How the Future Works
Leading Flexible Teams To Do The Best Work of Their Lives
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today Bestseller
Unlock the power of flexible work with this practical “how-to” guide from the leadership of Slack and Future Forum
The way we work has changed. The era of toiling from nine-to-five, five-days-a-week in the office is now a relic of the past, and is being replaced by a better way—flexible work. But flexibility means a lot more than a day or two a week to “work from home”: 93% of your employees want more flexibility in when, not just where, they work. They want choice and they are leaving their roles to find it. The most successful leaders will go much further than offering occasional remote workdays—they will redesign every aspect of how work gets done, from defining how they measure organizational success to training their managers to make it happen.
How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do The Best Work of Their Lives offers a blueprint for using flexible work to unlock the potential of your people. The book offers the steps necessary to building the new principles and guardrails to empower flexible, high-performing teams. And it teaches readers to lead with purpose, to manage and measure differently, and to believe that by letting go, they’ll get more back than they thought possible.
How the Future Works explains how to:
Establish leadership principles, commitments, and outcomes for truly flexible teamwork Measure and assess productivity in a flexible workplace Reskill managers to ensure a level playing field for all employees Implement the infrastructure necessary to make flexible work successful
Using original research from Future Forum, a consortium by Slack, and global case studies from leading companies such as Levi Strauss & Co., Genentech, Royal Bank of Canada, and IBM, How the Future Works offers concrete solutions and practical steps for building high functioning teams of talented, engaged people by providing them with the flexibility and choice they need to do their best work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Elliott, Subramanian, and Kupp, founders of a Slack consortium "focused on redesigning work for all groups of people," deliver a helpful guide to moving workplaces into a more flexible model. The nine-to-five never worked, the authors suggest, and there's no going back to it after the "grand experiment" of remote work brought on by the pandemic. While flexible work arrangements haven't been universally successful—caregiving responsibilities "often made work harder" and "disproportionally affected women, especially women of color"—overall, remote work has resulted in increased productivity. Using case studies on such companies as Apple and Dropbox, the authors set forth seven steps for leaders to bring workplaces up to speed, among them explicating a company's reasons for flexibility, ditching the idea of managers as "task-masters," adopting a culture of experimentation, and reimagining the concept of a headquarters. The authors also urge leaders to get rid of unnecessary meetings by sending general status updates via messages, and to promote asynchronous work with nonrigid hours. The wealth of concrete steps and research to back them up, plus some punchy writing, make this shine. In a sea of surveys on the future of work, this practical guide stands out.
