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How the Future Works · Humanity Working

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: But the ongoing sort of drumbeat of CEO get back into the office really does two key things.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: First, it uh creates all kinds of potential challenges in terms of retaining those employees that want to go around.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: And the second is back to that issue of trust.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: If I don't feel as an employee like I'm trusted by my employer, I'm actually gonna not gonna work as hard.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Today's a bit of a highlight for me.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm really excited to be joined by the author of one of my favorite recent books, How the Future Works, leading flexible teams to do the best work of their lives, Brian Elliott.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Brian is one of Forbes Future Work 50, and he's the co-founder of Future Forum, uh, which is a consortium backed by Slack and others, including BCG.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Brian's been a startup CEO, an executive of Google and Slack, and also is a senior advisor at BCG.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: So welcome to the podcast, Brian.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me on, Paul.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: Great to be here with you.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, really excited to talk about some of the themes that are in the book.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: Congratulations on writing it.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, for those that haven't picked it up yet, I I think I describe it as partly like settling an argument on how work environments should be structured and partly a step-by-step guide on how to make those flexible environments work really well.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: So let's start with that first part and specifically with nomenclature.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: You're you pretty much reject terms like remote and hybrid, even distributed, and you've landed on flexible work.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Can you explain to our audience why that is?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, a couple of reasons for that.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: Number one, flexibility is more than just where we work, it's importantly when we work as well.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: So in the work that we did at Future Forum, we found for years running that um location flexibility, which gets talked about in the press all the time, is important to people, but giving them schedule flexibility, allowing them to have dedicated chunks of time during the day to do deep focused work without interruption, uh, is even more important to their productivity.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: And it's more important to their lives too.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: When you think about it in terms of your ability to do things like take care of kids during an emergency or pick somebody up after school, the ability to have flexibility in your schedule is a real boost.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: So we wanted people to think about this more broadly than just how many days a week somebody has to go into the office, which is where the hybrid argument tends to land.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and so flexibility seemed more like a more appropriate term.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, um we we've been bouncing around the same thing ourselves, um, did much of the same uh similar research as well.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: And and those themes keep coming through.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's really, you know, when you think about it, the flexible term is a term that is to a certain extent centered around what employees are looking for versus a statement of where the workplace is.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it kind of makes sense that it would be that way because we think about, you know, when we've thought about the office, the office is a place, it's a physical place.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so when the the absence of that or the partial entity of that kind of reflects how people have traditionally thought about it.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, humans are humans want flexibility and uh flexible work styles are uh are kind of more aligned to sort of basic human nature, I think.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think that's right.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: I do think one of the terms you used was distributed.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I do think that's a really important one to keep in mind because most organizations, every place that I've worked for the past 25 years, uh, everyone has been distributed.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: I haven't run, I haven't managed a team that's been in the same city, let alone the same building for 25 years.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: So learning how to lead distributed organizations, how to help people collaborate, communicate, connect with each other across time zones, across oceans is challenging in and of itself.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: But that management discipline also requires a certain amount of flexibility to be successful.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: I said um I said you settle an argument.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um other people can determine whether that's true or not.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm obviously on one side of it.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: But um there's tons of data in this book.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's actually one of the things I really enjoyed about it because um for a while there, there were a lot of opinions, but not a lot of data.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: But now we've got to a point where you know the studies have been done and we can uh and we can uh kind of see the overall effect on productivity, we can see the effects on mental health and all that kind of stuff as well.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um But a lot of the data that you cite is really around the benefit organizations get on the recruitment and retention side.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: So tell me a little bit more about that.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there's a really big uh challenge when it comes to retaining talent if you're not willing to show them a little bit of flexibility.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a couple of reasons for that, right?
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, it just has to do with the sort of human psyche of the past couple of years and the fact that people have spent time proving they can be highly productive working from home.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: So it's become a big part of the equation.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh flexibility is second only to compensation in most surveys these days in terms of what gets people to change.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: But it's it's a lot bigger than that.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: When you think about it from an executive perspective, go back to that word distributed.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: Why would I limit myself to the ability to hire people that are willing to come to work in downtown San Francisco or New York or Tokyo or Paris, when instead I could think about how do I tap broader pools of talent that are often, by the way, more diverse than the people that you're going to find in those limited geographies?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: That part was actually a little surprising for me.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um I guess I hadn't done a deep dive look into some of the demographics, but you do cite how um how basically if you've got these organizations that are sitting in San Francisco as an example and they're looking to have a diverse pool of people.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, certainly when it comes to um to racial diversity, they're going to get a lot more of that if they're recruiting, uh, if they're recruiting nationally.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: So um, and of course, even internationally as well.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so you cite a very simple thing, which I think probably a lot of people don't think about, which is you know, where the people are is not necessarily where you are, particularly when it comes to diversity.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly right.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: When you think about it, like we did this not only ourselves as Slack when we were hiring people and thinking about it, but Levi's, Levi's Trossing Company, which is headquartered in San Francisco.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: San Francisco is uh notably uh not the biggest diversity city in terms of black employees, as one simple example, a lot more in the southeast of the United States.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're looking to diversify your workforce, you have to look more than one city in order to actually get yourself there.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: The other is we found this in the research itself that people who are employees who are black, Hispanic, Asian American really appreciate flexibility more than their white colleagues for a couple of really simple reasons, one of which is code switching.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: The ability to be in a situation that's majority white and then dial back out of it was first cited by um uh Brian Lowry, a professor down at Stanford University, who said he felt it himself as a black professor.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: Walking on Stanford's campus five days a week, nine to five, was taxing because he had to watch how he walked, how he talked, how he showed up.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: And that doesn't say that Brian wants to be fully remote.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: That means that he wants to be in that situation sometimes and then the ability to come back out of it again.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: So flexibility ends up being a real boost to inclusion for people who are in historically underrepresented groups.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: Hmm.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, really, really lots to lots, I think, to think about there.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you kind of make this real in the book a little bit as you talk about how all of this stuff is playing out inside Slack.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um first off, I would imagine that many people probably thought that Slack itself was already hugely flexible before the before the pandemic.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it's certainly if you if you kind of look back, you might think that way because Slack has played such an important role in organizations that want to become more flexible.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: But in reality, as you detail in the book, um Slack was was actually a little bit more traditional than that, right?
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, completely.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: We were very office-based and off office-centric.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_02: Less than 3% of our employees were remote employees.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember going through the all the problems and machinations of someone who wanted to move from the Bay Area out to Reno, Nevada, who we essentially put on a performance improvement plan because that person had to prove that they were capable of working remotely, right?
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: Because we didn't have the systems or infrastructure for it either.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: There was a there was a moment in, I'd say three or four months into the pandemic when one of our senior leaders, a guy named Mike Brevort, who was based in Denver, Colorado, said, this is a big deal because it allows all of us to be on a level playing field.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: And what he meant by that was all of a sudden, people who were working in the in Denver or New York or Vancouver no longer felt like second-class citizens.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't feel like because they weren't in headquarters, uh, they weren't uh part of the same team and didn't have the same career opportunities.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_02: So it was really two factors.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: It was both the fact that Slack itself was very office-centric, but we also had a very headquarter-centric mentality, which is not unusual in most organizations.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: Just think of the possibilities if you can flip that on its head.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's what that's where we came back to digital being the primary mechanism for people to communicate and collaborate, and digital becoming your headquarters was really an opportunity to kind of level that playing field for people from a wide range of locations and to not have remote employees or remote office employees feel like second-class citizens.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's one of the one of the more surprising aspects of it.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's and yet in a way it shouldn't be, because I think we're all accustomed to this idea, if we worked inside larger organizations, that there is, you know, one in one of my previous companies that we called Kotu was the uh uh was the nickname for the headquarters, which was center of the universe, right?
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so, oh, you're going to Kotu, are you?
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and you and you start to realize if you're in one of those satellite locations, what that what that kind of sort of feels like.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: This sort of leveling of the playing field is an is an intriguing side effect as to as to how all this is starting to pan out.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: And it it really has all kinds of interesting implications in terms of where you can hire and retain and bring talent together, but also just for people.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_02: Like Mike, the same guy who was our Denver lead from an engineering perspective, um, he made 23 trips to San Francisco in 2019, pre-pandemic.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: And he did part of that to be with his team.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: But if you dig into it, the vast majority of those trips were to be in the room where it happens to steal from Hamilton, right?
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_02: Because he felt like if he wasn't in the room with the senior executives that were debating something that was important to him, that he was going to have a hard time, you know, getting a word in edgewise or understanding what was going on.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: So going from 23 trips in 2019 to by 2023, Mike was probably making six trips because he wanted those trips in order to get time together with his team to build relationships is a huge boost to his life, not to mention the fact that Mike's got five kids.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: I I get a sense that this work has convinced you that companies that are trying to, I think there's a term you use in the in the book there, uh uh trying to unscramble the egg that Kobe created here are kind of on a fool's errand.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that's right?
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think so.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: Look, there's mounting evidence, even past the publication of the book, that uh return to office mandates have only one set of impacts.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: They're all negative.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um there are, there are, and we get into this in the book, there are ways in which you can, through team-level agreements, bring people together with purpose.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you can't, top-down mandates don't work.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_02: Top-down mandates tell people to turn their brain off, or worse yet, tell them that we don't trust you.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: And that is an instant negative from like an organizational engagement perspective.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: Individual free-for-alls can also be a real challenge, but if you center it at the team level and support teams and figure out the rhythm and habits and patterns that work for them, you can go a long way towards closing some of this gap.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: But the ongoing sort of drumbeat of CEO, get back into the office, um, really does two key things.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: First, it uh creates all kinds of potential challenges in terms of retaining those employees that want to go around.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: And the second is back to that issue of trust.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_02: If I don't feel as an employee like I'm trusted by my employer, I'm actually gonna not gonna work as hard.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um what it shows up in things like am I gonna go the extra mile, you know, for my employer or for a customer?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_02: And that's really important if you want to drive performance.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: So uh the mandates really aren't helping any in that dimension.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think as I mentioned, you you make the the case for the flexible work environments, but you also get into some specifics on what organizations need to do.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I think for folks that are looking for a comprehensive guide on this stuff, I I think this is one of the best ones out there.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um we've uh for folks that are wanting to go back and listen to some other points of view on this, I by the way, I'd remind them that we um we've had Dr.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: Gleb Sapersky on the uh talking about uh it on the past on this uh on this pod, worth listening to his episode.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: We also had uh Tam Sanderson um who uh wrote the book Remote Works, and uh we've also had Bob Johansson who wrote the the book Office Shock as well.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you kind of listen to all four of those uh those episodes, you'll get a really good 360 picture on this.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um but for me, I I think that um one of the best um examples of of of um of how you talk about this in the book is how you you show that just because it has flexible uh flexible environments have real advantages, uh it doesn't automatically translate into them working wonderfully.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: And just as just as mandates work, as uh don't work, as you pointed out, neither neither generally does uh free for all.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: As an organization, you have to do some work to help flexible work environments thrive, right?
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I've seen this in time and time again.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that we try to do in the book, as you noted, is marry the research up with tactical approaches.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: There's nothing that happens magically around this, right?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: We have to redesign how we work and we have to put experimentation and iteration against it because one size doesn't fit all, even at the organization level.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_02: So the starting point that seems to be the most effective in companies we've worked with is starting off with what are your principles and what are your guardrails.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: So principles are really core to how you actually help people understand why you're doing this in the first place, right?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: One of the core principles can be that we believe that flexibility helps us recruit and retain the best talent out there.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: And we think that's really important to us.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: Another principle can be we believe that we want to create a level playing field for people, regardless of where they're from or how they operate.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so we're gonna focus more on outcomes that people are driving as opposed to appearances, right?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: Who's showing up the most often?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: Those types of principles go a long way towards making sure that your management team is aligned in how you're doing it.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: But you also need guardrails.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: And guardrails usually come in the form of like, what's the permissible set of things that we allow to have happen?
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I actually am a big believer that getting teams together at least once a quarter, physically in person, is really important.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of companies have cut back over the past couple of years on the budgets for those types of things.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: But I think it's important to think about guardrails that do things like, hey, look, we really don't want at one extreme the executives to be coming back in more than three days a week, because if they do, that sends a signal.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: But on the other hand, we really don't want teams going without getting together at least three to four times a year to build deeper relationships and understanding one another that we actually think is important and the research shows is important for really feeling like you belong as part of a team.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: So that's an example of a set of guardrails in terms of how far you want people to go in terms of the extremes of some of these behaviors.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: But that requires work.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and as you talk about that, the some of the examples are I I think for many people would be would be a little surprising.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: You talked about the guardrails of not having the executives come in.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I love that because that that speaks to the power of modeling behaviors.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: You also use examples where um the organization is um is not permitting people to gather necessarily gather in a room with one camera and have everybody in have everybody in the room there, and then everybody who's remote on their own individual uh individual cameras.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love you to talk a little bit more about that because there's some real subtleties to that that I think some folks would not necessarily think of right away.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the there's a there's an issue in how hybrid meetings work that we've been grappling with for years, right?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_02: I saw this in my days uh back at Google as well, where we had teams spread out across eight different cities, and you had a main room that was kind of the commanding presence, and then people who were dialed in had a hard time getting a word in edgewise.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: And those can be challenging.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: There's ways of managing that.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: And we give tips in the book around things like having a hybrid meeting moderator, making sure the person on video goes first.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: But where that kind of falls apart the most is where the power structures in the room are really far apart.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_02: So the example that we use in the book is that we moved all of our C-level reviews, our chief product officer, chief marketing officer reviews, to be essentially Zoom only, to be video only.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: And the reason for that was that's the place where people are gonna feel the most pressure to be in the room where it happens, right?
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: We've all seen those meetings where literally how far away you are from the C-level executive at the desk can sometimes be a signal of whether or not you're gonna get airtime or an opportunity to participate.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: Those meetings, if you keep them all on Zoom, and matter of fact, we don't even allow people to book conference rooms for them, are a way to level that playing field and make sure that people don't feel the pressure to commute just to be in there, and where you don't have to sweat like the same dynamics about a manager who may only get to be in that room twice a year, feeling like they didn't get their chance.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: So those kind of rules can end up being more strict the higher you get in the organization as a way of making sure you're sending the right signal and you're dealing with those power dynamics.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: So, Brian, just a little aside as we uh before we go through some of the rest of the themes on this, I'm I'm curious, many of the examples that are in the book obviously are based on your guys' personal experience and the and the companies that you're working with.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: So there's examples from BCG, there's examples from Slack, uh, and then even the the examples that are not necessarily from uh tech companies or consultancies are also from kind of, I would say, like tech forward companies like fintech or or medtech.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: You've got genentech in there, Road Bank Canada.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: These are uh really, really great examples.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: Have you given much thought as to as to what this means, though, for I don't know exactly how you call it, like regular companies, right?
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: Companies that we that that that you and I would not necessarily have heard of, um, traditional small to medium-sized businesses.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think the the it's a good question.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: When we put the book out, you know, yeah, we did talk about Genentech and Royal Bank of Canada and Levi Strauss and Company and other folks like that.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: But there's been just every single industry has examples of this, and you can find them everywhere.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: So in the insurance industry, for example, both Allstate and nationwide both now have very team-centric hybrid working policies, right?
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: They have figured out that there's no one size fits all for their organization either.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: It has far less to do with the technology than it has to do with are you going to invest the time in really getting teams to think about this clearly.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: So I'll give you an example.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: At Allstate, one of the things that they found was there's not a one size fits all even within a marketing organization, for example.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: So what they do is marketing design and content teams tend to get together in the office two to three days a week because they want to see physical products and visual designs together in a room.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: Where the marketing analyst organization, who is a very kind of quant-centric group of people, tend to get together once a month for three days for learning and show and tell and other activities like that, because the vast majority of their work can be done remotely and by sharing files back and forth.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_02: So those are good examples coming from, you know, a you know, decades-old organization in the insurance business, which most people don't think of as being forward-leaning.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it has much more to do with management mindset than it has to do with whether or not you are, you know, a tech company.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we're going to get into the management side of things actually in a in a moment here.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but one one thing I think that you hint at really, uh, really well, you you even mentioned human-centered design or design thinking in the um in the book.
• 21:20
  unknown: Yeah.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think that's where a lot of organizations actually fell down, particularly, particularly early on.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um they were there was, for example, I don't know if you remember, of the many pronouncements that uh that uh Elon Musk came up with, one was, well, you've got this group of people that can't be out of the, uh, in quotes out of the office because they're on the factory floor.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: And why is it fair for them to um to not have that freedom and then for other people to have that freedom?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but really what you're getting at here is that as long as you're sensitive in designing the right environment for individual parts of the organization to do the best.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Work that for them, uh, that's for them, and are not too prescriptive at too high a level inside the organization, then in many cases it's very easy for employees to understand what you know, what the working environment is for them because in part they've been involved in creating it, right?
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: And this comes down to equity and adequality in a lot of different ways.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: So when Elon made that pronouncement, I happened to be going up on stage in front of a group of CHROs that that morning and asked the question how many of your CEOs, you know, feel like Elon does on this?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: And you got about a third of the group raised their hands.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: Like you've got to be more after that.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_02: There's a couple of things on that front.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, first, and the kind of glib response I got from one CHRO was Is Elon planning to give them access to his private jet?
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, frontline workers don't get uh the same thing as office workers today in terms of pay and compensation.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_02: The the second part of this is frontline workers, just like office workers, want flexibility, but they realize it's going to come in a different form.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: Office workers might have more location flexibility, but go all the way back to the start of our conversation.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: Both of them want some form of schedule flexibility.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: For frontline workers, that can come in fractional shifts, that can come in the ability to swap a shift, that can come in the ability to, as Neiman Marcus does, let store associates work from home one day a week to manage their customer list and outreach and merchandising plans.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_02: So there's lots of ways to address this.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_02: You just have to look at the population that you're working with, understand how they work in the first place, and what they need to be more effective, and you'll come out much better than simply it saying we're gonna have a one size fits all, which by the way, no CEO would ever do to their own customers.
• 23:45
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• 24:22
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• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: So we talked, uh, we've alluded a little bit to the management side of uh side of this.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: I want to delve into that a little bit more deeply.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um it seems like managing in this type of environment is quite different as well.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's something we've certainly seen.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: What are your thoughts on that?
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think it is different.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um I look, I am in my mid to late 50s.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I grew up in a world where, you know, even I grew up in a world prior to email uh as a as an individual employee, but I grew up as a leader under a set of assumptions that I think most leaders did, which is you built teamwork and collaboration and camaraderie by walking the halls, by holding all hands in the cafeteria, by going office to office and hosting events.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_02: And that's how you sort of, you know, built up, you know, teams and culture.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: I think the challenge is the world has changed and shifted dramatically.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a couple of key factors underneath that.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, our teams are more distributed in the first place.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_02: You can't go to every single location and make this work.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, second, um, there's this huge benefit called digital that's kind of risen underneath it.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that we found in Future Forum research is that the boost for um firms that invest in digital tools and ways of working isn't just around productivity.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: You get a decent productivity boost.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's even bigger when it comes to a sense of belonging with your team.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: And that comes down to whether or not executives themselves are actually present in those tools and in how they're working.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_02: I run into this all the time, whether it's Slack or Teams or whatever else.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: I'll be talking with someone who is a senior executive, but maybe reports into somebody in the C-suite, and they'll say, Look, I'm in the tool all day long with my team.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_02: I see what they're working on, I know what's going on.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: But by the way, I'm also having conversations over here about where we're going, where people, what did people have for lunch?
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: Or did you see, you know, uh the Grammys last weekend?
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: But my boss isn't, because my boss says, I'm over here in email and isn't willing to make the shift.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: The challenge with that is we now have two generations of digital natives in the workforce.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: They're very used to digital not only being a way in which they pass a file back and forth, but a way in which they build relationships with one another.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you're an executive that's sitting outside of that, you're missing two key factors.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: You're missing the work that's going on in the first place.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so you might be more concerned when you see an empty office.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_02: But you're also missing out on the opportunity to build, you know, teamwork, to build relationships, to show who you are as a leader by not being present.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: So I think there's a big leadership gap when it comes to understanding how relationships get built these days, right?
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: How do we build a sense of purpose in an organization?
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_02: And that that's got to be done not just through going and having the all hands, but also by, you know, working with people day in, day out through the tools that they're using.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let's let's double-click on that just for a second.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: The because I think it's related to this whole this whole idea of connectedness, period.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and particularly across organizations, especially as you've got different demographics working, uh working inside companies.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um we've we've definitely seen, I'm curious if you have to, that connectedness can can be a problem in these types of environments, particularly if it's not well managed.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: We already know that you know there's an issue with loneliness, um, societal level issue with loneliness, the Surgeon General pointed it out about a year ago, I think it was.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the reality is that many of us got at least some form of connection for free when we walked into an office.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that though that experience can be quite different for people from different backgrounds, as you pointed out in the earlier part of our discussion about diversity.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: But what do you what do you recommend people do, organizations do to really try to keep people connected in a flexible work environment?
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's a both and type of answer.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: That that's the key reason why I think these quarterly gatherings for teams, plus some sort of like local gatherings for employees in an organization are really critical.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: So the one side of it is if you're getting your team together once a quarter, you get benefit of their engagement for the next four to five months.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_02: There's been studies subsequent to the publication of the book by Atlassian and others that show this.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_02: Second, even if you've got distributed employees, you can think about how you help support them in getting themselves together on a local basis, right?
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_02: Executives can fly from city to city, but even just giving them a modest budget to do, you know, um gathering hours or coffee together, you know, once a week, once a month helps build some sort of local camaraderie.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_02: But the and side of this is your digital channels because people use those for social connection these days as well, right?
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: Having worked at Slack for six years, I've seen all kinds of uses.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_02: The employee resource groups that people set up, for example, inside of Nike, who was a big customer, ended up being just as important to them in terms of how they used Slack as the product and engineering teams that were using it for product builds.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: I had someone share a story the other day about starting up a similar effort within a Teams instance where he kicked up a channel uh for sneaker heads.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and this was, you know, people who were big, you know, Nike sneaker aficionados inside of his company.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: Initially it was 10 of his friends that weren't coming into the office as often anymore, a way to show sort of show what I'm wearing today, sort of show off the latest.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_02: That grew to 500 people.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_02: That grew from New York to multiple locations, that grew to 1,500 people.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: It became a way for people to connect with one another on a local level.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_02: There's a little bit of magic inside these things, though, too.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_02: And a little bit of magic is how do I get weak connections across an organization?
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_02: And those social channels can be a real way to do that because let's face it, those people aren't showing up in the same physical office anyway.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_02: If I'm trying to find somebody who's in marketing on the West Coast and I'm on the East Coast, I might have stumbled across them in one of these channels.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: And if I didn't, I probably stumbled across somebody who can help me connect to that person in the first place.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: So those social connections at work, we can we can make happen physically, but we can also make happen digitally.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_02: And we need to sort of marry them both together with intent.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, in what we've seen, the way we've described it to folks before, is that, you know, unmanaged, as it were, you tend to get um, as long as you have the infrastructure in place, the right infrastructure in place, you tend to get uh what we call stronger weak connections and weaker strong connections.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and um, which uh the stronger weak connections is really good.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: The weaker strong connections can be uh can be challenging.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: But as you pointed out, there are certainly things that you can do to to mitigate that.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it kind of relates back to the to what you said before.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's a point that we've got to make sure that that folks don't miss.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: When we're talking about these types of environments, we are not talking about, in most cases, environments where nobody ever sees each other, right?
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: We're not talking, we're explicitly not talking about just everybody working out of their home office and never leaving it, right?
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: What we're what we are talking about is what, as you pointed out, digital first, where effectively you're flipping the script from digital tools being used to supplement what's happening in person in an office to physical gatherings supplementing what is happening digitally.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: And once you start to it's really important that folks process that because that says nothing, for example, about how much money you spend.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: It says directly, it doesn't, it says it's not saying, oh, it's massively cheaper or anything like that.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: It says, it says a lot about dealing with the reality of where we're at today and using the benefits you can get from these types of environment for the strategic advantage of your company.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a long way for uh a lot of folks have not even still today at this day, I think, thought about those things very deeply yet.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think uh that goes back to the topic we're talking about with leaders as well, right?
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: Which is leaders are very used to a physical office-centric way of working, the office canoted work and where it happened and how it happened.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: A digital first mindset doesn't mean that I don't use offices and I don't use physical gatherings as key and important tools.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_02: What it means is that I understand the day in, day out, especially of a distributed team, especially of an organization that spans, you know, a continent, let alone the globe, it's gonna be the digital aspects of it that I have to think about first, because that's where more of the experience is gonna sit.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: And if not, if I'm not investing in that myself as a person, I don't mean cash money.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_02: I mean like if I'm not sitting there saying, how do I use this better, then you're probably missing out.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's talk about um an area where uh still to this day, I think a lot of people get this, uh get this a little bit wrong.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um even, you know, one of the justifications for bringing people back into the office at AWS was centered around this, and that is uh innovation.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: So the I there is I I guess I'll I'll summarize traditional thinking on this and then let you go with it.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, I think traditional thinking on this is number one, that the way you the way you innovate is brainstorming in a room, everybody physically together.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: Number two, that it's disproportionately important to have, as they as AWS mentioned, to have like the serendipitous meeting between two people that is, I don't know, two minutes before a meeting gets started and they happen to bump into each other in the in the hallway.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: So and the theory behind the traditional theory behind all of this is that um in order for innovation to happen as like those companies, that must happen.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that's the traditional theory.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: Go.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_02: The mythology around water coolers and whiteboards.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's just it's there.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_02: Look, again, all this stuff is rear view mirror, it was true, right?
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_02: 20 years ago, 30 years ago, this was true because that's how those connections you know occurred and those things, those things happened.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of things have changed since then.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, here's a couple of challenges, though.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, water coolers.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_02: Most people that bump into each other uh before and after meetings or on an office floor are the same people over and over and over again.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: So it goes back to your strong connections side of things, right?
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_02: That stuff happens in digital tools also, because I guarantee you the conversation about the meeting after the meeting still happens, even if the meeting is remote.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_02: It just happens in digital tools.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_02: Second one is whiteboards and the whiteboard being this fantastic tool for innovation.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_02: Whiteboard's a fantastic tool for groupthink.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: The vast majority of moderators in front of a whiteboard are people like me, maybe a few years ago, who love commanding, you know, the pen and setting it up and conducting an orchestra.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_02: And what happens is the people who are newer to the organization, who are junior, who don't look like you, are the ones that are probably sitting on their hands.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: So are the introverts, so are the people who aren't like the instant thinkers.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_02: There's great tools to get at this.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_02: There's a process we describe in the book called brainwriting, which is give people the prompt a couple of days in advance.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_02: Give them the piece of research or the problem you're trying to solve.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_02: Ask them to spend an hour or two notifications off, thinking about the problem, jot down their three to five ideas.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_02: You don't even have to flesh them out.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: Bullet points are fine.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_02: Don't share them until the meeting.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: At the beginning of the meeting, throw them all in a pot.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_02: What you're doing is you're getting rid of the filtering that happens in groupthink in the first place.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: So there's practices that you can do that are better.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe even more important than that, the research shows it's not true, right?
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_02: We did a piece ourselves that showed innovation among teams that were fully in office, fully remote and hybrid, zero difference across the board on them.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: There were two things that drove a difference.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_02: One was how do you answer the question, do I feel uh do I feel okay asking a stupid question?
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, does my team take risks?
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_02: Those are called psychological safety.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: Teams that did those things had a much higher innovation score than those than those that didn't.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_02: The second side of this is using those those techniques also involves technology.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: There's academic studies that show this too.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_02: What was true 15 years ago is that teams that were distributed had a much harder time, you know, tossing ideas back and forth on a rapid fire basis, being in sync with one another.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: That's changed.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: Almost every study out there shows that pre-2010, yeah, that was a problem.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_02: Post-2010, actually, there's some advantages that go to people that are more distributed, not less, because you get more diversity of thinking.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_02: So when it comes to innovation, it's much more about the process that you use.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_02: And having a distributed team that's more diverse is going to get you more ideas in the first place.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that's I think there's a lot for people to inspect once they start looking at the data about this.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, in terms of our own, I don't know, uh probably prejudices, to be honest, as to what we what we think of.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: We tend to think of innovation as being associated with a particular personality type, in some cases, even a particular gender or race and things like that.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like all the examples that are held up to us as being these, you know, these these great innovative, creative geniuses of our time, particularly in tech.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of them look very much like each other.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_02: And and it's really problematic when you have a senior executive or worse yet a board member stand up in front of the organization and say something like, Look, the way that the way that I was successful in my career was in the 1980s, I had this great lunch with a fantastic mentor of mine who taught me the following things, right?
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_02: You've just done a whole bunch of things there in succession.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_02: What you're basically doing is pointing to somebody who has been highly successful, who more likely than not looks like me.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_02: They're a white guy who doesn't who isn't a primary caregiver who is very successful.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so we'll set that one aside.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_02: And the second is they're pulling their own historical experience from literally 40 years ago when the world has changed around all of us.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I get it because that's what we condition our own understanding of how the world works on our own personal experiences, but you got to find a way to set it aside and try something new.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: All right, Brian, last question.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: So you've done a ton of research, um, but you're also now, if I look at your what appears to be, I'm guessing, uh your home office.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: But uh but yes, you're you're obviously very much an employee in flexible work environment yourself now.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I'd love to know one challenge of this new world that you're still kind of working your way through, but also a way in which it has changed things for the better for you.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: I think, look, uh personally, it's made my life uh a lot better in terms of work-life balance.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I also have the ability to dial in and dial out of a lot more situations to be helpful to people.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_02: There still are elements of relationship building that sometimes I feel like I wish I was in the office more often, right?
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_02: And part of that is even figuring out the habits and the rhythms of your team and investing in that is really important.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_02: There are times when I wish I had more of that in my life as well.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's that it's that balance and finding it that's kind of elusive.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_02: But I also think, like almost anything else, if you keep putting the work into it and keep trying new things, um, you can get it right and you can at least get it better over time.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_02: I will never ever again work for an organization that requires me to be in the office five days a week.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's just not happening.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_02: At the same time, I don't want to be sitting here in this office five days a week either.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_02: So I find a way.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um I get out, I get with my team, I get with other people, I go out and have conversations.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's the it's the both and that we all need to um figure out.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: Brian, thanks so much for joining us today.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: Paul, thank you for having me.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a great conversation.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neal.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: Our interviewer is Paul Slater.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: Music is by Dolo Records.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you like this podcast, please subscribe, like, and recommend us to others.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: It helps us reach more people.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to learn more about how Billion Minds gets companies ready for the future of work by building adaptable, resilient employees, look for them on LinkedIn or visit their website at billionminds.com.