We are at a time when much of the workforce is experiencing significant discontent and overwhelming exhaustion and few professionals see a return to an office-centric working model as a path to improvement. Employers will be asked to justify their decisions to change the current ‘normal’.

Many organizations today are playing back select results of employee surveys to their workforces, partly to justify their choices about a physical return to the office. But there is a time to think and a time to act - it is of crucial importance to create an understanding as to where employees are and in meeting them in their needs, both physically and mentally. Moreover as since a while many employees are in contemplation mode.

Professionals don’t know what they want and are reevaluating their relationships with work

This brings them closer to either reaffirm their paths through life—or choose new ones. Executives who don’t expect more waves of attrition may well be very wrong.

As such to me it seems we are at cross-roads, and with that the risk that professionals will disconnect emotionally even further from their organizations and leaders.

If leaders don’t accept the fact that they don’t know the shape of the future of hybrid working, their talent will keep on walking out the door.

But leaders can make a choice. They can continue to believe that they will deliver in the future because they have always delivered in the past.
Or they can embrace this opportunity for change and work with their people—closely and transparently, with curiosity and in partnership—discovering a new and better way to work.