How the Future Works

Step 4: Experiment, Experiment, Experiment: Normalize a Culture of Learning

It should be clear by now that flexible work is a real change for most people and most companies, and the changes required go well beyond simply allowing employees to WFH a day or two each week. After the pandemic hit, we spent a lot of time talking with executives about why so many were focused on getting people back into the office as soon as possible—especially considering all the evidence showing that most companies had been quite successful without it.

Much of what we heard came down to two things: fear and habit. “There's a lot of fear of the unknown; fear that the culture they came up in will ‘degrade,'” explained one executive, whose sentiments echoed much of what we heard elsewhere. “There's also an underlying presumption that the past was good, when it wasn't uniformly.” It may have been good for most executives, but, as we've seen, the way work was done in the past wasn't for everybody. The question becomes how do you make a shift this significant happen, especially when some people—especially those in decision-making positions—are personally happy with how things were before?

It will require a process of experimenting, learning, and making adjustments in both behavior and thinking if you want it to stick, and not everything is going to work perfectly from the start. This has been true at Genentech, a biotech company that has led the way on workplace flexibility since 2018, when they first ...