Debbie Lovich 3 tips for leaders to get the future of work right TED
Transcriber:
When I moved from New York
to Boston in 1989,
I completely lost my sense of direction.
It wasn’t me, though,
it was those winding,
nonsensical Boston roads.
Urban legend has it that in Boston,
they paved over cow paths
to form the very roads we have today.
Now, if you’re an urban planner
designing a city from scratch,
you would not base it
on how the cows wandered.
And if you think about it,
that’s exactly what we’ve done with work.
Hundreds of years ago,
in the industrial revolution,
people left their homes
to perform repetitive tasks
in the fixed time and place
of the factory floor.
And when knowledge workers
entered the scene,
we kept the same model,
this time with fixed job descriptions
and fields of cubicles from nine to five.
Even globalization and technology
did little to change the dynamic.
Fixed time, place and job descriptions
are the cow paths of work.
And like cow paths for roads,
it just doesn’t make any sense.
I’ve been challenging and changing
how companies work for the past 15 years,
starting with my own company,
Boston Consulting Group,
and then with dozens of other
Fortune 500 organizations.
And I have to tell you
something amazing happened to work
during the tragedy of COVID-19,
especially those first weeks and months.
If you remember,
all the low-value work disappeared.
It didn’t matter
what your job technically was.
People just worked together
across silos and even companies
to get stuff done wherever,
whenever, however it was needed.
Leaders simply had to trust their people.
They didn’t have time
for endless steering committees
or death by PowerPoint.
We just needed to trust people to deliver,
and they did.
So I’m on a mission.
A mission to bottle
these great work practices
and not go back to the old ways.
And yes, of course, I want
to get rid of endless back-to-back zooms
and loneliness and days
that blend into evenings.
But we have to make sure we don’t go back
to the rigid, structured, bureaucratic,
sluggish ways that sucked
the joy out of work.
And I have to tell you,
the future of work
is not going to be created
with top-down, opinion-driven edicts
from senior leaders
whose day-to-day realities
don’t match those of us dual-career,
time-pressed and income-pressed people.
Of course, senior leaders want to go back.
That worked for them.
But they have to recognize
that for 18 months now,
their people experienced unprecedented
agency, control, flexibility,
trust and accountability.
And people don’t want to go back.
And it’s this difference in perspective
from senior leaders and their people
that’s one of the main reasons
driving so much backlash
to all these return-to-office
announcements over the past months,
with employees venting on social media
and quitting in what’s being called
the “great resignation.”
And employees, I don’t blame you.
But before you take
to social media and walk,
try talking to your leaders,
tell them what you loved
about the past 18 months.
Tell them what you want to keep.
They might be more receptive
than you think.
And leaders, let me share three tips –
rather three must-do’s –
to get the future of work right.
Number one, trust your people.
Millions of workers and employees
have proved their trustworthiness
since March 2020.
But even with that,
so many leaders want to go backwards.
As part of the work I do,
I’ve spoken with hundreds of leaders
over the past 18 months,
and I get some really crazy questions.
One is, “Well, Debbie, how can I tell
if my workers are productive
when they’re working from home?”
And I can’t help but say,
“Well, how do you know
they were productive
when they were in the office?”
Just because you could see someone,
doesn’t mean they’re productive.
Or I have to love this, “You know,
when it’s safe to go back to the office,
we’re going to let people
work from home two days a week,
as long as it’s not a Monday or Friday
because we don’t trust them
not to slack off and take long weekends.”
What does that say
about the culture of trust?
Will there be abusers?
Of course, but they’ll be a tiny few.
So why make rules for the vast majority
who’ve earned your trust every day
for the past 18 months?
A trusting culture will not only attract,
retain and motivate your people,
it’ll also save you
a lot of time enforcing rules.
So that’s number one.
Trust your people.
Number two, be data-driven.
We all have our opinions
about how work should be done,
and the more senior we are,
the more we’re convinced
that our opinions are not just opinion,
but they’re fact, they’re truth.
But one thing COVID’s taught us
is that people are so different.
I have genetically identical
17-year-old twin boys, Abraham and Boaz,
and I emphasize the point
“genetically identical,”
because these two guys
could not be more different.
Abraham really struggled
when school went online.
He did everything he could
to engineer outdoor,
socially distant get-togethers
because you can’t call them
playdates when the boys are 17.
(Laughter)
But his brother, Boaz –
Bo was loving life!
“Ma, this is fantastic!
I don’t ever have to leave my bed!”
My boys couldn’t be more different,
and so are your workers,
so we must get data.
How? Well, try this.
Get some of your best people
together and ask them,
“What did you love about
these last 18 months?
What did you hate?
If we were to give you a magic wand
and you could create
the perfect work environment for you,
what would your days,
weeks and months look like?”
And then experiment. Yes. Experiment.
So many people are saying COVID’s been
the biggest work experiment ever.
I beg to differ.
I’m not a scientist, but I know
that prospective experiments
have hypotheses, control groups,
data collection,
learning loops and revisions.
We didn’t do that.
And so now’s the time to experiment.
And we don’t have to wait
until it’s safe to go back to the office.
We could do it now.
Take two teams that do similar work,
let one flex and work whenever
and however they need,
and another, give them fixed times.
You want them online
and you want them working.
And then measure.
Survey them every week.
Everyone says people are oversurveyed.
People are not oversurveyed
when it comes to this topic.
They want to have their opinions heard.
So ask them, “How’s it going?
Are you delivering value?
Are you able to collaborate well?
How’s your work-life balance?
What do you love? What do you hate?”
And take those learning
and spread them around.
This is new for all of us.
We’re not going to get it right
the first, second,
third or even fourth time.
But together with conversation
and data, and experiments,
we’re going to learn our way
to a better future of work.
So that’s number two.
Number one, trust your people.
Number two, be data-driven.
Here’s number three.
Think beyond the schedule.
Guess what? The future of work
is not two days
that you get to work from home.
This is our chance right now
to reimagine, reduce, replace
or even eliminate things
like long commutes,
endless meetings
with too many people there,
recurring meetings that never go away,
synchronous work, silos,
command-and-control leaders,
administrivia –
that’s my word for the low-value stuff
that clogs our calendars.
In other words, we could stop
contorting our lives around work,
but we could actually reshape work
to better fit our lives.
So that’s number three.
Think beyond the schedule.
And guess what, a lot of companies
are getting it right.
Take Dropbox, for example.
Before COVID, Dropbox only had
three percent of their workers
working from home.
They’re now moving forward
with a remote-first model
and trying to push
as much asynchronous work as possible.
And to help collaboration
with their model,
they’re setting core collaboration hours
that very slightly by time zone,
so they have four hours a day
when you know everyone is online
in case you need to collaborate.
One of my favorite examples
is the Mr. Cooper Group.
And Mr. Cooper Group’s been described
as a mortgage giant no one’s heard of.
A lot of their workers,
a large percentage,
are call center operators.
And like many, in the first days of COVID,
they got them all home
safely and successfully.
And guess what?
They were more productive,
and they were happier.
But even with that data,
many on the leadership team
wanted them back in the office
as soon as it was safe to do so.
They just couldn’t imagine
call center work
being done from home permanently.
Well, that’s where Kelly Ann Doherty,
their amazing Chief
People Officer comes in.
When Kelly Ann and her team
presented their recommendation
for a home-centric working model,
she got a ton of questions.
“Well, Kelly Ann, what about
onboarding and training?”
She said, “Of course, we’re going
to get people together for that.
Home-centric doesn’t
mean we’re never together.”
“Well, what about day-to-day
coaching and mentoring?”
“We’re experimenting with software
that allows managers
to do that even better.”
“Well, what about culture?
Communication? What about –”
And she just stopped them
It was a moment, and she said,
“I know you all
want to go back to your offices.
So do I, but we have to take a minute
to walk in the shoes
of our call center operators.
They are loving the flexibility.
They’re saving real money
by not commuting,
and we know this is
a high-turnover population.
Imagine if one of our competitors
is more flexible than us.
How many people are we going to lose?”
And with that, Kelly Ann and her team
had the leadership team on board.
They’re moving forward
with a home-centric model,
and they’re investing
in upskilling all of their managers
to be able to coach,
mentor and manage their teams remotely.
And now they’re taking
it one step further.
They’re tapping into
more flexible talent pools,
like military spouses,
who need a ton of flexibility
when their spouses are deployed.
In other words, Kelly Ann
and the Mr. Cooper Group
are urban planners of the future of work.
They’re trusting their people.
They’re using data.
They’re thinking beyond the schedule
to not go back to the old cow paths
of call center work.
They’re making work better
for them, for the company,
the customers and their people.
This is our moment, right now,
to together with our people and our teams
design a future of work
that’s more engaging,
more productive and more humane.
Thank you.
(Applause)