Chris Congdon: Leadership is complicated today. Managers are under pressure to deliver business results and create relationships with employees guided by empathy. We’re learning lessons from Google’s former head of People Operations about how the relationships between leaders and employees can improve one nudge at a time.
Welcome to Work Better, a Steelcase podcast where we think about work and ways to make it better. I’m your host Chris Congdon alongside our producer, Rebecca Charbauski.

Rebecca Charbauski: If you like this podcast, we would appreciate it if you rate and review it – which helps others find it.

Today’s guest is Laszlo Bock. Laszlo used to lead Google’s People Operations. He’s the author of “Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead.” And he co-founded Humu – a company designed to help managers create better routines and habits at scale.

CC: He’s going to give us the inside track on Humu’s research into hybrid work and help us with tips on how to go from insight to action. After hearing from Laszlo, I’ll be joined by Isabel Medellin, who focuses on talent attraction and retention, along with leading DEI efforts and she works with Humu to develop leaders here at Steelcase.

CC: Hi Laszlo, thanks for joining me today.

LB: Chris it’s a pleasure to be here.

CC: Laszlo, for people who may know you from your Google years, could you just give us kind of a quick overview of who you are and tell us a little bit about Humu the company that you co-founded and. And why did you decide to start that?

LB: Sure! I spent almost eleven years running people at Google and one of the things that was the hardest to do, and it was a little easier when it was a few thousand people, much much harder once we had 70,000 plus people,was actually to get everyone to change. To become better managers, to be healthier, to be more constructive, to build a better culture and one of the things we realized was that there’s a lot of traditional mechanisms to do that but often small gestures and small actions done in the moment make the biggest difference. For example, if you want your people to sort of learn and grow better, you can send them to training but one of the best things you can do after a meeting is just ask somebody: How do you think it went and have that conversation. I left google and the next year founded this company called Humu and what Humu does is we use software and science to bridge what we call the insight to action gap. Generally you know what you want to do, where you want to go, whether it’s from an employee survey or whether it’s a strategy you have or a cultural shift. It’s very very hard to actually get human beings to transform to grow to change behavior and so we use small nudges, little tiny interventions sent to groups of people at once. So a manager nudge is different from an employee nudge is different from an executive nudge but all aligned to get people to change and we found it actually has a huge impact not just on productivity and retention but actually it makes people happier too. It’s been a pretty satisfying last five or so years I should say.

CC: Thanks for giving us that background. I’m really interested in talking with you today because you have this front row seat to human beings at work right now and I think we’re all trying to figure it out and a lot of data that is out there, data that we’re finding in our research, is telling us that people are really struggling. I mean we’ve seen in the US I think you know some of the first drops in productivity that we’ve seen in decades and and even our data would say that people themselves are self-reporting that their productivity is a little shaky along with other metrics like engagement levels and feeling a sense of work-life balance, etc. Of course the worrisome thing that always goes along with all of that – if that weren’t enough to worry about – is people starting to say “Hey, maybe I’m more likely to leave my position than what I was previously.” So given all of the research that you do at Humu I’m curious kind of what you’re seeing in terms of where things stand right now.

LB: All of those things and it’s worse. There’s certainly been productivity declines when you look at aggregate productivity in the United States, for example, it looks like it’s been sort of pretty flat through the pandemic when you adjust that except for recently where it’s dipped, but when you adjust that for hours worked productivity per hour has gone down tremendously. So the fact that people early in the pandemic were working longer hours because suddenly you’re at home. You’re working all the time. It spills over into dinner, evening family time, weekends, it actually masks the fact that productivity per hour of work has dropped quite a bit and as you said, add to that historic lows and employee engagement add to that increasing rates of managers turning over. Add to that increasingly elderly workers leaving the workforce. It’s a pretty bad situation and what we’ve actually found though is that part of what’s missing is the sense of human connection. This sense of people being together at the end of the day. The pandemic’s been a pretty lonely isolating experience compared to what it was like actually being together. So we’ve done a lot of work assessing that, analyzing it, and trying to figure out how to help.

CC: Let’s talk a little bit more about that I mean because it feels a little bleak but I hope there’s hope on the Horizon. Let’s talk a little bit about hybrid work because now that’s been a transition during the pandemic, people who could be home were mostly at home and now we’ve entered into this era that is kind of settling in terms of the patterns where people are working from home or from the office and needless to say that’s been embraced in very different ways by different companies. But in different parts of the world, we see remote work being much more prevalent in some cultures than in others and I’m just curious about hybrid work in general – how do you think that’s starting to shape our work relationships?

LB: What we found in our research and when I talk about research, it’s typically randomized controlled trials. It’s not just we do a survey and ask people to sort of look at companies and take a population and run 2 very different conditions, the status quo kind of business as usual and then an experimental condition where you have hybrid work or you know other things changing and then we monitor over time to kind of figure out what’s going on. So the standard is for us, how would an academic researcher approach it? It would not be how would some you know a tech company or a consultant approach it and what we found are 2 things that are quite striking. One is that hybrid work can actually be great for people and that the ideal amount of hybrid work is one and a half to two days per week in the office or sorry one and a half and two days per week from home and 3 three and a half days in the office and that’s ideal from a perspective of productivity certainly, but also making people feel happier because it’s the right balance between heads down time to get things done and home time to go take care of errands things like that plus the social connection at the company. So point 1 is one and a half to two days per week from home seems to be ideal for human beings. The second thing we found that’s significant is that the thing that makes it work and that a lot of companies are hybrid is not working but the thing that makes it work is human connection, and psychologists talk about 3 types of social. Distance and social connection physical distance which is am I around you; we are together. That’s obvious the second is operational distance and connection which is, if you’re remote can I see you? Can we interrupt each other? Can we speak naturally? The third is effective distance and effective distance is emotional connection and who does a lot of work in our software here. But the key thing around effective distance is when you’re physically together it happens naturally, it shows up in body language. It shows up before and after meetings when you’re remote. It’s artificial and so to make hybrid work the second significant thing we found is you really need to invest in having people emotionally connect to one another, to their work and to the company.

CC: It feels like you’re describing my life a lot because I’m working in the office pretty much four days a week, we have a pretty easy commute here, so I don’t have the same challenge that maybe people in other parts of the world or country have, but that feels pretty good. I feel like I get a lot of time with my team but yet I really appreciate my Fridays or my work from home days where I can do some more heads down and kind of focus on things. But also what you’re saying about the connection, physically, it’s just so much easier, and I think that was one of the things I missed during the pandemic so much is that I enjoyed those casual conversations with certain people or those those “run into you in the hallway” kind of conversations – those didn’t happen as much when everything had to be scheduled virtually. I’m just curious what your thoughts are in terms of how we help people cultivate relationships that you’re talking about when they aren’t together physically and that just happens easily.

LB: The research on that is fascinating when you’re not together physically. It’s very isolating and lonely because we’re social animals. We’re designed to just be around other people even for people who are deep deep introverts. It’s important to actually once in a while just be around human beings. And connecting through the interface of a screen is actually exhausting. It’s tiring in ways that even just a voice conversation, a phone call – for example – we subconsciously, when we’re on screen, check our own image more often. So part of our mental capacity is consumed by this cognitive load of checking on ourselves. We keep eye contact more than we normally would. It’s exhausting to keep staring at people’s eyes. But when you’re on a screen we kind of feel compelled to look at one another and so there’s all these small things that make it more tiring. So a couple examples of things you can do if you’re fully remote or working remotely to bridge that connection is number one: Set a norm where it’s okay to turn your screens off sometimes. Now the management fears that as well people are going to be slacking off. They’re playing video games. They’re on their phones. So don’t do it every single time and don’t let the same people do it again again, but just say every third meeting we’re just going to have screens off so people can just focus on the conversation. Another example is to actually budget in the meeting social time upfront and at the end at Humu for example, we would have with our leadership team meetings – we’d start each meeting with a question and it would rotate who would come up with a question and everyone would go around and answer it and the questions would be things like what’s your favorite ice cream or what was a formative moment growing up or did you do anything fun this weekend and the idea was just to get people to sort of simulate that social interaction you would have bumping into people in the hallways and it would consume time in an hour long meeting. We take five or ten minutes but we budget for it and it helps us feel more connected to one another so you need to very deliberately do those things in order to maintain that human connection.

CC: I’m familiar with Humu because I get nudges from Humu and then we’re going to talk about nudges in a minute but, just in general as a leader in an organization, it feels like it’s a hard time to be a leader. I feel like on one hand we’re being asked to achieve higher results, better profitability, better sales, you name it and at the same time we’re being asked to help have these deeper human connections with people. I’m curious what you guys are seeing as you’re interacting with different leaders like what do you feel? Are leaders worried about it? What’s keeping them up at night do you think?

LB: There’s 3 things that whether we’re talking to CEOS or director level folks or even frontline managers that we’re hearing again and again are challenges for them. One is how to help managers get better. Managers are in this really difficult spot today. Kind of caught between the business results their bosses are looking for and the emotional needs and development needs of the people on their team. So it’s tough for managers. How do we make them better and there’s probably no company on this planet that if you say how are your managers doing, we’ll say perfect. They’re fine there. You know, no room for improvement. It’s been very difficult for managers and I’m happy to talk more about that. The second is knitting together cultures in this hybrid work world. What happened is for a lot of companies anywhere between twenty and sometimes fifty-sixty percent of their employees have been hired during the pandemic so they haven’t had the full experience of what it’s like to be a part of this organization. I’ve had a chance to observe things like for example, is it a culture where after meeting, everyone cleans up their coffee cups and straightens the pens on the table and pushes the chairs back in or is it a meeting where someone else is going to take care of that? And a culture where that’s someone else’s responsibility where you have much more hierarchy and kind of top-down command control structures can’t observe that over a screen and so the second big area is we know what our culture was we want to get back to that we want to keep people connected and the third is more broadly, where we started this conversation, which is business is under pressure. We need to grow. We need to transform, we need to become more digital, more agile. What can your technology help us do all those things because again, this is where we started this sort of the knowing-doing gap or the insight to action gap. We know where we want to go but it’s harder to get people there in a hybrid than it was when everyone was seated shoulder to shoulder and rowing in the same direction.

CC: Let’s talk a little bit about those nudges I mentioned. This is something that you guys have really kind of spent a lot of time thinking about in terms of how that can help us as managers or leaders within an organization. Can you just talk a little bit about the science behind the Nudge.

LB: Sure. The science is my favorite part because a lot of it’s very easy to build technology but it’s also very easy to do harm and it’s very easy to put out technology that doesn’t actually have an impact so I deeply believe, and the company found out this notion, that you start with science and the idea of nudging started with two professors, Dick Thaler at the University of Chicago and Cass Sunstein at Harvard and Dick’s a behavioral economist and Cass is a policy expert and economist. Dick actually won the nobel prize a few years ago in economics for his work in this area but their insight was, are there ways to architect the environment either physically laying things out or by reminding people? Can you nudge them to make a better decision? What was critical in their work wasn’t about forcing people or commanding it was about how do you help somebody? How do you make it easier to make the decision you would make on your best day? I’ll give you an example of a nudge from my Google days that might be relatable to everyone. At Google, famously, there’s food everywhere. Both at Google and at home and in our lives we like candy. We like the sweet stuff. We know we should eat less so one of the things we did at Google was have these things called micro kitchens where we have snacks available to everyone in the company and it’s M&Ms, peanut butter cups, and also apples and oranges and things like that. You have sugary soft drinks, bottles of water, you have diet soda and in our New York office we decided can we nudge people to be a little healthier without pissing them off so we took the sugary snacks and we put them in opaque containers instead of clear containers. All of a sudden, we couldn’t see the shiny M&Ms. It would just be opaque and it would say “M&Ms” on it and the dried fruit you could still see, the apples you could still see. We took the sugary soft drinks and put them in the bottom of the refrigerator and frosted the glass. They’re still there but you have to look for them and we put the water and the diet drinks higher up. Over a period of about eight weeks in the New York office people, as a result of this tiny change, just making it a little easier to make a healthy decision, they consume 3.1 Million fewer calories. That’s almost 900 pounds of fat that people did not gain over this period.

CC: Wow!

LB: So what we then did was we took this idea and kind of ran with it on the Humu front. What the science tells us is that you need high psychological safety. This is Amy Edmondson’s fantastic work on psychological safety. So how do you do that? You can’t just tell a bad boss and be safe like be nicer to people because a bad boss by definition doesn’t care. They’re not going to pay attention. But what we do at Humu for example is we would send a series of nudges. So we might send a junior person a note saying your team’s working on being more innovative. For that, you need more psychological safety. Try speaking up in the first ten minutes of your meetings this week because if you’ve ever tried this, it’s way easier to say something early in a meeting than late in the meeting. You got to be brilliant, right? Early in the meeting, you can just say something like “oh well, it’s scale” or basically any question people will put you on the board and then it’s easy to participate but because too many change efforts fail because you ask one person to try to change. We would also nudge other people in that meeting saying if someone’s quiet asked them what they think. And then we would nudge the senior person, the bad manager to ask questions and not give answers and then we check how did that go, did it help if it’s a little better than you get a more sophisticated nudge next time and what we found is you can make teams 8 to 10% more productive. You can improve retention 5 to 20 points. Just as importantly, you can actually make people feel like their environments are more inclusive. You can make people feel like their managers are 30 to 50% better with just these tiny tiny little nudges, these reminders of small steps you can take that compound and have a huge positive impact.

CC: It’s so interesting. I love this story about the M&Ms, which is a great thing just to remember at home. When I think about our physical experience here when we come into the workplace we kind of have a nudge because we wanted people to interact more socially. We want to build a sense of community at work and so the first thing you see when you walk in the door is not this pristine lobby but you see a coffee bar and you see little kind of social gathering areas where people are always there so when you come in, you get this permission to grab a cup of coffee sit and talk to somebody – it’s another form of how our environment can help nudge us in those directions that we want to go.

LB: To your point the physical architecture plays a huge role in this, right? Thinking about when I started my career, having towering cubicle walls was kind of en vogue and you wouldn’t see the people around you and you’d be heads down at work which, on the one hand is great because you can just get your work done. But the message it sends is you’re isolated. You’re not a member of a team. You’ve just got your thing to do and the trend that your firm has been a big part of about opening space up and being intentional about design is incredibly transformative because it’s not just creating the conditions where people might interact. But what your company does is it’s also giving people permission to engage with one another emotionally and socially and today if you’re only going to be in the office 40% or 60% as much as you used to, that permission from the company, that cultural shift, is way more important than it was three years ago.

CC: I want to talk a little bit more about the office but before we go there just I want to tease out the nudge thing a little bit more. This is one that I received fairly recently. Maybe you can give me your take on how that might change my management behavior which is one of them was to plan for a team retrospective. So, tell me a little bit about that – if I got that nudge, what is that? What’s that about? But how is that meant to impact my leadership style?

LB: First of all, the reason you’re getting that nudge is because there’s some insight somewhere whether from your employee survey or from your own analysis or from some cultural need that your organization has for your particular team. There’s a need for either. Perhaps more clarity about strategy or more transparency or more accountability right? So number 1 the reason you would get a nudge about plans now for retrospective is because there’s an opportunity for the team to be better. The people on your team are saying, “We want to know more about what’s going on or we want to be able to iterate more and improve and get more feedback,” so there’s a basis for why you’re getting it. It’s not just random and your peers and colleagues will all be getting different nudges based on whatever’s most important for their team. So it’s customized. The second thing is that specific point about planning now for a retrospective. It addresses the issues I’m getting at. It tells your team that for example, and I don’t know the details of how your team’s working out or have access to your data, but it addresses things like, for example, if a team tends to just run, run, run, run, run and never take a moment to reflect, to pause, to integrate, what’s been learned or improved? It’s helpful to put that reminder upfront because it’s what social psychologists call pre-commitment. You’re saying right now that in the future I will take an action which makes you more likely to take the action. Another issue that could be addressed or opportunity could be created is just clarity. People want to know where we are going and so if you know you’re going to plan for this thing ahead of time people will know that. Okay, this actually matters and the goal needs to be really clear because in six weeks or three months or whatever period we’re going to be looking back to see if the goals were accomplished. Let’s have a conversation about goals. So we know when we get to this retrospective, what we’re being measured against. So, there’s a lot of different things that might be underneath that one but principally the idea is this is something your team will benefit from now and what should be happening is your team members who also report to you, will be getting nudges saying “Make sure you ask for a retrospective. Make sure you ask what the goals are so that you by yourself aren’t responsible for driving this improvement but instead everybody is acting in concert.

CC: Lazslo, I’m feeling like you know too much about me because I’m like oh yes, my team we run, run, run, run, run and so it’s like yeah that was a really good nudge to say “hey stop a minute and let’s talk about what we’re learning as we go.” I want to talk more about the conversation that we we’re having earlier about the office and one of the things that we’ve seen and in our data is, depending on what country you’re in, there’s a little bit of a tug of war if you will about how much time should be spent in the office and then what’s the whole point of the office anyway and I think that’s the question. The question I want to ask you the most because in some parts of the world people are predominantly working in the office, like in China 95% of the time they’re working in the office. Other countries, like in France, have a very high rate of people being in the office but in cultures like the U.S., and Canada, Australia, where they’re more individualistic cultures that are more focused on the needs of the individual, it feels like there’s more tension where there’s more of that pull toward options for remote working and then it just brings me back to what job does the office need to do in the middle of this shaking out if you will, of how we’re going to work going forward.

LB: There’s definitely cultural differences and I can’t remember the name of the researcher but seventy eighty years ago there was seminal work done on national cultures and one of them was sort of categorized by 5 or 6 different categories but 1 of them was individualistic versus communal. I’m going to say something controversial and unpopular, which is I think in the more individualistic countries, the dominant conversation is people saying what they want rather than what they need. I mean speaking for myself personally I would much rather never have to go into an office again. I mean, I’m lucky enough to have a nice house. I live in a place with nice weather. I have a dog that I love. I’ve got kids that are much rather be around. I work in tech so I don’t want to have to dress up. I want to work in pajamas and all these things. But I can tell you what I felt is lonely and less connected and in fact, there was fascinating research published last year that in the United States, for men 70% of their social connections are in the workplace. It’s different for women. According to the author, women are better at forming social connections outside of that and maintaining it. But for men it’s in the workplace. So there’s something that’s really really missing in society. In these individualistic societies, just about everybody would prefer to just do their own thing. That’s the definition of individualism but there’s a cost if you look at rates of depression, if you look at rates of medical needs. People are sicker. They’re psychologically less healthy. And I’m a little far out over my skis right now. But I do think a piece of it is the fact that we actually haven’t been together and it’s compounded by what we alluded to before – if you joined a company during the pandemic you haven’t really embedded yourself in the culture and so it doesn’t feel that different to work for one company versus another compared to how it used to be. It used to be that you pick any random set of companies, Unilever and Procter and Gamble, very both consumer products companies of different cultures, people say now you know that’s not that different and so the purpose of the office is number one to give us what we need not what we necessarily are seeking right? We need that community in the office for better or worse in these countries. Third, place. It’s a place where we connect and then second, it’s an opportunity for companies to not micromanage, to not control, to not force productivity but instead to do what it sounds like you’ve done in your office to give people permission to forge those connections. That’s what it’s for and the work will take care of itself. Adam Grant from Wharton University of Pennsylvania has done a lot of work early in his career looking at when people find work meaningful, when they find culture compelling, are they more productive and on average? They’re about 20% more productive when they feel those connections, when they find that meaning and that’s the purpose of the office.

CC: I totally agree with you by the way. I feel like even though I’m like everybody where it’s a lot easier to just throw on sweats in the morning or only worry about what people are going to see from the waist up, but at the same time I do feel like when I’m working in that mode, I’m working a lot longer into the evening – I’m not I’m not taking care of relationships and those kinds of needs that I have. When I think about your role in terms of coming from a human resources background a lot of people who listen to this podcast are coming from the HR space and thinking about that and I’m just wondering what guidance you would offer to them? Before we let you go, how would you suggest that the HR folks would really think about these types of decisions because typically they may not be making some of the decisions about space or about technology or some of those kinds of things.

LB: I think when it comes to physical space design and at Google we’re very deliberate about this and experimented as you would expect. I think there’s 3 things that you need to think about and make sure you provide for people. First, people need a personal space. I know Google Cloud just announced they were going to have people hoteling and you know people sharing coming in on different days. Accenture did a similar thing fifteen years ago where they said we’re going to a hotel and you’re not going to have a fixed space. It’s a mistake. People like a place to put their kid’s photo. They like having their pen where it was. Nobody likes going to a hotel and sleeping in a bed that’s warm from the prior person. So number one it would be we want our own little tiny space. It doesn’t have to be one dedicated space for each person. It’s just their space. It doesn’t have to be big. The second is collaborative space where people can kind of come together and share ideas, debate and discuss. This could be like you’re describing your entry where you have a coffee bar. It could be an atrium that people are forced to cross but a place where people can kind of compare notes and brainstorm and collaborate and be social and then the third is you need to design the space so that you can have serendipitous encounters where people can bump into one another. When 9/11 happened two decades ago, there were a bunch of Google engineers in a cafe complaining about how hard it was to know what’s going on and because at the time you had to go to cnn.com and you know different news channels and someone behind them in line said well I could build something that scrapes everything together and surfaces the best news results and that became the Google News product and now every search product has a newsfeed where you can actually see the most relevant most important results. But that came about because people happen to bump into one another. We’d always put the food near and the bathrooms in the middle of spaces so people would be forced to cross paths. Those are the things I would think about dedicated personal space, some collaborative space and some bait to get people moving across the floor so you can have these serendipitous encounters.

CC: Ironically, Lazslo, our research showed exactly the same thing. The biggest thing that people want that they say I would even come into the office more often is to have privacy or to have an assigned space. So I think this is an area that leaders are struggling with because they’re trying to balance out having real estate in some situations. It’s sitting empty if people aren’t coming in so why wouldn’t I try and reuse that and repurpose it and why would I assign individual spaces but, you’re right – people want to come into the office to collaborate and do this kind of individual work and they need both. It’s so interesting that you’re kind of landing in the same space. This has been such a great conversation I have really enjoyed it. And I wish we could talk for another couple hours. But, I just am really thankful that you took the time to be with us today Laszlo.

LB: I appreciate it. Your company does amazing work and is so thoughtful about how to connect human beings. It’s just a pleasure for me to be here. Thank you.

CC: Thanks so much.

CC: After talking to Lazslo, I wanted to talk to Isabel Medellin, one of my colleagues here at Steelcase who is a director in Human Resources focused on talent retention, along with our DEI efforts. Thanks for that work because it’s really important, but thank you for joining me today too.

Isabel Medellin: Thanks for inviting me Chris, it’s a pleasure to be here.

CC: One of the things Laszlo talked about that I thought you’d have a point of view about, he talked about how much harder it is to connect to people now that hybrid work is so common, particularly where we are based in North America. I’m wondering what you think about how that’s getting translated to the office, and what you are telling teams about how to use the workplace to build trust and connection – those things that can be hard with hybrid work.

IM: I really connected with what Laszlo mentioned about the power of the small gestures and actions. When we’re mindful and consistent with that we can experience a deeper sense of human connection. For example, I share with teams exploring the three Cs. Communicate. Connect. Create. Communicating is about letting your team know that you’re out of the office. Increase your visibility. Increase your presence. Connect is about leveraging our amazing space that always invites us to be creative and supports our wellbeing, and expands social connections and networks and builds trust. Last but not least, create. That’s about opportunities to collaborate and innovate together and move from these directional ideas when we are working solo to intersecting team ideas and innovating. I think that when we have inclusion in mind to Communicate, Connect and Create, is when performance and innovation and growth go to another level.

CC: That is a really good tip, particularly for me – the communication part. I just showed up at the office and it made me think, maybe I should tell people that I’m here and reach out to them for those moments when we need to create something as opposed to when you’re working from home, and tend to focus on solo work. But those are some really good things to think about. He also hit hard on this idea about how to rebuild or recreate culture and I know how involved you are in our culture work here at Steelcase, especially as it relates to DEI. Do you have some ideas for that?

IM: It’s important to mention that DEI isn’t just DEI. It’s about culture, about who we are and how we do things. We have a systems approach by having a global strategy, objectives, key initiatives and measure of progress and outcomes, and the reality is we’re always looking to embed DEI sensibilities into our systems. The example I’d like to share is an intersection between DEI behaviors, our leadership pillars, and Humu. One of our leadership pillars is building strong teams, and another is uniting purpose. To achieve this, you need to display DEI behaviors such as the psychological safety Lazslo was talking about, or listening with empathy, or considering diverse perspectives to influence a sense of belonging. Humu is helping to influence this work because it is sending nudges, not only to leaders, but others too, so they can be mindful in practicing these behaviors and together we can drive our collective progress and have transformational change.

CC: It’s great insight to think about this whole thing as a systems approach to be able to make meaningful progress and be able to actually get to that culture we’re all looking for. I know there’s so much more we could talk about but this gives us a few things to take away from the conversation. Thanks for joining me today Isabel.

IM: It was a pleasure, thanks!

CC: Thank you for being here with us. If you enjoyed this conversation – please rate or review it, so more people can find it and visit us at steelcase.com/research to sign up for weekly updates on workplace research, insights and design ideas delivered to your inbox. Rebecca, any final words?

RC: Of course. We want to let everyone know that if they missed any episodes this season, they are now all live – we would love to hear which one resonated with you most. There’s Amy Gallo who tells us how to get along with anyone at work. Marcus Collins who shares how lessons from his work with Beyonce and Apple provide us with insights into how to create a great culture at work. And Jean Twenge who unmasks Gen Z so that we can do a better job working alongside the future of the workforce. Share your favorite episode with a friend and always let us know what you think.

Thanks again for being here – and we hope your day at work tomorrow is just a little bit better.

CREDITS
Many thanks to everyone who helps make Work Better podcasts possible. Creative art direction by Erin Ellison. Editing and sound mixing by SoundPost Studios. Technical support by Mark Caswell and Jose Jimenez. Digital publishing by Areli Arellano and Jordan Marks.