Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Workplace from Meta, where culture and technology come together to create a more productive future of work. Check out www.workplace.com/future to learn more.
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In yesterday’s article, we spoke about the 5 sine qua non steps of defining flexible and remote work and how, if companies haven’t spent the time on each and every one of those aspects then chances are, their flexible work efforts are misguided or, at the very least, unsustainable.
In short, the companies who are best positioned to make the best of flexible and remote work going into the future have done or will be doing:
- An in-depth exploration of one’s “WHY”;
- A true discussion on what work should be and what are real outcomes and ways to measure success alongside an exploration into common work versus individual work and the ways to do remote smartly;
- A large-scale and honest effort to replace command and control with servant leadership;
- New tools, processes and encouragement to habitually do the human work in empowered teams;
- A deep mentality change at the top to embrace the people-first/humanity-at-work ethos.
In today’s video, we got more in-depth to discuss why that is but we also offer some advice as to what are ways to tackle the big task that these 5 take.
As we outline, different companies have approached this effort differently and while few have top-down mandated sustained efforts to limit HumanDebt and attempt to not create even more which is the clear and present danger we must defend against, or while they may have used different terminology, they all have one thing in common: the extreme willingness to change. To grab this moment in time and make it work to their advantage. This crossroads of open questions and intentional, open-minded and empathic exploration of important and basal questions around the “where” and “how” of work but above all, around the “why” and the “who” as well.
Many of the companies we work with haven’t had the luxury of this body of work having been called out specifically as the most important effort and yet there are Superheroes and leaders who are very clear about what this list of five items contains and have it as their North Star even while the official discourse or policies seem far removed and they are the ones having the biggest burden. Their counterparts in people-first enterprises get to open-mindedly contribute and add value whereas these Superheroes spend immense cognitive loads navigating toxic cultural traits and politics to see these big pieces further but they too are privileged if we are to compare them to the places that have to work in virtue of inertia with no exploration or dialogue or, worse still, the places who insist to hold on to the absurd “eventually we’ll go back to working like before” mantra.
No one has it easy and while some companies had a head-start by the mere fact that they had had a people-first ethos prior to the pandemic (such as the digital natives or the Silicon Valley giants), everyone has had to rethink and reimagine to take the five steps above. If we had to boil it down to the two unescapable traits that everyone needed to do the above then we’ll find they were all displaying:
- Unprecedented Honesty – none of the steps above can exist in the absence of complete openness at every level of the discourse and without true and open-ended curiosity to find out how one’s employees truly feel;
- A Relentless focus on Humanity – Vulnerability, Emotions, Empathy, we need them all in spades and we can no longer allow the misguided convention of “being professional” to act as the wall we put up to avoid fully engaging with the enterprise-, and an understanding of the fact that the intentional work on individual and team behaviours has to commence in earnest.
As we say many times before, it is imperative we are poised and ready for the sustained human work enterprises will have to distribute to the team level in order to reduce HumanDebt and these are the bigger fish we have to fry when we realise we can no longer spend time on the red herring of whether or not flexible and remote work is here to stay.
The way we approach the next 5 years as humans in the workplace and how many of the steps above have been checked off the list will impact our children. Depending on what we achieve, they’ll either work in a world where they will feel happy, respected, important, whole, human and valuable and where they can have a life and apply their best selves to their profession working any time from anywhere, or they will addle along in a Frankenstein world where the remaining command and control bosses roam empty corridors of real but deserted buildings, thundering threats to return to the office and menaces of “going back” down the line into their VR headset while they hold virtual meetings in their metaverse offices.
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