Redesigning Work picks up a US publishing medal

London Business School Professor Lynda Gratton’s latest book Redesigning Work has been awarded the Bronze Axiom medal, Business Disruption / Reinvention category, 2023 in recognition of the relevance of the work to this important field of business.

The Axiom Business Book Awards are intended to bring increased recognition to exemplary business books and their creators, with awards across 25 business categories serving as the premier list to help readers discover new and innovative works that will inspire, inform and help them improve their careers and businesses.

Redesigning Work, which provides readers with a 4-step-process to transform their organisation and make hybrid work for everyone, has generated considerable media interest since it was first published in the US by MIT Press in May 2022, with articles in renowned publications such as the Financial Times, The Times, Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan. The book has also been the focus of numerous podcasts, including ‘Eat Sleep Work Repeat with Bruce Daisley – Redesigning Work with Lynda Gratton’; Management Today’s Workplace Evolution Podcast – Redesigning Work For The Hybrid Era’; and ‘The New Human Movement – Redesigning Work with Lynda Gratton’.

Most recently, the book was the subject of an in-depth article in The Australian – ‘What’s it all about? Time to redesign work’. Published on 31 March, the article delves into the ongoing transition to hybrid work and what leaders need to do to manage the transition successfully.

Lynda recommends that executive teams ask themselves four crucial questions:

1. What are our overarching values and principles?
2. What is special about the people we employ, the jobs we do and the customers we serve?
3. What isn't working, and what are the problems we're trying to solve?
4. What experiments have we tried that we can share with others, and what are other companies doing that we can learn from?

The transition to hybrid work can then be managed successfully by executive teams taking two important steps: 1) giving more support to teams and managers because it’s in the relationships among people where many connections fray under the strains of hybrid work; and 2) using data as a guide to understand what they’re learning, how work is getting down and how employees are feeling. Speaking about her book and the recent award, Professor Gratton said:

“I am thrilled that my latest book has been recognised with an Axiom medal. I wrote it at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic when we were experiencing what is undoubtedly the greatest global shift in work for a century. With the pandemic creating a once-in-a-life time opportunity for people to rethink what they want from work and their working lives, I wanted to help corporate leadership teams redesign work to make working a more purposeful, productive, agile and flexible activity.

“The book is fundamentally a call to action: to cultivate and trial new ideas, to listen to new perspectives and, crucially, to make the leap from the rhetoric of ideas to the action of creation and implementation. This is hugely important. As I wrote in The Australian, ‘The leadership teams best equipped to meet challenges deeply understand the DNA of their companies, are open to learning from within and outside their organisations, and take a positive view of experimenting with new ways of working.’”