With a fundamental disconnect between bosses and employees — a rift that’s only deepening, according to Sheela Subramanian, co-founder and VP of Slack’s Future Forum, a consortium focused on the future of work.
“These trends are all symptoms of fundamentally broken work for most, I dare say,” Subramanian said on Wednesday’s panel for Fortune Connect, Fortune’s exclusive leadership community. “Going back to the old ways won’t fix it.”
Subramanian quoted Spotify’s chief human resources officer, Katarina Berg, who advised against hiring adults just to treat them like children and expect them to not back down.
“People want to be treated like human beings, they want to be trusted,” Subramanian said. “And it is this belief that keeps them in the organization as loyal and engaged employees.”
Can repair damage: Choice and flexibility
Since September 2020, the Future Forum has released reams of data that continue to confirm what bosses and most workers already know: People want choices about how they work.
“They want to feel included and want their voices to be heard,” Subramanian said Wednesday. “And they want to work somewhere where they feel connected to their leaders, no matter where they’re from.”
Perhaps there is no more important benefit for workers than flexibility, especially in a tight labor market. That all circles back to trust, Subramanian said-trust your workers will finish the job during their life. He cited some Future Forum findings that support his point: 80% of global employees want location flexibility. (This does not mean that the job is too far, which is out of style; the majority of desk workers want to be in the middle.)
And 94% percent of employees want it schedule flexibility, which he said has remained constant quarter after quarter. Indeed, jobs that offer “core hours” or “async work” have become more popular than work-from-anywhere jobs, new research from career site Flexa has found. In this project, workers agree to log on during certain windows—such as 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.—but otherwise, they can choose the hours that work best for them.
Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, expressed these sentiments at the Fortune Connect event in October 2022, emphasizing the importance of choice. “People want structure, and people like boundaries,” Butterfield said fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell. “But they don’t like being told what to do, so I think the secrecy doesn’t make them feel like their autonomy is being denied or that their ideas aren’t important, while still giving them structure.”
Give everyone a say
Few CEOs have recognized the importance of flexibility. Consider Airbnb, Yelp and Spotify, which have established work-from-anywhere policies permanently. In a fortune Roundtable in June 2022, JCPenney CEO Marc Rosen called flexibility “critical.”
“We’re using new scheduling tools to look at: How do we provide more flexibility in scheduling? How can we change schedules at the last minute? How do you find substitutes and do those swaps? How do we gamify?” Rosen said.
But other bosses tend to say that they need people to work in unison to keep the business running. Subramanian insists the flexibility in the framework can be almost anywhere. “When I bring this, I often see deer-in-the-lights” from the manager, said Subramanian.
He added that two-thirds of executives do not include employees in discussions about policy – there is no sign of discontent.
To add insult to injury, the past three years have led workers’ expectations of transparency from their bosses to skyrocket. “Many executives are trained to know all the answers, to have certainty,” Subramanian explained. “And now employees expect executives to say, I don’t know, I’m still figuring it out, or — this is the hardest part — I need your help.”
Learn how to navigate and strengthen trust in your business with The Trust Factor, a weekly newsletter that examines what leaders need to succeed. Log in here.