group would get together for short discussions once everyone had weighed in. It worked better than expected, as did numerous adjustments to fundamental work habits and processes, like meetings, team building, measurements, and more (all of which we'll talk about in this book).
During that unprecedented time, companies were looking closely at the impact of what was happening, measuring not just productivity, but employee sentiment and engagement to see if business would simply fall off a cliff. But the opposite happened: these new, more flexible work practices were shown to actually increase productivity. According to an analysis by Goldman Sachs Group, productivity—defined as the measure of goods or services produced per hour by workers—rose 3.1% during the first year of the crisis.2
Within a few months, leaders at Slack had already begun talking about permanently applying some of the changes that had taken place and lessons that had been learned. “It was just very compelling evidence,” Butterfield explains. “It was an accident of history that we got pushed into this, but there's been a benefit to forcing this change because there otherwise would have been no way to convince anyone that it would work. I can't imagine how we ever would have come to believe this empirical fact that we could work so well with everyone working flexibly unless it actually happened.”
The evidence was convincing enough that Slack's leaders decided to change course. “At some point it felt like we had been operating this way for long enough that we could be confident we would continue to be able to operate this way in the future,” Henderson says. In 2020, Slack announced their intention to move forward, not try to go back to how things had once been, by introducing their new flexible work strategy. They opened up hiring within the US and allowed people to keep their jobs if they moved. They began developing tools and methods for people to connect and collaborate from wherever they were and whenever worked best for them and their team. Once they started down this path, it would be hard to go back, but Butterfield's confidence showed in his own choices: He realized he, too, could move away from the Bay Area he had once gravitated to and go somewhere else, which he did when he moved to Colorado. “I realized I can just go,” he says, “and it's not really going to make any difference to my ability to lead or do my work.”
It's been more than a transition for the company, it's been a transformation that's had a wide-ranging impact, one that we'll continue to talk about through the course of this book. But just in terms of the distribution of talent, by the end of 2021, only 36% of Slack's engineering team was located in San Francisco and the number of team members working remotely on a permanent basis grew from just 2% pre-pandemic to nearly 50%.
One of the main reasons Slack decided to make the fundamental shift to a more flexible way of working is the impact it has on recruiting and retaining employees—the battle for talent—which is one of the biggest challenges that employers of knowledge workers face today. A 2021 joint survey of CEOs by Fortune and Deloitte found that 73% said that a labor shortage was their biggest external concern, and 57% said that attracting and recruiting talent is among their biggest challenges; followed by 51% who said retaining it is highest on their list.3
As you will see over the course of this book, flexible work offers a real opportunity, not just to attract and retain talent, but to transform the way people work and unlock their potential. One of the reasons that's possible is because so much of the way we had been working pre-pandemic was rooted in old norms and organizational models whose evolution largely stalled out decades ago even as technologies continued to change and workforces became more diverse. It just took a crisis to open our eyes to it and force us to do something about it. As Butterfield put it, “This is no time for retreat to the comfort of well-worn habits. We can't respond reflexively. This moment demands a thoughtful and intentional response and will reward creativity in attempts to build a better workplace and world.” And that's far more attainable than some leaders may realize.
Flexible work “has opened up to question every aspect of the work experience; it all needs to be unpacked. The corporate office was the yardstick. It was facetime, it was your calendar, but even before COVID, that wasn't sustainable. We need to think about the employee experience. This is an opportunity to get the most out of your people as a company.”
— Atif Rafiq, President, Commercial and Growth, MGM Resorts International4
Why the 9-to-5 Mentality Needs to Go
The old adage that “time is money” goes way back. It's typically credited to Benjamin Franklin, and it describes the long held belief that more time spent working equals more success. And that may have been true at one time, for some anyway. In the agricultural era, more time in the fields meant more crops getting planted or harvested (of course, that only worked for the owner of those crops or those being paid by the hour or bushel to work the fields, rather than slave labor or indentured servants). Even still, much agricultural work was unlikely to continue after sundown and it's often seasonal, unlike what took root during the Industrial Revolution when a large part of the labor force moved from field to factory to work on a set daily schedule.
As journalist Celeste Headlee, author of Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving, put it: “Before the industrial age, time was measured in days or seasons. However, when workers began punching in and out of work, our understanding of time changed, as did our enjoyment of our time off.” If people got time off at all, that is. Shifts in factories and mills could sometimes last for ten, twelve, even fourteen hours a day, leaving little time to do much else but eat, sleep, and get ready for another day of work (a notion that may not seem all that unfamiliar to many working today).
Labor movements grew in power in reaction to strenuous conditions, but it was more than just workers who saw the need for change. In the 1920s, automobile titan Henry Ford found business reasons to impose limits on working hours. As someone who kept a close eye on efficiency, he noticed that when employees worked too many hours, they made mistakes and productivity suffered. As a result, he imposed restrictions: eight-hour days, five days a week. He wasn't the first to do this, but he deserves credit for bringing attention to the concept. “We know from our experience in changing from six to five days and back again that we can get at least as great production in five days as we can in six,” he said. “Just as the eight-hour day opened our way to prosperity, so the five-day week will open our way to a still greater prosperity.”5 Still, it wasn't until the next decade, in 1938, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act limiting working hours for all workers.6
It was during that Industrial Era that the concept of work became so tied to measures of time and output, to the point where they were seemingly inseparable. Management practices followed suit, with leaders relying on things like punch cards and monitoring practices to make sure workers were putting in their time and churning out product.
Many of these ideas persisted even as work changed considerably. In the mid-twentieth century, many workers moved again, this time from the factory to the office, but, like the field or factory, there was still a central location where work had to get done—that's where the files and equipment (typewriters, switchboards, fax machines) that enabled work were located, as well as the people you needed to collaborate with to get your work done.
Even today, most of us still think of the workday as some variation of 9-to-5 and the workweek as Monday through Friday. Bosses often expect to see their employees in the office at a certain hour and take note of when they leave (pre-pandemic, at least). This has largely remained true even though, thanks to a slew of new technological tools, the kind of knowledge work that drives much of today's economy doesn't need to be done from anywhere in particular, or during any particular hours. Many of us no longer have to show up in the field where the crops are in order to do our work, or in the factory to assemble widgets, or in an office to connect with colleagues and clients.
