“If the past 18 months have taught us anything,” McKinsey argues, “it’s that employees crave investment in the human aspects of work.”1Employees are looking to their jobs for meaning, agency, and purpose. Central to all three is a palpable sense of belonging. And fostering such a sense of belonging is made more difficult given hybrid working norms.2
“A tribe is defined both by who is in it and who is left out,” the Financial Times’ Gillian Tett writes in a recent column.3She cites research from Harvard Business School, Johns Hopkins University and Microsoft, exploring the interaction patterns revealed in more than 360 billion Microsoft Outlook emails, sent by 1.4 billion corporate employees, among 4,000 companies worldwide, Microsoft among them.4The email data covers a 24-month period that extends both before and after the start of the covid pandemic. Eschewing communications content, the researchers instead investigated ‘modularity patterns’ — the degree to which these electronic communications were clustered into self-contained “tribes.” As covid-driven work-from-home protocols became entrenched, the study finds, organizations became more siloed.
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