Helena Gottschling had been working at the same organization for more than three decades when they decided to make the fundamental shift toward flexible work. Gottschling is the Chief Human Resources Officer for the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), an institution with a long history dating back to 1864. It has more than 86,000 employees worldwide serving an excess of 16 million clients.

It was feedback from employees that first caused RBC to consider this shift. During the pandemic, when so many people were working remotely, they did a series of surveys, focus groups, and town halls across the globe, out of which came a clear message: The vast majority of their employees appreciated the personal benefits of flexible work. That dovetailed with the main business purpose for RBC, which was to gain a competitive advantage in the battle for talent. “We're in a very competitive marketplace for talent,” Gottschling says. “If done right, we believe flexibility could be a true differentiator.”

Flexible work options, while available, were not widely used across RBC before the pandemic, so what they were contemplating was a real sea change for the company. One of their first steps was to create what they called their “enterprise principles.” This was particularly important because of the global diversity of the company: RBC is a complex organization with multiple lines of business spanning 36 countries. They needed principles to help guide the right decisions and drive behavior change across the organization. “The nature of the work across our various businesses is very different, so we knew out of the gate that we couldn't push out a one-size-fits-all solution,” Gottschling explains. Someone working in personal banking, for example, might have to be on hand to meet with customers, whereas someone working in analytics or accounting would have very different requirements. Their principles—five in all—set a foundation, helping to create alignment across the large, diverse, and geographically dispersed organization and guide leaders in determining what's best for their respective businesses.

Getting to a place where they could distill their own vision of flexibility into five simple, easy-to-understand principles that applied to the entire organization was a process—one that involved lots of discussion about how to tailor some of the best practices of flexible work to the specific needs of their business. For example, when RBC launched their flexible work strategy, they focused on both schedule flexibility and location flexibility, but with some boundaries. They decided that, for their organization, “Proximity still matters” (Enterprise Principle number three). That doesn't mean employees have to be in the office five days a week, but similar to how “Digital-First does not mean never in person” at Slack, RBC's leadership recognized the importance of bringing people together every now and then in intentional ways (something we'll discuss in greater detail in Step 5). “Proximity still matters” communicates to the organization that it's important to RBC that people are generally located close enough that showing up once a week—or maybe a week at the beginning or end of each quarter, depending on what works for their team—is an option for meetings, events, or simply to plan and connect with colleagues.

“What we didn't want,” Gottschling says, “is to have one group say that all their team members could move to a different region and never come into the office while another group that does similar work says the complete opposite.” You'll note that “Proximity still matters” doesn't dictate that people need to live in a certain region or city. Instead, Gottschling points back to employees to make the decision by asking “What's your tolerance for commuting?” based on the team's frequency of in-person gatherings. You can see how this specific principle helps to provide a balance between flexibility and structure—something that both leaders and employees say they want.

Early feedback on their flexible work strategy has been positive, and the company has been using it in recruiting materials, like their “Why RBC?” aimed at potential new employees. There are some skeptics in their ranks, but when doubts arise Gottschling likes to remind people that they worked remotely for at least 18 months during the pandemic and they didn't skip a beat. That doesn't mean there isn't more work to be done to ensure their strategy is successful.

“We're going to learn as we go, keep having conversations about what works and what doesn't, and we're going to get better at it,” Gottschling says. They will make adjustments along the way, but she believes flexibility is here to stay. And she's leading by example: “I will never, personally, go back to five days in the office every week.” And, she projects, neither will most of their people.

Just like with RBC, the process of creating your flexible work purpose and principles at the leadership level—which is what you will learn to do in this step—is how you will start to gain the understanding and alignment necessary to drive an organization-wide change in how your people work together.

Your Flexible Work Purpose: What's Your Why?

Flexibility, especially schedule flexibility, will only succeed if you are willing to set aside outdated conceptions of how work should be done and think differently. But with so many different ideas about what flexibility can mean to each person, team, and company, it can be hard to band together and create this kind of shift. You should start by understanding your purpose and aligning leaders around it: WHY do you want to enable flexible work in the first place?

Why start here? Because too many organizations have jumped into defining a flexible work strategy without understanding why they're implementing it, other than the fact that their employees want it or they want to keep up with peer companies who are already doing it. This is a flawed approach for a couple of reasons.

First, as we know from research, companies with a clear purpose have an advantage. Increasingly, employees—especially younger ones—say they want to work for purpose-driven organizations that can clearly articulate how they serve their people, customers, and community. These kinds of companies perform better, too. A global Harvard Business Review study found that companies with a clearly articulated purpose had higher growth rates. They were also better able to innovate and transform—capabilities that are crucial in today's competitive marketplace. As one executive in the study put it: “Organizations do better when everyone is rowing in the same direction. A well-integrated, shared purpose casts that direction. Without the shared purpose, organizations tend to run in circles, never making forward progress but always rehashing the same discussions.”¹ The same could be said about taking a purpose-driven approach to anything as fundamental to your business as how work should get done.

Second, as we explained in the last chapter, flexible work can mean a variety of things. If you did a Google search in 2021, as companies were figuring out how to move forward after pandemic-imposed restrictions eased, you would have seen everything from “going back to the office full time” (Goldman Sachs) to “working two-to-three days in the office” (many Fortune 500 companies) to “fully remote” (Gitlab) and “virtual first” (Dropbox). You would have found companies that were focusing only on a Work From Home (WFH) policy, and others that were offering not just location flexibility, but the kind of schedule flexibility that a greater number of workers really want and that is inherent in the Digital-First approach that we recommend.

To move forward, your leadership team needs to talk through the real business purpose behind flexible work. After all, this isn't just something you do to make your people happy. It can have a real impact on your bottom line. Purposes may vary somewhat from company to company, but they all generally come back to addressing one key issue: talent. As we touched on in the last chapter, flexible work helps companies attract top talent. It allows them to recruit from a larger pool of candidates. It helps them engage and retain the talent they already have. As you have seen already, RBC's purpose for flexible work was to address the needs of their current employees, who valued flexibility, and to be a differentiator in a highly competitive marketplace for talent—which is compatible with their overall business purpose of “helping clients thrive and communities prosper.” There may be additional, often secondary, reasons for a flexible approach—like allowing more agility and connection among a global workforce or an initial savings on real estate costs—but your main Flexible Work Purpose will almost surely center on your people.

At Slack we touched on similar themes when defining our purpose. After much (often messy) debate over the course of several months, we articulated our purpose through a set of key questions and beliefs that the leadership team needed to agree on:

• Do we want access to the best, most diverse talent pool that exists? There's a giant pool of talent that today is inaccessible to us because unless someone lives within commuting distances of our offices, we didn't hire them.
• Will employees continue to demand flexibility as a basic benefit? In the same way compensation is market driven, work-from-home policies, flexible schedule policies, and a Digital-First approach are going to be expectations that employees demand.
• Do we want the agility that comes with being Digital-First? The ability to collaborate across cities and suburbs, time zones, and around the globe; the removal of the barriers of “remote offices” being second class; and the speed that comes with shared knowledge and understanding of goals all are better served by a Digital-First model over office-centric.

It's in those often messy debates about how flexible work will support your business objectives that you begin to build alignment among your leadership team. You will then continue to build it as you take that purpose and translate it into a set of core principles that will help you to introduce your flexible work strategy and align the rest of your organization around it.

Your Flexible Work Principles: How Can You Support Your Purpose?

Principles don't look too different from core company values in some ways. They're not focused on the tactical how (like how many days you should be coming into the office), but more on the mindset required to make a significant shift in how you do business.

You already saw RBC's principles, which cover:

• Their overarching intention: “Flexible work is here to stay.”
• How they're approaching the shift: “Starts with our business strategy.”
• Three main things they care about when considering what flexibility means to them, and how they want flexible work to play out in their organization: “Proximity still matters,” “Strategic investment is required,” and “Inclusive culture with growth opportunities.”

Principles are meant to be shared across an organization in order to provide direction, consistency, and inspiration as people make the big changes required to enable flexible work. Think back to the example of RBC: The bank has multiple business units across numerous countries. They have a wide variety of functions and tens of thousands of employees, all with unique needs. How do you create a flexible work strategy that can accommodate all that?

The answer is that you “don't push out a one-size-fits-all solution,” as Gottschling put it. Instead you allow for flexibility in the execution of your strategy, and you enable individual department and team leaders to decide what works best for their group—but within a framework and with top-level guidance.  Your principles act as a kind of North Star. Any decision that gets made at any level—about how often a team will meet, for example, or how to measure team or individual success—should be consistent with those principles.

Principles are also meant to help people begin to think in new ways. You have to always remember that flexibility upends traditional ideas about how work is supposed to be done, ones that date back far longer than the careers of anyone reading this book. Redesigning work and replacing old notions with something new and better will take time and reinforcement. It's another reason why spending the time up front to create clear and considered principles is so important. They provide your people with that North Star, that anchor, as they go about changing not just how they do their work, but how they think about it as well.

Some principles will be unique to your business, like RBC's “Proximity still matters.” Contrast that to the many companies that have gone in the opposite direction by instituting “work from anywhere” policies that allow employees to relocate to an island in the South Pacific if that's what they choose. Open source software company Gitlab, for example, is fully remote with no corporate headquarters at all, so they would have different requirements.² Your principles should marry your flexible work strategy with the overall needs and objectives of your business.

That said, we have found that many principles are pretty universal across different organizations and industries. (See the sidebar for some examples.) One is to “Ensure equitable access.” This is such an important one that we devote the next step to it. What's key to know now is that flexible work is meant to enable your people to do their best work. You undercut that if people feel like they lose access to knowledge within the company, opportunities for advancement, or a sense of community and camaraderie with coworkers if they don't show their faces in the office. It's not enough to simply say, “You can work from home if you want to.” You have to make sure that working from home doesn't make people feel like second-class citizens.

We're going to talk more about how you can start the process of defining and aligning around your flexible work purpose and principles in the next section. But before we do that, there are a couple of useful hints to keep in mind when articulating your principles:

• Provide context: Your principles should help your people envision what flexible work will look like and understand what matters most when putting it into practice.
• Keep it simple: Don't overengineer this. RBC has five principles. Most companies have between three and six. It's up to each business to decide what's most important to communicate, but the more complicated you make it, the harder it will be for your people to appreciate your vision.

You'll find further guidance on how to create your purpose and principles in the toolkit at the back of this book (see “A Simple Framework for Creating Your Flexible Work Purpose and Principles” on page 180).

The Process: How Leaders Can Start to Create Alignment

Even something that sounds straightforward, like defining your purpose or principles, can be a messy endeavor when you start talking about it among different people with differing opinions—as anyone who has ever tried it will know. We've been through a flexible work transformation at Slack, and we have worked with numerous companies as they've done the same, so we know what it's like. From those experiences we've distilled some best practices that will make your discussions a little less messy, providing focus and structure as you start defining and aligning around a purpose and principles that will guide this fundamental shift and continue to drive the change going forward.

The following sections will walk you through six ways to start creating leadership alignment around flexible work:

1. Start with the right orientation
2. Check your assumptions
3. Dedicate resources
4. Involve your people early
5. Lead with transparency
6. Keep a “more to learn” mindset

The Change Must Be Leader Driven

The question of how people will work together is so fundamental to any business that a move toward flexibility must be driven by top leaders—preferably the CEO. In fact, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) was able to measure the importance of CEO participation in their Future of Work survey. It found that flexible work strategies that were CEO-lead progressed faster than those that weren't (see Figure 1.1).

At Slack the change to flexible work started with dedicated time and attention from our CEO and executive team, including weekly dates on the calendar for in-depth conversations. Those conversations largely centered on three main questions that can provide a starting point for any organization:

• What problems are we trying to solve?
• What business outcomes do we want to achieve?
• What perceived challenges are we facing?

The team was largely starting from scratch because much of the research and examples we're including in this book didn't exist yet or hadn't been widely published. It took more than two months of conversations to agree on a purpose and come up with a set of principles that were ready to be shown to the rest of the organization. It may seem like a lot of time spent up front, but it was worth it because of the alignment we were able to build as a result.