Suddenly Hybrid

Chapter 11Enabling Collaboration for All

The forecasts were dire. Take this headline from an October 2020 article in Forbes: “Work from Home Fallout: Productivity Up, Innovation Down” (McKendrick 2020). The article cited the results of a Microsoft survey of some 9,000 managers and employees across Europe that found 82% reporting productivity levels that were holding steady or increasing. That was juxtaposed with a concerning statistic: of those surveyed, only 40% considered their companies to be innovative, a 16‐point drop from the year before.

Over the course of the time spent fully remote, many a manager and senior leader lamented the loss of face‐to‐face time, which they considered to be at the heart of developing new products and insights. But the anecdotal evidence runs to the contrary. Innovation actually accelerated across a wide spectrum of industries. Not only did some organizations come up with new ways of moving the needle by reconfiguring and creating new work flows that fit with their virtual reality (think healthcare and the availability of telehealth, for example), but they also figured out how to innovate and even launch new products and lines of business.

Allow us to share one such example from Pearson:

“We've been wildly successful,” says CTO Steve Santana, who oversaw the development of Pearson+, which revolutionized how college students consume textbooks through a subscription model. The idea was hatched about nine months into the pandemic in December 2020, ...