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Justin Harlan: Hi, I'm Justin Harlan, Managing Director of Tulsa Remote, and today we are doing an episode of Remote With that is unique and special in the sense that we have experts coming in and talking about all the amazing things that we can apply in our remote work every single day as leaders and employees. Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with Rebecca Hinds, who is visiting Tulsa for our Plugged In conference that we're thrilled about over the next couple of days. Rebecca, thanks so much for being here with us. We really appreciate you making time for us.

Rebecca Hinds: Thanks for having me. It's great to be in Tulsa, and I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Justin Harlan: All right. So let's dig in. I'd love just to kind of set the ground floor by having you share a bit about your story. What has your career been like? Where do you live now? All those good things. Tell the people who you are. Who is Rebecca Hinds?

Rebecca Hinds: Sure. So I am currently based in San Francisco. I did my college in the Bay Area and became really fascinated by organizations and how they function, how they breathe, how they operate, how great leaders lead. So I spent most of my master's and then PhD studying that topic. My PhD in particular was focused on remote work.

It was a little bit serendipitous in the sense that I came in September 2019, wanting to study remote work and it being a very niche topic in the literature and in the research. Then the pandemic unfolded, and all of a sudden it was relevant and applicable to every organization. I really became fascinated by the shift that we were seeing as the pandemic unfolded, how organizations were grappling with that change.

Drawing on a lot of my previous research on leadership and technology, I've always been really fascinated by technology and how it changes organizations and people. After my PhD, I went to start what we call the Work Innovation Lab at Asana. It's our internal think tank where we conduct research on the future of work. What's really special and unique about the lab is our close partnerships with academic experts.

Coming out of the PhD, I was a bit frustrated by the disconnect between the research and what I was seeing in practice in actual organizations, especially in the context of remote work. You know, we have decades and decades of research. It's niche, but on remote work and a lot of learnings that we can take into our organizations that I didn't feel I was seeing that connection. So we started the lab to bridge that disconnect. What if we could work really closely with academic experts and bring those learnings into an organizational setting in a way that's digestible for executives to act on?

Justin Harlan: Amazing. My mind is blown right now. Okay, so oftentimes, as someone who's preparing for these conversations, you read the bio, you get the questions, and then you show up and I'm just like, I have 19 million questions for you. And I'm so excited about the next 30 minutes. How like, why were you interested in remote work in 2019? Is that when you started your PhD? Or when did you start to go the path of the PhD specific around remote work?

Rebecca Hinds: So I had been thinking about it for years and years, and I actually deferred, deferred, deferred. I loved industry, but I felt I wanted to become an expert. I was doing a lot of writing on future of work topics, and I didn't feel like I was a de facto expert in the topic. So I decided to do the PhD September 2019. I enrolled.

Justin Harlan: Which was a different time, right? So this is before the pandemic, what was it about remote work that made you want to dig in deeper? Was there a lived experience or something that you had a personal connection to? Or was it just general interest in like organizational behavior and psychology, some of the things you mentioned?

Rebecca Hinds: It was a little bit of both. I think definitely this idea that an organization can operate in a fundamentally unique way. For decades and decades, dating back really to factory work, we've worked face-to-face. All of our business practices are really rooted in the factory era where we needed that surveillance face-to-face. We needed that monitoring. And I became fascinated by this idea that maybe we don't need to be in the office to be productive.

I also have done a lot of research on efficiency in organizations and the idea that the commute takes up so much time. What if we could solve that problem, minimize that tax really for employees? And I was commuting at the time quite a long way to get into my office. I was then working at Dropbox and commuting several hours a day. And it had been in the back of my mind for a long time. You know, all these different factors. Could remote work actually work?

Justin Harlan: Amazing. So fun fact, I graduated with Arash, who started Dropbox.

Rebecca Hinds: Oh, amazing.

Justin Harlan: Yeah, I graduated from high school. I didn't go to MIT, gosh, but I did graduate from high school with him.

Rebecca Hinds: He's incredible. And he actually interviewed me. So I joined Dropbox early enough that the founders still interviewed every prospective hire. I had a short conversation with him back in 2014.

Justin Harlan: How cool. He's been incredibly generous giving back to the... I grew up in the Kansas City area, and he's given back so much. But just so cool to be able to like say that you graduate with the guy that created Dropbox. So that's a fun fact that you gave me an opportunity and I took it.

Rebecca Hinds: Very fun fact.

Justin Harlan: What was your experience like working at Dropbox?

Rebecca Hinds: It was great. And I think one of the things I admire most about the company and the founders is, they're really not afraid to question the status quo, whether it's in terms of remote work or one of my very first research projects was studying their culture around meetings and how they completely rethought meetings from the ground up. And that willingness to not necessarily embrace the status quo, question it and question it as our work evolves. We need to be evolving our work practices. And we've seen them do that now with remote work and their virtual first philosophies and practices and then sharing those as well. It's multiple different aspects that I think is really admirable.

Justin Harlan: So when you finished your PhD, then we are post-pandemic, right? Or was that right around the time that everything was starting? Give me the timeframe there.

Rebecca Hinds: Sure, so I did a pretty accelerated PhD. I was in my dorm room during the pandemic working really hard. And so I finished it in about three years. So 2022, I was done and graduating.

Justin Harlan: Okay. What did you observe as you were doing your PhD? I'm sure it had to have been an incredibly fascinating experience for you, essentially kind of learning and creating thesis around like best practices while watching so many flounder in the ways in which you were kind of trying to push up against. So what was that experience like doing your studying as the world was changing and our work environment was shifting so drastically?

Rebecca Hinds: It was eye-opening. So my first study, and again, this was pre-pandemic, I decided to study one of the largest remote-first companies because that's, you know, if you want to study remote work, that seemed like the logical place to study. And so immediately I was captivated by this organization where everything seemed to be different. They'd been so thoughtful about all of their systems, all their technologies, their coordination, collaboration, fundamentally different ways of working.

You know, even taking a technology like Slack or like Dropbox or Asana, they were using those technologies in fundamentally different ways than I was seeing in face-to-face organizations. And so I became really excited because I thought, you know, what if we could put together these best practices where if you're shifting to remote company or you're already a remote company or you're an in-office company and have remote workers, how can we learn from these experiences?

And then the pandemic hit and I started to see this really interesting phenomenon in the company in that they were, you know, a lot of them were suffering. They were experiencing the pandemic. They had a lot of empathy for other businesses. But there was a sense of pride. There was a sense of pride that they knew how to do this. They knew how to navigate this new terrain.

And I thought, wow, you know, that's probably the experience of most remote first companies. And then I started to think, OK, there's another group of remote workers, right? There's a group of remote workers in companies that are not remote first.

And what are those experiences of those people? And so that was what I studied as part of, we call it the first year paper at Stanford, where you essentially do a large scale study and you try to publish it. And so I wanted to study this group of remote workers at hybrid or predominantly in office environments. Those conversations, you know, I had hundreds of conversations with these workers and they were stigmatized before the pandemic. They were creating all of this work to show they were busy, show they were productive.

They were against this very in-office culture where they had to do way too much work to prove their value. But as the pandemic unfolded, people started to see them as the superheroes in the organization. They started to lean on them. Now, that dissipated in the sense of people thinking they were superheroes in the organization. But what didn't dissipate for a lot of companies were these changes to their work processes. They needed to adapt in a way where they weren't relying on face-to-face conversation. So they started to work asynchronously. They started to realize that you can't just flip a switch. You actually need to go in and fundamentally rewire your organization to make it work. And so that's what I also became really passionate about. And as I work with companies now and do more research, that I think is the biggest learning that you can't just flip a switch. There are fundamental aspects of our culture and our work practices and our technology that need to be changed in order for remote work to work.

Justin Harlan: I've heard many folks say that they believe that hybrid just doesn't work. Like you're all in on in-office or you're all in on remote work and trying to kind of do this like middle dance is not effective because you can't really build systems that meet people where they are no matter what they want to do. What do you think about that?

Rebecca Hinds: I think we need to be very careful about these deterministic statements, especially with hybrid and remote work, because there's no deterministic. Hybrid work is not inherently good or bad. Remote work is not inherently good or bad. It's how we enact it in our organization. So I think hybrid work is incredibly challenging to get right. But if we're intentional about it, it can be just as effective or more effective than both remote and in-office work. And when you think about it, we can get the best of both worlds. Often, it's the worst of both worlds because leaders are not intentional about it. But when they are intentional about it, it can be the best of both worlds.

I think there's also a really important difference between structured hybrid and unstructured hybrid, right? The research typically points to the fact that structured hybrid, so you're in the office a set number of days. We have this policy at Asana where workers are in general expected to be in the office Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. That tends to be more effective because in a sense, you are being more intentional and you can predict when your colleagues are going to be in the office. If we're not intentional about hybrid work, yes, it's going to be worse than both remote work and in-office work, but I think we need to be very careful about making these deterministic statements because then people start to rely on their gut versus actual data and looking at, you know, how does work actually change and need to change as we adopt these new policies?

Justin Harlan: Yeah, totally agree. And an unstructured hybrid work would be you have an office, but you can also work from home and it's totally up to the employee when they're doing.

Rebecca Hinds: Yes. Or even, you know, you need to be in the office three days a week and it's up to the employee.

Justin Harlan: So what are the keys to successful hybrid work in your opinion and based on all the research that you've done and your expertise in this topic?

Rebecca Hinds: So there are lots and I think we can think about them in different factors. Obviously, technology plays a big, big important role. You need to have that infrastructure for asynchronous work, right? Most technology can either be used synchronously so that you're responding in real time or can be used asynchronously so that there's not that real-time expectation. To build a culture where asynchronous work works...

Jen Reimer at University College of London has done some great research on what are the foundations that need to be true in order to enable asynchronous work. You need what she calls a central source of truth. You need to know where to go to get the information because if you don't know, you're going to start tapping your colleagues on the shoulder.

Rebecca Hinds: You need to document decision making. You need to be able to not just understand the end product, but how you get there because then you won't be tapping people on the shoulder to figure out the history of decisions, how they've been made. And then you need what she calls an action-first culture. She uses a term similar to that where you need to enable people to move work forward in a way that doesn't require a synchronous meeting to move forward. And so those are some of the foundational elements that we need.

We also need technology that works across functions. One of my papers from the PhD looked at how there's often a tension between in-team technology collaboration versus within team. And so in general, teams tend to adopt technologies in silos. And so the engineering team will adopt a technology, then the marketing team will adopt another technology. And all of a sudden you have this hodgepodge of different tools that don't work together, right? And if that's the case, you're going to need more meetings, you're going to need more synchronous time, more in-person time to resolve some of these problems. So cross-functional collaboration is absolutely critical. So that's sort of the technology aspect.

Rebecca Hinds: Leadership is a big one. My thesis focused on this idea of status dynamics in organizations and how, in general, we have a bias towards in-office work, especially at that executive level, right? And if executives are coming back in. And we saw this in some of the organizations we studied. Executives were the first people to come back into the office. What expectation does that set for the rest of the organization? And depending on what the leaders do and how they talk and how they treat remote workers, that has massive implications on how safe people feel to work remotely or ask to work remotely. So I think those status dynamics are critical as well.

The other aspect that I think is really important is some of the social culture around remote work. One of the things we know to be true is when you build what we call multiplex relationships with remote workers, they tend to be much more engaged and productive. So multiplex is you're not just building relationships in a work context, you're also building social relationships, you're understanding their hobbies, even if it's a Slack channel where you're sharing your pets or your cooking recipes. Those multiplex relationships that aren't just based on work really matter to build those relationships, build that culture. So I think there's the cultural aspect, there's a leadership aspect, there's a technology aspect, there's lots of others too, but I'd say those are probably the three pillars.

Justin Harlan: That's one of the things I think that is so beautiful about the Tulsa Remote Experience too, if I could kind of get this plug in here. We leverage Slack for all of our members that move and they're able to make those connections that they might be missing in the workplace, where now you're not relying on the job or work to actually fill some of that social void that you might be experiencing as an isolated remote worker, but you're actually comfortable saying, "I'm connecting with people outside of work, and I'm going to just focus my work on work."

I do think that one of the things tied to that, that I often hear from, I'd consider it kind of the older generation around why we need to get back to the office is social connections. I have a lot of respect for my dad. I talk about my dad often; he is an organizational leader. And I often kind of look to him as, "What is the older generation thinking about this whole remote work thing?" And he really struggles with, "Well, how do I, how are we going to build culture? And how are we going to get to know each other?" And I often push against, "Well, why does that actually matter to you? Why, what are you trying to make happen?" And it often comes back to collaboration and ideas and being able to trust each other. What advice would you have for leaders that maybe are struggling to commit to all the beautiful things that come from remote work or hybrid work that I think at this point we all agree there's great things that could come from it? Due to the lack of social connection or collaboration that they just can't quite figure out when everybody's kind of dispersed.

Rebecca Hinds: Right. I think so culture is essential, right? And having that connection to your colleagues matters, even if you have connections outside of work. The research does show that when you have connections to your colleagues in the office, that matters. You know, you're thought of first for projects and you're thought of first for ideas and even promotion. But how we go about that, I think we can do a lot of rethinking. The research also shows that in-person interaction matters, but it tends to be quite sticky, right? So if you are in person, say an annual retreat, that connection tends to last much longer than we would think. It can last months and months, in fact.

And so yes, in-person collaboration is important for establishing those cultural foundations, but you don't need to do it every day. You don't even need to do it every week or every month. If you have those really intentional touch points, you can develop that sense of culture. And then you find other ways through technology or through meetups where folks are located in similar cities or regions where you can foster that ongoing connection that also helps to build the culture. So there's no substitute for in-person interaction, but we definitely don't need to be doing it every day or every week to create a great culture and create connections on a personal level.

Justin Harlan: Right. And what I hear in some of your answer is that just bringing people into an office alone, it also doesn't mean that you're going to have this flourishing culture just being present. There's also intentionality even in the presence that you have to prioritize.

Rebecca Hinds: Yes. And one of my favorite studies on this topic comes out of MIT from decades ago, where they found that when you're seated six feet away from one another in an office, you're four times more likely to collaborate compared with when you're seated 60 feet. And as soon as you're seated 100 feet away, that connection opportunity decreases to almost zero. So physical space matters. But if you're on a different floor than someone in an office, that's essentially like you're–

Justin Harlan: You might as well be home. 

Rebecca Hinds: Exactly. And so we can't assume that just bringing people in the office are going to foster that connection. If you seat them side by side, probably, but in general, it doesn't happen that way.

Justin Harlan: Well, you can't sit by everybody.

Rebecca Hinds: Exactly.

Justin Harlan: So I would love to hear your predictions about the next five to 10 years, especially somebody who has done such thorough research, loves technology. I assume there's some predictions about that, but how do you think our work environment will shift in big ways over the next five to 10 years?

Rebecca Hinds: So I always hesitate with predictions, especially academics, you know, tend to get them wrong. But I think I have a hope, and that is I hope we become much more data-driven in how we approach remote and hybrid work. So a lot of our research at the Work Innovation Lab focuses on looking at how collaboration actually happens in organizations. And by doing that, we're able to draw really clear signals in terms of this type of collaboration leads to this type of outcome such that it's extremely predictive. We're able to predict innovation within a company with 98% accuracy just by how people are collaborating, right? Are they collaborating across functions? We see the number one predictor of innovation within a company is the strength of collaboration between marketing and engineering, right? That's not necessarily intuitive, but if you think of great companies, Airbnb, Apple…

Rebecca Hinds: You see that collaboration. But those types of insights where we can't be relying on gut to make determinations in terms of whether remote works, whether our workers are collaborating, we need to use data. And when we use data, especially with AI, we can start to make these really concrete predictions and we're able to monitor over time. So we're also able to map out, OK, when a company transitions from in-office to hybrid or hybrid to remote, how does collaboration change? We know in general, certain relationships suffer. But if we're intentional about it, we can start to detect, OK, we see a silo forming. Let's course correct and figure out how do we use technology? How do we maybe bring people together for a day or two days to eliminate those silos and bottlenecks? We can become much more intentional. And I think that's really exciting, this idea that we could become more strategic about how we do this. And I think when we do that, a lot more companies will not only feel confident in adopting more flexible policies, but also start to actually move forward and do it.

Justin Harlan: If you were to write a hybrid playbook and there's one play in it, you get one piece of advice to give to an employer that's transitioning maybe from the office to a hybrid setting. They desire to give their employees a little bit more flexibility, but aren't quite ready to give it all away yet and see the value of that office. And it sounds like the way that Asana does too. What would you recommend? What's the one first step that a leader should take if they're transitioning from in-office to hybrid?

Rebecca Hinds: So I think having a policy. Having a policy, and we've done some research where we've seen that actually having a policy can matter more than what the policy says. Because you eliminate a lot of the ambiguity, especially if that policy has a why. Why are we adopting this policy? Why are we specifically choosing to be in the office Tuesday and Wednesday and not Monday, Thursday, Friday? A lot of employees don't have that clarity right now. And we saw that. We did a big report last year, the state of hybrid work, where we saw people are very uncomfortable because they don't have certainty. You know, there's all these backtrackings that happen. People are getting rewarded for coming in the office and they don't have clarity on what exactly is the organization's stance on hybrid or remote work and why. Having a policy and explaining the why behind the policy, I don't think there's anything more impactful for a workforce.

Justin Harlan: I totally agree. And often what happens is when you don't have that policy across an organization, then it kind of falls to the manager or department lead. And then you often have multiple iterations of policies across the organization. And that leads to inequity or confusion or not getting the good things out of the time in person that we desire.

Rebecca Hinds: Yes. And it also causes people to rely on bias, which is problematic.

Justin Harlan: So what about the opposite side? For an employee, maybe that desires all the things in a remote work setting that we know are beautiful about it, and they're being required to go to the office outside of just finding a different job, which is certainly an option. What would you recommend? Like, where do you start if you're an employee that's trying to make their organization kind of move in that direction?

Rebecca Hinds: I think it depends on the culture. I think there are some environments where it does feel really safe to advocate for remote work for yourself or your team. It might not be full-time remote, but I think the more you can demonstrate work outcomes and that those won't suffer when you move to remote work, I think the better off you are. Often organizations aren't measuring the right things. They tend to be measuring outputs versus outcomes. So the more you can tie your work to goals, your organizational goals, and show that those aren't affected if you work remote and maybe they're even enhanced because you have those efficiency gains or those work-life balance gains, I think that tends to be a really productive conversation because it's more focused on the work rather than the location. But it's hard because it's not always safe in that environment.

I think there's lots of things you can do on the edges as well, working shorter hours. Typically, organizations are much more flexible in the start and end time than they are actually being in the office. And so if you really want to push back a little bit, I think you can start to think about, okay, how do I make my individual days more flexible? And maybe I'm in the office six hours versus eight, and I can do the other two hours in the evening.

We're publishing research next week where we essentially see only 13% of employees right now follow the traditional nine to five workday. And so it's a very small minority that are actually in the office nine to five. And I think in general, we have much more, much higher level of comfort with those flexibility in terms of the temporal aspect and the location or the day-to-day aspect.

Justin Harlan: Dolly Parton needs to come out with a new song. That's the answer we all need in this world right now.

Justin Harlan: So what's your remote work hot take? What's something that everybody's getting wrong or that you feel like is something that's out there that you want to push up against?

Rebecca Hinds: I think it's these deterministic statements where remote work is bad, remote work is good. Oh, something's broken. It must be the fault of remote work. We need to get away from those statements because there's so much happening in our workplace. There's so much uncertainty in the market, in technology with AI. You know, you can always point to something that's broken and blame it on the unfamiliar. And the unfamiliar right now is remote work. It's natural human instinct if something goes wrong to blame it on the unfamiliar and lean back on what we're familiar with. And that for most organizations is a face-to-face environment.

We need to get away from that. And I think that's why data becomes so important, actually grounding your hypotheses in actual data, especially if you're a large company. As soon as you get above 100, 200 people, you're not going to know who's doing what or what's working, what's not working. You can hear stories from the few vocal employees who are sharing, but you need data to be able to understand, is this working? What part of hybrid and remote work is working? There's a part of every hybrid work environment that is working. There's also a part of every hybrid environment that's not working. Data is how you determine, you know, what's working and how do you course correct the aspects that aren't working.

Justin Harlan: As we wrap up, are there places that folks could find you online if they wanted to continue learning from you?

Rebecca Hinds: Yes. So we have workinnovationlab.com with all our research. Next week, we're really excited to publish what we're calling the state of work innovation. So lots of insights on hybrid work, remote work, micromanaging in an office environment tends to be higher than the remote environment. One of the insights from the report. So workinnovationlab.com. And I'm also on LinkedIn.

Justin Harlan: We're so glad that you gave us this time. It's been a great conversation. And we're grateful that you have chosen to be in Tulsa this week. And we'll give more knowledge and insights to our folks at Tulsa Remote and across the city of Tulsa at our Plugged In event. If folks that are listening want to check out the content that we develop over the next couple of days, please visit us at tulsapluggedin.com or go follow us on social media at Tulsa Remote on just about every platform. So thanks for being here. We really appreciate you and are looking forward to what's ahead.

Rebecca Hinds: Thank you. I love the conversation and am loving Tulsa