Episode 127: How to Foster Collaboration Within Hybrid Working Teams (an interview with Mark Mortensen)
On today’s episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David is joined by Mark Mortensen, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD.
Mark, who is a global thought leader in team collaboration and group dynamics, is known for his research surrounding hybrid working teams. And as we enter new dimensions of working in a hybrid world, what better time to get him on the show to learn more about his views on what it takes to make hybridity work.
This conversation will cover topics such as:
How to ensure equal opportunities amongst your hybrid teams
Fostering team collaboration within a hybrid working model
How to create psychological safety within hybrid teams
How to structure and manage your hybrid teams for the future of work
Enjoy!
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David Green: Today's episode is a fascinating one, one that I know will resonate with a lot of people listening: how to make hybrid work.
And who else to better talk us through this than Mark Mortensen, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD.
Mark Mortensen: Remember, human beings aren't neutral; none of us are. It doesn't matter how good we are, how practised and skilled we are at our ability to stay very objective and to say, "We're going to look at the data", and one of the temptations, particularly in things like evaluation, that's something that even if we sit there and say, "I'm looking at the data", etc., we have to recalibrate the data to make sure we're taking into account the way in which the structural things are actually changing the information we have to work with.
David Green: Along with advice on how to mitigate against proximity bias and so ensure equal opportunities amongst your hybrid team, my conversation with Mark will also cover team collaboration and structure within a hybrid work model.
We will also discuss how psychological safety in the workplace could be at risk in a hybrid environment and the actions HR leaders can take to avoid this. Mark will also be sharing a snippet of his recent research on how to effectively manage hybrid teams in a future world of work.
Before being a global expert in team collaboration and group dynamics, Mark started his early career in engineering. Interested in understanding what had prompted him to transition into researching organisational behaviour, I started the interview by asking him what triggered this career change.
Mark Mortensen: So, my path, I don't know if it's an unusual one or not, but I started as an engineer, I was building technology, building little widgets of things, and I really liked it; it was a lot of fun. I really liked the way that we thought as engineers, that very sort of methodological, very precise, very problem-oriented, very solution-oriented way to think about things. So, I was having a lot of fun. But honestly, after a while, I started to realise that I would build something, I'd build some little widget, and because I was an engineer, I'd sit there and go, "It's so beautiful, it's so cool, the code is awesome", I was so into it.
Then we'd hand it over to users, and they would do weird stuff, and I would say, "What is wrong with these people?" I mean, come on, my code of course, was perfect, but they were doing the wrong thing, and I didn't get it.
That's when I started realising, after a little while, you know, they talk about a bug being the feature, and I started to realise the bug, it wasn't the technology; the bigger bug most often was something to do with the social system. We'd built something, and we didn't really understand how people themselves would understand it, how they would try to put it to use, what they would do with it, their interpretations. And after some time of getting annoyed at how the users were all wrong, I realised maybe it was me or we, who were designing the technology, who were wrong in the way we were building it.
So, that was really my transition. I started to transition from studying the stuff I was building to the original equipment between people's ears and trying to understand how does the brain work.
And in particular, for me, it was always, "How does the brain work in a social context?" so not just the individual, cognitive-side piece of things, but what happens not just when David is off thinking big thoughts and Mark is off thinking something, but what happens when they get together and they start having a conversation, and then we have to start factoring in the social dynamics, the relationships, the pre-existing history, the context and the environment, you name it, all of that.
And that's really what led me to make my transition into the more organisational behaviour space that drives me crazy when people say, "It's the soft stuff", because we all know this is the hard stuff to do.
David Green: Well, I'm glad you did because, over the years, you've published a lot of really interesting work. If anyone wants to read more of what Mark writes, say in Harvard Business Review, you publish quite regularly in there, I think, with a range of colleagues that you write with. And a lot of work that you've focused on over the years is around teams as well, which is obviously a nice extension of organisational behaviour.
If we focus on this from the perspective of the team, what impact do you think hybrid working has on team effectiveness in comparison to in-office working, as well as the wholly remote model that most of us adopted in the last two years? I'm guessing that blend makes it, in some ways, more complex.
Mark Mortensen: I think it's a very common mistake I hear a lot of people making, that they say, "Well, remote is at one extreme, the office is at the other extreme, and hybrid is just somewhere in the middle". First things first, I think it's really important that people recognise hybrid is a unique thing. There are elements that are in the middle of the spectrum, and I should frame this by saying if you could see the amount of white in my beard, I've been doing this for a long time! I've been studying remote and various new forms of work for about the past 20 years, long before it became trendy and popular thanks to COVID.
For years, we've been studying how this affects the way in which, for example, we communicate. We know that people lose a lot of inhibition, they lose a lot of tendencies to moderate their thinking, their speaking, even when they're in a screen, even if it says a name, even if I look there and I see, "David Green" right there, just because there's a screen between us, it's going to change our interaction. So, all of this to say, remote absolutely has an effect; it affects the way in which we interact; a really big piece, one of my absolute favourite pieces of research, and it's now a classic; I think it's back from 2001, was researched on by Catherine Cramton where she coined the term, the Mutual Knowledge Problem.
She basically said, "One of the big challenges that we face when working remotely is we don't know the same stuff. So, if we're sitting together in a room, we would both know how warm the room is, and if we're uncomfortable, we both know whether or not one of us came in stressed out about a recent meeting or something else. The Mutual Knowledge Problem says, "Look, we don't know.
From what I can see from your background, it looks like a lovely place, but I've not idea what else is going on".
Even in the pre-discussion, we talked about potential distractions, which is actually a really good way to start a meeting, give people the heads-up, "I do have kids and a dog nearby.
They might make an appearance or interrupt", that sort of thing.
But all of this to say, hybrid working, or remote working, I should say, does have lots of effects on the way in which we interact. The thing we have to recognise about hybrid is it's about an inequality, an unevenness of the playing field. That's where things really start to get messy, and you do get a little of it when you're talking remote. Michael O'Leary and I did some work many, many years ago where we did an experimental manipulation. We looked at teams of people who are remote, but we played around with the balance of the configuration, so what happens if you have an even split versus a majority in one place versus isolates. Part of what we found was just playing with those numbers, where people were physically sitting, had a really big impact on the dynamics within the group.
Take that a big step further, now that we're talking about hybrid, and we're talking about hybridity varies in a lot of ways. So, there's one across the team; David may be a work-from-home kind of guy, Mark is more of a work-from-the-office kind of guy, so we see variations within the team across people. But David may be a work-from-home kind of guy on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays; Mark might be a work-from-home kind of guy on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; and by the way, maybe it's not the same every week. This week, my son doesn't have soccer camp. As a result, he's not going off to that; my schedule's a little bit different. On a different week, I might have something else that's shifting and affecting my agenda.
So, hybridity brings into play the fact that there's a huge amount of variation, it's a very dynamic context and a very dynamic variable that leaders have to deal with, and the fact that it isn't equally felt by all different people in the team, and I think that's one of the really big, big shifts when you talk about hybrid relative to other remote forms of work.
David Green: Is it more difficult now for managers, do you think; does it bring different skills for managers perhaps?
Mark Mortensen: I love that you just brought that up because you're absolutely right.
There are also different potential leadership skills that are involved. As you rightly said, this is not brand-new; it's not like people haven't been doing this. One of the issues that people in HR have been dealing with for a long time if you have a global organisation, variable compensation across places. The salary rate in place X may not be the same as the salary rate in place Y for somebody doing the exact same work. Now we have an issue around equity and fairness; how do people feel about that?
That same logic, that same challenge, is now being faced in the space of hybridity; because now have to deal with, "Well, David really wants to work three days a week remote, but Mark wants to work only two days a week remote, and how do we make sure that that's not only fair but perceived as fair?" And again, as we know, when it comes to anything to do with anything considered a compensation or a perk, or anything like that, perception is reality. If I feel like it's not fair, that's really what's going to start causing some problems.
So, leaders have to be very, very mindful of this around these equity and fairness issues. And realistically, there are some different -- I won't say different skills; I don't want to go that far. I don't want to say, "To be a leader in the hybrid age, you have to be a different beast"; you don't, but you have to keep top of mind some things that you didn't have to be reminding yourself of before, right, remembering that structure of the hybridity is seen by many as part of their compensation package, that's part of the reward that they're expecting to get. And therefore, we have to make sure they're perceived equitably and fairly.
Also, things like management by walking around, which has been favoured by many for a long time, I get to walk around, I get to stick my head over the cubicle walls, peak in, "Hey, how's it going?" see what's going on; I can pick up some things just by observing, either good or bad; I see some people who seem to be drifting, I see some others who seem to be in need of some help, or doing exceptionally well. I don't have that data; again, Mutual Knowledge Problem. I have to be more intentional about data collection in this hybrid environment in order to make sure that I have what I need to do my job effectively.
David Green: And I think you've published at least a couple of articles with Martine Haas around this intentionality, as you said, that managers need to work in different modes related to hybridity. So, is there anything else that you'd like to add to that what you just said, in terms of how HR leaders and people managers can effectively manage hybrid teams, so that everyone is included and there's equal opportunity for recognition?
Mark Mortensen: I think the first and most critical piece is, and this sounds trite, and people will probably say, "Oh, but of course", but keeping mindful of this and honestly, having the conversations with the people in your team about what it is that they want, what they need, because another piece of the puzzle, and I'm sure we'll come into this a little bit later on, is also that people are working with very different contexts, very different environments. So, there might be very different reasons that I want or even need, to have more flexibility to my schedule and to be able to work remotely, etc., as opposed to what your needs and your requirements are.
So, one of the first things, like I said, it sounds trite, it sounds overly simple, but have the conversations. Get out there and talk to people and find out what it is that they need. The second piece is you have to, in this case, when we're talking about equity and fairness, remember that human beings aren't neutral; none of us are. It doesn't matter how good we are, how practised and skilled we are at our ability to stay very objective and to say, "We're going to look at the data" and one of the temptations, particularly in things like evaluation is, "Well, we're going to look at the data".
Leaders have to recognise, for example, use the example I gave before if David works Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday and Mark works Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and the big boss also happens to work Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, David, you have an unfair advantage, so to speak, relative to me, because you have 66% more face time with the boss. That's something that even if we sit there and say, "I'm looking at the data", etc., we have to recalibrate the data to make sure we're taking into account the way in which the structural things are actually changing the information we have to work with.
David Green: So, there's so many different things to blend together, isn't there? And as you said, then that potential bias that comes in from seeing people face time versus not seeing people face time, only on video calls, or once a week perhaps, when you happen to be in the office on the same day?
Mark Mortensen: Absolutely. And, sorry, I just want to add one more thing; there's another piece of it. One piece is the visibility, but one of the things that Martine and I were also highlighting in this work is there's also a piece around access to resources. So, don't forget that when you, David, are working in the office, you just know more; just like we said, the leader knows more of what's going on, you know more of what's going on, you get information faster, you get it easier. That gives you an advantage.
Now, this is something that organisations are going to have to think about from a policy standpoint, and HR leaders are going to have to really consider this. Do you in any way discount if you say, "Look, you're allowed to work from home", and we say that as a matter of policy, do we also factor in that that may affect your ability to be productive. Now, this opens up Pandora's box of a whole lot of different things that we can get into because some people will say, "I'm much more productive working at home; I have less interruptions"; other people will say, "I can't work at home, I have more interruptions"; it's very contextual.
This is something though, that organisations and leaders have to intentionally consider, and that's the main thing is a lot of organisations have been sort of ploughing ahead and trying to figure it out as they go along, building the plane while they're flying, and this is one of those cases where pausing for a little bit and stopping and saying, "What is our policy, what's our position on this?" may really help you from some downstream headaches that might be coming your way.
David Green: Google famously found, through their project, Aristotle, that psychological safety is one of the top drivers for team effectiveness. But as we increasingly work in hybridity, there are less face-to-face encounters, as we've discussed, and again you've combined forces with Amy Edmondson, probably the world's leading authority or certainly the world's most recognised authority on psychological safety, and you've talked about how that could reduce psychological safety. So, why is hybridity hindering workplace psychological safety?
Mark Mortensen: Well again, as you rightly mention, this was an amazing opportunity to work with Amy, who, I was going to say, happens to be one of my favourite people, Martine does as well, so I've been very, very lucky to do a lot of collaborating, and my collaborating is with people I really like, which makes my job much more enjoyable.
I got to work with Amy on this piece around psychological safety, in part because it all came from a conversation. A senior manager in an organisation said, "I'm starting to get more and more pressure to come back in the office," and this was still in the middle to late days of COVID being very top of mind for people, and this person wasn't ready. It was a personal choice; it was about family, it was about a number of other things.
They said, "Look, I'm just not quite ready".
Now, the pressure they were getting wasn't malicious; it was actually very kind; it was, "We really miss you, we would love to see you in the office, we need --" so it was really hard to say, "Back off", but at the same time, they felt really torn. I brought this to Amy, and we started talking about this, and we realised part of what has to be rethought a little bit, or at least expanded, and as you pointed out, Amy coined the term; she is the person when it comes to psychological safety, but most research on psychological safety has been focused on, really fundamentally embedded in, the workplace.
This has been saying, "Look, does my boss allow me to speak my mind? Or, when I do speak my mind, am I at risk of something, a backlash, that is going to be damaging to me in my career?" etc. What we recognised was with hybrid environments, we now have a change in the space that we're working in. It used to be, in many, many places; the US is a very, very clear example of this; there are certain things and many topics that are off limits as an employer. When you're in HR, you can't sit there and ask people about their lifestyle choices in any way, shape or form, about their background, about their current living situation. This stuff is off-limits for a very good reason. This is about safety and security, etc.
The problem is, when we were working all in a physical office, that was fine because that stuff didn't happen in the workspace. Obviously, it had effects, always there effects, but they were easier to deal with. Now we have a new situation where a manager may have somebody who's working part-time in the office and part-time at home. That manager has to manage and coordinate, for example, the schedules across, say, ten people within their team; this is non-trivial. There are a number of companies that have popped up to start helping companies and are building technologies to help manage the logistical piece.
But as a leader, I now have a new problem because I can't only look at what's going on in the office, because if I'm trying to schedule David's time in a particular project and say, "Okay, you can work three days a week, then I also have to factor in the fact that David says, "But I need one of my flex days to be Tuesdays because I have tutoring for my child [or] I have an ageing parent and I agreed to play backgammon with my ageing parent every Thursday night; that's set". These may or may not be things that people are naturally wanting to share to their boss or their employer, but now suddenly, they actually are part of the material conversation around how to schedule work.
That's what Amy and I recognised was we actually have to rethink the conversation around psychological safety; we have to make sure that it incorporates those elements. But it also, in an interesting feedback loop, it makes psychological safety even more important because you need to have an environment where you feel psychologically safe, not only to talk about the work but also to talk about the non-work things, like being able to say, "I have a personal reason that I can't come to the office on these days, or that I would really like to have flexibility in a certain sense.
David Green: How can people managers and HR leaders create that culture of psychological safety amongst hybrid teams?
Mark Mortensen: The first one, parallel to what I said before, you need to set the scene, you need to have a conversation, you need to talk about the importance of psychological safety, and help people to recognise that it is in their best interests. It's not just, "Hey, I want psych safety because the research shows we get more innovation, higher productivity", all sorts of nice organisational outcomes, "I want psych safety because it's also important for you, as members of the team".
But let's be honest, talk is cheap. If I'm the big boss and I'm the leader, and I can say, "I really want you to be open, and we want psychological safety", everyone's going to say, "Yeah, sure", and then they're going to wait and see what I do. So, you have to lead by example, and we strongly encourage people to think about how can they use their own vulnerability, use their own situation, to create the evidence, the data that shows this is something we actually care about.
This can't happen all in one fell swoop; it's not going to be fast; it's going to be little baby steps; you show examples, start building it up, and whenever there is something that is a good, psychologically safe practice, we want to share it. We want to share again the fact that it's beneficial not just for the organisation but for the people themselves. The way I always think about this, this is a sales pitch to your people about why they should engage in and help build and foster a culture of psychological safety; you've got to sell it. And part of that selling is showing that there is a value to them when they're psychologically safe, not just to the organisation.
The last piece, you've got to be vigilant; you have to be because even with the best of intentions, somebody will make a mistake. I've read psychological safety, I've written on it, and of course, sometimes I screw up, and I do something that is not psychologically safe. As a leader and as a team, you need to be really, really vigilant; and when there is a mistake, a misstep, something that is not psychologically safe, you have to address it right away. The only trick, do it in a psychologically safe way. You also don't want to jump on the person who wasn't psychologically safe, harangue them, and then you in effect, destroy the psychological safety by punishing somebody for not being psychologically safe. It starts to get your brain in a little bit of a loop, but it's really important.
David Green: Going back to teams and how they collaborate within an organisation, what are your views on how team collaboration has changed since the pandemic, with everything working remotely and hybrid; does this change the whole way that teams are structured? I know you've published an article with Constance Hadley, I think, recently about this, with the provocative question, "Do we still need teams?"
Mark Mortensen: So, I have to admit, the work that I do with Connie, we laughed, and we got a little bit nervous when we came up with the title in the first place.
Both of us were mentees, advisees of Richard Hackman, the Late Richard Hackman, who was sort of the father of much research on teams. One of the things that Richard espoused, and is based on a massive body of research and very, very rigorous, huge amounts of data on it, is that the real core, the real key to success, is actually the structure. When I say the structure, I don't mean just the physical structure, but I'm talking about designing the team the right way is far, far more effective; getting the setup conditions right is far more effective than sitting, watching over as a leader and trying to fix the things as they're going wrong a little bit.
I actually wrote an article also with Martine Haas about this on team effectiveness, and this was one of the core things. We tried to take some of those ideas, do a little bit of updating, thinking particularly about remote types of work. What Connie and I started recognising, though was the reality has shifted, in that when you talk to people about their productivity, about what they do, again, some people are saying, "Look, I'm more productive working at home". We can't necessarily disagree with that; that may be absolutely true.
But even if you don't change that, teams are always -- collaboration is always a cost/benefit trade-off. Effective collaboration is not costless; it doesn't come for free.
It takes time to get the setup right, it takes time to build the relationships that are needed, it takes time to do the coordination functions; there's a lot of effort that goes into a well-oiled, high-functioning team. What Connie and recognised was, look, just doing the maths and literally drawing it out as an equation, as a maths equation, kind of helps. The costs of that collaboration are going up, and it's all the things we talked about in terms of now we have to coordinate across these multiple schedules of hybridity, in and of itself; more of the Mutual Knowledge Problem, where people don't have as much information, so now there has to be more time and more effort spent in updates and coordination and all of that.
So, the costs of collaboration have gone up, and the benefits, I won't say they have gone down, but it is easy to not achieve all of them. So, if the benefits have gone down or stayed the same and the costs have gone up, we run the very real risk that at least some teams -- and let me be clear, we are not saying we should get rid of all teams; teams are fantastic and the synergistic benefits are unparalleled. But what we do need to do is be conscious about it to assess whether or not we are in a situation where the costs have outweighed the benefits.
If they have, then we should ask ourselves, "Why are we trying to create a team?" and we talked about this idea of a co-acting group. It's not our idea; Richard Hackman actually used to talk about it. My favourite example of it, he talked about people waiting for a bus. People waiting for a bus are a collecting group. It's a set of people who all have the same goal, right? Get on the bus.
But there's no interdependence among them to do it. And let's be honest, if it's pouring rain, sometimes you see some very non-collaborative and non-cooperative behaviour with people throwing elbows, trying to push on the bus first. So the point is that is a co-acting group. You don't need them to be working lockstep; you don't need really integrated inputs and outputs and everything. You can have a group of people all working towards the common goal, all trying to go in the right direction.
What Connie and I are pushing on is maybe we need to re-evaluate some of the things that we have been, by default, considering; we just have to make them teams, and teams became the buzzword, the concept, the thing we all do.
Maybe we need to rethink whether we need to use them in all situations. And it's really funny, it is the article that probably spurred the most immediate reaction when I mentioned it online, and I started getting all sorts of responses with people saying, "No, teams are the best". I said, "I'm not against teams, they're great, but they are for a specific purpose", and I think that's one of the real things that people need to think about.
You asked, "How do we need to change the way in which we approach work and collaboration in this hybrid, post-COVID, hopefully, age?" We need to be very mindful that there's more in play, there are different amounts of hybridity, there are people who want to work remote.
We need to think about, as you mentioned earlier, what's the work that they're doing? Is it well suited to being done individually and remote? In which case, maybe they're great; let them go off and work on some beach, wherever they want; they'll be hyper-productive, they will have great quality of life, and everyone's happy.
David Green: Yeah, it makes sense to think what we're trying to achieve; first, the work and the outcomes, rather than the vehicle to achieve it, it seems. And I do recommend that everyone should read the article because, yes, the title; I wonder if some of the comments you got were for people who hadn't actually read it because if you read it, it's pretty clear that you're saying teams are a good thing, but maybe not in all cases now. I think that's, as you say, it's just maybe we need to think a bit differently sometimes, which I think is good because we do; we always need to evolve our thinking as we move forward as a field.
Mark Mortensen: I want to tell you about something that I'm really, really excited about that I think really speaks to this. I'm excited about it, not in a small part, because it's another collaboration with Amy Edmondson, again just a fantastic collaborator. But one of the things that we started to recognise was, as we were speaking to leaders and we were talking about their efforts to introduce things like hybridity and other things like new forms of work and all of that, we recognised that there was an interesting paradox happening, particularly if you're thinking at the organisational level about the policies and things that they were setting.
It came up to me honestly when I started thinking about this, talking to a lot of companies about hybrid work, and many of them were in this mindset of, "Look, if we want to attract, if we want to retain the best talent, we've got to give them what they want. Everybody's clamouring; they all say, 'We want remote, we want flexible, we want hybridity, give it to them'. We gave it to them, and in effect, and I'm going to say this is a sort of very crass way of saying it, but the logic was, we're going to buy allegiance by giving people what they want. David says he wants to work at home. We say, 'Hey, David, you come work for us; you get to work from home'. It makes sense; it's very logical. In the tradition of going with a simple solution, it is the simple, right solution".
Except, when I started polling, all throughout COVID and as people were doing more and more hybrid working, I've been doing tons of workshops working with companies, teaching at INSEAD, lots of conversations, and I would always poll and always ask people, "So, now that you're working much more remote, how do you feel your level of identification and connection to your organisation is, compared to the way it was before; is it higher, is it the same, is it lower?" Almost unilaterally, people said, "It's much less. I feel less connected". So, this is what started this, was we realised there's a paradox here. We're trying to buy allegiance by giving people something that reduces allegiance.
From an HR standpoint, there should be warning signs, "Warning, warning, this is a problem!" The more we started talking to leaders about this, the more we recognised, this is Amy and I, that part of the problem was the conservation around, you know, we talk about the employee value proposition, "What is it that we, at our company, are offering that is going to attract and hopefully retain people in the long run?" It was getting reduced down to a single dimension. And of all the things that it could be reduced down to, it's, unfortunately, arguably the weakest one. It's being reduced down to the very material offerings.
So, I would put things like a flexible work schedule hybridity. It's a material offering, in that it's something that the organisation is giving you in return for the work you are doing, in much the same way as we give you pay or other perks; we may give you a really nice office space to work in, or super-high connectivity, give you lots of vacation days, whatever. These are all things that we're giving you as a material offering. But we know from decades, literally decades in each of different buckets, so in parallel, we have lots of research on the importance of creating an environment that promotes growth and learning and development.
This is one of the reasons that you choose to join or stay at an organisation; you have a path.
We have equally, if not more, research and evidence on the importance of a sense of community, feeling connected, "I work where I work because I'm part of that group, I've been part of the group for a while, I feel connected, I care, I feel they care about me, there's mutual accountability".
Then, of course, everybody's favourite, particularly in recent years, meaning and purpose. People choose to join or stay because of meaning and purpose of the work to what they value as an individual.
So, what Amy and I recognised is that we need to rethink and refresh our approach to what we offer employees with a more integrated model. And where it gets really, really exciting is not just -- it's one thing to say, "We recognise that you need to think about all these dimensions". We're not the only people talking about this. McKinsey, PwC, many people have been putting out reports saying, "Don't forget, we need development…" What hasn't been really addressed is the need to think of it systemically. We need to think about this because when you look at these pieces together, you recognise there are potentially trade-offs, but there are also massive synergistic benefits.
Also, you have to recognise they're ordinal; they're not just four random buckets. Something like a random material offering is by far the easiest thing to manipulate.
I can give you a bonus tomorrow; I can give you flexitime tomorrow, I can give you more vacation time, a nicer office, easy. It's also the easiest to imitate and copy, and it's the least sticky because all it takes is somebody else to offer you a slightly nicer office, or slightly more vacation days, or a little bit more money, and you're out the door.
Go with the other end of the spectrum, and you end up with meaning and purpose, which are really hard, let's be honest, to put in place. This is not something you do on Thursday because you thought of it on Tuesday. Huge amounts of planning, huge amounts of effort. You've got to get people to really buy in absolutely. But so much more powerful in its ability to attract, retain and stay sticky, and it is not easy to imitate.
So, what Amy and I have been really focusing on is saying, look, HR leaders and all leaders, and I want to stress, this is not an HR problem, this is a critical problem for HR, and it has to be handled at the organisational level; but part of what we've been working on is we've created a set of measures that allow us to actually go into an organisation, assess what you, David, want from your organisation on these dimensions, assess what you, David, think you're getting from the organisation on these dimensions, and you can basically create like a radar plot of show that David wants a lot more growth and development, he's really happy about the sense of community, and we're overinvesting in building community, building community, and we've left him saying, "He'll learn somewhere else".
Person/organisation fit starts coming into play. We're able to capture data on this and then start looking at how these play out for things like retention, things like engagement, and there's all sorts of really fascinating scales on all things like "thriving" that Microsoft has been doing. And Amy and I have both been collaboration scholars; it has a very direct impact as well on performance. So, this is the work that I'm super excited about. We need to start thinking about the fact that hybridity is one piece of a larger pie around attraction and retention, and it has to be thought of systemically.
David Green: I'll certainly be looking out for that research when it's published, and I'm sure many listeners will as well. So, Mark, if we look into the future, what would you predict teams and collaboration will be like in five years' time, and don't worry; I won't hold you to it? And what do you think HR leaders should start doing to make sure that we are in line and ready for the future of teamwork?
Mark Mortensen: I can give you the cheeky hedge of an answer, which is, "I don't know"! Go five years back; nobody would have predicted we would be where we are right now, and all of those bets. I'm sure that you probably asked somebody about five years ago; go back through the archives, see what they said. I think what we need to do we need to be focused, as you've mentioned a couple of times, on data, on making sure that we have the evidence on the way that people are working, keep tabs on some of those trends, and talk to people.
One of the things from studying remote and distributed work for the better part of 20, 25 years now probably, organisations' leaders often fall prey to this bias of, "Well, I know what I would want, so let me give that to them". I think especially the experience that we all had through COVID is hopefully a reminder that what you want is not necessarily what others want. And I think that COVID was really a good reminder about not just the so-called golden rule of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", but the platinum rule, "Do unto others as they want to be done unto", however, the language works there, but you know where I'm going.
I think what we need to do is we need leaders to be thinking about what people actually want, talking to their people, finding out. Because, look, we're in a pendulum that has been swinging back and forth. We were very heavily face-to-face, then we swung all the way into aggressively remote.
There are pundits on both sides, pundits that say, "We're going back into the office", pundits who say, "We're all going to stay remote forever". Obviously, they're both wrong; they're doing it to get attention and that sort of thing. The reality is we're swinging somewhere in the middle, and we'll stabilise.
I think a lot of people who were very, very pro-remote, there were people who were pro-remote who will stay that way and are super-happy, and it works for them, and that's great. There are others who said, "Remote is the best; leaders don't get it".
The ones who want them back in the office, I actually had a conversation with a leader the other day where he said, "Look, my boss just doesn't understand; I'm more productive working at home.
He's this dinosaur; he doesn't get it.
He's focused on back to the office and everything". I said, "Look, you're probably right; you are more productive working at home", and he was very happy about that; he kind of puffed up.
I said, "So, as a decision head, how well do you think you're mentoring your junior people now? How well do you think the culture of your group is being maintained?" His face kind of fell and he said, "You know, you're totally right". We need to be collecting data, we need to be recognising this stuff is constantly changing, and we need to think about designing all the work that we do with an end time. I often talk about an expiration date, right. Any design you do, any time you design a team, design the team with an expiration date. Your milk has an expiration date, your team should too.
That is the date not when you necessarily kill the team, but you put a date in the calendar today for, it could be six months, it could be a year, depending on what you think is the right time period, where you say, "We're going to come back and revisit (a) whether we still need this thing, and (b) whether we're still working the most effective way". That's how you build something that is sustainable, something that is going to be future fit, because you're not trying to make it future fit, you're making it future adaptable, and that's what actually is going to make it a lot more successful in the long run.
David Green: We're moving to the last question, so this is a question we're asking everyone in this series.
We do create a little video of it and we put in on the MyHRfuture YouTube channel, and I think it might go over some ground that we've already talked about today; so, don't feel that you can't summarise some of the stuff that you've already said. What tips can you share with leaders on how to foster collaboration in a hybrid team?
Mark Mortensen: As a leader in a hybrid environment, I think the most important thing you have to recognise is the heterogeneity of the experience of the people that you're dealing with, your employees, the people in your team. We often fall prey to this assumption that we know, or at least we have a pretty good sense. The most effective thing you can do, simple as it is, basic as it is, is have some conversations, but have conversations focused on the experience.
I've seen this very, very often, where leaders will try to design a new team structure, a new way of approaching the work, etc. I saw this with time zones with people making adjustments and saying, "We're going to split the difference and move the projects around, because we have people in different geographies". They built a whole system, they worked for two years, and then they finally got everyone together for an all-hands meeting, only to find out that one of the groups, all engineers, myself being a recovering engineer, they were all engineers and they said, "We would have gladly taken all of the late night video conferences, because we love to work really late, as long as it means we can start later in the morning". So, they discovered that they had broken something; they'd created a problem by trying to fix a problem that didn't exist.
The biggest piece of advice: get in there, have conversations, try and understand the experience of people and the needs of people, and do that in an environment that is psychologically safe, where people feel like they can be honest and open; because also, you won't be successful if you only get the veneered version written on the surface.
David Green: Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, follow you on social media, get subscribed to your excellent newsletter that you've recently created on LinkedIn, and find out more about your work as well?
Mark Mortensen: Sure, and I'm always eager to talk about any of this work, as I mentioned, particularly some of this new work that we're doing on the value proposition.
Please don't hesitate to send me an email at INSEAD, just mark.mortensen@insead.edu; I'm also on LinkedIn, also on Twitter @profmortensen, and I post regularly, any time articles are coming up. So please, feel free to reach out, take a look and comment liberally on any and all things that are posted. The more discussions we get going about this, the better situation we're all going to be in.
David Green: Well, Mark, thank you for being a guest and thank you for what you do as well; it's really important in our quickly evolving world of work as it certainly is. So, thank you very much for being a guest.