1/24/2021 The New Normal Is The Distributed Company

EDITORS' PICK | Aug 2, 2020, 04:34am EDT | 11,796 views

The New Normal Is The

Distributed Company
Enrique Dans Senior Contributor
Leadership Strategy
Teaching and consulting in the innovation field since 1990

GETTY

There has been a sharp increase in demand for property in upscale

vacation areas, such as Lake Tahoe, about 200 miles from San
Francisco, or The Hamptons, 100 miles from New York, from well-
paid people fleeing the city and looking for properties with more
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space, as distributed work environments become the new norm and

their children will also likely have to study from home.

More and more companies are making it clear that the distributed
work environments are the future. It started with companies like
Square or Twitter, which soon after lockdown announced that their

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1/24/2021 The New Normal Is The Distributed Company

workforce will not have to return to the office unless they expressly
want to do so, and now giants like Google, Facebook or Apple, which
are no longer in a hurry to get their staff back to the office and do
not expect the situation to return to normal until mid-2021.

These are some of the most innovative companies in the world,

which set management trends: working from home requires
rethinking of many of the fringe offered to distributed workers,
redesigning the onboarding processes for workers who get hired in
remote processes, reducing and repurposing office space, and above
all, rethinking their policies and their business culture: if you want
to see it spelled out, check out the new distributed work policy of the
German multinational Siemens, expressed in a few sentences:

"The basis for this forward-looking working model is further

development [of] our corporate culture. These changes will also be
associated with a different leadership style, one that focuses on
outcomes rather than on time spent at the office. We trust our
employees and empower them to shape their work themselves so
that they can achieve the best possible results. With the new way of
working, we’re motivating our employees while improving the
company’s performance capabilities and sharpening Siemens’
profile as a flexible and attractive employer."

This is the end of being at the office to be seen or to keep a seat

warm, or not going home before the boss. Vestiges of an absurd and
irrational culture that simply transferred the workshop model of the
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Industrial Revolution, with constant supervision by the foreman, to

tasks in which it made no sense at all. More and more companies are
signing up to fully distributed models, to provide their workers with
the right conditions to be productive from wherever they see fit, and
to be able to attract and retain talent without geographical
constraints.
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Do companies really need offices any longer? If so, they will have a
completely different role, not focused on being places where people
do the bulk of their work, but rather places of interaction and
socialization to strengthen corporate culture. The office as we knew
it is part of the past.

Does your employer have a long term plan to develop remote work
and evolve into a distributed company, or do you still think things
will go back to the way they were last year?

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my other work here.

Enrique Dans

Teaching Innovation at IE Business School since 1990, and now, hacking

education as Senior Advisor for Digital Transformation at IE University. BSc

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(Universidade de… Read More

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