By Dale Carnegie Staff

• Working from Home (WFH) will be coming to an end for many who expected otherwise: physical offices are set to make a bigger rebound than anticipated.

• The widely-publicized cost savings of remote work could be outweighed by the impact of declining social capital and changing communication patterns.

• Whether operating remotely, in a hybrid model, or in-person, organizations may want to turn some attention to strengthening social capital.

As keen observers of human relations and their impact on organizations’ performance, we wrote several blogs back in 2020 on the future of WFH. We weren’t convinced then that remote work would become the “new normal” and it seems that many business leaders now agree.

A McKinsey pulse survey of CEOs reports that while many leaders don’t expect to really be settled into their post-pandemic working model until after 2022 (whether that’s back to their pre-pandemic mode of operation or a “new normal”), most now expect to return to the physical office.

Despite some high-profile exceptions, “wholesale moves toward remote working remain the exception rather than the rule”, they conclude. In fact, fewer than a third of business leaders surveyed are now committed to a hybrid model including two to three days of remote work per week.

Why?

Even with the appeal of significant cost savings from WFH, we think that recent experiences have given business leaders a heightened sense of the importance of social capital and its impact on collaboration, corporate culture, talent development, productivity and performance, which we explored in prior blogs.

At the heart of social capital development are trusted professional relationships and effective communication, and we’ve all seen how difficult it can be to consistently communicate well when restricted exclusively to email, texting and Zoom.

Our research (consistent with work done by many others) has found again and again that effective communication and social intelligence are key for psychological safety and team effectiveness, resilience, organizational agility, and the genuine inclusion that supports sustained diversity.

We’ve undergone our own digital transformation at Dale Carnegie to offer new flexibility to participants – Learn From Anywhere (LFA) option. Opportunities on the horizon for bringing people together for training around topics such as interpersonal skills, social intelligence, and leadership are good news as research suggests it may be more effective when taught using a blended approach that includes live instruction together with online enhancements.

If you’re ready to learn more about enhancing social capital-building skills within your team build, please contact us – we look forward to talking with you.

About the Editor:

Robert Graves, MBA, is a Dale Carnegie Certified Trainer for Dale Carnegie Tampa Bay. His focus is Relationship Selling. He is the author of “Making More Money with Technology.” He often speaks on the evolution of Marketing, Sales, and Service. Robert can be reached at robert.graves@dalecarnegie.com or call/text 813-966-3058.

About Dale Carnegie:

Dale Carnegie is a global training and development organization specializing in leadership, communication, human relations, and sales training solutions. More than 9 million people around the world have graduated from Dale Carnegie training since it was founded in 1912. Dale Carnegie Training can help your organization build effective interpersonal skills that generate the positive emotions essential to a productive work environment that lead to increased profits.