The New World of Work: Keith Ferrazzi, author of "Competing in the New World of Work"

0:00Hey friends, Olivia from Oli. Between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting, you need science-backed solutions that work with your life. That's where Oli comes in. Start your mornings off right with Maltese made to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics, and we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fam chase their big dreams. Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stock up on Oli.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

0:30When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

1:22Hi, and welcome to the new season of The New World at Work. I'm Adi Ignatius, Editor-in-Chief of HBR. And each week on this show, we talk to executives and experts about the future of work, how we will innovate, how we will collaborate, what kind of technology we will use. It's a 10-episode season. We are on LinkedIn Live every Wednesday at 12 noon Eastern Time. We're on YouTube now as well. So welcome to our YouTube viewers. Before we introduce this week's guest, though, I want to hear from our friends at Unisys, which has come back to be our sponsor for this season as well. Your employees went from working in one place to working in so many places.

2:06Our digital workplace solutions can help them all create and collaborate seamlessly. We're Unisys and we do digital workplace solutions really well. So before we launch into the show, I just want to say a word about the moment we're in. I think a lot of us are glued to our TVs or social media watching what's unfurling in Ukraine. And, you know, it's horrific. And, you know, it's also hard to get good information. But, you know, it matters not just as individuals, but we bring a lot of that anxiety to the workplace. And, you know, I think people, you know, in the office need outlets, need chances to talk about this stuff, to process this stuff.

2:49And I think good leaders need to understand that some of these things that are far away, that maybe don't have direct impact on their staff, so other people actually can weigh heavily. And that it's very helpful to talk, to discuss, to just sort of share the feeling, share the pain. So I just wanted to mention that. And I'm particularly pleased this week to introduce our guest, who's really an expert on how you create a workplace that is effective, that is humane. So he is Keith Ferrazzi, who is one of the world's great experts on how to imagine the workplace. He's the CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, which is a management consulting and coaching firm.

3:29And he is the co-author with Kian Gohar and Noel Wyrick of the very aptly titled new book, Competing in the New World of Work. Full disclosure, HBR Press is the publisher of this book. So, Keith, welcome. Thanks a lot. Full disclosure, not only are you all the publisher, but I just wanted to go on record thanking you personally, because at the peak of the pandemic, I called you and I said, this is an incredibly important time for us to double down and do some really important research. Let's figure out how the best of the best are reinventing the way they're working during this pandemic. And you were so on top of it.

4:06And your team has been extraordinary. So it's been a great partnership. Thank you. Yeah. All right. Well, Keith, well, thank you. So let's go right into it. You know, in terms of the topicality of the moment, where I am in Boston, we're basically at no, you know, mask optional. People are coming back to work who had sort of postponed that. So where are we now in terms of all of that? And who's, you know, who seems to be getting it right? Well, you know, it's the principle of our research and the principle of this book was really simple. It is. I kept hearing people say back in 2020, when are we going back to work?

4:42And it kind of pissed me off. I didn't want to ever go back to work because I didn't think work was serving us in the way in which we were working. I said, no, let's use this as an inflection point. Let's learn. Let's step in and let's go forward to work, not back. And so we had 2000 executives crowdsourcing. Hey friends, Olivia from Oli. Between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting, you need science-backed solutions that work with your life. That's where Oli comes in. Start your mornings off right with Maltese made to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics, and we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fam chase their big dreams.

5:19Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stock up on Oli.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast.

5:52That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. What they were doing that they never wanted to let go of but hold on to. And I do have to say that there's some sadness to me, which is I'm definitely seeing organizations as they are going back into now certainly more flexible, more hybrid work environment where people are more allowed to be remote and physical. But yet, I don't think people have sufficiently reinvented the fundamental underpinnings of how we worked. So I'll give you a quick for instance. I feel still people think that collaboration means a meeting.

6:36We've got amazing tools available to us today that actually allow us to start collaborating before we ever have to have a meeting, get massively more people involved, have more psychological safety. People don't have to be on the hook for immediate response in a face-to-face environment, whether it's virtual or physical. And fewer than 15 % of companies have really scratched the surface of what's called asynchronous, non-meeting-based collaboration. So to me, the big thing that I'm concerned about is that we still haven't learned our lesson in terms of stepping into the inflection point and true reinvention of ways of working.

7:16Yeah, that's where I think we are right now. But let me ask why you say that, because we've been remote. I mean, those of us who have the option to be remote have been remote, have stayed remote. And many people will tell you, business has never been better. We've never collaborated more effectively, et cetera, et cetera. So it seems to me we're using those tools you're talking about. Now, is your point that you're afraid we're going to blindly go back to the old way? No, we didn't go far enough. We didn't go far enough. And all of the research we showed, as I said, look, everybody I talked to, we say we're collaborating well, but everybody I talked to says we're fatigued with this incessant meeting after meeting after meeting, as an example.

7:57Yeah. When we do our research and we show that even in a remote meeting of 12 people, only four people feel that they've been fully heard in that meeting. And yet a very simple practice of a meeting, which is snap your fingers, have the entire group of 12 people go into a breakout room on a critical question. Open up a shared document, whether it's whatever technology you're going to use. Open up a shared document in groups of three answering the questions. Right. and then come back into the main room. You have fundamentally transformed the amount of candor in that team, the amount of transparency in that team, the amount of willingness the people to critique each other.

8:36I mean, I'll give you a quick idea. If you were to, in the middle of a meeting, ask people, what's not being said that should be said here? You'd hear crickets. If you send them into a breakout room and turn that into an assignment and you have them open a shared document and write what's not being said that should be said, and then you come back into the main room, you've totally reinvented the dialogue. And all I'm saying is the tools we're using, we're using them as if we were using them prior to 19. We're glad we can have meetings at the same time with people around the world. But how we actually think about collaboration has not changed as much as it should.

9:10That's just one area. By the way, everything we're talking about right here is in one chapter of the book around collaboration and inclusion. And it's one chapter. I'd love to span out beyond that as well. But it happens to be right now probably one of the most important things that we get right, which is reinventing the way we think about work, not just slapping tools onto old ways of working. So if you're watching this and have questions for Keith, put them in the comment section. We'll try to get to questions later. So, Keith, I'm tempted to say, and you'll see what I'm paraphrasing here, but, you know, maybe the future of work is already here.

9:47It's just unevenly distributed. I mean, are there people who are doing it right now that you would? And I'll go ahead and flatter you again and appreciate you because back in 2010, we started this work. So I was coaching. Hey, friends, Olivia from OLLI. Between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting, you need science-backed solutions that work with your life. That's where OLLI comes in. Start your mornings off right with Maltese made to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics. And we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fam chase their big dreams.

10:19Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stock up on OLLI.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast.

10:53That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. The executive team over at Cisco with John Chambers. And I heard about this thing called telepresence and this thing called WebEx in its early stages of development. By the way, I met this young man named Eric Yoon, who was over there now as the CEO of Zoom, of course. And so I started talking to these folks. I was like, wow, the world of work is going to change. Called you. And I said, let's do a series on that. And if anybody goes in hbr.org and type my last name, you see 12 pieces published from 2010 to 2016 on this subject.

11:34The future of work has always been there. We've been talking about this for decades. And I wanted to land it during the pandemic to say, this is the opportunity to, that we're almost forced to. We had this amazing laboratory of remote and hybrid work. And again, this is only one component because it's not just the use of the tools. The tools have always been there, but it's how we reinvent the way we think about work to leverage the tools effectively. I had 300 CIOs of some of the most prominent companies in the world, unicorns, fortune 50s, et cetera, 300 CIOs involved in the research in the last two years of the 2000 executives.

12:11And, and I say, I don't need to be disrespectful, but shame on us for having put tools in place without a roadmap, without a roadmap for how to change the way we work with them. Right. And that is, you know, the, the big, the big concern. And one of the myths is there's another myth, which is culture erodes in a virtual or remote landscape, meaning we don't bond together. Right. We don't connect as well as we used to. B.S. Just not true. The reality is if in the olden days when we were physically walking around the world in the offices, culture was organically marbled in the things we did serendipitously without us thinking.

12:50It was a walk in from the car park. It was the meeting after the meeting, which I never thought were appropriate anyway. All of those things were how culture was created. Boom, we snap into a remote environment. And then if we don't figure out purposeful ways to build culture, I mean, simply putting a, asking your team, put into chat on a scale of zero to five, where your energy is today. And then anybody who has a zero, one, or a two, you pause and say, Jane, are you okay? Dave, are you okay? That is a simple practice that turns purposeful. this sense of combined commitment to each other's energy, creating a safety net under each other, a sense of esprit de corps among a team that cares about each other.

13:32That stuff used to happen in the hallways and at lunchrooms and at meetings and at coffee hours. Now it needs to be a purposeful practice. So it's being that meticulous. And that's what we tried to do. We captured dozens, not just dozens, hundreds of these practices from executives. We then applied them in a laboratory setting into other companies. We measured whether or not those practices were efficacious through diagnostic tools. And then we created the high return practices that we talk about in competing in the new world of work. I'm going to try to get in as many of them as I can here, but I'm trying to do two things in this conversation.

14:10Give you the practice you should use, But awaken your insecurity, your FOMO that you haven't gone far enough because you haven't. And that's one of the things that I want to make sure we don't miss. Yeah, I like that a lot. All right. So let's imagine entirely hypothetical situation, a publishing company in Boston that's trying to figure out what do we do in terms of coming back to the office physically? you know, we can come up with a number two days a week, three days a week, but, but that would be probably sort of arbitrary. So in terms of thinking about what do we do to maximize all the positive effects of culture of collaboration of all these things, how do we, how do we get to the answer there?

14:56So, so, uh, I'll send you the bill for the coaching after the session. Hey friends, Olivia from OLLI between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting, you need science-backed solutions that work with your life. That's where Oli comes in. Start your mornings off right with Maltese made to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics, and we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fan chase their big dreams. Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stock up on Oli.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

15:27This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, Use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

16:00It's a hypothetical company. Hypothetical, hypothetical situation. Okay, here's the situation. We are in the middle of what a lot of people call the great resignation. And I roll my eyes on that term. First of all, it's so hackneyed and everyone's talking about it. It could be boring. But here's what I want you to think about, Adi. We're not in the great resignation. The great resignation is something that will be the outcome and of companies that aren't proactive in what's really the movement that's really going on. And this movement title was named by Mike Clemente, one of the members of our research institute, who's the chief people off head of people operations at Unilever.

16:41He's one of our faculty in the research institute that this book created. He calls it. No, what we're in is the great exploration. they're not in the great resignation and if if companies don't meet people in their great exploration you know that exploration of what do i really want for myself what has worked to me what kind of flexibility do i require for myself how you know how do i deal with the fact that i've been home with my kids and now i'm being asked not to be that's the great exploration if you don't meet that face to face you will you'll be the victim and suffer the great resignation so adi what i would suggest is first of all you say to your team here are the questions that we don't know.

17:17One of the beautiful things about the pandemic is that leaders stepped off their podium and became humble enough to say, I don't know. And I love that because that willingness to say, I don't know, is really just an invitation to co-creation with people. So what I want you to do, Adi, is to send a message to your people that says, listen, here are some questions that I think we have to answer that we're not sure about yet. We think we are, but we're not sure about. By the way, ask your people, what are the questions that you have that you think we should be exploring collectively as a team. And we want to turn this from a policy dictate that we figure out centrally and then hand down to you, which is very old school pre-2019.

17:56What we want you to do is we want you to be a part of the exploration and the co-creation of the answer. So if one of the answers is, I mean, I'll give you a simple one. We just wrote an article about this. What are we going to do differently when we're in the office that looks is different than 19 because what we learned is a lot of the stuff that we used to do when we were together in the office, we now can do virtually and remotely perfectly well. What makes being in the office that much better that we want to dial up on? That is a beautiful question that I'm encouraging leaders to ask their people to co-create.

18:30What does office connectedness look like? What do we do there differently? Another question could be, how do we effectively leverage the tools that we were using. Where didn't we go far enough? Where didn't we go far enough? Now, a lot of our writing tells you where you didn't go far enough. So you can see that conversation with them. But what I really just want everybody to start doing is opening their aperture, just like we did in our research, asking the questions and then using two-way dialogue. The Federal Express never had a meeting with their top 3 ,000 executives, but they had a meeting with their 2 ,000, 3 ,000 executives.

19:07And instead of being one-way broadcast communication, like so many other companies were, they turned it into a two-way dialogue. They snapped their fingers and people were in breakout rooms, giving them an opening shared documents, giving answers to questions that Federal Express wanted to co-create with associates. Now that, again, that's still in this chapter around collaboration. That idea of moving to crowdsourcing, moving to shared exploration in any strategic question, whether it's how we go back to the office or where risk opportunities, I mean, where risk is or where growth opportunities are.

19:45Unilever, instead of doing a cascading business plan from the top down, decided to ask their top 300 leaders, where are growth opportunities that we're not seeing? So they they moved their business plan to bottom up from top down because they now had. Hey friends, Olivia from Ollie. Between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting, you need science-backed solutions that work with your life. That's where Ollie comes in. Start your mornings off right with Maltese made to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics, and we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fan chase their big dreams.

20:20Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stock up on Ollie.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast.

20:52That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Tools that allowed them to do that. That's changing the way we work in the new world of work. So I want to go back to when you were talking about, you know, companies should maximize whatever it is they can do that they do well sort of physically together. And obviously every company is different. It does different things. But what are some possibilities? What are some examples, even generic ones for how to use this? The North Star that I think we have to think about when we're back in person, I coined something, the social chemical connection.

21:31It's just a it's a made up phrase. But what I was trying to say was when we're face to face, it is different. Right. When we're literally tactically in the same room together, it's different. By the way, in one ways, it's also intimidating because you get more psychological safety in a virtual format than you can do in a physical format. I think it goes back to our reptilian brains of fight, flight, and am I in danger here, etc. But I think we should lean in when we're face-to-face and in person. Lean into an agenda that's emotional. Lean into an agenda that's emotional. Celebratory. Celebration is the best things to have when you're together, right?

22:08Bonding, connection, caring, committing. Those are wonderful things. So, for instance, I've been doing during the pandemic, when I'm coaching a team, I'll have a bonding dinner. And a bonding dinner is literally an hour and a half. And sometimes it's sort of, depending upon the time zones, it's at the end of the day. So maybe we get a bottle of wine sent to everybody. Social lubricant for vulnerability is very powerful of alcohol, but not suggesting that's necessary. And everybody goes around and says, what are we, what's going on in our life personally and professionally that is most poignant?

22:40Now, as the coach, I'll lead with something vulnerable in my life, right? And I encourage you to open vulnerability in that kind of a shared dialogue. Now, if you move that into a physical realm, it's going to be so much more powerful. On the other hand, if you in the physical realm still have an offsite and everyone's doing a dinner party, but it's just small talk, you're totally missing the boat. In the olden days, we used to do small talk, but we did enough of it and we would serendipitously fall into a real conversation. Don't leave anything to serendipity anymore, right? do a purposeful bonding dinner in a physical environment where people actually share what's going on in their lives, it'll be significantly more impactful than what we used to do in 2019.

23:25Similarly, you can move some of that stuff online and it's better than it was physically when we were only doing small talk. So that's just an example of this idea of bonding or connecting this. I also think that you can get, when I used to have difficult times with one of my peers at Deloitte when I was chief marketing officer there, the CEO, Greg Seal, who was a dear friend of mine and a mentor would say to me, Keith, the two of you need to go have a long, slow dinner. And that is a powerful, that is a very powerful piece of advice. Go have a long, slow dinner. When you've got grist or anxiety with somebody, the ability to go sit down and have a long, slow dinner and a face-to-face dialogue is game-changing.

24:07Again, where social chemical connection advantages you is anywhere that there is an emotional heightenedness, celebration, bonding, grist or anxiety or frustration. That's where we should definitely dial up and then do it very purposefully in the process. So you mentioned anxiety, and I think a lot of us feel we have sort of gone from crisis to crisis in the last couple of years with the pandemic, with some disturbing social developments, certainly in the U.S. and, you know, now watching what's happening in Europe and Ukraine. What are your thoughts on how to create the space, create the opportunities for, you know, employees to connect, to grieve, if that's the emotion?

24:59Can you do that remotely? I mean, is that something that... A hundred percent. A hundred percent. But before I get there, you said something that I want to I want to give people a fun term for. What we practiced during the pandemic was what I call crisis agile. I'm assuming your audience understands what agile is. It's a framework of operations that is typically used in software organizations, program management organizations. And it's about breaking your work down into bite-sized sprints, negotiating very clear outcomes for those bite-sized sprints, and then giving autonomy to the teams to achieve those during that sprint.