Solving the Problem of Remote Work

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by Mark Mortensen

A framework to help leaders approach the topic more holistically and effectively.

 

The discussion around remote work — which has dominated news headlines, Slack conversations and water-cooler chats since countries relaxed their Covid-19 guidelines — is only getting more contentious. Many workers wish to continue working remotely in some capacity, while insisting that leaders’ productivity concerns are unfounded.

However, some high-profile executives have been vocal about their opposition. Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman declared that working remotely “is not an employee choice”. And Elon Musk denounced remote work as “morally wrong”. He further suggested that those working from home are merely “phoning it in” and mandated a return-to-office (RTO) at Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter).

One consistent aspect of the arguments for and against remote work is how strong and entrenched these stances are. And although conflicting perspectives on the topic are nothing new, tensions seem to be escalating.

Amazon workers conducted a walkout to protest their company’s RTO policies, Google recently began tracking employees’ in-office attendance and Farmers Insurance workers have threatened to unionise or quit over the CEO’s reversal of the company’s remote work policy. What’s more, stories of employees being terminated for failing to comply with RTO mandates continue to proliferate.

Amid increasing polarisation, it becomes even more difficult for employers and employees to reach a consensus on the best way forward. As I wrote in a recent article for Harvard Business Review, leaders and employees should actively collaborate to devise a balanced approach to the issue and arrive at a mutually beneficial solution — one that recognises and validates the needs and concerns of both sides.        Continue reading →

3 ways to shift the perception of HR from administrative to strategic

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by Jennie Yang

 

From recruitment and hiring to mediating issues among co-workers, HR’s work is often seen as an administrative function within an organization. Case in point: A recent study by Sapient Insights found that only 46% of business leaders see their organization’s HR function as strategic. That’s compared to 67% who view the finance role as strategic and 60% who consider the supply chain role as such.

It’s time to change this perception. To do so, HR leaders must demonstrate how critical it is to an organization’s success to align HR strategy and business strategy closely. That requires showing tangible impact, which starts with a diagnosis, or a baseline: What are the areas related to people that represent the most significant opportunities or challenges for the business?

Once you’ve pinpointed those, organize the work of HR in a deliberate direction against a handful of specific objectives. This very focused approach to what matters most to the business is what defines strategic HR.

From there, HR and people leaders can show the bottom-line business value the department creates by organizing its work around outcomes. There are three that matter the most to the C-suite: maximizing employee performance, improving employee engagement and decreasing regrettable turnover. By delivering against these three outcomes, HR leaders can show how investment in their operations contributes broadly to the success of the business. And it adds credibility to the claim that HR is a strategic profit center, not an administrative cost center.

Let’s take a closer look at each outcome. 

Maximizing employee performance

It’s straightforward: Employees impact a company’s bottom line. When they perform well, the company does well. When they don’t, output and morale take a hit—among other things. Because of this, HR leaders need to support managers to maximize employee performance and ensure employees are meeting or exceeding job expectations.

One way to maximize employee performance is by tracking goals. These goals bring employees clarity, focus and alignment, making them more likely to achieve them.

Once goals are established, they can give HR leaders a measure of how employees are either progressing or regressing over time. Goals also motivate employees to focus their attention and time on reaching a specific objective, allowing them to do their best work and help the organization thrive.  Continue reading →

Too Many Meetings, Too Little Time (to Work)

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by Guillaume Roels

What if there was a better way to schedule meetings for team coordination?

In January, Shopify deleted 12,000 recurring meetings from its staff’s calendars. The e-commerce firm also reinstated a no-meeting Wednesday policy. The idea wasn’t to prevent meetings from happening, but for staff to be intentional about them. In addition, it sent a clear message that it was OK to protect one’s time.

When I ask managers what their biggest operational frustration in their job is, they typically say: “We have too many meetings.” Before the pandemic, I interviewed product managers to have a clearer sense of their roles. They described their days as running from one meeting to the next and being interrupted the rest of the time. It’s a familiar experience. You can probably relate.

Indeed, ethnographic studies on software developers, for instance, revealed how chaotic and distressing work can feel. In 1999, Harvard’s Leslie Perlow coined the term “time famine” to describe the feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it, largely because of constant interruptions at work.

There is a fundamental trade-off between the time that we could spend working – being productive and adding value – and the time that we spend in meetings. However, it’s not that meetings are completely useless. Teams do need them to resolve issues, coordinate work, convey information and even socialise workers. There’s a lot of research on these benefits.

However, as UCLA’s Charles J. Corbett and I found, little academic work has been done on the art and science of scheduling team meetings. We felt the subject was relevant to the field of operations management: With a long tradition of scheduling machine work, its principles could be applied to finding optimal rules for scheduling meetings. Continue reading →

How institutionalizing talent strategies helps to future-proof businesses

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by Don Robertson

 

For quite some time, the talent landscape has acted as a chameleon, constantly evolving to meet the moment and blend in. Human resource and talent executives have seen the dynamics shift from the War for Talent to the Great Resignation to the Great Resurgence to Quiet Cutting and more.

If one thing remained consistent throughout these cycles, it was why the winning organizations were winning. It starts and ends with the way they approach their talent strategies. Over time, it has become increasingly clear that organizations with employee-centered processes, protocols and standards in place stand out. In fact, in 2012, London Business School’s Alex Edmans found that the companies on Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For in America” list generated higher stock returns per year than their peers.

That’s a call to action for organizations of any size. Now more than ever, it is a business-critical priority to have a strong employee value proposition and consistent approach to recruiting, developing and engaging top talent. By developing and formalizing a talent strategy that supports broad business goals with a talent-first approach, it also helps eliminate outdated HR practices that can act as a competitive drag on growth.

The good news is this: Organizations can get started by implementing the following five key steps toward building an institutionalized talent strategy.

Understand the desired business outcomes first

While HR can oftentimes feel like a siloed part of the business, it is anything but. Talent is perhaps the most essential part of any business strategy, constantly driving companies forward, especially during uncertainty and instability. Chief human resource officers need to step out of the HR domain, understand the business, and clearly see what talent it needs to deliver. Continue reading →

Incorporating DEI into Decision-Making

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by Edward Chang, Siri Chilazi, James Elfer, Cansin Arslan, Erika Kirgios, Oliver Hauser, and Iris Bohnet

 

Most people don’t think of themselves as biased or prejudiced, and people often explicitly endorse diversity as something companies should strive for. But many organizations struggle with DEI. Why?

Implicit or unconscious biases can lead to inequitable decision-making. More mundanely, people are just busy. They have lots of competing priorities and lots to occupy their brains. Even if they care about DEI, they might not have it top of mind as they go about their work. As a result, they might not see how their decisions are relevant for DEI and so might inadvertently make inequitable decisions.

To fix this, managers and organizations should make DEI more immediately obvious, or salient, when it matters most — that is, when consequential decisions about such matters as hiring, promotions, and performance evaluation are being made. Our academic research and experiences partnering with companies suggest that to make real progress on DEI, managers and organizations need to make DEI salient in those moments of consequential decision-making. We’ve identified three particularly effective ways of doing so.

1. Ask managers to hire for more than one job at a time.

Many hiring decisions are made in isolation, with only one person being hired at a time. When this is the case, diversity simply just isn’t that salient to decision-makers, who are often thinking not about diversity but instead about technical skills, cultural fit, or how quickly a candidate can start. This shouldn’t be surprising, because diversity is a property of groups, not individuals. You can describe a group of people as “diverse” or “homogeneous,” after all, but not an individual person.

On the other hand, when people make collective hiring decisions — when they hire multiple people at a time — our research shows that people select more diversity. They start thinking about the candidates they’re selecting as a group, which makes diversity more salient and leads to hiring decisions that improve it. For example, rather than hiring one person every month, a company might benefit from grouping these decisions together and hiring three people very quarter. The total number of people hired will be the same, but making collective decisions every quarter should lead to more diversity. Relatedly, it might also be beneficial to give one person oversight over hiring decisions across teams or departments, enabling that person to make collective hiring decisions.

Continue reading →