Brian Elliott’s Post

Feeling stuck? Moving sideways might be a good idea. Slower promotions and a weaker job market has led to a lot of folks feeling stuck in a rut. The solution might be moving around inside your own company -- which can help you grow, stay engaged, and increase cross-functional connection. Great examples in Chip Cutter's latest from Synchrony and Allstate: 🔸 At Synchrony, people can swap jobs for as little as 90 days or up to a year. "[People] want the ability to think about doing something net new and being empowered to do what’s best for them” says CHRO DJ Casto 🔸 Allstate increased internal hiring to 60% from 45% by focusing recruiters internally, starting with coffee chats. The starting point might be a bit rough. As Robert Toohey notes, “When you get a call from a recruiter internally, you start to go, ‘Am I losing my job?’” I've moved sideways at least three times in my career -- moves that accelerated learning and longer-term goals. Cribbing again from Bob, “I think we have to get away from just: ‘I move up.’ It’s ‘How do I progress?’” 🔗 Link to Chip Cutter's #WSJ coverage in comments, and thanks Bryan Berthold for the tip ... and putting me up to this! #career #turnover #layoffs #engagement

Apparently, return to office mandates still tick off employees -- and yet, a steady trickle of commands keep coming. My column about mandates for MIT Sloan Management Review was their 3rd most read story of 2024 (so far), which is a bit of a good news / bad news situation, tbh. The frequency of mandates has dropped; The Conference Board reports that #ReturnToOffice is way down the list of things to sweat this year for most executives. Those that remain tend to have two factors in common: executives under pressure for poor performance, and a desire to reduce staff. "Maybe people aren't working hard enough / taking this seriously enough" gets combined with "how do we know they're really working?" into "maybe we can avoid a layoff and severance." The challenge remains that the same command-and-control policy that might result in some "voluntary" turnover and remove people who really aren't working hard also tarnishes everyone -- including your highest performers. That's the doom loop. Flexibility also can't be a free-for-all. I've worked with enough teams grappling with coordination tax -- and people who want to come in, but not to sit alone on Zoom all day. Teams need to align on purpose for coming together, ensure they have regular in-sync hours, and agree on what tools they use (including the office) for which purpose. Leaders need to invest in getting themselves aligned on goals and priorities. What are the most important goals we've got for the back half of the year? Who's accountable at the exec level for getting us there? How does that roll out throughout the organization? What are we going to stop doing to do better on what matters most? Outcomes-driven leadership takes work, and hard decision making. It's harder than simply issuing a command. But it's the only way you're going to engage people on the goals of the business, instead of distracting the organization with the latest shift in policy. 🔗 Link in comments to the article! Huge thanks to the amazing researchers and experts that I tap for my work, including Mark Ma, Molly Sands, PhD, Annie Dean and team at Atlassian, Sharon Parker, Nick Bloom, Erin Grau at Charter, Caitlin Duffy, PhD at Gartner and several other amazing, incredible researchers whose work I love -- and thanks Leslie Brokaw, Abbie Lundberg and team at MIT Sloan Management Review! #RTO #leadership #futureofwork #remotework #remote #WFH #hybrid #hybridwork

🎶 The #RTO Tango... "Badge in from 8 to 6, to show us you exist. How can we manage people who we can't see? I know we're all adults, but some of us have faults and some of us are still kinda struggling with object permanence..." Way to go Forrest Brazeal!

Are you 👍 optimistic or 👎 pessimistic about the impact of #AI in the back half of 2024? "As we enter the second half of the year, I am filled with a sense of cautious optimism" That's Edith Cooper, who's seconded by Helen Lee Kupp: "I feel cautiously optimistic. Despite data showing that women are still lagging men in AI adoption, during a time when it’s estimated that women’s jobs are 9% more likely to be disrupted by AI, I have seen how powerful it has been to create accessible and easy ways for people to get hands on with AI quickly." Both of them point to the need to invest in learning at the individual level, as well as the team level, and to experiment and iterate together. I've seen a bifurcation in leaders: there's a set who are still largely just listening to the hype and thinking that efficiency and productivity will somehow magically show up. For those magical thinkers, the bloom will come off the rose. Then there's the realists, who get the J-curve... "Like every major technological shift before it, the impact of #genAI will be a J-curve: negative initial results with long-term impact created through experimentation, iteration and slow, steady progress." For more from all three of us, check out Charter's 2nd Half of 2024 Predictions, link in comments -- thanks Erin Grau! What's your take? #FutureOfWork #predictions #technology

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