Gartner, Inc. (IT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to this Gartner webinar, How U.S. Government and Executives Can Navigate Upcoming Workforce Changes. I'm Danielle, your moderator for this session. [Operator Instructions] Although there are no formal presentation slides available for this webinar, you can find other helpful resources at the bottom of the page. Throughout the program, you can rate this session and share feedback on the thoughts provided. To submit your rating, locate the Rate Session link below the player and box will open for you to select 1 to 5 hearts with 5 hearts being the top rating. Share your feedback on the thoughts provided in the Leave For The Feedback box and click Send. This webinar is being recorded, and you can launch this presentation again and find more great sessions on demand at gartner.com/webinars. Now I'd like to welcome Gartner Vice President, Analyst, Christie Struckman, Managing Vice President, Analyst; Elisabeth Joyce, Vice President, Analyst; Mike Brown; and Senior Director Analyst, Mike Shevlin. Thank you all for joining us. Now before we jump into things, I'll provide a little bit of context for the conversation. So leaders and employees are facing a magnitude of change coming at them every day, new things are coming on to the leaders' plates. We're not going to be able to cover all of the changes that organizations are facing. However, we do want to focus our time today on a few things that are having a disproportionate impact on the work of our public sector leaders. We're going to be focusing the conversation around these 3 things. Return to in-person work, resizing the workforce and managing employee experience and engagement.

So to get the conversation started, I'd like to first start with returning to in-person work and ask Liz, what point of friction can be reduced in this process?

Yes. It's a great question, Danielle. As you're bringing people back into the office, the key point that you need to be thinking about is how to make it easy for your employees. There is going few points across the employee's journey that will create friction. So for example, childcare, dropping off kids at school, getting into the office to commute in, even parking, as we've seen, in some instances, can create friction in the experience that your employees are having as they're coming back into the office space. So as leaders, what we want to be thinking about is where are those points in friction in the employees' journey and the person's journey to make those things as easy as possible. Now one point is that the friction points may be different from person to person. So you want to take time to really understand kind of what the most -- the biggest friction points would be that you can solve for.

Great. Thanks. And Mike S, I'd love to get your perspective here, too, on how to identify those employee points of friction.

Well, I mean, you can certainly start by looking at the typical employee journey during the day. So what's the employee? And then think about your own experience. What do you do when you get up, what have you done at prior points in your career when you're getting ready to come into the office and look for those things as you're coming in. It's even things like for folks that have -- that are just coming in now, did I remember my mouse? What do I do for those kinds of things. So that's what I think you do. I think some of what you can do for your employees depends too upon your organization and what resources you have. Do you have -- because a lot of us have been away for a while. Do you have enough desks for folks? Is there -- are there places for them to connect in? Those are the kinds of things that I think you think about as folks are coming back into the office.

Absolutely. And how do you scale this identification across your workforce and begin to ease it? You mentioned some of the things that you really need to be thinking about but how can you scale it? Liz, I'll start with you.

Yes. I think kind of to the point earlier, it's going to be different for every person. And as you're thinking about the employee journeys, you don't want to make a journey for every person. You want to look to where there's the biggest points of friction that you can solve for because there are some things that you just frankly won't be able to solve for your workforce or for your individuals. And then you want to arm your managers with those potential solutions to make it easier for that worker. So for example, if one of the things that you can do to solve some of the things like child drop off is to change the time of start and stop, allow your managers to have that flexibility to work with the individual to make those choices. So you're identifying the friction points at scale that you can solve for, you're identifying the points of solution that have potential options, both at scale and then you're allowing your managers to personalize that for the individual based on their need. So that's kind of thing I would be thinking about is what are the big things that we can really get to. And then how can we push it out to the workforce and to the managers to make some of those personalized decisions at the points that are most frictionful for them.

Right. Mike B, what about from you about scaling identification on friction points? I don't know...

Well, certainly, one friction point might be technology where people are now accustomed to the technology environment that they have at home and now they're entering into a new circumstance or reentering into the office circumstance. But I want to point out that this is something that the government has handled before with hoteling and swing space circumstances where an employee can just drop in with their laptop, connect, get access to multiple monitors and printers. I mean, this is not new. This was happening long before COVID and it certainly will be part of the solution set going forward.

Thanks, Mike. And Christie, I'd love to get your perspective here too.

Well, I would say that as you create personas for people. So a persona could be people with kids, a persona could be people who've actually never worked in an office, they're relatively new and they've -- they started during COVID. So what is this office thing? It could be people who have an extended commute, right? So you can take your entire workforce, and you can say, I think we can categorize as what a persona is, categorize people into these different areas. And bring in the employee voice, right? Like have your employees help you to identify what are those friction points. So don't try to guess, get their input. But let's be clear, just like Liz had said, you're going to get a list of things that you can do something about as well as things that you can't do something about. So be transparent. We're -- as part of our journey to be back into the office, we've got a list of the things that we'd like to work on. And even the list of things that you can't control, you might not be able to deal with all of them right away. So prioritize that list and again, communicate that you -- we've heard these things, we're working on them. Just remember, if you've got, let's say, you come up with 5 personas, work on something for each of the personas. Don't just work on one person's persona.

Absolutely. Thanks, Christie. We just got an interesting question that I think I'd like to kind of weave into my next one. I was just about to ask about anything that we should revisit regarding office behavior or etiquette. And someone just asked a very timely question. Someone is wondering a lot of people will be pulling dress out of the closet for the first time in years. So do you think dress codes will be different post COVID in this return to office phase? So Liz, I'll start with you there. I know you've got some thoughts on the etiquette. And if you can comment on dress code that people can be expecting.

Yes. I mean I think at the top line, there is going to be the rewriting of rules when we come back into the office. Now the rules might be the same as it was when we were always in the office all the time pre-COVID or they may have shifted. And I think that's a little bit of TBD based on the organization and the kind of the organization's approach to in-office engagement. But I think what everyone needs to be taking into consideration is that this is going to be a big change for most, if not all. And we'll have to take some time to actually reset some of those rules like the dress code. What I would recommend as leaders in the organization is to kind of get together and to give some guidance to your team around that on what they should do, what isn't acceptable, what is acceptable and so forth and maybe even get together with some of the individual contributors to co-create some of those new rules because they will need to reset those boundaries and behavioral norms as they come back into the office to include the dress code.

Absolutely.

And if I can chime in, I think the other thing to think about, and this could be 1 of Christie's personas, is that you may have some folks who've been hired since the remote works began and the post-COVID people. So they may be coming into the office for the first time. And if we're having questions like, will dress codes change? What's the appropriate attire? Certainly, they're going to have the same thing. They may not know where to go when they come into the building. So those are exactly the kinds of things that you think about that you add into your personas and you make allowances for with employees.

The 1 other thing I will add there is that like any behavioral change, I think about habits and creation of habits, it takes time to get back into a normal cadence of rhythm or kind of get used to that thing. We certainly felt that when everyone went out of the office years ago into COVID, where we had to kind of figure out what that process is, where do I go for -- what I do for lunch? Where do I sit in my home for work? Like that we had to kind of rethink that and work through those things. It's the same thing as coming back in. And to Mike's point, those new people, they won't have a frame of reference even from 5 years ago to lean on to make some of those decisions. So as you can guide them in the right way to make it as easy as possible, that would be great.

Right. So when we think about returning to in-person work and getting back into a similar set of habits that you may have been used to before or that you may have never had if you have never been in an office. I'd like to get everyone's perspective here and ask if there are any dos and don'ts that you would give to the audience. So Mike B, I will start with you for dos and don'ts for returning to in-person work?

Sure. Well, do be patient. It would be my first piece of counsel because this is a change and a number of things logistically will be being addressed as you come back into the office. And the points to the other panelists here, there will be adequate sort of assumptions that will be made and changes in regards to just how you conduct yourself in the workplace. Don't fail to seize the opportunity for community, right? So by virtue of being in the office now that sort of an opportunity to strengthen the community relationship with your coworkers. So don't fail to seize that.

Absolutely. Christie, I'd love to hear your perspective on any dos and don'ts.

So do take care of yourself. So walk -- take walking breaks, hydrate, healthy snacks, take care of yourself. Don't, I'm going to give you 2. Don't ignore the things that are bothering you, right? Like we're talking to you about what you do for others but there's things that are going to be bothering you. And we all know what it's like when if we came back into the office and the keyboard is hurting your hand, deal with it, right? If somebody -- if people are constantly knocking on your door, that's kind of one of those behavioral things and it's frustrating for you. Don't tolerate is what I would say, like talking -- say, okay, this is bothering me, there's probably other people. So let's bring this issue up and let's talk about it. But my second don't is don't be an island. I think we've all done an excellent job taking advantage of the technologies that we have in either this remote or hybrid environment. But that means that when we go into the office, like what I hope doesn't happen, is that people put their headsets on and so that their desk can never talk to anybody else to take advantage of being around other people and having those conversations.

Absolutely. Liz, how about your recommendations on dos or don'ts ?

Yes. I mean I will say that I think from a do is get your teams together and write your dos and don'ts for your team. And don't assume that everyone has the same perspective of how things should work in the office place. You want to bring your teams together to create kind of norms that you guys will live by in the office place. So for example, when should you be doing collaborative work together, right, when should you do synchronous work? And when should you actually put your headset on and do your heads down work. There's a time and a place for all of those things, and there's a necessity for all of those things. But you want to actively and prescriptively go after getting those rules and making sure that your team has a good understanding of how we're going to work together in this shared space.

Absolutely. All right. Mike S to round us out.

Okay. So I'm going to go back to 2 principles that I had in the military. And these are on my list of don'ts and they're don'ts for leaders. The first principle is called LOST because you know the military loves acronyms. And that's line of sight tasking. So as an employee walks by your door, I have a job for you just because they're within sight because they're going to be within sight more now that they're back in the office. And then the second one that I would say is don't is the complementary principle to that, which is DAD, and that's delegate and disappear. So you don't want to do that. You want to make sure that it's not -- you're not giving the impression that things are random, and you're there when people need you for responses. And I guess that would be my piece. And the simple stuff, like remember, there's now more people in the environment, don't be like me and sing while you're working.

I think a lot of people might appreciate that.

Yes. I would love to hear that, Mike. So, please.

May be after this. So before I start shifting gears to resizing the workforce, the question came in, and Christie, I'd like to pose this to you, someone saying remote work was instrumental during COVID pandemic. Do you believe remote work and the movement to the office might be going back and forth as a trend for other possible impactful situations such as reducing carbon, climate disruptions and so on?

Yes, mostly because we if we had a clear path of what exactly we want to do or not do, and if we had directions that stayed the same over time, I think we would be doing those actions. But I think it was -- if I might be egregiously misquoting [ Macron ] when he said, things have never been as slow as they are today. Basically, saying that -- maybe I misquoted it but changes the world, changes the future, things are constantly going to be changing. And so I think realizing that changes like this, in some context, we might be saying, "Oh, let's be more in the office." In other context, we might be saying hybrid work. And that's the opportunity in front of us, is to adapt to the current situation and stay focused on our mission and the work that we have to do and thrive within that current environment.

Well, and if I could jump in on that as well. What happened during COVID with everybody going to work in a different place, going home is a testament to the resilience of organizations. And it's part of the tool bag for organizational resilience for the foreseeable future. And hopefully, we'll never have something like COVID again, where we have to do that. But knowing that we could and we can do it at scale, I think, is an important sort of organizational resilience tooling. And I'll just point out that prior to COVID, the notion of, say, inclement weather being a reason that people didn't work was diminishing greatly because people were expected to work from home under situational circumstances. So again, this is just something that I think we should be proud of in many respects. The fact that we -- government went on despite the fact that we had this horrific pandemic.

Absolutely. Makes me think about the poor kids who never really know the joy of snow days anymore with all the remote learning. So before I shift, I just want to mention someone had a very positive comment of their own recommendation of returning to work of making your space cozy. A lot of the thoughts were reiterated by our panelists here but making sure that during your lunch break, don't eat alone, make sure you're connecting and communicating bringing a flowerpot, make this space your own, and she mentioned -- or they mentioned bringing a blanket. And I have to say we all know how chilly those office spaces can get. So I know I had my blanket when we were all in the office. Now I'd like to start talking about resizing the workforce. My first question is going to be how can you take a refreshed look at what work is and what essential functions are? So Liz, what are your thoughts there?

I think as we're going through the resizing of the workforce, one of the things that we're seeing is that it is a little bit all over the place into where we're seeing attrition happen. And so taking a step back and thinking about what is truly mission priority in this current environment is going to be really important. And what are the things that are kind of secondary or tertiary to those primary mission pieces? Because as our organization contracts, we won't be able to do all of the things as we have in the past at the -- with the -- because we just simply don't have the workforce that we had before. So thinking about prioritization but really grounding ourselves in mission criticality and pushing ourselves to make trade-offs. We will be -- when I was at agriculture, there were things that we all felt were -- like everything was mission-critical, and it did feel true. But as we were thinking about budget cuts and so forth, we had to actually push ourselves to say, which is the most critical of those things and put a marker on those priorities to make some tough decisions about staffing.

Sure. Mike B, can you share your thoughts as well about the refreshed look and what essential functions are?

Sure. Well, look, there's no better time than now to take a good look at your strategic portfolio management approach. We at Gartner have approached this tolerate, invest, modernize, eliminate approach, which I think can be very helpful. But fundamentally, what you're trying to do is find the work that should continue and the work that should be stopped. And another way of looking at this might be examine all of your sort of investment efforts and all of your O&M efforts, use some sort of a scoring approach, a scoring rubric that has on one axis kind of the negative mission impact and on the other axis a cost reduction. And the idea is to find the sweet spot between low impact to the mission and high cost reduction. This is kind of the same thing that you would generally do in a budget formulation approach just now it needs to be done, perhaps, a little more aggressively and with a real eye to the sort of steer situations you might be facing and budget reduction.

I'd have to agree with Mike on that one as well, Danielle. It's definitely the time to take a look at the various scenarios because you don't ever want to go back to the boss with just one solution. So come back in with multiple options and have the pros and cons of each option laid out because Mike is right, we're looking at much smaller government coming out of this. And if we do that, then we've got to do some real assessments on workload.

And the one thing I would add to that in terms of like scenario planning is you want to take the work that you need to do from a criticality perspective and then think about, break that down to the capabilities or the tasks that people will do and then the skills that are associated with that. Because as you're thinking about what workforce do we have to fit the needs of the work you may not have the same people that you've had before, and you may need to source talent from one place to that maybe you move them into kind of the more mission-critical sites that they are here. We need to actually change the work that they're doing. But take a look at it from the task and the skills and then scan your workforce for who has those skills, who could potentially map in different places as the scenario presents itself because I think as you guys all know, we are seeing different trends of like when people are trading the organization, there's probably -- there's going to be another tranche in the September time frame. There might be retirements. There's the higher increases of whole lot of things that are outside of a controlled reduction in force. So we need to make sure that we have the plans and who can fit into the different places, not from a Jane or a Joe but from here's the skill set that comes from this place that could potentially go into that place that we can fill in as we need to, to the most critical functions that we have.

Sure. I'm sorry, Danielle, not that it's kind of endemic in government but we do have a tendency to build silos. And to Liz's point, what we're really talking about doing moving forward is a much more collaborative workforce. So it may be that the skills or the personnel that you need exist outside your current division in your current.

100%.

And you have to be able to build the partnerships and the collaborative workforce to be able to shift those people around as Liz suggests.

Absolutely. So since you are talking about kind of restructuring the skills, I'd like to also ask about how can you restructure the work to fit the workforce? So Mike B, I'll start with you for that question.

Sure. Sure. Look, let me disabuse people of some of these old sayings, right? There's no perpetual motion, there's no free lunch, and the old adage more with less is probably more aspirational than practical. So fundamentally, people do less with less. That's the sort of moral of my counsel here. And there's a number of approaches to look at this. First of all, what is important to the agency, right? And normally, I would suggest go look at the strategic plan for the agency and see what those goals are. But we've had changes in leadership. And now those goals are evolving. And so in the case of changes for leadership, you need to look to things like campaign promises, early executive action or presidential actions to see what it is that is important to the new leadership. And another way of looking at work would be look in a more austere environment would be I think as you would for a major disruption in which you are exercising your continuity of operations plan and you would begin to restore operations based on the priority to the agency. And I think that's a good way of imagining how you might change the focus. These are the things that we're going to do first and the things that we would do in a continuity of operations exercise that we're going to do last might be things that we won't be able to get to with a different workforce. I've got a couple of other thoughts in this space. So again, the objective here is to find what is valuable to the agency and shed the work that is of lower value. Now we talked about kind of a budget analysis or that tolerate invest, modernize, eliminate approach that we at Gartner have. That's another way to go about this. And sort of complementing what Lis has said about the workforce and what Mike has said as well, there's a smaller workforce that's going to have to operate across multiple disciplines and there might be less specialization as there was in the past. And so this means employees need to be kind of perhaps more agile in their thinking and leadership's got to look to skills development kind of a new. So the sort of straight line skills development for a particular field may have to become more broad. And I'll take a breath there and yield the floor to my colleagues.

Yes. Let me go ahead and jump in. I think your advice, the suggestion of start with what if everything was shut down and we had to restart. It is a great suggestion. And it's with the reminder that you're focused on the capability first, right? So if you're in an IT organization, the first thing is probably connectivity, right? Okay? So that's that capability. But don't just take that as a big lump sum, like there might be some like what's the bare minimum of connectivity that you would need. And then like I'm trying to pull all the threads together and then you can say, and who should do the connectivity. And I think that's where we can have some real opportunities for improvement and streamlining. I mean, for so many of us, we've been working for years to improve processes and cut down paperwork or whatever. And that's what -- so if you start with what's the capability, the first capability and what's the minimum that we have to do, the question right after that is, and where can that be done? And that's where we have to look at things from a fresh perspective and don't just think, well, let's go back to the way we did it. It's -- we've been talking about potentially going to some shared service with these organizations. Is this our moment? Is this the opportunity in front of us.

If I could jump back in, just real briefly on this. There's no CIO that doesn't have a list of stuff that they'd like to get rid of. I can just guarantee you that. And this is perhaps an opportunity to get rid of the stuff you wanted to get rid of for years, just didn't have the appropriate catalyst to do so.

So it's an opportunity. And Liz, I'd like to get your recommendations as well on how to restructure the work to fit the workforce.

Yes. It goes a little bit to a question that came in from the audience around managing the workload versus the capacity that we have. And as I think about work for my team or when I was at agriculture doing workforce planning, there's 5 things that we had to think about in terms of the work. There is the time that we have to do the work, the staff or the resources that we had to do it, the scope of the work that's getting done, the quality of the work that we were trying to achieve and the technology that we had to enable it. Those are 5 levers that we have to think about how to do work differently, because, as Mike mentioned, we're not going to do the same or more with less. We are going to either do less with less or different with less. Now you can put to your leaders a scenario where we're going to do the same scope but it's going to take longer or we are going to do the same scope but at a lower quality. If we want to maintain the quality, what is the change to the scope? To Mike Brown's point, we may want to get rid of some of the things that have been kind of historical things that we just do because it's historical things. I don't know but that is the thing to think about. So every time you're going through kind of work evaluation, run it through those 5 levers to say, do I have the resources to maintain the same way I do? If not, what's the trade-off? Longer times, smaller scopes, lower quality, more technology to enable it to offset it, right, and make those trade-offs. But don't make those trade-offs in a vacuum, talk to your peers across the organization, talk to your leadership, talk to the administration and make sure you're making the trade-offs to align in the direction you want to go to the prioritization that you have. But put that out there and give them the scenarios. We can do this and pull this lever to make this work. We can pull this lever to make this work but we can't do same amount of time with less resources at the same scope with the same level of quality. It's just not reality but make sure that you're very clear on what those trade-offs would be so you can make some really good decisions in the scenarios that you have.

Thank you, Liz. Yes. Go ahead, Mike.

If I can add just a little bit? And it may be a tad of a controversial perspective. But some of what we've railed against for years are regulations that don't necessarily make sense. And I think there are opportunities in this environment to challenge some of those regulations. So as you're looking, don't just think of technologies that you want to get rid of. Think also maybe there's something that's actually in the way that you can make a case for, hey, we can do this as you do your scenario planning, we can do this if, and see how it goes.

Yes. If I could, again, jump back in. I want to follow up on what Liz had said about the trade-offs. I mean, that's really important. And just from a technology perspective, what you want is not for the CIO to make those decisions or the IT team to make those trade-off decisions unilaterally. The mission should be involved in what does and doesn't get done. You don't want to set up the IT organization as a group that is just taking things away without regard to the mission impact. So IT is a mission support function needs to have the counsel, the input and the agreement of the mission elements of the organization about what goes away and what stays.

One of the things that I would just add in here too is, especially for the HR professionals on the line, think about role design. We often think about kind of roles stay similar, and we do more of the same roles or less of the same roles. But there's often times where there's parts of the roles that if designed differently we could get more scale out of a role. I'll give you an example. Years ago, I had scientists in the agricultural organization who were doing a lot of the admin work. And if I could take the admin work off their plates and put it into another role, then it could get more out of the kind of the science side of it, right? So I had to think really differently about the roles that they were doing, the construction of their roles. So again, it's doing differently but this gives you an opportunity to kind of rethink that. And are all of the things that we're designing -- putting into a role the right things? Or is there kind of a -- can we turn it on its side and think a little differently about how work is organized by those task levels that I mentioned earlier, the skill set and put them together a little differently to start to get to some of the work in different ways.

Great. Thank you, Liz. Now I'd like to start talking about, of course, if we have additional thoughts or questions on that specific topic area, please feel free to ask in the Ask The Speaker box. But I have some questions on managing employee experience and engagement. So Christie, how do you talk to your employees about the changes to their organizations?

So we need to have an approach in a way that we're going to think about how we work through the changes that are happening. And the approach that we know is the best practice is to use what we call EFT, but it's not the financial acronym. It's empathy, transparency and focus. So if it's okay, I'd like to go through each of those but please Liz, Mike and Mike jump in if you want to dig down on something. So I'll start with the empathy. There's -- I have yet to come across a change that doesn't bring up angst in the employee group. It Doesn't matter what the change is. There's always going to be angst. And some changes are bigger impact and others are lesser of an impact. And the one thing that we can always do is listen deeply, and provide a place for people to be able to share thoughts and challenges that they're having. This is the way that you get those points of friction that we were talking about earlier is if you're really listening with empathy, you're going to hear those points of friction. So you want to really just provide that space. Now there's a balancing act here, right? Because we're all here to work and get stuff done. But you need to know where people are and give them that safe space to talk things through. So that's the empathy. Transparency. The metaphor I like to use when I talk about change. And again, it doesn't matter what it is, is that almost always a good way to think about this is that people feel like a rug has been pulled out from underneath their feet. And what they're trying to do is put the feet back down on something. And so transparency is one of the two ways that you help them with that because I need to transparently know, is there a piece of rug coming? Or do I need to hold on. So you know what you know and you don't know what you don't know. And one of the things that I think we're taught, I'm not sure where but we're taught as leaders as well don't say anything until you know the answer. But that creates a void. So I always say it's okay to tell people. So here's what I know. I know these 3 things. Now the next 2 questions that we're going to have or this or that, and I don't know the answer to those. We're working to get them. And believe it or not, that is actually information. The fact that you don't know the answer to something is information for them. So that's the transparency. And if you follow it with focus. So this is like one of the things that Mike S was talking about is people need to understand the small picture and the big picture. And when the big picture is a little fuzzy, make this -- the little picture today as clear as you can. So today, here are the things that we need to work on. So you can do little tactics like steal one of the best practices from the agile methodology, which is have daily standup meetings from 8:45 to 9:00. We do a quick check in, everybody knows what they're doing, who can help who kind of a thing. That might seem like not necessary. And maybe when there isn't a lot of change, it isn't. But when there is a lot of change, it's actually very valuable. So I know that was sort of a big answer. I'll just in summary, empathy, transparency and focus are the ways that you lead.

So I have to agree with Christie on the transparency and the -- it may not seem like you need it. There's a lot of time, I think we, as leaders go, well, everybody knows that. How could they not know that. The truth is somebody out there doesn't. They were out that day, they were on another call. They didn't get the information. And don't ever assume that your employees already know, or that your staff already knows. Make sure that you tell them. And sometimes you'll have to reinforce it. Sometimes you'll have to wander the halls to make sure that somebody, actually, heard the message, and they weren't toddling another problem in their brain to figure it out.

Absolutely. The one other thing I would add here is, kind of get rid of the old adage of every change has to have a what's in it for me moment because that's almost like selling the change and spinning it positively. And as Christie mentioned, no matter what change has ever happened in any organization that I've ever been in, there are reactions on varying different degrees, irrespective of the change, irrespective how I felt about the change or how our leaders felt about the change, right? But you want to go towards that authenticity of like let's translate this to what it means for you as opposed to trying to sell it as a positive thing or spin it, right? People will have their feelings no matter what you say. It is better to help them to understand the change and how to translate it to their day-to-day jobs than it is to sell them on the commitment to it. That is -- again, it is -- it could be a new technology. It could be an organization change. It could be a leadership change, it could any type of change. But getting them to understand how to work in that change is way more important than trying to convince that it's the right thing to do. And Mike B, I think I cut you off there. Sorry about that.

No, that's all right. That was probably much more insightful than what I was going to say. But I was going to comment on the F in the ETF. So another aspect of the F is there are some aspects of what's going on that aren't really different. So some things are the same. And I might point out that the return to the office effort was beginning to ramp up over the last couple of years. And so we may have seen some acceleration here. But the trend is similar as an example.

Yes. Liz, I love what you said. I've been trying to kill with them for a really very long time because it's not -- I don't really know where that came from and I'm not sure. Sometimes we create something to fix the wrong root cause. And you're right. I don't actually think we should ever be in the business of selling a plan. If the organization has said, we're going in this direction, then that's the direction we're going on and everybody make their personal choice with it. So maybe this will be another notch in the journey to remove that as a tactic.

I'd like to ask, and this kind of ties into a lot of what you all were just speaking about with -- in regards to the ETF. But how do you lead with confidence when you don't have all of the answers. So Christie, you did touch on this, but would you add any other thoughts?

Well, we have to ask ourselves what confidence. If you want to lead with confidence, what's confidence. And I think I don't know what other people would naturally assume it to be. But what I can tell you is that all change actually affects all people and we are all human at a fundamental level. We all just want to be heard. And so leading with confidence is in this context is focusing on what needs to get done, right? Like that's what people need. There's a lot of stuff going on. And so I love Mike B's comments about there's a lot that isn't changing. And so you can certainly confidently like we still have to get this work done. We still have to -- still have the same deadline. We're still -- a lot of plans aren't changing. So very confidently keep that work going. Like that's the tactics that we've been trying to talk about. The one thing I will add just to kind of tie back to our earlier conversation, Liz was talking about the different levers is that we -- it's very difficult for us to want to be in the situation of saying, "Well, we can't do that." Like that's an uncomfortable leadership message. So I just want to reinforce that what Liz was talking about in the context was think about this as I'm going to lead with options, right? I'm going to in any situation that comes that we have to talk to, I'm always going to be asking myself, okay, I can think clearly of an option A, is there an option B that we can put on to the table. And I just -- I feel that if we sort of have that approach that we're going to look at everything in terms of options, I actually think the confidence is going to come from that situation because almost always that other option makes you sort of think more deeply about the first one that you are offering. So I don't know if anybody else would want to jump in on that but that's my thought.

Well, I think that's sort of finer points of trade-off, right? Anything is possible, everything is not possible. And with the sort of option approach that you're describing, Christie, if you want to do something, you can confidently say we can do that. But we won't be able to do this or we must shift that or we'll have to delay this. And so I think the confidence piece is we can do anything but we can't do everything. So I think that's what a leader would be communicating to the team.

So maybe we adapt that improve technique of yes and. Can you do this? Yes. And we would need to outsource, we would need to reskill, right? Because managers -- like we don't want to be in the business of no, and we probably don't even think that it's in our best interest. So that's why I like that. It's an improv technique. It's yes and, and then the and can be all those knows and buts and challenges with implementing it.

Yes. And I need an extra 5 hours in my day every single day in order to...

And I agree with all of that. I agree with the options. I agree with -- but the -- and Christie said this earlier, I just want to make sure that it came across clearly. The -- one of the things that Todd Kimbrell has in some of his research around change in government is accept the mission. The mission is what the mission is. The mission is what the boss is determined to be. Don't try and fight the mission. We've -- from a high-level perspective, we do have to accept this, we do have to move forward. So yes, look at the options for how you implement but don't try and fight the mission.

Thanks, Mike. Liz, I'd love to get your recommendations as well on how to lead with confidence in a time like this where you don't have the answers.

Yes. I think about the magnitude of change that's happening. And then I think about kind of where our leaders have come from and where they have led before. And the reality is that we've all led through ambiguous situations where we don't have all of the answers. And it is authentic to say, I don't know, to your workforce. And I think as I look at organizations that manage kind of big, big changes where they don't have all the answers. It moves at a different pace or some people know something, some other people know other things because they actually just talk to their employees, right? We typically have this like change communication of I'm going to go out and tell you what I know. And the better way to actually do it is have a conversation with people, let them raise their hands because it also does for you, as leaders, it helps you identify where there are questions in the workforce that you may not have thought of that you want to go source information or source answers for them. The other thing I would say is enable your workforce to figure out what information they need and where they can go find it. As I mentioned earlier, and I think Christie, you said this as well with the kind of micro goaling, micro focus is like people want to do their jobs and they want to do it well. And when all these changes happen, their foundation is broken. So help them get the information they need to kind of stop this -- the change spin and focusing on what they need to do to contribute to the mission right now with the things that we actually know right now. And then when they ask you questions that you don't know, just say you don't know yet or that's not something that the leadership has made decisions on. That is authentic and people will thank you for it. If you kind of skirt around that, they will make up an answer and/or they will think that you know something that you're not telling them. And that is a reality, and that adds to the spin. If you can just say, I don't know, if you can just help them focus on the things that they need to get done, help them close the gaps to do those things that they need to get done today, tomorrow or the next day, it will serve you in the long run as you're managing through ongoing change that we see all the time in organizations, and we will likely see for the next few months, few years.

Thanks, Liz. And I think that authenticity will help with answering of my next question. Someone is wondering how do we handle the rumor mill in the organization. So I think this would come if you're not giving all the answers and not being totally transparent, people have the opportunity to speculate. So Christie, would love to get your thoughts there.

Yes. Thank you for Danielle. I always say the rumor mill, we derive it, the water cooler behavior, that rumor mill. It's actually informing us as leaders that there's a gap in information. That's -- the rumor mill thrives in the absence of information. So if you know that there's a rumor mill, that's your evidence that there's information that's not being shared. Now I would tell you that I would generally say that let's pretend that we were a leadership team. The rumor mill probably isn't equally distributed across us. Maybe it's my employees that are fostering the rumor mill, which means I is a leader and providing that gap. So that's why I say it's evidence to you is if it seems as if the people in a certain part of the organization are just doing something, it probably means that the leader of that part of the organization is maybe not passing messages down or is not comfortable or something. So I always say, think of the rumor mill as an evidence that there's something -- there's information that is missing. So how do you handle it? You pay attention to where it is and when you hear the rumor mill because what is the rumor mill. It's me saying, "Hey, did you guys hear that this is happening?" And what I'm really saying is, "Hey, is this happening." Like that's what it is. So think of it from that perspective and just know that as leaders it's our information about where there might be some communication gaps.

The one thing I would say is like a lot of organizations try to shut down rumor mills and rumor mills will exist, whether you like it or not. And to put these plans like use it to your advantage to get the information you need. And then if there's false rumors that are out there, pull them up and directly talk about them. This is something that we've heard floating around the organization. Let me give you the real deal. If you have those answers, of course, we don't have all the answers. People make up things in the absence of -- actually having the information and sometimes we don't have the information. But like trying to shut down rumor mills is not going to work. People will talk any way you look at it but use it to your advantage, listen to the rumor mill, get those answers that they need. And if there's something really wrong in the rumor mill like a rumor that's going around that's not actually at all factual, make sure that you tackle that head on with your workforce.

Thanks, Liz. Go ahead.

I might jump in on that a bit, embrace it. So Christie talked about maybe you're having a daily standup. So part of that daily standup is here's the rumors I heard, what have you heard? Let's talk about it, right? And debunk the ones that are, well, need to be debunked. And then there is going to be a vacuum. As we're going through -- these are significant change, there's always a bit of a vacuum around information. And I think the sort of transparency piece of ETF is the important way to address the vacuum, right? I mean we know what we know and we don't know some things. So don't make up things because we don't know. But embrace it and leveraging Mike's military background as well, the rumor mill in the Navy is called scuttlebutt, right? So that's the Navy's rumor mill, and it's existed since ships were made of wood and Vikings were storming the beaches and it's not going to go away. And the military addresses that with regular standups like a morning standup or a morning muster or something like that. So those techniques are not new or in any way novel.

Absolutely. Now I'd like to -- you have all provided great recommendations on my next question. We've covered a lot of it. But I'll just finish up with what specific tactics can you use to bring a sense of control to your team. So maybe I can infuse this question since we are short on time, the hour has flown. But with any final thoughts or recommendations for the audience. So specific tactics to bring control to the team and then any other final thoughts. So I'm going to go to everyone but Christie, I'll start with you here.

Sure. I think one thing to be really clear about is -- so we've been talking about the tasks. This is the work, you make sure this work gets done. Don't forget to clarify, okay, Liz, you're going to do this work. And then when you're done, make sure that Mike gets this. Like when there's a lot of change, if all of a sudden, people are more suddenly than you would have liked, people aren't around, who's supposed to be doing what and who has what authority kind of starts to get very confusing. So it's not just focusing on the task. It's also being really clear about any sort of decision making authority or something like that -- I'm basically saying there's going to be some roadblocks that people come up with because all of a sudden, they're not going to know. And so just know it's the task and the people. But if I could say one more final thought, which I just also want to say that we all have to remember that as leaders, and this is -- I say this to every group I get the chance to say this, too, change is the job. A lot of times, we think stability is the job, but that's not the environment that we're in. Actually, change is our job. And I just sort of want to leave you with that mindset. So thank you for letting me add that in.

Of course. Thanks, Christie. Mike S, I'll go to you next.

So I love -- and I want to make sure it's not missed. I love the piece, Christie, talked about earlier in terms of the small picture and the big picture. I may not be able to control the big picture but if you can help me control the small picture, you've just made my day because now I've got something to hang on to. And that's much better advice than the public executions that I was going to say for the rumor mill. But that's the piece that you really want to hang on to is provide the level of control that you can and people will get through it.

Thanks, Mike. Mike B?

Sure. Well, Christie stole a fair bit of my thunder. I was going to say change is constant. And so the impetus for this discussion is probably some of the change driven by elections. And I'll just point out we're going to do this again and again and again, and that's part of how the country works. And to Christie's point, the techniques that we use now will be the same kinds of techniques that we'll use again and again and again.

Thanks, Mike. Liz, you're closing us out here.

Well, I think there's a thread -- the common thread there that runs through all of the things that we've talked about, which is talk to your teams, to move off of the tel communication style, move into the talk communication style, whether it's about work, whether it's about the return to office, whether it's about the skills that they have and how to redeploy them, what work we do, what work we don't do. It is all predicated on talking to your workforce and having an open dialogue with them. So that's what I would leave you with as we end the session today.

Great. Thank you so much, Christie, Liz, Mike and Mike. Before we go, we've included some resources at the bottom of the page, including Gartner Conferences and Webinars. A quick reminder that this webinar is being recorded, so you can watch the session again and find more great webinars on demand at gartner.com/webinars. Lastly, please rate this session on the bottom right of your screens. To submit your rating, click Rate Session below the player and a box will open for you to select 1 to 5 hearts with 5 hearts being the top rating. You can share your feedback on the thoughts provided in the Leave For The Feedback Box and click Send. So with that, again, thank you to all of our panelists. And thank you, everyone, for listening.