Bill Kerr: As communities and businesses continue to grapple with Covid-19, the question of how, when, and where work gets done is as vexing as ever. Depending on the nature of the work, remote and hybrid approaches have proven to be productive, although not without their challenges. Flexibility is increasingly seen as a perk; and while its role is changing, the office isn’t going away. How can organizations find the balance required to maintain performance while providing equal opportunity and shared purpose? And what role does digital infrastructure play?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. I’m joined today by Brian Elliott, Slack vice president and executive leader of the company’s Future Forum consortium. The HBS alumnus tracks the technical, management, and cultural developments changing the nature of work. We’ll talk about the shift to remote work, how management can support the hybrid workforce, diversity, and work-life balance. Welcome to the podcast, Brian.

Brian Elliott: Thanks for having me, Bill. It’s great to be here.

Kerr: Brian, why don’t you tell us a bit about your background and your journey to be at Slack?

Elliott: Sure. So I was an HBS grad. Had a great time. I actually worked with the technology and operations management faculty, in fact, writing cases for a while. Jumped into consulting after graduating, but then jumped out into technology companies over two decades ago and spent the last 20-plus years leading and managing companies, start-ups, CEO, and teams, both at Google and then at Slack. And it’s been a fantastic journey. The one thing that I’ve learned often through the school of hard knocks is the old phrase, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” The ability to engage productive teams in the broader purpose of your organization—to get them aligned on what you’re trying to accomplish—really can accomplish great things. And when you mess it up, it can get really messy.

Kerr: Well, I think we’re going to try to explore multiple angles of that over this podcast, but Slack is clearly a frontier company. I think it’s also pretty close to a household name. But not every listener will know exactly what Slack does, so maybe you can give us a little bit of a summary about that.

Elliott: Sure. So Slack, itself, is your digital headquarters. It’s a collaboration tool that brings together your team with the tools you use and the partners that you work with all in one place. A lot of people think of Slack as being a messaging app, but it’s actually a lot more than that. So, for example, my team at Future Forum uses Slack extensively, obviously. We have a main Slack channel. It’s our team’s channel, which is the equivalent of a virtual room. It’s where we’ll share things like recent research results or project updates. We’ll also use it to have a quick chat—so a conversation with people, including doing what we call “huddles,” which is a voice-only channel where you can share your screen and look at the latest product design, for example. So it’s a really great way for us to stitch together groups of people that are scattered—in our case, all across North America—to make it easier for them to share knowledge and information, to work together asynchronously as well as synchronously.

Kerr: Brian, I’m sure many of our listeners that are working at more-traditional industries or in the government hear something about Slack and think, “Well, they probably had the whole thing down pat before the pandemic ever began.” Tell us about the journey at Slack during the pandemic. What were some of the bigger revelations that you had? And also, what were some of the challenges you had to face?

Elliott: If we roll the dial back to March of 2020, we were in the same position as a lot of companies. Slack, itself, was a very office-centric culture. We had offices around the globe—roughly speaking, 2,000 people at that point in time. And we, like a lot of other companies when the pandemic hit, had this moment of, “Wow, we’re not really sure how this is going to work or even if it will work. Will we be able to move and shift all the work that we’re doing into people’s homes with so many challenges around them as well and really make it work? Will people be able to be productive? Will we, importantly, be able to be creative and innovative as an organization? Will we be able to serve the needs of our customers?” Pretty rapidly, we started having conversations, not just within Slack, but with other organizations, where we were comparing and contrasting, “What were you learning? What are you learning about habits and practices that are working for you and for your team?” And that led to a lot of changes at Slack, but it also led to the birth of Future Forum—which is our think tank and the organization that I lead—trying to help people understand, based on our research, what is working for people—and what’s not—as we move forward.

Kerr: So as you think about the phrase “office-centric culture” that you gave there, is it office-enabled culture? Were there parts of it that really were centered and interactions that were happening inside a physical space office? And as you move through the pandemic—and increasingly, I think upwards of 40 percent of your team has been hired post-pandemic—how has that culture evolved for a more remote setting?

Elliott: Pretty much just a couple months into this we started seeing shifts. And I’ll give you some examples. So from a pre-pandemic perspective, one of the key things that we still grapple with, like a lot of companies, is that power tends to centralize in headquarters and physical headquarters—like literal floors of buildings. So I worked extensively with a team out in Denver, led by a gentleman named Mike Brevoort, who’s the engineering director out there. Mike in 2019 made 23 trips to San Francisco. San Francisco happens to be where our headquarters is. Mike had a team he was working with in San Francisco, but the main reason he made those trips wasn’t just to be with his team. It was because, when we were doing a presentation to, for example, Cal Henderson, our CTO, and Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s CEO and co-founder, Mike would want to be in the room where it happens, because if you’re dialing in remotely, it can be a real challenge to feel like, “How do you get in?” Mike was one of the first ones to coin the phrase, “Slack is our headquarters.” He did that in April of 2020, because, literally, like a month into this set of changes, he was on a more-level playing field. That movement to a digital-first approach, to thinking through, “How do you keep a level playing field where everybody can participate equally regardless of location?” really opened up not only improvements to his work-life balance—Mike, by the way, has five kids—but it also made his career opportunities a lot better. He no longer had to think about, “Man, can I stay based in Denver if I really want to grow my career here?” And that’s one example. And there’s lots of others that we’re seeing uniformly across organizations—of how this shift to thinking about, “How do you actually bring people together and have them work together that are distributed in ways that are making sure that you’ve got a level playing field for people?” really opens up recruiting opportunities for organizations, really opens up career opportunities for people, and really creates a massive opportunity to reset and rethink how work happens.

Kerr: At Slack, and then also at the Future Forum, how do you expect the hybrid office model to play out? What will be the function of the office? And then, what will be the balance that you’re seeking to strike between the virtual and the physical?

Elliott: Digital-first doesn’t mean never together. It doesn’t mean that we’re never in an office. In fact, we will—and are—reopening offices when it’s safe to do so. There’s a couple reasons for that. There are people who need office space. There are people whose at-home situations are not conducive to good working habits. They have real challenges, because they’ve been stuck in a small space potentially, or the Wi-Fi just hasn’t been good enough. And so providing them access to a space to get their work done is important. The main purpose of the office though really shifts. It shifts from being a place that’s primarily about housing people at desks doing individual work to being about, “How do you provide space for people to come together and do work? How do you provide the opportunity for people to have interactions with each other that are around team building?” That might be, instead of predictably saying, “Every week we’re going to be in Monday, Wednesday, and Friday,” it might be more like, “How does my team and my organization come together once a month for three or four days to actually get more time together?”—not just planning out the next month’s activity or kicking off a new marketing campaign, but also time to get to know one another. Time for shared meals, time for belonging and coming together. And we think that’s really important, because the flexibility that everybody wants and deserves and has demonstrated they can thrive under has to be balanced with ways in which we connect people together, both digitally and in real life, to build teamwork. And we have to find a way to do all this while also keeping in mind the inclusivity that we want to have for people from all walks of life.

Kerr: So I can imagine a hybrid world where, in theory, you were making these choices to do some team bonding, some innovative work, inside the office; otherwise we’re going to be remote. But if your project leader determines that every day out of the week they want to go and be in the office for whatever reasons—the Wi-Fi—does that mean that the center of gravity is going to go back into the office, and the employees are going to feel compelled to be there to be around the boss?

Elliott: One of the topics that we talk about a lot, both within Slack and at Future Forum with the other organizations, is we need to make sure that we’re not building a false sense of flexibility, that we’re not creating this two-tiered structure where some of the leaders are showing up 3, 4, 5 days a week, and where face time is still the thing that’s going to be key for people in terms of career growth and promotions. So it’s really important to think about how are we focusing in terms of principles. For us at Slack, those principles have been things like flexibility, but also inclusivity, ensuring that there’s equal access to opportunity. And when we’re doing that, it’s been really incumbent on us to talk with our leadership team first, so that they’re the ones that are setting the tone for how this is going to work. So I actually at Slack have two jobs. Future Forum and leading that is one of them. The other one over the past six months has been thinking about, as offices reopen, how are we going to come back? And what are we going to use them for, and where and how? One of the keys for that for all of us has been the executive suite. And it’s been having those conversations first, because those are the people that will set the tone for everybody else. First of all, Stewart Butterfield, our CEO and co-founder, no longer is based in San Francisco. So geographically distributing the team is a helpful first step. That said, if senior management still is showing up five days a week in the same space, it’s problematic. So all of our executives have actually committed, for example, that they’re not going to be more than three days a week in the office. And, in fact, we even took a step—that seems symbolic, but is really important—which is, we disassembled the C-suite. The traditional floor of our headquarters building—that was where Stewart had his office and where the rest of the C-level executives sat—basically doesn’t exist any longer. Those executives are going to be scattered throughout different floors and even different buildings as a way to make sure that we don’t end up with a situation where people feel like they have to come back in to be in those rooms for those executive briefings and conversations. Last thing is, that group is also taking the approach of making sure that those executive reviews themselves are done on what we call a “one dials in, all dial in” approach. So even if people are back in the office, we’re going to ask people to dial in for those meetings and be on a level playing field. It really makes a difference, especially in those situations where your senior team is reviewing work, where a junior member might only get that opportunity a couple times a year, to show the leadership of, “We’re creating this level playing field, and we’re serious about it.”

Kerr: Further down in the organization—so not the top leadership, but more the middle management—are you also getting some pushback at times? And then, how do you communicate the change to that level?

Elliott: We definitely see it in a lot of organizations, where middle managers—and especially frontline managers—are the ones that have been the most challenged over the last year, full stop. They’re often people that don’t have as much training or experience managerially, and some of them may have been trained—because they grew up and have decades of experience managing one way and thinking about, “How do I measure people on the basis of, are they in the office? Can I see what they’re doing? Can I manage them by walking around?” And those people have struggled more. A lot of what we have done is try to put in place new ways of measuring productivity. So, “How do we help managers focus on outcomes and outputs instead of inputs? How do I look at my engineering team’s velocity and quality? How do I look at my customer support organization and what customer satisfaction metrics look like? And how am I performing against my service-level agreements?” Those types of outcome measurements. But we’ve also had to spend a lot of time providing guidelines—guardrails for new habits that we want to see built. That phrase, “one dials in, all dial in,” is definitely one that captures people’s attention, but also gets them nervous and apprehensive, because they don’t know how it’s going to work. And one of the things that we try to get across to managers is, “We’re all in this together. You’re right. We all don’t know how all of these various aspects are going to work, but we need to lean in and experiment, and we’re here to support you.” So as we reopen, for example, our office in San Francisco, small groups of us started coming in and running physical experiments: In conference rooms, how many of us sitting in a room dialing in on a laptop with one microphone open and everybody else’s microphone closed would work for participating in team meetings that are now hybrid team meetings? How do we think about things as simple as putting a laptop stand on a conference room table as a visual hint for what we want people to do? And we tried a variety of different mechanisms to see what worked, and then we shared it with the groups more broadly to get feedback. We’ve also hosted a number of conversations with middle managers in different groups to help get their concerns out on the table. And these are real concerns that we all need to work our way through. I think the most important thing at the end of the day is, if leadership is setting the example, it becomes much easier. But you also have to be real with people—that there’s a lot of change that everyone is going through. We need to experiment and test, and we need to come up with the answers together as an organization.

Kerr: Right. Let’s think a little bit about the old nine-to-five model. In a virtual world, what is Slack doing around that kind of workday schedule? And then, the second part is, how can adjustments to that old model affect our ability to have a diverse workforce and reach out to workers that historically would not have been able to fit into the Slack schedule when it was so office-centric.

Elliott: Both of those are really key points. From a flexibility perspective, one of the conversations that is happening all the time these days is about flexibility in location. All of the conversation has tended to focus on, “Where am I going to work?” In our research at Future Forum, 76 percent of people want flexibility in work location. That’s not to say that they want to be fully remote. Most people want some access to office space for shared space and coming together. An even bigger aspect, though, is that schedule flexibility you’re getting at. It’s that breaking the standard fixed nine-to-five—especially a day full of meetings. Ninety-three percent of people in our research want flexibility in their schedules. And by the way, this is now obviously becoming increasingly key in the battle for talent out there. Over half of the 10,000 knowledge workers around the globe that we surveyed as part of Future Forum have said they are open to new job opportunities. And we’re seeing this happen in what people are calling the “great resignation,” right?—where people are job searching and moving around quite a bit. That flexibility in people’s schedule though is really hard to accomplish for a lot of organizations, because you took work that was done in offices, you put it into people’s homes. You took a calendar day full of meetings, and you moved it into Zoom or Teams calls at home. And then, if you were struggling as a middle manager, you just added more meetings on top of that to test where you are in terms of status on projects. That’s what people are reacting to. When we ask people what they want from schedule flexibility, they don’t want this unencumbered free-for-all. What they want is structured flexibility. They want flexibility within a framework. So Slack has encouraged people to build team-level agreements. So my team’s team-level agreement around schedules for example is 9:30 AM until 2:30 PM Pacific Time is when we hold and host internal meetings—with our team, with other teams inside of Slack, and any one-on-ones that you’ve got as part of the organization. That works for people on the West Coast and people on the East Coast. It also, therefore, gives people flexibility to work part of their day earlier, later, back in the evening when it works for them. This is essential. And it’s really essential, especially for women with children in the U.S. It’s parents, but it’s also in our research very distinctly women with kids in the U.S. that show this the most, that have caregiving situations that are very demanding of their time. So that schedule, that core collaboration hours that my team has, allows members of the team not only on the East Coast to then do more of their work early in the day and not worry about evening meetings their time, it also allows people who have childcare situations—where, for example, the school might not have aftercare open yet—to be able to pick up the kids at three o’clock, spend time with them, and then log back on in the evening to get more of their individual work done. The other thing that you’ve got at that’s really key within this is, you’ve got to get people within those team-level agreements ways to set boundaries. So, for example, my team knows, if we’re going to escalate an issue that’s urgent that requires your attention in the evening, A, it better really be urgent, and B, I’m probably going to call your phone. We’re going to find ways in which you don’t have to monitor and know what’s going on in all of your tools. There are ways in which we want people to set boundaries in their lives to be productive and be effective and have those boundaries, importantly. Second thing that you got at is, how does flexibility affect diversity? This is really key. Not only is it an issue of schedule flexibility, that helps women with children, flexibility, overall, is much more important in our research to Black knowledge workers, Hispanic knowledge workers, and Asian American knowledge workers. Black knowledge workers—much more so even than white knowledge workers—prefer a flexible schedule. They’re much more likely, 87 percent, to want and value schedule flexibility around where they work as well as when. And this shows up for a couple reasons. One of it ties back to the cost of code switching and micro-aggressions in the workplace. People’s satisfaction with work, their sense of belonging, among Black employees, actually grew when we shifted into remote work in our research, where white employees initially struggled and actually had a negative sense of belonging. When we’ve talked to academics, when we’ve worked with Management Leadership for Tomorrow—a nonprofit that’s one of our partners—a lot of this comes back to the ability for Black employees to recharge their batteries. It’s not that they want to be fully remote. It’s not that they also want to become second-class citizens because they’re remote from the rest of the organization. It’s that they need that opportunity and that place to disconnect from a majority white environment that might provide specific challenges to them on an ongoing basis.

Kerr: So, Brian, building on the last point though, there’s the question of being able to bring diverse people to the workplace, but then, there’s the challenges of how are you going to provide mentorship? What is going to be the proof of value of the work that’s being done? You earlier talked about shifting from input-based proofs of value to output metrics and so forth. Specifically, around this building of diversity through the virtual presence, how do you see organizations needing to change these types of inclusionary policies once people are a part of the workforce?

Elliott: If you actually want to build a more diverse workforce, you can do it by opening up the aperture about where you recruit people. So at Slack, for example, we were able to grow our underrepresented minority hiring by 50 percent over the course of the past year as we started recruiting people in broader geographies and for remote positions, as well as for positions that were more centrally located around San Francisco, New York, and Denver. That is only step one. It’s really critical that we also pair that flexibility in hiring with, “How do you really think about the principles of equal opportunity?” That’s where the inclusiveness really comes into play. And so, it’s really incumbent on leaders to set the right tone around that and to find ways to make sure that the focus isn’t coming back to face time in the office, that it’s not coming back to, “Five days a week I’m going to monitor where people are showing up,” because if you’re going to not have a leaky pipeline throughout the course of this, you really need to make sure that you’re thinking hard about, as a leader, “How and who are you promoting and supporting?” There’s two other steps, though, that we’ve talked about a lot within different executive working groups that we’ve hosted. One is, there is a networking gap. The networking gap for, especially, Hispanic and Black employees is real, and it’s material. And so finding ways to provide proactive sponsorship programs inside of organizations to help build the networks of Black employees, of Hispanic employees, is really important if you want them to thrive within your organization, because those networks, they lack compared to white employees’ typically. So you need to be proactive in building infrastructure and support in that way. And the last one is a phrase that I love, which is, “Look around the table.” Your leadership team, itself, needs to be thoughtful about, do they have representation from different groups? Are there women with children in the management team who are thinking about the challenges that are being faced by that group? Are there Black executives, Hispanic executives, Asian American executives, who have a lived experience that is going to be different from mine, for example? So all of this is increasingly important if you want to make sure that you’re not just able to hire a more-diverse pool of employees, but make the management process, itself, more inclusive.

Kerr: As we look ahead, the demographics of the United States and many other countries around the world are going to increase the caregiving responsibility of employees. If you were to meet an executive, or an executive was to come to the Future Forum, and be a little bit skeptical, saying, “Well, once we get the schools reopened next year, and that aftercare program is back, then we’re back to normal. I don’t need to do something special to bring caregivers into the workplace.” How would you respond? Is there a particular business case for reaching out to caregivers in new ways, beyond just access to talent and employee well-being?

Elliott: Absolutely. The evidence has been there since well before the pandemic and continues to be there—that women with children, especially in the U.S., are more challenged than men with children. It is a caregiver problem broadly. It is people who are providing elder care. It is primary caregivers—in the U.S., that happens, in our research and others’, to be more often women than it is men. And the benefits that they need are not that hard, but it’s rethinking how you put together what you consider your benefits. So, for example, the team-building and team-bonding activities that are the happy hours after work, for a primary caregiver—even when we’re back into “normal”—are not nearly as beneficial as flexible spending accounts that allow me to pay for childcare, as an example. Finding ways to build networking events that actually are within the work day, that allow people to come together—versus they feel like a social obligation during time when people would otherwise have to go and provide care—is one simple example. But it’s really about rethinking, “What’s your attitude toward growing and building a diverse workforce?” Because if your attitude is, “The time that someone shows up is really critical and important,” you’re going to still be focused on some of the wrong attributes. So increasingly, collaborative team-building skills are more important and more valuable than competition skills. How do I think about which people are actually providing a collaborative purpose-built team environment? How do I make sure that I’ve got a broad range of people that are able to represent that? Those types of cultures and those types of purpose-driven organizations are going to require that you have really good gender diversity and that you’ve got women with children that are able to provide those types of roles. That means we need to rethink and provide ways in which the way that you work is focused on, “Is this person achieving outcomes?” as opposed to, “Are they there because they’re demonstrating ‘hustle’?” And if the outcomes are there, and you’re rewarding them, they will continue to grow and they will actually attract more people into your organization like them. Diverse organizations, time and time and time again, have proven to be more effective in terms of not just driving growth, but more resilient in the face of challenge. If you want your organization to thrive into the next century, it’s going to be really important that you rethink decades-old habits around, for example, “hustle” and what it means to actually build successful organizations for the next century, which is going to require more collaborative approach. It’s going to require building purpose-driven teams. And it’s going to require greater diversity of management and leadership.

Kerr: So we’ve talked about broadening the aperture of talent that’s coming into the organization, measuring performance in different ways than we have for much of 20th century. As you look at Slack, you now have two leadership tracks. One’s called the “expert track,” and the second’s called the “team development track.” Tell us a little bit about the distinction between these and how this maps into the conversation we’ve been having.

Elliott: Sure. I first saw this a bit earlier in my career in technology, and I saw it, certainly, at Google from an engineering perspective. Think about what happens. You’ve got someone who is aspirational in their career, and they’re looking to grow and develop. In most companies, in most functions, the only way up is by taking on the job of management. And too often, what you end up with is, because people want to get the promotion—because they want the compensation, because they want the title—they say, “Sure, I’ll be a manager,” when it may not be that they actually want to manage people and lead teams and deal with all the challenges that come along with that. It may simply be that they are wanting to grow their expertise and that they actually are looking for the promotion, because of their expertise, their knowledge, their capabilities that they can provide. So what we’ve done at Slack, not only in engineering, but in design, in product management, in certain aspects of the marketing organization, is provide paths in which people can actually move up the organization without having to take on the job of management. They can provide more leadership through expertise, through their individual contributions, through leadership of—whether it is architecture or design—in ways that allow them to grow in the team to prosper. What that allows you to do, then, is to take the people who do want to be leaders and who do want to be managers and invest more time and attention in their development as leaders. It provides people with opportunities to grow in either direction.

Kerr: Do you ever, Brian, have people second-guessing or saying, “I thought this was right, but the grass looks awfully greener on that other track. I want to switch over.”

Elliott: Absolutely. Absolutely. And it’s a good thing that it happens, right? You’ve got to give them the way to move on to the other track. I have seen people who have been senior architects, for example, that have moved into management, and I have seen people who are senior leaders move into architecture roles. So providing ways in which people can be flexible with their career is also important.

Kerr: What do you think managers need to do to stay competitive in the future—either to first survive, as you said, the great resignation, but even beyond however long this current wave of resignations may last, to just be competitive for where you see the office being over the next five to 10 years?

Elliott: I think the first thing to key on is that last phrase maybe, which is where we see the office being. We have spent decades and decades since the industrial revolution of leadership and management thinking about my real estate portfolio, my seating charts, how the office layout works, conference rooms, et cetera. The amount of leadership time and attention put into physical infrastructure, unfortunately I think, often pales against digital infrastructure. The reason why we talk about a digital-first approach isn’t that we think digital tools are necessarily the solution to all problems, but it’s a real forcing mechanism for shifting yourself away from thinking that the office and an office-centric way of managing is the only answer to a lot of challenges, whether that’s new employee onboarding or innovation and creativity. If you’re going to think about life from a digital-first perspective, it causes you to rethink, “How do I afford people the flexibility they want while keeping them connected with one another? How do I transparently share information and knowledge with teams so that, not only are they more agile and able to move faster, but they have the transparency they need to feel trust in your organization?” So I think what’s changing over the next couple of decades is just an acceleration of what’s been changing already. Purpose-driven organizations are dependent on transparency. Transparency today is dependent on your digital infrastructure to share knowledge and information broadly within your organization. Companies that are investing in rethinking how work gets done, leveraging digital tools, are going to dramatically exceed those that don’t, because they’ll be able to tap the most broad pool of talent available, the most-diverse pool of talent available. And not only will they attract them, but they’ll be able to retain them. And at the end of the day, competition’s about talent. We’re not in a world any longer where access to capital, whether it’s financial or physical, is the key determinant of whether or not you’re successful. It’s, can you tap into talented individuals? Can you harness their knowledge, their insights, their backgrounds, their diversity, for the higher purpose of your organization? And if you’re going to do that, the office is a tool in your toolkit. But if you think digital-first, you’ll get a lot further in how you stitch those people together and in how you create a level playing field for them to thrive within your organization.

Kerr: Brian Elliott is vice president of Slack. He’s also the executive leader of the company’s Future Forum consortium, which is a valuable resource. Encourage you to go take a look at it. Brian, thanks so much for joining us today.

Elliott: Thanks very much for having me, Bill. It’s been great.

Kerr:We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.