The Big Transition Forward

While the delta variant of Covid-19 raises new concerns, pandemic restrictions continue to ease in many parts of the world. Many companies (among them many banks and private equity firms) have acted on their natural instinct to reunite teams and bring people back into offices. They know what that looks like, and they crave what that feels like.

Other companies, including many technology firms, are sticking with more recent rhythms of remote work. They are enjoying efficient collaboration across time zones, access to broader talent pools, and saving money on real estate fees while significantly lowering carbon emissions in the process. Why go back?

But in my view, both approaches overlook opportunity. The pandemic has been a historic humanitarian and economic tragedy, but it also has sparked innovation. We know that connecting in person builds important personal bonds, affords more active apprenticeship, and sparks creative collaboration. Yet returning to life strictly as it was before Covid-19 erases the many invaluable lessons that we learned during the pandemic.

I acknowledge that every company has unique considerations. Answers for manufacturing companies will differ from those in the services industries. Global companies may move in different directions and at a different pace than more local or regional businesses. For all, however, defining a set of principles to guide decisions will be valuable.

Here are some of our guiding principles on this topic at Bain & Company.

We are committed to a hybrid model. For a global services companies such as ours, people connections are critical, yet we encourage work routines that enable flexibility for our clients and for our employees and that reduce our carbon footprint. Across teams, this may come in different flavors day-to-day or week-to-week, but we aim for the best of both worlds.

We will continue to maintain our investments in office culture and apprenticeship. This is core to who we are, how we innovate, and how we operate. We may adapt floor plans and create new traditions, but we never want to allow our social capital to wane.

As safety permits, we will continue our investment in global training and other events that are core to establishing necessary foundations of trust and shared values. For example, “Diverse teams, One Bain” is one of our operating principles, a set of beliefs that guides individual behavior.

We will maintain our commitment to prioritizing investments in technology and related training. Hybrid services and experiences can’t happen without leading-edge connectivity, cocreation, and collaboration tools. We know from our work with clients that installing capabilities is not the same as creating change, so we’ll apply best practices internally to ensure that results stick.

We will continuously learn and adapt. We know not everything that we attempt will succeed. As always, we will pilot and learn before we scale.

Regardless of what a company prioritizes, leaders need to consider and solve for unintended consequences. Some issues can be anticipated. For example, as we lean toward a hybrid work environment to offer flexibility in work location, unconscious biases can emerge as employees who are not “in the room” may have trouble getting their voices heard or miss out on hallway coaching. We can and must proactively mitigate those biases.

The good news: If we have learned anything from the pandemic, it is how adaptable we truly are and how much we can accomplish under trying circumstances.