January 2022
Our first episode for series two of our ‘In conversation with…’ podcast for 2022, features Claire Haidar, technology entrepreneur, future thinker and Founder and CEO of Wyndr and Pattyrn.
Claire explains how the future of work is chaos, why we should all be embracing it and how companies can build resilience to adapt. Claire shares her view that hybrid working doesn’t work and explores what clashes of cultures can happen in trying to maintain a hybrid workplace. The conversation ends with some lessons learnt from building culture in virtual organisations and Claire’s one wish for the workplace of 2032 – hologram technology.
In Conversation With…Claire Haidar
Series 2: Episode 1.
Lucy Lewis: Hello, and welcome to the Future of Work Hubs in conversation with podcast. I’m Lucy Lewis, a partner in Lewis Silkin’s Employment team and in this podcast series, I’ll be hosting exclusive discussions with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders to explore their perspective on what the future of work holds.
The pandemic has accelerated longer term societal, economic and technological trends, giving us a unique opportunity, a once in a generation challenge to re-think who, how, what and where we work.
But while the pandemic has been a significant catalyst for immediate change, it’s only one of the many drivers of change in the world of work.
And here to discuss her thoughts on the world of future of work, remote working, how we should be planning our work following the pandemic is Claire Haidar. Claire is a technology entrepreneur, but she is also a brilliant future thinker. She’s got lots of thoughts about all things human, work and play. Claire is the founder and CEO of Wyndr and of Pattyrn. So welcome Claire.
Claire Haidar: Lucy, it’s so good to be here with you on the podcast today. Thank you for inviting me.
Lucy Lewis: Well thank you for coming. And I was wondering if you could start by introducing yourself.
Tell us a bit about your background and how you’ve got to be the CEO of these two fantastic businesses that you have now.
Claire Haidar: So, Lucy, I actually had a bit of an epiphany on a very jam-packed highway one morning as an 18-year-old way back in South Africa. So I just graduated at High School and I had basically started my college degree which was in industrial psychology and I was basically on route to, because I got myself part-time jobs whilst I was at college, and I was on route to this job one morning and the highway between the two cities, the city that I was working in and the city that I lived in. To give you an idea how congested it was, people had to wake up at like 4am to be on the highway by 5, to reach the office at 8. Ok, that’s the level of traffic. And this is just like normal everyday life for people. And I’m sitting … like we’re not moving, just standstill traffic and I looked to my left and there is a woman eating a bowl of cereal. Looked to my right and there is a woman applying make-up and I look in my rear-view mirror and there’s a man shaving. And this is at 5am in the morning. And I just, as an 18-year-old, my heart just sank because I was like you know, is this my future? Is this what it means to be an adult? And I made a promise to myself in that car, as the sunrise was coming up, that I was going to build companies that really addressed this issue that took away the absolute necessity to do these crazy commutes to work and that enabled people to work from anywhere.
Like the thought that was so dominant in my brain as an 18-year-old that morning was it’s not right for people to have to do this every day. This is not living. You know, people should be able to be able to sit on a beach. They should be able to be anywhere that they want and be able to work. And actually that’s, you know, it’s a pretty big issue. It’s not an issue that I have solved on my own. But I committed to dedicating my career and my life to working in that area to make work better for people.
So that’s how we got to where we are today.
Lucy Lewis: That’s fantastic. And we’ll come on to talk about some of those learnings. Because I know you’ve got lots to say about that. But, before we do that, I wanted to ask you about a TED talk that you’ve given about the future of work and you talk about the future of work being chaos and it really resonated with me because chaos is such an interesting word. It makes me sort of think of lack of control and disruption and of course, that’s what we’ve all been living for the last 18 months.
Future of Work Ted Talk
But, your challenge to us is that we should embrace the chaos and I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about that and explain what you mean by it.
Claire Haidar: So interestingly enough, I did this TED talk way before the pandemic even hit us. I did it back in 2016 and I … I really stood back, you know, when I was invited to do it and I asked myself the question ‘What is the reality of work moving forward and what is it that people at that point in time back in 2016 were really pushing back against’. And one of my primary observations that I’ve seen that spans geography, cultures, languages, all different types of industries, ages, generations, is the reality that we’re all working in all of these disparate systems. You know, so as Cloud has become a dominant way in which we function, both at a consumer level and at a work level, our work applications that we actually complete our work in are sitting in the Cloud. I mean this is an example. You and I are currently working in the Cloud right now as we are recording this podcast. And the number of those applications that we’re working in is increasing daily.
You know, pre-pandemic people were engaging with approximately anywhere between 18 to 30 applications on a daily basis. Like having to jump and switch between those. Post pandemic that number is increased to in and around 40-50 applications.
And so you’ve gone from an environment that was very insular in terms of the number of applications that people had to engage with so the context that they found themselves in were minimal, do you know what I mean? And so, context switching wasn’t such a big issue. And I then kind of peeled the onion back on that one in my thinking and I was like that context switching is highly disruptive at neurological level in the brain, you know. And that was kind of where I came up with the title for that talk – “The Future of Work is Chaos”. People perceive it and feel it physically in their beings as being very chaotic and it’s increasing because of the number of applications we’re having to engage with to complete our work.
And that’s when I was like ‘but hang on a minute, chaos is actually a scientific concept. Let’s actually go and dig into this’. And so, what I did in preparation for that TEDx talk was, I went, and I actually sat with scientists and I said to them ‘explain chaos theory to me, I really want to understand it’. And I just, my mind was blown as I emerged out of these conversations because chaos, if you look at it from the scientific concept that it is, is actually not chaotic in terms of how we, as humans, have kind of defined chaos. As you say we hear the word chaos, we feel chaos and we want to organise it and box it. But if you actually look at the scientific concept of chaos, it’s not disorganised at all, it actually doesn’t need organisation. It’s a highly, highly structured network with millions of nodes and all those nodes are interconnected. And that was my big epiphany. I was like, this is why it feels like chaos, but it actually isn’t. It’s just that globalisation and the fact that we are so in interconnected as a world and as a global human race nowadays and everything impacts everything else. That is why work feels chaotic. But it in fact isn’t.
So, my challenge to humanity at large is we need to make serious mind shifts about what we felt was normal and good and healthy before, and what this new reality really is that we’re dealing with.
Lucy Lewis: Thanks Claire. And one of the things that I know that you’ve talked about is that we can harness chaos. We can use that chaos to unleash our human potential so we’re increasingly moving towards an automated workplace, machine-based workplace. You’ve talked a lot about applications. We can all empathise with that, I know.
Leadership skills of the future workplace
And I wondered if you had thoughts about the kind of skills that we’re all going to need to thrive in that future workplace. And how companies go about building resilience and building an ability to adapt to that change in kind of workplace.
Claire Haidar: So I think the very first thing before I speak to the specific skills, I think something that is very important to note is that we need to accept that automation and AI is now an actual living reality in our working world. And people may not be aware of it, and yes, it may not be the most sophisticated forms of those things, but they’re there and they’re real. If anybody is using a project management system, if anybody is using a communication tool, like Zoom, or Slack, or anyone of those, those systems already have AI and automation built into them. And so, I think that’s one of the first key things that we need to accept. With that reality as a basis of our thoughts moving forward, one of the key things from a managerial perspective. So, I’ll talk first to the managerial skills and then I, you know, will delve into the employees’ specific skills is we need to understand that our responsibility as leaders and managers in workplaces is significantly changing. We actually need to start creating workplaces that include bots, that include automated creatures, if I can call them that, that work alongside our human people. Talent is no longer just human talent. Talent is now bots plus humans.
And that in and of itself, accepting that and actually starting to design around that will fundamentally change how we view who does what. And the immediate shift that will happen if we do actually go and work around that premises, is that there is a certain set of things that bots are really, really good at, which is all the automotive work and we will make it our mission as leaders and managers to get rid of all of those things that humans are currently doing but they shouldn’t be doing.
And then, leaders will very quickly, and some leaders who are really working in this area, are aware of this and they’re actually seeing it happen in the workplaces is that, people are pretty defensive about what they’re doing. They’re very protective about their work. And they take pride in it. And so, smart leaders are very aware of the fact that they’re essentially pushing their workplaces into a place of identity crisis. Each employee is individually going through an identity crisis because, what they’ve potentially been doing for 30, 40, 50 years in their career is no longer what they can or should be doing moving forward.
And so, the next skill there is really being able to lead people through that change. So, understanding change management and understanding how to lead teams through that into a new identity and a new way of being is one of the most critical leadership skills.
And then if you look at the employee skillsets, there’s a number of them that can be mentioned, but the most important one at this juncture that I would ring as the most important is curiosity. And the reason for that is it takes a curious mindset to be able to let go of that which makes you feel safe and let go of that which you are protective of and actually look at it objectively and say you know, what parts of the job shouldn’t I be doing any more? When parts of this can I automate? What parts of this can I hand over to a bot companion in the future? And how do I, as an individual employee, actually work myself out of my own job and into a new different type of job with different skills.
And I think, if we can really hone that in our employees and in our team members, the next phase will reveal a different set of skills but right now, for we, humanity, is I think that is the most important point.
Lucy Lewis: Thanks Claire. That’s really, really interesting and I know will be really helpful to our listeners. And actually it’s quite helpful to me because it takes me back to what something I said I would come back to which is allowing you to talk a little bit about the businesses that you’ve built and your thoughts about what those should look like and, I said at the beginning that one of the things that we’ve really focussed on in this podcast series is the who, how, what and where of work, you’ve talked a little bit about the who, which is great and the emergence of bots and working alongside bot companions. But, one of the other things that I know you’ve got really interesting thoughts about is, what we should be doing and how much of it we should be doing.
So, at the moment, lots of listeners are thinking about the return to work. Thinking about the new normal. A lot of them really trying to work out how we embrace hybrid working but I know one of your thoughts has been well, maybe we should just abandon the hybrid workplace and we should look towards reduced working.
Hybrid workplace environment
We should look towards working a 4-hour day for example and I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about that.
Claire Haidar: Yeah. So, Lucy, I do need to say that what I am about to proceed to say is very provocative. And, it definitely is a very challenging set of things that I’m going to share, you know, with the audience right now. And it’s things that I, myself, as a business leader, I’m really grappling with right now. These are not easy things.
So, if we look at, if we go back to absolute fundamental basic principles. If you look at the reality of what the pandemic has done, is its essentially taken a very time boxed approach to living. So, I leave my house, I go to work and I then come back. So, you’ve basically got two boxes in which people live. Work box. Life box. You know, a home box. And it’s just thrown those two directly into each other and so it’s completely intermeshed them and so, what’s happening is, is that where people before were pretty timeboxed in more or less anywhere between an 8 to a 15 hour window depending on geography. You know some Continents have much longer working hours than others, and hence my 8 to 15 hours. What’s happened now is that’s no longer timeboxed. That’s now literally spread across a full 24-hour day. So, somebody that was working 8 hours is generally switched on and physically available to work and to their team for approximately double that amount of time. And for people who were really working in excess, that’s like really pushed it to the absolute limit. And so, we need to go back to basics and say ‘ok, this honestly at its most fundamental level. This is a time issue that we’re dealing with’. And if you actually go and do the calculation, and I’m very happy to, you know, share this actual calculation that I’ve done around, what it actually takes to live a life, the scary reality is that the approximate human is working in a deficit of days.
Where every month that we’re living, we’re building up a deficit of approximately 8 days, which is 100 days short to live. Now that sounds totally crazy because you’ve only got so much time. Time doesn’t expand, do you know what I mean? so how is it possible to build up a deficit? It builds up, because what people tend to do is, instead of sleeping the 8 hours that they should, they sleep 4. Instead of exercising, they don’t exercise. And so, to manage that deficit of days, we sacrifice core parts of what are actual essential parts to living well.
And because of that reality, and what people are dealing with, all of a sudden, the context of the mental health crisis that we’re dealing with at a global level right now makes absolute sense. Because any person that’s living in a deficit of days is going to be mentally unhealthy.
And therefore, we need to seriously question about even considering going back to the way things were because they never worked. So people have now for two years lived in this intermeshed and if you go and speak to the companies, and we’re one of those companies, who have built virtual companies from the ground up, we’ve actually all tried to do the blended approach. We’ve tried to do the hybrid workplace. And it doesn’t work. It genuinely doesn’t work. And the companies who have experimented with this have been very, very large operations and then very small start-ups, like ourselves. So, this dataset actually spans, you know, the large and the small. And they’ve all come back as failed experiments essentially. And if you unpack that and you look at why it doesn’t work, it’s because building a virtual company and building an in-person company require completely, completely different cultures.
Which, culture at its essence is a set of collective behaviours around how people make decisions and get work done. To work virtually and to build that virtual culture is completely different than what it does and how it happens in an in-person place. And so, what I genuinely believe is going to happen, based on the evidence that we have from the companies that have experimented with this, is that people are going to try back to what they determine the near normal, which is this hybrid model, and they’re very quickly going to see that it isn’t going to work. And so, we’re going to have this whiplash effect where people are going to have to go back to the drawing board. Instead of doing the hard work now of redefining their culture and actually staking something in the ground, they’re kind of going to play this like ‘let’s kick the can down the road’ and in two years’ time they’re going to be forced to do it because they’re going to push their workforces to the brink.
So, I’ll pause there for a moment and, you know, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, but, it’s a harsh reality that we’re dealing with.
Lucy Lewis: Yeah, and I think you’re absolutely right. And we talked on this podcast series about conscious experimentation and people actually needing to go through that journey of change and understand or re-prioritise the things that actually matter to people and you and I have talked about the great resignation, the war for talent and, you know, increasingly these things are important to attracting the best people and we know that businesses that succeed are the ones that can attract the best talent. People that want to stay, want to learn, and want, as you say, to be curious. So, it will be fascinating to see how things pan out in this kind of conscious experimentation of a new normal.
Virtual business management
Claire Haidar: I love that phrase that you’ve just coined there. And that you’ve brought up in your other podcast, conscious experimentation and yes, I genuinely believe you know, it’s … if I had a magic wand, I definitely wouldn’t try and prevent the world from going through what they’re going through right now. It is something that you need to feel. It is something that you as a team need to collectively experience.
If I look at the experiments that we’ve run and because we’ve built a virtual company from the ground up, pre-pandemic, when it actually wasn’t popular to do this, you know, I’ve literally had VC’s tell me that the company is going to fail because we’re building it virtually. I’ve had business mentors tell me the same thing. Even my husband who is a fellow entrepreneur has told me that it’s not possible to build a company virtually. He’s changed his mind, subsequently. But I mean that was the common perception out there. And so, we did it with that conscious mindset from the outset and we were ruthless in being honest about where we were failing and where we weren’t. And I’m hoping that the world will be conscious as they navigate through these next few years, because we have to be highly conscious right now.
Lucy Lewis: And actually, that takes me back to something I wanted to come back to. Because you talked about the difference in culture. You need a different culture if you’re managing or building a remote workforce.
Agile way of working
I wondered if you were happy to share just a couple of observations about how you’ve gone about building that culture to have the successful businesses that you have.
Claire Haidar: Absolutely. Very, very happy to share that. There’s so much that I can share here, but because you’ve asked for specific observations, one that I think is really important to bring up, because it really is universally applicable, is just how different communication is inside a virtual company versus an in-person company. The communication overhead that happens inside a virtual company increases by approximately 20% per person. Now, lets go and just put that into actual like hours so that we can understand how significant that is. If somebody is working an 8-hour day ok, that is more than an hour additional time in a virtual environment that you need just to communicate, what you wouldn’t need to do in an in-person environment. And the reason why that communication overhead increases so significantly is because of the absolute lack of our ability. You’re not sharing physical space, so you can’t absorb critical information at subconscious physical level. And hence, everything needs to be communicated very explicitly in a virtual environment.
So, what we as a company have done to combat that is, we’ve been exceptionally intentional about how we go about actually designing our communications spaces. We’ve got very specific guidelines that we follow in terms of how we’ve designed our slack space for example. Like how we’ve set up channels. Like what we … the rules are that we’ve collectively agreed on in terms of how we engage in certain channels. We’re very conscious about cleaning up our communication spaces. For example, we have, as an entire company, we sprint, we follow the agile methodology and we sprint across the entire company but what we do is we actually share a daily stand up every single day in our slack spaces. And we’ve got specific channels just for the daily stand up. Because, it comes back to that, you know, principle of basic communication overhead where you have to be explicit about things and so that’s how we’ve been able to combat that.
And, you know, moving onto the next one. So, I’ve just shared a very practical example there around communication, but where I can speak more broadly across work as a whole is it comes back to the actual design of the physical spaces. So, if you think about a physical in-person office that you’re sitting in, it’s designed with a lot of intention. You know, the interior architects and the interior designers, literally pour over different, you know, models around where will the kitchen go, where will the water coolers be, where will the rest rooms be? And those are decisions that need strategic thinking. Because they’re actually thinking about human flow you know, and human connection as it happens spontaneously between how tables are set up etc.
And we don’t approach our online spaces with the same level of intentionality that we do when it comes to creating physical spaces. So, there’s this whole concept of online architecture, you know, online interior design that is completely new. Like people, that isn’t, those aren’t even coined phrases and yet they are essential because whereas spending a significant amount of our time in these spaces. And right now, people are just allowing themselves to essentially just go with the flow of how these tools have been designed by the UX designers that have designed them. But the concept of them being actual physical workspaces is something that was never taken into consideration by the UX designers. It was always just a tool you know that was used in a workplace.
And so, fundamentally, there’s a lot of work that needs to be re-done there and so that’s where, that’s ultimately the areas where the hybrid fails. And why companies need to make such a strong decision about it. You know, those are some of the principles.
So, if I was to summarise that, what Tracey, my co-founder, and I have done is, is because we’ve established a virtual company, we have done that in a very intentional way. So every single system that we sign up to, every single space in which the team come together hasn’t just been flipped on and users have been assigned, you know, we’ve actually gone in prior to the team coming in and we’ve thought very intentionally about how it will be used, what are the rules of engagement when it’s been used, how will we clean it up, what will the actual team and that schedule look like etc.
I hope that’s helpful.
Lucy Lewis: Really, really helpful. Thank you. And thank you for sharing your thoughts as a futurist but also your experience as a business leader because it’s great to hear it from a practical perspective.
I’ve got one last question. And it’s something I’m asking all our guests on this podcast series and you’ve already done a little bit of this because it involves some crystal ball gazing. But we both know that the world of work is going to look very different in 10 years’ time, probably in ways we can’t even predict now.
Virtual reality working environment
But if you had the power to ensure that there will be one change, so that if we looked at the workplace of 2032, one thing would be different. What would that be?
Claire Haidar: So, Lucy, I absolutely love this question. And I honestly don’t know if this will be reality in 2032, it may be a little bit further out from that. But I’m going to share it in any case. And that is that if you look at where, you know, hologram technology currently is, if you look at where virtual reality technology currently is, it’s got a long way to go.
But we’re very clearly starting to see the emergence of people essentially being able to place themselves in different environments through the use of this technology. And that really is my wish is that we will be able to essentially, like if I was able to wave the wand like you say like snap ourselves into a bubble of our own making to be able to work effectively wherever we are, so that we can engage fully with work in that moment but then at the same time very quickly bounce out of that bubble that we’ve put ourselves into and you know, move into the world around us, whether that be a coffee shop, you know, that we go to, or our child’s school that we want to engage with you know just down the road. But it’s essentially being able to really just snap into like an office bubble that has been created and designed for us instantaneously and then at the drop of a hat when you need to just essentially like let the bubble deflate and move away.
Lucy Lewis: It sounds fantastic! I’m definitely wanting to be in that world.
Thank you so much for joining us Claire, it’s been a really, really fascinating discussion and for our audience, if they’d like to hear more about some of the ideas that Claire has been sharing, more about the businesses that she runs, you can find that at www.clairehaider.com or www.pattyrn.com.
Thank you again Claire.
Claire Haidar: Thank you so much Lucy. It was great being here with you today.
If anyone would like to find out more about Claire and her work you can find out more here and here. You can also contact her via LinkedIn and Twitter.