How Tone-Deaf Leadership Is Undermining Hybrid Work (And What to Do About It)

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Brian Elliott: The big shift that leaders have to make in their organizations both make flexibility work and to get the leverage they want out of generative AI tools is move away from those visual cues and into outcomes management. What are the goals we’ve got for our organization? What are our top three priorities?

How are we gonna measure success? How do we drive that throughout the organization? How do we measure it quarterly? And then how do we assess teams on how they’re doing against outcomes? If you did that, you’d create a more level playing field. You’d actually get what a lot of executives want at the end of the day, which is better results.

David Rice: Welcome to the People Managing People podcast. We’re on a mission to build a better world of work and help you create happy, healthy, and productive workplaces. I’m your host, David Rice.

My guest today is Brian Elliott. He is the CEO of Work Forward and a well-known speaker and author in the HR and leadership space. Today we’re gonna be talking about how returning to the office has been working out for folks.

So Brian, welcome!

Brian Elliott: Thanks David, great to be here with you.

David Rice: Absolutely.

I wanna start at tone deafness, ’cause I feel like this is a big culprit in a lot of the return to office discussions that we’re hearing with or that we’ve seen play out in the media anyways.

I’m curious, what is the most tone deaf thing you’ve heard CEOs say recently to justify these mandates?

Brian Elliott: Man, it’s hard to pick just one. I’ll give you a couple of examples. One that I’ve just heard consistently, and I’ll give you a variant of it, is the board member actually who in a senior management meeting stands up and says.

You all need to get back in the office ’cause I know that’s the best way to work. Because based on my experience, back in the 1980s when I had that one lunch with the guy who turned out to be my mentor and coach, and that took my career from nowhere to everywhere, you all need to get back in. And he’s, he, and it’s always a, he is basing his experience on what worked best, for him.

And that kind of goes across the board, I think, in a lot of different ways. What you hear quite often is these pronouncements coming from somebody who’s not necessarily got the same life trade offs that a lot of their employees do, right? They’ve got a coroner office, they probably have a driver. In fact, they may be making these announcements or they happen to also have a corporate jet, and it’s just a very different experience they are going through, but they’re applying their own desire for hustle culture back on their employee base.

Works for some, never worked for everybody.

David Rice: No, it never did. And I think that idea of hustle culture is something that will come up quite a bit through all this but return to office starts and immediately it impacts groups that are historically a little bit marginalized, right? Women, people with disabilities going down the list.

And this is happening at a moment where DEI is often getting tossed aside. I don’t, personally, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two kind of go hand in hand, but certainly I would say it might be unfair to say all leaders just don’t care about these groups of people, or that they always wanted to go in this direction.

So I guess I’m curious from your perspective, what is the mindset that’s driving this, especially among leaders who are operating in businesses where most people aren’t co-located to begin with? Like they weren’t co-located before Covid.

Brian Elliott: Yeah, exactly. And I think there’s a couple things that have changed.

Some of this is oblivious. You’re not thinking about it from somebody else’s experience. I had this happen a couple of years ago. I had a group of CFOs that were actually in a round table with me, about a dozen of them sitting around the table, and we get into the topic of return to office and one after another for the first five or six, they’re one upping each other.

I’m going back five days a week. I’m at least going back five days a week. It’s that type of thing. It’s all guys, by the way. You get to number six or number seven, and he says, I’m not, I happen to be a divorced dad. I’ve got shared custody of my kids. They’re with me every other week, and I’ll go in the office a couple of days a week at least, even while I’ve got the kids. But I can be just as effective working from home some days as I can be in the office, and it helps me balance out my obligations. So you guys do you, I’m gonna do me. And after that, the tone changed.

You no longer had quite the level of ego and bluster happening with it. People recognized at least a little bit that what they were conditioning on was, their own experience. The sort of what worked for me type of thing. It’s always interesting to pull out the data and share it with folks, but, we did this for years with future form data and I still do it to these days of, there’s a lot of groups at work that actually do find benefit from flexibility, and they’re not asking to be fully remote.

They’re simply asking for a little bit of latitude. And to figure out like what’s the right answer for your team. There’s a second one that you touched on though too, which is a lot of executives don’t get the shift that’s happened within their company. I think a lot of them are rightly concerned that their managers aren’t really great, to be blunt, right?

Their managers aren’t that good at managing people in the first place. They’re struggling. That a lot of their managers aren’t good at leading people when they’re not in eyesight. The problem with all that is the world changed in the past five years, dramatically used to be that in much bigger organizations, you might have a minority of teams that were distributed across locations, right?

Like at Google when I was working there, it was maybe a third of the organization where the manager and teammates weren’t in the same office. Today, that’s inverted, right? It’s at least two thirds in most organizations, where the manager and the people that work for them aren’t in the same place in the first place.

So as a senior leader, you’ve gotta recognize that. And the choice isn’t remote or not remote. It’s like you’ve gotta train your managers to lead distributed teams. And if you don’t, you’re not gonna get the performance out of them that you’re expecting.

David Rice: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more like the focus on outputs and just like actual, work generate productivity, like how we define that. If that’s not changing, if you haven’t changed that in the last five years, like you’re already behind the curve.

Brian Elliott: Yeah, exactly. If you haven’t started making that shift, it’s gonna be more problematic the more time goes on.

The same is true by the way, when you start thinking about how we’re gonna put generative AI and leverage that in the workplace. If we don’t know what the goals are in the first place and how we’re gonna measure success.

David Rice: Yeah, absolutely. And like on the same vein of thinking.

You brought up something when we spoke about this beforehand that I found really interesting. You drew some parallels between the same set of patterns that we see leaders talk about is the exact same things that make it hard for firms to adopt Gen AI. They want hustle culture, but they want people to use AI and do more faster. Not necessarily better. They want more output.

And now some CEOs are talking about 60 hour work weeks and what would you say is the biggest challenge with leaders right now being a little, out of touch with where people are and what they’re experiencing with Gen AI in the workplace?

Brian Elliott: Yeah. I think part of this is back to, we have a lot of productivity theater that’s going on, right? And that productivity theater is, you can see in the research, Atlassian’s got a piece that I thought was great. 65% of people that they pulled said it’s more important for them to respond quickly to a message than it’s for them to focus on and deliver their core work. That’s just sad, right? That’s the visual cues of, activity happening.

And a lot of the same things happening when you look at like return to office mandates, it’s, I wanna see the visual signs of Johnny shows up early. Johnny stays late. Johnny must be a hard worker. It’s gonna inhibit a lot of people’s engagement. The thing that happens with generative AI is people hear the word efficiency, right? That’s the big word of the past couple of years.

It’s the, do more with less kind of mandates and you end up with people in large numbers doing one of two things. Either saying, I’m afraid of these tools, they might cause me to lose my job, so therefore I’m gonna slow down my adoption or using it, but not telling anybody. Ethan Mo’s got this phrase, secret cyborgs, right?

For people that have adopted the tools but aren’t telling their boss about it, sometimes out of fear, but what they’re doing is they’re just producing more of something, right? You and I both see it in our inboxes and so does everybody else. The number of, outbound emails from salespeople looking for things to make the sale has gone through the roof.

Producing more of a thing isn’t an outcome and the big shift that leaders have to make in their organizations. Both to make flexibility work and to get the leverage they want out of generative AI tools is move away from those visual cues and into outcomes management. What are the goals we’ve got for our organization?

What are our top three priorities? How are we gonna measure success? How do we drive that throughout the organization? How do we measure it quarterly? And then how do we assess teams on how they’re doing against outcomes? If you did that, you’d create a more level playing field. You’d actually get what a lot of executives want at the end of the day, which is better results, but it’s a big investment. It’s a major shift.

David Rice: Yeah, and I couldn’t agree more with what you said there. I feel every salesperson has a newsletter now. It’s do you need one though?

Brian Elliott: Yeah, exactly. How many more sub techs do we really need?

David Rice: Yeah. For real. And some of ’em are good, don’t get me wrong, but yeah, I can only subscribe to so many. In fact, I’ve got actual work to do that.

Brian Elliott: Exactly.

David Rice: Now, one of the things we’re seeing with Gen Z that’s interesting is that they’re more likely to go to something like YouTube or ChatGPT for help than they are their managers at work, right? I find that interesting. Managers have long been undersupported and now we’re in this moment where we’re going through this like embossing trend or flattening orgs, and it’s adding to the workload of the managers who still stick around, right?

You go from six reports to 12. In some ways, that use of AI could be a really good thing. It doesn’t do much to support a need for bringing people back to offices does it? That’s right. It’s like he keeps talking about collaboration and in-person connection is a big part of why they, what they’re looking for.

But then people aren’t even looking to each other for answers in many cases. So I guess it just feels like a lot of things with this RTO discussion, it’s like reality flies in the face of the narrative all the time.

Brian Elliott: Oh, absolutely. There’s a line that Andy Dean’s got from Atlassian. She’s got around this, which is essentially if you’re trying to say out of one side of your mouth, that we need to leverage generative AI to leverage our intelligence as an organization.

But at the same time you’re saying we need to get back in the office so we can have all these important hallway conversations. Last time I checked the Allway conversations weren’t making their way into the digital tools, right? There’s a complete non-sequitur disconnect that’s happening on that front.

I think more broadly though, what you’re seeing is what you’re getting at, which is you’ve got two generations now of digital natives in the workforce, right? Gen Z is much more likely to adopt these tools. They are also more likely to turn to YouTube than their manager quite often. At the same time, when we talk a good game about giving generative AI tools to people for coaching and for managing, there’s a lot of gaps still to close on that one.

What we’ve done instead is, yeah, we’ve de layered organizations and when you de layer an organization, if you also change how the work gets done, that can be really effective. But that’s not what’s happening in most organizations. Like you said, there’s tons of people going from six direct reports to 12 or 15, but nobody changed The fact that there’s still the same TPS reports do every week.

There’s still the same number of meetings that they need to be in. Only now they need to cover the meetings of the person who also got removed. And so those managers are the most burned out. You can see it in every study out there. They’re fried. They just don’t have much left to give. And then we wonder why people are struggling with connection and engagement in the workplace.

If your manager is just flat out burned out, they’re also the one that in theory is responsible for helping bring the team together and drive engagement. It’s just a recipe for heading in the wrong direction.

David Rice: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with that more. And it’s funny ’cause you mentioned that the those hallway conversations aren’t making their way into these tools. Half of ’em didn’t even make ’em into an actual workflow when we were in the office.

Brian Elliott: That’s right. That’s right. And by the time you had the hallway conversation, you go back to your desk, you’re like, what were we talking about? Was there a thing I was gonna do and follow up on?

David Rice: Yeah. Was there an actual action item from that or did we, I guess we were just talking.

Brian Elliott: Yeah, there’s a lot of mythology around things like water coolers also, right? There’s studies out there that show that you pretty much bump into the same people all the time when you’re in the office. The idea that you’d have this like wicked great innovation idea that came out of going to the kitchen and grabbing coffee next to somebody.

Not really how it happens. That’s mythology more than reality by far.

David Rice: Yeah. It’s like anything else in life, like when you see a stranger in Walmart. Yes, they might be shopping for the same thing as you. It doesn’t necessarily into a conversation. It’s the same thing with somebody you’ve never worked with at the water cooler. It’s no different.

Brian Elliott: Yeah, exactly. You’re much less likely to have that happen than you are just to, grab your coffee and head back to your desk.

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The data around return to office and its impact, it hasn’t really been all that great from what I’ve seen. You’ve got employers saying they, some employers, I should say. Saying that they see such a difference, but I’ve yet to see any of them show something substantive around that. They’re just saying that anecdotally.

So yet another situation where narrative and reality don’t quite think. Now hybrid work has worked pretty well in a lot of orgs, and I have seen some interesting data around that. So I’m curious, what do you think that the sweet spot is for companies to give the needed flexibility for employees, meet those expectations that the talent market has, but still maintain the culture and organizational ethos that they’re aiming for?

Brian Elliott: The sweet spot is in the middle. The challenge is in the middle is gonna vary to some degree across an organization. So anybody who’s got tens of thousands of employees or even thousands of employees, is gonna have people distributed across a bunch of different locations that are playing in different functions and different types of teams.

So there’s no magic number that the boss is gonna come up with. I was working with an organization that’s a global defense contractor. CEO stands up in front of us 250 most senior leaders, and says, half of you would like me to give you an answer. How many days is the magical number of days you need to be in the office?

It’s like we’re a global company. We’ve got seven business units, we have all kinds of functions. That’s why you’re here. You’re here because you need to figure out what the right answer is for your team, and I think that’s part of the magic. The magic is that you can’t have a CEO mandate that’s gonna get it right all the time.

One size does not fit all. Individual chaos is also not a good solution. Everybody figure it out for yourselves is a huge collaboration tax. The place to set it is at the team level, so functions, groups of functions. Figuring out, for example, that our sales teams are largely co-located in the first place.

Our junior sales teams in particular, it makes sense for them to be in the office together three days a week. Here’s the activities we’ll do Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. That makes sense and let’s get people in. Our engineering and product development teams are spread out across multiple cities. We need them together at least once a quarter, maybe once a month for a few days, to do planning activities, to reconnect with one another, and that’s worth it in terms of the payback on, accelerating the work itself.

That’s the place to figure it out is what’s the right level in the organization to make these decisions? How do you figure it out on the basis of the rhythm of the business itself? I’ll give you one other bit, which is you gotta put at least some modest amount of training and support in place for leaders.

Two big things. One is how do you get people understanding what it means to lead on the basis of outcomes? Like how do you set quarterly goals for teams and measure the results and impact and hold people accountable to that? And the other is, it sounds really simple, but it’s hard, which is how do you build human connections with people, right?

Like I’ve been in C-Suite meetings where I’ve said to people, Hey, do you guys do any kind of quarterly gatherings across teams? And you get a little bit of a yeah, we try to, but it’s largely the quarterly planning session, kind of death by PowerPoint. What do you do for team building?

And I got these blank stares, right? What do I do? So there are organizations out there that are basically putting just small, modest amounts of effort into how do we give leaders some centralized support for doing things as simple as how do you host the team on site once a quarter? What activities can you use?

Here’s a menu of options, and that can go a long way. It’s a modest investment that has huge returns.

David Rice: I’ve been hearing for the last year, all this talk around things like founder mode, hardcore cultures, move fast, break things, these common tech narratives that we get. And we’re now seeing them on the national stage with what’s going on with the federal government.

And I can remember, this is like a few weeks ago, Musk was tweeting about how easy it is to get rid of enemies, quote unquote, in the federal government ’cause they don’t work weekends, right? So he’s glorifying this like ridiculously long work weeks and working weekends. And you see some of this, not obviously that blatant, but like some of this sort of culture getting pedal around on LinkedIn or tech corporate spaces.

And it all feels to me a bit veiled, like basically they would just want younger workers. So I’m curious, do you think some of that glorification of hustle culture and all of this, it’s not just to get people to quit their jobs ’cause we know they’re using it to drive turnover, but actually to focus predominantly on younger workers and setting your culture and capabilities with them.

Brian Elliott: Yeah, there’s definitely some of that’s going on. Some of it is again, back to that sort of visible signs of hustle culture that a lot of these guys love. Sergey Brin did the same sort of thing about Google, right? We need people back in the office doing 60 hour work weeks. Chris DiBona, who was a leader at Google when I was there, wrote a great piece on this and he pointed to things like Yo, Sergey. 20 years ago, the equity value and upside of working really hard at Google was a lot different than it is in 2024.

But he also had a more fundamental point, which is having led engineering teams, having worked with them for years, I know the biggest boon to their productivity I can give them is a four hour block in the afternoon where nobody can interrupt them. No meetings in the afternoons for four hours. I set that up.

It was five days a week. Other people would yell at me, other teams would yell at me, why can’t I get time with your team in the afternoon? And I defended it. And those four hour blocks made them way more productive because engineers who are on their fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth hour are actually burnt out.

You’re trying to solve, we solve the same problem. It’s not working anymore. You need to take a break. You need to go have some meals, you need to get some sleep, you need to do something else, and then come back to it again tomorrow. There’s study after study that show that too. So it’s not really helpful.

But again, it’s back to that like visual signs of activity. The other thing that’s happening underneath all this is it’s the go fast and break things mantra, right? The go fast and break things mantra on social networks might be okay because in the early days Facebook went sideways. It wasn’t a big deal when Twitter had some server crashes post Elon buying it.

It wasn’t that big of a deal. That’s not what we want happening in the social security checks. And it sure to God isn’t what I want happening with the FAA. So we need to think harder about what we’re lauding here around all of this. And to your point, some of it is about younger workers and potentially being more agile.

At the end of the day, you’ve also gotta deliver outcomes as a business, not just, make a lot of noise.

David Rice: Yeah, I couldn’t agree there more. There’s a time and a place and a context for everything, right? If you’re a cybersecurity startup, move fast and break things is not necessarily the way to go.

Brian Elliott: And there are times when people need to buckle down because you’re getting close to a launch and the hours get really long and the weeks get long. Then you take a few weeks off afterwards and you recover because you want the same people coming back because now they’ve got more experience.

They know how to do it better next time. If all you’re doing is churning and burning through a younger workforce, you’re not building any expertise or experience, and that’s also problematic.

David Rice: Yeah. You don’t wanna be a void of institutional knowledge, right?

Brian Elliott: Yeah, exactly.

David Rice: One of the things we see with workplace trends though, is the pendulum often swings, right?

You look at DEI go back 10 years, people started to fall asleep on it, like it got really hot and then they fell asleep, and then George Floyd happens, and then now you see where we are, right? So that pendulum just keeps going like this. And you could see the same thing for like goal setting or performance review techniques, but with remote work.

Remote work, I think we’re in like this weird position because Covid sort of the pendulum had started to move gradually in a direction and then all of a sudden Covid pushed it really hard that’s right in that direction, and it created a whole new perspective for an entire class of workers about how their work could be done.

I feel like return to office is this attempt to swing it back violently in the other direction. I’m curious, where do you see this heading in the next two to three years? Because we look at the data and there are more remote and hybrid positions than there were in previous years. Contract is work is more common. It seems there’s no swinging it back, no matter who tries or how hard.

Brian Elliott: Yeah. It’s not gonna go all the way back. Th this tug of war has been going on for five years now. And the headlines get written about the CEOs who’ve changed their mind.

It’s the CEOs who have said, Hey, I used to say that you can be really flexible. Matter of fact, we let you move all over the place. Now I’ve changed my mind and I want you back in the office. And that’s a human interest story, right? So it gets a lot of attention around it. If you look at the underlying data, there’s still two thirds of firms that have a flexible work policy, and that didn’t change much throughout the course of last year in particular.

The reason why underneath all that is this is still about competition for talent. So one of my favorite bits of the past couple weeks was Verizon started running ads, basically targeting at and t workers. They’re looking for, data scientists and the ads are basically, Hey, if you’re unhappy with your employer’s workplace policies, check out our jobs page.

So this isn’t necessarily because there’s a whole mess of CEOs who are deep believers in remote work. They get that give people a little bit of flexibility and you get a talent advantage, right? I can hire people in more distributed locations, I can actually retain them. And maybe just maybe at the end of the day, this is not an argument that’s worthwhile in the first place.

Arguing with my own employees about whether they’re in the office two days a week, or three days a week. Really, I think we have bigger problems to focus on.

David Rice: With all the market uncertainty is this a productive or useful conversation with all the other challenges that we face from outside, before we go, there’s a couple things I always like to do to finish up our episodes. The first, I want to give you a chance to tell people more about where they can connect with you, what you’ve got going on, find out how they can interact with you.

Brian Elliott: Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn. It’s pretty easy. I’m Brian Elliott, I do run a newsletter on Substack. It’s called Work Forward. Not surprisingly, it’s theworkforward.substack.com. Workforce is also my organization of my company. You’ll find links on LinkedIn to more about me.

David Rice: And the last thing that we always do a little traditionally on the podcast, you get to ask me a question. Anything you want, can be related or not.

Brian Elliott: It is related. You guys had this piece that you put out about Workplace Cultures course.

David Rice: Ah, yeah. The index.

Brian Elliott: And one of the things I found interesting, ’cause this ties in with I think frontline workers in the Great Resignation, post pandemic, which was a lot of people swap jobs, right?

One of the things you guys had an observation around was that compensation itself doesn’t fix turnover. I think it was around like, Colorado and places like that would love, just like any insights that you got out of that work of figuring out like which states do well and which states do poorly when it comes to workplace culture or retention of employees, all that.

David Rice: Yeah, I thought it was interesting because in your head, you’re like places like Florida should do great. There’s no income tax. The sun’s shining all the time. Maybe you’re like, okay, and then Vermont does really well. Taxes are high. It’s cold. But what you, the more you dig into the data, the more you just realize that like life is more than money, or the sun shining, or there’s all these different pieces to it and how people feel cared for definitely matters.

And if you look at where those states that did really well, why they rank is there’s less of a sense of, if I lose this, I’m gonna languish. Or I’m gonna, I’m screwed, there’s some level of protection there. There’s some level of if companies wanna do that, fine, but these are the boxes that they’re gonna have to check and they’re gonna have to look after the workers.

And there’s like a, just a different level of ease that you can go to bed with at night. And I think that was like one of the things that really came out of it for me and the fellow that I did, we did the analysis together and found all the data sets and everything. And I just think you can talk about taxes and you can talk about income levels and all these other, the price of a house all you want.

But at the end of the day, people wanna feel cared about. They wanna feel like it’s not all gonna come to an end if they lose this. And they just, they generally just wanna feel like, valued.

Brian Elliott: Spot on. I was in a session with a professor who’s describing his work around frontline workers in particular on this and saying that people’s emotional needs are often, their career needs, career growth. Do I feel supported? Do I feel like I belong? We’re a big part of why frontline workers would switch jobs, and I swear half the crowd who were like, sorry, older like me, and even older than me, board members and executives were like, no frontline workers leave on a for a dime.

And he had to keep coming back to, and coming back to, these are human beings with needs and values, the same as office workers. And what gets them to stay or go is not just compensation, it’s how you treat them.

David Rice: No, it’s there’s, somebody equate it to the love languages and they were like compensation’s, like physical touch.

Yeah. Does everybody need it? Of course. But like for a lot of people it is not the most important thing I. Like words of affirmation to some people’s. In that case, it’s more am I appreciated? Am I valued within the organization? That kind of thing. It’s the same type of concept. It’s like I almost thought about it.

I was like, should I just write that book of just the five love languages of the workplace?

Brian Elliott: That’s a great idea. You should do it. Totally.

David Rice: ‘Cause everybody seems to have like really bought into that idea around relationships and I’m like, maybe you should, when you think about employees,

Brian Elliott: absolutely. I think it’s a great idea. The five love languages of an employer. Yeah. Do it.

David Rice: Brian, it’s been really good having you on. Thanks for coming on. I’ve enjoyed this conversation.

Brian Elliott: David, I have too. Thanks so much for having me.

David Rice: All right. Listeners, until next time, if you haven’t done so already, be sure you signed up for the People Managing People newsletter. Head on over to peoplemanagingpeople.com/subscribe. And until next time, learn the love language of your employees.