Work and the Future

In this episode of Work and the Future, economist and keynote speaker Linda Nazareth talks about the labour market and work trends as part of the Economic and Labour Market Update. She covers:

Linda Nazareth is an economist, futurist and expert on the future of work. The author of five books including her most recent Working it Out: Getting Ready for the Redefined World of Work (2023), she is also a regular columnist for the Globe and Mail and the Host of podcast ‘Work and the Future’.

As a sought-after keynote speaker, Linda’s audiences have spanned a range of audiences and have included clients such as The Economist Magazine, LVMH, American Express, and the Bank of Montreal all of whom have benefitted from the way that she can take huge ideas and distill them into information that organizations can use for their own strategic planning purposes.

Ready to navigate the future of work at your next event? Linda Nazareth helps organizations understand and prepare for workplace transformation. Visit lindanazareth.com to learn more about booking Linda for your conference or corporate event.

The post Episode 136: Economic and Labour Market Update appeared first on LINDA NAZARETH.

Organizations have long been criticized for giving scant thought to employee well-being – but is that now changing? Linda Nazareth talks to Mark C. Crawley, author of the new book The Power of Employee Well-Being about why that seems to be the case, and why that will be good for both workers and organizations.

In this episode of Work and the Future, economist and keynote speaker Linda Nazareth talks to Mark C. Crowley, author of The Power of Employee Well-Being. They discuss:  

Guest:

Mark C. Crowley, a pioneering leader and bestselling author, is leading a revolution in workplace leadership. With twenty-five years in the competitive financial services industry, he rose to national roles, earning Leader of the Year for his emotionally connected, heart-centered approach that drove exceptional performance and employee growth. On the vanguard of leadership transformation, his book Lead from the Heart (2011, second edition 2023) disrupted conventional management with research proving traditional methods undermine employee achievement. Now taught in eleven universities, it ignited a global movement for humane leadership. In The Power of Employee Well-Being, he advances this vision, demonstrating that thriving teams fuel organizational success. Mark’s Lead from the Heart podcast, ranked in the top 1.5 percent globally, reaches 175+ countries. A sought-after speaker, Fast Company contributor, and organizational culture consultant, he shapes modern workplaces. A UC San Diego graduate, Mark lives in La Jolla, California.

Linda’s Take:

I first spoke to Mark on this podcast in 2020, at a time when Covid was changing the way that people worked. At the time, Mark was optimistic about the ways that the disruption might improve the ways that organizations treated workers and he believes that in the years since things have changed for the better. We talked about why some organizations realize the importance of managing well, and what that means in practical terms.

I enjoyed speaking with Mark and hearing his upbeat take on the state of the workplace. My own vantage point is that of an economist, and as I watch the job market tightening I worry that a lot of the progress we have made over the past few years will be dialled back. Time will tell, but in the meantime any organization that sees the value of employee engagement would be well-served to listen to Mark’s points.

Book Linda as your Keynote Speaker:

Linda Nazareth is an economist, futurist and expert on the future of work. The author of five books including her most recent Working it Out: Getting Ready for the Redefined World of Work (2023), she is also a regular columnist for the Globe and Mail and the Host of podcast ‘Work and the Future’. As a sought-after keynote speaker, Linda’s audiences have spanned a range of audiences and have included clients such as The Economist Magazine, LVMH, American Express, and the Bank of Montreal all of whom have benefitted from the way that she can take huge ideas and distill them into information that organizations can use for their own strategic planning purposes.

Ready to navigate the future of work at your next event? Linda Nazareth helps organizations understand and prepare for workplace transformation. Visit lindanazareth.com to learn more about booking Linda for your conference or corporate event.

The post Episode 135: Are Organizations Seeing the Value of Employee Well-Being? appeared first on LINDA NAZARETH.

Using Artificial Intelligence in the hiring process is becoming mainstream, but is that a good or a bad thing? Organizations are embracing the new technology, but there are huge implications for privacy and security, as well as ethical considerations involved. Linda Nazareth talks about the implications of using AI in hiring with Tamara Elsahyouni of Talent Engagement Consulting about what is happening, and what should happen if organizations want to get the most out of the tools at hand.

In this episode of Work and the Future, economist and keynote speaker Linda Nazareth talks to Tamara Elsahyouni, Founder of Talent Engagement Consulting. They discuss:

Guest:

Tamara ElSahyouni

Founder, Talent Engagement Consulting

Tamara is a seasoned Talent Acquisition Consultant, HR Strategist, and Executive Coach with over 20 years of experience across diverse industries. After holding different recruitment and HR leadership roles, Tamara leveraged her expertise to help small to mid-sized organizations navigate growth and development through strategic talent acquisition. She is fluent in both English and French, making TEC a valuable resource for a globalized market.

Linda’s Take:

Artificial Intelligence is not going to go away as a driver or change or a disruptor to the economy so it is important to know as much about it as possible. This conversation with Tamara was really enlightening since she was able to share the things she was learning and observing from the frontlines.

One takeway for me from this conversation is that we are in the very early days of understanding the ways that AI, and specifically Generative AI, will change the future of work. Right now we are in kind of an experimental stage as organizations try different things and see what works best for them. In five years, or even in one year, we might be in a completely different place but either way there is no turning back.

Book Linda as your Keynote Speaker:

Linda Nazareth is an economist, futurist and expert on the future of work. The author of five books including her most recent Working it Out: Getting Ready for the Redefined World of Work (2023), she is also a regular columnist for the Globe and Mail and the Host of podcast ‘Work and the Future’. As a sought-after keynote speaker, Linda’s audiences have spanned a range of audiences and have included clients such as The Economist Magazine, LVMH, American Express, and the Bank of Montreal all of whom have benefitted from the way that she can take huge ideas and distill them into information that organizations can use for their own strategic planning purposes.

Ready to navigate the future of work at your next event? Linda Nazareth helps organizations understand and prepare for workplace transformation. Visit lindanazareth.com to learn more about booking Linda for your conference or corporate event.

The post Episode 134: What Will AI Mean for the Future of Hiring? appeared first on LINDA NAZARETH.

Why Has Hiring Become Harder? Linda Nazareth speaks to Alexandra Tillo of Indeed Canada about why a surge in applicants is making it harder to hire the best talent and what organizations and job-seekers can do to improve the process.

In this episode of Work and the Future economist and keynote speaker Linda Nazareth talks to Alexandra Tillo, Senior Talent Marketing Consultant at Indeed Canada about why hiring has become more difficult. They discuss:

Guest:

Alexandra Tillo is a seasoned Senior Talent Marketing Consultant at Indeed Canada, where she partners with HR and Talent Acquisition leaders at major Canadian organizations to deliver best practices, thought leadership, and data-driven insights. With over eight years at Indeed, Alexandra brings a wealth of experience, having transitioned from national sales roles to her current position in marketing.

Originally from France and based in Toronto for over a decade, she is fluently bilingual and has a deep understanding of the Canadian hiring landscape. Her career has been defined by close client collaboration, leveraging her in-market expertise to meet client needs and drive strategic hiring outcomes.

Outside of work, Alexandra is an avid traveller and a self-proclaimed white wine connoisseur.”

Linda’s Take:

These days it seems like there are two separative narratives on the state of the labour market. Job seekers are frustrated and talk about sending out hundreds of applications and getting little response. At the same time, organizations say that it is difficult to find the talent that they need. Interestingly, the tech now available (including AI) is making the process both easier and more difficult. Speaking to Alexandra really highlighted for me how complex a process it is to find the right talent to take us forward, and what is at stake when it comes to getting it right.

Book Linda as your Keynote Speaker:

Linda Nazareth is an economist, futurist and expert on the future of work. The author of five books including her most recent Working it Out: Getting Ready for the Redefined World of Work (2023), she is also a regular columnist for the Globe and Mail and the Host of podcast ‘Work and the Future’. As a sought-after keynote speaker, Linda’s audiences have spanned a range of audiences and have included clients such as The Economist Magazine, LVMH, American Express, and the Bank of Montreal all of whom have benefitted from the way that she can take huge ideas and distill them into information that organizations can use for their own strategic planning purposes.

Ready to navigate the future of work at your next event? Linda Nazareth helps organizations understand and prepare for workplace transformation. Visit lindanazareth.com to learn more about booking Linda for your conference or corporate event.

The post Episode 133: Why Has Hiring Become Harder appeared first on LINDA NAZARETH.

In this episode of Work and the Future, economist and keynote speaker Linda Nazareth talks about the labour market and work trends. She covers:

About Linda Nazareth:

Linda Nazareth is an economist, futurist and expert on the future of work. The author of five books including her most recent Working it Out: Getting Ready for the Redefined World of Work (2023), she is also a regular columnist for the Globe and Mail and the Host of podcast ‘Work and the Future’.

As a sought-after keynote speaker, Linda’s audiences have spanned a range of audiences and have included clients such as The Economist Magazine, LVMH, American Express, and the Bank of Montreal all of whom have benefitted from the way that she can take huge ideas and distill them into information that organizations can use for their own strategic planning purposes.

Book Linda as your Keynote Speaker:

Ready to navigate the future of work at your next event? Linda Nazareth helps organizations understand and prepare for workplace transformation. Visit lindanazareth.com to learn more about booking Linda for your conference or corporate event.

The post Episode 132: Linda’s Labor Market Update appeared first on LINDA NAZARETH.

In this episode of Work and the Future, economist and keynote speaker Linda Nazareth talks to Tara Chklovski, founder and CEO of Technovation. They discuss:

Guest:

Tara Chklovski, founder and CEO of Technovation, is reshaping opportunities for young women in technology. Inspired by her experiences growing up in India and working as an aerospace engineer, she developed a widely-adopted education model that combines mentorship, hands-on learning, and entrepreneurship to prepare girls to thrive in tech. Named by Techcrunch as “teaching the next generation of AI innovators,” she has built Technovation into a movement reaching 400,000+ people across 160+ countries. Her research shows that AI education for girls could unlock a $200 billion opportunity for the world economy. Through Technovation and The AI Forward Alliance (TAIFA), she’s preparing 25 million young women to lead in AI innovation and tackle global challenges.

Linda’s Take:

I enjoyed this conversation with Tara, particularly her take on why she started Technovation. Coming as she did from a low-income country, she was intrigued by the fact that in a high-income country like the U.S. young girls were being discouraged, in her view, from gaining skills in tech and in math. She started Technovation to give young women a fun way to gain technical skills and in the process get them excited about working in the sector.

I also asked Tara her views about how the AI will change work (a standard question for all my guests these days) and she answered honestly that she saw a huge disruption ahead. Service workers, in her view, might be protected but knowledge workers will be very vulnerable. She also noted that women are not learning about AI as quickly as men, and that that puts them particularly at risk as organizations change how they get work done.

Book Linda as your Keynote Speaker:

Ready to navigate the future of work at your next event? Linda Nazareth helps organizations understand and prepare for workplace transformation. Visit lindanazareth.com to learn more about booking Linda for your conference or corporate event.

The post Episode 131: How Do We Get More Women into the Tech Sector? Economist Linda Nazareth talks to Tara Chklovski of Technovation appeared first on LINDA NAZARETH.

In this episode of Work and the Future, economist and keynote speaker Linda Nazareth talks to Pablo Listingart, Founder of ComIT about why tech workers are frustrated with their work. They discuss:

Guest:

Pablo Listingart

Founder and Executive Director, ComIT

Pablo Listingart is the Founder and Executive Director at ComIT, a Canadian charity that helps people to overcome employment barriers. Since 2016, ComIT has been working with those less fortunate and highly talented, who are in need of a low-cost training strategy, to help them take an active role in the local workforce. 

ComIT has expanded its program nation-wide, helping over 500 people per year, offering them full access to a tailored IT education so they can take their rightful role in the Canadian economy. 

Nominated CBC Manitoba Future 40 in 2020, Pablo was featured by the Federal Government of Canada on their #ImmigrationMatters campaign where his story and work was shared to portrait the importance of immigrants in the future of the country. 

In 2021, ComIT launched along with Google Canada and the support of organizations such as Indspire, Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs and many others, its Recoding Futures program for Indigenous learners, reaching people across the country with an interest in pursuing a career in IT, where over 1000 people already participated in the trainings, from coast to coast to coast. 

Raised in Buenos Aires, Pablo is the youngest child of a low-mid class family and has called Canada home for 8 years. He holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and an MBA, and has worked in the past for IT corporations such as Microsoft and IBM.

Linda’s Take:

The tech sector is going through a transition of sorts and that is giving pause to many people who assumed that it was always going to be a source of well-paying, stable jobs. Tech is still and will continue to be an important and leading-edge industry, but my discussion with Pablo was a good reminder that all industries are now in flux and that there are no guarantees of stability for workers from any. I enjoyed Pablo’s upbeat take on things though, and appreciated hearing his views on the future of the sector as AI becomes more mainstream.

The ComIt survey on worker attitudes is in sync with everything I have observed about workers over the past few years. In all industries, people want to be heard and supported, and organizations that realize that have a huge advantage when it comes to holding on to top talent. 

Book Linda as your Keynote Speaker

Ready to navigate the future of work at your next event? Linda Nazareth helps organizations understand and prepare for workplace transformation. Visit lindanazareth.com to learn more about booking Linda for your conference or corporate event.

The post Episode 130: Why are Tech Workers Unhappy? appeared first on LINDA NAZARETH.

Back to work mandates are all the rage these days but they may not work out the way that organizations expect. The language around the mandates suggests that top performers understand the need to be at the office and want to be there and if the slackers do not then they are welcome to quit. What if the opposite is true though? What if the best performers are the ones who will quit if they are forced back to in person work?

To talk about the issues around ending remote work, Work and the Future host Linda Nazareth is joined on this episode by Brian Elliott, the CEO at Work Forward and author of How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives. They discuss the issues around remote work and the challenges that leaders are facing right now and what that means for work and the future.

Transcript:

Welcome to Work and the Future, a podcast about tomorrow with your host,

Linda Nazareth.

Linda Nazareth 

Well, hello. Thank you for joining us today. We’ll return to work mandates for all the rage these days. The U .S. government has ordered workers back to the office, but so many companies in the private sector, including Amazon, Google, IBM, JPMorgan Chase. More than that, though the language we’re hearing around it is all pretty harsh. They’re kind of an implication that those who want to work from home are in some way slackers and they’re welcome to quit if they won’t. Well my guest today thinks that the exact opposite might be true and that if you force people back to the office you’re going to lose your best performers. His name is Brian Elliott and he’s an executive advisor and speaker as well as the co -author of How the Future Works Leading Flexible teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives. Now, Brian has done work on holding on to your top performers, how you do that. And he does think that some of the decisions being made now might turn out to be short -sighted. I had a really good conversation with Brian about all the things that organizations are facing now and workers are facing and how maybe we should be taking a longer look at this. He has some really some good insights here, please stay with us to hear it.

Linda Nazareth

Well, are  back to work mandates a good way to lose your best performers? To talk about that, I’m joined by Brian Elliott. He’s CEO of WorkForward and author of How the Future Works. Brian, thank you so much for doing this. 

Brian Elliott

Great to be with you Linda. Thanks for asking me. 

Linda Nazareth 

You know, it’s a very topical subject. Back to work mandates are everywhere, but I’d like to talk about your own career first, how you ended up in a place where you’re advising companies on this. 

Brian Elliott

Yeah, so I startedoff as a consultant way, way, way back when, in the 1990s, when everybody worked in an office, because by the way, the internet barely existed, jumped into tech back in the 90s and was a startup CEO for numbers. Then in 2020, when the world sort of changed around us from the pandemic, I had to do something that was a lot of fun and something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, which is start a think tank called Future Forum. So I spent the next four years along with the team digging into what was working for people and what wasn’t during and post pandemic when it comes to technology adoption, belonging inside of organizations, burnout, and this whole topic of flexibility in the workplace and what’s working and what’s not. So these days, I spent a lot of my time working with executives on how are you going to adapt your organization? Because we all know that what worked for us in the past may not work for us in the future, especially given all the changes from a technology perspective, generations and demographics that are going on, global competition, generative AI, you name it.  And so how do we adapt our organizations to be sort of fit for purpose in that world? And a big part of that continues to be, unfortunately, how many days a week should somebody show up in an office, which is the silliest of arguments for a bunch of reasons, but undoubtedly we’ll get into that.

Linda Nazareth

 Yeah. I believe it’s very silly, but gee, it seems like a lot of high -level people are saying, this is the way to go. the argument now is it’s all about productivity. We can’t be as productive if we’re not all together. I mean, some of the companies you mentioned, Google and the like, and U .S. federal government are all over this. Let’s get your thoughts on productivity. How does that go? 

Brian Elliott 

Yeah. Let’s get into the extremes. A lot of this gets painted at the extremes, right? I’ve worked with companies that have gone to extremes in both directions, and extremes generally don’t work because most people don’t want to be fully remote. They also don’t want to be five days a week in the office. They want something in the middle. And the key question is, is your team all co -located I the first place, or are they distributed across cities and locations? Meaning, more often these days, what you see inside of organizations is, I may be working with somebody who has a time zone away from me. Commuting to the office, if most of my work is being done with people who sit in other offices, it’s not the office that’s the center of where work gets done, it’s all our digital tools and communication. So that’s one factor that plays out in all of this. But the bigger thing that sits underneath this is people do want to  be together on a regular basis for collaboration, for connection, for building gathering. The answers usually lie not in a top -down directive from a CEO, but figuring out what works for a sales team versus an engineering team, for example. Reality is when you do the research and you look at the studies, there are lots of benefits to being together with your team on a somewhat regular basis. 

The productivity data is all over the map.  It is. The most negative productivity data comes from a study done in India in 2020, which showed that remote workers were 20 % less productive than they were when they were in the office. The way they measured productivity was how many hours did it take those people to get a body of work done? Mind you, they weren’t paying the people hourly. They were paying them on the basis of the salaries that they made. I

worked with engineers in India in 2020. They were tethering off their phones. There was a pandemic going on. They were forced to work from home in conditions that were absolutely horrible and not conducive to good work. They were working extra hours to get the job done because it was much harder. So under those conditions, we shouldn’t be surprised, right? What a lot of firms have realized, though, is that measuring productivity is really challenging and hard. What we should be measuring is what are the results that people are creating. And instead of relying on measuring activity, meaning is somebody sending out a bunch of emails, how many hours a day are they clicking on their keyboard? Are we measuring the results? Are we measuring the basis on which people are getting work done? That shift to performance management for outcomes does a couple things. It aligns your team with the sort of objectives of the business in the first place and it creates a more level playing field for people. It’s hard work because you have to train leaders on how to be good at managing people for result-based performance as opposed to not. But we also all know and we can cite people who may be showing up in an office five days a week but they’re online shopping or they’re working on their second job or they’re not they’re working that hard in the first place. So most of the arguments about productivity have been put aside. If you read the recent pronouncements from an Andy Jassy or Jamie Dimon, they didn’t even mention productivity. 

Linda Nazareth

 Okay, let’s take that a bit at the time. Yeah, you forgot March Madness and selling cookies when we talk about productivity. But okay, take a Jamie Dimon. They’re writing these directives or letters or telling how it’s going to be. Is that because they’ve looked at these numbers? Is it because they’ve heard from their staff that it’s not working or is it because of something they themselves believe? Where are they coming from? 

Brian Elliott 

I’ve had this conversation with a lot of HR leaders, especially in the past couple of months again. More often than not, this is a CEO who is making a unitary decision because they feel like they need to have more control over what’s going on. They are returning to an office themselves that they find to be quieter than they want it to be. And you may even get the situation where more than one CHRO has said this to me. We said three days a week and what we’re getting is about two. And the CEO has ticked off because we said three, why are we not getting three? And there’s nothing in our productivity data that shows any real issues. There’s no correlation to time in the office and performance, but they just want to get people back in the office. That’s a broadset of issues. 

There’s also some really interesting narrow ones. Amazon has a data-driven culture. At Amazon, you do not make decisions without data to back it up. Their inability to produce data showing why five days a week in the office is better, let alone the three days they went to before that, is a big reason why you’re getting the employee uproar. What people are seeing and hearing in that is not a database decision. What they’re hearing is you don’t trust us. You don’t trust us to be working when we’re at home. And if you don’t trust your own employees, they also tend to drop engagement at the back end of this. There’s a couple other factors that are very clearly going on. One is what Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, before he got pushed out, said out loud, which is we want people to quit, right? We know that a five day a week return to office drive will get people to quit. The people that quit though are usually, may not be the people execs want to have quit. The biggest group that tends to leave are people who have marketable skills. They are your more skilled employees, your higher tenure employees, that other big tech firms that I know that have a two or three day a week hybrid policy or happily cherry picking off of Amazon right now. So you lose those people. 

The other people that you lose, and there’s a couple of pieces of research that show this are women by a three to one margin because that shift creates all kinds of shifts at home and mom more often than dad is the primary caregiver in the United States. And so, you know, you’re more likely to have women leave the organization than men. 

Linda Nazareth

Okay, but maybe arguably that’s okay with some of these guys. 

Brian Elliott 

That is the governmental intention here, is to shed people without segments, right? If you are a private, look, why they’re doing this on the federal government’s perspective, there are a lot better ways if you want to shrink the size of government than to do it this way, right? Not to mention the fact that half the federal government was already back in the office five days a week and 40 % in three days a week. And that’s only sub 2 % of the budget. So we’ll set all that aside. It’s the federal government, it’s political, they’re making a noise. Private sector, if you are doing this, you will lose talented people. You’re also counting on the fact that it’s a softer job market, right? And we’ve been in enough cycles that softer job markets don’t last forever. 

What you lose in this is you lose engagement of your own employees. You lose trust in your own employees. You do lose some of your talented people to your competitors, especially the smaller ones, 90 percent plus of all startups are flexible. But what happens the next time you want to hire people and bring more people back in? They’ll remember this. I do think there’s aspects of this that they’re counting on generative AI to have a knock on employees. So far, PWC put out a CEO survey just like early January showing that given generative AI, thus far, more CEOs have hired more people than decreased them. I think we’re a ways away from actually gen AI proving out that it can actually drive high levels of efficiency. But it’s certainly something that’s a lever that CEOs are counting on, to continue to sort of hold power over employees. I just, I personally know enough other CEOs who are not wanting to wield power in that way because they know that they don’t get the best out of their workforce when they do so. It’s a bit of game of like command and control suddenly re-exerts its head and that’s not proven to be successful long -term. So eventually the tides change and you’re more nimble competitors, you know, you alive. 

Linda Nazareth

Yeah, not for the public sector, but for the private sector and publicly traded companies. Is there an argument that this is coming from investors that, yes, you’re going to  improve the bottom line. So do the CEOs believe in this, or is this just a matter of, let’s make it look like we’re cutting costs? 

Brian Elliott 

 There’s a couple of factors here that play into that. One is you can track back a couple of years. By the way, this phenomenon is not new. We’ve had waves of returned office demands the past few years. There was a big one two years ago that was largely driven by activist investors. You could almost track the activist investor conversations at firms like Disney, Google /Alphabet, Amazon, Salesforce, look at activist investors showing up and within 30 to 60 days, an announcement about a return to office mandate being put in place, CEOs under pressure will respond to those types of pressures. Second thing is there are pressures also from Wall Street and very specific sectors. Commercial real estate has not had a good time post pandemic. And by the way, the push for the past couple of months has not made it any better. Vacancy rates in the United States in the office sector hit an all -time high at

the end of 24. Mortgage delinquencies hit an all -time high at the end of 2024. The push has not been largely successful, partly because for every CEO mandating five days a week back in the office, there’s two others that are sitting there saying one of two things. Either one, that’s great. You go for it. I’m going to steal your talent and I’ll be more flexible than you. There’s another one that’s just like, “This is not a fight I want to have as a CEO.” My firm, we said three days a week, four years ago. Yeah, we’re not getting three all the time, but we’re getting good enough performance out of it. If I really want my people to redesign how they’re working using JIN AI, for example, I’m going to have to be able to reinvent how we work. I’m going to have to have those employees engaged with me. Picking a fight with them over three versus five days a week in the office is not going to help make that happen. I think distribution of leadership is starting to emerge. 

Linda Nazareth

You talked to all these companies, Brian. Let’s remind ourselves that not every company has gone this route. Some are sticking to the hybrid or even fully remote. Which are the ones that you consider is being successful at that?

Brian Elliott 

 Sure. I’ll give you some examples. It’s actually 68 % of U .S. firms have some form of flexibility. That hasn’t changed for like Q2, Q3, Q4 flex index tracks like 9 ,000 US companies. Number didn’t change at all towards the end of last year. There’s examples in the tech sector, firms like Atlassian and Dropbox and others where you’d sort of understand they’ve got more distributed talent because it’s easier for them to do so.They’ve got tools that they’re really good at using in this. But it’s also places like Allstate, one of my favorite examples, and I’ve talked to them, written case studies about them, 50 ,000 -person insurance firm. What they figured out is there’s no one -size -fits -all. Claims agents that do a very measurable job do in -person training for a couple of weeks, and then they are in -person for the next six weeks, let’s call it, while they prove out to be capable in the job and learn the ropes of it. After that, they can work wherever. The reason why is it’s a very individual driven job, right? And it’s measurable. You can measure their performance. Designers, on the other hand, are in the office three days a week because that team decided that the right answer is for them to be co -located in together three days a week. Analysts are together once a month because that’s the pattern that works for them. So you got to think about this from like a work design perspective of not what’s the right answer for an entire massively scale distributed organization with multiple business units but what’s right down to the ways in which we work at a function and group level makes a lot more sense. 

H &R Block is another good example. Classic big Midwestern company had put a return office mandate in place. It wasn’t working. They literally reversed it and said this doesn’t make sense when instead what we could be doing is focusing on performance management, bring people together, especially people that are distributed across the US on a once a quarter basis to build connection and belonging with people that you otherwise would never see if you happen to stumble into an office and improve our retention of employees. Nick Williams got a great study in nature that shows the same thing, by the way, which is there’s a 35 percent decline in in attrition rates of moving to a hybrid schedule from the full -time office schedule You know, we all have reviews mine is that part of the failure of this if it has been a failure Is that managers haven’t been trained to manage the remote workforce, right? It’s been hard.  So it’s all coming from the C -suite. Some of them aren’t unhappy with how it is If you were going to give advice and

you do give advice to companies trying to make the success, how would you help those middle managers? First and foremost, it is how do you actually train them to manage people on the basis of performance? And that actually means that as executives, we also have to make some hard decisions, which is what’s most important, where the outcomes that we’re trying to drive. 

But the management by walking around default, meaning we promote somebody to a manager and we don’t really train them how to manage people on the basis of the results they generate, how to conduct good one -on ones, just those two basic rudimentary things are really the key starting point for making this work. And I think that has been a big part of the reason for failures of this is failures of management in a lot of ways. But training people on how to have the not once a year performance review, but the once a quarter adding minimum. Here’s what your top three objectives are for the next quarter. We on them, we know how we’re going to measure them so we can have a results -based conversation and we can talk about your professional development requires investment in those people and systems and training to do that. But if you do that, you get a lot better results out of it. You actually get people who actually, what happens, and I’ve worked with firms that have done this, you lower unwanted attrition, right? Because you’re treating people on the basis of their results on their showing up, you actually increase intended attrition. You actually can double or even triple the outward movement of people who are underperforming because you’re putting in place systems that are more regular and more thorough around performance management. From a CEO perspective, honestly, that’s often what they really need and what they really want, which is I want to know that we are taking care of both our high performers and we are dealing with our low performers. 

Linda Nazareth

You know, I see the whole remote thing as a bit of experiment, right? We tried it in 2020 under not ideal circumstances. We’ve gone back and forth. I never thought it was going to be a straight line. We’re going to say three days a week if anyone’s going to go with that. So now we’re going to the other extreme in some companies. When we get three years from now, five years from now, what do you think it’ll look like? 

Brian Elliott

We’re going to be One of the phrases that I love, this actually comes from Nick Bloom is, this whole thing looks very much like a duck. It’s calm on the surface, the number isn’t changing much while the churn underneath is fantastic. There’s a lot of companies that are a steady state, but there’s more that are like moving in and out of figuring this out and trying to make it work. By the time we’re five years from now, we will have come to the realization that this was a largely wasted set of energy and effort around this particular topic, because the skills basis on which people are able to generate good work, technology adoption are much bigger factors in organizational performance than days a week in the office. Some form of flexibility will be the norm. If we’re at 68 % in the US today, we’re going to be somewhere between 60 and 70 % five years from now. There will still be those people who are five days a week in the office come come hell or high water, but there’d be a lot of other people that will sit there and say, “This is working for us,” and we’re on to bigger problems and bigger challenges. 

Linda Nazareth

Let’s see what happens. Brian, thank you so much for joining me today. 

Brian Elliott 

 Linda, thanks for having me. 

Linda Nazareth

 Brian Elliott is the CEO of Work Forward and the author of How the Future Works. 

Well, that’s it for today. If you want to know more about Brian and his work, take a look at our shownotes. You can find them wherever you get your podcasts, but as well on my website lindanazreth .com. Now, if you did like this discussion about the future of work,  please take a moment, leave a rating or a review, wherever you get your podcasts, it will  help people to find us, and that will help keep these podcasts going.

If you want to connect with me, you can find me @lindanazareth .com. You can also find me at Instagram, @lindanazareth keynote speaker.  I’m also at X, which used to be Twitter at @relentlesseco. And I would love to hear from you however you want to connect.

Thank you so much for listening. And thanks as always to Stoakley Audio for audio production. 

The post Episode 129: Are Back to Work Mandates a Quick Way to Lose Top Performers? appeared first on LINDA NAZARETH.

Will ordering workers to return to the office make them less lonely? To talk about that Linda Nazareth is joined on this episode by Jim Frawley, the CEO and founder of executive development firm Bellwether. Jim is a consultant and coach who has studied and written about the the way that in-person work might be good for our mental health.

Guest:

Jim Frawley, CEO Bellwether

https://www.jimfrawley.com/

Announcer 

Welcome to Work and the Future, a podcast about tomorrow with your host, Linda Nazareth.

Linda Nazareth

Hello and thank you for joining us today. Well, it’s 2025 and one theme of the year is back to the office. I have some mixed feelings about that and we will explore those on the podcast this year as we go forward. But there are definitely some positives to being around people and interacting with them without using a screen. 

Now, we’ve been hearing a lot about loneliness lately, and it would seem that being around people, even if it’s just at work, is an effective way to deal with that. But just showing up at work is not necessarily really enough when it comes to forging real connections. 

My guest today has studied and written about the way in -person work might be good for our mental health. His name is Jim Frawley, and he is a coach consultant and the CEO and founder of Bellwether. That’s an executive development firm. Jim talked to me about the ways that workers can make connections at work and why that can be a very positive thing. It was a really interesting discussion. 

Please stay with us to hear it.

(upbeat music)

Linda Nazareth

Well, is going back to work going to solve the loneliness epidemic? To talk about that, I’m joined by Jim Frawley, he’s CEO and founder of Bellwether. Jim, thanks so much for doing this. 

Jim Frawley

Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited. 

Linda Nazareth

Well, it’s 2025 and everything is changing. Looks like one of the themes might be end of remote work, but we’ll come back to that in a second. I’m interested, first of all, in your background, because you’re talking about some interesting topics. How did you end up doing this? 

Jim Frawley

Yeah, background in a nutshell. I spent about almost 20 years in corporate, everything from executive communications to corporate training to business strategy. I jumped around, couldn’t really find my fit, was very frustrated with it. Turns out I’m very hostile to authority, so I decided to go out of my own. But I really earned my chops in corporate doing executive communications in the financial industry during the financial crisis in 2008. So I got really good access to senior leadership in terms of what are the decisions that need to be made? How do we communicate this under intense pressure? And I use that a lot, helping people

navigate through change today. 

Linda Nazareth

Well, one of the things we’re supposedly navigating now is this loneliness epidemic. You see it everywhere, right? Male loneliness, or loneliness in general, we’re not connecting, screens are the problem. What’s your perspective on that first? 

Jim Frawley

Yeah, I think it’s, you know, it really came to the, it’s been a challenge for a long time. It really came to the forefront with COVID, even though I don’t like to reference COVID because it was so long ago.

But what people realized, I think, during COVID was that they were stuck inside and they were forced to have conversations with themselves that they weren’t ready to have. And then when we think about, we look at what technology is telling us in terms of you’re a terrible person because I’m so great. Like we internalize these things where we just become overwhelmed with this idea of being social. We don’t know who we are as individuals. We don’t know how we present ourselves to other people. We don’t know how to be social. We don’t know how to have the small talk, how to, you know, we’re told how come up with your elevator pitch at a networking event and you have to have this script and everything’s got to be packaged. And we have lost, I would argue, just the comfortable space to be with other people with no agenda. And I think that’s an important focus point for me anyway for 2025. 

Linda Nazareth

Do you put this down to work? How important is work when it comes to making day -to -day connections? 

Jim Frawley

It’s incredibly important. I would say it for two reasons. It’s not just, so I put work under one of the categories of social interaction that you need. We need these micro interactions to feel part of something bigger. So when we’re having these interactions in the kitchen, we’re having these interactions with people in the hallway, whatever we’re doing, it reminds us that we have just these little tiny interactions even on the commute, the bus driver, that we’re part of a bigger community, but it also helps us articulate who we are as people. It helps us build resilience, and we nfight for the things that are important, and we go toe -to -toe and we interact with the people. We’re social beings, and so we need to interact with people in a social way, and when work takes up such a big portion of our lives, we need that big portion of our life to have the social component built into it, because it’s also, as we argue, work is such a big part of our purpose that we need to almost actively create a sense of community when we package so many things into the work that we do, our identity, our purpose, our time, or whatever else, our money, our income, everything, that we now have to actively put extra social work into that so that we can make it a more substantial and meaningful part of our lives. 

Linda Nazareth

You know, before I ask you about the types of connections that we are making or should be making, I’m going to ask you about remote work. I’m actually, I have very mixed feelings on this. I’m mostly in favor of at least a hybrid workforce. I know other people feel differently. What’s your big view on this?

Jim Frawley

It depends. I’ve seen some small organizations have complete remote work and they work incredibly well. Because they’ve been able to hire people who are capable of working remotely incredibly, incredibly well. What I’ve seen is the more people go back into the office, the more the business benefits. And so there is a benefit for the individual for the loneliness component and all of this. I think the big challenge is one individual might be more productive at home is a big argument. But the collective group is not necessarily more productive as a group, as when they’re all working together in the office. 

Now, organizations now have to create meaning to coming into the office. You’re not just going to come into the office, it’s sent on a Zoom call to waste of everything. So the reason people come into the office is to collaborate and to challenge ideas and to have different types of conversations with people from different departments that you normally wouldn’t see. There are a lot of benefits to the business, but there are also a lot of benefits to the individual.

You get more exposure passing the senior executive in the hallway, maybe she’s the head of marketing and that you wouldn’t normally see on a call because we’re so narrow in our groups with who we speak to, that getting more visibility in the office is a really, really, it’s a really good thing. So I’m pro back to the office to a point, but I understand why people don’t want to go either. 

Linda Nazareth

Yeah, it’s an interesting point. You’re right. The visibility helps careers, but, well, is that

how we should be deciding? I mean, this is not a subject that we can really delve

into. It’s like a big question. Are we talking about people’s work? Are we talking

about how they interact? 

Jim Frawley

And they’re both important, right? Yeah. And one thing onthat is it’s an important question that I ask most of my clients is, How are you defining a person’s salary? Is it 40 hours at a desk in a cube or is it the productivity that they’re able to create and how do you measure that? When you get to scale, it’s a difficult conversation. 

Linda Nazareth

Let’s get back to how we interact and the loneliness part of this. I saw your article in Fast Company, actually. You talk about three different types of interactions we have. The first one is the support system. tell us about them. 

Jim Frawley

Yeah, I would say everybody needs three groups of people when we’re managing change, just to give a context. Responding to change requires a focus on the individual and how do we prepare ourselves for managing change? And I say that there’s a physical component, there’s a mental component, mental preparation, and there’s a very important social component that people tend to ignore. And I think a lot of people, we call it social work, I call it social work, it’s not really social work, but it’s your personal social work. 

You need three groups of social people that are going to help you as you navigate change, and it’s building your own personal resiliency. And one of those, the first one is support system. And you need a small group, never more than 10 people, probably more like five, who only want the best for you with no agenda attached. And these could be a spouse, it could be a friend, it could be a co -worker, it could be siblings, It could be parents, maybe it’s not family, right? A lot of people will automatically lean into that. So if you were to pause and think, who are the three to five people where I, when I need a push or I need help, or I need just someone to kind of put the arms around each other, who are those people going to be?  So everybody I think really needs that, that support system that they can lean on when they really, really need it. 

Linda Nazareth

And that is often outside work, right? Some of the other categories are more related to work. You talk about newbies? 

Jim Frawley 

 Yeah, newbies. I think if you’re going to, the reason I love newbies, newbies, I call

them newbies, they’re new experiences. New people to challenge your belief system in

the way that you think. One of the most important parts of change management or responding to change, adapting to change is to have a belief system in place. But I argue you can’t have a belief system until you can understand why other people believe something differently, right? Beliefs are not truths. And so we need to interact with new people so that we don’t live in this echo chamber of everyone telling us that we’re right when the world just doesn’t operate that way. And I think you see that a lot with people graduating college. They haven’t been challenged in the right kind of way. They’re all kind of like -minded individuals in the same type of school, same type of people. So we need new experiences to open up our belief system to challenge what we actually believe and maybe have to adapt that and evolve our belief system over time. 

Linda Nazareth

And so we’re talking about this in a work context. These are the people who challenge you at a meeting or the manager who doesn’t want to go along with your suggestion? 

Jim Frawley

Yeah, in a work context, it could be that because if you’re able to articulate a belief system or to stick up for an idea that you have, the workplace gives you this parameter around the right way to do it, right? And how do you interact in a group setting or a small setting and

interact with these other types of people who are going to challenge you? That’s ultimate resilience in terms of what are you believing or what are you pushing forward in? Is this actually the right decision? And then swallowing it or accepting it when you’re not correct. That’s a big part of the vulnerability. There’s so many buzzwords in the workplace, resiliency, vulnerability, all of these types of things. Vulnerability isn’t sharing your problems over the weekend, it’s admitting when someone might have a better idea than you. And we need these new challenges. That’s why diversity is so important in the workplace. That’s why we want these different, these perspectives and histories and angles and all of these things. That’s why in -person interaction is so important because we get these different types of perspectives to challenge the decisions that we’re going to make.

Linda Nazareth

 What about getting them online? If you were interacting with people through Zoom or through whatever conferencing app or speaking on the phone or email or whatever, what portion do you think you get from that? 

Jim Frawley

You can get some because people are sharing perspectives. What people don’t understand about communication is that we communicate with much more than words. When you’re in a room and you just see the side eye somebody gives to somebody else who’s not on camera. Or you give the slumping chair, or you see the body language of all these people. You know when you walk into a room, and everybody’s done this, you walk into a room and you feel tension in the room, you know that there’s something up and you need to adjust the way maybe that you’re communicating or presenting your information or seeing how people actually respond who aren’t speaking on camera. There is a big collective learning that you get from seeing how two people interact that aren’t on your call. But you see how their body languages and how they respond and how people are talking about. Did you see how that person talked about that and blah, blah, blah? It’s a big component of in -person social interaction is a big communication lesson for us, as we’re looking about our belief

systems, how we communicate and how we interact at the office. 

Linda Nazareth

The final category you talked about is micro interactions. You mentioned this earlier, this is the casual encounters. 

Jim Frawley

Yeah, casual encounters are important, are very important because they’re very relaxing as well. They kind of separate us from our work. They are the small talk that nobody likes to do, but you get to see and connect with people on a different type of level. There are many people who interact, and this was a challenge with COVID also, is people went home, they lost all the social interaction they have for people who don’t necessarily have a support system, for people who don’t necessarily have new experiences and meeting new people who might be incredibly introverted and might not do the small little tiny letting a person go in front of you on the elevator, holding the door for someone, meeting someone in the lunchroom and saying, “Oh, thank you for sending that email,” whatever it is, these things, it’s not just for you, it also builds the collective group in a way that makes you feel connected. It builds productivity. It gets people excited. It really does help on many different human levels, not just for the work, but just from a human interaction type of level. 

Linda Nazareth

So for an organization who wants their workers to get along and be productive and create

relationships, what should they be doing? I mean, we’ve seen lots of things tried the last few years during COVID. They kind of stupid online games and then coming back to the office, let’s all have free lattes and you guys stay in line and chat. What are the things that are effective? 

Jim Frawley

One of the ones that I saw that was incredibly effective is people could go out for a happy hour. You invite three other people. You can’t pick the same people each time and work will give you like a hundred bucks to go do it with no work agenda. 

And so I think if you’re going to be bringing people back to the office, it’s not the days of the pizza party areover. Like people who are kind of hip to the kind of false motives on saying,

“Oh, well, we’ll give you free coffee if you come into the office and yada, yada, yada.” What we’re ultimately looking to do is there are really three things that work needs to be thinking about when we’re thinking about AI and change and all of that. 

Number one is social interaction. We want people to interact socially in person so that they can drive whatever with no agenda. There has to be no agenda. So just put people together, match them up. There’s a, I know one app called Bria that will just match people up in an organization just for coffee where they’re like, you both run marathons, you both have kids in college and you both have dogs. Here are three things to talk about and you just go meet for coffee. And no agenda, no kind of work and there’s no kind of pitching anything or any just honest social interaction

is a good place to start. That’s one is social. Two is critical thinking. How do we get people to think about what they want and what they believe and how do they learn to articulate this amid other people? So facilitating these types of discussions, it’s a popular training that a lot of organizations are looking to now is what’s a leadership philosophy? How do you build a personal philosophy and do that’s a really good investment that’s not the normal, right? Let’s work on listening skills. And then the third one is buying power, which I’m not going to get into, but that’s everything’s getting more expensive. People feel stressed and we’re ultimately looking to lower the stress. So understand where humans are coming from. They don’t want to commute. It’s a bigger expense. They’re losing time with their family. So how do you make the time in the office worth it for them so that they can actually feel connection with other people? 

Linda Nazareth

And if you were talking to one of those workers who says, “Yes, I don’t want to be away from my family just to commute. I don’t want to go in just for a free coffee, which I can get for $2. What would you tell them in terms of trying to make them understand there’s value

here? 

Jim Frawley

Yeah, there’s value. I think it’s, again, it would depend on the individual. I think we have many of us have shifted priorities over the last five years, where the need to go into the office, sit in a cube, sit in an office for so much time, just isn’t necessary when you have little kids or commuting from Westchester County into Manhattan, down into Brooklyn. It’s going to take you two hours each way, five days a week, it’s just not gonna happen. I think people are willing, people are asking now, is the money worth the sacrifice? And what is the balance now and Do I change? Do I make a change? And so the first question I would say to someone is, what ultimately is your priority today and tomorrow? And how do you look at that? And honestly, for some people going back into the office, it could be, it’s just dead in the water. They just don’t want to. And that’s okay. I would say that’s okay if that’s not going to fit.

But many of them are saying, I’ll just go get a remote job. There are no remote jobs. The remote jobs are going away. So like, I want people to have a realistic view on what their decisions are going to be, but I do think a lot of people are sacrificing a lot to work in offices, jobs that they hate for a long period of time, and they would be much happier and better off if they had gone and done something different for a little bit less money. And I think that’s fine. I think we do a lot of things just because what the Joneses tell us, we’re supposed to do. But there is a benefit to going back into the office. If you enjoy the work you

do, if you enjoy the company you are working for, going into the office, there is immense benefit to getting that social interaction.

Linda Nazareth

And I agree with you that the jobs, the remote jobs are gone, but maybe that’s not

forever. I really think this is something that’s evolving and it’s going to look

different as we go through the next one year, two years, five years. What’s your

view? Where are we going to to be in one year, where are we going to be in five

years?

Jim Frawley

It’s going , I mean, it’s almost like a new wave. Everyone worked from home for a short period of time. Now people are testing out the hybrid and some people are going to be bringing everyone back this year, I know Amazon already announced to bring everyone back into the office. Nothing is as good as you think it’s going to be, nothing is as bad as you think

it’s gonna be.

So I think they’re going to take their lessons, they’re going to see what happens. In my dark view of what’s going to happen, I think a lot of organizations are realizing they don’t need all of the people that they have. And so once they call the herd and they realize that they only need 50 % of their workforce, then there might be, you know, these 50 % of the people are the really valuable people that we’re going to keep. Then you might see some more flexibility coming back in on saying, all right, well, you’re really valuable. I know you’re providing it. We figured out it’s not the 40 hours that we need from you a week. It’s this productivity. Here’s how we’re going to measure it. Technology is going to help with that a lot. So I think that’s probably where we’re going to be in the next couple of years. Some people will get their special exemptions, but there’s going to be a wide kind of everyone come back now, and then we’re going to see what happens from there. 

Linda Nazareth

Interesting times, Jim. Thanks so much for talking to me. 

Jim Frawley

Thanks so much. 

Linda Nazareth

Jim Frawley is CEO and founder of Bellwether. 

Well, that’s it for today. If you want to know more about Jim and his work, please take a look at our show notes. You’ll see some links there. If you want to connect with me, I’m on Instagram @lindanazarethknotespeaker. I have a website, lindanazareth .com, and I’m also an X at @relentlesseco. 

Now, if you did like this conversation about the future of work, please take a moment and leave a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts. It will really help  people to find us, and that will help keep this going. 

Thanks so much for listening, and thanks as always to Stoakely Audio for Audio Production. 

The post Episode 128: Will Returning to the Office Solve the Loneliness Epidemic? appeared first on LINDA NAZARETH.

If everything is on the table when it comes to the future of work, should we be talking about having workers own the company – or at least own a bit of it? To talk about that, Linda Nazareth is joined on this episode by Elspeth Murray,   Director of the Centre for Innovation and Social Impact and CIBC Faculty Fellow in Entrepreneurship at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University.  They discuss why the benefits from employee ownership can go far beyond money and why this work model might be a good thing for  workers and organizations and maybe for society as well.

Guest:

Elspeth Murray

Director of the Centre for Innovation and Social Impact and CIBC Faculty Fellow in Entrepreneurship at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University

Elspeth Murray has served as the Associate Dean – MBA and Master’s Programs from 2012-2022 and has been a professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Smith School of Business since 1996. She also holds the CIBC Fellowship in Entrepreneurship, and founded Smith’s Centre for Business Venturing. She is the Director of the Centre for Entrepreneurship, Innovation & Social Impact.

Prior to joining Smith, she worked in industry for 7 years for several firms including IBM, and Canadian Tire. As an integral part of her work in the strategy and new venture fields, Dr. Murray specializes in the management of change.

In 2002, she co-authored a best-selling book, Fast Forward: Organizational Change in 100 Days, Oxford University Press, with Dr. Peter Richardson. She has recently co-developed (with Dr. David Saunders) the Analytics Climate Assessment Tool (ACAT), which is used to assess organizations technological capacity, skill sets, and analytics culture. Current research is focused on best practices in leading and managing change to create an analytics culture.

Dr. Murray teaches on many MBA and Executive Education programs, and consults widely with a diversity of firms including BMW, Detour Gold, Wawanesa Insurance, Versacold Logistics and the Auditor General for Canada.

She serves as a Director for several firms and is an advisor to several start-ups and CEO’s. Dr. Murray received an undergraduate degree in computer science and mathematics, and an MBA, both from Queen’s University. Her doctorate in Strategy and Management Information Systems was completed at the Richard Ivey School of Business.

Links:

https://smith.queensu.ca/faculty_and_research/faculty_list/murray-elspeth.php

Transcript:

The post Episode 127: Should Employees be Company Owners? appeared first on LINDA NAZARETH.