The following is a transcript of our podcast conversation with Sara Witta and Shannon Crile. You can listen to the full episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Sarah
Hello, and welcome to Humans Beyond Resources, an HR podcast by Reverb, where we cover topics from culture to compliance. Reverb believes that every decision a leader makes reverberates throughout the organization, from hiring your first employee to training your entire workforce. We believe in building healthy, inclusive cultures that engage your team. I’m your host, Sarah Wilkins.
Today’s episode features a guest host, Emily Senff from Reverb.
Emily
Welcome to Sara and Shannon. We’re so glad to have both of you here, and we’re going to be talking about flexibility and inclusivity in the workplace. These two women have amazing lived experience and advice and ideas to share with all of us. Sara, Shannon, I’d love for each of you to just give a quick intro, and maybe Sara can kick us off and then hand it over to Shannon.
Sara
Yeah, sure. I’m Sara Witta, and I’m here with my colleague, Shannon. We are part of Chapter 2 group, and we are kind of all things flexibility. We spent most of our career, or a lot of our career, at Google working in big customer sales and operations and business development, and saw a lot, and have had an interesting journey over the last 10 years, and are really focused now on what the future of work looks like, how we can apply that to businesses of all sizes, and kind of recognize that the working world has changed, and kind of envision what the modern working world could look like, and then take all of our lived experiences and help all of you kind of apply that to the future of work and what it can look like tomorrow.
Shannon
I’m Shannon Crile. Sara kind of covered on the high points. We have a very similar career trajectory, but we joined forces as colleagues at Google about six years ago, and we were, took a huge pivot in our career away from sales and into some social impact and eventually product development, but the biggest thing is that we were job share, and that’s kind of where our passion for flexibility was born, and we pioneered the concept and the value of job sharing within multiple organizations at Google, and that kind of spawned us to this next chapter, no pun intended, of working with other folks to inspire the same.
Emily
Well, thank you both. I thought we’d start by kicking off and having each of you share what does a flexible workplace culture mean to you? I think we all have our own definitions around flexibility, and so it’d be great to hear how you think about it.
Sara
Yeah, we kind of chat about this back and forth a lot, and it’s so easy to say what a flexible work culture is not, and it’s sometimes harder to really pinpoint some of the things that it is or what it means, and top level, it’s supporting employees where they are, and this absolutely means top to bottom, but it also means peer to peer.
Shannon Crile
And it’s perplexing. We’re so far behind. The modern workplace has this sort of one size fits all, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander mentality, and I think that’s just a huge missed opportunity. Embracing an inclusive and flexible in your workplace is really important right now. At the time is now.
Emily
Thank you both. We talked a little bit as we were preparing for this conversation about what are some of the signals or things that HR leaders and professionals can pay attention to that might give them, there’s an indication that they need to start considering flexibility. How would you respond to when is the right time to start taking action?
Shannon
When I think about this question, and it’s a great one, when I think about this question of flexibility, readiness, or when is the right time to move on this, a couple things come to mind, and the first is actually a quote from Reshma Sujani. I’m sure many of you are familiar with her. She’s a workplace activist and founder of Girls Who Code, and she said, as it related to COVID, actually, never waste a great crisis. We have a once in a generation, once in a lifetime opportunity to finally fix workplaces. As I just said, now really is the time. Sara touched on this already, but this post -COVID workforce has really put a stake in the ground that flexibility is an imperative moving forward. Beyond that, there are certainly indicators that you can look out for to help drive your decisions and how fast you move on flexibility. First is, in looking outside your walls externally, it’s really important to keep a pulse on what’s happening in your particular space. What are your competitors doing?
Are they making advancements in the area of flexibility and inclusivity? That’s going to be an important push or signal for you. Then business performance can also tell a compelling story. Sara touched on productivity. We’re not talking about this idea of visible busyness, but are there productivity metrics that you can track? Those can give you an indication of how healthy your workforce is and where their mindset is. Lastly, just know your people. Look at the data that you have on them. Supplement with surveys as needed, that kind of thing, but really just try to understand what are the things that you think impact the working experience of your employees? That can be things like the number of caregivers, where people are location -wise and proximity to if you have an actual office or headquarters, whether they’re pursuing outside education, those types of things.
Sara
A trend that we keep running into, I think it’s coined like quiet quitting, but just this idea that sometimes there’s doing your day job and then there’s building your brand and doing all the other things at your company that get you that promotion. Sometimes that lack of engagement or that unwillingness to seek that next opportunity because you’re just unable to because you’re balancing whatever you’re having to balance and you can’t bring your best self to work or be as productive as you’d like to be or whatever the culture is doesn’t allow you to do that. You’re still there. You’re physically there or wherever you sit and you’re doing your work. You might not be giving as much as you could be or would like to be in an optimal circumstance. I think that’s really true.
Emily
Shannon and Sara, I know that both of you have done a fair amount of research and I’m curious what you maybe have found through that about what are some objections or why people might be resistant or hesitant to think about flexibility and ways to bring flexibility to their organization. So essentially, why isn’t it more widespread? What’s holding people back? Yeah.
Sara
In a lot of cases, it’s lack of knowledge. Creativity. I think watching so many companies almost snap back in the last year has been interesting. There’s a little bit of a lack of awareness of the increase of options that are available. I think hybrid work gets talked about the most. It’s just one of many, many flexible options. But it sort of became this easy to check box. Yes, we’re flexible. We’re offering something different coming out of COVID. But for the most part, a lot of companies, especially bigger companies, I think snapped back. Almost universally, I think it’s time, people, money. So there’s no centralized resource or precedent or support being given. So it becomes this very creative one -off endeavor for maybe one brave soul or brave leader to try it out, which gives a lot of perceived risk and not a lot of recognition or reward. So it’s kind of like, why take it on? What we found definitely where we spent a large part of our career, but we spent also a large part of that career consulting with a lot of smaller companies.
And it’s almost never a structural program. And so it’s just a one -off. It’s manager -directed. That manager leaves. No one’s doing it anymore. And so that kind of one -off special circumstance arrangement doesn’t lend itself to being widespread or adoptable by very many. And that makes it really tough for kind of the few courageous souls that are trying to kind of move it forward. They lack support. I think it requires change. And change is really, really hard. And it requires trial and error and sometimes getting it wrong and an overall basic willingness. And even that sometimes is tricky for people. And so because of that, what we see the most is that it doesn’t get prioritized. It kind of lacks that urgency to just get it done. And it kind of moves. It’s there. It’s always on a list somewhere, but it doesn’t quite make the top of the list. But as Shannon said earlier, the time is now. And whatever incremental steps you might be able to take, we just keep seeing in our research over and over that flexibility is now cited as the number one most important priority kind of to our evolving workforce. I think we see a lot of people taking steps, but it feels small in comparison to what could be happening right now.
Emily
Sara, Shannon, I feel like we should just go to talking about what are some of the creative flexibility solutions that you’ve seen? Because I feel like people really probably do want to hear and learn more about some of the practical things. Yeah, we’ve talked about job share a little bit. There’s hybrid versus in -person. But I know that you have so many more ideas around that. So can you both talk to that piece a bit more?
Shannon
Yeah, sure. Happy to. First of all, embracing flexibility and starting to infuse it into your culture and build a foundational program. It is daunting, no question. But you don’t have to establish a concrete roadmap here and now. There’s a lot that you can do with creativity and imagination. And the first is really just committing to it as an organization. We are putting a stake in the ground here. We want to build for the future of work. And we’ll figure that out along the way. And this is easier for a smaller or newer company who’s more nimble. Infusing that at the outset is going to be easier and more seamless. But it can be done and it should be done for all businesses of all sizes. One of the things that we think about as a first step is besides making the commitment and starting to, top to bottom, build it into your culture, help support that process through workshops, for instance. Just focus around equitable work and this idea, again, that one size doesn’t fit all. And people are coming into their jobs with unique circumstances and backgrounds and needs. Things like culture norming and core value development and creating user guides as part of that. So that I touched on the educational aspect earlier. Your workforce also has unique working styles and preferences, right? So creating these guides for your teams to be able to access and say, hey, Sara doesn’t like to be pinged nonstop on chat. I’m going to leave her be for these hours and maybe she prefers to get on Zoom once a day. Whatever the case may be. Another one is eliminating bias and microaggressions in the workplace. And I think in order for flexibility to truly blossom, those microaggressions have to be eradicated. And it has to be, there has to be buy -in across the board. You know, and I’m talking about Sara and I, again, having spent many years in a job share, we’re met with a lot of snide comments like, oh, must be nice to leave work early and, you know, oh, I wish I got Fridays off. And not really thinking through, you know, we’re making a tradeoff here, right? We’re not getting paid as much. We don’t necessarily have as quick of a career progression as someone working full -time. Before anything else can happen, that has to be, you know, an important key step. And then, you know, similarly, and Sara’s touched on this several times, this idea of championing a results -oriented work environment. And again, this comes bottoms up, top to bottom, has to be a buy -in for everyone involved. And then I think recruiting with flexibility in mind, you know, as you’re building for flexibility, what does flexibility at your organization actually look like? And how can you, you know, put that out there for potential recruits?
Sara
I would maybe just add, Emily, you’re asking like very specifically what some of the arrangements could be. So in terms of, you know, Shannon kind of went through kind of how you kind of can get creative and just start building right away. What could some of those options be as relevant to your workforce? There’s obviously part -time. So that would be reduced hours to like a traditional 40 -hour week. There’s a job share where two people would share one headcount. That’s what Shannon and I have done for a long time. That’s where you might overlap a little bit here and there, but you each work a set number of hours that’s smaller and you ladder up to that one headcount. There’s, you know, the four -day, classic four -day workweek. I think traditionally that’s thought of as four tens, but actually there’s a lot of persuasion around 32 hours. So four -day week is actually 32 hours, not 40. And in almost every study, the productivity didn’t go down at all. People sort of consolidated their effort. They came in, they did their job and they went home. And that 32 hours didn’t produce anything less than what 40 hours would have. But what you got was this uptick in happiness and well -being and I would say overall joy. You could kind of have your life and have your job and it was an uptick on all fronts. What other arrangements that are pretty common that we, am I missing?
Shannon
And I just want to add on to what Sara was talking about. I don’t know how many of you have, you know, been following or seen the research around the four -day workweek studies that have been in the last couple of years that Sara touched on globally. I think it’s really interesting. They’ve done them in the US, the UK, several other countries and they were universally successful. It brings us back to that, making the distinction between part -time and job sharing, for instance. So in those trials, everybody worked reduced hours. So that was hugely successful. But just to touch on a minute, this idea of job sharing versus part -time, I was actually part -time for a handful of years. And in my experience and in the experience of other folks I’ve talked to in a similar position, part -time really has some challenges. I think, you know, there’s a lot of continuity that happens in part -time. And while the team is kind of waiting for that part -time person to get back in the office, that part-time person has a, you know, is overcompensating and feeling a lot of stress about their status. For me, that was very much the case. And when I did find job sharing, it was like this massive aha, right? Because I wasn’t working a full -time schedule, which I needed for the other priorities in my life, but I wasn’t overcompensating. I knew that my partner was also accountable to the business and to the projects we were working on. And I could, you know, heads down, focus, be hyperproductive when I was there and know that my partner would, you know, pick it up right where I left off kind of thing. So I just, I wanted to touch on that distinction because I think there’s a lot of confusion when people think about them in the same way.
Emily
I think you also had shared like some other ideas that were beyond arrangements too, which is like, how does flexibility fit into other things that, you know, an organization can offer or do? Can you speak to a couple of those examples?
Shannon
I think a couple of things that we touched on were, you know, this idea of infusing it into the benefits program so that it’s part of the benefits package, part of the benefits team. And then that inherently protects it from some of these one -offs. And then I think, you know, some of the other things that we talked about were really thinking about restructuring how people are evaluated and performance reviews to ensure that the expectations and the demands and the, you know, the measurables are consistent and account for people who work in flexible arrangements. You know, I think the risk if you don’t do that is that there’s measurables that are associated with time or, you know, as Sara was touching on earlier, you know, volume of work versus value and quality of work kind of thing.
Sara
It’s very hard in a traditional performance evaluation not to evaluate the person and to really focus on the work. And if you take the opportunity to scope a job, to post it correctly, to recruit, to review people based on the scope of work that they were hired to do and the impact that they’re having on the business, you suddenly have a different evaluation process, which is really about kind of positive outputs of someone’s work product and less about where they physically were at any given time or how many hours they work or this, that, or the other. And it’s a really big shift. I think we saw it over the course of our time at Google and watched kind of a big company who is supposedly getting it right a lot, constantly kind of rethinking that piece because it’s really, really hard. It’s hard to leave bias out of it. And I think this is where, especially the smaller you are, the more you can get it right because you can build it into your culture. You can have that be what sets your culture apart and it’s fulfilling for everybody. I think it allows people to grow because their work is what’s being evaluated and their opportunity to grow their skillset, to move up the ladder versus feeling vulnerable as a human because they might have a different life circumstance that requires a different kind of way of work. And so it almost, the arrangement, you know, kind of to your point, Emily, almost shouldn’t matter. It should be really tied to kind of what the scope of the headcount is and what the company is trying to do and what kinds of work needs to get done to make that company thrive. And if you can really kind of make that all kind of threaded together, that’s where that kind of that value equation that I was talking about at the very beginning becomes this like really beautiful, this beautiful thing.
Emily
Yeah. Thank you. I was thinking that there probably are people that are part of today’s call that just still feel like, I just don’t know quite how to like get started. Like, you know, and I know you talked about just starting the conversation and things like that. But if you could give, you know, if I’m an HR leader at a smaller company and I could walk away and these are like, you know, some practical things that I could do today, tomorrow, like what would some of those advice pieces be?
Sara
Yeah. Top level. If you’re early in your company growth, like build this in early, just start it from day one and it never becomes something that you have to do later. So I would just, I always like to mention that because it’s something that really can be done early on. And then really practical steps. Do you know your workforce? Like understand them. That’s a really easy project or, and if it’s not, it really should be who is working for you and what do they care about? Do you have a really good updated analysis of, you know, the demographics of your company and the psychographics? Who’s over underrepresented in certain segments? Like, do you have at risk segments? Like that will start to become clear and it will start to really give you a good idea of what you might need to do. So that’s, that’s a really low bar. It doesn’t, shouldn’t take a lot of extra cost or effort to understand your workforce. It’s good for all things. You need to know about it for your benefits. You need to, you need for your planning, for your economic life cycle of your company. Understand your current workforce. Next, give your employees a voice. Like, do you have a town hall? Do you have a weekly meeting? It probably depends on the size of your company, but where is your employee voice in all of that? And is it safe? Is it a safe space? Whether it’s surveys, whether it’s town halls, whether you’ve created, you’re bigger and you have like really distinct affinity groups, whatever your mechanism is, make sure you have several. And they, they create an opportunity for all types of employees to contribute and make sure it’s a really safe, safe space for those employees. And then I think maybe two more. If you’ve never done this, maybe define a flexibility, a flexibility purpose for your company. Or if you’ve been tinkering with this, maybe you’re refining it. Hopefully you’re refining it, some of you. And it’s, it’s defining, it’s kind of figuring out what that business purpose is that you’re not just checking a box, right? You’re, you’re actually aligning this with your organization’s overall purpose. So that it’s beneficial, again, that value equation for everybody involved. Another kind of really practical step is kind of identifying stakeholders and ensuring there’s some sort of sponsorship or ownership. So in some companies, probably the smaller ones, HR benefits, like it should kind of sit all right there at the epicenter of a kind of your culture. At a much larger company, there might be a separate kind of people programs that’s working on these types of things. But make sure it lives somewhere. It has a tendency to be a hot potato and that, that means that it, it doesn’t ever stick or go anywhere. And so really practically like have an advocate and have an owner and put stakeholders and make it matter for them too. Like, so that it’s worth it for them to kind of get, get a little sticky with it. And then ensure that they have the right policies and guidelines. So that you’re not building this one, you’re putting all this effort into like a one -off scenario, but you’re thinking about all of these steps as part of building something foundational and structural for your culture.
Shannon
Yeah. And I would, I would just add, you know, those are, those are great initial steps when you’re ready to take the next step. It doesn’t have to be, you know, all in dive in headfirst kind of thing. I mean, we’re really strong advocates of testing. We spent a lot of time running pilots in our career at Google. And so the idea of dipping a toe in and doing some testing, running a couple of small pilots is a really great way to learn. It’s, it’s super low risk, low cost, low fidelity. And it gives you some insight before you decide to take that bigger step with a, with an investment and you know, a plan to move forward. And so just to, you know, thinking through a couple of examples, we touched on some of these at -risk segments. You know, maybe you establish a pickup program for one of these groups of people, part of the population, it might be a parental leave return so that you give, you know, folks coming off of parental leave, you know, either the opportunity to, to job share for X number of time as a, an opportunity to phase back in and whether that’s successful and can be carried on, who knows you’d have to evaluate that or just part -time as well as an option. Test a few pilots, identify, you know, identify a couple of teams or parts of the organization where that you feel like there is an opportunity. People are either unhappy or there’s, there’s a nutrition situation and test a couple things. Test the 32 hour week, test a couple of job shares. This will give you a sense of if you do want to move forward, where these things could be sick, most successful.
Emily
Yeah. Those are great. Thank you. I’ll be one last one from me. I think that we all probably have ideas about like what the risk factors are. If this is not something that you embrace, so there’s, you know, attrition and retention challenges, et cetera, but are there other things that you’ve learned, you know, through your own experience or research? Like if we don’t embrace this, like this, this is what happens.
Shannon
Yeah. I mean, I think we’ve, we’ve, we’ve touched on a lot of them, but you know, again, just to recap that the attrition is huge because when people leave, you have to invest more time and money in talent and training programs. Also, you’re running the risk of creating a workforce that’s burned out and unhappy. We touched on the whole quiet quitting concept, but this is, this is bad for culture and it’s bad for productivity. There’ve been a ton of studies out there, more and more that talk about how flexible employees are happier, they’re healthier, they sleep better, and they’re more productive and they’re more likely to stick around. Another element is the lack of diversity in your work population. I think that today there are nearly 2 million fewer women in the workplace than there were at the beginning of the pandemic. And you know, that, that’s a problem. That should be a problem for companies out there. They should, they should want to risk that. And by not, by punting any, you know, acknowledgement or work on flexibility, they’re basically saying that they don’t care about a giant population. And then I think it’s, we’re remiss if we don’t talk about this next generation, right? This is a generation of talent who has absolutely denounced the hustle culture. They refuse to put all their eggs in one basket. You know, they’re out there making money and doing side hustles and, and, and spending time with passion projects. And so your ability to attract that huge generation of upcoming talent is going to be dependent on, on whether you get on board with inclusivity and flexibility. And then all of the things that we’ve talked about contributes to just general erosion of culture, which, which again is a risk. And it doesn’t just affect you internally, but it can tarnish your brand reputation, your, your customers, partnerships, all sorts of things. So those are just a handful of risks.
Emily
Sara, Shannon, any final thoughts or words of wisdom from either of you? Thank you so much for spending some time and sharing with all of us.
Sara
I would say do something. Everything is hard. Change is hard. And everyone is in a place these days, I feel like where they don’t have a little bit extra. But I would say in our experience, most people that are looking for an alternate arrangement, it’s because they want to be there. They want to figure out a way to continue thriving at work. And if you can provide an infrastructure to partner with them to do that, it’s a win -win all the way around and be willing to have the conversation, be willing to explore, just take some step. And there’s probably a lot of people that want to help. And I think that there’s, that’s kind of good bang for your buck too, is just, is just taking a step. And then it might not feel so hard because we, we, we, we’ve seen it.
Sarah
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