Article Details
  • Published Online:
    September  2024
  • Product Name:
    The IUP Journal of Effective Executive
  • Product Type:
    Article
  • Product Code:
    EE050924
  • Author Name:
    Kai-Alexander Schlevogt
  • Availability:
    YES
  • Subject/Domain:
    Management
  • Download Format:
    PDF
  • Pages:
    32
Teleworkers Under Meta-Leadership Fire: Using the Inverted Office Power Pyramid to Understand Back-to-Office Mandates
Abstract

The “Great Reset” agenda, an integral accelerator of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, aimed at leveraging the fluidity of the global Covid-19 pandemic to enforce lasting fundamental changes to capitalism on a worldwide scale. One part of this agenda, which had been proposed by the World Economic Forum, was a radical redesign of work, with a strong emphasis on digitally empowered remote labor schemes. Yet after permitting liberal and apparently permanent teleworking arrangements during the pandemic, various organizational leaders, in the process of completing their context-setting “meta-work”, are increasingly whipping their staff back to the post-pandemic physical workspace. The new “Inverted Office Power Pyramid” model distills the fundamental granular forces driving the seemingly unstoppable return-to-office megacycle trend after a prolonged period of work from home. This first part of a pioneering research series on the future of work by the author focuses on the top two layers of the four-level framework, i.e., the organizational economic and behavioral economic levels

Introduction

The Center for the History of the Russian Diplomatic Service, a Moscow-based museum, proudly guards a mysterious gift, which the then-Secretary of State of the United States, Hillary Clinton, handed over to her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, during a meeting in Geneva in 2009.