How the Future Works. Brian Elliott
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people go,” Butterfield recalls.
That's essentially where the company was at when the pandemic hit, offices closed basically overnight, and everyone was forced into a kind of grand experiment. Just like we have seen with company after company, in industry after industry, the nature of work changed.
In the beginning, the focus of Slack's leaders was simply on productivity, on how people could continue to achieve pre-set goals in these altered circumstances. They paid close attention to the metrics as things unfolded, and to everyone's surprise, they quickly found that overall, output, quality, and reliability remained strong. “It was surprising how well we continued to operate,” Henderson says. Even still, there were some significant variations across teams depending on their circumstances. Parents with young kids, those dealing with health challenges in the family, or those with poor work setups and internet connections struggled more, for obvious reasons. But as the company got better at identifying where problems existed and what those problems were, they were able to provide help—giving people support, space, even equipment—and the outlook continued to improve.
In the beginning, most companies—most people, in fact—thought the shift would be temporary, but as lockdowns were extended, most workers began settling into a rhythm—and not just at Slack, but at numerous companies we worked with during the period. They also made some discoveries about the conventional wisdom that had previously dictated so much of how we worked—and, oftentimes, that “wisdom” just didn't hold up. Because so much of how people were used to working was based on the idea of being present together in space and time, there was an assumption that these things were necessary for collaboration and innovation. Many had relied on whiteboards for brainstorming sessions, for example, but when forced to find another way, solutions—often simple ones—presented themselves. Team members at Slack began brainstorming in an online document where everyone, in their own time, could offer ideas and opinions, and then the group would get together for short discussions once everyone had weighed in. It worked better than expected, as did numerous adjustments to fundamental work habits and processes, like meetings, team building, measurements, and more (all of which we'll talk about in this book).
During that unprecedented time, companies were looking closely at the impact of what was happening, measuring not just productivity, but employee sentiment and engagement to see if business would simply fall off a cliff. But the opposite happened: these new, more flexible work practices were shown to actually increase productivity. According to an analysis by Goldman Sachs Group, productivity—defined as the measure of goods or services produced per hour by workers—rose 3.1% during the first year of the crisis.2
Within a few months, leaders at Slack had already begun talking about permanently applying some of the changes that had taken place and lessons that had been learned. “It was just very compelling evidence,” Butterfield explains. “It was an accident of history that we got pushed into this, but there's been a benefit to forcing this change because there otherwise would have been no way to convince anyone that it would work. I can't imagine how we ever would have come to believe this empirical fact that we could work so well with everyone working flexibly unless it actually happened.”
The evidence was convincing enough that Slack's leaders decided to change course. “At some point it felt like we had been operating this way for long enough that we could be confident we would continue to be able to operate this way in the future,” Henderson says. In 2020, Slack announced their intention to move forward, not try to go back to how things had once been, by introducing their new flexible work strategy. They opened up hiring within the US and allowed people to keep their jobs if they moved. They began developing tools and methods for people to connect and collaborate from wherever they were and whenever worked best for them and their team. Once they started down this path, it would be hard to go back, but Butterfield's confidence showed in his own choices: He realized he, too, could move away from the Bay Area he had once gravitated to and go somewhere else, which he did when he moved to Colorado. “I realized I can just go,” he says, “and it's not really going to make any difference to my ability to lead or do my work.”
It's been more than a transition for the company, it's been a transformation that's had a wide-ranging impact, one that we'll continue to talk about through the course of this book. But just in terms of the distribution of talent, by the end of 2021, only 36% of Slack's engineering team was located in San Francisco and the number of team members working remotely on a permanent basis grew from just 2% pre-pandemic to nearly 50%.
One of the main reasons Slack decided to make the fundamental shift to a more flexible way of working is the impact it has on recruiting and retaining employees—the battle for talent—which is one of the biggest challenges that employers of knowledge workers face today. A 2021 joint survey of CEOs by Fortune and Deloitte found that 73% said that a labor shortage was their biggest external concern, and 57% said that attracting and recruiting talent is among their biggest challenges; followed by 51% who said retaining it is highest on their list.3
As you will see over the course of this book, flexible work offers a real opportunity, not just to attract and retain talent, but to transform the way people work and unlock their potential. One of the reasons that's possible is because so much of the way we had been working pre-pandemic was rooted in old norms and organizational models whose evolution largely stalled out decades ago even as technologies continued to change and workforces became more diverse. It just took a crisis to open our eyes to it and force us to do something about it. As Butterfield put it, “This is no time for retreat to the comfort of well-worn habits. We can't respond reflexively. This moment demands a thoughtful and intentional response and will reward creativity in attempts to build a better workplace and world.” And that's far more attainable than some leaders may realize.
Flexible work “has opened up to question every aspect of the work experience; it all needs to be unpacked. The corporate office was the yardstick. It was facetime, it was your calendar, but even before COVID, that wasn't sustainable. We need to think about the employee experience. This is an opportunity to get the most out of your people as a company.”
— Atif Rafiq, President, Commercial and Growth, MGM Resorts International4
Why the 9-to-5 Mentality Needs to Go
The old adage that “time is money” goes way back. It's typically credited to Benjamin Franklin, and it describes the long held belief that more time spent working equals more success. And that may have been true at one time, for some anyway. In the agricultural era, more time in the fields meant more crops getting planted or harvested (of course, that only worked for the owner of those crops or those being paid by the hour or bushel to work the fields, rather than slave labor or indentured servants). Even still, much agricultural work was unlikely to continue after sundown and it's often seasonal, unlike what took root during the Industrial Revolution when a large part of the labor force moved from field to factory to work on a set daily schedule.
As journalist Celeste Headlee, author of Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving, put it: “Before the industrial age, time was measured in days or seasons. However, when workers began punching in and out of work, our understanding of time changed, as did our enjoyment of our time off.” If people got time off at all, that is. Shifts in factories and mills could sometimes last for ten, twelve, even fourteen hours a day, leaving little time to do much else but eat, sleep, and get ready for another day of work (a notion that may not seem all that unfamiliar to many working today).
Labor movements grew in power in reaction to strenuous conditions, but it was more than just workers who saw the need for change. In the 1920s, automobile titan Henry Ford found business reasons to impose limits on working hours. As someone who kept a close eye on efficiency, he noticed that when employees worked too many hours, they made mistakes and productivity suffered. As a result, he imposed restrictions: eight-hour days, five days a week. He wasn't the first to do this, but he deserves credit for bringing attention to the concept. “We know from our experience in changing from six to five days and