Marisa and Wayne answer a question posed by Tony Hartsfield asking how to be productive on a multigenerational team. They discuss their experiences on a multigenerational team (and a multigenerational podcast duo), things to keep in mind no matter which generation you're in, and how to ease the tension between everyone.
Rajiv Ayyangar, CEO and Founder of Tandem, joins Wayne to discuss hybrid work and the tools we need to make it happen.
Tandem is a virtual office for remote and hybrid teams.
Join us for a powerful, 4-part video series titled, Demystifying Remote Leadership. You will learn how to create solid working relationships in a virtual team with more confidence and less stress!
You may have noticed some people talking about running out for an errand during their work day or moving some of their work to a time when they're more productive. Marisa asks Wayne about time shifting, or asynchronous work, and how to do it successfully in your organization.
Join us for a powerful, 4-part video series titled, Demystifying Remote Leadership. You will learn how to create solid working relationships in a virtual team with more confidence and less stress!
Marisa Eikenberry: Welcome to another episode of The Long-Distance Worklife. We're here to discuss and answer your questions about how to lead, work and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Marisa Eikenberry. Joining me is Wayne Turmel.
Wayne Turmel: That would be me. Hi.
Marisa: If you have a question that you would like us to answer, you can contact us on our website. Longdistanceworklife.com or e-mail. Email me directly at Marisa@KevinEikenberry.com. Wayne, today we're going to do one of our one topic episodes and I think we should talk about time shifting or how I've also heard somebody at GitLab describe it with asynchronous work.
So we're going to talk about what is it? When is it okay to do that kind of thing? Are you ready?
Wayne: It sounds vaguely science fictiony, right?
Marisa: Well...
Wayne: It's like we're going to time shift. You cannot do that, Captain.
Marisa: Yeah. Sounds like are about to jump into a time machine.
Wayne: Yeah. Basically, time shifting just means in our brains for the last hundred years, we've had this notion that a workday is 8 hours long and it starts at seven, eight, nine. Whatever time we start and it stops at three, four or five based on when you started. And regardless of where you work, every buddy that you work with is essentially on the same time schedule.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: Right. That's kind of been the way it works. And for a lot of people with remote work, this means that people like me start work at 6:00 in the morning so that I am on pace with those of you back East And what we have found as people work remotely and they're working from home and they want more flexibility is that it is a mixed blessing, that kind of scheduling.
Yeah. And so people want to be able to work when it makes sense to them. Some people are morning people. It really doesn't bother me. Starting work at 7 a.m.
Marisa: Well, you're already your morning person, so that makes it.
Wayne: I'm already a morning person. And otherwise, you know, I'm sitting around for a couple of hours doing nothing until my workday starts and my body at 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon. Is that quite enough of that?
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: And so for me, I've actually been time flexing for a while. And, you know, if I have a class at 4:00 in the afternoon, I will take a couple of hours in the afternoon and take the dog for a walk or run my personal errands or do whatever. A lot of this has been stealth flexibility.
Marisa: Yes. I've seen that a lot, like on LinkedIn or something. I know that, you know, people say, hey, I'm going to go take a couple hours to go run an errand or they go on a walk or something. Somebody else I saw they they basically shift their day, kind of like what you were talking about earlier. And so they went outside and worked on their sidewalk in their yard for a couple of hours.
Because they're more productive at night. So they just kind of shifted everything over.
Wayne: And what it boils down to is what is the company's approach? We were talking a couple of shows ago about remote friendly versus remote first. It's the same thing with flexibility, right? You can have all the flexibility you want but if I'm in the office at 9:00 and I want to reach you and you're not there.
Marisa: Right? Yeah. It's not possible.
Wayne: Is your work really?
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: And so this is actually a pretty fundamental shift for a lot of organized machines, especially as they start to grow. Right. Because you start your company and you're living wherever you live. And, you know, you might have to adjust for customer time zones, but basically you work whatever time you work.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: But now you hire somebody who lives in another time zone. Hmm.
Marisa: Yeah. Really changes everything.
Wayne: You know, and so when you think I mean, it's interesting because you work from home a lot, but I know that you maintain kind of traditional workplace hours. Yeah. Tell me, is that a conscious choice, or do you think you ought to do that?
Marisa: I think it's a little both. So, I mean, you know, for those of you who haven't joined us before, like working here at the cabin, I can bear group. This is my first job out of college. Like, I graduated on a Saturday, and my first day was Monday, so I don't really know any different. So when I first started there was definitely this idea of I start my day at eight and it ends at four.
Like, that's it. And I have kind of adjusted that sometimes a little bit as needed to like, you know, OK, I do have to go run an errand super quick or especially when lockdowns and stuff were happening, but you could like get out a little bit. My husband and I would jump in the car, "Hey, let's go get Taco Bell because we've been sitting in our house for two weeks."
Like, let's just get out somehow.
Wayne: For those of you listening, I am all about taking your spouse to lunch. I'm not sure that that would necessarily fit most companies health and wellness policies, but for sure.
Marisa: For sure. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, just little things like that. And I do know that there have been times that I have seen, you know, coworkers and stuff. Hey, I'm going to take the afternoon off or I'm going to, you know, jump off for a couple of hours. I'm going to come back on at night. I did this a little bit when I did work remotely full time many years ago, but it was for a particular project.
And it was just because the majority of the stuff that I was working on, I was working on at night, mostly because I couldn't get interrupted at night. So but that was that was a little bit of a different story. So I do think there's a little bit of I think for me, I like having a set schedule.
I like knowing that I'm going to start at eight and I'm going to stop at four. And that that's just it. I'm going to, you know, take a lunch break at noon. I personally like schedules, but that's just me.
Wayne: Now, I would say that it also helps that you are in the same time zone as the majority of people in the organization.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: So that it's very easy free for you to live on that schedule. There are three I wrote down three things as you were talking. The first is when we're talking about asynchronous work, it kind of raises the issue of how much synchronous work do really need. So if your job is leave me alone, let me get my work done, and I don't need to interact with other people in order to make that happen.
It matters less whether I am sitting at my desk at a given time right Absolutely. What matters and this has to do with a whole approach to leadership and managing performance is are you measuring behaviors such as when do you show up and when do you go to work? Or are you measuring the work that gets done? If reports need to be done Friday, and you don't need my input on that.
I don't really care what time of day you work on it. Yeah, depending on your family situation, depending. In this case, it's just you and Parker, so you want to sync your schedules so that you are both available at the same time and yes, free time. So that is part of the equation. You know, this whole idea of what is the work that needs to be done and what's the best way to do it.
Right. A lot of us started working from home so that we can get stuff done.
Marisa: Right? Yeah. Because the work still has to get done.
Wayne: So you know, when you're thinking about it is what's the work that we're doing? When do we need to be synchronously available? Now, that's going to depend on the job, right? If you're in a customer service job, you need to be available when customers expect you to be available, whatever. Right outside that is, you may have internal customers that you need to be immediately responsive to.
So that's part of the discussion is you setting up what are my work hours, how flexible can I be? Is what are the things that have to happen in order for the work to get done?
Marisa: Yeah, and I think with that, too, I mean, you were mentioning like customer service hours and stuff, and there's a small and small. It's not really quite accurate, but there is a piece of my job that is customer support. And so I have to be around to answer support tickets and stuff like that because, you know, when I'm not doing that, well, somebody else is doing that and that's OK because that's his business.
And, you know, he answers them in the off hours. But to your point, like I try to make sure that I'm available during those hours expecting that that's when I'm going to get the majority of those support tickets. But most of my other projects, it doesn't really matter what time I'm doing those.
Wayne: Yeah. And so the other thing that you said to me, which is kind of interesting, is I take an hour for lunch or I do this. The problem with working from home for a lot of people is they have this in their head that they've got to work. They but they take that to the point where they always have to be available.
And so there are a lot of people who don't take the breaks that they would take in the office. They don't take an hour for lunch. They don't get up from their desk every hour and a bit and stretch their legs and get some oxygen and do what they need to do. So that notion of wanting to be responsive to customers, wanting to be responsive to their teammates.
Afraid they're going to miss a message stops people from actually leveraging the flexibility.
Marisa: Yeah, I was you know, when you're talking about that, I was guilty of that when I first started working for Kevin and you. Yeah. I was gonna say, I know I was and I've gotten a lot better since I got married, but, you know, I know that I was somebody who was in and I accidentally trained the team to expect this of me, which was my fault entirely.
But just this idea of, well, I'm tech support, so I have to always be on well, first of all, nobody's dying in tech support. Like, it can wait until later, almost always. But, you know, so I was setting this expectation up that I was available all the time. So if you sent me a Slack message at 7 p.m., I was going to answer you.
Why? Because I lived alone and I didn't have anything better to do. To be quite honest about it, you know? And so once I got married and I went to remote working full time, one of the things I knew that I had to do was I'm going to walk into, you know, we had a bedroom set up for our office.
And so when I walked into that room, OK, I'm starting my work and at 4:00 I'm leaving and that's it. And I had my Slack set to do not disturb and all of that stuff. I mean, yeah, there were occasions that somebody might message me and I might still respond, but now there's, you know, a new culture essentially that I had to train everybody with for myself personally, that if it's after 4:00 and you send me a message, I'm not seeing it until the next day.
So if it's really important, you need to call me and that's almost never happened.
Wayne: Well, and even if I do see it, I can guarantee and I'm going to answer it.
Marisa: I'm so thankful for the Slack remind feature because there are some times where, yeah, I'll see it, but it's right at the end of my workday. And so it's like, you know, I see this, you know, I might respond, but I'm not taking care of this until the next day. And some Slack will remind me about it the next day, and I go from there.
Wayne: Well, as so often you've said a couple of things just in passing, like does that actually require some thinking? Right. If you're going to time shift as a policy for an organization, for example, what time is everybody else working? You know, if the goal is somebody has to be there to answer the phone or somebody has to be there if you've got three people on your IT Team, all three people don't have to be available at the same time.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: Right. So if you've got somebody on the East Coast and they start their day earlier and somebody on the West Coast who can finish up at the end of the day, great. Make a work absent. You've got somebody who's an early bird is up early anyway. Let them work when they're good and somebody else. As long as the mission critical things are covered.
Marisa: Yeah, it reminds me, I know I mentioned this slightly in passing a little bit ago. So you know, we sell DISC assessments with the Kevin Eikenberry Group and discpersonalitytesting.com and I do customer support on that site and there are only two people on the customer support team. It's me and one of our co-founders. And so, you know, I try to take care of the tickets between eight and 4:00 so that way that can free up him to do the stuff that only he can do.
And, you know, I just message him if I need to, if there's a support ticket that I just don't know how to handle. But after 4:00, that's all him because, you know, A, it's his business. So that makes sense. And then he can adjust and decide, do I want to take these at night or not, you know? And so, I mean, there's also even a little bit of training customers to know like you send me an email 2:00 in the morning because you're in Australia, we're not answering it until 8 a.m. at least.
Wayne: That's, you know, my friends customers in Australia.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: Or clearly.
Marisa: We love them just the same.
Wayne: Right? It's just the reality of the situation. And as the workplace changes, we need to make those kinds of decisions when is it important that somebody be there immediately to respond? And when does a reasonable time frame to respond makes sense? The whole idea of we have to be available to each other synchronously is what is leading to people putting in too many hours and people being on Zoom meetings from beginning of the day to the end of the day.
One of the things about hybrid work and we've talked about this before and we'll continue to say it until people figure it out.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: Is that hybrid is not just like the office, but with webcams.
Marisa: Yes. Even though people are trying to make it seem that way.
Wayne: Well, and they always have because that's what we know. That's how we've always done stuff is we get together and have a meeting.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: For hybrid work to truly work for flexible workspace time flex to work to be able to really happen, we need to reexamine how the team works together. And that means leveraging asynchronous tools. You mentioned whether it's Slack or Microsoft teams, we do a really good job, although it's time to go in and do a cleanup of having very mission specific groups.
Marisa: Yes, yes. Specific channels for different things.
Wayne: So that if you have a question about something that the whole organization doesn't have to be on the clock. In order to answer that, you just need to know that the other person in that conversation is going to answer you.
Marisa: Right?
Wayne: That is much easier to negotiate.
Marisa: Well, and I think our team is also really good about using the Do Not Disturb features in general to to let you know, everybody know, hey, I'm heads down for a couple of hours, I'm going to change my Slack status. And, you know, if you really need me, call me or you know, like I said, I end my day at 4:00, my Slack goes in a Do Not Disturb mode and you can see that I'm not available.
Wayne: The other thing that you said just kind of in passing and I can't stress this enough because this is traumatic for a lot of people is this notion that we teach people how to work with us.
Marisa: Yeah, absolutely.
Wayne: We teach people it's like if I am constantly if I tell you I'm in a meeting, but I'm still answering your messages and answering your emails, I have told you it's perfectly OK.
Marisa: Yeah.
Wayne: To bother me in the middle of a meeting whereas if it says Wayne's in a meeting till 2:00 and you hear from me at 205, the message is I was in a meeting right? As time shifting and flexibility becomes more important, not only do we have to get better about setting boundaries, right? The other people on our team need to respect those boundaries.
Marisa: Yes.
Wayne: And that is it's funny. People will be much better about respecting those boundaries than we are about setting them just right and one of the reasons for burning out when you work from home comes from a bunch of guilt and wanting to take one for the team and being a good teammate to the point where you are draining your own resources and for flexibility to work we need to be able to set expectations for the company.
I mean, let's start with you're getting paid to do a job. Absolutely. So the job is going to have certain expectations. Yes. Now, with that, what requires you to be synchronous with the rest of the team? What does we figure that out? What is the expected availability? What is the expected response? Time to messages and whatever what are the tools that we are expected to use?
Marisa: Right, Google Drive, Slack, whatever. And I know there's a lot of asynchronous tools coming out all the time, too.
Wayne: Yeah. And new tools every day. And that's a whole other a different. That's a whole other source of service that we don't want to get into. But, you know, these are the things that we need to determine. These are the things and they may be up for review.
Marisa: So with that, I know that you're mentioning a lot of stuff that, you know, us as workers can do and, you know, ask our leaders about. But I guess from a leaders perspective, how do you set these boundaries? I mean, you know, are some people just waiting until they come up? Should we be trying to make that culture ahead of time?
Wayne: There are a couple of problems that's a fabulous question. Yes. The organization should be thinking about this. And if you are in HR or you are in operations and you're trying to figure out how do this work, start doing your research. There's plenty of good work out there. Long distance leader or Teammate.
Marisa: Links in the show notes.
Wayne: And in bunches of other content which will tell you what you should be think about. The problem is that a lot of senior executives have never worked in a flexible environment. They've always worked sometimes literally nine to five.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: But they've always worked in a highly structured environment. And so if you're coming from that environment and you're trying to adjust, you don't know what you don't know that's true.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: So having the company make all the decisions makes no sense, right? What needs to happen is you need to sit with your team and you need to say, OK, what is the work that needs to get done? What is the mission critical work that absolutely has to be done synchronously what can be done asynchronously with a giant asterisk and what doesn't matter where it happens and when that happens.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: Set those boundaries, set those expectations and let people tell you how this works. And then and this is the part that people stress about just because you set a policy doesn't mean that's written in stone by a month, two months, three months. Is the work getting done? Our customer complaints rising is there you know, is working with the other parts of the organization, creating a problem and then reexamine it and do the process again until you find something that works?
Marisa: Yeah, we always reserve the right to be smarter.
Wayne: There you go. I think looking at the time, good lord, as always, that's probably it. But, you know, if you're looking for the the nutshell of this whole thing, it's what's the work that needs to be done, really not your preference, what really needs to be done synchronously and asynchronously.
Marisa: And sometimes meetings are not it.
Wayne: Not it. And sometimes they are right right. So here's the thing. If you have, if you're in the middle of your flex time and there needs to be a meeting, does it matter that you are in a baseball cap and t shirt? Probably not.
Marisa: Yeah.
Wayne: Right. Do the meeting. Do what you need to do and go back to your life up until it's time for you to do more work. So this is going to be an ongoing process. We're going to constantly be learning about this, and we need to be open to constant reexamining in order to find the optimum way to make time shifting work sounds great.
Marisa: Thank you so much for answering this question today, Wayne. I think we had a great conversation today.
Wayne: Well, you answered as much of it as I did, which is the way this is supposed to work, frankly.
Marisa: Again, we're getting smarter all the time. So thank you so much for listening to another episode of the Long-Distance Worklife. If you'd like, we'd love if you would write, review and subscribe and tell your friends about us. We're on YouTube and everywhere that you get your podcasts, you can also connect with us at longdistanceworklife.com.
And we would love to answer your questions in a future episodes so you can either contact us on the website or email me directly at Marisa@Kevin Eikenberry.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
Abhinav Chugh from Peoplebox joins Wayne to answer the question, "Why do people resist using technology designed to make managing easier?"
Peoplebox is an OKR & Performance Management Platform that help you solve for alignment, team performance and engagement to drive exceptional business outcomes.
Join us for a powerful, 4-part video series titled, Demystifying Remote Leadership. You will learn how to create solid working relationships in a virtual team with more confidence and less stress!
Wayne Turmel: Everybody. Welcome, welcome once again to the Long-Distance Worklife podcast. I am your humble servant, Wayne Turmel. This is the podcast where we look at remote work, technology, leadership and just surviving, thriving, keeping the weasels at bay in this crazy world of remote work and all the changes associated with it. This is one of our Marisa-free episodes not that that makes it better, just different because I am talking to a longtime colleague of mine, somebody I've known for a while, and I think it's high time we had this conversation.
So I am being joined by Abhi Chugh, who you should be able to see on the screen. There he is. And we are talking about the metrics that managers need to follow and how do we do that and how does software play a role and why does that freak people out? So that's what we're going to be chatting about.
Joining us from Bangalore, Abhi, my friend, how are you?
Abhinav Chugh: I'm great. Thank you for having me.
Wayne: Thank you for being had. So very quickly, tell the folks what Peoplebox does.
Abhi: Thank you. So what our vision is to build an operating system of strategy, execution for high growth companies. And that sounds like a very complicated setting. So I'll make it very simple a lot of time in companies, and especially as remote heads of companies, people, different departments are very misaligned, you know, are not really sure what are their strategic priorities, what our key goals.
So just imagine a central system in the company. Any company is going pretty fast or and in that central system, all your strategic priorities, all your cross-functional goals, all your initiatives are aligned tracked and achieved. And that is a system we are trying to create or we have build, which helps companies execute their strategy faster and get get better business results.
Wayne: Now, that, of course, sounds fabulous. Like all technology sounds fabulous because you're building it to solve a problem. And Lord knows misalignment is a problem as you roll it out in companies, especially remote first and hybrid companies, what are the misalignments? What are people missing out on that they need the help with?
Abhi: I think I think it's a great question and a lot of times people don't understand what exactly is misalignment. People think that a misalignment is all about a lot of leadership or the employees not knowing what our number one goal is. And I don't think that's true because a goal is usually a number. It could be a revenue, it could be a user margin.
It is generally a number and leaders make sure that they communicate that number so frequently that everybody knows you want to achieve hundred million dollars in revenue. We want to achieve 3.5% margin or we want to be on a team of 50 million monthly active users. That's very easy. I think the misalignment happens when people don't know what our focus is.
So if you and this is what I always to say to the founders that are top leadership in the middle of the night and ask them What are our top three priorities for this quarter? And see how they answer it and how misaligned they are, a lot of times you can come back and say, What are our leaders?
Our founders are misaligned, all while our one of our co-founders said this and we said this. So a lot of misalignment happens on what our focus or strategic priorities is and what is actually made. It really was is the whole pandemic and the remote one because no longer now employees are in the same room, they're working from home and misaligned is now more visible.
Wayne: And yeah, I think there's a couple of things that have happened. And you point out the pandemic. It's kind of the the watershed moment, right? There was the before times and now there's now there's now in the before times you had misalignment across teams, across functions. But I think with remote work, people become very focused on their nuclear team and rightly so.
Right. We're trying to get the team through this and stay in communication. But the cross-pollination with other departments and other teams doesn't happen the way it did when you had to look at each other in the cafeteria.
Abhi: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that the the place where we come in, which is to build that central system where across the line goals are tracked, it fragmented. I would say two things which change this. I mean, imagine maybe five or ten years ago and think of any company like that the bold tracking happens in silos. Every department has their own maybe a spreadsheet or a dashboard on a PPV and usually more where you can't find or go to a place where you see how stated goals are aligned with the product goals.
Our design goals are aligned, but it just doesn't happen now. Four things really changed. This one was this whole introduction to the framework of OKRs. You know, primarily invented by, of course, Andy Grove and Intel, but made famous by John Deere and Google. And then you see all these amazing hypergrowth startups like Spotify, Twitter, LinkedIn, adopting it, you know, and startups are usually at the forefront of adopting it because again, for them, execution is everything they have, everything right.
Wayne: OK, so for for the uninitiated, let's not we try on this show not to go down the jargon road. OKR stands for.
Abhi: OKRs are goals framework stands for objective and key result. So it's, it's, it's drastically different from the traditional goals like KPIs, which is key performance indicators or PR which is key results area. What ours make sure is that your goals also have strategy in it. So to give you an example that suppose you are a company who are at stage $10 million revenue and you want to in the next one year or two $20.5 million.
So you will put your number one company goals at $25 million revenue from current $10 million that's a typical KPI. OK got it what. OK and goes and says no that's not a great goal. The reason why that's not a great goal is because that doesn't answer the question how, how are you going to do that? What is it that you want to focus on which will help you achieve?
So primarily breaks the ball into two different pieces. One is the objective where do you want to go and what are your focus on strategy? Around it? So, you know, that could be like become the the most customer centric company in India or become the fastest stay CRM system. So it is your strategy, which is underline it could be anything for Amazon.
It's customer service for Google, it's innovation. What what they actually highlight is the focus OK? And that's make it really different. And then the result is just the number. How do you measure it? How do you know that you are going to go and achieve that? So again, it is it's a very famous very one of the fastest growing sort of framework.
Almost every company now from start ups to the Nike's and the IBMs and the, you know, cap Gemini of the world are adopting it. And that's what I see. So that was the sort of the first step towards building this growth aligned goal system. OK, but so.
Wayne: We're going to start I'm going to stop you there because that's fine at a high level. We're talking about strategies now we need to take it down to the managers.
Abhi: Yes. Yes.
Wayne: And so the company has goals and strategies and we've got stuff in place and now it's dropped in my lap as the manager. What I know that people box has the structure and the the ways of putting all this in, but it's always what problem are you trying to solve? Right. So what are managers and teams not doing?
They get in the way of executing that. Absolutely. And aligning it.
Abhi: I think you ask a really good question. What is the problem you're trying to solve? And ultimately, when you look at either the managers or the the leadership or the business heads that are going to try to solve what we call the class, the results and the retention, which is everybody is aligned from an employee to his or her manager to he's our manager to each other of the leadership.
They all want this do we want faster results? They want better retention. OK, well, when it comes to managers, you know, what are the challenges that they face in achieving better results? And retention? And the number one challenge that they face themselves is misalignment, all the employees aligned or our fear about how their work is aligned for the overall company purpose.
Are they all working towards what are the companies number one, focus on Friday, you know, and having that clarity is very important. When we run engagement surveys, one of the very important questions we ask is how happy are you working at the company or how motivated are you working under the manager they're a very high level question. But when you dig deep on why they are unhappy working with the company, the number one thing comes is the work God.
If they are not really clear about their role, they're not really clear about their job description. They're not really clear that they're really amazed by the company vision, what the company is doing, but they're not really clear that how the work, the day to day tasks that I am doing, how's that blind to the word confusion and that problem is solved.
If somehow you can build a system which makes sure that any employee, even an intelligent company, is able to align his or her work all the way to the company's strategic priorities or their overall mission. And that's the challenge we try to solve, and that helps manage it to a great level because that makes sure that we are all going in the same direction that the work doesn't happen in silos.
There's no chaos. And we all you know, while you are collaborating or while we are, you know, working in a unit, actually, we all are working towards the same people.
Wayne: So it makes perfect sense on some level. If, you know, I'm struggling to do this on my own, it makes sense that there is a structure and there are steps and procedures to help me do that. And and whenever a company puts in a tool like this, I have seen it time and time and time again. That everybody agrees this is a problem.
Everybody agrees that this would solve it, and they immediately fight the technology they immediately resist having to follow the procedures, even though what was happening before wasn't working. There is just something about codifying and making this that much of a process that seems to make people crazy. What has been people's experience? Not just with PeopleSoft, but you've been in this business a long time.
Why do you think there is that resistance and how does an organization overcome it? If they want people to use the darn thing?
Abhi: I think that's a wonderful question. And I agree with you that the one of the biggest challenge in software, and especially in software, would change if it's bring some sort of a change management is a huge resistance. And I think the only way to go and solve that resistance, if you understand that where that resistance coming from. And I just think our example, you want to build a system where all your cross functional goals which means your marketing, your company goals, your initiatives by the product and engineering that all at once.
OK now what does that mean? Does that mean that if I'm an engineer who is working in say to like JIRA or if I'm a sales guy who's working in a CRM system like a sales for the HubSpot are we going to double entries? I have to go in a built in Salesforce and then I have to go and do it in incentive system that just bad.
I mean, I would myself resist that because you are just increasing my job. Oh, and one of the major challenges happens when some of these software systems create more or heads and more work for the people, you know, just to solve a certain problem. And that has been our experience that if you ask people to do some things so that it solves a larger problem, you are sitting on a failure.
And what we try to do there is to make technology. Your friend and not the fool any more and say that is the best way to go and solve that problem is through some magically easy tracking of goals to deep integration. What that means is that imagine that you are a sales guy and you use sales force and you go and enter everything you know, all your ideas, all your leads or all your theories into the sales for the moment.
You do that through the integration, through an invisible software. The central system is automatically updated. That's a really, really welcome move because now I don't have to go and double one. And in fact, when I present to my leadership, I don't have to call people, so I don't download. I don't have to export something and pasted in a PDF or a spreadsheet.
I already have already made data available for me. So but the answer to this adoption or the resistance challenge is to how do you make it so magically easy for people to do their work and reduce the time? I give a very good example. Let's just take a simple example of business use in companies. Almost every company they go through this monthly business reviews on a quarterly business review, and that generally happens on PowerPoints, you know, parties and theme starts creating the people.
It is two weeks ago they have to put the narrative they have to put again, they have to go to different tools, take the screenshot, copy pasted, and many of the time when they present the data, it's obsolete. It's like one record, OK, and a lot of effort goes out. Intention is that how can we make this new or happen within hours and make the data really light?
So it sounds both the problem. It's not the leadership problem, but the data is naive and it tells the employees and the business heads or the managers problems that they don't have to work. And that's our way of solving and overcoming these challenges.
Wayne: So certainly having to stop the redundancy in the multiple thing, I mean, even even having multiple passwords to remember is enough to make people crazy.
So let's as as we get to the end of our chat here, talk to me about the two or three main behave was that if there was a system, obviously they should use minimal box, but assuming that they have some other system or there's something in place, what are the two or three behaviors that managers can change or perform that will help with alignment that maybe they aren't doing now?
Abhi: Yeah, I think I think the first thing that we have learned, and it's a very top down thing, I think I think managers have to have a certain constraint there because if from the leadership they don't have a way to align their cross-functional goals, there is very little managers can do. You know, if I'm a sales head and there is no way I can go and align my goals with the product team or with the design team or with the operation team, there is very little my sales manager or the product manager can do about it.
Wayne: And it's very natural and it's very natural then to control what you can control. Right. And the team becomes more insular and more nuclear.
Abhi: So so one of the things that we try and do is to go to the leadership or go to the business heads and say that OK, this is this this needs to start from you. When you set your goal to that are quarterly goals or semiannual goals and you've got to set it in a more aligned and collaborative and that results will be magical.
And then look at all the companies who have adopted opioids or any on any cross align frameworks. But once that happens, then it is so magically for the managers because now they have the visibility that just wasn't. I give a very simple example that is a problem in every company so salespeople in every company are dependent, acutely dependent on product.
They want a certain features because their customers or their leaders are asking. But they have no way to view what is the status of that particular feature. So you pick an example, let's suppose you are of your sales person in a software company and all your want to be customers are hot leads are asking for, say, Microsoft integration.
So you call a product manager and say, Hey, we need that environment. You say, OK, we already have it in the roadmap well, there's no way for you to know what is the status of that because that project is being run in Dev Toolset JIRA or Microsoft Azure, which as a sales guy I don't have access to, you know, so the only option now I have is to keep calling the manager, keep calling the engineers and say, Hey, what's the status?
And if for some reason, if this is delayed, there's no way for sales guy to know. And I keep promising people it's going to come in, bite me back very bad. Now, the best impact of this central system, Federal Budget Alliance, is that I as a sales guy, can go and see everything, whatever happening in any department without even me having an nexus and that creates this unbelievable visibility and focus so that we all go into the same direction.
OK, so as a manager, because I have this system I'm now no longer working in Silo, the collaboration improves, the alignment improves, and that obviously makes sure that there is focus and everybody goes into the same direction nor does that just imagine I as a manager, when I do my one on one, I have a clear eye. And on all the goals, you know, how they are aligned.
What are the red flags that these flags are coming from? They may be coming from different departments. When we are doing our performance review, we are goes out of the center of it. So any system that holds as an input performance reviews, incentive management, rewards management one on one, you now have that system on a platter. You don't have to follow up people who update your goals, update the progress that system is already made.
So as a manager, my job to become very easy as an H.R. My jobs become very easy.
Wayne: Well, and of course, one of the problems with goals is that because we aren't looking at them, we don't have a simple way to check them. Right. It tends to get lost in the conversation of just the regular one on ones. And the larger goals often don't get covered. Abhi, I can't thank you enough. This has been really, really eye opening.
I mean, first of all, the whole problem of alignment. And then second of all, why people resist tools that could help, i think is is just worthy of raising the issue. If nothing else. Thank you very much. We are going to have links to Peoplebox and to your contact and all that sort of thing on our website and on the show notes.
If you go to long distance work life.com, you will find all of this. We will have links to Peoplebox and to Abhi. Thank you for listening to the Long-Distance Worklife. If you have questions, comments, vicious personal attacks, but especially questions we urge you. We have a spot on our website. Get your questions in and we will answer them in one of our Q&A sessions like we're going to have next week with Marisa you know the deal.
If you listen to podcasts, please like and subscribe tell people about it. We really, really want others to hear these really good conversations. And of course you can reach me Wayne@KevinEikenberry.com or Marisa@KevinEikenberry.com and all of our episodes are available on long distance work life dot com. On behalf of Marisa, on behalf of Abhi Chugh thank you.
Thank you for joining us and we hope to see you on the next episode of the long distance work life.
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