TED@BCG 2021

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When I moved from NY to Boston in 1989 I completely lost my sense of direction.

It wasn’t me– it was the nonsensical, winding Boston roads.  Urban legend has it that in Boston, they paved over cow paths to make the roads we have today. Of course, if you hired an urban planner to create a city from scratch, they would NOT model it on how cows traveled.

But if you think about it, this is exactly what we have done with work. In the industrial revolution, we moved workers out of their homes, into factories, & assigned them narrowly defined repetitive jobs at a specific time & place.

When knowledge workers came on the scene, we gave them narrowly defined jobs & put them in cubicle fields from 9-5.

Even with globalization and technology, little changed.

Fixed time, place, and job descriptions are the cow paths of work. And like cow paths, they just do not make sense.

I have been challenging and changing how we work for the last 15 years– first inside my own company, The Boston Consulting Group, and then with dozens of other Fortune 500 companies. And let me tell you, I was amazed to watch what happened at work during the tragedy of Covid-19 – especially those first weeks and months: Low-priority tasks disappeared, employees left the constraints of their “jobs” to help wherever needed; we invented new ways to get work done overnight without endless steering committees and death by PowerPoint; leaders simply trusted their employees to get work done wherever and whenever. And they did.

I am on a mission now to bottle all this good — while, of course, getting rid of the bad things like loneliness, endless zooms, and work days that blend into nights

I want to make sure we do not slip back to the old, rigid, hierarchical, and sluggish ways that sucked the joy out of work

First, we have to recognize that the future of work cannot be created with top-down, experience, and opinion-driven edicts from senior leaders whose day-to-day realities simply do not match the lives of their front-line, dual career, time-pressed and income-pressed employees. Of course, some senior leaders want to go backward – because that worked for them. But they’re designing a return for thousands of their employees who experienced true agency, control, flexibility, accountability, and trust.

This divide between the realities of leaders and their employees is part of what is causing so many return-to-office announcements to backfire – with employees venting on social media. I don’t blame them! But employees, before you quit in response to these edicts – speak up! Try sharing what you want to keep from the past 18 months. Your leaders might be more receptive than you think.

And for leaders, I want to share three tips – or rather must-dos – to not disappoint, demoralize, or drive out your best employees.

#1. Trust your people.

Even though millions of employees proved their trustworthiness starting in March 2020, I see leadership teams sliding backwards. I have spoken with hundreds of leaders over the past 18 months and one of the funniest questions I get is, “How do we measure our employees’ productivity when they’re remote?” I can’t help but answer, “well how did you measure their productivity when they were in the office? Just because you can see them doesn’t mean they’re productive?” Then there’s my favorite, “we’ll let our people work from home two days a week as long as it is not Monday or Friday because they might goof off and take a long weekend.” Sounds like you don’t really trust your team.

Will there be people who take advantage and slack off? Of course. So deal with the few abusers directly through performance management not making rules for the vast majority who’ve earned our trust every day throughout the pandemic.

A trusting culture will not only attract, motivate and retain your employees, but it will also save the time and effort needed to enforce those rules.

#2. Be data-driven

Listen, We all have our experience-based biases and deeply held beliefs – and the more senior we get the more we think our opinions are absolute truth. But even I had to recognize that our covid experiences varied dramatically. For example –

I have genetically identical twin boys.  I say genetically identical because their personalities cannot be more different.  One extroverted and one introverted.  Their reactions to zoom high school couldn’t have been more different either – my extrovert, Abe, struggled not seeing his friends and organized outdoor backyard get-togethers even in the cold New England winter. Meanwhile, my introvert Boaz thought this was the best way to experience high school, “I don’t have to leave my bed – this is FANTASTIC!”

The same is true of your people.

We Must. Get. Data.

How?

Try this. Get groups of your best people together from across the company – those whose teams were productive and happy. Ask them what they loved about working during covid, what they hated, or missed. Ask if they could wave a magic wand and reinvent work, what would their days, weeks, and months look like? Pull all that information together and jointly craft a few experiments to try together.

Yes – Experiments. Everyone said Covid was a great big experiment – but I beg to differ.  Real prospective experiments have hypotheses, control groups, data collection, and rapid learning loops.  That’s what we need to be doing. Have one team decide their own working hours and locations and then have a second very similar team as a control – dictate their schedules and locations like always. Then survey each group weekly and ask about their own productivity, how happy they were, their connection to colleagues, etc. Mine and share what worked across the organization. We’re not going to get it right the first, second, third, or 14^th time… but eventually, we will learn our way there together through trial, error, measurement, and two-way dialog.

 #3: Think beyond the schedule.

The future of work is NOT just about adding a couple of days of remote work.

We can now reimagine, reduce, replace, or even eliminate things like daily commuting, endless meetings, recurring meetings, fixed jobs, rigid career paths, command and control leaders, siloes, synchronous work, and low-value administrivia – all the stuff that clogs our calendars. Let’s stop requiring everyone to contort their lives around work. This is our chance to finally reshape work to better fit around our lives.

There are many examples of leaders and organizations who are getting it right.

Like Dropbox. Pre-pandemic, only 3% of Dropbox employees worked from home. Now, they’ve moved to a remote first and asynchronous first model. To make it work best for everyone, they set ‘core collaboration hours,’ four-hour windows where everyone’s online & available at the same time.

Another one of my favorite examples is Mr. Cooper Group – a growing mortgage giant you’ve never heard of. Their employee base has a large percentage of call center operators. They used to work side by side with managers looking over their shoulders. In the first weeks of COVID, they successfully moved them home. Productivity and morale went way up.

But many on the leadership team STILL wanted them back in the office as soon as it was safe to do so. It was hard for them to imagine a permanent hybrid working model for call centers – even though it worked for months during COVID. That’s where Kelly Ann Doherty, their fantastic, visionary Chief People Officer, came in.

When presented with the productivity and sentiment data the leadership team asked:

• What about learning and development? Kelly Ann’s team answered: we will bring them together in person for that
• What about day-to-day coaching? There is software managers can use to do that remotely.
• What about camaraderie and culture? What about. . .

Kelly Ann stopped them, “I know you all want to go back. And so do I.  But our lives as executives are so different. Please just walk a mile in our call center employees’ shoes. They don’t have offices, and they are saving real money and time by staying at home. This is a high turnover population – how many will we lose to other companies who are more flexible?”

It was the moment executives got it. Now, they’re moving forward with a flexible model. They’re upskilling all front-line supervisors on how to motivate, coach, and manage distributed teams; And upgrading technology to do all of that remotely.

And Kelly Ann is thinking one step further: She wants to tap into new flexible talent pools that they couldn’t access before, like military spouses who move a lot and need flex hours during times of deployment.

In other words, Kelly Ann is a true urban planner of the future of work. She is not going back to the old cow paths of call center work. But rather using the learnings from Covid to co-create a future of work that is better for work and better for the lives of her teams.

This is our moment.  Our moment to make work more productive, engaging, and humane. Let’s go for it.

Thank you.

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