0:08

Welcome to the new Rules for Work Labs, where we're rewriting the rules of work. In our lab, we glean insights from the world's foremost minds, exploring leadership, team dynamics, creativity, artificial intelligence, and more. Join us as we dissect, analyze, and incubate ideas shaping the future workplace. Stick around to learn how we turn these insights into practical activities. Get ready for a journey into the future of work. This is the new Rules for Work Labs.

Elise Keith: 0:37

Last year, we sat down with Laurel Farrer, an internationally recognized expert in remote and hybrid operations from distributed consulting. Our focus was the game changing role of operational handbooks, specifically how companies can build a single source of truth for their ways of working. Now, if you're wondering what exactly these modern operational handbooks look like in practice, check out the companion article to this interview. There we break down the terminology and showcase real world examples from companies that actively use these handbooks today. But in this conversation, we're going to zero in on what matters most to leaders right now. How to actually get started. If you're looking to modernize how your company operates and documents its work. This interview is your roadmap. Let's dive in.

Dave Mastronardi: 1:32

All right. So Laurel, we're here to talk about documentation and organizational performance. It sounds, well, what's that? What's got you excited about? Look,

Laurel Farrer: 1:45

is the word that

Dave Mastronardi: 1:46

everybody, you know, different strokes for different folks. But of course this is, this is important. And I imagine it needs to get revitalized. It's important to focus on. It plays a critical role in the organization. My, and my guess is most people don't. Even realize the role that it plays. What is got you excited about the role of documentation in today's organization?

Laurel Farrer: 2:11

I think that it just solves so many pain points that people can't figure out where they're coming from. And so they don't know what to do to fix it. And if we can just develop the singular skill of documentation, it will help knock down a whole lot of dominoes.

Elise Keith: 2:26

So there's that the stupid debate about where we should work and whether we should be in the office or whatnot, which is overlooking how we work. How is this modern? Take on documentation different from knowledge management and handbooks and all the stuff we've had forever.

Laurel Farrer: 2:44

Yeah, I'm so glad that you bring that up because yes, as we advocate for remote work and workplace flexibility, and that is my area of specialty is virtual organizational behavior. We very quickly get caught in this current of, Well, are people more productive in the office or outside of an office? And that is completely the wrong conversation, what it needs to be and what it was pre pandemic before the hypergrowth of remote work was that if we focus on how people are working and enabling their behaviors to be more location independent then. We can naturally as an organic consequence work in a variety of locations without interrupting business. So we're really focusing on autonomy first, and then workplace flexibility comes second. So that's what we want to do with all of this is to focus on empowering and enabling individuals to be productive no matter where or when they're working.

Elise Keith: 3:55

I love that. That if you are very clear on how to get the result. You can do it anywhere.

Laurel Farrer: 4:01

Yeah.

Elise Keith: 4:02

But I've had companies who are legacy companies. They've been around for a very, very long time. They went remote during the pandemic. And it wasn't glorious, you know, cause they, yeah, shocking, right. They went from all, you know, we stand around in a circle and we learn each other and how to work that way to we're on zoom or teams or whatever. And now they're coming out and they want to go hybrid and they're having internal schisms between knowledge, working folks, You know, the I T team, the design ops who are like, well, GitLab does it, you know, Atlassian does it not recognizing that those companies have radically different foundations for doing that work than these other teams. So that's the scenario we want to play with. We want to talk about the companies who are in that situation who might come to you where now they want to be remote.

Laurel Farrer: 4:57

Yeah, absolutely. These companies did not go remote. What they did is they implemented an emergency plan in order to maintain as much business continuity as possible with shelter in place. conditions. So there was no virtual organizational infrastructure built. There was no change management process. It was just how do we change our workplaces and maintain our workflows as much as possible and as quickly as possible. So when they looked around a year later and they said, Oh, everybody is working from different locations. And again, this is not about where we're working. This is about how we're working. So how we're working in order to enable more flexibility of any level needs to change. We need to be much, much more focused on that infrastructure side and on that organizational behavior side. That will then enable people to work very seamlessly as individuals in independent, autonomous roles, regardless of where they choose to work.

Elise Keith: 6:02

Okay. So let's play with a fictitious company. I'm going to take the role of someone who has contacted you, right? You've got expertise. You help companies work through getting their employee handbooks and their whole way of remote being. Into ship shape. So, in this case, you've been approached by a mid sized clothing and gear brand steeped in the culture of ranchers, rodeo enthusiasts, and the cowboy aficionados. So they want to get their employee handbook in shape. So the company itself is nearly 80 years old. But their operations, their foundational stuff was digitized 15 years ago. They have online electronic records. And their IT and their design teams, they use Agile, they use design thinking. So they're modernized in many ways. But despite all of these advances Their employee handbook consists of a folder of HR policies that they hand out to new hires when they arrive and that they update in announcements over email and the quarterly cowboy round up meeting that they hold. So question one from them, they've got the HR policies documented. What do they need to know about great modern employee handbooks before they get started?

Laurel Farrer: 7:38

That's a great question. And the comfort and the support and encouragement that I give to them in this moment is you've already started it. So this HR policy handbook that you are referring to is exactly what you need. the birth and origin story of modern handbooks. So what we want to do is just take that and iterate on that because what we're looking to do as a goal and as a vision for handbooks specifically in the world of documentation is to create a single source of truth where anybody in the company, or maybe even outside of the company can go to this knowledge repository and find what they're looking for. Maybe it's about a coworker. Maybe it's about part of their role. Maybe it's about, you know, taking time off, whatever it is, they want to be able to go to one place and not have to figure out where to find something So that's what happened in the eighties and nineties. We saw this HR handbook that was sitting on the shelf and saying, well, we need somewhere that is about how this company works. And that's a start

Dave Mastronardi: 8:44

Oh,

Laurel Farrer: 8:45

binder that was sitting on every HR director's shelf.

Elise Keith: 8:48

Well, it is cowboy gear.

Laurel Farrer: 8:51

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's like, all right, we

Elise Keith: 8:53

it's branded for this company, right? So cool. We should make

Laurel Farrer: 9:00

So we pulled that off the shelf in the 80s and 90s and said, all right, here's the beginning of how things operate at this company. Let's just add more information to it so that no matter what question you have about this company, whether it's HR or something else. You can find it in the same spot. And so we just took that information and kept expanding it and kept expanding it. And now it is that iconic single source of truth that so many distributed and remote first companies are using. So this company, I want to give them that encouragement of, look, you don't have to say, Start from scratch and think what in the world is a handbook and who are we going to have to Own this and operate this and where do we even start with content writing? You say look you've already got probably 30 percent of it done So let's conduct a quick audit on the information that you do have versus the information that you ideally would want in a handbook Figure out exactly where you are in that And figure out if there is more of that content that already exists in other places that we can just copy and paste right into it or hyperlink to it. And then the hard part's over. So it's really changing the mindset from this is a book that we have to write, which is a daunting project for anyone, to How do we create a navigation system to the information that already exists in your company? We want to create more of an information desk that you can go to of like, Hey, I have a question about this project that the marketing team is working on. And this information desk is just like it has been for decades and decades of somebody saying, Oh, let me help you with that. What you're looking for is up on the third floor, turn right, make a left. And that's the, that's the team that you would want to connect with about this project. And that's exactly what we're doing here is we're providing the information in the handbook, or we're hyperlinking to where you can find information about it. So if you're just thinking about a glorified table of contents, it's a lot easier to get to. Get the intrinsic motivation to start a handbook rather than thinking about we have to write a book.

Elise Keith: 11:06

All right. So you said something in there that I thought I saw Dave's eyebrows go way up that we should touch on as they're working on this, you mentioned, you know, whether it's a single source of truth is accessible to everybody in the team and maybe even the public.

Laurel Farrer: 11:20

You know, that is another lane of the future of work is radical transparency, right? We do have a lot of sensitive and privileged information, especially as public corporations. But why, if it's not sensitive and if it's not, stock related, Why are we keeping it close to the vest? Yes, there are definitely Mm

Elise Keith: 11:40

Why would they do that? Who in the public needs to know about how they make their boots?

Laurel Farrer: 11:45

Research and development projects that we need to, for the sake of intellectual property laws, keep them safe and protected. But if it's a question about how do we structure PTO days or, what's the average number of PTO that's offered to a new hire, do we need to keep that hidden? Is that secret, safe information? Or is

Dave Mastronardi: 12:10

No, because these companies tend to be competitive. I mean, it's nice when companies go out there and do it, but you can infer a lot from, even if it's not necessarily proprietary information, I would think there's a benefit to the job hunter, right? If I can go out and I can compare and I can see what the policies

Laurel Farrer: 12:28

Knowledge sharing and documentation as a greater community just as beneficial to business as a whole as it could be internally in your organization. So the more that we share information and can share benchmarking data about how businesses operate, it really comes What pops into my mind immediately is how imperative it was in the earlier days of remote work. So, you know, telecommuting has existed since the 1970s. So I'm not going back that far. I'm going back to when fully distributed workplace models, so 100 percent remote, Started gaining a lot of traction and we're starting to scale up and starting to become an industry. And so when we, as thought leaders we're starting to share back to that root of all of this conversation, which is empowerment of autonomy. Right? How has another company dealt with the exact same thing and what have they learned from it? And maybe we could adopt it. In our own company, it's just the same idea of let's share knowledge for the greater good.

Dave Mastronardi: 13:37

are.

Laurel Farrer: 13:37

Absolutely.

Dave Mastronardi: 13:39

Is there an industry as opposed to just a specific example of a company that, has adopted these more public policies with relationship to their handbook?

Laurel Farrer: 13:51

Ideas back then, this is how we did it is we just went into each other's handbooks and they were, and we said, Oh, that's how you do compensation models with variety of tax infrastructures. And, Oh, that's how you negotiate nexus tax laws. And, Oh, like there was so much. Knowledge sharing that way and we could test different theories and share with each other and say, Oh, we tried that, but this worked better. And because of that, because we were all sharing in real time, how we were incubating and, you know, Prototyping all of these different infrastructure ideas, we were able to come together as a community and accelerate the development of how distributed companies could and should work at a much higher scale because we were willing to share that information. So none of the conversation was really about product. It was about business. It was about the future of work in general, and So I the community really came together in about 2016. And because of that, we had best practices in place. We had glossaries in place in only two, three, four short years. Before it really hit the fan and before in 2021, everybody needed this information immediately. So we were still nurturing at a small scale, but because we could share this information so openly, it prepared the world to be able to

Dave Mastronardi: 15:26

Yeah, it seems like when it's new or when it, maybe when it's novel. There is more of an incentive to share and get it right and then maybe as it Matures people start to if we're going to do it this way and it's a little different maybe it starts to pull back but I think a couple of things that have Come to mind as you've been talking because this is I think we're talking About more than an employee handbook, whether it's something that was pulled off the shelf at Staples or it was leather bound with my initials branded into it, which would have been really nice. But I am at all the big companies that I worked for, it was the former. And so, When I think of documentation, I either go back to that employee handbook, which was like, when do I roll benefits and how do I get my expenses reimbursed? And then depending on what the job was, I had to document my code, but there was a, there was

Laurel Farrer: 16:25

hmm.

Dave Mastronardi: 16:25

Like, this is how we do things around here. Is what you're advocating for when, and maybe we shouldn't be using the word employee handbook, or has the definition changed? Is it more than HR and accounting policies?

Laurel Farrer: 16:44

Absolutely. 100%. So I tend to use the term operational handbook just because for me that encompasses the operations of the organization. So, the goal of a handbook is to make any shared knowledge accessible. searchable. And so that might mean, what is the marketing team working on? I'm going to start at the handbook because that's our single source of truth. And then I'm going to click through to whatever framework that handbook uses and say, I'm going to go to marketing and I'm going to figure out who's on the team. And then I'm going to figure out what projects they're working on. And it says, here's the list of the current projects that we're working on. It might mean all of the HR things that you referred to. It might mean product development roadmaps. It might mean a directory to the people that you work with because shared knowledge is not just technical knowledge. It's also behavioral knowledge. So you're also documenting any shared knowledge such as how do we work here? How is our culture and our behaviors different here than it might be at a different organization? So you're going much, much, much more in depth into topics like values and behaviors codes of conduct than you ever did in a physical organization, because in a physical organization, you could observe those behaviors and you could on your first day be like, Oh, we're like five minutes late kind of people. So if I'm like five minutes late, it's not a big deal, because I arrived on time, people are still trickling in. Not a big deal, but in a virtual organization, if you show up five minutes late to your first meeting, that could go fine. It could not go fine. You don't know if it's not documented. So any type of knowledge about what does it mean to work in this organization documented in an ideal circumstance. Yeah. So we're talking workflows, processes, behaviors, directories,

Dave Mastronardi: 18:45

right.

Laurel Farrer: 18:46

models, everything.

Elise Keith: 18:48

Well, and it's one of the things that makes for great marketing. Honestly, like so a lot of the examples that we use in our blog posts about meeting behavior or way of working behavior come from companies who shared openly, like you're talking about in the tech in the remote world and then realized. That having clarity about how they work and that the fact that the way they work is cool made for good blog posts. So you can see things like Atlant Atlassian's, you know, playbooks and all of these things coming out of that explosion.

Laurel Farrer: 19:23

Yeah. And it creates, again, that autonomy in all phases of the employee lifecycle. As a job seeker, I can go to that culture and be like, Oh, self select. That is not a good match for me. I don't like how they do that. I'm not going to apply. So then you're getting a higher quality and a higher match rate of candidates in your hiring process in the middle phases of the employee life cycle. People are able to align their behaviors more closely when they're saying I'm seeing this happen in our team, but that doesn't seem like it aligns with our values. per this page. So here's an example. Let's help keep each other accountable to what we believe our culture to be. And then same thing that can also create defensibility and it can create empowerment in individual work as well. Having workflows documented has enabled so much more neurodiversity in our hiring processes because people are able to say, wait, what was that again? I just need a little bit more processing time. So write down the instructions and I can manage the process as in the way that I need to, without the pressure of observation of people around me. It's, world changing, but it is a big job.

Elise Keith: 20:40

So this is exactly Dave, what Andre Martin was talking about. We, I don't know if you know him yet, Laurel, you should read his book, wrong fit, right fit. It's all about, how the employee. Manager, you know employer relationship can be improved with self knowledge and clarity about how you work and our fictitious rodeo where company is inspired by this. They're like, okay, we want to get to the place. where we can share as much of our documentation publicly as possible.

Laurel Farrer: 21:12

Mm

Elise Keith: 21:13

So they start down the road, they pick their platform for their single source of truth. They get those first pages up and then, you know, because it's on the internet and even though it's private, who knows what happened. They decide to go through legal review before it goes live and their internal lawyer goes through and he adds a bunch of red lines and clarifying clauses. The documentation becomes a lot longer,

Laurel Farrer: 21:41

Mm hmm.

Elise Keith: 21:41

maybe a little bit more obscure, quite a few footnotes to explain the terms. And then the lawyer goes on vacation and they're kind of stuck. So they realize, okay, that was the wrong path. That process won't work for us going forward, but they don't know what the right level of review is. So based on your experience, what's an ideal policy? And for, in terms of the review process,

Laurel Farrer: 22:12

hmm.

Elise Keith: 22:12

what has to be true for that policy to work?

Laurel Farrer: 22:15

Mm hmm. That's a great question. So I think always iteration is key. If you have the goal of we are going to write our handbook, that is literally a several year project. So don't start with that in mind. Start with that as an objective or as a North Star, but start iteratively and say, How can we just make a better sense of what we currently have? We've gone through this digitization process a few years ago, right? Is that working for us now? Or is there any changes that we want to make before we take this to the next level and then go slowly from there? So when we're talking about this specifically looking at the policies. That's going to start with that binder that's already on the shelf, right? We're just going to pull that down and be like, all right, is this still working for us? Before we use this as a foundation, is there any changes that we want to make with this? Not even thinking about handbook yet, but is this content ready to go? Make accessible. So then after we do the policies and that legal side, then we start documenting Processes. Those are the workflows. That's the operational content. After that's complete and most of that should already exist in some format Maybe it's a matter of formalizing it with A chart but it should already be happening. We're just documenting what is currently existing in activity in the, in the operations. And then after both of those phases are done, then we get into that micro level of the behaviors. So we're focusing on the people. What are our ways of working, et cetera. So moving from policies to processes, processes. To people is a clean way to break up this very daunting idea of how do we start thinking about this handbook? So specifically, if you're looking at just like a flexibility policy, there's, there are those layers in that flexibility policy. The first layer is the policy layer. And that is okay. Legally, where can you work from in order to be in accordance with the nexus laws that our company has access to? Where do we have employer of records statutes in each country, right? So. legally, where can you work from? Then the next layer is the processes. What does that look like? How will we get you equipment? Do you pay for that? Do we pay for that? What work schedule are you going to be required to participate in? What does, you know, PTO look like? All of that. And then you go to the next level of All right. Are kids allowed to be interrupting meetings or pets, or, you know, do you have complete freedom in your schedule or not? And you can get into the more micros. So it's important to think about all three of those layers in any content development that you're doing.

Elise Keith: 25:13

So as the content gets developed let's say they work through that for those policy things and they find a way to do that in a, in a reasonable timeframe, right? The approval process gets, gets manageable and everybody gets super excited and they want to write up how to, how to run the quarterly meetings and how strategy works and whatnot. How do they decide who does that work?

Laurel Farrer: 25:37

hmm. So this is up to each culture individually. There are many companies that do put a single person in charge of. the handbook. That is a very clean option. It's a, not a very scalable option. Usually that only works for company sizes up to, I'd say 500 max. But there are other organizations that are much larger. You use GitLab as an example where the theory literally is everyone contributes and everyone does contribute. Any person Internal or external can make a recommendation to a handbook page and it can be a very small edit, like this word is spelled wrong, or I have a proposal for this entire policy to be different and what that does is that each page has an owner who is responsible for that lane of decision making. And the request goes to the, the decision maker, the page owner, and then it is escalated or de escalated as deemed necessary by that page owner. So the more that you can have, Everybody contributing. Yes, it does feel very vulnerable for traditional leadership methods. However that is the most scalable and sustainable option for shared knowledge management. Because the shared knowledge of your company

Elise Keith: 27:08

it's shared, right?

Laurel Farrer: 27:09

like you

Elise Keith: 27:10

hands,

Laurel Farrer: 27:11

all of the knowledge. Everyone has all of the knowledge.

Elise Keith: 27:14

Well, and many hands make lots of typing go faster. So,

Laurel Farrer: 27:19

who has written hundreds of handbooks, I really like it when company leadership is confident enough in themselves and trust, they trust their workforce, their workforces enough to actually delegate that work.

Elise Keith: 27:37

okay, cool. So so our cowboy friends have gone from having the binder with the brand on it and, you know, with the policies and now they're hiring people around the world. It's 18 months later, right? They've got this handbook. It's full of things. It's not complete. Right? But they've worked through a lot of problems. What do you see as the consultant, as the expert who is brought in 18 months to 2 years later, are the problems that they have not yet encountered and need to have on their radar? And, flip side, what are the opportunities they have not yet realized that they are now ready to take advantage of?

Laurel Farrer: 28:27

Yes, good question. Ideally, they will have answered these questions for themselves because when we are establishing this mindset of documentation, it's also establishing that, cultural norm. Of autonomy, right? So ideally what we want to see happen is that the workforce members that have been contributing to this documentation also feel empowered to be able to make changes and see problems for themselves and say, Hey, this doesn't really seem to be working. Can we do this? And we want them to be proposing the changes and identifying those flags for themselves because that is what will ensure that the handbook is not just. repository of content, but it's a cultural icon. It showcases how they work. So ideally we wouldn't need to come in. However, if we do need to come in I would be looking first for the sustainability of the maintenance. So was this a project that we came in a year and a half ago and just wrote all of this content and delivered and people are searching it to find their answer and then logging out or has it been maintained? Do they have some type of ritual and, and cadence to say, how often are we going to update this? We'd love that to be happening. Weekly, if not daily, but at least quarterly or annually would be would be sufficient. And then we also want to be seeing activity levels, actually measuring the traffic in each of those pages to see, are people using this often? Because, That's the goal. We want this to be a resource for them to answer any question that they have at any time of day about their work. So this is, you know, their, their AI assistant essentially is like, I have a question and then I can find the answer quickly and easily by myself without having to wait for a meeting, without having to go into an office, or without having to interrupt the productivity of a coworker.

Elise Keith: 30:37

That's really clear. I mean, that's a really clear vision for these older companies companies with in office experiences in terms of finding their way to this living online repository of talking about how they work with their teams and their public. Very cool.

Laurel Farrer: 30:53

Yeah.

Elise Keith: 30:55

Given that background, we've run the rodeo through, through HR Handbook to living repository of brilliant knowledge about how to steep yourself in their cowboy way.

Laurel Farrer: 31:10

I just also want to point out specifically for our, our Western clothing, wear and supplies. I think specifically for this company and any company that has manufacturing. One thing that I personally love is that it standardizes and equalizes the accessibility of knowledge between all levels of workers. So if your manufacturing team in the warehouse, whether it be the distribution warehouse or the manufacturing plant also has access to the handbook, they have access to every single piece of knowledge that their counterparts in the offices do. And that's a really empowering vision for the future of business that everybody in your business can be on the same page, regardless, not only of their location. But the location of their roles or their, the roles that they are performing in. So no matter what type of equipment they may be using, no matter what type of career path they're on, they all have access to the same information.

Dave Mastronardi: 32:12

All sounds great, but we're dealing with a bunch of cowboys here that like to do things their own way. And we all know the so of course, while these systems that we put in place, these, searchable knowledge and navigation systems that we put in place are of course perfectly implemented, but usage varies. Depending on the individual, the department, but to play a little bit of a game and maybe explore how we might get more adoption or more equal usage across the company. I thought it would be fun for each of us to rank five standard departments in terms of adoption likelihood, right? Especially at our company where we're dealing with cowboys, the wild west, you know, you've got to improvise. You've got to be out on your own. You're a bit of Yahoo anyway. So, I. Some standard, let's see, I want to do this to everybody just to put into the chat. So standard organizations, engineering, product, sales,

Laurel Farrer: 33:15

Okay.

Dave Mastronardi: 33:15

accounting. So just so we have them all there. So

Laurel Farrer: 33:23

okay. So to be honest it's not necessarily going to be the department or their roles that make them more or less likely to adopt these systems. It's going to be their managers and how their managers empower them to work. Record and store information. So, all of this is just like having a project management system, right? If an accounting assistant or let's say a new hire in any of these departments says goes to their manager and says, what is the latest status report on this project? blank, this client, this employee, this product, this code review, whatever, right? What is the latest status report? And they say, the manager has two choices in that moment. They can say, Oh, it's this. And I know that because I just looked at the documentation. Or they can say, have you checked the handbook? And so if they are developing and pointing those behaviors towards asking the shared knowledge database or the single source of truth instead of asking individuals, that is going to drive behavior. So honestly, I see all of these departments going Very well or very not well, just based on leadership modeling what the value of this resource so I would say currently where you are going to have. It depends on leadership.

Elise Keith: 34:59

So what you just said, is like an implementation detail, right, about how to make it successful at one level, but the other thing you just said was a redefinition of the role of the manager.

Laurel Farrer: 35:10

Yes.

Elise Keith: 35:11

Right. So in, in that world, with clear documentation, the micromanagement and the manager as the, the Godhead that holds all the knowledge and you have to go through them goes away.

Laurel Farrer: 35:26

Mm hmm.

Elise Keith: 35:28

So are you seeing faster adoption in companies that have sort of a servant leadership value base? built into how they operate or maybe a distributed autonomy kind of,

Laurel Farrer: 35:40

Mm hmm. Absolutely. And this extends way beyond documentation, right? This is again, coming back to that, that theme that we will say multiple times. This is about autonomy. This is about empowerment of people. So as managers, what that means is that we need to be trusted and trust. In a new way that we are no longer supervising our workers, we are supporting our workers. They are smart enough and capable enough and talented enough to manage their own work and to supervise their own work. We are there because we need to make sure that that aligns with everything else that's happening in the company. So we are not saying, this is what you do. We are saying, how can I help you do what you do? What do you need me to support you on as you do what you do? So yes, it is. Mid level management is 100 percent the area where we need to be investing in the most in order to transition more smoothly into the future of work. This has been a very, very. Punished abused demographic over the past several years that we said the world is on fire and the leadership said, all right, everyone below me make it work and everyone at the entry level said, what do we do? And here's mid level management saying. I don't know. And everybody's feeling threatened and confused and unsafe and unsecure because number one, we're in a global crisis, but number two, the business continuity fell on their shoulders with almost no instructions whatsoever. So here are heroes that kept the businesses running with. Flying by the seat of their pants, and now we're asking them to continue this momentum into the next generation of hybrid or staying remote or going back to the office.

Elise Keith: 37:46

Or you guessed today.

Laurel Farrer: 37:47

Yeah, exactly. Again, with no instructions. So we really need to focus on these people and helping them understand. What does it mean to be a manager in the future of work? You are safe. You are secure. This does not impact the security of your job, but it does change the description of your job. And this isn't just a pandemic thing. This is the fourth industrial revolution, right? This is this is big stuff. So we need to first have empathy for them, but then second, empower them and enable them with what it means to be a new type of leader that is not the leader that was based on literally the last industrial revolution, standing over the floor, watching the machinery, making sure that the factory was still operating at the right speed. We've been operating on that mindset for a long, long time. Now we have a different type of productivity, a type of, of work, and we need to adjust our management styles accordingly.

Elise Keith: 38:54

Right. So if you have that responsibility, ensure alignment, manage change, support continuity, then you've got you've got a whole different way of conceiving of the job.

Laurel Farrer: 39:09

Yeah. And keeping, keeping people connected and really redefining work and what it is to be a valuable employee and to contribute to a team and to be productive. It's a, it's an exciting era that we live I hope that we all embrace the possibilities that are ahead of us

Dave Mastronardi: 39:31

Everything old is new again.

Laurel Farrer: 39:35

To sum up

Elise Keith: 39:37

we so we've got all kinds of things in here. We've got all kinds of insights about how to where to get started, why you might want to publish your documentation publicly, the importance of this living single source of truth that all kinds of people from all kinds of departments can reference in for different reasons on different days. Laurel, help us let people know how to find you when they are so excited about the possibility of taking this project on for themselves.

Laurel Farrer: 40:08

Absolutely. So I'm always easy to find at distributeconsulting. com or on LinkedIn. I'm the only Laurel Farr. So if you have my name spelled right, you should be able to find me quite easily.

Elise Keith: 40:21

Fabulous. We will definitely make sure that's available for people. Thank you so much for spending time with us. And, you know, I know we got, we got gritty on these things and I, I hope people appreciate That these are challenging, complex projects that have straightforward ways to get started and that there's no reason not to get started right away.

David: 40:48

Thank you for joining us in the lab. We appreciate our guests for contributing to the thoughtful discussions on the future of work. If you've enjoyed the ideas we've explored today and want to put them into action, check out our companion newsletter at labs. newrulesforwork. com for the practical activities and additional resources. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback is the catalyst for our ongoing journey into the future of work. Thank you once again for joining us. We'll see you next time in the lab.