When it comes to the working environment of your business, it is best not to try to fix it.

Instead of fixing the old environment, which is broken in the past, create a new environment for the future.

You can’t change the past. It has happened and nothing can fix it.

You can learn from it though.

What you need is the idea of what the future environment needs to look like to enable your business to deliver on its vision. Every business of every size has an opportunity to design a new way of working that will bring better results for everyone.

After wars, we did not rebuild what was there before. We built new futures.

The NHS was created in 1948. The leaders of the day learned something from their past and the new environment they created was free healthcare for all at the point of delivery. This was not about fixing the past, it was about creating something that had not existed before.

The economic growth in post-war Britain was not so impressive because it was not until the 50’s/60’s that innovation really took off in the UK.

We are now faced with a similar opportunity following on from a horrendous situation. This is an opportunity for both social and economic advancement.

The lockdown process forced the majority of the workforce to adopt different working patterns.

Now the discussion seems to focus on three options, return to the office, stay working at home or the ‘hybrid’ option. Working from home (WFH) and working in the office (WIO) will need to coexist and that will mean new social interactions.

The real opportunity is to fundamentally alter how people work and improve people’s lives and economic productivity. It will be different for every business.

But there are some traps people need to avoid.

• One size fits all. It does not have to be a certain way. It does not have to be as it was before. Business owners and leaders need to let go of how it was in the past and engage all of their staff by working out how to move forward so that everybody wins.

• Relationships with employees will change. Your employees have had more freedom in how they organise their life and their work. For many, productivity has increased. For some it has been a struggle to remain productive. Each situation must be considered on its own merits, which means the old top-down command and control approach won’t work, you need to organise differently.

• There is a path back to normal. Returning to pre-covid ways of working in your business is a pipe dream for most businesses. Hospitality is one of the few where the ‘employee-customer-business’ matrix will return to something that closely resembles pre-covid but even that will be different. Businesses that try to force their people to fit back into the old model will suffer as employees will look for alternative work that will meet their individual needs.

• Your staff who have been on furlough have changed. Just like a team member who has been away for a holiday, takes a few days to get back into their stride, so your furloughed staff will take time to adjust. You need to actively design the return to work period to reintegrate people, adapt to new working conditions and adjust to a blend of WFH and WIO.

The post-pandemic era will deliver many challenges to businesses, from small teams all the way up to corporations. How we organise will determine the results we achieve. We can either turn and face a future rich in possibilities or we can try to fix the past.

If you want to move forward we have to break the tenacious grip the past has on everyone in the business. When we clearly distinguish the past as the past, we have access to it for learning without being controlled by it. That gives us freedom with respect to the past. We can unlearn it to create a new future.

It is time to choose your path.

The problem with everything new is that something old gets replaced. The problem with that is that we humans are very attached to our possessions and our traditions.

So how do you let go of the past? How do you give up the old things?

The answer is a simple one, but it takes time to adjust. We give up what went before when the new thing becomes more valuable to us.

We give up what is in the past, what’s behind us, when the future, what is in front of us is of more value to us. And we make that choice in the present.

Let’s consider the topic of the day… returning to the office.

The past, where everyone worked in the office.

The next past and currently the present is most people work from home unless their work requires them to be in a specific physical location.

The future… What will it be?

The old past would like everyone back in the office, a return to command and control, that can see everyone is at work.

The new past has different ideas, hybrid, better home working support, distributed hubs or use of business centres and hot desking.

The present would like to maintain the freedom of home working and the flexibility it gives, better for the environment, less office overhead required.

Now apply the value test.

What would be most valuable to the organisation, the employees and the customer?

The trick is, design for the future you want to create. The trap is to create a new normal, which will only be a view of normal see through the lens of the past.