MAX IF function that refers to other sheet won't work

I have a sheet in my workbook called Group Dashboard. On that sheet I am entering a formula referring to another sheet.

=MAX(IF('Worker Dashboard'!C:C=1,'Worker Dashboard'!F:F))

I want it to look through all the data in Worker Dashboard. For each line where the value in the C column is 1 (or 1.0), I want it to consider the value in Column F. It should then output the MAX value among the considered values from Column F.

This formula seems to work fine.

However, when I then enter the following:

=MAX(IF('Worker Dashboard'!C:C="<1",'Worker Dashboard'!F:F))

It just reads 0. The max value should not be 0. Column C in that sheet has values <1 such as 0.8, 0.6, 0.5, etc. If I change the formula to:

=MAX(IF('Worker Dashboard'!C:C="<1",'Worker Dashboard'!F:F,-1))

Then the output is -1. This makes me think there is an issue with the logic statement:

'Worker Dashboard'!C:C="<1"

I have also tried variations for other purposes where the logic statement is:

=MAX(IF('Worker Dashboard'!B:B="General",'Worker Dashboard'!F:F))

However, here too it spits out 0 even though the max is 5.0 for rows where Column B lists General and the value in Row F is considered.

Any ideas? I have tried everything I can think of and I can't figure out why only the one version works and every variation fails.