Back to work mandates are all the rage these days but they may not work out the way that organizations expect. The language around the mandates suggests that top performers understand the need to be at the office and want to be there and if the slackers do not then they are welcome to quit. What if the opposite is true though? What if the best performers are the ones who will quit if they are forced back to in person work?

To talk about the issues around ending remote work, Work and the Future host Linda Nazareth is joined on this episode by Brian Elliott, the CEO at Work Forward and author of How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives. They discuss the issues around remote work and the challenges that leaders are facing right now and what that means for work and the future.

Guest:

Brian Elliott is the CEO of Work Forward, an executive advisory organization. He’s also the co-founder of Future Forum, a think tank that enables leaders to redesign work to be better for people and organizations. He has spent three decades leading teams and building companies as a startup CEO, at Google, and at Slack where he is a Senior VP. Brian’s a proud father of two young men. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and Harvard Business School. His work has been published in Fortune, Harvard Business Review and Time, and cited in The Economist, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and many other publications.

Transcript:

Welcome to Work and the Future, a podcast about tomorrow with your host,

Linda Nazareth.

Linda Nazareth 

Well, hello. Thank you for joining us today. We’ll return to work mandates for all the rage these days. The U .S. government has ordered workers back to the office, but so many companies in the private sector, including Amazon, Google, IBM, JPMorgan Chase. More than that, though the language we’re hearing around it is all pretty harsh. They’re kind of an implication that those who want to work from home are in some way slackers and they’re welcome to quit if they won’t. Well my guest today thinks that the exact opposite might be true and that if you force people back to the office you’re going to lose your best performers. His name is Brian Elliott and he’s an executive advisor and speaker as well as the co -author of How the Future Works Leading Flexible teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives. Now, Brian has done work on holding on to your top performers, how you do that. And he does think that some of the decisions being made now might turn out to be short -sighted. I had a really good conversation with Brian about all the things that organizations are facing now and workers are facing and how maybe we should be taking a longer look at this. He has some really some good insights here, please stay with us to hear it.

Linda Nazareth

Well, are  back to work mandates a good way to lose your best performers? To talk about that, I’m joined by Brian Elliott. He’s CEO of WorkForward and author of How the Future Works. Brian, thank you so much for doing this. 

Brian Elliott

Great to be with you Linda. Thanks for asking me. 

Linda Nazareth 

You know, it’s a very topical subject. Back to work mandates are everywhere, but I’d like to talk about your own career first, how you ended up in a place where you’re advising companies on this. 

Brian Elliott

Yeah, so I startedoff as a consultant way, way, way back when, in the 1990s, when everybody worked in an office, because by the way, the internet barely existed, jumped into tech back in the 90s and was a startup CEO for numbers. Then in 2020, when the world sort of changed around us from the pandemic, I had to do something that was a lot of fun and something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, which is start a think tank called Future Forum. So I spent the next four years along with the team digging into what was working for people and what wasn’t during and post pandemic when it comes to technology adoption, belonging inside of organizations, burnout, and this whole topic of flexibility in the workplace and what’s working and what’s not. So these days, I spent a lot of my time working with executives on how are you going to adapt your organization? Because we all know that what worked for us in the past may not work for us in the future, especially given all the changes from a technology perspective, generations and demographics that are going on, global competition, generative AI, you name it.  And so how do we adapt our organizations to be sort of fit for purpose in that world? And a big part of that continues to be, unfortunately, how many days a week should somebody show up in an office, which is the silliest of arguments for a bunch of reasons, but undoubtedly we’ll get into that.

Linda Nazareth

 Yeah. I believe it’s very silly, but gee, it seems like a lot of high -level people are saying, this is the way to go. the argument now is it’s all about productivity. We can’t be as productive if we’re not all together. I mean, some of the companies you mentioned, Google and the like, and U .S. federal government are all over this. Let’s get your thoughts on productivity. How does that go? 

Brian Elliott 

Yeah. Let’s get into the extremes. A lot of this gets painted at the extremes, right? I’ve worked with companies that have gone to extremes in both directions, and extremes generally don’t work because most people don’t want to be fully remote. They also don’t want to be five days a week in the office. They want something in the middle. And the key question is, is your team all co -located I the first place, or are they distributed across cities and locations? Meaning, more often these days, what you see inside of organizations is, I may be working with somebody who has a time zone away from me. Commuting to the office, if most of my work is being done with people who sit in other offices, it’s not the office that’s the center of where work gets done, it’s all our digital tools and communication. So that’s one factor that plays out in all of this. But the bigger thing that sits underneath this is people do want to  be together on a regular basis for collaboration, for connection, for building gathering. The answers usually lie not in a top -down directive from a CEO, but figuring out what works for a sales team versus an engineering team, for example. Reality is when you do the research and you look at the studies, there are lots of benefits to being together with your team on a somewhat regular basis. 

The productivity data is all over the map.  It is. The most negative productivity data comes from a study done in India in 2020, which showed that remote workers were 20 % less productive than they were when they were in the office. The way they measured productivity was how many hours did it take those people to get a body of work done? Mind you, they weren’t paying the people hourly. They were paying them on the basis of the salaries that they made. I

worked with engineers in India in 2020. They were tethering off their phones. There was a pandemic going on. They were forced to work from home in conditions that were absolutely horrible and not conducive to good work. They were working extra hours to get the job done because it was much harder. So under those conditions, we shouldn’t be surprised, right? What a lot of firms have realized, though, is that measuring productivity is really challenging and hard. What we should be measuring is what are the results that people are creating. And instead of relying on measuring activity, meaning is somebody sending out a bunch of emails, how many hours a day are they clicking on their keyboard? Are we measuring the results? Are we measuring the basis on which people are getting work done? That shift to performance management for outcomes does a couple things. It aligns your team with the sort of objectives of the business in the first place and it creates a more level playing field for people. It’s hard work because you have to train leaders on how to be good at managing people for result-based performance as opposed to not. But we also all know and we can cite people who may be showing up in an office five days a week but they’re online shopping or they’re working on their second job or they’re not they’re working that hard in the first place. So most of the arguments about productivity have been put aside. If you read the recent pronouncements from an Andy Jassy or Jamie Dimon, they didn’t even mention productivity. 

Linda Nazareth

 Okay, let’s take that a bit at the time. Yeah, you forgot March Madness and selling cookies when we talk about productivity. But okay, take a Jamie Dimon. They’re writing these directives or letters or telling how it’s going to be. Is that because they’ve looked at these numbers? Is it because they’ve heard from their staff that it’s not working or is it because of something they themselves believe? Where are they coming from? 

Brian Elliott 

I’ve had this conversation with a lot of HR leaders, especially in the past couple of months again. More often than not, this is a CEO who is making a unitary decision because they feel like they need to have more control over what’s going on. They are returning to an office themselves that they find to be quieter than they want it to be. And you may even get the situation where more than one CHRO has said this to me. We said three days a week and what we’re getting is about two. And the CEO has ticked off because we said three, why are we not getting three? And there’s nothing in our productivity data that shows any real issues. There’s no correlation to time in the office and performance, but they just want to get people back in the office. That’s a broadset of issues. 

There’s also some really interesting narrow ones. Amazon has a data-driven culture. At Amazon, you do not make decisions without data to back it up. Their inability to produce data showing why five days a week in the office is better, let alone the three days they went to before that, is a big reason why you’re getting the employee uproar. What people are seeing and hearing in that is not a database decision. What they’re hearing is you don’t trust us. You don’t trust us to be working when we’re at home. And if you don’t trust your own employees, they also tend to drop engagement at the back end of this. There’s a couple other factors that are very clearly going on. One is what Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, before he got pushed out, said out loud, which is we want people to quit, right? We know that a five day a week return to office drive will get people to quit. The people that quit though are usually, may not be the people execs want to have quit. The biggest group that tends to leave are people who have marketable skills. They are your more skilled employees, your higher tenure employees, that other big tech firms that I know that have a two or three day a week hybrid policy or happily cherry picking off of Amazon right now. So you lose those people. 

The other people that you lose, and there’s a couple of pieces of research that show this are women by a three to one margin because that shift creates all kinds of shifts at home and mom more often than dad is the primary caregiver in the United States. And so, you know, you’re more likely to have women leave the organization than men. 

Linda Nazareth

Okay, but maybe arguably that’s okay with some of these guys. 

Brian Elliott 

That is the governmental intention here, is to shed people without segments, right? If you are a private, look, why they’re doing this on the federal government’s perspective, there are a lot better ways if you want to shrink the size of government than to do it this way, right? Not to mention the fact that half the federal government was already back in the office five days a week and 40 % in three days a week. And that’s only sub 2 % of the budget. So we’ll set all that aside. It’s the federal government, it’s political, they’re making a noise. Private sector, if you are doing this, you will lose talented people. You’re also counting on the fact that it’s a softer job market, right? And we’ve been in enough cycles that softer job markets don’t last forever. 

What you lose in this is you lose engagement of your own employees. You lose trust in your own employees. You do lose some of your talented people to your competitors, especially the smaller ones, 90 percent plus of all startups are flexible. But what happens the next time you want to hire people and bring more people back in? They’ll remember this. I do think there’s aspects of this that they’re counting on generative AI to have a knock on employees. So far, PWC put out a CEO survey just like early January showing that given generative AI, thus far, more CEOs have hired more people than decreased them. I think we’re a ways away from actually gen AI proving out that it can actually drive high levels of efficiency. But it’s certainly something that’s a lever that CEOs are counting on, to continue to sort of hold power over employees. I just, I personally know enough other CEOs who are not wanting to wield power in that way because they know that they don’t get the best out of their workforce when they do so. It’s a bit of game of like command and control suddenly re-exerts its head and that’s not proven to be successful long -term. So eventually the tides change and you’re more nimble competitors, you know, you alive. 

Linda Nazareth

Yeah, not for the public sector, but for the private sector and publicly traded companies. Is there an argument that this is coming from investors that, yes, you’re going to  improve the bottom line. So do the CEOs believe in this, or is this just a matter of, let’s make it look like we’re cutting costs? 

Brian Elliott 

 There’s a couple of factors here that play into that. One is you can track back a couple of years. By the way, this phenomenon is not new. We’ve had waves of returned office demands the past few years. There was a big one two years ago that was largely driven by activist investors. You could almost track the activist investor conversations at firms like Disney, Google /Alphabet, Amazon, Salesforce, look at activist investors showing up and within 30 to 60 days, an announcement about a return to office mandate being put in place, CEOs under pressure will respond to those types of pressures. Second thing is there are pressures also from Wall Street and very specific sectors. Commercial real estate has not had a good time post pandemic. And by the way, the push for the past couple of months has not made it any better. Vacancy rates in the United States in the office sector hit an all -time high at

the end of 24. Mortgage delinquencies hit an all -time high at the end of 2024. The push has not been largely successful, partly because for every CEO mandating five days a week back in the office, there’s two others that are sitting there saying one of two things. Either one, that’s great. You go for it. I’m going to steal your talent and I’ll be more flexible than you. There’s another one that’s just like, “This is not a fight I want to have as a CEO.” My firm, we said three days a week, four years ago. Yeah, we’re not getting three all the time, but we’re getting good enough performance out of it. If I really want my people to redesign how they’re working using JIN AI, for example, I’m going to have to be able to reinvent how we work. I’m going to have to have those employees engaged with me. Picking a fight with them over three versus five days a week in the office is not going to help make that happen. I think distribution of leadership is starting to emerge. 

Linda Nazareth

You talked to all these companies, Brian. Let’s remind ourselves that not every company has gone this route. Some are sticking to the hybrid or even fully remote. Which are the ones that you consider is being successful at that?

Brian Elliott 

 Sure. I’ll give you some examples. It’s actually 68 % of U .S. firms have some form of flexibility. That hasn’t changed for like Q2, Q3, Q4 flex index tracks like 9 ,000 US companies. Number didn’t change at all towards the end of last year. There’s examples in the tech sector, firms like Atlassian and Dropbox and others where you’d sort of understand they’ve got more distributed talent because it’s easier for them to do so.They’ve got tools that they’re really good at using in this. But it’s also places like Allstate, one of my favorite examples, and I’ve talked to them, written case studies about them, 50 ,000 -person insurance firm. What they figured out is there’s no one -size -fits -all. Claims agents that do a very measurable job do in -person training for a couple of weeks, and then they are in -person for the next six weeks, let’s call it, while they prove out to be capable in the job and learn the ropes of it. After that, they can work wherever. The reason why is it’s a very individual driven job, right? And it’s measurable. You can measure their performance. Designers, on the other hand, are in the office three days a week because that team decided that the right answer is for them to be co -located in together three days a week. Analysts are together once a month because that’s the pattern that works for them. So you got to think about this from like a work design perspective of not what’s the right answer for an entire massively scale distributed organization with multiple business units but what’s right down to the ways in which we work at a function and group level makes a lot more sense. 

H &R Block is another good example. Classic big Midwestern company had put a return office mandate in place. It wasn’t working. They literally reversed it and said this doesn’t make sense when instead what we could be doing is focusing on performance management, bring people together, especially people that are distributed across the US on a once a quarter basis to build connection and belonging with people that you otherwise would never see if you happen to stumble into an office and improve our retention of employees. Nick Williams got a great study in nature that shows the same thing, by the way, which is there’s a 35 percent decline in in attrition rates of moving to a hybrid schedule from the full -time office schedule You know, we all have reviews mine is that part of the failure of this if it has been a failure Is that managers haven’t been trained to manage the remote workforce, right? It’s been hard.  So it’s all coming from the C -suite. Some of them aren’t unhappy with how it is If you were going to give advice and

you do give advice to companies trying to make the success, how would you help those middle managers? First and foremost, it is how do you actually train them to manage people on the basis of performance? And that actually means that as executives, we also have to make some hard decisions, which is what’s most important, where the outcomes that we’re trying to drive. 

But the management by walking around default, meaning we promote somebody to a manager and we don’t really train them how to manage people on the basis of the results they generate, how to conduct good one -on ones, just those two basic rudimentary things are really the key starting point for making this work. And I think that has been a big part of the reason for failures of this is failures of management in a lot of ways. But training people on how to have the not once a year performance review, but the once a quarter adding minimum. Here’s what your top three objectives are for the next quarter. We on them, we know how we’re going to measure them so we can have a results -based conversation and we can talk about your professional development requires investment in those people and systems and training to do that. But if you do that, you get a lot better results out of it. You actually get people who actually, what happens, and I’ve worked with firms that have done this, you lower unwanted attrition, right? Because you’re treating people on the basis of their results on their showing up, you actually increase intended attrition. You actually can double or even triple the outward movement of people who are underperforming because you’re putting in place systems that are more regular and more thorough around performance management. From a CEO perspective, honestly, that’s often what they really need and what they really want, which is I want to know that we are taking care of both our high performers and we are dealing with our low performers. 

Linda Nazareth

You know, I see the whole remote thing as a bit of experiment, right? We tried it in 2020 under not ideal circumstances. We’ve gone back and forth. I never thought it was going to be a straight line. We’re going to say three days a week if anyone’s going to go with that. So now we’re going to the other extreme in some companies. When we get three years from now, five years from now, what do you think it’ll look like? 

Brian Elliott

We’re going to be One of the phrases that I love, this actually comes from Nick Bloom is, this whole thing looks very much like a duck. It’s calm on the surface, the number isn’t changing much while the churn underneath is fantastic. There’s a lot of companies that are a steady state, but there’s more that are like moving in and out of figuring this out and trying to make it work. By the time we’re five years from now, we will have come to the realization that this was a largely wasted set of energy and effort around this particular topic, because the skills basis on which people are able to generate good work, technology adoption are much bigger factors in organizational performance than days a week in the office. Some form of flexibility will be the norm. If we’re at 68 % in the US today, we’re going to be somewhere between 60 and 70 % five years from now. There will still be those people who are five days a week in the office come come hell or high water, but there’d be a lot of other people that will sit there and say, “This is working for us,” and we’re on to bigger problems and bigger challenges. 

Linda Nazareth

Let’s see what happens. Brian, thank you so much for joining me today. 

Brian Elliott 

 Linda, thanks for having me. 

Linda Nazareth

 Brian Elliott is the CEO of Work Forward and the author of How the Future Works. 

Well, that’s it for today. If you want to know more about Brian and his work, take a look at our shownotes. You can find them wherever you get your podcasts, but as well on my website lindanazreth .com. Now, if you did like this discussion about the future of work,  please take a moment, leave a rating or a review, wherever you get your podcasts, it will  help people to find us, and that will help keep these podcasts going.

If you want to connect with me, you can find me @lindanazareth .com. You can also find me at Instagram, @lindanazareth keynote speaker.  I’m also at X, which used to be Twitter at @relentlesseco. And I would love to hear from you however you want to connect.

Thank you so much for listening. And thanks as always to Stoakley Audio for audio production. 

The post Episode 129: Are Back to Work Mandates a Quick Way to Lose Top Performers? appeared first on LINDA NAZARETH.