Brian Elliott

Leaders who focus on outcomes (not attendance), invest in how teams actually work, and empower teams to lead the way are building a talent advantage.

Those doubling down on 5-day mandates because “hybrid doesn’t work” are missing the point — and losing engagement and trust in the process.

The truth is: hybrid work isn’t the problem. Mistaking policies for solutions is.

In our new piece for MIT Sloan Management Review, Nick Bloom, Prithwiraj Choudhury and I share what the research says — and what leading companies like Atlassian, Allstate, and Airbnb (just to name the A's) are doing differently.

One of these paths leads to stronger teams and the ability to leverage AI for real results. The other leads to frustration and resistance.

Thanks to Leslie Brokaw, Laurianne McLaughlin, Abbie Lundberg, and the MIT SMR team for bringing this conversation to life.

🔗 Link to the article in comments!

#HybridWork #Leadership #Engagement

I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as Executive in Residence at Charter!

Charter is a future-of-work media and insights company that bridges research to practice. We give leaders tactical playbooks for building workplaces where people actually thrive.

Want to learn more?

👉 Check out my newsletter and subscribe to Charter—links in comments!

Hybrid is dead.

Not because everyone's back in the office: 71% of Fortune 100 companies still have flexible policies, and the massive RTO noise last year resulted in a ~2-3% average increase in office usage in the US.

It's dead because the term itself is dying.

Stanford's Nick Bloom removed "hybrid" from his upcoming book title. "Hybrid" focuses on where people work. The smallest part of the challenge of unlocking the power of redesigning HOW teams work.

Harder questions are how teams collaborate, do they understand their "why," and how do we make "when" more effective?

Smart companies have moved on from arguing days per week to redesigning how they work leveraging AI and engaged employees.

What the data, including brand-new data from Nick, actually shows:
→ Work from home stabilized at 25% of days (3.8X pre-pandemic)
→ 3 days a week has stabilized as an average norm; F100 CEOs pushing 4 and 5 days are looking to boost turnover (and/or their egos)
→ Hybrid cuts turnover 1/3 with zero performance difference—math says it's more profitable
→ Remote teams coming together one day a month boost productivity 8%

Nick joined Charter Forum leadership session where leaders are solving next-level issues:
🟡 How do you drive efficient collaboration when 40% of teams are distributed?
🟡 How do you coordinate across time zones?
🟡 How do you make "hybrid meetings" not suck?
🟡 How do we prevent AI-enabled impersonation?

The solutions those leaders are trying and Nick's latest research—some unpublished until now—are in this week's Work Forward:
https://lnkd.in/gDZUhtnE

Have you moved past "where" to "how"?

What problem are we trying to solve?

Thinking like a product manager—and treating employees like customers—is the not-so-hidden secret to driving real outcomes with AI.

The joke in the image is a bit too real: 74% of CEOs fear losing their jobs if they do not deliver measurable business gains from AI within the next two years, according to The Harris Poll.

Most AI rollouts fail because leaders focus on the technology, not the problem it solves. Product managers know better: they start with user needs, then build solutions.

One HR team used AI to combine two data sources—tenure and performance ratings—and pushed them to managers via Slack with a simple yes/no button for promotion intent. That eliminated hours of manual work.

That story, shared by an HR leader in a webinar last week, got others excited and wanting to know how to replicate it. It reduces toil, which Debbie Lovich and Matthew Kropp point out is key to real uptake.

That's product management thinking applied internally. It's treating employees like customers.

Companies spend >10X the amount understanding customers that they do on employee experience. Yet people-centric organizations are 7X more likely to be mature in their AI adoption. We need a product management approach, and there's no better time.

You need "builders" in your organization—people who understand systems, challenge the status quo, and want to optimize workflows.

Are those all engineers? Nope. Helen Lee Kupp gave me the low-down: at a private equity firm, it was the lawyers. At a tech firm, product counsel and the chief strategy officer. It's also not GenZ, or just Millennials. They're everywhere, across generations and functions.

Three examples of how to lead like a product manager:
🔸 Map the toil first: Identify where your team wastes time on repetitive work. Don't start with AI capabilities—start with real problems.
🔸 Find your builders: Look for systems thinkers who tinker with new tools and optimize workflows. Give them space to experiment.
🔸 Lead cross-functionally: Real transformation touches multiple functions. Rally people around outcomes, not tools.

The leaders succeeding with AI aren't necessarily in IT or HR. They're the ones who understand how work actually happens and can mobilize others to make it better.

What's one process in your organization that creates toil for your team?

🔗 All the data and more in Charter: https://lnkd.in/dsSNHswM

My dad has cancer. Mom’s a caregiver herself, and just had a hip replacement. My brother and I are having conversations we used to call hypothetical.

We’ve got it easy: they're stable and don't need us day to day. But between 10% and 20% of workers across every industry are providing unpaid elder care right now. Nearly half are Gen X. Many are also raising kids. Most are senior managers or leaders.

And almost none of them are talking about it at work.

We have a cultural blind spot: when someone has a baby, there's a shower, a card, pictures in the Slack channel. Elder care? People hide it. Because it's associated with loss, not celebration. Because it rarely ends with a good story.

After interviewing KPMG economist Matthew Nestler, PhD about the care economy, I posted in a few group chats: "Anyone willing to talk about elder care?" The response was immediate: stories people wished someone had told them before they suddenly found themselves in it.

Karen Fascenda, CPO at Udemy, was in a brand new role when her mother died suddenly. That same day, her father broke his hip and eventually moved into her home, where he began showing signs of dementia. She was grieving, caregiving, and trying to prove herself in a new job—mostly in silence. "I don't want people to think I can't do this job because I have to care for my dad, too."

Most people doing this don't even think of themselves as caregivers. That's exactly the problem.

The numbers are accelerating. Assisted living now costs nearly $5,500 a month. Home-care costs jumped 20% in the back half of 2025. A trillion dollars in Medicaid cuts start hitting the care economy in 2026 and more in '27.

The caregivers in your workforce are already overwhelmed. The least leaders can do is normalize the conversation.

I wrote about this in Charter today and focused on three zero-cost things any organization can do, starting with the language we use.

👉 Please give it a read, and let me know what you think (link in comments)

Part two drops Thursday in Charter Pro, and goes deeper into what leading companies are doing to address the growing gaps, and retain critical talent.

Thanks to Karen, Matthew, Dina Chaiffetz, Madhavi Bhasin, PhD, Theresa de la Osa, Sarah Kagan, Tracy Layney for sharing their stories. And to my Mom and Dad, for being OK with me telling ours.

Are you navigating this right now, or have you had to?