Brian Elliott’s Post

#WFH went up last year, contrary to a lot of headlines about #RTO. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “~35% of all employed persons in the US spent the average working day doing at least some of their work from home.” That’s kudos reporting from Millie Giles and William Coulman at Sherwood News (who I found thanks to Rani Molla!) I would bet serious money Nick Bloom can digest the latest BLS survey twists and turns better than me, but it seems more like a point of stability. We know from Flex Index that fewer companies every quarter are full time office. We know from Kastle Systems that their occupancy measure hasn’t shifted on average. We also know most people don’t want fully #remote. But #hybrid is here to stay. If you haven’t made the modest investments needed to make it work, it’s time to get with the program. 🔗 Links to the Chartr reporting and to a great study from Naomi Titleman and team in comments. #FutureOfWork #remotework #hybridwork #workfromhome

Want to improve business results? Focus on creating high performance teams. "[M]ost leaders are not trained on how to manage and optimize team effectiveness and are much more comfortable providing individual feedback rather than focusing on understanding and improving team dynamics." That's from The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp)'s latest report, which posits 39% higher #productivity from improved team collaboration. The focus in a world of #hybrid and #remote on individual productivity doesn't work well in knowledge work. It's not a new topic, Peter Drucker in 1969 said "once we automate rote tasks, what’s left is creativity, decision-making, and complex problem-solving." High performance organizations only happen if you enable and support high performance teams. Katheryn Brekken, Ph.D., Rob Cross and team have found a few common problems, and solutions. 🔥 Priority overload is the most common dysfunction -- too many priorities, too few resources. 🔥 Misalignment is the most toxic dysfunction: differing incentives across a team and/or competition over collaboration build a lack of #trust. What do leaders in high performance teams do differently? ✳ 4X more likely to act to reduce burnout: prioritize the work, say "no" (or at least "not now"). ✳ 3X more likely to diffuse cliques, remove toxic people and reduce posturing and politics. ✳ 3X more likely to talk through goals across the group and build shared purpose up front. ✳ 2X more likely to streamline approvals, to escalate resource conflicts. They also point out common infrastructure at companies that are looking to foster high performance teams: 1️⃣ Best practices are gathered from internal high-performing teams and disseminated throughout the organization. 2️⃣ Support from coaches who help teams improve collaboration. 3️⃣ Training for leaders on how to focus on the needs of teams, not just individual performance. There's a lot more to it, worth taking the time to read and digest. Links to the report and a July 11th webinar in comments. FYI also folks like Sacha Connor, Samantha Gadd, Chrissie Arnold, Sophie Wade, Naomi Titleman and many others who are great at this type of work! #FutureOfWork #leadership #team #teams

There's three magic words that can help you overcome imposter's syndrome. They'll also improve your team's engagement. "I don't know." I was trained early on to be "seldom wrong, but never in doubt." I had to have all the answers if I wanted to be successful. It's taken me decades to get out of that fixed mindset. Many times I slip back into it. But it doesn't help team motivation if you're not willing to be the know-it-all, do-it-all -- or signal that everyone else also needs to have all the answers. As leaders, we need to point to the mountain we want to climb as a team. We need to be inspirational, motivational and set lofty goals. But the more we're able to say "I don't know the exact route to get there" the more our teams will enlist to take on challenges with us. We're building learn-it-all organizations, instead of know-it-all organizations packed full with imposter syndrome. Paraphrasing Rodney Evans, "we wouldn't have imposter's syndrome if we didn't spend so freaking much time faking it." In many ways, I'm glad to hear that 71% of CEOs have imposter syndrome. It's a lot easier to learn and grow from that than by being fully convinced you really have all of the answers. The other 29% might be a bigger concern... 🔗 Read on for Brian Delk's great coverage of Korn Ferry's study in Bloomberg #leadership #engagement

How many tech companies have #hybrid work policies that require specific days of the week in office? How does that vary by size? Starting today, you can figure it out for yourself! Flex Index just launched FlexGPT, an #AI copilot that queries the Flex Index database of >8k companies' #flexible work policies, and gives back some lovely, interactive visuals like the one below. Getting past clickbait headlines and "everyone is doing X" requires real-life data. I've been a fan of the team since they started -- we need to root our conversations in real-world data. Now, instead of sending Rob Sadow, Kate Walsh and Michael Samuels my umpteenth "hey, what's the breakdown in Financial Services for firms over 10k employees?" I can do it myself. Plenty of folks out there who I hope will find this useful: I'd love to see more journalists and researchers using it, as well as #CRE brokers and consultants. But the biggest value ought to be for the #workplace and #people leaders who need insights into how their policies (or potential changes in policies) stack up against their peers. Together with Flex Index Office Benchmarks, they're building an indispensable set of tools! 🔗 Check it out, link to the new FlexGPT in comments! #remote #remotework #hybridwork #commercialrealestate #realestate

Fan of four day work week, but can't convince the boss? You're not alone. As Kevin Rockmann put it to Matthew Boyle "deploying a four-day week broadly in the white-collar world won’t take hold unless there’s an overhaul of corporate culture, particularly in the US." There are some companies that are making it work, and a lot of pilots -- Matt's coverage has some great examples. We explored it at Slack, but given the B2B nature of the business it just wasn't feasible to have something that worked broadly. Instead, we focused on root issues: too many days jam-packed with meetings, not enough focus time in big blocks, and manager burnout. As Matt notes, 🔎 Focus Fridays 🔍 was one of the resulting programs. Even that required work to get it to be "sticky" (I've certainly tried before!): 🔸 No internal meetings! Customers and job candidates may still need time. 🔸 Turn off notifications for blocks of time to get work done. 🔸 Regular reinforcement through comms, surveys and leadership. The other element was focusing where the pain is most acute: directors and down the org chart. Executives spend too much time in meetings, but if something has to give it should be them -- not their teams. It was one of the most successful programs we built; 85% of managers called it a moderate or significant benefit. I got asked this week "did some people go play golf Friday afternoon?" Yeah, I'm sure they did -- and if they got their work done and customers had coverage, I certainly didn't care. What are you doing to reduce meetings that don't matter, and increase focus time? 🔗 Links to Matthew Boyle's coverage and my Focus Fridays blog post in comments. #4DWW #meetings #focus #productivity #Futureofwork

"The reality of this thing is dumb." Mandates don't work, even when you use sticks. Dell Technologies new policy to not promote remote workers and grading systems for hybrid work is having an impact, maybe not in the direction they wanted. Polly Thompson got the inside scoop: ♦ Almost 50% of employees have opted to stay #remote, including ~1/3rd internationally. ♦ #Hybrid, which requires ~3 days/week to get a promotion, doesn't appear to be getting that number: "colleagues who opted for hybrid work have described near-empty offices in some locations." The reasons why aren't a surprise to anyone who's read the research or talked with other companies who've tried similar approaches: 1️⃣ Teams are distributed: why would I come in 3 days a week if my team is spread out? "My meetings are with people in different conference rooms across the country by themselves." "My team is spread out around the world. Almost 90% of the team [stayed remote] as in our case there was no real advantage going to the office." 2️⃣ Promotions had already stalled: "I know a few people who probably would have been deterred from staying remote due to the threat of the possibility of promotion, but since there haven't been any opportunities, they saw it as a meaningless threat." 3️⃣ The personal cost is too high: "Every mom that I talk to at Dell says that they are looking for other jobs because they need the remote work." Some turnover might be intentional: in a recent BambooHR survey, 18% of HR professionals hoped for voluntary turnover among workers after implementing an RTO plan. The challenge, of course, is that the ones most likely to leave are the most valuable (high performers, longer tenured) and most diverse. The closing quote is quite the kicker: "Before this whole fiasco, I wouldn't have considered going somewhere else. Being a second-class citizen doesn't leave you any career opportunities." Research from Gallup, Caitlin Duffy at Gartner, Mark Ma, Austin Lee Wright, David Van Dijcke, Nick Bloom, Prithwiraj Choudhury and others predicted all of this... 🔗 Link to Polly Thompson's work in Business Insider in comments! #ReturnToOffice #layoffs #engagement #remotework #hybridwork

Instead of asking "how will #GenZ learn in a #hybrid work world" we should be asking "how will all of us learn from younger generations?" There are a lot of myths about Gen Z and some real differences. They're the least likely to want either extreme of the #remote vs in-office tug-of-war, but they do have different learning needs, modes and experiences. My latest in partnership with Amanda Schneider, LEED AP, MBA 🤓 dives into ThinkLab research and provides five practical, tactical steps you can take to not only help younger generations but learn from them as well. "Just as a fish doesn’t know it’s in water — it’s just swimming — our youngest workers can provide a case study on how to reframe “the way it’s always been done” for a new era." 🔗 Full article linked in comments — read on and tell Amanda and I what you think! Thanks to Leslie Brokaw, Abbie Lundberg and team at MIT Sloan Management Review for your support! #development #learning #research #FutureOfWork #hybridwork #leadership

People using mouse jigglers might be cheating the system, or it might be job preservation in the face of bad management. Re-upping an awesome Jodi Kantor piece from 2022. It's worth your time to read all of it, here's one story... ---- Jessica Hornig, a Rhode Island social worker who supervised two dozen other UnitedHealthcare social workers and therapists seeing patients with drug addiction and other serious problems, said their laptops marked them “idle” when they ceased keyboard activity for more than a short while. They were labeled derelict during sensitive conversations with patients and visits to drug treatment facilities. “This literally killed morale,” Ms. Hornig said. “I found myself really struggling to explain to all my team members, master’s-level clinicians, why we were counting their keystrokes.” In recent years, she said, the scores have become even more consequential: On performance evaluations, social workers were rated 1 to 5 based on the amount of time they were digitally engaged — numbers that affected compensation. Ms. Hornig said her team spent hours each week piecing together alternate records but had trouble keeping up without compromising core parts of their job. --- 🔗 Link to full The New York Times article in comments. #Productivity #technology #engagement #culture #remotework

"What you measure is what you get. More likely, what you measure is ALL you'll get." Wells Fargo might want to (finally) listen to Accounting historian H. Thomas Johnson, who decades ago summed up the results of measuring activity vs outcomes. Thanks to Emily Peck for talking with me about her coverage of how the mouse jigglers debacle at Wells Fargo is symptomatic of #productivity theater. "Remote surveillance is just the latest version of a boss looking out at the office floor to check that there are 'butts in seats.'" Management through monitoring is the weakest form of management -- in fact, it's counterproductive. Not only do people behave to that system, but you destroy #trust and drive down #engagement. You'd think companies like Wells in particular would have learned this by now: this isn't their first issue of "ethics" scandals driven by activity-based incentive systems. The answer is simple but requires hard work: put in place systems that align people against an organization's overall purpose and goals, ladder those goals up and down the org, and measure performance based on outcomes. Not keystrokes, badge swipes or butts in seats. #Productivity #monitoring #engagement #remotework #hybrid #technology #FutureOfWork