< Back to the Future of Work Roundtable
Transcript
CLAIRE HAIDAIR (HOST): I think one of the things that we really need to stop and pause around is the fact that everything has changed. We say it, but if you listen to how we actually go and talk about what we're planning to do with our companies, we're gravitating towards what was comfortable and what was good before.
And so, if we abide by the principle of everything really has changed, it's going to take very, very real leadership to really set a different tone, to set a different culture, and to set a new path forward because it's actually gonna take pioneering. It's gonna take forging forward. This is not just a question of, like, micro-evolution into a new shape. Everything has changed. This is, like, a tsunami hit the world. The house is down. It's, like, completely down. And we're rebuilding from the foundations up again.
We're building something completely new. What we need to understand is that we literally are back at pioneering stages as a leadership team. We need to actually fit that tone at leadership level and then filter that down into the organization, and the very first starting point of that is aligning where we are as an organization, but where we are growing on that spectrum that we've just spoken about.
Do we want to grow in an adopted/leader organization, or do we wanna stay at starting phases and actually go back to being in-person? And I think one of the things that I'm seeing very, very clearly emerge in the industry right now is that it's assumed that blended works, but the research that's coming out, all the data that's coming out is that blended actually doesn't work. And there's a few very, very specific reasons for that, and that is that the blended work environment is so fundamentally different because a remote virtual culture and an in-person culture are so diametrically opposed to one another.
It's literally as big as a difference as socialism and capitalism. This is a tough conversation to have because you're taking people's norms, you're taking 50, 60, 70 years of neural networks that have just been embedded into people's ways of doing and thinking and you're challenging it, and you're saying, oh, are we gonna keep going along this line, or are we gonna completely rebuild the past? How we need to position that as leadership teams is exactly as you would from an architectural standpoint, is that when you build a house or an office for a virtual company, you're going to be building it very, very differently than how you would build it for in-person company, and therefore, you can't blend it.
Because just going right down to the cement mixers for the two are totally different, do you know what I mean? You're talking about two different sets of foundations. You're talking about two different types of glass windows and sealants that go on those glass windows. It's all different, and that's why it is so critical to actually have that debate and really hash it out because somebody being flippant about it and going, well, we'll be blended, do you know what I mean?
We'll have a little bit of in-person like we used to have, and then we'll build the rest around remote is actually gonna come back and really hurt us because the building is gonna topple again, but this time we won't have the excuse of a pandemic to go, "It's okay." It's kind of gonna be us standing on our own, you know, and there's gonna be a group of companies that have done this hard work up front that are gonna be forging ahead, and then there's gonna be a group of companies that are gonna remain in that laggard position. Where are we we today, and where are we defining ourselves moving forward?
SCOTT WESSON: I think a lot of people have this underlying assumption that we all agreed the way we were gonna work previously, and we didn't, you know? I mean, accounting didn't work the way that legal work, the way that operations work. I mean, so we really had a bunch of different cultures and operating styles already, and that's been one of the comments I've been talking to our CEO about is, well, we weren't alike before, so why do we have to be alike now? We used to have this problem in IT because we were running a 24 hour shop. So we're trying to figure out how do we work together when some of us aren't here on the other side of the clock? And so what we came up with were things like core operating hours that we would all agree for these X number of hours, we were all gonna be here. I think it's tough because, you know, I guess it begs the question, do we all have to agree? I know what you're saying, that perhaps, you know, these different styles don't mesh very well, but do we all have to agree to one set of rules?
ANGELA GIBBONS: I think we're still struggling. To go from one extreme to the other, I mean, like I said, we had to prep for that when we initially went out and we did go to it and we moved very quickly.
We moved up, from a technology standpoint, we were not equipped and ready to move in that direction where we took us all remote at all at one time, but we all came together and we did do it, but for us to kind of move into that direction and kind of go one way or another, I think we would struggle, and I think, you know, how do you balance that? I mean, we do have some people that do work remote today and they worked remote 100% before we had the pandemic. You know, I kind of struggle a little bit. How do we kind of manage through that?
JOANNA ZABRISKIE: People have enjoyed the ability to work from home and are not clamoring to come in, so I do feel like we've gotta do something differently going forward and provide collaboration space, but not necessarily workspace in our corporate offices.
We're certainly going into this not having all of the answers right now and doing a lot of conversation and listening to what other people, not just in our industry are doing, but some of the people who are back in the office now, full-time, what are their challenges and what are their teammates saying?
GIBBONS: Some of the things that we've actually been seeing as we actually have been losing a few people as we start to bring them back into the office, where they've got out and they were talking to other companies that will allow them to work 100% remote. And so we have seen that shift in where people said, look, I really want more flexibility.
PETER KIM: We're looking for a hybrid work model, and I think the question that we're asking ourselves, does it really have to be the same for every department or business unit or organization within the company?
HAIDAR: You really nailed the question on its head, and I think if we take it back to that elemental metaphor that I keep using around building a building, which is so applicable to your guys' industry, that when a school is built, it's designed around the needs of accomplishing what a school needs to accomplish, not the individual preferences of students coming through the school.
The same applies to a family home, you know? Yes, you can get input into, you know, the various children, the bedrooms, you know what I mean? And the teenager's room is gonna look very different to the toddler's bedroom, but at the end of the day, the house is designed around a certain set of functional need that needs to be met of the group as a whole, and the same goes for an office, is that if we go back to the basic designs are, we're fundamentally rebuilding here.
You can, absolutely, to Peter Kim's point, work from the point of, yes, this needs to be different for every department, but at the end of the day, there's a business that needs to achieve a certain set of objectives, and it operates in a market that has been defined by a pandemic. But I think where we as business leaders need to be working from in terms of our broader thinking around this is that this, we're going to see vaccine and pandemic hitting us at a faster rate than they have been, so we've seen, you know, we've seen the, like, spotty Ebola outbreaks and those types of things in Africa and other regions and in micro-pieces of life, the continental US, but it'd been very quickly contained.
Whereas, we know because of globalization, and because of the connectivity that we experience with the world right now, this is actually gonna become a norm that we're gonna see at recurring speeds that are gonna happen faster than that 100 year lag that we saw between the Spanish flu and this one.
And so, from that perspective, I think it would be pertinent for us as business leaders to bake basic health and hygiene into an office, where, again, Scott, to your point, it was never a consideration before. It was, you know, yes, we'll supply the basin for people to wash their hands and assume that people will wash their hands, you know? And so, I think it's more broadly not, is the COVID vaccine going to become, you know, part of our everyday life, but is overall hygiene in the greater prevention of any disease going to become part of our thinking and our doing as an organization?
GIBBONS: But it's also the mental health piece of it, too, coming out of this, so I think you've got to make sure you look at the full spectrum of how we're gonna manage through that. And we've been talking within our organizations and other peer groups to kind of, how do we manage through that piece as well? You know, we've been focusing a lot around the hygiene piece, but I think we've gotta bring the mental health piece into that as well.
HAIDAR: So naturally, you know, when we're talking at this, at leadership level, there is a very real concern for single people, you know, not married people, young college graduates just coming into company, anybody that isn't in their broader family structure. And then, if you look at the broader family structure, you know, there's a whole different set of stresses there that relate to the mental health piece. And I absolutely agree with you that that has to be a consideration. It has to be baked into the policies.
There's the health and hygiene piece, Angela, as you point out, but then there's the mental wellness piece, but it's also the socialization aspect. So how do we socialize as an organization? How do we build a building that meets the objectives of the company? Not everybody can have a voice at the table. Yes, you bring opinions to the table. Yes, you weigh it in, but at the end of the day, there needs to be a very strong leadership layer in place that actually decides this is gonna be the foundation, this is how we're gonna build it up from here, and these are the needs that need to be met and people need to find their space within that overarching building.
And I think what the tendency right now that I'm seeing and that we as a company are seeing across the board is that people are either giving into the fear that they're going to lose people because they define something the way that doesn't meet the needs of a lot of the people on the ground so they're thinking about the short term churn or, on the other end of the spectrum, they're actually not giving that any weight at all and just assuming that nothing has been redefined, and both of those sets of, you know, they're giving into the fear side, as well as they're not willing to change it all and see this as a new environment are equally harmful. And so it's about coming to the beginning of that.
The point that I really wanna make here is, Scott, you, again, really emphasized this and you said it very well, is that we were never aligned before. And the interesting thing is we depended on buildings to define our culture. We depended on buildings to organically create spontaneous conversations. And so, the interesting thing that we, as business leaders, face right now is that we actually have more work on our hands than we had before, because we don't have buildings that can do the hard work for us. We have to define how people are gonna have those water cooler moments. And we actually have to design that experience. We don't have the, oh, I can quickly glance across the passageway and see a meeting happening in there. Oh, okay, that means their deal should be progressing 'cause they're, you know, those four people are sitting around the table, and so you kind of put that piece of knowledge to the back of your head and keep moving, you know? So we have to design communication in a way that we've never had to design communication before.
That is one of the very real challenges that business leaders face in this reality, is that we're actually redesigning the experience because the building is no longer there to just create it for us. Yes, it's hard work, it's exceptionally hard work, and it's gonna require an exertion of leadership like we've never seen before, but the beauty of it is that many of the cultures that have been handed down to us by these buildings that we worked in weren't actually healthy to start with.
And so, we actually have the ability to go back to the drawing board and go, hang on a minute. You know, Scott, to your point, what did we like before and what did we actually not like, you know? Like, let's throw some things out here, you know? Let's clear out the house a little bit, and I think that's the opportunity that's presented here.