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On the WorkWell Podcast, Jen Fisher — Human Sustainability Leader at Deloitte and Editor-at-Large, Human Sustainability at Thrive Global — sits down with inspiring individuals for wide-ranging conversations about how we can develop a way of living and working built on human sustainability, starting with ourselves.
Jen Fisher (00:00):
I'm really excited to share that my TEDx talk, the future of work is out. It combines my personal story with practical ways we can all come together to create a better world of work by focusing on human sustainability. Just search for Jen Fisher TEDx on your preferred search engine to watch my talk, and please join me in the movement to make wellbeing the future of work by sharing it with your networks. Thank you. The way we work has fundamentally changed technological advances, changing demographics, and of course, a worldwide pandemic amongst other shifts in society has spurred new ways of working to try to meet the evolving needs of employees. But companies and team leaders are still struggling to figure out which way of working will work best for them. This is the Work Well podcast series by Deloitte. Hi, I'm Jen Fisher, and I'm so pleased to be here with you today to talk about all things purpose, wellbeing, and human sustainability. I'm here with Annie Dean. She's a globally recognized expert on remote and flexible working. She's also the global head of team anywhere at Atlassian. Annie also oversees the real estate and workplace experience teams and the Team Anywhere Lab, which is a dedicated group of behavioral scientists focused on designing and validating evidence-based ways of working.
Jen Fisher (01:27):
Annie, welcome back to the show. Thank
Annie Dean (01:29):
You. I'm so happy to be here. It's
Jen Fisher (01:31):
So fun bringing you back and a lot has changed, but let's start with you and kind of who you are. And I guess most importantly to this conversation is where did your passion for flexible and remote work come from?
Annie Dean (01:45):
I love that question and it has been a while. I miss my days at Deloitte. But yeah, I think so. I'm Annie Dean. I'm the head of team anywhere at Atlassian, and I've over the past several years played a number of roles at companies, kind of building the future of work. I started my career as a corporate attorney working on Wall Street, and I had my kids a little bit on the young side. I was 27 when I had my first son. And that was hard because you're in a place in your career where you don't really have enough autonomy to call your own shots. You know what I mean? Yeah. And when I had my son, you know, I was working on transactions that would have me at the office until four o'clock in the morning.
Annie Dean (02:35):
And whole days would go by when I wouldn't see my son awake. I was trying to manage breastfeeding in and out of the office, and it was really breaking me, you know, I was feeling exhausted. I was feeling kind of hopeless. Being a lawyer was a career that I had been working for since I was a teenager, and it really surprised me how quickly it felt intractable. So I, I started to, you know, get really curious about the pain that I was experiencing and thought that it was a bigger problem than just what I was experiencing myself. It just, it didn't make sense to me. And so I became really focused on researching and understanding that issue. And I ultimately built a company that was a data and analytics company back in 2016, helping the Fortune 500 figure out how to make the best use of flexible work.
Annie Dean (03:30):
And it was really interesting at that time because remote work would've been way too crazy to bring to these executives at that time. And what we were seeing is that there was a huge demand, especially among caregivers and women, to have more location flexibility in their day-to-Day experience. And what people were really asking for at that time was the ability to leave the office and just go to the doctor, which was not the norm. And that's crazy to think about. And then, you know, ultimately I, that company was acquired and I was really fortunate to spend my next run at Deloitte figuring out new ways of working for clients. I started three weeks before the pandemic. And so, you know, the work that we were doing together was unprecedented and really fun. And then I ultimately became the head, the first head of remote work at Facebook. And now I've been at Atlassian leading our distributed work strategy for the past 18 months. So it's been a, a funny it's been a funny and different kind of career path, but it's always been fused by this idea of trying to solve a problem for, you know, what I was experiencing as a young mother, just trying to make it work.
Jen Fisher (04:44):
Yeah. And I mean, it, it, it is so interesting that many of the challenges of, you know, flexible and remote work. And I wanna get into what all of those terms mean. 'cause There's so many terms out there, but, you know, we tend to think of it as kind of a, at least I do, of like this more recent problem, right? But this goes back many, many, many years now. It, it may have evolved and kind of morphed and changed in terms of the needs and desires of the workforce, as you stated. But this is, this has kind of been around for a while, but I feel like we're really now, I guess, at a point where organizations and leaders are almost being forced to, to figure this out. Where I wanna start is exactly what I said. There's so many terms like flexible, remote, virtual, distributed, hybrid . So like, where are we going with all of this?
Annie Dean (05:37):
Yes, , that's a great question. And you know, it's funny, we think about this all the time on my team. We're always looking at trends of, you know, who's searching what, and what term is winning out . My preferred term is distributed work. Okay. and, and the way that I would define that is work that's not shoulder to shoulder. So, you know, I think that most work that's happening right now is generally done online. It is, you know, the sharing of information and making decisions across a virtual network. And that's how most desk workers collaborate to get today, whether or not they're spending time in an office. So, you know, the fact that you might have a return to office mandate, or you might be required to spend you know, a couple days in the office per week, chances are you're collaborating in a distributed way repeatedly throughout the day.
Annie Dean (06:31):
That's probably your norm, meaning that you're not doing the work, you know, without technology shoulder to shoulder. And that's why I do think, by the way, that it's important to acknowledge that companies at scale are distributed. You know, the way that we work today is distributed. That's that. And so we should not be afraid of designing for and optimizing for distributed. But I think a lot of people talk about remote work and remote work is an important term, especially right now. I think it's how a lot of people understand types of jobs that you let you work from outside the office. But the way I think about remote is you don't have a home office that you are commuting to. Mm-Hmm. I, I think of it as relationship between an employee and a home office. The other kind of term that gets thrown around a lot is the idea of hybrid work. And hybrid to me involves a mix of mandated in-office time and, you know, remote work or work from home, however you wanna label it. But at the end of the day, whether you're working remotely, you're working hybrid, you know, in a hybrid format, everyone's acting in a distributed way. So I'd love to talk about how the work gets done as opposed to using these location-based labels.
Jen Fisher (07:47):
I, I love that. In that, when you were talking about distributed work, I wanted to dig deeper on that because you said in many ways, regardless of where we're working from, the work that we're doing is distributed, is what I, is kind of what I heard you say because yeah, even, even if we're perhaps sitting shoulder to shoulder, we are still using in large part technology to collaborate and share information. And so by definition, does that make it distributed?
Annie Dean (08:21):
Yeah, and I think, I think yes. I mean, it's interesting because things have changed so significantly Yeah. Over the past several years, and it's hard to remember where we were . And I think a lot of the conversation that we're having sort of has these arguments from from back, you know, in 2019, 2018, but hasn't really caught up to the change in experience. So, for instance, I remember when we were first redesigning workspaces back in early 2020 or I should say the second half of 2020, people were anticipating what return to office might look like in 2020. And by the way, that never happened, right? There was a lot of discussion about physical whiteboards. It, there was a lot of discussion about how some people would be based in a conference room and other people would, you know, be based on, on Zoom and that kind of thing.
Annie Dean (09:15):
I think that I, I don't know what other people's experiences might be, but what I see anecdotally is that people are using different types of tooling to facilitate that. There's no longer a question of physically recording the whiteboard behind you to try to facilitate a, what we would've called then a hybrid experience. You know, now people are using online as their format to get work done. And that's an advantage. That means that great work can get done all over, whether you're traveling, whether you're in the office, whether you're not in the office. I don't know why we wouldn't design for that outcome, because technology certainly makes it possible.
Jen Fisher (09:53):
Yeah. And what I'm fascinated by in your definition of distributed work is in many ways I feel like that that definition, I don't know if diffuse is the right word, but if the work that the majority of desk workers is already doing is distributed, then I guess why is mandatory in office versus not in office? Like, why, why are we where we are if the work, I guess if you knew the answer to that, we, we wouldn't be talking. I mean, I don't know, but like, I wish we all knew the answer to that, right, .
Annie Dean (10:29):
Yeah. Well, you know, I think you raised a really good point, which is I think the reality is non-controversial. Yeah. So that's what I, I try to point people towards. There's still a lot of debate about should we be in the office? Should we not be in the office? It feels like a very surface level and almost emotionally driven conversation, but the reality is almost all the time people are working in a distributed format, right? This simply is the reality. It's kind of something that we should just look at as the table stakes for how work gets done in the 21st century, and look at it as an opportunity and an advantage to keep getting better at it. And when I think about why we are where we are, I have a lot of empathy for leaders that are navigating all types of changes for the first time.
Annie Dean (11:15):
You know, all of these structures that served us and that we could rely on as normal over the past, you know, several decades are, it's just no longer the case. And that's a difficult thing. And I think where people are kind of falling short on the office versus, you know, distributed debate is people think that if we bring people back into the office, these magical things are going to happen. , they think, you know, we know that workers right now are suffering. Yeah. They are monitoring too many inboxes. They can't focus, they can't do deep work. They can't get ahold of their collaborators to get into a live session and ideate on the most important tasks. They're waiting five weeks to get 30 minutes with the five people that need to discuss things. So I think that there is this idea that if we bring people back to the office, we're gonna have these productive teams. We're gonna have connected teams, but that's, that's not what, that's not what the solution set says. That's not what the problem set is indicating. And so I'd love executives to get more focused on designing new ways of how we work that really do overcome those problem spaces.
Jen Fisher (12:28):
I did we have those problems before, like what kind of got us to this point of realizing and recognizing, you know, that like, that's just not a, it's not a sustainable way of working, and it's what's burning people out and quite frankly, creating, you know, many negative outcomes for the workforce, including, you know, an area that I'm passionate about, right? I mean, we're seeing so many negative wellbeing outcomes that are being caused by the way we're working and the design of work, right? Yeah. That those are the root causes. It's not that organizations don't have good benefits and programs and tools and resources. It's that the work itself, the way work is designed people's feelings of, to your point when you, you know, did your introduction, people's feelings of, you know, autonomy in terms of deciding what are the best ways to get my work done? I'm the one doing the work, and so how do I, you know, how much power and influence do I have on deciding how that work gets done?
Annie Dean (13:32):
Yeah. And I think the short answer is that these problems did exist before the pandemic. Yet at that time, most people were required to be in an office most of the time. And that served as a bandaid to kind of keep the whole system functioning together. But one really interesting and significant change since the pandemic is that teams are largely no longer co-located. So it used to be that you would design your workforce strategy around the San Francisco office and the New York office and you know, the London office. And now, you know, there's been a lot more fluidity in where people are located. One of my favorite stats is that Microsoft shared that they had 60% of their teams co-located prior to the pandemic. And that number is now 25%. So even if you go into the office, you're not there with your collaborators, right? And on an industry level, and only about 19% of teams are co-located. So again, you know, it's, we're not going to be able to solve team productivity, team collaboration, or team you know, connectedness if people are not lo if teams are not located near each other, right? Nor is that the best outcome. You know, that's not a recommendation for people to go consolidate all of their teams into, you know, the most expensive cities in the world. We have more options now. And so you know, that's a great advantage for business.
Jen Fisher (15:03):
So Annie, I mean, I guess as, as we talk about these different styles or ways of working and what you're seeing in your research, like what, what is coming up as effective ways of working? I mean, I do think that my own personal view is that there is a always a need or a time and place for humans to gather together in real life. Yeah. And there's lots of benefits. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that everybody's required to go to the office on Tuesday and Thursday. And so what, like, what is an effective way to work?
Annie Dean (15:43):
I think that there's a few different ways to think about. I, I think basically about effectiveness and connection kind of as two key components of the puzzle. And on the connection piece, you really want teams to be connected, and you really wanna build connection in person to the extent possible. People can choose their own workplace every single day. They're never required to go to the office, but they do, you know, we have high attendance rates at all of our offices because a lot of people voluntarily choose to work there. But the way that we drive Team Connection is that we have what we call intentional togetherness events. And this is where teams come together from potentially across the globe for three to five days to socially bond, and also to do, you know, the, the hardest work that is worth doing together at that time.
Annie Dean (16:32):
And what we see is that we generally see a boost of about 27% on Team Connection. We look at that through passively connected collected survey data. So it's not like we ask participants, do you feel more connected? We are always measuring connection, team connection as a company wide metric. And we see that among participants connection goes up by 27%. That increased connection remains high for four to five months. So that suggests that people should come together three to four times a year, and that will really result in connected teams. By the way, team Connection is a great predictor of team effectiveness as well. So we know that this isn't just about feeling good, this is really about driving business outcomes. We also noticed that if you are earlier in your career, that you probably need to come together in person a little bit more frequently.
Annie Dean (17:28):
You might need to do it four to five times a year instead of three to four times a year. When we looked at office attendance as a predictor of connectedness, we found that it had no impact. So it's really interesting because I think a lot of leaders are saying, well, come to the office and that's how we'll drive connection, but that's just not what we're seeing in our studies. The other thing is about how to be effective in how we work. And, you know, the way that we're thinking about that right now is across three verticals. One is time, the other is clarity. And then finally think building smart networks. And so a lot of what people can optimize in this environment is figuring out how to design their time to drive their most important impact. So don't let your five weeks calendar dictate how you're spending your time.
Annie Dean (18:25):
You're the CEO of your calendar. And we recommend keeping about 30% of the day unreserved so that you can use that for focus time or to scoop up a collaborator and work on something difficult together. We also recommend knowing every single day, what is the one thing that you must get done today in order to drive your goals forward? And that makes it so that you organize every day to drive that impact. And that's what we mean by that vertical of clarity. Are you clear on what your goals are? Do you know how to communicate clearly? You know, do you know what you need to get done today to drive impact long term? And then finally, building a smart network is all about knowing who you need to know to get your work done. And that, I think, is different than it was pre pandemic, where it was just kind of know as many people as you can.
Annie Dean (19:15):
Now I think it's really about who are those cross-functional partners? Who are the people that you're going to get work done with? One of the things that I always say to my team and they laugh at is cancel all your relationship meetings. Instead, go spin up a really difficult cross-functional project and make relationships by getting the work done together. Because too often, you know, Jen, I'm sure you, you, you may relate to this at least the, the idea of, you know, having all the hard work in your day pushed after your kid's bedtime or after 9:00 PM and you know, I always say to my team, do your hard work during the workday. Don't do it after work. That doesn't make any sense. That's not driving the impact we need from every employee, you know, on our team and in our company.
Jen Fisher (20:03):
Yeah, I think I, it definitely relates to me. I mean, definitely relates to probably a lot of the research that you're looking at and that, that we're looking at. You know, and I think in particular with caregivers, right? You know, we, we kind of spend, we spend all day in online meetings and aren't able to do kind of that deep and difficult work, and then we log off and, you know, do what matters to us in our personal lives and then log back on to actually get that, you know, difficult work done. Which is interesting because I think that, you know, sometimes some of the collaboration is happening at nine or 10 o'clock at night, and that's certainly not optimizing anything for anyone .
Annie Dean (20:42):
Right, right,
Jen Fisher (20:44):
Right. Do not recommend. So yes, it, it definitely resonates with me. And when you talk about connectedness and kind of the, the research and the results that you all are seeing, I mean, you know, there's so much out there that is suggesting that flexible and or remote work is increasing the loneliness epidemic. So what, you know, what is your view on that, just based on kind of what you're seeing, what's coming out of the research?
Annie Dean (21:16):
Well, I'm, I wanna acknowledge upfront that, you know, there are certainly people who are impacted by feeling isolated, especially as we navigated the crisis of the pandemic, right? But in general, I, I sort of have a different theory, which is I think that when we do a lot of these studies on loneliness, we're baselining it against engagement with our companies in a pre pandemic world. And I think that in that pre pandemic world, work tended to be at the top of our quote unquote identity stack. Mm-Hmm, . It was, you know, we were going to the office every single day. We were spending nine to 10 hours there every single day. And I think actually it's okay in this new era if we are less attached to our workplaces because it means that we're reinvesting our energy into our families and communities.
Annie Dean (22:09):
So I'm hoping that you know, the fact that people are looking on a database longitudinally less connected to their companies means that they're feeling more connected to their families and, and their local communities. And some of the research that we've done has validated this. So, you know, we are seeing that people are picking up new hobbies. They are investing more regularly in wellbeing activities like exercise. They are buying homes for the first time. And they're saying that, you know, having flexibility is a major contributing factor to these changes. So I, I do think that when you look across the landscape of people who are talking about flexibility and remote work, a lot of them are talking about how this will really be a shift in how we live. And I think we're starting to see the beginning, the beginnings of that now.
Jen Fisher (23:04):
Yeah. I, I, I love that counterpoint, . I completely, I agree with it. I mean, and again, to your point, not to discount the many people that are experiencing isolation and loneliness, we know that the loneliness epidemic is real. It was also real before the pandemic. And there's a lot of factors causing it. But I I, I, I love this, you know, that, that the research is showing that people are reevaluating the role that work plays in their life. And so, and, and, and to me, that's a very healthy thing for all of us to do on a regular and ongoing basis, right? Yeah. I mean, it's something that continues to change and evolve. And if we are finding, you know, connection and meaning in other aspects of our life, that that's a really good thing. Because I think some of that actually pre pandemic had probably been lost.
Annie Dean (23:59):
I totally agree. Yeah. Yep.
Jen Fisher (24:01):
So you talked about kind of, you talk about it as team effectiveness. Can you talk to me about, I wanna dig into the obsession that the world has with productivity. And I noticed that you don't use the word productivity very often. You use effectiveness , which I love . And so I want you to unpack that for me.
Annie Dean (24:27):
, I love, I love that you noticed that. Yeah. So I think productivity is interesting because in a knowledge worker environment, and certainly a lot of the growth that we have experienced across different industries have been driven by technology, right? And knowledge work over the past several co couple of decades. And in that time period, I think it's been really difficult for businesses to know what productive output looks like. This is no longer the world where we can look at how many inputs are going into a machine, and how many outputs come out of that machine. You know, we want to make sure that people are sustainably performing over time, that they are innovative in their approach, that they are ambitious and solving their goals that they are building long-term sustainability into their solutions. And these things are much more difficult to evaluate than, for instance, how many calls come out of a call center.
Annie Dean (25:28):
Which by the way is many of the studies on remote work and or the early days were in those more measurable kind of productivity focused environments versus more different kinds of knowledge work outcomes. And I, so as a result, you know, we, we never figured that out pre pandemic. We haven't figured it out post pandemic. And yet it's a conversation that's really weaponized to try to suggest that working outside of the office is an undesirable thing to do. And I just don't think the research should suggest that, because study after study indicates that people feel more effective when they have the choice to choose where they're working from. So for instance, today it's Halloween. I don't know when this episode will air, but today we're recording on Halloween. And Halloween is one of the most notorious days of the year that can be stressful for parents because you have to bring your kid in costume, you have to set up the trick or treating after school, you have to have, you know, your provisions ready at your door for your neighbors.
Annie Dean (26:46):
And if you need to get to the office in, you know, that, that set of circumstances, it's really hard to get anything done. Whereas today, I, you know, I'm working from home. I could have chosen to work from the office, and it means that I can every spare minute, minute that I've got until I need to go pick up my kids at school. And trick or treat is dedicated to getting work done. So what we're seeing is that workers can when they're empowered to choose their working location and have good solid norms and ways of working that support distributed work, that's why we continue to see more effectiveness across teams and, and individuals. So yeah, I think it's not just about productivity. It's a, it's a bigger story.
Jen Fisher (27:33):
Yeah. I, I agree. And I think we need to move away from this constant obsession that we have around productivity at all costs. Jen's view of the world, but , because I actually think it makes us less productive, not more productive. But anyway, that's a whole other podcast, probably . But you like, I guess what, what other myths around, you know, flexible, distributed, remote work should we dispel today that we haven't talked about that are coming up in, in what you're doing, the work you're doing and the research?
Annie Dean (28:10):
One, I think a myth is that distributed companies actually should be building premium office experiences for those who want and need it. And two, it's okay to not require people come to the office. They're still going to come if they, if it's a good experience. I think so few companies are thinking in, in the landscape of, oh, we can let people choose. We can really empower people to make that choice. They will choose responsibly.
Jen Fisher (28:38):
Yeah. I, I think we're seeing some of the same, where does trust come into all of this? Because I think trust between the, the leaders and the workers, but also, you know, the workforce trusting their organization. 'cause I feel like what I hear a lot is, yes, my leaders say that it's okay to not come into the office, but then they're in the office. And so if I don't get that face time with them, you know, there's a lot of swirl around, kind of like, will I, if I don't get that FaceTime with them, will I still be considered a high performer or still be considered for promotion? And maybe that's not technically trust, but I think that some of the foundations of it are right, that if you tell me I don't need to be in a specific location, I don't need to be in a specific location, and therefore it's not going to impact my career in any way.
Annie Dean (29:34):
Yeah. I just think it's really interesting and funny that there's still a conversation that whether you not or not you attend the office is an indication of your performance or drives what trust you can have with your leader. You know, I think it's amazing because we hear these incredible outpourings of stories from people where, you know, it's not small things. It's like, my dad had a heart attack and he was on in a very difficult circumstance in the hospital, and I was able to go home and work every single day, but see my dad every day. And by the way, I think this is why the return to office conversation in the press is not going away. I think it's crazy that we're still having this conversation, but it's not dying down because the issue is so unresolved, right? People know that they can work productively from anywhere and they can't unlearn this. But for whatever reason, leaders areen pretending that that is controversial.
Jen Fisher (30:36):
Yeah. I mean, and that's a, you know, an experience that resonates with me, you know, as a, a caregiver for my elderly mother with Alzheimer's, right? I mean, there are just times where I need to be able to either drop everything and, and attend to her caregiving needs or be able to wrap my work around the things that I need to do for her. You know, and, and something similar just happened with her where it was a very intense time with caregiving, and I was, you know, I was able to step away but also stay connected to work and the ways that worked for me during that time period. And I got all the support from my team and my leaders. And it, it's, you know, that in itself builds tr like, like builds trust, builds experience, right? Builds in. I mean, all of these things that we say we care about and want in our workplaces, when you step back and you create cultures and styles of work that, that support that you are also creating. I mean, it, it, it, it, I'm, I'm with you. 'cause I, it kind of blows my mind that we don't get this right. . Right, right. Because it seems so simple, but yet it's not .
Annie Dean (31:50):
Totally. So interesting. Yeah.
Jen Fisher (31:53):
One other area that I wanna dig into, and I don't know if this is kind of part of what you all thought about or coming up in the research I'm certainly seeing it kind of from a sustainability and human sustainability perspective is you distributed, flexible remote work can also have a positive impact on climate change and our planet. Yeah. can you talk a little bit about that and if it's been part of the conversation and the strategies that you're rolling out but just kind of also broader at large.
Annie Dean (32:26):
Absolutely. and you know, I think that there's been some really encouraging research not authored by us, but at large that focuses on how things like reduced commuting time can really have a significant impact on climate at scale. And I think this is really the time to seize the opportunity and build cities and communities that align with our needs for more green space, for safety, for thriving culture. And you know, I think that by, especially I'm in New York City, you know, the way that Midtown and Wall Street just don't feel like they used to there's a huge opportunity to reclaim some of those spaces to live in them as opposed to have them be these separate commuter areas that people only use for work. And I just think that, you know, like I said earlier in this conversation, changing the way that we work and where we spend most of our time changes the way that we live. And that's a, a huge invitation for us to innovate.
Jen Fisher (33:37):
What are some things that you've done personally or you and your team have done to disrupt your approach that, like, tell me one or two that have worked really well and maybe tell me one or two that didn't go so well, .
Annie Dean (33:50):
Yeah. one thing that's interesting is I'm always iterating on how I run my leadership team meeting. So my direct reports are pretty diverse in their surface areas, and they might not naturally kind of come together, right? Because we have one person who leads real estate development, and we have one person who leads all of our offices and another person who leads strategy integrations into our operations and talent portfolio. We have another person who leads research. We have another person who is always telling the stories of what we're learning to our internal and external stakeholders. So everyone has kind of a very different remit. And one of the things that we've done is that we lead the meeting with a 10 minute read. So everyone joins and we read for 10 minutes. And everybody indicates the three most important things that they're doing this week.
Annie Dean (34:47):
And we also update it with the three most important things that were from last week. And we score them red yellow and green so that we're constantly evaluating on a week by week basis, are we accomplishing the most important things on our plate? And we also do fun things like we have people talk about their weekends and the fun things that they're watching and reading. So it's really enjoyable and it ends up really informing everyone deeply about what everyone else is doing. I would say that we've probably had 20 different formats of that page over the 18 months that we've been doing it. So we constantly are asking ourselves, how can we make this exercise more useful to drive better knowledge sharing and outcomes for the team? What's one thing that we've done that hasn't worked so well?
Jen Fisher (35:37):
I I have to, I have to, I have to comment on that because I love that the first 10 minutes are like allotted for everybody to actually read because that gets rid of the pressure of needing to pre-read . Yeah. Nobody has time to pre-read. Right? ,
Annie Dean (35:53):
I'm, I'm anti pre-read. This is controversial. Some people feel like pre-reading is really important, especially for those who may be neurodiverse or need more time to read. Yeah. but I think the way around that is really good writing. So another thing that we've done is we've implemented this communication framework. And I was actually just speaking to the founder of this yesterday, and I was saying, there's almost no things that you can do that are zero out of two effort and 10 out of, sorry, zero out of two out of 10 effort and 10 out of 10 impact. And it's literally just how do you write a smart message that communicates exactly what you need to know? And I, I started to ask my team to only communicate information to me in this format. Oh, wow. And I started to time time myself and you know, what would happen is I would get these really long-winded overviews of complicated issues that were coming to me in written async format. And it took me 43 minutes to edit one of those things into a format that I could then ship up the chain to my executive team to inform 'em about what was ultimately being escalated.
Jen Fisher (37:11):
Yeah, that's pretty amazing. That's awesome.
Annie Dean (37:13):
It's interesting 'cause things don't work all the time. You know, I, I have people, I'm constantly doing these book book clubs in my wider organization and we're always reading books and trying different things, and half the time they fail, you know, we'll do we'll do a new type of reporting or a new type of meeting. Like sometimes I'm really obsessed with doing work in meetings. I hate having meetings talking about work. I only have meetings if we're working in them. I love that. And we'll schedule a series of meetings on high priority work to really pick it apart and then we'll realize, hey, like, we've grown out of this. So that's not an epic fail. Yeah. I wish I had kind of an epic fail story, but I think what we're comfortable with is we're failing a little bit all the time and we're trying to just get better, you know? Yeah.
Jen Fisher (38:03):
I love that. I actually love the fact that you don't have an epic fail story because I think the reason that you don't is because you're failing a little bit all the time, right? And so in the moment you're able to change and evolve or, you know, move on to the next big thing because you realize that it wasn't, you know, it wasn't what you thought it was or it wasn't worth your time. And I think that's a mindset and a style that most of us need to adopt. .
Annie Dean (38:28):
Totally. so
Jen Fisher (38:30):
Well, Annie, thank you so much. There's like so much goodness in this podcast. I don't usually go back and listen to my own podcast, but I feel like I need to go back and listen to this one, to fully , to fully grasp all of the, the, the great wisdom that you imparted upon us. So thank you for being on the show.
Annie Dean (38:48):
Oh, thank you so much. You know, it's always a treat whenever I get to chat with you, so I'm really grateful that you invited me today.
Jen Fisher (38:55):
Absolutely. I'm so grateful Annie could be with us today to talk about flexible and remote work.
Jen Fisher (39:09):
Thank you to our producers, rivet 360 and our listeners. You can find the Work Well podcast series, or you can visit various podcast catchers using the keyword work. Well all one word to hear more. And if you like the show, don't forget to subscribe. So you get all of our future episodes. If you have a topic you'd like to hear on the Work Well podcast series, or maybe a story you would like to share, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. My profile is under the name Jen Fisher. We're always open to your recommendations and feedback, and of course, if you like what you hear, please share post and like this podcast. Thank you and be well. The information, opinions, and recommendations expressed by guests on this Deloitte podcast series are for general information and should not be considered as specific advice or services.