Navigating Workplace Evolution: Creating a Culture that Works for Your Company

Michael McCarroll: Good morning everybody, and welcome to Teamraderie Leadership Lab. My name is Michael McCarroll, I’m the Chief Executive Officer at Teamraderie, one of the co-founders, and this is a recurring series that we do. It’s inspired by the priority issues that our customers want to explore. Today our focus is culture, and specifically the challenge that all of you have expressed about activating your culture, particularly for teams that work together across different offices or different countries.

To explore this, we gathered three experts that we respect, and I know you do too. There’s no more authoritative voice on modern work than Stanford University Economist, Nick Bloom. Joining Nick, there are few CEOs as attentive to company culture as Yamini Rangan. She’s the Chief Executive Officer of HubSpot, a 10,000-person software company, market cap in excess of $30 billion. And Jacqui Canney is the renowned Chief People Officer of ServiceNow, 22,000 employees, one of the most respected companies in the world.

So, welcome to our three panelists. Before we start, let us entertain you for 60 seconds with how Chief People Officers are building more connected, and skilled, and engaged workforces with Teamraderie.

So we are live, shared team experiences for groups of 8-10 that activate your culture and bring people forward. But what I want to do is start with a little bit of data.

One of my power skills is analyzing data. And for this event, all of you—or almost all of you—contributed to this culture survey. A couple things that came out of it: You look very much like what the rest of the country looks like. For the most part, you are either full flex or hybrid. For those of you 10,000 employees and above, you are mostly hybrid. For those of you 1,000 to 10,000, you’re mostly employee-choice, but you’re still working with distributed organizations, certainly across offices and often across the world.

What was really interesting is although in-person gatherings are a very effective way to disseminate culture, they aren’t happening at most of your companies. 70% of you get together either never or once a year. There’s all sorts of cost reasons for that. So all of you are looking for “how do we solve this if we’re not all going to be co-present?” We asked what culture initiatives you’re trying to drive in your companies, and we asked you what’s considered effective to do that. 85% of you said team gatherings onsite, but all of you noted the challenge that those are not cost-efficient.

Whereas team gatherings virtual, 61% of you are considering that effective, three-quarters of you saying it’s cost-efficient. And you can see the other elements here of what you’re trying. In terms of the priorities that you have, almost 60% of you in your companies are trying to elevate focus on customer needs. Almost another 60% are actively trying to make sure that your internal talent is developed and seen so that they can be effectively promoted to the next levels in the company.

There’s lots more insights here. We’d love to share it with you. If you’re interested in a view for your industry or for your work mode, schedule 25 minutes with us. Tell us what views you need. We’ll prepare them and we’ll take you through the data.

So with that, let me turn it over to Nick to get us started.

An Overview of Modern Workplace Culture

Nick Bloom: Hey Michael, thanks very much. I’m going to talk for just 5 minutes, give a quick scene set, and then I’ll talk to Yamini and Jacqui about a set of the questions.

I think the first thing to point out is this is the new normal. So, I’m still getting asked about “when the return to office happens” or “when this work from home ends.” So, yes, there was a big drop in working from home in 2020, 2021, 2022. But really for the last 18 months, things have been very stable. So now is a perfect time actually to think about how to manage distributed work, to think about building culture, to think about mentoring, teamwork, etc.

Where we are now, kind of you know, summer 2024, is a pretty safe bet for where we’re going to be for the next 2, 3 years. My bet is actually 5 – 10 years out, we’re going to be more remote than we are now because the technology is improving so much, but that’s going to be a slow rise.

So then, a couple of things that come up a lot, I’ll go through and then we’ll go to the discussion. So one is really the importance of performance reviews. A lot of people say, “In 2019 when we were in the office full time, you could kind of get away with management by walking around.”

So, if Michael, you were my boss, you could see when you walk by, am I at my computer typing away? When you walk by me, what is on my screen, is it something productive? That could be Python, Excel, email, whatever. Or do I appear to be watching Champions League on Netflix? People would say, look, that’s not great management, it’s kind of 5 out of 10, but it’s livable. You can kind of see whether people are working.

The problem is when people are working from home, you’ve really no idea what’s going on. So of course, one solution is surveillance software, but that’s seen as really creepy. People really don’t like it—there’s an enormous push back against that. So one big learning for the last 3 – 4 years is moving from trying to measure inputs in the office—how much time people are doing—to focusing a lot more on outcomes or outputs. And that becomes critical when folks are working from home.

And what I’ve heard over and over again is it benefits both managers and employees. So, Michael, if you’re my manager, I’m a professor so my outcomes might be teaching, research, university service, etc. You’re going to evaluate me on that basis, it means you don’t have to be watching me or breathing down my neck all the time.

In reverse as an employee, it’s also better for me because I’m evaluated on what I do, and so if I want to go pick my 8-year-old up from school, go for a run—in fact, I met someone, Christina, today, hilariously, before this event, who I think is online—Go to the dentist, whatever I want, I can do that a bit during the day and then make up for it in the evening.

So one thing is the big importance of performance reviews that focus on outcomes, particularly when people are working from home.

The other issue that comes up a lot is over-coordination, and I think we’re going to come onto this maybe in the discussion. So, the biggest gripe I hear about RTOs is people saying, “I’m being forced to return to the office, but half my colleagues aren’t there. I’m commuting in, it’s taking me ages. I have to get ready for work, get dressed, and I come in and nobody’s there, or half the team is there and I’m spending all day on Zoom. It’s super frustrating.”

So the other thing is, I think if people are coming in, it’s important to coordinate—either team by team, the company level for events, whatever it is—kind of make sure that people are coming in on the same day.

I have a fantastic anecdote from a friend of mine who said, “My company requires us to come in 2 days a week.” They’re a very famous company, I won’t mention who. But they don’t stipulate which days. And she said, “So I come in Monday and Friday because no one else is there and I don’t like my colleagues.” So, I was like, “Well, you know, that isn’t really a very good policy. That feels like it’s kind of you know, failed on multiple dimensions.”

What do Today’s Employees Want From Work?

Nick Bloom: So at this point, it would be great for Yamini and Jacqui to come join me. And we’re excited to hear from them. At this point onwards I’m just going to ask a few questions and let them do the talking.

So why don’t we start off with HubSpot and ServiceNow, arguably, two of the world’s top companies to work for. We know they’re absolutely inundated with job applications, we were talking about it earlier—just swamped. With high employee engagement, soaring stock prices, strong-end markets.

So, I’ll start with Yamini, and then reverse. What’s changed recently in terms of what employees want from work?

Yamini Rangan: Yeah, it’s always such a pleasure to talk to you, Nick. I follow your work and you do incredible work. And Jacqui, it’s such a pleasure to be here on this panel with you.

A lot has changed and it seemingly is simple to explain, but the second-order impact of the changes that we’ve gone through in the last 4 years are just immense. As we started this whole thing with, in 2019, we were mostly in-office. And I’ll talk about HubSpot: We were 88% in-office, about 12% remote.

And, right now it has flipped. Our in-office, which means someone comes into the office every single day, is about 10%, and 90% are either flex or completely remote. And so, that’s really the first order change.

And without us actively choosing initially, but then actively choosing later on, we’ve gone from being an in-office company to a global hybrid company. That’s number one.

I think to answer the question of “What do employees want?” As we are settling into this remote hybrid combination world, a few things are seemingly contradictory, but need to be balanced. The expectation—the first one—is: “I want flexibility, but give me connection. I want to choose—I want to be on Monday and Friday when nobody else is around, but, I want connection.” Well, if you show up on Monday and Friday when nobody else is around, how are you going to get connection? I mean, that seems a little contradictory.

The second thing that people want is: “I want to be autonomous, I want to work independently. I want to actually design what I do, and I want to work autonomously. But, I don’t want to be siloed.” But again, there’s a contradiction, because every single person—if you want to work somewhat autonomously without knowing what everybody else is doing, then you will end up becoming siloed. So, how do we deal with this?

And the third thing, Nick, I couldn’t agree with you more, you already touched on this, which is: “Don’t measure me on activity but measure me on outcomes. And don’t let bias creep in because the day that you go into the office, you see someone, and that person somehow gets an advantage over me [because] I’m completely remote.”

So as we settle into this hybrid world, the expectations are very nuanced. And I think that’s where we are in the process of being CEOs, being people leaders—which a lot of the audience here are—being functional leaders, who are trying to find policies that actually help attain that right balance of all of those things.

So it’s just been fascinating. I don’t think we have nailed it or we have a playbook for how to do this, but we understand what our employees are asking of us to balance in this new world.

Nick Bloom: Fantastic. Thanks so much, and Jacqui?

Jacqui Canney: Yeah, so much similarities, which is comforting yet daunting, right? The good news is we all haven’t figured it out, so we have the opportunity. And I was just thinking through, it was so much easier to get people to go home when COVID started than it is to figure out this new way of work. We’re still figuring it out and it’s been years.

For context, ServiceNow is about 98% flexible and remote. Most flexible—which means 2 or 3 days in the office—and then fully remote. So we significantly shifted our workforce too from in-office to other models.

And our culture—When I started 3 years ago, we were 15,000 people, now we’re almost 23,000. So it’s a very fast-moving organization even in these uncertain times. The culture in and of itself has to be strong to be able to sustain that type of growth. Then you layer in hybrid, flexible work environments, how do we maintain that?

So we’ve done a lot of listening. At first it started with safety and trust. That was number one, especially when we wanted to make sure everybody was safe. Safety obviously is like table stakes, but it’s now listening even more into what else people want. And it is flexibility, it’s collaboration, it’s career growth, it’s my well-being—my mental, my physical, my financial well-being—all of that support.

And what my team has done on the people side is: We didn’t really have a value proposition, so we created something called the “People Pact” because as we’re iterating into what the right solution is for the workforce—physically and in-office or not—the People Pact is something we’re leaning on to be our north star, which is: If you come to ServiceNow, you can live your best life. You can do your best work, and, we’ll fulfill our purpose together.

So constantly making decisions on our values, our purpose, and that People Pact, and communicating with transparency to the organization why decisions are made, why policies are chosen, why they aren’t, and having this very real-time dialogue is how we’re iterating into our growth and keeping our culture really strong.

How AI Impacts Workplace Culture

Nick Bloom: Fantastic, thanks. I was going to say that I’m sure that HubSpot and ServiceNow, both of which are at the forefront of AI, are thinking about what’s next. What are the changes you’re making in culture to reflect those new priorities for employees and also for customers? Why don’t I go to Jacqui next?

Jacqui Canney: Sure, I’ll take a crack at this. We believe—Bill McDermott, who’s our CEO, you can hear him talk about this a lot—is that we are at the forefront of an amazing technology revolution—I think more than an evolution—in so many ways.

If I take a step back, we’re an enterprise software company, so generative AI impacts a million of our processes that we support. It’s like 40 billion workflows. So it’s a massive amount of changing work for ourselves, but certainly for our customer base. Our people inside the organization are insatiably curious. That’s 1,000% the workforce.

What we’ve done is brought a broad-based baseline education of “What does generative AI mean?” And “What you should know about that, whether you’re on my team, you’re on the sales team, etc.” Then there are double clicks and deeper-dives into exactly what that means so you can do your job with more confidence.

I also believe that we’re in a human capital renaissance, not a technology renaissance. This is going to unlock a lot of productivity and efficiency, but it’s also going to unlock a lot of creativity. New revenue streams can be built. New ways of working, all those things. I absolutely believe that we have to fuel this organization with the skills that they have today, build them out, and then the skills that they’re going to need in the next 6 months, 12 months. And my team, using generative AI, is how we’re building out our new way of doing learning and development, and it includes experiences.

And our people are again, just diving into it—they want it. They want to grow personally and professionally, and it’s our job to be there to do that because I do believe talent has a lot of choices, right? They can go to many different places, and we have to be that destination. This is the way I believe we’re able to do that.

Nick Bloom: Jacqui, have you found most employees are enthusiastic about AI? Has there been any nervousness?

Jacqui Canney: Not a widespread nervousness—I think though there is some human nature towards it.

I’ll give you an example in my own team: We’ve implemented generative AI in our Tier-Zero/Tier-One cases to start to get our own work going, because we have a lot of pride in using our own technology inside our own company.

In 3 weeks, we had over 30% productivity gains. And the leader of my team in that space said it would’ve been better, but our team checked the work of the computer. So even in a place like ServiceNow where really there should be fearlessness about this—it should be all growth and upside—is the human nature.

So creating a safe place to experiment, which is what—now we have a set of use cases, we have a product mindset, so the HR team is able to engage in their ability to influence the products that we serve to our people with a human-centered design. And building more confidence that this is a good thing—that they don’t have to go back and check the work—is our own journey.

Nick Bloom: Yeah, I mean, that’s the beginning. We had an internal discussion at Stanford, and this was amongst a group of faculty, and there was a lot of enthusiasm until someone pointed out: “You know, AI at some point may actually be able to teach—possibly even do research.”  And at that point, everyone was like: “Hmm, I’m not so sure.”

Yamini Rangan: That’s exactly right, Nick. “I’ll embrace AI, except when it comes after my job.” I think that’s where the little bit of risk aversion comes in.

I wanted to pull a thread with what Michael started this whole topic with, which is customer orientation of the culture. We started this conversation talking about what happened to employees. We went from mostly in-office to mostly flex and hybrid, and that has been a big shift in the last 4 years, but that’s only part of the big change that has happened in the world in the last 4 years.

I think especially in tech—and I think it’s happened in most of the other industries as well—we’ve gone through this period of massive acceleration followed by somewhat of a deceleration, and you could see this in terms of growth rates that have declined over the last couple of years in almost every company and most of the industry.

That actually puts an additional layer of pressure on functional leaders, on getting performance to an elevated level. As you are navigating “I want more connection, I want more autonomy, and I want more career growth”—at the same time, the market and the environment has actually changed.

Then, as we just started talking about, AI, especially in the tech industry, is a huge tectonic shift—it’s in the very early stages. But fundamentally what it’s doing is it’s redrawing competitive landscapes. If you thought that you were at the top of the pack in your industry and you had some competitive advantage, it’s gone. You’re now reset, and you’re competing in a new game, and in a completely new landscape, which means you need to change faster, you need to innovate quicker, you need to add value to your customers even more in a differentiated manner.

So, if you take that hybrid transformation that we were talking about, and then you add the marketplace dynamic and the technology shift, what that means is that it is even more important for leaders—everybody that’s listening on this call—to take employees through that journey. Because otherwise, every time we turn back around, we feel like we’ve left someone behind, right? And we feel like: “Oh, we should’ve done this a little bit better because we are leaving people behind.” Otherwise, they’re going to react and say, “Why are you doing performance management now?” Not because the market dynamic has changed, or your customer expectations have changed, or there is a new disruptive force in terms of AI,—they’re like, “This is another layoff, isn’t it?” and the answer is no.

And I think it is a challenge for us as leaders, but exceptionally important to maintain in terms of the culture, to enroll people on the level of change that’s happening within the industry and within the company.

Nick Bloom: That’s a great point. I mean, it’s hard to think of a period that’s been through more change. As an economist, it’s hard to think that the US labor markets have probably not changed this much since World War II. World War II was epic because you saw an enormous increase in female labor force participation when men went off to fight. You got to go back 50 – 60 years to see similar shifts.

From Strategy to Tactics: Taking Action

Nick Bloom: I was going to change topic a little bit and go from strategy to tactics. So how do you take action? How do you get your organization to take action? How do you get them to drive through some of the cultural shifts you’re trying to make? Jacqui, why don’t you go first?

Jacqui Canney: Well, I mean, this won’t surprise you all and we’ve heard it today: It starts with the CEO. The CEO is the north star, where the expectations all start. And obviously having a great board, a great management team, a winning strategy, is like “Has to be,” right? You have to have those ingredients, especially if you’re someone in the job I have. To be able to drive a talent strategy, you need those ingredients.

But with that, you do need to be able to see: “What is the talent strategy that you need to build? What’s the inside strategy of the people in the company? How can you grow? How can you get them to do the work they love? The careers of their lifetime?” You know, get that really turned on so that people can have mobility and all the things that they desire.

But also know: “What do you need from outside the market that you can pull into your company, to be able to supplement where you don’t have that inside?”

So you have to have a great inside/outside talent strategy. And as an HR team, I’ve challenged our people to think AI-first. So what does that mean? How are you thinking about all of the work that needs to happen? Recruiting, development, rewards, exiting, all of the things that happen inside a company to keep it healthy and its culture strong—If you were starting a company today, how would you do that? And then set your budget and your investments in that direction, because that’s how we are going to be able to enable all those things that we need to for our shareholders, and for our CEO.

So tactically, there’s a playbook that you can follow, that—you execute your own way, but it is having from strategy to tactics of “What’s your AI-first strategy? What’s your product mindset?” And then “How are you constantly agilely moving through that so that you’re always making it better?” Iterating as if you were iterating on this, you’re iterating on your HR processes and policies for your people with them at the center. Not HR at the center.

Nick Bloom: Fantastic.

Yamini Rangan: Yeah, I love what you’re saying, which is like that constant iteration. At HubSpot we have this thing, which is: “Culture is another product.” Just like we evolve our core product which we offer to our customers, we evolve culture. Our core product attracts customers, and culture attracts employees. And we’re constantly iterating. In fact, our culture code, which we have published online, is now going through version 39. Dharmesh and I are in the process of doing a major revision to the culture code and it will be version 39.

Just like a product manager would treat their product and ask questions of their customers, we treat culture code in a similar way. We’ve gone to our employees and we said, “What are the features that you like the most? And what are the features that you would want to request the most?” And when we start with that, in the case of HubSpot, the features they like the most are: One, the fact that we treat culture like a product. It’s a little bit of a meta answer, but they like the fact that we are constantly evolving, which also means that they know that we are constantly listening. Even if it’s not perfect today, we’re going to iterate and get it back to where it needs to be. The second thing they like is transparency across all of the layers. And the third thing is flexibility. And it’s interesting: Flexibility never came in the top three liked features many years ago, and now it is always in the top three. So we are investing there.

What is even more interesting is “What are the new features that they want, and what do they request the most?” [The answer] is clarity in terms of career path and growth. I think to your point, Nick, when people were all coming into the office and management was designed by walking the floor, and you as a leader could see—but they also could see you. And they also felt that connection and they could talk about the project that they were working on. And so it felt a little bit more clear for them in terms of “What do I need to do in order to get promoted? What do I need to do in order to grow my skill set and have that?” That’s lost right now because they’re sitting mostly in their office without anybody else, or in their house.

And so I think the requested features are: Clarity in terms of career path, more connection, and better ways to get work done because it feels a little bit more siloed. They’re not running into people in the office in an organic manner. So that’s the thing.

So you ask the question of: “Tactically, what does that really mean?” We feel—probably a little bit of hindsight—we brought the leadership team along the journey. So that means directors, VPs, SVPs within the organization, they kind of got this context and what was happening in there. I think we did not do enough for managers as they have gone through this journey. And we talked about the business climate changing, a new technology shift coming, and going through hybrid—I don’t think we brought the managers along.

So we’ve now recognized that we need more manager foundations and fundamentals because what also happened during this period is we promoted a lot of first-time managers and we said, “Okay. Here you go, you got a promotion, go figure it out.” Now they’re dealing with hybrid, now they’re dealing with very different expectations of their teams and they need to bring these people along.

So partly, the tactic for us is one: Look at what are the most requested features—but more specifically get clear on job foundations. “What is your job? What’s your expectation? What do you need to master your craft, and what do you need to get promoted?” And then these manager foundations: “What is your job as a manager? How do you do it in this hybrid world? How do you remove bias when you assess for performance?” And “How do you make sure that you’re coaching not just your top performers because they’re driving the best outcomes, but maybe the ones that are left behind in this world?”

And so I think those are the tactics and I think we learn every single quarter where we’re missing the mark versus where we are actually hitting the mark and then iterate from there.

Adapting a “Culture Code” to a Virtual Environment

Nick Bloom: Great. I’m going to follow up on something and then go to Jacqui. It’s just fascinating about having kind of a culture book. So do you feel that now, because you’re much more distributed and less in-person, is more written down? GitHub is famous for basically writing everything down. Is that something you’ve seen as well—there’s more written documentation because people are less there in-person?

Yamini Rangan: Yeah, I think we need to do even more, Nick. I do think that these are the second-order shifts that we’ve started talking about. The first-order shift is like, “Where are you working?” And, then “How do you get work to be done?” When I hear from our employees, “Hey, I didn’t know that this other team was doing this other thing,” it really gets back to, “Oh, we’ve not connected the dots, and why have we not connected the dots? Because things are in meetings and discussions, but they’ve not been codified and they have not been documented.”

So, I do think that the onus is on us as leaders to be even more clear. This is really the process that we are going through: We’re kind of rewriting what this culture code means and how we have adapted this to the hybrid world, and therefore what the expectations are for people managers and leaders versus what the expectations are for an individual contributor. We probably need to do even more, but I think that’s definitely a next-order consequence of where we are.

We’ve got to be writing more, we’ve got to be speaking more. We just had our strategy off-site at HubSpot where we bring the top leaders. We had it a couple of weeks ago and we literally interviewed people as this was going on. We put a video—we shared it with the employees. It’s not just the written communication, but it’s also like, “Here’s how we’re getting together and these are the kinds of decisions that we’re making. Here’s the context.” So I think context sharing is elevated to the next level to be able to really motivate your hybrid people strategy.

Nick Bloom: Would the culture code be something that everyone in the company has seen/read/is aware of?

Yamini Rangan: So far, yes. They haven’t seen this updated version, but everybody—when we talk to prospective employees, we’ll send them the culture code, it’s actually on the web. So we send it to them and we say, “Look at it, and if you feel like, ‘Oh yeah, I can fit in there and I can add to this culture, and this is something that I’d be passionate about,’ then you’re a perfect employee for us. If you look at it, and you’re like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know, these people seem very different from my philosophy,’ then that’s not the right place.”

And so I think it starts for us even before you become an employee we send it, and then certainly as an employee. But I think what I’ve also found is that culture and tenets of culture need to be lived. You can have values and you can have culture, but how you walk the walk and how people experience culture when they come into your virtual halls now, that is what matters. And I think there’s an even harder job for us to make sure that the culture feels lived when people are in so many places and it’s virtual experience that you’re doing. So you have to work doubly hard at making sure that culture feels lived, and that lived experience is consistent with what you’re sharing as Jackie put it as your People Pact. People need to feel it, people need to feel like that’s what is being lived.

Nick Bloom: Got it. Jacqui, it would be great to hear—

Jacqui Canney: Yeah. I mean, I agree. Our manager enablement—we’ve done a lot of it, we have to do way more, because I do think it’s the hardest job in the company, maybe next to the CEO. That has to be feeling confident. It’s where all the action happens, it happens in the teams. So how you enable a manager, whether they’re a new manager—we do the same thing, we promote people pretty fast here, too. We hire from the outside, so being a new manager inside ServiceNow has its own persona of what we need to address and help them to be enabled. That’s one area I totally think doubling down on, you could not lose or go wrong.

And I love the “It has to be a felt culture.” You know, writings on the wall, writings all around are important, but if you’re not really feeling it, it does feel disingenuous. So how you show up, and in our jobs the storytelling of the culture is really important, too. And we ask our people every time after a town hall or an event/a cultural moment/a manager forum: “Do you understand the People Pact? Do you understand how the People Pact is coming to life?” To start to be like, “This is working,” or it’s just words. And I can tell you that the confidence in that has climbed tremendously because we’ve learned what people are hearing and what we are trying to say. So I think that has been a really good iterative process.

And then I use metrics to see if it’s working too. Last year our applicant pool went from 700,000 to over a million. So we had a jump for 5,000 jobs of people from the outside that wanted to come work here. So that felt really good, especially with our financial results, tying the people strategy and the business strategy together.

The other is our engagement. Our team had 95% participation in our surveys and they’re like 85% engaged. And then our attrition is the lowest it’s ever been, especially for our high performers. So, I think you have to have your eye on the enablement piece, the authentic storytelling of your culture as it shows up. And then what are the metrics that you’re going to look at to say it’s working or it’s not, including these transparent conversations.

Nick Bloom: A million applicants—that’s more than the population of a small European country, so I’m impressed you can handle that.

Successes and Failures

Nick Bloom: I was going to say, in the pre-meet with the three of us and Michael, there was a kind of a therapy moment where we’re talking about good and bad decisions, so I was going to ask—I think we just about have time to think of maybe two or three things you got right and two or three things you maybe got wrong that other people could learn from. Just to put this in context, it has been a wild time for the last 4 years, and so no one can have got this all right. I know Stanford has made many good and bad decisions. So, two or three things right/wrong, I don’t know who to start with here, but if anyone—

Yamini Rangan: I can go. I’ll tell you in this period, we got more wrong than right, I’ll be the first one to humbly admit that. The things that we got right: Empathy in dealing with our employees as they were going through a health crisis, followed by a social crisis, followed by all of this. I think we got the empathy and supporting employees as they were going through this transition right.

Very early on we stuck to our version of providing flexibility which is truly—we didn’t mandate days, we didn’t have specific days, we said, we’re going to encourage you—and I think that was important for our employees. We got that right, we didn’t go back and forth between “Yeah, maybe come back and maybe not.” We just stuck to it, and I think that has helped. So those are a couple of things that we got right.

To what we did not get right, I do think the move to hybrid is more than the first-order changes of: “What is your choice of where you’re getting work done?” The second- and third-order things that you need to do [are]: “How do you drive connection, even with flexibility? How do you drive independent work while not getting siloed? How do you make sure decision transparency is there even when a lot of cross-functional meetings are not taking place organically?” I think there’s work to be done. We have a lot more to do there.

And then as I said earlier, a very tactical thing is: Managers, managers, managers. They’re kind of the leverage point. They’re pretty important within almost any organization, especially ones that are going through big change, and I don’t think we nailed it. I think we have more work to do to be able to get all of them there.

Nick Bloom: Fantastic, thank you. Now this is like, part way through therapy, so Jacqui, any thoughts?

Jacqui Canney: Yeah, I feel like we got empathy right, too. That felt natural for the company to get that right from the top all the way. I think the innovation that happened during COVID and continues, that part of our culture has really stepped on the gas, so that feels good.

If I summarized where I think we got it wrong is that we kept decision-making still too much at the top, and we didn’t push decision-making down far enough into the organization. As we spend the time to develop managers or as we spend the time to develop leaders, they have the ability to make these decisions, yet at times, I feel like we still have taken the—they look up for it and they know better. So how we’re continuing to create—and trying to create—the safe spaces, try to make the decision and if it’s not right, it’s not a problem—How to teach that skill, and I think we’re still really working on that.

What Skills are Increasing in Importance?

Nick Bloom: Fantastic. Thanks so much. I think there may be time for one or possibly two audience questions. So, there were like 250 audience questions, so we’re going to have a mere dipping, but, one was: What skills are you looking for now that you weren’t in 2019? So for pretty distributed workplaces, what skills in terms of recruitment/promotions have become more important? Yamini, why don’t you go first?

Yamini Rangan: I don’t know if it is more important, but I will say that the ability to embrace change and work through change is more important for all the reasons we’ve been talking through. If you were a manager in 2019, you could go into the office, look at people around, that’s great. You know how your team is doing. Now, it’s completely different. So the ability to embrace that type of change.

Also, embrace things like AI, and be able to bring that has completely been very, very different. I think the ability to communicate even more clearly—especially at the leadership level and the manager level—because again, you’re not spending as much time together, which means the time that you do spend you have to be able to get things done cross-functionally. So how you communicate and how you work cross-functionally is becoming even more important. And those are the kinds of things that we are helping our folks learn, but also focused on as part of the skills growth that we are investing in.

Nick Bloom: Great, thanks. Jacqui?

Jacqui Canney: Yeah, I would add—for sure those, and personally, inside the people team as an example, I have added an AI data lead that I didn’t have in my roadmap 2 – 3 years ago—I was sort of relying on the rest of the organization. But we needed someone inside the company on my team who’s thinking about that from a human resource lens, so that’s a new job.

Product managers inside Human Resources is also a new job inside our company. I’ve seen how great product managers work when it comes to products that we sell, but how do we have that product mindset inside our companies? So training people for that, too. And interestingly enough, we’ve collapsed learning under our HR team for partners and customers and inside the company.

And I see this job now where you were once the content creator/curriculum designer of learning, now we’re pivoting you to how you are the content knowledge manager. So how you’re taking the questions that come into our bot and training the bot with the right answers, the way to think to be able to answer—and that’s a relatively new job at scale. It may have existed, but now it’s certainly at scale. So I think that those are three off the top of my head I would say I didn’t anticipate to be so widely needed three years ago.

Final Thoughts/Takeaways

Nick Bloom: Thanks so much. I’d say as a professor, the skill I’m definitely working on is punctuality. So given it’s 9:15, we should probably stay very much on time. Thanks very much, Jacqui and Yamini, and I’ll hand it over to Michael.

Michael McCarroll: I want to thank everybody. The points that I thought were particularly well stated today that I hadn’t heard before: The change that we are going through now, in many ways—Jacqui you said—is harder than COVID. And it’s what Yamini pointed out as the second-order and third-order effects of where we’re now working, leads to these really challenging pieces. So I thought that was a really interesting point.

The shift in terms of the skills that we really need to be great at: Embracing change, communicating, and making sure that our managers and our companies have those skills at the first-line level. And, of course, the emphasis that the tenets of culture need to be lived even in—Yamini’s term was: in the virtual halls that we all work in.

So thank you everybody for joining. If you want to see more of the data that we showed at the start, do set up time, there’s really interesting pivots that we’re happy to share with you. And then we can show you examples of programs to activate the culture in the way that everybody is discussing here. So thanks everybody for joining today—Jacqui, Yamini, Nick—and we look forward to welcoming you to the next Teamraderie Leadership Lab. Have a wonderful Friday and weekend.

Yamini Rangan: Thank you so much.