Summary
Lynda Gratton explains why hybrid work represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redesign work, rather than simply adjust where people work. She argues that hybrid will only endure if organisations prioritise productivity and intentionally design work around energy, focus, collaboration and cooperation.
Gratton highlights the importance of fairness in hybrid models, particularly for organisations with mixed frontline and knowledge-based workforces. She also calls for a rethink of performance management and the role of managers, moving away from presenteeism towards clear outcomes, explicit norms and new uses of technology. The interview concludes that successful hybrid work requires a deliberate design mindset, not incremental fixes to old models.
About Lynda Gratton
Lynda Gratton is a professor of management practice at the London Business School and founder of HSM Advisory. She is an award-winning author on the future of work and the role of corporation. Her 10 books have sold over a million copies and have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Her recent book, co-authored with Andrew J. Scott, is ‘The New Long Life – a framework for flourishing in a changing world’. Global recognition of her work includes the Indian Tata prize, the Australian AHRI prize, and the US Fellow of NAHR, she has also received the LBS Best Teacher Award.
Gratton served on former Japanese prime minister Shinzō Abe’s Council for Designing 100-Year Life Society, is a member of the Council of the World Economic Forum, has chaired the WEF Council on Leadership and is currently co-chair of the WEF Global Future Council on Work, Wages and Job Creation, as well as a member of the international advisory board of Equinor.
Transcript
Why hybrid work is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
Right now, and of course we're talking in the early summer of 2021, the big question is what's going to happen with hybrid work?
And I guess there's a short-term issue, which is how are we going to make this work? When some people are at home, some are in the office, how do we make this stay productive? But I think in the longer term there's big questions - could this be a time when we totally reinvent work? This is a once in a lifetime possibility to reinvent, to redesign work. So let's think about how to do that so that we can create work, which is meaningful, which allows people to really be incredibly productive, which allows them to be human, to spend time with their family. So I think it's a very exciting time.
Productivity Must Come First
We've really got to put productivity first. So as we redesign work the question we've got to ask ourselves is will this help people perform better?
Why am I saying that? Well, I've been around long enough to see fads come and go. And I can tell you that if in a year's time productivity goes down because of any of the redesigns we're doing right now - encouraging people to work from home, for example - all of that will be pulled out. I can promise you on that one. So number one, make sure that you put productivity first.
At number two, in that case, really think about what are the forces of productivity, which in my view are about creating energy with people, about allowing them to do some focused work, allowing them to be collaborative so they're working closely with each other and then also to be cooperative and innovative. And so number three, think not just about place, which I think people are getting very myopic about right now, but also think about time.
So the question that I'm addressing in my new book, Redesigning Work, is what is the combination of place and time that helps you to do those parts of your job which could be really important. So for example, if your job's really about focus, what we know is the real important aspect is a time aspect and it's really about being asynchronous, ie not connected to other people. So that's a level of intentionality in terms of design that we've never really seen in work before. So it's a great opportunity for those of you in the HR community to really step up and work with your CEOs, who are now very interested in the issues of the future of work, and really make sure that we build lasting high-performing working practices.
Designing fairness into hybrid work
Many companies have amazing collaborative technology to pull in lots of employees' perspectives and views. Now is the time to use that technology. Now is really the time to engage your employees in a conversation because it seems to me that one of the real issues is going to be about fairness and about justice. How do we create a way of working that feels fair wherever you are in the organisation.
We had a census taken right in the middle of the pandemic, which was fascinating really, because one of the questions that everybody in the UK was asked on that day is where are you working?
Only 30% of people were working from home. My son, for example, Dominic, is an A&E doctor. He hasn't worked at home for a single moment. The people who are working outside collecting my bins and not working from home. So we have to be incredibly sensitive and there are lots of companies, and you might be in one of them yourself, where half of your employees are working from home and half of them are in a factory or in a retail depot. That's why I think time and about place is so very important because we can bring flexibility around place and give people opportunities to work from home. But we can also think about how do we manage time? And I think if we want to be fair to a whole bunch of people, we have to have conversations about time, as well as conversations about place. So we have to be much more thoughtful about how we design for work.
Rethinking performance and management
We also have to think about performance management and what we've done is we've been a bit lazy, really in terms of performance management, we've said we'll watch you and we'll decide how good you are by whether you're around, the sort of presenteeism, but actually we'd have to really now ask ourselves what's the objective of the job and what are the means by which people can be assessed by that and companies that are virtual, and I've been studying a number of companies that are entirely virtual, have always been very good at that because they've never been able to fall back on just seeing whether you're in the office or not.
If you talk to people who have entirely remote knowledge-based companies, not remote sort of call centres, but remote knowledge-based companies, one of the things that they've said to me is look you have to be very explicit. Part of the learning to do a job is to learn about the norms the culture and the norms.
So if you're virtual you have to be much more explicit about what the culture and the norms are. So people don't have to discover them, they're much more obvious to them. So that's the first thing that they've said. The second thing they say is that you have to build in a lot more opportunities for people to observe each other.
So I've been writing a case actually, specifically - and I mentioned it in the MIT article - about a company called Artemis Connection, which is made up with very, very highly skilled strategy consultants. And they have a very clear line of sight that says you've just joined us this is what's going to happen today, this is what's going to happen next week and so on. Now, by the way, they have quite, they have a turnover rate within a month or two, because some people say this isn't suiting me at all, this working virtual isn't suiting me at all.
Companies are becoming much more idiosyncratic in how they're now redesigning work. I think that's a good thing. I think we're moving away as it were from the model T of work, everything looks the same and it's all the same colour, but on the other hand, in doing that, you need to be much more explicit about what the deal is and in terms of that explicitness, make it explicit to people who are joining you.
I love the fact that Goldman Sachs has said you need to be in the office all the time. That's the deal. I don't know if I would like that deal, but there's enough people in the world who do, and they're being straight and clear about what the work deal is.
And I think we've all, as leaders, got to build much clearer narratives about what the deal is because companies are going to differ in terms of what that deal is.
Watching the technology that will shape work
I think the second thing to say is watch the technology on this and I was interested to see PwC, for example, is using virtual reality goggles to help people meet each other and to go into conference rooms and see each other and so on. So there's a huge investment currently being made in the virtual technologies that support work. So I would say watch out for what's coming because I think some of our fundamental viewpoints about how culture is created, how networks are formed, those are really going to come under scrutiny as we begin to build extraordinary technologies that allow people to be connected to each other.
Managers jobs have been completely transformed with artificial intelligence and machine learning. And IBM's a really good example of that. IBM use a whole range of chatbots to help to talk to employees about their career and so on.
They also do a lot of data scraping and a lot of machine learning to give managers a real good insight into what's happening around them and also to measure managers. So there's much more clarity about what the role of managers are, but that of course doesn't help the fact that managers have too much to do. It's a very fragmented job.
So what do you do about that? Well, one of the companies that we featured in our own work is Telstra, which is an Australian telecoms company.
And they've completely split, they've made a decision to completely split the role of the manager into the 'leader of work' and the 'leader of people' and the leader of work, which I think is an increasingly important job, really manages the projects, the scheduling, the resource benches and the leader of people is responsible in Telstra for 200 people with the same sort of, they call it a chapter, the same sort of skill sets, and they're there to support them to make sure that they upskill, but also to help them to reskill, to bridge into other parts of the business. What they're realising there is that there's more than one job as a manager and we need to have a great deal more clarity about what those are.
We have to take a design perspective and actually model what it is we're thinking of doing and asking ourselves what are the unintended consequences of this? What are the unwritten rules of the game that are going to make a difference?
Because we're actually interfering with complex systems and one of the reasons why CEOs don't like changing work is that they have a system of productivity that if they start pulling a thread out, they don't know does the whole thing just fall apart, will it all be dismantled? So you can see there's been a lot of anxiety about redesigning work, but now we're in a stage where everybody's doing it and there's masses of experimentation going on. And so, for someone like me, this couldn't have been a more exciting time.
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