In 2015, I wrote the book Work Rules!, which laid out a set of guidelines, based on my time building Google’s culture, for how to combine data analysis, academic rigor, and human resources best practices to create a world-class company culture. And Google was named by Fortune as the best company to work for in the United States eight times. While hybrid is often presented as a new model, the fundamentals of what transforms a group of people into an exceptional team haven’t changed as much as we might think. When I was the senior vice president of people operations at Google, we had many employees, especially in engineering and sales, who worked from home a few days each week (even if we didn’t call it hybrid back then).
The CTO of a 30,000-person consulting firm told me the pandemic has been great for senior partners who no longer have to travel the world and are moving to low-cost havens like Bermuda, but miserable for associates who miss out on the coaching and apprenticeship of the “before times.”.