It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. Something we've learned from this pandemic quarantine,

a lot of the things we thought were unchangeable in our workplaces, like going all remote,

are not so unchangeable after all. In her 2021 talk from Ted Salon, Patty McCord, the former chief talent officer at Netflix,

pulls the insight from this year of radically changed workplaces into some concrete lessons for all of us.

I've spent the last couple of years traveling around the world, giving talks to big corporations

and little bitty startups and lots of leadership

teams and women's groups. And what I've been talking to people about, I've been trying really

hard to convince people that we can change the way we work. But every time I do a talk,

somebody comes backstage or follows me offstage and says, you know, I'm so inspired by what

you say. It's so great. It makes so much

sense. But we can't. We can't because we're regulated. We can't because our CFO says we can't do it.

We can't because we're in Europe. We can't because we're a service industry. We can't because

we're a nonprofit. And then last year came the

pandemic. And the pandemic changed everything all over the world. Service people started realizing

that they had to suit up and wear masks and take temperatures and wash their hands. We had to

start standing six feet apart in lines. We started

working from home. We started working virtually. And we started learning all kinds of things

because we had to. All that muscle around innovation and flexibility and creativity that we didn't

think we had. We had all along. And we now have realized that we didn't think we had, we had all along.

And we now have realized that we can't.

So what have we learned? I mean, what did we learn right away?

First of all, we learned we're not family.

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