Brian Elliott on Building Trust and Thriving Teams in a Flexible Workplace

Brian Elliott, bestselling author and CEO of Work Forward, will join the i4cp 2025 Next Practices Now Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona (March 3-6, 2025) to discuss the impacts of workplace flexibility, technology, and inter-generational workplace dynamics.

He’ll also share the best practices gleaned from his work with hundreds of executives across industries. He recently spoke with the Institute of Corporate Productivity (i4cp) about what’s shaping his outlook on the future of work and what priorities should be top of mind for HR leaders.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you think HR leaders will need to prioritize in this new world of work?

I think the biggest thing in this new world of work is [considering] how we enable leaders of teams to be more effective. It's the key superpower to organizations that can unlock better ways of working, lower stress for employees, and deliver better results…Teams are the center of where work gets done.

How should leaders think about performance management and productivity as tech continues to evolve?

There's always going to be art plus science in doing these things and it does get hard.

At Slack we took a [performance management] approach that was very much impact oriented. Your impact wasn't always about a number, it was about the impact of the thing that you were working on. For example, for product managers, designers, and engineers, we asked is the thing that you're building not just launched, but is it being used? Better yet, is it driving revenue?

There’s a phrase around ‘landings not launches.’ The number of products you launch doesn’t matter. It’s whether anybody is using the stuff at the end of the day.

Beyond impact, or what people do, there’s how they do it. Are they having a positive impact on their team’s goals? Do they live up to our organization’s core cultural attributes? 

If you keep those attributes pretty simple and the goals limited, you can have that conversation about performance more than once a year.

You can start measuring on a more regular basis and aggregating it so that you're having career conversations with somebody on a more frequent basis about how they are doing against the goals that you set out because you're capturing the data as it comes through.

What is the role of the office and flexibility as it stands right now?

There is a critical role for shared space for people and it's hugely dependent on the nature and type of team.

One of my favorite examples in our book How the Future Works was Genentech because they have R&D workers who must have access to a lab. I can't do biochemistry in my garage—at least I better not do biochemistry in my garage. They also have operations people that are in a manufacturing facility, and salespeople that are on the road more than they're in an office, so there's sort of that team-by-team difference.

But for most teams there are going to be certain elements of work that depend on building relationships together and solving complex problems through collaborative work, not individual work. The role of the office has inverted.

It used to be that about 70% of an office was dedicated to housing individuals in cubicle farms or open office floorplans to do heads down work. It's now 70% about space for collaboration for project teams, reviews with your sales team, or for training events.

And it does play a critical role even for the fully remote team. Pre-pandemic, remote companies like Gitlab would get their people together at least once a year and often they’d get smaller teams together once a quarter which is a pattern I've seen work really well with folks…If you've got a product development team and they're spread out across multiple cities, flying them to get together at least once a quarter is essential.

I think the worst thing that we've seen happen is leaders hiring employees under one set of rules and then changing that set of rules. That dramatically upsets not just their expectations, but actually their lives. That's when people lose trust and faith in the organization. Especially when leaders have no willingness to provide data to back up why that change is necessary     .

You may be [bringing people back to the office] to control the employees that you think are slacking off at home, but the signal you send to everybody else is exactly the same, which is that you don't trust them. Your top performers get that message also and they're the ones that are the most marketable and most likely to find another job.

Last, the future of work is more diverse than ever, especially as it relates to the generations currently in the workplace. What should be top of mind for HR leaders managing the multi-generational workforce?

Millennials, oddly enough. They are the current generation of leaders. Boomers are headed slowly but surely into retirement. I'm Gen X myself and we're moving and migrating in that direction as well. Millennials are now the ones sitting at the center.

They are the sandwich generation already [supporting] their parents and their own children. They kind of have to play the same role internally inside of an organization.
They’re asking how we help bridge gaps of understanding between these groups and get past the stereotypes of Boomers and Gen Z to talk about what we learn from one another, like Gen Z’s embedded digital knowledge and Boomers’ history in an organization.

Millennials and Gen Z are also digital natives. They know and understand innately how technology, not just physical place, is key to building and maintaining relationships.

From a multi-generational workplace perspective, a little bit of patience is going to go a long way.

 

Join Brian Elliott and other thought leaders at i4cp’s Next Practices Now Conference

Don’t miss the opportunity to hear Brian Elliott share insights on workplace flexibility, technology, and multi-generational teams at i4cp’s Next Practices Now Conference, March 3–6, 2025. Join HR leaders in a vendor-free environment to gain actionable strategies and drive real-world impact. Visit i4cp.com/conference to learn more.