Brian Elliott

San Francisco

co-founder @FutureForum, exec at @Slackhq, @google, startups, @bcg. find me on Threads @brianpelliott or LI: https://t.co/OfeAK7cBLu

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Articles

The return-to-office reality gap

1 week ago | charterworks.com | Brian Elliott

The return-to-office reality gap Published on May 29, 2025 · 3 min read Art: Charter / Photo: Jelena Danilovic & gorodenkoff, iStock By Brian Elliott Fortune 500 companies are leading a significant shift in workplace policies, with full-time office mandates nearly doubling from 13% to 24% since Q4 2024, according to the latest Flex Index data.
The return-to-office reality gap

1 week ago | time.com | Brian Elliott

May 29, 2025 5:30 AM EDT Fortune 500 companies are leading a significant shift in workplace policies, with full-time office mandates nearly doubling from 13% to 24% since Q4 2024, according to the latest Flex Index data. But a critical gap has emerged that’s impossible to ignore: these increasingly rigid policies are colliding with stubborn workplace realities. The most revealing finding?
How Tone-Deaf Leadership Is Undermining Hybrid Work (And What to Do About It)

2 weeks ago | peoplemanagingpeople.com | Brian Elliott |David Rice

We're trying out transcribing our podcasts using a software program. Please forgive any typos as the bot isn't correct 100% of the time. Brian Elliott: The big shift that leaders have to make in their organizations both make flexibility work and to get the leverage they want out of generative AI tools is move away from those visual cues and into outcomes management. What are the goals we've got for our organization? What are our top three priorities? How are we gonna measure success?
RTO Mandates Won’t Fix a Broken Culture - Tribune Content Agency

2 months ago | tribunecontentagency.com | Brian Elliott

Brian Elliott is an executive adviser and speaker. He’s a coauthor of How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives (Wiley, 2022). The tension over whether employees can continue to work from home or need to return to the office is often driven by executives obsessed with culture. Amazon and other companies have hinged their five-day-a-week return-to-office (RTO) mandates on it.
RTO Mandates Won’t Fix a Broken Culture

2 months ago | sloanreview.mit.edu | Brian Elliott

Topics Column Our expert columnists offer opinion and analysis on important issues facing modern businesses and managers. More in this series Subscribe Share Summary: As the return-to-office debate continues, many executives still think of culture as something that only happens inside office walls. But real culture is how we work.
How to Get Real About Measuring to Outcomes

Mar 5, 2025 | mitsloanme.com | Brian Elliott

Traditional management often conflates presence with performance, rewarding employees who put in face time even when their results lag. At NMG, Severson and his team took another route. Starting in 2019, they implemented what they called the NMG Way of Working (WOW), a framework built on a simple premise: Give people more choice over when, where, and how they work in exchange for accountability for results.
How to Get Real About Measuring to Outcomes - Tribune Content Agency

Mar 3, 2025 | tribunecontentagency.com | Brian Elliott

Brian Elliott is an executive adviser and speaker. He’s a coauthor of How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives (Wiley, 2022). What matters more at the end of the workday: actual results, or all of the sensory cues from people actively scurrying about? That’s the essential question that lies behind the gap in the adoption of flexible work practices such as working from home or choosing your own hours.
How to Get Real About Measuring to Outcomes

Mar 3, 2025 | sloanreview.mit.edu | Brian Elliott

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Five steps for solving calendar overload and unnecessary meetings for your team

Feb 18, 2025 | charterworks.com | Brian Elliott |Cari Nazeer |Kevin Delaney

The calendar crisis is real: nearly half of all meetings could be eliminated without negative impact, yet most organizations struggle to make meaningful changes. Leading companies like Dropbox and Slack have cracked the code, achieving 69% meeting effectiveness and 85% of employees saying that time management programs are a significant benefit. Most attempts to fix calendar overload fail because they're too localized or temporary.
Five Hybrid Work Trends to Watch in 2025

Dec 15, 2024 | sloanreview.mit.edu | Brian Elliott

Topics Column Our expert columnists offer opinion and analysis on important issues facing modern businesses and managers. More in this series Subscribe Share Just a few months ago, many people thought the battles over the value of the hybrid work model — and, on the flip side, return-to-office (RTO) mandates — were finally dying down.