Brian Elliott

Brian Elliott ran the flexible work experiment from inside a company that had to make it work, which is a different qualification from having studied it.

He spent twenty-five years in technology as a startup chief executive and as an executive at Google and Slack, and at Slack he cofounded and led Future Forum, the research consortium backed by Slack with BCG, Management Leadership for Tomorrow and MillerKnoll, which surveyed tens of thousands of knowledge workers on a rolling basis through the years when every company was deciding what its office was for. Its finding, repeated across waves, was that flexibility in schedule mattered to people at least as much as flexibility in location, and that the executives setting policy were far more office-bound than the people it applied to.

How the Future Works, written with Sheela Subramanian and Helen Kupp and published in 2022 with a foreword by Slack founder Stewart Butterfield, is the leadership playbook that came out of it: how to set principles rather than mandates, how to give teams the authority to design their own working agreements, and how to measure output rather than presence. It is one of the few books on the subject written by people who had to implement what they recommended.

He now leads Work Forward, an advisory group and think tank, publishes the Flex Index, which tracks flexible work policies across thousands of companies, and the Work Forward newsletter, and serves as a senior adviser to BCG. Forbes named him to its Future of Work 50, and he has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg and The Economist.

He is booked by executive teams designing or repairing a flexible work policy, by HR and workplace conferences, and by leadership programs, and the sessions run as keynotes and as working sessions, since the useful output for a leadership team is usually its own set of principles rather than his.