Efficiently executing on a hybrid plan continues to vex many firms, whose drained return-to-office mandates stay difficult to enforce, and whose workers stay difficult to please. Who higher to chop by the noise and disillusionment and create one thing near a sustainable center floor than an professional within the subsequent iteration of the workforce?
If such an individual exists (even the consultants have admitted they’re “building the plane while flying it”), it’s most likely somebody like Beth Lokken.
A profession technique and advertising skilled, Lokken’s present title at 3M—the manufacturing conglomerate at No. 116 on the Fortune 500—is “Future of Work Manager.” The HR staff function has solely existed since 2021, when 3M’s workplaces have been simply starting to reopen. Initially, Lokken’s title was “workplace strategy manager,” however as future of work experts (and certainly, journalists reporting on their work) started cropping up like mushrooms throughout the non-public sector, her title modified and her work deepened.
If she does her job proper, Lokken tells Fortune in an interview, at some point none of those jobs will exist in any respect.
Defining the longer term
At 3M, she and her staff see the amorphous definition of “future of work” as encompassing “changes to work, the workforce, the workplace, who does the work, how it gets done, where and when, and so on,” she says. “That’s where my role sits.” Within the close to time period, she’s targeted on advancing flexibility for 3M’s sprawling worldwide workforce, alongside weighing in on different HR-related priorities, like folks administration and AI integration.
Requested how she describes the summary “future of work manger” function, Lokken quotes one other subject professional, Lauren DeYoung, “workplace futurist” at Allstate Insurance coverage, who says it’s pushed by the query, “how do we make distributed work work?”
3M’s reply: a coverage dubbed “Work Your Way,” which—like its well-liked companions at companies like Spotify and Atlassian—is a trust-based function centered on most flexibility.
“We are aiming to deliver both a superlative employee experience and business performance,” Aman Gupta, 3M’s vp of Enterprise Office Technique, stated of the plan in 2021. “It is about getting your work done and delivering results. Not about where you sit and what time you logged on.”
Every worker, along with their supervisor, considers the believable necessities of in-person work for each the function and the bigger staff, Lokken explains. That dialog ends with many 3M workers working remotely; fewer than 20% of desk employees spend most of their time on-site, which is considerably below the national average.
“3M is very much a science-based company; following the evidence and the science is really at the heart of everything we do,” Lokken says. “The evidence so far suggests this model is working.”
Why flex is the best way ahead
All the concept of executing a flexible-work plan—a lot much less a return-to-office plan—appeared a bit extra tenable in 2021 and 2022, Lokken says, when most individuals in her sneakers had “great support” from the C-suite in pulling these plans off. However since then, as completely different companies have splintered off in new instructions, the preliminary groundswell has tapered too, making the plans even more durable to implement.
“We’ve always been a global company, and our teams will continue growing in a distributed way,” she says. “A third of our managers have a direct report in another country; we need to work in a way that adapts to that new reality, of mainly hybrid, distributed teams.”
Lokken and her staff are “trying to refocus away from ‘Work Your Way’ as a policy,” as an alternative specializing in the best way work is definitely achieved, she says. “This is a trust base—we trust you to know what we need.”
Then there’s the productivity argument. Because it pertains to measurable outcomes faltering, Lokken stays unconvinced that distant work makes even a dent. “We know productive teams are built on trust, and we enable trust with this model.”
But when the system works too successfully, that would price Lokken her job, no less than because it exists as we speak.
“I hope to work myself out of a job,” she provides. “I hope ‘Work Your Way’ becomes the way you work, and no longer needs to be created.” However that doesn’t imply your complete speciality is ready to dissolve. “I think there’s always a role for futurists: people thinking about what the world will look like five years from now.” Plus, not each firm essentially wants a delegated professional on employees when executing a brand new hybrid plan, she stated, however all HR technique ought to heart on “what we think the future will look like.”
Lokken, who studied archeology and anthropology in faculty, steadfastly believes which means of connecting and speaking have all the time modified and developed—and can proceed to take action. “I used to study stone tools and cave paintings,” she remembers. “That’s something that’s easy to forget about; it’s easy to think this is the way things have always been done.”
Slightly than standing athwart to the shifting tides and hoping they recede, Lokken galvanizes leaders to get excited by the approaching adjustments—and keep away from greedy the reins of management too tightly. Only for good measure, she emphasizes that “3M, like I said, is a science company.” Meaning its management “follows the science and we’ve recognized that things might shift and evolve and we’ll need to adapt.” Its backside line? “We don’t think mandates are the way to adapt.”
