The Fall of The 5 Day Workweek with Brian Elliott

Frank Cottle [00:00:45 ]: Brian, welcome to the Future Work podcast. It’s really exciting to have you here today. And wow, what a resume. I’m intimidated and that’s hard to do. That’s hard to do. You’ve got an amazing background, you’ve accomplished so many things. And so I’m very grateful for you to participate in our podcast today. I’d like to start off just by laying some groundwork and ask you, what do you mean by the future of work? Give us some definition. Demographic, social, technical shifts, those things that you think comprise the future of work.

Brian Elliott [00:01:25 ]: Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s not an easy one to answer first. Frank, thanks for having me. I’ve been excited to be on this. You’ve had some great guests, some people that I know pretty well. The future of work term gets banted around a lot these days. For the past few years it’s meant flexibility in a lot of different places.

Frank Cottle [00:01:42 ]: Right.

Brian Elliott [00:01:43]: But really what we’re talking about whenever we talk about the future of work are you, what are the trends that are driving change in how people work together? And typically that comes about through changes in demographics. So for example, we currently have four generations of people working in the workforce in the US, right? So you can talk about Gen Z, which will be over 25% of our workforce next year. Those changes in demographics also come often with changes in things like workforce labor participation, some of the challenges that employers have had around getting people to work, but also generational shifts in beliefs. What drives people? How do you get them motivated? How do you get them marching in the right direction and then sitting underneath all this are a couple really fundamental factors. One is technology, right? So you can’t get away.

Frank Cottle [00:02:31 ]: No, that’s not important.

Brian Elliott [00:02:32 ]: Yeah, nothing in there whatsoever. And I’ve worked in the technology space for 30 years myself, startup CEO Google, Slack Salesforce, and have seen firsthand some of the shifts upfront from a technology company perspective. But also everything that we use in our modern day lives at home and socially has come into the workplace. The consumerization of tech, broadband availability in homes, all this have caused fundamental shifts in how we work. And now you’re dealing with the second, 3rd, 4th generation of collaboration technologies and AI and what’s happening on that space as well in terms of the tools that can help us be more effective in our jobs. You mix that into a stew, you add into it global competition, you add into it some of the psychographic shifts in terms of people’s orientation. And what you get is these sort of attempts to discern where we think the future is headed when my favorite quote about all this is back to William Gibson, who said, the future is all around us, it’s just not evenly distributed. So I get a lot of my lessons from looking at some of those trends in demographics, societal trends, technology, and add into it who’s out there that’s already playing around with this stuff today? Who can we learn from? Who can we tap on the shoulder to ask some questions that appears to be doing something different, that’s working so the rest of us can learn from them?

Frank Cottle [00:03:52 ]: Well, you know, it’s funny that you mentioned that. I’ve been accused in the past of having a crystal ball, and I’d like to pretend that I do, but certainly I don’t have one. But I do have a theory. And this relates exactly to what you said about the future is all around us, just not evenly distributed. People say, well, how do you forecast something? And I say, it’s very simple. I use what I call pebble in a pond theory. I drop a pebble in a pond. Now, the pond is irregularly shaped, and so the wave pattern in the pond hits one shore roughly, and very quickly it hits another shore. It takes forever to get there, and it’s a tiny little ripple and no one even notices. That’s the way the future, and that’s the way the future of work is shaping itself. It is all around us every day. And a lot of the things that we forecast, we forecast knowing they will be here. We just don’t know when they’re going to hit our particular shore.

Brian Elliott [00:04:58 ]: That’s right.

Frank Cottle [00:04:59 ]: And I think that’s a really important thing to recognize, especially when you talk about your generational issues. I am obviously at the upper end of one of those generations. I hate it when people refer to me as Gen Z. I just hate it. No, I would be proud to be Gen Z. Yeah, me too. I say that in all truth, when we look at the generational issues of it’s all around us, it’s just not evenly distributed. That’s not just geographically distributed or nationally distributed or economically distributed. It’s very generationally distributed.

Brian Elliott [00:05:47 ]: That’s right. That’s right.

Frank Cottle [00:05:49 ]: Well, let’s take one major issue today. Return to office. Let’s break that down on generational issues over things. Return to office is an absolute success and failure at the same time. There’s a lot of reasons why people want to be in the office, a lot of reasons they don’t. But it is very generational. You have a breakdown on that, and I think we’ll end up, that pendulum will keep swinging and narrowing, and pretty soon we’ll say, aha, 32, 35% of the people are never going back is, how are they going back? Hybrid full time. What’s it going to be? That battle is huge. You have a lot of insight into that. Can you share that with us?

Brian Elliott [00:06:36 ]: I do. I do. And that one actually comes back into both generational issues, but also sort of the shift in terms of expectations that we’ve all had that you and I grew up with. Right. I’m gen x myself.

Frank Cottle [00:06:48]: I’m not grown up yet.

Brian Elliott [00:06:50 ]: Thank you. I’m not sure that I ever will. For that matter. THere’s a big shift that went on a couple years ago driven by the pandemic. Clearly, it changed expectations and people’s understanding of what was possible. And what’s funny about that is we had a couple decades before that, certainly the last ten years, when everything that happened during the pandemic, in terms of people being able to work from home, could have already happened.

Frank Cottle [00:07:12 ]: It was to a degree, to a.

Brian Elliott [00:07:16 ]: Degree, to a limited degree. But like I sat in slack where I was an executive, we had the debate on a regular basis every few months about would we stand up a remote first team within slack because we were office centric. And the reason we never did is because we’d never done it before. We didn’t feel like we had the skills, the wherewithal to pull it off, even though we had the world’s hardest time recruiting more and more people into San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, Canada, you know, a few other places where we’re trying to hire, especially designers and engineers. The pandemic was a seismic shift that caused us all to go through this crazy experiment at the same time that upended our own expectations of what was possible. Because all of a sudden, everything that researchers have been showing us was possible. And that a few people told us was possible, we experienced with our own eyes. And so that shift caused people to sit there and go, what do I think is the right answer going forward? And when you look at, there’s no one size fits all at an organization level, certainly an individual level, generationally, what you actually see is the people that are most likely to want either extreme, to want to be full time in the office, or to be fully remote. Frank, they’re people who look like you and me. It’s people who are over 50 years old. The people who are least likely to want either extreme, to want to be fully remote or fully in the office are Gen Z. They want time in shared space with people. They only want it a couple of days a week, but they want it for socialization, they want it for mentorship, they want it for learning. Right? We like to toss out quips like kids these days just don’t want to work that hard, or all of them want to be remote because my kid is or something like that. That’s just not true. And what I’m seeing happen from a return to office perspective is if you take even those words out and just say, what are the behaviors that people want? Most people want time together with their team on a regular basis. Most people want it to be a couple of days a week. If you allow a team to set its own norms around that, it generally works pretty well. You’ve got to recognize that a lot more teams are also distributed post pandemic, meaning people are spread out across cities. But if you set up infrastructure and rules and regulations that are more like norms and agreements and supporting managers in figuring out what the right way is to do this, and you give them access to great spaces and you give them the tools to do it, they will figure out what the right pattern is for their team. That might be three days a week because it’s an inside sales team and we’re all learning together. That might be once a month because it’s an engineering team and they’re going to do three days of going deep into the next cycle of planning. That type of team based activity also gets people positively engaged talking about it as a team. Like we’ve done research at Future Forum, Boston Consulting Group’s done the same sort of stuff that shows if the people are directly engaged with it, you get a lot more compliance, you get a lot more enthusiasm out of people, and they move forward faster. If instead you decide that at the senior level, someone sits there and says, the magic number for this entire organization is four. Four days a week in order to be together with your team is the number. To some degree. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong, you’re immediately going to get resistance because we are all human beings and we don’t like being told explicitly what to do, like we are children. More importantly, that four days a week may not fit with a team that’s spread out across multiple cities. Hey, boss, what are you talking about? Four days a week to be in with my team? My team’s in five different cities in two different continents. That’s insane. So you’re kind of blowing the logic test as well with your employees. So mandates themselves tend to turn people off. They turn off most, actually your highest performers. There’s research that’s come out in the past year and a half that shows the people most likely to leave after a mandate are your highest performing folks.

Frank Cottle [00:11:07 ]: Independent thinkers.

Brian Elliott [00:11:09 ]: Independent thinkers. People who can get a job someplace else. Women, people from underrepresented minorities are also the ones that are most likely to leave because it’s the pattern that fits least well with them.

Frank Cottle [00:11:19 ]: Well, you know, you said just a moment ago, flexible, flexible, move around, do, do, do, make your own decisions, blah, blah, blah. And you said, and they go to an interesting place. You brought up the place firm. And so I’m going to throw some oil on the fire here for a second and say, as soon as you mentioned place, if I’m a corporate, I’m the decision maker and I’m the CFO, okay? And I look at place and I said, you know, isn’t it nice that this remote team wants to work remote when they want to, but they want a place that I have to provide when they don’t want to. I’ve got a fixed asset and a fixed liability and a debt on my balance sheet for the long term lease. I have to buy furniture and I have to asset manage all this stuff. It’s only got 30, 40% utilization. So the management of place in this decision making process is why does Jamie Dimon want everybody going back to the office in New York? Because he’s got 50 floors of space to fill back up.

Brian Elliott [00:12:41 ]: And he also has some fairly sizable investments in commercial real estate, which might be biasing his decision making.

Frank Cottle [00:12:46 ]: Yes, yes. And so he’s got to protect those assets, which now may actually be liabilities overall. You also said you use the term flex. Everybody wants flex. And I’ll raise that a little bit. I’ll call you and raise you one, I guess, and say that historically, if you and I started a company together 20 years ago, let’s say, yep, we needed two things to succeed. We needed a good product that was accepted by the marketplace and capital to scale our company. Slack. Slack Google. We can make it work, right?

Brian Elliott [00:13:36 ]: Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:13:37 ]: We didn’t need flex. So if you don’t have flex as your third component, you will fail.

Brian Elliott [00:13:46 ]: That’s right. Well, because the third component you really needed, Frank, was people.

Frank Cottle [00:13:51 ]: Well, and people have been fighting that battle for talent. I remember in 16 1718, I remember, we’re the virtual office business.

Brian Elliott [00:13:59 ]: Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:14:00 ]: So, 1617, we’re working with HR companies and that sort of thing saying, well, Google would like to hire these three programmers, but they refuse to move from Akron, Ohio. Can you get us a virtual office?

Brian Elliott [00:14:12 ]: Yeah, yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:14:14 ]:People were already had more than dip their toe into the remote work or flexible work or hybrid work pond before the pandemic. The pandemic just sealed it. Everybody that was in the threshold.

Brian Elliott [00:14:30 ]: That’s right.

Frank Cottle [00:14:30]: Giant foot came along and kicked them in the rear, right out in front, in front of the process. So I think that that goes back to your quote about the futures all around us. It’s just not evenly distributed. A lot of people were seeing it then.

Brian Elliott [00:14:47 ]: That’s right.

Frank Cottle [00:14:48 ]: I think the first, as you were speaking, I thought, well, what was the first instance of real remote work where you had a, you said, stand up a remote team? I thought, I remember in the mid eighties, we put a call center in India. It was all remote. We didn’t know anybody. I’d never even been to India. But we put a stand up team in India that was 100% remote workforce, and it worked just fine. So we’ve been doing this for decades on a massive scale. Why can’t we do it simply on an evolutionary basis? Why are we having such struggles, do you think?

Brian Elliott [00:15:33 ]: I think it comes down to leadership comfort levels with situations we’ve never managed and led in before. And so what I mean by that is, I’ll even take it back to the slack example. Cal Henderson, our chief technology officer, had never managed teams of remote engineers. He wasn’t sure that it would really work. Would they be as productive? Would they be as creative? Would people be able to collaborate just as effectively? Because he’d never seen it. We went through the same conversations you just had. Do we open a Denver office? Because if we open a Denver office, we can hire people from around Denver. Do we open a Toronto office? Because then we can hire people from around Toronto. The pandemic was a mindset shift, not a reality shift. It exposed people to that decision. And all of a sudden, a lot of firms started saying, hey, you know what? I can hire people in Boise, Idaho, and Raleigh Durham, and in Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, and not sweat having an office space every day for all of them. And I’ll make some trade offs like Allwork.Space’s. One of my favorite examples these days. I’ve worked with a team there. They’ve gone down this path of different teams, have different norms. Right. And your marketing, brand, design team that needs to be together three days a week, that’s decided that’s the right pattern for them, has access to office space for those three days a week, and you have to live close enough to one of their seven main hubs in the US to go in to do that. They also have people that are more spread out in other places, and they’ve started doing flexible hubs. They will get access to a space in a part of the country where they don’t have a big enough body of employees that are there every day. So they can host the monthly sales team meeting and the quarterly on site programs for regional groups of employees. And it just makes sense, I think part of what’s happened, too, and you probably know this even better than I do, is, man, I know a lot of CFO’s and CEO’s who in 2021, when offices started reopening, asked the question, so when people come back, when are the seats going to be 100% occupied?

Frank Cottle [00:17:29 ]: They were 100% occupied to begin with.

Brian Elliott [00:17:32 ]: Exactly. At best, in most firms, they were 50% to 60%. Right. So every CFO and CEO’s mind got blown. They’re like, what do you mean? We had this really expensive asset. It was only 50%, but the office always felt busy. Yeah, chief. The conference rooms always felt busy. The collaborative spaces always felt busy. But do you know how much that space was already not well used, pre pandemic. And so it’s a mindset shift that goes, wait a minute, I can get around sunk cost fallacy. At some point, I can start looking at those long term leases and go, I’m not renewing it at the size and shape that I am. My hope is they start thinking harder about not just flexible space, but also redesigning what they’re keeping. Because the spaces people left in 2019 are not what we need on a.

Frank Cottle [00:18:19 ]: Go forward basis and applying the technology to manage it. And necessary. Absolutely.

Brian Elliott [00:18:26 ]: Yeah. And for too long also, you’ve had this sort of separation between workplace sat in one corner of the chart, people sat in another corner of the chart, and it sat in a third corner of the chart. And they didn’t really collaborate terribly well. And in some firms, they still don’t really quite collaborate really well. In the firms that are getting it right, all three of them are figuring out how do we align what we’re doing together? Because it takes people leadership training, skills, capabilities and policies. It takes collaborative oriented workspaces that are more module. You need flexible access to space in more locations. And you really have got to get the tech tools up to consumer grade to help people stitch those global firms together effectively in ways we haven’t before. But if you do that, if you’re the CFO, you’re also looking at that and going like, I think I can do this on net savings. I can reduce my square footage. I can put a chunk of it into travel, a chunk of it into flexible space, a chunk of it into redesign. And I’m certainly not spending any more than I was the day before, but I’ve just unlocked a major gain, which is I’ve got access to talent in more places. And I’m no longer squabbling over New York and San Francisco and Chicago real estate in the same way that I was. And I’m not squabbling over those same employees in the way that we always were. And outside of people who have money in commercial real estate, every other CFO is going to look at that and go, I know what the right trade off is here. I can get more for less.

Frank Cottle [00:19:57 ]: Completely agree. And it’s really, for most companies, it’s not just a cash flow issue, it’s a balance sheet issue. All those leases that if you and I go out and start a company and we take a full floor in a building in Manhattan on a ten year lease, well, nine of those years is going on our balance sheet as debt. And that debt restricts our capacity to access capital for other purposes, for growth. You can look at your efficiency and say, well, I was only 40 or 50. We could argue 40% to 60% efficient before. If you can get your fixed asset cost down by 20% one day a week, okay, look at it like that. By 20%, the impact on your balance sheet is massive. You’ve now got capital to hire those other people to put those programs in place.

Brian Elliott [00:20:52 ]: Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:20:53 ]: And that is happening right now. If you look at the commercial real estate in mostly in markets where the workforce was imported every day through commuting, particularly public commuting. So we don’t need to name any names like New York, as a good example, the depreciation in commercial office space and the defined need for repurposing that into housing at a lower cost so people can work where they live, and the dream of the 15 minutes city starts coming alive, etcetera, that’s all being driven by this change overall. And to put it in perspective, in 2021, when all the offices in Manhattan were sitting empty, our virtual office business grew by 91%.

Brian Elliott [00:21:44 ]: Globally.

Frank Cottle [00:21:45 ]: Globally. And it was that recognition that there are actually structures out there that are flexible, that do work. The other thing, too, I think, that we’re seeing on a social basis is that when you hire somebody from Kentucky and say, hey, you have to move to Silicon Valley to get this job, your talent pool is substantially reduced, your costs are substantially increased, and your life cycle of the employee is substantially shattered.

Brian Elliott [00:22:23 ]:
That’s right.

Frank Cottle [00:22:24 ]: People don’t like to leave their families, their lifestyle, etcetera, unless you pay them a lot more money.

Brian Elliott [00:22:30 ]: Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:22:31]: And then they have to live in a more expensive environment, so that costs a lot more money again.

Brian Elliott [00:22:36 ]: That’s right.

Frank Cottle [00:22:36 ]: Leave them be.

Brian Elliott [00:22:38 ]: Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:22:38v]: Everybody’s happier.

Brian Elliott [00:22:39 ]: Yeah, exactly.

Frank Cottle [00:22:40 ]: Everybody’s happier.

Brian Elliott [00:22:42 ]: Yeah. Most, most leaders know that if you do a forced relocation on a group of people, the real intent is just to get them to leave. It’s a, it’s a way to push attrition up because most people won’t. You know, I had a couple folks working for a large company who recently did this. Reach out to me and say, look, I loved working for the company, but my family is here in Florida. My family is here in New Mexico. My network of support for my kids is here. We can’t move. We’re not moving. And so it’s just, it’s, it generally doesn’t work out that way.

Frank Cottle [00:23:15 ]: No, I. And that’s a limitation. You’re, it’s a self imposed limitation that companies are doing still today that they don’t need to do. But when you talk about so many days in the office, you’ve already mentioned third places in some ways. So we’re talking about variations on hybrid work.

Brian Elliott [00:23:34 ]: That’s right.

Frank Cottle [00:23:36 ]: Or what we call digital lowmads. Local nomads. Yeah, we call them digital nomads. And, you know, where they’re working two to three places simultaneously, fit on a physical basis. Home office, third place. Yeah. What are your best, how do you set best practices for that?

Brian Elliott [00:24:01 ]: I think it really comes.

Frank Cottle [00:24:03 ]: What do we come to for that? Because I know companies are really struggling with this, how to manage the assets, distribution of technology, security of technology. How do you set those rules effectively to make it all work?

Brian Elliott [00:24:21 ]: I think a lot of this comes down to that three in a box I was describing earlier, workplace hr and it working together in terms of how do you line all this up? Because typically the top down singular policy, like the three days a week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, is the right place to be in the office, causes the challenges that it does. The better answer is give people the framework for figuring out what the right pattern is for their team. So again, this is like, Allwork.Space’s done this, Genentech’s done it in very different ways. Each organization has a different set of needs.

Frank Cottle [00:24:52 ]: Right.

Brian Elliott [00:24:52 ]: Genentech, when they went through this exercise, it’s pretty obvious that the people working in the R and D labs are going to be in the R and D labs three or four days a week. The operations people are five days a week. Finance sales may be a very different pattern because the sales people are also out there. So you have to work through it on a function by function, team by team basis. When you do that, you start figuring out what those patterns look like, and then you can start figuring out how am I going to shape spaces around that. Right? Because R and D lab workers, it’s fairly obvious what they’re going to need. But people whose teams sit there and go, for example, in Allwork.Space, there’s the three day a week folks, but then there’s a whole series of people who are once a month they’re in for a week. And a lot of workplace folks are facing that. Right? Workplace facilities now becomes facilitators. It’s the ongoing growth of on sites and the needs for that that’s going to shift what your portfolio needs to look like bluntly. Right? How much heads down seating space and meeting space do I need on a regular basis? And then what’s my capacity and where am I going to get it for collaborative efforts? And I think that latter part is where flexible workspaces come into play, not only in terms of more distributed and more locations, but even for firms, I’ve seen this happening more and more. Companies that have shrunk their office space footprint to some degree in a particular geography or region can handle the sort of average week to week, but once a month, there’s a big onsite that needs to happen, and they need to get access to a venue or a flexible space to accommodate it. So you’ve got to start thinking about like, how am I going to manage my variety of, not just a fixed long term lease commitment asset that’s 25% utilized, but how do I manage my leased commitment, plus these flexible workspace providers that can give me a lot more on demand access to very cool spaces for my teams. Then you layer onto that and that comes out of, you know, so functions figure out their patterns, workplace figures out how to support it. Technology has got to support secure access. The capabilities for that have been there for years. Right? We’ve seen this because I saw it firsthand. At Slack, for example, you can have people that are doing high security activities that are gov, cloud oriented, sitting right here at home with the right setup and the right monitoring and the right controls over a device so that that is capable. Question is, where is your company in the investment curve on all that. And where’s your company in terms of the investment curve? So that when people walk back in the office, they don’t walk in and go, my home setup is so much better. My home setup just crushes this.

Frank Cottle [00:27:33 ]: And I think that’s a major issue when you talk about things. One of the things that we’re talking about is workspace management as hospitality management, not just in the flexible workspace sector, co working centers, et cetera, but at the corporate levels.

Brian Elliott [00:27:52 ]: Yes.

Frank Cottle [00:27:53]: And the other thing that when you talk to these multi generational, you, Gen Z is just forming. The Gen z generation is just forming their careers.

Brian Elliott [00:28:06 ]: That’s right.

Frank Cottle [00:28:06 ]: They’re deciding who they want to be and how they want to live their life. So I’m going to put together a question for you. You just said the operations people are on site five days a week and the marketing people get together three days a week. And the technology people, they can work anywhere. This and that. I’m gen Z. Am I going to choose my career path based on the flexibility of my workplace model versus something else? Am I going to say, you know, I want my career path, but I want a career path that doesn’t require that I’m on site five days a week. So I’m not going to go into operations. Yeah, I’m going to go into marketing. And they start choosing that path as they see that develop because gen c is still in high school. They start choosing as they move forward through upper education and that sort of thing, the path based on the flexibility that path has in the workplace. And now everybody’s, there’s no operations people anymore. There’s only, is this something to think about?

Brian Elliott [00:29:23]: There are, for every standard that you can toss out there about a generation, there always are going to be people who are different to it. I do think workplace flexibility will be a factor. I think for Gen Z, there’s some other things that are much bigger factors. I think purpose is a much bigger factor for them. So purpose, what’s the purpose of this company? What’s the purpose of my team? Feeling supported like they belong with this team and that your manager supports you? A very big deal for them as well. And so, and I think they’re also the ones are least likely to want either one of the extremes again. Right. So it may be harder to get them into operations jobs, but there are some people who love that and that’s, you know, their thing. And so they, you will have some affinity to some degree. You know, all of this is a bit of a giant, you know, sorting hat of people’s preferences in finding both the workplace, the workplace policies and the team that they fit with the best. But I still think purpose is going to drive it a heck of a lot more than just flexibility alone.

Frank Cottle [00:30:22 ]: Well, it. I have to agree that purpose, actually, I’m a very purpose driven individual myself.

Brian Elliott [00:30:34]: Same here.

Frank Cottle [00:30:35 ]: And again, no one’s going to confuse me with being Gen Z, so I don’t think that is a new thing necessarily so much as thing that is being, you know, anything we talk about more gets a little more press. Yeah, but I, you know, I’m an old hippie trailer guy, grew up on a beach and such, and so, you know, why am I doing something and who am I doing it with has always been critically important. And I don’t, I’m glad that more people are worried about that than just maybe making money. I think that hopefully will drive a better world as we go forward.

Brian Elliott [00:31:20 ]: Yeah, me too.

Frank Cottle [00:31:25 ]: If you were to make some grand prognostication about the next five years, we’ll take this out to 2030. 2030 is a benchmark year for a lot of things. We’re going to have net zero here and there, and all sorts of things are going to happen by 2030. Where do you see what stabilizing structure do you see to where we’ll say, ah, we’ve settled into this new structure? What do you think 2030 is going to look like? Where people say, yeah, the text, this and that, where do you think this is going to stabilize?

Brian Elliott [00:32:01 ]: I think the, when it comes to flexibility, I think in 2030 people would be looking back and going, I can’t believe we’re arguing over this thing called return to office as much as we did. You’re right that we spent so much time and energy arguing over this. I do think where we’ll settle out is some. Let’s put this way, I think the five day in the office work week is damn near dead.

Frank Cottle [00:32:25]: Agreed.

Brian Elliott [00:32:26 ]: And going away. I actually think there’s no such thing. That’s going to sound odd. As a fully remote company, every firm that I talk with who is remote first actually gets people together on some regular episodic basis. Right. There is an element of human connection that is hugely valuable to people, and I think the meeting spot in the middle is really going to depend on the company. But I do think that there is an advantage that goes to firms who lead with a mindset of flexibility because it gets them access to more talented individuals in more locations. It also gets those people more engaged. And here’s a little trick. It also forces you to be pretty good about managing people on the basis of outcomes, not just showing up. So if I have to teach my managers how to manage people on the basis of what results they deliver, instead of whether or not Johnny fills a seat, I’m probably going to outperform my competitors because I’m going to have a better way of articulating what outcomes I’m trying to drive, of measuring results and of holding people accountable to it. So I think we’re going to look back. A lot of people are going to go. I forced people back in the office because I didn’t think my managers were capable of managing people. And instead, what I could have done is I could have actually said, how do I manage them on the basis of results? I probably should have placed a different bet.

Frank Cottle [00:33:46 ]: Well, I don’t think I could argue with that at all. I’d like to, but I don’t think I can. No. There are so many changes going on, and yet when you come back to the basics, we just want to get our jobs done. We just want to produce our product. We just want to have a quality of home life. Our wants and our needs haven’t changed a bit. I think what we’ve realized is certain things we don’t like and we’re not going to put up with anymore. Yeah, I forget the old, old film where there was a newscaster and he went crazy in the middle of a newscast and his tagline was, I’m mad and I’m not going to put up with it anymore.

Brian Elliott [00:34:38]: Network. Yeah, absolutely.

Frank Cottle [00:34:41 ]: But he was just angry and he wasn’t going to put up with certain things anymore. And I think that the pandemic values we created about what was important versus what isn’t important. Those values teach us to things that were certain things we’re just not going to do anymore. I know a friend of mine runs a very, very large hr company on a global basis, and they get a five to one response rate on a job opportunity if it includes the word not even full time, if it just includes the word remote in it. So if I’m an employer trying to build a team, every ad I have is going to include remote, which means I have to have a remote work process and it doesn’t have to be full time. I agree with you. The thing that I believe you lose the most when you go 100% remote team isn’t productivity, it’s loyalty. It’s hard to be loyal to meeting.

Brian Elliott [00:35:59 ]: That’s right.

Frank Cottle [00:36:04 ]: Shake a person’s hand. And you can’t commit at the same level, especially when the cat’s dancing across their desk, you know, you can’t commit to the same level. So I think companies lose loyalty.

Brian Elliott [00:36:19]: Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:36:20 ]: And the cost of that lack of saying, I’ll do it because I said I’ll do it because I looked them in the eye and said I can take care of that is massive. Yeah, we have to have that. We just have to make sure. And I won’t be leagger. This is. We just have to make sure we don’t have too many meetings.

Brian Elliott [00:36:41]: Oh, that too. Yeah. I could go on. I could go on all day long.

Frank Cottle [00:36:44 ]: About that one too many meetings. We go on to that topic this time. Maybe. Maybe next time. I was just gonna really want to thank you for your time today. You just such a joy speaking with you and learning everything that you’ve got to share and your book to future works is quite an accomplishment. And I would advise anybody that’s trying to figure out the future of work to take a good look at that. Thanks, Frank. Well worth the time and effort of the reap.

Brian Elliott [00:37:14]: Appreciate it. Appreciate your time and great talking with you. Let’s go build a better future ourselves.

Frank Cottle [00:37:18 ]: I’m ready for it. I’m ready for it. Take care.

Brian Elliott [00:37:21]: Thanks, Frank. Bye.