Workday and Hilton address the post-pandemic office situation.
Good morning.
As a leading provider of HR software, Workday takes the workplace seriously. It has been polling its own employees weekly and consulting with other human resource leaders to get a fix on the post-pandemic workplace. So I thought it would be worthwhile talking to the company’s chief people officer, Ashley Goldsmith, about the company’s own return-to-work plans.
“We’ve taken a persona-based approach,” says Goldsmith, dividing the staff into four groups: “always”, “mostly”, “seldom”, and “never”. The “always” are those, for instance, who look after data centers and need to be in the office daily to do their jobs. The “seldom” include sales and service people, who need to be in the field with customers. “Never” is a small group—recruiters, for instance—who get little benefit from in-office collaboration.
But the biggest group is “mostly”—roughly two-thirds of Workday employees. The company is expecting them to spend 60% of their time in the office. And it is challenging team leaders to focus that time on what it calls “moments that matter.”
“The ‘moments that matter’ are when people come to the office for collaboration, when innovation thrives, or for strengthening relationships,” Goldsmith says. “Somebody working on development may find their time together is best spent at the beginning of the quarter, while somebody in finance may be at the end of the quarter. Maybe somebody wants to come in just a few hours a day, to avoid rush hour. The key is intentionality. All of us have to be highly intentional as we move into this new world of hybrid. It’s new muscle. New habits.”
“Flexibility” also is critical. Workday isn’t setting a firm date for the return to office, but rather allowing several months of flexibility, for employees who need to remake arrangements for caring for their children, for instance, or those who moved during the pandemic and need to relocate. “The point is meeting people wherever they are on this journey, and creating space so they will be comfortable coming back.”
And for now, the company isn’t planning to reduce office space. “We decided we didn’t want to reduce our office footprint,” Goldsmith says. “That felt premature. Let’s bring people back, let’s start learning. We will see where it goes.”
Separately, our guest on Leadership Next (Apple/Spotify) this week is another person eager to see people get back to the office—Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta. I asked him: What will the new normal for business travel look like?
His response:
“I’m not a big believer in new norms. Business travel is already coming back. It is probably a little bit better than half pre-pandemic levels in the U.S. My expectation is that as you get kids back in school in the fall and you get offices open, you will see a significant uptick in business travel. There is a huge amount of pent-up demand for business travel.
“As effective as it has been to use the various technologies out there, most CEOs I’m talking to realize to a very large degree that we’ve gotten to the limits of it. To really build culture, to get the collaboration and innovation and in-the-moment thinking, building partnerships and the like, it is just very hard to do in a digital format. My own view is that business travel will take two or three years to get back to where it was. But it will.”
More news below. And if, like me, you are one of the people who wonders what happened to the Bezos-Buffett-Dimon effort to reinvent healthcare, you should read Erika Fry’s fascinating piece about her effort to solve that mystery, out this morning here.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
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This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.
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