You get what you pay for. Legitimate Leadership believes that people should be paid primarily for their contribution against a standard, not the result. Part of contribution is behavioural standards – including collaboration, face-to-face engagement, and getting to know people as human beings not human resources. Virtual interaction has its benefits but is never first prize. It can never replace the benefit of spending time in person with colleagues in one-to-ones, in team meetings, and out in the field watching the game. I liked Sinek’s ideas with respect to getting people back to the office in a way which is encouraging and supportive rather than by dictate.

OUR SUMMARY OF THIS VIDEO EXCERPT: One of the challenges that has hurt collaboration across the board was lockdown.

Isaac Stern, the famous violinist, said music is what happens between the notes. Trust is what’s built between the meetings – it’s the chatter as you’re walking into the meeting, it’s the meeting that happens after the meeting, it’s the bumping into someone in a hallway and ‘Oh, I meant to tell you …’, ‘You want to grab lunch?’, ‘You want to grab a coffee?’

It’s all those little innocuous things that by themselves do nothing but over time build trust and support collaboration.

But when we work at home we just have the meeting. There is no ‘between’.

Sarah Kubric, the millennial therapist, said remote teams are like long distance relationships. You’re on the phone the whole time and you have to work much harder at building trust. You have to create artificially the ‘between’.

And so when a company starts to have fast growth, for instance, silo-ing can happen because you’re so focused on the numbers and you forget some of the other things that you used to focus on.

Then, firstly, you have to be prescriptive about it, and secondly, you will get the behavior you reward.

So are you rewarding and recognizing people who are collaborating, or are you only recognizing and rewarding people who are hitting the numbers regardless of their collaboration? If the latter, you’ll create a culture where collaboration comes second. And if you have remote or hybrid/blended teams, more effort is actually required for it.

If people do not come to an office, I like making them to meet in a designated city to have a hackathon for two days to work on a project or a problem. That works wonders.

The biggest value of a physical get-together is not anything you’re going to learn in presentations. So during the breaks, when there’s coffee, don’t wander off into a corner to check your emails. Because that is missing the point, which is to get to know people you don’t know, to put a face to somebody you’ve only seen on a screen from across the country.

The relationships that you build then, even if you get behind on your emails, will pay dividends over the years.

Regarding return to the office, teams do want more flexibility in terms of how they work and where they work.

The bad news is it’s not settled, no one has figured it out. We are in a period of flux and the dust has not settled since we started going back to work.

You have a young generation, some of whom started work during lockdown, who don’t realize the value of in-person and refuse to come to work. I know somebody who’s really smart and works for a good company. She likes her company, she likes the culture, and she has told me that if they make her go back to work she will quit.

it’s also a generation that’s not really afraid of quitting. Many older people wouldn’t dream of quitting without having another job lined up.

But this generation will quit without another job. It’s mind-blowing to us. And worse, they’re suffering mental health challenges – and then they come into work and they freak out but they don’t realize it was being home alone that created that challenge.

So not enough time has passed, we are not through the woods yet on this complication.

The good news is that when they have in-person contact, they like it. We have young people in our team who are very cynical about the whole in-work thing. But we had a company ‘off site’ and none of them wanted to leave; they begged us to do it again, they wanted to do it more often. It was so much fun when you actually got to be in it, got to solve a problem with people in person, got to see how creative you were.

So part of it is experimenting.

If you do have plans to go fully back to work, the best strategy I’ve seen was a company that wanted to make everybody come back to work but they didn’t make a grand pronouncement that everybody had to come back to work. And they didn’t do it partially, with the intention of doing it fully later.

No, the CEO said: ‘I’m making one demand which is that my most senior tier of leaders have to come back to work five days a week. Everybody else is hybrid.’

Those senior people don’t get to question it, they have to comply.

But it turns out when your boss comes to work every day his direct reports start coming to work more. And when that level starts coming to work more, the level below them starts coming to work more, and before you know it everybody is back at work.

But flexibility is here to stay – that’s for sure. It used to be: ‘Can I work from home from Friday?’ Now you just send an email: ‘I’m working from home from Friday.’

That’s here to stay and I think it’s a good thing. But create little opportunities – not forcing people to come back to work, but showing them the value of working with each other in a hackathon-type environment. I think those are invaluable and magical, especially for young people to really get to enjoy the feeling.

Even if they complain on their way there, they’ll come back asking to do another one on the way. We’ve seen it happen.