 Up next is Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics. She'll be speaking on the who, what, when, where, why, and how of work in a post-pandemic world. Now this session is particularly compelling to me because it zooms the lens out and it gives us a bird's-eye view of the ripple effects across the full spectrum of remote work. So many of us have been fully immersed in work since the start of the pandemic with the closure of borders and offices worldwide. But what does the data tell us about how remote at scale will change our world? Take it away, Kate. Hi there. My name is Kate Lister. I'm president of Global Workplace Analytics. And today we're going to be talking about the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the future of work. Now I've been an advocate for remote work and flexible work for over 17 years. But I want you to know that I'm not just an advocate because I happen to like the concept of remote work. It's because of the research that I've done and the results that I've seen in organizations that I've worked with and for that's really convinced me that it's the right thing to do for people, for planet, for profit, and for society. Having said that, I think every organization, every team within an organization and even every individual on that team needs to do what's right for them. The desire for workplace flexibility isn't new. Surveys over the past 10 years have consistently shown that 70 to 80% of employees say they'd like to work from home at least some of the time. Number of studies show that they would take as much as a 10% pay cut for the opportunity. And while the Society for Human Resource Management reported prior to the pandemic that 70% of employers said they offered remote work, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that only 7% of employers did. The difference was that Bureau of Labor Statistics only counts those who offered to all or most of their employees. So it's kind of been this 7% privilege for the last several decades reserved for the more senior, the higher salary, the more educated employees. The fundamental problem is that managers simply don't trust their employees to work untethered. In fact, before the pandemic, only about 4% of the U.S. workforce considered home their primary place of work or work there half time or more. So there's long been this mismatch between who wants to and who's allowed to. But then this baby hit and everything changed. Going forward as we emerge from this crisis, it's clear the genie is out of the bottle and it's not going back in. These numbers are from a study by the Becker Friedman Institute. I think it's one of the most robust studies out there since the pandemic. There were over 15,000 people surveyed. But we've seen the same numbers in companies that we've worked with, companies that are just making the transition now and in numerous other studies including some of the research we've done ourselves. And what we're seeing is that among those with compatible jobs, Becker Friedman found that 27% of employees want to continue to work from home full time. Generally we're seeing something in the range of 15 to 25% with the companies that we're working with. Becker Friedman found that 11% say they never want to work from home. We're seeing that number typically, or sometimes as low as 5%, never more than about 20%. And the rest want some form of hybrid in total 76% say they want to work from home at least once a week. Again, that's not very different from what they were saying before. It's just now they feel that they can ask for it. Employees are kind of lobbying for three to four days a week. Managers are kind of lobbying for one to two days a week at home. But the sweet spot seems to be about half time and that's been consistent over the years as well. Importantly, it's not an either or. This is not something that is polar. It seems that the media loves to talk about, oh, we're never going to see our colleagues or we're all going to be in the office. But it's really about choice and that's what's truly critical. As we think about the future of work, I urge all of us to do it with fresh eyes and an open mind. I mean, do we really need to replace the water cooler? My husband has a saying, sometimes we try harder and harder to get better and better at things we shouldn't be doing at all. Were your meetings effective before the pandemic? Did the places and spaces that you worked actually support the kind of work you were doing? This guy's wearing a headset like a lot of people do. I mean, that's not an effective workplace. Did your people have the right tools and technology and did they work well? Organizations right now are ready for a change like I have never seen before. Let's not miss this opportunity to hit the reset button on practices and processes that were broken to begin with. And for heaven's sakes, let's not replicate those broken processes in the digital world. This is our opportunity to rethink not just the where of work, but the who, what, when, where, and why as well. Let's start with why. This is how my dog looks at me when I don't have a cookie in my hand when I ask him to do something. We've known for decades that purpose and autonomy are what lead to peak engagement and performance, but few organizations really act on that knowledge. From Maslow in the 1940s to Hertzberg in the 60s and pink in modern times, the message has been the same. Human motivation is not about foosball tables or sliding boards or free beer or even compensation. Giving people a sense of purpose, helping them to see how they contribute to the organization's mission, tying that to the broader needs of society. That's what's going to attract top talent in the future. It's what will inspire people to do their best work. And eventually it's what's going to attract investors and customers. Hertzberg, as I said, studied about two decades after Maslow studying human motivation in the 50s and 60s. His Harvard Business Review article titled, One More Time, How Do We Motivate Employees, is still one of the most downloaded articles about management ever published. His big discovery was that the kinds of things that create job satisfaction and motivate people to do their best work are entirely different than the things that cause dissatisfaction. In fact, there's no connection between the two. The stuff below the blue line here, these are the demotivators. Get them wrong and people will be unhappy in their job. But once they're no longer dissatisfied, making them better isn't going to raise their satisfaction and it isn't going to motivate them to do their best work. That comes from the kind of stuff above the blue line. So for example, poor working conditions might cause dissatisfaction, but the greatest ones in the world aren't going to motivate you unless you are intrinsically motivated by achievement, recognition, the work you actually do. Here I've combined Hertzberg's learnings with Abraham Maslow who studied the topic two decades before Hertzberg. The workplace and the physical places of work, he called these hygiene factors. If your office is freezing and your back is killing you, you're not going to be thinking about what you contribute to the company's mission and purpose. You're going to be looking for a blanket and some tile and all. You can also think of the stuff at the bottom of the pyramid here as wellness factors and the stuff at the top as what creates well-being and engagement. These are some things organizations have been chasing with little success for many years. It's really hard to have a sense of well-being unless you are physically and emotionally well. Most workplaces don't satisfy even our fundamental hygiene needs. We don't need a bunch of fancy amenities. We need jobs and careers that are fulfilling, one that gives us in Dan Pink's word, words autonomy, mastery and purpose. So what does all this have to do with workplace flexibility and the why of workplace flexibility? Well, these are the words that people use to describe why they like to work from home or remotely. The blue ones, these are hygiene factors, but the gold ones read like a chapter out of Herzberg, Maslow or Pink. And here's what they say they like about coming to the office. Clearly, there's a blend between the two. Again, the blue are hygiene factors. As more and more organizations adopt hybrid workplace strategies, it's going to be critical that employees actually get what it is they're looking for when they come to the office. All right, let's look next at the who of work and how that is changing. The future of work will be more diverse in terms of ethnicity, age, life stage, gender and even cognitive abilities. High-tech companies, for example, are finding that individuals on the autism spectrum have a great capacity for coding. Being able to work from anywhere is going to open new opportunities for the disabled, for military spouses, for people living in rural areas and for others who haven't been able to fully participate in the workforce. We need to think about how to deliver a consistently good workplace experience across this diverse set of players. And that means understanding that people have different career goals and aspirations. They have different learning styles and different social needs. And we need to not just understand these differences and accommodate them, we need to respect them, we need to celebrate them and we need to leverage the opportunities that having this kind of diverse group at the table offers. All right, next let's think about the what of work and how that's changing. It's a sure bet that the future will be more about brain power and less about brawn. But we need to do a better job of using science to understand what fuels the brain and what depletes it and align our workplaces and when our work practices including the virtual workplace in a way that helps people not only do their best work but live their best lives because they're inextricably entwined. For example, to the extent that we get to use our strengths every day is a huge impact on job and life satisfaction. But how much of your day, the work that you do every day, the things that you spend your time on are things that you don't enjoy or that you aren't good at or that don't inspire you? I call these kinds of things workplace sludge, the stuff that gets in the way of people doing their best work. Organizations need to do a better job of eliminating sludge. This isn't rocket science. If employers want to increase productivity and reduce employee stress, this is a good list to start with. Imagine if you got to do what you really enjoy. Your work was optimized for who you are and how you work best and the friction that often gets in the way of doing your best work is minimized. For example, I would love it if I was working on a PowerPoint presentation and the computer started to vibrate and said, you know what, you're not very good at this. Did you know that we have ten vetted contractors who could be doing this for you? And then it would just lead me right to that. Some people may not like the intrusion of that but I think it would be wonderful. I think in the future we're going to see an unbundling of work that will allow organizations to optimize the resources they have by assigning those disaggregated pieces of work to the people or machines that can do them best. I think we're also going to see a move toward internal talent markets. We're already seeing this in terms of companies like Hitch. The allow employees to opt into projects on their own outside of their own team. Given the rate of change, I think we need to understand that learning is going to become part and parcel of what we do, not just a day, a week here or a couple of weeks there. It's something continuously on the job. And a result of all this is greater autonomy, mastery, and purpose. The when of work is ready for a reset too. Being able to control when people work is actually more important than where they work. Greater mobility and globalization will bring an end to the nine to five mentality. Rather than a marathon, work will be increasingly performed in sprints. Days will become less linear and will work in ways that are more in tune with our individual body clocks and around the needs of our families, our personal preferences and the rest of our lives. To be successful at that and with work in general, we need to learn to collaborate and communicate less synchronously in real time. GitLab and many of the other all virtual companies have already mastered this and we and other organizations need to follow their lead. Synchronous communications happens via chat through video conferencing or in-person meetings even over the phone. This kind of communication is best for one-on-ones, for complex problem solving, for developing and maintaining social connections, so I would argue that that can also be done asynchronously and for sensitive conversations. Asynchronous communications involve message boards, internal wikis, e-mail, recorded meetings, collaboration, collaborative documents. These are some of the activities that are good candidates for asynchronous communication. Announcements, delivery of one person to many status updates, these kinds of things. The benefits of Async include increased autonomy and accountability, better collaboration that can come from the reduced hierarchy, leveling that playing field, from having a more diverse thought pool, and both of those things can result in greater innovation. Async can also make people more efficient and effective with their time. Again, making it possible to break work into chunks and assign the best people for each piece. And importantly, it can put an end to endless Zoom meetings. All right, moving on, let's look at the where of work. It's not just about remote work. Even before the pandemic, many organizations had already begun thinking of the workplace in terms of an ecosystem of places and spaces, both internal and external. So rather than going to one place, we would choose the place that we're going to work based on what we're doing in a particular day. This model offers agility to the organization, offers individuals greater choice, offers the opportunity for greater sustainability, and allows people to work in a place that suits them best. Offices are changing too. Occupancy studies over the last decade have consistently shown that offices are underutilized, sitting vacant 40 to 50% of the time during working hours. Reading rooms were wrong sized. There were too many large ones, not enough small and medium sized ones. The trend was moving away from single assigned seats to activity based strategies where the emphasis was on movement between spaces and working in the kind of space that was most conducive to the work that you were doing. The pandemic accelerated these trends as well. With hybrid workplaces becoming the new norm, organizations are reconfiguring those spaces with the concept that people will be doing their focus work mostly at home and that they'll be coming to the office intentionally to socialize and to collaborate. So the shift is toward more we space and less me space. Some of my clients are even repurposing their private offices as team rooms. So over the last 10 years, we've been through this period of de-densification and open office, but the new focus really is on people. Employers, at least the ones I'm working with, are generally looking to create environments that help people do their best work. And that includes finally taking lessons from science about color and materials and daylight and heating and cooling and air quality, and importantly, physical and psychological safety. The nature of these new spaces will increase organization agility and resilience, but just making the spaces isn't going to get people to use them. It's going to take a change in culture to really make these places effective and useful. And then there's the how of work. Of all the things I think that need a reset button, this is the one that needs it most. How we're working just is not sustainable. The burnout is at a critical level. The pandemic has worn us all down. And while the end is in sight, the return to the office isn't going to be easy either. The place you left is not the place that you're going to be going back to. There's the separation anxiety of being away from family and from pets in both directions. People will be asked to adopt new routines. All of this is actually going to add to stress. Obviously, people are experiencing stress from a variety of parts of their lives right now, but in terms of what the workplace adds, here's some of the biggies. Overworking has always been a problem with remote work, and the pandemic has made it even worse. When it's right there with you 24-7, it's often hard to turn it off. We're dealing with life getting in the way of work when we're at home and work getting in the way of life. We're stressed by the ambiguity of return to the office. The majority of companies have not even announced what they're going to do yet. And so we have this anxiety about, am I going to be required to go back to the office? When is that going to happen? Is it going to be safe and all of that? And it's just this lack of control that's incredibly stressful. There's also the worry that if I do continue to work from home, is that going to affect my career growth or are my colleagues not going to like me anymore? Is my boss going to be on board with it? Am I going to get the same raises that everybody else does? These are very real worries. One of the problems with stress is that many of us don't realize how bad it is until we flip. This is another one of my dogs. Her trainer calls it trigger loading. She's fine with the first dog she sees, the second dog she sees, but maybe that third one even. But then she goes bat kaka on a kid on a bike. At work stress leads to absenteeism and a slew of other problems like these. Old practices are part of the problem here. Many of them are what's creating those 12 to 16 hour days, although quite frankly we had too many of those before the pandemic too. We've already talked about asynchronous communications, but we also need new team understandings. Meetings were ready for a complete do over. And we need to find ways to balance the need to earn a living and the desire to have a life. All work and no play isn't good for the employee and it's not good for the company. And we need to stop acting like those long hours or something to be proud of or to brag about or as a metric for company success. We need to understand just important, how important it is to give people choice and control over where, when and how they work. So we're going to look at each of these in just a little bit more detail. Team norms reduce ambiguity. They help people understand, you know, it's okay to not answer the boss's email at three in the morning. It's okay to take a break after a big project. It's okay to ask your manager for help in managing your workload. Your team norms should also include things like what tech you'll use, expectations around availability, and meeting and communications etiquette. Meetings, as we've said, were broken before the pandemic. And like team norms, they need to be agreed to even in writing. And they should address things like whether attendance at meetings is opt in or opt out. I suggest you do opt out to the extent possible. This puts the responsibility on the individual for deciding whether or not they really need to be there or whether or not they might be able to attend async to look at the recording. You should agree on whether or not the meetings will start on time. I've got one client that starts all their meetings at five minutes after the hour so that everybody has a chance to get there from the prior meeting. I'm not going to read all of these. These are just examples and suggestions of things that we need to be thinking about as we go forward. Hybrid meetings are a particular problem. The mostly remote best practice is that if one person is on a call that's remote, everybody should be. And that evens the playing field. We've heard during the pandemic that people who were remote prior to it are actually feeling more included. So we need to keep some of those good practices that we've learned and learn new ones as well. Maybe having somebody that's remote run the meeting, having a buddy system where there's somebody in the room that's responsible for making sure their buddy gets heard. Again, I won't go through all of this, but we all know that bias, that feeling of being an outsider when everybody else is in the room. Sometimes they get up and they go to lunch and they don't even tell you. We need to avoid that. We need to ensure that there is equity in meetings and in all areas of work between the people that are in the office and the people that are not. In terms of work-life separation, leadership and managers need to walk the walk and talk the talk if they really want their people to do this. If they're in the office early and they leave late every day, that's what their people will do. If they really want to encourage work from home, they need to set the standard. Otherwise, people are going to come in because they fear missing out. We need to give them permission to use these new spaces, the social spaces of work and not have them feel like they're goofing off if they're sitting on a sofa having a cup of coffee with a colleague. In the virtual world, we also need to have boundaries and we all need to take responsibility for managing them. Some people create rituals like closing the office door if you happen to be lucky enough to have a separate room or taking the dog for a walk. I know one person that gets in the car and drives around the block and parks back in front of their home at the end of the day to distinguish between work-life and home life. I think if there's a silver lining to the pandemic, I think there are many, but I think one is empathy. We need to hold on to that. When we're sitting there looking at the CEO of the company in his armchair with his dog, that just makes him a whole person and we need to treat each other like whole people and understand that they bring their whole selves to work. I'm also a big believer in having no meeting days. I use an app called Calendly that has just been transformative. When somebody wants to meet with me, I send them an invite or a link where they can book a 20-minute, 40-minute or a 50-minute meeting. And Calendly knows that I want 15 minutes between my meetings. I don't want any more than seven a day and none before this time or after that time. It's just made a huge difference in my life. So let's remember that this is a journey and it's one that's far into all of us. We don't know how this is all going to work out. There will be blind quarters, there will be dead ends, there will even be U-turns along the way. But I truly believe that we're going to emerge from this crisis in a far better place than where we started. Finally, I want to thank GitLab for holding this conference and for leading the way and so openly sharing what they have learned about making remote work work better. Thank you.