Future Work

Thinking about HR and leadership means thinking about Dave Ulrich. Dave is called the “father of modern HR” for designing the HR systems we know today, including the concept of HR Business Partners.

Dave wrote over 30 books on HR, leadership, and modern organizations; has spoken to large audiences in 90 countries; performed workshops for over half of the Fortune 200; and coached many successful business leaders.

Dave is one of the most awarded people in the industry, including the #1 management guru by Business Week, Fast Company’s top 10 creative people in business, and a spot in the Thinkers 50 (Hall of Fame).

In this episode, we’ll discuss how to lead teams and ourselves in the remote and AI-driven future of work:

1. First of all, what is leadership? It’s not a title or a position. It’s attributes times results, so do I have the right attributes, and can I deliver results in the right way? I also like Dave’s question to leaders: does someone leave an interaction with you feeling better or worse about themselves?

2. Principles of Leadership: While practices may be different, from the pyramids of Egypt to now, the principles of good leadership remain the same:

• Strategy
• Execution
• Personalized Talent Management
• Human Capability or Systems Building
• Personal Proficiency
• And throughout all that, being agile and resilient.

3. The Paradox of Leadership: It’s not either people or profits. You need to take care of your people and deliver results. Leaders need to navigate this paradox - going back and forth between the organization and the individual. Another area where we need to find balance is in Personalization, toggling between company Principles and individual Practices.

4. The second to last insight is that Work is about Value Creation: Dave said that as a leader, he wouldn’t worry about where you work, but about your ability to create value for the customer, no matter when and where that is. And, that he hopes that the organization will support everyone in their flexible needs so that people can take care of themselves, their children, and parents.

‍5. The last insight is that AI becomes an important part of how work will get done. We’ll start with the requirements of the job, the tasks to be done, and then think, where do I need full-timers, where do I need part-timers, and where can I apply technology? And this is a great future to imagine because AI can take over especially the meaningless work, so that people can do the high-value stuff.

6. And speaking of value, let’s conclude with Dave’s wish for the future. Work is not what I do, it’s what others get from what I do.

We hope you’ll love this episode and can put these insights to good use. Subscribe on FlexOS, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube for the latest episodes.

Like reading more than listening? Find the article on our website “The Playbook for Leadership That Impacts People AND Profits”.

Edie Goldberg is the Founder and President of E. L. Goldberg & Associates. She is a nationally recognized expert in talent management and the future of work. Her practice focuses on designing human resources processes and programs to attract, engage, develop, and retain Employees.

Edie was a Global Thought Leader in the Human Capital Practice at Towers Perrin. In addition to her strategic advisory work, she is the Chair of the Board for the SHRM Foundation and a member of the Board of Advisors for three HR Technology companies.

Her book, The Inside Gig, stems from this deep look into how companies need to adopt new approaches to work given changing business dynamics.In this conversation, we discover the following insights about the future of talent management throughout the employee lifecycle.

• Employees Want Purpose: More than ever, employees want purpose and meaning. They want to impact their team, company, or the world positively. Similarly, learning and growing (as Daniel Pink says: Mastery) can be very motivating. Managers can ensure that people continuously learn.
• Remote Culture, Goals and Motivation: We're not always together in hybrid and remote work. The sense of belonging is the glue that holds everyone together. People want a place to belong, so company culture is so important. This is also why goals are important: working together toward a common objective. Managers can help employees by having meaningful conversations about setting and achieving goals, which drives motivation, engagement, and performance.
• Training Managers: We need better support managers for successful hybrid and remote teams. First, to help them understand that management is about getting work done through other people, training them to do it well, and then recognizing them for success. We should also separate the leader of the work and the leader of the people. These are different things that require different skill sets. Don’t make people take on work that drains them.
• Fractional Work: Talent marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork connect people with work that matches their skills and interests. Edie believes we can apply that in a company too. Because we don’t know or leverage all of our employees' skills, experiences, passions, and interests. Even just giving them time to opt into projects they’re interested in could be a huge win for people, their teams, and the company.
• And I love Edie’s final note: If you’re not learning, you’re falling behind.

Find more Edie Goldberg on LinkedIn.We hope you’ll love this episode and can put these insights to good use. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube for the latest Future Work episodes. Like reading more than listening? Find the article on our website “The End of the Full-Time Job: How Fractional Work Finally Liberates Us”.

After working for Yahoo!, Jennifer became co-founder and CEO of The Dealmap. She joined Change.org as COO and president and played a leadership role at Facebook.

Jennifer founded Rising Team, a platform our teams at FlexOS and Dreamplex have loved using to easily run awesome team development sessions.

Jennifer writes about leadership for LinkedIn Influencers and Fortune and is a Stanford Graduate School of Business management lecturer. Her first book, Purposeful, about how we can be a movement starter, became a Wall Street Journal Bestseller.We discussed how managers can lead hybrid and remote teams successfully:

• It’s still about good management. While many things are different now, the basics of good management still stand. For Jennifer, these are the four C’s:
  • Clarify: Where are we going, what is the vision? How does your work relate to what we’re trying to accomplish together?
  • Coach: Great managers know each person on the team as an individual. Your preferences, working styles, talents, and how you want to be appreciated are unique.
  • Connect: How do you make the team feel like a team? This is what will make them effective.
  • Consistently: You have to do all these consistently and frequently. Keep sharing the mission, and keep investing in coaching and connecting.
• Managers are more important than ever but struggle. Jennifer chose the identity and language because she believes great managers are like sports coaches. But managers are struggling the most; they’re the least supported.
• Companies need to support managers better. Companies also need to invest more in manager’s ability to lead well by:
  • Setting the right high expectations
  • Offer the support to get there
  • Require their action and delivery

From her experience in non-profits, Jennifer saw that managers can become truly empowered when companies provide these three elements.

• Psychological safety is key in the future of work. Jennifer explains that psychological safety is when people feel safe to express their thoughts, ideas, and concerns without fear of negative consequences. Google’s Project Aristotle found that it directly creates high-performing teams. It has four stages:
  • Inclusion Safety, Learner Safety, Collaborator Safety, And Challenger Safety. People feel safe for what they bring and are included in their preferences and talents.
  • Some quick tips:
  • Be vulnerable. Jennifer shares the importance of the team leader going first.
  • Include all voices. Ask a question and let people write down their thoughts first so there’s room for everyone’s voice, including introverts.
  • Ask good questions. You want to ask questions like ‘Is anything missing?’ or ‘What do you see that could be wrong here?’ Ask questions that invite people to point out.
• Traditions are critical in distributed teams. As Jennifer is now running a remote team, she highlights the importance of rituals.
• Practice F.O.W.M. People don’t lie on their deathbed saying, I wish that one more OKR. They’ll think about the people that mattered to them and the things they did that mattered. So forget about FOMO and focus on FOWM.

Brian Elliott spent 25 years building high-growth companies and leading teams as a startup CEO, a leader at Google, and then an executive at Slack and Salesforce, where he co-founded Future Forum, a think tank focused on redesigning work through data and dialog.

Brian is the author of the WSJ bestseller, “How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to do the Best Work of Their Lives,” he’s been published in the Wall Street Journal, HBR, Bloomberg, the Economist, and other publications.

Today, we will discuss how Future Forum’s research helped Slack transition from in-person to hybrid remote work, all the lessons Brian learned during this time, and how you can implement them yourself, including:

1. When matters more than where. The first key insight from Future Forum is that while we talk about location flexibility and how many days a week people should be in the office, time matters more than place. Giving people uninterrupted time to do deep asynchronous work boosts productivity more than location choice.
2. Online and offline connections. The second great insight is that even today, leaders don’t connect people well online and offline. When managing remote teams, getting people together and focusing on building relationships is critical, even if it’s just once a quarter.
3. Create an inclusive environment. The third insight is to rethink how flexibility can drive inclusion in the workplace. As Brian shared, from their data, women and caregivers wanted flexibility more than men. He also noted vast differences between countries and their policies that drive the need.
4. Bring not just data but storytelling and practical ideas. Storytelling and practical ideas help build your case for flexibility better. Brian gives a great example of how we can gain the effect of a whiteboard session without being together offline.
5. We can’t lift and shift. Instead of copy-pasting things that worked in an office, rethink them completely. Like meetings – do you really need all of them? What can be handled through online collaboration? Besides this, rethink mentorship, onboarding, and training. Think about the outcome you’re trying to achieve and the best way to get there without holding on to how we used to do things.
6. Supporting managers. Whether you’re managing a team or managing managers, we need to rethink how we support managers. We need to give people who don’t want to be managers that opportunity and provide practical support for key management elements like asking good one-on-one questions, running virtual icebreakers before team meetings, and understanding each others’ personal user manuals.
7. Finally, on a more personal level, Brian shared two great personal lessons that we should all take to heart.- There is no straightforward route to achieving success. It’s important not to become overly concerned with titles or the size of your team. Prioritize your personal development and the tangible impact you can make.- Unlearn the idea that you need to know everything as a leader. The idea of ‘seldom wrong, never in doubt,’ isn’t true. Set ambitious goals but then make it a team effort, ask for help, and achieve it together.

We hope you’ll love this episode and can put these insights to good use.

Today, we’re kicking off our second season with an extra-long episode featuring Professor Nick Bloom of Stanford University.

Nick has been researching work from home for over 20 years. He was heavily involved with policy, including meeting President Obama and speaking at the White House 2014 Working Families Summit.

Nick isn’t just collecting and analyzing data on tens of thousands of employees, he also consults with 100s of CEOs and managers. His work has been covered extensively by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC, Financial Times, and the Economist.

He was called the “Prophet of remote work” by Fortune Magazine, “America’s best work-from-home expert” by Business Insider, elected to the Bloomberg 50, and one of our 55 Top Remote Thought Leaders.

Today, we talk about why the media is often wrong about hybrid and remote work, what people want from work, why the office as we knew it is never coming back, and what the opportunities are for employees globally now that work is becoming more remote, including:

• Media versus data. The media is incentivized to paint remote work negatively. Nick’s panel data and another source like Kastle, which measures actual swipe-ins into the office, are flat in 2023; people are not returning more than before. Data over anecdotes, as Nick says.
• Remote = positive. Nick’s research shows no real negative impact on productivity. As he says, offering remote working days is a huge benefit for employees who value it about the same as an 8% pay increase.
• Intentional office days. Don’t let people return to the office to be on Zoom calls. As Nick said, focus on one-on-ones, mentoring, group meetings, problem-solving, training, presentations, etcetera. People come back to the office to meet other people.
• Offices won’t disappear. There will be roles that always remain on site, and therefore offices will not disappear. But they will have to be good enough to want to spend time in, which means bad news for ugly, old offices and office buildings.
• Global employees’ opportunities. If we can make jobs remote, people in Southeast Asia can take much better-paying jobs while working where they live. This is an amazing opportunity for our region.
• Outcomes, not keystrokes. Nick calls this the Marissa Meyer point, referring to when she took over Yahoo when it was a fully remote company. We need a better framework for measuring and evaluating good work to successfully manage hybrid and remote teams. And to be clear, this is not surveillance, it's not watching keystrokes.

I hope the insights from this interview serve as a reminder or even a wake-up call to follow the data and focus on giving people more flexibility to mold work to their lives rather than vice versa.

Start with people, then design work schedules, work days, and offices around them.

For more Nick, follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter. Find all of Nick’s research data on WFHResearch.

Future Work is the bi-weekly podcast from Daan van Rossum, CEO of FlexOS – the platform that helps hybrid and remote managers level up their leadership game.

Find all episodes on our website, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other podcasting platforms. Find the article on our website!

On this episode of Future Work, we welcome Renee Kida, a high-impact human resource leader with over 20 years of corporate experience in Japan and APEC at companies like Google, Goto, and Ikea.

Some of Renee's many areas of expertise include project management, change management, diversity and inclusion initiatives, client relationship management, team leadership, talent management initiatives, and organizational development.

Join us as we hear about:

• Renee’s journey from the US to Asia, and into HR
• Cultural differences in markets like Japan, Singapore, and Indonesia
• Why HR needs to understand the broader context they are working in
• High-context versus low-context cultures in communication styles
• The challenges of managing people
• Why and how managers should tap into HR for guidance, programs, and frameworks
• The importance of building relationships for remote managers
• The need for open communication, understanding of working preferences, setting expectations, and providing accountability
• Why and how senior teams need to model proactive behavior
• How to prioritize people management alongside the manager’s own work
• The difficulty and importance of transitioning from an Individual Contributor to a People Manager

Ensure you listen to the end to hear about Renee’s mantra of ‘Consider, act, reflect, reiterate” as a framework for a better work-life.

Find Renee on LinkedIn.

Future Work is the bi-weekly podcast from Daan van Rossum, CEO of FlexOS – the platform that helps hybrid and remote managers level up their leadership game.

Find all episodes on our website, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other podcasting platforms. Like reading more than listening?

Find How Managers Can Make a Difference in Hybrid and Remote Teams on our website!

Future Work is the bi-weekly podcast from Daan van Rossum, CEO of FlexOS – the platform that helps hybrid and remote managers level up their leadership game.

In this episode, we’re joined by Antony Slumbers, a globally recognized speaker, advisor, and writer on proptech and space-as-a-service and one of our Top 55 Remote Work Influencers.

Antony is a serial entrepreneur who founded and exited several proptech software companies and now consults real estate boards on their transformation, technology, and innovation strategies.

He writes an influential blog at antonyslumbers.com, is a prolific Tweeter (@antonyslumbers), and teaches the online ‘#SpaceAsAService - The Trillion Dollar Hashtag’ course.In the episode, Antony discusses:

• The paradox of technology and the need for humans to become "exponential humans" in a world of exponential technology.
• Why we need to get much better at abstract and critical thinking.
• The integration of AI and its impact on the workforce in startups and enterprises.
• How employees can be ahead of companies embracing new technologies.
• How hybrid remote work has changed the world of work fundamentally.
• How applying an office-centric way of working to hybrid is doomed to fail.
• The need for companies to design experiences that cater to individual and team needs.
• The innovator’s dilemma and how companies should reinvent themselves, learning lessons from Microsoft and intel.

How technology should address significant global challenges, focusing on building a beautiful world and finding purpose in making a positive impact.

Want more Antony? We understand! Find him today on LinkedIn, Twitter, and his website.

Like reading more than listening? Find We Need to Become Exponential Humans on our website!

Future Work is the bi-weekly podcast from Daan van Rossum, CEO of FlexOS – the platform that helps hybrid and remote managers level up their leadership game.

On this episode, we welcome Christie Hoffman, who hosts the highly popular Flip Flops & People Ops podcast, is a Brand Ambassador + Workplace Experience Strategist at Pingboard, and a recently crowned Top 55 Remote Work Influencer.

Join us and hear answers to all your questions on employee engagement best practices:

• What is employee engagement, really?
• How do you define employee engagement?
• What’s the difference between employee engagement and employee experience?
• How can we improve employee engagement?
• How can I prepare my first employee engagement survey?
• What can managers do? And what’s HR’s role?

Click here to find Christie’s magical employee engagement survey workshop and don’t forget to familiarize yourself with the 3 survey formats available!

And, listen to the end to hear why and how managers can take care of themselves before they take care of others – something we can’t overlook in our never-ending quest for engaged team members!

Need more Christie? We understand! Find her today on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. Like reading more than listening?

Find Employee Engagement Best Practices from a Pro on our website!

Future Work is the bi-weekly podcast from Daan van Rossum, CEO of FlexOS – the platform that helps hybrid and remote managers level up their leadership game.

On this episode, we welcome Dror Poleg, an economic historian researching technology's impact on how people work and live. His insights have been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Financial Times, NBC, Bloomberg, The New Yorker, The Times of India, China Daily, and beyond.

Dror is the author of Rethinking Real Estate, an award-winning book that predicted the current reshuffle of offices, homes, and cities. He regularly delivers keynotes at public and private gatherings for industry-leading companies such as UBS, Bank of America, HSBC, Recruit Holdings, BCG, AvalonBay, CBRE, Hines, British Land, Liberty Mutual, Dubai Holding, Cushman & Wakefield, and others.

During our discussion, Dror highlights the various ways work is evolving, including the impact of remote work on productivity and lifestyle.

• Offices have set how we live and work for a long time and what's about to change.
• Remote work has opened up new possibilities for people to work from anywhere and live the life they want.
• The trend of talent decentralization has also become more prominent due to remote work.
• Assessing creative work with traditional metrics such as hours worked or lines of code is no longer sufficient.
• The "scalable class" concept refers to individuals who can achieve their goals independently by leveraging AI and the internet.
• and much more.

The interview concludes with Dror’s advice for young professionals to take risks and share their expertise with a specific audience, even starting with the least expensive methods. Tune in to gain practical insights from Dror Poleg on the changing nature of work.

Connect with Dror Poleg on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Like reading more than listening? Find After Offices: How Life and Work Will Change Forever on our website!

Welcome to another episode of our Future Work podcast with your host, Daan van Rossum, CEO at FlexOS.

In this episode, we have a special guest, Corinne Murray, the Founder and CEO of Agate, a strategic consulting studio that shepherds companies as they undergo major organizational transformations around how, where, and when work gets done successfully in the post-COVID era.

Corinne has an extensive Workplace and Real Estate background, working across various sectors, including occupiers, consultants, landlords, and service providers, including WeWork, Gensler, and RXR. Her ultimate goal is to create sustainable and beneficial relationships between people and their workplaces.

Throughout the episode, Corinne shares her valuable insights on transforming the workplace experience, including:

• The shift from defining the workplace as a physical location to a broader concept includes the entire digital ecosystem where work is done.
• Organizations must consider designing the workplace with intention and user experience in mind, similar to any other consumer product or service.
• The importance of in-person and virtual interactions and the need to strengthen weak ties.
• The return-to-office trend and the need for organizations to focus on activities that are best supported by physical presence.
• The friction between online meetings and the lack of suitable spaces in the office leads to frustration among employees.
• The importance of conducting an audit of existing work environments and involving employees in identifying challenges and areas for improvement.
• The need for organizations to address universal frustrations and solutions in a people-centered manner.

Corinne's expertise and passion for creating meaningful workplace experiences shine through in this episode, and her insights undoubtedly provide valuable guidance for organizations navigating the changing work landscape.

Connect with Corinne Murray on LinkedIn.

This podcast is sponsored by FlexOS, unleashing the full potential of hybrid and remote teams. Go to our website and grab your management toolkit today.