An increasing number of companies are trying to get back to “business as usual,” however, many are still struggling to determine what their workplace looks like in 2021 and beyond. COVID is still a factor in many regions of the world, and business and IT leaders across the spectrum of vertical markets are looking at ways to adapt their strategies to restructure both physical workplaces and digital remote work scenarios. This is especially true in the AI, IoT, mobile, wireless and telecom industries, where companies have found great success with work from home policies and question whether the majority of their employees even need to return to an office setting. They’re determining how they can use artificial intelligence (AI), video, and collaboration tools, among others, to enable better communications among executives, employees, partners, and customers.
Long-time technology influencer Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research, a technology market research and strategy consulting firm, is tackling these questions and more in her new podcast – Reimagine Hybrid Work. The PR Vibes™ team sat down with Lopez to discuss the trends impacting the workplace today and how companies can develop strategies for evolving a corporate culture to support distributed work, new hiring practices, data collection via AI, and employee management.
Prior to founding Lopez Research, Maribel honed her expertise at Motorola, IDC, Shiva Corporation, and Forrester Research.
PRVibes: Tell us how the podcast got started. What made you focus on Reimagine Hybrid Work?
Lopez: I’ve been talking to people about digital transformation and future of work for a while. When COVID happened, our clients were more interested in how work would change, and I thought it was an opportunity to start the podcast. It felt like all the things we said we would do as an industry, we finally tried doing them and things worked out a little differently than we thought.
There’s a lot of questions about how we build culture and how we run companies and create engagement. Do we go back to the office 50 percent? Do we get to 75 percent? Will we ever see 100 percent of employees back in the office again? How do we create culture? So, I thought it was the perfect time to launch a podcast to discuss all the facets of this newly hybrid workforce. But it’s not just about work in general, it’s more taking the viewpoint that it’s work in a distributed environment.
PRVibes: Who is your audience for the podcast?
Lopez: It is targeted to anybody that runs a group. So, it could be sales, marketing, finance, IT—anywhere across the company where you have a team and you need to think about how to run your team successfully.
PRVibes: How do you find the hybrid workplace that you’re talking about? Is that really as simple as 50 percent, 75 percent, full time?
Lopez: Not quite. A lot of companies said that they had remote work policies, but it was only for a few people in the organization or where they had very specific situations. When we think about hybrid work now, it’s the example that some people will work remotely full-time, some people can be full-time in the office, others will be nomadic. Nomadic, which used to mean that they were on planes and trains and automobiles all the time, and now means they’re in the office a couple of days a week. Maybe they just come in for collaboration or a team meeting, a customer meeting, and I think that’s really a different way of thinking about it.
A lot of people also moved during the pandemic as they worked from home. So now you are also talking about different time zones and that means you need to be more flexible. Putting a finite definition around hybrid workforces is difficult because different people want different things. Some people are dying to go back to the office full-time, some have already gone back and then other people are like, “I never want to go back again.” Then there’s some people that are like, hey, I could go in for a few days a week.
PRVibes: Your podcast touches on everything from the culture of a hybrid workforce and wellness initiatives to smart buildings and the tools that will help workforces of 2021 and beyond. You even tackle cloud computing and AI. What do all these topics have in common?
Lopez: There are a few universal themes. Everyone needs to attract and retain talent to their team, and everybody wants to create a workplace in which they are engaging their employees. Then I guess I would say there’s maybe a few more esoteric things, like we collect more data now on everything—on devices of people and so on. As we move forward, there’s going to be some ethics and privacy rules around data that everyone’s going to have to deal with. And we’re just sort of breaching that now.
I also think there’s a realization now that people are somehow quantifying what employees do, how many hours they work or what application to use. That’s a universal issue—how do they deal with that data? How does the employee feel about the fact that data may or may not be available? Truthfully, it always happened in sales. Your employer knew how many phone calls you made if you were dialing for dollars, so to speak. But now I think we need to consider that every employee somehow can be quantified in some way. Technology providers are providing data collection, more insight, and that’s rubbing up against workplace privacy and what their managers know about them.
Another underlying theme is how do we make everybody feel a part of the process and culture even if they’re not in the office. If you’re the only one that’s on a video conference, how do you feel about it?
PRVibes: Without COVID, would we be at this stage yet as far as a hybrid workforce is concerned?
Lopez: I don’t think we’d be at this stage for another 5-10 years. There were a lot of people that needed to be convinced that you could productively and effectively work at home. COVID put that to the test in a very real way, where it wasn’t just 2-3 months, it was a year or more. And we were all kind of forced to be productive because what else was there to do? I think a very real test of the hybrid work movement is as everybody moves towards being “open” again, do we feel we get the same productivity in that environment. If we get that same level, then we’ve got a real shot saying, yeah, we can make a hybrid workplace work. I do think there are still a lot of naysayers, though—I’m shocked at how many.
PRVibes: Does the experience level of the worker matter?
Lopez: It seems to me that the more junior people would want to be in the office if they had that option versus working remotely. They crave the social interaction. Many of the senior people don’t want to be. For younger people, a lot of your social network was at work and that’s how you met your friends, right? That hasn’t been happening for them in the WFH environment. What I really see it coming down to is does management want to be in the office. If they do, then I see them wanting more of their employees in the office as well.
As a manager, you have to craft being comfortable with the fact that the person’s not in front of you. It’s a lot easier if you’ve worked with them for a while or if they worked with the company for a while. I do think experience matters because if you already have the experience, you already knew how to do it, it’s just a matter of you executing. But it’s much more complicated if you are just starting out and need a lot of guidance. Managers can’t just pop by your desk to see how things are going.
PRVibes: What additional topics will you be covering in upcoming episodes?
There are a few things based on the same themes we’ve been talking about. One is the globalization of the workforce. If you’re going to start to work with people all over the country, that helps your hiring and retention. But then bigger questions arise. What is our company culture? What do we stand for? What are the values that we want people to go out and promote? These were discussions that people already started to have and now we’ve layered another element into it. How do you do that remotely? And then how do you make sure that everybody’s part of them?
Another theme is the changing role of executives. We’ve got diversity and inclusion goals now but we’re also looking at social, ethic, environmental, and responsibility topics. It’s a very difficult time for the leaders—before they could just focus on building the product and selling it for profit. Now you’ve got other stuff that you’re dealing with.
The podcast will tackle not what they should be doing because I don’t want to preach what their diversity efforts or environmental efforts should be. But I do want to open an honest and transparent dialogue about the trade-offs the businesses need to think about, and that Wall Street and other entities need to consider.
PRVibes: Will you also talk about AI?
Lopez: I think it’s interesting. I did one podcast with Google on AI ethics, one with Kirk D. Borne on the principles of AI and one with IBM on the latest in AI research. This topic is so big that I’m launching a specific AI podcast. AI Ethics is a real huge issue for the Reimagine Hybrid Work podcast especially as we have more model building and more automation processes. Helping people understand particularly at the beginning that their model needs to be explainable for them and when they talk to customers. They need to think about the implications of what they did because sometimes you get unintended consequences.
PRVibes: How is the podcast integrated into your consultancy? Are these issues businesses are hoping you can help solve for them?
Everyone is looking for guidance on how to structure new remote work policies. What should they include? What are other companies doing? What does diversity and inclusion look like and how do we get there? Heck, will any of this even work? These questions get touched upon in the podcast but it’s only the beginning of the dialogue. Every organization is slightly different so Lopez Research will work directly with them to work through their challenges. For technology vendors, Lopez Research helps them understand what companies are looking for and helps the vendors understand how to connect their technology to creating business value.