The Climate Culture Shock Is Coming
In the corporate world, big change starts at the top—which means companies will have to shake up their leadership to fulfill their environmental agendas.
My newsfeed—and probably your newsfeed too—is chockablock with stories about professional workers returning to their offices this summer. What the pandemic’s grand, unwitting experiment has shown is that the structure of work isn’t just habit, it’s culture.
Work culture varies not just industry to industry, but also company to company, and sometimes even worker to worker. Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., for instance, have their global headquarters a few blocks from each other in Manhattan but are miles apart on their workplace policies—hybrid and report-to-your desk, respectively. Meanwhile, younger professionals are anxious about missing out on skills-development and relationship-building, while working parents—having experienced flexibility of time and location—may be less eager to re-engage with their pre-pandemic commutes and intricate schedules.