Sophie addresses current business conditions and explores ways to navigate the disruption. She shares informative insights and interviewing leading innovators who are providing or benefiting from transformative solutions that will allow companies to emerge with sustainable models, mindsets, and business practices.
Find out how to transition to more effective, productive, and supportive new ways of working—across locations, generations, and platforms—as we harness these challenging circumstances to drive significant, multidimensional changes in all our working lives.
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Vidya Krishnan, Chief Learning Officer at Ericsson, combines her engineering experience, systems thinking, and love of learning to connect core upskilling with corporate strategy. For Vidya, learning at the speed of technology development requires a learning mindset and future-focused dynamic approach to jobs and skills. Vidya explains how a project marketplace enables internal talent mobility: redesigning work with a skills-focus; facilitating evolution to ‘resource fluidity’; and allowing organic shifts into emerging areas as employees gravitate towards where work is flowing. Vidya recommends stability management with change management.
TAKEAWAYS
[02:06] Vidya studies electrical engineering influenced by her family’s engineering legacy.
[03:16] Deeply admiring engineering and loving learning, Vidya admits she had ‘will before skill’.
[04:14] Vidya promotes internships: good summertime feedback boosts her while some college studies challenge.
[05:07] For personal reasons Vidya leaves AT&T joining Nortel (acquired by Ericsson) in Dallas.
[06:19] Always an engineer, now focused on people’s experiences in L&D, Vidya loves teaching.
[08:24] Learning is as the heart of every transformation for Vidya’s team and workplace.
[09:19] Learning even more from failure, by addressing both shame and ignorance after mistakes.
[11:11] Technology and people are inherently upgradable—ongoing learning at a tech company.
[12:34] How engineers need "power skills" like storytelling and managing stakeholders.
[14:05] Looking creatively to other industries, like aviation, to solve engineering challenges.
[16:49] Vidya has a double life for three years learning and networking at learning conferences.
[18:54] Managers want her to advance in engineering, but Vidya is determined to change field.
[19:45] Vidya overcomes self-doubt and family concerns while transitioning her career.
[21:15] After three years, Vidya transitions horizontally into technical training for customers.
[22:56] Becoming a studio offering digital learning using multimedia and experiential techniques.
[23:41] How to create capabilities that customers will pay for and employees value.
[27:00] Systems thinking to describe work’s three dimensions: digital ecosystem, business system, and culture system.
[30:14] A systems vs programmatic approach to work is strategic and natural at a tech company.
[31:20] Skills development is vital and therefore must be connected to company strategy.
[33:21] Constructing a framework where skills are derivative of corporate strategy.
[34:20] Starting with the one skill that is most consequential to the strategy—less is more.
[36:20] Two sets of skills—global critical skills (top down) and job role skills (bottom up).
[37:30] Digitalizing a job architecture starts development of a skills taxonomy.
[38:23] Getting on the skills games board through credentialing and contribution.
[39:13] To be future focused, skills and job roles are digitalized into a relational database.
[40:40] Skills’ journey phases: initialize, mobilize, and capitalize advancing with winnable games.
[43:10] "Resource fluidity" is where employees’ skills are not confined to their job role—reskill and constantly redeploy.
[44:45] A talent marketplace that is a project marketplace redesigns work to put skills to work.
[47:43] Disaggregating work into projects enables work packages doable outside of people’s day jobs—a third space—to develop new skills.
[50:30] Enabling employees to gravitate towards emerging areas from eroding areas.
[51:35] The hypothesis that progressive career reinvention at scale will pay for itself.
[52:25] A project marketplace creates capability and expands capacity.
[54:50] Partnership is the new leadership, and co-creation and co-ownership are key to execution.
[56:10] Stability management needs to accompany change management.
[57:16] How business cross-functionality can allow varied thinking and ‘wicked’ problem solving.
[58:13] Project marketplace decouples work from many traditional boundaries.
[01:00:21] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: Start now. Start small with one critical skill. Connect it to strategy, which is done systematically.
“If we give people the opportunity to put their skills to work, this is actually very healthy for the company because we are organically self-shaping away from eroding areas into emerging areas …people naturally gravitating to where the work is flowing.”
“You have a dynamic platform that's digitalized for jobs and skills to stay in lockstep with industry evolution: what's emerging, what's eroding, and for that stuff to easily automatically flow through every other system in the company where people are making decisions about who to hire, how to evolve their career, how to specify the requirements for this requisition, what job roles need to go out the window, what new job roles need to be introduced.”
“How do you put learning in the flow of work and work in the flow of learning so that it's happening to people experientially?”
“Work has three dimensions: there's an ecosystem, a business system and a culture system.”
“The logic was that if things that are vital should be systematic rather than programmatic so that they happen no matter what, because that's what vital things should do. And then you fundamentally believe that skills are vital, as I do, because they are what connect strategy to execution. So if you believe that, then it follows you must take a systematic approach.”
“Strategy without skills is a daydream. Skills and execution without strategy is a nightmare.”
“Capabilities are what create execution of the strategy.” “It's a means to an end. What's the end? It's to execute strategy. Therefore, it has to be systematically connected to strategy.”
“Partnership is a new leadership and co creation and co ownership is actually the key to execution, which is not clean and it may be a little bit messy.”
128: Mark Ma - RTOs: Research-backed Realities and Recommendations
Episode 128
Friday, October 18, 2024 • Duration 44:02
Mark Ma, a research professor at the University of Pittsburgh, studies social and economic issues including Return To Office (RTO) mandates, AI, and tax evasion. A working parent during the pandemic, Mark describes how personal and community experiences initially generated his interest in researching remote work options and hybrid policies. He shares his discoveries that stock market declines generated RTO mandates but not improved corporate results. Mark discusses the dynamics of executives’ control, power, and distrust affecting work policies. He advocates for workplace flexibility—giving employees and teams choices.
TAKEAWAYS
[02:23] While Mark’s parents advised him to study accounting, he found it fascinating.
[03:01] For his PhD, Mark explores financial analysis, and his tax avoidance research is cited.
[03:45] Passionate about research, Mark pursues academia, also appreciating the flexible lifestyle.
[05:09] Parental challenges during the pandemic fuels Mark’s interest in remote work options.
[05:50] Noticing neighbors’ complaints about returning to the office, Mark attends a conference and hears about working from home research.
[06:41] Mark gets tenure and explores risky research projects that help improve people’s lives.
[08:25] In late 2022, Mark starts collecting data on companies’ return-to-office mandates.
[09:25] Leaders say remote workers aren’t working hard, while employees keep performing.
119: Tim Oldman - Measuring the Impact of Workplace Design on Performance
Episode 119
Friday, July 19, 2024 • Duration 57:04
Tim Oldman is the CEO of Leesman and Founder of the Leesman Index - the world leader in measuring and analyzing the experiences of employees in their places of work. Tim is an expert in user experience of the built environment. He explains why we need to be considering whether work environments are supporting employees’ activities, needs, and satisfaction. Tim brings his wealth of knowledge to explore and reveal how workplaces—wherever people work—are tools for organizational performance and how we can measure that.
TAKEAWAYS
[02:25] Having always enjoyed building things, Tim studies interior design at college.
[02:51 Tim opts for a shorter course in interior design admitting he is impatient!
[03:22] Tim would love to study at university now with rapid prototyping and other advances.
[04:00] Encouraged by his uncle and tutor, Tim secures his first design job at 16.
[05:36] Tim first works in transport design, realizing the impact of design on bus stations and airports.
[07:06] The attention and detailed science in every aspect of airport design, including signage legibility.
[08:08] Tim wants to apply more and more rigor and science as his career develops.
[09:33] Tim discovers retail design is more numerically driven that he had understood earlier.
[11:27] The shift in retail emphasizing the shopper's brand experience.
29. Lisa Morton - How Purpose and Values Make a Difference in Business
Episode 29
Friday, October 15, 2021 • Duration 40:22
Lisa Morton, CEO of Roland Dransfield, founded her PR agency in Manchester, England, combining entrepreneurial spirit, Northern grit, purpose, and values to build her company and expand nationally and internationally. Lisa explains her intentional emphasis on purpose and living her values daily which has been core for attracting and retaining clients and employees, while guiding all their actions and decisions. She also shares what happens when values are not clearly defined and how they have benefitted from setting boundaries.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
[02:50] Who was Roland Dransfield and how was he relevant to Lisa’s business?
[03:46] Lisa’s father great saying about cars and baked beans!
[04:16] How Roland Dransfield started Lisa off as an entrepreneur.
[05:54] Circumstances were not easy when Lisa started her company.
[07:34] A dramatic incident impacted the purpose and role of Roland Dransfield early on.
[08:53] Manchester has changed significantly since Lisa first started her career.
[10:19] How purpose is manifested for employees coming to work at the agency.
[12:15] Lisa’s approach to mutually enriching development and progress.
[13:20] The celebration dinner for Roland Dransfield alumni.
28. Jeremy Fleming - Shifting Skills and Scope for Growth and Resilience
Episode 28
Friday, October 8, 2021 • Duration 41:57
Jeremy Fleming, the Founder and CEO of Stagekings, discusses how he evolved and grew the Australian event and theater staging business after a necessary radical pivot at the beginning of the pandemic. Re-applying everyone’s crafts’ skills to design, develop, sell, and distribute innovative desks, they engaged new customers online and used feedback to help expand the product range. Jeremy also shares how encouraging people to work across all areas of the business as well as diversifying revenue and vertically integrating is creating resiliency to ensure the company’s ongoing stability and success.
[02:57] How Jeremy started his career in bridge carpentry and scaffolding.
[04:11] Jeremy brought his event staging experience from Europe to launch Stagekings in 2015.
[05:52] Versatile use of their skills expanded services into building theater sets and whole theaters.
[06:52] Jeremy’s scaffolding and event experience and innovative approach enabled rapid assembly and dismantling.
[08:07] Friday March 13th 2020: Devastating news for Stagekings’ business.
[10:03] Friday March 20th: Jeremy’s difficult decision to let employees go after exhausting all options.
[11:58] How chatting with a former employee seeded the idea of creating desks for people working from home.
[12:22] Sunday March 22nd: Mick’s furniture-making hobby and skills are engaged to explore desk ideas.
[13:13] Unique desk designs: no-tool quick assembly/disassembly, one packs flat for easy storage.
Laurel Farrer, Founder and CEO of Distribute Consulting—a virtual organizational development consulting firm, is well aware of the rewards of transitioning long-term to remote working, and the risks, especially with hybrid models. As a 15-year seasoned remote worker, Laurel has identified the key factors that are critical for success and benchmarking goals for healthy virtual organizations. She shares her experiences, insights, and cautions as we all work through our inevitable, work-related transformations.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
[04:02] Laurel’s accidental exposure to remote working and her early experiences.
[07:43] The primary barrier to success was credibility.
[08:21] Determination to overcome the credibility gap fueled her company’s internal culture development.
[08:46] How the success of their creative team was not dependent on the existence of a [physical] whiteboard.
[09:46] The benefits of facilitator in virtual discussions, especially for brainstorming including introverts and extroverts.
[10:53] How asynchronous communications and pre-work boosts collaboration and outcomes.
[12:29] Laurel works on benchmarking to develop goals for healthy virtual organizations.
[13:48] How to navigate the challenges as we explore new work arrangements.
[14:37] The importance of balance and transparent communication.
26. Ramon Ray - The Empathy Factor Driving Small Business Success in the New Era of Work
Episode 26
Friday, August 27, 2021 • Duration 37:48
Ramon Ray, founder of SmartHustle.com, has been involved in the small business sector for over twenty years as a serial entrepreneur, podcast host, author, and expert advocating for small business success. As a vocal participant and active contributor, he helps small businesses adapt to new marketplace dynamics—from developing meaningful client relationships to motivating and supporting employees. He shares five priorities to focus on and the strategic importance of empathy.
TAKEAWAYS
[02:27] How Ramon’s experience working at the UN was the embryonic beginning of his focus on entrepreneurship and small businesses.
[03:56] Technology advice and understanding have been core to Ramon’s support to small businesses growth which has evolved with platform, application, and digital media advances.
[05:41] Ramon bridges the chasm between small emerging businesses and large tech companies trying to reach them—their empathy factor and influencer.
[08:36] Five priorities for small businesses to focus on to transform for the new era of work.
[11:34] How empathy came to the forefront for Ramon in 2020 as many significant events occurred.
[13;16] What it means to wear someone else’s shoes—in life and when offering business advice.
[14:59] Empathy can mean recognizing but not agreeing with another person’s perspective.
[16:14] Ramon encouraged a client to empathize with him, facilitating an effective way to work together.
25. Sacha Connor — How to Succeed as a Remote Leader: Include, Innovate, & Iterate
Episode 25
Friday, July 23, 2021 • Duration 52:58
Sacha Connor—Founder and CEO of Virtual Work Insider—was a remote work pioneer for The Clorox Company. Sacha explains how she transitioned to working 3000 miles away from HQ for eight years and became the first fully remote member of the Leadership Team of a $1 billion division. Sacha shares how processes were reimagined, what issues arose, what solutions were developed, as well as surprising benefits gained along the way.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
[03:50] Sacha discusses her career in marketing.
[05:28] Why Sacha chose to go remote and move 3000 miles away from her company HQ.
[06:29] How Sacha planted seeds over time to get agreement to work remotely as an experiment.
[08:32] A trusted relationship laid the foundation for constructive conversations about how it could work.
[09:29] How Sacha was allowed to lead an innovation team remotely.
[10:43] The three major career limitations that were initially part of Sacha’s remote arrangement.
[11:26] How risk was assessed in allowing this remote experiment.
[12:15] Potential was initially linked to promotability which was tied to location.
[12:38] How acceptance was enabled by The Clorox Company’s existing performance management system which tracked her defined and detailed objectives and measured her success.
24. Neil Bedwell — Marketing Internally to Effect Change, with Empathy
Episode 24
Friday, June 25, 2021 • Duration 42:54
This episode is about using sophisticated traditional marketing techniques to transform employees’ apathy and ambivalence into engagement and enable change initiatives to succeed. Neil Bedwell is a Founding Partner of LOCAL where he applies his extensive expertise in consumer marketing to internal corporate audiences to effect lasting change. The key is understanding how culture impacts new initiatives from ideation through development and execution. Neil explains what marketing techniques are core to LOCAL’s effective ‘Change Marketing™’.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
[02:49] How Neil fell into marketing.
[04:49] Realizing the effect of corporate culture on ideas as they are developed.
[7:10] In big organizations, it is a challenge not to weaken ideas as they become more complex, trying to solve additional asks.
[10:06] Neil shifts to marketing to employees, founding LOCAL with two partners.
[11:00] What is ‘marketing’ and what is ‘Change Marketing’™?
[12:08] Why knowledge about your employees is a central sources of competitive advantage.
[13:30] Understanding the dire effect of unengaged employees on your business.
[14:33] Insights—Why Neil believes listening to employees is the difference between success and failure.
[15:23] Narrative—Change is a journey with employees as the heroes of the story.
23. Paul Reid — Triggering Trust and Engagement through Anonymity and Action
Episode 23
Friday, May 28, 2021 • Duration 46:31
Paul Reid is the CEO and Founder of Trickle and a serial entrepreneur. He shares how his early employment experiences taught him to build trust-based, thriving cultures at his first two start-ups. Now, these learnings have been encoded into the software that powers his latest venture, Trickle. Trust—which is key for employee engagement, effective communication, and collaboration—is generally earned, slowly. However, Paul explains how to generate trusting relationships more quickly through a purposeful combination of anonymity and action, supplemented by transparency.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
[04:00] Paul’s first work experience at a tech start-up and the work conditions for employees.
[06:05] How Paul tried to solve employees’ issues by sharing anonymous data.
[07:18] The surprising response he got from the company’s founders.
[08:34] The recurring process established to fix the problems and its impact on the culture.
[10:12] How important was the co-founders’ role in the process?
[11:15] Paul’s first venture—a tech start-up that focused on feedback and open discussion to create a high-performance culture.
[13:15] Recruiting software engineers and then setting them free to do the right thing.
[14:22] As a business scales up, how trust can be sustained.
[15:09] The ‘Broken Windows’ criminology study of derelict buildings and what it signals.
[11:06] Return-To-Office mandates often happen after a stock price crash—but why?
[12:00] How remote work gets blamed—without evidence—for poor performance.
[14:36] RTO mandates also result from executives’ loss of control and not trusting employees.
[15:40] Companies may also use RTO policies to easily/cheaply lay off employees.
[18:16] Male and powerful CEOs—with higher relative salaries—issue more RTO mandates to assert control.
[21:38] Employee and team choice is recommended combined with intentional office time.
[22:32] Mark needs data from companies offering employee choice to confirm the best approach.
[24:58] Amazon’s shifts to 3-days/wk then 5-days/week RTO has caused employee dissatisfaction and departures.
[25:50] One example of Nvidia’s flexible policy enables it to benefit from Amazon’s rigid one.
[26:59] Mark finds no evidence that RTO mandates help firms’ performance or stock price.
[27:43] Should productivity be measured appropriately and over what time period?
[29:12] States level data shows structured hybrid work reduces depression and suicide risks.
[32:00] Fully remote workers often self-select which fits their lifestyle and social setup.
[32:50] Companies going fully remote need regular off-site engagements to mitigate isolation.
[34:18] New research explores RTO mandates’ affect turnover, especially in finance and tech.
[35:20] Initial findings show higher turnover, especially among women, follows RTO mandates.
[36:48] After RTOs announcements, turnover increases quickly as some people can’t go back to the office.
[39:06] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: “First, allow flexibility so employees have choice. Second, promote flexible team leaders to signal that people working from home will not be penalized. Third, for new graduate hires who want to work at the office, ensure mentors are present to support them.
“The more powerful CEOs and the male CEOs are more likely to impose return-to-office mandates.”
“You should allow team choice plus employee choice. That means teams decide when they want to come to office together. And on those in office days, those meetings should be intentional.”
“We clearly do not find any evidence that Return To Office mandates help firms’ performance or stock price.”
“Five-day in-office work is not necessarily good for your mental health.”
“A lot of top executives, when they do not see the employees in the office, they do not trust the employees. They feel they have lost control of the employees.”
"Firms are telling their employees, you can work from home, but you will not be promoted. That's not a good strategy because your good employees will leave."
"By promoting flexible team leaders, you will send a signal to those people who want to stay remote or hybrid that there is a clear career path for them."
[13:26] Tim's time at Vitra exposes him to extraordinary design history and expertise.
[14:20] It was a mind-boggling experience to work on the campus every day for five years!
[15:10] The user-centric design of a new distribution center makes Tim energized and very curious.
[17:22] Using transport examples to illustrate the importance of employee-centric office design.
[18:48] Developing the Leesman Index, Tim encounters naysayers to begin with.
[19:46] Initially provocative, “space is a tool in organizational performance” sticks.
[20:59] How space is a tool in organizational performance.
[21:48] Contrary to expectations, the design community initially resists the Leesman Index.
[23:07] A friend’s referral leads to the first successful deployment of the Index.
[23:36] The index reveals engineers’ preference for compressed, energetic workspaces.
[24:41] The facilities management industry becomes a key user.
[25:02] Executive leadership teams appreciate data-driven insights.
[26:43] Tim describes the Index's methodology and its impact on workplace design.
[27:50] The Leesman index measures employee activities and their satisfaction with workplace features.
[29:41] ‘Sentiment Superdrivers’ are crucial to accommodate to achieve workplace satisfaction.
[32:54] The importance of supporting individual focused work.
[33:29] The pandemic highlights the inadequacies of traditional office designs.
[35:52] Many organizations are now seeking to improve their offices to better support employee needs.
[36:44] The rise of video conferencing underscores the need for better acoustic and visual privacy.
[38:12] Organizations increasingly seek to create offices that employees genuinely want to visit.
[39:45] Tim’s new venture aims to help clients improve both remote and office-based work environments.
[42:31] Commute satisfaction correlates with the quality of the office environment.
[45:28] The shift towards higher-quality, more amenity-rich office spaces.
[47:40] Standard Chartered Bank exemplifies successful office space reduction while enhancing quality.
[49:24] Tim advocates for clearly articulating the purpose of office spaces.
[52:15] How Facilities Management can create more technologically advanced, smarter buildings.
[54:09] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: Use evidence and be real, conversational, human. Find out what impacts the human experience as the human dynamic is motivational guidance. Live a day in the life of a frontline employee, experience it yourself.
"Whether it's an exhibition stand that you're building that's only up for five days, or it's a retail environment, or it's a bus station, or as we now are looking at the impact of office design on the organizational performance of the companies that we're working with.”
"I would leave work in a day feeling more energized than I arrived there in the morning. And I wanted to know why, fundamentally, I couldn't work it out. And that was really where the ideas behind Leesman and the idea of a measurement protocol started to seep through."
“It's all economics driven. Whether it's an exhibition stand that you're building that's only up for five days, or it's a retail environment, or it's a bus station, or as we now are looking at the impact of office design on the organizational performance.”
"Having thought about your day at work in the way that you have, can you tell us what you think about the following things in relation to your workplace? So, does it enable you to work productively? Are you proud of it? Do you enjoy it? Do you think it supports your organization's environmental sustainability standpoint?”
I think the bigger a workplace gets, the harder it is to satisfy everybody, because the more people are in it, the more variability there is in the work that they do and their personalities and their size and their demeanor and all the other things that make us different than individual human beings."
[14:21] What happens when values do not have defining boundaries?
[15:54] Lisa set hard lines to achieve alignment and expected some people to resign.
[17:16] How they explored values—finding out which values resonated most.
[18:20] What they did once new values were agreed to integrate them effectively.
[18:49] Exploring Greater Manchunian values through their podcast “We Built This City”
[19:29] Values are lived actively—one is selected and reinforced every week.
[20:44] Lisa confirms potential new clients’ values before agreeing to work with them.
[21:33] How their value “Admit it, fix it, move on” helps them improve.
[22:08] How BrewDog admitted their mistakes and made amends and why other companies don’t.
[24:17] After finding disconnected values were really upsetting her team, Lisa resigned a client project.
[26:31] The positive outcomes after Lisa took this difficult step.
[28:08] How new recruits connect with the company values.
[29:40] Purpose helps retention and values provide protection.
[31:04] Why Lisa feels pro bono work is important.
[32:14] Are the agency’s values manifested differently in London and Los Angeles?
[35:26] How do boundaries make it easier when things are really tough?
[36:25] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP – Take time out to work on your values. Write them down, do some iterations and consider how to integrate them into your life.
“My dad always used to say, ‘if business is going well, have a great car and eat baked beans. And if business is going badly, have a great car and eat baked beans.”
“We will hope to make your lives better in terms of your personal professional development, and we want you to help us make our platform even richer.”
“You wouldn't come and join Roland Dransfield if purpose wasn't at your heart, or if you didn't feel you wanted to be part of a purpose driven organization.”
“I want to know—for a 21 year old who's coming into this business—what's important to you? What does work need to look like for you? What gets you out of bed in the morning?”
“What we don't want to be as individuals or an organization that just goes through life using all the resources around us. Our platform as people and as a business needs to use the platform to create more resources. So we go out having left more than we've taken out.”
“Having put that values piece in has helped me to create space for myself as a mom, as a business person, as a friend, and as a leader.”
[14:15] Monday March 23rd: The business now needs ecommerce to sell the new desk products online.
[15:18] How Jeremy’s frank letter shared on social channels to market their desks goes viral.
[16:11] Tuesday March 24th: StageKings’ former employees are called back to work!
[16:55] Stagekings hires more people as the demand for IsoKing desks grows.
[18:25] New desk designs and other products are added as the business expands rapidly.
[19:19] Customers enjoy receiving desks delivered by entertainment event roadies.
[20:07] The product line expands driven by ‘community-led innovation’ with surprising requests!
[23:01] Stagekings consolidates IsoKings’ products and operations after rapid first year growth.
[24:27] A new brand of at-home furniture is launched as well as IsoKing becoming its own brand.
[26:42] With continuing uncertainties, the focus becomes establishing more income streams.
[27:58] Vertical integration enables Stagekings to broaden their offering and customer base.
[30:55] Jeremy attributes their success to the team, their adaptability, and positive attitudes.
[34:02] How Stagekings gives back to the event industry, supporting unemployed event workers.
[34:59] Discussing the challenges for freelance workers during the pandemic.
[37:02] The optimism Jeremy has about 2022 for Stagekings across market segments.
[37:39] What flexible approaches to work and encouraging employees to move around business areas means for them and the company.
[39:21] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: If you have an idea, go for it. And it doesn’t have to be massive steps. Small, consistent steps will get you much further.
“There’s a time when the show must go on—and wherever we’re up to, that’s where it is when it happens!”
“We called it community-led innovation, where it was the community telling us what they wanted, and we’d design it.”
“Out of anything bad, something good will come, and you need to work on that. Don't focus on the bad, focus on the good that'll come from it.”
“It’s real event mentality—problems are going to come up, and you’re just going to deal with them, you’ve still got to get through it.”
“We lost all of our work, what can we do? What can we do? Yeah, there's something you can do.”
“I’ve really focused over the whole of the last 18 months on establishing more pillars of income.”
“I think that’s what people like about it here—it’s that nothing is every the same!”
“The big thing for me is if people have an idea, just really go for it.“
[15:29] Companies with economic challenges in offering work from home options benefit from explaining the situation to their employees.
[18:17] Company culture is impacting the management process because it takes time to develop a strong culture.
[21:03] Culture is one the six pillars of Laurel’s company’s methodology.
[21:21] Training is key for remote workers to be equipped as successful self-managers.
[22:11] Managers need training to be able to manage people they can’t see—replacing supervising with support and encouragement.
[23:14] The difference between deliverables and results and the importance of tracking both.
[25:15] How a knowledge management system unifies a team to streamline communication and collaboration.
[26:16] Virtual infrastructure encompasses documenting culture and workflows with virtual handbooks.
[27:01] Compliance is a major issue - we haven’t yet achieved operational models for location irrelevancy yet.
[28:16] Understanding what you are getting into is essential.
[29:05] When we were forced to work remotely, it was an emergency not a long-term plan—which are two very different things.
[30:52] Hybrid teams are complicated. The risks and rewards of hybrid work models.
[32:15] The ultimate goal is to be operating as location irrelevant as possible, but we have not broken our habits enough as organizations.
[34:09] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: Communicate! Employers and employees need to be talking and listening to each other! Together you can work out how to unleash the power of remote work for your specific and unique organization and organizational culture.
[34:34] Remember, remote work is not a one-size fits all.
[35:23] Go at your own pace—if some people are stressed and resistant, slow it down.
“We also leveraged asynchronous communication. So everybody always felt safe in the systems.”
“What is the checklist of things that I have to do in order to be better? That doesn't exist for virtual organizational development. It doesn't exist necessarily for remote work at all.”
“We really need to figure out how to communicate as transparently as possible about why decisions are being made the way that they are.”
“You might have those cat posters on the wall that say you're humble and that you're innovative and that you're adaptable, but are you really?”
“We need to be able to create space to measure and track all types of outcomes, all types of diverse productivity as opposed to just deliverables.”
“We haven’t yet achieved operational models for location irrelevancy yet.”
“There are so many organizations that say, "No, it's not possible. Everyone come back to the office." And it is possible. You just need to know what to do.”
“We haven’t broken habits enough to have location irrelevant mindsets yet so naturally we are dividing people by location which is going to be problematic as we try to move forward as a unified team.”
[17:46] Understanding and fulfilling your own needs as well as supporting others during tough times.
[19:51] The power of contentment to appreciate the positive aspects of your situation.
[22:35] How empathy is particularly important now to bridge differences, connect with more people, and mitigate our more insular situations due to COVID19 restrictions.
[24:02] Managing differently in small companies to adjust to a less predictable marketplace while staying profitable—being more transparent, flexible, and supportive with employees.
[26:57] The reciprocal benefits of empathy, trust, and communication especially in changing conditions.
[27:56] Ramon shares the challenges of his kids—navigating work as a recent graduate and coping with very restrictive situations overseas during the pandemic.
[30:02] Wondering about new labor market entrants learning new work conditions as the standard.
[31:13] Aligned intention, shared values, and empathetic understanding with customers promotes strong relationships.
[34:33] The benefit of clients recognizing you for who you are!
[36:06] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: Encourage and care about people. Be empathetic. Build and focus on your personal brand. Don’t be afraid to amplify who are you—in an empathetic way!
“We cannot predict the future. Be comfortable with that.”
“It comes to the human dimensions, right? That make the biggest difference.”
“It’s not just shooting the target. 60% of it is mindset.”
“Somebody reading this may want to do it a different way. That’s okay.”
“We all need someone to reach out to us. It’s not a business thing. I go on WhatsApp once a week and send a message to 10-15 people and let them know I care.”
“I understand the broad strokes of your company [and your values], now unleash me and let me do what I do.”
“Don’t be afraid to amplify who you are.”
[13:55] Surveys allowed Sacha to monitor team sentiment and development of trusting relationships that were important for virtual collaboration.
[14:40] What were some of the challenges and benefits of remote working across time zones?
[15:50] How to work effectively with new team members.
[17:27] Sacha’s steep learning curve and technology challenges in 2010.
[20:19] Adapting workflow for a distributed innovation team.
[21:54] Sharing experiences, learnings, and resources improved effectiveness.
[22:24] How the Employee Resource Group for remote workers helped employees bridge gaps between office locations too.
[23:40] Sacha became an influential pioneer regarding Future of Work adaptations at a 100-year old organization.
[25:06] Definitions of workplace flexibility, hybrid models and working, and remote working.
[26:47] ‘Virtual’ used as a term to encompass work and relationships across locations.
[28:51] Myth #1: The ‘magic’ generated by chance office encounters does not happen in virtual environments.
[31:03] Intentionally establishing rituals to create the interactions that enable creativity, influence, problem-solving, and ideation for virtual and multi-office workers.
[32:58] The importance of stimulating intersections of people across divisions and networks.
[34:05] Myth #2: Brainstorming effectively is not possible in virtual environments.
[36:09] Unintended (beneficial) consequences of new processes for virtual brainstorming.
[38:35] Hybrid meetings: reducing the challenges and biases, and improving inclusiveness requires facilitation and conscious action.
[40:10] The impact of a ‘virtual-first’ work approach and being intentional about how work is done.
[44:05] Whatever workforce and workplace strategies companies are working on now are not the final answer—it takes a flexible and iterative approach.
[45:21] It takes an infinite mindset to tackle the Future of Work—with each organization iterating and adjusting as they go.
[47:15] Everyone needs to upskill for new work circumstances and learning virtual leadership skills, whatever role employees are in.
[48:30] More areas to emphasize to enhance virtual work—setting expectations clearly; building relationships; fostering a culture of trust and inclusion; having the right technology tools; and teaching how to use the tools.
[49:05] Empathy is key for understanding each other beyond the virtual curtains between people and other ‘soft’ skills which are critical.
[50:42] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: Have empathy for yourself and others in order to be able to adjust and iterate and make this next transition. Everyone is at a different stage and comfort level about what’s next.
“Do we want to live near the careers that we love or near the people that we love?”
“They trusted me and trust is a huge component with remote work. They knew I was dedicated.”
“Innovation felt like one step removed from the risk (of being remote) because it was something that we were preparing for the future.”
“Potential was linked to promotability which was linked to location.”
“You think about measuring performance. You need to have that in place whether you’re located together or not.”
“The seemingly innocuous moments that happen on the way to the elevator, they’re actually moments of influence. They're moments of problem-solving, connection, and idea generation.”
[16:40] Helping people understand every step of transformative change by taking them along the storytelling journey.
[17:26] Craft—creating the quality of messaging to the win attention of employees.
[19:29] The significance of employees’ participation in change initiatives.
[20:17] What stories can fill the void if companies don’t communicate to their employees.
[21:32] How culture allows new initiatives to survive or die.
[21:57] Culture is created by your people, not you as a leader.
[22:42] How to influence employees by listening and crafting an intentional story.
[23:40] How to craft a story that is going to resonate with each employee.
[25:52] The meaningful role of a company’s ‘Believers’.
[26:46] Who influences the ‘Swayables’ in the middle?
[27:21] How to shift the norms within a company.
[30:30] The level of empathy in your company’s culture has determined resilience to disruption.
[32:36] Talented people are moving to cultures that have natural empathy built in.
[33:33] What it takes to foster, strengthen, and maintain a culture.
[34:10] Being in one place together used to be a key part of cultural ‘glue’.
[35:25] How cultural ‘cyclones’ can be developed away from the corporate hub and help solve the problem of cultural dilution.
[37:54] The powerful ‘Infinity Loop’: two connected halves—the customer and employee experiences.
[39:49] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: The Assumption Problem – Marketers don’t assume anything. Start with employees’ apathy and ambivalence. You have to earn their caring and their belief.
“I’m a big believer that people shouldn’t have one career, that you should have as many different careers as you can.”
“Culture is what allows things to survive or die.”
“It doesn’t matter how helpful your idea is, if you don’t actually think about how it travels through culture, you’re likely going to lose that battle.”
“Marketing is ‘the orientation of everything you do around your audience.’”
“Around 2/3 of adults in the US are disengaged at work. They are unhappy, miserable, with the thing they spend half their waking life doing.”
“If you're not listening to your employees and understanding how they think and feel, you are in danger of not understanding the impact of that disengagement.”
“Disengagement hampers innovation, productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, customer service, the quality of your products, etc. Anything that you attribute to growth can be linked back to employee engagement.”
“Two thirds of those [change] initiatives require significant employee behavior change in order to succeed.”
“Smart talented folks are voting with their feet…they are seeking out those culture that have natural empathy built in.”
[17:00] The benefit of Trickle’s internal ‘broken window sessions’.
[18:25] How do you ‘trigger’ trust in a company, enabling it to build quickly?
[19:00] Psychological safety is a huge component of a highly-functioning team. How do you cultivate that? People feel they can speak up without fear of negative consequences.
[20:18] Why Trickle doesn’t record anything if someone wants to contribute anonymously.
[21:14] Action must follow quickly after listening to employees. If you survey employees, it is important to show them progress is being made based on their feedback.
[22:01] Trickle’s effectiveness is based on tying engagement to the actual issues.
[22:58] Why Trickle focuses on introducing three things: inclusivity, transparency, and agility.
[23:25] As trust builds within an organization, many employees start to feel comfortable enough to submit feedback without being anonymous.
[25:05] How champions spend five minutes a day to support habit-forming.
[27:19] Due to the pandemic, people were afraid to ask doctors how they were doing, so Trickle added a feature to check in with them and gathered insights to help improve their well-being.
[31:20] How Trickle helps nudge people to establish new habits—e.g. sending a fist-bump!
[32:35] Why the sign of a healthy organization is engagement with a rolling cadence responding to issues of interest to talk about.
[33:45] The three stages of check-ins to engage employees feedback on key issues.
[35:16] What will happen when people go back into the office and how can Trickle help?
[36:23] How transparency is always a key theme for Trickle.
[36:51] Why not to fear anonymity – it helps more people engage in and contribute on key issues.
[37:47] The hybrid model that Paul anticipates for Trickle going forward and why.
[38:58] What is Paul’s onboarding process like, especially sharing the company’s culture?
[41:52] How Paul helps employees speak up during uncertain times and Trickle shares targeted mental health advice responding to anonymous check-ins.
[43:51] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: Don’t get hung up on how to respond to employee feedback. Gather the data so you can understand how people feel. Without that, you can't create the environments that people are going to thrive in.
“You’re here because you’re very talented and you’ve got a desire to get things done and we’ve got a desire to be the best at what we do, and in order to do that, we are going to need to challenge each other.”
“The premise of Trickle is about helping people to speak up within an organization. So, we built it because we know that people don't often speak up about things that they care about.”
“When Google studied their highest-performing teams, what was the thing they had in common? Psychological safety. The ability to speak up without fear of negative consequences.”
“People don’t often see the value in speaking out, because they feel that things don’t change.”
“The idea is to tie the engagement and the action into one thread.”
“You’re trying to embed this openness.”
“When there's massive uncertainty, that’s when you want to be giving people a chance to speak up and get feedback.”
“If you don’t understand how people feel, you can’t create the environments that people are going to thrive in.”
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