The events of last year caught much of the global business world off-guard, but while 2020 was a year 
of responding to the crisis, 2021 (and beyond) are poised to be focused on recovery and transformation. A reimagination of work, as founding partner of Deloitte Consulting's Future of Work practice Jeff Schwartz called it in a recent conversation with Consulting. We recently sat down with Schwartz to discuss how the pandemic has changed everything we thought we knew about the world of work, and how companies are pivoting to thrive in that new world.
Consulting: What are some of the most important things companies can do to prepare their workforce for the New Normal we find ourselves in?
Schwartz: We've been moving through COVID and 2020, going through some version of what we at Deloitte call the respond-recover-thrive progression through a crisis. We're still in the extended recovery, it's taken longer than almost any of us thought, but now we're pivoting to what we call the thrive phase. I think the challenge for us as business leaders and consultants is to be thinking about where we want to be at the end of 2021. This is a reimagination moment. We call it rearchitecting work because it's not just an imagination exercise, we need to build something new. We need to reimagine it. And I think the challenge is to sort of strike the balance between recovery and survival and thrive and leaning forward right now. And to push ourselves because we now live in an exponential world. Everything we did in the last decade we need to do in the next five years.
