Joe Fuller: Have well-intended pandemic accommodations limited employers’ long-term post-Covid options with workers? And do uncertain times call for a different approach to leadership?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor and nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. My guest today is Jacob Morgan, author, consultant, and longtime observer of future of work trends. Jacob also hosts the Great Leadership podcast, which I’ve had the pleasure of appearing on. We’ll talk about how business leaders are handling return-to-office initiatives and why their views on hybrid work often diverge from academic research on the topic. We’ll also talk about C-suite responses to AI and skills-based hiring and how employee wellness programs often miss their intended mark. We’ll also discuss Jacob’s latest book, Leading with Vulnerability. In it, he argues that leadership models resiliency by admitting shortcomings and demonstrating constructive responses. Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast, Jacob.

Jacob Morgan: Thank you for having me.

Fuller: You’ve been following the future of work of long as anybody. Tell me a little bit about how you think things have changed over time since you first started looking into this issue.

Morgan: I first became interested in this because I had really bad jobs working for other people. And at the time, I became really interested in this idea of how do we create a place where employees want to show up to work each day. We were just talking about these internal collaboration tools, like Jive and Yammer and Salesforce Chatter. Social media was still picking up. We were talking more about culture. And I think today we’re living and working in a very, very different world. I think a lot of people argue there’s a lot of geopolitical uncertainty. The pace of change, although we always talk about it being increasing and exponential, it feels like it’s never been faster than it is now. We’re completely changing the way that we think about leadership. We see what’s going on with wars and protests on campus. We see what’s going on with the battle of hybrid work and getting employees back to the office.

Fuller: Your latest book is called Leading With Vulnerability. What’s the premise, and how does it reflect this evolution that you were just describing for me?

Morgan: If we think about what vulnerability actually means, it’s this idea of exposing a gap that you have—a gap in competence, in emotion, in intelligence, in capability, whatever it is. And in your personal life, being able to do that, there’s value in it because it helps create connection and relationships and build trust. But at work, you have a very different dynamic. So at work, you have a boss, you have leaders, you have customers, projects, deadlines, you’re being paid a salary. So if you just show up to work every day talking about the gaps that you have, nobody’s going to look at you and just say, “Gee, thank you for doing that.” They’re going to want to know what you’re trying to do to solve the problem. So leading with vulnerability is this idea of not just exposing a gap that you have, but demonstrating what you’re trying to do to close the gap. This, I think, is one very critical and important aspect when we think about the future of work, because over the past few years—during the pandemic and post-pandemic—I feel like we’ve over-indexed a lot on the vulnerability piece. And now, more and more, when I talk to CHROs, what they’re telling me is that they want to get back to the work side of things, the competence piece, the confidence piece, more of the traditional aspects of work. It’s not that the vulnerability and the emotional stuff is not important. It is. But it has to be combined with the competence and with the leadership. In 2024, 2025, and going forward, we’re going to see more of that coming back together.

Fuller: It’s summer, June 2024, when we’re speaking on this recording. We’re now after that first half-life of returning to office and understanding what new working relationships are going to unfold. What are the challenges you’ve seen unfold in that? And, specifically, this apparent shift in what employees expect of work and expect from their employer that seems to be pretty vexing for senior management and showing up in all sorts of media reports about CEOs kind of pounding the table—“Everyone’s got to come back!” And instead of 30 percent of people showing up next Monday, 40 percent show up, but a whole bunch don’t. What are you hearing? What are you seeing. And what do you think it means?

Morgan: Yeah, this is a very contentious topic, and I’d love to get your thoughts on this, too, and see what you’re seeing, too. The balance of power used to be very much in the hands of organizations. Then, during the pandemic, it swung wildly into the hands of employees. And what I’m seeing is a lot of leaders and organizations out there who are saying, “Okay, we need to get things back to an area that is a little bit more realistic.” And the hybrid work area is just the big battleground that we’re seeing around this. I think for a lot of organizations, when they think about flexible work, what that means is, you’re coming into the office five days, but you can pick and choose when you want to come in. If you’re stuck in traffic in the morning, come in at 10. If you have a soccer game, you need to go to or a doctor’s appointment, leave early. Occasionally, if you have meetings that you need to do at home, and you’re not feeling well, or whatever the case might be, you want to work from home, fine. That was the original concept of flexible work. I think the best piece of advice for every organization out there is, you have to do what makes sense and works for you. But if an organization, if leaders come forward and they say, “Hey, we believe that, in order for our business to be successful, we need you in the office. We’ve observed, as leaders, the collaboration struggles, innovation struggles. We’re not able to solve the types of problems that we were once able to solve. We’re lacking in the culture that we worked so hard to create. And, therefore, we want everybody back into the office.” It is the organization’s right, and it is the leader’s right to say that. And you, as an employee, of course, have a choice. You have a choice to either work for that organization or to not work for that organization and go get a job elsewhere. The big challenge that I think happened during the pandemic is that a lot of organizations were not clear on what kind of a culture they wanted to make. And so there are some organizations—like Northrop Grumman, like UPS—where even during the pandemic, they were very clear and they were saying, “Look, we know that we’re going through a pandemic, but we want all of you to know we are an in-office company, culture first, and during the pandemic, we’re going to have a lot more flexibility and you’ll be remote, but don’t forget that when we get through all of this, we want you back in the office. We’ll have that flexibility that we’ve always had, but we are an in-office company. That is how we’ve maintained our culture.” And the challenge that a lot of companies had is, during the pandemic, they just threw up their arms and they said, “We’re remote first. Do whatever you want. We don’t care. Everything is fine.” And then, post-pandemic, they’re like, “Wait a minute, that messaging doesn’t work for us anymore.” And now they’re trying to take a step back. They’re trying to make a pivot. And that’s where you’re seeing a lot of challenges.

Fuller: It does seem that companies overshot the mark a little bit, particularly in not making it apparent that the types of liberalities that they were taking in terms of working relationships were a function of the pandemic. They were not a function of a decision to restructure the business. But in terms of flexibility, it strikes me that kind of flies against the DNA of a lot of HR policy—that, in fact, HR functions have really tried to eliminate customization. They don’t like administrating uniqueness for individuals. They want to have rules. And if you’re outside of compliance, there’s no debate about it. You’re really talking about a shift to my mind, which suggests a level of personalization to customization we haven’t seen. And, in fact, I’d say outside of pretty exotic professional service-firm settings, big company HR functions just aren’t configured to do. Are you imagining a broad-based reengineering of the way that function governs work?

Morgan: Yes. So, definitely. If you were to think back before the pandemic, I think a lot of organizations did a fairly good job, especially HR companies, saying, “Hey, you have managers that you work with, you have leaders that you work with. You figure things out with them.” But now, I think we’re seeing this big battle over hybrid work. And, yes, it means that HR functions need to change. It also means organizations need to think differently about what makes sense for them. I just talked to the CHRO of TELUS. They have 30,000-plus employees. They’re all in on the flexible concept. They give employees the full power and accountability to shape their schedules, to kind of pick and choose the days where they want to come in. That works for them. Then you talk to a company, as I mentioned, like a Northrop Grumman, like a UPS, and they say, “Our corporate culture—what makes us who we are and how we’ve been able to grow and excel and succeed over time—is by having employees in the office.” I think the challenge is when you let employees dictate what the organization’s policies in a lot of situations are, even though the organization or the leaders believe they know what’s best for them. And I think that’s where you see a lot of pushback. And then you see what happens. Apple went through this, right? And so did a lot of companies. They said, “Hey, you know what? We want employees back into the office.” I think it was three days a week or two days a week. And then employees said, “How dare you tell us to get back to the office.” They were boycotting. They were staging walkouts. People were furious. Like, “How dare you tell us to get back to the office?” And then Apple said, “Okay, okay, fine, fine, fine. We changed our mind.” And I don’t think that is a very effective approach. We need strong leaders, strong leaders who are not scared to step up and to say, “This is what our company’s about. Here’s what we need in order to be successful. Here is what we value. This is what is okay and what is not okay. Yes, we want you back in the office. It’s okay if that’s not for you. You’re more than welcome to look for a job elsewhere, and we’ll help you find another job elsewhere.” But there’s another side to this. If you, as an individual, have aspirations of leadership, of growth, of becoming an executive inside of your organization, you actually have a very unique opportunity now to take advantage of this, because while a lot of your peers don’t want to show up to the office, you can show up to the office, which means you’re going to get more visibility in front of your peers and leaders. You’re going to get more one-on-one time. You’re going to get more coaching from your leaders.

Fuller: It’s funny how that issue you were just speaking to is often portrayed in the media, not as a way to get ahead, but somehow a problem in equity—that if somebody’s deciding they really want to make that commitment, is all in, is showing up, is spending more time with supervisors, is demonstrating commitment—that somehow that’s unfair to the worker who’s made an alternative choice. What’s your reaction to that positioning?

Morgan: Well, there was kind of a tough-love approach that a lot of people probably don’t want to hear, and that is: Why do we assume that everything always needs to be on a level playing field for people who are willing to go above and beyond, versus people who don’t. I mean, my dad, he worked for decades for the same organization. He used to wake up at five o’clock in the morning to commute two hours to work, two hours back from work. He wouldn’t get home until 7pm. He made tremendous sacrifices to be able to get where he was in his organization. And I think the challenge that a lot of organizations have is that, when they hire somebody, saying that “You are fully remote, and you never need to come into the office,” and then they hire somebody else who is coming into the office, that’s when they say there’s a lot of imbalance. And I think part of what needs to happen there is just clear and open dialogue and communication. Of course, performance makes a difference. Of course, how you show up every day makes a difference. But there is something to be said for those employees who are willing to go above and beyond, who are willing to make those sacrifices, who are willing to show up to the office, who have that extra face time, the coaching, the one-on-one with their leaders. It’s understandable why those people would get promoted, why they would become better leaders.

Fuller: This is the way companies described their commitment to their workforces at the beginning of the pandemic—that they invoked very laudably, I think very sincerely, the principle that the company was going to do everything in its power to ensure the “well-being” of their workforce. And that somehow got transmogrified into some new nature of the deal between the employer and the employee. And, suddenly, the employer had to make choices that maximize the well-being of the employee in the eyes of the employee. And hence, “I need to be remote because my commute’s inconvenient.” Take your poor dad. That sounds like a miserable commute. And who would want to commute two hours one way? And I quite understand that that would be really challenging and that somebody would question whether they wanted to stay employed by someone who insisted that they come to work every day, would’ve taken two hours one way. But does that notion that well-being somehow took over the dialogue resonate with you? Does it fit with what you’re hearing? And how do you undo that? Because it’s pretty hard to say, “Yeah, we’re not that interested in your well-being. We’re really interested in your productivity.”

Morgan: Yeah. No, there’s a lot there. If you are an employee who is remote full-time, and you do want to get into those leadership roles, it’s also your responsibility to speak up. It’s also your responsibility to say, “Hey, I know I’m remote, but I do want to lead inside this organization. What can I do? Is there a way that I can maybe come into the office a few times here and there? How do I get that one-on-one time with my leaders? What do I need to do so that I can get that promotion?” Because that’s just kind of the reality of the world. We are social creatures. We do need that in-person interaction. And so we need to, I think, do a better job across the board on how we figure out what that’s going to look like. Now, in terms of well-being—and I talked to several CHROs during the pandemic. These companies went above and beyond with various well-being programs, whether you talked about giving them credit for this, credit for that, post-pandemic free food, gyms, all sorts of crazy things—it’s not to say that these things are bad. But one of the things that I put up on LinkedIn fairly recently is, I said, “No, your employees don’t care about your well-being program. They care about four things: Pay them well, give them a leader who looks after them and coaches and mentors them, give them learning and development opportunities, and give them the opportunity to grow inside your organization and to advance.” And, of course, you can put flexibility in there, as well. Those are the core aspects of work that I think a lot of employees care about. The well-being stuff and the perks go on top of that, after you get those four things done well. And the other component to this is, we forget that employees are also responsible for their well-being. We need to give employees accountability and responsibility over their own lives. There have been a couple of books that have come out fairly recently, one by Abigail Shrier called Bad Therapy, one by Jonathan Haidt called The Anxious Generation. What we’ve done is, we’ve coddled this younger generation. Employees also need to have accountability and responsibility over their own engagement. This is a two-way street. And we are scared to have that conversation and that dialogue inside of our organizations. And it’s crucial. Again, it’s not that these well-being programs are bad, but you can’t just show up to work, point out problems, talk about all the things that are going wrong in your life, and expect somebody else to fix everything for you. That’s also not realistic. Quite a few organizations, they’re actually taking a step back and trying to revisit what does “well-being” actually mean. Like I mentioned, the CHRO of TELUS, she gave me a great analogy. She said, “A lot of organizations look at well-being as programs, different programs that we give to our employees. But what’s more effective is to create well-being programs that are based around culture. It’s also the conversation. It’s how we talk about things. It’s having little challenges, where leaders can challenge their employees. And I think that is a very, very effective approach for a lot of organizations to take, right? Also, teaching people to be accountable.

Fuller: In my conversation with large companies, they’re almost universally now saying that they’ve seen meaningful productivity declines from hybrid and remote workers across the board—in some occupations and tasks, a modest decline; in others, a considerable decline. There’s actually data that’s suggesting that, in this new equilibrium, there are important productivity declines. Are you seeing that? And also, how do you think we ought to be measuring productivity under modified rules of work? I know, in the past, you’ve said that you have to be pretty careful about relying on productivity statistics as being absolutely definitive, because that can become constraining. So how do you put that all together as you think about the future?

Morgan: There’s oftentimes a very big disconnect between what academic research and data shows, versus what a lot of leaders are saying. And I think, even fairly recently, there was a Nature paper that came out from Nick Bloom at Stanford where he did an experiment. [It] was a Chinese company, 1,600 employees. And they looked at hybrid work, versus full-time work. And they found that hybrid work reduced, I believe, turnover, increased productivity, things of that nature. And there have been several other experiments and things like that that have been done. But then, when you talk to a lot of leaders at organizations, they say, they echo what you said, where, “When we don’t have employees in the office, we do struggle with a lot of productivity. We struggle with culture and things of that nature.” I think it was Satya Nadella, I think, at Microsoft did a study. Sallie Krawcheck who runs a company called Ellevest. They both came forward, and they said, “In an environment where employees don’t show up to the office, yeah, we see some improvement in productivity. But we also see decrease in collaboration, decrease in creativity, decrease in innovation. And I’m not quite sure why there’s a big disconnect between academic data, versus what leaders are saying. And I’d love to get your thoughts on that. But I always say productivity just means you’re going to go out of business later. Productivity just means that you’re checking off things from your to-do list. A lot of organizations want to solve complex problems. They want to innovate. And this goes back to what we talked about earlier, that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach. Just because you see a study come out that says two days in the office is good, does that mean that that’s going to make sense for your company? Probably not. But I’d love to get your thoughts on why you think there’s this disconnect.

Fuller: It’s a really interesting question, Jacob. I’m a huge admirer of Nick Bloom from Stanford, who you cited his work. And my colleague here, Raffaella Sadun at Harvard Business School, has done very interesting work in this area. Whether or not it’s something that is just really now emerging and definitive, so that if studies were done from a going-forward basis, we’d see that effect—that could be it. While I have no reason to question the research design of Nick and his colleagues, we do find regularly in future-of-work topics—beyond the productivity question, post-Covid—that, very often, the research is essentially pivoted around testing a single hypothesis, and that the lack of thinking about the impact systemically obscures the all-in effects of change. And this, by the way, is endemic in large companies—that, as you’ll know, in some of our research on the impact of caregiving on voluntary turnover, companies offer very flimsy, limited support for caregivers, such as unpaid leave of absence or the ability to go to your colleagues and ask them to give you some of their vacation days so you can take care of someone who’s severely ill in your family. Those aren’t very attractive benefits. The companies point to them and say, “Well, no one uses our caregiving benefits, so there’s really no demand for them.” I agree there’s no demand for lousy benefits. But companies, therefore, don’t take steps that actually significantly reduce voluntary turnover of higher-wage workers and create the very turnover in their workforce that they complain about. So the lack of systems thinking isn’t just in the academy. It’s pretty much human nature and certainly in complex institutions.

Morgan: Yeah, I think this is where the rise of people analytics is so crucial. I always tell organizations, “Have your own people analytics team. Make your own decisions based on what makes sense for your company. And so, collect your own data. See what makes sense based on the data that you’re collecting. And if you find that some sort of a program is generating a return, great! Do it!” Does that mean that another company should take that same thing and do it for themselves? Probably not.

Fuller: Another big phrase that’s getting bandied around HR functions and even boardrooms days is “skills-based hiring.” We had a real movement toward probing the legitimacy of requiring college degrees for a lot of jobs. Certainly, that was a topic I researched extensively a few years ago and saw that there was a degree-inflation pattern, where jobs that did not historically require college degrees—and where a significant majority of the current occupants of those roles didn’t have degrees—were suddenly requiring them. That’s brought about this notion of skills-based hiring, where people can move away from relying on proxies, like where you went to school and what your grade-point average was, to throw open opportunities. Our research with The Burning Glass Institute really demonstrates that, while there’s a lot of public embrace of this as a movement, the actual number of jobs being affected is pretty limited. What do you make of this movement? Do you think it’s durable? Are companies pursuing it with vigor? Or is it primarily just stepping back from that college-degree requirement and letting the chips fall where they may, as hiring managers select among candidates who may or may not have degrees?

Morgan: Yeah, it gets talked about a lot, not just in terms of hiring, but also in terms of internal talent mobility and moving people based on the skills that they have. I mean, I’m a big believer in focusing on the skills that people have, but I don’t think we’re there yet. I think, to your point, what most organizations are doing now is, they’re just kind of saying, “Hey, we’re not going to focus on the college degree that you have, or we’re not just only going to hire from Ivy League universities.” But that’s kind of the extent that I think a lot of organizations have gotten to so far. I think a lot of organizations want to rely on AI, but they’re also very nervous to rely on AI. They’re scared to have AI have that decision-making power right now. And it’s funny. I actually put up a poll on LinkedIn. And I think it’s 600 people responded so far, or 700. And I asked them that same question. I said, “When we think about skills-based hiring, would you rather trust a human being—like a leader who’s going to be hiring these employees—or AI?” And it was around 75 percent trusted, said “the human,” and 25 percent for “AI.” But I think we’re going to get to a point, obviously, where we’re going to see an amalgamation, where both of these things are going to be relevant. But when you were on my podcast, I think you were saying that it’s probably going to be maybe three, four years out, and I tend to very much agree with that. We’re moving in that direction, but we’re definitely not there yet.

Fuller: That was interesting data. I think that a lot of people, particularly younger workers, tend to over-dignify the ability of technology to make “rational”—or one of the worst words in employment relations, “fair”—decisions. When I was a CEO, the only operative definition of the word “fair” that I could come to was “acceptable of the person I was talking to.” Now it is the summer of 2024, and one cannot avoid the entire topic of generative AI, which is now some of the mystery and some of the fascination with it’s getting behind this. And companies are beginning to really think hard about whether and how to put that technology to work. What are you seeing in your dialogue with companies? What challenges or issues are they raising, or what enthusiasms are they expressing for generative AI?

Morgan: Definitely a lot of enthusiasm. Also, a little bit of a fear. I think the biggest challenge isn’t going to be that AI is going to take your job. It’s that another human being who knows how to use AI better than you is going to take your job. AI has tremendous utility as far as helping you do anything, whether it’s leading a team or coding. But there’s also a lot of skepticism and fear, because a lot of people are not quite sure how this thing works. Where is it getting its data and information from? Is it accurate? Is it truthful? And some companies are trying to build their own internal AIs. So I think we’re still very much at the early stages.

Fuller: And the rate of improvement is, really defies description, and that, therefore, when, with each passing iteration, we’re more and more surprised, and also with the growth of learning in the LLMs [large language models] that we can’t explain entirely, because we really don’t know what’s going on in those huge neural networks, it’d be pretty foolish to have a forecast other than: Keep an eye on it, and expect continued major change. I do find, in a number of companies, I’ll say most—particularly those outside of professional services and financial services—a lot of caution and a lot of companies that are more concerned about losing data sovereignty or unlawful use of other people’s copyright materials. So the chief legal officers are very involved. The chief technology officers seem to be treating it as they’ve had lots of application software, whether they’re cloud-based or not, that, “We’ve got to go very cautiously. We’ve got to test it.” I’m not sure that’s consistent with what’s going to lead to better outcomes. That this is so fundamental that, if you can move with confidence quickly, there could be some really attractive stakes, including the people satisfaction with their work. If I just look at how I use it, it allows me to move to the more interesting parts of my research quicker, because I can ask it to summarize every article ever written in labor economics on a topic, and it does it in about 30 seconds flat. So before we sign off, Jacob, a couple of quick questions. One is, if you look back across your corpus of work over 15 years, are there a couple of postulates or rules that you think have consistently been proven to be the case, all the way through, despite the fact that there has been a lot of change in the expectations about work in technology, in workplace demographics?

Morgan: Yeah, there are a few. So one is I think the employee experience is consistently going to remain one of the top talent trends, and employee experience will always be about three things: culture, technology, and space. That’s what my book in 2017 was about, and I’m working on a new version of that for 2025. I think that’s universally true. I think another aspect that’s universally true is the leading with vulnerability piece. The two most important aspects of any leader are competence and connection. Be good at your job, connect with people. Another one that’s also going to be true is that we’re constantly going to try to figure out what that balance is going to be between AI and humanity, between technology and humanity. I think that’s going to be an ongoing conversation going forward. I think the conversations around things like hybrid work and things like that are probably going to dissipate in the coming years. And I’m a big believer that nobody’s going to look out for you but you. And you, any individual, needs to take accountability and responsibility for their personal and professional development. Don’t rely on your educational institutions, and don’t rely on your companies to teach you everything you need to know to be successful. That’s just not the reality that we live in anymore. The harder you work, the smarter you work, the better connections that you put together, the scrappier and more resourceful you are, the more you’re willing to go above and beyond, the better things are going to be for you.

Fuller: Well, Jacob Morgan, observer and commentator on the future of work and someone I always enjoy talking to, thanks for joining us on the podcast.

Morgan: Thank you for having me.

Fuller: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.