 Is it a good idea to go back to a place where you've grown up, had a wonderful time, to go back after a couple of years, because you know, something changes. That's just what happened to me when I went back to XLRI after many years. I had finished my post-graduation. I'm not going to tell you when, but it was a long, long time back. And then after a couple of years, when I went back to XLRI, Jamshedpur, when I went to the town, I felt that something had changed, but then I thought that, oh well, maybe I didn't remember it all that clearly because I was a student at XL and I didn't really step out that much into the town. So, I decided to hold my judgment until I went back to the old campus and I was so looking forward to it. I wanted to meet the old professors, go back and visit that classroom, maybe sit down there without any stress for a change. And as I went closer to the campus, I discovered that, ah, maybe, oh well, I thought I'm going to hold judgment because the first thing that struck me was the campus looked different. There were barriers there where none existed. The old tea shop had moved somewhere else. Yes, the hostel was there. That was a reassuring sign because that's really the first thing that you see as you step into XLRI. And then the taxi driver asked me a difficult question. He said, do you want to go to the old guest house or the new guest house? And you know, when it's a choice between something old and something new, it's a bad idea to go back to something new when you go back to your old alma mater. So, I said, I'm going to play it safe and I'm going to go back to the old guest house. When I went there, I found it was run by a different set of people who didn't recognize me. Well, when I was there, I knew everyone and I was a little disappointed. So, I introduced myself and wanted to check in. They said, no, your booking is probably in the other guest house. So, I went to the other guest house and before I would go there, I stopped to turn back and say, but where is the other guest house? They said, oh, it's in the new campus. And I said, oh my God, where is the new campus? And all this was new news to me. The campus was different, you know, the place where there used to be football matches that field really had now become part of the old campus. Where the staff quarters used to end the professors' houses, that now was just the beginning of, you know, what was going to be the new campus. I walked across, stepped into this new place. It was really, you know, much nicer than the, you know, the guest house that I had stayed in once, the older guest house. But something was missing. You know, it was a different place. It almost seemed as if I didn't quite study there. This was a different college that I had come back to. So, I thought I'm going to wait until I meet some of the older professors. As I inquired around, all the professors seemed to have retired. They had left and there were one or two people and I was so excited about seeing all of them. But I also realized that this was not going to be the old XLR that I was used to. And in some sense, I don't know whether I should say it was disappointment, but certainly I felt that, you know, a part of my childhood which was there, you know, I should have just let it be. But then this was the real world. So, I decided to reconcile those feelings and I went back to talk to some of the people who were studying there. And I really discovered when you talk to some of the youngsters who are there, so I asked them, you know, which of the two streams, business management or IR or HR, are you a part of? And they said, well, I mean, I'm part of a certificate program. So, I said, what is that? Because when I was a student there, they had the daytime course which had two streams and then there was the evening batch. So, we used to finish it in two years, the daytime course students and the others who are the working people who used to do it part-time took three years to complete the degree. There was about the only difference if you ask me and then now when I inquired about the whole process, they said, well, there is the certificate program, there is the short-term course, there is the stay-up with this particular place and there are a whole lot of people. And I said, how many students are there? And the number that they told me really was mind-boggling. And then I also discovered that they were to open another campus in another city. It was in some senses a destruction of that whole campus, you know, the little dream that I had, that little imaginary place that I had written about, I have spoken about so many times. I just thought the soul had changed. So, why am I telling you about this today? Because you're going to feel exactly the same thing as you step into the workplace and as this new workplace opens up wrapper by wrapper, fold by fold, you will discover that it's a different place altogether. So, stop looking for the old place because you're going to feel like me going back to the old campus and thinking, everything has changed and you're going to keep looking at today from the lens of yesterday and nobody wants that. Because when I was talking to the students who were there, they didn't want to talk about, you know, what was happening at the time when I was a student and there's only so much of nostalgia that you can take. You can say, oh, you know, it used to be so lovely, we used to sit here for hours together and have tea and their whole point is, okay, get it. So what about the world now? That's what they want to talk about. They want to talk about what's happening in the world of HR today. And so I was talking to them about how HR is going to have to get reinvented. That's the term we've used a lot in the past but we didn't really know what reinvention means because reinvention actually can mean something dramatically different. It's going to be a different workplace, that's for sure. So everything about that workplace will look different. You know, take, for example, when people come there wearing masks all around you or that you have to stand in line. So your concept of time and space is the first casualty that's going to be noticed. You will discover you take a lot more time to get into the office. Somebody checks for temperature. Somebody makes sure that it's sanitized. Somebody comes and cleans up the workplace. You sort of go and sit down there after so long. If you left a desktop there, you know, it may not start up right away and you are grateful that you have the IT support there because at home when you're working, that IT support was not there. Of course, when people first discover that they're going to go back to the workplace, they're also filled with excitement. They're going to meet their old colleagues again. But what they have not factored in is, your colleague is now looking at you and wondering, I hope it's safe to sit this close to you because I'm going to maintain social distance and suddenly all the rooms suddenly appear very small. The air conditioning, as soon as it is switched on, some people feel paranoid. Is it safe to put on the air conditioning? Can we do without the air conditioning? And then it gets so hot, some people say, okay, I'm either going to die of the heat or I'm going to die of the virus. So that's going to be our choice. Departments are going to change. So what it means is maybe the admin department or facilities department, whatever you decide to call it in your organization, they are also going to have to start working and thinking about sanitation a lot more, hygiene a lot more. The cafeteria is not going to be the same. Where people really stood there next to each other, they sat there and had a conversation as they ate. A lot of people are going to wonder, why I'm not quite sure whether the cafeteria is a safe place to go. So that's going to change. And along with that, also the way people learn, the way people get onboarded, the way people get hired, if anybody is hiring at all. And then you're going to have virtual interviews because there's no point getting a person in. You don't know whether the person is, the candidate is going to be disease free or virus free. That's going to be something that we've never ever had to worry about. Think about it, when you cover this much of the face and you're just looking at me from this kind of a distance, so much is covered. A lot of how we make sense in informal conversations is actually going to disappear because you can't make out whether somebody is smiling or scowling at you. So just think about it, this much is covered and you'll kind of discover that when I said something to the boss, was he smiling and so therefore it's on or was he just really being grumpy. Signals that we have used for survival in all kinds of settings are going to go away. Well, if one thing people are going to be grateful for that no more virtual conferences to attend all day. No more classrooms to attend all day because people are really almost grateful to get back to a different mode of learning which they always used to say, oh that's not good enough I can learn on my own because one of the things we discover is learning is not just about content transfer which is very efficient actually by the way when you think about online courses, they are very very efficient. So when you think about learning, how would you learn? Is it going to be a mix? Is it going to be a combination? Is it going to be 90% virtual, 10% in-person or the other way round? When you go back to the workplace, you might discover that not if your top talent is unable to join you for various reasons and some people may have left. Your workplace may have trimmed down the number of employees that they have. So you may need to create a different workforce strategy. Are you going to work with freelancers and are you going to worry about their health when they come in to work with you? Are you going to leverage them as part of your learning and development process? Invite some of the experts in to come in, upskill your task force and then let them distribute this particular new skill across the organization. Or perhaps something that someone said is maybe we are going to use our L&D budget to distribute infrastructure so that as and when people need to work from home, in case of a shutdown, sudden shutdown, they should be able to do that without letting work suffer. So these are all going to be extremely hard new decisions that people will have to take and think about it. This is all going to be about people in that new workplace. As you bring them in, it is not going to be the old workplace. It's going to be a new workplace with new norms and I think the new norms will have to be co-created. It will have to be done with the employees. What do they think about privacy versus safety? What are those choices? Are people comfortable making those choices? So as we get into this new workplace, we will have to ask ourselves, let us stop using the lens of the old times and keep tweaking that this new world of work. Let us stop tweaking that to make it look like the old times just because it makes us comfortable. You know, when I went back to XLR, I so wanted to turn the clock back and relive that time. But I'm a different person today and I would be just as out of place if the old workplace came back. So yes, there will be new things, new behaviors, new methods of thinking, new roles that will come up. In every function, you'll have to sit back and think what are the roles that did not exist before and you are going to have to build those in. Your supply chain will probably have to be reconfigured. So will your hiring strategy or career management strategy, talent management if you will. And then instead of working with people being brought in from outside, some of that will still continue. But a lot of it really gives you an opportunity to help people discover their own strengths, make people move within the organization and it's the equivalent of really discovering each other. As we did when we were spending time with the family, you discover aspects about them that we didn't know existed. We lived with them for so many years, but there were strangers and this lockdown gave us a chance to really get to know them a lot more closely. So the same thing is going to happen in the workplace. You will discover colleagues have skills which you weren't aware of or that they have taken an online course which equips them far better than the person who's been formally charged to do that particular piece of work. So in many ways, as they say, the workplace is dead, long live the workplace.