Employers are forcing their employees back to the office to impose control over workers, but they are failing to recognize that remote work enables worker power. In fact, remote work is empowering workers by giving them more control over their lives and work. With remote work, workers can choose where and when to work, which gives them more control over their schedules and their work-life balance.
Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts
Remote work is possible.
You can have trust and connection within a digital space.
You just need a leader who is comfortable with and optimized for working that way, of which most conventional leaders aren’t, which is why they’re forcing their workers back to a conventional way of working that they are comfortable with.
One of the better documents that I’ve found that highlights what digital leadership is capable of and how it will be the way of the future is the IBM paper entitled Virtual Worlds, Real Leaders.
Obviously the key difference here though is that these are real communities where leaders are chosen by the community themselves, thus these leaders can’t dictate their way into leadership by controlling others, they have to earn their community’s trust and respect to be in them.
Gaming leaders are more comfortable with risk, accepting failure, and the resulting iterative improvement, as part of their reality. Many of these leaders are able to make sense of disparate and constantly changing data, translating it all into a compelling vision. And the relationship skills of the best gaming leaders would put many Fortune 500 managers to shame.
If you want to see what business leadership may look like in three to five years, look at what’s happening in online games.
Byron Reeves, Ph.D.
The Paul C. Edwards Professor of Communication at Stanford University
and Co-founder of Seriosity, Inc.