Actionable Advice with Aaron Falcione (Organon) | S4E11 | JKLAdvisors.ai

Yeah, it's a great point. It is. Everyone's wrestling with this, right? And it starts, we did lean on our culture and those behavioral standards a lot in not so obvious ways. When I think about it, first we were pretty vulnerable. We had an ongoing dialogue with our founders. We basically said we don't have the answer, no one does. So I think we started to set aside this notion that there is a solution that's going to satisfy everyone. We dispelled that. We talked about what we wanted. We valued in-person collaboration, we valued human connection. We believe that yields more innovative, creative results. As a company, we need to be performing at our best, so we believe that some degree of human connection and collaboration in person is essential to our success. We listened to our founders, we heard their feedback around the challenges, the struggles of getting into the office, the commute, the logistics of it all. And we landed in a place that we thought was balanced, and we were wrong. The truth of the matter is, we got it wrong at first. We sent a note out announcing our new return to office strategy, and our founders threw up all over it. They just said, 'What? No, this is terrible.' And we listened, and we said, 'Okay, hang on, let's have a dialogue. Let's share what we were thinking and why, and let's recalibrate and course correct.' And we've done that, and we've landed in a place that I think generally speaking, the majority of our founders feel really positive about. Another really important part of the dialogue, again, we did this all through kind of co-creating our approach with our founders. We talked a lot about this in open forums. There are other considerations that influenced our decision. Our strategy right now is we guide the organization. We'd like people to be in the office two to three days a week. We have one day of the week that we say is our anchor day where we really encourage people to come in on Wednesday so they can have cross-functional collaboration. We allow flexibility of coming and going times. We've created all kinds of hopefully attractive amenities to try and make that a positive experience. And we just guide to it and really encourage. I invite people to the office instead of just hope they come. We do things to try and encourage that in-person collaboration and make it a positive experience when they're here. But the other factors that we talked a lot about in order to encourage people to come into the office, to break this issue down: first of all, we know we're a global organization. About 75% of our employees live and work outside of the United States. This hybrid office issue and the return to office issue is most acute in US knowledge worker based, office-based people, where we have the luxury in the US of having generally nice accommodations, comfortable home offices. That's not always the case out around the world, where the space is limited, you often live with extended families, you don't have the same comforts that we have here. So it wasn't as acute around the world. So we kind of talked about that, that's one dimension. The other dimension is we have a manufacturing presence. We have six manufacturing plants around the world. These are heroes in my mind. These are people that showed up to their workplace every single day in the height of COVID, when we didn't know what was happening, we were washing our food and sanitizing ourselves even just by going outside the house. It was really scary, and these people showed up at their workplace every day. So let's have some solidarity with those people, because I marvel at them and I appreciate them and all of the essential workers that helped keep our world going during that time. And the last piece of consideration is we also have a sense of communal obligation, community obligation. We as a new company put down roots here in Jersey City, where I'm talking to you from. We made an investment in this community. We set up office space. There are proprietors, coffee shops, dry cleaners, pizza places, maintenance workers who are here because we're here. And if we don't show up, we just stop showing up. I don't think that's necessarily meeting our obligation to the community. So individually, none of those reasons are maybe fully sufficient to drive people back into the office, but taken collectively, I think it's helped us reposition this from what could be an adversarial dynamic with our workforce to one that's much more collaborative, much more understanding, and I think supportive of spending time together. And again, not losing sight of the importance of just good old-fashioned human connection, which I'm afraid is becoming more and more rare these days. And we don't want that to be a defining feature of our company. We want human connection to be the defining feature, not distance. It also kind of goes back to your point of treating your employees like human beings, which sounds simple, but it is the collaboration, the discussion, it's not the mandate that was handed down, which is what I think a lot of companies are facing right now. So I think that's an important point. And we just really tried to emphasize that. I can't say what's right for every one of our 10,000 founders. They have to decide that for themselves. There's also a diversity dimension to this. We know that our company is founded on a premise and a purpose to improve the health of women everywhere in the world. It's our focus. We are a women's health company. The disruption that happened during COVID disproportionately affected women. The disruption to the childcare infrastructure is still reconstituting itself. Women still in our society bear most of the responsibility for child raising. So forcing people back into the office had a disproportionate impact on our women and the women in our workforce. And we said that's not okay, that can't be. So there are lots of good reasons not to mandate this, but to guide. And I feel really good about where we've landed. Thankfully, we have a lot of people that come to the office voluntarily, and we don't need to mandate. We've kind of inched our way to a new pattern of in-office behavior, and we're just fine with that. And as a senior leader, sometimes you just got to eat a little humble pie. Let's just be honest here. It's not easy whenever the thing that you think is the right thing is absolutely rejected by your team. And having had that happen before, I know the initial response is almost anger. Like, 'Hey, what do they know?'

Yeah, we want people that are eager to learn it all, not necessarily know it all. It sounds simple, but it really is a characteristic that we look for a lot. I had a conversation with a former colleague recently whose company has mandated in the office. This is a person who had been going to the office for the last year, four days a week. So she's already there. The moment they mandated it, she expressed what could be best described as resentment. It didn't affect her behavior, it didn't affect her in-office presence, but the very fact that someone mandated it was almost audacious. 'You have to tell me as a grown adult that I have to come in?' It just had such a negative impact. And I wish more companies could sort of find a better path to this. Again, every company has its own challenges with this and they're finding what's right for them, so I don't want to be too judgmental. I know where we landed is right, but I also think the ripple effect of this will be felt by companies for a long time to come.

Thanks, Jeff. Great to see you, Aaron. Thank you so much. Okay, ciao.