance to reimagine what the workplace looks like, so make this planning process a creative endeavor. Try splitting employees into small focus groups to generate ideas for how to make the most of your office space and eventual in-person time. Bringing your people into the conversation can help surface better ways of working, break down silos that have formed over the past year, and make everyone more excited about the possibilities of getting together in an office again.

Highlight what your teams will gain with in-person time. In a survey conducted in late 2020, <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-news/pages/hybrid-work-model-likely-to-be-new-norm-in-2021.aspx">PwC found </a>that over half of employees prefer working from home three days a week or more. Chances are high that not all of your people will be excited to come back to the office, especially if you’re asking them to come in more than a couple of days a week.

Instead of demanding that your teams get ready to be back in the workplace, focus on highlighting the benefits of getting together in person. If there were specific pre-COVID-19 culture events or celebrations that people enjoyed, share a plan for how you’ll restart them when everyone is together again. It’s likely that your people have also experienced some frustrations around digital communication or felt isolated at times. Remind them that getting together in person addresses both of those issues. According to PwC’s survey results, almost 90% of employees said that team collaboration and building relationships were much easier in person.

Present the change as an experiment. Humans resist change. Even though many people are looking forward to returning to the office, there will still be anxiety around the change — especially given that the details of the transition won’t be perfect at first. To ease people’s anxiety, frame the return to offices as an iterative process: Tell them that your organization will try Version 1 of a hybrid work setup at first and then iterate based on employee feedback. This will help people feel that it doesn’t have to be perfect in the beginning.

Though the return to offices might still be far off for your organization, it’s likely that most of your people are starting to think about it. By taking the steps above now, you can help employees feel more certain about the future, excited to reconnect with their colleagues, and supported by their leadership team.

Return to offices - What data is to be collected for better transition and decision making?

Organisations face 3 types of challenges during a pandemic:<ul><li>Traditional Demand: The need to satisfy the same customer demand as before but with a modified approach.&nbsp;</li><li>Emergent Demand: The need to satisfy a new customer demand that emerged from the pandemic</li><li>The time period of changes: Forecasting how long these changes will last, whether temporary changes are likely to disappear once the pandemic is over or sustained changes that will become a regular part of your organization’s operations going forward.</li></ul>

Organisational challenges during a pandemic

Adapters: Deliver the same products or services but likely with fewer resources<ul><li dir = "auto">Restaurants creating outdoor dining and consumer-goods&nbsp;</li><li dir = "auto">Reckitt Benckiser ramping up production of Lysol disinfectant spray to keep up with global demand</li><li dir = "auto">Flour, a bakery group based in Boston, has nine locations but couldn’t balance the demand for baked goods across its restaurants when they experienced changes in foot traffic under COVID-19 restrictions. In response, it centralised baking to increase the quality and consistency of food provided to customers with a much smaller workforce.</li></ul>

Innovation for addressing a pre-existing demand for a temporary period

The Optimiser: Reconfigure resources to satisfy existing sustained customer demand, by increasing the efficiency by which they deliver these products and services.<ul><li>Ikea, which had previously invested in augmented reality to help customers choose furniture without physically going to an Ikea store. During the pandemic, with foot traffic all but disappearing at times, the company decided to invest more in this new technology and added more than 2,000 products that customers could visualize from the comfort of their own homes.</li></ul>

Innovation for addressing a pre-existing demand for a sustained period

Trendsetter: Developing entirely new products or services that will continue to be in high demand post-pandemic.<ul><li>The U.S., Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) began a new effort to offer telemedicine appointments during the pandemic.&nbsp;</li><li>Doctors and nurses were required to learn how to use this new technology, develop new skills for providing care, and implement new routines to satisfy the emergent demand.</li><li>Competitive advantage by improving the user experience, reducing overhead, and satisfying its health customers by offering patients more flexibility in scheduling appointments.</li></ul>

Innovation for addressing a new demand for a sustained period

Trailblazer: Use existing resources to solve new problems they had never tackled before.&nbsp;<ul><li>Dyson, a company famous for innovation, saw that the world needed more medical equipment during the pandemic and recognized that it could produce ventilators.&nbsp;</li><li>&nbsp;Dyson developed an entirely new ventilator design — one that could actually be produced at a fraction of the cost of previous designs due to limitations in resources.&nbsp;</li><li>Alcohol distilleries producing hand sanitiser, fashion brands producing masks,</li><li>Pharmaceutical companies repurposing drugs to alleviate COVID-19 symptoms.</li></ul>

Innovation for addressing a new demand for a temporary period

<ul><li>Companies are often more attuned to using the traditional innovation process, which allows them to address a known problem with more strategic control and direction.&nbsp;</li><li>The coronavirus crisis has shown that it’s important for organizations and leaders to become more comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity — fundamental parts of the emergent innovation process</li></ul>

Traditional V. Emergent Innovations

<ul><li>Anchor their processes on the constraints of the solution rather than the clarity of the problem.</li><li>focusing on a narrow set of resources within the business, asking users how their products could be useful in new ways,&nbsp;</li><li>Iterating through several open-ended domains until a clear and specific problem emerges near the end of the process.</li></ul>

How to adopt emergent innovation in your organisation?

A framework to help leaders understand how they weathered COVID-19 and to keep leveraging their new innovation skills.

A new playbook can help leaders determine which changes will endure and when to invest more in opportunistic transformation.

While COVID-19 continues to cause devastating disruption to the global economy more than a year into the pandemic, it is also continuing to force <a dir="ltr" href="https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/what-a-crisis-teaches-us-about-innovation">remarkable innovation </a>across different industries. Companies have found new ways to sell, service, and operate during the crisis. But will opportunistic changes made during turbulent times also create opportunities for systematic growth after the pandemic passes?

It’s unlikely that fashion brands will still be making protective face coverings a couple of years from now or that barbers will be giving haircuts outdoors. However, many of us may still be working remotely or choose to see our doctors via telehealth appointments rather than losing valuable time to heavy commutes and in-person visits.

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At first glance, the adaptations businesses have made in response to COVID-19 may appear to be nothing more than entirely reactive responses to an unprecedented situation. However, innovation has always been a turbulent process of venturing into the unknown, and recent research can guide businesses to better understand how changes made in the past year can help them emerge from the pandemic stronger than before.<a dir="ltr" href="https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-framework-for-innovation-in-the-covid-19-era-and-beyond/?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_content=The%20Future%20of%20Work%20Is%20Through%20Workforce%20Ecosystems&amp;utm_campaign=Enews%20GEN%2008/31/21%20Best%20of%20%28So%20Far%29%20B#ref1">1 </a>The first key to this understanding is recognizing that there are two fundamentally different types of innovation; the second key is understanding that each type requires different problem-solving skills to successfully overcome challenges and pursue opportunities for growth.<a dir="ltr" href="https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-framework-for-innovation-in-the-covid-19-era-and-beyond/?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_content=The%20Future%20of%20Work%20Is%20Through%20Workforce%20Ecosystems&amp;utm_campaign=Enews%20GEN%2008/31/21%20Best%20of%20%28So%20Far%29%20B#ref2">2 </a>

We’ve analyzed a broad range of organizational responses to the coronavirus crisis over the past year through the lens of the latest research on innovation. The result is a powerful framework that can help business leaders discover new innovation capabilities within their organizations and determine how best to invest resources for long-term success.

Several of the most common innovation methodologies in organizations today — design thinking, lean startup, and <a dir="ltr" href="https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/an-interview-with-clayton-m-christensen/">“jobs to be done,” </a>to name but a few — share a common approach to problem-solving. First, you must identify the core problem or customer need to address. Then you can generate many different approaches to solving the problem and conduct various tests with users to determine the best possible solution. This approach works because it helps business leaders foster a culture of exploration while staying closely aligned with the existing mission and current objectives.

However, this process is not necessarily appropriate for all situations. For example, many businesses are operating in emerging industries such as the internet of things, personal robotics, or biohacking, where the specific customer problems are still unknown. In these situations, rather than trying to anchor on the problem and then searching for a solution, research shows that you can be more successful by anchoring on the solution (such as a new technology or patent) and then searching for a problem.<a dir="ltr" href="https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-framework-for-innovation-in-the-covid-19-era-and-beyond/?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_content=The%20Future%20of%20Work%20Is%20Through%20Workforce%20Ecosystems&amp;utm_campaign=Enews%20GEN%2008/31/21%20Best%20of%20%28So%20Far%29%20B#ref3">3 </a>Using this emergent innovation process allows organizations to take existing resources and explore entirely new business opportunities.<a dir="ltr" href="https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-framework-for-innovation-in-the-covid-19-era-and-beyond/?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_content=The%20Future%20of%20Work%20Is%20Through%20Workforce%20Ecosystems&amp;utm_campaign=Enews%20GEN%2008/31/21%20Best%20of%20%28So%20Far%29%20B#ref4">4 </a>Well-known examples include 3M and its invention of the Post-it Note; and Dyson, which has found many ways to reapply its vacuum technology to other product categories, such as hand sanitation, air purification, and hair care.

In the context of COVID-19, many businesses have reflexively adopted one or both types of innovation, resulting in new capabilities they can further refine and strategically deploy in the future. The challenge, however, is knowing which one to use and when.

We have developed a framework to help business leaders conduct this analysis. (See “Company Innovation Profiles During COVID-19.”) First, you can assess whether your organization’s response to the pandemic represents the traditional innovation process (satisfying the same customer demand as before but with a modified approach) or the emergent innovation process (satisfying a new customer demand that emerged from the pandemic). Second, you can forecast how long these changes will last, whether temporary changes that are likely to disappear once the pandemic is over or sustained changes that will become a regular part of your organization’s operations going forward.

By identifying where your organization fits in this framework, you can determine how best to leverage your experience from the past year to devise new innovation strategies that align with your future business goals.

1. The Adapter. The Adapter quadrant of our matrix is reserved for businesses that saw temporary changes to demand for products and services they already produced before the pandemic. This includes scenarios like restaurants creating outdoor dining and consumer-goods company Reckitt Benckiser ramping up production of Lysol disinfectant spray to keep up with global demand. Successful companies in this quadrant have learned to deliver the same products or services but likely with fewer resources.

For example, Flour, the lauded bakery group based in Boston, has nine locations but couldn’t balance demand for baked goods across its restaurants when they experienced changes in foot traffic under COVID-19 restrictions. In response, it moved all baking to a central location and allocated goods to each restaurant, enabling it to increase the quality and consistency of food provided to customers with a much smaller workforce. As a result, Flour learned how to reconfigure its resources on the fly to satisfy shifting customer demands. Although these changes are expected to be temporary, the organization gained new problem-solving skills that can be reapplied to other challenges in the future. For example, it now has the ability to quickly respond to new food trends, or it could open new stores in much smaller locations that don’t have enough space for a full kitchen.

2. The Optimizer. Successful Optimizer companies also learned how to reconfigure their resources to satisfy existing customer demand, but because that demand will be sustained, they must shift their focus to increasing the efficiency by which they deliver these products and services. Consider Ikea, which had previously invested in augmented reality to help customers choose furniture without physically going to an Ikea store. During the pandemic, with foot traffic all but disappearing at times, the company decided to invest more in this new technology and added more than 2,000 products that customers could visualize from the comfort of their own homes. As retail reopens more broadly once vaccines are distributed and regulations change, Ikea can continue innovating by optimizing its augmented-reality app to complement and enhance the traditional in-store experience.

3. The Trendsetter. Trendsetter companies responded to the crisis by developing entirely new products or services that will continue to be in high demand post-pandemic. For example, like many health care providers across the U.S., Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) began a completely new effort to offer telemedicine appointments during the pandemic. Doctors and nurses were required to learn how to use this new technology, develop new skills for providing care, and implement new routines to satisfy the emergent demand.

Looking ahead, MGH can gain competitive advantage in its industry by continuing to innovate with this service offering and working to develop a gold standard for delivering virtual health care. This includes improving the user experience, reducing overhead, and satisfying its health customers by offering patients more flexibility in scheduling appointments.

4. The Trailblazer. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve seen many examples of Trailblazer companies — those that use existing resources to solve new problems they had never tackled before. Dyson, a company famous for innovation, saw that the world needed more medical equipment during the pandemic and recognized that it could produce ventilators. Interestingly, because Dyson could work only with available resources, it confronted unusual constraints that pushed the company to develop an entirely new ventilator design — one that could actually be produced at a fraction of the cost of previous designs. As COVID-19 becomes a distant memory, the need for large quantities of ventilators will diminish, and Dyson will likely withdraw from the industry.

However, the skills that Dyson’s workforce gained from this experience are everlasting and can be instructive for other companies that engaged in emergent innovation during the pandemic. Many businesses followed a similar process, such as alcohol distilleries producing hand sanitizer, fashion brands producing masks, and pharmaceutical companies repurposing drugs to alleviate COVID-19 symptoms. While these may seem like opportunistic adaptations based on unexpected circumstances, research shows that this type of innovation can actually be systematically used to produce highly innovative products and services on a regular basis.<a dir="ltr" href="https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-framework-for-innovation-in-the-covid-19-era-and-beyond/?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_content=The%20Future%20of%20Work%20Is%20Through%20Workforce%20Ecosystems&amp;utm_campaign=Enews%20GEN%2008/31/21%20Best%20of%20%28So%20Far%29%20B#ref5">5 </a>

As Trailblazer companies look to the future, they may be wondering how best to use this type of innovation for optimal growth. Although emergent innovation can provide new business opportunities and yield tremendous long-term value, it also presents important challenges for organizations to overcome. Companies are often more attuned to using the traditional innovation process, which allows them to address a known problem with more strategic control and direction. The coronavirus crisis has shown that it’s important for organizations and leaders to become more comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity — fundamental parts of the emergent innovation process.

To navigate this ambiguity successfully, companies must remember to anchor their processes on the constraints of the solution rather than the clarity of the problem. This may involve focusing on a narrow set of resources within the business, asking users how their products could be useful in new ways, and iterating through several open-ended domains until a clear and specific problem emerges near the end of the process.

The pandemic has forced companies in almost every industry to innovate in some regard. During this unprecedented moment in business history, some have discovered new business opportunities that will last long into the future, and others have developed new skills that can be reapplied to solve other problems and discover new opportunities they may not have foreseen. By orienting their organizations within our innovation framework, company leaders can better understand how they weathered the storm and leverage newfound innovation skills for long-term success.

<a dir="ltr" href="https://www.usfca.edu/management/faculty/johnathan-cromwell">Johnathan Cromwell </a>is an assistant professor in the Department of Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Strategy, and International Business at the University of San Francisco. <a dir="ltr" href="https://professional.mit.edu/programs/faculty-profiles/blade-kotelly">Blade Kotelly </a>is an innovation consultant and senior lecturer at MIT and an instructor for MIT Professional Education, where he teaches courses on innovation and design thinking.

1. A.K. Cohen and J.R. Cromwell, “How to Respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic With More Creativity and Innovation,” Population Health Management, forthcoming.

2. J.R. Cromwell, T.M. Amabile, and J.F. Harvey, “An Integrated Model of Dynamic Problem Solving Within Organizational Constraints,” in “Individual Creativity in the Workplace,” eds. R. Reiter-Palmon, V.L. Kennel, and J.C. Kaufman (New York: Academic Press, 2018): 53-81.

Cases of Innovation in the COVID-19 Era

<ul><li>More fatiguing for some as there are fewer social cues than those conducted in person.&nbsp;</li><li>Some employees appreciate the more detached meeting style</li><li>In summary, the feedback has been paradoxical.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Challenges of Virtual Meetings 

<ul><li>Virtual meeting preferences signal the need for a tailored response from leaders.&nbsp;</li><li>Collecting feedback on your meetings</li><li>Communicate to employees that you want meetings to be a more positive experience for them.&nbsp;</li><li>Cancel unnecessary meetings and make necessary meetings shorter.</li><li>Assign different roles to attendees when it makes sense, such as facilitator, notetaker, or timekeeper.</li><li>Use breakout rooms for problem-solving, discussions, and social interactions.</li><li></li></ul>

What will help to reduce the deal with the preference paradox in virtual meetings? (1/2)

<ul><li>Hold asynchronous meetings, such as by creating a shared Google Doc for employees to contribute to throughout the day.</li><li>Build in breaks during long meetings and in between back-to-back meetings. Encourage employees to get up, stretch, and walk around.</li><li>Implement meeting-free time blocks or days.</li><li>Moderate and facilitate virtual meetings more actively, moving topics along when needed and ensuring that everyone has an opportunity to contribute.</li><li>Turn off “self view,” if possible, on your meeting platform and make camera use optional for some meetings.</li></ul>

What will help to reduce the deal with the preference paradox in virtual meetings? (2/2)

<ul><li>How helpful are our team meetings?</li><li>What is working well and not so well? What should we do differently?</li><li>To optimize your workflow, should our meetings be scheduled in the morning, midday, or afternoon?</li><li>How long should our meetings be?</li><li>How often should we meet?</li><li>Would you benefit from days or time blocks with no meetings?</li><li>If you were to lead the meeting, what would you do differently?</li></ul>

Checklist of questions to assess the health of meetings

Leaders can make meetings more effective and less fatiguing by incorporating feedback from their teams.

What exactly makes virtual meetings so draining, and what can leaders do to improve them?

Last year, the world of work experienced a huge shift practically overnight as meeting attendees switched from rushing between conference rooms to rushing to find the right Zoom link. While the medium of meetings has shifted for many of us, our need to come together in groups to collaborate, discuss project progress, and tackle work challenges is unchanged and ever present.

In fact, the number of meetings per day has actually <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w27612">increased </a>since many workplaces went completely remote in 2020. A recent “Future Workforce Pulse Report” by Upwork predicts that by 2025, <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.upwork.com/press/releases/economist-report-future-workforce">36.2 million Americans </a>will be working remotely — almost a 90% increase from pre-pandemic levels. In short, virtual meetings aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

This virtual context adds layers of complexity for both meeting leaders and attendees. We aren’t used to the unnatural lack of nonverbal cues, prolonged eye contact, or overload of faces (including our own!) to process on the screen. Seeing our own faces as we talk or listen, and the associated hyperawareness of how we appear or emote, is <a dir="ltr" href="https://news.stanford.edu/2021/02/23/four-causes-zoom-fatigue-solutions/">stressful </a>.

The amount of effort required to process all of these stimuli while simultaneously thinking and communicating is <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/coronavirus-zoom-fatigue-is-taxing-the-brain-here-is-why-that-happens">fatiguing </a>. <a dir="ltr" href="https://hbr.org/2020/04/how-to-combat-zoom-fatigue">Recent recommendations </a>for reducing “Zoom fatigue” have included avoiding multitasking, taking screen breaks, or switching to a phone call or email. While these strategies may be helpful for alleviating one’s own fatigue, they do not address the quality, content, or taxing nature of virtual meetings themselves.

What exactly makes virtual meetings so draining, and what can leaders do to improve their meetings? Over the summer of 2020, we collected data from 150 employees from a range of industries in the U.S. and Europe to learn about their experiences in virtual meetings and, more specifically, meeting fatigue.

The vast majority of those surveyed reported feeling fatigued and drained during and after their virtual meetings — more so than with in-person meetings. This came as no surprise. But there was much less consensus regarding their explanations for why they felt fatigued. Meeting schedules and structures emerged as major themes, but survey respondents varied widely in their preferences regarding both.

We encountered what we call preference paradoxes : Different people had different virtual meeting preferences, so some people’s preferences contradicted those of their colleagues. Some employees reported, for example, that virtual meetings are more fatiguing than those conducted in person because there are fewer social cues, whereas others appreciated the more detached meeting style. One person reported that they missed the easy social interactions of the office but did not want virtual meeting time bogged down by chitchat. What’s the best path forward given attendees’ varied preferences?

There’s no universal solution; virtual meeting preferences signal the need for a tailored response from leaders. Don’t assume that your preferences are the same as your team’s or that all teams share the same preferences. For more effective and less fatiguing meetings, one of the most important things a leader can do is ask for feedback from meeting attendees.

Collecting feedback on your meetings is a good practice for <a dir="ltr" href="https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-surprising-science-behind-successful-remote-meetings/">holding effective meetings </a>in general. Not only will you collect important feedback to inform how you plan and lead future meetings, you’ll also communicate to employees that you want meetings to be a more positive experience for them. Start by facilitating conversations about what works and what doesn’t for the individuals or groups you meet with. By asking employees to think critically about their meetings and contribute to their success, you may spark more engagement and investment in your meetings as well.

Your feedback solicitation could take the form of occasional pulse surveys, more open group discussions, or both. The questions you ask in these conversations or surveys should capture people’s evaluations of current meetings and their preferences. You could also ask your team to make suggestions for future meetings.

To help guide this meeting feedback solicitation process, consider these potential questions:

<ul><li>How helpful are our team meetings? </li><li>What is working well and not so well? What should we do differently? </li><li>To optimize your workflow, should our meetings be scheduled in the morning, midday, or afternoon? </li><li>How long should our meetings be? </li><li>How often should we meet? </li><li>Would you benefit from days or time blocks with no meetings? </li><li>If you were to lead the meeting, what would you do differently? </li> </ul>

After collecting feedback from meeting attendees, absorb and reflect on it. Let their thoughts sink in, and do not get discouraged. Then experiment and change things up based on what you learn. It’s important, though, to recognize that you won’t always be able to accommodate everyone’s preferences. Mix it up: You may consider catering to some team members’ preferences one month and others’ the following month. This signals that you are trying to make accommodations that ultimately benefit the entire team in some way or another. You are listening and taking action to make meetings better for the group (even if this means accommodating only a few people at a time).

Although the unique ideas you glean from your team will guide your action plan, these best practices for making virtual meetings more effective and less fatiguing also deserve consideration:

<ul><li>Cancel unnecessary meetings and make necessary meetings shorter. </li><li>Assign different roles to attendees when it makes sense, such as facilitator, notetaker, or timekeeper. </li><li>Use breakout rooms for problem-solving, discussions, and social interactions. </li><li>Hold asynchronous meetings, such as by creating a shared Google Doc for employees to contribute to throughout the day. </li><li>Build in breaks during long meetings and in between back-to-back meetings. Encourage employees to get up, stretch, and walk around. </li><li>Implement meeting-free time blocks or days. </li><li>Moderate and facilitate virtual meetings more actively, moving topics along when needed and ensuring that everyone has an opportunity to contribute. </li><li>Turn off “self view,” if possible, on your meeting platform and make camera use optional for some meetings. </li> </ul>

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to reducing virtual meeting fatigue or to eliminating “bad” meetings. Be willing to adapt and grow. Experiment with different meeting strategies or platforms. Adjust as needs change or evolve. Rely on meeting best practices and develop a tailored response to make sure your next virtual meeting energizes rather than drains. While navigating a paradox of sometimes contradictory preferences, leaders can still make a difference. Find out what matters to your people and then deliver.

How to Combat Virtual Meeting Fatigue

<ul><li dir = "auto">Employee groups are becoming heterogeneous.&nbsp;</li><li dir = "auto">Standard blanket homogenous rewards and benefit offerings are no longer ideal for employees.</li><li dir = "auto">Employees have started to prefer organisations that offer a basket of reward options based on their individual preferences.&nbsp;</li><li dir = "auto">This includes offerings that support their healthcare, lifestyle, wellbeing, learning priorities such as gym memberships, cafeteria options, skill addition opportunities etc. </li></ul>&nbsp;

Changing Employee Preferences

<ul><li>Am I aligning rewards offerings with organisational purposes?</li><li>Am I accounting for post-covid remote working realities where lines between work and home are blurred?</li></ul>

Key Questions For Reward Strategy

Collect Data -&gt; Analyse Data -&gt; Creatively customise the offerings -&gt; Communicate new offerings -&gt; Implement wisely -&gt; Monitor and evolve.&nbsp;

Broad Level Roadmap for Reward Strategies

Pay, incentives, and benefits haven’t significantly changed for decades, but people’s preferences have. Employee compensation needs a rethink if companies are to attract and retain talent.

Recently, a major US insurance broker with 20,000 agents started to question why so many were leaving the company—and taking their business books with them. The answer lay in the data about reward. It turned out the company was significantly out of touch with what people wanted. The company’s employee preference surveys had not been translated into the type of benefits it was offering. Based on the new analysis, the company redesigned its performance-based compensation, reduced equity awards, improved supplemental healthcare, and implemented a personalized training and development portal. The result: increases in agent sales performance (of 5 to 20%), engagement (up to 21%), and employee satisfaction and retention (up to 20% in some areas). What’s more, all of these gains came with a decrease in compensation costs of 8 to 12%.

<ul><li><h3><a href="https://www.strategy-business.com/article/Create-a-virtual-watercooler-to-spark-innovative-problem-solving">Create a virtual watercooler to spark innovative problem-solving </a> </h3><div>by Nele Van Buggenhout, Soraya Murat, and Tom de Sousa </div> </li> </ul>

Similarly, a global bank was able to redesign a costly reward package that was failing to retain key talent when it realized that what employees wanted was more than money and shares. They valued choice—especially the flexibility to control certain aspects of the employee experience, including training, working patterns, and even their home office setup. The bank made a number of changes to its offerings, created a platform for individuals to mix and match different corporate benefits, and ended up saving as much as US$2,800 per employee per year while maintaining (and often increasing) retention and employee satisfaction.

These are good examples of why it’s important to regularly rethink old practices. Over the past decade, what people value in terms of employee benefits packages has changed, even though the fundamentals of corporate rewards have not. Year after year, most employers offer the same menu of choices—health benefits, pension contributions, gym memberships, cash incentives—without bothering to ask employees which ones they prefer and which ones they value most highly.

Such complacency has costs. If companies were to ask whether the rewards they offer make a difference, they’d get a shock. Today’s workforce is more diverse than it used to be, attitudes toward work are evolving, and employee preferences are changing. And the speed of that change is only accelerating in the post-COVID-19 world. We know this because for ten years we’ve been collecting data—more than 50 million data points from more than ten million surveys undertaken with global companies—on the trends in employee preferences for financial and nonfinancial benefits, and how much value employees place on them. What we’ve found makes it clear that it’s time to rethink the approach to rewards.

If companies were to ask their employees if the rewards they offer make a difference, they’d get a shock. Today’s workforce is more diverse, attitudes toward work are evolving, and employee preferences are changing.

A key trend we see in the preference data is that employee populations have become more heterogeneous. That means that standardized approaches will rarely lead to an optimal result. Employers need to understand preference at the individual level—in other words, from the bottom up, not from the top down. Rather than offering a plethora of alternatives for people to choose from, the list of options should reflect an understanding of the potential impact on every single employee, not just employees in aggregate.

Our proprietary analysis, which uses data collected via TrueChoice Solutions, a preference analytics company headquartered in New York, shows that the relative importance of financial compensation has declined by 11% over the past decade. The importance of other types of benefits—medical, dental, vision, and life insurance; wellness and supplemental health benefits; and child care—has doubled. Work–life balance options and training and career development have tripled in importance (see chart). But HR departments, overly concerned with what other companies are doing or what benefits are most cost-effective, are not keeping up.

Old-fashioned engagement surveys provide little or no meaningful insight into reward strategies because they focus on a point-in-time sentiment rather than a gauge of employee preferences. Companies need a new approach to understanding the big picture of reward that will allow employees to tailor their options. Our data suggests that in many cases, as with the insurance and bank examples above, this will cost companies less than their current blanket reward packages while yielding measurable improvements in engagement, satisfaction, retention, and performance. We suggest a four-step approach to designing reward packages that are fit for today’s changing world: start with the data, customize, communicate, and, continually monitor.

Traditional incentive-based pay started with the dawn of industrial manufacturing in the 1920s, when workers were given one-time cash bonuses to meet quotas. The 1940s saw the introduction of longer-term incentives to deliver sustained performance. And through the decades, inducements have been introduced to encourage behavior change and drive results, especially as the global war for talent escalated.

<ul><li><h3><a href="https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/upskilling/global-culture-survey-2021.html?WT.mc_id=CT11-PL1000-DM2-TR2-LS4-ND30-TTA9sandb">Organizational culture: It’s time to take action </a> </h3> </li> </ul>

The annual bonus and ratings-based performance management processes that most organizations use today took hold in the 1980s. Companies that wanted to offer more simply added benefits to their offerings, such as company cars, gym memberships, private medical insurance, and cafeterias with free food. Once these became standard, companies that didn’t follow suit became uncompetitive.

That takes us to about 2010. Although some tech companies and startups have sought ways to differentiate themselves (vegan cafeterias, unlimited time off), for the most part reward offerings have not evolved. Recently, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues have emerged as a factor in the way people view their relationship with their employers and technology. In a <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/library/consumer-intelligence-series/consumer-and-employee-esg-expectations.html?utm_campaign=sbpwc&amp;utm_medium=site&amp;utm_source=articletext">recent PwC survey </a>of 2,500 employees in the US, 84% said they wanted to work for a company that valued ESG. That also includes how it rewards its staff. At more senior levels, bonuses are <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/esg/exec-pay-and-esg.html?utm_campaign=sbpwc&amp;utm_medium=site&amp;utm_source=articletext">increasingly based on delivering on ESG metrics </a>, for example.

Companies differ by sector in the types of employees they have. Not everyone wants a gym membership in lieu of higher pay, for example. Nevertheless, our underlying TrueChoice data shows that it’s important to ask people the right questions and understand that how the reward offerings are valued is changing. Some of the topics to ask about:

Well-being. In many instances, employees are willing to trade 20 to 25% of their salary for a much better work–life balance. Understanding this can reduce costs and improve employee well-being.

Healthcare. Supplemental healthcare offerings, such as dental care and private care in countries with a national health service, continue to increase in perceived value for employees and are now worth at least 1.5 times the cost of providing such benefits. This ratio might even increase in the wake of COVID-19.

Purpose. If a company is perceived by employees to live its “sense of purpose,” people consider that to be worth as much as 20% of the total reward in comparison with companies in the same industry that do not.

Training. The perceived value of training and development has almost doubled in the last five years. A person will accept a job at a company that offers a strong development path over a company that doesn’t, even if the job pays less. And digital upskilling is viewed as highly valuable by most employees.

Lifestyle. Benefits such as the provision of a car, a phone, internet service, and a travel allowance are increasing in perceived value even though they can affect taxes.

Pensions.  For younger employees, pension contributions by an employer often yield a low perceived value when compared with the cost.

Even though there are demographic and cultural idiosyncrasies to the data, these insights start to help us think differently about what employees should and shouldn’t be offered.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on where and how people are working have given HR departments good reasons to rethink their reward offerings now. The blurring of the boundaries between work and home and the emergence of hybrid working means that traditional structures are no longer fit for purpose. Couple that shift with an increasingly diverse workforce that is looking for new approaches to rewards, and it’s clear companies need to make adjustments.

For example, a London-based banking organization we’ve worked with is planning a “return to work” road map that incorporates flexible working. Its traditional offerings of a car allowance and high-cost-location supplement (also known as London weighting) are no longer relevant for some. Instead, it should think about providing well-being support, helping with home office setup, and offering training to future-proof skills in a changing organization.

In the current squeeze for global and local talent, PwC Australia decided to take a new look at its rewards and benefits options to understand what influenced people to work for the firm and stay. “Like many [other] organizations, we have been challenging ourselves to reimagine how we do things in response to the uncertain global environment. This drove us to consider something beyond the usual market analysis, benchmarking, and tinkering with our old systems,” said Catherine Walsh, head of people and culture at PwC Australia.

The data showed clearly that although financial reward remained important, career development, skill-building, mentoring support, and well-being were much more than afterthoughts for most people. The analysis looked at the “whole person” and not just the “person on the job,” taking into account employees’ stage of career and stage of life. Then, using predictive analysis, the organization can restructure the menu of benefit choices. This approach can yield a return on investment that is up to five times by giving people what they want and not paying for things that are not valued. “From pay, bonuses, recognition, career paths, promotions, development, flexibility, and hybrid work to social inclusion and personal impact, our new model truly reflects what our people value most, depending on level and stage of career,” said Walsh.

Here are four key areas to consider to create rewards that work for you and for your employees:

Data and insights. Understand your employees and your workforce segmentation. Collect a series of data sets from engagement surveys and real-time preference analytics that give employees choices. These can be cross-referenced with other data, including demographics, locations, and career development goals, to elicit rich insights and identify what is valued. Companies can use predictive analytics to make evidence-based decisions and apply the results to reward offerings. Because financial compensation appears to be declining in importance compared with other rewards, companies should ask what employees would trade for cash, for example.

Customize and be creative. Understanding the data and insight allows companies to personalize their total reward packages, offering “deals” that bundle types of rewards, benefits, and experience. Our data indicates that if employees feel they have choice and control, they place greater value on the overall offering. Reward today might even include choices involving environmental impact or time with the family.

Using the data, companies can step out of the traditional rewards silo and come up with new rewards to match the new ways of working. Two of the main drivers of preferences and value are the life stage of an individual and that individual’s career aspirations. Understanding these drivers for each employee should inform the new ways of rewarding people, with more focus on learning, mentoring, career development, and well-being than on financial reward. Customization is challenging, as the added complexity generally costs more. We have found the best path to improved business performance is to apply an 80/20 rule: maintain 80% of the current offering (albeit streamlined and simplified) and redesign 20%.

Communicate and implement. Once the total reward offerings have been personalized, they need to be effectively communicated. The value proposition needs to be explained clearly. Our research shows that 80% of people expect a more consumer-based experience in the workplace. Importantly, employers need to combine such an experience with the ability to personalize offerings and provide support and guidance for those decisions. It should be as easy as using a restaurant delivery app, for example, to sign up for a customized reward package. A significant driver of perceived value can be found in helping employees answer the question “What is right for me?” However, most employers fall short in this area and in describing their total reward offerings. More than 70% of employees feel they do not know or understand what benefits their employer offers and would value better guidance and decision support.

Increasingly, companies are tying rewards messaging to a broader agenda—for example, upskilling and learning pathways, or agility and internal mobility. One company we worked with tied its offerings to “limitless possibilities” and gave individuals control over learning playlists, projects, and working abroad.

Monitor and evolve. Leaders need to be agile and recognize that the landscape will continue to transform. Employee preferences will change. Today, “learning is the new pension.” Companies can experiment with offering a learning pot, or allowance, for example, directed to new skills for the job; education could be traded off against pension contributions. Or there could be incentives for “intrapreneurship,” such as a points system for creative contributions to the company.

Customization doesn’t mean absolute choice. Employers create offerings based on employee preferences, which is why step one—data and insights—is so important. And trade-offs need to be quantified. It may be too expensive, for example, to offer everyone the same upskilling opportunities.

Today’s total reward offerings need to keep up with the dynamic and increasing heterogeneity of preferences and perceived values of employees. Competitive salaries are important, but they are only one piece of the puzzle. It is critical that companies focus on the needs of the whole person and not the requirements for the job, and offer the benefits employees value. The real differentiator for companies looking to attract, keep, and motivate talent today is customization and communication. Employers that transform their total reward offerings with this mandate in mind will create a sustainable win for all stakeholders and have a significant competitive advantage in the ever-present war for talent.

<ul><li><a dir="ltr" href="mailto:Andrew.curcio@pwc.com">Andrew Curcio </a> is the joint global leader of the reward and benefits practice of PwC. He specializes in solving complex people problems for global organizations, focusing on total reward and performance improvement. Based in Melbourne, he is a partner with PwC Australia. </li><li><a dir="ltr" href="mailto:Alastair.woods@pwc.com">Alastair Woods </a> is the joint global leader of people analytics at PwC, working with multinational global clients. Based in London, he is a partner with PwC UK. </li> </ul>

<ul><li><div data-share-count="">189 </div><div>shares </div> </li> </ul>

Rethinking total reward strategies

<ul><li>To what level can one be vulnerable is something everyone has had an inner conversation with themselves at some point in their lives.</li><li>Beautiful Mess Effect points to the fact that degree of actual vulnerability and self perception of it can be quite different from how others percieve it.</li><li>Assumping that people would always treat vulnerability as weakness is a wrong one.</li></ul>

Beautiful Mess Effect 

Self Improvement

<ul><li>When displaying vulnerability at workplace, it is important to be appearing competent first. </li><li>Without competency, a display of vulnerability can reduce the percieved value of you as a professional.</li><li>When you're competent, one would be perceiving you as somebody who is working 'inspite of' all that is going against you but without competency it becomes 'baggage' that is dragging you down. </li></ul>

Pratfall Affect 

“Beautiful messes” have a certain allure.

Emotional Intelligence

“Beautiful messes” have a certain allure.

Over the past year, visitors to the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City have been revealing their deepest fears and wishes. As part of a special exhibit, museum-goers were invited to write down their secrets on small pieces of vellum paper and hang the entries on a wall for everyone to see. On one side, people posted their anxieties; on the other side, their hopes. Thousands of visitors contributed lines like, “I’m anxious because I’m afraid I’ll die alone,” “I’m anxious because I might miss my chance to become a mom,” and “I’m hopeful because life is beautiful and I will feel happy soon.”

This exhibit, A Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful , which was on view from February 2018 until earlier this week, was a catalog of anonymous confessions, a place where people willingly exposed their weaknesses and flaws: “I’m anxious because I don’t have a home for my boys”; “I’ve relapsed three times since trying to become sober”; “I feel like I disappoint everyone in my life.” These more than 50,000 entries expressed thoughts that many people wouldn’t otherwise share publicly due to fear of rejection and shame.

But psychological research suggests that such fear can be overblown in people’s minds. Often, there’s a mismatch between how people perceive their vulnerabilities and how others interpret them. We tend to think showing vulnerability makes us seem weak, inadequate, and flawed—a mess. But when others see our vulnerability, they might perceive something quite different, something alluring. A recent set of <a dir="ltr" href="http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-34832-002">studies </a>calls this phenomenon “the beautiful mess effect.” It suggests that everyone should be less afraid of opening up—at least in certain cases.

The researchers—Anna Bruk, Sabine G. Scholl, and Herbert Bless of the University of Mannheim in Germany—found evidence for the beautiful mess effect across six studies involving hundreds of participants. Inspired by the work of Brené Brown, a professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work who popularized the importance of vulnerability in her books and TED Talks, Bruk and her colleagues define vulnerability as the willingness to expose yourself emotionally to another person despite being afraid and despite the risks. In their studies, the team asked participants to imagine themselves in a variety of vulnerable situations—such as confessing romantic feelings to your best friend, being the first to apologize to your romantic partner after a big fight, and admitting that you made a serious mistake to your team at work. When people imagined themselves in those situations, they tended to believe that showing vulnerability would make them appear weak and inadequate. But when people imagined someone else in those situations, they were more likely to describe showing vulnerability as “desirable” and “good.”

The results, which were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , lined up with Brown’s findings in her qualitative research that vulnerability is humanizing. “We love seeing raw truth and openness in other people,” Brown writes in her book Daring Greatly , “but we’re afraid to let them see it in us.”

In another study, Bruk and her team invited students into the lab and broke them into two groups. Those in one group were asked (vulnerability alert!) to sing an improvised song in front of a jury, while those in the other were asked to serve as members of that jury. It was a bluff; in the end, no one sang or judged. But before the participants realized that they were being had, they answered some questions about vulnerability. Those in the singing group saw their anticipated vulnerability more negatively, endorsing statements such as “When I show my vulnerability, other people find it repellant” and “I should avoid showing my vulnerability.” The judges were far more generous when they evaluated the vulnerability of the singers, saying that their singing would be a sign of “strength” and “courage.”

To find out why this gap exists, Bruk and her team tested a theory about how the human mind processes information. They found that when we think about our own vulnerability, it’s more concrete and real, because we are so close to it. Under that magnified perspective, our imperfections are clearer, and it’s easier to identify everything that might go wrong. But when we think about another person’s vulnerability, it’s more distant and abstract. We can take a wider perspective that allows us to see not just the bad, but the good as well.

Research beyond Bruk’s and Brown’s generally supports the notion that people tend to admire vulnerability in others. When people show vulnerability at school or work, such as by asking for advice and help, they <a dir="ltr" href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.721.7786&amp;rep=rep1&amp;type=pdf">appear more </a>competent to their advisers and <a dir="ltr" href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=766586592215223769&amp;hl=en&amp;as_sdt=0,9">supervisors </a>—and opening up in personal relationships can even make people fall in love with each other. But there are times when being vulnerable can backfire—when it comes across less as beauty and more as straight-up mess.

A classic example is a 1966 experiment led by the psychologist Elliot Aronson. Aronson and his colleagues had students listen to recordings of candidates interviewing to be part of a quiz-bowl team. Two of the candidates appeared smart by answering most of the questions right, while the other two answered only 30 percent correctly. Then, one group of students heard an eruption of noise and clanging dishes, followed by one of the smart candidates saying, “Oh my goodness—I’ve spilled coffee all over my new suit.” Another group of students heard the same clamor, but then heard one of the mediocre candidates saying he spilled the coffee. Afterward, the students said they liked the smart candidate even more after he embarrassed himself. But the opposite was true of the mediocre candidate. The students said they liked him even less after seeing him in a vulnerable situation.

In psychology, this is known as the “pratfall effect.” Responses to someone’s vulnerability largely seem to depend on how others perceive that person beforehand. If she appears strong and capable before showing vulnerability, people are sympathetic; the vulnerability is humanizing, like that time Jennifer Lawrence <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.eonline.com/news/830990/biggest-oscar-moments-of-all-time-jennifer-lawrence-trips-onstage-and-into-our-hearts-while-accepting-best-actress-award">tripped </a>on her way to accept the Best Actress award at the 2013 Oscars. But if the person doesn’t seem competent, people are repelled; she really does seem like a mess, nothing beautiful about it.

The pratfall effect can be especially pronounced in the workplace, where, in America at least, there’s been an overall push for people to open up and be “<a dir="ltr" href="https://hbr.org/2013/10/be-yourself-but-carefully">authentic </a>.” But if you haven’t established your competence first, showing vulnerability can damage your credibility, says Lisa Rosh, a management professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York. For example, at one company Rosh studied, a woman introduced herself to her colleagues not by mentioning her credentials and education, but by talking about how she’d been awake the previous night caring for her sick baby. It took her months to reestablish her credibility. Being overly familiar at work, Rosh says, can overwhelm others and make the vulnerable person appear needy and unstable.

Whether at work or on a date, it seems safest to show vulnerability within a relationship that has some history—in which there is reciprocal sharing and the connection between two people <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.amazon.com/Daring-Greatly-Courage-Vulnerable-Transforms/dp/1592408419">grows in tandem </a>with the disclosures. And yet, the truth is there’s nothing really ever safe about being vulnerable—and that’s precisely what allows for a special connection in the first place. When someone shares his hopes and anxieties on vellum paper, or admits to a mistake, or professes love to a friend at a café, that person is doing something risky, but the possibility of being hurt helps open the door to a more genuine, intimate interaction. Things might not work out in the person’s favor, but there’s still something rare and, indeed, beautiful about the gesture.

“Many of us feel like we’re barely keeping it together,” says Candy Chang, the artist who created A Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful with her partner, James A. Reeves. “But seeing some private corner of your psyche reflected in somebody else’s handwriting on a wall can be incredibly reassuring. It’s a reminder of the humanity in the faces around us.”

Your Flaws Are Probably More Attractive Than You Think They Are

<ul><li>Stora Enzo, a paper and pulp giant was struggling to run business profitably given the rise of digital media. </li><li>Leadership was in need of fresh ideas and execution methods.</li><li>Ideas from conventional pathways of senior leadership groups and selected high performers were drying up.</li><li>It was then the leadership propsed ato create a unqiue self nominating cross cutting group of people under the pathfinder programme. </li></ul>

Reinventing Business Models

Problem Solving

<ul><li>The proposed programme for stora enco was called pathfinder initiative. </li><li>It brought together diverse candidates who can self nominate themselves for selection. </li><li>Once selected, they'd work with project leads and department heads to propose new ideas. </li><li>Department heads would help the pathfinder members to make execute the ideas. </li><li>The pathfinder members found themselves learning more than ever at the same time leadership finding their team infused with fresh thinking. </li></ul>

Filling Imagination Void 

It relied on insiders to lead the change.

The decline in demand for paper hit Stora Enso hard. By 2011 the pulp and paper giant — the world’s oldest corporation, dating back to 1288 — had laid off over one-third of its 30,000 employees. Though profitable again, the company needed to transform itself into a global renewable materials company.

Jouko Karvinen, the CEO at the time, and his team decided not to depend on consultants, which would have been the typical way to go. Instead, they sought to reenergize and leverage their own people, but, Karvinen explained, “We also did not just want to handpick the usual senior managers we had always worked with before, because we knew that, in order to drive the transformation of the company, we needed new and fresh perspectives.”

Among a number of initiatives to kindle the transformation, Stora Enso took a novel approach to change management. Rather than handpick the usual senior managers, a team called Pathbuilder was formed of a diverse group of insiders to present senior leaders with new ideas. Think of it as a “shadow cabinet.” To start, the Pathbuilder team undertook establishing a new company purpose and values along with the design of a group-wide process for how to implement disruptive innovations and digitalization.

On a larger scale, the Pathbuilder group supported Stora Enso’s transformation into a global renewable materials company. In 2006, 70% of revenues and 60% of the company’s profits still came from paper; today the new growth businesses contribute 67% of sales and 76% of profits. Since 2011 the share price has more than doubled. The culture is also evolving and improving, as evidenced by an annual survey that tracks the main levers for the transformation, including innovation and sustainability, leadership, team, and engagement.

Here’s how the Pathbuilder program succeeded — and how you can implement it at your company.

The initiative began with an ad on the company’s intranet where anyone in the organization was invited to apply to the Pathbuilder program — an internal change initiative designed to address some of the most critical challenges facing the company at the time. The ad read: “As questioning old ways of doing things and finding new and different solutions to satisfy customers, shareholders, and employees is a daunting challenge, we have concluded that the Group Executive Team needs help.”

Two hundred and fifty employees from throughout the organization applied to become Pathbuilders. Following a thorough selection process, including interviews, ability tests, and an assessment center, 16 participants from widely different functions and levels of seniority were selected to work with top team sponsors over a six-month period. Interestingly, many of the Pathbuilders who excelled in the program had not been on the radar of Stora Enso’s established talent screening system.

When designing the Pathbuilder journey, Stora Enso made five choices that, in combination, contributed to its success in the company’s continuing transformation.

First, and most important, by relying on the self-nomination approach, the company tapped into the hidden energy, diversity, and skills of its employees. As a result, Pathbuilder represented different corporate functions, geographies, and personality types. In addition, participants came from all hierarchical levels of the organization. As one participant commented on this mix: “We had very senior teammates with an intimate understanding of the organization working alongside recent hires who brought fresh outside perspectives. It was this mix of perspectives that allowed us to come up with unconventional yet implementable ideas and recommendations.” As a testament to the diverse group of talent assembled, more than 70% of the Pathbuilders have moved into significantly different or more-senior positions since they participated in the program.

Second, the leadership team was closely involved in the projects, sponsoring the teams throughout the six-month journey and emphasizing how critical the initiative was to the transformation of the company. On the one hand, this elevated the visibility of the program and enticed the most capable and motivated candidates to apply. On the other hand, top team sponsors also benefited from the continuous and intense interaction with the Pathbuilders. When sponsors worked with their teams and engaged in discussions over the six-month period, they were challenged to open up to the potential of new ideas and, over time, develop different perspectives and views of the business. Because of their active involvement throughout, the sponsors were ultimately more eager to move the project recommendations forward in their respective line organizations.

Third, building the project work around mission-critical challenges was important not just to motivate participants but also to sustainably engage top team sponsors. If projects had been set up primarily for the sake of participant learning, as is often the case in executive education programs, the sponsor’s interest would likely have waned after one or two runs. However, since project sponsors saw pressing challenges being resolved, the program became a vital vehicle to help them achieve business goals. One business head comments: “Initially, we had to coerce the top team colleagues into submitting their projects. After having witnessed project outcomes over several years, in 2015 all of us were ultimately competing with 14 proposals, which were directly pulled from the strategy, for one of four project slots.”

Fourth, intensive training helped accelerate contribution. Building a diverse team with highly motivated people was necessary, but not sufficient. Several of the Pathbuilders, though smart, young, and energetic, had little or no experience working in close collaboration with top management on highly complex challenges, so enabling them to perform was essential. More concretely, participants learned specific, project-relevant skills in areas such as strategy, structured thinking, innovation, digital, and, equally important, leadership to be able to work effectively as a team and navigate the dynamics and difficult trade-offs of the senior leadership team. In each cohort, the Pathbuilders convened for three five-day, face-to-face modules where they learned relevant concepts and received outside inputs, which they directly integrated into their project work.

Fifth, Stora Enso closely tracked both the business and the people impact of the Pathbuilder program. Working outside the line organization created impact, but also a lot of noise in the system, as it challenged traditional ways of working. In particular, the self-nomination process upended the established power distribution and people’s sense of entitlement, as companies would normally appoint people to be part of important initiatives rather than allow “just anyone” to apply. To manage and counteract this noise and to maintain momentum, business impact was rigorously measured by following up on the results of each project. The impact on people was measured by tracking how many participants had moved into considerably different and/or more-senior positions within 12 months of finishing the program. These tangible success stories served as proof points to justify and sustain the chosen approach over time.

.css-d7z4j9{font-family:'Source Sans Pro',sans-serif;font-size:2rem;line-height:2.5rem;letter-spacing:-0.125%;font-weight:700;}Satya Nadella as a refounder to Microsoft