Here's your sign...

If you needed a sign, here it is.

We are officially past the "winging it" phase.

The world is not going to get more stable than it is right now. "Normal" is so far back, you can't even see it in the mirror. And there will be no circling back.

It's time to commit to a path:

1. You are office-centric, with a little more flexibility

2. You are office-centric, but with a lot of flexibility

3. You are digital-centric, but use fixed real estate regularly

4. You are digital-centric, and use rented physical locations a few times a year

Once you make that hard decision, you've got 100 more waiting for you. How do we use all these new tools? Is it ok to message people after hours? How do we handle time zones? Why does my manager want to install monitoring software? How does this change onboarding? Why do you get mad when I send an email instead of a message? Why am I in so many meetings?

If you aren't in the thick of answering all of these questions, you are behind.

This is what The Digital Workplace is all about. It's a safe place to come and wrestle with tough decisions and hear what others are trying.

And have some debates now and then :-).

I've still got lots of thoughts swirling around my head from last week. Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the event.

Digital collaboration

DHH

• "We need to be realistic in our expectations. Will the future magically be better just because we are remote? No. All the standard blockers for organizational progress will still be in place. What was the maturity of in-person communication? Pretty low. Utopia is not the bar. We just need to be marginally better than where we were, which is not a huge jump."

Erica Dhawan

• "In a digital workplace, body language hasn't disappeared, it has transformed."

Frank Pathyil

• "Technology is being rolled out faster than playbooks and culture are adapting."
• "If you don't get this right, are you going to be able to run a business? Because people will be exiting."

Digital Leadership

Bill Taylor

• "Remote can’t mean psychologically apart."
• "Am I learning as fast as the world is changing?"

Maribel Lopez

• "Listening and showing empathy is not equivalent to abdicating authority."

Suresh Sambandam

• "Leaders don’t struggle in the digital age because they can’t use Slack. They struggle because they don’t understand the new paradigm required that employees are demanding."

Hybrid Work

Darren Murph

• We are in the awkward teenager phase where we are trying to figure out how to operate in a digital world using office-first norms and tools and workflows.

Sheela Subramanian

• ? of executives are not including employees in the return to office plans. That’s a problem. A focus group of one will not help your employee engagement or retention."

Zach Dunn

• "Getting team collaboration wrong has become more important than getting focus work wrong. If you do nothing else with your office, make sure it is pretty good, if not the best option for team collaboration."

If you are just joining us, welcome to the ride. Now is our chance to rebuild work for the digital age.