by Mikkel Krenchel and Tamara Moellenberg

When it comes to figuring out the future of their work, leaders are looking in all the wrong places. They look externally at what other companies are doing; they look at their own experience as a yard stick; or they look at what individual employees say in surveys and focus groups. Pandering to individual preferences, however, does not work. In surveys, employees report a desire for greater flexibility and autonomy. Yet our recent research has shown a crisis in belonging globally, where more people feel cut-off from their colleagues or professional communities. Worse, this loneliness epidemic has contributed to increased burnout for some remote employees. So, workers want more freedom, but they also feel disconnected when they have it.

What are employers to do? In this article, we lay out a three-pronged approach: First, we advise managers to gather evidence within their own organization rather than looking at other organizations. Second, managers should adopt a ‘beginner’s mindset’ to avoid defaulting to their own biases when making decisions, thereby creating solutions that only work for them and do not reflect the wide diversity of their employees. Finally, it requires that managers to stop asking in surveys what makes employees thrive and start observing in real settings what makes teams and organizations click.

How can we reimagine our relationship to work? It’s clear that the pandemic has catalyzed major shifts in people’s expectations and notions of what ‘work’ is, and why, where, and how it should be done. We’ve seen a pivot away from the five-day workweek and nine-to-five schedule in favor of more fluid hybrid formats.

This upending of the workday has set off a cascade of crises among executives scrambling to re-articulate hybrid work models, reconsider office spaces, and overhaul training programs. At the heart of these decisions is a fundamental question about the future of work. What does ‘good work’ look like going forward — by that we mean what kind of work that has the most positive effect on your organization’s long-term performance? And how can leaders ensure that everyone, from the C-suite to the call center, has the resources to perform at their highest level?

To answer these questions, many leaders look in all the wrong places. They look externally at what other companies are doing; they look inside themselves, using their own experience as a yard stick for the rest of the company; and they look at what individual employees say in surveys and focus groups instead of observing what they do. The result is executives implementing policies that appear generic, out of touch, and short-sighted.

..executives need to take a page out of the anthropologist’s playbook and go deep into the culture(s), norms, and practices of work within their own organizations.

Instead, executives need to take a page out of the anthropologist’s playbook and go deep into the culture(s), norms, and practices of work within their own organizations. They should study their own unique organizations with rigor, empathy, and an outsider’s sense of wonder and discovery to unearth deep social and cultural insight into how and why good work happens today and what approach to talent, workplace, tools, and learning is needed to promote it going forward.

Trap #1: Looking externally

“What is Microsoft doing? What is Twitter doing?” A young biotech executive we met was voicing a sentiment we’ve heard many times before. There is a tendency to follow the ‘trend factory’. Just two months into the pandemic, Twitter announced it was allowing all employees to work from home indefinitely; its move away from the physical office was followed in short order by other hot tech firms, such as Shopify, Spotify, Slack, Square, and Meta. Conversely, David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, famously declared that remote work “is not ideal for us, and it’s not a new normal.” Stepping in sync, many big US banks and investment firms have been adamant on a return to the office.

Every time a company adopts a new approach to work — the gaming company Valve building an unbossed organizational chart, or Patagonia rolling out a new suite of purpose-driven benefits — the media commentary that follows always asks, ‘Is this the future of work’? As if there were one model everyone else should follow.

The problem with following industry trends is that work is not a replicable mechanical system but an organic process. Each company or organization is unique. Most discussions about the future of work treat ‘work’ as if it is one thing. It is not. The definition of ‘work’, and what counts as productive, looks wildly different in an ad agency, a cyber security software company, or an investment firm, for example.

Companies therefore need to first build a clear perspective on the kind of work they do, rather than looking for off-the-shelf solutions from peers or competitors. This will require a deep investigation into the rituals, routines, and practices that make up daily work among their employees. It involves looking past the assumptions that many executives have about the work we do and how our best work happens, to understand the specific dynamics that shape it day-to-day.

Trap #2: Looking at themselves

Other executives need to resist the impulse to cull from their own memoirs when it comes to what will and won’t support good work in their organizations. Working from home “doesn’t work for those who want to hustle,” said Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, seemingly alluding to his own long hours throughout his career. Elon Musk has required all Tesla employees to be physically present in the office for a minimum of forty hours a week, citing the fact that he himself has at times “lived at the factory.” On the flip side, Mark Tuchen, CEO of the London fintech Onfido, has advocated for a hybrid setup, drawing on reflections from his own experience as the firm’s “remote CEO” based in California, while Dana Canedy of Simon and Schuster, says that she “doesn’t have any problem” with remote work because “I’m getting my work done, and so are my colleagues.”

While intuitive, the risk of privileging personal experience is that what works for one person or team may not work for others. People — how they think, operate, or even innovate — vary remarkably: some of the world’s most successful companies, including Microsoft, Disney, Virgin Records, and Amazon, were started from suburban garages, in what might be called the original post-industrial work-from-home setup. But that does not mean that working from a garage-like setting gets the best out of everyone. In medicine, senior physicians have long been derided for supporting a culture of overwork among residents out of a sense of “we survived, so will you” — despite proof that severe fatigue leads to clinical errors.

Yet too many executives today are making a similar mistake in assuming that the way they have done good work is the only way it can happen in their company. The types of work that people do within an organization are not the same, nor are team or even individual working styles. Susan Cain’s Quiet (2012) compellingly argues that introverts need more decentralized working models and the chance to review materials in advance. In our own research, we have found that collaboration styles vary not only across teams, but even within them: Some interactions are more output- vs. experience-driven, and what teams need from their set-up varies by what mode they are operating in.

Again, defining how good work happens requires a closer, on-the-ground look at what helps your particular employees thrive. Such an understanding can’t be manifested from the board room but only can be uncovered by diving deep into the daily rhythms of ‘good work’ wherever and however it is happening.

Trap #3: Looking at individuals

That said, differences can’t always be accommodated, and there are many instances when individual working styles may need to be harnessed within the broader context of the group. So far, one of the most common approaches to understand workplace habits, cultures, and practices has been to poll individual employees. Ford and Salesforce, for instance, both moved to hybrid models after surveying employees on their preferences and one Norwegian company, Equinor, has even gone so far as to use employee survey data to create nine different ‘personas’ that are meant to reflect individual situations, each with a working setup tailored to accommodate them.

The issues with pandering to individual preference are multifold. To start with the obvious, preferences can often be contradictory, fleeting, and misleading. For instance, in surveys the majority of employees report a desire for greater flexibility and autonomy: 88% of knowledge workers want one that offers complete flexibility in hours and location. Yet our recent research has also shown a crisis in belonging globally, where more people feel cut-off from their colleagues or professional communities and denied access to key networks and opportunities. Loneliness has contributed to increased burnout for some remote employees. So, workers want more freedom, but they also feel disconnected when they have it. What are employers to do?

Another challenge of privileging employee polls is that they fail to consider the fundamentally communal nature of work. Almost all work is social to some degree. Even highly independent academics — sequestered away in their “ivory towers” — still liaise with students and administrators on a nearly daily basis. The social nature of work means that leaders will need to have a clear sense of the shared needs and dynamics of the collective, including how these balance with the preferences of individuals. That requires spending time observing, not just asking employees, how they do ‘good work’: e.g., in the breakroom as they bond, around the conference table as they pitch ideas, over the Slack channel as they share tips and memes. People may say they want one thing, but does this match how they behave, especially with their colleagues?

Looking in as an outsider

So, if executives shouldn’t look externally, rely on personal experience, or prioritize individual preferences, how can they navigate their organizations through this transition period where work norms are in flux?

We advocate a fourth approach, which adopts the methods and mindset of an anthropologist — a time-tested practice for a novel problem. Anthropologists study groups of people — how they interact, what lifts them, what binds them together — and they do so by (ideally) setting aside their own preconceptions and acknowledging that, while some aspects of human experience might transcend to the ‘universal,’ context matters: human aspirations, behaviors, rituals, and practices are shaped by the specific settings, social groups, and situations in which they play out.

This means that executives will need to do three things to fully understand the future of their organization’s work:

• First, look for answers and gather evidence within your own organization rather than starting outside, to better understand what specific problems your company faces. An extreme example of this is how AirBnB cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky literally began working remotely by “living on AirBnb.”

• Second, adopt a ‘beginner’s mindset,’ especially when trying to make sense of what the data you gather might mean for your company’s spaces, policies, tools, and training. It is all too easy to default to our own biases when making decisions but doing so means that we end up creating solutions that only work for us, or people like us, rather than the rich diversity of people employed in an organization.

• Finally, stop asking and start observing. That is, stop asking what makes employees thrive and start observing what makes teams click. Step away from the Zoom screen to observe how and why good work happens in your organization. Pay attention to moods, to social norms, to the fabric that pulls your organization together. There is value in a boots-on-the-ground approach that immerses you in the everyday spaces where your company’s work actually happens, be that an office cubicle, a home kitchen, or a Slack channel. This embodied, first-hand experience, when combined with others’ observations, will give you a more holistic portrayal of how the nature of good work at your organization has changed, and what is needed to nurture it.

Big bets are being made around the future of work. If ever there was a time for them to take a more hands-on approach to carefully observe their employees’ habits, norms, rituals, and practices — how good work happens today, and what it can be going forward — this is it.

Mikkel Krenchel (mkr@redassociates.com) is a partner at ReD Associates, a New York-based strategy consultancy that applies the human sciences to advise top companies across a range of industries. He has published widely (Wired, Foreign Affairs, VentureBeat) on the role of culture in shaping new digital technologies.

Tamara Moellenberg (tmo@redassociates.com) is a senior manager at ReD Associates

[Banner image by Graeme Worsfold, via Unsplash]