Elements of Collaboration and Employee Experience with David Burkus
Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to The Future of Teamwork podcast. My name's Dane Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 Group. I'm really excited to welcome David Burkus to the show today. David is an organizational psychologist-- I tripped on that one-- and author of four books doing a lot of work around leadership, teams, work- life balance. Fantastic to have you here, David. Thanks for joining us.
David Burkus: Oh, it's my pleasure. I'll let you on a little secret, if you can say organizational psychologist properly they give you a master's degree. It's like a little rule that's hidden. It's hidden in the faculty handbook, but that's what it is so keep trying and maybe we'll get you that piece of paper one day.
Dane Groeneveld: Maybe, yeah. It's funny because I have heard it abbreviated as, and Australians like to abbreviate everything, as org psy I think. Is that right?
David Burkus: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a weird field. So org psy, or some people will say I- O psychology from back in the day when it started and it was like Frederick Taylor timing factory workers and... Then others of us are like, " No. No, we don't really like that part of our origin story so let's drop the I." You know?
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: It's a weird field.
Dane Groeneveld: It is, but it's a cool field and it's a never more important field with what we've just come through with COVID and all the change we're seeing in the workplace.
David Burkus: Yeah. Yeah, I know. I agree. We are now... You know what, I mean, really, one of the unspoken or unrealized things that we talk about Great Resignation and all of that sort of stuff, one of the unspoken things is that what it was was a giant reset button. People went along with so many outdated or outmoded systems of management and systems of work and really low expectations because they were in the habit of doing it. Then, boom, pattern interrupt, the habit is over. We all have to make new habits. That's caused a lot of people to go, " Well, wait a minute. How do I really want to do this? How do I actually want to combine work and life? How do I... What am I actually looking for?" I've heard some stats, when you look into the data it's not really a resignation so much as a reshuffling. Why do people reshuffle? They think the grass is greener somewhere else, right?
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: So yeah, it's a massive opportunity really to draw talent in by creating a better experience of work, and that's what we do in org psych. Yeah.
Dane Groeneveld: No, I love that. Tell us and our listeners a little bit more about sort of your story. How did you find this field, early life, find the field and develop your expertise and passion for this whole world of teams and teamwork and leadership?
David Burkus: Yeah. Well, I mean, how far back do you want to go, right? I went to-
Dane Groeneveld: When did it get real?
David Burkus: Right. I went to college, or Aussies say uni, right? I went to university.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah.
David Burkus: I went to a four year program for English and creative writing. I wanted to be a writer from the time I was in high school. Now, when you're that young, when you're 17 or 18, you think that writing is fiction. You think your grand existential crisis is like, " Do I want to be Ernest Hemingway, hopefully with a longer life expectancy, or do I want to sell out and be James Patterson?" Literary versus commercial, right? " What do I want to do?"
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: Along that time, I mean. I was really lucky. This was when Gladwell was writing some of the early New Yorker pieces and some other kind of social science writers were writing some really solid articles, long- form narratives and books that were blending social psychology and storytelling. I'm picking it up on it because I'm studying storytelling, I'm studying fiction and creative writing, but I'm also noticing that those people... More people read their books than read novels and they're making a bigger impact and they're not starving like a lot of novelists, and so in my mind I was kind of like, "Hmm, there's something here. This is... I'm finding this research fascinating but I'm finding blending that research with the storytelling also fascinating so I want to do that." I graduated and got sort of a normal job and studied part- time at times, nights and weekends sort of org psych program until I got into a doctoral program and became... Ended up in a weird twisted way becoming a faculty member. I honestly had no intention of that. I thought I was going to be the straight up Gladwell or Shane Snow or Jonah Lehrer of" I just know a little bit of the science and then I write about it". I ended up spending a 10 year detour in business school teaching leadership and organizational behavior, but still incredibly worthwhile experience, right? But it's funny how people ask me, " Oh, you're an academic and then you started writing books." I'm like, " No. Actually, writing was always the goal. Helping people through that was always the goal. The academic side, total detour."
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That's cool. Detours are a fascinating part of careers and businesses' business pivots. You could probably spend a whole show talking about detours. It's kind of like, you know-
David Burkus: ...
Dane Groeneveld: ...life's what happens, not what you wrote in the plan but while you're trying to achieve the plan it takes you in different directions.
David Burkus: Yeah.
Dane Groeneveld: ...
David Burkus: Yeah. Oh, for sure, for sure. I mean, COVID is a great example of that, right?
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: I wrote a book on kind of innovative management practices and ways that new teams were forming, had some fun insights for teams, especially around temporary teams, et cetera, and around virtual and remote teams. I wrote that in 2016. What I didn't anticipate was that four years later there would be this sort of global great work from home experiment where people would start, including my publisher, going, " Hey, remember that one chapter? Do you think you could expand on that for us? Do you think you could provide?" I was in the middle of a project on teamwork and motivation and then that detour sort of happened and that became the book Leading From Anywhere. That's been... I mean, most of what I talk about right now is how people are collaborating in a hybrid team environment now, but how do we keep teams together when we don't have that normal 40 hours a week to rely on for accidental camaraderie, right?
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: How do we do that? That's been the grand question. Again, totally unexpected. Honestly, I think that's probably true for everybody. I'm sure that's true for you and for HUDDL3 too, that COVID was that sort of major detour, but
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: Yeah. Bow I'm sort of like, " Wow, this is awesome. I should have been doing this before." You know?
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. I had a small detour early in my career. I went to university to become an economist. I was working in a bar, I had a girlfriend from out of town and I decided I didn't like going to class. I met a recruiter in a bar and so I worked for a summer as a recruiter and that totally changed the direction of my career path.
David Burkus: Oh, interesting. Well, you've got that... I mean, I'll be honest, you've got the glasses and the jacket T- shirt combo that would make for a good young economist doing kind of... You know, like a freakonomics junior, right?
Dane Groeneveld: ...
David Burkus: Yeah.
Dane Groeneveld: There may still be a future there.
David Burkus: Right. Yeah. Don't give up hope. I'm just kidding. Not totally.
Dane Groeneveld: But you just made a great reference to this term I've not heard before, accidental camaraderie. Tell me a little bit more about that.
David Burkus: Well, I mean, we're... That's word I've been using to put a name to this feeling that a lot of the leaders that I'm working with and trying to convince otherwise, quite frankly, are having. We're seeing shifts. I mean, I would say most organizations I'm working with, most organizations I'm seeing, recognize that they're going to have to offer some level of flexibility or hybrid but there are holdouts. There are leaders who are, " Nope, we're all coming back or we're doing this until it's safe and then we're all coming back, et cetera, et cetera." When you talk to those leaders, most of the time what they're actually telling you is that they don't know how to make a team feel like a team without them being in person which makes sense. I mean, we're social creatures. We were wired for anywhere between tens of thousands or millions of years depending on how you count. We were wired to work in tribes and communities in person so I get it. I get it. That doesn't mean it's impossible. It means it's difficult. It means we're still going to get in person from time to time but we can stretch out now between deliberate actions. With the technologies that we have, we can stretch out those intervals of time that we have to be in person and still keep that team together. That's kind of what I... I started saying accidental camaraderie or people will say, " Oh, there's more serendipity in the office." Well, fun thing about that, the research has sort of shown that that's a total myth. People don't actually have those serendipitous creative collisions in office spaces, at least any more than they would in a hybrid environment or in sort of an accidental seeing someone on a Teams meeting environment. We can put that aside. The real thing is you're just going, " I'm frustrated with leading a team in this remote environment. I don't know how to get them to feel like a team. I felt like we were before when we were together, therefore I'm going to make us come back together." That's great for the bottom 60%, maybe bottom 80% of people on your team, but your top performers are going to go, " I'm going to go find a team that lets me have that flexibility."
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah. That is the truth. One of my early bosses always talked about the importance of affirmation and he said, " If you don't know why something worked out, what you did to achieve that success, you don't have affirmation on what you should be doing more of." It sounds like that's been a big problem with teams in the workplace historically, and now as we come back together, " What used to work well? What are the myths that we believed in that have now been disproven and how do we create that formula going forward for success?"
David Burkus: Yeah. Yeah, precisely, precisely.
Dane Groeneveld: Collaboration and teams is an interesting one, and naturally... You were talking to me earlier, David, about the new project and thinking about what a future team could look like. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
David Burkus: Yeah. I've been diving into a lot of the research on how do we explain... Actually, let me back up, at least in terms of... If we're thinking about this through the lens of future of work and future of teamwork, I believe that one of the disruptions that COVID had and one of the pivots we all took is that employee experience is now a much larger function of team culture than it is company culture. Gone are the days of free food in the break room and all sorts of perks and benefits. Those are great but you can't really brag about free food if nobody wants to come to your office, right?
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah.
David Burkus: You might be able to... If you've never done free food before the pandemic, you might be able to use it every once in a while to bring people into the office. Who knows? But in an environment where people are not seeing each other every single day, they're working more and more with the same team or the same two or three teams and so the culture of that team, not the whole organization, affects their motivation, their collaboration to a much stronger degree. In fact, if I ask most people in the last two years, if I ask them to talk about their company culture, they start telling me things that are really a reflection of their team and their leader. I started from kind of that premise and started looking at, " Okay, well, what makes for a high performing team culture? What makes for a culture of collaboration, et cetera?" In my mind, the single best study for practitioners on this is Google's Project Aristotle study. That was a really popularized study because it was honestly a rediscovering of Amy Edmondson's awesome body of work around psychological safety, but it also had four other elements that I don't think get enough appreciation. When you combine that study, which is more a practitioner focused study, there's better well- conducted studies by actual academic researchers, et cetera, but then you read that paper and you fall asleep three pages in. When you combine what they did with all of this kind of other research, what you find and what I've sort of boiled it all down to is I think you really need three elements. Psychological safety is clearly one of them. The other one I call common understanding, or you could call it... Anita Williams Woolley calls it a collective intelligence. Basically, it's what happens when people have not only a clear sense of their roles and responsibilities but also an understanding of the other people they're working with so they understand the personality too. I kind of think it as clarity plus empathy or clarity of roles mixed with clarity of person. When that happens, that's what you actually need to get a team collaborating. Not just, " Do I know my roles and responsibilities?" But, " Do I know how to communicate project updates or request for help or feedback to other people based on their personalities and their different preferences and that sort of thing?" That's sort of element three... Or element two. Then the third element that I see is what I started calling prosocial purpose after... Adam Grant has a body of research on prosocial motivation that kind of formed give and take but in my mind stayed at the individual level when some of his studies and some of the studies that came after that look at the power of teams as well. Knowing who is served by the work that a team is doing, knowing how their work fits into the larger hole that helps the whole organization can be just not only a motivating element but a bonding element as well because it creates something sort of bigger than ourselves. To your question around collaboration, really I see those as the three kind of vital elements if you want a team that really collaborates well. You need those vital elements because now more than ever people are going to be defining whether or not they're happy with their work, whether or not they're motivated not with the company culture, but with the culture of that actual team.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah. Prosocial purpose. It reminds me of one of the studies that Dan Pink shared recently at a conference around, and you're probably aware of it, around the chefs in the kitchen seeing on an iPad the restaurant visitors and who they were cooking the food for.
David Burkus: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What I love about that particular study actually is that it didn't measure the motivation of the cooks, it measured the customer satisfaction.
Dane Groeneveld: So its true end result.
David Burkus: Right, so you have sort of... Right, you have an unbiased measurement on the result that they were literally cooking food that tasted better because they could see who it was for.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: Right. Yeah, exactly. You see it in the other kind of body of work, so that... I'm blanking on who that study was from. I know they fancy themselves a behavioral economist which is really... Behavioral economists are organizational psychologists who are trying to win a Nobel Prize. That's really the only difference because there's no Nobel Prize for organizational psychology, but if you call yourself a behavioral economist you can win one. Anyway, so there's that study. There's also a whole body of research from Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton on what they call job crafting, which is the thing that unmotivated employees do to motivate themselves, the little tasks that they take on or the little reframe that they go through when they're bored to try and motivate themselves. The biggest part of that is relationship crafting, trying to be able to interact with the beneficiaries of their work much more. This is like... One of Wrzesniewski's famous studies was the janitor at a hospital who takes the time to rearrange plants in a patient room or flowers in a patient room just to provide some variety and interact with the patient for a little bit longer just to make their day, right?
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: My thing is if that's what people do when they want to motivate themselves, that's probably what we should do as leaders automatically. If it works because people are taking it on themselves to do it, maybe we should just try doing it and see how that works.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. The interesting thing with both of those cases, the chef seeing the customers and the janitor rearranging the flowers, is that those are individual tasks. That's not a team collaborating. I wonder, have you seen any ways where you do see teams of people collaborating for a...
David Burkus: Well, so the chefs one is because if you think about the way that food is produced, it is an interdependent role, right?
Dane Groeneveld: Good point.
David Burkus: There's multiple parties inside of that. That's really kind of the way to look at it, is you could have the exact same approach of that person who's doing this prep piece on this side is handing that meal over to the next person in line for it, et cetera. They could look at there, " Who was that?" Or they could be reminded of the ultimate goal.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: That's the real kind of, I think, power in that study. When you look at these kind of broader reminders of why what we do is so important, you also tap into a body of work from Muzafer Sherif and a few others on what's called superordinate goals, in other words when you can point to something that's bigger than just us, bigger than just do your role.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: The janitors in the hospital are feeling... Truthfully are doing it partly to reminded of who they serve but also because now they feel like part of the healthcare team.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: They're tapping into the superordinate goal of the hospital, which is providing patient care, et cetera. You kind of tap on that element as well. Like I said, the single best study on all of this in my mind is the Google Project Aristotle study, but it's massively incomplete. There's a whole lot of other pieces that kind of anchor into this team dynamic, they're just in really, really boring journals.
Dane Groeneveld: Yes. Yeah, that's certainly why I didn't make it as an economist. I had to read too many papers.
David Burkus: Well, there goes the Nobel Prize for both of us.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: Yeah.
Dane Groeneveld: Psychological safety, you raised that. It comes up in nearly every show that we do. As you look at the hybrid work environment or the remote work environment, are there any key practices that you're seeing with some of the people you're working with that help build on that psychological safety?
David Burkus: Yeah. The thing with psych safety in a hybrid environment or a remote environment is not that it's any more important or less important. It's equal to colocated teams. It's just a whole lot harder Because if you're trying to create a culture where people feel heard and feel like their differing opinions are welcomed, et cetera, you have the worst mediums of communication to do that. If you're running a meeting on Teams or on Zoom, for example, it's harder to see body language that signals... The furrowed brow that signals a person disagrees with you or that leaning forward that people do when they're ready to share something, so it's harder to do. In terms of best practices, when I work with a lot of leaders I make sure that we open the floor a bit more for dissent and comments, that we're willing to wait. The worst thing that happens in a lot of meetings is that call at the end is, " Are there any questions, concerns, clarifications?" And it's 1: 58 and all of us have another Zoom meeting to be on at 2: 00. You didn't plan that well enough to get it. We need to make sure that we're calling for that earlier in the meeting, that we're willing to wait in awkward silence and do it. Also, the language that we use I think matters a lot. This is actually something totally unrelated to hybrid. I learned this when I was a university professor. The way that you call for questions, which are ultimately a form of dissent or a form of differing opinion, the way that you call for people to admit they're unclear on something and ask for clarification or ask for help matters. You can say" any questions" which sends a subtle message that like, " You shouldn't have any, but if you do have any I'm condescending down to you to give you time." Or you can say... I started doing this. Often you can say, " Hey, we talked about this and this today. I was kind of unclear on it. I made jokes about losing the Nobel Prize because of my career path so I might have been a little unclear. What questions do you have for me?"
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I like that one. Yeah.
David Burkus: Right. We can do the same thing when we're calling for dissent or disagreement. We can say, " Are there comments, concerns, clarifications?" Or we can go, " Hey, sounds like we're headed to consensus but I just want to check in and make sure because I have my own blind spots. We all do. What am I missing before we move forward?"
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I like that leading... In both of those examples, I love the leading with vulnerability as the leader, " Hey, I'm aware that what I delivered today wasn't perfect. Can you help me improve upon it."
David Burkus: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the fundamental element of trust that... One of the two keys to psychological safety, right-
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: ... is thatyou don't... The way you get trust on a team, it's not given, it's not earned. It's reciprocated. You show vulnerability and people realize that you're trusting them in that moment and they respond both with trustworthy behavior... Most of the time. 4% of people are psychopaths, but 96% of them respond with trustworthy behavior and with a greater feeling of trusting you as well.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. No, that's good. I know there was a coach that I've worked with, Craig Weber, in the past and he does a lot of talk around conversational capacity. Another one of his examples was to say, " Is there anything that people came to the meeting excited to talk about that we failed to talk about today?" It's not a question, it's an invite.
David Burkus: Right. Yeah.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. It's definitely... The language is a really important part of that, and, to your earlier point, the planning, the structure, making time for that opportunity for others to talk.
David Burkus: Yeah. I would say too it's not just in meetings. We have more mediums of communication now as hybrid or remote teams than we did in the past, and so some people may not feel comfortable at all with disagreeing on a Teams call or a Zoom call. They might do it in an email thread a bit later. You as a leader, it's really tempting sometimes to be like, "No, no, no, we had time for... It's too late now." No, it's not too late because that person wanted to do it then. Now, there are people obviously that we gain commitment from everybody, it's clear and then three months down the road they're super negative. We're not talking about those situations. I'm talking about the next 48 to 72 hours after a meeting. You may get people who say, " Hey, I had this concern but I couldn't find the right way to phrase it in the meeting. Here's what it is." You need to show just as much acceptance and just as much appreciation for that dissent that comes in a different medium as you did on, let's say, a Zoom meeting or an in person meeting.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. We had... I was talking to Kian Gohar the other day from Geolab and he was talking about the use of asynchronous meetings, asynchronous tools, whether it's a Google Doc or otherwise. It allows exactly that. It allows people to go away and think about it and come back and respond in their own time once they've given it suitable time to digest.
David Burkus: Yeah. Yeah, that's... I get asked a lot of questions around creativity and problem solving and in a hybrid environment, what does that look like, et cetera, because it's not... The moment of brainstorming is not as good in Zoom as it is... Or no matter what tool you use, as it is in person. But what I remind people is that that's not the only step in the process. You might think that's all creativity is with your team but there's thinking about it ahead of time, there's silent generation periods, researching the problem, et cetera. Moving that to an asynchronous mode of communication and giving yourself a few days for that can really enhance what ends up happening when you either get people in person or get them synchronous on a Zoom call.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: It still may not be as good on a Zoom call, but since you've built up all of this extra kind of creative energy from giving people time in the asynchronous it kind of offsets it.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah. That's actually a theme that really came up heavily yesterday. I was at the Staffing Industry Analysts conference in Dallas.
David Burkus: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dane Groeneveld: It was super cool.
David Burkus: Yeah. My buddies Tim and Heather were speaking there, yeah.
Dane Groeneveld: Tim and Heather were awesome, great keynotes. Tim came on and-
David Burkus: I'm jealous of Heather's glasses.
Dane Groeneveld: And her shoes. She wore these killer yellow shoes. They were awesome. But both of them were on point, just as you are, with a lot of these emerging themes and the research, the science behind it, which is important because a lot of us, people like me that are in operating roles, aren't as well researched or resourced.
David Burkus: Yeah.
Dane Groeneveld: When you see this combination of science and best practice and recommendation, you start to see just how quickly a team can really move the chains downfield and improve upon the existing teamwork environment. To that end, Tim Sanders from Upwork, he was sharing that brainstorming's a really bad term, get rid of brainstorming, because he kind of talked through the stereotypical the boss comes in, says, " We're not going to troubleshoot any of these, just throw it on the board." Organizes it and then does what they were planning to do. I was like, " Oh, I'm guilty. I've done that before."
David Burkus: Yeah. No, I mean, I agree. It's one of those terms... I don't know, it's sort of like xerox, right?
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: It's one of those terms we use, we all know what we're talking about but we all have our own different baggage on it, et cetera, so I agree. The other thing is, is just you want to get into the simple science of it. Brainstorming is a term coined by an ad guy, Alex Osborn. He had a specific process and specific rules, and what we now know is that some of those rules are wrong. His fundamental rule, no idea is a bad idea, defer judgment, well, ... has this huge body of research that shows if you can harness task focused conflict in the midst of idea generation, you get better ideas and you get more ideas. I should invert that. You get more ideas, and then as a result better ideas.
Dane Groeneveld: You get better. Yeah.
David Burkus: It's just straight- up wrong. So Tim, it's a term I use often because people know what I'm talking about, but I'm with him on that one. I really am.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. The other cool thing he touched on, which you've just raised now in your use of the asynchronous meeting to prepare people for the conversation, he said that three days in advance, if you're giving them a read ahead and a specific role, " Here's the read ahead. We want you to come in and focus on where we might have gaps or blind spots here." He said that encourages people to come into that meeting with some confidence about raising some of the problems, the differing opinions that need to be addressed by the team.
David Burkus: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think... The other reason I think that's so important, especially in the last two years, is there are people... I get asked questions all the time, simple little stuff like, " Oh, how do we get everybody to turn their camera on in a remote meeting?" Or something like that. I think truthfully that's a symptom, that that's not the problem. The problem is you actually messed up a while back because if you called a meeting and then all you did is present information at people for the first 30 minutes...
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: They're checking... They're checked out anyway, so Tim's idea of the read ahead or what have you, there's really no reason, unless you have to do it from a legal or certification, like continuing ed thing, there's really no reason to use a virtual platform to present information at people on your team. That can be recorded. You talk over the slides, record it ahead of time, you send it out as a read ahead, et cetera. The purpose if you're going to get everybody together in a virtual capacity, it should be to discuss, to debate, to decide things that require interaction. If you do that, people will obviously... I mean, not everybody, but most people will feel like, " Oh yeah, of course I should have my camera on for this." Then the other people will kind of come along. If we do the meeting right those problems take care of themselves, but a lot of times we're still doing it. We call a Zoom meeting, we share our screen so no one sees us and then they just watch us narrate over the slides for the next 45 minutes. I wouldn't turn my camera on for that either.
Dane Groeneveld: No.
David Burkus: I got a really nice camera.
Dane Groeneveld: No, that's right. Also, if you're in that meeting and you know you're getting kind of just a notes from the field, you're more likely to be doing your emails or doing something else. It's not very engaging is it?
David Burkus: For sure. For sure. Yeah, especially if we already know the minutes are going to get circulated around afterwards.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah. That's right, or we're recording the actual meeting.
David Burkus: Right.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: Yeah, exactly.
Dane Groeneveld: Where do you find, David, the... As you think about the future of work, there's obviously low hanging fruit and then there's harder problems to solve. Where do you think there may... I think harder problems to solve are people that have to turn up and do frontline jobs every day, they work in a refinery, they drive a bus, they do these other things. How do you think that we're going to be creating better opportunities for collaboration... Even people in the kitchen. Better opportunities for collaboration among those teams?
David Burkus: Yeah. Well, let me say the thing I'm not supposed to say as an author of a book on remote teams, et cetera, which is that I don't think there's going to be a whole lot of virtual or remote collaboration in the future anyway.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: I mean, I think there'll be more of it than ever before. My grand prediction, if you want to give a grand future of work prediction, is that the percentage of people who say they work remotely full- time pre- pandemic versus post will double.
Dane Groeneveld: Right.
David Burkus: It'll go from 4% to 8% and everybody will be back in a hybrid environment at first, and then a lot of organizations are going to do hybrid poorly and so people will just feel pressured to come back or feel like, " Forget it, I'm just going to come back anyway." I don't see a lot of those people that are forced to be on site... I don't see that as as difficult as maybe it has been over the last two years. Certainly it's been a challenge over the last two years.
Dane Groeneveld: That's a great way to reframe it.
David Burkus: That said, I think there's still going to be that kind of us versus them mentality between blue collar and white collar that we have to worry about. I think it's a really weird thing, and Tim Sanders's body of work sort of sticks to this too, is that we're shifting from the organizational chart as a definition of a team, meaning a team is who you report to, to organizing companies around individual projects. More companies than ever before are using more of that professional services consulting, law firm, project- based work model. When you add onto that things like what Upwork is doing with enterprise level outsourcing, meaning, " Oh, we have this project and we need 24 coders, for example, but we don't... This project's only 18 months long. We don't want to give them a full- time employment contract." Now you finally have... If we get really nerdy, now you finally have Charles Handy's clover organization of three leaves of a clover between full- time, part- time and this kind of middle range thing. In all of that big challenge to me is what you might call... In org psych you might call it the problem of shared identity. How do we unify people under that guise of, " Even if it's just this one project, we're still working towards one thing bigger than ourselves. We feel united, we feel part of that team, et cetera." There's a couple... We already talked about superordinate goals, that role of prosocial purpose, who is served by the work that we're doing. That can help tremendously there as well, but then there's also we're going to have to think on the hard stuff as like even just the technological questions and the access to information questions, et cetera, that are truthfully a little more nitty- gritty. I'm more on the org side than the I- O side, but those will be big challenges too. Big challenges. Even just how we... We in the United States, in my opinion, I don't believe we have the right classification of employee to move forward. We have this part- time, we have this full- time, we have this independent contractor, but there a hole missing if we're going to do this.
Dane Groeneveld: The fractional employee or the project based employee. Yeah.
David Burkus: Right. Right. Right. What's funny is we're already seeing fractional employees in a remote world where some really savvy people are holding down two jobs at once because both jobs are 100% remote.
Dane Groeneveld: Well, there's actually some scarier science on that that you're seeing fractional roles in a remote world where someone's holding down five roles and farming it out to other people because you don't know who's doing the work.
David Burkus: That's true. Right, right, right. Like I said, we don't have... There's all sorts of nitty- gritty legal, technological information security questions in that regard that have to be answered. I'll be honest, I'm not the person that has to answer them, but on the experience of work side we really need to be focusing in on that shared identity piece and what we're doing, even if we're shifting to project based work, what we're doing to make sure everybody feels like we're involved.
Dane Groeneveld: Let's play on that shared identity a little bit longer. Heather McGowan talked about it at the conference this week about there are some workers that are lifers that are going to continue to grow and evolve with the business, and there's some that are great project workers and they come in to solve an issue and then move on. She classified herself in that latter category. Shared identity when you're only on the team for a short period of time, is that more difficult to achieve? Do you get this hired gun mercenary type vibe that's going on that gets in the way of collaboration?
David Burkus: Well, I... Yeah, I think it's most difficult when you have a mix of those two types of employees working on the same project.
Dane Groeneveld: Oh, okay.
David Burkus: Because obviously the full- time employees are going to feel like they're taking it more seriously, even if they're not.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: The advantage of the project based worker and the freelancer, the gig economy person, et cetera, is actually that they're already in a mindset that, " Even though I'm doing this work project by project, I'm working in a very small world and I'm going to see these people again and so maintaining interpersonal relationships matters. It actually matters for my professional health because how do I find new work? I find it through this network of past collaborators, et cetera." Simple interactions, civility, camaraderie, et cetera, come easier to that side than this side who is, " Oh yeah, you're just here temporary. You're not as committed as I am." Like, " Well, no, that's not actually true. You just see the only projects that are in part of this company that matter, and I see the broader ecosystem." So there's that. I think this really then gets back down to this idea of, " Why does this project matter? Who is served by the success of the project? What is it for?" Because I think you can still get people highly... The research on superordinate goals is almost entirely done on short- term temporary teams.
Dane Groeneveld: Okay.
David Burkus: So it's definitely possible, and whether or not people do it is a whole other dilemma, right?
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: Whether or not people take the time to really pause for purpose, reiterate the reason we do it, et cetera, especially when you've got people, like I said before, on that team for whom their performance metrics and their incentive compensation and all of that sort of stuff actually has nothing to do with the success of this project.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: Whereas the project based workers who might be joining in obviously is entirely incumbent upon that, right?
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: You have those kind of difficulties as well.
Dane Groeneveld: I like the way you framed the gig workers, the freelancers, the project based professionals as almost like nomadic tribes, that they're relying on each other for which wells they're going to visit again in the future and how they borrow and trade with each other to get through projects or to find the next thing.
David Burkus: Well, I think... I mean, you see it, right? I mean, some of the earliest research done on this was done by academics like Brian Uzzi and Jarrett Spiro who did it in Broadway. You see it also in... There's a great piece. It's probably three or four years old now. No, sorry, three or four months old now. It was in the New York Times weekend edition that was basically like what Hollywood can tell us about the future of work because movies are that same thing, just like a Broadway show, and more and more industries are moving towards that. Not everyone's there yet, I get it, and certain industries will never necessarily be there, but more and more industries are moving that way. It's the people who are in those industries that have the kind of mentality advantage.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. It's funny you mentioned Hollywood. Had you seen Tim's presentation that he did yesterday when he talks about Toy Story?
David Burkus: No. Did he mention that?
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. ...
David Burkus: No, I mean, I shouldn't say Tim and I have known each other for a decade. I'm the one that... I'm sure... Let's see, did he give genius is a team sport?
Dane Groeneveld: Yes.
David Burkus: Was that the name?
Dane Groeneveld: Genius is a team sport.
David Burkus: My first book, The Myths of Creativity, uses the sentence" creativity is a team sport" and when he read it he loved it so much he emailed me. That's actually how our relationship started-
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Cool.
David Burkus: ...like a decade ago. I've given him permission to sort of use... I'm not the only person that's ever used" blank is a team sport" so there's not exactly something I can trademark here, but it kind of came from that similar mentality. We were working in similar spaces and kind of found each other, so yeah, I'm not surprised that there's some overlap there.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it's cool. He talked about the Toy Story project, which was obviously the first computer generated animation film. The way he talked about it, which ties in exactly with where you've gone there on Hollywood shaping the future of work, is that the only way Toy Story worked was that they got a team that was really good at identifying lots and lots of small problems and solving lots and lots of small problems rather than focusing on a big problem. I actually think that's where businesses today go wrong, is that they grab a bunch of people together and they give them this huge objective, this huge project, and they say sort of, " Go fix it." They put a timeline on it, they pressure it, where actually if you look at Hollywood, Hollywood's not saying, " Let's stack up the next 10 years of movies." They're saying, " Let's go and get the next best movie and let's really do a very good job of it." Maybe there's something there in creating a muscle memory for putting teams together around small projects and getting good at identifying the problem and solving the problem iteratively.
David Burkus: Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, there's a lot of research from Brian Uzzi in particular on the creative benefits of that mentality. What you see is it's usually 18 to 36 months is the max you could stretch that project out before, one, it becomes so large it's almost demotivating because you see... When you have a four year timeline, you're like, " Oh. Wow."
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: When you have 18 months, it's totally different. Then also, if you're refreshing who's on the team every 18 to 36 months you have a new injection of diversity of ideas and perspectives. Usually enough of the core team from a past project or from earlier in that project to keep things moving, but a fresh injection of new ideas, that helps tremendously as well.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I like that. You and I, before the show, we were talking about the role of leaders in driving some of these changes. I thought it was really interesting you brought up the whole unlimited vacation as a great case study and how we're probably failing or going to continue to fail at hybrid and remote work and building this collaboration. Can you expand a bit more on where you think unlimited vacation went wrong?
David Burkus: Yeah. This is another... This was a whole chapter of that same book that had remote work in it. What I found when I dove into the research is that unlimited vacation works really well in a high trust organization.
Dane Groeneveld: Right.
David Burkus: In a high trust organization, people feel like, " Okay, no one's breathing over my shoulder making sure... Looking over my shoulder, breathing down my neck." That was an interesting mix of metaphors there. " No one's micromanaging me, et cetera." What you tend to see in those organizations also is that people blend time off with work time, so instead of four days at the beach we rent the house for two and a half weeks and I'm working for some of it.
Dane Groeneveld: Yes.
David Burkus: That's fine. I'm fine with it. Work- life integration seems to work better than work- life balance anyway, right?
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: You get that in a high trust organization. You get leaders, usually at the senior levels, who are showy about their out of office time. Not showy in a way of like, " Look at me, I'm the boss so I get 19 weeks and you only get six." I don't mean that, but I mean they know that they have to be seen working from lots of different locations knowing that they're doing that work- life integration and time off thing so that their people feel free to. In low trust organizations, you end up with managers who think, " If I can't see you... Presence equals productivity. If I can't see you, I don't know you're working." Therefore, people feel that sort of subtle pressure and so it kind of falls apart. That makes the big difference. It's not for every organization. If you already have high trust, it's a great policy. I think remote and this hybrid format is going to kind of shake down the same way. High trust organizations are going to have a pretty fine time in the transition and they're going to stay hybrid for a really long time. They're the minority, though. The majority of organizations I wouldn't categorize as high trust. Why? Why do I know that? Because spy software and other tools like that spiked when the pandemic happened.
Dane Groeneveld: Everyone bought all the tools. Yeah.
David Burkus: Right. Right. In those organizations, you're going to get leaders, senior leaders especially, partly generational and partly out of this low trust environment who are going to want to be back at the office most of the time.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah.
David Burkus: The people that want face time and to be seen and to be marked as a productive worker, they're going to be there most of the time and then that's going to roll downhill to where... There's some research on this that I explored before the pandemic, that most organizations in the Fortune 500 had language somewhere in their employee experience section of their website talking about their flex time program and the benefits of it, but there were hidden stigmas to asking for it, particularly stigmas that broke down on gender which is really infuriating. But there were hidden stigmas to asking for that flex time. The truth is, I think that's where we're actually headed for most organizations because most organizations aren't high trust organizations. They're going to have a hybrid policy but what's going to be said is different than what's going to be seen and people are going to respond to what's seen. In the end, what hybrid or flex time for a lot of organizations is going to mean is, " I can work from home that afternoon because I'm waiting on the plumber or because my kid is sick."
Dane Groeneveld: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
David Burkus: That's about it.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah.
David Burkus: Not, " I can work from home or I work from home two or three days a week because it's better for me to have uninterrupted focus time where I can do work that generates value, which is what we want out of a hybrid environment." It's going to be kind of that other way, " Life circumstances happen and I'll be forgiven because they do because we have a flex time policy."
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. You've probably reduced the heartburn there for a lot of commercial landlords too.
David Burkus: That's possible. That's certainly possible. I mean, the reality is only... We heard the headlines about companies selling massive amounts of office space or what have you or... I forget which tech company it was spent like$ 50 million to get out of a commitment to occupy a building in San Francisco. But we heard about those stories because they were unique.
Dane Groeneveld: Yes.
David Burkus: The vast majority of companies, in America at least, either already owned their campus or had a 10 to 20 year lease on that facility and so the space is still there.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, definitely. No, that's good. As you look out over the next couple of years, where do you have hopes for continued leaps in the extent of collaboration and good teamwork that we can be doing in the business world?
David Burkus: Well, I mean, the concept we were talking about earlier, project based work, actually really excites me. I know that this is the type of work that I do. I gather it's a lot of what you do too. I think it's more engaging than the drudgery of the day to day so I think more people are going to be engaged on that. I think that idea that we were talking about, the team culture matters more than company culture, actually excites me as well because it's a whole lot easier to give leaders the tools they need to shape a positive culture just on their team than it is to do these massive company culture programs. No offense to the people who make millions of dollars consulting organizations on massive employee experience interventions, but that's ...
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Right.
David Burkus: That won't be worth paying for soon, right?
Dane Groeneveld: Right.
David Burkus: In a way, that actually kind of excites me. Yeah. Those two things excite me a lot. I think the cloverleaf organization idea excites me a ton too just from a pure creativity and innovation standpoint. We are much smarter when we have access to a renewable source of diversity that a lot of people who've been those... I forget what Heather's term was. The lifers in organizations and who suffer from not invented here syndrome sort of don't have.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: There is a lot to be excited about. I realize I gave you some downer on most people probably won't be working hybrid by 2025, they'll be back in the office full- time. I realize that's a downer. What I will say, though, is that even if they're back in the office, virtual collaboration across teams formed from various offices in various parts of the country. That will stay high and that collaborative work with project based workers will stay high. The experience of work even if you're back at the office will still be a little bit better, and so all of those things are, in my opinion, reason for excitement.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I agree. You say a downer but it's too early for us to know what the social impact, the health impact of not being in office is. I know BBC ran an article the other day saying in a remote world some people are losing out on opportunities to socialize, to get away from the relationship at home which might be a little bit all too consuming, to get away from kids running around. Yeah. I don't think there's a black and white answer onto what is good and what is bad. It's going to be different for everyone.
David Burkus: No, yeah, I agree. There's a really interesting study from Nicholas Bloom on work from home, pre- pandemic study on work from home with a Chinese company, Ctrip.
Dane Groeneveld: Right.
David Burkus: What's funny is everybody always talks about the first half of the study and nobody talks about the second half. You nodded your head, right?
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: Like, "Yeah, okay, we did this thing and remote workers were more productive mostly because they worked longer hours and they took shorter breaks." But in the second phase of the study they said, " Oh look, hey, we did this thing and remote work is a success and so we're going to offer it to everyone." Here's the interesting part of the study. People who were working in an office and weren't chosen for the study and now chose to work remotely, they were more productive. People who were forced to work remotely because they were chosen for the study and didn't like it and wanted to be back in the office got moved back into the office and then they were more productive.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
David Burkus: The dirty little secret of that study and of this whole conversation is that people don't actually want to work from home. They want autonomy and flexibility. They want to decide where is the best place for them to do certain jobs. That's what especially high performers are going to be looking for and that's what people and teams who are looking for the best work experience are going to be looking for.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I love that. I think that is much more accessible for most companies, regardless of size too. That's a really a good note to end on. David, it's been an absolute pleasure. So many... I'm going to have to go and re- listen to this with a notebook and go and find a few of those studies, but I really appreciate the energy and the passion and what you're doing out there for the future of work, future of teamwork.
David Burkus: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Dane Groeneveld: All right. Thank you.
DESCRIPTION
Today on The Future of Teamwork, host Dane Groeneveld interviews David Burkus, best-selling author and speaker on helping teams and leaders work better together. David defines organizational psychology and talks about his detour into the field. He and Dane also talk about the concept of accidental camaraderie and employee experience in the context of COVID and remote work. David rounds out the conversation with the idea of high-trust organizations, a shared identity at work, and a discussion about what it means for teamwork to be career workers versus project workers.