How do employees spell flex? Hint, it’s a five-letter word. T-R-U-S-T.
When I speak privately with executives about the future of work, or publicly in front of larger audiences, I often find myself returning to the same three mantras: 1) that flex-work (remote, hybrid, asynchronous) requires trust; 2) that you simply cannot make new working models work successfully without real investment; and 3) that the flex everyone is talking about now (remote, hybrid, and asynchronous work) is just the beginning. With advanced robotics, generative AI and other new technologies evolving rapidly, get ready for even more changes in how we work—and how we even think about work.
Flexibility is a five-letter word.
My dear friend and former colleague Grant Freeland, a former Forbes contributor, once asked me how kids spell love. “I’ll give you a hint,” he said, “it’s a four-letter word.”
I knew it was probably a trick question, but I gave the obvious answer anyway: “L-O-V-E.”
“Wrong,” he said triumphantly, “It’s T-I-M-E.”
Basically, what he was telling me with his classic Freeland gotcha, was that kids don’t want to hear “I love you” from parents nearly as much as they want to spend meaningful time with them—even, he explained, if they complain about it.
This quick episode has come to mind a lot in the past year as I’ve become aware of more and more company executives issuing return to office edicts. When employees ask for flexibility, they are not just asking for permission to work from home on Mondays and Fridays, they also are asking for trust, agency, and accountability. To steal Grant’s construct: “How do employees spell flex? Hint, it’s a five-letter word. T-R-U-S-T.”
When you spell flex that way you see instantly how wrong dictated days-per-week in office edicts are.
Don’t expect new working models to work without real investment.
Designing the future of work has less to do with the exact flex-work model your team or organization chooses and more to do with your willingness to invest in the enablers of that model. Five key investments are required to make flexible work actually work: in manager capabilities, in collaboration and communication tools and the training and practice needed to master them, in the development and adoption of new team-based working norms, in metrics to measure impact (versus badge swipes) and, finally, the willingness of senior leaders to personally change how they themselves work.
An analogy: If an organization plans to move from mainframe to cloud and from desktop to mobile, do they do that by issuing a memo and hoping that it not only happens, but does so in a way that drives better employee and customer outcomes and lowers costs—or do they invest (time, money and effort) in building new systems, capabilities, processes and even operating models?
We all know the answer.
So, what makes some leaders think they can rewire how everyone works simply by issuing (and even policing) a hybrid work policy?
To assure the success of the new ways of working—in other words, to make flex-work actually work—organizations need to invest in the following:
1) Enhancing manager capabilities to direct, coach, develop, build connections with and inspire team members who may be widely dispersed geographically and working across multiple time zones. Even before the pandemic, team members often worked from different floors in the same building, from different buildings in the same complex, from different cities and even different countries. The above management skills were incredibly important then and they’re essential now.
2) Communication and collaboration tools and know-how. The good news is that there is a growing range of tools to use for remote and asynchronous collaboration and communication. The bad news is that it’s easy to become digitally overwhelmed by the many channels competing for your attention, all of which may be conduits of needed or important information. Aligning as teams on what channels and platforms to use for what purposes will streamline work. After there is alignment, it is critical to enable everyone, including senior leaders (who may need tutoring on how to use the tools so they can easily access team members where they are and edit and comment on shared cloud documents.)
3) Establishing team-level working norms. Make the implicit norms of working hours, response times, screens on/off, what a closed door means, and so forth explicit. If individuals are left to decide for themselves it leads to chaos. If executives set the norms it leads to resentment. Let the team(s) with which you do most of your work decide. And that means do more work through cross-functional, persistent teams: #businessagile@scale!
4) Metrics and tools to measure the effectiveness of hybrid workers. It’s amazing to hear senior leaders, including some CEOs, say, “Hybrid work is not working.” How do they know that? They know, they claim, because “people aren’t coming into the office; we’re measuring badge swipes.” Since when is being present the same as being productive, innovative, engaged, and doing a bang-up job, such as ensuring customer satisfaction? We need to put metrics in place to measure real impact versus face time, computer time or badge swipes.
5) Ensuring that senior leaders act as role models in the new ways of working. You cannot ask team members to work in ways that leaders don’t publicly embrace. So, yes, item #1 applies to top executives as well. Bring on the coaches.
The Future of Work starts today.
Employers have a unique opportunity right now to create a true talent advantage by “Making Flex-Work Work.” Going backwards on the flexibility, agency, trust, accountability, agility, collaboration, empowerment, and support most, if not all, leaders and organizations embraced during the pandemic will undermine employee engagement, morale and productivity.
The technological revolution now taking hold will usher in the next Future of Work. This includes automation of physical processes (using robots, for example, to deliver food and clean up the arena after the game); using generative AI to streamline work (write this article for me 😊); or extending human capabilities (translating between different languages for customers or patients).
These coming changes—if done well—have the potential to make organizations even more productive and the work of their employees more impactful and rewarding. If we can’t successfully adapt to trust, hybrid, asynchronous and flex-work, it’s hard to imagine how we’ll deal with the tech-driven changes that lie ahead.
