41%: Experts Discuss the Top Workplace Trends of 2021

Today, I’m joined by the podcast’s correspondents, Desmond Dickerson and Mary Melton. Desmond is a Microsoft employee who works remotely out of Atlanta, and Mary is a journalist and editor who works for Godfrey Dadich Partners, the company that produces this podcast. Hey, Desmond, hey Mary.

MARY MELTON: Hi, Elise.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Hey, how’s it going?

ELISE HU: Well, it’s going good. And it’s the final episode of the season. So we’re kind of looking back. And I’m curious. For y’all, what were the themes that really stood out to you?

MARY MELTON: Right off the top, the Great Reshuffle. The Great Reshuffle is something we heard just again and again and again.

ELISE HU: And we should note that we call it the Great Reshuffle on purpose, and not the Great Resignation, which you’ve probably also heard.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Yeah, and, you know, that stood out to me as someone who actually participated in that, you know, left one job and joined another in the midst of all of this.

ELISE HU: There are some numbers on just how many people did do this reshuffling, right?

DESMOND DICKERSON: Right, right. So earlier this year, Microsoft did a survey, and 41 percent of the folks that they surveyed said that they may leave their employer at some point over the next year. And then that really bore out by the time we got to September. I’ve got the data here: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in September alone, they said that 4.4 million workers reported leaving their jobs. That is a record! And the month before was 4.3 million.

ELISE HU: That’s wild.

MARY MELTON: I think that’s why a lot of people are calling this the Great Resignation. Right, like, because so many people have resigned, but we really like the term the Great Reshuffle because it connotes transition, something that’s positive. Hopefully something that leads to something new, which is, you know, a little less bleak than the resignation.

ELISE HU: Yeah, instead of a fixed endpoint, like just leaving.

MARY MELTON: [ laughter ] Exactly.

ELISE HU: Wow. And in our first episode, the Microsoft corporate vice president for modern work, Jared Spataro, pointed out that the impact of the pandemic on our psyches has been enormous. We have certainly felt it individually, felt it collectively. And it’s actually not unlike the Great Depression or a world war. People are rethinking where they spend their time and how they spend it. They’re exploring these big existential questions.

MARY MELTON: And they’re also, you know, exploring things that they have to do because they hadn’t had to do them before, right? There’s a lot of reshuffling going on by necessity.

ELISE HU: And something that we explored, Mary, was just how sort of unequal that this pandemic was, in terms of how it hit us, right?

MARY MELTON: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’re exploring these big existential questions about our careers. And that’s kind of a privilege to be able to do that. But we also are exploring these ideas because we had to. The pandemic really hit frontline workers really hard. If you have kids, if you’re taking care of anyone who’s older in your house, you didn’t have options about daycare, right? And so a lot of people had to leave jobs because they just had to, because they had to stay home with their kids. So there’s also some real inequality here, and also, the digital infrastructure piece of this, right, That’s a huge deal. A lot of people just didn’t even have the tools at home that they needed to enable them to work from home.

ELISE HU: There was a flip side to not going into the office, though, too, because there were others, a lot of folks who found they could be really productive at home despite the distractions of everyday life.

DESMOND DICKERSON: That’s a lesson I learned years ago. I’ve been working from home for about five years now, so that’s something that works for me. People talk about the distractions of everyday life, but there’s distractions at the office, too. And there’s folks stopping by your desk or there’s, you know, some sort of celebration down the hallway, or whatever’s going on, or just the miserable traffic that you have to sit through in most of the cities where these types of jobs are.

ELISE HU: Right, right. On the flip side of that, there’s a lot of folks who have said in surveys, and we know this anecdotally, that we miss the bonds created by working in person. Like, I miss when somebody stops by my desk and says, do you want to go to lunch or do you want to go get a coffee, and we’ll walk to a coffee.

MARY MELTON: Yeah, I’ve been working at home for four years, too, Desmond, and I did find myself in this odd position at the beginning of being kind of the sage in the office telling everyone how to do this, right, since I was used to it. ( laughter ) But you – never really let go of some of those things that you really miss, you know, those connections that you make, and also just the serendipitous nature of being in an office and falling into conversations that you wouldn’t have otherwise, or being able to express yourself about something that you’re going through. There’s a lot to be said for keeping those bonds strong that you have in person.

ELISE HU: Right, right. This idea that you’re talking about, about how we want to work from home and there’s a lot of productivity gains from it, but also, we miss being around our co-workers, is something that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been calling the Hybrid Paradox. Microsoft took a survey of 31,000 employees in 31 countries and found a similar and really high number of people [who] want to work from home, but also want to work at the office.

Many folks are seeking out jobs that can give them both. And Dr. David Rock, who we spoke to this season , he is the co-founder and CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute, he breaks down this fundamental challenge.

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DR. DAVID ROCK: What we found from our data and from the science suggests basically a third of people really want to work at home because that’s where they’re most productive, not because they want to goof off, but actually, they do their best work there. Those people being forced back in feels like punishment. It’s like, on the one hand, you’re telling me to work hard; on the other hand, you’re making it hard. And, you know, I got my life back when I was working at home. So, why are you doing that?

But there’s another third of people who are just polar opposite. They’re like, if you make me go home and work, it’s like suspension from school. I can’t get anything done. I hate it. People are really passionate on both sides of this. And it turns out, both groups say the reason is because that’s where they’re most productive. And then you’ve got about a third who say they’re most productive actually mixing it up.

(Audio clip ends.)

DESMOND DICKERSON: First of all, I’d like to just say how cool of a name is Dr. Rock? Like, that just sounds so, so authoritative. ( laughter )

ELISE HU: Yeah, the point that he makes is one that we’ve been grappling with throughout this season. And as we arrive at the end of this first season, there are no concrete answers, but we know it is that last—it’s choice C of what Dr. Rock mentioned. It’s a mix, right, and figuring out how to best mix it up or give employees flexibility in making those decisions.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Yeah, yeah. And you know, you were mentioning managers just a minute ago, and I think that managers have never been more important in how they figure out how to manage their team, how to, you know, give their team some agency, but then find what works for each and every individual on the team.

ELISE HU: Absolutely.

DESMOND DICKERSON: It’s a key time. You know, those are the folks that are going to make employees feel welcome, and feel like their work is meaningful and keep them from, you know, exploring other options and moving out. So, this is the time for organizations really to invest in their managers and making sure that they’re trained in the right way, not just to lead teams, but to understand how do you lead teams in this new way of working.

MARY MELTON: That hits directly on something else I remember Dr. Rock saying, which is how people are trying to increase their sense of autonomy—so many things felt so out of control in the last few years. And managers can really help foster that sense, so that employees feel like they have power over their choices, right? Underlying all of this is the buzzword of the year, which is flexibility. That word came up probably more than any other this entire season.

ELISE HU: Mm-hmm. A LinkedIn survey showed 81 percent of leaders are adjusting their policies in order to offer greater flexibility. And why? Because they’re responding to workers. Seventy-three percent of workers say that job flexibility is their top priority, and that surprised Dan Roth. He was one of our guests this season . He is the editor in chief of LinkedIn.

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DAN ROTH: We see this in all of our data at LinkedIn, there is this incredible demand for the ability to be able to carve out your own path and to have flexibility... We’ve done these kinds of surveys before, and it was always like, hey, what’s a priority for you as a worker? It was always pay and recognition. In the pandemic, job flexibility shot instantly to the top and it has stayed there.

(Audio clip ends.)

DESMOND DICKERSON: On the same episode where we talked to Dan Roth , I talked to a friend of mine named Temi. He has a job at Microsoft, and this is his day job, so he’s doing very technical stuff, technical sales. But outside of that, he’s doing very creative stuff with photography and videography and storytelling, and he’s just really growing with the outside stuff within the creator economy. And then he leveraged that and brought it back to work, and said, hey, you know what, I want to switch to marketing. I want to do more creative stuff. And it was just that smooth transition for him.

ELISE HU: Yeah, it’s very cool. And Mary, the WorkLab digital publication actually has a story from Jared Spataro highlighting the top 10 words and phrases that defined the work trends of 2021. Tell us, what was the upshot of that?

MARY MELTON: Yeah, Jared touches on things like Hybrid Paradox and the Great Reshuffle, and he zeroes in on flexibility, naming that the word of the year. And that makes sense because we’ve seen not only flexibility on how we work and where we work, but also in how we’re thinking about, as Desmond just said, flexibility in what we’re doing. People are rethinking how they can bring their side hustles into their day jobs, maybe, or focusing more on being a part of what has been called the creator economy. People have dubbed it a hyphenate culture, because you’re not just one thing, you’re many things. So, that’s just a very different way of identifying who you are.

ELISE HU: Yeah, it’s a very L.A. lifestyle. ( laughter )

DESMOND DICKERSON: ( laughter ) Yeah.

ELISE HU: Like, you’ll find somebody who makes some sort of food product for the farmers market, but also is an architect and also has a screenplay, you know? And so, it seems like that whole ethos is very now.

MARY MELTON: Yeah, I love that this is being adopted on a much wider scale. It just is such a more exciting way about thinking about your prospects and about who you are, and broadening just the definition of what makes you you.

ELISE HU: And corporations are really having to work with employees in order to offer them the flexibility that they’re looking for. Flexibility is a major factor in Microsoft’s own management framework, which is called Model, Coach, Care, which we talk about a little bit on this season . And Microsoft’s corporate vice president for talent learning and insights, Joe Whittinghill, talked about why that’s become so important to managers.

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JOE WHITTINGHILL: So during the pandemic, we’ve really asked our managers to lean in on Model, Coach, and Care. We’ve asked them to model the behaviors that we need to create inclusive and connected teams and model our culture. We’ve asked them to coach their teams, not only on being productive and getting work done, but on how to stay healthy and stay connected with each other, and continue to learn and grow. And most importantly, we found during the pandemic that care was critically important with their teams, and to really meet with their teams individually and ask them how they were doing, and to be empathetic to what the needs of those individual team members were, and to find ways to create as much flexibility as possible for them, in order for them, as individuals, as a team member, and then, quite frankly, as the company to be successful.

(Audio clip ends.)

ELISE HU: Yeah, this is not only important for retention, but it’s also important for the bottom line, is what he was saying.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Yeah, I started a new gig, in the midst of all of this, earlier this year, as a part of the Great Reshuffle. And before I even started, like a couple of days before I started, my boss called me, and he’s like, “Hey, you know, I just went through this process and, these are the challenges. These are the roadblocks. Here’s what I learned, so this will smooth it out for you. On Monday, do X, Y, and Z.”

And, I was just hanging out. I was on vacation at the time, but to get that call and to have that care before I even started, and it truly did make a difference. Like, things were smooth the following week. That’s what leaders have to do. That’s what managers have to do. When I joined the team, I already know, oh, this person has my back. You know, they’ve got my best interests in mind. So, I’m going to make it work.

MARY MELTON: Yeah, this is really complicated terrain for managers right now. I mean, it’s complicated for everyone, obviously for employees, for everyone, you know, but for managers to really figure out how to really keep an eye on folks and to know how they’re doing, when they actually aren’t seeing them every day, that’s really difficult.

I think about this from a parenting point of view. Like, I can’t imagine parenting from a distance, like how to do that. So, how managers are navigating that and learning new things along the way, you know, and being patient, hopefully, with themselves, too, it’s a huge question.

ELISE HU: But also exciting, right, because it creates some opportunities to make our workplaces better, to really take care of the employee in a holistic way, in a way that maybe was really devoid from work culture 10 years ago or even more recently in some places. Anne Helen Petersen talks a lot about this . She is a culture writer, long time at BuzzFeed, and now on her own, writing her own newsletter. And she writes so well about work culture, she’s even co-written a new book on the subject. Her take on manager empathy was really insightful.

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ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: So much of management is actually listening. Like, I think sometimes, we think of management as your ability to talk to other people when really, it’s a lot more of that invisible labor of listening, and not just, like, nodding your head —and not speaking, but hearing what the person is saying and asking the sort of follow-up questions that allow people to understand what’s actually going on.

(Audio clip ends.)

DESMOND DICKERSON: I’m going to ask you a question this time, Elise.

ELISE HU: Sure.

DESMOND DICKERSON: You’re a mom. What have you learned about being a good listener from parenthood?

ELISE HU: My biggest parenting insight is that the things that we try to really recognize when you’re parenting small children, which is that kids just really want to be seen. They just want to be heard and seen. It’s actually true for everybody. Like, it’s true for adults, too. ( laughter ) And we sort of lose that, I think, in dealing with our friends or our peers, our co-workers. But I try to sort of think about that and bring that to my relationships, which could also be really useful in the workplace.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Yeah, absolutely.

MARY MELTON: Yeah. We were talking earlier a little bit about what we miss about being in an office and those interactions that we have with our co-workers, when we can just check in with each other or we can just tell someone’s feeling a little down or maybe had a hard night with their kids or having a hard morning.

ELISE HU: Right.

MARY MELTON: And you don’t feel necessarily as safe to be as transparent with that. So right now, we’re going through a life change in my family, where my mother-in-law, who was very ill with COVID on the East Coast, hospitalized for a month, and rehab for six weeks, we’re actually moving her out here now to be closer to us. And this is a big change in our life. It’ll be a big change for us, and it’s the kind of thing I would probably be chatting about with my colleagues, right, if I was seeing them.

ELISE HU: Yeah.

MARY MELTON: And you don’t want to be that person at the beginning of the virtual meeting who’s like, I’m not feeling so great, right? ( laughter ) So mental health and wellness is a huge factor right now, and checking up with each other, and being patient with each other. And how do you do that when you’re not actually seeing each other?

DESMOND DICKERSON: Yeah, Microsoft’s been doing some interesting research around that concept. They’ve been exploring this idea of what we call mindless chatter, those little conversations that you have before a meeting or maybe after a meeting. And through that, studying that, they’ve been able to see how powerful it is just to reframe it, and not think of it as mindless chatter but mindful chatter. And that emphasizes how important, how meaningful it is to have those conversations. You’re talking about your family, or whatever’s going on with you outside of office hours, and it really draws people in. It helps to enhance those ties, enhance those bonds that you need to do innovative work, and creative work together.

ELISE HU: Yeah, and what you mentioned, Mary, about how wellness and mental health really need to take priority in a time where we don’t have the same assumptions that we used to have about being able to kind of feel somebody’s energy in the same room is really, really important. And, we talked about this a little bit earlier, too, but that, some groups have done better than others with hybrid work, and there’s a lot of reasons why that’s the case. And Desmond, you spoke with someone, Wangui McKelvey at Microsoft, who talks about this , right?

DESMOND DICKERSON: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, she was talking to me about why she thinks that female and Black workers in particular, are embracing new ways of working and how we think that it’s a trend that really deserves a little bit more attention.

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WANGUI MCKELVEY: You’re not worrying right now about missing out on the group lunch or the water cooler discussion, or being invited into a room. It has allowed relationships to flourish, in a way, because everybody is looking for a connection now. You’re not just going to go to your safety net of friends that sit next to you in the office. Now, you have to be intentional about actually establishing relationships with people.

Now, I think with hybrid, you’re going to see more and more people wanting to come together and maybe not so much in these sort of siloed ways, right? It’s going to be very intentional about how you bring people together in very intentional ways. It’s opened up a great opportunity for people to have some of these connections that they probably wouldn’t have had before.

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ELISE HU: Yeah, I love that she mentioned intentional and intent, because that word really feels like a close second to flexibility as a buzzword this year.

MARY MELTON: And also communicated that, as we were saying before with Anne Helen Petersen, why it’s so important to listen, how managers can really glean so much from just listening to what their employees want and looking for ways to establish new norms and ways of doing things, and being ready to, again, be flexible, right, to change when you get the new data that shows that something’s working or that something isn’t working.

DESMOND DICKERSON: So, speaking of intentionality, I think that if business leaders are very intentional about how they’re building their workforce in this hybrid era, it’s just going to unlock so many more opportunities for innovation and creativity and new ways of thinking. So now, women workers or Black workers or even folks that have disabilities or chronic illnesses, for whatever reason, they may not have thrived or enjoyed that office environment, but now that everything is open to everyone to create new relationships and new ways of working, this is the time when those folks can make huge investments and huge impact on the way that we’re all working.

ELISE HU: And businesses should be intentional not only in how its managers and employees behave, but also in how they hire, right? There’s McKinsey research that shows the big companies in the top quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity outperform those in the bottom quartile by 36 percent. This season, we spoke with Ritu Bhasin. She’s an expert in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and she outlined what she sees as the best way forward for managers to support employees.

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RITU BHASIN: We’ve been shaken to our cores around how are you going to lead. And so, being intentional, being mindful, being vulnerable, being authentic, being flexible, cultivating a mindset of growth and agility over constantly aiming for perfection, which doesn’t exist, doing your best takes on a whole heightened level. And so, as a leader, as a team member, your imperative is to be as intentional as possible in how you lead, offer team members choice and flexibility, and then, perhaps the most important piece for me, as it relates to DEI, is that ensuring that you are taking proactive measures to integrate and support those who choose to work primarily in a remote way.

(Audio clip ends.)

ELISE HU: There was also a tip I think about finding a buddy or sort of assigning buddies for any new employees or even established employees, you know, so that you kind of have somebody to go to that might not be your manager. What other tips do you all recall about making people who are working remote feel included?

MARY MELTON: Yeah, I think when you’re on a virtual meeting, as I mentioned before, it’s hard to read people sometimes. And if someone really seems to be a little bit off, listening to them is really, really important and following up. And that’s, again, something where if you were in an office, maybe that would be a little bit easier to do—I’m just going to go drop in on their office.

ELISE HU: Yeah, absolutely, frequent check-ins are essential, and managers should be keeping track of employee wellbeing as well as progress on projects. There have been challenges, though. Microsoft conducted a global survey of workers and found that 54 percent feel overworked and 39 percent feel exhausted. Managers can and should be doing more to support employees who are struggling or are simply stressed out. Earlier in the season, we talked to Clare Purvis from Headspace on why it’s important for workplaces to be more responsive to the mental health needs of employees.

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CLARE PURVIS: We’re starting to see a shift, slowly but surely, to the idea that actually, just as we eat vegetables, and go for walks and do things to care for our physical health, we can actually engage in different skills that help us take care of our emotional health. And this is all creating a conversation that centers on this theme that mental health is real. It’s something we all experience, and it’s something that we have some agency to manage.

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DESMOND DICKERSON: We were joking about how soon it gets dark, how early it gets dark.

ELISE HU: Yeah.

DESMOND DICKERSON: But that’s real, you know, and it has true impacts on your mood. What is it, seasonal affective disorder?

ELISE HU: Yup.

DESMOND DICKERSON: And, as she said, there are different ways that you can work around it. So maybe that’s taking a walk during the day while the sun is still out so that you’ve kind of stretched your legs and got a little energy, and built yourself back up as you have the opportunity before it got dark.

ELISE HU: Are either of you doing any meditating?

MARY MELTON: Yeah, I start out my day with a meditation, and I also took very seriously your conversation with researcher Michael Bohan on this season, Desmond, when he talked about the scientific reason why our brains do need a break, a Microsoft researcher, really, the data shows that we need that. So, in addition to a morning meditation, I purposefully take breaks throughout the day.

ELISE HU: I love that.

DESMOND DICKERSON: I’m not doing as good with my morning meditations, but I’m big on the breaks, and not just, hey, let me stand up and stretch my legs, but I go outside. I stand back on the veranda and soak up some fresh air. Try to get into the sun if I can.

ELISE HU: Yeah.

DESMOND DICKERSON: You know, these are the things that I do that really break it up and makes me feel like I’ve gone a different place. I’ve stepped out of this virtual world and fully immersed myself into the true, real physical world.

ELISE HU: Yeah, love that. I’m just curious, are there any other takeaways from the season that you have put into action?

MARY MELTON: I had a huge one with Dr. David Rock a data-bi-area='Body_Content' data-bi-type='Link' data-bi-id='WorkLab Podcast | 61%: Flexibility, Autonomy, and Managing Through Hybrid' class='article__paragraph__link' href='https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/podcast/flexibility-autonomy-and-managing-through-hybrid' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer'>Dr. David Rock . He had so many great actionable tips. ( laughter )

DESMOND DICKERSON: He did.

MARY MELTON: Yeah. I mean, he just was just a font of them. And the one that really stuck with me and I put into action immediately is a company I work for, Godfrey Dadich Partners, the partners producing this podcast, we had this standing morning meeting that I felt like was mostly to talk about things that we should be doing, if we weren’t actually having a meeting, talking about the thing we should be doing during the meeting. ( laughter )

So, I immediately called a meeting, of course, to say, can we not have this morning meeting every morning, and instead maybe have a status doc that we just update? And this really immediately helped me gain back, I swear, a month of my life, and not just my life, but of all of my colleagues’ life where we were having this meeting.

ELISE HU: Wow. So, everyone listening should go back and listen to that episode with Dr. Rock, but here was how he framed it, and clearly, it was really persuasive to Mary.

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DR. DAVID ROCK: We call it Minimal Meeting Mondays and Minimal Meeting Mornings, just because they’re fun alliterations. You know, if you leave Mondays and mornings open for people to do their own work, they end up doing amazing work, much better work because that’s the time your brain’s most creative. That’s an example of an organizational-wide practice you can do that can really help people with that road rule.

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ELISE HU: Oh, love it! And think about doing that, too, in your own workplaces.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Yeah, yeah.

ELISE HU: If your Monday meetings aren’t as productive as you—as they were intended to be. ( laughter )

DESMOND DICKERSON: So, I’m not doing it on Mondays, but I really enjoy my Freedom Fridays or my Free-time Fridays, where it’s pretty much no meetings. And, you know, it’s really a good time to reflect on the week that you’ve just had, knock out some things that you may have overlooked, and then prepare for the week ahead, and then, you know, an hour or two of just really thinking deeply and creatively about what’s going to make a difference. Like, where can we have a breakthrough?

ELISE HU: Are there any other moments that you’ll remember or insights from conversations that were really practical for you or just kind of personally amusing?

MARY MELTON: Yeah, I have one for this. It was in the first interview I did this whole season , with Jaime Teevan, who’s just a brilliant Microsoft researcher, and we were talking about something that she calls “the leaf blower problem” — I’m guessing we’re all probably familiar with this. You’re in this really nice, calm virtual meeting, and then there’s suddenly a very loud, unexpected racket in the background. But the leaf blower problem is not just that noise. It’s the fact that you turn down the speaker, you go on mute on your side, but the people on the other side, they don’t know that you’re still hearing that noise, and that’s actually the leaf blower problem. Because they can’t tell that you’re still reacting to something that’s going on in your environment and that’s something I’d never really thought of.

But of course, as we were discussing the leaf blower problem, a leaf blower came into my neighborhood and we had to stop the recording. ( laughter ) So, it was just a little too meta, to have something so relatable like that happen during the podcast.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Yeah, yeah.

ELISE HU: ( laughter ) That’s so on the nose.

DESMOND DICKERSON: That’s how it goes, yeah. It’s like a conspiracy. ( laughter )

ELISE HU: Desmond, any last word from you?

DESMOND DICKERSON: Yeah, it’s been a fantastic season, lots of wonderful guests. I’m very much looking forward to the next season and chatting with even more experts about the future of work.

ELISE HU: Fantastic, so are we. I think that’s a great note to end on for this season. Thank you both for helping wrap up what was an awesome first season with your insights and your funny stories.

MARY MELTON: Thank you, Elise. We learned a lot this season.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Thank you.

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ELISE HU: That’s it for this episode, and this season, of the WorkLab podcast, from Microsoft. Check out the WorkLab digital publication, too, where you can find, among many other things, a transcript of this very episode. That is all at microsoft.com/WorkLab. And for this podcast, we’d love it if you could rate us, review, and follow us wherever you listen. We will be back next year with more great interviews and insights on the future of work.

The WorkLab podcast is a place for experts to share their insights and opinions. As students of the future of work, Microsoft values inputs from a diverse set of voices. That said, the opinions and findings of our guests are their own, and they may not necessarily reflect Microsoft’s own research or positions.

WorkLab is produced by Microsoft with Godfrey Dadich Partners and Reasonable Volume. I’m your host, Elise Hu. Our correspondents are Mary Melton and Desmond Dickerson. Sharon Kallander and Matthew Duncan produce this podcast. Jessica Voelker is the WorkLab editor. Thanks for listening.

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