‘Not Everything Has To Be A Meeting’
Twitter was presciently early to the hybrid work conversation. In 2018, the social media company began allowing employees to work from home as they saw fit.
When Covid-19 hit and work-from-home became universal, Twitter made “that pivot pretty seamlessly because we had a lot of the structures and practices in place,” says Jennifer Christie, Twitter’s CHRO.
In May 2020, Twitter made this employee-choice hybrid work policy permanent.
The decision was driven primarily by two imperatives: to retain existing talent and to cast a wider, more inclusive net for new talent. “Our employees were asking for more flexibility,” Christie says. “We also found ourselves very limited in terms of hiring by [restricting] ourselves to certain locations.”
For any organization, coordinating across just two or three time zones is hard enough.
Twitter’s leaders are now tasked with managing a truly global workforce based in 36 locations, from San Francisco to Singapore. To make it work, Christie says, management embraced what has come to be called an “async-first” policy: mandating asynchronous communication—as opposed to synchronous communication, where interlocutors are all present at the same time and in the same place, physical or virtual—whenever possible. In other words, “Not everything has to be a meeting,” as Christie puts it.
For those meetings that are deemed necessary, Christie says, “We put practices in place around ... setting equity related to time zones. Not everything should be set up in San Francisco’s time zone when you have a lot of people calling from different parts of the world.”
When it comes time to reopen its offices, Twitter estimates that nearly 75% of its people will work on-premises at least partially—but just 5% will do so full time.
And that’s just fine with Christie.
“It’s about flexibility,” she says. “All of our decisions were really very easy because [we’re] principled around what’s in the best interest of our people.”
Try not to micromanage how your people spend every hour of their day. Focus on what they’re delivering and not their schedule.”
A ‘Culture Of Listening’
With billions invested in many of the world’s most famous startups, executives at SoftBank Group International regularly interact with founders distributed around the globe. Even before Covid-19, they were no strangers to hybrid meetings: Requiring everyone to be in the same room is impractical when you’re talking across so many time zones.
To make the most of these hybrid meetings, SoftBank’s leaders actively built a culture that values and respects individual participation, says Francisco Sorrentino, SoftBank’s CHRO managing partner.
“SoftBank is the first time I’ve experienced an environment where people do not interrupt each other,” he says. “Whether it’s in the room or virtual engagements, people are very respectful of what others have to say.”
In this “culture of listening, [you] engage only when you feel the other person has already expressed what they had to say, and there’s really no search for airtime,” Sorrentino adds.
As hybrid meetings become even more common, Sorrentino is confident this culture will remain intact. “We are naturally inclined to recognize that people have very different ways of communicating,” he explains.
“We’re not looking for a particular style or pushing for a particular style,” he says. “We are not asking for people to be more vocal, for instance. This incentivizes those who are vocal, but it has the opposite effect on [participants] who aren’t as comfortable. It’s almost like saying, ‘You should be taller.’”
As one manifestation of the firm’s long-held values, Sorrentino says, this active attention to participant needs will become even more critical in a hybrid work world.
“It’s the concept of servant leadership, [where] you are there to support your team, not for your team to support you. We really believe and practice that at SoftBank.”
When you have a mixed environment, a hybrid environment, it forces you to be a bit more disciplined around the routine that you have in the meeting.”
‘Voice Your Opinion Fearlessly’
PepsiCo’s executives are no strangers to dispersed work environments. With some 400 locations across North America, the beverage company has always had a “scattered” workforce, says CHRO Andrea Ferrara. Hybrid was in some ways “already built in.”
The move to work-from-home during the pandemic was seen as an opportunity for PepsiCo to increase employee satisfaction by respecting individual needs.
“In the last 18 months, we saw that, when you give people flexibility, your engagement goes up,” she explains. What might flexibility mean in practice? Not penalizing employees who need to pick up their kids at school—or maybe even scheduling meetings to take into account these employees’ important routines.
“It doesn’t hurt our business operations one bit when people have this flexibility,” Ferrara says.
PepsiCo’s management, too, has made the most of remote work. “We've had leaders do virtual cooking and virtual happy hours and all the fun things they would have never done but for this hybrid way of working.”
As the company’s “Work that Works” initiative rolls out to its offices around the world, effectively putting hybrid work decisions in the hands of team leaders, Ferrara admits there may be a learning curve when it comes to ensuring participant equity in meetings. But, she adds, PepsiCo’s guiding principles will help ease this transition.
“One of the values that [our] managers really espouse is, ‘Voice your opinion fearlessly,’” she says. “We as leaders try to make sure this happens in every meeting. [It] gives everyone a license to speak up, whether you’re in-person or you’re on the phone.”
With PepsiCo’s leaders actively aware of equity’s importance, Ferrara is confident that all voices will continue to be heard.
When you can provide people with flexibility, it enables them to be both effective and efficient with their time.”
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