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Hello and thanks for joining us for sustaining us here on KLCS PBS.

I'm David Nazar.

We're hearing a lot these days about working remotely or telecommuting as opposed to working from the office.

This became much more of a trend during COVID, when everything was on lockdown and the world was shut down.

Back then, the original idea was to work from home so you don't pass your coronavirus germs on to your office.

Coworkers.

Well, fast forward to today.

post-COVID.

It seems many CEOs and company bosses are encouraging their employees to work from home or work remotely.

Not a bad deal for some.

You don't have to commute to the office.

You can kind of make use of your home or just your internet, your email, your phone.

You save money on gas and you really can work from anywhere.

And operational costs are lower for your employers.

However, some critics of this argue an actual office setting is the better working environment.

Your boss is your employers while they can manage you better at the office.

There's more human interaction, more collaboration, better teamwork, and you're less isolated.

In a few minutes, we're going to talk with some experts to discuss the pros and cons of all of this.

First, though, we asked average everyday folks their opinion about working remotely versus working from the office.

Better to work from home or better to work from an office in your line of work.

In my line of work in sales.

Better from home, I'd say that's what I enjoyed the most.

What we would do sometimes is hybrid, where we'd go in once a week or four, maybe a company meeting once a month to kind of learn best practices from everyone.

But for day to day, for me, working from home was almost a non-negotiable.

I wouldn't even consider a position that wasn't at least some time the option to work from home.

Do you work from the classroom?

Do you work from home?

Is it sort of a hybrid?

Right now I'm full time classroom.

How do you like that?

I love it.

So initially, when COVID first happened, they had us doing Zoom with the kids and it was terrible.

I mean, there was on both ends, you know, teachers didn't know what to do.

Students didn't know what to do.

They were barely logging in.

And I think it was just from my perspective, it was just bad for everybody.

What do you do for a living?

I work in finance, work from home, and I want to stay working at home, working remotely.

Does it ever get lonely?

Do you?

Do you feel isolated to a degree, not being with your peers?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I think we're made to be with people, you know, And I think there's a certain time to be at home and work from home.

But I think you're more productive.

I think, you know, the energy of working with somebody and having your peers definitely cheer you on is definitely better.

Working remotely or working from the office, which is better.

My line of work for working remotely, being out hands on in front of customers, it's kind of a necessity in the interior design and home design business.

So yeah, that's that's kind of my my avenue on that COVID.

You know, we were essential workers during COVID, so we were able to still go out and, you know, be in front of clients.

So, you know, it didn't didn't really impact our line of work, which was good, you know, kept us lucrative, kept us, you know, in business.

I prefer a hybrid schedule.

I love the flexibility that I get being able to work from home.

But I do like the interaction of going into the office.

That's my current situation.

But I mean, I think yeah, I mean, we enjoy it.

I feel like we get good interaction with people outside of work and family around.

So.

What do you miss when you were working from the office?

I mean, it's great to collaborate.

I'm a graphic designer, so I work for a graphic design studio and you miss a little bit of that.

But I do think that we've transitioned pretty smoothly.

So we've found little workarounds that still make everything work.

When you had to work remotely via Zoom or over the Internet due to COVID, did you feel sort of a loss of purpose or isolation or aloneness?

Can you talk about that?

Yeah, for sure.

So I'm really big on mental health too.

So when I first started, I was an interventionist, so I worked with a lot of social emotional support.

And there are so many kids who are who are depressed, especially like, you know, the freshman sophomores, because they're going into high school, not having that typical high school experience.

So when they came back their junior senior year, it went by even quicker.

You know, high school.

High school goes by quick.

So when you only have two years, it goes by really quick.

So I just think it all depends.

There are some kids who honestly prefer that staying at home because just socially, they're they're not as up to date as a lot of kids.

So they prefer being at home.

So I think even how I said earlier, it depends on the person that can work from home or or a remote.

I think it depends on the student too.

Some students thrive being at home and being independent and and doing that.

And I think that's awesome.

But there's a lot of other students who need to be a person, who need their visual learners.

They need a constant person to kind of hold them accountable.

And it's kind of hard to do that over technology.

Is there anything you miss about working from the office, the camaraderie, being with others?

You know, I do miss that a little bit.

I mean it.

I could go into the office like once a week and get a little bit of that.

But as far as the the benefit of being there, when my wife needs a little break or help with the kids for a second, you know, then that that really outweighs my desire to kind of go to lunch with my buddies or something during, you know, right in the middle of work.

All the little interactions still take place via Slack or via chat messages back and forth.

And I still end up on the phone with, you know, coworkers and managers.

But I would say when I was in the office, I actually wasted a lot more time with just little conversations.

I get way more done when I'm from home and I feel like, like I said, just texting and messaging and other coworkers.

I still have all the pluses of that work environment.

I think there are some industries where people would prefer to work from home.

They can get a little bit more work done when they're not sitting in two or 3 hours of traffic a day.

So you know, I think there's a lot of companies that have kind of thrived in the the COVID stay at home.

And joining me now to further the discussion is Sheila Subramanian.

Sheila is the coauthor of the book How the Future Works.

She most recently served as the co-founder and vice president of Future Forum, a research project which we're going to be discussing in a moment.

Also joining the panel is Taryn Brehm.

Terran has spent a career working with leading national and international companies to help collect research and data to find the best business strategies going forward and how companies can improve.

And also the executive program at Future Forum.

Thank you both so much for being here.

Thanks for having us.

Now, I should tell our audience I try to invite some CEOs who have their employees work from the office to be part of this broadcast.

They declined to be interviewed about this issue.

So, Sheila, beginning with you and before we get to the issues, tell me more about yourself, your book, How the Future works, and then about the Future Forum project, which you were part of in the We'll get to the issues.

Thanks again for having us, David.

So Future Forum, which is an organization I co-founded back in 2020, was founded after we saw organizations make bigger changes than they ever thought were possible in how their employees worked.

But what we saw at the time, back in 2020, was that most organizations simply did a lift and shift.

When the pandemic hit, they lifted existing office space norms and they shifted them into people's living rooms.

So we found a future forum, a consortium backed by Slack, to better study how work was changing and redesign work to become more flexible, inclusive and connected through thousands of conversations with executives.

We oftentimes heard the question of, All right, I'm bored and I believe in flexible work, but how do I even get there?

And that was the origin story behind writing How the Future Works.

A Wall Street Journal bestselling book around the seven steps to redesigning work and empowering your teams to do the best work of their lives.

And I'm thrilled to be sharing more insights from our book, as well as research from Future Forum with all of you today.

And we're going to get to that in a moment here.

And I want to find out more about you.

Yeah, this work is so important to me.

It's important to the way we operate, the way we think about work and really being able to be at future forums who work so closely with leading global executives, board directors, those who are few, you know, two years out of the C-suite, even to really help shape and redesign what good work looks like and what good work looks like for the future is something that, you know, I consider priceless.

Sheila.

Based upon your data, your intel gathering, as I say, why is working from home working remotely better than working from the office?

And is the data you've collected also your personal opinion?

Now, what we've seen from the research is that it's not just working remotely or working from the office.

What we see is that most employees want flexibility, and flexibility is more than just where you work or when you work.

It's how you work.

Ultimately, it's about choice.

People want to have the choice in terms of how they work and also how they live their lives.

What we see from the research is that 81% of knowledge workers surveyed globally want flexibility in where they work.

And what we're also seeing is that those employees report 8% higher productivity than those who are back in the office full time.

But working flexibly is not the remote versus being in the office full time debate.

It's, again, a little bit of both.

People want to come into the office to connect, build camaraderie, but they also want the choice to be able to work from home, to do solo focused work.

And what we've seen in the market is this push towards top down mandates where work is assumed to be one size fits all across all organizations.

And what we write a lot about in the book is how it's important to look at work on a team level and define what those norms and operating models are based on the work of the team itself.

So, Taryn, same question, working remotely, I guess you could say, versus working from the office.

What else is there?

Although there is more to it, obviously, as Sheila mentioned.

What does your data tell us?

What's your personal opinion?

Yeah, I think the argument it focuses so much on to where work gets done.

I think we lose focus on what flexibility means for your schedule itself.

So 93% of employee respondents want flexibility in when they work.

This was a continued trend that we saw wave after wave of future forms, quarterly surveys.

And it is my personal opinion that schedule flexibility is not talked about enough.

Some focus on the four day workweek and what that looks like.

But if you think about that four days where it's 16 hour workdays squished into that shorter week, there's still no ability to adjust their hours.

When pre-set schedule.

And we're not really addressing that issue much.

Sheila, let me give a counterargument since no CEO is here.

CEOs who sort of say to their employees, you've got to be in the office, maybe they shouldn't want to talk about it.

But as you might know, many critics say, oh, gosh, I hate to put it this way, but we're creating a society of snowflakes, a society of these lazy young people who prefer just being at home, going to the office.

It's just too much trouble.

Sheila, what do you say to that?

And then we'll get to Aaron's response.

I would respond to that question with why?

Why do you believe that employees have a certain demeanor about them?

Because they want more choice in their lives?

I believe that.

I'm Katarina Berg.

She's the chief human resources officer at Spotify.

She puts it best when she says if you hire adults and then treat them like children, then this whole thing is going to backfire.

I think labeling people as snowflakes or lazy is essentially not treating them like adults and treating them like children and essentially imposing what you believe is the right way to to work on a whole population of individuals.

Instead.

I would advise CEOs to think about productivity.

Productivity historically has been measured as this person is the first one in the office, the last to leave their great employees.

They're productive.

They deserve to get promoted.

But is that really a measure of productivity?

No.

I think I encourage CEOs to think about what are the outcomes, what are the goals that you are setting for your organization, for your respective teams, and empower your employees to figure out how to achieve that.

But all of the baseline around come into the office at a certain time, leave at a certain time.

That was based on an old way of working, based on a very different time.

With technology in place, with, you know, diversity, as was an important priority for for CEOs.

I would advise them to think a lot more about hiring the best employees regardless of where they're located, rather than looking for a specific type of work ethic or a specific type of hustle as a marker of a good employee.

And term to give sort of another counterargument and counter you just a bit.

I know people who do prefer to work in an office setting.

They say they're less lonely.

They have a better purpose of their day.

They're with their friends and coworkers.

A They take part in meals and work related activities, events, the work retreats, all that stuff.

You know, some people do thrive in that type of environment.

They like the camaraderie.

They sort of have an extra motivation tier.

And then back to Sheila.

Yeah, you're right.

There is a population that obviously does thrive in that sort of environment.

And we're not saying never gather in person here.

We're saying do it with intention.

As Sheila mentioned, you know, the majority of employees want a hybrid arrangement.

So when you design work to be solely onsite and in person, physically, you're completely negating those that have either always worked remotely or those and or those who have had just a much better employee experience working remotely in the last three or so years.

And Sheila, just to add to that, we could even take this a step further.

You know, there's mental health experts I've spoken to some of them in researching this issue.

They say working from the office well can be better for your mental health, particularly if you're, let's say, a widow or a widower or if you're an older worker and work is your only source of human interaction, so to speak, you know, helps your mental health.

It helps people have depression, you're less isolated and whatnot.

All this maybe can somewhat improve their mental state, especially if you work with other people in an office setting.

That's what the critics say.

Sheila Okay.

And I think that that's a valid point.

And I'm really glad that we were having more conversations about mental health in the workplace.

That said, every body is different and you can't expect the office to fix our society's loneliness problem.

I'm going to offer a counterexample to that.

Prior to the pandemic, I have two young kids.

I would drop them off at preschool.

Race to the Bus.

Hope to get that bus race in for my 9:00 meeting, pack my days between 9 to 5, barely eat because I would just be over programed and then race home.

Hopefully I wouldn't get stuck in traffic, pick up my kids, make dinner, put them to bed, and then get back on my computer.

That was my existence.

My mental health was not great.

And what I would say now is the opportunity to work flexibly has offered me to live a richer, fuller life as a leader, as well as as a human and an individual.

And I've had a stronger sense of belonging as a leader, as well as as a mother and a daughter and a neighbor.

Now, I have a higher sense of longing than I did prior to the pandemic, and that has helped my mental health.

So I'm a sample size of one.

But I think that we need to think about this as as letting people live the lives that they want to live.

And giving them the choice and flexibility to get there.

Taryn, do you have anything to add to that?

And I've got some other questions for you, Taryn.

Yeah, I mean, we're at a crossroads.

I think we're still trying to figure out the best way to operate after a few really tumultuous kind of years.

And people have spent these last few years really reflecting and deciding what is important to them in every facet of their lives.

And that includes how work gets done when it gets done.

And where it gets done is no exception to that rule as well.

So really taking this time to understand people's experiences and really get to the bottom of what we want to do, why we want to do it, and how that's impacting our business for the positive in these situations, I think is where a lot of companies are missing an opportunity to.

And I appreciate that.

Now to a different issue of sort some of your data references, people of color in your research as this relates to working remotely, can you give more of a comprehensive explanation of exactly what you're talking about?

Sure.

So the rise of flexible work has been an absolute game changer for making workplaces more inclusive and a desire for flexibility remains strongest amongst underrepresented groups.

So we're talking women, working mothers, people of color.

And we continued over the course of future harms quarterly surveys to see a higher preference for location flexibility among employees of color and the percentage of U.S. respondents by race and ethnicity that preferred these environments were pretty high 86% Asian, Asian-American, 81% black, 80% Hispanic, and 79% white.

And you think about why that could be.

We get this question a lot as to why did you see those those numbers rising?

And anecdotally, I think about the way that the day was structured to really take away some of those points of tension and possibly contention for people of color in the workplace.

I think about code switching, and I don't know if you know that term, but it's really like changing the way you act, think, speak to be a better part of the majority, to be more relevant to the other part of the majority.

And I think about some of these old workplace customs where maybe it's, you know, your team doing a a great bonding experience where you bring in the baby pictures of everyone.

And if you are one or one, a few of the people of color or women or those who might have a visible disability, it's very easy to spot who that person is.

And you have, you know, the jovial laughter about this, this really funny situation.

But it creates a sense of othering for people.

It creates that that opportunity to definitely feel like you are not belonging in that situation.

You are not a part of the majority.

And I think being able to remove that, being able to be remote or removed from that physical workspace, it gave a bigger sense of belonging and and inclusion for a lot of people.

Let me jump in here.

I completely agree with what Taryn just said, especially around the power of code switching.

Here's one challenge that we have seen in our data, and that's around something called proximity bias.

Proximity bias is the act of favoritism towards someone who's located nearby.

In this case, in the office, and we've seen proximity bias play out throughout corporate history in terms of this person, the first in the last to leave.

But now, as we're at this junction, as Taryn put it earlier, around, what work is going to look like, What we're seeing from the research is that those who prefer to go back into the office full time tend to be men.

They tend to be white employees, they tend to be executives.

Whereas those who want more flexibility are women caregivers as well as employees of color.

So it's critical for leaders to really be aware of proximity bias as a challenge, especially when it comes to inclusion and equity around promotion time or performance review season, because feedback needs to be given against the person's outcomes, the impact that they've made within the organization rather than oriented towards, well, this person was the first and the last to leave.

I see them in the office all the time, so they tend to have more hustle than everybody else.

If we continue that as a performance measure, what we're going to see is that monoculture that the corporate world is right now will continue to perpetuate and it will raise some of the gains that we've seen around equity and inclusion over the last few years.

And to piggyback off of that, those that we typically see in leadership positions have been older, white male who have spent decades leading teams physically in an office.

So the ways in which we've been working over the last few years has forced leaders to have to rethink the way they manage their team, the way they connect with everyone, the way they build that relationship, not necessarily bumping into each other in a kitchen, not necessarily seeing each other in the elevator ride up, but really spending time to to further connect, to understand the experience, to see where someone might be lacking a little bit of focus, where someone is really working hard but might not be the first one at the last one out.

So with that said Tyrone, can you talk a bit more about what is it?

It's just this connection and community.

It's termed connection and community.

I was reading about that.

It's kind of a culture thing these days and then we'll get Sheila's take on it.

I bet if you asked ten different people in a company, leaders down to front line employees, their definitions of connection and community culture, you'll get 75 different answers.

And I believe that's where a lot of this disconnect is about cultural erosion, about, you know, culture and connection disruption.

That's where it all really lies.

So saying everyone needs to get back to the office because our culture is suffering is a gross generalization.

I think that connection to the parents point has varying definitions, and the way that I usually define it as feeling valued, seen and heard.

And what we have seen over the last few years is that employees increasingly want to feel valued, seen and heard, especially by their executive team.

What we see from our research, however, is that two thirds of executives are actually not including their broader employee base when it comes to future of work planning.

They're operating as a focus group of one or focus group of a few rather than hearing from their teams across locations, backgrounds, functions, as well as levels.

So what I encourage leaders to really think about as they're looking to foster connection is to embrace more transparency.

Now, transparency is not just like, you know, giving all the answers.

It's getting more comfortable saying, I don't know or I need your help.

And also asking feedback from your broader employee base.

This is a new line item when it comes to that leadership playbook, which is increasingly the expectation from employees, especially as they're looking to trust their leadership and this new way of working.

And going back a little bit to what I was just talking about with that, you know, physical and digital connection, you can recreate a little bit of this or try some ways virtually.

It's a better connect with yourselves, with your team as your leadership team or your managers using things like the donut app.

This is something that's embedded in several software items that can pair people serendipitously.

It can pair Sheila and I to talk about our favorite way to eat breakfast in the morning.

They can force connection, they can forge connections that necessarily aren't ones that you would typically have, whether you're in different departments or, you know, you would never talk to the CEO.

But because you're getting pulled in to talk about your favorite breakfast item, it's a way to really build that connection and that camaraderie.

Also, you think about things like employee resource groups, which are ways that communities of shared connection and shared interests can come together and feel like they are not just one or one of you, whether it's veterans, working mothers, whether it's people who like sneakers, You know, one of my favorite Slack channels was always, you know, fresh kids.

And that's whoever has the newest sneakers.

So what you just purchased and our research also tells us that connection strongly correlates with retention expectations.

So, you know, those who feel connected to their managers, 46% said that they were it's unlikely that they'll be looking for a new job at another company in the next 12 months.

So when you're thinking about this, the conversation of culture has gone.

It's missing.

Think about the ways that people are actually physically doing it in your companies and the ways that you can help facilitate that and strengthen that to retain that top talent.

Sheila Subramanian, Taryn Brown, thank you both so much for a great interview.

Now, I just want to work from home.

Make sure your Wi-Fi is great.

Now for more information about our program, just click on KLCS.org and then click Contact us to send us your questions, your comments or story ideas so we can hear from your contact.

Me at @DavidNazarNews on Twitter or just go to DavidNazarNews on YouTube.

Contact me there and be sure to catch our program here on PBS or catch us on the PBS app for All Things Sustainable.

Thank you so much for joining us for this edition of Sustaining US here on KLCS PBS.

I'm David Nazar.

Sustaining us is made possible by fire, heart pictures and viewers like you.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm David Nazar host of Sustaining US.

Thank you so much for watching KLCS, if you enjoy our program as well as all the other programs here on KLCS, please consider supporting this station.

Your support helps keep all your favorite programs available.

You can support KLCS by calling 888998 KLCS or simply visit KLCS.org again, thank you so much for watching KLCS PBS.