Will You Lead or Follow in the New Normal?
3 priorities to ensure success in remote working and learning
As the world surpasses 12 million recorded cases and 540,000 deaths from Coronavirus, it is becoming increasingly clear that recovery will be a slow and painful process. The COVID-19 pandemic has massively disrupted the economy and aggravated longstanding social inequalities, resulting in a resurgence of social justice protests.
Despite these massive shifts, some businesses and governments, whether consciously or unconsciously, still cling to the hope of a “return to normal” — normal markets, normal profit margins and normal electoral cycles. This is a mistake. The future will not look like the past.
Amidst the tragedy caused by COVID-19, organizations must find their footing and work diligently to create the new normal. The question is, in this unknown world, will your organization lead or follow?
Why corporate learning is critical
In the “new normal” caused by the pandemic, remote working and learning have already emerged as critical for success. Before COVID-19, only 33% of corporate training was done via virtual classroom or self-paced digital learning while 54% was still delivered in person. Yet in-person learning, as every university is finding out, is now a very risky proposition.
To survive in the new environment, businesses will need to reverse that balance and shift far more to remote learning. The traditional obstacle preventing companies from moving to digital learning was cost, though this had dramatically improved in the years leading up to COVID-19. The challenge now is that businesses in survival mode have already started cutting their learning and development budgets at precisely the moment when they should be maintaining or increasing them.
Today’s barrier is not just a delivery issue, meaning how training is delivered within corporations, but a prioritization issue – businesses need to reserve budget for training. The purpose of corporate training is to help onboard employees and support them in all aspects of their functions through continuous training. Because the pandemic is changing the very way in which business is done, corporate training is mission critical for people to perform at their best. Furthermore, the kind of corporate training previously carried out may be neither possible nor desirable today. Both the delivery and the content of corporate training need to be rethought and redesigned.
Surprisingly, the answer is not to just do more “online.” As work-from-home (or living-at-work) — whether loved or hated — becomes a permanent part of the new normal, companies need to help their staff explore and refine both the optimal work processes and their boundaries. This necessitates a tolerance for the unknown, a willingness to take risks, an acceptance of mistakes, and a dedication to experimentation. For the foreseeable future, the virus has made companies and employees alike pioneers.
Defining the new normal will require experimentation around three human-centered priorities:
1. Reboot communication and consultation
In the traditional manager-worker relationship, the worker’s experience often takes a backseat to the manager’s authority. This balance has shifted because the business’ survival now depends on front-line workers managing the daily risks and difficulties of customer interface under pandemic conditions.
As speed, safety and flexibility all become more important, managers need to truly listen to their front line, which is closest to the pulse of this rapidly moving situation and is — literally — running the risks. Any manager who does not truly listen to their front line is on borrowed time.
Agility and adaption to local circumstances are now more essential than ever. Businesses must innovate service delivery and customer service on the fly and week by week. At the same time, there is also now less margin for error with respect to safety protocols and quality standards.
The managerial impulse will be to go more rigid, with tighter one-size-fits-all protocols and processes. Instead, these layered challenges are best handled through iterative communication, feedback loops and consultative processes. As a number of studies begin to tease out the relationship between individual and group work, and the benefits of moderation, timing and bursts in communication, teams need to continually test out what works for them.
2. Accelerate diversity and inclusion
It is now well documented that COVID-19 and its knock-on effects disproportionately affect vulnerable populations — minority communities, the elderly, women, the poor. Therefore, part of the response to the virus must be to reverse the effect of these long-standing social injustices.
In remote learning, promoting diversity and inclusion must consider questions of equal access. Managers need to give careful attention to broadband connection, IT equipment, and even access to working spaces in the home.
Overall, less than half of all households (48%) have what the 2018 US census defines as “high connectivity”: a laptop or desktop computer, a smartphone, a tablet, and a broadband Internet connection. According to the same census data, minority households were the least likely to have high connectivity. Low-income households were far less likely to have high connectivity than high income households (21% of households with an income under $25,000 v 80% of households with an income of $150,000). The rural/urban divide also compounds this gap: only 54% of low-income rural households had high-speed broadband versus 96% of high-income urban households. There is work to do.
COVID-19 is also eroding decades of hard-fought gender gains in the workplace as women lose jobs at a faster rate than men. Remote work and corporate training need to be redesigned to ensure they do not disadvantage caregivers — mainly but not exclusively women — working out of the home. The overall understanding of remote work and training needs to evolve from a benevolent tolerance of the “toddler run” and the “potty break” to a new reality in which comprehensive and tailored child care are seen as critical.
Above all, businesses will now need to work even harder to reach out and recruit, retain and promote a diverse workforce at every level.
3. Act with empathy (and expect it from others)
No matter how tech savvy you may be, all workers have been pushed to use and rely on technology far more than in the past. As companies and managers navigate the physical changes to working in the pandemic, it is important to remain attuned to the psychological and emotional needs of employees and customers.
COVID-19 has heightened the challenge of maintaining a work-life balance, and employees may need more flexibility from managers to mitigate this issue. More seriously, there are many for whom home may not be a place of comfort and safety. Awareness of these issues is the mandatory “new normal” baseline for managers.
For example, the virus has disproportionately affected older citizens. Older learners and workers are not only getting sick at higher rates, they are also more likely to be challenged by the increased use of technology and new ways of working, so care must be taken to ensure they are not left behind. Corporate remote learning and operations need to extend beyond one-size-fits-all learning models to address these needs, as it started to do with addressing accessibility requirements.
Solving these problems and the many unknowns still over the horizon will require genuine empathy — felt and acted on by those in leadership. Regardless of the business age and size, success will also require a spirit of entrepreneurship and experimentation.
Contribute to the new normal or be consumed by it
In times of change, the data shows that those who act fast and engage firmly with the new reality will do the best in the long run. Organizations that fail to step up and contribute to formulating the new normal will be left to embrace the reality created by others. If you’re not at the table, you’re probably on the menu.
As they pivot, managers will need to embrace a posture of humility to help their people see success. If you think you know what the new normal is, think again. None of us do. Listen to those around you, care for them, trust them, and they will help you create the future. We are all pioneers now.
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High-performing teaming
Work today is too complex for individuals to succeed in isolation. Almost every critical decision, innovation, or transformation depends on teams working effectively together. Leaders rely on their teams to deliver results. Teams, in turn, rely on their leaders to create the conditions where performance is possible. This exchange, what leaders need from their teams, and what teams need from their leaders, sits at the heart of what we call teaming.
When teaming is strong, leaders get what they need from their teams [creativity, resilience, execution] and teams get what they need from leaders [direction, support, and the conditions to thrive]. It’s how strategy becomes action, how uncertainty becomes opportunity, and how businesses stay competitive in a fast-changing world.
Team meetings: A missed lever for performance?
Meetings are a universal ritual in organizational life. While managers on average spend more than half their working hours in meetings, many leaders can’t shake the feeling that meetings are falling short of their potential. Are they advancing the work, or quietly draining energy? At BTS, we study teams not as collections of individuals, but as living systems. This perspective reveals dynamics that traditional methods often overlook. Rather than aggregating individual 360° assessments, we assess the team as a whole to examine how the team functions collectively. Applying that lens to one of the most common team activities (meetings) uncovers patterns worth paying attention to. Drawing on thousands of team assessments in our database, we focused on two meeting behaviors:
- Do teams meet regularly?
- Do team members leave meetings with clear accountabilities and next steps?
Our question: How strongly do these behaviors relate to overall team effectiveness?
What the data revealed
Using data from 1,043 respondents (team members and informed stakeholders) we ran a Bayesian analysis to evaluate the predictive power of each behavior. The results were striking:
- Both behaviors were linked to higher team effectiveness.
- But one mattered far more: leaving meetings with clear accountabilities and next steps was 3.9x more predictive of team effectiveness than simply meeting regularly.
- And teams that often or always wrap up meetings with next steps rated 0.66 points higher on a 5-point scale of team effectiveness than teams who sometimes, rarely, or never close with accountabilities - that's almost a full standard deviation higher (0.96 sd)
Meetings aren’t the problem, muddy outcomes are.
Teams often default to frequency, setting cadences of check-ins or standing meetings. Our data suggest that what differentiates effective teams from the rest is not how many meetings they hold, but what comes out of them. A team that meets less often but ends each session with clear accountabilities will outperform a team that meets frequently but leaves outcomes ambiguous. In other words, meetings aren’t inherently wasted time; they become wasted time when they don’t translate into aligned action.
A simple shift that pays dividends
The good news: improving meetings doesn’t require radical redesign. Small changes reinforce accountability and dramatically increase the value extracted:
- Close with clarity. Reserve the last 5–10 minutes of every meeting to confirm: What decisions have been made? Who owns what? By when? This habit shifts meetings from “discussions” to “decisions.”
- Make commitments visible. Use a shared action log, team board, or project tracker so next steps are transparent, and progress is easy to follow. Visibility builds accountability.
- Assign a “Closer.” Rotating this role signals that closing well is everyone’s responsibility. The Closer ensures the team doesn’t drift into vague agreements, but leaves aligned and ready to act.
When teams adopt these habits, the difference is tangible: less rehashing of the same topics, faster progress on priorities, and a stronger sense of shared ownership. These small shifts compound quickly, making meetings not just more efficient, but more energizing and effective. In a world where teams face relentless demands and limited time, focusing on how meetings end may be one of the fastest ways to improve how teams perform.
6 things you can do to shift your culture without a massive change effort
Most leaders focus on strategy—not because they undervalue culture, but because strategy feels concrete. It has structure, timelines, metrics, and deliverables. It’s visible and defensible. When pressure is high, strategy gives leaders something they can point to and steer. Culture doesn’t always feel that way. It’s harder to define, harder to measure, and often lands in the “important, but not urgent” pile. That’s not a leadership flaw. It’s a gap in how we’ve equipped leaders to lead.But if you want to change how your organization operates, you have to start with what people experience every day.
Below are six no-fluff actions from our recent event, , designed to help you leave your team stronger than you found it.
Culture Without the Fluff→ Don’t miss events like these! Sign up for our newsletter or visit our events page to see what’s coming.
1. Build shared habits
If strategy defines where you’re going, culture determines whether you’ll get there. Strategy can shift quickly, with a new market, goal, or CEO. Culture can’t. It’s shaped by the beliefs, habits, and norms that don’t pivot on command—and that’s where friction starts. The disconnect doesn’t usually show up in big moments. It shows up in how decisions get made, what’s prioritized under pressure, and whether feedback is honest or avoided. These daily behaviors signal what really matters, regardless of what the strategy says. That’s why high-performing organizations go beyond communicating direction. They turn strategy into clear expectations for how people should work, lead, and collaborate—and then reinforce those expectations through routines, incentives, and leadership behavior.
Try this:
Pick one strategic priority and ask: What should people be doing differently if this is truly our focus? If you’re not seeing those behaviors, there’s a gap. Ask yourself: Do our daily habits match the future we’re trying to build?
2. Use the levers you already own
Culture change doesn’t have to start with a massive initiative. It can start with the levers you already own. Culture lives in the mechanics of your team’s work: how meetings are run, how frontline decisions are made, how failure is treated, and what behaviors leaders model. These small signals shape big beliefs. That’s why abstract values and vision statements alone often fall flat. They’re not wrong, but without action behind them, they’re just words on a page. Real change starts by zooming in on specific moments that shape how work gets done, and making small, intentional shifts. Want a culture of accountability? Focus on what happens after meetings. Want more innovation? Look at how failure is handled during team reviews.
Start here:
Pick one lever (like how meetings are run) and ask:
- What messages are we sending through how we meet?
- Who speaks up? Who stays silent? What actually gets decided?
Then make small adjustments that reinforce the culture you want—not the one you’ve inherited.
3. Avoid the tempting pitfalls
If you’ve ever rolled out a new set of values, launched a culture initiative, or shared a bold new vision, only to see behavior stay exactly the same, you’re not alone. Most culture efforts stall not because leaders don’t care, but because they start with what’s visible and familiar: messaging, posters, kickoff events. These feel like the right moves. But they rarely shift what people actually do, and rarely resonates in a meaningful and lasting way In our recent webinar, we shared six common traps that organizations fall into often with the best intentions. Here are three that come up again and again:
- Relying on values to do the heavy lifting. Most teams have clear values, but that’s not the problem. The challenge is turning those values into real habits. If the way you run meetings, make decisions, and give feedback doesn’t reflect what’s on the wall, people notice—and disconnect.
- Expecting HR or culture champions to lead the culture shift alone. HR and champions play a big role in culture, but they can’t do it without leaders. People take their cues from credible influencers in the business: what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, and how leaders show up under pressure. That’s where real culture change starts.
- Announcing culture change before actually changing anything. This is a classic case of show don’t tell. When leaders talk about change without shifting the day-to-day experience, people become skeptical. They’ve heard it before. What earns their belief and commitment is seeing leaders act differently in ways that directly affect their work.
P.S. We’ve rounded up 3 more pitfalls worth avoiding. See them here.
Start here:
Surface the unspoken. Ask: What do people believe they’ll be rewarded for today? What would they have to believe to behave differently?Culture change requires shifting the mental models that shape behavior.
4. Shift the beliefs beneath the behaviors
You can’t shift behavior without understanding the beliefs behind it. If teams aren’t collaborating across silos, it’s probably not because they don’t want to—it’s because they’re rewarded for competing, not collaborating. If leaders aren’t taking smart risks, it might be because failure has been punished, not treated as a learning moment. These everyday behaviors are just the surface—what’s driving them are deeper, often invisible beliefs that probably outlast the tenure of some of your employees.
Start here:
Ask: What are the unspoken rules here? What would someone need to believe for this behavior to feel natural, safe, and worth it? Until you name and shift those beliefs, culture efforts will stay stuck at the surface.
5. Don’t let your culture fall behind your tech
Honestly, the real surprise would be if AI wasn’t reshaping your culture. Some organizations are going all-in on experimentation. Others are still figuring out what their approach will be. But wherever you are on the curve, one thing’s clear: this moment feels a lot like the wild west. And your talent is picking up on that. Leaders are signaling the need to adapt and innovate—but rewards and incentives often tell a different story. Without clear signals from the culture that it’s safe to try, valuable to learn, and worth the risk, even the smartest tools won’t be used to their full potential.
Ask yourself:
- How are we capturing what’s working with AI—and making those insights visible and usable across the organization?
- What are we taking off people’s plates to give them the time and space to learn, experiment, and adapt?
- Have we updated the priorities, deliverables and expectations to reflect the new reality—or are we layering AI on top of an already full workload?
- Are leaders helping people see the personal value in this shift—so AI feels like a path to growth, not a threat to their role?
6. Start small, scale fast
Most leaders assume culture change has to be slow and sweeping. But it doesn’t.We’ve seen major progress start with one small shift—the kind that’s visible, repeatable, and high-impact. The key? Start where the energy already is: a team that's eager, a leader who's ready, a process that’s stuck. Then focus on one behavior that’s holding things back—and change it. From there, scale what works.
Start here:
Use this simple 3-step exercise to find a small, high-impact place to start:
- Pinpoint a stuck spot: Where is strategy getting delayed, deprioritized, or lost in translation? Common areas include:
- Team meetings that always run long but lead to no decisions
- A new tool or process people aren’t adopting
- A frontline team disconnected from the broader strategy
- An area with low engagement or slow execution
- Identify the blocker behavior:
- What specific habit, mindset, or expectation is in the way? (e.g., defaulting to top-down decisions, rewarding speed over learning, fear of trying something new)
- Make one shift—and scale what works
- Change that behavior in one team, one moment, or one process.
- Capture the impact. Then share the story and replicate what worked.
Change spreads through stories. Show people what’s possible, and they’ll move with you.
Culture change is hard. Doing it alone? Even harder.
We work with teams around the world to:
- Spot what’s working—and what’s getting in the way
- Test small shifts that create big ripple effects
- Keep momentum going as change starts to spread
Reach out to us to start a conversation!
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From top-down to judgment all around: The AI imperative for organizations
Each business revolution has reshaped not only how businesses operate, but how they organize themselves and empower their people. From the industrial age to the information era, and now into the age of artificial intelligence, technology has always brought with it a reconfiguration of authority, capability, and judgment.
In the 19th century, industrialization centralized work and knowledge. The factory system required hierarchical structures where strategy, information, and decision-making were concentrated at the top. Managers at the apex made tradeoffs for the greater good of the enterprise because they were the only ones with access to the full picture.
Then came the information economy. With it came the distribution of information and a need for more agile, team-based structures. Cross-functional collaboration and customer proximity became competitive necessities. Organizations flattened, experimented with matrix models, and pushed decision-making closer to where problems were being solved. What had once been the purview of a select few, judgment, strategic tradeoffs, and insight became expected competencies for managers and team leads across the enterprise.
Now, AI is changing the game again. But this time, it’s not just about access to data. It’s about access to intelligence.
Generative AI democratizes access not only to information, but to intelligent output. That shifts the burden for humans from producing insights to evaluating them. Judgment, which was long the domain of a few executives, must now become a baseline competency for the many across the organization.
But here’s the paradox: while AI extends our capacity for intelligence, discernment, the human ability to weigh context, values, and consequence, is still best left in the hands of human leaders. As organizations begin to automate early-career work, they may inadvertently erase the very pathways and opportunities by which judgment was built.
Why judgment matters more than ever
Deloitte’s 2023 Human Capital Trends survey found that 85% of leaders believe independent decision-making is more important than ever, but only 26% say they’re ready to support it. That shortfall threatens to neutralize the very productivity gains AI promises.
If employees can’t question, challenge, or contextualize AI’s output, then intelligent tools become dangerous shortcuts. The organization stalls, not from a lack of answers, but from a lack of sense-making.
What organizations must do
To stay competitive, organizations must shift from simply adopting AI to designing AI-aware ways of working:
- Build new learning paths for judgment development. As AI replaces easily systematized tasks, companies must replace lost learning experiences with mentorship, simulations, and intentional development planning.
- Design workflows that require human input. Treat AI as a co-pilot, not an autopilot. Embed review checkpoints and tradeoff discussions. Just as innovation processes have stage gates, so should AI analyses.
- Make judgment measurable. Assess and develop decision-making under ambiguity from entry-level roles onward. Research shows the best learning strategy for this is high-fidelity simulations.
- Start earlier. Leadership development must begin far earlier in career paths, because judgment, not just knowledge, is the new differentiator.
What’s emerging is not just a flatter hierarchy, but a more distributed sense of judgment responsibility. To thrive, organizations must prepare their people not to outthink AI, but to out-judge it.
BTS acquires Nexo to strengthen its position in Brazil and Latin America
P R E S S R E L E A S E
Stockholm, May 5, 2025
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – BTS Group AB (publ), a leading global consultancy specializing in strategy execution, change, and people development, has agreed to acquire Nexo Pesquisa e Consultoria Ltda., Nexo, a boutique consulting firm headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil.
Nexo has been growing continuously since it was founded in 2017. With revenues of approximately 12 million Brazilian Reales (approx. 2.1 million USD) in 2024, and a highly capable team of 21 members, Nexo has built a strong reputation for delivering transformative projects in strategy, innovation, leadership, and culture.
Nexo collaborates with a great portfolio of clients across sectors such as financial services, consumer goods, and technology, assisting both local and global companies in navigating uncertainty, unlocking creativity, and activating strategy through people. Their work encompasses culture transformation, leadership development, employer value proposition, innovation culture, and vision alignment – supported by proprietary methodologies and frameworks.
BTS currently operates in Brazil servicing both local and multinational clients with a team of 13 employees. By acquiring Nexo, BTS not only increases the Group’s footprint in Brazil but also adds significant capabilities in culture and transformation services. Nexo’s client base has limited overlap with BTS, creating strong growth potential and synergy opportunities.
“Nexo is known for helping leaders and organizations tackle some of the most complex, human-centered challenges with creativity, empathy, and strategic clarity and the Nexo team is loved by their clients,” says Philios Andreou, Deputy CEO of BTS Group and President of the Other Markets Unit. “Their products and services complement and elevate our existing offerings, especially in culture transformation, and we are thrilled to welcome the Nexo team to BTS.”
“We’re excited to join BTS. We’ve long admired BTS’s approach and unique portfolio to support large organizations and leaders in connecting strategy with culture across the organization,” says Andreas Auerbach, co founder of Nexo. “Becoming part of BTS, allows us to scale our impact and bring more value to our clients while staying true to our values and culture,” adds Mariana Lage Andrade, co-founder of Nexo.
Upon completion of the transaction, Nexo’s business and organization will merge with BTS Brazil. Nexo’s founders will assume senior management roles in the joint operation.
The acquisition includes a limited initial cash consideration. Additional purchase price considerations will be paid between 2026 and 2028, provided Nexo meets specific performance targets. A limited portion of any such additional purchase price considerations will be paid in newly issued BTS shares. The transaction is effective immediately.
BTS’s acquisition strategy continues to focus on broadening our service portfolio, expanding our geographic reach, and enhancing our capabilities to support future organic growth in a fragmented market.
For more information, please contact:
Philios Andreou
Deputy CEO
BTS Group AB
philios.andreou@bts.com
Michael Wallin
Head of investor relations
BTS Group AB
michael.wallin@bts.com
+46-8-587 070 02
+46-708-78 80 19
High-performing teaming
Work today is too complex for individuals to succeed in isolation. Almost every critical decision, innovation, or transformation depends on teams working effectively together. Leaders rely on their teams to deliver results. Teams, in turn, rely on their leaders to create the conditions where performance is possible. This exchange, what leaders need from their teams, and what teams need from their leaders, sits at the heart of what we call teaming.
When teaming is strong, leaders get what they need from their teams [creativity, resilience, execution] and teams get what they need from leaders [direction, support, and the conditions to thrive]. It’s how strategy becomes action, how uncertainty becomes opportunity, and how businesses stay competitive in a fast-changing world.