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I help enterprise leaders navigate the intersection of AI, workplace flexibility, and…
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Brian Elliott shared thisNobody at Atlassian is required to come into the office, and attendance went up 9% last year anyway. There are lots of ways to get office attendance up if you're looking for appearances, but the better way is to give people what they need: a place to connect and tackle gnarly problems together. Magnets vs mandates, transformation vs billboarding. Owl Labs found that 48% of office workers choose their office days based on when senior leaders or clients will be there. Jessica Guynn's piece in USA TODAY this morning is about exactly this: "billboard days," where people commute in to be seen. Nick Bloom and I are both in it; Nick describing how office peacocks need an audience... Atlassian is earning its attendance, and a lot of others are getting people to show up for the boss's calendar. At a Charter Forum session I hosted last month, Atlassian's Alisa Yu, PhD put it simply: "When coming together is an act of agency rather than a policy requirement, a vibrant space and strong community become a true magnet. There's no badge tracking required." Future Forum partner-in-crime Ryan Anderson of MillerKnoll talked about how AI is changing why people need shared space, and it's not about the individual needs. His team went looking for how AI changes behavior at work and found individuals on laptops looking, well, like people on laptops. The real shift showed up when whole teams started redesigning how they work together, and that intense, real-time work pulled them into the same room. His suggestion for what to call it beats anything in your RTO memo: re-attach, not return. This week's Work Forward has the rest, including the three kinds of space Atlassian is designing for and what to measure instead of badge swipes. Links to both pieces are in the first comment. So what's pulling your team into the office right now, and is it more than putting up appearances?Nobody at Atlassian is required to come in, but attendance keeps going up.Nobody at Atlassian is required to come in, but attendance keeps going up.
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Brian Elliott shared thisTech loves debating p(doom). Manoush Zomorodi is asking a better question: what's your p(joy)? p(doom) is the odds AI ends civilization. p(joy) is whether the satisfying moments in your work are going up or down, what reliably causes them, and whether you're setting yourself up for more of them. Manoush wants to take hers from 28% to 40%—respect to anyone sets an OKR for happiness. Mine is sitting around 40% these days. I've worked to get myself into that position. It's trending up too, most days. Doing work that I find has purpose with people that I love working means most days I don't think of it as "work." What tanks it? Doing too much. Trying to nail down a bunch of small "to do" items, and finding myself skimming across a lot of tasks, trying to run 3-4 agents at once, when I should be going deep on one thing at a time. Time to close the laptop and go for a run. A lot of your teams are in that same trap right now. As I told Manoush: "We're asking ourselves to operate at machine pace. It's not going to work." Three ways to raise p(joy) for you and your team: 1. Pick goals one through five and let the rest go. Actually let them go, which is the hard part. 2. Use AI to automate something boring and repetitive that you hate doing. Or get a teammate to do it and celebrate her victory on your behalf. 3. Get together with your team and do something fun. Sounds insane in The Decade of Efficiency, but when Glassdoor announces a "new record low for employee confidence" EVERY QUARTER, maybe we just need to put a bit back into being humans together? Manoush's full column is worth your time, at least the bits BEFORE she interviews me (link below). What's your p(joy) today? What's the one thing that moves it most? Take the quiz in her column! https://lnkd.in/erk55BBT
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Brian Elliott shared thisYour AI mandate is buying compliance when what you need is contribution. 72% of leaders believe their change program will work. Only 49% of their teams agree. BCG's Julia Dhar, Kristy R. Ellmer and Philip Jameson call that "change distance." It shows up before you've even said what the change is: 68% of execs feel good about a coming change, vs. 45% of their employees. Mandates do move usage. But Duolingo's Luis von Ahn tied AI use to performance reviews, then walked it back this April. People were pushing tools instead of owning outcomes. Al Dea spent close to a decade leading change on big tech transformations. In a recent Charter Forum session, he explained why mandates stall: "You can get people to comply with using an LLM. It is very hard to get them to contribute their insights about your customers, your workflows, your business." Compliance is a floor, and nobody ever won a category by installing a floor. Your competitors run the same models you do. Your edge is what's in your people's heads, like the fifteen weird exceptions in quote-to-cash that nobody wrote down. And your people have read the layoff headlines. Here are a couple of recommendations that came out of the conversation: 1. Say what isn't changing. Use Dea's two-column slide: what stays the same on one side, what's changing on the other. 2. Reward contribution visibly. Make sharing real knowledge a win, not a risk. 3. Treat resistance as data. The people slowing you down know which problems got ignored. BCG's Debbie Lovich puts the test simply: the benefit has to include what's in it for employees. 90% of organizations get that wrong. More in today's Work Forward column: https://lnkd.in/gBdC8bh6 What's gotten people on your team through real change?
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Brian Elliott shared thisYou'll miss them when they're gone. Middle managers are under fire (again). Reducing "spans and layers" is all the rage. Maybe AI can take over the coordination they do? Jack Dorsey said they're just routers. Player-coach is the term du jour, even if every frontline manager you know already had their own load to carry. That first line is from Callum Borchers in today's The Wall Street Journal. His take: "Leaders who expect AI to free them to concentrate on major initiatives will ultimately inherit the personnel dramas and small decisions that deputies used to take off their plates. They may also find their grand plans don’t get executed when there are no rallying forces at the team level." You should read the whole thing (thanks Peter Miscovich for calling it to my attention!), linked in comments. We'll have a lot to say about this at Charter Workplace Summit on October 21st. We've got brand-new research coming out that definitely has true signal, not just noise. Christina Janzer is leading the way on that. What's the future of middle managers? Databricks CPO Amy Reichanadter will be moderating a conversation on that topic with WRITER CPO Jevan Lenox and Vicki Walia, Ph.D., Prudential Financial's Chief People & Experience Officer. What questions do you want answered, from the research in conversation with leaders in the middle of all of it?
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Brian Elliott shared thisSaying nothing to your team about AI risk still says something. It was impossible to miss the last week's blaring headlines about AI safety risks (even while on vacation, trust me). At work, the risks are closer to home: Will I have a job? Gallup reports that people fearing losing their job to AI jumped from 20% last year to 27% this year. Communications consultant Ellen Griley describes people going to bed thinking about existential risk, then arriving at work to an email about their company's AI assistant's latest enhancements. If you're a leader, how do you talk about the risks of AI with your team? Most leaders stay quiet because they don't have answers. Fair enough, but 78% of employees trust their employer (Edelman's 2026 Trust Barometer), and if you don't spend that trust, conjecture will. As Harvard's Amy Edmondson has said, "If there's no bad news, remind yourself: It's not that it's not there. It's that you're not hearing about it." What works better than silence, or false promises: 🔹 Take the fear seriously without feeding it. Comms expert Nikki Summer advises leaders to "challenge worst-case thoughts, and stress that the future is unwritten." Dismissing people's concerns, Griley warns, risks "more than just rupturing trust." 🔹 Borrow from the CDC's crisis playbook. Share what's known, what isn't, and what you're doing to close the gaps. Admitting the headlines rattled you too isn't bad. 🔹 Name your bet and its time horizon. "Here's what we're prioritizing through year-end, and when we'll check back in" is a promise you can keep. "Nobody's job is changing" has a shelf life of roughly one earnings call. 🔹 Brief your managers first. They're the ones who bring the temperature down, so give them room to ask the hard questions before your all-hands does. More research and expert-backed advice for leaders on how to talk with their teams about AI and risks from Nikki, Ellen along with insights from Katie Burke, Donna Morris and more in today's Charter Pro newsletter, linked in comments! What have you told your team about the AI risk headlines, and what did you decide not to say?
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Brian Elliott shared thisOver a third of workers age 18-44 are afraid AI will make their jobs obsolete. New data out from Gallup today shows that those fears are up massively in the last year, across all types of workers. > Overall up from 20% to 27% > College grads up from 19% to 25%, non-college grads up from 21% to 29% > While only 19% of those 45+ are worried, 34% of workers under 45 are sweating it Would love to see the breakdown of 18-24 year olds on this one. As Tracy Layney and I have written for Charter recently, fears of AI's impact on early career workers are understandably on the rise. At the end of the day, though, leaders can't blame AI. These are leadership decisions, many of them to date having less to do with AI's direct ability to displace jobs than leaders decisions to drive for efficiency, sometimes pinning the blame on AI. Read on, our columns in comments. WDYT: Is it AI, or is it the leadership?
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Brian Elliott shared thisTracy Layney's first column for Charter argues that AI did not kill the entry-level job, leaders did—starting about a decade before ChatGPT. Mine argues the quieter loss is what AI is doing to on-the-job learning for the young people who do get hired. Read together they are two halves of one problem. Thrilled that Tracy Layney is joining Charter as a Senior Advisor, and thrilled she'll be with us in NYC for the Charter Workplace Summit, where Christina Janzer and I will be unpacking the results of the first Charter AI Pulse! Read on, more below...How leaders (not just AI) are damaging early career workersHow leaders (not just AI) are damaging early career workers
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Brian Elliott shared thisYour player-coach can't coach anymore. We're all sweating AI's impact on entry-level hiring, and we should be: Erik Brynjolfsson's team at Stanford found workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed jobs are employed 19% below those in less-exposed jobs. But I'm far more worried about the broad damage being done to learning and development. Especially the quieter damage happening inside companies that are cutting layers, cranking up agents, and expecting managers to "do more with less" on an escalating basis. One manager I heard from is leading a team of junior staff and a set of AI agents at the same time, while customers and senior leaders expect more output in less time. Every day she picks from the same two bad options: slow down to teach and fall behind, or fix it herself and skip the coaching. Guess which one wins almost every time? Matt Beane found a similar pattern in operating rooms. When robotics arrived, the lead surgeon ran the machine and the trainee, who used to actively assist, mostly watched. Fewer reps, slower skill development, and the most driven residents ended up teaching themselves on the side. That's a lousy thing to leave to "side work." We're not making the investments broadly in skills development either. Atlassian found execs are 84% more likely to invest in technology than in their teams' AI skills. Three things you can do this quarter: 🔸 Before you automate a task, ask what a newcomer learns by doing it. Rebecca Hinds, PhD who leads Glean's Work AI Institute: "Protect the work that builds judgment, even when AI can do it faster." 🔸 Use AI to raise feedback frequency, not replace it. Hilary Gridley built a coaching tool at WHOOP that's "probably 80% as good as what I would do, but they can get it over and over." 🔸 Build guardrails into AI itself. AI Skills, instructions for the tool, that tell it to return three hard questions that test its own logic, teaching the user to question AI’s context and reasoning for any complex task (ex., forecasting sales). More in my latest column for Charter, linked in comments. What are you seeing happening in your own organization?
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Brian Elliott shared thisI've been waiting to announce this for three years! Unbiased research, quarterly longitudinal data on how AI is impacting workers, as well as work. That's the gap the Charter AI Pulse, announced today, is built to close. I couldn't be more excited to be working on it with Christina Janzer, who ran Slack's Workforce Lab and was one of my Future Forum co-founders. It's an independent, rigorous, human-centered read on how AI is actually reshaping work, grounded in the voices of thousands of workers and senior executives. Not vendor hype, not another CEO pronouncement. What's working, what isn't, and for whom. We'll debut the findings live at the Charter Workplace Summit this fall, a day built around leading at the human edge as AI transforms work. The lineup is stacked: co-chairs Betty Larson (CHRO, Merck) and Amy Reichanadter (Chief People Officer, Databrickss), fireside conversations with Clara Shih and Van Jones, plus Theresita Richard of Patagonia, RAISE US Pres Janet Foutty, and Harvard's David Deming among many others. Sessions on the AI use cases that actually work, the science of sustainable work, and the fight over middle management as AI flattens hierarchies. What's the one question about AI and your workforce you most wish someone would answer with real data, not anecdotes? Drop it below! 🔗 Registration link (the virtual session is free to the public!) and more speakers in the comments.
Brian Elliott replied to a comment
3h
Compliance, five years later, is joy a business result.
Brian Elliott replied to a comment
5h
Makes tons of sense, and I really appreciate Ryan Anderson for laying it out so simply for the Charter crew!
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Brian Elliott reacted on thisBrian Elliott reacted on thisAre your coworkers "calendar stalking"? 📅🔍 It’s the latest hybrid-work behavior making waves across corporate culture. If you’ve ever hesitated before heading into the office, you’ve probably done it too. Office workers are using a sneaky new habit to decide whether a commute is worth their time. Before stepping out the door, they're firing up Outlook or Google Calendar to answer three critical questions: Who else is actually going to be in the office today? Is my manager or teammate working from home? Am I commuting 45 minutes just to sit in on Zoom all day? With "coffee badging" already reshaping office attendance, calendar stalking is becoming the ultimate pre-commute screening tool. But what does this mean for team productivity, company culture and the future of hybrid mandates? I asked Nick Bloom and Brian Elliott. 👇 Check out the full USA TODAY article here: https://lnkd.in/gGhsTJEv 💬 Have you ever checked your boss' calendars before deciding to commute? Let's discuss in the comments! 👇
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Brian Elliott liked thisBrian Elliott liked thisThis post appears to be shadow banned. Only 11 impressions after 7 hours. Is it because of the word "r*pe"?
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Brian Elliott liked thisBrian Elliott liked thisWho owns the hour saved by AI? The best answer I've found came from a 19-year-old I worked with 25 years ago. He built our entire content management system, trained every new hire, and then left before launch day. He was too young to join us at the bar to celebrate. I can't recall his name; just what we called him: "Our Consultant." He was a preview of the future of work: the right skill, in front of the right problem, for exactly as long as it was needed. No title, no tenure, no resume required. That's the idea behind my latest essay, "The Future of Work Is Programmatic." AI transformation is breaking work into its components and deciding what goes to AI and what stays human. But most organizations stop there. The human work that remains gets folded back into the same full-time roles, measured by the same hours, paid by the same salary bands. When I tested this idea with members of the AI Operators Exchange, that question kept coming back: Who owns the hour saved? My answer: Once pay is decoupled from time, the saved hour stops being something to fight over. It belongs to whoever can put judgment to work in it. The essay introduces the Programmatic Employment Framework, a way to match human work to the right engagement model (full-time, fractional, contract, advisory, or output-driven) instead of forcing everything into a job description written for a different era. Also inside: 📄 The Human Agency Architecture whitepaper lays out the governing standard behind this framework and the others in the series: how to design human-AI systems that expand human judgment instead of eroding it. 🎓 My LinkedIn Learning course, The CHRO's Guide to AI Transformation, is built for people leaders who have to make these decisions now, not after the org chart catches up. H/T to others I know are thinking about this problem: Brigid Schulte, Jennifer Turner, Shannon Power, Meg Bear; Marie Gill, Gina Jeneroux, MBA FLPI DipCorpGov, Mark Wayman and AETHEON crew; Steve Carnevale, Heather Jerrehian, Michael J. Jabbour, Hans Yang, Maya Bisineer, Brian Elliott, Tom Rachman Kevin Wheeler, Shujaat Ahmad, Michelle Riconscente, PhD Bill O'Such, Blaine Mathieu, Elisa Camahort Page, Rebecca Crotts, Amber Winton, Pragya Maini, Rachel Ann Williams, Rachel Gulley, Ross Dawson, Daniel Green, David Chestnut, Sonia Malik, Emily Ma, Anju Choudhary, Paula Goldman, Kelly Monahan, Ph.D. Aneesh Raman Rishad Tobaccowala #FutureOfWork #AITransformation #HumanAgencyArchitecture #FractionalWork #WorkforceStrategy #HRLeadership #CHRO #OrganizationalDesign #PortfolioCareers #ProgrammaticEmployment Optionality HiPowerAI Applied, Part 6: The Future of Work Is ProgrammaticAI Applied, Part 6: The Future of Work Is Programmatic
Experience & Education
Licenses & Certifications
Volunteer Experience
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Trustee, Co-Chair Board
San Francisco Friends School
- 6 years 1 month
Education
Board member and advocate for SFFS, a entrepreneurially spirited, values-based progressive K-12 school in San Francisco. Co-led development, including first capital campaign. Co-Clerk (Chair) of Board, responsible for overall governance with a wonderful team of trustees, administrators and staff.
Honors & Awards
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Top Vendor to Top 1000 Retailers
Internet Retailer
Monsoon Commerce was recognized by Internet Retailer as one of the top overall vendors to the IR 1000 (top 1,000 retailers in terms of online sales). In addition, Monsoon's Stone Edge product was ranked one of the top 3 Order Management applications. Of the IR 1000 merchants, 48 are Monsoon Commerce customers, far more than any other solution designed for mid-sized merchants
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Top Workplace Award
The Oregonian
Monsoon Commerce was awarded an Oregon Top Workplace award, which recognizes companies with superior organizational health in Oregon and southwest Washington states: http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2012/09/happiness_is_a_great_place_to.html
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Baker Scholar
Harvard Graduate School of Business
I said enough smart things enough times, or I just talked a lot. Your pick.
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Highest Honors
Northwestern University
Honors in Economics; Highest Honors in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences (MMSS). MMSS was one of those transformative opportunities that applied a lot of concepts now gaining traction in "EdTech" -- highly immersive, peer engagement, exercise-based learning.
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Internet Retailer Top 150
Internet Retailer
Alibris is an Internet Retailer top 150 web store: http://www.internetretailer.com/top500/profiles/Alibris-Inc/
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