Welcome to Transform’s Q&A Author Spotlight Series, where we feature insightful authors who are redefining people and culture, work, leadership, and technology. Join us to gain fresh perspectives and practical knowledge from those at the forefront of today’s evolving professional landscape.
Hybrid working is more complex than we think and
requires a lot of alignment of organizational systems.
About the Author
Gary Cookson is a father of four and a husband of one, running a successful business, EPIC, in his spare time. He’s an expert on work and workplace performance, with extensive experience leading and directing HR, OD, and L&D functions across all sectors. His clients like working with him as he is authentic, honest, knowledgeable, communicative, and people-focused, with a broad and deep range of skills and experience.
Gary is a leading expert in the design and delivery of leadership, management, and HR/L&D programs and an inspiring and entertaining keynote speaker. He has been recognized in awards, written for publications worldwide, and spoken at global events.
He is one of the world’s leading thinkers on hybrid working and the modern world of work and is in regular demand with clients and conference organizers worldwide as a result, speaking on these topics, plus leadership, management, and various HR/L&D issues. He is the Author of Making Hybrid Working Work.
Background and Inspiration
Transform: What inspired you to write about the Future of Work, and what keeps you motivated in this field?
Gary Cookson: Most of my career has been helping to create the right experience at work for people, and that naturally leads to thinking about what the future of work might hold. For many years, I’d been an early adopter of many modern working trends – I started remote working in 2001, for example – and constantly strive to make the world of work a better place. My experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic, where lots of people and organizations asked me for advice about remote working since I’d been doing it for so long, inspired me to write down some of my experiences and advice.
Transform: Can you share a pivotal moment or experience that led to your interest in the future of work?
Gary Cookson: In 2017, I reached burnout point. Lots of things had happened at work and in my life and I could no longer sustain them. I quit my job because the world I was working in wasn’t beneficial to my health, and I set up my own company so that I could get more of what I needed and help others to do the same. There’s a LONG story behind this, and if anyone wants to know the full story of what happened, please ask me.
Transform: How have your professional experiences influenced your writing and perspectives on workplace trends?
Gary Cookson: Working in HR and L&D we are regularly exposed to aspects of the employee experience and often need to consider organization design and the organizational system. We have to craft initiatives, cultures, behaviors, systems, and experiences that are positive. So it’s natural that I, like many other people professionals, have an interest in workplace trends because every day, we see the impact of those things.
Writing Process
Transform: What does your typical writing day look like when working on topics related to the Future of Work?
Gary Cookson: There’s no typical day. Every day is different. When I do schedule some time to write, I block out time in my diary and first jot some notes down to give me an overall structure of what I want to write about. Then I flesh that out. I don’t spend too much time editing, and I usually am happy with a first draft. If I’m doing longer writing as in a chapter of a book, then I will spend a full day doing that and usually complete a chapter in 2-3 days.
Transform: How do you stay current with the rapidly changing trends in the workplace to ensure your writing remains relevant?
Gary Cookson: My work with clients and, more generally, in my professional networks exposes me to what is going on in organizations and the world of work in general. My own approach to research and learning ensures that I can stay abreast of and also contribute to developments in those areas.
Transform: Do you prefer to outline your ideas in detail before writing, or do you allow the narrative to develop organically?
Gary Cookson: The former. I work better with a structure and then flesh it out. Sometimes, the narrative goes in a different direction, but there’s always an outline to begin with.
Leaders who were great in an onsite environment are not
necessarily your best leaders in a hybrid environment.
Content Development
Transform: How do you develop the case studies or examples in your books, and do they evolve as you write?
Gary Cookson: All of the case studies in my book are from real-life organizations. I ask for people to volunteer themselves and their organization if they can help with anything I am researching, and I normally share 2-3 bullet points I am particularly interested in. We then have a conversation and cover those points. Still, the discussion goes in different directions often, and the eventual case study is sometimes used in ways I hadn’t anticipated at the outset.
Transform: What is the most challenging aspect of creating relatable and impactful business scenarios?
Gary Cookson: I’ve never struggled with finding people who volunteer themselves. My main issue has been finding a diverse range of organizations, particularly from a global perspective. I’m based in the UK, so most of my professional network is too, and initially most of the case studies were as well. I consciously widened that for Making Hybrid Working Work, but that took effort.
Themes and Messages
Transform: What core themes do you explore in your writing, and why are they significant to you and your audience?
Gary Cookson: Flexibility, autonomy, choice. Those are the big themes that are present in all of my writing. They matter to me because they have underpinned all of my positive working experiences, and their absence has underpinned all of the negative ones. I work daily with senior leaders and people professionals who are similarly impacted.
Transform: How do you balance conveying important messages about the future of work with engaging storytelling or practical advice?
Gary Cookson: I use anecdotes from my own experience, including from my personal life. I find they make the content more relatable and, I hope, entertaining. I can make helpful learning points for each story and turn them into practical advice.
Transform: Are there recurring motifs or ideas in your work that you believe are crucial for understanding the future of work?
Gary Cookson: That work is rarely a one-size-fits-all approach. People are individuals, and no two are the same. Even if they do the same job, their approach to it and sense of what is important will differ. We must personalize the employee experience to get the most from people.
Challenges and Rewards
Transform: What has been the most challenging part of your career as an author focused on the Future of Work?
Gary Cookson: It’s a fast-flowing river. Look away for a moment, and you might miss something important. Spend too long focusing on one aspect, and you might neglect others. Constantly looking upstream to see what is coming next might mean you don’t spot how the current trends impact today’s world.
Transform: What’s the most rewarding aspect of writing about workplace trends?
Gary Cookson: They matter to everyone. In different ways, but they matter. Every leader in an organization has a perspective on them, and most are willing to talk about them. It’s also about creating a legacy to hand down to the next generation – if we make the right choices, it improves their lives. That’s rewarding.
Publishing and Reception
Transform: Can you describe your journey to getting published in the HR and business genre?
Gary Cookson: Within my professional network, I have always interacted with other authors and shared conference stages with them when speaking. That got me talking to a publisher who knew my work already and was encouraging when I talked about writing a book. It developed from there. Almost all publishers have a process for proposing a new book and getting it accepted. I found that doing work behind the scenes before submitting my proposal led to it being accepted more readily – I could tailor the proposal based on the informal discussions and networking I’d done beforehand.
Transform: How do you respond to feedback and criticism of your work, especially from HR professionals?
Gary Cookson: Honestly, not well, but I’m not alone in that. I’m pleased that the work I’ve done so far has met with overall really positive feedback, but what worries me is that any negative feedback may not reach me. For example, someone might read one of my books, disagree with what I say, and throw the book away without sharing their perspective. That worries me. I try to respond to every piece of feedback if I can and ideally incorporate it into future work. And I’m aware that I have a perspective that will differ from others – I have to be open to those.
Advice and Future Plans
Transform: What advice would you give to HR professionals or business leaders who aspire to write about their field?
Gary Cookson: Most of your experiences will help you here and be useful for others to know about. You have more to offer than you first think. Talk to existing authors for advice, and get to know the decision makers at publishing companies informally first. Talk to your professional network about what you are thinking and use their advice to refine your ideas further.
Transform: What’s next for you? Are you working on any new projects or books about the future of work?
Gary Cookson: I have been approached to write another book, this time on middle management and the place of such leaders in the modern world of work. If it goes ahead, that will be published in late 2025.
Transform: How do you envision your writing evolving as workplace trends continue to change?
Gary Cookson: I had this debate with my wife recently. If one focuses on the future, at what point does your existing knowledge and skillset become yesterday’s news? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I suppose the future never truly arrives. It is always there, and there is always something new, and there are always questions about how that affects what people experience today. That’s where I’ll be.
Personal Insights
Transform: How do you unwind and stay grounded when you’re not immersed in writing about the future of work?
Gary Cookson: My family is what keeps me grounded. And my sporting pursuits – mostly training for and competing in triathlons. I do my best thinking when I’m exercising and enjoying time with family and friends to ensure I’m not always thinking about work.
Deep Dive into Specific Works
Transform: What’s the story behind the title of your latest book on the future of work, Making Hybrid Working Work?
Gary Cookson: Partly it’s a play on words, with the part-repetition being intentional. Hybrid working, though, is a common feature of many workplaces, but very few get it right, and even fewer try to. It is too often either left to chance or overly mandated. Neither is particularly helpful. Hybrid working is more complex than we think and requires a lot of alignment of other aspects of the organizational system – culture, leadership behaviors, processes, communication and more. If we focus on all of these together, we take into account trends in the modern workplace as a whole and make it fit for the future.
Given that hybrid work is so common, to make it work is to make work itself work.
Personalizing the employee experience is crucial—
there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to hybrid working.
Engagement with Readers
Transform: How do you interact with your readers, especially those who are HR professionals or business leaders?
Gary Cookson: I’m very active on social media, on a range of platforms, and interact with people daily on there, whether they are people professionals or not. I will ask questions, and I’ll offer my thoughts on current trends and on other people’s requests for help.
I’m lucky enough that my work brings me into daily contact with a very wide range of leaders and people professionals. I get to talk to people about their work and what matters to them. I feel very lucky to be able to do that.
Transform: Has feedback from readers ever influenced or changed your perspective on a topic you’ve written about?
Gary Cookson: Regularly. When I wrote my first book, a lot of it was done from my own experiences of remote and hybrid working over a 20-year period. Feedback about that book, and in particular what I’d not covered in it but which people wanted to know about, directly led to Making Hybrid Working Work.
About the Reader:
Transform: Describe what a leader/organization looks like one year after reading Making Hybrid Working Work and committing to its teachings.
Gary Cookson: Even in one year, there could be quite a difference. A leader will be more in tune with what individual employees need from them. They will be more comfortable managing employees who they cannot always see face to face and using data and virtual body language to assess productivity, performance, and health. They will be more aware of what team dynamics are important in a hybrid environment, and when onsite working happens, what environments and tasks are best suited for collaboration and socialization.
Gary Cookson: The organizations will be more forward-thinking. Their culture and leadership behaviors will be aligned with flexibility, autonomy, and choice. They will have redesigned the onsite environment and ensured that hybrid workers and teams are supported to do that effectively. They will have taken steps to improve efficiency and integrate technology more effectively into the working day. Tasks will have been redesigned, and the working week is now able to be shortened without negatively impacting anything.
Transform: Considering a reader who just finished your book, Making Hybrid Working Work, and is processing all the great insights, what is the first step they should like to operationalize their learning?
Gary Cookson: Start by thinking about yourself. Change happens one person at a time. Think about what makes you productive (or what you could do). What do you do (or could you do) to improve that? What support is necessary to sustain it? What environment is best suited to it? What tasks are you most productive at and why? These questions and more are within Making Hybrid Working Work and should help you to improve the world of work at your organization. Focus on yourself first, and then the next person, and the next, and the next.
Transform: Share three takeaways from Making Hybrid Work Work that the reader should walk away with.
Gary Cookson: There is no one-size-fits-all approach to hybrid working (or, indeed, work). Personalizing the employee experience is crucial. Leaders who were great at leading in an onsite environment are not necessarily your best leaders in a hybrid environment. They must adapt and learn new skills.
Hybrid working can work, but only if we want it to and make efforts to make it work. Left to chance, or with minimal thought, it won’t.
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