How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives
By leaders of the "Future Forum (FF)," a research group that grew out of Slack and was accelerated by the pandemic, to determine how work would change in the future (and one can imagine, how to poise Slack's products to succeed in this environment).
- "Remote" isn't the best term, because location flexibility is only part of the story.
- Out of 10,000 knowledge workers surveyed across six countries:
- 76% want flexibility in where they work
- 93% want flexibility in when they work
- FF concludes that schedule flexibility is far more important.
- "Battle for talent"
— Recruiting and retaining employees were the top concerns among CEOs.
- After compensation, flexibility is the next most important driver of job satisfaction among employees.
- Employee engagement
- Flexible work increases inclusion of those with less typical life arrangements and those who who have historically been discriminated against.
- It levels the playing field for people who tend toward introversion.
- It increases creativity and innovation.
- Better results
- Flexible work increases productivity.
- Customer engagement is improved by making it easier to meet more customers by adapting to schedules.
- Diversity is enabled through both location and schedule flexibility.
- Ultimately a company's bottom line is improved through employee retention, increased productivity, and less spending on offices and travel.
Change must be leader driven.
- Avoid "in-person favoritism." Everyone should have the same access and ability to contribute.
- One of Slack's guardrails: "One dials in, all dial in." Either everyone is physically at a meeting, or everyone participates virtually, including attendees present in the office, or even in the same room.
- Similarly encourage participation using asynchronous media and tools that better support "those in different time zones, parents who are wrangling kids, or introverts who are unlikely to speak up on a crowded video chat." These include project/code management tools, collaborative documents, chat, and async voice and/or video.
- Consider instituting "maker hours" — blocks of time where responsiveness expectations are minimized.
- Challenge assumptions about traditional brainstorming
- Studies have shown that "the often lauded brainstorming session is a waste of time, at best; at worst it can lead to the dreaded groupthink and even harm productivity."
- "Brainwriting" has been shown to be better — individuals commit ideas ahead of time, which are then shared and debated.
- A set of "norms" that establish expectations for how a team will work together.
- Should be "a balance between top-down guidance about what's important to your company and empowering teams to figure out what works best for them."
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Rather than having set "working hours," what we've found works best in most cases is for teams to set what's called "core collaboration hours." This is generally an agreed-upon three-to-four hour timespan during the day when team members can expect to be "live" and available to one another for things like meetings or requests for feedback.
- Core collaboration hours can accommodate employees working across several time zones.
- Consider setting expectations around notifications and response times.
- Being intentional about video in meetings can help reduce fatigue (freeing up productivity) and level the playing field for individuals without ideal video situations.
- Regularly prune standing meetings to keep "meeting-creep" in check.
- We expect team members to be available to be available for in-sync work from 10:00am-2:00pm PT, Mondays through Thursdays (core collaboration hours).
- We default to notifications off during non-core collaboration hours.
- We set clear expectations for who needs to respond and when, and we reserve off-hours escalations for truly urgent issues, via text or phone call.
- No video will be used for one-on-one conversations or afternoon meetings.
- We commit to creating agendas 24 hours in advance of all live meetings or else the meeting is subject to cancellation.
- We denote a clear owner or decision maker for work, reducing the number of team members necessary in a given meeting.
- Notes, decisions, or meeting deliverables are always documented and shared back to the team.
- Local experiments are key to proving the effect of flexibility on productivity and engagement, and to building confidence and support.
- Performing experiments "in public," especially when led by leadership, generates trust.
- Question the existence, frequency, and duration of meetings.
- Status updates can be performed via chat, with automated reminders.
- Many parts of a meeting can be done asynchronously beforehand to make time spent together more productive, such as generating ideas for discussion, pre-reading, and giving advance feedback.
- Instead of 30 or 60 minute meeting blocks, schedule for 25 or 50 minutes.
Organizational culture is less about the where and more about the why and how. Challenge assumptions.
- Sense of belonging and satisfaction with work were higher among surveyed employees with time flexibility (+36% belonging, +50% satisfaction).
- Idea generation (creativity) levels were not significantly different across work location norms (remote/in-person/hybrid).
- Creativity is impacted by psychological safety: "whether a person feels like their team is willing to take risks, and whether that person feels comfortable asking the team for help."
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The assumption that being in an office together builds our sense of connection ignores an important fact: Traditional office culture was never the right fit for everyone.
- Gathering comes with power dynamics. Leaders must deliberately design and execute an environment that "levels inequities and invites people to contribute."
- Make digital your new headquarters, with the same intentionality and investment.
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The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.
— Max De Pree, CEO of Herman Miller
The shift to "continual discontinuity" of the early 2020s has been taxing for middle managers — they have reported significantly lower job satisfaction, sense of belonging, and productivity; and higher stress than senior and executive managers.
The role of today's manager:
- Being transparent about purpose, measurements, and expectations as a way to build trust.
- Providing clarity for team members on their responsibilities and goals through direct (and two-way) feedback.
- Unlocking potential for team members to do their best work through equitable practices and saying "no."
Avoid burnout by enabling boundaries.
- Call attention to the problem by noting communication at all hours, and ask if the person could use help.
- Practice good presence management. Team members should signal when they're available and when they're not using calendars.
- Make it clear that it's OK to say "no."
- Prioritize weekly the asking of every team member if their workload is manageable, and working to offload what doesn't matter.
- Communicate these priorities by saying what does and doesn't matter and why. Celebrate focus.
- Decide on issues that are escalated to you. Escalate the things you cannot decide. If you don't know if you're the decider, escalate that.
- Tracking tickets closed doesn't capture the type or quality of the tickets.
- For new product development, track:
- Quality measures, e.g. how many new bugs are being reported
- Usage statistics, e.g. how quickly the product is being adopted
- Emphasize continuous learning at the individual (personal investment) and team (collaborative assessment, e.g. retrospectives) levels.