Rob Sadow: Flexible, Policy, Match, Benchmark | Work 20XX
Jeff Frick
Engagement in an AI Driven, Asynchronous World | Builder | Top Voice | Video Virtuoso | Content Curator | Host, Turn the Lens podcast and Work 20XX podcast
Rob Sadow started with a simple question. Which organizations are remote, and of those, what are their policies? Workplace flexibility is right up there with compensation and benefits when people are deciding on their next career move. Was there a single repository of this information?
Enter the Flex Index . Rob and the team started building the database reaching out, and opening up to contributors, collecting and organizing, and codifying policies and patterns.
They release trends and highlight updates quarterly.
Full-Length Episode on - YouTube - Spotify - Transcript and show notes - or wherever you podcast (editors note: originally premiered 2023-Aug-04)
Enjoy this curated clip collection from our forty-minute conversation
What are Organizations' Hybrid policies?
Q - Which Companies are Hybrid? - asked everyone
A - The data wasn't available, so we created the Flex Index?- Rob Sadow
Start at the beginning. What is the Flex Index and Why is the Flex Index?Love the open-source ethos. Collect the data, share the data, watch the value grow, and see trend lines over time.
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Where does the data come from?
Q - How do you collect the data? - Jeff Frick
A - A few different ways. Employees can add their companies to the Flex Index- We collect public information - We reach out to companies in the index and invite them to update their listings and policies - Rob Sadow
What are individual company remote work policies? The #FlexIndex is creating the repository.
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What's the most common model?
The most common model within structured hybrid is a minimum days per week. A company?wants everybody to be in the office two or three days a week. Then the specifics often get kicked down to teams - Rob Sadow
Push control down as far as logical
What's the logical team-level agreement level?
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Full-time lagged Flexible in Headcount growth
It's one thing to say how important flexibility is, but do people actually make decisions differently on it? Are they really choosing one company versus another or leaving companies based on their flexibility posture? - Rob Sadow
Compensation and Benefits were top of the charts for a long time. Now add flexibility policy to make a New Big 3 HR considerations going forward.Spoiler Alert - We're not going back to 2019, 1999, or 1959 for that matter
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Pivot: Commuting and Covid
We faced one of two things. Either we could wait this out, and the other was we started hearing from our customers for the first time about hybrid work and the idea that maybe people would never go back full-time - Rob Sadow
领英推荐
The Scoop Origin story, par deuxCovid collapsed the Commute, Covid codified hybrid workSo the solution was reborn in Phoenix-ian fashion, to focus on hybrid work. Listen to market signals.?Some are loud, some are quiet, find the signal in the proverbial noise.
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People want to go into the office, based on who else is going in
Make it easy to share where you're working or planning on working and reproduce that out to all of the places where that information is useful - Rob Sadow
Covid forced Rob and team Scoop to pivot from commuting to coordinating. The core remains, removing friction, making it easier for people to coordinate schedules to be at the same place, at the same time.There's nothing worse than a dark, empty space, when I took the time, and effort, and was excited to come in and see colleagues. Less effort intentionality.
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Automate Coordination
People are interested in going into the office, but don't know what day, other people don't know either, and?the manifestation of that was hundreds of Slack messages - Rob Sadow
Remove the toil and tedium.
Automate the coordination.
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Routines and Snapshots
Most people are creatures of habit, right? The challenge is not figuring that out for yourself, but it's remembering everybody else's routine and how this team does it versus that team and in larger companies it becomes impossible - Rob Sadow
- Use computers for the data collection, orchestration, assembly, and presentation of information (they're good at it). Then the person can use their cognitive load to make decisions, not aggregate data from across several systems.
The more minutia and toil we can pass to the machine, the more we free up our mental processing to make decisions.
Ease into existing workflows
I like to build into things that you're already doing, everyone can benefit and there's no learning curve associated with it whatsoever - Rob Sadow
There was a time when everyone wanted to own the 'screen' that was open, the top-level application, platform, orchestrating everything else.
Why not just slip into an existing workflow, with an easy button? People don't want another application. And they don't want to learn another application.
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Thanks again Rob. Keep collecting and sharing the data on what's actually happening in the market, to the benefit of us all.
Full-Length Conversation
Rob Sadow : Flexible, Policy, Match, Benchmark | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick - YouTube - Spotify - Transcript and show notes - or wherever you podcast
VP, Head of Operations & Strategy at Headway
1 年Thanks Jeff, great to chat with you!