Let Go of Certainty

Margaret Wheatley | Flexibility Is Good for Business… But Not Flexible Work? | Factoids

Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

As we work together to restore hope to the future, we need to include a new and strange ally—our willingness to be disturbed. Our willingness to have our beliefs and ideas challenged by what others think. No one person or perspective can give us the answers we need to the problems of today. Paradoxically, we can only find those answers by admitting we don’t know. We have to be willing to let go of our certainty and expect ourselves to be confused for a time.

| Margaret Wheatley, Willing To Be Disturbed

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Apologies for the intermittency in posts. A new grandchild (11 weeks), and a serious cold have destabilized my routines, such as they are.

And I still plan to write more about Corey Robin’s work on freedom (or unfreedom) at work, soon.

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Flexibility Is Good for Business… But Not Flexible Work?

The growing list of CEOs ending flexible work policies and demanding everyone-back-in-the-office-or-else seems to be continuing. The absolutism is staggering, but then, businesses are inherently autocratic.

Recall, only a few years ago, during the pandemic, when working remotely was an imperative, and CEOs praised their employees for making it all work? Flexibility was lauded as a superpower, a capability to be aspired to.

But, today, a few years have passed, and CEOs are certain that flexibility in work schedule and location is now a liability, so they demand that everyone has to return to the office, and to hell with the desires of the workforce, and especially the desires of women, who want that flexibility most.

That CEO certainty will be undermined by reading a new article by Brian Elliott, Nick Bloom, and Raj Choudhury with the accusatory title, Hybrid Work Is Not the Problem — Poor Leadership Is. (Archive.is link.)

In the article itself, they are less assertive about the failure of leadership in the RTO wars; however, the evidence they have amassed is compelling.

They write like academics and as such, they have buried the lede of the story in the conclusion:

Today’s leadership challenge isn’t about “remote work” anymore; it’s about leading distributed teams effectively.

However, a great deal of energy is dissipated by the friction RTO policies are creating, like the management attention wasted on the debate.

While narrow-thinking CEOs debate office policies and measure badge swipes, organizations with the four capabilities [see below] we just explored are quietly building sustainable advantages.

Their teams are aligned around goals, not compliance, and rewarded for performance, not appearances.

When implemented thoughtfully, hybrid approaches deliver superior outcomes for both people and businesses.

The biggest takeaway:

To date, no peer-reviewed research shows a benefit to a rigid five-day office model.

Other takeaways are the four sets of capabilities that the authors’ research has uncovered in diverse companies successfully implementing flexible, distributed work, like Atlassian, Microsoft, Airbnb, the European Central Bank, Allstate, Teradyne, and others.

1. Use Flexibility To Attract and Retain Talent. Understand

   what drives performance in your specific context and how flexibility for talent might support broader business objectives.

2. Measure Results, Not Presence.

   The shift from monitoring activity to measuring outcomes is perhaps the most critical — and difficult — transformation for most organizations. It requires moving beyond “Is Sarah showing up as frequently as we’ve asked her to?” to “What result is Sarah delivering?”

3. Let Teams Lead the Way. Don’t adopt one-size-fits-all models. Instead, let those closest to the work -- teams -- figure out what is best for the team.

   One challenge with team-based norms is that they sometimes never take hold because managers treat them as a box-checking exercise or don’t spend enough time creating them. As we’ve found in our work with multiple organizations, ensuring general compliance with sensible plans is important. Unfettered individual choice creates a “collaboration tax” on the team overall. That’s one reason why organizations like Microsoft have adopted sensible corporate RTO standards (in its case, three days a week) while allowing business units and teams to vary their approaches.

4. Invest in Getting Better.

   Most organizations fail because they treat hybrid work as a policy change rather than a capability-building exercise. Companies that succeed over the long term make sustained investments in three critical areas.

   The first area is infrastructure redesign.

   They rethink the workplace around the models of flexible interaction that the company’s teams have adopted. [Emphasis mine.]

   The second area of investment is resource allocation. When teams are distributed, leaders need to budget for bringing them together intentionally. Atlassian’s research shows that quarterly team gatherings can positively affect engagement more than daily chance encounters.

   Even though they cost more, and require greater coordination.

   The third area of investment is skill development. Research shows that only 25% of managers have received training on how to lead distributed teams.

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The authors lay out how to get started today with this four capabilities framework. They leave aside the elephant in the room: will the CEO drop his blinders and adopt a sensible approach to distributed, flexible work? Presuming that is resolved, then follow this scenario: