Ask Wayne Anything, Leadership, Surviving Remote Work

Mandatory Office Days

Marisa asks Wayne about mandatory office days. What's the strategy behind them? Is this a way for management to bring everyone back to the office full time? Are we resistant to it because it's mandatory? 

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Returning to Office with Kevin Eikenberry

Wayne joins Kevin Eikenberry to discuss how return to office is going. What are some things that aren't going so well and, for the companies that are succeeding at this, what are they doing? 

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00:00:08:09 - 00:00:35:20
Wayne
Hi everybody. Welcome to the Long-Distance WorkLife Podcast. I am Wayne Turmel. This is the podcast where we desperately try to learn some new skills and information to help us thrive, survive, generally keep the weasels at bay in this crazy world of remote and hybrid work. This is a Marisa-less episode, as most of our interviews are, but we are not.

00:00:35:20 - 00:00:59:20
Wayne
Eikenberry-less, as a matter of fact, the person joining us today is the namesake of the Kevin Eikenberry Group. And my friend and my boss and my coauthor of The Long-Distance Leader and Long Distance teammate, and he's actually one of the most qualified people to talk about today's topic. So, Kevin, how are you, man?

00:01:00:12 - 00:01:07:03
Kevin
Well, I'm good. I'm glad you didn't bring on people that are unqualified to talk about whatever your topic might be. I'm glad to be with you.

00:01:08:05 - 00:01:36:12
Wayne
So we've been talking a lot as an organization about how the return to work is going and what our customers are experiencing. And it occurred to me the last time we had this conversation that it was probably a conversation other people are interested in. So for those of you who don't know and I can't imagine there are many of you listening to this, Kevin is a very sought after thinker and speaker in leadership.

00:01:36:12 - 00:02:04:22
Wayne
He's regularly, regularly on lists like, you know, it's top 50 leadership thinkers and all that good stuff. So he talks a lot to organizations at a higher level even than I do. So Kevin, the return to office thing kind of started in June. All these organizations were getting ready and then there were fits and starts and some of it was working and some of it wasn't.

00:02:05:08 - 00:02:13:19
Wayne
And most organizations are kind of somewhere on the return to office journey. What are you seeing out there?

00:02:14:12 - 00:02:34:10
Kevin
An interesting thing is, you know, people have been thinking about this now for a year and a half. Right. And we've got some big clients, names of companies that you have products in your homes for that we're going to do this a year ago in June and then in July and then in August and then later. And I think that that's just an example of what where many people are.

00:02:34:10 - 00:02:56:14
Kevin
Right. And lots of people made proclamations and statements, some of which they've had to take back about what they were going to do or not do. And I think that, you know, I wish I knew what percentage of organizations have actually made a decision. I think there's like three parts. Have you decided what it's going to be? Have you delineated that and have you implemented that right?

00:02:56:14 - 00:03:23:01
Kevin
And I think that I wish I knew, Wayne, what the percentage of each of those were. My sense is there's people in all those buckets. And and it's really fascinating to me. And I knew we were going to have this conversation and I had it to be somewhat coherent. So I've been thinking a lot more about maybe what the reasons why people are in the different buckets, like why wouldn't we be further along this path?

00:03:23:01 - 00:03:26:07
Kevin
Because we all knew it was coming right. And maybe we'll get there as we go.

00:03:26:13 - 00:03:44:00
Wayne
Yeah. What are you seeing out there in terms of, you know, how is it going when it's the return of. It's great. Is it pretty much what people thought it was going to be? Is it different than people thought it was going to be? What's your sense of that?

00:03:44:04 - 00:04:01:08
Kevin
I think it depends a little bit on what what the decision was that an organization made. Right. Like how much different is it than where they were for the last two years? I think that's one of the things. And I think that like any big change like this, there are there are unforeseen or unintended consequences that are coming along with it.

00:04:01:14 - 00:04:20:08
Kevin
And I think maybe and this may end up being my biggest message in this conversation, Wayne, is that it's at least as much about how they've implemented it. Well, it's at least as much about how they decided on what the plan was going to be and how they implemented that plan as it is about what the actual plan was.

00:04:20:18 - 00:04:31:17
Kevin
Right. Because, you know, I don't know that there is there's certainly not a global right answer. It used to sort of be if you had a sales team, they were remote. Everyone else came to the office. Right.

00:04:32:07 - 00:04:41:02
Wayne
It's not even the global. I don't even think it's a global answer. I think inside organizations, different functions and different teams exactly are going to be different.

00:04:41:03 - 00:05:06:22
Kevin
The point is there used to be like an answer, right? Like it was kind of black ish and whitish. And now the there's not a single right answer. There may be a best answer for your organization or your team or your department, but that isn't necessarily the same as everybody else's right answer. And so I think that there's a lot the organizations that are having the most success, whatever their decision is.

00:05:06:22 - 00:05:32:13
Kevin
And I think when sometimes we get sort of people think, oh, they're proposing everyone ought to be remote. We're not proposing that. What we're proposing is people ought to figure out what the right answer is for their organizations, and there's probably some flexibility in that. But what it actually is depends a lot on a lot of factors. And I think the organizations having the most success, whatever decisions they've made, comes down to who all did they involve in the starting point and how did they implement it as opposed to what they actually decided?

00:05:33:06 - 00:05:58:19
Wayne
Yeah, I know where you're going with this because we've had this conversation. But when you say who they've involved in this, I get the feeling that those organizations that were kind of top down here is the policy delivered from Mount Olympus are the ones that perhaps have had the most surprises, without question.

00:05:58:22 - 00:06:19:18
Kevin
And even if that decision was one that looked an awful lot like what people maybe hoped for, like maybe people in the organization were hoping for some flexibility and maybe even looks a little bit like that. This is the kind of decision that shouldn't be made in a bubble. It shouldn't be made by people that all have here the color of mine, yours.

00:06:20:00 - 00:06:46:14
Kevin
It shouldn't be made by people. It should be made with everyone. You know, I guess the word is stakeholder. All of the stakeholders involved, because, number one, they're all impacted greatly. And the other thing is, they all have information and experience from the last two years. Right. There's a lot of leaders that have felt like in relationship to return to office and other things in this whole sphere wane that I'm like, I don't I don't have all the answers.

00:06:46:14 - 00:06:52:22
Kevin
Kevin What am I supposed to do? I said, You're not supposed to have all the answers. You're supposed to work with your team together to find your answers.

00:06:53:10 - 00:07:21:08
Wayne
Well, I think one of the maybe most surprising things for senior leaders is that if you give people essentially two years to sit and think about what they want, they will think about what they want. What they want may be radically different than it was two years ago. And so if you are not including people in that discussion, your assumptions just may be completely off.

00:07:22:07 - 00:07:51:00
Kevin
Well, and I think, you know what people want. Not only do they have time to think about it, but they had a chance to experience something different, you know? And you and I have talked to this 100 times. Well, what we growing up thought work was when and where and how and all that is drastically different than it is now for our daughters, certainly, but for lots of people that have now been working from home for two or two and a half years.

00:07:52:10 - 00:08:06:23
Kevin
And some people that at the beginning said, I never want to go back. Now, some them are saying I want to go back some of the time. Right. So it's an it's an evolving thing. And to your point, we need to involve the people that have experienced it well.

00:08:07:01 - 00:08:29:14
Wayne
And I think, you know, it goes back to what some of those assumptions are I've shared with you before. I have a client who has done very expansive and expansive returning to work surveys. And in a nutshell, what they're finding is there's less than 10% of people who have been working from home who can't wait to get back at the office.

00:08:29:14 - 00:08:52:17
Wayne
They need that. They want the structure. They want the social activity. They want all that stuff. And then there's another slightly less than 10% who never want to see an office again. We are perfectly happy being where we are. Thank you very much. And that leaves 80% of the workforce who are on a spectrum of outcome.

00:08:53:04 - 00:09:00:16
Kevin
If I lost to I'd like to get in once a week or two days a week, or I want to see my team every few weeks or whatever.

00:09:00:21 - 00:09:19:16
Wayne
But that big thing is that requests for flexible ability is the number one thing that we're hearing from people and employers are hearing. And it's impacting how you retrain, retain people. It's impacting who you can attract as workers. It's got a lot. It's got yeah.

00:09:20:06 - 00:09:35:16
Kevin
I've been saying for a long time, it's the future. I don't know what the future of work is, but the future of work is flexible and it's flexibility in terms of when we where we work, when we work. We can talk about that if you want and who we work with and a whole bunch of other things. And here's the thing.

00:09:35:16 - 00:10:09:07
Kevin
Big organizations with policies, flexibility doesn't jive with that very well. And so I think another piece of this puzzle is how do we help? How do we, in the work that we do, help organizations think passed a policy to guidelines or or guardrails or expectations, whatever you want to say it how we want to say it, because I don't think policy is necessarily the right answer here, because it tends to overly prescribe and box people in which is part of where people's issues are.

00:10:09:19 - 00:10:34:03
Wayne
And with all due respect, nobody cares what we worry about or think about. And, you know, people are listening to this conversation looking for what the heck do we do? So why don't we start with what are one or two things that you're seeing people do very well? What just a couple of examples of the folks that we've worked with.

00:10:34:15 - 00:10:38:18
Wayne
What are a couple of things that companies that are getting this right are doing?

00:10:39:22 - 00:11:02:13
Kevin
Well, getting past what we've already said, which is engaging people in the front end of it. Think things the things that thing that people are doing well is, number one, they're recognizing that if we're coming in, the work needs to be different when we're in versus when we're out. If we're going to come into the office and sit at our computer all day with our headset on and never talk to anybody, why did we come in?

00:11:02:17 - 00:11:22:00
Kevin
Which is what many employees have said, like, why am I coming in to do exactly what I did at home? So I think what organizations are doing right is that they're they're rethinking the work that we do on the days that we're in versus the days that we're not. And that's there's there's sort of team discussions around that, but there's also individual routines around that.

00:11:22:00 - 00:11:44:17
Kevin
Right. And I think the next thing that organizations that are getting this right are doing is they're supporting their team members and leaders in in building the skills to communicate differently, to collaborate differently, and to have that different set of routines and expectations on the different days, whether they're in or whether they're out.

00:11:44:21 - 00:11:57:07
Wayne
Yeah, let's do a little bit of a dove into what some of those routines are, because we a lot of organizations weren't ready for when COVID pushed them across.

00:11:57:13 - 00:11:59:02
Kevin
You mean like almost all.

00:11:59:12 - 00:12:10:01
Wayne
Like almost all. I can't count the number of people who said, yeah, we're going to implement a strategy in the next six months. And then, oops, it's March. And we weren't.

00:12:10:01 - 00:12:11:10
Kevin
Ready. When we were ready.

00:12:11:21 - 00:12:36:03
Wayne
They were ready. We've been standing on that corner for a while. It just took everybody else to join us. I am kind of curious though, there were some things that kind of went from 0 to 60. I would say Zoom went from what? Zoom to a verb to a syndrome. In less than 18 months. It was fascinating to watch.

00:12:36:19 - 00:12:55:21
Wayne
Yeah, but there are some behaviors and some things that have taken on a life of their own while people were remote. And as we think about returning to the office, we have to address them. I'm thinking particularly about just the back to back meetings thing.

00:12:55:21 - 00:13:21:11
Kevin
Yeah, for the most part, we didn't like meetings when we were all together and so then when we weren't together, we had more of them. Right. So like, that's not necessarily a good approach, right? So I think that figuring out how to have other ways to communicate besides meeting, thinking more about asynchronous ways of getting things accomplished and collaborating.

00:13:22:02 - 00:13:38:20
Kevin
And I think that organizations that have figured some of that out have been more successful teams that have figured some of that out have been far more successful because, you know, it used to be, as you used to say in the before times, if people work from home for a day, they were very productive because they weren't interrupted.

00:13:39:00 - 00:14:08:02
Kevin
They had they had time where they could, you know, do heads down work or whatever. And and the opposite that has become true. Right. We've got more different things that can send us dings of notifications than ever before. So teams, leaders, individuals, organizations that have figured some of that out, whether that's things like no meeting Wednesdays or whether that's no email Fridays or whether that's being far more judicious about when we choose to have a meeting or what we choose to have a meeting about.

00:14:08:15 - 00:14:13:08
Kevin
All those sorts of things I think are things that can help us significantly.

00:14:13:20 - 00:14:39:09
Wayne
Yeah, I think that there's it's funny, I think about why did we suddenly have so many meetings? And I think it's two things. One is we got to get the work done and we've always done the work collaboratively, so we need meetings. And the second part of it was this crying need for human contact that, you know, we're trying to keep the team together and we're trying to keep relationships formed.

00:14:39:09 - 00:15:07:10
Wayne
And and so everything then became a meeting because it was doing double duty. There was the function of the meeting and there was the social component. But I know that we've been doing a lot of work around asynchronous meetings. We wrote about it quite a bit actually in the book that's coming out in February. The Long Distance Team, maybe you can talk a little bit about asynchronous meetings.

00:15:08:10 - 00:15:13:14
Wayne
When do they work and why should we give them more respect than maybe we did?

00:15:14:02 - 00:15:33:08
Kevin
Well, the first thing, the way that I mean, you could say it's an oxymoron to say an asynchronous meeting. But really, the thing is, how can we collaborate in ways that don't require us all to be in the same place at the same time? And we certainly have the tools that allow us to do it. But I think a couple of the things that are critical are, number one, a very clear desired outcome or a very clear problem statement.

00:15:33:08 - 00:16:06:13
Kevin
All depends what you're collaborating on, like what are we really trying to accomplish and making sure that everyone's crystal clear on that, because then we can be we can be more far more effective. Now, as it turns out, that also makes synchronous meetings far better. And it's one of the reasons they aren't very good. But if we can get clearer on that on the front end and we can ask questions that everyone understands and they can then do their do that thinking on their own before they respond, whether that response that happens in a meeting or that happens in a in a in a Slack channel or a microsoft teams channel or whatever, or whether

00:16:06:19 - 00:16:24:17
Kevin
whatever that looks like or whether that's in a, you know, a digital whiteboard that everyone has access to all the time. And they can add stuff to whatever it is. The point is that getting clearer focus and intentionality about what the outcomes are will help us a great deal. A great deal.

00:16:25:21 - 00:16:55:08
Wayne
So one of the things which I'm experiencing with my clients and I know a lot of the people listening to this are experiencing, is there are organizations that have charged, they had made decisions and now they find out maybe it wasn't the right decision. There are organizations, CDNs, that are trying to implement things gradually, kind of methodically, but there are a ton of organizations who are just frozen in their tracks right now.

00:16:55:22 - 00:16:56:04
Kevin
Yep.

00:16:57:13 - 00:17:11:00
Wayne
I mean, first of all, why is that? They're perfectly smart, capable people. Why have they come to a screeching halt? And then if you are in an organization that is kind of paralyzed at the moment, how do you crack that?

00:17:11:22 - 00:17:30:12
Kevin
Yeah, I've thought a lot about these two questions, especially the first one, and I think there are a bunch of reasons and we don't have time to unpack them all. But I'll say a couple of things. Number one is we're frozen. People are frozen in their tracks because they're just so darned. There's so much uncertainty. Right? And when we really don't know, we make up.

00:17:30:12 - 00:17:50:09
Kevin
Make it up. We make up the worst, like the worst is going to happen when we're going to have another. And and then the next one is they're they're waiting for someone else to have the right answer. And every time a big organization makes some proclamation, first of all, they're not all proclaiming, proclaiming the same thing. Some senior leaders are saying, we're bringing everybody back.

00:17:50:09 - 00:18:06:05
Kevin
Some senior leaders are saying we're letting people work from home. They're not even necessarily the organizations you would have guessed would have said one or the other originally. And so people are kind of waiting for someone to say, generally, what's the right answer? And no one's coming out with that because there's not going to be a single right answer.

00:18:06:09 - 00:18:36:20
Kevin
So it's the uncertainty kind of waiting for something, people being scared to do something wrong. And quite honestly, I think there are a lot of senior leaders that really want more people in than out. And they feel at odds with their with their workforce thinking that, well, what I want, if I implement that, they're all going to leave, which is possible.

00:18:37:03 - 00:18:59:08
Kevin
But when we put ourselves in that mode of pitting ourselves the outcomes versus the folks doing the work, getting those outcomes, we're framing it incorrectly. Right. And so we've got to we get past it by getting all of us on the same page together and we get past it. And so to answer the second part of your question, I would say, well, one more one more reason that we're not making progress.

00:19:00:01 - 00:19:17:11
Kevin
And that is that I often say that you only have a problem if you know what you've got and what you want. And if you don't know what you want, you don't have a problem yet. Right? So a lot of people really don't know what they actually want. So we're good at solving problems, but there isn't really a clear problem.

00:19:17:20 - 00:19:42:01
Kevin
There's just something that isn't the way. We're not sure that the way it is needs to be the future or not. And what I would say is, if you want, you're in the organization, you're a front level leader, you're a mid-level manager, you're an individual contributor, and you're trying to help your organization get off the dime. You're trying to have your team get off the dime, say, just try something, nothing has to be the final answer.

00:19:42:06 - 00:20:10:01
Kevin
Let's try something. Let's ask ourselves, what have we learned in the last two years? What worked better before that? We don't want to lose what's been working for us now, what's not been working for us now. Let's try something. Call it a pilot. Call it a test. Call it 30 days, call it 60 days. Do something. Because once we do something, we can start to say we small steps almost always help, right?

00:20:10:01 - 00:20:19:05
Kevin
And so we try something, we learn something, we take the pressure off of it because we're not saying it's a decision, we're saying it's a test. I think that's the best thing we can do.

00:20:19:14 - 00:20:41:17
Wayne
That's great advice. Thank you so much, Kevin. Obviously, you and I have talked for hours about this and the conversation could go on forever and people don't have that kind of time in their life. So for those of you who want to talk more, Kevin, of course, is on LinkedIn you can reach me Wayne@KevinEikenberry.com.

00:20:42:01 - 00:21:09:00
Wayne
The lovely and talented Marisa at Marisa@KevinEikenberry.com. You of course can find show notes and links to any number of things by visiting the web site for the podcast. Longdistanceworklife.com. If you are interested in remote work and getting your mitts around it, you may consider our video series which is totally free, which you can link to from the Web site.

00:21:10:00 - 00:21:20:03
Wayne
Kevin, thank you so much for being with us. Really good advice and always, always good to talk to you, brother.

00:21:20:03 - 00:21:29:20
Kevin
Well, thank you and thanks for thanks for putting for putting the effort into doing this podcast and it's making a big difference for people. And and thanks for having me.

00:21:29:20 - 00:22:04:12
Wayne
And those of you listening know the drill like and subscribe. Tell your friends. Word of mouth is very important in spreading these things in which unless you don't like it, in which case keep your mouth shut. We appreciate you. Have a great day. Thank you for joining us on the Long-Distance Worklife.

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Ask Wayne Anything, Hybrid Work, Leadership, Surviving Remote Work, Working Remotely

The Long-Distance Leader Anniversary Episode

In 2022, The Long-Distance Leader celebrates its 4th anniversary! Marisa asks Wayne about some ways that remote work has changed since the book was written and some key takeaways that he hopes that readers get from reading the book.

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View Full Transcript

00:00:08:18 - 00:00:18:18
Wayne Turmel:
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 Eikenberry:
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 yadda 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.

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Ask Wayne Anything, Leadership, Working Remotely

Expectations for Returning to the Office When You’ve Never Been to the Office

Returning to the office is inducing some anxiety for people who haven't been back for the last couple of years, but what if you have never been to the office? Marisa joins Wayne to discuss what new workers might expect and how you can help them be successful when they're just starting out. (Or have only been remote before.)

Additional Resources

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Transcript

Wayne: Hi, everybody. Once again, we are here with the Long-Distance Worklife podcast. My name is Wayne Turmel. With me is Marisa Eikenberry.

Marisa: Hi, everybody.

Wayne: People get very upset when Marisa isn't here, so we're very excited that she is. This is the podcast where we talk about how to work, lead and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. And there are a lot of questions about those things, and that's what this episode is about. This is one of our Marisa gets to ask Wayne anything questions.

And I kind of sort of know what we're going to talk about. But not much. So Marisa have at it, lady.

Marisa: Yeah. So I thought, especially in this whole idea of, you know, we've got return to office is a hot topic right now, just like, you know, and people are graduating and all that kind of thing. I mean, we're recording this in May. So I wanted to talk about what are the expectations of new workers now. You know, people who are just now entering into some of these remote teams or they've been around for a bit, now they've got to return to the office.

So I thought we could kind of touch on that a little bit, maybe like what they expect and what's professional and what's not, that kind of thing.

View Full Transcript

Wayne: Yeah, it's really interesting, actually. The last couple of years has created some havoc. And as we're returning to the office and and this is information coming to us from our clients you know, it was originally when people got sent home during the COVID Diaspora, we got- they said, well, it's just like working in the office except.

Marisa: And if you've never worked in the office...

Wayne: Well, that's the problem is over the last two years, we have brought in a whole group of people who maybe don't have that experience.

Marisa: Yeah. Or they've only done an internship. So it's not quite the same thing.

Wayne: Yeah, exactly. Right. And so, you know, you can't say, well, it's just like when you were in the office and they go, Yeah, OK.

Marisa: Exactly.

Wayne: And it's interesting because this often falls under the generational differences problem, right? And the grumpy old guys like me are like these darn kids don't know how to, you know, how things are done and they don't know how things are done in the office and and we're not wrong.

Marisa: But how can they know if they've never been there?

Wayne: Yeah.

Marisa: So I think we're not giving them enough grace either.

Wayne: When you're absolutely not giving them enough grace. That's that's a grumpy old man problem.

Marisa: Yeah. "OK, Boomer." Kind of deal.

Wayne: Going back to the dawn of time, right? But it's a real thing. And one of the ways of combating this that organizations are doing, which makes a lot of sense, is that they are allowing remote and flexible work based on how long you've been around. So when you are new to the organization, we're going to want to keep you close to the mothership.

We're going to want you to meet people. You're going to want you to see how things are done here. We're going to want you by mentoring and by just osmosis. It's amazing how much stuff we suck up out of the air around us that nobody ever says out loud. But if you work here, you just know.

Marisa: Yeah, you figure it out.

Wayne: We talk about culture a lot, and culture is a $10 word for it. This is how we do stuff here.

Marisa: Yes.

Wayne: The problem is that here the definition of here has taken a beating.

Marisa: Yeah.

Wayne: Do you mean this is how we do it in the office at 8021 Westover. Or do we mean this is how we do it as the Kevin Eikenberry group as an organization. And a lot of this hasn't been planned. I mean, leaders were thrown into the deep end. We're trying to make it work. We're hiring people.

You know, the people we're hiring know technology better than we do in some cases. So we assume that along with knowing how to use the technology, they know how to use the technology. And that's not necessarily true.

Marisa: Right. You've talked about this in previous episodes that. Yeah, just because you know how to how to technically use a program, email, whatever, doesn't mean that you know how to use it effectively in an organization or professionally.

Wayne: Exactly. Right. And so if we think about new people coming into the office and working from home, right?

Marisa: Yes.

Wayne: When somebody comes into the office for the first time, they often have to adjust. What is my working schedule like? It's a little bit unfair to take somebody who has never worked nine to five and let them send their own work schedule.

Marisa: Right. They don't really have anything to compare it to.

Wayne: You don't have anything to compare it to. You don't know what works real well and what doesn't. You don't know you're probably betting that more things can be done asynchronously than probably can fair. And that's assuming that you know what you're doing and you don't have the kind of panicky questions that newbies at any job are going to have, let alone people who are brand new to the workforce.

So I'm actually fairly sympathetic to organizations that say no, when you come to work for us, you're going to start in the office and then we're eventually going to take the reins off. And assuming your productivity is up and your professionalism is maintained and all of that stuff, we're going to then let you have more flexibility and get your life back.

But we want you fairly close at the beginning.

Marisa: Right? That absolutely makes sense there.

Wayne: I have a lot of sympathy for that. It does create an issue, though, when you are hiring people who are remote first. You know, as we start to the beautiful thing about being able to hire remote workers is that you are not bound by geography.

Marisa: Yes.

Wayne: Right. If the best available person is in Denver or Belize or whatever. Right. And more and more people are choosing to be digital nomads that's great. The thing is, what a lot of people are telling us is when we're hiring remote first we are not taking kids out of school.

Marisa: Right.

Wayne: We are refusing to hire anybody who hasn't already worked remotely for a couple of years.

Marisa: Yeah. So that way they kind of know what they're doing a little bit.

Wayne: And so we've created this black hole in the middle and it's you know, it's the time honored tradition. We only hire people with experience. Well, how do you get experience if you don't?

Marisa: Exactly.

Wayne: And this is a very big deal if you're talking about diversity and inclusion and hiring nontraditional people in your organization, yes. Whether those are people with physical disabilities, you know, people who culturally have not been part of your organization, and that's a very real thing.

Marisa: Yeah, I've seen a lot of people talk about that recently as far as inclusivity goes, especially with people who, you know, have some sort of physical disability or mental disability or something that working from home or working remotely is more inclusive to them, even though they're not in the office all the time. So you might think that's the other way around.

Wayne: Yeah. Theoretically, remote work should be more inclusive. The fact of the matter is, though, if you are concerned about cultural fit, if you are concerned that they need to have X amount of experience you are no longer going to people who aren't already in that job pool, which defeats the whole purpose.

Marisa: Right.

Wayne: So how do we then help these darn kids who don't know what it's like to work in an office? And we forget, for those of us that have done this our whole lives, that it is a completely unnatural experience. And we need to learn things like doors opened, doors closed, you know, when you just walk down the hall and bother somebody in accounting and when you go through chain of command.

Marisa: When do you pick up the phone versus the Slack message?

Wayne: Exactly right.

Those types of things which you often pick up kind of in the air or you start to do something. And old Bob, who's been there 20 years you know, gives you the hairy eyeball and you go, Oh, maybe I shouldn't do that, right?

Marisa: But you don't know any better.

Wayne: But so what happens in this is the point I think that we're trying to get to with this question is it's important that you work with your new employees to say These are the things that absolutely need to happen. How are we going to quickly involve you in the real work of the team and help you get to know people and get you comfortable to the point where it's OK to ask people questions and people will be proactive about mentoring you?

Marisa: Yes.

Wayne: And that kind of thing, I think and I know we've talked about this before, but I'm also not foolish enough to think that everybody slavishly listens to every one of these episodes.

Marisa: Fair.

Wayne: One of the things that we do at the Kevin Eikenberry group that to me is so natural and so many people don't is when somebody joins our organization, the first thing they do, their first job is to individually reach out to every member of the team and set up a half hour. Webcam conversation has to be a webcam conversation, and it has to be with every member of the team, regardless if you're going to work with that person or not.

Marisa: Absolutely. And well, and some of us who I know, I work in Indianapolis, so when I started, I was in Indianapolis. And so there are a few of those people. I actually did those conversations face to face. But we're also talking about pre-COVID times.

Wayne: Well, and you know, when you can do that, the problem with the face to face piece is that it usually happens much earlier than the rest of it. Yeah, I mean, think about what happens we have a team meeting. Everybody's in the building. We have a team. Hey, everybody, Marisa's joined the team. Everybody say hi to Marisa and everybody says, "Hi Marisa" and then they scatter and some are working in the office and some are working remotely.

And Marisa may never talk to the people who work remotely until they come back into the office.

Marisa: Right.

Wayne: How do we intentionally jump start those connections? How do we intentionally identify the people that Marisa is going to be comfortable going to? I can assign somebody as a mentor, right? Oh, Bob's been here a million years. We're going to make Bob her mentor.

Marisa: But if we don't click, that could be a problem.

Wayne: But you don't click, you know, for whatever reason, right? Right. And it doesn't have to be anything traumatic, really, does it? You just don't.

Marisa: We just might have different communication styles.

Wayne: Exactly. Right. So, you know, makes sure that the more people you're interacting with as richly as possible and then identify who are the people. You know, one of the things that managers don't do is debrief those conversations. So what did you learn? And you're going, what is Wayne's problem? That's where I or you know, I really like Angie.

What's her story? And that helps me as the manager to think, aha, maybe we need to foster this relationship, which I wouldn't normally think of.

Marisa: Yeah. Because clearly those people click. Yeah, absolutely.

Wayne: And also talk to the people who, you know, she seems really but she doesn't have a lot of experience in this or she was asking a lot of questions about a certain topic that should tell me a ha. We need to bolster her experience and her training in that particular area. It's really interesting when people join the workforce, they come in at all kinds of different places some have.

I was lucky my mother was a secretary back in the days when there were secretaries and she taught me what it is to work in an office. Even though I'd never worked in an office, I knew how to take a phone message.

Marisa: Right.

Wayne: Right. Even at home. We answered the phone. Wayne Turmel speaking, Who do you wish to speak to.

Marisa: So you were ready.

Wayne: And you knew when you take a phone message, this is what I knew, that when I got into the office, I was like, OK, I'm going to take a phone message.

Marisa: Yeah.

Wayne: If you if that wasn't part of the air you breathed.

Marisa: Then you'd be at a disadvantage for sure.

Wayne: Be at a disadvantage. And then people think you're an idiot, which is not fair, right? You can't you know, you can't say a bear is smarter than a fish because a fish can't climb a tree.

Marisa: Right. Kind of in a similar fashion. You know, in your case, like you learn how to work in offices beforehand, like I watched my mom work in nontraditional environments and small businesses my entire life. And so for me, you know, thankfully, I started working in an organization that technically is a little bit nontraditional. I went to the office.

The office is a house. Nobody lives there, but it's a house, you know, and so some of those little cultural things, but not corporate things I was already used to anyway. It's a different thought process. It's on the opposite spectrum, but it is kind of similar in a way.

Wayne: So I think to, you know, make this practical for people because they're not that fascinated with our childhood furniture. Although why? Why not? I say I think if we're going to make this practical for people, a couple of things. One is find out what is what experience do people have working in the kind of environment that you work in.

Ask them what their concerns are yes. You know, during the interview process, having the interview process may not be the right time necessarily. Simply because people tend, oh, I have no flaws, you know, what's.

Marisa: Maybe onboarding.

Wayne: What's your biggest flaw? I care too much. Oh.

Marisa: I'm a perfectionist.

Wayne: Yeah, you know, it's not. But we've been trained to answer these questions. But as part of the intake process, you don't take the time to ask people what has been their experience with. And this is where experience based interviewing is so important it's not just your attitude, it's what have you done? Or in this particular, you know, if you're working on something and you realize that there's a problem, who's your first call?

Gotcha. Right? Those types of things will help set this up. And if you're in h.R. Or learning and development, these are the kinds of trainings that people are going to need and they don't some of it should be done in a class environment, whether that's a virtual or an in-person, because the social learning component is so important and there's so much to be said for learning in cohorts for working across the organization and building relationships and all of that stuff.

But really, as we're bringing in people who don't have that workplace environment, listen for where there are gaps in the knowledge.

Marisa: And maybe also kind of think about what those could be. And, you know, as an example, you know, I've been working for this organization now for eight years but when I hit right around year five, year six, it never occurred to me that I should have been talking to my manager about, Hey, I've been working here for five years now.

Like, you know, do people get more days, more days off at this point, or are there other negotiations that need to happen? That would have never occurred to me because this is my first job. And I had another coworker who had talked to me later and she was like, oh, my gosh, I didn't even think about the fact you wouldn't have even known to ask this.

You know, here's what you need to do next time or something like that. So, I mean, even if they're not, quote unquote, new, you may want to consider those things as well.

Wayne: Well, one of the things that we do and we're near the end of our time is when we set up mentors. We assume that people are only going to need those mentors for the first month month and a half.

Marisa: And even after.

Wayne: And then the mentor gets.

Marisa: Don't know.

Wayne: The mentor gets sprung to go back to work and not have to worry about, you know.

Marisa: Mentor somebody else.

Wayne: And suddenly you're expected to fly instead of doing what I should do is make you somebody else's problem.

Marisa: Yes.

Wayne: Because the mentoring and the learning and the things that we need for our careers and such are ongoing forever. So that's probably if again, if you're taking stuff away and looking in our show notes and you should jolly well be looking on our show notes at longdistanceworklife.com, that's the thing is how long does your mentoring go on?

And, you know, at different stages of people's onboarding and career, do we need to reexamine who does that for that?

Marisa: Absolutely. Yeah, it needs to be an ongoing conversation.

Wayne: Speaking of longdistanceworklife.com, that's where you will find the show notes for this show. You'll also find on that page at the bottom a place to ask questions. And Marisa is actually doing a great job of scanning these every week and picking out the questions that might become one of these ask, me anything kind of interviews so in the meantime, please, like and subscribe.

If you have not yet read The Long-Distance Letter and The Long Distance-Teammate, that's probably a really good place to start. You can buy those Amazon or wherever fine books are sold. You can also reach out to me Wayne@KevinEikenberry.com or Marisa@KevinEikenberry.com. That is this week's episode of The Long-Distance Worklife.

Marisa Anything you want to say before we release people into the wild?

Marisa: I do also want to say that we also have a free video series called Demystifying Demystifying Remote Work, correct?

Wayne: Yes. Yes.

Marisa: It's a four video series. Sorry, I forgot the name for half a second. It's a four video series. It's totally free. We'll also have a link for that in the show notes too, to help you guys continue to live and thrive in a remote and hybrid team.

Wayne: There you go. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next episode.

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Ask Wayne Anything, Leadership, Working Remotely

Remote-First vs. Remote-Friendly

Marisa asks Wayne about the difference between remote-first and remote-friendly and what phrases companies should be using depending on their circumstances.

Question of the Week:

What's the difference between 'remote-first' and 'remote-friendly'?

Additional Resources:

Transcript

Wayne Turmel: Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Long-Distance Worklife Podcast. I'm Wayne Turmel.

Marisa Eikenberry: I'm Marisa Eikenberry.

Wayne: Yes, she is. And this is the podcast where we look at remote work, technology, leadership, and just trying to survive the way the workplace is changing. And keep the weasels at bay. Welcome. Welcome. Today is a joint Wayne and Marisa one-topic episode. Marisa has chosen the topic. So, Marisa, go ahead, lady.

Marisa: Absolutely. So one of the things I thought that we could talk about and I know we talked about this a little bit before we started recording, but this idea of remote-first versus remote-friendly and maybe some of the other buzzwords that we hear about in this remote world right now. But I know those two specifically, I see all the time and I know there is a difference and we should probably talk about it.

View Full Transcript

Wayne: Well, we probably should. The first thing to remember is that we track the buzzwords so you don't have to. Dear listener, I have been in this business in the virtual remote work space well over 15 years and listened to the way things change. I remember when we used to telecommute and before that or after that, it was teleworking.

And the government actually has big binders full of telework policy that they then had to go in and do a search and replace because now it's work from home or WFA. And one needs to be very careful with the acronyms when you start using those letters in some combination. So there are a bunch of buzzwords that we should probably tackle.

But let's start with remote-first and remote-friendly. Remote-friendly basically means we're open to the idea of people working remotely. It suggests that there is an office, there is a central location, but we've got people that work elsewhere and we do our best to not make it suck.

Marisa: So in a way, it's almost kind of saying we're a hybrid company, kind of.

Wayne: Well, you're willing to be a hybrid company. Remote-friendly kind of presumes that the default is the office. But we will still love you if you don't come in every day and you work somewhere else. We're going to talk about hybrid, I suspect, in just a minute. Remote-first basically means we are set up as a remote company.

Marisa: So the primary is remote.

Wayne: It's primary remote. We hire people with that notion. We build our systems around that. There may or may not be an office where a couple of people sit, maybe an admin or two, but basically we are a remote company. And where you see that a lot is in engineering and especially I.T., coding, those types of companies.

Marisa: Yeah, I just saw that Robinhood recently advertised it. I say recently it may have been a few months ago but that they are now advertising themselves as a remote-first company.

Wayne: And it's interesting because just for the record, for Canadians, we are talking about the banking app, not about the flower company, Robinhood Flower being very near and dear to my heart.

That's a really good example because there are certain industries. I'm trying to remember, I think it was Bloomberg just did a report on which industries are more likely to have remote work. And if you look at financial services and I.T. services, it's well over 75% of the jobs associated with those tasks could be done remotely.

Marisa: Gotcha.

Wayne: Which is interesting because I.T. companies have embraced it and financial services companies have kind of freaked out and rebelled, even though they have the largest percentage of jobs that theoretically could be done remotely. I mean, as we've said before, if your job is fight traffic, get to the office, hang your coat over the chair, sit at your computer, get up at the end of the day, pick up your coat, get back in the car.

There is a pretty good chance you could do that remote at least part of the time. But that's the difference between remote-friendly and remote-first. Remote-first recruits sets up systems, processes. They assume that everybody's going to be remote. And if you want to come into the office and say hi to people, that's great. But that's not the way that they are built.

Marisa: So I guess as an add-on question, and I know that companies like Buffer are like this, what's the buzzword now for a company who's entirely remote? Or is there a buzzword for it yet?

Wayne: They basically have embraced remote-first.

Marisa: Okay, because I know that companies like Buffer, I think WordPress might be also and have been since way before pandemic even happened, but they were remote only. There is no office to go to. Everybody's remote.

Wayne: Yeah, absolutely. And so they've embraced- This week the word is remote-first.

Marisa: Gotcha. I know I've seen it a lot more lately.

Wayne: If you look at our good friend Chris Dyer, who has been on VLC and will probably be on this show eventually.

Marisa: For those that don't know, VLC is our conference Virtual LeaderCon, which we do once a year and we'll do again in September of this year,  2022.

Wayne: And Chris has built several virtual companies, and they used to be virtual companies. That was the buzzword. Right?

Marisa: Right.

Wayne: And all of a sudden, he started using with his company, and I can't remember the name of it right now, or I would say it. [Chris Dyer's company is PeopleG2.]

Marisa: We'll make sure it's in the show notes. Yeah.

Wayne: Make sure it's on the show notes. Thank you. All of a sudden, you know, he was a we are a remote-first company, so that's the buzzword du jour.

Marisa: Okay. So it's getting companies encompassing both processes, essentially.

Wayne: Yeah. But it's a different mindset.

Marisa: Absolutely.

Wayne: It's a different mindset. It's, you know, as we choose these buzzwords. Right. Telecommute. Presumed that you were kind of somewhere else, but you were coming into the office that there was a central hub.

Marisa: Okay.

Wayne: And that's where the buzzwords can get a little muddled. And the most muddled word at the moment is hybrid.

Marisa: Okay. That makes sense.

Wayne: A hybrid is getting, you know, it's kind of like the Princess Bride. You use that word a lot, but I don't think it means what you think it means. You know, hybrid often gets conflated with blended or flexible work or a bunch of other terms.

Marisa: Right.

Wayne: That basically imply what you had said earlier on. This notion that there is an office and some people are in the office and some people are out of the office. And that's kind of what it means. It usually means that there's some mix of that.

Marisa: Okay.

Wayne: What we need to do, though, I think when we focus on this notion of the office and then others.

Marisa: Mm hmm.

Wayne: It does a couple of disservices and people that are listening to that. Please. You know, we'd love your comments and your questions about that. The challenge is and if you've read A World Without Email by Cal Newport, you know, his thing is the reason we get in trouble with too much email and too many meetings and Zoom Fatigue and all of this stuff is we're trying to recreate the office environment.

Marisa: Right?

Wayne: When we do that, we create constrictions around time. Yeah. I joke that in America, if you live on the West Coast, you better be an early morning person because the sun revolves around the Statue of Liberty and everything is based on East Coast time, no matter where you are. Well, that kind of takes out the flexibility. If you need to be available during East Coast hours.

That's not true flexibility. If you default to the home office in your systems, you know, yes, you can work anywhere you want. But as so many organizations used to say quietly and now places like Morgan Stanley are saying, the quiet parts out loud. Right? If you can't be bothered coming into the office we will continue to hire you.

And you can do good work, but don't expect to be promoted and don't expect to be on the fast track.

Marisa: Which is so unfortunate now that we're getting more and more data all the time about productivity is going up. And some of these people who are working from home and I realize it's not everybody but some people who are working from home are thriving and doing so much more work, so much more engagement than they ever did when they were in the office.

Wayne: Yeah, far be it from me to defend senior leaders ever. That is so not my default position.

Marisa: That's a great place to start.

Wayne: I am at heart a bomb throwing radical who's just found himself with a job title. But the challenge is you can't take something that has made a lot of people really rich and really successful and has entire cities built around it. Mm hmm. And say, Oh, we don't need that anymore and expect everybody to be cool with it.

Marisa: Right.

Wayne: And, you know, you can't just say, "Hi, London and New York, it's been real. But, you know..."

Marisa: Yeah, absolutely.

Wayne: I'm moving to Montana, and here's my IP address. You can't really do that.

Marisa: Right. And that's some of what you talked to Laurel about in the last episode, too.

Wayne: Yeah. This notion that it's all going to be utopian and whatever. And that's the thing about hybrid work is hybrid started out being just this messy blend. And I guess that's what that kind of traditional arrangement is, is a blended approach, a true hybrid. If you if you look at the biologic definition of a hybrid is it's two species that are brought together and they actually create a new species that is capable of breathing among itself and.

Marisa: Doing other things.

Wayne: Doing other things. And so that's the Holy Grail. Now, for companies that want to have a physical presence and want to be remote-friendly.

Marisa: Right.

Wayne: Right. They're not going to be remote-first as long as they're building buildings and investing in infrastructure, physical infrastructure.

Marisa: Right.

Wayne: But there's this new thing that we have to find ways to. For example, right now, we have an overreliance on synchronous communication. The reason that I have to be functional at seven in the morning is because people insist on being online at seven in the morning. And if I'm not there, I'm losing out.

Marisa: Mm hmm.

Wayne: Are there ways to collaborate and meet and share information asynchronous so that the amount of time we actually have to spend connected, talking, holding meetings, doing that kind of thing, it's a different form of workflow. Right. It's a different expectation on how people should work.

Marisa: Absolutely.

Wayne: And it's a brand new thing. And like all hybrids, it hasn't existed before. We may do and some people have said we're going to be remote-friendly. And others have said, well, we're going to do this blended thing and we're going to. And what happens when you blend like that is the default goes to the office, almost always the default right to the office, the systems, the times that you meet.

Marisa: Where the meetings happen.

Wayne: Who gets a promotion where you hold the meetings? When you do get together, where is it?

Marisa: The birthday celebrations.

Wayne: You know, there's cake in the break room. It's a long drive to the break room. So you don't get cake or you don't get to eat cake with everybody else.

Marisa: Mm hmm.

Wayne: And then by the way, the weasels in the office get cake on their birthday, and I don't. And so they, like, you know, mom likes them better than they like me.

Marisa: Absolutely. Almost breeds a feeling of resentment, too.

Wayne: Well, it can. And we actually should do a conversation about that dynamic, right? Yes. Don't actually create something new. What does that? Because there's a whole show and conversation about those potential landmines, but that when we talk about hybrid, we're still trying to define it.

When we eventually define it, it will become a buzzword and then be out of fashion in about a week. And we'll have to find something new because that's the way it is with everything.

Marisa: So given this given this, you know, hybrid, remote-first and all that, and I know that we've talked a little bit about when companies maybe should use certain options, but I guess if companies have not necessarily said which option that they should use yet, what should they be thinking about? As they're trying to create their remote-friendly, remote-first, hybrid, blended, whatever, as they're trying to think through those processes and figuring out, okay, this is the word we're using.

Wayne: Come back to me in a year when The Long-Distance Team comes out and.

Marisa: There we go!

Wayne: We can have this conversation because Kevin and I just finished that book.

Marisa: Love it.

Wayne: Nice plug.

What should they think about? I think it always starts with what is what do we do? What is the job that we do? Right. What are our outpits? Outpits? Outputs. What are the tasks that create those outputs? What are the roles that are necessary to do the tasks that create those outputs? And then once you and I would suggest visually mapping that and then once you've mapped it you start looking at is that a place that needs people co-located or at least synchronous at some time?

Marisa: Okay. That makes sense.

Wayne: And this is not. You mentioned the conversation with Laurel, and we're going to have a link in the show notes to that previous show because I am less rosy about a lot of this and I am less focused on remote-first. Remote-first is great. If you have the kind of company that can do that.

Marisa: Okay.

Wayne: If you have chosen to have a company that can do that, right. There is something to be said about being a small group of people co-located working together in physical proximity. It is not like that is evil and must be destroyed.

Marisa: Absolutely.

Wayne: But it's a choice.

Marisa: Yes.

Wayne: It limits who you recruit. It puts constraints on what you spend money on because you need a location. It it needs to be a conscious decision. And it's not always a wrong one.

Marisa: Right.

Wayne: But that's the thing. What is the. It always starts with what is the work? Form follows function. What's the work that needs to be done? Who needs to do it? Then you get to what do those people do and where do they need to be when they do it?

And that is about all the time we have for what could easily be a three beverage conversation.

Marisa: Before we end, though, I do want to ask you. So you mentioned that you're not as rosy about remote-first, which I'll admit surprises me given, you know, the blog posts that you've done, the books that you've written already, and we'll have links to those in the show notes as well. But why are you not remote-first, are you more remote-friendly then?

Wayne: I am very remote-friendly that that is my default position and I have benefited from everything.

Marisa: Absolutely we both have.

Wayne: Right? The fact that Kevin works in Indianapolis. You work in the office with him at least part of the time.

Marisa: Yes.

Wayne: You have a very flexible working arrangement there. And when I was in Chicago, the dynamic was different. I could pop in the car and in 3 hours be in Indianapolis.

Marisa: Very true.

Wayne: Right. I can no longer do that. Without hopping between COVID and the laws of physics. I have not been in Remarkable House in quite some time.

Marisa: Right.

Wayne: I just think here's why I'm not rosy and the reason I'm not rosy about most things, and it's the reason that I am a grumpy old man is I there has never been any system, product or tool invented by humans that they have not managed to make suck.

Marisa: So engineers out there, challenge for you.

Wayne: It's just that everything can be used for good or used for evil, and it can be thoughtfully applied and maximized or you cannot think about it very hard and take the easy way out and get less than optimal results. And that's just the way human beings operate.

Marisa: That makes sense. And I know that you've had some conversations about similar stuff, not only with me, I think also with Pilar recently too, about this idea that we're implementing these technologies without really having any idea of how to implement them. And so it's backfiring.

Wayne: Well, and time is flying away. And this is another conversation that we should definitely have. And we are actually going to have with some of the people who make the technology. We've done it with a Hoyin Cheung at Remo and some others, so we will continue to do that. Which brings us to we really, really, really need to wrap this up.

Thank you for listening to worklife. Long-Distance Worklife Podcast. Please, if you've enjoyed this like and subscribe and most importantly, tell your friends we will have show notes as well as and this is important a place for you to ask your questions. Marisa is coming up with killer questions and I'm digging these conversations, but we want to know what you want to know.

Marisa: Yeah, I'm not the only one out there that has questions. I know that for sure.

Wayne: So on our show notes page is a place to get questions in queue. Please take advantage of that. You can reach Marisa and I at The Kevin Eikenberry Group. Wayne@KevinEikenberry.com. Marisa@KevinEikenberry.com. That's it. Thank you for listening to the Long-Distance Worklife podcast. We really, really, really need to go. Marisa, thanks as always.

Marisa: Thank you for answering my question today.

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Guests, Leadership, Technology

How to Be Virtual Not Distant with Pilar Orti

Pilar Orti, founder and director of Virtual Not Distant, meets with Wayne to discuss tips for new managers on a remote team, having conversations around how to use tools effectively, thinking about "remote-first", and how silence doesn't necessarily mean things are okay.

Virtual Not Distant works with leaders, managers, and HR professionals to create a "remote-first" environment whether you're planning to stay remote or becoming a hybrid organization.

Question of the Week:

What is one pitfall that managers need to be aware of?

Additional Resources:

Transcript

Wayne Turmel: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Long-Distance Worklife, the podcast where we talk about remote work, technology, leadership, and generally just navigating and surviving this crazy world of virtual and hybrid work. My name is Wayne Turmel. Marisa will not be joining us today because I have an interview with a very smart person named Pilar Orti. Pilar is the founder and director of Virtual Not Distant.

Most of her work is done in England and the European Union and I think she brings a really interesting perspective to remote work. And so I wanted you to experience that. Of course, you know the drill. Listen up, take good notes. We will, of course, capture and transcribe that in our show notes. And for right now, I want you to enjoy the conversation with Pilar Orti.

I am really excited today to be with Pilar Orti. Our trails have crossed a couple of times over the last couple of years. She does really good work. Her company is VirtualNotDistant.com, of which she is the founder and director. Really quick, Pilar. What do you guys do?

Pilar Orti: Well, mainly we help managers of remote teams through either training or by providing a listening ear sometimes. And we have the 21st Century Work Life Podcast, which aims to support anyone who is interested in leading teams and working online.

Wayne: So obviously she's a direct competitor and must be destroyed, but she does really good work is the point. And I wanted to introduce all of you to her because you cannot have enough smart people in your orbit. Pilar, you've been in this space a long time. Let me ask you this. When a manager is taking on a new position, especially if there's a remote component and they have never done that before.

What kind of is Job One? What is the first thing that they need to do?

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Pilar: I've actually got two answers to that. So I think that there's always two elements for me in leading a team. One is what we do as individuals and how we connect to the team members individually. And the other one is how we look after the team and how we support the team to continue all the time building that team and and supporting them.

So I think that the first thing when we are new, either we might even be in our team and become the team leader or we might come in for a new team is to communicate our availability and how we communicate, how available we are to people because especially we are remote, we sometimes we assume that if we say, "Oh, I'm available all the time," that people are going to look for us when they need us.

And actually there's when you can't see whether someone is busy, working, etc. you more reluctant normally to interrupt them.

Wayne: I think that's a really, really important point, which is one of the things that the people on the team struggle with is I don't want to bug the boss I don't want to bother them. And what that means is the manager is saying, "Hey, I've got an open door policy, come talk to me" and nobody's coming to talk to me.

So I think that's a really interesting point.

Pilar: And the equivalent of having an open door policy as well could be if setting hours, setting open door hours during which you sit behind your computer. If you're if you're at that time and you open a meeting and everyone has the link to that meeting, are you just there? And people can literally drop in? That's one, one thing that you could do.

So communicating availability. And the other thing I think is to be aware of and this takes a bit more time, is to be aware of the team's rhythm of communication and how that fits with the tasks we're doing and the need to connect. So, for example, our experience working remotely might be of being in a team where everyone pretty much gets on with their work because that's the best way of doing it.

And suddenly we might land in a team who are used to being available a lot, sending lots of messages backwards and forwards during the day. So it's this awareness and then making sure that that rhythm fits the task and also the need for connection. So one is something very immediate, and I think looking at the team takes a little bit more time.

Wayne: There's two things that you said there. One is the idea of creating office hours, for lack of a better term.

Pilar: Yeah.

Wayne: Where regardless of where you are in the world, you know that at this time it's okay to bug your manager.

Pilar: Yes.

Wayne: And I think that's a really simple and yet effective tool. The second thing is this idea of the rhythm that the team works. Generally speaking, we are not starting from a blank sheet of paper, right? That the team already exists, the boat is in the water and we need to adjust to it.

What is what are some of the things that managers bump their nose against when they take over an existing team like that?

Pilar: I think it's sometimes it's an assumption that we are using technology in the same way. So it could be that. And if we are a remote team, we're using technology to communicate. So it could be that we use a platform that we've used before, but we're used to using it in a certain way and the team is using it in another one.

And not having that conversation at the beginning of how we're going to use the technology. I think this can be one of the biggest things and one of the biggest differences assuming back to that.

Wayne: We'll come back to that question for those of you listening. The reason Pilar stopped talking is because I got this look on my face and she realized my head was about to explode. Um, I want to talk about that notion of using tools differently because you work with teams and primarily you're on the eastern side of the Atlantic with your clients, with tools like Microsoft Teams, like Slack, with these kinds of tools.

What are you seeing in terms of how well people use them and actually do what the darn things can do.

Pilar: Yeah.

So there's there's lots of things. And I think that we cannot ignore the pandemic, which meant that everyone started using the the tools.

Wayne: Well, and also, yeah, Microsoft threw Teams out in the world two years too early.

Pilar: Yeah.

Wayne: Isn't this a-

Pilar: Good.

Wayne: Win?

Pilar: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That it is also true that when you go for it and very interestingly. So I started using Teams with a client before the pandemic and we rarely met on it on Teams. We used it mainly for asynchronous communication. We used all the other tools. So I think that one of the things that we're seeing is that tools that can be used for asynchronous communication, like Teams are only being used in the video function and they're being used mainly to communicate in real time.

So I think that that is the main thing I'm seeing is that there's not the tools haven't been embraced as a space to give us a bit more breathing space and to be able to communicate in a slower pace. And so that being used to communicate quite rapidly as though we were in the office next to each other.

Wayne: I'm glad you went there because this is actually a question that I've been struggling with and why I'm looking to very smart people who can look at this. A lot of what we're dealing with it seems to me too many meetings, too much email, all of that is because we're trying to recreate the office environment.

Pilar: Yeah.

Wayne: And as especially as we start to think about return to the office, and most of that is going to be some hybrid mix.

Pilar: Hmm.

Wayne: Right. People in the office and people not. And some people in on Tuesdays and not on Wednesdays. What what do we need to think about differently instead of just trying to recreate the office or worse going back to defaulting to the office?

Pilar: Yeah.

Wayne: Right? Where everything, you know, the sun revolves around the Statue of Liberty. And so everything has to be done on New York time regardless.

Pilar: Yeah. Yeah.

Wayne: What does this new as we're thinking about creating something new, what needs to be new and different?

Pilar: I think I'll start with two things. One, which leads from the use of tools that we were just talking about. So we need to have some kind of conversation. And this is very difficult because we need to have some conversation about how are we going to communicate. And this means maybe setting some agreements and we might not be used to this because communication, why do we need to, to, to set so many parameters?

But for example, if you look at how email has been used, some people use it as almost instant message. Some people think it's okay to wait three days to reply to an email. Some people are like, "Why didn't you reply to my email that I sent 2 hours ago?" Because email was introduced without having a conversation around it in most organizations.

And so now everyone uses it differently and sometimes it causes some chaos. So some stress, rather. So I think that first of all, is we need to talk about how we are using these tools and have some agreement, some parameters. Even if it sounds easy and even if it sounds like we are removing all spontaneity from human contact, we need that.

And then the other thing specifically to hybrid work, which involves maybe some people being in the office, others not or people using the office at different times, is that if we think of hybrid as a subset of remote, it means that essentially the office becomes one more tool, one more space where we do the work it becomes one more place where we communicate because we also have the video tools.

We also have asynchronous platforms and if we think about it like that, then we have a chance of creating some kind of cohesive way of working rather than ending up where, well, if you're in the office, you work like this. If you're online, you work like this. Lots of us are in the office all the time, so we work in this way.

A lot of us are remote all the time, so we work in that way. So I think that mindset of hybrid is a subset of remote, because in the end, the space that is common to every knowledge worker is not the office, it's the online space regardless of where you are. So initially that mindset shift and then the practicalities, of course, that are harder.

Also, you know, nothing is easy, but you need that mindset initially rather than thinking, well, we are office based and some people work from home some time.

Wayne: And wow, I'm really glad that you stated that so succinctly that the default is no longer in the office. Right. It used to be in the before time's the blessed before times when most people were in the office and we let some people work from home. And so basically the office is how this works. And now the default is the kind of cyber space as opposed to the office.

And that changes how we meet when we meet and yeah, who works on things and. Yeah. And like that. The second thing you said, by the way, and I don't think there are enough icky conversations, icky being the highly technical term for slightly uncomfortable and weird and I don't know why they're uncomfortable. Over 70% of our workplace communication happens in writing.

People that have been listening to this podcast are already tired of me saying that my business career ties perfectly to the intro from the introduction of email to wherever we are now. So I've watched this thing occur. Well, if there is something that we spend 70% of our time doing and it's already existed when most people are in the workplace, why do we not talk about it?

Like, how can we not give people better training how do we not have the conversations about when do we use what? And no, you know, when you're on your eighth thing in an email thread, pick up the phone.

Pilar: Yes.

And I think it's because it's assumed that, of course, everyone knows how to do it. This is one of the resistances I used to get and maybe but everyone has preferences and everyone has a legacy from another time and everyone and everyone thinks that something is the common sense to do. I think maybe that said is that it is common sense, but our way of saying common sense is different.

So we need to agree, agree on that. And especially as you were mentioning earlier, especially if there are different cultures than our points of reference, we're working across the globe. Our points of reference are going to be different as well because we've grown up in different contexts we've worked in different contexts. So we can't really assume that we all think that common sense means the same thing.

Wayne: Wow. That is absolutely true. So, okay, we are almost at the end of our time because I knew that this would happen and- One pitfall that managers should be wary of. Just what if you could give one warning if you could yell out, stop to the managers out there, what is one thing that you think they need to be aware of today's warning.

Pilar: I would say that don't assume that silence means everything's okay.

So I'll leave it at that and everyone can. Can I leave it at that?

Wayne: No, it's absolutely true. I mean, there are a couple of things associated with that. One is we tend to, as managers, default to spending most of our time on our problem children. And so we assume that if we don't hear anything, no news is good news. And that creates some interesting dynamics changes. But the other thing and it goes back to setting those office hours or making yourself available as people are not as willing to be proactive about reaching out as they could or should be.

Pilar: Yeah. And in the end, all you all some people need is how is everything going? That's all they need. And then they'll open up. But actually, they might not think that the time is ever right to bring anything up if they don't ask. So I think that's especially when you're working at a distance with different kinds of people.

I think that the interpretation of silence you've got to be very careful with.

Wayne: And the way you ask that question, how's everything going is very different question than is everything okay?

Pilar: Oh, yeah. Yes. Because is everywhere. Is everything okay? It's really easy to answer regardless. It's very difficult well, it's very difficult sometimes to say no. You know, it is there with you. No, it isn't. Yeah. Yeah.

Wayne: Excellent. Thank you so much, Pilar Orti who is the founder and director of Virtual Not Distant. So good to talk to you again. Lovely to talk to you. And thank you for being on the Long-Distance Worklife.

Pilar: Thank you very much.

Wayne: Thank you so much for joining us on the Long-Distance Worklife today. I trust that you enjoyed that conversation. You will find links to Virtual Not Distant and Pilar's work on our show notes. Those, of course, are on longdistanceworklife.com. Join us next week when I will be joined by Marisa. We will be doing one of our Q&A issues.

We really, really want your questions and your comments to guide where our conversations go. So please visit longdistanceworklife.com. Drop us a comment. You know, if you listen to podcasts that it's really important that you like and subscribe so other people can find us. Thank you so much for joining us. We hope that we are helping keep the weasels at bay and we will see you next episode.

Thanks so much. 

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Guests, Leadership

Attracting and Retaining International Talent with Lona Alia

In this episode of Long-Distance Worklife, Wayne sits down with Lona Alia, head of revenue at SafetyWing, a social impact entrepreneur, Y Combinator founder, mentor at 500 Startups, Advisor at EU for Innovation, and an international nomad. 

SafetyWing is building the first global safety net for remote companies, remote workers, and nomads worldwide. It offers medical insurance for nomads and remote companies around the world. It is also developing other insurance products such as pension savings and income insurance. Its products are built and designed by a fully remote team of nomads distributed across three continents.

Question of the Week:

What do organizations need to take into account when recruiting people outside the United States?

Additional Resources:

Transcript

Wayne Turmel: Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's edition of the Long-Distance Worklife podcast, where we look at what it's like to work on remote and hybrid teams. We are examining remote work, technology, leadership, everything it takes to thrive and survive in the new long-distance workplace. Today, I am alone. Marisa's not with me, but I am not flying solo.

We have a really, really good interview with Lona Alia. Lona is the chief revenue officer at SafetyWing, and we are talking about recruiting and retaining employees internationally. And this is not just hiring people in different countries, but digital nomads. And the whole idea of creating a truly international and dispersed workplace. You're really going to enjoy the interview.

We go all over the place and it's really, really good stuff. So here is my interview with Lona Alia.

Hi everybody, this week on the Long-Distance Worklife, we are talking to Lona Alia, who is with SafetyWing. First of all, welcome, but also two sentences quick. What is SafetyWing? What do you do? Why do we care?

Lona Alia: Thank you. Thank you so much, Wayne. Really excited to be here. SafetyWing. We're building this global social safety net. And what that means is that we offer global benefits for remote workers, remote teams and nomads living around the world. The idea is that now we're hiring people from all over the world and they need to be covered somehow.

With remote health insurance, with retirement, with life and disability if something were to happen to them. So how do we cover these team members that are all over the world? So SafetyWing does that. I'm the head of revenue there. I'm also a Y Combinator founder. I'm an advisor to many different startups, and I'm also an original remote worker.

So I just love talking about remote work, hybrid, all of these fun things.

View Full Transcript

Wayne: Well, that's why you're here. I mean, SafetyWing is lovely. And there's probably a three beer conversation that you could have about what are the benefits, you know, in different parts of the world, because American companies go, "Hey, we can give you health insurance and we can give you maternity leave." And people in the rest of the world goes, "Yeah."

And so the world is a very diverse place, but you are kind of uniquely positioned to help. So let's start with as we're thinking about digital nomad and hiring people in other countries, if you are thinking about doing that. What are the top three things that employers need to consider in recruiting and just as importantly, keeping people?

Lona: Sure. Absolutely. So I would recommend from my experience, I've grown a team from zero to 14 people in the last year or so, built the B2B sales team from scratch, and I hired people from all over the world. We have also 100% retention. So that tells you that what we're doing maybe is right. So a couple of things that I would say.

One is compensation. Think about that. Are you offering a flat compensation across all countries and cities, or are you doing a location based kind of like salary range? This is a very hot topic right now. Many people don't agree with one or the other. There's really no right way to do this.

Wayne: You can get a sense compensation and stuff is what you do. Very briefly, what we're talking about is if I have a company in New York and so I pay New York salary. But you're in the Philippines, and of course, the cost of living is lower and everything. Do I pay you a good salary from the Philippines or do I pay you a New York salary regardless of where you live?

I mean, that's what we're talking about. Yes. What are the pros and cons?

Lona: So, yeah, last week, I hosted this webinar with 300 people that showed up. So amazing. Like so many people were interested. We had about 70 questions live, and we had companies like Remote that help you hire people all over the world. Carta that which handles your equity does a few different hybrid companies. And we were talking about just this topic, right?

And it's like, what is the right way of doing it? So for example, GitLab, which is a great remote-first company, but also a public company. What they have chosen is to do location-based salary so they will tie your compensation based on what's best in that location that you're in. I'm not sure what happens as you move locations from place to place, which is a problem now as people want to be more free, they want to live all over the world.

Do they do you say like, "Okay, well, because it started in Bali and now you're coming to San Francisco, you're not going to be making $200,000 a year. You're actually going to be making, you know, I don't know, $30,000." I'm not sure what the price is in Bali. Right? So we had this conversation at Safety. We offer flat salaries across the board.

We take a salary that's maybe like in an average city in the US not in San Francisco and not in New York, but something that's in the middle. And we offer that across the board. So we feel but that makes it the, the most kind of competitive but also the fairest.

Do you think it's the right way to do it? We don't know. This is all an experiment that everybody is doing at this time.

Wayne: So and it's happening in the US as well. I mean, I hire you and you're living in San Jose, so I'm paying you commensurate with San Jose and then you decided during COVID that you're going to go move to Montana. Well, am I still paying you what I was paying you in San Jose, or do I pay you the average salary for Bozeman, Montana, which is very different.

Yes. So this is something all organizations are dealing with as people become more mobile.

Lona: Yes. The good thing to keep in mind about that is to stay flexible, to stay flexible with your team, with the best people that you have because you don't want to be in a situation where you lose that talent in the great era of great resignation. So that's because you decided that they moved around. Now they're going to get a lower salary, right?

You don't want to lose a great engineer, that head of people or that head of something just because they would like to be more mobile. And global mobility is the next thing, right? Like people want to be more mobile globally so that they can take advantage of things like a geo arbitrage, like what is geo arbitrage? It's like you can live in a lower cost country and keep that extra money that you will be spending on rent and insurance and all those things to yourself.

So a lot of people are waking up and saying like, "Wait a second, I don't have to live in the most expensive city in the world. I can go live in Colombia, pay $400 a month in rent, and then save the rest and invest it are like retire early." You know, things like that.

Wayne: Yeah. Oh man. The possibilities are so endless, as are the challenges associated with it, right? Yes. This is great. Unless you're trying to hire people in New York or San Francisco. Yes, you know that as well as anybody. So compensation is the first thing. A couple of other things that.

Lona: Yes, benefits is the other. So benefits is huge. What are you bringing to the table for the best talent in the world to join your company? Are you offering great benefits starting with health insurance, obviously, which is great in the US, but also worldwide. They do want to have some type of private health insurance, even though some countries do have good health care.

It's nice to have a private health insurance they can get in front of the line. So, for example, in the UK, there's the public health system has long lines if you want to get a surgery. But if you have private insurance, you don't have to go to the public hospital. You can go get that surgery done sooner. So things like that are great.

Some great benefits that I love that we offer where we're at doing location. Independence is a big one. So a lot of companies are trying to figure out what do they do with a young generation that wants to live and work abroad? Do they allow them to be location independent, which means that they don't have to be based in, you know, New York, if that's where the job is, can they be based in, you know, Bali for three months in Italy for another four, in Paris for another five?

How could they be living this life that they want to live? And this is huge. I think a lot of young people want this benefits. So when they look at a company that is hiring, they will ask like, okay, is this remote? But also is it location independent means do I have freedom to live wherever I want? Or are you going to take me down to a location?

Wayne: Well, and what's interesting is more and more, because we're remote location really means time zone. Yeah, right. You can live in a village in Spain somewhere, right? Or you can live it in Hamburg because it's the same time zone. It makes no difference. 9:00 in the morning. It's 9:00 in the morning. Right. If you're trying to do work between Thailand and Spain, that's a different set of challenges.

Lona: Yes. But also I want to mention there are tax implications and a few things that you have to consider there to make sure that you're fully compliant. But there is a lot of companies solving for these things, though, not to worry. So if there's a heads of operations or heads of people person listening to this, like, "Oh my God, this is a problem I have, how do I solve this?"

And if you want to give your people this global mobility policy, there are solutions out there to help you give people what they want. Therefore, they can stay in your companies.

Wayne: Okay, so we've recruited people. We've somehow lured them into our evil trap, and they're now working with us as somebody who's done this multiple times yourself, what are the biggest mistakes people make when onboarding international team members do you think?

Lona: So, the biggest mistakes that I see that I've seen actually lately we've been talking about this is like the onboarding kind of wave of you on board people. A lot of new hires are falling off after onboarding because many companies are not taking this seriously. So, for example, when you're being onboarded in a company that's physical or you have an office, you might have like a body that helps you show you around you might have someone that's checking in day in and day out with you and you might have a training program in place.

So now that everything is remote, that onboarding has kind of went back to the back burner and not in the front lines so that people are not really paying that much attention, but we should pay a lot of attention to that because we want to make sure that if I hire women, I want the way to succeed. And for when to succeed is for him to understand my organization, to know the mission and values the culture, and to see it's firsthand to have this body that is assigned once a week.

You have a check in and you talk for an hour and answer any questions. Maybe you have notion as an internal knowledge database so that everything is written on there. So very good communication. Having someone to kind of like hold your hand for the first month or so is very important in the onboarding.

Wayne: And there's a couple of things about onboarding that you just said there. One is, you know, in the old days you would have a mentor or a buddy when you're working dispersed. What we might want to do is take that job of mentor and break it up between multiple people so that you're hearing multiple voices in your learning different parts of the organization rather than just following Bob around the office for a couple of days.

Lona: Well, I'm very thankful because I had one of the co-founders be my buddy, and basically we had weekly calls, and I cannot tell you how helpful that it was to parlay the culture of the company to me. And I was able to build the team with the culture that we want. And that's another thing. It's culture I like.

Mistakes that people make, especially in remote, is letting culture kind of take its own shape versus making an effort to really set the culture that you want and then making sure that steps are taken to, to to ensure that that culture is the one that you want.

Wayne: Yeah, just as a really simple example, and I'd love to hear something specific that you do at Safety, but what we do when somebody joins the team is their very first assignment is they have to set up a half hour face-to-face video call with every member of the team. It's not like, "Hey, everybody, joined the team."

Everybody says, "Hi, John," and then you never talk to John for a month, right? It jumpstarts that getting to know people and creating relationships and something as simple as that can make a big difference. What are some of the things maybe that you do very specifically that people can steal shamelessly?

Lona: Sure. Absolutely. So one thing is exactly what you said. Having this maybe half an hour or one hour, one on ones that you book with everybody in the team to get to know them. We do give a stipend of you know, you can do a lunch for free at each month so you get $30 per month to spend and have lunch with anybody that you want on the team continuously.

So that's nice that you can get a free lunch, you know, once a month. We have an internal NPS score that the CEO actually reports on each month. So there you can find out that NPS is Net Promoter Score, which is a very specific terminology, but it's basically a way of keeping track.

You can call it friends all you want, but you're monitoring the stuff you're monitoring to seeing. Are your people happy? Is the culture something that they love being in? And also, are they speaking their mind and being taken seriously? So this is something that we place a lot of effort in is being authentic, speaking your mind? That's a big part of our culture. Another great thing that the founders do is that they lead by example.

So for example, they take four days off like every quarter. They will take a week off. They will be off of Slack, off of email, off of everything. So you cannot reach them. Now, this sends a great signal to the rest of the team that, "Hey, this is our culture. You are it's okay to take days off because we want you to be healthy and we want you to be creative and we don't want you to burnout."

So these are signals that company leaders can give to their employees so that they can create the culture that they want.

Wayne: I love what you just said. And if you listen carefully, you can hear heads exploding all over North America at the notion of the management taking a week, a quarter and just disappearing. Yeah, people are having aneurysms listening to us right now. We have created a health crisis I think that that's important. And I, I love that you're taking your experience elsewhere and bringing it here as well as us just importing our dysfunction.

Lona: And something I mean, I grew up in, you know, New York and San Francisco. I saw my working years were in Silicon Valley, right? So I was distilled with this toxic culture of working 12 to 16 hours a day, of sleeping 4 hours a day. And that was heroic. And this is the culture that I grew up with. And I'm just like this is wrong.

And this this cannot be healthy. People are going to die. They're going to get cancer by being, you know, worked to death. And then who profits is the companies that are making millions and billions and trillions. Right. See, the Googles, the Apples, the Facebooks and the people, if they get cancer, who looks after them? Like what happens to them?

So this is serious stuff. This is, you know, the whole population waking up and the consciousness, the rising and now the new generation wants to have a life that is better than their previous ancestors has. So we need to wake up and people that are having an aneurysm need to wake up and say, okay, Gen Z is not going to work 14 hour days or 12 hour days.

They need work life integration. They need that balance. They don't want to be just working and not doing anything else. So what we have is.

Wayne: That is so, so important. And we're already coming up on the end of our time, which I knew would happen. And the giant list of questions that I provided are kind of irrelevant because this has been a great conversation. If there is one thing that if I'm a manager and I've got people in different countries and, you know, I'm trying to herd the cats and keep things organized, if there is one piece of advice that you would give them from your own experience, one practical tip or something that they can do, what should we leave them with, won't it?

Lona: Sure. That's something very simple. I as a founder, we are told, especially at the Y Combinator, that you should build things that people want. And when it comes to management, you should do things that people want. So you should listen to your people who are your people, your team members, your employees, your contractors? They are your people. What do they want?

Just ask them if they're leaving and they're getting another job. Please have an exit interview. Why are they leaving? Is it the benefits? Is it the working hours? Is it the burning out? Is it I don't know. Something else. What is it like? Just ask your people. It's that simple. Keep track. Make sure that they're healthy and they're doing well.

Lona: Be empathetic, take steps. But really just ask their people, is that simple and keep tabs on it.

Wayne: Thank you so, so much. I knew that you were the right person to ask about this. We will have links to SafetyWing in the show notes. Thank you so much. I so enjoyed our time together.

Lona: Thank you. I really appreciate you doing all the best.

Wayne: I had such a good time talking to her today. I hope that you enjoyed and got great value from the conversation. If you are enjoying the Long-Distance Worklife, you've listened to podcasts before, here's where I beg and plead for you to like and subscribe. And please, for heaven's sake, tell your friends.

If you would like links to much of what we discuss today very thorough show notes you can find those at longdistanceworklife.com, and if you have read Long-Distance Leader or Long-Distance Teammate and you want more information on how to develop long-distance work skills for either yourself or your organization, reach out to us at KevinEikenberry.com or RemoteLeadershipInstitute.com.

We will talk to you next week. My name is Wayne Turmel. Thank you for joining us. Hope we've helped kept the weasels at bay and I look forward to seeing you next time. On the Long-Distance Worklife.

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Ask Wayne Anything, Leadership, Technology, Working Remotely

When Did Remote Work Start? – Ask Wayne Anything

For our first Ask Wayne Anything episode, Marisa asks Wayne Turmel about when remote work really started, some things companies were forced to learn when going remote in 2020, and ways managers can check-in without micromanaging.

The biggest surprise of the pandemic was bosses found out they could trust people to work without being watched. - Wayne Turmel

Questions of the Week:

When did remote work really start?

What are some things companies learned when forced to work remotely in 2020?

What are some ways managers could check-in with their staff without micromanaging?

Additional Resources:

Transcript

Wayne Turmel: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the Long-Distance Worklife podcast. My name is Wayne Turmel. Joining me is Marisa Eikenberry.

Marisa Eikenberry: Hi.

Wayne: There you go. As we've told you before, the purpose of this podcast is to help get our mitts around the long-distance work life. We're looking at remote work and technology and leadership and surviving the world of work. And while we are going to have interviews with experts and that kind of thing. One of the things that we're really excited about is the ability to answer your questions.

So if you're listening to us and you're excited by what you hear, we will give you a way for you to get your questions to us. In the meantime, though, I have been walking this planet a very long time. My adult life work career literally coincides with email. My first job was rolling out email to our organization.

Marisa: And for that I am so sorry.

Wayne: Yeah. Well, you know, what can I tell you? Whereas Marisa is going, "Yeah, and you rode to work on a dinosaur and you walk to school uphill both ways in your short coat." But it happens to be true. Marisa, on the other hand, being a millennial, a younger millennial, being a digital native and just having an entirely different work-life than mine has some questions.

And I thought what we would do in this episode of the podcast is just throw it open. I kind of have an idea of where she's going today, but not really. So I'm just going to leave it here. So, Marisa, the show is yours, lady.

View Full Transcript

Marisa: Sounds great. So I guess one place for us to start. So, you know, right now, remote work is the big topic right now. And I mean, I've worked on a hybrid team for eight years. I know this is not new. And I'm sure, you know, you obviously have a lot more experience. So I guess my question is really, when did remote work really start?

Because, I mean, it feels like it's this new thing, but the concept isn't new at all. Right.

Wayne: Well, it's really not. Long time followers of Remote Leadership Institute have heard me say in the past, and it happens to be true. There's always been remote work, you know, whether it's drums sending messages to the next village or smoke signals or, you know, Genghis Khan ruled half the world and never held a Zoom meeting. So it's always been done.

And some people have done it better than others, you know. Julius Caesar did great out in the field. It's when he came back to the office. It's kind of went sideways. So remote work has always happened. And there's three things I think, that need to happen. The first is that everybody needs to be aligned around the mission and the purpose.

If everybody is doing the same things for the same reasons, you can somehow make this work. I think the second thing is there is accountability built in. There are processes. There are consequences. For doing things right and there are consequences for doing things wrong. Genghis was particularly good at this. You know, H.R. would probably quibble with his methods.

Marisa: I mean, potentially might get called in the office.

Wayne: Not that I haven't been tempted to bury somebody in an anthill up to their neck, I've just never actually done it. And there is nothing on my record to show that I have. So there's alignment, there's accountability, and process. There's got to be a way to do this. And then you maximize whatever technology you have at the moment to make the best of it.

And you know, in Genghi's case, his advantage technologically were horses and years you know, that the collapsible tents that they used allowed them to travel very easily and efficiently. And their ponies, the Mongol ponies, were built for long distance, and they were sturdier than a lot of the horses of the people that they ran into. We are doing better than horses in years.

Marisa: Thank God.

Wayne: Well, and, you know, as much as we complain about Microsoft Teams and Lord knows there's enough to complain about, we complain about Teams and Zoom and all of that stuff. Can you imagine doing what we do now? Ten years ago?

Marisa: For sure. I mean, it would have taken so much more time.

Wayne: You know, and so it's always remote. Work has always been possible. I have my first job, the same one that was rolling out email. I had a hybrid team. I had people in the office, but I had instructors because I was managing instructors all over the Western United States. And then 15-18 years ago. 18 years ago now. Good Lord, never do the math.

My advice to Marisa is never do the math when you're thinking about how long ago something happened, it is just debilitating. But 18 years ago, I started working full time from home. And so you know, when people say, "How long have you been in this field?" I've been writing and teaching about remote work for 18 plus years.

You know, remote work didn't start St. Patrick's Day 2020.

Marisa: Thank God.

Wayne: Well, it's funny. I feel a little bit like the crazy guy with the sandwich board who for years Kevin and I walked around saying "The end is near." And we were just kind of politely ignored. And now we have a new, a new sandwich board that says, "Told you."

Marisa: Right.

Wayne: And with the Long-Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership and Long-Distance Teammate: Stay Engaged and Connected Working Anywhere. Our timing was superb, but it wasn't like we weren't already here. So remote work, to answer your question specifically, has always existed. What happened was it took this virus to kind of push us across the Rubicon to where it ain't ever going back to what it was.

Marisa: Absolutely. As you were talking, it occurred to me that I watched my mom do remote work. God, 20 years ago, maybe not quite that long, but I was in middle school. So to your point, I'm not going to do the math.

Wayne: And please feel free to keep reminding me.

Marisa: Always, Wayne, always. It occurred to me that- So my mom used to be an editor for this online magazine. And, you know, her boss, she never met him in person. We never met him. And but she worked from home and she did all this editing, and she communicated with him over Yahoo messenger. And they would, you know, have phone calls and voice calls and all that kind of thing.

And, you know, full disclosure, when, you know, the Internet was becoming a big thing, both of my parents were super in on it. You know, the AOL chat rooms and the ICQ and all this other kind of stuff. It's part of why I got introduced to it so early, because my parents were all ready for it. But it even occurred to me that, you know, yeah, I was introduced to remote work directly, you know, eight years ago but I watched somebody do it 15-20 years ago.

Wayne: I think that is such an important point because it's really easy for people to assume that if you are a certain age, you are old and techno phobic and you know you need your handheld to know where the mouse is. And if you are younger, that you are absolutely comfortable working in a remote environment. And it's not true.

Being a digital native or being a certain age does not mean that you understand the dynamics of working. And that's something that organizations need to get their head around, which they haven't necessarily done a great job of collective like.

Marisa: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm very fortunate in that my job is tech. So for me, yeah, tech is not a big deal, but I know people my age and younger that, you know, they don't know how something works or the Cloud or, you know, whatever. And I've had to explain that. That's okay. That's totally normal. And just this assumption that, well, if you're young, you understand everything.

It's not true. We all were beginners.

Wayne: Well, and the dynamics of the workplace are different. And just because you can text a thousand words a minute and that is, you know, in your thumbs fly around like propellers and that's your preferred method of communication doesn't mean that you know how to use it well or appropriately.

Marisa: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, there's times even now that I'll send a Slack message that, "Oh man, that really should have been an email."

Wayne: Well, and over the course of this podcast, we are going to spend a lot of time talking about exactly those things. But I know you have very specific questions.

Marisa: Yes. So one of the other things that I kind of want to talk about is, you know, okay, so we've already discussed that like 2020 is this big, oh my God. You know, and it obviously taught us a lot about working remotely in hyper teams. And in some cases for many companies and many individuals, we weren't really ready for that lesson.

I know you and I, you know, this idea of, oh, okay, we're all going to work from home, not a big deal. But I guess the question I really have is like, what are some of the things that companies were kind of forced to come to terms with by doing this remote by fire kind of situation?

Wayne: Well, the biggest thing and there are going to be people with C in their job title who are not thrilled that I am sharing this. When the pandemic hit, when the decision was made, you know, to send a third of the workforce. And we have to remember that it's only a third of the workforce.

Marisa: Absolutely.

Wayne: But this notion that they had to go home and work, a lot of senior leaders, particularly senior leaders, but even line managers didn't believe that it was going to work. They put on a good face and whatever and they said, okay, we're going to make this work. And they went, this is going to be a disaster. And it wasn't a bunch of things happened that nobody expected.

No one. And this really makes me angry when I think about how leaders underestimate their people. The first thing that happened is in a lot of organizations, employee engagement scores actually went up.

Marisa: Wow.

Wayne: Now, why is that? Well, what is employee engagement? Employee engagement is the amount of discretionary effort you put in. It's how much you care. It's. Well, what happened? Everybody's in trouble. I want to keep my job. I'm going to have to work extra hard and figure this out. My friends need me. We can get through this. This sense of all of a sudden we were all pulling together to achieve something.

And maybe they cared about the company they worked for. Maybe they didn't, but I guarantee they cared about their coworkers and they cared about their boss. And so people stepped up in ways that senior leaders never expected. And they overcame things that they never expected to do. So that was the biggest thing for a lot of organizations was a if people work from home and I'm not standing over them, you know, they're going to be watching The View all day and.

Marisa: And Facebook.

Wayne: And, you know, they're going to be on the tweet face link blog thing, you know, and it just didn't happen. They wildly underestimated the workforce. I think that's that's the first thing. And the second thing was and there are good and bad things about that. And of course, you know, over upcoming episodes, we're going to be talking about burnout and setting boundaries around our time and all the things that nobody was taught to do before they got thrown in the deep end for sure.

But I think the other thing is this notion that people won't work or won't do good work if the boss isn't standing over them, if they're not in the office where we can see them. And again, wildly underestimating people's desire not to suck at what they do.

Marisa: Absolutely. I mean, you know, some of us, it's we like what we do. We have a passion for what we do. This idea that, like, somebody has to be over us all the time. Like, no offense, if you've got people that you can't trust to work from home, then you shouldn't have hired him anyway.

Wayne: Yes. And you got to remember that there are businesses like call centers, for example, where that's the business model. All we need is somebody is but in the chair. And if they turn out to be good at the job and they stay a while, that's a bonus. Well, if that's your business model, you're going to have a really hard time going forward.

Marisa: That's totally fair. And I've definitely worked a temp job where, you know, I found out the turnover rate was like two years. I don't even want to know how they did everything in the last couple of years.

Wayne: In call centers, the turnover rate is often 100%.

Marisa: Absolutely.

Wayne: So I know there's another question and time is already flying, which should tell our audience, by the way, we love these questions. There are some really good discussions to be had. So get your questions to us. Go ahead, Marisa. One more.

Marisa: Yeah. So I guess, you know, in this whole thought process of, you know, managers being over top and seeing everything and, you know, let's get real, they were checking Facebook in the office too don't act like they don't didn't. But I guess what are some ways that managers who have these remote teams or these hybrid teams can kind of check in with their staff without micromanaging them?

Wayne: Yeah, I think the big difference is the word checking in. And we will go into way more depth in future shows on this. But I think there's a difference between checking in and checking up, checking in implies that it's expected. I'm going to be checking in with you. It's not a big deal. Checking up is getting that call out of the blue.

That says, how's it going? Checking up is, hey, I notice that you're way behind on your numbers. And I wasn't planning to have this conversation you know, the frequency checking in implies that there's been a discussion around how often this is going to happen and if it's expected that, I don't consider it intrusive. You know, yourself, the four scariest words in the English language are it's actually five words is have you got a second?

Marisa: Absolutely. Or can we talk.

Wayne: Oh, dear Lord, can we talk is terrifying. And it's funny because the person making the request, it's a legit request for information. Is this a good time or are you doing something? Have you got a minute to talk? Is a perfectly legitimate question. But when we're doing so and this is one thing about being remote is I can't see you heading my way across the cube farm, right?

So by the time you get to me, I'm not surprised that you're there. What happens is I'm working on whatever I'm working on. All of a sudden, it's "Have you got a second?"

Marisa: Mhm.

Wayne: And now it's Oh, no. What did I do? What's wrong now? I'll never get this work done now because I got to deal with this. And so I think. And we'll have to continue this conversation down the road. But I think that notion of checking in versus checking up when people feel like they are being spied on, when they feel like they are not trusted and respected, that the manager has to make sure we're working, you know, these kind of surprise inspections can actually be fairly demotivating.

And so I think just the language that we use, you know, using check in versus check up is going to make a big, big difference.

Marisa: Absolutely. And for those of you, you know, who are listening, who are not managers and you just want to, you know, give some feedback to your managers, I know something that I did with one of my managers was if you needed to check in with me or it's totally fine. But like, don't just say, hey, can we talk?

It's, hey, can we talk? I have some questions about this website because I know for me personally, my anxiety, you know, I'll shoot through the roof. "Oh, God, I'm getting fired." There's literally no reason for me to think that. But in my mind, that's where it's going.

Wayne: It's like when your spouse says, we have to talk. Nothing good starts with that sentence, even though perfectly innocent conversation start with that sentence. Hey, I want to tell you, you know about this thing. Yeah, but the human brain is wired to avoid pain and stay out of trouble. And so for a lot of remote workers, that's our default position.

This is a great conversation, Marisa. And I think we're going to have a lot more conversation on this topic on our next all question episode. For the time being, they can find the show notes. They can find links to everything that we've talked about, including articles at Kevin Eikenberry Group and Remote Leadership Institute blogs that talk about this very thing.

Thanks. These are great questions. I am really looking forward to hearing more about what's going on in that brain of yours.

Marisa: Absolutely. I've got plenty of questions. Just you wait.

Wayne: And by the way, everybody else, we do want your questions. There will be a way on longdistanceworklife.com on the show notes page to submit your questions for Marisa to ask us. For now, thank you for listening to this episode. If you liked it, you know the drill. You've listened to podcasts before plays like and subscribe and-

Marisa: Tell your friends.

Wayne: And tell your friends help other people. As I used to say in my standup days, if you enjoyed it, tell your friends if you didn't keep your mouth shut, it's our little secret. In the meantime, thank you, everybody. We're going to return you to the wild. Keep the weasels at bay. And we look forward to seeing you, hearing you, listening to you on our next podcast.

Thank you so much.

Marisa: See you next time!

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