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the musk memo · Humanity Working

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_03: Hey everyone, Matt here.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_03: One quick note before we get into things.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_03: We recorded this episode before Elon Musk pulled out of the Twitter deal or whatever's happening with the Twitter deal.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_03: So our discussion on that is a little out of date, but I wanted to keep it in as there's some really useful discussion there on what different companies with different cultures are doing regarding enabling remote work.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_03: Enjoy it.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: So it's been a while since I had you guys together.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_03: And then um I I wanted to talk about this because you know normally we don't talk about news on the podcast, but but there's uh there's one thing I think we should talk about, and that's the the the Tesla memo, the the Tesla work from home story.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I mean, I couldn't, I was we can talk about it later, but you know, this one this one was really interesting to me.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, you know, I'll start reading exactly what he said.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_03: So here's what he said according to CNN business.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_03: Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum, and I mean minimum, of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_03: This is less than we ask of factory workers, Musk wrote, adding that the office must be the employee's primary workplace where the other workers they regularly interact with are based, not a remote branch office unrelated to the job duties.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_03: Musk said he would personally review any request for exemption from the policy, but that for the most part, if you don't show up, we will assume you have resigned.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_03: So what do you think?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh even in very busy news cycles, certainly in uh in certain quarters, that made that make quite a bit of news.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, it's obviously interesting for a for a bunch of different reasons.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's a lot to unpack in there.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, obviously, people have been focusing in on the uh on the remote work aspect of it.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's the other aspect of it, which is minimum and I mean minimum of 40 hours per week.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: So that's interesting as well.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um and of course, there's there are some specific nuances associated uh with this in terms of the nature of the company that Tesla is, and and we can uh we can get into the into the specifics of that as well.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I think I think overall, for many people, um they were somewhat shocked by the directness of it, despite the fact that it was from Elon Musk, who um has you know is known for in certain cases for some inflammatory comments and some uh some very direct comments.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um but also I think it sort of has led to probably a fairly healthy debate um more broadly as to what it means to work remotely and what it means to work from uh from within the office.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um in terms of the specific stuff around um the likely motivations and unique situation at Tesla, of course, there's a few things at play here.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, number one, this was announced um very shortly before um he also announced that they were that they were planning on uh having some layoffs at Tesla.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: So um those two things are probably connected in some way.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you're looking to lay people off and and uh you're also telling people that you need to they need to work in a different way, then the attrition that you're looking for might happen to a certain extent naturally.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, that says nothing about you know the the pay the people that you will lose and whether you'll lose, you know, some of your best people versus some of the people that you would um that you would be more happy if they did leave.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: But regardless of that, um those you know, those two things are probably inter uh interconnected in some way.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then of course there is the dynamic which he calls out between the factory workers and uh the people that are doing, if you like, office work or knowledge work um inside the organization.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Any organization that has those two those two categories of workers, there is there can and often is frequently a tension between the those those different parties, right?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: So if you are looking at this from the perspective of a factory worker, this whole idea of you know working from home or working from anywhere is just a luxury that you don't have and it doesn't exist.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're facing tensions culturally in an uh in a work environment from from one aspect of it from the factory workers, then one way of potentially relieving that, at least from a cultural perspective, is to kind of create a we're all in this together, we all come into the office together and all that kind of stuff.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that that's been called out by some parties, but it hasn't probably really been called out um as much as as you might think.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: So there are you you know those motivations.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing is as well, is to a certain extent, yeah, he can say stuff like that because he can get away with it.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason that he can get away with it is because for many people, Tesla is a really cool place to work and it's a cool thing to have on your resume.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so you'll do whatever is necessary in order to be able to have that on your resume.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Most companies, of course, are not in uh are not in that situation.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: He's if you think about it in terms of his uh you know ownership of that organization, and then you contrast it to Twitter, which you know, if if it ends up going through, will end up being owned by Musk, they, of course, have announced something fairly relatively recently that is completely different.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: They've said that any uh any Twitter uh employee can work from anywhere uh forever.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's a very, very different um cultural environment, and it would be very interesting to see if he looks to have the same approach in that company that is a pure tech company or whether he considers it to be completely different.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I think all of these are um are highlighting really that exactly what you're going to do inside each organization is going to be relatively organization specific, but we think potentially that the Tesla might be uh might be more of an outlier than what will become the norm.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they they have a lot of unique characteristics as you lined out.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's really true.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I keep coming back to the way that I I felt when I first read that.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I was it was like a sensation of shock.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um it seemed so outlandish and iconoclastic, you know, even for an Elon Musk, uh given that we are currently in an environment where talent is a premium.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I mean, most of the stories that we hear from organizations that we speak to is how challenging it is to you know get and retain talent.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and so I find it very interesting that you make a remark, and I'm taking some liberties here, but you make a remark that basically says, I don't care.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like I I'll let talent go, and talent comes and goes, and most organizations don't feel that way.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: And as Paul mentioned, um, you know, in terms of the reason why they can get away with it, um, is kind of a cache thing.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I want to make sure that you know we think about this as a cachet thing, um, not as a as a unique trend.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um you know, I can be proven wrong 10 years from now, but it certainly doesn't seem like it.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: The trend at this point, as we are seeing, is that talent is a premium, talent will remain a premium, work from anywhere uh from a cultural perspective is on the rise, if not exponentially on the rise.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: That again, going back to his point about the outlier, just because he has a giant megaphone uh that that he can use, uh we hope that doesn't trigger thoughts that this is kind of a a trend that's that's starting.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um you know, because it is the the cachet that's that's driving some of that.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: So how many organizations, what's a percentage of organizations have that level of cachet?
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: 0.01?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and so the other organizations are still fighting for talent, retaining talent, helping their employees um not just be effective in a work from anywhere environment, but but truly thrive um in that space.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so um this is not a strategy for most companies.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_03: It feels like there's there's a there's a couple angles, right?
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_03: So there's there's the employer angle and the employee angle, but also like a couple things come up there is is you know, they have to justify real estate.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_03: There, that's something that's that's gonna be in the on the employer side.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_03: And it depends what you're doing and your mindset and whether you're an introvert or an extrovert, maybe you needed those people around to really function.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_03: Some people were dying to get back to an office somewhere, right?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_03: It's oh man, there's so many angles there.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_03: So so if it's an employer angle and an employee angle, and just keep it to those two, uh, you know, what are you seeing on either side of that equation that that's that's coming up?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's again, it's extremely interesting because there appear to be, from what we're seeing anyway, there appear to be sort of majority opinions and minority opinions, but the minorities are large enough that they need to be considered.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, your point about um the employees and the different needs of the employees, what we're seeing roughly, it's that classic 80-20.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: So roughly 80% of people that have had in quotes the freedom of being able to work from anywhere that was brought on for most people by uh by the pandemic, roughly about 80% of those people want to maintain at least some of those freedoms, right?
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And what we're seeing is roughly around 20% of people are like, nope, I want to be back in the office.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, 20% is quite a lot, right?
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a uh that's a uh a 20% whose needs probably in some way need to be catered for.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And on the employer side, it's a lot more complicated.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: So the employer side, um, you've seen tech companies kind of lean in in many cases to this idea of, you know, anybody can work from anywhere, and there are uh there are reasons for that.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the more traditional employers, we're seeing the majority of those, probably again, around sort of 70 to 80 percent, are in some way wanting to get employees back into the office.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so the real thing, the real question then is why.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: And um what we're seeing is that for the employer, the employer's perspective, it's about knowing that they're getting value from their employees and they feel like they don't know that.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: And in many cases, the employers feel like they're not getting value from their employees.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: We hear a lot of um, you know, when we hear from the employer side of this, we hear a lot of, well, you know, I don't really think they're doing much.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think I and even actually even within teams, right, where you've got um groups of employees, some of whom are in the office and some of whom are out of the office, you start to hear rumbles from employees saying, oh, you know, whoever who's working out of the office, I don't think he or she is really doing anything, and and uh I'm having to take on more of the workload.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's creating an interesting sort of dynamic even within within the context of teams.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: But largely for employers, it's around that idea of getting of knowing that they're getting value from their employer, uh, from their employees, and um that they feel like if they're in the office with under some measure of, if you like, adult supervision, that they under uh that they can have that feeling.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: So they're equating supervision with the idea of effort and work from employees.
• 12:34
  unknown: Yeah.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then on the employee side, the main thing this is about is about freedom of choice.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: So it's about uh empowerment, I guess would be another way of thinking about this as well, right?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: I will do work, but I know best how to do my work.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you give me that freedom of choice, if you give me, if you treat me like an adult, then I'll be more happy to work for you.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we don't know exactly where this will wind up, but the history probably has something to teach us about.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Long-term trends generally suggest that employers can load more responsibility onto employees, employers can often load more work onto employees, but more restrictions on them, more restrictions about how and when they do it, that tends to backfire.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that is that's when uh employees tend to say, you know what?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: I like what I do, but I don't like that you tell me exactly how to do it, and I can go somewhere else where they don't.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the that's gonna be the interesting challenge that that that is that is faced and that has to be resolved.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: We think that long term, um, these trends around uh giving employees freedom about how they do what they do, about empowering employees, um, is gonna is gonna be the thing that wins regardless of the news stories that are in the press today.
• 14:20
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• 14:24
  SPEAKER_03: 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.
• 14:32
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• 14:46
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• 14:59
  SPEAKER_03: Billionminds, helping everyone do great work from anywhere.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, so we know it happened so much that it became called water cooler conversation.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_03: Like we know they're talking about Seinfeld right now, you know.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so that's really crazy.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean it's it's it's an impasse though, kind of, at least for now when there seems to be a choice being made.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_03: You know, how does this get resolved with this kind of different motivators battling each other?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_03: What do you how do you see that going on?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's an it's it's an interesting one.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: I I mean based on what we've seen, um it's it's probably fairly clear how uh how it gets resolved.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: Just one quick point about your your talk about, for example, water cooler and stuff like that.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: As we're talking about this, right, we're not we're not making a statement that working from the office is better than working from home, or working from home is better than working from the office, or working from a beach is better from whatever.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: What we're talking about is sort of like human motivations here, right?
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: So there are there are reasons why working from the office can be actually very helpful.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Great example is the sort of water cooler moments that you're that you're talking about.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: That creates serendipity in you know, these serendipitous meetings that you have in the office that lead to some kind of innovation that leads to something you know net new that was completely unexpected.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Those things are very difficult to recreate virtually.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not really a statement as to as to what's better, it's just as I say, really a kind of a statement about human motivation.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: But on that topic, you know, things might change temporarily if unemployment goes up a lot, but in general, the power is on the side of the employee.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the thing that that folks have missed out uh on is that the reasons why the power is on the side of the employee, right?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: In part, you might just think about it as like unemployment's low, so employees have more power.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that of course can change at any moment.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: But if even if unemployment goes up, there is one thing that has radically changed, which is that as an employee, I can basically go work for anywhere, uh for pretty much any organization, pretty much anywhere in the country or pretty much anywhere in the world.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I have a lot of choice as an employee, and that choice is only uh is only going to increase.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: So employers are gonna have to get a lot smarter.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: If you are an employer, we've talked about this a little bit in previous episodes.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you are an employer and you are requiring um the uh everybody to come into your office, what you're basically doing is you're restricting the number of people that will work for you to people that are within a relatively small geographical range of you, or who are prepared to relocate to wherever you have to wherever your office happens to be.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of tough, right?
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: You've you've basically reduced the number of the pool from which you can get really, really good talent.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a little bit like um there's something called Joy's Law from uh from Bill Joy of formerly some microsystems, and he talks about the fact that the smartest people um don't work for your organization.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because your organization, even if your organization employs 200,000 people, there's seven and a half billion people or more now out there in the world, the chances of them working inside your organization are actually relatively low.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, now as an employer, I can at least source talent almost from anywhere, and no matter where I happen to be.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: So if I start to think about that as a benefit versus a cost in the medium term, and I start to think about what I need to do in order to be able to get those people and give those people a great experience, then the quality of the people that I can get that I have access to inside my organization is actually much higher.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: So you are kind of, you you kind of got one hand tied behind your back if you're saying I'm only gonna employ people that are within a 20-mile radius of me and or are prepared to move to be within a 20-mile radius of me.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: That is that's that's basically saying all the talent that exists in the world that doesn't fit into those two categories, they're out of reach for me.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that over time this will this will shift.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: It will shift in the favor of where the employee is currently at, but ironically, it will do so to the benefit of the employer once employers start to change their mindset on it.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, when you put it like that, it's it seems extremely obvious, right?
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_03: So employers are gonna have to change, and if it's them that need to do that change, and what what can they do that'll work for them at this point, especially if they've been maybe on the fence this whole time or or or changing strategy mid mid-pandemic, you know?
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_03: Uh you know, what what what what do you think is gonna work for them?
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I I think it starts with um I what did you say, Matt?
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: You said it was something that was obvious, right?
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: And uh the one thing I've been thinking about some for some time now is uh how how kind of obvious the solution is.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's hiding in plain sight.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um and we talk about it in terms of skills development.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um what organization doesn't care about the skill level of their employees?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: What what organization does not have you know some form of uh of development, uh skills development, training, um leveling up, upskilling, if you like.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's been around forever, right?
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: And organizations have always held the responsibility of helping their employees grow in role and then grow into new roles and advance.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so hard skills that could be you know project management or uh software development, you know, but it could be a number of things, and then soft skills like leadership and and things like that, they they've they've always they've always been there.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um and this is the part that is like the hiding in plain sight.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: But what organizations have said I'm gonna help you build a skill in how you work.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: And thinking about it in terms of all right, the reality is that things have changed.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_02: The reality is that we've built a set of skills over hundreds of years that are related to the environment of being in the office.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: Now suddenly, we're not in the office anymore.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: Well, guess what we've got now?
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_02: We've got a skills gap.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's really what's happening here, Matt, is it's a skills gap.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so it really comes down to skills development.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the point I'm making about the organization's accountability there.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_02: Once you recognize it, once you see it through the lens of a skills gap, well, then the organization's like, oh, well, of course I take responsibility for upskilling my employees.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's just a matter of how you upskill them.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: And there's really four core skills that we talk about in terms of um what basically anybody who's going to spend any time working out of the office, what they need to develop.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_02: You want to call them the remote worker, the work from anywhere worker, the digital nomad, uh, you know, whatever nomenclature you subscribe to, um, if you're spending any time doing work outside the office, um, you have to build a set of skills that helps you self-impose structure, that helps you to self-motivate.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: These things are very important when you don't have the, as Paul described it, the adult supervision.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: I I love this quote from uh Seth Godin.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_02: He said, uh, so people are getting what they asked for, autonomy, but now they can't say, just tell me what to do.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: So they've lost that.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like this this desire for flexibility um is is is tucked in this, you know, really you're picturing yourself on a beach, you know, with your laptop and stuff like that.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: You're picturing all the benevolent parts of it, right?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: All the all the positives, but you're forgetting about, in many ways, the byproducts of it.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_02: What you've just eroded a bunch of structure that you used to count on.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: So now going back to those those four skills, um, you know, pretty pretty straightforward is you know, first off, start by getting control of your day, just being in recognition that your day is now unstructured and ambiguous.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: That's just the fact now.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: If you're not, if you're working absent structure, it's gonna be unstructured.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: So, what are the set of skills you need to develop to get control of that?
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: Secondly, motivation.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, how can you get better at connecting what you're doing with why you're doing it?
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: Again, if you're outside of, if you're disconnected from an office or even disconnected from leadership and management from periods of time, um, maybe you're missing that reminder of why.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: You're missing that connection to the overall mission of the organization.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_02: So, how do you find and retain that motivation?
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: That is a skill.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then integrating work with the rest of your life.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: If you're working outside the office, life is gonna intervene.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's just a fact.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, of course, we've all lived through COVID.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: So it, you know, we've all had a taste of you know, the dog barking and you got to take the dog out between meetings and how unless the dishwasher is gonna become between you and closing a$10 million deal.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we've all we've we've been through that, but that has not just disappeared.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's still the case.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: That is just an example of what an integrated work-life situation looks like.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_02: How can you find harmony in work-life integration once you accept that it is in integration?
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that was the third skill.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: And then fourth, uh, how do you manage change?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: Change is coming at you from all sides of your life.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_02: From a work setting from now, um, now you've got an integrated work-life system, from a life setting, new things are coming at you, new information, new changes, or things that could uh could potentially change your day.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: How do you get good at collecting those things, triaging them, and then acting on them appropriately?
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so this is let's call it the the new baseline of skills that that if you accept the fact that every employee is going to spend some time out of the office, um, maybe save for the outliers like like Tesla, if they stick to that over time.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: But if you make that assumption, then that means you have to make the commitment.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_02: The organizations, employers have to make the commitment of getting all their employees to that baseline of skills.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we we have to talk about this more.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's like a whole other podcast on on just just that.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um So if we go back to Tesla for a minute, do you think do you really think it's unique?
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, not unique in uh uh in as much as that there will always be people in power who uh use that power in certain ways, who behave, if you like, a little bit more dictatorially.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was actually very struck by um uh there was a comment from uh from uh one of the people that has actually uh that works with us fairly uh fairly closely in a company called Talent Dev, a guy called Michaelay Volpe, who we've had on a previous podcast.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: And he talked about it as uh as like a 19th-century industrialist in a sense, that the the way in which um the way in which Elon Musk was was kind of approaching um all of this.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that you know that will always be the case.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: There will always be leaders inside organizations um who choose to lead those organizations in a in a very specific way, and they choose to impose their power in a very specific way.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um and there will always be very specific reasons that are associated with very specific work cultures that lead the uh that lead to direction on how uh on how work should be done.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the the question here is less around whether it's unique at Tesla and more around what the what the norm will be for the majority of organizations.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: And being on the side, if you like, of of human nature, in other words, that people want to be autonomous, people want to um to have flexibility in their lives, uh, and accommodating that in the workplace is probably something that is much more uh going to be much more associated with success.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: So to go back to the point that we made uh made before around employers uh conflating, if you like, adult supervision with the idea of success, that's been embedded in our culture for a long time.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's very often that the you if you did not have a manager or if the title of the person that was immediately looking after what you were doing was not necessarily a manager, but a supervisor.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: So they their job was literally to supervise your work.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: Their job was to make sure that your uh your work was being done in the way that they expected to because they were supervising it.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: That that uh role still exists inside many organizations.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not surprising that you have this idea of uh of a supervisor being the thing that allows good work to happen consistently inside inside your organization.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: But I think we probably need to look in in other areas.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: And one area that I think is is really interesting in this space is the military.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I don't know how many of our listeners have have read uh Team of Teams, the uh Stanley McChrystal book.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: But a good proportion of that talks about how uh the performance of the US military um increased by virtue of creating units inside the military that were more autonomous in nature, that behaved in a more autonomous way, and whereby you were effectively devolving some decision making down the organization, you were uh creating more trust as you handed it down within the organization, and how that was associated with increased performance.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, what we need to do is give people the skills that they need in order to be able to work really well without a bunch of supervision and work really well no matter where they're located and where they're doing their work and when they're doing their work, the type of skills that Ryan was talking about.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: Give them those skills in the first place, and then combine with hiring people that you know that have those skills and where you have a high degree of confidence that you can trust those people, and then let them just get on with it.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: That ultimately is gonna be, I think, where we where we wind up.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, as Ryan says, what we face right now is a skills gap issue that is leading to um certain behaviors that is leading to, in many cases, a lack of trust.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we can fix all those things, we have to fix all those things, but long term it's gonna be about empowering people to do great work and then letting them go do it.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_03: The Way Too Busy podcast is brought to you by Billion Minds.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_03: Are you one of over a billion people who works out of the office at least one day every week?
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_03: If so, you probably want the freedom that working from anywhere affords, but you also want the same opportunities your in-office colleagues get.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_03: It turns out that to do really great work out of the office that your colleagues and leaders will truly value, you need a specific set of skills.
• 31:43
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• 31:52
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• 31:56
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• 32:02
  SPEAKER_03: Billion Minds, helping everyone do great work from anywhere.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_03: Well, if they have those things and you offer this collective space in the future, you know, it's okay to have real estate because as we said at the beginning, those serendipitous meetings, those water cool cooler conversations can be, you know, huge.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_03: You could have ideas that that change the culture of the entire company, change the course of the whole company through those serendipities.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_03: So having both is actually even more powerful than you know pulling everybody back into an office without those skills.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_03: You're kind of gonna go revert back in a way.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: And Matt, think about the other serendipitous moments.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: Let's let's turn that one on its head for a moment.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um let's find let's say you find out that you do your best innovative thinking from a coffee shop.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: Wouldn't you want your employer, employee, excuse me, wouldn't you want your employee to go to a coffee shop every day when they're doing their innovative thinking?
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_02: Isn't that in your best interest?
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and so what happens when you're at a coffee shop?
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_02: Lots of moments for serendipity there too.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: And they're outside of your organization.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: Innovation doesn't just happen in the four walls.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_02: Innovation doesn't just happen in an RD uh organizational unit, you know.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um it it happens with deep collaboration, especially now, happens with deep collaboration uh with people that don't work for you, right?
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so imagine that really cool over-coffee conversation you had with a stranger gives you that spark, that insight, that that innovative thought that then you turn into something that's uh very important, uh very lucrative even for the organization longer term.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: So uh you're almost limiting serendipity by saying that serendipitous moments can only happen within the four walls of your own real system.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_03: I mean the shower moment, you know, the wall the when you're out for a run ideas.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_03: You have to have the time to have a run and make sure you do that to have those those things happen.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_03: That's a great point.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, good idea.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, Matt, let's do a uh future podcast.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: I've got the name for it already.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's space and time.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: So so if you think about it, right, what we've been describing here, a lot of it is about space.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: So it's create the space for employees to do great work, um, in kind of almost like a esoteric um sense.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's the physical space, and what are the physical spaces where people do their best work?
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a bunch of them, right?
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's the office is one of those spaces.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: So what's the relationship between that and those and those other spaces?
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's the time piece, right?
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: Which is when you do your best work, and um and when are the periods where individuals do their best work, and when are the periods where teams can come together and do their best work.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: So let's uh let's get that one on the docket as well.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think that would be a really interesting part.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_03: The other thing that that I was thinking while we were talking was about um something that we might be interested in talking about more, digging into a little bit more, which is the idea that and and this has come up in like coaching and in other conversations with people throughout the pandemic.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I think all three of us are fortunate to have some of these skills and have applied them in our careers over time.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, I think people don't realize they have these opportunities either.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_03: I think there's still a lot of fear of jumping out there.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_03: This change made people actually say, oh boy, I better not mess up because now I don't I don't know what's gonna happen next.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_03: So I so I think there is also a psychology out there, and a uh probably a big percentage of people who don't think they can make a move.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_03: They might not realize they have the freedom and the opportunity that they do uh in this market.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_03: We we're studying it and looking at it and thinking about it all the time, but I I don't know if everyone is.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and think about the impact of confidence.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you know, so think about the person, the employee who um was doing incredible work, very confident in what they did, and they were a specific office worker.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: They came to the office every day.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_02: And then you force them into, or the pandemic, I should say, forces them into a situation where they can no longer do that.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: And their productivity is suffering, their their well-being is suffering, they're they're not able to be as effective as they used to be.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_02: And they're like, holy cow, am I losing it?
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like what happened to me?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_02: I used to be kind of a badass, and now I'm really, I'm really struggling to get by.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's that lack of awareness, uh, again, that it is a skills problem.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_02: Because with that knowledge, that individual could say, Oh, well, obviously, because I wasn't trained for this.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_02: I I didn't develop a set of skills for this over time because I worked in a certain way for all this time, versus the knowledge worker who has always worked from home or worked from anywhere when the pandemic hit, yeah, yeah, that much of a problem.
• 37:23
  unknown: Right.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so they were they were prepared because they'd spent all that time honing that skill or that set of skills.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_03: So I know employers, you know, have have conflated supervision with good work, but in a hybrid world, as as we're seeing, at least the reality right now is we're we're in this hybrid virtual mix.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_03: Uh how are they how are they doing that with without demanding them like uh to come back in like Elon Musk did?
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's a it's a complicated question, and we're seeing all kinds of of practices that are starting to appear.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: First off, it starts, as you say, with that idea that um that more supervision equals better work and less supervision equals not such good work, which is not necessarily true.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: But um all of that said, there are there are forms of of technology that are out there, some of which are a little bit more mature and some of which are uh are less mature, um, that have sprung up largely out of the pandemic and that are centered around uh around exactly that, around measuring, if you like, attention for the employees, measuring how much time employees are spending on uh on inside their core applications, for example, in the company.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: How much time are they spending on that versus how much time are they spending on, for example, I don't know, looking on Facebook or looking inside inside other applications.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: So we've seen a few things.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen uh work-issued uh tech that blocks um that blocks access to things like social media sites.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen that more in-depth uh technology supervision that is intended to measure attention, that is intended to measure whether people are uh are working on this on the core things that you're that they're supposed to.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: There's even stuff at the edges, which is looking at you know sentiment analysis and looking at engagement, how engaged is the employee in a meeting, but both in terms of what they say and terms of eye movements and facial expressions and things like this.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um this type of supervision surveillance, I suppose would be the way to think about it, tech surveillance.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah um we totally understand why employers are doing it.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's exactly the same things that that have all we've already discussed uh in in the pod today, right?
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's dealing with an underlying anxiety about how much uh you're getting from uh from employee uh employees.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: But to us at least it seems extremely counterproductive.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um and in reality, uh there have been several surveys that have been conducted recently about how employees feel about that.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: And majorities of employees say that if they you know become aware of you know surveillance uh on them as an employee, that that would be a reason for them leaving the organization and going to work somewhere else.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: This ties in very much to the stuff that we've been talking about here, the the human needs and desires of the employer versus the human needs and desires of the employee and how there is a how there is a mismatch between the two.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so betting on that as the solution, as I say, we think that's going to be uh gonna be necessarily counterproductive over time.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's way better to be on the side of empowering your employees to do their best work and giving them the skills to be able to do it and then trusting them.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_03: And some of that tech, even when I as you were talking about it, I was thinking about what it would be capturing, and and that's going to give you false flags anyway, based on the research, because you know, like if you're talking about time in app, for example, or going to a time waster app or whatever, or spending time looking at social media during the workday, we we know your brain sort of sort of shuts down in increments and you need to give it a rest.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_03: And maybe for some people, that rest is that little you know, mindless activity on a different app.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_03: And if if your you know IT solution is to flag when people waste time somewhere, people are like, Yeah, I needed a five-minute break.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_03: So instead of going out to the water cooler or whatever, I I look here or whatever.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_03: So it's yeah, it's it's uh false positive.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: And how do you measure the value or lack of value associated with any of those things?
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's very, very last century to imagine that, for example, that when somebody you know goes off onto social media or goes into some other area that that's inherently bad.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that, for example, uh staying in app is inherently good.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: What if I went off onto, I don't know, LinkedIn and read something really useful on LinkedIn that sparked what I was going to be doing for the rest of the day, that gave me an idea, or created a connection with somebody that can help me do more effective work, or led to something that ultimately becomes an innovation.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we think about these things.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: We think about, for example, innovation as something that only innovative people do, and a tiny group of people inside my organization are responsible for innovation.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: We know that innovation can spark from anywhere, and it can spark from any source.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: It can spark from going on a run or it can spark from, you know, uh something that you see on social media.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the other thing, of course, it does is it puts categories as to things that are um that are inherently good and inherently bad.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: So if I'm in a situation wherein I'm an employee and I'm being surveilled in this manner, I still need breaks.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: So all that says to me is that in order to be able to take a break, I need to take a break in quotes offline so that I avoid the surveillance, right?
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: These types of things are just um are inherently flawed and inherently counterproductive in their uh in their nature.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_00: But there are places that employers are going, and they're going there for the reasons that we've uh that we've spoken about.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it's gonna take a while for this to mature, and it's gonna take a while for um employers to really realize what works and really realize what doesn't.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, there's gonna be a lot of uh of pathways, you know, of of dead ends that employers go down unless they're thinking about this really seriously right now, and unless they're making it a core piece of their strategy.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: So we would urge employers at this time to start thinking about how you make the best out of this new world of work and not how you go about turning the clock back to something that you think worked better.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_03: Well, another great one, guys.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_03: We'll catch up again soon.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_03: We got a lot to talk about.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_03: All right, that sounds great.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Matt.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_03: The Way Too Busy podcast is brought to you by Billion Minds.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_03: We've all heard about the great resignation, but what does it mean for your team, your group, or even your organization?
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_03: Often it starts with employees losing their work mojo as they try to perform unstructured, ambiguous work while working from home or in the hybrid workspace.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_03: Billion Minds can help.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_03: Our mastering personal effectiveness program gives all employees the skills they need to conquer their day and helps them learn to love the job they're in.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_03: For more information, go to billionminds.com today.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_03: The Way Too Busy podcast was presented and produced by me, Matt Neal, and was brought to you by Billion Minds.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_03: If you want to get in touch with us, tweet us at Rising Billion or email us at WayTooBusy at BillionMinds.com.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_03: Billion Minds are creating practical tools for our way too busy lives.