Ask Wayne Anything, Hybrid Work, Working Remotely

Is Giving Up Your Desk the Future of Hybrid Work?

The idea of giving up your personal desk—does it make you cringe or cheer? Many organizations are moving toward a hoteling model to save costs and accommodate hybrid work, but making it work smoothly is another story.

In this episode, Wayne Turmel and Marisa Eikenberry tackle the challenges of hoteling, from loss of control and hygiene concerns to desk wars and office politics. Plus, they offer practical solutions for leaders to involve employees, test the model, and ensure a smoother transition.

Thanks to listener Benjamin for inspiring this conversation! If your organization is considering hoteling, this episode is for you.

Key Takeaways

1. Understand the Purpose of Hoteling – Hoteling is a flexible seating arrangement where employees don’t have assigned desks, allowing companies to optimize office space while accommodating hybrid work schedules.

2. Address Employee Concerns Proactively – Employees may feel uneasy about losing their personal space, dealing with hygiene concerns, or setting up/breaking down their workstations daily. Leaders should acknowledge these concerns and create solutions in advance.

3. Create a Comfortable and Hygienic Workspace – Provide cleaning supplies, encourage good desk etiquette, and ensure employees have access to sanitized and well-maintained shared workspaces.

4. Equip Employees for Success – Reduce daily setup stress by offering lockers, duplicate equipment (mice, keyboards, monitors), and designated storage areas so employees don’t have to carry everything back and forth.

5. Involve Teams in the Transition – Instead of enforcing top-down changes, engage employees in discussions about hoteling logistics, scheduling, and workspace preferences. Address concerns before implementation.

6. Test Before Committing – Pilot the hoteling model for a limited time before making it permanent. Gather feedback and make necessary adjustments based on employee experiences.

7. Balance Cost-Savings with Employee Needs – While reducing office space saves money, organizations must also invest in tools, processes, and amenities that make shared workspaces efficient and employee-friendly.

8. Recognize Routine Disruptions & Help Teams Adapt – Change is hard, and employees may struggle with losing familiar setups. Help them establish new habits by creating structured, predictable hoteling systems.

9. Encourage Open Communication – Employees should feel comfortable sharing feedback and proposing adjustments to the hoteling system to ensure it works effectively for everyone.

10. Remember, Adaptation Takes Time – While initial resistance is natural, teams will eventually develop new habits and find stability in the hoteling environment. Patience and flexibility are key!

View Full Transcript

00;00;00;03 - 00;00;20;13
Marisa Eikenberry
Because the idea of giving up your desk for more remote flexibility make you cringe or cheer. Many organizations are grappling with this exact dilemma. If you're considering a hotel model to save money and embrace hybrid work, you're not alone. But how do you make it work for everyone involved?

00;00;20;15 - 00;00;36;11
Marisa Eikenberry
You. Welcome back to long distance Workplace. We help you live, work and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Russell. I can be a fellow remote worker. And as always, joining me as my co-host and remote work expert, Wayne Trammell. Hi, Wayne.

00;00;36;14 - 00;00;40;17
Wayne Turmel
As always, because there's no escape. He's freaking everywhere.

00;00;40;19 - 00;00;45;00
Marisa Eikenberry
But we are always here. We live in the computer.

00;00;45;03 - 00;00;48;24
Wayne Turmel
Indeed. We live in this little box. Hello.

00;00;48;26 - 00;01;12;20
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, today we are actually inspired by a listener question. And today we're diving into the challenges of transitioning to a hotel and model while supporting employees who want flexibility through remote work. So, Benjamin, the person who sent us this question, thank you so much for your thoughtful email that led us to this, the situation that many organizations are navigating as they rethink office spaces and work styles.

00;01;12;23 - 00;01;21;02
Marisa Eikenberry
So we're really, really excited to get into this. But, Wayne, for some of our listeners that may not be familiar. Can we just do a quick definition of what hotel room is?

00;01;21;06 - 00;01;44;09
Wayne Turmel
It's a weird word. I don't know how it became the word. I think it's it's kind of the mental model of staying in a hotel versus having a space of your permanent space of your own, right? That when you check into a hotel, you don't know which room you're getting. You don't really know. I mean, Hamptons all look alike, right?

00;01;44;09 - 00;01;56;12
Wayne Turmel
But but it's not your. And it's not your room. There are things that you can do in a hotel room. There are things that you shouldn't do in a hotel room because it's not your space.

00;01;56;15 - 00;01;56;24
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;01;57;02 - 00;02;28;04
Wayne Turmel
And I think it's as good a word as any, but it does. It's funny. It creates far more drama than we think it should. And I'll give you the example. And not everybody will relate to this, but I do, which is I grew up in a small town, went to a small town church, and while in churches there are no assigned seats per se, everybody knows where Mrs. Williams sits, right?

00;02;28;06 - 00;02;30;14
Marisa Eikenberry
And God forbid, literally.

00;02;30;16 - 00;02;56;02
Wayne Turmel
That's you take that spot at your peril. So even though officially you sit anywhere you want, everybody has their pew. They sit in the same place every week. They sit there, they're comfortable there. They are close enough or far enough from the pastor's burning eyes. They are easy access to the exits out. Whatever you're.

00;02;56;02 - 00;02;57;03
Marisa Eikenberry
Praying.

00;02;57;05 - 00;03;30;21
Wayne Turmel
For. Choosing a seat in church. And while there are no official seats, when somebody is in your seat, it gets really uncomfortable and that's the best analogy that I can come up with. So the way that hotel I usually works is rather than, you know, there's a cube farm and you everybody has a seat assigned to them because, you know, it's Tuesday and only have two people come in on Tuesday.

00;03;30;27 - 00;04;04;21
Wayne Turmel
We have just slightly over more than half of the normal number of desks, and people kind of grab whatever's open and they set up and they do their work, and then they go home. And on paper that sounds extremely reasonable. And what's the big deal? The problem is you are dealing with human beings who are notoriously irrational. And so there are a couple of reasons that people get freaked out about this.

00;04;04;23 - 00;04;12;05
Wayne Turmel
And as with everything with people when I say them, a lot of people are going to go, that's not a big deal.

00;04;12;07 - 00;04;14;18
Marisa Eikenberry
Except it's a big deal.

00;04;14;18 - 00;04;49;09
Wayne Turmel
Human being. Humans are going to human. Yeah. So some of it is a simple matter of lack of control. When I come in, I like what I like. I like the view out the window. I like to see the coffee break room. I want my back to the coffee break room. Whatever it is we we have basically a set of esthetics that we like when we work and when we don't have control over that, that becomes a thing.

00;04;49;11 - 00;04;55;21
Wayne Turmel
There are a few other things, some of which make no difference to me, but they might.

00;04;55;22 - 00;04;56;04
Marisa Eikenberry
Just somebody.

00;04;56;07 - 00;05;16;18
Wayne Turmel
They are going to make differences to somebody, one of which is hygiene concerns. Okay. I don't know who was at this desk last. I don't know what cooties they had. I don't know what their personal hygiene is like. God only knows what they've done to that keyboard.

00;05;16;20 - 00;05;18;20
Marisa Eikenberry
Lysol was everywhere.

00;05;18;22 - 00;05;45;04
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, exactly. So part of if you're going to bring in a hotel situation is you need to make sure that you have things like sterile wipes at every desk and bottles of Lysol and those types of things. Because while I'm pretty much, I mean, I, I clean up after myself. I'm not a complete slob, but that's not top of mind for me.

00;05;45;04 - 00;05;48;20
Wayne Turmel
It's going to be top of mind for some people, right?

00;05;48;22 - 00;05;55;10
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, I'm with you. It's not a big deal for me. But like, now that you said it, it's like, oh yeah, okay, I can see it now.

00;05;55;12 - 00;06;16;29
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. I mean, especially because the whole reason most of us wound up working from home was cooties. And so it's going to be part of the thinking, another thing is that and again, it sounds minor and it's really not, which is you need to set up and break down every day.

00;06;17;01 - 00;06;27;21
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. And oh, God, I forgot the my specific pens that I really like to bring or I forgot my mouse. I've done that before and that sucks.

00;06;27;23 - 00;06;58;20
Wayne Turmel
Oh, we've all done it. And you know this idea of okay, so now I'm schlepping to the office, so I've got my backpack, which now has my laptop and my mouse and whatever else in there. It's just a bigger deal every day. Getting ready to go to work is more hassle. It takes time to set up. It takes time to break down at the end of the day, you've got to put that backpack on, which now somehow weighs 20 pounds more than it did when you came in in the morning.

00;06;58;22 - 00;07;13;15
Wayne Turmel
So there's what is this do to your day? What does this do to the setup? Right. And so some of that may be a loss of productivity. I'm not using my mouse.

00;07;13;17 - 00;07;15;27
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. My horse or whatever.

00;07;15;29 - 00;07;52;26
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. And there are simple ways to avoid this, right. Duplicate mice. Right. One at home, one at the office. So, so this is a thing that organizations can do, and it's not quite kindergarten. Everybody has their own cubby. But I think that lockers where people can keep their equipment, that meant that they use in the office so that you don't have to schlep it back and forth so that you can have duplicates so that it's already there, and you can very easily set it up.

00;07;52;29 - 00;08;11;07
Wayne Turmel
We'll actually take some of this strain off. It's going to require developing new routines and developing new socks. We all know that. But, you know, things like that can make it less awkward and weird.

00;08;11;09 - 00;08;14;26
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;08;14;29 - 00;08;43;03
Wayne Turmel
One of the one of the reasons that people don't like it as well is, you know, when I have my desk, I've got a picture of my wife and kids or, you know, Mr. Whiskers in a holiday outfit and there's stuff on my desk that is mine, and that's not going to be there, you know? Right. Situation, you know.

00;08;43;03 - 00;08;49;21
Wayne Turmel
And what are the rules around personalization and what can you do?

00;08;49;24 - 00;08;55;27
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. You're not necessarily sitting at the same desk every time where you can have that kind of stuff.

00;08;56;00 - 00;09;00;27
Wayne Turmel
Well, and you know there are drawers. What do we keep in the drawers.

00;09;00;29 - 00;09;07;08
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. Yeah. It's like, you know, there's storage or whatever is mine.

00;09;07;08 - 00;09;24;13
Wayne Turmel
Is there. So we need to address those. And, and this means we need to address them far in advance of it being an issue. So how these conversations need to be had before the magic wand is waved.

00;09;24;16 - 00;09;45;14
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, that's exactly where I was getting to is like, what are some ways that leaders can involve employees in the process? You've talked about some ways that, you know, they can already, think about doing stuff like Lysol and having cubbies for stuff and all that. But like, what kinds of things should they be doing to involve their employees in the process of doing this?

00;09;45;16 - 00;10;09;00
Wayne Turmel
There is a huge conversation which will be uncomfortable and is going to make a lot of people feel weird. But here's the thing everybody wants their desk, but they only want to be added a couple of days a week. Well, what this means in the long run is that the organization is paying for space that is not being used right.

00;10;09;02 - 00;10;34;25
Wayne Turmel
One of the things driving the return to office is the CEO comes out of her office and looks around at all this stuff that is costing X dollars per square foot and nobody is there. And so the organization is paying for space, equipment, things that they are not getting a return on. This is a legitimate concern.

00;10;34;28 - 00;10;35;22
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? Absolutely.

00;10;35;22 - 00;10;36;25
Wayne Turmel
They're not doing their money's worth.

00;10;36;26 - 00;10;38;05
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;10;38;08 - 00;11;09;06
Wayne Turmel
Why are we paying for three floors in a building if we could arrange our schedule, accommodate everybody two days a week, and not have to pay for all that square footage, that is a legit business conversation, right? And employees need to care. Because if it comes down to we're paying for all this space and the employees are whining, right?

00;11;09;08 - 00;11;17;20
Wayne Turmel
Whining loose, right? It needs to be a discussion about mutual benefits and concerns.

00;11;17;23 - 00;11;20;04
Marisa Eikenberry
So how can they manage some of that?

00;11;20;09 - 00;11;38;21
Wayne Turmel
Well, again, it's here are the reasons we want to go to hotel. You have said you only want to come in occasionally. You only want to come in a couple of days a week. And we can arrange this so that we clearly don't need this many desks.

00;11;38;29 - 00;11;40;02
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;11;40;05 - 00;12;11;03
Wayne Turmel
And you have concerns about privacy in this in that. So how do we address that? And there needs to be a real harsh conversation around what's negotiable and what's not negotiable. If you've decided as a group of employees, two days a week in the office is plenty, you can't complain about the fact that some of the things that we are paying for are going to go away, right?

00;12;11;03 - 00;12;16;12
Marisa Eikenberry
It's like it's the consequences of the things that you want, right? It's like you can have your cake and eat it too.

00;12;16;14 - 00;12;48;19
Wayne Turmel
So which do you want more? And that just needs to be a real, honest conversation. And some organizations are much better about that than others right now. Maybe this can be done on a team basis if your office is set up so that, you know, this bullpen is salespeople and this group of people are admins. And however that set up, as a team, talk about what do we need?

00;12;48;21 - 00;12;50;19
Marisa Eikenberry


00;12;50;21 - 00;13;10;16
Wayne Turmel
You also need to prioritize what is important to you. Do you need a window? Okay. Some people do. Some people they need daylight. They need vitamin D. They need to be able to when they're thinking look out the window. Other people get distracted by looking.

00;13;10;16 - 00;13;11;16
Marisa Eikenberry
At the right.

00;13;11;18 - 00;13;33;16
Wayne Turmel
Do you want to be near the bathroom? Do you not want to be near the bathroom? Those types of things, because on a small team, often we self-select anyway. Right. If I'm in Monday and Wednesday and you're in Tuesday and Thursday and we decide we're going to share a desk and nobody else cares, great. There's your answer, right?

00;13;33;18 - 00;13;36;16
Marisa Eikenberry
That makes it easy.

00;13;36;18 - 00;13;43;17
Wayne Turmel
So, you know, if you can do that on a team basis, it's certainly going to be easier.

00;13;43;19 - 00;14;10;04
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? Well, and I could see to the idea of, you know, this group is needs quiet work to do or quieter or work to do something. Yeah, you're web developers or something like that. Whereas you know, your sales team or your marketing team, they might be louder, but, you know, so it's like, is there a sound issue also to consider about where they sent me office, or that these two teams should not come in on the same day or whatever?

00;14;10;06 - 00;14;40;09
Wayne Turmel
Exactly. There are ways to address this. Maybe conference rooms is the answer, right? Right. There are rooms for conversation. Take advantage of those. Yeah. So these are the kinds of things that you need to consider. And I would suggest just as individuals what's important to you. Right. Think about what is your routine. What is your daily routine look like when you go to the office?

00;14;40;09 - 00;14;41;27
Wayne Turmel
What is important to you?

00;14;41;29 - 00;14;44;02
Marisa Eikenberry


00;14;44;05 - 00;14;54;14
Wayne Turmel
And then talk to your teammates and say, hey, I really, really like the idea of the window. Do you mind if I have that.

00;14;54;17 - 00;14;58;06
Marisa Eikenberry
You know, and then fight to the death if you need to.

00;14;58;08 - 00;15;05;26
Wayne Turmel
You know, it's it's a great it's a great team building exercise to have gladiator battles in the middle of the year.

00;15;05;27 - 00;15;08;15
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. Certainly.

00;15;08;15 - 00;15;09;17
Wayne Turmel
A lot of this.

00;15;09;18 - 00;15;11;02
Marisa Eikenberry
The story. Oh.

00;15;11;04 - 00;15;18;12
Wayne Turmel
Well, just a lot of this is boils down to a cultural resistance to change.

00;15;18;14 - 00;15;20;25
Marisa Eikenberry
Which is going to happen no matter what you do.

00;15;20;27 - 00;15;50;05
Wayne Turmel
Which is going to happen. It's going to be awkward and weird. The more we discuss it, the more we recognize what the stressors are. Right. What is it that you're concerned about. Right. And then how do we address it. I always come back to an example in the early days of Covid that I was talking to to a team, and this almost became equitable issue.

00;15;50;07 - 00;15;51;14
Marisa Eikenberry
Wow. Okay.

00;15;51;16 - 00;16;12;17
Wayne Turmel
Is they made somebody said they made me come home and I've got my laptop, I have this big tower and a desk and a keyboard and multiple screens, and it's great at work. And I came home and I've got this stupid little laptop and this little rubber dealy that I'm supposed to use instead of a mouse. And I said, well, why don't you just buy a mouse?

00;16;12;17 - 00;16;14;26
Marisa Eikenberry
They're like, right, that would be.

00;16;14;28 - 00;16;47;05
Wayne Turmel
Their $9 at Walgreens. You know, just buy one. And his issue was, I shouldn't have to be out of pocket to do work for them when this change is being driven by them. And I get, okay, I can see that. Have you talked to your manager about this? Yes. Well, the policy is the manager is sticking by the policy that we don't pay for equipment that's not being used in the office.

00;16;47;08 - 00;16;56;26
Wayne Turmel
And so there's a showdown over a $9 mouse. Now, is the $9 mouse really the issue?

00;16;56;28 - 00;16;57;23
Marisa Eikenberry
No.

00;16;57;25 - 00;17;18;04
Wayne Turmel
No, it's you are asking me to work in a certain way, and you are not giving me what I require to do my job. So you are adding to my inconvenience. And oh, by the way, it's costing me money that I don't want to pay for something that I don't want to do, right.

00;17;18;07 - 00;17;21;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. The underlying issue that nobody really wants to say.

00;17;21;21 - 00;17;48;10
Wayne Turmel
So this is going to get to, you know what? You're saving $2,500 a month on square footage, spring for lockers, spring for duplicate duplicate equipment. So people have mice at their desk. Maybe there is a camera at every desk that people can use when they're there, and they don't have to break down their own camera and bring it to work every day.

00;17;48;12 - 00;18;11;04
Wayne Turmel
It's so often we have said, it's the little things, right? It's the thousand little pinpricks that lead to war, that have a pebble in your shoe that if you can handle those, make the larger issues much easier to discuss and deal with.

00;18;11;06 - 00;18;30;09
Marisa Eikenberry
And so before we wrap up, I do have one last question for you, but it's so for organizations who are thinking about trying hotel and and maybe they've, you know, not done that previously, what kinds of things that they can do to like pilot these programs, test and fine tune and roll them out to their teams. Like, I guess first steps.

00;18;30;11 - 00;18;40;17
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. Well, you use the word pilot before a policy. It's like literally, let's try this for two months and see how it works.

00;18;40;19 - 00;18;42;01
Marisa Eikenberry


00;18;42;03 - 00;18;56;02
Wayne Turmel
Rather than this is what we are going to do. And if you don't like it or you make the wrong choice or you think you want to be near the bathroom and you find that too distracting, sucks to be you, right?

00;18;56;02 - 00;18;58;20
Marisa Eikenberry
You make your choice. Now you have to live with it, right?

00;18;58;22 - 00;19;14;24
Wayne Turmel
Know people don't always know what they're choosing, and they may decide. And we may decide that, you know what, the same people take the same hotel desks all the time. And it really, after the initial chaos, isn't that big a deal.

00;19;14;26 - 00;19;16;22
Marisa Eikenberry


00;19;16;25 - 00;19;24;24
Wayne Turmel
Right. I'm working with the same people every Tuesday and Tuesday we show up and we go to the desk. We always go to a, nobody has an issue with it.

00;19;24;27 - 00;19;27;08
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. You get used to it.

00;19;27;10 - 00;19;40;26
Wayne Turmel
So identify the barriers, address or mitigate as many of them as you can. Make it easy for people to hotel.

00;19;40;29 - 00;19;43;26
Marisa Eikenberry


00;19;43;29 - 00;20;05;22
Wayne Turmel
And then try it and see what works and what you need to fix. You need to fix and you will eventually settle into a rhythm that works for you. Human beings like routine. We, you know when our routines get disrupted we freak out. When do we stop freaking out? When we have established a new routine.

00;20;05;24 - 00;20;10;11
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? Which I mean, really is also where some of this boils down to to begin with.

00;20;10;11 - 00;20;28;06
Wayne Turmel
And and there's a paradox here. On the one hand, this is not as momentous or even insane a change as it feels like. And at some point you will get over it and deal with it.

00;20;28;08 - 00;20;28;25
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;20;28;27 - 00;20;43;20
Wayne Turmel
On the other hand, to diminish or to discount the very real feelings that people have, only make it harder to reach that new, that new rhythm and that new norm.

00;20;43;22 - 00;20;58;22
Marisa Eikenberry
Absolutely. Wayne, thank you so much for this conversation. I really hope that it was helpful for our listeners. And I know I learned a lot more about hotel later. Hot desking or you know whatever, whatever other name remote work wants to start calling it. Right.

00;20;58;24 - 00;21;06;10
Wayne Turmel
Well, it's so funny because the terminology changes all the time. I mean, hot desking. Who does that sound like? Fun.

00;21;06;12 - 00;21;24;26
Marisa Eikenberry
I was going to say. I think that's what we called it last year. I, we did a whole episode about. I'll have to link it in the show notes. So at first it was like, wait, what's hotel? And I know Hot Desk, who knows? So listeners, you may be listening to this a year or so from now and have no idea what we're talking about.

00;21;24;29 - 00;21;30;23
Marisa Eikenberry
Or it's called something else. So it just goes to show how fast things are changing. But before we go.

00;21;31;00 - 00;21;45;00
Wayne Turmel
But tell us what what are your thoughts on this? I mean, we're sitting here being all very wise on the mountain. Here are the things you can do. What's your experience? Yeah. And what's worked for you and what hasn't. Tell us.

00;21;45;03 - 00;22;06;10
Marisa Eikenberry
Yes. Yes, absolutely. We would love to share your thoughts and your questions. On another episode. But before we go, I do want to say that we're very excited to share the second edition of The Long Distance Leader. It's now available, and this updated guide is packed with actionable strategies to help you lead effectively in today's remote and hybrid environments.

00;22;06;12 - 00;22;32;03
Marisa Eikenberry
Don't wait. Order your copy at long distance work life.com/ldl and take your leadership skills to the next level. And thank you for listening to the long distance work life for Shownotes transcripts and other resources, make sure to visit Long Distance worklife.com if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe so you never miss a future one. And while you're at it, leave us a rating or review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this.

00;22;32;06 - 00;22;48;10
Marisa Eikenberry
It's quick and it helps us reach even more listeners just like you. And we would also love to hear from you, as Wayne already said. So reach out to us via email or LinkedIn using the links in our show notes, and let us know that you listen to this episode, or even suggest a topic for Wayne and I to tackle in a future episode.

00;22;48;17 - 00;23;06;20
Marisa Eikenberry
We would love to hear from you. And again to Benjamin, who sent this in. Thank you so much for reaching out to us so that we could have this conversation. And before we go, as Wayne likes to say, don't let the whistles get you down.

00;23;06;22 - 00;23;07;13
Marisa Eikenberry
Thank you.


Timestamps

00:00 Introduction
00:48 A listener question sparks today’s topic
01:21 What is hoteling? A quick definition
02:28 Why losing your assigned seat feels so personal
05:55 Hygiene concerns: Should you trust a shared desk?
07:16 Setup & breakdown: The hassle of moving every day
09:45 The business case: Why companies are pushing hoteling
12:11 The trade-offs of office space reduction
14:40 How teams can self-organize for smoother transitions
17:48 Small frustrations that create major workplace tensions
18:30 How to pilot a hoteling program before rolling it out
20:43 Final thoughts

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Additional Resources

Order The Long-Distance Leader

Perfect your remote leadership skills with the updated edition of "The Long-Distance Leader" by Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, featuring new principles and proven strategies for today's hybrid work environments.

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Ask Wayne Anything, Technology, Working Remotely

Breaking Free from Screen Fatigue: A Guide to Digital Detox

Are screens taking over your life? In this episode of The Long-Distance Worklife, hosts Marisa Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel dive into the growing issue of screen fatigue and explore how remote workers can break free from digital overload. Learn about the physical and mental toll of excessive screen time, why our brains crave those dopamine hits, and how to set boundaries for healthier habits. From practical tips like setting screen-free zones to embracing old-school tools (hello, paper planners!), this conversation is packed with actionable strategies to help you reclaim balance in your remote work life.

Key Takeaways

1. Define Screen Fatigue: Recognize that screen fatigue involves both physical strain (eye fatigue, disrupted sleep from blue light) and mental exhaustion from constant input and dopamine-driven habits.

2. Set Clear Screen Break Goals: Decide specific times or durations for breaks, such as “no screens for 15 minutes,” instead of vague promises like “less screen time.”

3. Create Screen-Free Zones: Establish boundaries like no screens at the dinner table, during family time, or in the bedroom to reinforce healthy habits.

4. Limit Notifications: Turn off unnecessary alerts to reduce distractions and the urge to check your devices. Fewer dings mean less stress and temptation.

5. Reduce Blue Light Exposure: Use tools like night mode on devices, dim lighting, or e-ink screens to minimize eye strain, especially in the evening.

6. Incorporate Offline Activities: Replace screen time with activities like reading paper books, going for walks, or engaging in chores to refresh your mind and body.

7. Practice Intentional Device Use: Avoid using screens as your default downtime activity. Try alternatives like music or silent walks to give your brain a genuine rest.

8. No Screens Before Bedtime: Commit to at least 30 minutes of screen-free time before sleeping to help your brain wind down and improve sleep quality.

9. Use Technology Wisely: If you rely on tech (like a Kindle), explore settings to reduce blue light and adjust brightness for less strain during necessary use.

10. Develop New Habits Gradually: Don’t go “cold turkey.” Instead, build sustainable habits over time by integrating small changes consistently into your routine.

View Full Transcript

00;00;07;29 - 00;00;29;18
Speaker 1
Do you ever feel like screens are running your life? The constant thing. Back to back meetings and endless hours. Staring at a screen can leave you drained and unfocused. But what if you could take back control of your day? Welcome back to Long Distance Worklife, where we help you lead, work and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Marisa Eikenberry, fellow remote worker, and as always, joining me is my co-host, Wayne Turmel.

00;00;29;23 - 00;00;32;03
Speaker 2
That would be me. Hi. How are you?

00;00;32;05 - 00;00;34;19
Speaker 1
I'm great. How are you?

00;00;34;22 - 00;00;40;14
Speaker 2
I'm. Well, it's, It's good. It's. We're heading into the holiday season as we record this.

00;00;40;16 - 00;00;44;16
Speaker 1
Right. And I think it'll be January when it comes out, so.

00;00;44;18 - 00;00;52;19
Speaker 2
So everybody in a fetal position, after having survived. Horrible for.

00;00;52;21 - 00;00;52;29
Speaker 1
My.

00;00;53;03 - 00;01;01;28
Speaker 2
Okay. Yeah. Well, the only way you're going to be refreshed is if you actually get downtime. Which leads us to right.

00;01;02;01 - 00;01;22;17
Speaker 1
Yeah. Today we're actually going to talk about screen fatigue and digital detoxing and what it is and how you can break free from the cycle to feel more balanced in your remote work life, which is something we would all aspire to have. So, Wayne, why don't we just start off with the basic definition of what is screen fatigue?

00;01;22;23 - 00;01;25;10
Speaker 1
How does it manifest to remote work settings?

00;01;25;12 - 00;01;58;16
Speaker 2
Well, screen fatigue is actually a couple of things. But it basically means we're on screens all the time. And, you know, I'm you're on your phone, you're checking your phone, and then you're staring at a computer monitor, and then you take a break by going downstairs and watching TV, which is basically a larger computer monitor. And then you say, oh, I'm going to go read a book, but it happens to be on a Kindle or a tablet, which is yet another screen.

00;01;58;20 - 00;02;40;01
Speaker 2
Right? And so there are a couple of challenges there. One is physical, staring into a screen all that time. It's not only bad for your eyes, but it is physically draining the blue light that emanates from those screens has actual physical effects on the human body, which we will talk about. The other thing is you're constantly taking in information and input, and if you don't give your brain a break, it becomes mentally and physically exhausting.

00;02;40;04 - 00;02;54;05
Speaker 1
Right? You might actually get kind of, irritable or I know if I've been looking at screens a lot and I've been doing a lot of especially like research or something like I kind of a jerk if I don't, I have a brain.

00;02;54;07 - 00;03;05;15
Speaker 2
And, you know, I mean, for some of us for whom curmudgeon is our default setting, it might be less noticeable. But when Marissa's in a bad mood, the world notices. You're saying.

00;03;05;17 - 00;03;08;10
Speaker 1
Wow.

00;03;08;13 - 00;03;27;17
Speaker 2
So so the fact is that there is this constant bombardment and barrage and intake. And at some point, the only way it's not like, well, I'm going to watch YouTube videos on my phone instead of staring at spreadsheets. Your brain doesn't care.

00;03;27;19 - 00;03;27;28
Speaker 1
Yeah.

00;03;27;28 - 00;03;56;13
Speaker 2
What the content is. It's the actual interaction of your eyes and your scrolling finger and your brain with a screen period. Which leads to this notion of a digital detox. And a lot of people kind of take a detox. Well it's not like it's an addiction. It's not alcohol. It's that. But in fact call it what you want.

00;03;56;15 - 00;04;14;04
Speaker 2
It has all the earmarks of an addiction when it goes away your brain responds dopamine neuron receptors. All that good stuff responds in the same way as any bad habit.

00;04;14;06 - 00;04;23;03
Speaker 1
Right, right. Well, I wake up in the morning, you grab your phone. Like what? What are the screens that you gravitate towards without even thinking about it?

00;04;23;05 - 00;04;35;22
Speaker 2
Yeah. It's funny. They have done studies these and found that Farmville, you know, sets off the same dopamine receptors in your brain as cocaine.

00;04;35;24 - 00;04;40;04
Speaker 1
Wow. That is a game I heard about a lot.

00;04;40;06 - 00;04;42;15
Speaker 2
But that's it's changing so quickly.

00;04;42;15 - 00;04;43;10
Speaker 1
Yeah.

00;04;43;12 - 00;04;53;23
Speaker 2
But Farmville was one of the first where they gamified something 200 points that it actually became addictive. And then, you know, it was Angry Birds and.

00;04;54;00 - 00;04;55;09
Speaker 1
And Candy crush that.

00;04;55;09 - 00;05;05;13
Speaker 2
Yeah. And somehow I have avoided all of those and yet I will twittered doom scroll for hours.

00;05;05;15 - 00;05;09;05
Speaker 1
Right. Well, I'm on this tick tock now. Right. Like you know well.

00;05;09;07 - 00;05;31;23
Speaker 2
And they're all I do not blame the poor coders who are doing this because they are doing what they are requested to do. But the fact of the matter is that all these sites are designed to be addictive. They're designed to play with the pleasure centers of your brain. And let's assume for a moment that you are a superior being.

00;05;31;25 - 00;05;52;03
Speaker 2
And you, I do not fall prey to this. I use my screens for work and other noble purposes. Okay? The fact of the matter is, when you hit send on an email, there is a ping in your brain that goes, yeah, I did something. What else can I do? Oh look, there's another one.

00;05;52;05 - 00;05;53;14
Speaker 1


00;05;53;16 - 00;06;20;05
Speaker 2
And you know this is all not terribly scientific. And yet we know it to be true. So the dopamine and reward systems and the feedback loops from screens are a big part of the problem. That's why every time we say I'm just going to put my phone away and I'm not going to look at it and it's in your hand before you know it.

00;06;20;08 - 00;06;38;18
Speaker 1
Oh yeah. Well, it's why there's that whole thing of, you know, if your phone is your alarm, either a stop or be like, put it in another room, but loud enough, you could still hear it because there's so many people. And I will say, I am also one of these people. This is not, you know, I am one of you.

00;06;38;25 - 00;06;55;26
Speaker 1
But, but like you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is reach for your phone. And so it's like, if it's not there, you have to physically get up and go get it. Well, now you're already up. Go do something else. Is a bed rotting while watching TikToks? Not that I did that this morning or anything.

00;06;55;28 - 00;07;10;00
Speaker 2
Well, it's funny, one of the people ways that people are breaking this is going back to the future. Everybody remembers those horrible, ugly brown, radio alarm clocks I've.

00;07;10;00 - 00;07;11;25
Speaker 1
Pretty sure my dad still has.

00;07;11;25 - 00;07;39;23
Speaker 2
One side. You're bad. Right? Yes. Well, but here's the thing. That is actually better than your phone for keeping time. Because it's red light. It's not the blue light up your screen every time you pick up your phone and look at it, blue light hits your eyes and your brain, and it messes with your sleep patterns. Where as the red light so is well, I use this as my alarm clock.

00;07;39;26 - 00;07;42;04
Speaker 2
You know, there are alarm clocks, right?

00;07;42;07 - 00;07;48;15
Speaker 1
Correct. Or even, you know, whether you wear apple Watches or whatever, you can have it there too.

00;07;48;17 - 00;08;01;15
Speaker 2
Yeah, but even your Apple Watch emits a blue spectrum light. So I have an actual alarm clock, and then you don't have to have your phone by the bed.

00;08;01;18 - 00;08;02;21
Speaker 1
Very true.

00;08;02;24 - 00;08;24;26
Speaker 2
If it's not by the bed, there's less chance you're going to automatically reach for it. So that's the reason for it. That's the reason we need a digital detox. But it's not that easy because it's the ubiquity of the screen. Like I say, I'm going to stop work for the day, right? What am I going to do?

00;08;25;01 - 00;08;37;19
Speaker 2
I think I'll watch some YouTube videos. Well, that's the same problem, right? Well, staring at the same screen, maybe even the same device. And it's not helping.

00;08;37;21 - 00;08;55;15
Speaker 1
Well, and especially with remote workers too, it's like, you know, if you were in the office, you're in front of your screen, you're doing your thing. Oh, okay. I'm going to go meet with the marketing department. You physically get up and go to a conference room, or you go to a table and you're no longer on your screen because now you're face to face, that doesn't happen anymore.

00;08;55;22 - 00;09;15;09
Speaker 1
So now you're going from, I'm doing all this email and I'm doing all the stuff, and now I'm on zoom, and now I'm having meetings for zoom, and I'm talking to people on slack that I wouldn't have spoken to like that if they were in the office. And there's almost this extended screen time that would not have necessarily happened if we were still in the office.

00;09;15;12 - 00;09;48;10
Speaker 2
Right. And that goes on all day. And then our leisure activities take place on screens. Right? So part of it is what needs to be done. What do we actually need to do. And we've talked about this 100 times on this show about removing the alerts and having a start and an end to your day where you are no longer doing work stuff.

00;09;48;12 - 00;09;50;07
Speaker 1
Well, even break start to.

00;09;50;09 - 00;09;57;02
Speaker 2
Break and taking breaks during the day. But then those breaks can not include other screens.

00;09;57;04 - 00;10;03;18
Speaker 1
100%. Like if you're going to go have lunch, go have lunch and like that's it.

00;10;03;20 - 00;10;29;04
Speaker 2
But some of this is we have four strategies around this, right? We decide, oh, you know we're going to go cold turkey. Well no you're not. Yeah. You are not going to go cold turkey. It doesn't work that way. Your brain is going to torture you and you will eventually crumble and collapse. So how do we overcome this stuff?

00;10;29;04 - 00;10;49;00
Speaker 2
Well, first of all, you need to set clear goals. Why do I need a break? What kind of break do I want? How long a break am I going to take? That kind of thing, right. Because if you say, well, I'm just not going to look at my phone for a while, your brain is going, how long is a while?

00;10;49;04 - 00;10;51;25
Speaker 2
Oh, my God, we might be missing out on something. Yeah.

00;10;51;28 - 00;10;54;18
Speaker 1
No. So it's right there. I could see it.

00;10;54;20 - 00;10;59;07
Speaker 2
Whereas I'm not going to look at my screen for 15 minutes.

00;10;59;10 - 00;11;01;01
Speaker 1


00;11;01;03 - 00;11;16;25
Speaker 2
You might get a little twitchy, but at some point your brain goes it's only 15 minutes and then you will get back to the sweet embrace of the blue light broke. Go off right.

00;11;16;28 - 00;11;30;02
Speaker 2
Having no screen times, areas, you know, the dinner table, no phones at the table.

00;11;30;04 - 00;11;38;00
Speaker 2
I can't tell you how many parents I see in restaurants tell their kids no phones at the table. And yet they're constantly doing this.

00;11;38;02 - 00;11;40;14
Speaker 1
Oh 100% you know.

00;11;40;16 - 00;11;49;05
Speaker 2
So we need to walk it like we talking and having everybody is miserable as you. It's not a bad thing.

00;11;49;07 - 00;12;10;14
Speaker 1
Well and only because, you know the generation that I'm in this whole concept that these darn kids and their darn phones. I'm not saying that we're not on technology all the time. Not saying that. I also tell you, I see more boomers attached to their phones sometimes in certain situations. No offense to you, because that's not the cause.

00;12;10;14 - 00;12;20;10
Speaker 2
We use the phone to expand so we can actually read the menu and probably using it as a hearing aid. So there may be there may be medical reasons. Okay. Smart.

00;12;20;12 - 00;12;31;11
Speaker 1
Like I'm just saying I do see that constantly where it's just like these darn kids and I'm like, my phone's in my purse in another room. You're playing Candy crush while we're talking.

00;12;31;13 - 00;12;44;14
Speaker 2
Yeah, but the idea of a no screen zone or a blue Gatorade, no screen times is a really good and frankly, important way to do.

00;12;44;17 - 00;12;45;08
Speaker 1
Right, to.

00;12;45;10 - 00;12;57;14
Speaker 2
Start to break that habit. And there are alternatives. You know, I don't know if you know, this books used to come on paper and maybe.

00;12;57;15 - 00;13;00;15
Speaker 1
You can use both because I know, I.

00;13;00;19 - 00;13;13;08
Speaker 2
Know because if you're doing both, you're looking at the screen. What I'm saying is if you're going to use reading as a break, activate right. Use a non electronic form.

00;13;13;08 - 00;13;16;19
Speaker 1
It okay.

00;13;16;22 - 00;13;19;14
Speaker 2
Yes I know but your listen I know.

00;13;19;14 - 00;13;44;24
Speaker 1
I have other tech things but I'm not even going to go there because like I mean okay actually no no I'm going to do it. If you have to use a piece of technology for something, Kindle phone, whatever, they're usually are some sort of setting that you can set to reduce the blue light during certain times that automatically kicks in.

00;13;44;26 - 00;14;06;17
Speaker 1
I'm a Kindle reader. I do also read physical books. You know, those of you that are watching can see them behind me. They're constantly they're. But when I have my Kindle on at night, it's on a, you know, lower level, it's on more red light than blue light. It's dimmer. People who have the Kindle Paperwhite, it's the e-ink.

00;14;06;17 - 00;14;25;00
Speaker 1
So it's actually better for your eyes anyway. Like, there's all of these different things that if you if you feel like you need to be on a piece of technology, there are some ways to help, combat some of these eyestrain and other issues in general.

00;14;25;03 - 00;14;36;28
Speaker 2
And there are certain things that just make sense, not only for the blue light, but for the mental stimulation. No screens a half hour before you go to bed.

00;14;37;01 - 00;14;37;26
Speaker 1


00;14;37;29 - 00;15;00;16
Speaker 2
And I realize everybody just got really twitchy because most of our routines is we watch TV until it's time to go to bed. Some people go to bed to turn on the TV and watch some more before it's time to go to bed. At the very least, the ones that are right in front of your face, radiating directly into your brain.

00;15;00;19 - 00;15;30;09
Speaker 2
No phones for a half hour before bedtime, right? Put down your non Paperwhite, Kindle and give yourself a break. You know that's when you brush your teeth and do your ablutions and whatever you need to do before you go to bed, kill the screens and then do your bed routine and your brain will more easily adjust to that.

00;15;30;11 - 00;15;53;22
Speaker 1
Right. Well, and you were talking about, you know, less notifications or no notifications earlier to. With by doing that we will theoretically pick up our phone less anyway because you're not going to have the dings that you're used to. Which let's get real, it's a Pavlov's, you know, dog situation. We hear the ding. And so we pick it up.

00;15;53;24 - 00;16;11;02
Speaker 2
And the lack of a day, I mean, there is nothing there. And my thing is my phone is on vibrate or silent 90% of the time. But then I go, I wonder if anybody's called. Right. So there's so there's that.

00;16;11;04 - 00;16;13;05
Speaker 1
Yeah.

00;16;13;07 - 00;16;18;17
Speaker 2
Here's the other thing, though. Don't take your phone when you walk the dog.

00;16;18;19 - 00;16;19;20
Speaker 1


00;16;19;22 - 00;16;42;22
Speaker 2
Get outside when you're doing chores, put on music, do something else. Give your brain, your eyes, your entire physical and actual brain. It's weird to think that doing dishes and emptying the dishwasher and throwing a load in laundry could be a break, but it actually is in many ways.

00;16;42;25 - 00;17;09;05
Speaker 1
Well, and it's funny that you say some of that too. So, there it's been a while since I've seen it, but there was a thing for a while on TikTok where they were, I think they had another word for it, but there were multiple at the time. But this idea of, you know, go on silent walks and it was like a brand new concept for, you know, Gen Z or younger millennials because that's just not what we do.

00;17;09;05 - 00;17;16;11
Speaker 1
And, you know, even as we're talking, it's like, yeah, go, go on a walk without anything, like just listen to the nature.

00;17;16;14 - 00;17;37;26
Speaker 2
It's I can't remember the last time I went for a walk with earphones. And now some of this is I don't have music on my phone, so there's no there's no way to put brain music. But I find if I'm walking the dog or I'm going for a walk and I don't have earbuds in.

00;17;37;28 - 00;17;38;26
Speaker 1


00;17;38;29 - 00;17;48;08
Speaker 2
I hear things, I relax, I get to spy on the neighbors because I overhear conversations. It's really cool.

00;17;48;10 - 00;17;49;00
Speaker 1
Right.

00;17;49;03 - 00;17;58;02
Speaker 2
But yeah, I, I have quit plugging earphones in when I go for walks. For exactly that reason.

00;17;58;04 - 00;18;02;28
Speaker 1
Yeah. It's just crazy to me. I think it's like a new new phenomenon.

00;18;03;00 - 00;18;33;15
Speaker 2
Listen to your Uncle Wayne. Leave the earbuds. Oh. And, and you got to develop these habits the first time you do it, it's going to be weird. And you're going to not know what to do with yourself. And it takes multiple times of doing something for it to become a habit. And it's important we are. It's funny, we are doing less physical labor than ever before.

00;18;33;15 - 00;19;11;11
Speaker 2
For the most part, human beings work less and our health is impacted by our work. Being seated all the time, being sedentary can't stand exposure to screens. Yes, it's not tarring roofs in the hot sun and it's not, you know, hauling wheelbarrows full of stuff, which is incredibly taxing on the body. But there is, of course, to the way we're working, and especially as we get to the time of year when people do New Year's resolutions, which I try to avoid.

00;19;11;14 - 00;19;32;00
Speaker 2
But if you're doing New Year's resolutions, this is a really good one. Yeah, if you're worried about your health and you're trying to get healthier, this can actually play a really big part in it. And that means don't put your exercise plans solely on your phone.

00;19;32;02 - 00;19;34;28
Speaker 1
Yes.

00;19;35;01 - 00;19;35;10
Speaker 2
It did.

00;19;35;12 - 00;19;38;15
Speaker 1
Print it out. It's okay.

00;19;38;18 - 00;19;42;26
Speaker 2
So here's the thing. Yeah, go old school. You know.

00;19;42;29 - 00;19;45;25
Speaker 1
Paper planner.

00;19;45;27 - 00;20;10;06
Speaker 2
Whatever, by any means necessary. Here's the deal. As we come to the end of the year, whenever you're listening to this, get some rest, take a break, catch up on your sleep, do what you need to do. Nobody else is going to do it for you. Your boss may pay great lip service, and may even mean that they want you to take a break.

00;20;10;08 - 00;20;15;21
Speaker 2
But when you're on the screen answering that email at 10:00 at night, they're not stopping you either.

00;20;15;23 - 00;20;17;10
Speaker 1
Right?

00;20;17;13 - 00;20;28;03
Speaker 2
Right. And it's not that they're evil, horrible, exploitative people. And even if they are, you still can control what you can control. All right.

00;20;28;06 - 00;20;52;09
Speaker 1
Well, Wayne, thank you so much for this episode. I hope that it's helpful to the people who are listening. And before we go, we're excited to share that the second edition of The Long Distance Leader is now available. So those of you who are starting your New Year's resolutions or thinking about things for this year, you might want to pick up this book because it is packed with actionable strategies to help you lead effectively in today's remote and hybrid environments.

00;20;52;11 - 00;21;16;25
Speaker 1
Don't wait. Order your copy at long distance work life.com/ldl and take your leadership skills to the next level. And thank you so much for listening to Long Distance Worklife for Shownotes transcripts and other resources. Make sure to visit Long Distance worklife.com if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe so you never miss a future one. And while you're at it, leave us a rating or review on Apple or Spotify.

00;21;16;28 - 00;21;33;22
Speaker 1
It's quick and it helps us reach even more listeners. Just like you. We would also love to hear from you. Reach out to us via email or LinkedIn using the links in our show notes. Let us know that you listen to this episode, or even suggest a topic for Wayne and I to tackle in a future episode. We would love to hear from you.

00;21;33;25 - 00;21;38;21
Speaker 1
And finally, as mine likes to say, don't let the whistles get you down. Hey!


Timestamps

0:00 Introduction
0:30 What Is Screen Fatigue?
1:25 The Physical and Mental Impacts of Screen Time
7:00 Digital Detox Strategies
10:30 Setting Boundaries with Screens
13:45 Blue Light and Notification Hacks
15:35 Enjoying Offline Activities
20:10 Conclusion

Related Episodes

Additional Resources

Order The Long-Distance Leader

Perfect your remote leadership skills with the updated edition of "The Long-Distance Leader" by Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, featuring new principles and proven strategies for today's hybrid work environments.

 Order
The Long-Distance Leader
Read More
Use Your PTO! The Holiday Guide for Remote Workers
Ask Wayne Anything, Surviving Remote Work, Working Remotely

Use Your PTO! The Holiday Guide for Remote Workers

The holiday season is here, but are you really taking time off? In this episode of The Long-Distance Worklife, Wayne and Marisa dive into the importance of using your PTO, setting boundaries with work, and creating intentional plans to recharge during the holidays. Learn strategies for resisting the urge to check work emails, protecting your time, and collaborating with your team to ensure everyone gets the break they deserve. Plus, discover why unplugging is vital for your mental health and productivity.

Whether you're struggling with holiday guilt, a recovering workaholic, or simply unsure how to navigate PTO as a remote worker, this episode has actionable advice to help you thrive.

Key Takeaways

1. Plan Your PTO Today: If you have unused PTO, schedule it now. Use it to rest, recharge, and reflect on your accomplishments.
2. Set Boundaries: Silence notifications, turn off work alerts, and resist the urge to check your inbox during time off.
3. Be Intentional: Create small plans that bring you joy, whether it’s reading a book, enjoying coffee dates, or scheduling social activities.
4. Communicate with Your Team: Plan ahead with colleagues to ensure adequate coverage during holiday breaks. Use tools like Slack or email scheduling to respect others' time off.
5. Unplug Guilt-Free: Remember, taking PTO isn’t just a perk—it’s essential for maintaining work-life balance and long-term productivity.

View Full Transcript

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;22;02
Marisa Eikenberry
The holiday season is supposed to be a time for joy and connection, but for many remote workers, it feels more like juggling act of work, emails and holiday plans. Sound familiar? If taking time off without sneaking a peek at your inbox feels like an impossible dream, you're in the right place.

00;00;22;05 - 00;00;34;22
Marisa Eikenberry
Welcome back to Long Distance Worklife, where we help you lead, work and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Marisa Eikenberry, a fellow remote worker. And joining me as always, is co-host and remote work expert Wayne Travel. Hi, Wayne.

00;00;34;24 - 00;00;36;26
Wayne Turmel
Hey, Marissa. How are you?

00;00;36;29 - 00;00;59;29
Marisa Eikenberry
I'm great. It's the holiday season and lights are up and things are happening. And you know, it's it's just great. But obviously we have to also start thinking about taking time off. And so there's I mean, we got to talk about setting boundaries and disconnecting and actually enjoying our holiday season. What a concept.

00;01;00;03 - 00;01;11;15
Wayne Turmel
Yeah it's it is an interesting thing. And if you have trouble setting boundaries this is the time of year when it becomes an Olympic sport.

00;01;11;17 - 00;01;14;03
Marisa Eikenberry
Oh, great.

00;01;14;06 - 00;01;44;17
Wayne Turmel
If you have no trouble setting boundaries. God love you. Enjoy the turkey and party down. But it is tough. And we're not even talking about all the family stuff that goes on it. Actually, this speaks to. And I'm speaking to my since I am now a citizen, my American brothers and sisters. Who are notorious for not taking their time off.

00;01;44;19 - 00;02;16;28
Wayne Turmel
The average American lives 10 to 14 hours of personal time in there. Use it or lose it at count. And that means they lose it every year. We are awful about that. Europeans are like, these people are morons. I can't help. But it is important that, you know, I more than once have been taken aside and said, I don't care what you have planned.

00;02;17;03 - 00;02;26;05
Wayne Turmel
You need to take this time off. And so there you go. And a lot of people are in that position.

00;02;26;08 - 00;02;27;19
Marisa Eikenberry


00;02;27;22 - 00;02;49;14
Wayne Turmel
I find it's easier for me to take days throughout the years so that there is less of a chunk of unstructured time because Wayne basically loses his mind. You know, if I don't plan to go anywhere and I it's just my wife and I. So I am left to my own devices. Right. You know.

00;02;49;16 - 00;02;50;10
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

00;02;50;12 - 00;02;54;04
Wayne Turmel
You know, let's see I transcribed back.

00;02;54;06 - 00;03;15;19
Marisa Eikenberry
You know what. It'll probably actually do pretty well. But it's, it's interesting too that you're talking about this because like I actually got a newsletter this morning that was talking about, you know, taking PTO and, and why you should. And here's the things you can do. But they had this line and I wanted to remember it for this episode, but it says, remember that paid time off is more than just a perk of your job.

00;03;15;24 - 00;03;20;17
Marisa Eikenberry
It's a vital part of maintaining your work life balance.

00;03;20;20 - 00;03;26;15
Wayne Turmel
And oh, by the way, it's the law. They have to give it to you. So stop feeling guilty.

00;03;26;18 - 00;03;29;02
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, that do.

00;03;29;04 - 00;03;48;20
Wayne Turmel
Seriously, I don't care about your perfect attendance record. You know, it is your time. You are being paid for it. Take advantage of it. And to Marissa's point. It does allow us to recharge our batteries, and we need to do that.

00;03;48;22 - 00;03;49;24
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? So.

00;03;49;26 - 00;03;58;06
Wayne Turmel
You know, it's funny this time of year. This time of year. I I'm just going to get personal for a moment.

00;03;58;08 - 00;03;58;25
Marisa Eikenberry
That's fine.

00;03;58;28 - 00;04;21;24
Wayne Turmel
The end of the year is really hard for me. I tend not to celebrate the end of the year. I tend to go in a fetal position and obsess about all the ways that screwed up. Oh, no. I mean, basically, I hate New Year's Eve. I love New Year's Day. Okay, here's day. I've got a start. I've got a fresh start.

00;04;21;27 - 00;04;32;26
Wayne Turmel
New year's Eve is just a giant convention of all my neuroses hanging out inside my head. And, oh, by the way, let's fuel that with alcohol.

00;04;32;28 - 00;04;34;01
Marisa Eikenberry
You know.

00;04;34;03 - 00;05;07;06
Wayne Turmel
Sure. So. Woo hoo! So I have learned. And that's why I'm sharing this with you. I have learned that while staying busy over the holidays keeps me somewhat sane, I tend to balance it out so I will with discussion with my manager. I will work part days. I will work a couple of days and then take each day off during this time.

00;05;07;07 - 00;05;15;26
Wayne Turmel
It's also a really good chance for me to be a good teammate and cover for people who are, you know, stressed for time.

00;05;15;29 - 00;05;33;04
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? Well, and it's interesting too, that you talk about, you know, you prefer to take days over the year and all that. I, I am somebody my very first year here. And for those of you that have been listening for a while, this will surprise no one. I didn't take a single day off the first year that I worked for getting.

00;05;33;07 - 00;05;39;13
Marisa Eikenberry
That was just me as a person. I just, while I'm here, I got to take the day, you know? So unless you're hoping for a.

00;05;39;13 - 00;05;40;20
Wayne Turmel
Certificate on the wall.

00;05;40;20 - 00;06;05;05
Marisa Eikenberry
Because the thing is, I. What I wasn't, it was just in my head. I'm like, well, I'm supposed to go to work, so I'm going to go. Or, like, I didn't have any reason not to go. And yeah. And like, Kevin pulled me aside and was like, hey, so take your day. And, you know, because I, I don't really travel at this current time in my life and I don't really do a lot of extra stuff.

00;06;05;05 - 00;06;32;25
Marisa Eikenberry
So for the most part, I don't really have a reason to just take a random Thursday off because, you know, to your point, like I just sit at home, I go, well, I could have been working, but the last couple of years I do take a chunk of time at the end of the year. Because, you know, I host Christmas Eve and I'm trying to bake cookies with my mom and so there's all this stuff that happens at the very end of the year anyway, and it's just like all of that stuff comes together and it's like, you know what?

00;06;32;25 - 00;06;50;23
Marisa Eikenberry
Okay. And so the last I think two year, 2 or 3 years now, I've just taken the last two weeks of the year off and it's just been that's it. I'm I'm out of the office and it's weirdly been the best thing for me to do to get myself reset for January. Yeah.

00;06;51;00 - 00;06;53;18
Wayne Turmel
Not everybody can go.

00;06;53;20 - 00;06;54;13
Marisa Eikenberry
100%.

00;06;54;13 - 00;07;17;14
Wayne Turmel
Without a break. And so, you know, if you want to grow up and be like, Marissa, God love you. Not everybody functions that way. And so it's really important. What if you struggle with that? If you struggle that what am I going to do except obsess about work? Make a plan for that day.

00;07;17;17 - 00;07;18;02
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

00;07;18;04 - 00;07;40;11
Wayne Turmel
Even if it is. I mean, I have said I am stepping out. I live in Las Vegas, so I can do this. I am going to spend a couple hours on the deck with a book, me and the hummingbirds and maybe a cigar. I actually plan for that and I leave and it's it a I got to check something off my list.

00;07;40;11 - 00;07;44;07
Wayne Turmel
I sat right back and I watched the hummingbird and I had a cigar. And it's all good.

00;07;44;10 - 00;07;45;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Check check check check.

00;07;45;21 - 00;07;52;14
Wayne Turmel
But plan little. What makes you happy? What is a treat for yourself?

00;07;52;16 - 00;07;53;20
Marisa Eikenberry


00;07;53;22 - 00;08;16;14
Wayne Turmel
And it doesn't have to be huge. It really doesn't. But little things that make you happy. Is there a book you've been wanting to read? Is there a movie you've been wanting to see? Is there you know, my wife and I have coffee dates and we get out of the house, which is the function, because Wayne is in the house all week.

00;08;16;20 - 00;08;18;04
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;08;18;06 - 00;08;46;09
Wayne Turmel
We get out of the house, we have a cup of coffee. We chat about stuff. But we make it an event. And I think that's the thing is. Well, what am I going to do with this time anyway? Get used to being good to yourself, and it doesn't have to be big, and it doesn't have to be expensive, and it doesn't have to be anything that any body else cares about.

00;08;46;11 - 00;09;05;29
Marisa Eikenberry
100%. I mean, I'm not going to lie. Parker and I have. So Parker's my husband. For those of you listeners that haven't heard me mention that name before, but like there has been once or twice, but we took a day off of work. Why? Because again, we were really excited about came out and we were going to play it together.

00;09;06;01 - 00;09;23;02
Wayne Turmel
Absolutely. Little things make us happy. And if you are alone at this time, plan for things that get you involved with other humans.

00;09;23;05 - 00;09;26;03
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, the social part is so important.

00;09;26;05 - 00;09;47;01
Wayne Turmel
It is. It's really easy for this to be hard for people. My daughter is in Chicago. She's alone. She struggles with seasonal stuff. Anyway. She has to. Yesterday she went to the, sing along with it at.

00;09;47;05 - 00;09;48;04
Marisa Eikenberry
Okay.

00;09;48;06 - 00;10;00;16
Wayne Turmel
By herself, her and half of Chicago, from the sounds of it. Just singing popular at the top of her lungs for two hours, and it made her happy.

00;10;00;18 - 00;10;09;12
Marisa Eikenberry
Thank you. You know, I definitely want to see that movie, but I'm waiting for the no singalong version for a bit, because I've actually never seen it.

00;10;09;15 - 00;10;14;00
Wayne Turmel
But that's what she has seen the stage play nine times.

00;10;14;02 - 00;10;15;16
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, there you go.

00;10;15;18 - 00;10;47;01
Wayne Turmel
So she is a little of right, but this but this is the thing is that we need to guard our time. If you are working during this season. Don't begrudge the people who are taking their time. Plan with them what's available, what's really do. What can you do to help them? What can they do before they disappear to help you so that you are not left stranded?

00;10;47;04 - 00;11;23;28
Wayne Turmel
Right. And these conversations take place kind of organically when we're all in the office together. But when we work remotely and I. If there's a drinking game for this show, the words we. So and intentional are probably the ones that will put you over the line. But intentionality is so important. It's funny, we're talking about taking time off and recharging your batteries, but you need to be intentional about that.

00;11;24;01 - 00;11;32;25
Wayne Turmel
You can't just assume that it's going to happen or assume that everybody understands or does that the same way that you did.

00;11;32;28 - 00;11;57;15
Marisa Eikenberry
Switching gears a little bit. Talking about intentionality and, and you know, when we are taking that time, but like how do we also intentionally protect that time by, you know, resisting the urge to check work messages and slack messages and emails and all that? I know I struggled with that for a very long time. I have some tips I'll get into in a minute, but do you have some tips on that?

00;11;57;18 - 00;12;20;13
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, for me it's really simple. It's just kill the alert. It's a simple. Yep. Setting. I mean, for me, it's enough that I kill the auditory work because I'm like Pavlov's dog. I hear a ping. I need to check it. Right? Right. I can pick up my phone and see there are eight messages in outlook. Well, I ain't working right now, so.

00;12;20;16 - 00;12;38;22
Wayne Turmel
But I also have 60 years of practice that allowed me to get there. But kill the alerts. Silence the notifications. It's easy to do, and you'd be amazed at what a difference it makes.

00;12;38;24 - 00;12;44;13
Marisa Eikenberry
I've had my email this off for years and it's so helpful.

00;12;44;15 - 00;13;11;15
Wayne Turmel
And if you are obsessive, just pick a time. I mean, okay. I'm an early morning riser. My wife is asleep. I'm supposed to be on vacation. I'm supposed to be whatever. I will sneak a peek of my emails just to see if there's a burning fire. But once it's done, I'm done. I can relax. I have hit the little valve on my brain that vents that stuff.

00;13;11;17 - 00;13;35;13
Wayne Turmel
And I can now relax because I know there's nothing there that requires my immediate attention. For a lot of us. It's the anticipation of, oh, my God, there's something in my inbox. I know there is. So, you know, hitting the little vent and letting the steam escape is actually better than just trying to ignore it. Stick your finger in here and go la la la la la I'm not listening.

00;13;35;14 - 00;13;36;10
Wayne Turmel
You.

00;13;36;13 - 00;14;07;06
Marisa Eikenberry
Well funny enough that is what I do is that I, I have all the do not disturb, but I know me. I know that for me, I am a recovering workaholic. And if I first of all, I get a bunch of emails just telling me that the websites have updated constantly. And so those happen anyway. But I know that if I go in to look at stuff and if I see something that's a task my brain isn't going to be, oh, that can wait until Monday.

00;14;07;06 - 00;14;29;08
Marisa Eikenberry
It's, well, I can do that right now. I'm already home. Like, I'll just go do it. I know me and so I won't look at it at all. So if if you are like me, like, that's okay too. Whatever you need to do to protect yourself and your time. I know that one of our coworkers used to frequently tell me we are not surgeons.

00;14;29;09 - 00;14;33;11
Marisa Eikenberry
These are not life and death situations. And if it is, they will pick up the phone.

00;14;33;14 - 00;15;01;00
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, it's. We've been doing this show a long time. We have given you lots of advice. Readers, listeners. I still I'm an analog guy. Dear listener, we have given you a bunch of stuff. Some of it is going to ring true. Some of it is going to seem weird. Probably we should have offered this disclaimer when we began doing this show, which is your mileage may vary, right?

00;15;01;01 - 00;15;32;26
Wayne Turmel
We are all human beings with our own individual styles. For me, quick bursts of venting and then being allowed to possibly go about my day works for other people. It doesn't. As long as it doesn't go down the rabbit hole, as long as you it doesn't interfere with your pleasure, with your relaxation. I know that being worried about stuff is counterintuitive to time off.

00;15;32;28 - 00;16;13;24
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. Defeats the purpose. Get used to it is my advice. Small doses gradually building up resistance. And that is the answer. But we all do stuff differently, and there are generalities. We need time off. We need to recharge our batteries. We need to set boundaries with the people we work with and for so that our life, work life does not overrun our personal life and steal our joy.

00;16;13;26 - 00;16;20;26
Wayne Turmel
And yes, this is grumpy old white guy talking about joy. You are allowed to have it.

00;16;20;28 - 00;16;30;08
Marisa Eikenberry
Let the record state at 1127 at 2 p.m., Wayne said. Let there be joy.

00;16;30;11 - 00;16;34;23
Wayne Turmel
And it were. And let there be joy. Darn it, it's the holidays.

00;16;34;25 - 00;16;54;02
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, and to your point about, you know, respecting each other's boundaries and things like that. So, you know, if I know that Wayne is out for a week and I might still be working and I have something that I need to talk to him about or whatever, maybe I don't send that email right now. We have slack schedulers.

00;16;54;03 - 00;17;14;24
Marisa Eikenberry
I'm sure Microsoft Teams has some sort of scheduling thing. I know outlook does. You know, if you need to get the email out of your head. So that way you don't forget. Great. Do it. Schedule it for when they come back because it's it's just not important right now. And if it is pick up the phone.

00;17;14;27 - 00;17;20;19
Wayne Turmel
And your desire to get it off your plate does not mean you get to mess with somebody else.

00;17;20;21 - 00;17;24;05
Marisa Eikenberry
Absolutely. And while it will.

00;17;24;06 - 00;17;33;20
Wayne Turmel
Things scheduling emails, you know, these little behavioral niceties.

00;17;33;22 - 00;17;35;09
Marisa Eikenberry


00;17;35;12 - 00;17;51;28
Wayne Turmel
Build up. You know we've talked before about the trust bank account and how every time you have a good interaction with somebody it builds positive will and positive will so that when inevitably something unhappy happens you don't drain that account.

00;17;52;00 - 00;17;53;01
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;17;53;03 - 00;18;11;29
Wayne Turmel
And these little things make all the difference. You know, you've heard me say before. My favorite quote from Napoleon. If you want to avoid war, you avoid the thousand little pinpricks that lead to war. Little things like this matter.

00;18;12;02 - 00;18;34;05
Marisa Eikenberry
So one of the last things I want to cover before we end this episode is, you know, what are some strategies that teams can implement to, like, ensure adequate coverage when team members are taking time off, especially like, you know, we're going into the holiday season, lots and lots of people are taking time off. And in some cases you're working with skeleton crews and things like that.

00;18;34;05 - 00;18;40;28
Marisa Eikenberry
So what can teams kind of plan for ahead of time to accommodate?

00;18;41;00 - 00;18;49;21
Wayne Turmel
I can't remember the last time anybody listening to this heard me say, have a meeting, but this would be one.

00;18;49;24 - 00;18;51;07
Marisa Eikenberry
Yes.

00;18;51;09 - 00;19;22;22
Wayne Turmel
Right. Prior to probably mid-November, as a team, look at what is remaining that needs to be done for the rest of the year. That is time sensitive, right? That isn't just more of the same, but what are the unique demands of the end of the year? There are reports that need to be done. There are all kinds of end of the year activities that get added on to, oh yeah, we're trying to run a business and sell some stuff.

00;19;22;25 - 00;19;23;26
Marisa Eikenberry
Crazy.

00;19;23;28 - 00;19;48;15
Wayne Turmel
So as a team, identify what those are and then talk about who's going to be a way during that time. You know, people have use it or lose it time. You know, so-and-so can't shut up about their upcoming trip to Hawaii. We know they're not going to be here, but somebody else has a bunch of use it or lose it time, and there's no real occasion.

00;19;48;15 - 00;19;51;00
Wayne Turmel
So we didn't know that they're going to be gone.

00;19;51;03 - 00;19;53;26
Marisa Eikenberry


00;19;53;29 - 00;20;19;19
Wayne Turmel
Have these conversations and maybe have a slack channel or something like that. That's just for holiday coverage. Hey I'm around. Hey I'm going to be around but I'm going to be out for two days. Something came up. I'm not in the rest of the day. Right. Keep each other apprized so that there are fewer uncomfortable. Recognitions.

00;20;19;21 - 00;20;21;20
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. Sudden recognitions.

00;20;21;22 - 00;20;38;21
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? Well, and in your out of office emails, too. You can also say, you know, hey, if you have questions about this talk to this. I know every time I do an out of office, especially if I'm the only one taking time off. Like it depends on what it is. You know, if they're talking about long distance work life, I tell them to go to you.

00;20;38;21 - 00;20;46;16
Marisa Eikenberry
If they're talking about Remarkable Leadership podcast, they go to Lisa like, I have a list. Here's all the people that you need to talk to because I'm not here.

00;20;46;19 - 00;21;13;25
Wayne Turmel
Here's the other thing with a couple of very obvious exceptions, because you are the tech guru that the rest of us aren't. Stuff gets done. The company is still standing when you come back on January, whatever the heck it is. Yeah, the building will still be there. You will still have a job. Your boss is still going to expect you to get back to work.

00;21;13;27 - 00;21;16;15
Wayne Turmel
And the world has not come to a halt.

00;21;16;18 - 00;21;18;07
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;21;18;09 - 00;21;28;27
Wayne Turmel
If you are that vital to the preservation and maintenance of the business, you are underpaid and your boss is doing it wrong.

00;21;28;29 - 00;21;36;14
Marisa Eikenberry
And probably have no idea anything about delegation either. Depending on where you're at in the hierarchy.

00;21;36;17 - 00;21;49;07
Wayne Turmel
But that's something that we need to get used to, to this notion that if I take my holidays, the bill, you know, the company will fail. No it won't. Yeah.

00;21;49;10 - 00;21;54;05
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, it's like we said earlier, that man, that's a life or death situation.

00;21;54;07 - 00;21;59;18
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. It's like, take your time. It's right across.

00;21;59;21 - 00;22;19;11
Marisa Eikenberry
Do it. So I guess the lesson for this episode, listeners is that if you aren't taking your PTO, please take it. If you know that you have days that you haven't spent this year, and especially if it's a use it or lose it. Figure out when you're going to take off. Like right now. Like stop the show. Go do it.

00;22;19;13 - 00;22;38;08
Marisa Eikenberry
We will forgive you for not listening to the rest of this episode. But, Wayne, I want to thank you so much for this last live episode of the year. This last one that we're going to be recording. So for those of you that are listening, you'll hear about two weeks of replays before we get new shows up in January.

00;22;38;11 - 00;23;05;03
Marisa Eikenberry
But before we go, we're excited to share that the second edition of The Long Distance Leader is now available. This updated guide is packed with actionable strategies to help you lead effectively in today's remote and hybrid environments. Don't wait. Order your copy at long distance work life.com/ldl. Take your leadership skills to the next level in 2025. And because the holidays are in full swing, we do want to wish you a joyful and restful season.

00;23;05;06 - 00;23;26;12
Marisa Eikenberry
Take these moments to recharge. Use your PTO. Connect with your loved ones and reflect on the wins that you've had this year because you've earned it. And thank you so much for listening to The Longest Worklife for Shownotes transcripts and other resources. Make sure to visit Long Distance worklife.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe so you never miss a future one.

00;23;26;14 - 00;23;43;11
Marisa Eikenberry
And while you're at it, leave us a rating or review on Apple or Spotify. It's quick, and it helps us reach even more listeners like you. And we'd also love to hear from you. So reach out to us via email or LinkedIn with the links in our show notes and let us know that you listen to this episode, or suggest a topic for Wayne and I to tackle in the New Year.

00;23;43;13 - 00;23;50;11
Marisa Eikenberry
Thank you so much for being part of our community. We hope you have a wonderful holiday season. And as Wayne likes to say, don't let the weakness get you down.


Timestamps

00:00 Introduction
01:00 Why Americans struggle with taking PTO
03:15 The benefits of PTO for work-life balance
05:00 Personal stories of managing time off and holiday stress
08:00 Small joys: Planning activities for your time off
12:00 Tips for disconnecting from work during PTO
14:30 The power of scheduling and protecting boundaries
18:12 Strategies for ensuring adequate team coverage during holidays
22:00 Final thoughts: Why you need to take your PTO now!

Related Episodes

Additional Resources

Order The Long-Distance Leader

Perfect your remote leadership skills with the updated edition of "The Long-Distance Leader" by Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, featuring new principles and proven strategies for today's hybrid work environments.

 Order
The Long-Distance Leader
Read More
Staying Connected When Natural Disasters Disrupt Remote Teams
Ask Wayne Anything, Leadership, Surviving Remote Work, Technology, Working Remotely

Staying Connected When Natural Disasters Disrupt Remote Teams

Wayne Turmel and Marisa Eikenberry dive into a topic often overlooked—natural disasters and how they impact remote and hybrid work environments. As hurricanes, blizzards, and wildfires increase, so does the need for effective business continuity plans. Wayne and Marisa discuss real-world stories and provide insights on how companies can balance employee safety with the need for operational continuity. They cover essential strategies like communication protocols, cloud-based backups, risk assessment, and creating an emergency contact directory, offering practical advice to help remote teams stay connected and productive during crises.

Key Takeaways

1. The Importance of Preparedness: Why every organization needs a disaster preparedness plan, especially in areas prone to natural calamities.
2. Real-World Consequences: Wayne shares a cautionary story about a company that delayed evacuation, resulting in tragic consequences.
3. Remote Work’s Role in Crisis Management: How remote and hybrid work setups can offer flexibility and continuity when disaster strikes.
4. Communication Protocols and Access Plans: Ensuring that every team member has access to essential data and knows how to communicate their availability during outages.
5. Human-Centric Leadership: The significance of showing grace and understanding toward employees facing personal crises during natural disasters.

View Full Transcript

00;00;00;01 - 00;00;14;12
Marisa Eikenberry
When disaster strikes, what happens to your work, whether it's hurricanes, floods or blizzards? These events can disrupt our lives and our jobs in an instant. As your workplace prepared.

00;00;14;14 - 00;00;28;23
Marisa Eikenberry
You. Welcome back to the long distance work life. We help you live, work, and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Mercer, I can marry a fellow remote worker. And joining me is my co-host and remote work expert, Wayne Trimble. Hi, Wayne.

00;00;28;25 - 00;00;46;24
Wayne Turmel
Hello there. Marissa. Hello, listeners. Greetings from Las Vegas, where we have set a record for days over 100 degrees, and people are melting on the sidewalk. And so does rasters. And nature and stuff is very much on people's minds.

00;00;46;27 - 00;01;17;26
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? And so, listeners, as we are recording this, Hurricane Helen just came through, multiple states in the past weekend. And so we thought that this would be a really interesting episode while we dive into a very critical topic, which is how workplace workplaces handle natural disasters and ensure that business continues while keeping employees safe. So, Wayne, I just want to start off by saying, like, you know, all of these different things happen blizzards, wildfires, we've heard different stuff.

00;01;17;28 - 00;01;31;12
Marisa Eikenberry
Oh, definitely. Over the past couple of years. And how can organizations ensure that business continuity while prioritizing employees safety during these natural disasters? Because, like business can always stop? Yeah.

00;01;31;13 - 00;02;01;10
Wayne Turmel
Therein lies the problem. What I am going to say is based merely on multiple news reports. I'm not taking it from a single source, and I don't know the veracity of it, but we know of at least one company in Tennessee. People wanted to evacuate the workplace. The employer said no until it was too late, and there were 10 or 11 fatalities as a result.

00;02;01;12 - 00;02;30;15
Wayne Turmel
This is thankfully not common, but it ain't unheard of either, right? So this is a very real thing, and you can be cynical and say this ties to the whole work in the office presenteeism kind of thing. But it's also companies are trying to make a living, and they're trying to get as much work done as they can before the storm or the fire or whatever it is happens.

00;02;30;15 - 00;02;34;06
Wayne Turmel
And, you know, we we guess wrong, right?

00;02;34;12 - 00;02;36;17
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. Weather can be unpredictable in that way.

00;02;36;20 - 00;03;03;25
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. So I am not casting blame other than to say that it happens. Right. But that does raise the issue of with sufficient warning. What are the company's plans. How much of a company's work can in fact be done off site. And this is where to say we are going to abandon remote work and everybody get back to the office.

00;03;03;27 - 00;03;34;28
Wayne Turmel
This is exactly the kind of thing that one faces. Before Covid, companies were starting to put call them business continuity plans. Call them what you want in place. And some of this is helped by the fact that so much is now on the cloud, or that the servers are somewhere other than the office. I mean, 1520 years ago your office had a huge server farm in it, and if your office went down, so did everything you own then?

00;03;34;28 - 00;04;07;01
Wayne Turmel
No. Right. That's that's less and less the case now for most organizations. So you know, what is the plan? First of all, for the data, your business has to survive. Your company has to survive. And then how do you ensure that people can get at it? And if you are in a cloud environment, if you are in a paid server environment where the servers are somewhere other than where you are, and if you're experiencing the disaster, hopefully your servers are not.

00;04;07;03 - 00;04;33;20
Wayne Turmel
But ready. What is the plan? And I think that organizations need to have a plan that says even people who don't normally work outside of the office need to know how to access the data. They need to know how to if they're on a VPN, they need to know how to do that. There needs to be there.

00;04;33;21 - 00;04;42;25
Wayne Turmel
And ironically, you know, if you put it in a manual, in the manuals in the office and the office is no longer there, that's a point.

00;04;42;27 - 00;04;43;06
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;04;43;06 - 00;05;01;19
Wayne Turmel
And I, you know, I say that I'm not making light of the situation clearly. So the first thing is think about it from an organization standpoint. If something happens, I mean, we talk in the office all the time about what if Kevin gets hit by a bus?

00;05;01;22 - 00;05;08;23
Marisa Eikenberry
Yep. We've said that about many, many people on our team just because of how integral they are.

00;05;08;26 - 00;05;22;08
Wayne Turmel
Right. We don't want that to happen. We clearly keep you know, we keep him wrapped in bubble wrap when he's not in the office. But you have to have those conversations, and it's irresponsible not to.

00;05;22;10 - 00;05;22;28
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;05;23;00 - 00;05;45;05
Wayne Turmel
If you live in a place that is prone to hurricanes, if you live in a place that is prone to winter blizzards, if you are, you know, whatever it is that needs to be addressed. How do people, the as many people as possible, continue to keep the business afloat? And if you haven't had that conversation, you'd better have.

00;05;45;05 - 00;06;16;14
Wayne Turmel
And if people don't have access codes and they don't have, I mean, I I've heard of people who, when they return to the office after Covid, lost their access to the VPN. Is that really what you want? Mr.. Mrs.. Business owner. So you need to think about that. You also need to and this is best done I think on a team by team basis is does everybody know where everybody is.

00;06;16;16 - 00;06;44;14
Wayne Turmel
Do they? I'll never forget I had an instructor in one of the buildings at the World Trade Center. Wow. The day that 911 and I spent 14 really bad hours waiting to hear from that person. She was safe. She was fine. She got out at the first sign of danger of building all of that good stuff. But for 14 hours, we didn't know where she was, let.

00;06;44;14 - 00;06;45;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Alone.

00;06;45;21 - 00;06;54;18
Wayne Turmel
What she was doing with the business. Whether what was going on with the client. None of that. We didn't physically know if she was still with us. Right.

00;06;54;21 - 00;06;56;21
Marisa Eikenberry
That's terrifying.

00;06;56;22 - 00;07;23;25
Wayne Turmel
So do people know when there is a disaster? Is there a plan for letting your peers and your boss know you're okay? Letting your peers and your boss know I have internet access and I am available, right? Because some people, if you have internet access, there are things that I could do in your absence, but only if I know that you don't have the internet access.

00;07;23;27 - 00;07;41;10
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, I was going to say with that example, we have a person on our team, Guy Harris, who, he's in South Carolina. So while his home is safe and his family is safe, he was hit by a lot of the storm and, like, didn't have power and didn't have internet and thankfully had a generator. But it can only do so much.

00;07;41;10 - 00;08;00;27
Marisa Eikenberry
And he called me very early on to be like, hey, like, I need you to take care of all the disk or disk, support tickets, because I can't help you unless you know, we need to have a phone call about something. But, like, he physically could not get into the back end to help me with anything. And so he made sure to let me know.

00;08;00;29 - 00;08;16;02
Wayne Turmel
So, is there a plan? Right. Do you have the home phone? Numbers are no longer a thing. But do you have the cell, the personal cell number of all your employees? And do they have each other right?

00;08;16;02 - 00;08;19;05
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. Or directory somewhere that they can access.

00;08;19;07 - 00;08;33;06
Wayne Turmel
Is there a directory that exists? I know teams that put each other in their contact list, because having an online resource doesn't help if you can't get online, right.

00;08;33;08 - 00;08;34;08
Marisa Eikenberry
That's fair.

00;08;34;11 - 00;08;46;06
Wayne Turmel
That's a decision, right? You can decide do people want to be that connected to each other? You assume that everybody's going to be a grown up and behave responsibly right now.

00;08;46;06 - 00;08;48;20
Marisa Eikenberry
Drug text Susan at two in the morning.

00;08;48;22 - 00;09;26;20
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, but that's a that's a very concrete thing, right, that you can do to help make sure that that happens. So you need to think about what's going to happen before it happens. Now, I am firmly of the belief that every time one of these disaster have disasters and somebody gets convinced that maybe remote work is not the worst thing that could happen, because even if everybody is physically safe, even if everybody's homes are physically safe, if the office is damaged, if the roads are impassable.

00;09;26;22 - 00;09;33;05
Wayne Turmel
If any of that is going on, could we rarely meet somewhere else and still function well?

00;09;33;05 - 00;09;34;10
Marisa Eikenberry
And on that same.

00;09;34;10 - 00;09;35;03
Wayne Turmel
That line.

00;09;35;04 - 00;09;56;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Is. Yeah. Well, I was going to say on that same line, you know, for people who have teams that are working from home and stuff like that, I mean, there's still thunderstorms, snow, you know, lots of rain might cause flooding or whatever. Like, you know, we've all been in situations of, hey, we got a really bad storm here.

00;09;56;20 - 00;10;18;28
Marisa Eikenberry
I don't have internet or I don't have power. Right now, but it doesn't make sense to go into the office or in your case, your states away from the office. It doesn't make sense to do that. Like what level of flexibility should companies be offering employees for dealing with things like power outages and internet disruptions or personal crises, even during a disaster or just severe weather?

00;10;18;29 - 00;10;46;13
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, I think that this there's several levels to this, right? On the most basic level, you need to sit and think about what risk analysis is, what are the odds of something happen. And what are the results of it. Did that's risk analysis in a nutshell, right? So have you done a risk analysis on your business. Right. What business absolutely has to be done out of the office.

00;10;46;15 - 00;11;08;26
Wayne Turmel
What can be duplicated conducted elsewhere, whatever. And then what are the plans for that on an H.R level, it's yes, the company is fine, but Maurice's house just got washed away, right? First of all, odds are she's not coming into work a few days.

00;11;08;29 - 00;11;11;06
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, I got other priorities right.

00;11;11;09 - 00;11;37;02
Wayne Turmel
And do we have an ability to absorb that or are we going to stick to the. Well, that's personal time. And you've got five days to get your insurance together because after that we ain't paying you. And these conversations happen and they happen all the time. We are very blessed. I mean, we have had some interesting things in this organization in the last year.

00;11;37;05 - 00;11;59;27
Wayne Turmel
I'm about to go out for my second knee replacement in a year, and we've kind of worked around that in terms of time off and all of that. And it's all very civilized. Guy is stuck in a hurricane zone at the moment, you know, as an organization, we have decided we want to take care of each other.

00;12;00;02 - 00;12;17;29
Wayne Turmel
Right. And there is a mechanism in place for that. Right? First of all, there's a lot of grace. There's a lot of people pitching in and helping each other. That's really the kind of thing that it can happen on the spur of the moment. But boy, it's easier if you've planned it.

00;12;18;01 - 00;12;36;10
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. Well, I was going to say like, you know, I, I know that there's also been situations too, where it's like, this thing is not important right now. You know, speaking of spur of the moment, like, you know, my stepdad died last year and I was out for a week because it was just I just can't right now.

00;12;36;10 - 00;12;56;11
Marisa Eikenberry
And so it was like, podcast didn't get edited like this show didn't happen for a week or two. Like, and I don't want to say like everybody was okay with that. But it was grace was given. Right. You figure out what's the what's the biggest priority here. And frankly, it's not that well.

00;12;56;14 - 00;13;19;28
Wayne Turmel
And there are organizations that will tell you that that is the priority. And get your butt back here. We've seen we've seen it time and time again. Again. This is where the possibility of remote work, the idea of even if it's not all the time, can you access the data that you need? Can you reach your customers? Can you reach your teammates?

00;13;20;01 - 00;13;24;01
Wayne Turmel
Do we know if we can't reach the boss who does what?

00;13;24;03 - 00;13;24;14
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;13;24;20 - 00;13;53;22
Wayne Turmel
Those conversations are uncomfortable and they're weird, but you have to have them. And teams that have had those conversations and they know if something happens to Guy, Marissa handles that. If something happens to somebody else, you know, I know the intricate workings of a couple of people here in job, right? If I have to step in, at least short term, I can do that.

00;13;53;24 - 00;13;56;22
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. Basically, make sure you have a backup person.

00;13;56;24 - 00;14;27;28
Wayne Turmel
We've talked about it and we've planned for it a lot of companies. And this is where bad managers get in trouble, because if you weren't used to delegating, if you are used to doing everything yourself, if you don't share the passwords and the information and the workflows and the relationships with other people in the company. If you haven't included your team on that and built into that because you are so important, God forbid something happened to you.

00;14;28;00 - 00;14;28;21
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;14;28;23 - 00;14;46;13
Wayne Turmel
And you know, this gets back to ripen. Wrapping Kevin in bubble wrap. Clearly it's a founder led company. That's a very serious thing. Right. But we can hold the fort for a bit.

00;14;46;16 - 00;14;58;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. I was going to say and and to your point, like there are plans in place if something should happen, like he's got stuff written down in places and knows who to contact and like we know what to do.

00;14;58;22 - 00;15;25;25
Wayne Turmel
But this all boils down to a couple of things. First of all, you have to trust your employees. You have to trust. And Covid proved this almost beyond a reasonable doubt. You know, if we send people to work from home, they're going to slack off. They're nothing. It's not true. When there is a crisis and Covid was a crisis, when there is something that happens, people naturally pull together.

00;15;25;25 - 00;15;47;14
Wayne Turmel
I know Americans like to think they're the only ones that do it, but no, people do that right. They help each other, they come together, they do what they do. So your employees want the company to exist. Your employees want each other to be successful. They want to stay employed. If you want to, you know? Yeah.

00;15;47;17 - 00;15;49;07
Marisa Eikenberry
Hiring like a paycheck.

00;15;49;10 - 00;16;14;01
Wayne Turmel
That's, you know, for the short term, people will move heaven and earth and they will make it happen. But you have to help them achieve it. So have the conversations have not just a central location. I mean, it's great to have everything in a filing cabinet, but if there is a raging wildfire between me and the filing cabinet, that's not going to help.

00;16;14;03 - 00;16;17;06
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? Right. I do have one last question for you.

00;16;17;07 - 00;16;34;26
Wayne Turmel
It just hasn't been being and I'm not being facetious other than my normal smart Alec self. This is serious stuff that needs to be done. But they're uncomfortable and they're weird, and there's always something more important that we have to do until there is right.

00;16;34;28 - 00;16;53;05
Marisa Eikenberry
And we've talked a lot about business continuity and things like that. But one of the things that, one of my last questions for you is like, how can organizations provide meaningful support both during or after a disaster, to employees who are being affected by this and, you know, like home damage, family safety, that kind of stuff?

00;16;53;05 - 00;16;58;28
Marisa Eikenberry
I mean, we've already talked about like checking in and, you know, okay, what can I take from you? But like, what about the person itself?

00;16;59;03 - 00;17;04;22
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, a lot of that is just human grace and kindness.

00;17;04;25 - 00;17;06;16
Marisa Eikenberry
A strange concept, right?

00;17;06;19 - 00;17;37;28
Wayne Turmel
Well, it is, and when everybody is affected, it's very difficult to if there's a team member that I don't normally work with or that I'm not really close to, it might feel uncomfortable and weird. Right? For me to to reach out to them or to offer them something. But generally, most teams have somebody speaking very generically, politically and incorrectly.

00;17;38;00 - 00;18;05;10
Wayne Turmel
Eight times out of ten, it's a woman. That's where is the connector, who knows what's going on and will organize getting food to somebody or making sure that somebody has a roof if they need one or whatever that is. And we need to encourage those types of relationships, and we need to encourage those kinds of people on our teams.

00;18;05;12 - 00;18;09;14
Marisa Eikenberry
I would also encourage having a back that is one of those two.

00;18;09;16 - 00;18;11;03
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. And the backup, one.

00;18;11;03 - 00;18;21;00
Marisa Eikenberry
Of those, I mean, legitimately, because we had that happen where our connector had an issue and we all had a moment of, oh crap, who is it now? We figured it out, but still.

00;18;21;03 - 00;18;38;25
Wayne Turmel
And figured it out pretty quickly because we wanted to we cared. We care about our teammates. We care about all the people that we work with, and employers are shocked at how much we care about them. Right? They really are. How?

00;18;38;27 - 00;19;02;00
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, Wayne, thank you so much for this. And listeners, if any of you or family members, relatives, friends are affected by the most recent hurricane, our thoughts and prayers are with you. But before we go, I do want to let you know that the second edition of The Long Distance Leader is now available. This updated guide is perfect for navigating today's remote and hybrid work environments with new principles and proven strategies.

00;19;02;04 - 00;19;27;08
Marisa Eikenberry
Kevin, I can Mary Wayne Trammell show you how to lead effectively no matter where your team is located. Don't miss out on the latest insights and exercises designed to boost productivity and morale. Order your copy now! At Long Day's Work life.com/ldl and strengthen your leadership skills today. Thank you for listening to the Long Distance Worklife. For Shownotes transcripts and other resources, make sure to visit Longest Work life.com.

00;19;27;10 - 00;19;47;17
Marisa Eikenberry
And if you haven't yet, subscribe to the show so you don't miss any future episodes. And if you're on Apple or Spotify, please give us a rating or review. This helps us know what you love about our show and reach more listeners just like you. Feel free to contact us via email or LinkedIn with the links in our show notes, and let us know you listen to this episode, or even suggest a topic for Wayne and I to tackle in a future episode.

00;19;47;22 - 00;19;53;14
Marisa Eikenberry
We would love to hear from you. Thank you for joining us. And as Wayne likes to say, don't let the weeds get you down. Hey.


Timestamps

00:00 Introduction: Why Disaster Preparedness Matters
02:01 The High Cost of Delayed Evacuation
04:07 Ensuring Data Accessibility for Remote Teams
08:33 Building a Team Directory and Backup Contacts
12:00 Offering Employees Grace During Crises
15:00 Trust in Remote Employees During Disasters
19:02 Wrap-Up: The Importance of Proactive Disaster Planning

Related Episodes

Additional Resources

Read More
Amazon's Return to Office: Is Remote Work on the Way Out?
Ask Wayne Anything, Leadership

Amazon’s Return to Office: Is Remote Work on the Way Out?

Marisa Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel tackle the hot-button issue of Amazon’s recent return-to-office mandate and what it means for the future of remote work. Amazon’s decision to require employees to come back to the office—and its ultimatum of “come back or find a new job”—has sparked conversations about whether this marks the end of the remote work era.

Marisa and Wayne dive into the reasons behind Amazon’s push for office attendance, from massive real estate investments to a company culture driven by performance. They also explore the broader implications for other companies, the financial and cultural challenges that come with hybrid work, and how employees worldwide, like those at Ubisoft in France, are pushing back against such mandates.

Key Takeaways

1. Amazon's RTO Mandate: Why Amazon is forcing employees back into the office and the real estate and management philosophies driving the decision.
2. Is Remote Work Fading?: Why some companies are clinging to old work models, despite the success of remote work during the pandemic.
3. Worker Pushback Globally: How employees, including Ubisoft workers in France, are fighting against return-to-office policies—and what this means for global trends.
4. A Seismic Shift in Work: Why we’re in the midst of a massive change in how companies view work, leadership, and productivity.

View Full Transcript

00;00;08;03 - 00;00;18;14
Marisa Eikenberry
Welcome back to long distance worklife, where we help you lead work and thrive in remote hybrid teams. I'm. Marisa Eikenberry. And joining me because my co-host and remote work expert Wayne Turmel. Hi, Wayne.

00;00;18;16 - 00;00;21;09
Wayne Turmel
Hi. Hello. That would be me. Hi. How are you?

00;00;21;11 - 00;00;22;27
Marisa Eikenberry
I'm great. How are you?

00;00;22;29 - 00;00;26;15
Wayne Turmel
I am swell. And the great scheme of things.

00;00;26;17 - 00;00;47;13
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, I'm sure you're going to be even more swell. If not, your brain will explode here shortly as we're tackling the big question of. Is this the end of remote work or just the beginning of a new conversation? So one of the things that I know you've been talking a lot about lately is that Amazon just decided that everyone is returning to office.

00;00;47;15 - 00;01;02;04
Marisa Eikenberry
And if you didn't want to do that, well, have fun finding a new job. So why do you think that some companies, like Amazon, are pushing for this full return to office mandates, despite remote work being successful during the pandemic?

00;01;02;07 - 00;01;07;20
Wayne Turmel
Okay, so there's about five things to unpack in that sentence. Things.

00;01;07;23 - 00;01;11;00
Marisa Eikenberry
That's fair. I kind of gave you a loaded question right?

00;01;11;02 - 00;01;38;17
Wayne Turmel
And there was a lot going on. First of all, you know, were we successful during the pandemic? Generally speaking, yes. Work got done. Productivity. Depending on the type of job rose or fell a little bit. People generally got their work done. Why? Because people generally get their work done. There are people who don't, and there are people who will overachieve.

00;01;38;20 - 00;02;15;01
Wayne Turmel
And it all kind of averages out in the great scheme of things. But how does this apply to companies wanting to go back to the blessed before times? And I think there are. And I didn't write this down. So you have to count for me. I think there are three major things going on. Okay. Number one is companies have tons of money invested in real estate, space, equipment, all of this stuff.

00;02;15;03 - 00;02;26;11
Wayne Turmel
And when a CFO or a CEO walks into a building that is 50% empty, they have an immediate, visceral reaction, right?

00;02;26;12 - 00;02;27;06
Marisa Eikenberry
They're not getting water.

00;02;27;06 - 00;02;28;08
Wayne Turmel
On their business.

00;02;28;10 - 00;02;28;29
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

00;02;29;01 - 00;02;56;18
Wayne Turmel
It's not unreasonable because the question is, well, this doesn't make any sense. And here's the problem. If I have kind of negotiated that, you're going to spend three days in the office in two days out, and you can't shrink your footprint because you need space for the people who come in Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, if everybody's there those days, you still need as much space as you had before.

00;02;56;20 - 00;02;57;07
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;02;57;09 - 00;03;25;13
Wayne Turmel
So there is a sunk cost factor to all of this. That is not unreasonable. I mean, if we're going to change the way we work, if we're going to change the size of our footprint, we need to reexamine what it means to have an office. And what does it mean to have physical space, and what should that physical space look like?

00;03;25;15 - 00;03;54;26
Wayne Turmel
Which is a really big conversation that is harder to have than, let's get people back, right? Right. It's just it's a big problem that requires heavy thought and radically changing what you do. And business is not primed for that for the most part. The second thing I think, is that it depends on the kind of business that you're in.

00;03;54;26 - 00;04;22;08
Wayne Turmel
And it's funny because Kevin and I are constantly on this list, on these lists of best remote thinkers and all that stuff. And I say that not to say, look at me, I'm on cool lists, but to say that we get lumped in with the four day work week, death to the office. Do your job on the beach kind of people.

00;04;22;08 - 00;04;25;29
Wayne Turmel
And we're really not right.

00;04;26;02 - 00;04;27;26
Marisa Eikenberry
We've talked about this before.

00;04;27;29 - 00;04;53;28
Wayne Turmel
Every business has to examine what it does and how does it serve its clients, and what kind of company does it want to be when it grows up? And you look at a company like Amazon and for all of their cool computers, computer servers and algorithms that torture artists on a regular basis, the fact of the matter is, they are a 20th century horse and buggy business.

00;04;54;00 - 00;05;04;15
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, they have warehouses full of stuff. That stuff needs to go on wagons. The wagons go to people's homes. That's their business, right?

00;05;04;17 - 00;05;05;26
Marisa Eikenberry
Right, right.

00;05;05;29 - 00;05;34;23
Wayne Turmel
And so, you know, an old school approach is not the most unreasonable thing. The third thing I think has to do with the kind of management company you want to be. And what I am going to say is information based on publicly available data. It is not. You know, Jeff Bezos does not need me to tell him how to run a business.

00;05;34;26 - 00;05;37;25
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. Jeff Bezos does not know who we are.

00;05;37;27 - 00;05;45;24
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. Well, but I'm sure his lawyers do, you know, a simple Google search can flag that or.

00;05;45;26 - 00;05;46;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;05;46;21 - 00;06;08;05
Wayne Turmel
But here's the thing. Amazon has a management style that they take pride in, which is produce or die. Do as you're told, do what we say, and nobody gets hurt. I mean, that's basically their stock. They have a 150% turnover every year.

00;06;08;07 - 00;06;10;24
Marisa Eikenberry
Oh I'm not sure I really like.

00;06;10;26 - 00;06;42;19
Wayne Turmel
Most of that is in there. Where every staff which are not working remotely anyway. Right. The the number is lower than that for admin and office staff, but it's still a pretty high turnover organization and that's how they choose to operate. They always have as we we in Las Vegas where there is a big Amazon presence, we like to say everybody knows a lot of people who used to work at Amazon.

00;06;42;21 - 00;06;47;05
Marisa Eikenberry
My stepdad used to work at Amazon, but we're in Indianapolis. But yes.

00;06;47;08 - 00;07;11;01
Wayne Turmel
Right. They have high turnover. It's March or die. This is how they choose to operate, and they are free to do so. I mean, it's their business, their rules. Now, you asked a question because I was paying attention. So those are the three things, right? There's kind of this legacy real estate problem, which is tied to CEO ego.

00;07;11;04 - 00;07;21;25
Wayne Turmel
There's what kind of business win. And then there is what's your general attitude towards your people? It was three. And I remember you did.

00;07;21;27 - 00;07;22;19
Marisa Eikenberry
You did.

00;07;22;22 - 00;08;02;18
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. So you have to start thinking about what is this going to mean in the long run? In the short term, along with the announcement that Amazon was going to do this. Announced that they were cutting their management staff by 15% and increasing the number of direct reports each manager would have. Well, it would not be the worst thing if I were at Amazon to say everybody has to come back to the office and 10 or 12% of your managers said, the heck with that, I'm going to find a job somewhere else.

00;08;02;24 - 00;08;13;21
Wayne Turmel
And they go, okay, that's done right? They insist this is not a way of laying off managers.

00;08;13;23 - 00;08;14;28
Marisa Eikenberry
But yes, in any way.

00;08;15;03 - 00;08;35;14
Wayne Turmel
Unintentional. The result is probably going to be about the same that that it also makes sense. You know, if you want to have that in office mentality, divesting yourself of the people who don't share that mentality is probably not a bad policy. I mean, you want people who are going to buy in, right?

00;08;35;17 - 00;08;36;22
Marisa Eikenberry
Of course.

00;08;36;24 - 00;09;04;18
Wayne Turmel
Now, what is this going to mean long term? And this is where you start to look at other companies besides Amazon. You know, Google said, a year ago, year and a half ago. Everybody get your crap back to the office. And there was plenty of pushback to the point where, quite as it's kept more people working there every day than there used to be.

00;09;04;23 - 00;09;13;14
Wayne Turmel
But ain't all that now, you you had sent me, an interesting article about Ubisoft.

00;09;13;17 - 00;09;35;08
Marisa Eikenberry
For the gamers in the audience and the ones that do not know, Ubisoft is a very, very, very large gaming company. If you're familiar with things like Rayman or Assassin's Creed, they make those games. And yeah, to your point, like I saw this article, just the other day that employees in France are actually threatening to strike over return to office mandates.

00;09;35;09 - 00;10;06;03
Marisa Eikenberry
And at the time that we're recording this, that strike has it happened yet? But by the time you're listening to this, if it if the strike goes through, it will have already happened. So I'll be linking to a story from PC gamer about it, and I'm sure there will be updates on it as you're listening to this. But speaking of that, like, you know, we've been talking about Amazon in the US a lot here, but do you think that we're going to see more worker pushback globally against these policies, like what Ubisoft is doing in France?

00;10;06;06 - 00;10;53;24
Wayne Turmel
Well, I think that we are in and I've said this before, and people are rolling their eyes and getting tired of hearing me say it. We are in the middle of a seismic change in what it means to have a job. What does it mean to work for somebody? What does it mean to have employees? Right? All of this stuff is changing probably more dramatically than since the 1920s or 30s, when we got a 40 hour workweek and a five hour or a five day a week, schedule and people commuting this seismic change that nobody really knows where it's going to wind up.

00;10;53;26 - 00;11;17;18
Wayne Turmel
Part of it. And the Ubisoft, Ubisoft, employees. I'm I'm sorry, guys, that it's happening. I'm not surprised that it's happening in France, because France has a long history of work stoppages and using their protest, and certainly much more so than North Americans do.

00;11;17;20 - 00;11;18;15
Marisa Eikenberry


00;11;19;05 - 00;11;51;12
Wayne Turmel
But it speaks to the fact that there is a generational change. There is a change based on the type of work one does. That changes people's relationship with their employer and whether they feel like where the work gets done as important as what work gets done. I mean, if you're a coder and you're spending your time in the dark with your mother shoving food, you under the door and any hour of the day or night, you can get inspired and work on stuff.

00;11;51;14 - 00;11;58;19
Wayne Turmel
Swiping a bag at 9:00 every morning may be of questionable value.

00;11;58;21 - 00;11;59;11
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;11;59;14 - 00;12;32;21
Wayne Turmel
The other thing, and I'm verging on breaking one of our sacred rules at the cabinet. I can very group which is oh, no political. But there is a sense in the workplace right now, and every study is kind of bearing this out. As benefits start to go away for more and more employees. Boeing, for example, just announced its dropping health care for its employees.

00;12;32;24 - 00;12;45;02
Wayne Turmel
People want a sense of being able to earn something or have a perk. And one of the few negotiable bills at this moment is work flexibility.

00;12;45;05 - 00;12;47;06
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;12;47;09 - 00;13;14;09
Wayne Turmel
It's one of the few things that employers. Yeah. Okay. If you want to stay home Monday and Friday, knock yourself out. Are we benevolent? It's a short sighted policy. It's a short sighted policy on the part of the employees. It's a short sighted policy on the part of the employer. But it keeps people from quitting or gives people enough motivation to come and work for you.

00;13;14;12 - 00;13;37;17
Wayne Turmel
But we're in the middle of all of this chaos where it used to be that if you wanted to work in a certain field or something, there was a place that you went and did that. Now you have a few more options about where you work. What I would say about this and I babbled a lot and we've covered a lot of ground.

00;13;37;24 - 00;14;06;22
Wayne Turmel
But let me kind of boil this down to a couple of things for employers. It is going to be a matter of time before you figure out what are the things that are really important to them. What is the return on investment for having these big real estate kind of investments, and what kind of people do they want to attract?

00;14;06;23 - 00;14;27;03
Wayne Turmel
We've said before that, you know, when you say we have flexible work, or remote work, but you need to be in the office once a week. You've really said, I want the best people I can get who live within 20 minutes of the office.

00;14;27;06 - 00;14;30;06
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? You don't really want the best people, right?

00;14;30;07 - 00;14;57;05
Wayne Turmel
I mean, that's which is fine. That was always who they were hiring. But with remote work and the advent of, kind of dispersed work and we've reached this point where, you know, we could hire different people, we could hire a different type of employee, but not if we're not if we're stuck with that old paradigm. It is totally the company's right to do that.

00;14;57;08 - 00;15;29;14
Wayne Turmel
The golden rule, the one with the gold makes the rules right. Now I'm going to say something which is, perhaps unpopular with some of our listeners, which is what will make this work increase. Remote work is that we, as the employees, need to prove that we are worthy of it. We need proof of concept. We need proof that the employer is not giving everything up by letting us do that.

00;15;29;16 - 00;15;42;29
Wayne Turmel
A lot of the arguments that people use about remote work are, well, I want time with my family, I want this, I want that. Well that's nice. Your boss doesn't really care.

00;15;43;02 - 00;15;44;23
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? Right. It does. It benefits.

00;15;45;00 - 00;15;50;28
Wayne Turmel
Employees. Satisfied voices are important only insofar as it affects your work.

00;15;51;00 - 00;15;53;06
Marisa Eikenberry
Well so real quick I'm going to go slightly off on.

00;15;53;06 - 00;15;54;22
Wayne Turmel
It's going to take a while.

00;15;54;24 - 00;15;55;20
Marisa Eikenberry
Okay.

00;15;55;23 - 00;15;56;17
Wayne Turmel
Okay.

00;15;56;19 - 00;16;16;22
Marisa Eikenberry
Oh I think we had a slight delay but I think it's solved now. I was just going to say on the same line as we're talking about, you know, employers and CEOs. A recent survey of CEOs actually suggests that remote work will be dead in three years. What is influencing this belief? Like, is it just wishful thinking?

00;16;16;24 - 00;16;33;03
Wayne Turmel
Mostly it's wishful thinking. I mean, there was a CEO in the UK who was famous for a microsecond for saying what we really need is 20% unemployment. So all these people will remember who they are.

00;16;33;05 - 00;16;36;19
Marisa Eikenberry
I remember us talking about that in a past episode on like.

00;16;36;24 - 00;17;09;08
Wayne Turmel
So there's some of that. Here's what it's going to take. And I don't know who's going to do it. I don't know how they're going to step up when somebody becomes the next Google, when somebody becomes the next big company with a remote first policy. People will start to pay attention on a larger basis. Right now, the companies that are successful remote first are very niche in terms of the industry that they're in, and they tend to be fairly small.

00;17;09;09 - 00;17;29;05
Wayne Turmel
All they tend to be startups. When a company reaches mega status and works in this new way, follows this new God help me, I use the word paradigm, then it will start because people follow the leaders.

00;17;29;08 - 00;17;30;17
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? Right.

00;17;30;19 - 00;17;47;09
Wayne Turmel
And so that's what it's going to take. Somebody has got to really break out of the box. Or remote work is going to continue to team by team, organization by organization. Bit by bit. And it's never going to 100% takeover.

00;17;47;12 - 00;17;49;12
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. Of course. Like we don't expect it.

00;17;49;13 - 00;18;11;12
Wayne Turmel
They're still going to be. Well if you listen to people out there everything is binary right. Either. It's death to the office and burn your ties, and you never have to go back into the office again. Seize the means of production. Or. That was a lovely little experiment. Get your butt back to your desk.

00;18;11;14 - 00;18;12;01
Marisa Eikenberry
That's fair.

00;18;12;07 - 00;18;44;10
Wayne Turmel
And I don't think it's going to be that simple, but our goal in in with this show, and I hope our listeners understand this. Our goal is just whatever the situation is, whatever your situation is, find a way to make it work right. Make some good decisions about your own attitudes, your own behaviors, and your own choices so that you can navigate this crazy changing workplace and keep body, soul, and spirit intact in the weasels away from your ankles.

00;18;44;13 - 00;18;46;04
Wayne Turmel
That's what we're here for.

00;18;46;06 - 00;19;08;00
Marisa Eikenberry
Okay? Right. So, Wayne, thank you so much for this conversation. And there was a lot of stuff that I would have loved to get to, but we do not have time. So probably another show. And before we go, the second edition of the Long-Distance leader is now available. This updated guide is perfect for navigating today's remote and hybrid work environments with new principles and proven strategies.

00;19;08;03 - 00;19;31;08
Marisa Eikenberry
Kevin Barry and Wayne Trammell show you how to lead effectively no matter where your team is located. Don't miss out on the latest insights and exercises designed to boost productivity and morale. Order your copy now! At Long Distance Work life.com/ldl and strengthen your remote leadership skills. Today. And thank you so much for listening to Long Distance Worklife for Shownotes transcripts and other resources.

00;19;31;10 - 00;19;53;25
Marisa Eikenberry
Make sure to visit Long Distance Work life.com. If you haven't yet, subscribe to the show so you don't miss any future episodes. And if you're on Apple or Spotify, please give us a rating and review. Your feedback helps us improve and reach more listeners just like you. Feel free to contact us via email or LinkedIn with the links in our show notes, and let us know you listen to this episode, or suggest a topic for Wayne and AI to tackle in a future episode.

00;19;53;28 - 00;19;59;06
Marisa Eikenberry
We would love to hear from you. Thank you for joining us. And as Wayne, like, say, don't let the whistles get you down.

00;19;59;09 - 00;20;03;02
Unknown


00;20;03;04 - 00;20;04;29
Unknown



Timestamps

0:00 Intro
1:00 Amazon’s Return-to-Office Policy Explained
3:20 Why Some Companies Are Going Back to the Office
5:30 Real Estate and CEO Ego: What’s Really Driving the Mandates
10:00 Global Pushback: Ubisoft and Strikes Over Office Returns
13:00 Is Remote Work Really Going Away?
16:00 What Does This Mean for Employers and Employees?
18:30 Remote Work Isn’t Dead Yet: Final Thoughts

Related Episodes

Additional Resources

Order The Long-Distance Leader

Perfect your remote leadership skills with the updated edition of "The Long-Distance Leader" by Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, featuring new principles and proven strategies for today's hybrid work environments.

 Order
The Long-Distance Leader
Read More
Mastering Hybrid Coaching: Avoiding Proximity Bias in Remote Teams
Ask Wayne Anything, Hybrid Work, Surviving Remote Work, Working Remotely

Mastering Hybrid Coaching: Avoiding Proximity Bias in Remote Teams

Wayne Turmel and Marisa Eikenberry tackle the challenge of proximity bias and its impact on coaching in remote and hybrid teams. Proximity bias, where leaders give preferential treatment to those physically closer, can skew coaching opportunities and development. Wayne and Marisa discuss how to overcome this bias and ensure remote team members receive equal attention and guidance. You’ll also learn practical tips on how to leverage technology, such as Zoom, Slack, and Teams, to create more effective and meaningful coaching experiences.

Key Takeaways

  • Defining Proximity Bias: What it is and why it matters, not just for leaders but also for peers and teams.
  • Coaching Differences: How coaching remote employees differs from in-person coaching and why proximity plays a significant role.
  • The Importance of Regular Feedback: How coaching should be proactive, consistent, and more formal in remote settings to avoid isolation.
  • Leveraging Technology: Tips on using tools like Zoom and Slack to enrich one-on-one coaching experiences and maintain engagement.
  • Avoiding Bias in Hybrid Teams: Strategies to ensure that in-office employees don’t get favored over their remote counterparts during coaching sessions.
  • The Emotional Impact: How not receiving feedback or coaching can be demotivating for remote employees, and what leaders can do to avoid this.

View Full Transcript

00;00;07;27 - 00;00;08;18
Marisa Eikenberry
Welcome back to.

00;00;08;18 - 00;00;20;00
Marisa Eikenberry
The Long-Distance worksite, where we help you live, work, and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Russ, I can be a fellow remote worker. And joining me is my co-host and remote work expert, Wayne Trimble. Hi, Lynn.

00;00;20;03 - 00;00;22;05
Wayne Turmel
Hello, Marissa. How are you?

00;00;22;11 - 00;00;23;28
Marisa Eikenberry
I'm great. How are you?

00;00;24;01 - 00;00;27;01
Wayne Turmel
I'm fine. Even though we're nowhere near each other.

00;00;27;03 - 00;00;57;00
Marisa Eikenberry
Right, right. You in Vegas and me in Indianapolis said we're going to kind of talk about that today, as we do every time on our remote show. But today, specifically, we're talking about coaching and differences between coaching in-person and remote and how to try to make those similar and avoiding proximity bias. So one of the first things that I do want to start with, and we've talked about this a lot on the show, but for people who have never listened to an episode of ours before, maybe we should define what is proximity bias.

00;00;57;08 - 00;01;35;21
Wayne Turmel
Proximity bias as it relates to leaders. Okay, is and I'm looking at this very fancy I generated definition and okay, like all I generated definitions I want to go. That's not entirely it. It says and I quote proximity bias is a cognitive bias that occurs when people have positions of power, favor employees who are physically closer to them, and that includes things like promotions and coaching opportunities and an unintentional exclusion for those who aren't there, and all of that good stuff.

00;01;35;21 - 00;02;02;03
Wayne Turmel
The problem with this definition, of course, is that it happens not just in leadership, it happens in life, and it happens among peers. On teams. So when we're talking proximity bias, yes, in this case, because we're going to be discussing coaching its leaders, but it's also peers and colleagues and stuff like that.

00;02;02;06 - 00;02;11;06
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. So how does proximity bias specifically like affect the coaching experiences of remote employees as opposed to ones in person?

00;02;11;08 - 00;02;41;12
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, well, proximity bias affects coaching in some obvious ways, right? An obvious way is if I'm in the office and I see somebody doing something incorrectly or wrong or even really well, and I want to give them some coaching and some feedback on that, my brain says, I see this happening and I should respond, the problem, of course, with remote workers is you often don't see things happening in real time.

00;02;41;19 - 00;03;11;24
Wayne Turmel
You see them long after the fact, and they generally need to be pretty dramatic in order for your brain to go, you know, I should pick up the phone. I should type them a message. I should make a point of mentioning this. So coaching happens much more spontaneously, much more frequently, and often better in person than it does remotely.

00;03;11;24 - 00;03;49;09
Wayne Turmel
And the ultimate impact of that is more than you would think. Because when you are remote and you perceive that other people are getting coaching and attention that you are not getting, it can be rather disheartening. And the. Well, of course, but when you're the one who is guilty of the bias, you often don't see that. For example, you know, out of sight, out of mind to a lot of leaders is, you know, unless there's a problem, I'm just going to let Marissa do her thing.

00;03;49;11 - 00;03;51;29
Marisa Eikenberry
And for some reason, you're okay with that.

00;03;52;01 - 00;04;27;00
Wayne Turmel
For some people, they're okay with that. But even people who are really good at their jobs and prefer to be left alone to do them need a little love. They need some attention. They need positive reinforcement and and occasionally correction. Because a lot of us who work remotely and we've talked before about the Wiley Coyote moments, where, you know, it's like the Roadrunner cartoons where you run, run, run, run, run and you're way off the cliff before you realize that you're off the cliff.

00;04;27;02 - 00;04;31;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. But if you would have had, you know, weekly or biweekly meetings, you may have if.

00;04;31;19 - 00;04;59;23
Wayne Turmel
You were getting regular feedback, which is ultimately what all of this comes down to is feedback loops, right? And proximity bias tends to have really strong feedback loops with the people with whom you are physically proximate and weaker, and less frequent feedback loops with people that you do not interact with in a rich way nearly as often.

00;04;59;25 - 00;05;14;10
Marisa Eikenberry
So what are some signs that a manager might be showing proximity bias during one on one? So if they are, you know, actually meeting. But how might those one on ones differ a little bit if they're showing proximity bias?

00;05;14;12 - 00;05;48;06
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, I think there are a bunch of ways. And I'll just tell you because everything ultimately is about me. It used to make me crazy with managers who, if they were in the office, would call people in. They'd have a cup of coffee, they'd sit across the desk, they do their thing. But because I was usually on the other end of the country or traveling or they were traveling, I would get my coaching conversations on a staticky cell phone in a busy airport lobby.

00;05;48;08 - 00;05;50;10
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, it was an afterthought.

00;05;50;12 - 00;06;22;20
Wayne Turmel
It was, well, we got to do this. It's schedule. Let's do it. And so there wasn't time to connect. There wasn't the visual component where you could see that somebody was stressed or not. You basically because you're trying to drown out the distractions around you run from a checklist. And so a lot of those one on ones were not coaching opportunities so much as they were check ins on tasks.

00;06;22;22 - 00;06;23;06
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;06;23;06 - 00;06;25;06
Wayne Turmel
Which is important.

00;06;25;09 - 00;06;26;01
Marisa Eikenberry
But it's not the whole.

00;06;26;07 - 00;06;52;20
Wayne Turmel
Coaching. Coaching is more than that. Coaching is not just having a one on one coaching conversation or conversation. Coaching is a very specific thing. It involves feedback. It involves both performance and development. So it's not just this is what you're doing, but what would you like to be doing right? What would you like to be doing better? How can I help you do that?

00;06;52;22 - 00;07;25;28
Wayne Turmel
Is true coaching. It's not just feedback right. So and that's one that's a very obvious one. I think the other thing is that coaching remotely by definition is going to be more formal and needs to be planned, which means there are big coaching moments. Okay. But there's not a lot of that spontaneous in the hallway giving somebody a thumbs up when you hear them on the phone, doing a great job with a customer.

00;07;26;00 - 00;07;45;08
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. That's fair. So, you know, you were talking a second ago about your old coaching conversations where, you know, staticky cell phones and things like that. And obviously we now have tools like Zoom and Slack huddles and Microsoft Teams that give that visual and help make things a little bit easier, even if it isn't quite the same way.

00;07;45;10 - 00;07;53;09
Marisa Eikenberry
So how can technology help to kind of create a level playing field during one on ones between remote and in-office employees?

00;07;53;11 - 00;08;25;17
Wayne Turmel
Sure. Well, we have talked a lot on this show about the importance of richness and scope and understanding when you use which right. It's fair to say that coaching should be an extremely rich experience. It doesn't mean you can't send an ad a girl over over slack or something like that. But in general, coaching, requires a little bit more attention.

00;08;25;20 - 00;09;13;08
Wayne Turmel
And, and so that's part of it. So so the richer technologies are probably helpful. The other thing and not enough coaches do this, I think, is when you're on teams or whatever you're on, is the ability to share data so that you are not just staring at each other's faces, but you're actually looking at numbers and saying, you know, if I say you're not hitting your numbers or you were a little off this month, that's very different than looking at a spreadsheet that shows exactly how much you were off relative to the month before or the last couple of months, and it makes it more real when it's just face to face.

00;09;13;15 - 00;09;17;10
Wayne Turmel
It's very easy for coaching to become emotional.

00;09;17;14 - 00;09;17;24
Marisa Eikenberry
Okay.

00;09;18;00 - 00;09;33;19
Wayne Turmel
And emotional in good ways, but also emotional in ways of becoming defensive or, you know, putting on a front or whatever. And and that's for both the coach and the coach.

00;09;33;21 - 00;09;35;03
Marisa Eikenberry
Coach, of course.

00;09;35;05 - 00;09;37;10
Wayne Turmel
The person being coached. Okay.

00;09;37;12 - 00;09;48;01
Marisa Eikenberry
With that. You know, are there some things that managers can be doing, like to, enhance that a little bit during one on ones.

00;09;48;03 - 00;10;20;00
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. And I'm not going to make this whole thing a shameless plug for the new book, the new old book, but in the Long Distance Leader Revised Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership, which is the updated version. One of the things that isn't updated a whole lot is the section on coaching, because it's the same as it's been. It's funny, one of the critiques we got of the book is, well, there's all this stuff about coaching, but it's not specific to remote and hybrid.

00;10;20;02 - 00;10;36;25
Wayne Turmel
And that is correct, because one of the things that we don't do well enough, even in person, is coaching. And there's no evidence that says we're going to do it better without the visual and approximation cues. And those sorts of things.

00;10;36;27 - 00;10;37;20
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;10;37;22 - 00;11;10;23
Wayne Turmel
But there are some things that need to happen. And a big one is when you are coaching, you need to check your beliefs because it's very easy to. And this is part of proximity bias. If you see people busily working, you assume that they're always busily working. And that tells you something about that person, right? If you feel positive towards them, you are inclined to cut them slack when something goes wrong because you see them working.

00;11;10;25 - 00;11;24;23
Wayne Turmel
When you are dealing with somebody who is surrounded by white space and you don't see everything that's going on around them. While we want to assume positive intent.

00;11;24;27 - 00;11;25;08
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;11;25;15 - 00;11;56;15
Wayne Turmel
We don't always. Because if I've worked with Morris a long enough, there is a part of me that goes, you know what she's like. And and that colors how we approach our coaching. And over time, if we don't check those beliefs, if we don't stop and ask ourselves if the information we're getting or the impression we're getting is accurate, we start to act on those beliefs by default.

00;11;56;17 - 00;12;17;28
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, we've talked about this in previous episodes too, but because, you know, you can't see somebody, maybe their performance is down this month. And you know, you notice that. So you just assume, oh, they're lazy. But if you had been seeing them you would notice like they're stressed out, they're overworked, they're burned out. They've got something going on at home that's affecting stuff.

00;12;17;28 - 00;12;22;04
Marisa Eikenberry
And you have no idea if you're not checking in like that.

00;12;22;06 - 00;12;49;18
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. And so, you know, a coaching conversation actually has several parts. And one of the most important, you just said it and we kind of glossed over that part, okay. Is at the beginning of the conversation when we say, how are you? We made the correct response with the correct response is, oh, I am fine. Let us please get to this meeting that I don't really want to have.

00;12;49;18 - 00;12;51;02
Wayne Turmel
But you have called.

00;12;51;05 - 00;12;51;15
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;12;51;23 - 00;12;52;20
Wayne Turmel
Right.

00;12;52;22 - 00;12;54;00
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

00;12;54;02 - 00;13;22;11
Wayne Turmel
And, and and so and I'm sure I've said this before because I'm mildly obsessed with it. How are you? Is both a greeting and a request for information. Right. And a good coaching conversation starts with the request for information. Yes. The second thing that the coaching conversation does, and hopefully over time, the person understands that that is a legit request for information, right?

00;13;22;11 - 00;13;29;14
Wayne Turmel
When I say to you, how are you doing? You are generally pretty forthcoming with me about how are you doing?

00;13;29;17 - 00;13;34;01
Marisa Eikenberry
I mean, we have that trust established, right? Like, I just I don't have to trust anybody.

00;13;34;03 - 00;14;05;19
Wayne Turmel
Right. But we have that trust established. I have demonstrated in the past that I am actually willing to listen. I give a hoot. And and so, I mean, we started we start every conversation with how's it going? How you doing? Is, you know, what's going on in your world. But the other thing that a good coaching conversation does, this is different than the sports model coaching that we often think of, where the coach tells you stuff right.

00;14;05;21 - 00;14;06;22
Marisa Eikenberry


00;14;06;24 - 00;14;32;28
Wayne Turmel
Nobody sees Phil Jackson. Ask Michael Jordan what's going on out there. You see Phil talking to Jordan right. You have these guys that was maybe the oldest white guy reference I could have made there. But but a good coaching conversation lets the other person speak first. Yeah right. What's going on. What would you like to talk about?

00;14;33;03 - 00;14;57;12
Wayne Turmel
And the reason is very simple. I can come in saying I need to give Billy Bob feedback on this thing that isn't work, and that's fine, right? Because we need to get his performance up. So I'm going to coach him. But as you alluded to earlier, let's find out what's going on with Billy Bob. And one of the really important things is does Billy Bob know there's a problem?

00;14;57;15 - 00;15;27;01
Wayne Turmel
That's right. If I say, tell me about your numbers last week, oh, it's no big deal, blah, blah, blah. If I say, tell me about your numbers last month. And Billy Bob goes, oh, God, you wouldn't believe it. It's such a okay. Until he events, he is not going to be able to hear my feedback. If I think that he's in denial, I'm going to give him different feedback than I would if he is guilt ridden and knows that there is a problem, right?

00;15;27;01 - 00;15;57;02
Wayne Turmel
Because he is guilt ridden and knows that there is a problem, he probably wants to get better. And I am going to approach that coaching conversation different than I will. If he doesn't think there's a problem at all. Well, it's really important for me to know where the coached person is psychologically, mentally in terms of the problem, because that's going to radically dictate how we have that conversation.

00;15;57;04 - 00;16;16;23
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. Well, it's interesting that you're saying this too, because it's one of those things that like, I, I mean, I've been working for the Kevin like Burger for ten years, right? And I did not realize that almost every conversation I've had with any manager that I've had has been like that. The one on one started off with, okay, I have some things for you, but let's start with you first.

00;16;16;29 - 00;16;35;06
Marisa Eikenberry
What do you have for me? And then and sometimes it's the same stuff that's on their list. But it was just, you know, I mean, I have a biweekly meeting with, you know, my manager now, and it's always what's on your list first. And it didn't occur to me until now that it's like, oh, yeah, well, like that let me lead the conversation first for a little bit.

00;16;35;08 - 00;17;02;07
Wayne Turmel
Well, you know, we both have lists, right? Right. The manager here has a Kevin has a waiting list. Right. These are the things I need to talk to Wayne about. And Wayne has a Kevin list. And it is an actual physical running list that I keep. And if what is on the top of Kevin's list is not what's on the top of mine, I'm going to be responsive to what Kevin's telling me.

00;17;02;07 - 00;17;15;18
Wayne Turmel
But in the back of my head I'm going, yeah, but what I really want to talk about is right, right, right. Or what I really think is important is this. And I may not be fully in the game.

00;17;15;20 - 00;17;18;22
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. Well, it may be something that's not on Kevin's radar.

00;17;18;29 - 00;17;49;04
Wayne Turmel
Right. So here we are running radically out of time. And most of what we have talked about is coaching, because coaching is coaching. And the nuances of doing it remotely are important. There not the biggest things in the world, but they matter. The only thing before we wrap up is that in hybrid hybrid coaching, if you've got people couple days in the week, blah blah blah, choose when to do it in person.

00;17;49;04 - 00;18;05;27
Wayne Turmel
And coaching in person is almost always more valuable than coaching at a distance. So if you can schedule your time and arrange your schedules so that if you are in the office together, that's when that stuff happens.

00;18;05;29 - 00;18;25;27
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? Have it be as rich as possible. Of course. So Wayne, thank you so much for this. And I really hope that our listeners got a lot out of this. But before we go, the second edition of The Long Distance Leader is now available, and this updated guide is perfect for navigating today's remote and hybrid work environments with new principles and proven strategies.

00;18;25;27 - 00;18;56;12
Marisa Eikenberry
Kevin and Wayne show you how to lead effectively no matter where your team is located. Don't miss out on the latest insights and exercises designed to boost productivity and morale, and order your copy now! At long distance work life.com/l d l and strengthen your remote leadership skills today. And thank you so much for listening to the long distance work life for Shownotes transcripts and other resources, make sure to visit Long Distance Work life.com and if you haven't yet, subscribe to the show so you don't miss any future episodes.

00;18;56;17 - 00;19;12;04
Marisa Eikenberry
And while you're there, make sure to give us a rating and review your feedback helps us improve and reach more listeners just like you. And feel free to contact us via email or LinkedIn with the links in our show notes. Let us know you listen to this episode, or suggest a topic for Wayne and I to tackle in a future episode.

00;19;12;06 - 00;19;17;23
Marisa Eikenberry
We would love to hear from you. Thanks for joining us. And as Wayne likes to say, don't let his weasels get you down.

00;19;17;25 - 00;19;23;05
Marisa Eikenberry
Hey.

00;19;23;07 - 00;19;31;26
Marisa Eikenberry
There.

00;19;31;29 - 00;19;32;07
Marisa Eikenberry
You.

Timestamps

00:00 Intro
00:27 What is Proximity Bias?
01:35 How Proximity Bias Affects Coaching
03:11 Differences Between In-Person and Remote Coaching
05:14 Signs of Proximity Bias in One-on-Ones
07:45 Using Technology to Enhance Remote Coaching
09:48 Creating a Level Playing Field with Remote Tools
10:48 Coaching Conversations: Feedback and Emotional Dynamics
12:22 The Importance of Trust in Coaching
14:05 How to Start a Good Coaching Conversation
17:49 Final Thoughts on Hybrid Coaching
18:25 Long-Distance Leader Book Promotion
18:56 Outro

Related Episodes

Additional Resources

Order The Long-Distance Leader

Perfect your remote leadership skills with the updated edition of "The Long-Distance Leader" by Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, featuring new principles and proven strategies for today's hybrid work environments.

 Order
The Long-Distance Leader
Read More
Ask Wayne Anything, Hybrid Work

Is Your Hybrid Work Strategy a Mule or a Platypus?

Wayne Turmel and Marisa Eikenberry dive into the hybrid work debate, comparing two very unlikely animals: mules and platypuses. Wayne introduces his humorous yet insightful analogy, explaining how a “mule” model of hybrid work is intentional and strategic, while a “platypus” model is a chaotic, unplanned combination of different parts.

They discuss the challenges many organizations face when trying to make hybrid work “work” and provide practical advice on moving from a disjointed model to one that serves both teams and the business. With the rapid evolution of remote and hybrid environments, the question becomes: is your team a well-planned mule or a hodgepodge platypus?

Key Takeaways

  • What hybrid work really means and why most companies are just coping rather than strategizing.
  • The difference between a mule and platypus approach in hybrid work.
  • How strategic hybrid teams balance not only where but also when work happens.
  • Practical steps to move from a platypus hybrid model to a mule-like, intentional approach.
  • The importance of understanding both asynchronous and synchronous work in a hybrid setting.

View Full Transcript

00;00;07;26 - 00;00;08;18
Marisa Eikenberry
Welcome back to the.

00;00;08;18 - 00;00;19;13
Marisa Eikenberry
Long distance work life. We help you live, work and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Marissa Eikenberry, a fellow remote worker, and joining me is my co-host and remote work expert, Winter Bell. Hi, Lynn.

00;00;19;16 - 00;00;21;23
Wayne Turmel
Hello, Marissa. How are you?

00;00;21;25 - 00;00;23;21
Marisa Eikenberry
I'm great. How are you?

00;00;23;23 - 00;00;32;17
Wayne Turmel
I am fine. For the uninitiated, we are recording this on the Friday before a long weekend and things may get silly. Is.

00;00;32;20 - 00;01;03;02
Marisa Eikenberry
We're ready to go. But anyway, we're also talking about something silly, so that that helps. But lately, in articles and stuff, when you've been talking about hybrid in the sense of do you want a mule or a platypus? And which, first of all, I think it's hilarious. But why don't we start off with can you explain how that analogy applies to remote models or hybrid?

00;01;03;02 - 00;01;37;13
Wayne Turmel
Well, there are there are grown people basically saying, I don't want a mule or a platypus. What are you talking about? So here is what is I have been spending a lot of time thinking, writing, talk to customers about hybrid work, and I realized that most of what we call hybrid work isn't okay. at best, what most teams are doing, most organizations are doing is a hostage negotiation.

00;01;37;15 - 00;01;38;22
Marisa Eikenberry
Sounds about right.

00;01;38;24 - 00;02;01;07
Wayne Turmel
How much can we make them come into the office before they quit? And how much can we whine and complain about not going into the office before they fire us and we settle on? Okay, come in three days a week. And that's kind of it. And that works kind of, sort of that doesn't make anybody ecstatic, but it gets stuff done.

00;02;01;07 - 00;02;29;07
Wayne Turmel
It's fine. But the problem is that it is not a strategy. It is a coping mechanism. And as a result, you get some weird problems with it. I go into the office and I can't get anything done because people are stopping by my desk and they want to have meetings I hadn't planned for, and there's somebody's birthdays, or there's cake in the break room, and I can't get anything done.

00;02;29;07 - 00;02;45;03
Wayne Turmel
But when I work from home, where I used to be able to get stuff done, now I'm on zoom meetings from morning till night, and that's one of the problems when you've kind of negotiated one problem but haven't really thought about the others.

00;02;45;06 - 00;02;46;04
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;02;46;06 - 00;03;22;00
Wayne Turmel
So the question leaving aside mules and platypuses is do you want to have a strategically planned hybrid work system, or do you just want to have this kind of ad hoc thing? Which got me thinking about animals? I'm getting to the point. I swear. I know it got me thinking about animals. What is a hybrid? In biological terms, a hybrid is the offspring of two different animals or biological entities.

00;03;22;00 - 00;03;51;16
Wayne Turmel
You can have hybrid axes, but in this case two different animals, which creates a third animal which is a unique beast. So the classic example is a mule. Yes, it's part horse and part donkey. But if you've ever encountered mules, you know that they are their own distinct thing and another mule is going to be more like a mule than it is its parent.

00;03;51;18 - 00;03;52;17
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;03;52;19 - 00;04;23;03
Wayne Turmel
So I started thinking about other animals that are kind of a mash up, and the one that struck me a because it's hysterical, and B because it's a really good example is the platypus, which, as you and I have discussed, Marissa is essentially God had spare parts lying around and created this thing with a duckbill and a beaver tail and poisonous toenails on its back feet, and because why not?

00;04;23;10 - 00;05;07;13
Wayne Turmel
And that's the whole point, is, from an evolutionary standpoint, all of those things developed for a good reason. But evolution is slow. And as the environment changes around it. The corpus has a lot of stuff that just doesn't make any sense anymore. And if the environment is changing very quickly so that it is rapidly becoming endangered and there are fewer places on the planet, it's geographic, where you find them geographically is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, and it's just kind of like, I know there's a reason it evolved.

00;05;07;13 - 00;05;36;22
Wayne Turmel
Poisonous toenails, but probably every time they introduce a new, predator into the environment, they know that you have poisonous toenails. And so they stay away from that. Right. And so applied. And plus, while it continues to exist, it's kind of an evolutionary dead end, and it can't suddenly change direction and become something else.

00;05;36;25 - 00;05;38;12
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. That makes sense.

00;05;38;14 - 00;06;07;09
Wayne Turmel
So a mule is carefully chosen for very specific things. It's replicable and it will continue to be useful and exist for a very long time. A platypus has been left to its own devices. And, you know, if you live in the right part of Tasmania and and you don't bother them too much, they're fine. But they're not expanding, they're not growing, they're not becoming more plentiful.

00;06;07;12 - 00;06;20;03
Wayne Turmel
Right. Because they've just kind of been allowed to evolve. And the way that they've evolved has responded slowly to changes in their environment. But there's no plan to it.

00;06;20;06 - 00;06;31;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? So okay, so if mule is considered the true hybrid, what are some elements of successful hybrid work models that you're highlighting in this?

00;06;31;21 - 00;06;41;12
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, the big thing about hybrid work is most people think work. Hybrid work is what work gets done. Where.

00;06;41;14 - 00;06;42;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;06;42;21 - 00;07;23;04
Wayne Turmel
And a hybrid a truly hybrid work experience is, yes, what work gets done where, but also when it introduces the concept of time, the idea of there are times when asynchronous work is preferable and is really good, and there are times when perhaps we need to be together. So, a platypus team, for example, might say, yeah, we're in the office three days a week, and the days when you're not, we want you logged in the same time as the people in the office.

00;07;23;04 - 00;07;36;12
Wayne Turmel
And when you logged out, when they're gone. Right. So that essentially, yes, you are free to work wherever you want, but by golly, you better be available when Nancy in accounting wants you.

00;07;36;14 - 00;07;44;17
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. And it's different if you're, you know, customer support or something like that, where those hours are really important. But, you know, if you're a web developer, does it really matter?

00;07;44;17 - 00;07;52;07
Wayne Turmel
Well, well. And if in my case, I live three time zones away from you and Kevin.

00;07;52;10 - 00;07;53;14
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;07;53;17 - 00;08;14;09
Wayne Turmel
Right now I'm an early bird. So fortunately my body clock in my brain starts very early in the morning. So I kind of sort of keep East Coast hours, but I don't have to. Right. There are certain number of hours in a day where we want overlap.

00;08;14;12 - 00;08;17;18
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. When you and I talk about available.

00;08;17;21 - 00;08;49;09
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. When you like I talk about stuff when we have team meetings there is time that we need to overlap. But generally speaking Kevin doesn't track my time. I'm getting stuff done. You're getting stuff done. It's all cool. you know, again on a platypus team. Great. I have to come into the office three days a week, so I fight traffic and I show up in a bad mood, and I throw my coat over my chair, and I try to concentrate, and people are bugging me.

00;08;49;09 - 00;08;52;12
Wayne Turmel
And then at the end of the day, I pick up my coat and I leave.

00;08;52;15 - 00;08;53;03
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;08;53;05 - 00;09;24;24
Wayne Turmel
Well, that kind of work maybe doesn't need to be done amongst all those other people. And when other people are asking for your time, right. And hybrid teams that are really effective maximize the what, where and when. So when they are in the office together that's when the collaboration, the team building, the social niceties occur and people aren't worried about checking stuff off their list.

00;09;24;27 - 00;09;30;29
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. Yeah. They plan the day around being in the office essentially.

00;09;31;01 - 00;09;45;17
Wayne Turmel
Absolutely, absolutely. And conversely, if I'm in the office three days a week, I do not expect to be on zoom calls from morning till night when I'm working away from the office, because a lot of that should have happened when we were together.

00;09;45;20 - 00;09;46;26
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;09;46;28 - 00;10;08;00
Wayne Turmel
The idea of meetings, right. When do we hold meetings? Well, maybe we hold meetings when people are there as opposed to not right. so hybrid teams take this into account and even meetings are different. Let me give you an example. On a good mule team. And I don't mean mule team like calling the.

00;10;08;02 - 00;10;09;04
Marisa Eikenberry
Dope mules.

00;10;09;06 - 00;10;42;13
Wayne Turmel
On a mule type team. You are going to have a meeting to brainstorm something. Well, there's an asynchronous component up front. Let's put all the ideas in teams before we get there, and we, as good teammates, will have read it and thought about it and actually be prepared to discuss it when the meeting starts so that the meeting is actually spent doing valuable stuff, sorting through ideas, defending, studying, figuring it out.

00;10;42;18 - 00;10;55;10
Wayne Turmel
At the end of the meeting, we're pretty sure we have a choice, and we've all left meetings and been halfway down the hall and go, oh man, you know what I should have said? Or you know what, I didn't ask. Oh my God, we didn't think about that.

00;10;55;13 - 00;10;55;25
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;10;55;28 - 00;11;15;27
Wayne Turmel
Well, on an asynchronous team, you go back and say, hey, I know we thought about this. Here's what we need to think about for our next meeting. Has anybody got an answer for this? You can talk me off the ledge because I think this is kind of important. and they maximize what work gets done when.

00;11;15;29 - 00;11;16;23
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. That makes sense.

00;11;16;29 - 00;11;47;11
Wayne Turmel
And it's conscious. It's intentional. Now, let's be fair. It's a lot easier to do this with a startup or a team or a project that is just coming to fruition than it is to fix the boat when it's in the water, right? And it doesn't mean it can't be done, of course. But the big thing, the whole point of metaphor of the mules and the platypuses is, are you intentional?

00;11;47;17 - 00;11;58;05
Wayne Turmel
Do you know what you want that team to accomplish? I'm doing research for a new novel right now, so I'm fascinated with mules. That's how this whole thing started.

00;11;58;08 - 00;11;59;25
Marisa Eikenberry
Okay.

00;11;59;27 - 00;12;13;21
Wayne Turmel
And what I found is that mules can carry far more weight than horses. they consume less water than camels on long rides.

00;12;13;24 - 00;12;14;10
Marisa Eikenberry
Okay.

00;12;14;12 - 00;12;40;10
Wayne Turmel
And their feet are designed for rough terrain, right? Because their feet are much more like donkey feet than, which means for certain jobs, i.e. anything involving the desert mules are way more helpful than horses. Horses are prettier and more expensive, and all of that and donkeys are smaller, and there's only so much you can do with them.

00;12;40;13 - 00;12;50;10
Wayne Turmel
But mules are bred for very specific things, and every mule is going to have those particular things in them.

00;12;50;12 - 00;12;53;14
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. That makes sense. It's intentional.

00;12;53;17 - 00;13;19;12
Wayne Turmel
It's intentional. And so that's a that's where the metaphor came from. Lest you think I do nothing all day but think of weird things. but when I started thinking about applying that to work and being intentional about how you form your team, so many teams are formed because, well, okay, here's what we got. So how do we make this work?

00;13;19;12 - 00;13;36;19
Wayne Turmel
And we got to make sure everybody's happy. And you know, yes, the work has to get done. But we'll just do this. And then they find out that it's not working. And now what do we do. And so it's little tweaks and adjustments rather than taking a long term view.

00;13;36;22 - 00;13;54;04
Marisa Eikenberry
So if a user and or user listener is on right now and maybe they realize that, you know, their organization has this platypus type hybrid model, what are some steps that they can take to kind of transition into a more mule like model?

00;13;54;07 - 00;14;24;21
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, there are questions and there are plenty of questions in the long distance leader. Some of the resources and things that you can get. If you sign up for the book on our website, you can get, resources and checklists for things. But the biggest thing is what is the work that needs to be done? Who needs to do the work, and what's the best optimum way for that work to get done?

00;14;24;26 - 00;14;40;09
Wayne Turmel
And if you can answer those, it starts to become fairly clear. Oh, this is something that does need to be, you know, the widgets need to be taken from the warehouse to a truck that's not going to happen any other way.

00;14;40;11 - 00;14;43;29
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? Right. Yeah. Some stuff becomes very obvious.

00;14;44;01 - 00;15;05;04
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, some stuff is very obvious. Other stuff is like, do we really need to be in the office, or do we need to be doing that job from 9 to 5, whatever it is? And if the pandemic has taught us nothing, it's there are lots of jobs that can be done remotely that nobody thought about.

00;15;05;06 - 00;15;07;06
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. Or thought couldn't be done remotely.

00;15;07;07 - 00;15;28;21
Wayne Turmel
Or thought couldn't be done. And man, maybe we need to do this. So the big thing that I want people to take away is what work needs to be done when and to be very intentional about that. And you might be wrong the first time.

00;15;28;24 - 00;15;29;20
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

00;15;29;22 - 00;15;36;10
Wayne Turmel
You may not get it right the first time. but you're in this for the long haul.

00;15;36;12 - 00;15;37;08
Marisa Eikenberry
One would hope.

00;15;37;10 - 00;16;09;13
Wayne Turmel
Hopefully. And so that's the thing about the hybrid work. And there are advantages, right? if we need to be in the office all the time and we need to hire new people, people will say, oh, we need to hire the absolute best, most talented people out there. And what they really mean is we need the best, most talented, smartest people out there who live within a 20 minute drive of the office right?

00;16;09;16 - 00;16;15;05
Wayne Turmel
If the best talent is what is most important to your business.

00;16;15;07 - 00;16;15;25
Marisa Eikenberry
They might be three.

00;16;15;28 - 00;16;34;24
Wayne Turmel
How much does location matter? Yeah, exactly. So these are the types of questions. So the whole thing about mules versus platypuses is a very long, convoluted, slightly amusing way of framing your thinking as you think about what your team should look like going forward.

00;16;34;26 - 00;16;52;24
Marisa Eikenberry
Real quick before we wrap up, you know, as hybrid work continues to evolve and continues to get more prevalent, do you think that organizations are going to be strategic and develop these mule like models, or do you think that platypus style models are going to remain prevalent?

00;16;52;27 - 00;17;29;05
Wayne Turmel
I think there's always some of it. Human beings are not great at strategic thinking, the ones who are very good at it. But human beings in general do not think very strategically. we're often reacting to the crisis de jure. I think again, new companies, startups, projects that are just getting under way have an advantage because you have a short period of time where you can actually stop and think about what you're doing before the work starts.

00;17;29;08 - 00;17;30;15
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;17;30;17 - 00;17;41;23
Wayne Turmel
So I'm trying to. Not be too judgmental about people that aren't because we're all doing our darndest here.

00;17;41;25 - 00;17;53;21
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, yeah, we're trying our best. Right. But Wayne, thank you so much for these insights and why. You know, you have the that, hybrid versus platypus model or.

00;17;53;23 - 00;18;00;11
Wayne Turmel
You walk around with this brain and see what kind of stuff you come up with is all I'm saying.

00;18;00;14 - 00;18;03;29
Marisa Eikenberry
I'll choose not to, but that's another day. All right?

00;18;04;06 - 00;18;07;05
Wayne Turmel
Not a bad choice, by the way.

00;18;07;07 - 00;18;26;20
Marisa Eikenberry
Okay. But anyway, thank you so much. And before we go, I want to let all of you listeners know that the second edition of The Long Distance Leader, which if you're watching on video, I have right in front of me, it is now available. And this updated guide is perfect for navigating today's remote and hybrid work environments with new principles and proven strategies.

00;18;26;20 - 00;18;57;20
Marisa Eikenberry
Kevin, like Mary and Wayne Trammell, show you how to lead effectively no matter where your team is located. Don't miss out on the latest insights and exercises designed to boost productivity and morale. Order your copy now! At Long Distance Work life.com/l d l and strengthen your remote leadership skills today. And thank you for listening to the long Distance work life for Shownotes transcripts and other resources, make sure to visit Long Distance worklife.com if you haven't yet, subscribe to the podcast so you won't miss any future episodes.

00;18;57;23 - 00;19;14;22
Marisa Eikenberry
And if you're on Apple or Spotify, please give us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us improve and reach even more listeners. Just like you. Feel free to contact us via email or LinkedIn with the links in our show notes, and let us know that you listen to this episode, or even suggest a topic for Wayne and I to tackle in a future episode.

00;19;14;28 - 00;19;32;16
Marisa Eikenberry
We would love to hear from you. Thank you for joining us. And as Wayne like to say, don't let the whistles get you down.

00;19;32;18 - 00;19;32;23
Marisa Eikenberry



Timestamps

00:00 Introduction
01:05 Hybrid Work Explained
02:30 Mules vs. Platypuses
04:20 The Platypus Problem
06:10 What Makes a Good “Mule” Hybrid Model?
08:45 Hybrid Work Strategies
10:30 Asynchronous Work and Its Benefits
12:00 Building Intentional Hybrid Teams
14:00 Steps to Transition from Platypus to Mule
16:40 Closing

Related Episodes

Additional Resources

Order The Long-Distance Leader

Perfect your remote leadership skills with the updated edition of "The Long-Distance Leader" by Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, featuring new principles and proven strategies for today's hybrid work environments.

 Order
The Long-Distance Leader
Read More
Ask Wayne Anything, Leadership, Surviving Remote Work, Working Remotely

The Long-Distance Leader’s Evolution and Its Ongoing Relevance

This is a repost of one of our favorite episodes from The Long-Distance Worklife. As we approach the release of the 2nd edition of The Long-Distance Leader, we’re revisiting this special conversation where Wayne Turmel and Marisa Eikenberry celebrate the book's fourth anniversary. Wayne reflects on the unexpected changes in remote work since the original publication, how the book's advice has held up, and what to look forward to in the updated edition. Whether you’re new to the podcast or revisiting this discussion, it’s the perfect time to hear insights on leading from a distance.

Key Takeaways

1. The Unexpected Surge in Remote Work: How the pandemic accelerated trends and pushed remote work to the forefront.
2. Stealth Remote Work: The hidden practice that many companies ignored until 2020.
3. Evergreen Principles: Why the leadership principles in The Long-Distance Leader remain relevant, even as technology and work patterns evolve.

View Full Transcript

00:00:08:18 - 00:00:18:18
Wayne
Hello everybody. Welcome to The Long-Distance Worklife podcast. I am Wayne Turmel. Along with me is my co-host and copilot, Marisa Eikenberry.

00:00:18:22 - 00:00:19:15
Marisa
Hi, everybody.

00:00:20:09 - 00:00:41:23
Wayne
And this is the podcast. For those of you unfamiliar, where we're just trying to work our way through the world of long distance work, whether that's being a digital nomad, whether it's working from home full time or in the office some days or not, and bouncing back and forth. And it's a hybrid world. That's what we're doing today.

00:00:41:23 - 00:00:47:01
Wayne
And Marisa chose today's topic and I am going to let her tell you what it is.

00:00:47:23 - 00:01:03:14
Marisa
So at the time of recording this, we're celebrating the fourth anniversary of the book, The Long-Distance Leader, co-written by Kevin Eikenberry and my co-host Wayne Turmel. And we wanted to invite you into our celebration by hearing insights about the book straight from one of the authors. So, Wayne, if you're ready to dive in, I'm ready.

00:01:04:00 - 00:01:08:11
Wayne
Yeah, it's always a little weird talking about your work, but I am happy to do it.

00:01:09:11 - 00:01:19:09
Marisa
So one of the first things I wanted to start with is other than the obvious pandemic remote work surge, like what did you not expect to happen with remote work when you wrote the book?

00:01:20:05 - 00:01:21:23
Wayne
You can't yadda yadd a third of the workforce

00:01:23:19 - 00:01:24:02
Marisa
Fair.

00:01:24:03 - 00:01:47:03
Wayne
For getting sent home. You can't do. It's like other than the invention of the telephone, what's changed in communication. The Long-Distance Leader and this is now the first of soon to be three books in the Long-Distance Worklife series. Long-Distance Leader came out in 2018.

00:01:47:03 - 00:01:47:22
Marisa
Mm hmm.

00:01:47:22 - 00:02:02:04
Wayne
And at the time, as I have explained to people who said, boy, you guys were in the right place at the right time, I felt a little bit like the crazy guy with the sandwich board walking up and down the street saying the end is nigh, man.

00:02:02:13 - 00:02:21:13
Wayne
Now I just have a new sandwich board that says, "Told you." What has changed primarily and you can't discount this is that remote work was growing and it was growing at 30% a year, which is a lot.

00:02:21:13 - 00:02:43:16
Wayne
Crazy high exponential growth. But what happened in 2020, of course, is that we got pushed across the Rubicon and all these people who said, well, we should have a policy and we should think about it and maybe we should experiment with remote work. And this is not a drill. This is real.

00:02:44:00 - 00:02:44:10
Marisa
Right.

00:02:44:22 - 00:02:54:18
Wayne
And some organizations went, yeah, okay. Because there was a lot of people doing what I call stealth remote work.

00:02:55:04 - 00:02:56:10
Marisa
Okay. So what's that?

00:02:56:22 - 00:03:06:12
Wayne
Stealth remote work was, "Where's Marisa today? Oh, her kid's sick. She's working from home. She'll take the conference call from home."

00:03:07:03 - 00:03:07:12
Marisa
Okay.

00:03:07:23 - 00:03:15:13
Wayne
Or somebody was working. I'm working on a project. It's impossible to get anything done in the office. I'm going to go home and work.

00:03:15:22 - 00:03:16:06
Marisa
Right.

00:03:17:03 - 00:03:21:21
Wayne
And a lot of organizations just pretended like this wasn't happening.

00:03:23:09 - 00:03:24:00
Marisa
Hence the stealth.

00:03:24:00 - 00:03:41:17
Wayne
I have a client, a big international company. And I remember distinctly walking through her office and her saying, "Wayne, I love you guys, but, you know, we don't do remote work. Everybody needs to come into the office." And I'm walking through the office and 50% of the desks empty.

00:03:42:01 - 00:03:42:18
Marisa
Oh, my gosh.

00:03:42:19 - 00:04:01:11
Wayne
They're obviously assigned. There's pictures of kids and cats and. Yeah, inflated birthday balloons. And I'm like, oh, so-and-so's in Denver today. So-and-so's kid was sick. If they are working and they are not at their desk, they are remote.

00:04:01:11 - 00:04:01:23
Marisa
Right.

00:04:01:23 - 00:04:16:18
Wayne
The organization had zero process in place for things like performance reviews and, you know, everything. Career path, everything was based on presence in the office.

00:04:17:07 - 00:04:33:00
Wayne
Even though people weren't in the office and that was going on a lot. So what happened in 2020 is everybody got pushed out of the boat by a third of the workforce. And we have to remember it's only a third of the workforce.

00:04:33:04 - 00:04:33:15
Marisa
Of course.

00:04:34:05 - 00:05:04:04
Wayne
A third of the workforce suddenly found themselves in this situation. And the reactions, of course, ranged from what's the big deal? I've been doing this forever and I hear a lot of that. I hear a lot of people. And why is everybody so freaked out? Because I was doing this before the pandemic to oh, my gosh, we didn't think these jobs could ever be done remotely to I can't wait to get back in the office.

00:05:04:09 - 00:05:04:18
Marisa
Yeah.

00:05:05:15 - 00:05:17:07
Wayne
Right. So the big thing was this was building up, building up, building up. And then it happened. And fortunately for us, as, you know, mercenary weasel selling books.

00:05:17:07 - 00:05:18:09
Marisa
Mm hmm.

00:05:18:09 - 00:05:33:11
Wayne
We were there when that happened. And the response to Long-Distance Leader has been just overwhelmingly positive. And very encouraging. And of course, for our business, which is teaching.

00:05:33:11 - 00:05:33:22
Marisa
Of course.

00:05:33:22 - 00:05:37:13
Wayne
Stuff, that's not a bad thing either.

00:05:37:20 - 00:05:55:15
Marisa
Right. So so with that, I know that in the book you guys have best practices and you have models and. Has anything from the book changed since you've written it? Anything that was a best practice. But maybe now that more people are remote, it's a little different.

00:05:56:09 - 00:06:08:10
Wayne
I, I think what's happened with the book is the general principles are pretty solid. We wrote the book intentionally to be evergreen.

00:06:08:17 - 00:06:09:03
Marisa
Right.

00:06:09:07 - 00:06:19:16
Wayne
Right. But some things have happened. I mean, one of the things in the book is we're telling people, use your webcam, use your webcam, use your webcam, because there was a lot of resistance.

00:06:19:16 - 00:06:20:06
Marisa
Yes.

00:06:20:06 - 00:06:39:14
Wayne
And then Zoom came along. And it's fascinating from a watching technology thing. Right. Because Zoom went from this free niche product that nobody in corporate America was using to a verb, to a syndrome in 18 months.

00:06:39:22 - 00:06:40:11
Marisa
Right. Well.

00:06:41:01 - 00:06:47:02
Wayne
People are already now people are already ditching Zoom for their internal things like Teams.

00:06:47:13 - 00:06:47:22
Marisa
Right.

00:06:48:06 - 00:07:00:14
Wayne
Slightly different things. So use your camera. Use your camera. Use your camera. Now, people are on meetings from morning till night and they're suffering Zoom fatigue. And that's a very real thing.

00:07:00:21 - 00:07:01:11
Marisa
Of course.

00:07:01:18 - 00:07:14:22
Wayne
So the message is still use your camera a lot because it's a really good idea and use your head. Right. If you're one of 17 people on a meeting, nobody needs to watch you eat your sandwich.

00:07:15:06 - 00:07:17:23
Marisa
Right. But one on one, you'll definitely want to turn it on.

00:07:18:02 - 00:07:37:02
Wayne
The more the communication needs to be rich, the more it adds value. And it's just it's like everything else. Use your head when it adds value to it. And, you know, I just got back from the gym is a pretty lame excuse. If it's just you and a coworker. Right?

00:07:37:02 - 00:07:40:05
Marisa
Right. Yeah. But if it's a full team meeting, a little different.

00:07:40:17 - 00:07:53:06
Wayne
Exactly. So, you know, the the kind of it went it's shot way past use your webcam, to is it okay if we don't use our webcam sometimes?

00:07:53:14 - 00:07:54:02
Marisa
Right.

00:07:54:09 - 00:08:16:02
Wayne
So that was one thing that certainly happened. The other thing and again, it's a matter of degree and intentionality is we were we in the book talk a lot about how you need to be connected and rich communication. And what happened was people just automatically defaulted to the Web meeting.

00:08:17:01 - 00:08:17:20
Marisa
Okay. Yep.

00:08:19:02 - 00:08:32:08
Wayne
And it used to be in the glorious before times. One of the reasons you went home is so you got left alone to do your work. Right now, I'm point is that I'm in meetings back to back to back to back?

00:08:32:21 - 00:08:34:14
Marisa
Yeah. When am I supposed to get my work done?

00:08:34:21 - 00:08:43:14
Wayne
Yeah. And people are struggling with this. And so they as the pendulum always does, it's swinging to, well, we're going to have no me, no meetings Fridays.

00:08:43:21 - 00:08:46:15
Marisa
Right. Yeah. We've been seeing a lot of articles about that lately.

00:08:46:16 - 00:08:48:08
Wayne
That's fabulous for Friday.

00:08:49:12 - 00:08:51:01
Marisa
What about Monday through Thursday?

00:08:51:01 - 00:08:57:05
Wayne
And all the meetings that were going to happen on Friday and how you're shoehorning them into Monday through Thursday.

00:08:57:13 - 00:09:00:06
Marisa
So Friday suddenly gets very stressful.

00:09:01:01 - 00:09:31:23
Wayne
Exactly. So I think we are both blessed and intentionally so because the book was intended to be evergreen and I think it holds up pretty well. There are a couple of things that maybe we should reword, things like use your webcam and when you meet the like that. But I think overall it stands up pretty well and that's certainly the feedback that we're getting.

00:09:32:10 - 00:09:46:23
Marisa
Yeah, absolutely. One of the other things I wanted to talk about and so, you know, you called The Long-Distance Leader, The Long-Distance Teammate. We are The Long-Distance Worklife. Why 'long-distance' as opposed to some of the other terms we see in remote work?

00:09:48:21 - 00:09:58:19
Wayne
Because the language changes really quickly. And so rather than hook on to whatever we're using in the zeitgeist at this moment, when we didn't just invent our own darn word.

00:09:59:16 - 00:10:00:09
Marisa
That's fair.

00:10:01:12 - 00:10:04:14
Wayne
It's like it won't go out of style because it's ours, darn it.

00:10:06:15 - 00:10:28:02
Wayne
You know, if you look at, for example, in 2018, when The Long-Distance Leader came out, the government was investing a buttload of money and still are. And people can say what they want about government work. But there were a lot of people giving thought to this even before the pandemic. But it was called telework or tele, right?

00:10:29:02 - 00:10:47:14
Wayne
That was the word. And then suddenly nobody was using it. And then everybody was using remote. Well, you know, the whole idea of long distance is that it covers time, space and dimension. Right. It's not just physical separation. It's time zones. It's flexibility.

00:10:48:08 - 00:10:48:17
Marisa
Yes.

00:10:49:01 - 00:11:10:18
Wayne
Time flexing and and those types of things. So, I mean, it's it's a word we could brand around it. If you were being completely cynical and honest, you know, in the interest of full, transparent. See, to our viewers, these are the kind of decisions you make when you're writing a book. But it turned out to be a pretty good one.

00:11:11:12 - 00:11:11:19
Marisa
Yeah.

00:11:12:09 - 00:11:37:11
Wayne
As we move towards a more hybrid kind of thing, as we move towards a hybrid working arrangement, the point is that some of the people are going to be further away than others. And that might mean just far enough that you only come into the office a day or two a week. So the long commute doesn't really hurt as much to being on the other side of the planet.

00:11:37:20 - 00:11:46:13
Marisa
Yeah, we're seeing a lot of digital nomads. I know there was even a digital nomad conference meet up something recently. I know those are happening all over the place.

00:11:46:13 - 00:11:49:16
Wayne
Irony of that. The irony of that is lost on nobody.

00:11:49:16 - 00:11:53:07
Marisa
I realize. But yeah, I mean, they.

00:11:53:09 - 00:11:56:11
Wayne
Let's all get together to talk about how we can be anywhere and do this.

00:11:56:22 - 00:12:12:08
Marisa
Well. And I can't think of the country right now, but I know there was a news story that came out recently about a country that's giving digital nomad visas. And I'm sure as more countries kind of hop onto that, there's probably going to be even more of these digital nomad long distance.

00:12:13:00 - 00:12:27:14
Wayne
It's happening a lot depending on where you are in the world. Costa Rica, some of the smaller countries in Europe, like Luxembourg and Andorra are doing this. You know, it kind of makes some sense.

00:12:27:14 - 00:12:35:02
Marisa
Right. So what is one takeaway that you hope that everyone gets by reading this book?

00:12:37:03 - 00:13:00:06
Wayne
Okay. You have to be careful what you wish for. Okay. In this world, when you put a book out, it gets reviewed and people come back. And we were very intentional that one of the most important rules that you had to bear in mind and it was, you know, we have these 19 rules, which is really 18, because rule number 19 is, remember, rule number one.

00:13:00:16 - 00:13:01:00
Marisa
Right.

00:13:02:02 - 00:13:06:23
Wayne
And rule number one was think leadership first, location second.

00:13:07:08 - 00:13:07:18
Marisa
Yes.

00:13:09:00 - 00:13:45:22
Wayne
And the whole point of that is, yes, it's different. And yes, you need to be very much more mindful about how you communicate and when you communicate how technology plays a role in that. But at the end of the day, good leaders demonstrate good leadership behaviors, and that makes it easier to cross these these barriers. And one of actually really the only major criticism of the book was, well, this is just the leadership.

00:13:46:02 - 00:13:49:03
Wayne
We know all this stuff.

00:13:49:03 - 00:13:49:15
Marisa
Okay.

00:13:50:05 - 00:14:19:05
Wayne
And that's actually fair. I mean, Kevin and I had a fair amount of discussion about how much of this general leadership thought do we put into this book that is specifically about remote. And by the way, we have the same conversation about The Long-Distance Teammate and the new book, which is coming out in February. The Long-Distance Team is a lot of it is just team building, being part of a team one on one.

00:14:19:22 - 00:14:33:15
Wayne
But what's I think what's important is that it is easy to get hung up on the differences. It's easy to get hung up on what's changed and forget what's really important.

00:14:34:21 - 00:14:38:05
Marisa
Yeah, forget that some of those leadership principles don't change.

00:14:38:19 - 00:15:00:21
Wayne
Yeah. And, you know, that is really critical. I mean, there are three things and we don't talk about this in the books specifically, but there are three things that make a remote team work. Number one is there needs to be a mission. We need to follow the mission. Right. Number two is that there needs to be accountability.

00:15:01:04 - 00:15:01:11
Marisa
Right.

00:15:01:20 - 00:15:06:12
Wayne
And number three is you need to leverage the technology at your disposal.

00:15:07:08 - 00:15:08:00
Marisa
Absolutely.

00:15:08:06 - 00:15:16:11
Wayne
And those things need to happen. But it all starts with what's the vision? Well, that's all leadership stuff.

00:15:16:13 - 00:15:24:06
Marisa
Yeah. I was going to say a lot of what you're saying, I mean, even leverage the technology, like even that could be said about people who stay in the office. Right.

00:15:24:06 - 00:15:35:10
Wayne
But accountability is management stuff. There's leadership type stuff. There's management stuff because all managers are leaders, but not all leaders are managers.

00:15:35:12 - 00:15:35:23
Marisa
Right.

00:15:36:19 - 00:15:52:17
Wayne
Or at least should be. And then there's the technology piece. Right. And there are teams that run very low tech and are highly successful. There are teams with all of the tools in the world that can't find her, but with both hands.

00:15:53:04 - 00:15:53:11
Marisa
Right.

00:15:55:01 - 00:16:15:01
Wayne
That's the highly technical, professional way of explaining it. And so I think that the criticism that there's a lot of general leadership stuff in the book and, you know, I think a lot of people who read books like this or read a lot of books like this, of course.

00:16:16:07 - 00:16:19:10
Marisa
Yeah. You don't just read one and say, oh, I know everything about this topic. Now.

00:16:19:17 - 00:16:23:21
Wayne
And generally, leadership nerds tend to read leadership books.

00:16:24:04 - 00:16:24:13
Marisa
Right.

00:16:25:04 - 00:16:32:15
Wayne
And so, yes, you have heard a lot of this before. Now, if you look around the world and say, are people doing it?

00:16:33:17 - 00:16:34:07
Marisa
Yeah. So my.

00:16:34:07 - 00:16:36:02
Wayne
Dialog. Different conversation.

00:16:37:06 - 00:16:37:16
Marisa
Yes.

00:16:38:19 - 00:17:09:01
Wayne
But yeah. So I think that is the and that's the thing about the book is that it's going to help stay evergreen because those leadership behaviors don't change. And yes, you know, the book was written presold. I mean, Zoom literally isn't in the book. Right. When we wrote Long-Distance Teammate, the first draft was in before the pandemic.

00:17:09:11 - 00:17:13:20
Wayne
But the second draft the world had already shut down.

00:17:14:05 - 00:17:17:07
Marisa
Oh, wow. I'm not sure I realized that.

00:17:17:07 - 00:17:22:10
Wayne
Well, the first draft was finished first in January of 2020.

00:17:22:15 - 00:17:23:08
Marisa
Yeah.

00:17:23:08 - 00:17:30:12
Wayne
And then we send it out and we get the notes and we come back and we have to do the second draft that happened in March.

00:17:31:04 - 00:17:32:14
Marisa
Oh, my gosh.

00:17:32:23 - 00:17:52:18
Wayne
Well, in between it's like, okay, do we talk about the pandemic? Do we reference it? Zoom is suddenly a thing. There was no mention of Zoom. We intentionally tried to avoid brand names and specific technologies. We talk about meeting platforms. Right. To this tool or that tool.

00:17:53:00 - 00:17:53:09
Marisa
Right.

00:17:54:23 - 00:18:09:03
Wayne
And so because we made those decisions, generally speaking, it holds up pretty well, as evidenced by the fact that the last two years the book has sold almost identical number of copies year over year.

00:18:09:03 - 00:18:11:15
Marisa
Yeah. People still need that stuff.

00:18:11:15 - 00:18:29:07
Wayne
Which in any book is a rare and beautiful thing. So we are extremely grateful. Absolutely. And now, of course, there's Long-Distance Teammate which is from the teammates point of view, because one of the big questions is how do we form relationships and how do we.

00:18:29:22 - 00:18:32:08
Marisa
Yeah, I'm not a leader, but how do I do things?

00:18:32:14 - 00:18:55:12
Wayne
So that's what Long-Distance Teammate is. And now that we are coming out of the pandemic to some degree and everybody's going, what's next? We literally on Friday submitted the final manuscript for the Long-Distance Team, which is about taking a step back and saying, if we were building this team from scratch, what would it look like?

00:18:55:20 - 00:19:00:05
Marisa
Right. And reminds me, I know it's coming out next year, but when as a.

00:19:00:05 - 00:19:02:18
Wayne
Contract, February 28th, give or take.

00:19:03:01 - 00:19:26:07
Marisa
Perfect. So put that on your calendar, folks. Wayne, I wanted to thank you so much for this conversation. I mean, I know that Long-Distance Leader has changed a bunch of lives, a bunch of companies as people read it and and do the practices in it. I also wanted to thank you, audience members, for listening to the Long-Distance Worklife. For show notes, transcripts and other resources.

00:19:26:07 - 00:19:42:06
Marisa
Make sure to visit longdistanceworklife.com if you haven't yet. Subscribe to the podcast so you won't miss any future episodes while you're there. Be sure to like and review that helps our show reach more teammates and leaders just like you. Feel free to contact us via email or LinkedIn with the links in our show notes.

00:19:42:11 - 00:20:13:15
Marisa
Let us know you listen to this episode or even suggest a topic for Wayne and I to attack on a future episode. Lastly, if you're interested in purchasing The Long-Distance Leader, you can check out our website at longdistanceworklife.com/books for more information and links to purchase. Thanks for joining us. And as Wayne likes to say, don't let the weasels get you down.


Timestamps

00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:47 Celebrating The Long-Distance Leader's Anniversary
01:09 The Unexpected Evolution of Remote Work
02:21 Stealth Remote Work: Before It Was Mainstream
05:05 The Impact of the Pandemic on Remote Work
06:56 Best Practices: What’s Changed and What Hasn’t
09:32 The Evergreen Nature of Leadership Principles
12:12 The Choice of the Term "Long-Distance"
16:38 Key Takeaway: Leadership First, Location Second

Related Episodes

Additional Resources

Pre-Order The Long-Distance Leader

Perfect your remote leadership skills with the updated edition of "The Long-Distance Leader" by Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, featuring new principles and proven strategies for today's hybrid work environments.

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The Long-Distance Leader
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Ask Wayne Anything, Leadership, Surviving Remote Work, Working Remotely

How Remote Leadership Has Transformed Since 2018

In this episode of The Long-Distance Worklife, hosts Wayne Turmel and Marisa Eikenberry dive into the evolving landscape of remote and hybrid leadership. With the upcoming release of the second edition of The Long-Distance Leader, Wayne shares insights on how leadership has transformed since the book's original publication in 2018. From the disappearance of the "Remote Leadership Institute" brand to the emergence of hybrid teams as the new standard, the discussion highlights crucial changes in the way we work and lead. Tune in to learn about the key updates in the book, the importance of ongoing learning for leaders, and practical strategies for thriving in today's remote work environment.

Key Topics

1. How Remote Leadership Has Changed Since 2018
2. The Rise of Hybrid Teams
3. First Order vs. Second Order Changes in Leadership
4. The Shift to Written Communication
5. Preparing for Ongoing Changes in Work and Technology

View Full Transcript

00;00;08;02 - 00;00;20;06
Marisa Eikenberry
Welcome back to the long-distance worklife. We help you lead, work and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Marisa Eikenberry, a fellow remote worker and joining me is my co-host and remote work expert, Wayne Turmel. Hi, Wayne.

00;00;20;08 - 00;00;25;21
Wayne Turmel
Hello, Marissa. Hello, listeners, wherever you may be. Hi. How are you?

00;00;25;24 - 00;00;28;23
Marisa Eikenberry
Great. How are you?

00;00;28;25 - 00;00;34;18
Wayne Turmel
I am, I'm fine. I'm excited. We have a new book coming out. Kind of. Sorta.

00;00;34;25 - 00;00;39;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Yes. So do you want to introduce that a little bit before we get into our questions today?

00;00;39;22 - 00;01;22;09
Wayne Turmel
Well, I'm excited. We are coming up, in 2018. Of course, Kevin Eikenberry and I wrote The Long Distance Leader Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership, which, you know, came out before Covid, and it it's in seven languages, and lots of people have read it and that's wonderful. but it was 2018 and the world has changed. So we now have the long distance leader revised rules for remarkable remote and hybrid leadership, which is the second edition and the updated edition of the original long distance leader.

00;01;22;09 - 00;01;28;06
Wayne Turmel
There's about 2,025% updated content in the book.

00;01;28;08 - 00;01;50;22
Marisa Eikenberry
That's incredible. And we're actually going to talk about some of that today. specifically, we're going to dive into what is now chapter two of the revised one, about how remote leadership has changed and, that kind of thing. So I guess I want to start off with, how has the perception of remote leadership changed from, you know, 2018 to now?

00;01;50;25 - 00;02;24;09
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, it's changed. And I will give you a very concrete example of how it's changed. When I joined the Kevin Eikenberry Group and Kevin hired me. We actually formed a subdivision called the Remote Leadership Institute because people didn't know how to lead remote teams, and they hadn't done it. And it was this weird kind of thing. And over the last year or so, the brand of Remote Leadership Institute has actually gone away.

00;02;24;09 - 00;02;36;01
Wayne Turmel
It's been folded into the Kevin Eikenberry Group because it's no longer its own unique thing that nobody knows what the heck to do with. It's part of the water we swim in.

00;02;36;03 - 00;02;44;27
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, I remember when it was still a big deal about what we were going to call it because, well, some people call it telework and some people are calling it telecommuting, and these people are calling it remote.

00;02;44;27 - 00;03;10;09
Wayne Turmel
And when was the last time somebody used the word telework? Right. So, so much has changed. I mean, in since 2018, when we wrote the book, zoom literally did not exist. It was a free service that had no corporate penetration. And suddenly it went from what? Zoom to a verb.

00;03;10;11 - 00;03;12;05
Marisa Eikenberry
In like two months.

00;03;12;07 - 00;03;16;07
Wayne Turmel
To a syndrome where suddenly people had zoom fatigue.

00;03;16;09 - 00;03;17;05
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

00;03;17;07 - 00;03;36;03
Wayne Turmel
And so things have changed. It is the short answer. Now, what really has changed? Well, a couple of things. Number one is more people have experienced remote work. more people have been successful doing remote work than anybody, especially their bosses thought they could.

00;03;36;05 - 00;03;37;20
Marisa Eikenberry
Yes.

00;03;37;22 - 00;03;55;27
Wayne Turmel
so the genie is out of the bottle. the other thing that's happened, and this is why we've added the word hybrid to the title, and a lot of the new content is about hybrid teams, because even though a lot of organizations are returning to the office, are they really?

00;03;56;00 - 00;03;57;07
Marisa Eikenberry
You're right.

00;03;57;09 - 00;04;08;27
Wayne Turmel
You know, so many organizations have come to the situation where, well, you know, we're going to be in the office 2 or 3 days a week.

00;04;08;29 - 00;04;35;23
Wayne Turmel
And that's great. It's a compromise. Everybody's kind of doing the best they can. But as I like to say, that's not a strategy. That's a hostage negotiation. Right. You know how how much can we make them come back to the office before they quit? How much can we whine about going into the office before they fire us? And so they kind of reach this compromise, that sort of kind of works?

00;04;35;27 - 00;05;05;25
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. Real hybrid work is a very different thing. And what we urge in the book is to take a look at whatever it looks like. Right? Whether it's you've got full time, some people remote full time, some people in the office, people are in a couple of days a week. That's still a remote team. If you have one member of your team who isn't where everybody else is, you have a remote team and don't forget that.

00;05;05;28 - 00;05;19;07
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that you talk about in this new chapter, the book, is this concept of first order versus second order changes. Can you explain what that is?

00;05;19;10 - 00;05;45;02
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. It's kind of like, a first degree burn is how a third degree burn has you in the hospital. All right. The same is true when you are talking about change. A first order of change is we need to do this differently. We need to do it better, faster, smarter, whatever a second order change is, what we're doing isn't working.

00;05;45;02 - 00;05;47;23
Wayne Turmel
We need to do something else.

00;05;47;25 - 00;05;48;22
Marisa Eikenberry
Gotcha.

00;05;48;24 - 00;06;23;11
Wayne Turmel
So a first order change is we need to use our webcams more often. Yeah, a second order change is we need to make sure that we meet once a quarter as a team, regardless of where people are. It is worth coming together to do that so that our team is connected, engaged, gets to know each other. All that good stuff.

00;06;23;13 - 00;06;36;09
Wayne Turmel
And those kind of changes, those kinds of changes are bigger than we think. I mean, the thing about remote work is the first order change is great and come in a couple of days a week.

00;06;36;11 - 00;06;38;11
Marisa Eikenberry


00;06;38;13 - 00;06;57;18
Wayne Turmel
A much bigger change is we don't expect you to come in and try to get your tasks done that day. We're going to do all our meetings on the days when we're together and allow people to not have to join meetings on the days that they're working from home, right.

00;06;57;19 - 00;07;03;00
Marisa Eikenberry
That's a huge shift in mindset in how you work during the week and everything. Well.

00;07;03;03 - 00;07;12;19
Wayne Turmel
This isn't in the book, but it's core to, I think, how we think about hybrid work. And it's kind of mentioned, but.

00;07;12;21 - 00;07;14;24
Marisa Eikenberry
So you're getting an inside scoop, listeners, are.

00;07;14;25 - 00;07;43;23
Wayne Turmel
You getting an inside scoop? Here's the thing. Most of what we call hybrid work is not it's a blend. It's a compromise, a true hybrid takes two things, puts them together and creates a whole new entity. So the most obvious example is a mule. Yes, one parent is a donkey and one parent is a horse. But if you've ever dealt with mules, you know that they are their own unique animal.

00;07;43;25 - 00;08;05;00
Wayne Turmel
They have traits of both. But a mule is a mule and it is not a horse. And it is sure not a donkey. That's the thing about hybrid work. For hybrid work to really take the next level, to really be strategic, we need to realize that it's not just some people are in the office and some people aren't.

00;08;05;02 - 00;08;14;27
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, it's not just what work gets done where, but what work gets done where, when?

00;08;15;00 - 00;08;15;23
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;08;15;26 - 00;08;36;25
Wayne Turmel
It takes time into account. And so that's going to require a little bit of different thinking. But just as remote leadership was look do the leadership stuff and you'll probably be okay. Right. What we do as leaders hasn't changed. How we do it is a little bit different.

00;08;36;27 - 00;08;38;23
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. But the basic concept is the same.

00;08;38;26 - 00;08;51;19
Wayne Turmel
Basic concepts are the same. The same is true of hybrid, except you're building time into the equation in ways that weren't when it was just like, okay, work wherever you want.

00;08;51;21 - 00;09;09;29
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, and speaking of the idea of, you know, the leadership concepts haven't changed, but how we do them does. So one of the things that we've seen happen with this remote and hybrid shift is the shift of written communication, more than, you know, oral communication. You're not going down the hall and telling Suzy Q that something has changed.

00;09;10;05 - 00;09;17;13
Marisa Eikenberry
So because of now the shift to written communication and the prevalence of email, like, how is that impacted leadership styles?

00;09;17;15 - 00;09;45;15
Wayne Turmel
Well, it's not just the prevalence of email. Email is in fact becoming less prevalent than than it was because things like teams and slack and text messaging and all of that stuff. But what that does is it changes the way we communicate. Written communication, by its nature, is less rich than spoken communication.

00;09;45;17 - 00;09;46;22
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;09;46;25 - 00;10;10;00
Wayne Turmel
Right. I can send you a message. I can't see your face. I have no idea if you've even read it. I don't know whether you're going to take action or not. If you have a question, it's going to take time for that question to get back to me. Whereas if we're sitting face to face and I say something, you don't understand, I can see on your face because I want to play poker with you someday.

00;10;10;03 - 00;10;11;14
Wayne Turmel
Oh, I can see, oh.

00;10;11;14 - 00;10;12;24
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, I replace lose.

00;10;12;24 - 00;10;44;28
Wayne Turmel
So that there's confusion and. Yes. And whatever. Right. And and on a hybrid team, that can be a challenge because the people that are physically together get a different level of communication. Sometimes than the people who are remote. And at best that can lead to kind of quickness. And at worst it becomes a proximity bias issue. Right. Which excludes the more remote members of the team.

00;10;45;00 - 00;11;11;05
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, we've talked about that in some other episodes, and I'll link those in the show notes. And so, you know, with this, like we're constantly learning and we're constantly changing how we're doing things to adapt to this remote and hybrid environment. So, you know, why is it so crucial for leaders to accept it, that, you know, they are going to require ongoing learning and they are going to require adaptation that maybe they weren't doing prior to the remote shift?

00;11;11;08 - 00;11;38;05
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. one is that when Covid hit and there was the explosion in remote work, everybody was just dog paddling as fast as they could to get through it. And the good news is that they got through it. Yeah. Productivity did not drop the way people thought it would. Employee engagement did not drop the way that they thought it would.

00;11;38;08 - 00;12;01;21
Wayne Turmel
more people quit after Covid than quit during it, quite frankly. so the we can do it. And we got through it and we kind of burst our way through it, and we did the best we could. And some people had the good sense to buy the long distance. Later or, you know, have us teach our long distance leadership series.

00;12;01;23 - 00;12;07;28
Wayne Turmel
and that's certainly still available. But the nuances.

00;12;08;00 - 00;12;08;24
Marisa Eikenberry


00;12;08;26 - 00;12;33;23
Wayne Turmel
Of how do we do this in a remote environment? There was kind of a tendency to think, oh, we can go back to the before times. We can go back to the way things were. But for the first time, leaders over frontline supervisor are now likely to have at least one member of their team who is remote.

00;12;33;25 - 00;12;56;15
Wayne Turmel
So kind of relying on the way we did it in the before times creates some issues with employee engagement with communication that don't often turn into burning fires, but they are problems that could be believed and situations that could be better than they are.

00;12;56;17 - 00;12;57;13
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;12;57;15 - 00;13;26;00
Wayne Turmel
And so with this notion that, well, we're all back in the office now. Well, no you're not. On any given day, 50% of your desks are empty. So it's easy to kind of fall into that. Remote's over. We're back to normal. Well, no, the new norm is that you are going to have these things. You're going to have to figure out how to include your remote employees in the discussion in a meaningful ways.

00;13;26;07 - 00;14;06;17
Wayne Turmel
You're more importantly, for the first time, organizations cannot just put their succession planning and their employee development kind of default to the people in the office. If you want to keep your best people and statistics say that your mid-level and junior senior, you know, not C-suite, but, director level folks are most prone to want to work remotely at least some of the time if you do not as an organization, adjust to that, develop succession plans, develop personal development plans.

00;14;06;19 - 00;14;40;28
Wayne Turmel
It's going to be very hard to keep good people. It's going to be very hard to attract people, and it's going to make onboarding a real pain unless you systematize, systemize, systematize. I'm not quite sure what the word is, but you know what? if we don't somehow create a system that acknowledges the differences amongst the team and builds those into creating one team, it'll work, but it won't work.

00;14;40;28 - 00;14;50;18
Wayne Turmel
Great, right? And none of us are listening to this podcast because we want it to just work. We want it to work great.

00;14;50;21 - 00;15;07;24
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? So, you know, how can leaders kind of prepare themselves and their teams for, you know, more inevitable changes in work expectations and technology advancements? I mean, we've already discussed this is the new normal. We're going to have new stuff coming in all the time.

00;15;08;01 - 00;15;25;24
Wayne Turmel
But well, and it's normal this week, the exactly I mean, one as of 1048, July, whatever the heck it is. this is the normal. By the time we talk next week, it will be something else.

00;15;25;26 - 00;15;26;22
Marisa Eikenberry


00;15;26;24 - 00;15;57;04
Wayne Turmel
So the first thing as leaders is don't panic but don't get comfortable. Understand that change is inevitable. Things are going to change. Keep an eye on it. Right. Don't just keep an eye out. You don't have to know every new thing. You. I guarantee you have someone on your team who is the first one to say, hey, there's this new thing we should use, and nobody likes them and nobody listens to them.

00;15;57;06 - 00;16;02;26
Marisa Eikenberry
And you know, we do. We can.

00;16;02;29 - 00;16;23;21
Wayne Turmel
You're early adopters are lovely human beings, and frequently a bit of a pain. but as leaders, you need to be aware of not so much what tools are out there, but what problems might a new tool address?

00;16;23;24 - 00;16;24;14
Marisa Eikenberry


00;16;24;16 - 00;16;28;08
Wayne Turmel
That's how to look at new technology, right?

00;16;28;08 - 00;16;31;27
Marisa Eikenberry
Because not every new solution is going to work for every team too.

00;16;31;29 - 00;16;48;19
Wayne Turmel
And those of us who survived the Betamax, VHS, TiVo DVR comes with my cable system. Oh, look, I can fit it all on my phone who have survived that understands you can't get too comfortable with technology.

00;16;48;24 - 00;16;55;29
Marisa Eikenberry
Right about the time that you think this is going to be the thing it's not. And then, you know, vinyl comes back.

00;16;56;01 - 00;17;25;28
Wayne Turmel
Well, I mean, as we said before, Covid, Microsoft Teams did not exist, right? It was slack for business or Skype for business. Skype for business no longer exists. Now we have teams, right. Because organizations were looking for not having 17 different tools. They wanted one ring to rule them. All right. And whether that rather.

00;17;25;28 - 00;17;27;26
Marisa Eikenberry
That ring should be Microsoft is a whole different.

00;17;27;26 - 00;17;48;02
Wayne Turmel
Ballgame. It's a totally different question. But they will take the convenience of having one thing and the less and cost and the ease of not having to get 17 licenses for every single tool. Absolutely right. As we've said so many times on this show, every decision gets made for a reason.

00;17;48;05 - 00;17;52;00
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? It makes sense to somebody. It just might not be, you know.

00;17;52;03 - 00;18;18;19
Wayne Turmel
So and we're not going to go down the Microsoft rabbit hole. But you know, your question was what do leaders need to think? We just need to keep listening. you know, exclusion on remote teams is the biggest, most corrosive thing. When people feel they are not included, when they feel they're being actively excluded, which is frequently not the case.

00;18;18;21 - 00;18;30;10
Wayne Turmel
I'm not being mean to you. I am not promoting you because I don't like you. I literally don't think about you because I got somebody right here in front of me.

00;18;30;13 - 00;18;38;10
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. You need we, as one of our coworkers says a lot. Guy Harris, he says, assume benign intent. They didn't intentionally do this to hurt you.

00;18;38;15 - 00;19;07;01
Wayne Turmel
Right. And we need to know. You need to keep taking the pulse. You need to have rich conversations. You need to give people the chance to engage. Engagement comes from within. I can't think I can engage with you, but you will not necessarily engage with me unless you choose to. Yeah, but I have to give you that opportunity, and I have to avoid the things that will make you disengage.

00;19;07;04 - 00;19;22;29
Marisa Eikenberry
Yes, it's a give and take right. So, you know, we've discussed that like things are always changing, they're always adapting. And we need to be doing that. So what are some effective ways for leaders to stay updated and continuously improve their leadership skills.

00;19;23;01 - 00;19;49;16
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. And I mean, this sounds self-serving because look what we do for a living here at the Kevin Eikenberry Group. But there are plenty of including our own. And we're happy to share those with you ongoing newsletters and updates. And there's no shortage of stuff out there. If you're on LinkedIn, find the gurus that speak to you and just subscribe to them on LinkedIn.

00;19;49;18 - 00;20;00;15
Wayne Turmel
Kevin and I are on LinkedIn. We post new information all the time so that you at least have some sense of what's happening out in the landscape.

00;20;00;18 - 00;20;02;04
Marisa Eikenberry
Absolutely.

00;20;02;06 - 00;20;25;19
Wayne Turmel
There are ways to develop your skills. There is e-learning, there is shortcuts, and there are actual training. Whether your organization provides it or you come to someone like us and our long distance leadership series. and oh, by the way, not for nothing. There's books out there, right?

00;20;25;22 - 00;20;33;28
Marisa Eikenberry
There's there's learning for everyone. So speaking of that, and because we're coming up on our time, I do want to.

00;20;34;04 - 00;20;36;05
Wayne Turmel
See the subtle way I let us.

00;20;36;07 - 00;20;59;01
Marisa Eikenberry
To. I did I did, so, as you know, those of you who are watching just saw Wayne hold up a lovely book. And so we have a special announcement and that is that the second edition of the Long-Distance leader is available for preorder and will be launching on September 17th, and this updated guide is perfect for navigating today's remote and hybrid work environments with new principles and proven strategies.

00;20;59;02 - 00;21;21;00
Marisa Eikenberry
Kevin, I can very Wayne Trammell show you how to lead effectively no matter where your team is located. So don't miss out on the latest insights and exercises designed to boost productivity and morale. Preorder your copy today at Long distance Work life.com/l d l and strengthen your leadership skills today. And Wayne, thank you so much for this conversation.

00;21;21;00 - 00;21;30;08
Marisa Eikenberry
I hope that people are really excited about the new book. it's you've changed so much, and I think it's really going to be helpful for the people who are reading it.

00;21;30;11 - 00;21;42;16
Wayne Turmel
So it's it's, it's a blast. And, you know, it's funny, we say all the time here at the cabinet Kingsbury group training as an event, learning as a process. And that includes for us.

00;21;42;22 - 00;22;09;26
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, absolutely. We are also learning all the time and, you know, early adopting, but anyway, thank you so much for listening to the long distance work life for Shownotes transcripts and other resources. Don't forget to go to long distance work life.com. And if you haven't yet, subscribe to the podcast so you won't miss any future episodes. And if you're on Apple or Spotify, please give us a rating and review.

00;22;10;01 - 00;22;25;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Your feedback helps us improve and reach more listeners just like you. Feel free to contact us via email or LinkedIn with the links in our show notes, and let us know you listen to this episode, or suggest a topic for Wayne and I to tackle in a future episode. We would love to hear from you. Thank you for joining us.

00;22;25;19 - 00;22;28;12
Marisa Eikenberry
And as Wayne likes to say, don't let the weasels get you down.

00;22;28;14 - 00;22;41;04
Unknown


00;22;41;06 - 00;22;42;01
Unknown



Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to Today's Episode
01:50 How Remote Leadership Has Changed Since 2018
03:36 Understanding Hybrid Teams and Their Impact
05:05 First Order vs. Second Order Changes in Leadership
09:09 The Shift to Written Communication in Remote Teams
15:07 Preparing for Continuous Change in Work and Technology
20:34 Special Announcement: Preorder the Revised Long-Distance Leader
21:21 Final Thoughts and Call to Action

Related Episodes

Additional Resources

Pre-Order The Long-Distance Leader

Perfect your remote leadership skills with the updated edition of "The Long-Distance Leader" by Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, featuring new principles and proven strategies for today's hybrid work environments.

 Pre-Order
The Long-Distance Leader
Read More
Leading Through Conflict: Communicating Unpopular Policies
Ask Wayne Anything, Hybrid Work, Leadership

Leading Through Conflict: Communicating Unpopular Policies

Marisa Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel dive into the complexities of leadership when confronted with disagreeable or unpopular policies. Learn effective strategies for communicating these policies to your remote or hybrid team, ensuring clarity, empathy, and maintaining morale. Wayne shares his extensive experience on how to handle the challenges of remote leadership, from understanding the reasons behind decisions to managing team pushback. Whether you're a seasoned manager or new to leadership, this episode offers valuable insights for navigating conflict and leading with confidence, no matter where your team is located.

Key Takeaways

1. Communication is a two-way process; it's crucial to listen as well as deliver the message.
2. Use rich communication mediums, like video calls, for delivering significant news.
3. Be transparent about what you know and don’t know, and ensure ongoing dialogue.
4. Schedule follow-ups and one-on-ones to address individual concerns and questions.
5. Understand the technical, organizational, and personal implications of policy changes.

View Full Transcript

00;00;07;28 - 00;00;19;04
Marisa Eikenberry
Welcome back to long distance worklife where we help you lead, work and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Marisa Eikenberry, a fellow remote worker. And joining me is my co-host and remote work expert, Wayne Turmel. Hi, Wayne.

00;00;19;07 - 00;00;21;05
Wayne Turmel
Hello, Marisa. How the heck are you?

00;00;21;06 - 00;00;22;24
Marisa Eikenberry
I'm great. How are you?

00;00;22;26 - 00;00;25;13
Wayne Turmel
I am, I am well today.

00;00;25;16 - 00;00;36;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Good deal. Because today, we're going to be talking about leadership and conflict and how we can handle disagreeable policies or unpopular policies.

00;00;36;22 - 00;00;46;17
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, it's part of being the manager, right? Nobody is when everything's going great. Being the boss is fabulous. when.

00;00;46;17 - 00;00;47;08
Marisa Eikenberry
Trade.

00;00;47;10 - 00;01;12;14
Wayne Turmel
Policies come down and you, as the manager, are expected to inform the team about them, and even worse, enforce them, it can be super, super unpleasant. And when you are not in the same place as the people that you're working with, it can be unpleasant and stressful. So more stressful to be specific.

00;01;12;21 - 00;01;34;00
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. So given you know that we have remote and hybrid teams now. And so it's way different than, you know, walking into the office in the conference room and being like, hey guys, like here's this decision that's been made from on high. So what are some effective communication strategies that managers can use with their remote and hybrid teams when explaining some unpopular policies to their team?

00;01;34;03 - 00;01;47;18
Wayne Turmel
Well, let's take a step back when everybody's in the office, right. There's like this immediate conversation and kerfuffle. And then there's cubicle conversations. And, you know.

00;01;47;20 - 00;01;48;23
Marisa Eikenberry
Slack messages and.

00;01;48;25 - 00;02;17;19
Wayne Turmel
Whining and people going out for beverages later. And, you know, like that when you are not physically co-located with your coworkers and with your team. That same stuff happens, but you don't know what's going on. You aren't privy to the chat conversations and the texts and the whining and complaining. There is so much, as always, with long distance leadership.

00;02;17;25 - 00;02;44;11
Wayne Turmel
There is so much white space that you don't really know what's going on. And so the number one communication thing is to do it. and communication is in fact a two way process. It's delivering the message, but it's also listening. And it's listening to what people say and what they don't say.

00;02;44;13 - 00;02;44;23
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;02;44;24 - 00;02;49;28
Wayne Turmel
If you are met with dead silence, there's stuff you need to learn.

00;02;50;01 - 00;03;07;12
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, and you mentioning dead silence, I mean, that also is a good point to like how we're delivering this message. We've talked about mediums of communication before, but it sounds like, you know, if you're going to deliver something that might be unpopular, probably needs to be on a video call. Yes.

00;03;07;15 - 00;03;21;06
Wayne Turmel
Well, certainly you want it to be as rich as circumstances demanded. a video call is a great way to break the news if it's possible to do it that way.

00;03;21;08 - 00;03;22;20
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;03;22;23 - 00;03;35;10
Wayne Turmel
and you need something they can refer back to a written document that it says this is what is and isn't covered.

00;03;35;13 - 00;03;36;25
Marisa Eikenberry
Okay.

00;03;36;27 - 00;04;03;12
Wayne Turmel
because when you make an announcement, particularly one that is unpopular or has emotional tripwires attached to it, there's no guarantee they're going to get it the first time to really understand what's going on. So the communication strategy as such, there are a few steps that you have to take. The first is you better make sure you understand the change.

00;04;03;14 - 00;04;03;28
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;04;03;28 - 00;04;41;18
Wayne Turmel
And that's not just whether or not you agree with it. You may or may not, but you darn well better understand it. And there are several levels to this. You need to understand technically what is changing or not, what is going to be the difference. You need to understand as best you can. Why is this happening right? The moment I became a real grown up adult worker was the day I realized that every decision, no matter how idiot shtick, was made for a reason.

00;04;41;20 - 00;04;43;10
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

00;04;43;12 - 00;05;18;24
Wayne Turmel
Somebody had a reason for doing what they did. Now, whether this is the right response. There's all that. But if you understand what the reason is, the it tempers some of the, the pain. So you need to understand what is actually changing. You need to understand why it's happening. And you need to understand the repercussions. If we know if you're making notes to yourself for how to break this news, it starts with when this happens, this will be the result.

00;05;18;26 - 00;05;20;18
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;05;20;20 - 00;05;38;11
Wayne Turmel
Good, bad or indifferent. And there's what's the result on an organizational level. There's what's the result on a personal level. And the challenge for leaders is that the information comes down always with the priority on the organizational level.

00;05;38;13 - 00;05;39;08
Marisa Eikenberry
Of course.

00;05;39;10 - 00;06;00;29
Wayne Turmel
This is what it means to the organization when you break it to your people. That's the secondary consideration. They want to know what does it mean for me? And you'd best have as good an answer as you can have. Now that all makes sense. The problem is we don't always have all the information.

00;06;01;01 - 00;06;01;29
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;06;02;02 - 00;06;14;04
Wayne Turmel
And one of the mistakes that leaders make is if they don't have certain information they either withhold it completely.

00;06;14;07 - 00;06;15;13
Marisa Eikenberry


00;06;15;16 - 00;06;35;08
Wayne Turmel
Or they act as if they have the information. And this is going to happen. And what happens as policies get implemented is things don't always happen the way that we think they're going to. And then if it doesn't match what you've told your people they say you lied to us, you weasel.

00;06;35;11 - 00;06;37;01
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. Well, and.

00;06;37;01 - 00;06;55;04
Wayne Turmel
You may not have intentionally you may have tried to spare their feelings. You may have tried not to make a situation worse by saying this could also happen, but you also are perceived as not having told them the truth.

00;06;55;06 - 00;06;56;21
Marisa Eikenberry


00;06;56;24 - 00;07;03;05
Wayne Turmel
And you did it for all the right reasons and you did it to be a good person. And it's still going to blow up in your face.

00;07;03;07 - 00;07;06;08
Marisa Eikenberry
I think this is part of course for being a leader to be honest.

00;07;06;08 - 00;07;39;04
Wayne Turmel
Well but that's you know, how often have we said on this show time after time, leadership first, location second, like, yes, this is breaking bad news. Leadership 101 and when people aren't there, they can't look at each other and go, what the hell? They can write the text messages and the chats are going crazy and there's all kinds of stuff going on, and you can't physically see everybody's eyes, right?

00;07;39;05 - 00;07;51;25
Wayne Turmel
Right. If you call everybody into the bullpen, into the cube farm and you make an announcement, you can see so-and-so looks stunned, so-and-so is ticked off. So-and-so just looks confused.

00;07;51;27 - 00;07;52;20
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

00;07;52;22 - 00;08;07;18
Wayne Turmel
And you can respond accordingly. You don't have that benefit unless it's a very small team and you're on camera, and even then, you're so busy delivering the message that you may not see everything that's going on.

00;08;07;20 - 00;08;19;00
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, that's what I was getting ready to say, too. I mean, even if you do have a small team, maybe everybody's on camera. Okay, I might look fine here, but you don't know. My foot shaking under my desk. You know. Right?

00;08;19;03 - 00;08;46;15
Wayne Turmel
Right. Absolutely. Which means that delivering the message is only part of it. I mean, one of the things that we've taught at the cabin, I can very group for a billion years, and they've been teaching in the world for much longer than we have walked the earth is communication is missed. Message send, message received, message understood, and action taken.

00;08;46;22 - 00;08;47;21
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;08;47;23 - 00;08;56;05
Wayne Turmel
Right. A commute, a successful communication sends the message. And whatever you want to have happen, happens, right?

00;08;56;06 - 00;08;57;10
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;08;57;12 - 00;09;13;04
Wayne Turmel
The problem when you are instituting a an emotional or a complex message, is that message send is the only thing you know is going to happen.

00;09;13;06 - 00;09;15;07
Marisa Eikenberry
Absolutely.

00;09;15;09 - 00;09;27;01
Wayne Turmel
Right. You can say I sent the message. I held that call. I did that announcement. I sent that email. Yep. You sure did. And it's only a quarter of the process.

00;09;27;03 - 00;09;32;28
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. The email went to spam. They didn't watch the video. They didn't attend the call anyway.

00;09;33;05 - 00;09;43;05
Wayne Turmel
Exactly right. I mean, there's a lot of stuff, so sending the message is only part of it. The second thing is, did they actually hear it?

00;09;43;12 - 00;09;44;25
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;09;44;27 - 00;10;05;29
Wayne Turmel
Well, you know, the richer the form of communication, the more likely that they are going to physically it is going to physically hit their ears. Yeah. Right. But we all know the minute you hear something that you don't want to hear, you cease being able to hear it.

00;10;06;01 - 00;10;06;28
Marisa Eikenberry
Yes.

00;10;07;00 - 00;10;22;18
Wayne Turmel
Right. Hey we're doing a reorg. If you're so busy thinking that's it I'm getting fired. I'm getting laid off. This is the end of life as we know it. I am literally not hearing what you're telling me, let alone understanding.

00;10;22;26 - 00;10;28;08
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. And they might be saying your departments fine. And you don't have no idea it.

00;10;28;10 - 00;11;05;02
Wayne Turmel
So you have to make sure they they received the message clearly do the best you can to make sure they understand it. And some of that is eliminating the walls that are immediately going to shoot up. If you merely focus on the organizational part of this, they are going to be so busy trying to figure out what it means to them that now, one way to do that, particularly live, is to say, what I am about to tell you is what we know right now.

00;11;05;04 - 00;11;33;14
Wayne Turmel
There's a lot that we don't know. There's a lot that might change. So I'm giving you the best information I can at this time. I would ask you to listen to it and I will answer your questions as best I can. Yeah. Because you want to eliminate the barriers so people can at least take the information in, then you better make darn sure that people understand it.

00;11;33;17 - 00;12;02;04
Wayne Turmel
Some of that can happen in the moment, right? It's an all hands meeting. There are questions that most people will not ask their questions out loud. Most people do not even know what their questions are until they hang up and later. So on a remote or a hybrid team, make sure that there is plenty of opportunity for that instantaneous feedback and connection.

00;12;02;06 - 00;12;31;03
Wayne Turmel
Ideally, if your team is small enough, you would schedule one on ones immediately. You want to do check ins. How you doing? What did you hear? What are your questions and be able to address those as best you can on an individual basis. particularly for those who aren't don't have easy access to you. Right. And again, you want to be empathetic.

00;12;31;06 - 00;12;38;25
Wayne Turmel
I know this is hard. That's not the same as sympathetic. I know I think it sucks to is not help.

00;12;38;28 - 00;12;51;23
Marisa Eikenberry
Well. So pivoting a little bit like should managers even be transparent with their own reservations on stuff like if, if, if I'm a leader and I hate this idea, should I tell them.

00;12;51;25 - 00;13;01;15
Wayne Turmel
I think it is appropriate to say I have questions myself about this?

00;13;01;18 - 00;13;03;17
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

00;13;03;20 - 00;13;23;07
Wayne Turmel
When I first heard it, I had some concerns. I hope that I get the answers that I need, and I hope that I pass those that you know, and I will let you know when I have those answers. It is not it. It is helpful to empathize. It is not helpful to throw the company under the bus.

00;13;23;10 - 00;13;25;01
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;13;25;04 - 00;13;46;15
Wayne Turmel
Because at the end of the day, on a purely mercenary, selfish level, you as the leader are going to be at least partially responsible for the enforcement and coaching and training and helping people make this change if they know that you're against it.

00;13;46;17 - 00;13;47;08
Marisa Eikenberry


00;13;47;11 - 00;13;53;04
Wayne Turmel
First of all, are your efforts really going to be good faith efforts to make it happen?

00;13;53;06 - 00;13;54;10
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;13;54;12 - 00;14;18;21
Wayne Turmel
And secondly they know you think it's nonsense so why should they bother. It is going to be three times harder to implement the change than it would it be if people were merely unhappy. So and this goes back to understanding the change, right. Why is it happening? I understand why the company is doing what it's doing. I don't have to like it.

00;14;18;21 - 00;14;46;14
Wayne Turmel
I don't have to agree with it. But I better be able to say when somebody says, why are they doing this? And there's a difference between the stock is tanking and they need to shore up the numbers. And and you know, the stock is tanking. And so they're throwing us overboard. Those are two very different right ways of explaining what's going on.

00;14;46;16 - 00;14;50;19
Marisa Eikenberry
And one of them is okay. And the other one is definitely not.

00;14;50;22 - 00;15;07;29
Wayne Turmel
And it's perfectly natural I mean, you want transparency is important in that it creates trust. Right. Hey I don't know exactly what's going to happen either. We will figure it out together.

00;15;08;01 - 00;15;33;09
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. So hypothetically speaking like you know if, if managers have a bunch of pushback from their teams about a decision, you know, and it's something maybe they personally disagree with how they've decided to share that with their team. Hopefully they take some of our advice from this episode. But how do managers handle that pushback? Because, you know, they still need to support what the decision was.

00;15;33;16 - 00;16;02;14
Wayne Turmel
Well, when the pushback happens, there's a couple of things. First of all, it needs to be heard. And people need to know that it is being heard. And of course, in a remote environment that might be written. So you obviously want to have one on ones with people. But maybe there is a special slack or teams chat, for questions about things.

00;16;02;16 - 00;16;29;00
Wayne Turmel
Right. You want to take that information because some of the information you're going to be able to answer and you're going to be able to diffuse the drama. Pretty much right away. There is also there are going to be questions, especially if you don't have the answer, that it is your job as a manager to go up the hill and get the answers that you can get, even if the answer is when are the layoffs going to start?

00;16;29;03 - 00;16;30;15
Marisa Eikenberry
It's still important to know that answer.

00;16;30;16 - 00;16;31;25
Wayne Turmel
They got to know that.

00;16;31;27 - 00;16;47;22
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. And we've talked about this on the show before too. But I want to reiterate because you've you've kind of touched on this already, but this idea of if you get asked a question and you don't know, it's okay to say, I don't know, but I'm going to go find out, do not.

00;16;47;25 - 00;16;50;15
Wayne Turmel
This is where you get accused of lying.

00;16;50;18 - 00;16;50;26
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

00;16;50;27 - 00;17;09;25
Wayne Turmel
Because if you try to gloss over the question or you kind of think this is the right answer. And so you give it because you want to sound like you know what you're doing. You don't want to sound like an idiot. It's going to blow back on you if that answer turns out not to be true.

00;17;09;28 - 00;17;16;09
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. And we as a society just need to get better about saying, I don't know, but I'm going to go find out.

00;17;16;11 - 00;17;45;13
Wayne Turmel
We as human beings, just in general. Right? Again, most of what we've talked about is conveying bad news or handling conflict 101, regardless of where you are. I think as we near the end of our time in a remote or a hybrid environment, there are a couple of very specific differences. Number one is you want to make sure that the whole team gets as much information as they can.

00;17;45;16 - 00;18;05;16
Wayne Turmel
As a team, it's very tempting, for example, to call the people in the office together, make the announcement, and then have a call for the people who aren't. It's a very natural, kind of instinctive thing to do. But the team needs to hear it as a team.

00;18;05;22 - 00;18;07;26
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

00;18;07;28 - 00;18;30;25
Wayne Turmel
so that's one thing, is don't fall into that trap. It should be delivered as richly as possible, and it needs a backup. It needs to have a place that people can go back and now read it for themselves. Right when the drama has settled, or they're a little calmer and they can read it and take a look, because then they may get some of their questions answered.

00;18;30;25 - 00;18;32;12
Wayne Turmel
Other questions may arise.

00;18;32;14 - 00;18;32;23
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;18;32;26 - 00;18;40;10
Wayne Turmel
And there needs to be an ongoing conversation. It's not like you can just say, well, I told them and that's it.

00;18;40;12 - 00;18;41;09
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;18;41;11 - 00;19;10;22
Wayne Turmel
Right. It's going to be an ongoing conversation. And then you need to figure out what. Training are people going to need. What are they going to need to know. Some of it contextual, some of it, you know, added hey, here's what's going to happen. And there may be things they need to do differently. What are those things. And get that training in place as quickly as possible.

00;19;10;24 - 00;19;16;28
Marisa Eikenberry
Absolutely. Wayne, sounds like we kind of talked about this for a lot longer than now, but unfortunately we are out of time.

00;19;17;00 - 00;19;39;20
Wayne Turmel
But someday when you are a manager, young lady, you will learn, it's this is the bane. There are two things implementing policies that you yourself might not agree with and having to let people go. These are the hardest things that a manager has to do.

00;19;39;23 - 00;20;05;04
Marisa Eikenberry
We want to talk about that second one on another episode sometime. Absolutely. That that might be really important. And listeners, if you're listening right now and you're like, yeah, I want to hear that. Please let us know. so that way we know that that needs to go higher up on our list. But listeners, thank you so much for listening to The Long-Distance Worklife. For shownotes, transcripts, and other resources, make sure to visit LongDistanceWorklife.com.

00;20;05;06 - 00;20;27;07
Marisa Eikenberry
If you haven't yet, subscribe to the podcast so you won't miss any future episodes. And if you're on Apple or Spotify, please give us a rating and review. Your feedback helps us improve and reach more listeners like you. Feel free to contact us via email or LinkedIn with the links in our show notes, and let us know you listen to this episode, or even suggest a topic for Wayne and I to tackle in a future episode.

00;20;27;10 - 00;20;50;16
Marisa Eikenberry
Like we already mentioned, we would love to hear from you. And before we go, I want to let you know that the second edition of The Long-Distance Leader is now available for preorder. For those of you watching, Wayne has a copy of it right here and it will be launching on September 17th. This updated guide is perfect for navigating today's remote and hybrid work environments with new principles and proven strategies.

00;20;50;17 - 00;21;14;15
Marisa Eikenberry
Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel show you how to lead effectively no matter where your team is located. Don't miss out on the latest insights and exercises designed to boost productivity and morale. Preorder your copy now at longdistanceworklife.com/LDL and strengthen your remote leadership skills today. Thank you so much for joining us. And as Wayne likes to say, don't let the weasels get you down.

00;21;14;17 - 00;21;28;25
Marisa Eikenberry
Hey.

00;21;28;27 - 00;21;29;08
Marisa Eikenberry
You.


Timestamps

00:00 Introduction: Welcome and Episode Overview
00:36 The Role of Leadership in Conflict Management
01:34 Effective Communication Strategies for Remote Teams
02:44 The Importance of Listening and Understanding Team Reactions
05:03 Steps to Ensure Clear Communication of Policies
07:39 Challenges of Delivering Bad News Remotely
11:04 Transparency and Trust: Handling Managerial Reservations
15:32 Managing Pushback and Ongoing Conversations
17:45 Team Training and Support for Policy Changes
20:05 Conclusion and Call to Action: Preorder The Long-Distance Leader

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Additional Resources

Pre-Order The Long-Distance Leader

Perfect your remote leadership skills with the updated edition of "The Long-Distance Leader" by Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, featuring new principles and proven strategies for today's hybrid work environments.

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