How the Future Works

A I'm Evelyn Lee. And I'm Janine Chastain.

B We're collaborating on curated conversations to explore how the industry of architecture is changing.

C Together, we'll find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects. Welcome to Practice Disrupted. Hello, listeners. Hello, Janine.

B Hi, Evelyn. Hi, disruptors.

C In today's conversation, we've invited my colleagues from Slack to join us to revisit a conversation on the future of workplace culture. In season 2, Helen Kupp joined us to talk about how the workplace was shifting, especially during the pandemic.

B When we last spoke with Helen, we were still deep in the pandemic and not really sure about where things were heading. But we're at a different moment in time where there is less uncertainty, more optimism, albeit cautionary. The world has moved forward again, and lessons learned during the pandemic have shifted the way we're working.

C So we've brought Helen back as well as Chrissy from the Future Forum, and the Future Forum is a consortium focused on building a way of working that is flexible, inclusive, and connected. Most importantly, it attracts and retains top talent. Many leaders in the AEC space want to know how to do this and increase diversity within their firms as well. So we're gonna talk about all of that, how to engage people at work, and how to effectively build their practices by focusing on their most important assets, the people. These are all things that the Future Forum is looking at, and they are leading the conversation on reimagining how people, processes, and tools come together to make work better.

B They also recently published a new book, How the Future Works, leading flexible teams to do the best work of their lives. We'll be touching on this a bit during the episode and I picked up this book earlier this summer and it's been part of my summer reading list, so I'm very excited to dive into a lot of the lessons learned in their research. So we will drop that book in the show notes.

C I'm really super excited to jump into this discussion, and there is a lot to learn and a lot to cover. So welcome, Helen and Chrissy.

D Thanks for having us.

A Thanks for having me back.

B We are so glad to have you back.

C We always open or start off each episode by asking our guests. I mean, we've obviously done a little bit of an introduction. Tell us about you, your role at the Future Forum, and then if you could cover a little bit more about what the Future Forum is doing right now, that would be great.

A Yeah. Why don't I get started? So as you all know, if you've listened to the first episode, my name is Helen Kupp, and I'm 1 of the cofounders of the Future Forum and 1 of the coauthors of our book, How the Future Works. And just a little bit more about the Future Forum, so we're a research consortium, that's backed by Slack and our founding partners, Boston Consulting Group, Miller Knoll, and management leadership for tomorrow. And we're both a research consortium where we launch a quarterly survey around the future of work and knowledge workers, but we also engage in executive dialogue, with Fortune 500 c suite executives to figure out what they're doing, with flexible work in their organizations. And I'd say it's been a really interesting journey over the last 2 and a half years as we've learned more, experimented more, and started to put down into paper, you know, what is working and what isn't. And that's been really cool at Future Forum.

D Yeah. And I'm Chrissy Arnold. I'm the director of advisory services for Future Forum. So I really focus on partnering with executives at Fortune 500 Companies, to, you know, put into practice a lot of these things around flexible work. What does it look like on a day to day basis? What are the tools that you need to put in place? How do you operationalize this stuff? We have lots of believers and and then a lot of questions about, okay, but what does it actually look like on the ground? On a personal note, I've been at Slack for the last 7 years, and, you know, what really drew me to this work was my own experience as a leader at Slack and realizing that when I started to put tools like team level agreements into place with my team, it had a really transformative effect on our ability to work effectively and flexibly together. So that's me.

B I kinda wanna just clarify quickly because I I know you both mentioned Slack and Future Forum. Just briefly, how do those 2 organizations work together or fit together?

A Yeah. So we're all, employees of Slack. And, at the very beginning, you know, many of us had different jobs, but when the pandemic hit, I think, like so many other people, at first, we were like, okay. Just gotta make it a couple weeks virtually with remote work. Then a couple weeks turned into a month, 2 months. And I think at some point, Brian, Sheila, and I, who are all cofounders of Future Forum, realized that it didn't matter if the pandemic was gonna be over the next day. We had fundamentally shifted how we were all working. And I think all of our original expectations about office work, how work was getting done, how we could work together, that was thrown out the window.

A And so we started Future Forum within Slack. So Future Forum is sort of an organization within Slack. It's our research arm and dove into, at first, the data of, you know, what was happening on the ground. And data turned into well, this is interesting, but how do we make this work better, which is what led to some of the executive conversations and workshops that Krissy talked about.

C 1 of the things that people don't entirely realize about Slack is we were very much in spite of our product, which I think works well in a hybrid workplace, in a remote workplace, in a flexible workplace, we were very much an office based company. So 5% of our employee base was office based. Everyone had an assigned desk. Leadership at that time was very supportive of everyone coming into the office to get the work done. So even internally for us, this is a very big shift away from what how things were pre pandemic.

B Now, a lot of our listeners work in companies that have very different culture than tech, so I thought maybe you could also give us a sense of what working for a company like Slack or Future Forum is like. How do you describe the culture?

D Yeah. I I love this question. I get asked it all the time, when I'm interviewing people, to come work at Slack, and the thing that it always comes down to for me is the people. You know? Slack is a very people first company and really takes the time to listen to people, to be empathetic, to understand what people need. And when we look at what's effective sort of in this new world of flexible work, it's the exact same things. It's about people. It's about having empathy for, you know, what's working, what's not working, what are the challenges people are having. You know, beyond the the focus on people, dissatisfaction with the status quo really comes up.

D You know, Slack is always looking for better ways to do thing, whether do things whether that's within the product or whether that's within, you know, how we work together. And that comes back to this sort of, you know, core behavior that we have around looking at things in a smart way and not as in sort of IQ, but looking for better ways to do things, looking at things sideways, being playful with the way we get work done. And I think those are all really key things to to keep in mind when we are looking to the future of work, especially.

A Yeah. I would add that when we when we think about flexible work, what we've seen in our work on Future Forum and in writing this book is that those who are innovating and those who are forward thinking in how they're, you know, implementing flexible work are not just tech companies, actually. If you look in the book, a lot of the examples are from companies, that you wouldn't expect, like the Royal Bank of Canada, for example. It's less about being in tech and that culture, and it's more around your ability to enable experimentation, to be agile, and willingness to be vulnerable and say, we don't know the right answer yet. We don't have the blueprint, but we're willing to try and see if this works. We listen to our people and move forward from there 1 step at a time. That, I think, is more important than, you know, other aspects of culture that we typically associate that word with. But I'll also add something about Slack that comes up a lot in terms of culture and people first that I have always loved and I keep hearing when new people onboard is, there is a slide in new hire onboarding at the very end of, I think, day 1 orientation where you end the day and it just says, you belong here.

A And in many ways, it's just so powerful for people to see that and for a company to say that and focus on, like, their people, and to acknowledge that they belong here and build that empathy. So that is a good Slack example that I feel like has been very powerful for the last 6 years that I've been here.

C So 1 of the most, I think, impressive things about the research that that feature form is doing are these poll surveys that come out quarterly. Is that correct? It comes out quarterly. Yep. So what's great about the poll survey, and I'll let Helen and Chrissy talk a little bit more about it, of course, is that it is it's it's a quarterly survey that's, like, literally taken the pulse on what knowledge workers have felt about where they are currently over the course of the pandemic and how that has evolved and how that has changed. That's super high level from somebody unaffiliated with the future forum describing that. But I don't know if 1 of you wants to go a little bit deeper into describing what the poll survey is, and then also maybe each of you can chime in on, you know, what has come out of that research and what is the most surprising statistic, or something that you've found surprising and unexpected.

A Evelyn, you're not totally unaffiliated with Future Forum and the data

D and the pulse, for

A what it's worth, for our readers. We pull a lot of Evelyn's expertise in thinking about space, and space in a new way for future of work. But what you said is true. So the Future Forum Pulse is a quarterly survey of knowledge workers all around the world. We survey over 10, 000 knowledge workers every quarter. The big thing we do is we ask a lot about how, you know, their employee preferences for flexible work and for work in general is shifting, but it's also an opportunity for us to look at what sort of practices, are and are not working. We we try to understand different factors of work, like sense of belonging, productivity, satisfaction with your overall work environment. And we look at how different, you know, aspects of work, different practices shift and change, how employees are experiencing some of those factors.

A So, for example, like, more flexibility tends to improve, you know, all dimensions of the work factors, like productivity, focus, and sense of belonging even. And so the pulse has been really powerful in us just digging deeper around flexible work and understanding what is and isn't working. I will say the the single most surprising thing for me that came out early in our research and our data is that, you know, most of the conversation, even now around flexible work tends to be oriented around flexible location, so work from home versus work from the office. But our data shows that while that's important, over 3 quarters of people want flexible location. Almost everyone wants flexibility in their schedules, so time matters more than place. And when you think about it, I think that's a little bit more obvious than I would have, I would have originally thought. Because if you're working from the office or from the home, if you're in meetings 9 to 5, back to back every single day, That's not the flexibility that you want, and it actually doesn't matter if you're working from a coffee shop or your house. You still feel not in control of your time and your work.

A And what people are looking for is just a lot more autonomy over their day. And so flexible schedules points to that. How do you give people more focused time, more ability to, you know, take control of their day, do things that they need to, like drop the kids off, or, you know, integrate some of a better balance with work and life, get things done, and still collaborate with our colleagues. And how so that's always been sort of surprising and 1 of the biggest findings, I think, from our research.

D Yeah. You know, for me, when I think about it, this notion of sense of belonging, often gets conflated as well with sort of culture within an organization. It's really top of mind for people right now. And there's this concern out there that, oh, people are going to experience less sense of belonging with our company if we're not together in an office. I think the most surprising thing for me has been that the data has actually dictated the opposite. You know, that sense of belonging for all groups has increased over the course of the pandemic, particularly so for black, Hispanic, and Asian American employees. You know, early in the pandemic, when we started to see trends around that, we were quite surprised by it. And we went to, Brian Lowery, who's a professor at Stanford, to ask, you know, what was up with this? What why are we seeing these trends? And he actually wasn't surprised at all.

D He said, well, of course, you know, there's there's no need to code switch. We've talked about this as, like, the psychological commute into the office. What's required of you to change from, you know, your home environment where you're comfortable, where you're able to work as you are, and fit into a different environment, that maybe feels less at home to you. Beyond that, I think about it for myself as, you know, a working parent. I feel a much greater sense of belonging with my team because we're intentional about the time we spent together. I no longer have to, you know, go into the office and rush to get out to pick up my kids, miss out on happy hours, miss out on social events where people are building that sense of connection. So, you know, since having children, my sense of belonging not being in the office is much greater with my team. And, certainly, that that is contradictory to sort of what people assume would be the case as we're not in offices as much.

B So 1 question we had was really around the idea of, is this an industry specific challenge that architects are facing or is this something broader going on within the way we think about work? You know, when we started this podcast, I do think that Evelyn and I were thinking a lot of these issues were specific to architecture as a practice, but I think the more and more conversations that we're having, we're realizing that other industries are experiencing some of this too. So I wanted to get your take since Slack and Future Forum cuts across industries. It's not you guys are looking at all different types of work. What is your take on major themes that run across everything?

D In the data, there is just a broad desire for flexibility as as table stakes for everybody. So, you know, across all sectors, across all ages, across all levels of management functions within an organization, everybody wants flexibility. There's some variation, within those groups in terms of, you know, whether people wanna be more, like, full time at home versus in the office, but it's not meaningful, and that's often surprising to people. You know, you hear people say younger workers wanna be in the office more to sort of build their careers, and older folks are used to being in the office, and they wanna be in the office more, and and the fact is that everybody wants flexibility to almost the same degree, and it's especially important when people think about staying within a company. You know, desire to leave the company or look for a new job. If you're dissatisfied with your current levels of flexibility, you're you're 3 times more likely to definitely be looking for a new job within the next year. So this stuff really matters, and and people should be taking it seriously.

B I wanna also talk about, like, the myths of returning to, to the office. It's funny because I was just on LinkedIn the other day and I saw, like, this push and pull argument going on between the 2 extremes of the people that are, like, all remote, all digital, and then, the opposition was saying, no. We gotta get back into the office, which is amazing to me that we're, like, still we're still thinking of it from, like, an either or standpoint. So I wanted to ask, like, in the data, what are the myths, about returning to office? What have you guys learned?

A So many myths that we've honestly debunked over the last 2 and a half years. Right? But you're right. I feel like the conversation in the media tends to be too black and white, where it's either or. And 1 of the things that we often say is that digital first doesn't mean never in the office. And what people are looking for is a balance as well as what they're really looking for when they say they want flexibility is autonomy and trust. Right? That's ultimately what it comes down to. And so part of, I think, what we're seeing in the media, the backlash of RTO mandates and all that is a bit of that. Chrissy already talked about the myth around sense of belonging, that you need the office to build culture and a sense of belonging and, those sort of relationships.

A I think the other prevalent myth that we continue to hear is that, you know, maybe you can be productive when you work from home, but you need the office to innovate. You need it to be creative and have those serendipitous conversations in the hallway. And not only does the data does our data not support this, there's actually been decades of research in the past that say, you know, things like brainstorming in a room together actually doesn't generate the best ideas. There's a higher chance you get groupthink, and oftentimes, less voices are being heard or included in the discussion. And the reality is what we find is that we should be thinking about things like brain writing over brainstorming. So how do you mix in some asynchronous ideation beforehand where people can jot down different ideas whether in a Google Doc or on Post its like me, because I'm more traditional in pen and paper, and bring that into a, you know, shorter meeting where you can actually focus on discussion and debating of ideas. That tends to be much better for coming up with really great ideas as well as ideas that you wouldn't typically have generated together. And so I think that that is 1 of those things where it's a very, I would say nostalgic myth of the office, but research in the past outside of our own doesn't support that.

A And when we look at the data at future forum, we see that location doesn't impact how people are feeling in terms of creativity. What matters is psychological safety. So the ability how they feel about, you know, whether they can take risks as a team, and whether they are able to ask for help across their team, those are the factors that really impact how creative a team can be. And that that is agnostic of being in the same location or being in the office.

C That notion on psychological, safety is kind of really interesting at this point of time, especially for architecture firms. So you 2 aren't probably aware, but just recently, the first union in a private architecture firm of 22 was formed in New York. So there's been a lot of talk about the need to from the bottom up to kinda transform a culture, not only the workplace, but in the studio environment. And I think so much of what that ties back to is actually having psychological safety within the workplace. And it's interesting to me to hear about all of these firm owners that are pushing people back to the physical workplace saying, like, that's the only way we can innovate. That's the only way we can sit around and talk about design and charrette where, like, the key component isn't not necessarily place based. I think architects also like everything to be place based because we are architects. But, but it's really about creating that psychological safety, which which is something that I don't feel like architects think about enough when it comes to what's going on in their practice and what's going on in their firm and, and especially as a mechanism of, like, enabling people to be more productive by feeling psychologically safe.

A Yeah. I mean, I will tell you, I am your classic introvert despite what I do with podcasting and future forum. I'm very, very introverted, and I can tell you that for the most part, you know, being in a room and trying to, get in a comment when there's a lot of talk and discussion and overlapping voices happening, it's hard. And I have found that when I have mentored other introverts as well, that's 1 of the things that really prevents us from chiming in with, you know, our ideas, whether half baked or even just a a thought. You it it works much better for introverts, generally, if there's an opportunity to, like, write something down in advance, prep, and submit that idea, even just the act of, like, writing on a Post it and putting it somewhere is better. And so I think we hold on to this nostalgia of, you know, what it looks like to be creative in the past without thinking about what formats and, you know, how to solicit voices in a way that everyone feels comfortable to contribute. And I think when you get more people contributing, you do get better ideas, and that's just the reality of it.

D And I like, I think what you're speaking to there, Helen, is, you know, we often almost frame the current moment as, like, oh, we have to make it work in a different environment. We have to make the way we work together, shift sort of over to digital first. But, ultimately, like, this is an opportunity to really radically reimagine how people are working together and to look at the practices that we came to take for granted and say, okay. Who was that serving and who wasn't it? Is it serving our team in the way we want it to? So how do we, you know, really use this moment to take a hard look at the things that we've taken for granted for a long time?

A Taken for granted or just made the assumption that it it worked without saying, did it really work?

B Yeah. Definitely. So I always found myself in conversations, especially in architecture firms, as like the lone extrovert, a lot of introverts. So it's it's pushed me into a direction of studying introverts to understand the way that they make decisions and what they need and how they communicate. And I'll say as an extrovert, I used to misunderstand the silence as non participation and didn't understand that that's not what was happening, you know, because I was always, like, who's the loudest voice in the room? I'm gonna jump in. I'm gonna rumble and make sure that I get my voice in there too, which came naturally for me. But then I learned that there's a lot of things that introverts need too. And if our extroverted voices just continuously crowd them out, then we don't leave enough space for them at the table, which is why redesigning some of the forums and the way you communicate with your team is so important to create better balance.

A Yeah. And we're right now, we're talking about 1 dimension, right, of personality, which is introversion, extraversion. But think about neurodiversity. Think about, a and how that impacts how they show up and what they need, I think it you're right. We're introversion, extroversion is an easy 1, that are broad buckets to kind of address. But each individual brings to the table different needs, and the best ways in which they work. And it's an opportunity for us to say, how can we make it so that we are pulling the best out of everyone?

C And I think that comes back to all of these initiatives around diversity and equity and inclusion too. Right? Because as you begin to add more diverse individuals to your organization, your business, that means that you're going to be dealing with added complexities how information sinks in, how they process information, and then kind of how they report out as well. So we cover a lot around flexibility. And, actually, you know, 1 of my pet peeves is when organizations tend to stop their return to work conversation with how many days we're going to be in the office. So I'm trying to sit here as a listener to the podcast, and they're like, okay. Well, people want flexibility, but does that mean unlimited flexibility? Like like, how how do we truly make flexibility work in a way that's meaningful to the organization?

D Yeah. You know, most people don't want unlimited flexibility, whether that's about location flexibility, whether that's about schedule flexibility. What they want is flexibility within a framework. They're looking for predictability so that they know, you know, when am I expected to be where, and then how do I maintain autonomy over the rest of my time? So, you know, there's sort of 2 elements here, I would say, on on the location side. We said it before. Digital first doesn't mean never in person. But if we're gonna come together, we need to have a purpose for gathering. It doesn't make sense to arbitrarily say we need to be together 2 days a week in the office and then to go in, spend all that extra time commuting, and spend the whole day sitting on Zoom.

D Like, that's really frustrating for employees. I had the experience recently where I chose to go into an office, and, you know, I burned an hour and a half on the commute each way and 30 or $50 for parking downtown, and, you know, I was there because I wanted to be, and I thought, wow. If I was forced to be here, that would be so frustrating. So really thinking about what's the purpose for us coming together if we're going to do that, and what are you gonna get out of it? And then on the schedule flexibility side, you know, 1 of the tools that that we found really effective comes from Dropbox, actually, this idea of core collaboration hours. So what are the hours that you're expected to be available for synchronous work with your team within the day, and sort of where can we have that sort of more bursty conversation where, you know, we might come up with new ideas, we can build off 1 another. And then the rest of the time when I'm not expected to be there, when my team doesn't have that expectation, is mine. And so if I wanna work after the kids go to bed at night, that's fine. I'm not letting anybody else down.

D If I wanna take my dog for a walk during the day, that's fine. So this notion of what are the hours that we are all gonna agree to work, together. For us, we do 9 AM to 1 PM. We've got people on the East Coast on our team, so I know that those are the hours that need to be available for meeting. I wanna be responding more quickly in Slack, and then the rest of my time is mine. Helen, what would you add there?

A That core collaboration hours is not your workday, is not 9 to 5. I think that that is an important point for us to remember.

C Yeah. Organizations are gonna be like, okay, core collaboration, 9 to 5.

A No. No. No. Because the research also shows that teams are better when they're bursty together. Right? So that when they have this smaller amount of time where they can have, you know, live synchronous collaboration, really quick back and forth for feedback, paired with more focused time, silent time, where you're not connecting with your team on a, like, continuous basis. And the 9 to 5 workday is not structured to do that. Right? You're, like, sort of expected to be on and available for 8 hours a day or more for some of us who work longer hours. Instead, it's just saying, okay.

A You have you have focus time and you have synchronous time, and that synchronous time is not 9 to 5. You can decide. What we see is a 3 to 4 hour block per day is pretty good because then you get, you know, variety and discussion, ability to schedule meetings, and all that. But it's it's not the same as your full workday.

B I wanna dive further into this because this actually came up on a call that I had today and something that I'm prepping for. The need for focus time and how do you protect like, how do you build consensus around focus time on a group or a team dynamic? And then how do you protect focus time from all those, like, avalanche meetings that end up inevitably, like, maybe, you know, I do have free time.

D Maybe I should put it, take this meeting during that time. Like, what what are some quick tips you can share with our audience? You know, I think, ultimately, where this stuff works is when there is agreement within the group about what's expected and what we're going to try. And coming back to Helen's earlier points, this is about experimentation. You know, you don't have to put something in place and say this is how we're always going to do it. But we use a tool called team level agreements. We found them to be really effective at, you know, brokering a conversation within your team to say, what are the norms around working that we are going to explicitly agree to? And it forces you to take pen to paper and say, well, what are we currently doing? So things like, what are your core collaboration hours or things like, you know, what do we use meetings for? What's expected of a meeting owner? You know, we take it a step further at Slack, and we've been doing this for a while now, but we've actually implemented 2, you know, company wide programs. So we have a focused Fridays program, and the expectation is that on Fridays, there are no internal meetings at Slack. And, you know, at different levels of the organization, this might look different.

D Of course, if you're a senior executive and you need to have an important meeting, that's okay. But as a general rule, we do our best not to schedule internal meetings. We do our best to give frontline managers and individual contributors that time to really put their heads down and focus. So that's Focus Fridays, and then we have a program, across Slack and Salesforce called Async Weeks or Maker Weeks. And so these are weeks where we do our best to cancel all recurring meetings. 1 on ones with your manager, you have an option about whether you wanna keep those or not, but sort of that weekly team meeting, take it off the calendar for a week, See if you really need it. See if it's providing value to you. It's just a really good chance to kinda audit your schedule and think about, is this working? So those are 2 programs we've tried.

D And, again, they might change. Right? This is all an iterative process, and and we make sure that we're taking pulse surveys on these programs to see, are they having the impact that we want them to have for our employees? And where can we improve? Where can we change?

A Yeah. The reality is that meetings, are a habit and in many ways a bad habit. And meeting creep happens all the time, even with us. And so the ability to just say, let's audit, let's cancel all meetings for a week and see you know, go meeting, declare meeting bankruptcy and say, do we did we actually need these? Because if they were important and urgent, it will make its way back on the calendar. Trust me. It will. And so III think that's the theme of a lot of what we're talking about, you know, with team level agreements, with some of these programs around meetings, it's just a chance to pause and say, is this still working? Let's actually evaluate and have that conversation, and what can we experiment with and change? The thing that I often like to say about team level agreements is that, you know, it's a it's an interesting tool because it's so simple, and its simplicity is in that there are so many invisible norms that exist in the workplace with with and with your team and with other people. And for so long, we just operated as if that was normal.

A And once we write it down, it's an opportunity to actually ask ourselves, is this norm actually working for all of us? Because the fact is we never questioned it when it wasn't written down. Right? It when it's an invisible norm, you actually never take a step back and say this is still working. But the act of writing it down gives you this chance to redesign and rethink it. And so though those are really great ways to using the team law agreements, using some of these, like, meeting bankruptcy programs to say what what is and isn't working for us.

C The invisible norms is an interesting way to approach things because as a new employee too, I think it takes you time to learn those invisible norms, right, within within the culture. So just having them actually written and documented makes it kind of easier to understand how understand the team dynamics and understand if I need help, this is what I need to do to get immediate support. If it's something that, like, can wait 24 hours, this is kind of how I reach out to my team members.

D Hey, Evelyn. I love that, especially as we're talking about more distributed work and hybrid work because when you were in the office, 1 of the things that you could do was kind of observe the people around you and figure out what those norms were. And that's something that is fundamentally quite different when you're sitting at home in front of your computer all day. And so, how do you make things as explicit as possible for your employees, so they're not wasting energy guessing, like, is it okay for me to miss this meeting? Is it okay for me to, you know, reach out to this person? And they can actually focus their energy on getting good work done. So I think it just becomes, like, even more important to document explicitly when we're not

C together. So 1 of the other myths that I feel not only architects are facing, but a lot of I just read a New York Times article about, how you mentor the young individuals coming into the office, that it has to be done in an office. That's the only way they can pick up on our culture. That's the only way we can hold our hand going forward so they understand what we're like and how we work with. Is there anything that we haven't necessarily talked about yet that can help with bringing in those younger individuals into a more flexible workplace?

D Yeah. And, you know, I think a lot about, again, back to what are sort of the informal ways that people have learned on the job in the past, and what were we kind of relying on the shared space in the office to do for us instead of intentionally designing. So, you know, 1 example might be like a a sales rep who is on a client call and has appear on that call with them. You know, after you got off the call with the customer, if you were sitting together, in the office, you would have time to informally debrief to, like, get feedback on how that went to sort of take a breath together, and look for opportunities to improve. If you're not together in that shared space, you have to be intentional. You know? We work in Slack, so there's a Slack Huddl's feature. And 1 of our best practices is after we get off a client call, we jump on a Huddl for 5 minutes. It's not a 30 minute meeting.

D It doesn't have to be on the calendar. It's a chance to informally check-in and give a little bit of feedback. And, you know, if it didn't go well, take a breath and be like, it's okay. You're not alone. You're gonna do great next time. Right? So I think with especially newer employees really being intentional about making sure those moments can happen, those on the job learning moments is is critical to success here.

C A lot of what you're talking about, I think, demands leader like, support from leadership, but it also relies heavily on kind of the middle manager to implement and to execute. What are suggestions there, and, you know, what, you know, to what extent are you seeing, organizations kind of upskilling or retraining those middle managers to manage in this new way of working?

A I think that more organizations need to be doing more to support their middle managers. Middle managers as a group, even pre pandemic, were under supported in terms of when you think about, like, what are the expectations of the job and what's the right training, what's the right support from a peer perspective, to really shine as a manager. And this is especially true because over the last decade, right, the the role of a manager has shifted so much and even more so during the pandemic, from the traditional, you know, role of gatekeeper, task tracker, you know, delegating work to being more of that sort of empathetic coach and leader. And we just haven't we haven't helped enough people make that transition. You go from being great at your job to now having to, like, help your team build connection, build relationships, navigate things that are happening in the world in terms of our society, the news, etcetera, and, you know, helping to manage a distributed team and having people build that autonomy and flexibility. Like, those jobs are fundamentally different. And you're right. The the frontline manager in particular, they're the linchpins of flexible work.

A Right? If you think about it, they're the individuals that connect their team to the rest of the organization, to information, to opportunity, to other people, and access. And so 1 of the, I I'd say, 1 of the frameworks that we talk about in the book, that we that comes from our own updated manager training program at Slack is, that managers have sort of 3 core roles that I think are are new and in many ways not new, and that is to create clarity, to inspire trust, and to unlock potential. And you'll see none of that is about monitoring or making sure that your employees are working from 9 to 5 or 40 hours a week. It's really about things that we've talked about. Right? Trust, how you, give people the agency to work the best way that they need. How do you you unlock their potential? How do you create psychological safety? Those are all, I think, within those buckets of creating clarity on a team with things like agreements, inspiring trust, and and trying to find ways to bring those diverse voices to the table and unlocking potential. And that's just, you know, across the board, more support for middle managers are is needed and more upscaling and training.

C So, Helen, really quickly, what's next for the Future Forum and you?

A Future Forum's gonna continue to do research. I think we're grounded in data. But 1 of the things that I'm really excited about is just diving in with more companies, and understanding what companies and leaders are experimenting with and seeing in the field, and pulling just more stories and examples to share with our community. And so that to me is probably the most exciting thing over the next year. And who knows? Maybe another book? Maybe? I don't know. We'll see. We'll see.

C Chrissy, same question to you, especially since Helen mentioned, you know, working with working a lot more with companies. And I I feel like when it comes to advisory services, this is also critical to your role, in the future form.

D For us, I I think there's 2 pieces. 1 is supporting people as they try to make this work. The the future I wanna see is that people have access to the resources they need to give people, the flexibility that's gonna let them live their best lives and do their best work. Right? And, you know, it's kind of a desert out there in terms of stories of actually, like, what are people trying? What are they, doing on a day to day basis to make this real? And so being sort of the people who can can share those tactics and can say, here's something you can try, and here's a framework, from which to think about this. And as we start to get deeper with what are the real challenges that people on the ground are seeing so that we're not just hearing an executive conversation. We're understanding, you know, what are people, that are going to work every day experiencing? What does the data tell us on 1 side, and then what what does it look like on the ground? And so, yeah, we we will continue to listen and to, you know, hear what the challenges really are right now. The ones that are emerging are around things like team level agreements, around things like meeting culture, and then how do we build the sense of of connection when we aren't together. So those are our focus areas at the moment, and I'm sure more will emerge as we get further, into this.

B So I I just wanna ask. Evelyn just changed her role at Slack, and and she's taking on a new role. I was hoping that you all could explain it to our audience who is a bunch of architects who don't know anything about Slack, but are very curious, like, what what is her role and what is she doing? Can you help us understand this?

D When we see companies be really successful with flexible work, it's when they're our digital infrastructure that we need to collaborate to what's our digital infrastructure that we need to collaborate to questions of how are we going to bring people together and where. And so having strategic leadership that has sort of the ear of the executive team to say, well, here's where we need to make investments, and these are the people that I need, and these are the programs that I wanna roll out. That's that's ultimately how we're going to continue with this experimentation and and to be successful. And so that's what that's what Evelyn's gonna be charged with is is sort of figuring that all out. I mean, she brings so much expertise, obviously, from the architectural space and from understanding space and design, and also just experience design, and how do people work together, and what do they need to sort of collaborate most effectively. So I'm super excited to have her in that role and to see, where we take this next at Slack and what the next sort of set of experiments are gonna be.

B I'm really glad you touched on how her identity as an architect is helping Slack because that's something that we are trying to take back to our listeners also to understand that, that architecture, while a very focused topic, has potential to influence things like the technology industry, like workplace strategy, and, that there is a lot of synergy between those different disciplines that we can learn from each other and inform each other's work based on our point of view.

C The easiest way I've described my role is that and we mentioned this at the top of the podcast. Slack is very much, organization in transformation through the pandemic as well. So a future forum is the body that is gathering all of this great information, then I feel like my role, or, you know, a large part of my role is taking the future forum's research and implementing it within Slack, the company. So it's cross functional. My role has always been cross functional, but it is really understanding people leaders' needs, understanding the executive leaders' needs, but then also understanding the needs of our employees and helping them meet in the middle so that everyone can is 1, 1st and foremost, happy, productive. They love being at and working together at Slack, and that includes kind of our imagination of of what the office means to us. We've mentioned it multiple times that digital first doesn't mean never in person, but we also mentioned that we we want to only have meetings that matter, especially if that means asking people to commute all the way into the office and especially if that means asking people to fly, right, and spend time with us in San Francisco overnight or in any on 1 of our, number of other offices where Salesforce is located. So so all of that, ups up helping up level our managers, helping design meetings and on like, you know, the off-site is a new on-site, helping design meaningful on sites.

C So people don't leave meetings saying, oh, I could have just done that from at Zoom. I feel like that's, like, the absolute worst feeling after being called into the office. So, yeah, that's my goal.

B With that idea in mind, I'm gonna ask you both the slight final closer question, which is about the fact that we're talking about a lot of change. And, Evelyn, you mentioned implementation. So how are you both finding balance in implementing a lot of the changes that you're describing through this research and new ways of working while still getting work done. When you guys hit barriers, how do you keep moving forward and, like, what tips can you leave with our listeners?

D 1 of the things about having worked at Slack for 7 years in a rapidly scaling organization is everything changes every month. Right? You just you can't grow to attach to the way things are because you know that it's gonna change. And that's been a real gift for me moving from I've worked in nonprofit leadership prior to being in the technology industry. So I think it's about nonattachment, right, at the end of the day. It's about really taking a hard look at how we're doing and whether something's working. And just because it worked 2 months ago doesn't mean that it's still working now, and that's not a bad thing. And so for me, I think it's it's really a perspective thing and a welcoming of change and making sure that you're not changing things for the sake of it. It's not to sort of feign this idea of movement instead of progress, but to really say, okay.

D Well, what's gonna serve us right now? And it's okay for it to be different than what it was in the past.

B Well, I have been looking forward to this conversation for a while, and I'm so glad that we had it. I wanna remind everybody to check out the book, How the Future Works, Leading Flexible Teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives. The link is in the show notes, and I highly encourage you to buy the book and read it because there's a lot of really good ideas in there about how to shift the way that we're working, and you can take them back to your team. So with that, thank you so much to Helen and Chrissy and Evelyn. Thanks for letting me turn the interview on you also. Hi, disruptors. If you like the content from today's show, you can find all of our past episodes over on practice of architecture dot com/podcast.

C Be a part of the conversation by joining us, our speakers, and others in our community at practice of architecture.com/community. Our social media handle is at practice of arch. That's at practice of arch. We love to hear from you. Drop us a note to say hello.

B This show is part of Gable Media. You can learn more about other podcasts and video channels in our community by visiting gablmedia dotcom.

C Thank you for joining us on Practice Disrupted, a podcast by Practice of Architecture. Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.