Another fall season brought another set of return to office deadlines. The headlines earlier this month were everywhere — “Enough Bosses Say,” “The Office’s Last Stand” and “Will Return to Office Get Serious in September?” were just a few. Sure, there’s been an uptick in office occupancy this month, but as one recent headline […]
Morra Aarons-Mele’s The Anxious Achiever podcast explores the intersection of mental health and work, and how we can all do both better. I joined Morra (who also happens to be one of my favorite people) and Amelia Ransom, SPHR, VP of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Smartsheet, during a recent episode to answer listener questions about how to […]
In today’s USA Today Opinion, I share why “As we teeter on the brink of a possible recession, business leaders have a make-or-break choice. Use this moment to threaten or plan layoffs while mandating employees return to the office. Or double down on flexible ways of working and make flexibility a core part of their operating model. “Will they revert to […]
To the organizations that had hoped the threat of a recession would cause people to place less value on flexibility, it’s not happening. Flexibility+Pay+Opportunity remains the value proposition that drives whether people quit or stay in their jobs, per new research from The Conference Board… “Flexibility was among the top reasons workers quit their jobs.” Reasons […]
How do employers begin to prepare for a Post-Roe vs. Wade workplace? Texas offers insight into the challenges to come. Many employers have announced abortion-related benefits. https://lnkd.in/gPEu8V_V. However, as the researcher in this article points out, “Assuming just 10 percent of women aren’t able to secure an abortion, that’s a massive rise in fertility.” That means […]
This update of a popular corporate finance textbook reinforces the role strategies like work flexibility will play in the operational, cultural, and financial success of organizations: “We’ve devoted an entire new chapter to Responsible Business. But, it’s not just something pigeon-holed into a single chapter; it pervades the book. Out of the five principles that […]
Why “hybrid” is not working: –It leads with the wrong question “how many days in the office,” instead of “what do we need to do?” and THEN thinking through “where” that work is done best. –But “what do we need to do” can’t just focus on the core tasks of people’s jobs because in many […]
I can define high performance flexibility a hundred times, “It’s a flexible, dynamic way of operating across place, space, and time that achieves high level of performance and well-being by answering the question: what do we need to do, and how, when and where do we do it best?” But nothing beats hearing it described […]
There’s a lot of debate lately about how many days in the office is ideal for employees and employers. It’s accelerated as we slowly move forward from the past two years where many had to work from home 100% of the time. I’ve become increasingly concerned that narrow focus is causing unnecessary conflict and keeping too many organizations stuck. Finally, last week, when the Wall Street Journal […]
I recently chatted with Digiday‘s WorkLife editor Jessica Davies about asynchronous work and the confusion surrounding this term as part of their “WTF…” series (that title is so apropos for this era of change!) “The confusion is occurring because not everyone has understood that to make it work well, you need to set some guardrails on how it’s […]