Two and a half years ago, Sheela Subramanian was a mother of two young children and worked a traditional nine-to-five office job, five days a week. When the pandemic hit, she noticed that her office, as well as most organizations around the world, simply did the “lift and shift.”
 
“We lifted office space norms and shifted them into people's living rooms,” she said. “And we realized quickly that it wasn't working.”
 
Subramanian is the co-founder of Future Forum, a consortium reimagining workplace flexibility, inclusivity, and connection. She is also the co-author of How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives, released in May 2022. In December she spoke with moderator Katie Johnston, a reporter for the Boston Globe, in a fireside chat entitled, “Flexible Work and the Future Workplace.” The conversation kicked off a From Day One virtual conference on “The Future of Jobs: Trends Shaping How We Work in 2023 and Beyond.”
 
“So much of the way that we work is focused on trust, it's focused on transparency,” said Subramanian. “It's also focused on giving people choice–not just in where they work, but when they work, and ultimately how they work.”
 
When Subramanian and her team began studying how work was changing in 2020, they also discovered that flexibility played a huge role in terms of creating greater belonging, especially for historically discriminated groups, including women and employees of color.
 
“We wanted to better understand how managers could build cultures of inclusion, and rebuild work to work for all groups of people, rather than the select view that built these traditional norms decades ago,” she said. “How can technology play a role? But also how can in-person gatherings play a role for people as they thought about building culture, camaraderie, and action across an organization?”
 
Flexibility is a core expectation among employees, according to Future Forum research. It ranks second, only behind compensation and benefits when it comes to determining job satisfaction. While 58% of workers are open to looking for a new job in the next year, that number increases to 70% if they're not happy with their current levels of flexibility.

“The conversation prior to the pandemic was, how’s my life going to fit into my work? Work was the nucleus of people's identity,” said Subramanian. “And then, as people had more flexibility, they're able to get things done and live their lives, the conversation has shifted to, how is my work going to fit into my broader existence?”
 
While employees want more choice in how they work, they also want to be measured on the outcomes that are delivered instead of outdated in-office metrics prone to “proximity bias.” Managers will require additional training in order to shift from gatekeepers to empathetic coaches, said Subramanian.
 
“So much of traditional performance management has been based on how many days or how many hours is this person spending in the office or this person is responding to my email at midnight, or responding to my message within seconds–they must be a hard worker. But activity is not necessarily a measure for performance.”
 
Subramanian encourages leaders to evaluate their employees on the impact that they're producing for the organization rather than the way they're sacrificing their health or their lives in order to show that they’re good employees. Speaking out against activity monitoring, she advocates for the “boom loop” rather than “doom loop” approach.
 
“The doom loop is measuring keystrokes, or measuring when someone is clocking in and logging off,” she said. “Whereas the boom loop is saying, ‘This is what our team is held accountable for, this is what you are responsible for. Now I'm gonna give you the resources, the budget in order to help you get there and the guidance that you need, but figure out how to get there on your own.’”
 
It's important for leaders to set behavioral guardrails as well as the overall principles of how they want their organizations to work. Then leaders need to get out of the way and empower managers to set team-level agreements.
 
“Team-level agreements go a long way in terms of fostering psychological safety and trust amongst the team,” she said.
 
Two-thirds of executives are not including their employees as they think about the future of work planning, according to Future Forum data. And applying a one-size-fits-all model across disparate organizaitions, and teams within organizations, is actually burning people out. Collaboration, experimentation, and a fundamental shift in performance metrics can aid leaders in creating a culture of connection, increasing satisfaction and productivity, by offering their workers more of what they want.  
 
“How can we help people live fuller richer lives,” said Subramanian, “both as employees as well as human beings?”
 
Samantha Campos is a freelance journalist who’s written for regional publications in Hawaii and California, with forays into medical cannabis and food justice nonprofits. She currently resides in Oakland, California.