Julia Hobsbawm
Hybrid working has hardened into a structural problem rather than a temporary arrangement. Leaders are being asked to hold productivity, culture and connection together while their people work in places, patterns and rhythms the old office was never built for. The instinct to issue mandates rarely survives contact with the workforce, and the cost of getting it wrong shows up in attrition, engagement and trust.
Julia Hobsbawm OBE is a writer and futurist on the future of work who helps organisations rethink hybrid working, workplace social health and the human side of AI-era productivity.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Julia Hobsbawm
- She named the problem before most boards understood it. The Nowhere Office gave senior leaders a vocabulary and a framework for hybrid work at the moment they most needed one.
- Workplace social health is a category she effectively defined, and Bayes Business School made her its first Honorary Visiting Professor in the field.
- Her thinking is built from primary research and senior-leader interviews through Workathon, the invitation-only network she founded for decision-makers wrestling with workforce change.
- She translates a fast-moving debate into board-ready language. Her Bloomberg Work Shift column ran for two years through the period when work itself was being rewritten.
- She has a four-book arc, from Fully Connected to Working Assumptions, that gives buyers a coherent intellectual backbone, not a topic of the moment.
Biography highlights
- OBE for Services to Business, 2015.
- Honorary Visiting Professor of Workplace Social Health, Bayes Business School (formerly Cass).
- Author of The Nowhere Office, The Simplicity Principle, Fully Connected and Working Assumptions.
- The Simplicity Principle won the American Book Fest Best Book Award 2020 and the NYC Big Book Award 2020; Fully Connected was shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year.
- Bloomberg contributing columnist; author of the Working Assumptions column for Bloomberg Work Shift, 2022 to 2024.
- Founder and CEO of Workathon, and founder of the World Work Organisation, launched in 2025.
Biography
The office stopped being a single place in 2020 and never went back. The Nowhere Office, the 2022 book that gave the post-pandemic workplace its working name, set out the case that hybrid was not a phase to be managed but a structural shift to be designed for. Julia Hobsbawm wrote it from inside the conversation, drawing on a decade of research into how connectivity changes work.
That research has a formal home. Bayes Business School made her its first Honorary Visiting Professor of Workplace Social Health in 2018, formalising a category she had been building since Fully Connected, the 2017 book shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year. The Simplicity Principle followed in 2020 and won the American Book Fest Best Book Award and the NYC Big Book Award, extending the argument into how leaders think and decide under cognitive load.
Her platform now runs in two directions. Workathon, founded in 2024, is an invitation-only network of senior decision-makers feeding her primary research on workforce change, and produced its first annual study, The United State of Work, in 2025. The World Work Organisation, launched the same year, is an attempt to give the future-of-work conversation a global institutional anchor.
She writes for buyers as well as boards. The Working Assumptions column ran in Bloomberg Work Shift from 2022 to 2024, and her latest book of the same name reads as a field report on what leaders thought they knew about work before Covid and generative AI, and what they know now. She was awarded the OBE for Services to Business in 2015.
Key speaking topics
- The future of work and the Nowhere Office
- Hybrid and flexible working models
- Workplace social health and connectivity
- Simplicity and decision-making in complex organisations
- Generative AI and the human side of work
- Productivity, presence and the redesign of office life
Ideal for
- CHROs and people directors redesigning hybrid policy and workplace strategy
- CEOs and executive teams navigating return-to-office and workforce expectations
- Boards and investors assessing workforce risk and organisational design
- Real estate, facilities and workplace experience leaders rethinking the role of the office
Audience outcomes
- A clearer language for hybrid work, anchored in named frameworks rather than slogans.
- A sharper read on what employees now expect from work and how that reshapes retention.
- A practical lens on workplace social health as a measurable component of performance.
- An honest account of how generative AI is changing the texture of daily work, not just the tooling.
Talks
A working thesis on what hybrid actually is and how leaders should design for it.
Key takeaways:
- Why hybrid is a structural shift, not a temporary accommodation
- The four forces reshaping work after Covid and through the AI wave
- What boards and CHROs should be measuring instead of attendance
A talk for leaders making high-stakes decisions under cognitive overload.
Key takeaways:
- Why complexity has become an organisational tax
- Six lenses for cutting through information density
- How simplicity changes leadership behaviour, not just process
A keynote treating connection inside organisations as a measurable asset, not a soft benefit.
Key takeaways:
- The case for social health as a board-level metric
- Where hybrid models break human connection, and where they strengthen it
- What organisations gain when they manage connectivity deliberately