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apples and gladwells · Humanity Working

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_02: Malcolm Gladwell once killed a rock with two birds.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: When Malcolm Gladwell jumps in the water and he doesn't get wet, the water gets Malcolm Gladwell.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: So we've been getting a lot of feedback from listeners asking for our thoughts about a couple of recent news articles, news stories.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: And um by the way, if you want to come to us, contact us at any time, feel free to email us at podcast at billionminds.com or tweet at rising billion.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um anyway, but back to these questions.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um they basically centered around Malcolm Gladwell's comments about remote work and Apple's return to Muffus policy.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: So what do you think we we go through those today?
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean this so let's start with Malcolm Gladwell.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm sure most of the listeners know who he is, but for those that haven't found him, he's he's a staff writer for The New Yorker, writer of books, including The Tipping Point, David Gillemeth, Blink, Outliers.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um he's a podcast host for Revisionist History, as well as co-managing his own podcast company.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that's not why he was in the news.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't one of those podcasts, it was on another one uh called The Diary of a CEO.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll put the link in.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was like episode 162.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Inity said he he took exception to people who are content just, and I'll quote, sitting in their pajamas, sitting in your pajamas in your bedroom, and said it's difficult to sort of feel necessary when you're not in the office.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then, quote, if we don't feel like we're part of something important, what's the point?
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: If it's just a paycheck, then it's like, what have you reduced your life to?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um it was pretty striking to hear him say that.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, what what are your thoughts, Paul?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah, there's a lot in there as the as there has been with a lot of these things.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um First off, by the way, um the that podcast, Revisionist History, um, if you are a podcast listener, definitely go and listen to it.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_03: It's really, really good.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um and also, uh, you know, I'm a fan I'm a fan of many of the Malcolm Gladwell books.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_03: My I think my personally my favorite one is Blink, but but uh those books are all very interesting as well.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um for those people that sort of um listen to Gladwell a lot or uh or read his books, they'll know that you know ostensibly he's a storyteller.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_03: And um and so uses stories um in order to uh in order to move forward a point of view.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_03: Here, of course, he's a guest on somebody else's uh podcast.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_03: And and the discussion itself, I know you listened to it as well, Matt, the discussion itself was extremely wide-ranging.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: It was a long, long podcast covering a whole lot of things.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: 90 minutes or so, yeah.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_03: Uh-huh.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_03: And this was actually a relatively small part of that, uh, of that thing.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_03: So I thought one of the things that was more fascinating about it was the fact that you've got this very wide-ranging interview with somebody who's not particularly known for this topic.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that one thing comes out and becomes the thing that everybody's paying attention to.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_03: So if you spent any time on social media, you might have seen social media sort of uh broadly ridiculing it.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_03: There were a whole bunch of other articles that sprung up and you know, with titles like, you know, Malcolm Gladwell doesn't know what he's talking about and things like that.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and it just goes to say what an incendiary topic this is for so many people and for people that are on either side of this equation.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I think in part that speaks to the fact that um, you know, many people are are kind of holding on to this idea of being able to work uh away from the office almost it feels like a thread.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_03: And that and that they really want to continue to be able to work out of the office.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_03: And then also it speaks to the fact that, as we've spoken about before, for many employers, um, they're sitting on the other side of that equation, desperate to bring, in some cases, to bring employees back in.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_03: Now there was an added bit of spice, I suppose, in this one, in the sense that I think a lot of people felt that there was um a perceived hypocrisy associated with it.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um there's elements even in the same uh podcast itself where he's you know he's talking about um you know being alone and how you know helpful that was at certain points in his life.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: And and then also um it's well known, particularly at various points in his career, that that he was not working in an office, right?
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_03: There's photos of him in coffee shops and various other places doing work.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um and of course he had a job.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_03: This that this is the heart of it.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_03: He had a job um for much of his career um that had for to which there was almost no benefit to be sitting in an office setting.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_03: And in fact, when uh about a week later he was on CNBC and he kind of clarified that he worked outside of the office much more when he was predominantly writing books, uh, versus now, and of course he still still does write and so on, but now he is the co-manager of this podcast company called Pushko Media.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: So I think that when you start to break it down, it's kind of one of those things that there's elements of truth in it along the lines of you know, if you don't feel like you're part of something important, what's the point?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_03: That's true.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, sure.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um and and so if your job is just a paycheck, that that can be difficult.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_03: Not always.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, in some cases, your job just being uh uh just being a paycheck is just what you need for that time in your life.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_03: So even that isn't just enough.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_03: But there's elements of it to that, but it's been all kind of like pushed together as a thing that becomes again this idea of work in office good, work out of office bad, or the flip of that, if you're on the other side of that equation, work out of office good, work in office bad.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_03: And it's never gonna be that simple.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that that's part of the challenge, isn't it?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: It it it it doesn't need to be so polarizing, it doesn't need to be so black and white.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: I I think it's awesome that we're having these conversations in the public setting.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: I I think what's really what we're seeing is as evidence here is um uh it's it's a movement.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um when when when people are this loud on a on a topic um and this you know passionate, vehement on a topic, um, it typically is an indication of a of a movement.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: Almost like a lot of this was pent up for a while, and and now it's you know finally we have the opportunity to really push forward um to some kind of a new paradigm.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I think the the discussions are great.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the the biggest challenge is that they're starting to really um come out to be so black and white.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um and it it doesn't need to be.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, because we're kind of if we're doing it black and white, we're ignoring the type of work people do.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and and that becomes a challenge um because everybody's roles are different.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: There's so many different job functions.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, hundreds, thousands, millions of them.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so to to take one position of two um on that volume of of variety and diversity in terms of um job roles is it's just you know kind of crazy.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um we explored this a little bit um in the last couple of podcasts, actually, um, when we did space and time, right?
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um we looked at some of this through the lens of the employee and and through the lens of the employer.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so uh we talk about a lot of the changes that are happening and and really all at the same time, you know, you've got certain roles that um would work very well um outside of the office, but were required to be in the office previously.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so, in many ways, this movement um has been very liberating for those resources.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then of course you've got the antithesis of that, right?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: You've got um roles that are really better suited for a in-the-office setting, um, whether that's due to particular archetypes or particular job functions or reasons, uh, necessity of collaboration, innovation, things of that nature, um, then being forced to be out of the office is detrimental to them.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: And and then what we're missing is all those juicy bits in between those two ends of the extreme, you know.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so there's so many roles that are kind of somewhere in the middle, whereby the there's so much diversity within the role itself that there's um there's goodness in working outside of the office on some days, and there's goodness in working inside the office on other days, but it's it's based on the needs of the role and the needs of that individual human or the needs of that individual business, instead of let's say a policy, if you like.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and just uh just so the listeners know, we we did uh put a blog post on uh on our website about this um just a couple of weeks ago.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_03: So uh if you haven't already, uh head over to billionminds.com and check out the blog post on uh on these issues, um, whereby we kind of publish um a model.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um the the previous podcast episodes that we were um that we were referring to actually talk about this space and time thing.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_03: But we use that space and time model and kind of define role types and how they map against it.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_03: And then we've also started some work, which we haven't published yet, but we've also started some work on uh on what the archetypes are that are increasingly doing remote work, and then what the special uh or specific needs are um of those types of roles, and and we'll be publishing some more information about that soon on our website as well.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: The Way Too Busy podcast is brought to you by Billion Minds.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Working out of the office brings employees all kinds of freedoms, but it can be really difficult to do well and stay engaged every day.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Billion Minds has spent years studying the day-to-day habits of people who do great work in unstructured, ambiguous environments, and they've used it to develop a revolutionary platform that embeds key work from anywhere skills into employees in just ten minutes a day.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to help your employees become remote work masters while generating better business results for your organization, visit billionminds.com today or contact us at info at billionminds.com.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Billionminds, helping everyone do great work from anywhere.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: So there's merit to what he said, but there's a lot of nuance.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I think that's the the part to really think about here.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and I I think what's really interesting about this, Matt, is that the the reaction, the way this was talked about, the way it was responded to.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: The title is it's destroying us.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's a strong word that working from home is destroying us.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: That like really?
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the comments on YouTube, like a thousand, a thousand comments on the YouTube video, like, no, no, no, it's the best thing ever.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: So obviously, like you said, Ryan, it's it stirred up a lot of emotion.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, it's interesting.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_03: It it it just illustrates that it is just so easy to be black and white on the issue.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_03: And if you are, to your point, Matt, you're gonna get a ton of clicks, you're gonna get a lot of listens, um, because this is getting so tribal.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_03: Although I think you get a lot more clicks than you get listens, given the fact that to your point, like there were all these comments on it where some people clearly had not listened to all of it.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but the problem, of course, with being this black and white is that ultimately that can lead to some really bad decisions inside organizations, right?
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_03: Some really not well thought through, some absolute yes, absolute no, no um uh no adjustments to um any procedures to or policies to kind of support that ultimate decision, no reflection on what that might mean for the culture, uh, no reflection on what it might mean in terms of what technology you need in order to be able to support whatever decision you made.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_03: So you could almost say uh if we would kind of borrow from the politics sphere, it's almost like it's good politics, but bad policy, in the sense that, you know, good policy politics can be very, very simplified messaging, um, but bad policy is often very, very simplified, not nuanced policy.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I was thinking about this um earlier today, Paul.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um I don't remember how many times we've mentioned this in previous podcasts, but Paul and I were part of an agile innovation team um in inside of Microsoft.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I it's it's interesting now we kind of forget because COVID and and then all the and then now all the all the energy and momentum around work from anywhere that in some ways COVID um kind of spurred on.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: We're forgetting some of the trends that were happening immediately prior to that.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: So these agile innovation teams were being set up, and um and some other policies were being set up to encourage people to get out of the office.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: Remember that?
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, okay, no, innovation needs to move to the front line.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: Innovation, you need to get out of your RD bubble and go into a customer facility and innovate with your customer there.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_02: Get out of the office.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: You know, so we talk about these moments of serendipity.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: Well, there's moments of serendipity and then there's moments of serendipity, right?
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_02: So there's like in the office, it's almost like controlled serendipity.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you're you're there with the five other people that you see all day, every day, and sure, running into them could um, you know, create some discussion and some um some ideas and some insights among that group.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: But what about the um serendipity that occurs when you spend a week with a customer on site on touring their factory and interviewing their employees and you know running ethnographic experiments and stuff like that?
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's that's been already we had seen um these trends of moving RD to the the front, you know, and and getting out of the office, and there was you know, encouraging those things.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so um, anyways, I just I thought that was an interesting memory that popped into my my brain uh around this, Paul, is that that was a strong encouragement just a few years back is to get out of the office.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: And again, I think it comes down to um it's situational.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so it's in those particular roles, or if you're kind of an agile innovation team and you're innovating um on something that's kind of big industry initiative, then being with people that are in the industry all day, every day is more valuable than you being in your office with your people.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_03: Well, gosh, there's a bunch of nuance to that, isn't there, when you start to think about it.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, what you're highlighting, I think, there is something really interesting, which is there is being in your office and being in an office.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_03: And then it's being in no office, right?
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_03: Because if you think about it, right, let let's let's pull on that thread just for a second here, right?
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_03: If as you as you mentioned, right, when we were doing that work at that time, it was all about okay, get away from your office because you want to understand your customer, but where are you going?
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_03: You're going to your customer's office.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_03: Well, what if your customer didn't have an office, right?
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_03: It would actually be very difficult to understand your customer in that fast, rapid way because the customer that you're dealing with themselves are so distributed, right?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_03: You couldn't literally, you know, but part of the work that that you and I did was was walk into offices and literally peer over people's shoulders and things like that, right?
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_03: And and go chat to this person and then go chat to their boss, and then go chat to the other person, and then grab a few people around a computer screen and do something, and all that kind, all those kind of things becomes significantly less um efficient.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that actually draws us to another interesting element to this.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_03: So we've talked about how how situational uh this type of this type of stuff is.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_03: What that highlights, what that example highlights, is that when you are trying to understand something that you don't understand yet, trying to try and actually familiarize yourself with, let's say, a customer, or trying to even familiarize familiarize yourself with your own organization, and you're trying to do so rapidly, the collection of people that you interact with, um, them being physically together actually really helps with that process, right?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_03: Them being collect literally being able to walk into an office, we'll all remember this kind of experience.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_03: You walk into somebody's office and you have a conversation with them, and they say, Hey, you know who you need to talk to, you need to talk to Bob, and he's just down the corridor, and I'll go grab him, right?
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: And then before you know where you are, the three of you are are having that discussion.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_03: Now it is sort of kind of possible to replicate that over Zoom, but it's not that easy.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_03: And Ryan talked about in a previous podcast about the fact that that in Zoom, um, now a lot of meeting, you know, a lot of people are the number of meetings are increasing and increasing.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_03: So because of that, the likelihood of that other piece even being available is somewhat less than it would have been previously.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_03: So there is something, it's something really intriguing there.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_03: That idea of, you know, your office getting out of it in order to understand others is beneficial, but you've got to have somewhere to go.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_03: And when you're initially, initially immersing yourself into uh into an organizational culture, it is probably slowed.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_03: And we have seen that.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_03: We've seen that as one of the challenges for, for example, new employees, new hires, and things like that, um, particularly people just coming out of college.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_03: I think we spoke about this on a previous uh podcast, and they're coming into a company and how long it takes them to really understand the culture and how long it takes them to understand, you know, how everything works, because there's not really the thing they're trying to immerse themselves into is too distributed to be able to immerse yourself in it very rapidly.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_03: Now, that's not an argument to that we should all be throwing ourselves back in the office, but it is a change and it is something that we need to understand more deeply.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, also remember pre-pandemic, I've almost forgot about this myself.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: That whole like um office of the future, big table in the center, everybody comes in, like turning an office into a coffee shop.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: To mimic that thing was a colossal failure, basically.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, right?
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yep, in many ways.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: And companies redid their entire offices to mimic this idea.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then Google came out a year later and was like, whoa, that was a bad idea.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: That didn't work, right?
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was happening too.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, no, people need some space sometimes.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: People need a cubicle or an office or their own room or their own stuff around them sometimes, whether it's in an office or at home office or whatever.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, that was crazy.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: The pandemic put the brakes on that in a way that that is odd too.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um well, no, that's that's it's interesting too.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I I really like this topic because it well, it reminds me of stuff that was happening a while ago that's just fun to remember.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: But there's there's so many kind of analogs and and correlations here.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_02: So just picking up what what Matt was just saying, um, within the confines of an office building, if you like, companies are actually trying to create like a work from anywhere environment in those four walls.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: So you go to this area of the building if you want your you know, your friend's coffee shop, you know, situation.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: You go to this area of the building if you just want kind of like to hear chatter, but you're still working with your headphones on.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_02: You go to this area if you need privacy.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so anyways, so those are those it was already can if you what we can pull from that is that there's already a sense of need for different work modalities at different times for different people, right?
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and unfortunately, the reason really, Matt, why I think that a lot of those things failed is because of the polarization, right?
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: It went from everybody has a closed door office to everybody is in an open space cubicle, right?
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and so the reason why that failed is because it's too black and white.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it this is actually you're right.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_03: This is a really interesting topic, and and maybe it's something that we can go into in a little bit more depth on a future pod because um I uh it's not entirely dead, right?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_03: I was um I was fortunate enough uh to uh to be in Arkansas about a week or so ago.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_03: And uh while I was there, I met with somebody who was uh who's involved in the uh in the building of the of the new campus for for Walmart.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_03: And it's not complete yet, um, but it was very clear from our discussions, and I also told the the uh the Walmart Museum as well, where they talk about it quite a bit.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_03: It's very clear that um what they're trying to do in Bentonville Architect.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Arkansas is very much a we're gonna create an office environment that um that our our executives in particular want to be in.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um and we're gonna consider all of the things that uh that kind of Ryan was talking about.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_03: My opinion on this in general is that um when you think about let's say coffee shops, let's say our home, let's say all of these, uh all of these other places, um we probably if we built our own home office and we've custom built our own home office and we've had the resources and the availability to be able to do it and we've really thought about it, we really thought about how it needs to be set up to be perfect for us, then it's probably well appointed and well meeting our needs.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_03: But for many of us, particularly in the home office, it's a massive compromise, right?
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's a, you know, if you live in a apartment in New York, we we would be on Zoom calls with people who had small apartments in New York, and like the the husband was in the was in the bathroom and the wife was in the um was in one tiny part of the bedroom because they had to be co-located because of COVID and so on.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_03: And they were makes making massive compromises.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: I launched this podcast with you guys from my son's closet.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_03: There you go, right?
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_03: So you're you're familiar with those the kind of compromises that we're talking about.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_03: And so these organizations that have um, you know, huge amounts of money at their disposal, right, they should be able to get this right.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_03: They're gonna get it wrong a bunch of times before they get it right.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_03: But they should be, if they, if they really, really think about it and they really, really think about what is necessary in order to build the office of the future, um, what they should be doing is they should be building spaces that, as we kind of discussed previously, that people want to go to.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and they want to be able to go there because they feel like they're gonna do their best work.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_03: Now they're never gonna get rid of whatever they do until uh they solve teleportation, right?
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_03: They're never gonna be able to get rid of a commute, right?
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: They're never gonna be able to get rid of the fact that you're somewhere and your family is somewhere else, right?
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_03: They're never gonna be able to change any of those things.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_03: But if they are building spaces, then they want to, they should be taking great care to make sure that those spaces are conducive with people being able to do their best work and make it uh make it sort of part of the of the overall piece of the rest of their lives.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_03: There's one other thing I wanted to bring up as well, because I I want to make sure we don't miss it, which is that you know, we've spoken in previous uh in previous podcasts about the fact that this is um, as I say, a bit of a double-edged sword in terms of working away from the office and working in the office.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_03: Um, as a lot of the discussion about Glabwell came up, um, there were there was quite a lot, as I mentioned, of chatter on social media, and a particular article from uh from Microsoft kept getting cited.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_03: And this was also really interesting, Matt, because you would see this was another example of a very long-form report with a whole bunch of data on it, basically showing that it was a that that work from anywhere um is a mixed picture.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_03: And then you'd see folks quoting um without quoting the report itself, using the report as evidence, for example, that people have become far more connected with their colleagues when they're working from home.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_03: And in reality, you go into the report, and the report is pretty much in many cases uh arguing the reverse.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_03: But I wanted to call it out because there are um there are I'll encourage people to read it and uh we'll put the link to it in the in the show notes.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_03: But here's a here's a few uh statistics from it that are you know kind of alarming.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um so this was done um during the pandemic, but they kind of talk about what happens afterwards.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_03: But in a global Microsoft survey in April, 42% of employees reported feeling less connected versus 22% more.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_03: 32% feel that they have fewer opportunities to collaborate during COVID, 24% more.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_03: And then they quote a separate study where the share of individual contributors who've reported favorably on their team connectedness dropped from 90% in April to 74% in December.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_03: And for managers, it dropped from 95% to 83%.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_03: And so we've seen a drop in overall employee engagement that's happened during this period.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_03: And then in addition to that, you're seeing these um these challenges that are happening around uh you know connectivity and people uh people feeling that they can collaborate effectively.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_03: Now we'll get on to things that you can do about that, but I think it's very important as we look at this stuff to to not assume that there are no problems to solve, right?
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_03: To not assume that everything is solved just by allowing people to work from anywhere.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_03: No, it's rather than uh rather than that, it's more a case of you can do great work from anywhere, you absolutely can, but in order to be able to do great work from anywhere, you've got to be able to to address some of these issues.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think those stats too, you gotta put a layer of uh pandemic sadness over top of it, you know?
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, totally, yeah.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, are you are you feeling less connected to everything in your life at that time?
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, December of you know, year two of the pandemic, but uh Yeah.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it is complicated.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I read there's there's some other stuff that's related to it, which suggests that actually like close connections became stronger, right?
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_03: And it's the looser connections that that that kind of became uh became weaker for people, which makes sense, right?
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, obviously there is some horror stories as to what happened when people were forced to live together, but for many people, the idea of like living together in this in the same house was you know, was for a long period of time led to them being more connected to each other.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_03: So it is it's a comp it's a complicated uh complicated question, but there is some work in there on the rest of that study where they kind of talk about the lingering effects beyond the pandemic as well.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_03: So, as I say, we will put the link into it uh in the show notes.
• 28:22
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• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: Are you one of over a billion people who works out of the office at least one day every week?
• 28:31
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• 28:39
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• 29:06
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• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um okay, so on the topic of tech companies, um, what about Apple's decision?
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess I should outline what that is.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: So according to Bloomberg, uh they're bringing people back to the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays with a third day being decided at a team level.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: So what do you what do you think of that?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_03: Well, again, funnily enough, this I guess this is like becoming like a commentary of what what media reporting is like these days and what people's response to media reporting is these days.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_03: But um there was a lot of detail left out of many of the initial reports, and then people jumped to a lot of conclusions associated with it.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um but it appears, uh, now that we've been at a point where we've seen the memo that came from uh from Tim Kirk on this, that um it appears that was fairly well communicated internally.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_03: They first started thinking about this um uh uh earlier in the year.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um, they're framing it as a pilot that they'll continue to learn from and continue to uh to make adjustments based on what they learn.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_03: Um I to be honest, I think the response has been kind of silly.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_03: I but I read something in Inc.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_03: magazine, for example, that went into this huge diatribe about how if you look at how much money they made during the pandemic, um, that it indicates that people working from home um was directly related to the uh to the fact that they made far more money and therefore they'll be a far more effective company if they carry on having people running from home.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_03: When so many factors were affecting um the purchase of of technology and software during during that period of time, not least of which that that uh a whole bunch of people were sat at home watching Apple TV and playing with apps and thinking, well, I'll just buy myself a new phone because I've got nothing else to do.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_03: So there's so many, there's so there's so many other things that uh that relate to uh to Apple's profitability due to that period that you can't apply it directly to whether people were working from home or not.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think that um when you when you think about Apple, um there are some it's a little bit like the conversation we had about Tesla a few weeks ago, but when you think about Apple, there are some specific things related to Apple that would suggest that they would uh that they might approach it in uh in this specific way.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um but the bottom line is at the very least, this is an attempt, an attempt at trying to address the varying different elements of what a hybrid work policy could look like.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_03: So for example, they're not requiring everybody to come back into the office five days a week and work at least 40 hours in the office a la Tesla, right?
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_03: They are suggesting that there are some individual dynamics, hence you'll be able to work out of the office two days a week, some team dynamics, hence there'll be a team decision as to when that uh as to when that third day is, and some organizational dynamics, hence we'll have everybody come into the office on a Tuesday and Thursday.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_03: So you can see that they're they're really trying to uh to think through some of those things when they're trying to balance the needs of the employees with the needs of the employer.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_03: Now, uh is it perfect?
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I think they think it's not perfect, which is why they're referring to it as a pilot and why they're gonna learn from it.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, experimentation is great.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, I I I applaud the experimentation.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: I I think just like anything, what it comes down to is um uninformed versus informed decisions, as we often say.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it is an uninformed decision to choose black or white, you know, in this type of scenario.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if Apple's doing what we suspect they're doing with the verbiage that you they use in terms of pilot, uh would indicate that there's at least a healthy dose of experimentation going on to get enough data um to make a decision.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but you know, ultimately what it comes down to is uh how much of this is mandated across the board and etched into policy versus um providing more decision authority to individual employees and teams.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um I suspect if organizations are doing a healthy dose of experimentation, because you've heard us talk about this plenty, um it it's the answer is gonna end up being something around supporting diverse work styles.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I I don't know if that term is gonna be a term that ends up being coined or what have you, but um just the same way that we support diversity in so many other ways, and it's so important for organizations, and and we believe in it very deeply, um, work style diversity is a real thing and it needs to be accounted for.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so ultimately it's gonna come down to embracing how people work, how they want to work, how they do their best work.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um and unfortunately, um it's just I think a fact to state that um if you're an organization and you don't support work style diversity, you're probably gonna see pretty massive attrition.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, because as an individual employee, um, you know, you're gonna respond to policy decisions with your feet.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_02: You're, you know, that's just that's just what's going to happen.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's you're going to end up leaving the team or leaving the company if if the company refuses to embrace your work style, um, or if they've embraced a work style that's not for your archetype.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so um, anyways, I I think I I hope.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: I hope that what Apple does, I hope that what Apple is doing is in the in the you know vein of experimentation.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I believe that what they will discover is that it's not gonna be a one-size-fits-all.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: I I'm glad it was a I'm glad to hear there was follow-up and that there was, you know, it was it was a pilot rather than because when I saw that and seeing a tech company come out with that kind of message like that seemed black and white in the reporting at first, you know, there was even some follow-on that I think from, you know, the writer of the article that I'm remembered.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: That was like, well, now that Apple's announced, it's only a matter of time before everybody else follows suit and brings everybody back to the office like they were giving permission.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then it was just like, hmm, that's odd.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: But it makes more sense that it's an experiment, or not an experiment, but a data gathering exercise pilot to figure out what is the best way to go.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, they've been very successful during the pandemic.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think they were set to open that that sphere, the circle building just before the pandemic as well.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean, I'm sure it's an amazing campus to be at.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so there's a draw there as well.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's interesting.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um Yeah, I mean like none of us can can know the future on this stuff fully.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_03: I can, Paul.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so so as as as you can, Ryan, let's uh let's move let's have a conversation about what bets I should place in the next let's go.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_03: But anyway.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_03: So but that said, um I actually think that the broad outline of what they're doing is is probably, probably where a lot of organizations will end up, and whereby uh the the debate to a certain extent will be on where the office is, which we've spoken about before, right?
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um so for example, you might, and we'll talk in more detail about this on a on a future podcast, but for example, going into an office, if you're in Tulsa, Oklahoma, might be a shared office space with your colleagues that happen to be in the in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area, right?
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um and for other parties it might be different.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_03: It might be the headquarters or whatever it happened to be.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_03: But there will be, I think, probably a period of time where you're encouraging um the organization as a whole to gather wherever they're gathering at around about the same time, which is the sort of Apple Tuesday, Thursday thing, right?
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um, there'll be uh then a decision that is made at the team level, and then the and then employees will be free to do whatever they do with the with the rest of it.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_03: I think I think that's what people have been missing in the context of this, which is that it is, if you think about it, an individual dynamic, a team dynamic, and an organizational dynamic, and then it's gonna be dependent upon the organization as to how much weight you place upon all three, uh, all three of those elements.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_03: And to your point about the the circle, right?
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_03: This is an example of a company that for a long period of time, uh certainly dating back to Jobs and Jobs' involvement in Pixar, um, was actually, as far as I understand, a strong, strong element of this.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um there was strong emphasis placed on on physical proximity.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_03: You may remember the story about um the job saw the the the fact that you uh where you placed the bathrooms was incredibly was incredibly important, right?
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_03: And where you placed your canteen was incredibly important and things like that, because it would lead to these serendipitous discussions between people that would almost never uh never happen in in other ways.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_03: So that's the that's what I think is is the the attempt, I think is actually laudable, which is trying to find out what the right uh what the right balance is.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_03: And what's really intriguing about the the the flex team day, I think is super interesting because to Ryan's point, let's say you're let's say that you're in a team and Mondays and Fridays, you kind of need those to be work from home days for whatever reason.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_03: For another, you know, for a work-life balance type issue, you need it to be Mondays and Fridays.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_03: And your team's norm is to work Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays in the office.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that doesn't mean you gotta leave Apple, right?
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_03: You you find another team where it's Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and you can still and you can still do that.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_03: So Apple really requires you to make the Apple as a whole requires you to make the Tuesday, Thursday thing work, right?
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_03: And then your team is determining what uh what other days will work.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's what we talked about this a little bit in the previous organization where you have this idea of like like the the matchmaking thing whereby like one team has got a working norm and and they publish it, and then the other team has a different working norm and they and they publish that.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_03: So I think that's where they're trying to go, um, which I think which I think means uh makes a lot of sense.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_03: As they go through this experiment, they're going to gather data on the results, they'll tweak, they'll wind up with a uh with where they uh where they end up.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_03: But I do think that another aspect of tech companies, which is really interesting, is that typically they don't blindly follow each other, right?
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_03: Really successful ones don't anyway.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_03: So this will be this is based on a whole bunch of things, the campus that Apple has, the nature of the work that they do, all of that kind of stuff.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um, what they do is gonna create a huge whole bunch of headlines because it is Apple.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_03: But at the end of the day, the results of these experiments are gonna come in, they're gonna be, they're gonna understand what it means for them as an organization, what it means for the people that work for them.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_03: They'll make a bunch of decisions, which will probably be quite different to where we are right now.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_03: And at the end of it, they'll do what's right for for them as an organization.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_03: But it is encouraging that it is being done in that kind of iterative, uh, that iterative way with attention to all of those different dimensions.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: Very cool.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting stuff.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: All right, guys.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: See you next time.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you, Matt.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Matt.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: The Way Too Busy podcast was presented and produced by me, Matt Neal, and was brought to you by Billion Minds.
• 41:33
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• 41:41
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• 41:47
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• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks.