How the Future Works

Leading Flexible Teams To Do The Best Work of Their Lives

Brian Elliott, Sheela Subramanian, Helen Kupp

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781119870951
• eBook ISBN: 9781119871576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today Bestseller Unlock the power of flexible work with this practical "how-to" guide from the leadership of Slack and Future Forum

The way we work has changed. The era of toiling from nine-to-five, five-days-a-week in the office is now a relic of the past, and is being replaced by a better way—flexible work. But flexibility means a lot more than a day or two a week to "work from home": 93% of your employees want more flexibility in when, not just where, they work. They want choice and they are leaving their roles to find it. The most successful leaders will go much further than offering occasional remote workdays—they will redesign every aspect of how work gets done, from defining how they measure organizational success to training their managers to make it happen.

How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do The Best Work of Their Lives offers a blueprint for using flexible work to unlock the potential of your people. The book offers the steps necessary to building the new principles and guardrails to empower flexible, high-performing teams. And it teaches readers to lead with purpose, to manage and measure differently, and to believe that by letting go, they'll get more back than they thought possible.

How the Future Works explains how to:

• Establish leadership principles, commitments, and outcomes for truly flexible teamwork
• Measure and assess productivity in a flexible workplace
• Reskill managers to ensure a level playing field for all employees
• Implement the infrastructure necessary to make flexible work successful

Using original research from Future Forum, a consortium by Slack, and global case studies from leading companies such as Levi Strauss & Co., Genentech, Royal Bank of Canada, and IBM, How the Future Works offers concrete solutions and practical steps for building high functioning teams of talented, engaged people by providing them with the flexibility and choice they need to do their best work.

Step 1: Stand for Something: Agree on Purpose and Principles

Helena Gottschling had been working at the same organization for more than three decades when they decided to make the fundamental shift toward flexible work. Gottschling is the Chief Human Resources Officer for the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), an institution with a long history dating back to 1864. It has more than 86,000 employees worldwide serving an excess of 16 million clients.

It was feedback from employees that first caused RBC to consider this shift. During the pandemic, when so many people were working remotely, they did a series of surveys, focus groups, and town halls across the globe, out of which came a clear message: The vast majority of their employees appreciated the personal benefits of flexible work. That dovetailed with the main business purpose for RBC, which was to gain a competitive advantage in the battle for talent. “We're in a very competitive marketplace for talent,” Gottschling says. “If done right, we believe flexibility could be a true differentiator.”

Flexible work options, while available, were not widely used across RBC before the pandemic, so what they were contemplating was a real sea change for the company. One of their first steps was to create what they called their “enterprise principles.” This was particularly important because of the global diversity of the company: RBC is a complex organization with multiple lines of business spanning 36 countries. They needed principles to help guide the right decisions and drive behavior change across the organization. “The nature of the work across our various businesses is very different, so we knew out of the gate that we couldn't push out a one-size-fits-all solution,” Gottschling explains. Someone working in personal banking, for example, might have to be on hand to meet with customers, whereas someone working in analytics or accounting would have very different requirements. Their principles—five in all—set a foundation, helping to create alignment across the large, diverse, and geographically dispersed organization and guide leaders in determining what's best for their respective businesses.

Getting to a place where they could distill their own vision of flexibility into five simple, easy-to-understand principles that applied to the entire organization was a process—one that involved lots of discussion about how to tailor some of the best practices of flexible work to the specific needs of their business. For example, when RBC launched their flexible work strategy, they focused on both schedule flexibility and location flexibility, but with some boundaries. They decided that, for their organization, “Proximity still matters” (Enterprise Principle number three). That doesn't mean employees have to be in the office five days a week, but similar to how “Digital-First does not mean never in person” at Slack, RBC's leadership recognized the importance of bringing people together every now and then in intentional ways (something we'll discuss in greater detail in Step 5). “Proximity still matters” communicates to the organization that it's important to RBC that people are generally located close enough that showing up once a week—or maybe a week at the beginning or end of each quarter, depending on what works for their team—is an option for meetings, events, or simply to plan and connect with colleagues.

“What we didn't want,” Gottschling says, “is to have one group say that all their team members could move to a different region and never come into the office while another group that does similar work says the complete opposite.” You'll note that “Proximity still matters” doesn't dictate that people need to live in a certain region or city. Instead, Gottschling points back to employees to make the decision by asking “What's your tolerance for commuting?” based on the team's frequency of in-person gatherings. You can see how this specific principle helps to provide a balance between flexibility and structure—something that both leaders and employees say they want.

Early feedback on their flexible work strategy has been positive, and the company has been using it in recruiting materials, like their “Why RBC?” aimed at potential new employees. There are some skeptics in their ranks, but when doubts arise Gottschling likes to remind people that they worked remotely for at least 18 months during the pandemic and they didn't skip a beat. That doesn't mean there isn't more work to be done to ensure their strategy is successful.

“We're going to learn as we go, keep having conversations about what works and what doesn't, and we're going to get better at it,” Gottschling says. They will make adjustments along the way, but she believes flexibility is here to stay. And she's leading by example: “I will never, personally, go back to five days in the office every week.” And, she projects, neither will most of their people.

Just like with RBC, the process of creating your flexible work purpose and principles at the leadership level—which is what you will learn to do in this step—is how you will start to gain the understanding and alignment necessary to drive an organization-wide change in how your people work together.

Your Flexible Work Purpose: What's Your Why?

Flexibility, especially schedule flexibility, will only succeed if you are willing to set aside outdated conceptions of how work should be done and think differently. But with so many different ideas about what flexibility can mean to each person, team, and company, it can be hard to band together and create this kind of shift. You should start by understanding your purpose and aligning leaders around it: WHY do you want to enable flexible work in the first place?

Why start here? Because too many organizations have jumped into defining a flexible work strategy without understanding why they're implementing it, other than the fact that their employees want it or they want to keep up with peer companies who are already doing it. This is a flawed approach for a couple of reasons.

First, as we know from research, companies with a clear purpose have an advantage. Increasingly, employees—especially younger ones—say they want to work for purpose-driven organizations that can clearly articulate how they serve their people, customers, and community. These kinds of companies perform better, too. A global Harvard Business Review study found that companies with a clearly articulated purpose had higher growth rates. They were also better able to innovate and transform—capabilities that are crucial in today's competitive marketplace. As one executive in the study put it: “Organizations do better when everyone is rowing in the same direction. A well-integrated, shared purpose casts that direction. Without the shared purpose, organizations tend to run in circles, never making forward progress but always rehashing the same discussions.”¹ The same could be said about taking a purpose-driven approach to anything as fundamental to your business as how work should get done.

Second, as we explained in the last chapter, flexible work can mean a variety of things. If you did a Google search in 2021, as companies were figuring out how to move forward after pandemic-imposed restrictions eased, you would have seen everything from “going back to the office full time” (Goldman Sachs) to “working two-to-three days in the office” (many Fortune 500 companies) to “fully remote” (Gitlab) and “virtual first” (Dropbox). You would have found companies that were focusing only on a Work From Home (WFH) policy, and others that were offering not just location flexibility, but the kind of schedule flexibility that a greater number of workers really want and that is inherent in the Digital-First approach that we recommend.

To move forward, your leadership team needs to talk through the real business purpose behind flexible work. After all, this isn't just something you do to make your people happy. It can have a real impact on your bottom line. Purposes may vary somewhat from company to company, but they all generally come back to addressing one key issue: talent. As we touched on in the last chapter, flexible work helps companies attract top talent. It allows them to recruit from a larger pool of candidates. It helps them engage and retain the talent they already have. As y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Introduction: The 9‐To‐5 Just Doesn’t Work for Us Anymore (And Maybe Never Did)
• Why Flexible Work Works
• How the Future Works: The 7 Steps to Getting There
• Step 1: Stand for Something: Agree on Purpose and Principles
• Step 2: Level the Playing Field: Create Guardrails for Behavior
• Step 3: Commit to How You'll Work: Develop Team‐Level Agreements
• Step 4: Experiment, Experiment, Experiment: Normalize a Culture of Learning
• Step 5: Create a Culture of Connection from Anywhere: Reimagine Your Headquarters
• Step 6: Train Your Leaders to Make It Work: “Soft” Skills Matter More than Ever
• Step 7: Focus on the Outcomes: Avoid the Doom Loop and Embrace the Boom Loop
• Conclusion: Making a Difference
• Resources: Your Future of Work Toolkit
• Acknowledgments
• Cast of Experts
• About the Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement