< Back to the Future of Work Roundtable
Transcript
CLAIRE HAIDAIR (HOST): One of the guiding principles that I've found extremely useful in navigating this in our company is we've actually recently brought on few very well-known architect who has prior to the pandemic being specifically working in this area around redesigning buildings and spaces, specifically with community at a thought, okay? And how do you engineer spaces to actually create community?
SCOTT WESSON: I always love things that are counterintuitive. And one of the counterintuitive things at the beginning of the pandemic was, all the leaders, myself included, we all thought we were gonna have to figure out a way to crack the whip and keep people working in exactly the opposite was the problem, they were working much harder than we wanted them to.
And so we had to create some things to say, okay, you know, if you're leading a project, then meet with your team at 4:00 pm to tell them to stop working at the end of the meeting. Because we had people that were working all through the night or they were working until they put their kids to bed and then they go back, and so they were working much, much harder than they were when they were in the office, when they could actually leave a physical place.
JOANNA ZABRISKIE: This industry we've done a better job on our assets in creating that work-life balance than we have for our corporate team members. The work from home shared environments in our clubhouses, the indoor outdoor fitness centers, the outdoor fitness areas, all of those where, you know, all of us are doing, right? Where we're retrofitting and building new, and we didn't really think about that component of the whole human being for our corporate team members.
PETER KIM: For us, you know, definitely there's a commute piece, right? I mean, I see people saving two to three hours a day just from getting ready in fighting traffic, trying to get into work. And, you know, we feel kind of like we're in limbo mode, right? We haven't finalized a permanent strategy in terms of what this remote work looks like. I think we have a lot of employees that are waiting to make a decision, do we relocate permanently? Do I stay in town, because I may be coming back into the office?
There's just a lot of unknowns and the social interaction, the community that's missing from, you know, people who may be single, new hires right out of college. Those are the kind of the areas that I am obviously, you know, worried about, right? Because they're alone, they're alone at home, they're working 10, 12 hours a day, then they're back to being alone, so how do we, I mean, I think those are things that we are looking at from a leadership standpoint.
And we may find it healthy if, hey, you should come into the office two to three days a week, we'll provide a, you know, office for you or we'll provide some kind of desk sharing for you, but that may not be the right approach or strategy, right? So I'm definitely interested in seeing what our industry and how we tackle that, especially for the corporate and regional offices.
HAIDAR: The survey that we are sending out during this information gathering phase that we're in, should be a little bit more explicit. It shouldn't be, do you wanna work in an office or not? The questions we should be asking are, what helps you to transition between work and home? What helps you to connect to people? You know, what is it that helps you to socialize? What is a social interaction look like that has meaning? Our questions need to be a little bit less black and white and a little bit more nuanced in terms of delving more into, Joanna as you said, a thought whole human.
ZABRISKIE: Some of our team members have taken it into their own hands to relocate during all of this. And they went to find the place where their neighborhood is. And we've hired people that we never would have hired previously. We've hired a couple of senior team director and VP level people that are out of our four markets and nowhere near corporate offices. And they're building teams and integrating within the fabric of our company pretty seamlessly.
HAIDAR: You're able to do that because you're starting to hire according to your company culture and not location, and that is significant. When you design according to your business outcomes that you need to achieve, part of that design results in this is our culture, this is who you are.And when you thought hiring according to that culture, place genuinely becomes irrelevant, except if it's a frontline person that you need to have in a physical building, but you can still hire according to culture for that person.
One of our key criteria that we look for in the people that we hire into our company, get somebody that is connected into their neighborhood. So because we're a virtual company, we know that our people struggling with isolation. And so we're making sure that the individuals that we're bringing in, have got very deep community roots, have got, you know, those extracurricular activity that tie them outside of the company that they're working in. We're filtering out a certain level of connectiveness that we cannot control because we are a virtual company. And I think that is something that will become part of hiring plans moving forward.
If you look at where we started, we said everything has changed, okay? Fundamentally, you as leaders need to go back to your leadership team then you need to alien on that. Does everybody genuinely believed that everything has changed and needs to be re-engineered? Or do you actually have to go back even to basics where you actually have to get everybody onto the same page around that? Because there may be a dominant belief that everything is gonna go back to normal and that's actually challenged number one, that has to be solved right there.
Then moving on from there, it's like baselining, okay, if everything has changed and we need to re-engineer this, where all we on the spectrum? Let's baseline ourselves and let's decide where are we gonna be in six months time, let's decide where we wanna be in 12 months time, and then let's decide what we want to design ourselves to be in the future. And then depending on where that baseline is, you then take that HR function and you go and you redesign across the all, every single one of those functions.
We then bundle that up and you bring that into the communicators document that can be put into a webinar, or it can be put into an all hands session, it can be an actual written document, but it essentially becomes the operating manual of your company. It's not something that, you know, you just assume that people understand or know it, actually it has to become a written immune status document and way of being.
So what you guys are seeing on this slide right now is essentially hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of a lot of scientific research and articles that have actually come out around change management and how change management happens successfully inside organizations. If you look at the single thing that change management research keep teaching us over and over again, it is that, if change happens within an organization at only one of these levels, so if you look on the screen, you'll see that there's leadership, there's systems, there's processes and team.
If change is only managed across one of these layers, and not all of them at the same time, the change will never be sustainable. If the leadership team go and have a discussion around this, but they don't actually go and define a process, go get into a system and made sure that the team are following the system and then go and train the team around the change will fall away, and the team will revert to what they were doing prior to that. Which actually cumulatively over time devolves the organization rather than evolving it forward, because the team have been exposed to a new concept, a new idea innovation, but they actually fall back into an old way of doing things and they realize that they could be better.
And so you're creating a mental deficit. Your company culture is not the set of values that you've written on the wall, or the way you show up into the office, the company's culture is the set of definitive behavior the people in the company display over and over and over again, okay? It's the way you meet as a company, it's the way you talk on Zoom. If you're a "cameras off" company on Zoom, that is a defining part of your culture. If you're a "cameras on" company on Zoom, that is a defining part of your culture. And so what we need to understand is, is that as we move into this new norm, it's that we're redefining our culture. And every change that we bring into the organization, we actually need to make sure that every single one of these four leavers are being called in order to drive the change forward. And that's deep, hard work leadership.
RICK HAUGHEY: Wow, what an engaging conversation I could have listened for another hour. I know everyone has a lot of important decisions to make in the coming months that will define what the future of work looks like at their companies, and I'm looking forward to seeing how things move forward.
Thank you, Claire for agreeing to come back and continue the conversation you started at OPTECH last year, a special thanks to our impressive industry panel today, Angela, Peter, Scott, and Joanna, thank you all. And thanks to our online viewers, the roundtable is available in chapters, so you can take in the topics that most interest you in any order you'd like. Additional resources are also available to download to help you on your journey. And the conversation that started at OPTECH 2020, will continue at OPTECH 2021, so please plan on joining us in person on November 8th through the 10th at National Harbor, and that's in the Washington DC region for the 2021 NMHC OPTECH Conference.
Thanks again to all of our speakers and listeners today, I hope to see you all in November.