Former Google Exec Laszlo Bock’s Next ‘Startup,’ The Productivity Theater Problem And More

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Does your workforce make efforts to look like they’re working more than they actually are? You know what we mean: The Slack or Teams icon remains green, even if they’re not at their desk. “Schedule send” features for messages and emails are commonly used, with workers responding to messages at all hours to prove they’re always available. It’s productivity theater, at scale.

That kind of performative presence is called the “green status effect” in a new report from software firm BambooHR, a term that encapsulates the pressures employees feel to “show” they’re working. And it stems from a real place of concern: Return-to-office mandates have only amped up the sense in many cultures that being “seen” or “visible” is what matters, rather than actual, tangible results. With 32% of managers acknowledging in the survey that tracking work habits was a primary goal behind their mandates, it’s no wonder workers feel like they should be visible at all times.

The report also surveyed managers and workers about a range of topics, including their goals behind setting return-to-office mandates. About 18% of HR professionals, and about 25% of C-Suite executives and vice presidents among the respondents, said that one of the goals of an office mandate was to prompt some voluntary layoffs. (Let’s hear it for some honesty!)

Both of these findings, of course, suggest a problem some companies appear to have in measuring performance. Their people worry too much about being seen rather than doing real work, and they put off tough decisions about performance in favor of “soft layoffs,” or job cuts in disguise.

Meanwhile, turnover is a real problem at companies with full-time office mandates. In another new survey released Monday, the Conference Board found that at companies with full-time office presence requirements, the increase in voluntary turnover over the past six months grew twice as fast (16%) as it did at companies with hybrid or fully remote workforces (each 8%). The survey of more than 200 HR leaders also found that those who let people choose their onsite work schedules expressed significantly less trouble retaining workers than those that either mandated or strongly encouraged an onsite work schedule. At companies that give employees a choice, just 15% of HR leaders said it was difficult to retain workers, compared with 45% of those where an onsite policy is more prescriptive. We keep hearing people say they want flexibility more than anything. It’s probably a good idea to believe them.

Read on for the latest workplace and human capital news, strategies and advice from Forbes contributors and our sit-down with former

HUMAN CAPITAL

So much for falling interest rates. The labor market grew at a faster pace than expected in May, according to Friday’s monthly jobs report from the Labor Department, with non-farm U.S. payrolls expanding by 272,000, which will not help hopes for interest rate cuts. The reported figures blew past consensus economist estimates of 180,000 and puts the unemployment rate at 4%, up from 3.7% the same month the year prior. In an emailed statement, Indeed Economic Research Director Nick Bunker noted to not “get overly spooked by the rise in the unemployment rate. The labor market is still gliding toward a soft landing. The rise in unemployment can almost entirely be chalked up to workers 24 and under, while prime-age employment rose.”

EMPLOYEE ACTIVISM

The latest form of employee activism could take aim not at company policies or what CEOs have or haven’t said—but on employees’ investment options in their 401(k)s. Google employees are urging the $2 trillion company to offer retirement investment options that don’t include fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron, reports Forbes’ Richard Nieva. Amid the company’s promises on climate change, workers are asking Google to make a fossil fuel-free fund and make it the default 401(k) option in their benefits packages.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

For our latest Midas List package—which highlights the most influential venture capitalists in business—Forbes senior writer Alex Konrad takes a deep dive into the influence battle over AI that’s dividing Silicon Valley. On one side, a powerful set of tech leaders believe that by controlling AI’s development and regulating how it’s used, tech can mitigate unintended consequences. But an increasingly vocal faction of open-source absolutists think talk of disasters is a play by AI’s early power holders to keep it, Konrad writes in his incisively reported story.

OFFICE SPACE

The New York Times assesses the damage on the office real estate market after four years of hybrid and remote work, finding that foreclosures are increasing, delinquency rates are up and some buildings are selling for a fraction of their pre-pandemic prices. The strain from hybrid work is “intensifying,” the Times writes, reporting that it could take until later this year or 2025 before the full scale of the problem is clear. “When you see delinquencies rising and foreclosures rising, that means we’re approaching the acceptance stage of the grieving process for office properties—and that’s healthy,” Rich Hill, head of real estate strategy and research at investment firm Cohen & Steers, told the Times. “But we’re not at the bottom yet.”

WHAT’S NEXT: Entrepreneur and former Google head of HR Laszlo Bock

Laszlo Bock was the head of HR at Google during its heady growth years, wrote the bestselling book Work Rules and is the cofounder of two companies, including Humu, a software tool for guiding managers. In a recent interview, Bock said the executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, where he was a previous board member, once tallied which CHRO had the most former employees go on to become CHROs themselves, and found it was Bock. (The number is about 150.)

He recently announced a new program at the University of California, Berkeley for CHROs that he’s called his third “startup”. Bock co-designed the program and will co-lead it with Jennifer Chatman and Sameer Srivastava, professors at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business who co-direct the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation. The program will launch in October. Excerpts from the conversation below have been edited for length and clarity.

How did you get involved in this?

The genesis was of it was [three] things. One was the Heidrick list [of CHROs that had developed other CHROs]. I was like, maybe there’s something to the approach I took that was worth sharing. The second was through Google, I got to spend time with so many CHROs, but also so many CEOs. One third of our buyers were CEOs. What the CEOs would tell me is [CHROs] were missing skill sets. They weren’t deeply analytical enough. … The CEO perspective was that they didn’t understand the business well enough.

The third trigger was I had a conversation with Ethan Mollick at Wharton. He had this idea where he said he actually thinks AI should be owned by the CHRO at companies. His logic was AI shouldn’t be owned by the CEO because it doesn’t operate like traditional software. With traditional software, you buy it, you buy a per-seat license, it does what you expect. It’s predictable. AI is not predictable. We don’t even know what the use cases are. Nobody’s buying enterprise licenses for this stuff. His view was if you give it to the CIO you might end up with marginal utility but you’re not going to unlock anything.

The biggest impact is going to be on what somebody else called the “fingers and toes” of jobs. AI is not today replacing white collar jobs or any jobs in their entirety. It’s replacing and modifying things on the margin. Performance management, assessment, pulling and analyzing data. Those are all parts of jobs. He said the single biggest impact and most important thing to know when you’re dealing with AI will be how it actually impacts how work happens—the flow of work, who does what, who do you need, what are the skill sets. That is an HR question.

How does this compare to what else is out there?

There’s nothing like it. Part of it is because I, and we, have such a strong thesis about what’s missing. This isn’t a general survey course about “here’s all the things you need to know.” This is very targeted to analytical skills, problem solving skills, consulting style skills, some HR topics that are evergreen like exec comp and how to navigate succession planning at the board.

They’re going to learn financial statement analysis, they’re going to learn valuation—both in the sense of how companies are valued, but also from an M&A perspective. That’s not something you learn in an HR program. The program is targeted at people who are one, maybe two moves away from being a CHRO.

It’s interesting that you chose the word transformative. I know that’s a big kind of buzzword.

Turmoil has become such a constant. You just need a very different skill set. … What does the science say about what works and what doesn’t? How do we design an experiment to tell what’s going to work best for our company? And how do we do this against the backdrop of the pandemic, Ukraine, Israel and Gaza—everything going on in the world that’s also pulling on your attention. When we labeled it as being for transformative CHROs, it was almost a systems dynamics view. HR people can’t afford to think in a linear way anymore.

You mentioned Ethan Mollick; I interviewed him for his book and one of his big points was how central HR was going to be to making all these decisions, and influential in helping companies with what people will do with the time AI frees up.

An easy answer is companies are just going to say we’ll lay off 10% of people and then we’ll reapportion the work. But there’s a million reasons why that’s the wrong way to do it.

What’s driving your motivation to do this now?

Same thing that got me into HR. … Work just sucks for too many people. It’s not pleasant, and it doesn’t have to be that way. We spend more time working than we do anything else. Nobody works an eight-hour day—but if you work an eight-hour day, that’s a third of your life. You spend more time with your colleagues than you do with the person you marry and choose to spend your life with. It turns out there’s ways to make that experience so much better. … That’s what led me to decide I want to go and work on that problem. What led me to, at Google, have us open source so much of what we did. That’s what led to the book. That’s what led to Humu. In a way it’s like the fourth attempt to solve this problem of how do you make work better.

STRATEGIES + ADVICE

Why generative AI is the future of onboarding new hires

How a 60 year-old management theory can help rejuvenate offices

Here’s why dating services should be an employee benefit.

How generative AI will lead to the ‘great averaging’ on workforce teams

FACTS + COMMENT

The ADP Research Institute released its “People at Work” report June 3, finding that competitive pay remains a critical factor in motivating employees. Contributor Lindsay Kohler wrote about the survey, which drew responses from nearly 35,000 workers in 18 countries:

55%: The percentage of people worldwide who rate salary as one of their top three priorities for their job, more than any other factor. Job security came in second, and career progression third.

40%: The share of people dissatisfied with their salary, according to ADP’s survey

“Competitive wages and fair pay structures are so important, and sometimes companies must simply pony up,” writes Kohler, an employee engagement consultant. “Implement clear pay structures with defined career paths and salary increases based on performance and experience.”

QUIZ

A new survey from Bankrate found that about 35% of Americans think tipping is getting out of control, a five percentage point increase from last year. The practice increasingly gets added to checkout procedures at a growing number of workplaces—and companies use tipping as a way to ensure workers make money “without their employer needing to foot the bill,” says Bankrate senior industry analyst Ted Rossman. Amid “tipflation,” as the proliferation of tipping has been called, which generation did the Bankrate survey find had the least consistent tippers?

1. Baby Boomers
2. Generation X
3. Millennials
4. Generation Z

Check out if you got the right answer here.