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space and time part 1: the employers · Humanity Working

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm in relative dimensions in space, but we'll go with space and time after all.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know you gotta flex that big brain.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: In the last podcast, we talked about doing an episode called Space and Time, and then we had a chat about it, and I think we're gonna do two of them actually.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_03: One discussing the employer point of view, and one talking about the employee point of view.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_03: So today, let's talk about the employer point of view.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I know you've also written a blog about this, uh, which is really interesting, but for now, uh, you know, tell me what you mean by space and time in this context.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: In terms of of what we're what we've been looking at um over the last few months, really, is the organizational dynamics of different types of work and how that maps to roles.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um and our real focus here has been on the sort of on the how people work and how that is connected to necessity versus say culture.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: So what we've done is we've done it across two dimensions, a space dimension and a time dimension.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And you can think of the space dimension as how tied the role is to a physical location, and you can think of the time dimension as to how coupled that work is to the clock.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, do you need to be doing the work at a certain time?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Do you need to be doing the work between a certain number of hours, that kind of thing?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then we've taken that information and we've mapped that to a set of skills that employees need, depending on where they fit um in this mapping, and also policy decisions that organizations need to make.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: So that the blog post is is largely about that, and we're going to talk about some of those elements today.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_03: That's uh that's interesting.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_03: So tell me about the the space part.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we found that there are three categories of work that are tied to a physical location.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: So work that is tied to a location because it has to be.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's literally a requirement to get the work done.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh then work that is tied to a location because it yields better results.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not required, but it's advised if you like.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's optimized in that way.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's work that's tied to a location because it's cultural, it's culturally based.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's a culture or policy, it's a lifestyle decision that's being made.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Can you give me an example then of sort of all three?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, sure.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: So um let's think about like tied to a location.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: So tied to a location probably is one of the easier ones for people to get their heads around.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: There are certain jobs, certain roles whereby the role can only function uh if it's tied to a location.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: And typically what that is related to is there's some form of physical infrastructure that the person has to interact with in order to be able to perform their job.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not always that.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: It could be also to do with the fact that that person needs to be co-located with other people as well.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: So classic example would be a factory worker.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: So a factory worker, you are in a role and you're interfacing with a physical infrastructure that is itself tied to a location.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: So you're there because it's there.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um that other example that I was describing where you're interfacing with other people, that could be like a receptionist in an office, for example.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: So people visit the office, so therefore you have to be at the office in order to greet those people in the office.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that they're connected, but they're they're subtly different to each other, but both of them are tied to a physical location.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Then the second example in terms of better business results, where you can think of, for example, different ways in which potentially you could conduct your business, right?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: And one of them is tied to physical location and the other one is not tied to a physical location.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I I like the example of an independent bookseller in that, uh, in that example, right?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: So an independent bookseller could transition their environment to fully online, but in order to differentiate themselves and provide a set of services, um, they actually have a physical location associated with what they do.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it yields the uh better business results because that's a that's a form of their differentiation.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: The look and feel of the bookshop makes people want to use it versus, for example, using uh trying to compete in an online marketplace against the likes of Amazon.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of yielding better business results by virtue of being tied to a location.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then the third category you can think of, this this culture or policy example is a situation where every aspect of the work could be done equally well or better in a virtual environment, but for some reason it's uh it's stuck around as being physical.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I I an example I like of that now is physical call centers, right?
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: So you can absolutely uh have virtual call centers with much lower infrastructure costs and um and much more flexibility associated with it, but some places still have physical call centers, maybe because historically they have and they haven't moved away from that yet, um, or just simply because um there's a preference on the part of the leadership to have all those people in a physical space.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so it seems like there's gonna be companies that have a combination of all of those, all of those situations and are sort of a hybrid mix of those, right?
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, almost certainly.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um especially in larger organizations, um, the larger a company gets, the more likely it is that they're gonna have a lot of these different things.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: So if you think about like the RD and operations are different divisions.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: So as a company grows, you tend to see this scaffolding get built around the concept of these different work habits or different outcomes that they're trying to drive from a business perspective.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so um even with that though, most companies will skew one particular way.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: So if you look at manufacturers, for example, um they're gonna have more people that are tied to a location because again, this goes back to the point that's out of necessity.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas let's say a software company, it's much more likely to be tied to cultural policy.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and it's it's uh it's interesting too, because there's an another overlay on this as you're talking about it to me.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_03: That's uh when you know this information and you can set it up in that way, uh, another dimension is the human dimension of what's the person's personality type.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_03: You know, maybe introvert, extrovert, maybe that's another another thing for another another topic.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_03: But that's what came to mind is like, man, once you laid this out and you looked at the the way your company actually is, in that you you know, think about it in these dimensions of space and time and the work that needs to get done, and then you overlay the personality types of your team to maximize the effectiveness of it, the introverts, the extroverts, that that could be a really powerful tool.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think that's actually a very important point that you bring up there, Matt, which is that once you start to lay it out like this and you're truly understanding, okay, which are the parts of my business that are that are flexible in terms of of the choices that I can make of where people uh where people work.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And for some organizations, as we say, you know, you might be in a position where 80% of the people, you basically don't have a choice, right?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: The survival of the business relies on people being in a in a physical location at a at a particular time.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um and for other companies that might be 20, 30, 40 percent.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: So the reason even that we're even talking about it in this way is that once you know what that that group is, then it's a matter of it's a matter of choice as a business.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so at that point, particularly for that group of users, that's when you can start to uh to make decisions that are that take those things into account, right?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: That potentially favor the flexibility of that set of users.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: But it's complicated because there is a broader cultural dynamic that is associated with that, which I think we'll probably get into.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, that's fascinating to think about it in those terms.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_03: It it seems so obvious, but I I it just hasn't been thought of that way, you know.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_03: Uh it's it's all always been this uh drastic shift.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_03: So so talk about time.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it's a similar story um in that some work is tied to the clock by necessity, some is basically due to business results that um there is a strong time dimension to it, and some is due to culture or policy again.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: So to give you examples of that, right?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh let's think of a more fun example, like a s like a sports team, for example.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: So a sports team, they have to train together and play together.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: They are literally a team.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so obviously there are other business uh analogies to that.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in terms of business results, think of work that involves a lot of synchronous collaboration.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: So that could be, if we were gonna kind of get more uh into sort of IT cultures or something like that, it could be collaborative brainstorming, for example.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: In order to do collaborative brainstorming in a collective group, that group has to be working synchronously in order to allow that to happen.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so roles that that favor that, roles that are responsible for it.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, co-writing, for example, in the creative space, right?
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: The co-writers may need to co-write together.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Some do not, but may but they may need to co-write together in order to be able to do it effectively.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so certain creative disciplines can be um can be really important to have synchronous collaboration.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then for culture or policy, think of say workers that work more or less completely independently.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: This could be, for example, a software developer who just picks up elements um from an uh from a queue and starts working on them.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um and yet that software developer is working in a company with fixed hours.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: That would be a good example again of something where culture or policy is determining uh the behavior of the of the individual.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's similar.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Interestingly, they can be interconnected with each other.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: So for example, if the space is uh is dictating that you need people in the uh in a particular location at a particular time, in some cases that also requires them to be in the office at the same time.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so that is that's kind of where the the sort of interconnectivity of the of the two tend to happen.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but there are many cases where even if there is a physical uh location element to it, you don't have to have people um all together at the same time, or people can work very flexible hours.
• 11:59
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• 12:03
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• 12:10
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• 12:25
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• 12:38
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• 12:46
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, this is such a great organizing structure.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um it's it's you know, what does this mean for decision makers in the company?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_03: It's almost like this light bulb moment.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_03: All right, decision makers, what do you do?
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think practically we recommend almost universally in every situation to uh take the uncertainty out of the equation.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, a great first exercise is to simply assess where your organization is against this framework.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um that'll give you an idea at least of the things you can change and the things you can't change.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, you know, conventional wisdom would suggest you know, focus on the things that you can control, right?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it it might be that 20% of the roles uh are truly flexible in the time and space dimensions or or both.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um it could be the case that it's 80%, right?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh once you've done that, it's at that point that you can figure out what to do with those roles specifically.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_03: And then obviously the next step is you translate at translate into your culture and your policy, right?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: And and funnily enough, Matt, that is easily, easily the most complicated piece, right?
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: You've spoken already about uh about you know the personality types and you know and the people inside the organization.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, right, employees um have an opportunity to select roles that uh by definition can be more flexible and actually.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the reasons why, from a company perspective, the culture piece and the policy piece is so challenging is because you're not just dealing here with uh individual dynamics, particularly in larger organizations, you're dealing with organizational dynamics alongside the individual dynamic.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: This kind of came up in our previous uh podcast when we were discussing Tesla and we're discussing the fact that you know Tesla, you know, is uh is an unusual beast in many ways.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And and the reason that it's an unusual beast is that it's it's kind of a it's a car company that is often thought of as a tech company.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: And and those things are you know commonly very different.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I'd even go a step further than that.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's it's probably more accurately um an uh a battery company, an energy storage company, um that uh manufactures batteries that manufactures uh vehicles that those batteries fit in, alongside other things, right?
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Giga factories, etc., that are uh you know producing these batteries at uh for a multitude of different uses, not just to not just to sit inside cars.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: So that makes it a complicated organization with a complicated supply chain, um, but it also means that a very large proportion of the organization is as a manufacturing company.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: So culturally, what does it mean for you as an organization if you have a huge proportion of your workforce that are unable by necessity to work in a flex uh in a truly flexible way, and then another part of that organization that functionally is able to work in a highly flexible way, what does it mean for your organization when you have those two different parts that are in the same organization?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Is it culturally good to say, for example, for all of you folks that have to be in the office at a particular time in a particular place, you must be.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And for all of those people whose role doesn't require it, you don't have to be.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: In some cases that can work, in other cases that will not work, in other cases, um the fact that you've got 20% of the organization working from home um while the other 80% of the office is having to clock in and clock out, that can cause problems.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: It can cause organizational dynamic challenges.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so you have to be able to figure out how to how to manage that in order to be able to get the best out of all of the employees in your organization.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: So that is one of the complicating factors that we've uh that we've spoken about on the previous podcast that is dire that is directly related to this.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in general, it's almost certainly best to create the best working environment for each part of the organization.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: But it is that question as to whether you are trying to optimize locally or optimize globally.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there's another aspect to this, which is uh which is also closely related as well, which is let's say, for example, you're saying, look, we just need everybody to come uh to come into the office.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: What does that mean in terms of the diversity of people inside your organization?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: You're saying to people, no, you must come in because it's our culture and our policy.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: Which people are you excluding from your organization?
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: Are you, for example, excluding all the introverts?
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Are you, for example, excluding people that could be fantastic employees but have other aspects of their life that make it difficult for them to come into the uh to the office on a day-to-day basis?
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that exclusionary policy, is that affecting the diversity of thought that happens inside your organization as a result?
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: And is that in turn having a negative impact on your business results?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: So these are some of the things that organizations really, really need to think about inside their organizations.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so what we generally recommend for organizations that we're working with is that we start with this basically mapping that we've been talking about, so you get a clear understanding of what the roles are and how they sit.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: You then start to look at the people inside your organization and what their preferences are and what their needs are, um, because obviously the existing people inside your organization right now are the most important.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: You then start to think about that in terms of the broader ecosystem of people that could be working for your company if your policy was the same or if your policy was different.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then that gives you, in turn, a sort of roadmap, if you like, from where you are to where you can be in order to be able to get the best out of all of your employees and in order for your company to do best.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we're working with companies, we're helping uh helping them basically understand that so that they can start to build out a set of policies that are centered around how flexible workers work, and then also map that to a set of skills that those flexible workers um will need inside the organization.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then thirdly, start to think about the cultural dimension and what, if anything, about the organization's culture needs to change in order to accommodate any changes you want to make to your remote work policy.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_03: Man, and think of the power of that.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_03: And then and then you add for for the employer to know that information and to and to build their organization accordingly.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_03: Like I I was also thinking of other dimensions like that come through when you start to really think about your own effectiveness, like um when do I do my best work?
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_03: What hours of the day are my best work?
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_03: And if you could lay that dimension on top of this and say, okay, I have in my, I don't know, in my creative engineering team, I got six night owls, and I keep forcing them to come into the office at 8 a.m.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_03: and I know they're not as good as they could be.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_03: Actually, let's shift your work to midnight, you know, or uh 11 p.m.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_03: Like whenever you do your best, like to let's lay that on there.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_03: That's a really interesting thing.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's really interesting.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Powerful.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, Matt, we've seen just small examples of this, not a lot.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: But in organizations that have fully, you know, pretty much self-organizing teams, you do start to see that.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: So you'll see like a self-organizing team of say five or six or whatever, and they collectively realize that basically they're all night owls.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so they're and so they're actually working because they're working tightly collaboratively and creatively together.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they are all working in much the same much the same time schedule, but that time schedule itself has been shifted to something that is unusual.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it is interesting because certain forms of creative work do tend to map to certain times of day.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: So um it's it's a common uh it's It's commonly uh thought of in terms of developers.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of developers do um tend to work do most of their work, tend to be night hours, and they do tend to work sort of more into the evening as an example.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: But there are other forms of work as well, other roles that tend to sort of skew more towards one direction or another.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so it is interesting, once you get down to a sort of small enough team level, um, yeah, there can be these norms that appear inside an organization.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not just a question of providing flexibility to the individual, it is also a question of potentially providing flexibility to self-organizing teams and have them determine what is the best structure for them to do their best work, including when they do their work and physically where they do their work.
• 22:47
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• 22:50
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• 23:31
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• 23:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and it's it's like knowing that that power is there for the employer seems now, as we talk about it, so obvious, but almost like the common theme out there is that employers um feel like flexible work is like a necessary evil they have to figure out how to work around.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_03: And um for employees, it's a more desired state to have that flexibility.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_03: But when we talk about it, it's like, no, this is actually better for everybody if you just think about it a little bit.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it it is unfortunate.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think you're wrong.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think and we have heard that the necessary evil part, but unfortunately, when you break that down, that implies that you know categorically that it's both necessary and evil.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think uh those both of those things are unknowns until you go through this uh this self-exploration that we've been talking about, you know, and and and mapping into your culture.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: I also wonder if if the term culture is gonna take a turn.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what is what does the term mean?
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's a it's a set of norms that a group of people follow, right?
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: But does that mean they all have to work in the exact same way?
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't necessarily imply that directly.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: It usually means that they have a set of beliefs, right?
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh or they're uh marching to you know a particular beat or they have a particular set of outcomes that they're aligned to, but uh it certainly doesn't presuppose that you have to do things exactly the same way.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's the interesting part about this, Matt, is that um you said for the employer it's this and for the employee it's this, you know.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you know, on the employer side, um actually uh let me take a step back.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: I I want to tell you about this experience I had this past week.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I literally had this manifest, it this whole situation manifest in front of me.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: Paul, we were at that that event, um, and I was literally at a table with a couple of people, um, and they both worked for large financial institutions.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, one of those financial institutions um has a mandatory comeback to the office policy.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: The other is embracing a remote work policy, right?
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh flexible work policy.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it's so interesting because um there are two people that have almost the same job function, but this person on the right has this forced comeback to work policy, and and she's like, Well, that's just what I'm doing, that's what they're telling me to do.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: And and I said, Well, you know, what happens if you learn that you do your best work at a coffee shop?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like I guess I don't do my best work, you know, and then um and you're talking to the other person and and she's like, you know, I I because we've moved the pendulum so far this way, I I feel like I I can't come to the office or I shouldn't come to the office, but I do really miss seeing people.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so what if I do my best collaboration work in a in a personal live setting?
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, unfortunately, when you've when you've been so polarizing as an organization, you've made it like a decision of this or this, then and you haven't really gotten people set of skills that they need to kind of figure this out for themselves, you've unwittingly forced them into a model that they cannot produce their best stuff.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: They they can't they are restricted in a way, right?
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so that's what's very interesting.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: I I feel like what we're going to find over the course of um um the next several years, maybe the next decade, is work lifestyles.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that is that people will identify how they do their best work, where they do their best work, when they do their best work, and that will be very personal.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: And it will be the job of the employers to embrace that, to build an ecosystem that supports that.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, everybody benefits from that.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: The employers get the best out of their employees.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: Employees can, if they want to work from the office, they can.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: If they don't, they won't, right?
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just there's that flexibility that's inherent in that structure.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it's it's it's so we we really need as employers, we really need to be very open-minded about that.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it goes back to what Paul was talking about about DEI.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, it we we we do talk about you know how important diversity and inclusion is.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, what if you're what what if you have a bunch of people that have different work styles?
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: You only you only support one of those styles, but you're alienating a group of people, right?
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's not very inclusive.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so it also everybody's relationship, going back to your question about um you know, employers and their reaction to this, is it a necessary evil?
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: It it's really a statement of fact.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's here.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so it really depends on the employer and their relationship with it.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, some companies, especially like tech companies, have really fully embraced it.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you know, when you think about it in terms of these tech companies, we do have to be a little careful in how we assess this because some of these companies are also building technology that really support remote work, building flexible productivity tools, things like that.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: They can make you know, devices that you can take your work everywhere you want to take it, you know, things like that.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a lot of technology that's enabling flexible work style.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um heck, that's the business that we're in, you know, billion minds.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: We arm people with a set of skills for them to be really good at remote work.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: Not just do remote work, but be really, really good at it.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: So we're in that camp as well.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, gosh, there was so much you you mentioned there, Ryan, that we can um that we can explore and probably probably need to in a an additional podcast.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: I know we're gonna um we're gonna do a a second part of this, as it were, that is really focused on on the employee, where we can get into a lot of that, uh, a lot of those pieces in more detail.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: One thing I particularly love is is this idea of these are um work lifestyles and the employer accommodating a different set of work lifestyles in order to get the best pool, uh, the best pool of employees.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's sort of hybrid work reframed, but I but I think it's a really effective reframing.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because really all that hybrid work says is just you know uh be accommodating of everything in a sense, or choose where you are on the spectrum and wherever you are on the spectrum is uh um is appropriate for the for the culture that you have.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: But what's really interesting about this other approach is it kind of looks at it from the perspective of the individual uh of the nature and the categories of of flexible work and the employees that need to perform it, and then a decision that you make as an organization to say, okay, for these for this set of roles, for example, so every time you have a job description for this set of roles, these categories can be supported.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so that as that happens, employers that are really smart about this will start to think about the not just the challenges that they need to overcome in order to accommodate these pesky workers who don't want to come into the office, but instead start to think about it in terms of the benefits that they get as an employer by accommodating flexible work.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we've talked on you know one here already, which is the diversity, right?
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: So there is that diversity of of um of employees to include the people that do want to work from everywhere, but more broadly than that, you're you're massively increasing the pool of qualified available workers, no matter where you are physically located.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: This is a particular importance, we alluded to it previously, but it's a particular importance to organizations that are not necessarily located in, I don't know, if you like the sexy cities, right?
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: So uh you're you're in a location, you've got a great company, but the idea of bringing somebody physically to you to work for your organization is really tough.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: And not only that, but in your local space, your domain, the the workers that even are there are now working for people, you know, for other companies that are based in, you know, New York or Seattle or London or Paris or wherever it would happen to be.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: So the ability for you, particularly for these organizations that are not located in the, you know, in the in the cool places, um, and I mean that strongly in quotes, by the way, uh, are um the ability for them to get a pool of qualified available workers based on the type of organization they are, not based on where they're physically located.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's a massive, massive benefit and a boon to these organizations.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: Ironically, what we found is that some of those organizations aren't thinking about it in that way at all yet.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: And instead, they're thinking about it in the way in which we open this podcast, like the, you know, I really need my people to come in, but if I do, they'll quit and so on.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: And they're not really thinking about it in terms of the flip of that and what a massive opportunity they have to get great workers from just about anywhere, as long as they can accommodate the uh the fact that those workers are not working uh in their physical location.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: The second aspect of this is that you can increase your responsiveness outside of traditional work hours.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: So organizations that stick very physically to a clock, right?
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's great for a bunch of reasons that we've talked about with regard to mental health and giving people, you know, structured breaks and all of that kind of stuff.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: But it does mean that if you want to be responsive outside traditional work hours, you need overtime or you need another location and another time zone or whatever it happens to be.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: You can increase your responsiveness outside of traditional work hours if you provide people with flexible work schedules that overlap with each other.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and when we say flexible work schedules, by the way, it doesn't have to be 100% on the flexible work scale, whereby it's like you can you can work wherever you want, whenever you want without telling anybody.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: It could be, no, I I my work time, I choose that to be 1 p.m.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: to 10 p.m.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's still an element of flexibility, what we used to refer to in uh as flex time.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then the third element, obviously, is that you can dramatically lower your costs associated with the physical infrastructure, right?
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're either your office is getting smaller, or you don't even have an office, or you're using virtual office space in various different places.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that can of course lead to a dramatic lowering of costs associated with the physical infrastructure.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: So these are just some of the examples of the benefits that that people see.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: And what we would suggest to organizations is that you start to think about after you've identified that group of workers for whom uh flexible work style will work really well, and you start to think about what that flexible work style might look like, think about it very simply from a business case perspective, right?
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: Think about all of these elements that we're talking about, um, create, um, do a cost-benefit analysis associated with all uh with all of those things, and then then make the business case for the change that you're that you're visualizing.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then you get a lot of the a lot of the emotion uh that is centered around this out of it.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: But the reality is flexible work styles can work, they can work really well.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: But in order for them to work really well, you need to make sure that you've addressed the policy issues, you've addressed the cultural issues, and perhaps most importantly, you've set your employees up to do it successfully.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that means giving your employees the skills that they need in order to be able to do remote work effectively.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so that last piece, obviously, we know is something that employers have traditionally missed.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we'll, you know, we continue to work with them to try to address it.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: The key here is that the challenges are not in themselves a barrier, they're just things that need to be addressed, and if they are addressed, then you can get great business results out of accommodating flexible work styles.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: Excellent.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's great.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_03: Let's wrap it up there and uh I look forward to the next one space and time part two.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_03: Sounds great.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_03: From the employer standpoint.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_03: The employee sequel.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks, guys.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks a lot.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_03: The Way Too Busy podcast was presented and produced by me, Matt Neal, and was brought to you by Billion Minds.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_03: If you want to get in touch with us, tweet us at Rising Billion or email us at WayTooBusy at BillionMinds.com.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_03: Billion Minds, creating practical tools for our way too busy lives.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_03: If you're enjoying the Way Too Busy podcast, leave us a rating and review on iTunes so others can find us too.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks.