Founder of Connect Consulting Group, helping leaders thrive in our VUCA world with neuroscience, behavior change & lean communications.
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“You’ve got to go where the people are.”
This platitude fits many situations. For example, it’s commonly used in organizational change efforts—the focus here—as well as in marketing and community building.
From an organizational change perspective, this standard phrase has now morphed into a double entendre. Where exactly are the people—that is, the organizations’ knowledge workers? Working at home? At the office? Or in a hybrid setting? And if hybrid, what’s the schedule? And who sets it?
Where people work today has become a heartfelt topic for many Baby Boomer and Generation X managers, renting significant headspace, too. For several global companies I’ve been working with lately, their experienced managers are eager to talk about “the future of work” regardless of whether the topic is explicitly on the agenda.
Many of these Boomers and Gen X managers are yearning to return to the ways they worked pre-pandemic when “workplace” meant the physical office. Based on what my fellow coaches and facilitators and I are hearing and observing on shared and separate assignments, these managers often express desires to provide their direct reports with on-the-job training in the office, stop by cubicles to check their team members’ work and bring staff members to client/customer meetings to learn through observation. The older generation that was taught the business this way often wants others to repeat their experiences.
When these leaders tell me that virtual work is not real work even when employees are productive, I bite my tongue and tell myself, “I’ve got to go where these managers are, and right now many of them are in mourning.” That’s my silent signal to acknowledge their many losses. While these bosses bemoan all the things they think their younger team members are missing by not being in the office, the bosses are grieving for something deeper. They are losing control as well as their “standard work” practices from before the onset of the pandemic.
However, the nature of work has been changing dramatically since the late 1990s thanks to globalization and technology. Both trends have created a workforce that’s distributed more widely across locations in the United States as well as the world.
In their desire to return to “normal” now, many seasoned managers seem to have forgotten that they work with team members in multiple time zones. Even before 2020, managers weren’t able to grab morning cups of coffee or work over lunch in the company cafeteria with all of their team members. The difference now is that more employees prefer working at home rather than commuting to any company office, especially after their experiences starting in March 2020.
Selective memories are a common symptom of dealing with change, especially changes foisted upon people without advance warning. And when they’re caught flat-footed, it’s easy to get lost in the romance of what life used to be like and start to pine for the good old days. Those days probably didn’t exist the way individuals are remembering them now.
Having learned this the hard way, I now give space to people to grieve, which is lesson one. Individuals need time to acknowledge their feelings as well as their losses. And they often appreciate opportunities to vent before letting go of the past and recognizing the new. As a former colleague used to say to individuals who weren’t yet ready to accept and adapt to their new situation, “You can visit Pity City right now. However, you can’t build a house there. You’ll need to move on.”
The second lesson I’ve learned is to stay quiet and encourage willing colleagues to speak up. The change-averse who’ve erected walls trying to hold back the future of work often will listen to their peers tell stories about how things are different today, especially technology. The stories that consistently penetrate are how technology changes now allow everyone to work anywhere and when they want. Also effective are stories about the ways young adults and teenagers meet people online and build relationships. And for extra emphasis, someone often asks to reflect on the frequency with which they observe their children texting their siblings and friends while they’re all sitting in the same room. Not all Boomers and Gen X managers embrace these developments but they nod their heads in recognition.
The third lesson is to understand that bosses, especially Boomers and Gen X ones, and workers often have competing self-interests that they may not communicate explicitly. As mentioned earlier, bosses expect to be in control thanks to their position. By contrast, knowledge employees grew accustomed to having more autonomy during the pandemic. They not only enjoyed their independence, but they also thrived in it and don’t want to give it up.
When you have autonomy with your work, you’re able to decide where and when you work. (Check out the Harvard Business Review article "Forget Flexibility. Your Employees Want Autonomy" [registration required] for an insightful explanation of the differences between autonomy and flexibility and helpful descriptions of the various combinations of the two concepts.)
By the way, autonomy is important to everyone at work, along with being competent and having a sense of relatedness. Whenever these three elements exist in combination, an individual gains a greater sense of control over their life, plus they feel more motivated to take action. That’s because they believe they can influence the outcome. This forms the self-determination theory, developed by two psychologists back in the mid-1980s when many Boomers were already managing employees and older Gen Xers were entering the workforce.
So where to go next? My fourth lesson is to follow the science. Provide as much autonomy as possible to fit people and the business. Also provide training opportunities to help people be competent. And third, bring people together to build relatedness. At a minimum, conduct three “C”s in person: contemplate, calibrate and celebrate. By committing to this compelling combination, you can get people to come to you... some of the time.
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