Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza 0:00
Welcome to our panelists. Before I get into asking all of you a bunch of questions about flexible working, I do want to take the time to get each of you to introduce yourselves and then very briefly describe your company’s policy on flexibility, whether you do hybrid there’s a mandated number of days in the office if you’re all in office, just so we can get a sense of the type of environment everybody is working in. So let’s start with Kelly and Aflac. Tell us more about what you do there and your work arrangement.
Kelli Henderson 0:37
Hello. Good afternoon, everybody. I’m Kelly Henderson, and I’m the Vice President of Total Rewards for Aflac, and that is our broad-based compensation teams, as well as employee benefits and employee wellness. For our work designations for employees that are within 50 miles of an Aflac office, and they are required to work a hybrid locate arrangement, which for us is a 60% a week in office arrangement. So we allow a little bit of flexibility at the team area to say what days of the week, but it is a 60% requirement.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza 1:15
Thanks, Kelly. Seema?
Seema Bhansali 1:18
Hi, thanks for having me on. Seema Bhansali. I am with Henry Schein. For those of you who don’t know who we are, we are a global distributor of healthcare supplies and solutions. We’re in 32 countries. We have about 25,000 team members across the globe, and our workforce is distributed. You know, we have folks on the front line in warehouses, picking and packing and doing the real tough work they’re in every day. We have some folks that are every day, and then we have team members who are sales team members who are in the car. And then we have hybrid workforce. So it depends on what your role is, but for us, hybrid is very different. Managers get to determine whether or not you’re hybrid, and it’s up to them and their line and how many days a week. We just require if you’re hybrid, that you’re in the office one day a week. So that’s how we determine, although we also have a 50 mile radius as a marker for whether or not you can, you know, get reimbursed for commuting. But that’s how we do hybrid at Henderson, thanks,
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza 2:19
Seema. Michael?
Michael Watson 2:23
Good afternoon. Everyone. Mike Watson, from Eightfold, I am the Senior Director of Customer Success. I was the very first customer success person hired at Eightfold because I’m a former customer. So the first 25 years of my career was all on the HR side. So been there and done that, and know what you’re going through as far as our setup, because we’re in the Bay Area, giving a mile distance, if I said, Hey, you’re within 50 miles, sometimes that could take you three hours in Bay Area traffic. So we’ve cut it down by how long it takes you to commute into the office. So if you are within an hour’s commute, we would ask that you be in the office couple days a week. If you’re within between an hour an hour and a half, we would ask for one day. And anything beyond that, we say, hey, come in as you’d like join the office. Please do. But anything beyond that, we’d say, hey, save the windshield time. Be more productive at home. Get a little bit more work life balance back, and
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza 3:21
see what we can do.
TJ Mercer 3:25
Thanks. Michael TJ, good afternoon. My name is TJ Mercer. I’m the director of EDI business partner for Operations Group here at AbbVie. So AbbVie is a biopharmaceutical company. We have about 55,000 global employees. Operations group makes up about 15,000 of those. And so we have a multitude of different work environments. So we do have individuals at work, remotely, full time. We have some of their hybrid. Myself in my hybrid, I’m in my home office as my wife’s home office today. But we also we have plants and operations. And so that requires, you know, individuals, to be there and hands on and what we’re producing. And so the primary thing is to make sure that the work is getting done. But then also, right behind that, I’ll consider 1b is to make sure that our employees are enjoying a great work life balance and being able to take advantage of what remote work and other entities can offer. But pleasure to be here today. Happy to have all of you. I’m going to come right back to TJ to get started. Let’s begin with this. In your view, what are the pros and cons of hybrid work and some of the new types of flexibility we’ve seen since 2020?
Wow. Okay, easy question to start. There’s tons of pros and cons. I’ll start from from my lens specifically. So most of my background has been in talent acquisition, talent management, other HR functions along that. Right now I serve in a diversity role, but from a talent standpoint, it’s really stressed and transformed the way in which we’re able to go and adapt and. Find talent, right? And so I grew up in St Louis. I left St Louis after I graduated for a few different reasons, mostly because of the I will call it, the recession was 2009 and I came to Chicago because there was just more opportunities, right? I felt like there was a better opportunity to kind of compete and do that. When you think about when remote work really, really kind of took off, obviously, during, like, the covid period. One of the great pros is that there’s a lot of regional talent that went back to a lot of these, like Midwest cities, right? So if you grew up in, you know, a St Louis, you wanted to be near family. If you grew up in, you know, Lexington, or you grew up in, you know, Charlotte, these places that don’t maybe have some of the same headquarters as you do in, say, like in Chicago or Atlanta or San Francisco, there’s opportunities for you. You can still be with the premier company. You can still apply for those positions. You can still kind of go from there. I will say, one of the cons to that, however, is, I’ve, you know, worked at organization for two and a half years and never got to see anybody out of the purple box or the blue zoom box, or, you know, things, as far as that goes. And you know, one of the things I loved about being in the office was that when a meeting start, it wasn’t, it wasn’t straight to the meeting. So if I was to have a scheduled meeting for a half an hour with Michael. We’re probably going to jump in. We’re going to get right to it right because that’s our scheduled time to do that. It’s limited opportunities where I stopped by and I asked Michael, how was this weekend? You know, we get to know each other. I know his his kids are playing soccer, or this is happening, or that’s happening, like some of that small talk just doesn’t really happen as organically or naturally. And I think that people, they do miss that from time to time, but again, I think the pros and cons historically have kind of balanced themselves out, but those are some that come kind of like top of mind for me.
Seema Bhansali 6:54
Sure.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza 6:57
Anyone else, while TJ was speaking, think of anything he said, resonate with you? Any other pros and cons that came to mind as he was speaking? Seema?
Seema Bhansali 7:07
I think everything you said is people are feeling, I think the other one of the pros, certainly from a diversity, inclusion lens, a lot of folks have needs at home that they need to be there. So it’s a real pro on that end, but I would say, I don’t know if I’d call it a con. I think there’s a way around it, but I think one of the bigger issues is, how do you keep connected? I mean, we’re here more and more around wellness that relationships are the key to being healthy. They’re a really important part of it. And Surgeon General’s come out with that. So I think one of the cons is you don’t actually get to be as as TJ said already, that he hasn’t seen anybody outside box. You don’t really get to see people that often. And what does that do for your wellness in terms of relationships and relationship building? I think that is one of the balance issues that we have to still work out. Sure.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza 8:04
What recommendations do you have then Seema for how HR can help facilitate relationship building, especially since you know you’re remote yourself, how do you get people connected? How do you encourage people to do that on a regular basis? And can it be replicated the type of thing that happens in the office?
Seema Bhansali 8:24
Yeah, so just a caveat that I work out outside of HR in the Office of the CEO, but I will say broadly, for anybody in the people field, that you know, the big question is, how do we maintain our culture? How do we maintain our culture, and how do we come together as people? And I think you have to be really intentional about it. So number one, we are really intentional about living our values, and we don’t just talk about them in everything that we do. We tag our values on the screen. We put our values into action so people can see how we live, our values and what they are. Because when we do that, the new team members coming on start to understand who we are and how we live, and that’s really important. So they understand how we interact with each other. They understand what we put as important for us, our values fall under three pillars, community, caring and career. It’s very simple for folks understand. And then we bring together, either virtually or in person, for something we do called connection days. And actually, I’m in the office today because we just did a connection day today in this afternoon where we were building kits for our team members who were impacted by the recent storms in southeast. So we got folks together. We build care kits for them that we’ll be sending out. And we try to do these across the globe in different ways, you know, culturally relevant ways, with some frequency. So people have the opportunity to come in and come together and be together. But for those folks who are remote and away. We also engage people remotely. We have a Games platform called the Henry Schein games, where everybody’s assigned to a team, Team Esther and team Henry. They’re the founders of Henry Schein, and they compete all throughout the year for different things. And so they’re connected remotely. Through that, they can talk to each other, they can see who’s winning. You know, there’s lots of different ways. So we try to be really intentional about how are we setting the culture? What do we want people to experience? And then, how are we making sure it’s good for folks who are in person, folks who are hybrid and folks who are fully remote. You need to have an integrated strategy for that.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza 10:40
Kelly, when you introduced yourself and talked about a flex policy on in-office work, you described a 60% policy. So when workers report to the office, what are expectations about how they spend their time? Is it any different than working remotely? How does that work?
Kelli Henderson 10:59
Yeah, and we really try to work with our employees to understand how to use their time when they’re in the office versus at home. And we want to set it up where when you’re in office or having in person meetings, we’re getting together to talk and have those conversations, like TJ mentioned how important some of those conversations are. So what we don’t want to have happen is you drive an hour to the office, you sit in your office with the door closed on Zoom calls all day, right? So we’ve got to be really intentional, and we’re asking our leaders to make sure that they’re they’re designing events and activities where they’re together. You know, it’s, it’s a balance, though, because you want to give people flexibility and freedom to schedule their weeks, right? But what I try to say is at least one day a week, everybody on a team needs to be in the office, and that’s the day that you have your team meetings, right? So there’s things that you have to be really purposeful about. It does take a little bit more time, a little bit more coordination organization, but we have seen the benefits from trying to do it that way.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza 12:02
Have you had any pushback on folks wanting to come into the office? And if so, how do you respond to that?
Kelli Henderson 12:10
Oh, yes, you know, I think when we all came back out of covid, when everybody was working remote, we, you know, we just, we announced it last March that we were going to have the 60% return the office. Our executive team really saw the importance of bringing people together, having people work together, and we got a ton of pushback from our employees, because they’re like, we have been doing our job successfully for years, 100% remote. So you’re telling me I’m not doing my job well. So we had, we had to have a lot of conversations around just what we talked about, the importance of coming together to be able to collaborate. So, you know, we, when we first did it, there was a little bit of concern that we may have people leave the organization because they wanted to maintain a full blue boat role. So we even went through our exit interviews and added a reason for being wanting to stay fully remote. And thankfully, we really did not lose very many people. It was under 10 employees that left because they wanted to be remote. So I think as much as you hear griping and complaining, we work really hard to show the importance of being the office that people understand.
Michael Watson 13:20
Yeah, Michael, yeah. Add to that real quick. I think one thing that you can do is, is, if there’s any type of stats that you have as an organization, that you can say, hey, here was our production pre covid, and here’s our production post covid. And God bless all of you, you’ve been working really hard, but we do see this a 15% decline since we’ve all moved remote, and we’re trying to cut down on that delta. I think if you use some stats instead of just saying, Well, hey, the manager just wants to see you in the office, like that doesn’t work anymore, right? I mean, think about this. If there’s one thing that hasn’t changed too much, it’s work, right? 1000s of years, show up, do a job, go home, while everything else around us has changed, the pace of technology, innovation, everything has changed, but the work structure has stayed the same. So I do think that it’s high time for us to revisit that, and I think that it just can’t be about well, this is the way it used to be, and I’d love to see you now, and I’m the boss, and you should do that like to me, that’s not the type of organization that I’d want to work in or right? But if the organization came in and said, Mike, love the work you’re doing, would love to see if it’s able for you to come back in, right? Let’s have individual conversations. Let’s understand everyone’s circumstances, like, Hey, I got a mom that’s got Alzheimer’s right now, and is, you know, on the tail end of that. And you know, guys, yeah, I’m 15 minutes from the office, but I’m helping taking care of mom. And once this is taken care of itself, then we’ll, we’ll talk about how often you’ll see me, right? I mean, it’s having an individual conversation like that that you just can’t have a blanket policy. So I’ll stop there.
Kelli Henderson 15:06
But I think everything that everyone has said here so far has been spot on, yeah, Mike, and we struggled with that too. Just from what Stats Can we show? You know, we’re a people culture. We do a lot, you know, it’s a lot about relationships. It’s hard to kind of tie it back to actual production. And so that’s what we had to rely on, something to say, Okay, this is the reason. And not just the manager. Say, Hey, you know, come in so we can have meetings. I see it all the time, like, out you know, there’s cubes out here. When you see them all standing up and talking and working through solution, and I’ll walk out there say, yeah, you couldn’t do this when you were at home, could you and yeah, wait for the little box to pop up, typing, and then it disappears. I’m like, Where’d you go? You have my answer right?
Michael Watson 15:41
So exactly, totally get it right. And one last thing on that, look, if the stats show that you’re doing more by being remote, also share that as well, and say, folks, from a productive productivity standpoint, we’re knocking it out of the park. What I’m concerned about is people’s mental health being locked up. I mean, I live in a beautiful place. I’m on two acres here. I’m on a farm. It’s my dream place. But if I don’t get out of here when work is over, out into the real world, it’s like sitting in a place with bars. It doesn’t matter, right? We have to have those interactions as humans to really fulfill everything we need in life.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza 16:30
PJ, what would you add?
TJ Mercer 16:33
No, I think everything. I mean, one of the things we talked about like productivity, which is like another pro, right? So, like, when you think about the hybrid model you see, you know, you see people standing up, and they’re all gathering, they’re all talking, right? We also have been in those environments where, like that person that is always kind of buzzing around the office that looks super, super busy, right? But their numbers are exact same as the person that does come in and sit at their desks, right? And so when we get into fourth quarter. Now we do interview type stuff, right? We’re starting to see more transparently, like, who’s actually doing what with some of those numbers, right? And so I’ve seen, you know, retention go down at several companies I’ve consulted with, because people are at the end of the year and upset because you know, Joe, whoever, or Samantha, whoever you know, got a promotion over them and their numbers the exact same, and the manager couldn’t articulate why this person got that right. And so now those intangibles and those different kind of things are really starting to show up. And specifically when you start talking about, you know, biases and different things within it, like we’ve seen a huge increase in women promotions. Obviously our underserved communities, we’re seeing those as well too. And so it’s one of those type of things, but I’ll say one of the points that Michael said is so key. Like, I have a four and a half and two and a half year old, and I’m due to AbbVie, but I was very, very transparent and upfront during my interview process, like, things I’m not willing to miss, right? So like, I love picking my kids up from school like that energizes me for what I have to do in the evening, right? The hug that I get in the morning before I go off to work, like that gives me what I need to do, what I want to do, right? And so it’s not to say that I get to do it every day, all day, but if you’re telling me I’m just going to miss all his soccer games because our office is not 15 minutes away, maybe it’s 40 minutes away, and I have to be in there every single day, like, that’s like a non negotiable for me, right? And I know that my parents sacrificed different things as I was growing up, because work was work, and, you know, that was kind of what was a priest. Like, you sacrifice. You do what you need to you know, search and sing. But I would say it’s not really me, like, I’ve gone on like, a field trip, and the teacher pointed out, and she was just like this, the the craziest ratio of like dads to moms that I’ve seen, right? Like, which I think is awesome, right? Like, I love being a dad, and my friends love being dads, and the studies and the information that’s out there shows how much more active maybe, you know, fathers have been over this last, like, generation. And it’s not to say that moms are not being as active. It’s great seeing both, like it’s me and my my wife, or me, or you see, you know, partners, and they’re together, and they’re sharing with their kids, and they’re doing that, and you’re gonna, I think, see and hear a lot less of, well, mom couldn’t make these because she was in this profession and she was doing this, or, like, Dad couldn’t there because he was in this profession doing that. You’re seeing everybody at all times. And I think it just, I think it does increase productivity. And I think it definitely, you know, just puts people in a different mindset to really want to go out and do the best for their organization, because the company’s taking care of them as well. Yeah.
Michael Watson 19:50
TJ, if I can add to that, right? I think after we all went through a pandemic, and we saw how fleeting life can be, right, and all of a sudden we know that. It, and I’m going to be a little bit morbid here for a second, and I apologize if I if something was happening to me tomorrow, yes, Eightfold would mourn. Within two weeks, they’d have a new position open, and they’d be trying to backfill me, and they’d be moving forward. And right? My family is going to think about me and mourn me forever, right? And so when we have to make decisions like that, right? We’re now putting it through this lens of watching everything being taken away from us and covid, losing people at the drop of a hat all of a sudden, to come back and realize that, yeah, it works great. They’re giving me a paycheck and they care about me, but they don’t care about me more than these people that I don’t see more than work, right? I see these people that I love and I care for two days a week, and I see these people that I’m great friends with, and I make my career with five days a week, right? So I think just going through that experience of a global pandemic made people really kind of shift and say, You know what? It’s really about family for me, and if I have to make a sacrifice, if I have to take less, people are willing to do, that is what I’m seeing.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza 21:05
I want to steer us back to performance and productivity, which you mentioned, can be measured, of course. So do you have recommendations for tracking and measuring performance in a remote or a hybrid workforce that doesn’t approach an encroach on privacy or erode the trust of your workforce that you’re measuring, because it can seem like I’ve been doing my work just fine. Why are you? Why are you watching me? There have been many stories over the last couple years about different types of tracking software that is a huge turnoff for a lot of employees, who can just feel totally distrusted. TJ, I think this is something that you you’ve looked at measuring performance. Is that right? And
TJ Mercer 21:48
I mean, we see those like, when we’re out and we’re having conversations, whether it be, you know, at my current organization, or if you’re, you know, I’m consulting someplace else, and you’re talking about it right now, like, Yes, I’m at home. If I were to pin the camera. You know, this way, there’s a TV that’s hanging on the wall. It’s almost three o’clock central time. It’s also fantasy football season. I know at three o’clock ESPN is going to, you know, I may want tips for the waiver wire, right? Can that be on in the background and I still be productive and do what I need to do? Yeah, essentially. But if we’re doing one of the things where you’re meeting with clients and you’re doing type of stuff we talk about the importance of, like, being on camera, or, you know, just doing other stuff too. Like, I love in teams, they have, like, avatars. I think it’s cool to kind of break it up throughout the day, because sometimes it’s just like a fun thing to do out there. But we all have also seen that person that’s just never on camera. And so then it’s like, are you present within the conversation and meeting right when we’re talking about what you’re willing and what you’re bringing to that meeting set? And so I think Kelly talked about the people standing up and problem solving. If you’re not in the arena, your voice isn’t in the arena. And we’ve spent years since the call of action from a diversity standpoint, talking about not just diversity and what this diverse panel looks like, but then the thoughts and experience that all of us bring, right? If Michael isn’t present within this conversation, then his thoughts, ideas and what he brings to the team isn’t there, right? And so sometimes being on camera and having those type of policies, that really does go a long way, because you’re forced to be present within it, right? If I just cut it off, and it’s just a handsome photo of me, you know, sitting there, like, you don’t know if I’m truly engaged and really offering what I could from a full capacity kind of standpoint. And so those are kind of where we’re measuring and looking at stuff. Now we’re not saying like, Hey, you got to be here to do this, but we are saying you need to be, you know, present and accounted for. And we’re saying it in a way that we’re not saying to monitor you. We’re saying it to maximize what it is that you bring to this team. You’re so valuable, your skills are so important, that we need you engaged, and this is how we want and this is how other people want you to be engaged with them.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza 24:06
I want to come to you next something that is beneficial to both employees and companies, which what we’re talking about today is career development. Companies need their employees to grow, and employees want their careers to grow. They want to gain new skills. How do you do that when you have a distributed workforce? And I hope you could also address how this is done for really young workers. Our youngest generation in the workforce today graduated during the pandemic and when folks were working remotely, and so they don’t have the in office experience that older generations do. How do you develop that talent?
Seema Bhansali 24:44
Yeah, I think it’s such a good question, because for me, it is the one issue area that I think about daily, which is, how do early career team members really get some of the unwritten skills the. Written rules of the workplace, right? I mean things that you learn just by being together in person. But here’s what I really realized as I’m thinking about this, you have to redesign because if we think about, how can I replicate what I had in the workplace? Now it’s not going to work. We’re in a new it’s a new time. We should continue to evolve. This is about career evolution. And so one of the things that we are looking to do is, okay, first of all, let’s level set. Does everybody know the expectation on what skills we want you to have, what soft skills, what technical skills? Does everybody across the organization know what we expect? And do we expect the same thing for everybody? So that’s something that we are partnering on to drive throughout the organization. What are our core, core skill sets that we want? And then, as it relates to the early career team members, how do we get them, sort of mentored and guided from folks? We do encourage a lot of sponsorship in our organization as part of the diversity and inclusion educations I get to lead, that’s one of the things that we talk a lot about, is, how are you sponsoring folks if you’re senior leaders in the organization? What does that look like? We have a mentorship program where we encourage people to mentor. And as part of career development conversations, we ask managers make sure that your team is either mentoring if they want people leading experience, or is being mentored by someone if their early career, that’s going to be really key. You can do it remotely. And look, some of us need to be mentored in the remote environment. Other folks have it better. Maybe we’ve been in the career for a long time and we knew what to do in person, but it is important for us to understand how we’re doing it as a in a remote environment. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity to define and develop people if you are re looking at processes, relooking at language, re looking at how you develop team members in this environment, I think the mistake people make is they just try to use what worked and keep going. And that is not functional for today. It’s just not going to work.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza 27:07
You mentioned sponsorship? Could you sometimes sponsorship? More often sponsorship programs are more informal, where mentoring programs can be very formal. There’s matching going on. How do you do sponsorship?
Seema Bhansali 27:19
So we we don’t have a formal sponsorship program to your point. And honestly, we’ve talked to a lot of places where some folks really love their sponsorship program, and others it doesn’t work as well. What we do is try to talk to the team about why. First of all, what is sponsorship? Sponsorship is different than mentorship. People don’t always know that, but sponsorship is really taking somebody’s career sort of under your wing, having the conversations about them in rooms where they aren’t and don’t have access to so that’s really important, and then teaching our team. Why does this matter? You know, we talk about people who have sponsors, they feel that they work in a more equitable environment, they are more likely to move up to the next rung in the ladder. But all of these pieces are really important, and so we talked to the team about what does it mean to sponsor somebody? Can you just sponsor somebody? For one thing, let’s say I don’t know everything about that person. That’s why people are afraid to sponsor them. Like I know Seema is good at this, but she’s not, I don’t know anything about you know this piece of her. So what I give people the advice is, sponsor them for what you know, because you never know where that’s going to take them. If you know they’re really good at public speaking, sponsor them for that piece. Talk about them in rooms. Make sure they get an opportunity to present. Having those types of dialogs is really key, and it will help the early career, people who are coming in, our team members who are coming in, to grow and develop. So I think that’s, you know, for me, defining sponsorship and then telling people how they can work with it’s important,
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza 28:55
Kelly, because you have a lot more in office time with employees at Aflac. Do you feel that it’s easier for you compared to distributed workforce to develop that early career talent. Do you have any strategies when your environment is a little more fluid and flexible than five days in office?
Kelli Henderson 29:13
Yeah. I mean, I think it does definitely help for the early career that are in office and hybrid. We still have a remote population there that’s outside the 50 miles. And so I think that’s been a challenge too to Okay, we have some group that’s hybrid, some that’s on site, some that is remote. So how do you make sure you’re catering to all of them? And what we really focused on when we changed our workplace location configurations was to think about management training. And okay, as a manager, you’ve got to be able to understand how you lead people in all these different configurations and making sure you’re inclusive of everybody. You know, if you’re having a Zoom call and you’ve got people in the conference room, you know, we went as far as testing all of our conference rooms out because. Realized that it wasn’t great for those that were remote, you know, they could maybe see one person and they had trouble hearing so we really had to beef up the equipment and technology, and I think that’s important to do, that you’re going to have a mixture of on site and off site employees, so that everybody feels that they have the same seat at the table. But I do think it’s really important that to think about your managers and how they’re addressing it, because otherwise that’s your front line right there.
