Weekends are time when things slow down a little. Your weekend shouldn’t be two more regular workdays. That’s a sure road to burnout. Take time to refresh yourself. Take time for something different. Take time for some of that reading you can’t find time for during the week.

Here are choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms. This week there are articles about the impact of the pandemic on workers and the workplace.

From Dale Buss: The New Abnormal

“As companies get back to business, CEOs are asking: how will the way we’ve worked change the way we work?”

From Erin Griffith: Airbnb Was Like a Family, Until the Layoffs Started

“The moves thrust Airbnb into the center of a growing debate in Silicon Valley: What happens when a company that has positioned itself as family to its employees reveals that it is just a regular business with the same capitalist concerns — namely, survival — as any other?”

From McKinsey & Company: The future of business: Reimagining 2020 and beyond

“In this special edition of The Next Normal, McKinsey senior partners envision how the COVID-19 crisis will transform entire industries in the coming 12 to 18 months.”

From Bhushan Sethi and Jean-François Marti: Redefining employee experience: How to create a “new normal”

“As workplaces, customer behaviors, and economic conditions continue to change in response to COVID-19, companies should focus on three key actions.”

From Wharton: The Post-COVID Workplace: Will Employees Be Safe?

“After nearly four months of a coronavirus-compelled shutdown, many workers across the U.S. are being asked to return to offices and shop floors. The kind of workplace they’ll be returning to, however, is not so clear. After all, COVID-19 cases are active and even on the upswing in areas across the country, and, with much still unknown about how the virus spreads and behaves, many wonder whether the workplace they will find will ever look and function like the one they had before the middle of March.”

From HBS Working Knowledge: Restarting Under Uncertainty: Managerial Experiences from Around the World

“A survey of 50 companies across countries and industries reveals business leaders are hard at work adapting to the COVID threat. Research by Raffaella Sadun and colleagues.”

From Tim Hood: Beyond the disruption of COVID-19

“The emergence of COVID-19 has forced many organisations to review their business models and operations and in recent months I have seen many that are grappling with the challenge of doing this effectively. Often, that’s because they are reliant on manual processes that require people and paper to be physically together in one space.”

From Stephen Jones: The psychology of remote working

“In depth: The lockdown has proven that we can make working from home work, but the jury’s still out on what it’s doing to our brains.”

From Molly Colvin: That ‘Brain Fog’ You’re Feeling Is Perfectly Normal

“The cognitive changes associated with acute stress may be overlooked but are no less significant. Our full attentional resources are deployed to transform our cognitive and sensory powers into laser beams that search for and analyze threats. Anything of lesser importance is suppressed from awareness. Time warps so that the present moment is elongated. Complex thinking skills, like decision-making or planning, temporarily go offline.”

Thanks to Tanveer Naseer for pointing me to this article.

Every Monday, I do a blog post about business reading and business books. Follow this link to my review of That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea by Marc Randolph