Welcome to the AGPIAL audiobook production of McKinsey's Quartly. 

Return as a muscle.

How lessons from COVID-19 can shape a robust operating model for hybrid and beyond.

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New research shows how resilient organizations thrived through the pandemic.

Here’s how to use those lessons to craft a better approach to how work gets done across time (real and asynchronous) and space (digital and physical).

by Aaron De Smet, Mihir Mysore, Angelika Reich, and Bob Sternfels In May 2020, we published an article arguing that the return to the workplace was a new muscle that organizations needed to develop, not a plan with a predictable timeline.

The need for organizations to build this muscle is especially urgent today, as vaccination levels around the world rise, infection and hospitalization levels in many countries decrease, and companies begin their return from remote.

Many companies are already in various stages of a physical return to the workplace.

In the United States, for example, employees are starting to return to office locations at a greater pace.

Consumer and retail footfall to headquarters has increased by 80 percent, travel and logistics are up 50 percent, and pharmaceutical and healthcare are up 10 percent.

A few short months ago, it wasn’t clear that business leaders would so fully embrace a return to the office.

But it’s now evident that they will.

Some 52 percent of C-suite executives we surveyed espouse an almost full return to the office, with workers on-site four days per week or more.

Nine out of ten think that employees will be in the office at least three days per week.

Company leaders have good reasons for wanting workers back in the office.

As the pandemic dragged on, people’s sense of belonging and social connections suffered, especially among newer employees.

Interactions across silos became increasingly difficult via remote.

Many women left the workforce, widening the gender gap.

Mental- health issues, grief, anxiety, and burnout are on the rise, reflecting a decline in the informal and intimate human connections that often occur at the workplace.