Marisa and Wayne answer a question posed by Tony Hartsfield asking how to be productive on a multigenerational team. They discuss their experiences on a multigenerational team (and a multigenerational podcast duo), things to keep in mind no matter which generation you're in, and how to ease the tension between everyone.
You may have noticed some people talking about running out for an errand during their work day or moving some of their work to a time when they're more productive. Marisa asks Wayne about time shifting, or asynchronous work, and how to do it successfully in your organization.
Join us for a powerful, 4-part video series titled, Demystifying Remote Leadership. You will learn how to create solid working relationships in a virtual team with more confidence and less stress!
Marisa Eikenberry: Welcome to another episode of The Long-Distance Worklife. We're here to discuss and answer your questions about how to lead, work and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Marisa Eikenberry. Joining me is Wayne Turmel.
Wayne Turmel: That would be me. Hi.
Marisa: If you have a question that you would like us to answer, you can contact us on our website. Longdistanceworklife.com or e-mail. Email me directly at Marisa@KevinEikenberry.com. Wayne, today we're going to do one of our one topic episodes and I think we should talk about time shifting or how I've also heard somebody at GitLab describe it with asynchronous work.
So we're going to talk about what is it? When is it okay to do that kind of thing? Are you ready?
Wayne: It sounds vaguely science fictiony, right?
Marisa: Well...
Wayne: It's like we're going to time shift. You cannot do that, Captain.
Marisa: Yeah. Sounds like are about to jump into a time machine.
Wayne: Yeah. Basically, time shifting just means in our brains for the last hundred years, we've had this notion that a workday is 8 hours long and it starts at seven, eight, nine. Whatever time we start and it stops at three, four or five based on when you started. And regardless of where you work, every buddy that you work with is essentially on the same time schedule.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: Right. That's kind of been the way it works. And for a lot of people with remote work, this means that people like me start work at 6:00 in the morning so that I am on pace with those of you back East And what we have found as people work remotely and they're working from home and they want more flexibility is that it is a mixed blessing, that kind of scheduling.
Yeah. And so people want to be able to work when it makes sense to them. Some people are morning people. It really doesn't bother me. Starting work at 7 a.m.
Marisa: Well, you're already your morning person, so that makes it.
Wayne: I'm already a morning person. And otherwise, you know, I'm sitting around for a couple of hours doing nothing until my workday starts and my body at 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon. Is that quite enough of that?
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: And so for me, I've actually been time flexing for a while. And, you know, if I have a class at 4:00 in the afternoon, I will take a couple of hours in the afternoon and take the dog for a walk or run my personal errands or do whatever. A lot of this has been stealth flexibility.
Marisa: Yes. I've seen that a lot, like on LinkedIn or something. I know that, you know, people say, hey, I'm going to go take a couple hours to go run an errand or they go on a walk or something. Somebody else I saw they they basically shift their day, kind of like what you were talking about earlier. And so they went outside and worked on their sidewalk in their yard for a couple of hours.
Because they're more productive at night. So they just kind of shifted everything over.
Wayne: And what it boils down to is what is the company's approach? We were talking a couple of shows ago about remote friendly versus remote first. It's the same thing with flexibility, right? You can have all the flexibility you want but if I'm in the office at 9:00 and I want to reach you and you're not there.
Marisa: Right? Yeah. It's not possible.
Wayne: Is your work really?
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: And so this is actually a pretty fundamental shift for a lot of organized machines, especially as they start to grow. Right. Because you start your company and you're living wherever you live. And, you know, you might have to adjust for customer time zones, but basically you work whatever time you work.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: But now you hire somebody who lives in another time zone. Hmm.
Marisa: Yeah. Really changes everything.
Wayne: You know, and so when you think I mean, it's interesting because you work from home a lot, but I know that you maintain kind of traditional workplace hours. Yeah. Tell me, is that a conscious choice, or do you think you ought to do that?
Marisa: I think it's a little both. So, I mean, you know, for those of you who haven't joined us before, like working here at the cabin, I can bear group. This is my first job out of college. Like, I graduated on a Saturday, and my first day was Monday, so I don't really know any different. So when I first started there was definitely this idea of I start my day at eight and it ends at four.
Like, that's it. And I have kind of adjusted that sometimes a little bit as needed to like, you know, OK, I do have to go run an errand super quick or especially when lockdowns and stuff were happening, but you could like get out a little bit. My husband and I would jump in the car, "Hey, let's go get Taco Bell because we've been sitting in our house for two weeks."
Like, let's just get out somehow.
Wayne: For those of you listening, I am all about taking your spouse to lunch. I'm not sure that that would necessarily fit most companies health and wellness policies, but for sure.
Marisa: For sure. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, just little things like that. And I do know that there have been times that I have seen, you know, coworkers and stuff. Hey, I'm going to take the afternoon off or I'm going to, you know, jump off for a couple of hours. I'm going to come back on at night. I did this a little bit when I did work remotely full time many years ago, but it was for a particular project.
And it was just because the majority of the stuff that I was working on, I was working on at night, mostly because I couldn't get interrupted at night. So but that was that was a little bit of a different story. So I do think there's a little bit of I think for me, I like having a set schedule.
I like knowing that I'm going to start at eight and I'm going to stop at four. And that that's just it. I'm going to, you know, take a lunch break at noon. I personally like schedules, but that's just me.
Wayne: Now, I would say that it also helps that you are in the same time zone as the majority of people in the organization.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: So that it's very easy free for you to live on that schedule. There are three I wrote down three things as you were talking. The first is when we're talking about asynchronous work, it kind of raises the issue of how much synchronous work do really need. So if your job is leave me alone, let me get my work done, and I don't need to interact with other people in order to make that happen.
It matters less whether I am sitting at my desk at a given time right Absolutely. What matters and this has to do with a whole approach to leadership and managing performance is are you measuring behaviors such as when do you show up and when do you go to work? Or are you measuring the work that gets done? If reports need to be done Friday, and you don't need my input on that.
I don't really care what time of day you work on it. Yeah, depending on your family situation, depending. In this case, it's just you and Parker, so you want to sync your schedules so that you are both available at the same time and yes, free time. So that is part of the equation. You know, this whole idea of what is the work that needs to be done and what's the best way to do it.
Right. A lot of us started working from home so that we can get stuff done.
Marisa: Right? Yeah. Because the work still has to get done.
Wayne: So you know, when you're thinking about it is what's the work that we're doing? When do we need to be synchronously available? Now, that's going to depend on the job, right? If you're in a customer service job, you need to be available when customers expect you to be available, whatever. Right outside that is, you may have internal customers that you need to be immediately responsive to.
So that's part of the discussion is you setting up what are my work hours, how flexible can I be? Is what are the things that have to happen in order for the work to get done?
Marisa: Yeah, and I think with that, too, I mean, you were mentioning like customer service hours and stuff, and there's a small and small. It's not really quite accurate, but there is a piece of my job that is customer support. And so I have to be around to answer support tickets and stuff like that because, you know, when I'm not doing that, well, somebody else is doing that and that's OK because that's his business.
And, you know, he answers them in the off hours. But to your point, like I try to make sure that I'm available during those hours expecting that that's when I'm going to get the majority of those support tickets. But most of my other projects, it doesn't really matter what time I'm doing those.
Wayne: Yeah. And so the other thing that you said to me, which is kind of interesting, is I take an hour for lunch or I do this. The problem with working from home for a lot of people is they have this in their head that they've got to work. They but they take that to the point where they always have to be available.
And so there are a lot of people who don't take the breaks that they would take in the office. They don't take an hour for lunch. They don't get up from their desk every hour and a bit and stretch their legs and get some oxygen and do what they need to do. So that notion of wanting to be responsive to customers, wanting to be responsive to their teammates.
Afraid they're going to miss a message stops people from actually leveraging the flexibility.
Marisa: Yeah, I was you know, when you're talking about that, I was guilty of that when I first started working for Kevin and you. Yeah. I was gonna say, I know I was and I've gotten a lot better since I got married, but, you know, I know that I was somebody who was in and I accidentally trained the team to expect this of me, which was my fault entirely.
But just this idea of, well, I'm tech support, so I have to always be on well, first of all, nobody's dying in tech support. Like, it can wait until later, almost always. But, you know, so I was setting this expectation up that I was available all the time. So if you sent me a Slack message at 7 p.m., I was going to answer you.
Why? Because I lived alone and I didn't have anything better to do. To be quite honest about it, you know? And so once I got married and I went to remote working full time, one of the things I knew that I had to do was I'm going to walk into, you know, we had a bedroom set up for our office.
And so when I walked into that room, OK, I'm starting my work and at 4:00 I'm leaving and that's it. And I had my Slack set to do not disturb and all of that stuff. I mean, yeah, there were occasions that somebody might message me and I might still respond, but now there's, you know, a new culture essentially that I had to train everybody with for myself personally, that if it's after 4:00 and you send me a message, I'm not seeing it until the next day.
So if it's really important, you need to call me and that's almost never happened.
Wayne: Well, and even if I do see it, I can guarantee and I'm going to answer it.
Marisa: I'm so thankful for the Slack remind feature because there are some times where, yeah, I'll see it, but it's right at the end of my workday. And so it's like, you know, I see this, you know, I might respond, but I'm not taking care of this until the next day. And some Slack will remind me about it the next day, and I go from there.
Wayne: Well, as so often you've said a couple of things just in passing, like does that actually require some thinking? Right. If you're going to time shift as a policy for an organization, for example, what time is everybody else working? You know, if the goal is somebody has to be there to answer the phone or somebody has to be there if you've got three people on your IT Team, all three people don't have to be available at the same time.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: Right. So if you've got somebody on the East Coast and they start their day earlier and somebody on the West Coast who can finish up at the end of the day, great. Make a work absent. You've got somebody who's an early bird is up early anyway. Let them work when they're good and somebody else. As long as the mission critical things are covered.
Marisa: Yeah, it reminds me, I know I mentioned this slightly in passing a little bit ago. So you know, we sell DISC assessments with the Kevin Eikenberry Group and discpersonalitytesting.com and I do customer support on that site and there are only two people on the customer support team. It's me and one of our co-founders. And so, you know, I try to take care of the tickets between eight and 4:00 so that way that can free up him to do the stuff that only he can do.
And, you know, I just message him if I need to, if there's a support ticket that I just don't know how to handle. But after 4:00, that's all him because, you know, A, it's his business. So that makes sense. And then he can adjust and decide, do I want to take these at night or not, you know? And so, I mean, there's also even a little bit of training customers to know like you send me an email 2:00 in the morning because you're in Australia, we're not answering it until 8 a.m. at least.
Wayne: That's, you know, my friends customers in Australia.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: Or clearly.
Marisa: We love them just the same.
Wayne: Right? It's just the reality of the situation. And as the workplace changes, we need to make those kinds of decisions when is it important that somebody be there immediately to respond? And when does a reasonable time frame to respond makes sense? The whole idea of we have to be available to each other synchronously is what is leading to people putting in too many hours and people being on Zoom meetings from beginning of the day to the end of the day.
One of the things about hybrid work and we've talked about this before and we'll continue to say it until people figure it out.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: Is that hybrid is not just like the office, but with webcams.
Marisa: Yes. Even though people are trying to make it seem that way.
Wayne: Well, and they always have because that's what we know. That's how we've always done stuff is we get together and have a meeting.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: For hybrid work to truly work for flexible workspace time flex to work to be able to really happen, we need to reexamine how the team works together. And that means leveraging asynchronous tools. You mentioned whether it's Slack or Microsoft teams, we do a really good job, although it's time to go in and do a cleanup of having very mission specific groups.
Marisa: Yes, yes. Specific channels for different things.
Wayne: So that if you have a question about something that the whole organization doesn't have to be on the clock. In order to answer that, you just need to know that the other person in that conversation is going to answer you.
Marisa: Right?
Wayne: That is much easier to negotiate.
Marisa: Well, and I think our team is also really good about using the Do Not Disturb features in general to to let you know, everybody know, hey, I'm heads down for a couple of hours, I'm going to change my Slack status. And, you know, if you really need me, call me or you know, like I said, I end my day at 4:00, my Slack goes in a Do Not Disturb mode and you can see that I'm not available.
Wayne: The other thing that you said just kind of in passing and I can't stress this enough because this is traumatic for a lot of people is this notion that we teach people how to work with us.
Marisa: Yeah, absolutely.
Wayne: We teach people it's like if I am constantly if I tell you I'm in a meeting, but I'm still answering your messages and answering your emails, I have told you it's perfectly OK.
Marisa: Yeah.
Wayne: To bother me in the middle of a meeting whereas if it says Wayne's in a meeting till 2:00 and you hear from me at 205, the message is I was in a meeting right? As time shifting and flexibility becomes more important, not only do we have to get better about setting boundaries, right? The other people on our team need to respect those boundaries.
Marisa: Yes.
Wayne: And that is it's funny. People will be much better about respecting those boundaries than we are about setting them just right and one of the reasons for burning out when you work from home comes from a bunch of guilt and wanting to take one for the team and being a good teammate to the point where you are draining your own resources and for flexibility to work we need to be able to set expectations for the company.
I mean, let's start with you're getting paid to do a job. Absolutely. So the job is going to have certain expectations. Yes. Now, with that, what requires you to be synchronous with the rest of the team? What does we figure that out? What is the expected availability? What is the expected response? Time to messages and whatever what are the tools that we are expected to use?
Marisa: Right, Google Drive, Slack, whatever. And I know there's a lot of asynchronous tools coming out all the time, too.
Wayne: Yeah. And new tools every day. And that's a whole other a different. That's a whole other source of service that we don't want to get into. But, you know, these are the things that we need to determine. These are the things and they may be up for review.
Marisa: So with that, I know that you're mentioning a lot of stuff that, you know, us as workers can do and, you know, ask our leaders about. But I guess from a leaders perspective, how do you set these boundaries? I mean, you know, are some people just waiting until they come up? Should we be trying to make that culture ahead of time?
Wayne: There are a couple of problems that's a fabulous question. Yes. The organization should be thinking about this. And if you are in HR or you are in operations and you're trying to figure out how do this work, start doing your research. There's plenty of good work out there. Long distance leader or Teammate.
Marisa: Links in the show notes.
Wayne: And in bunches of other content which will tell you what you should be think about. The problem is that a lot of senior executives have never worked in a flexible environment. They've always worked sometimes literally nine to five.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: But they've always worked in a highly structured environment. And so if you're coming from that environment and you're trying to adjust, you don't know what you don't know that's true.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: So having the company make all the decisions makes no sense, right? What needs to happen is you need to sit with your team and you need to say, OK, what is the work that needs to get done? What is the mission critical work that absolutely has to be done synchronously what can be done asynchronously with a giant asterisk and what doesn't matter where it happens and when that happens.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: Set those boundaries, set those expectations and let people tell you how this works. And then and this is the part that people stress about just because you set a policy doesn't mean that's written in stone by a month, two months, three months. Is the work getting done? Our customer complaints rising is there you know, is working with the other parts of the organization, creating a problem and then reexamine it and do the process again until you find something that works?
Marisa: Yeah, we always reserve the right to be smarter.
Wayne: There you go. I think looking at the time, good lord, as always, that's probably it. But, you know, if you're looking for the the nutshell of this whole thing, it's what's the work that needs to be done, really not your preference, what really needs to be done synchronously and asynchronously.
Marisa: And sometimes meetings are not it.
Wayne: Not it. And sometimes they are right right. So here's the thing. If you have, if you're in the middle of your flex time and there needs to be a meeting, does it matter that you are in a baseball cap and t shirt? Probably not.
Marisa: Yeah.
Wayne: Right. Do the meeting. Do what you need to do and go back to your life up until it's time for you to do more work. So this is going to be an ongoing process. We're going to constantly be learning about this, and we need to be open to constant reexamining in order to find the optimum way to make time shifting work sounds great.
Marisa: Thank you so much for answering this question today, Wayne. I think we had a great conversation today.
Wayne: Well, you answered as much of it as I did, which is the way this is supposed to work, frankly.
Marisa: Again, we're getting smarter all the time. So thank you so much for listening to another episode of the Long-Distance Worklife. If you'd like, we'd love if you would write, review and subscribe and tell your friends about us. We're on YouTube and everywhere that you get your podcasts, you can also connect with us at longdistanceworklife.com.
And we would love to answer your questions in a future episodes so you can either contact us on the website or email me directly at Marisa@Kevin Eikenberry.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
Abhinav Chugh from Peoplebox joins Wayne to answer the question, "Why do people resist using technology designed to make managing easier?"
Peoplebox is an OKR & Performance Management Platform that help you solve for alignment, team performance and engagement to drive exceptional business outcomes.
Join us for a powerful, 4-part video series titled, Demystifying Remote Leadership. You will learn how to create solid working relationships in a virtual team with more confidence and less stress!
Wayne Turmel: Everybody. Welcome, welcome once again to the Long-Distance Worklife podcast. I am your humble servant, Wayne Turmel. This is the podcast where we look at remote work, technology, leadership and just surviving, thriving, keeping the weasels at bay in this crazy world of remote work and all the changes associated with it. This is one of our Marisa-free episodes not that that makes it better, just different because I am talking to a longtime colleague of mine, somebody I've known for a while, and I think it's high time we had this conversation.
So I am being joined by Abhi Chugh, who you should be able to see on the screen. There he is. And we are talking about the metrics that managers need to follow and how do we do that and how does software play a role and why does that freak people out? So that's what we're going to be chatting about.
Joining us from Bangalore, Abhi, my friend, how are you?
Abhinav Chugh: I'm great. Thank you for having me.
Wayne: Thank you for being had. So very quickly, tell the folks what Peoplebox does.
Abhi: Thank you. So what our vision is to build an operating system of strategy, execution for high growth companies. And that sounds like a very complicated setting. So I'll make it very simple a lot of time in companies, and especially as remote heads of companies, people, different departments are very misaligned, you know, are not really sure what are their strategic priorities, what our key goals.
So just imagine a central system in the company. Any company is going pretty fast or and in that central system, all your strategic priorities, all your cross-functional goals, all your initiatives are aligned tracked and achieved. And that is a system we are trying to create or we have build, which helps companies execute their strategy faster and get get better business results.
Wayne: Now, that, of course, sounds fabulous. Like all technology sounds fabulous because you're building it to solve a problem. And Lord knows misalignment is a problem as you roll it out in companies, especially remote first and hybrid companies, what are the misalignments? What are people missing out on that they need the help with?
Abhi: I think I think it's a great question and a lot of times people don't understand what exactly is misalignment. People think that a misalignment is all about a lot of leadership or the employees not knowing what our number one goal is. And I don't think that's true because a goal is usually a number. It could be a revenue, it could be a user margin.
It is generally a number and leaders make sure that they communicate that number so frequently that everybody knows you want to achieve hundred million dollars in revenue. We want to achieve 3.5% margin or we want to be on a team of 50 million monthly active users. That's very easy. I think the misalignment happens when people don't know what our focus is.
So if you and this is what I always to say to the founders that are top leadership in the middle of the night and ask them What are our top three priorities for this quarter? And see how they answer it and how misaligned they are, a lot of times you can come back and say, What are our leaders?
Our founders are misaligned, all while our one of our co-founders said this and we said this. So a lot of misalignment happens on what our focus or strategic priorities is and what is actually made. It really was is the whole pandemic and the remote one because no longer now employees are in the same room, they're working from home and misaligned is now more visible.
Wayne: And yeah, I think there's a couple of things that have happened. And you point out the pandemic. It's kind of the the watershed moment, right? There was the before times and now there's now there's now in the before times you had misalignment across teams, across functions. But I think with remote work, people become very focused on their nuclear team and rightly so.
Right. We're trying to get the team through this and stay in communication. But the cross-pollination with other departments and other teams doesn't happen the way it did when you had to look at each other in the cafeteria.
Abhi: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that the the place where we come in, which is to build that central system where across the line goals are tracked, it fragmented. I would say two things which change this. I mean, imagine maybe five or ten years ago and think of any company like that the bold tracking happens in silos. Every department has their own maybe a spreadsheet or a dashboard on a PPV and usually more where you can't find or go to a place where you see how stated goals are aligned with the product goals.
Our design goals are aligned, but it just doesn't happen now. Four things really changed. This one was this whole introduction to the framework of OKRs. You know, primarily invented by, of course, Andy Grove and Intel, but made famous by John Deere and Google. And then you see all these amazing hypergrowth startups like Spotify, Twitter, LinkedIn, adopting it, you know, and startups are usually at the forefront of adopting it because again, for them, execution is everything they have, everything right.
Wayne: OK, so for for the uninitiated, let's not we try on this show not to go down the jargon road. OKR stands for.
Abhi: OKRs are goals framework stands for objective and key result. So it's, it's, it's drastically different from the traditional goals like KPIs, which is key performance indicators or PR which is key results area. What ours make sure is that your goals also have strategy in it. So to give you an example that suppose you are a company who are at stage $10 million revenue and you want to in the next one year or two $20.5 million.
So you will put your number one company goals at $25 million revenue from current $10 million that's a typical KPI. OK got it what. OK and goes and says no that's not a great goal. The reason why that's not a great goal is because that doesn't answer the question how, how are you going to do that? What is it that you want to focus on which will help you achieve?
So primarily breaks the ball into two different pieces. One is the objective where do you want to go and what are your focus on strategy? Around it? So, you know, that could be like become the the most customer centric company in India or become the fastest stay CRM system. So it is your strategy, which is underline it could be anything for Amazon.
It's customer service for Google, it's innovation. What what they actually highlight is the focus OK? And that's make it really different. And then the result is just the number. How do you measure it? How do you know that you are going to go and achieve that? So again, it is it's a very famous very one of the fastest growing sort of framework.
Almost every company now from start ups to the Nike's and the IBMs and the, you know, cap Gemini of the world are adopting it. And that's what I see. So that was the sort of the first step towards building this growth aligned goal system. OK, but so.
Wayne: We're going to start I'm going to stop you there because that's fine at a high level. We're talking about strategies now we need to take it down to the managers.
Abhi: Yes. Yes.
Wayne: And so the company has goals and strategies and we've got stuff in place and now it's dropped in my lap as the manager. What I know that people box has the structure and the the ways of putting all this in, but it's always what problem are you trying to solve? Right. So what are managers and teams not doing?
They get in the way of executing that. Absolutely. And aligning it.
Abhi: I think you ask a really good question. What is the problem you're trying to solve? And ultimately, when you look at either the managers or the the leadership or the business heads that are going to try to solve what we call the class, the results and the retention, which is everybody is aligned from an employee to his or her manager to he's our manager to each other of the leadership.
They all want this do we want faster results? They want better retention. OK, well, when it comes to managers, you know, what are the challenges that they face in achieving better results? And retention? And the number one challenge that they face themselves is misalignment, all the employees aligned or our fear about how their work is aligned for the overall company purpose.
Are they all working towards what are the companies number one, focus on Friday, you know, and having that clarity is very important. When we run engagement surveys, one of the very important questions we ask is how happy are you working at the company or how motivated are you working under the manager they're a very high level question. But when you dig deep on why they are unhappy working with the company, the number one thing comes is the work God.
If they are not really clear about their role, they're not really clear about their job description. They're not really clear that they're really amazed by the company vision, what the company is doing, but they're not really clear that how the work, the day to day tasks that I am doing, how's that blind to the word confusion and that problem is solved.
If somehow you can build a system which makes sure that any employee, even an intelligent company, is able to align his or her work all the way to the company's strategic priorities or their overall mission. And that's the challenge we try to solve, and that helps manage it to a great level because that makes sure that we are all going in the same direction that the work doesn't happen in silos.
There's no chaos. And we all you know, while you are collaborating or while we are, you know, working in a unit, actually, we all are working towards the same people.
Wayne: So it makes perfect sense on some level. If, you know, I'm struggling to do this on my own, it makes sense that there is a structure and there are steps and procedures to help me do that. And and whenever a company puts in a tool like this, I have seen it time and time and time again. That everybody agrees this is a problem.
Everybody agrees that this would solve it, and they immediately fight the technology they immediately resist having to follow the procedures, even though what was happening before wasn't working. There is just something about codifying and making this that much of a process that seems to make people crazy. What has been people's experience? Not just with PeopleSoft, but you've been in this business a long time.
Why do you think there is that resistance and how does an organization overcome it? If they want people to use the darn thing?
Abhi: I think that's a wonderful question. And I agree with you that the one of the biggest challenge in software, and especially in software, would change if it's bring some sort of a change management is a huge resistance. And I think the only way to go and solve that resistance, if you understand that where that resistance coming from. And I just think our example, you want to build a system where all your cross functional goals which means your marketing, your company goals, your initiatives by the product and engineering that all at once.
OK now what does that mean? Does that mean that if I'm an engineer who is working in say to like JIRA or if I'm a sales guy who's working in a CRM system like a sales for the HubSpot are we going to double entries? I have to go in a built in Salesforce and then I have to go and do it in incentive system that just bad.
I mean, I would myself resist that because you are just increasing my job. Oh, and one of the major challenges happens when some of these software systems create more or heads and more work for the people, you know, just to solve a certain problem. And that has been our experience that if you ask people to do some things so that it solves a larger problem, you are sitting on a failure.
And what we try to do there is to make technology. Your friend and not the fool any more and say that is the best way to go and solve that problem is through some magically easy tracking of goals to deep integration. What that means is that imagine that you are a sales guy and you use sales force and you go and enter everything you know, all your ideas, all your leads or all your theories into the sales for the moment.
You do that through the integration, through an invisible software. The central system is automatically updated. That's a really, really welcome move because now I don't have to go and double one. And in fact, when I present to my leadership, I don't have to call people, so I don't download. I don't have to export something and pasted in a PDF or a spreadsheet.
I already have already made data available for me. So but the answer to this adoption or the resistance challenge is to how do you make it so magically easy for people to do their work and reduce the time? I give a very good example. Let's just take a simple example of business use in companies. Almost every company they go through this monthly business reviews on a quarterly business review, and that generally happens on PowerPoints, you know, parties and theme starts creating the people.
It is two weeks ago they have to put the narrative they have to put again, they have to go to different tools, take the screenshot, copy pasted, and many of the time when they present the data, it's obsolete. It's like one record, OK, and a lot of effort goes out. Intention is that how can we make this new or happen within hours and make the data really light?
So it sounds both the problem. It's not the leadership problem, but the data is naive and it tells the employees and the business heads or the managers problems that they don't have to work. And that's our way of solving and overcoming these challenges.
Wayne: So certainly having to stop the redundancy in the multiple thing, I mean, even even having multiple passwords to remember is enough to make people crazy.
So let's as as we get to the end of our chat here, talk to me about the two or three main behave was that if there was a system, obviously they should use minimal box, but assuming that they have some other system or there's something in place, what are the two or three behaviors that managers can change or perform that will help with alignment that maybe they aren't doing now?
Abhi: Yeah, I think I think the first thing that we have learned, and it's a very top down thing, I think I think managers have to have a certain constraint there because if from the leadership they don't have a way to align their cross-functional goals, there is very little managers can do. You know, if I'm a sales head and there is no way I can go and align my goals with the product team or with the design team or with the operation team, there is very little my sales manager or the product manager can do about it.
Wayne: And it's very natural and it's very natural then to control what you can control. Right. And the team becomes more insular and more nuclear.
Abhi: So so one of the things that we try and do is to go to the leadership or go to the business heads and say that OK, this is this this needs to start from you. When you set your goal to that are quarterly goals or semiannual goals and you've got to set it in a more aligned and collaborative and that results will be magical.
And then look at all the companies who have adopted opioids or any on any cross align frameworks. But once that happens, then it is so magically for the managers because now they have the visibility that just wasn't. I give a very simple example that is a problem in every company so salespeople in every company are dependent, acutely dependent on product.
They want a certain features because their customers or their leaders are asking. But they have no way to view what is the status of that particular feature. So you pick an example, let's suppose you are of your sales person in a software company and all your want to be customers are hot leads are asking for, say, Microsoft integration.
So you call a product manager and say, Hey, we need that environment. You say, OK, we already have it in the roadmap well, there's no way for you to know what is the status of that because that project is being run in Dev Toolset JIRA or Microsoft Azure, which as a sales guy I don't have access to, you know, so the only option now I have is to keep calling the manager, keep calling the engineers and say, Hey, what's the status?
And if for some reason, if this is delayed, there's no way for sales guy to know. And I keep promising people it's going to come in, bite me back very bad. Now, the best impact of this central system, Federal Budget Alliance, is that I as a sales guy, can go and see everything, whatever happening in any department without even me having an nexus and that creates this unbelievable visibility and focus so that we all go into the same direction.
OK, so as a manager, because I have this system I'm now no longer working in Silo, the collaboration improves, the alignment improves, and that obviously makes sure that there is focus and everybody goes into the same direction nor does that just imagine I as a manager, when I do my one on one, I have a clear eye. And on all the goals, you know, how they are aligned.
What are the red flags that these flags are coming from? They may be coming from different departments. When we are doing our performance review, we are goes out of the center of it. So any system that holds as an input performance reviews, incentive management, rewards management one on one, you now have that system on a platter. You don't have to follow up people who update your goals, update the progress that system is already made.
So as a manager, my job to become very easy as an H.R. My jobs become very easy.
Wayne: Well, and of course, one of the problems with goals is that because we aren't looking at them, we don't have a simple way to check them. Right. It tends to get lost in the conversation of just the regular one on ones. And the larger goals often don't get covered. Abhi, I can't thank you enough. This has been really, really eye opening.
I mean, first of all, the whole problem of alignment. And then second of all, why people resist tools that could help, i think is is just worthy of raising the issue. If nothing else. Thank you very much. We are going to have links to Peoplebox and to your contact and all that sort of thing on our website and on the show notes.
If you go to long distance work life.com, you will find all of this. We will have links to Peoplebox and to Abhi. Thank you for listening to the Long-Distance Worklife. If you have questions, comments, vicious personal attacks, but especially questions we urge you. We have a spot on our website. Get your questions in and we will answer them in one of our Q&A sessions like we're going to have next week with Marisa you know the deal.
If you listen to podcasts, please like and subscribe tell people about it. We really, really want others to hear these really good conversations. And of course you can reach me Wayne@KevinEikenberry.com or Marisa@KevinEikenberry.com and all of our episodes are available on long distance work life dot com. On behalf of Marisa, on behalf of Abhi Chugh thank you.
Thank you for joining us and we hope to see you on the next episode of the long distance work life.
Have you ever dreamed of being a digital nomad but felt like it was unattainable? It's not always lazing by the pool and soaking up the sun in Bali. Wayne interviews Kevin Eikenberry Group teammate, Angie Thompson, who has been traveling with her husband in an RV fulltime since 2019. They talk about what led to the decision to become a digital nomad, some of the concerns that had to be discussed with her boss, as well as her advice to those who would like to pursue being a digital nomad themselves.
What are the things you would tell someone who would like to be a digital nomad?
Join us for a powerful, 4-part video series titled, Demystifying Remote Leadership. You will learn how to create solid working relationships in a virtual team with more confidence and less stress!
Wayne: You're right.
Angie: I have an official title. There's my cat in the background. I have official title of director of process engagement. And what that means is I build process automation to manage our clients, both our clients and our team members. So I help our clients get connected to what they need online, and I help our team members stay connected to our clients with digital information, database management, that kind of thing.
Wayne: Now, first of all, she has been doing this for a very long time and extremely well. But the important thing is about a year and a half, two years ago, you made the decision, which shocked the heck out of everybody, given the job that you do, which sounds very much like you should be holed up somewhere in a secure facility or maybe even in the office with access to the boss.
But you decided to do something two years ago and tell everybody what you did.
Angie: So it was kind of a strange convergence of events, and it all actually came together at the same time, which was odd. My husband and I first of all, I am not a camper. I don't like the outside. I don't like bugs. But my husband and I decided we wanted to maybe think about RVing and we bought an RV and did the weekend warrior thing and absolutely loved it.
And then we started following all these people on YouTube who live in their RV full time and they travel around full time. And boy, wouldn't that be great? What an exciting life. And I don't know how we would ever do that. And in 2018, the 2018-2019, basically school year we were empty nesters. We had two kids at college, one a senior and one freshman and loved it.
Some people hate being empty nesters and we just really kind of found our groove and really enjoyed it. And then that oldest child graduated and moved back home.
Wayne: As, as one does.
Angie: You know. Yeah. And, and I love her, love her to death but we kind of got used to in that short year being empty nesters. And the more we watched the YouTube stars that were doing it all the time, you know, the bigger the dream became. And all the while in the background was the memory that in
February 17th of 2006. My dad retired at age 59 from his coat and tie sales job. Didn't have to work, but was planning on learning some woodworking skills. He found a handyman he was going to work with and redo doors and window frames and maybe make some furniture like he was going to dig in with his hands and really enjoy it.
February 17th, 2007. My dad passed away after fighting stomach cancer for ten months. He and my mom had planned for a great retirement and saved and they'd been really smart and the thing that they couldn't account for and save up was time and since then, that's just been brewing in the back of my mind of why put it off?
What can I do to make sure that that doesn't happen to me? My mom a few years later was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and she's now in an assisted living facility, and has to have help caring for herself. So neither of them got to live their retirement dream of what a great life it was going to be once you didn't have to work anymore.
And they saved the money. And, you know, there were a lot of things they went without so that they could save the money for retirement. And then they didn't get any. And so my husband and I kind of looked at each other and said, "You know what, 'traveling around in an RV is something retired people do.' Is a load hogwash! Let's just do it." You know, why not?
So we we did a lot of research and we did a lot of planning. And three days after Christmas in 2019, we left our house in central Indiana. And in the terrific care of my daughter and her then boyfriend who is now her husband, they rent our house that's one of the things that full time RVers struggle with.
How do you afford both kinds of things? Well, that's how we afforded it because our daughter and son in law are paying rent now.
Wayne: One of the other ways that you've afforded it is that you kept your job, which, as I say, is central to this organization. I am not kidding when I say Angie is largely the glue that keeps us functioning as an organization. So you're very tight. You have your finger on a lot of buttons that are important to me.
I have to be. But seriously, I know how seriously you take your job. So what were the things that you were concerned about? First of all, in thinking about doing the job you do, which is very connection heavy with being this gad about RVer.
Angie: Oh, it's entirely connection heavy. There's nothing I can do with my job that doesn't require an Internet connection. So that was the first thing prior to actually going on the road. I had worked basically from home for Kevin for ten years, so I already knew that I could do my job anywhere. I wanted to. And we had actually tried a couple of trips where I didn't take the full week off.
We went to Pigeon Forge or someplace, and I worked a few days and I took a few days off and we adventured in the evening, and my husband kind of sat out by the campfire and just enjoyed his days in the peace and quiet. And so we had done a little bit of remote working from the RV, but the, the the biggest single unknown factor is the Internet connectivity.
A lot of parks have free Wi-Fi, but it's not very good. It's not very strong it's not very reliable. And so we prior to even doing this, that was one of the very first things we researched. OK, how's the best way to get a consistent Wi-Fi connection? That's just hot spotting from your phone because everybody knows that's going to run out eventually, you're going to get either cut off on your data or throttled.
Wayne: OK, so that's the WiFi connection.
Yeah, the Wi-Fi connection is part of it. Now you have to go in and you are blessed in that. Kevin, besides being a fine boss in general, you know, we literally wrote the book on remote work. So you know, he was predisposed, I'm sure. But how did that conversation go? What were your concerns? What were his concerns? How did that talk go?
Angie: Well. I did the best I could to try and pre think, what are all questions that are going to come up? What will be his concerns and how can I address them? How many of these can I address in advance? And and basically presold and when I Kevin and I have the great relationship that's not superior subordinate I'm not exactly an equal peer but he doesn't treat me like, you know, a slave in the galley. There's respect and there's consideration and he's known for a long time- I mean I started working for him shortly after my dad passed away.
So he's known all about how my life has progressed. And we've had personal conversations about things going on in each other's lives. And so we're kind of on that level. To be honest with you, I didn't ask for permission. I said, "Here's what we're thinking about doing and here are the challenges that it could create. And here's how I think I can solve the ones I've come up with. And what do you think?"
Wayne: Give me an example of one or two problems that you had to kind of preemptively address in order to make him feel better?
Angie: Well, I did have to. I mean, of course, the connectivity was an issue, like if I can't get on the Internet, I can't do anything. We long before that had centralized file storage on Google, on Google Drive. So all my files, all of all of any of the work that I would be doing is accessible by anybody else at any given time.
We had also long before that implemented Slack. So we had a lot of communication techniques in place standards because almost all of our team is remote anyway. They're not on the road they're in their houses. But almost all of our team works from home at some point, most of them. Right? So we already had established when do you tell people that you're not available?
How do you do that? Do you email them? Do you slack them? Do you call them? When were we going to travel what if what if we were actually traveling on a workday? And how was that going to work out?
And I quite honestly said it's going to take some more diligent communication on my part to tell the team when I am and am not available. And it's going to take some more diligent reading of those notices on their part to know and that's, you know, just some of the stuff that probably right now the single biggest issue I still have is that because of my Internet connection, it is cellular based, but it's not a cell phone.
It's a cellular based router. I still don't get great bandwidth to move large files. So our other tech expert, Marisa, your co-host, when I need to move a large video, she helps me out. Moves the large video, and it's done in 5 minutes when it would take me 3 hours to download it and re-upload it to wherever I need to be.
That's the only so far, knock on wood, the only place I really need assistance still from somebody who's land based.
Wayne: So let's talk about working with the team. Has there been an appreciable change in how you work with all of us? I mean, I'm always an idiot, so I still need help, and I still need you know, what I send up a flare, I need to find you. But has there been an adjustment in how you work with everybody else?
Angie: Well, I don't think so. You'd have you might want to ask some of my teammates. I mean, maybe you could chime in on whether or not it's changed anything. But again, because we're we're almost all remote and hardly ever down the hall from each other, co-located, as we say, communication always, almost always starts with a slack message, an email, a text message, a phone call, just normally.
So whether I was slacking from home or slacking from my RV, you can see I'm in my RV right now.
Kind of didn't matter. I don't think.
Wayne: Now, there were some prosaic things that have to happen when we talked to Laurel for a couple of weeks ago, she was talking about the fact that there is a lot of paperwork and, you know, tech stuff and things that need to be figured out. If people are mobile, you basically have a state of residence, right? Or you're still listed as an Indiana resident? OK, so for tax purposes.
Angie: I'm registered in Indiana. I still own property in Indiana. But you might my kids are just paying their money to me. They're not they're not they haven't taken over my mortgage. I haven't sold their house. Sold my house. So I'm still a property owner and registered to vote. And my mailing address is Indiana and all that.
Wayne: Well, I think, you know, the important thing for those listening is it's not just, oh, I'm going to pick up stakes and get a check. There is some paperwork. There are some things. Right. You're an Indiana resident. I'm a Nevada resident. Regardless of where our butts are at any given moment, there's some very prosaic paperwork needs to go on in order to make this a win win and not put a burden on the company. From that.
Angie: So we've been relatively paperless for a really long time because of the inherent remote nature of our team. Anything, it didn't make sense to have papers to pass around. That's why we have Google Drive to be able to pass files back and forth. And, you know, at the end of the year, when Kevin does my W-2, I can just download it.
Wayne: So Angie gets to take somebody by the shoulder who is thinking about becoming a digital nomad, and you get to have the heart to heart with them. There may or may not be a beverage involved in that conversation. What do you tell people thinking about this besides, you know, make sure you have an Internet connection? What are the things about structuring your time, about focusing your work?
What are the things you want to tell people who are thinking about doing this?
Angie: The first thing I would say is that it's absolutely doable.
And it's not without its challenges. It's I can't just you know, we're in Tampa right now. I can't just it's I can't just pick up on a Thursday afternoon and go to the beach. I have to work. I can't just suddenly decide, hey, we're going to up and move to, you know, Fort Myers today. Let's go. Nope. Got to work.
Thanks. So, you know, there's it's not as carefree and randomly nomadic as you see some of the people on YouTube who I don't know how they afford it. I don't know when they work. They don't really show that part, but they seem to just be on the go all day, every day, wherever they want to go. I'm sure that's because that's the part they want you to see on YouTube.
I don't really have that all that freedom, but I would say do your research try and pre anticipate what what kinds of issues might come up. When we were getting ready and we were, you know, thinking about what we were going to do with a I prepared an entire folder that is now our office that's got our birth certificates, our Social Security numbers, our Social Security cards, all of our insurance information, like all of the things that you keep in your file cabinet at home for important stuff.
I have it with us just in case. I haven't needed it, but I have it and I don't have to worry about how am I going to get that if I need my Social Security card for something, who knows? So but it's it's the biggest thing for me is just don't don't put off life or your job. I love my job.
I love working for Kevin. I love what I do and I'm loving my life outside of work so much more now than I did. And I didn't dislike it before. I just like it that much more now.
Wayne: I think that's a great place to leave it. I mean, as remote work and hybrid work becomes more common and people have had a couple of years of enforced quiet to think about what they want to do, let's not underplay the role that covered and all the changes have played in that people are doing the kind of math in their head that you've done.
And I want to thank you for coming on and not doing the glamorous, you know, sitting in Bali by the pool version of what it takes to make this work and we do make it work. So I want to thank you very, very much. Angie Thompson is part of our team here at Kevin Eikenberry. Group. Thank you for listening.
Those of you who are listening to the Long-Distance Worklife Podcast, you can find transcriptions, links, all of that good stuff. We'll also get a couple of our favorite videos and put links to those on our website. So visit us at longdistanceworklife.com if you want to.
Angie: You can follow us on YouTube and you can follow us on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Empty Nest Roadshow.
Wayne: There you go. There will be links to that. I guarantee it. If you have a question, a comment, a vicious personal attack you can reach Marisa and I. Wayne@KevinEikenberry.com Marisa@KevinEikenberry.com. You're a podcast listener. You know the drill like subscribe, tell your friends, blah, blah, blah. I want to thank Angie for sharing her story with us.
I want to thank you for sharing the last 18 minutes or so with us. And please, please, please let us know how we can help keep the weasels at bay. Have a great day. We'll see you next show.
In this Q&A episode, Marisa asks Wayne about what companies learned from doing virtual happy hours, courses, and other virtual meetups at the beginning of the pandemic. They discuss what stuck, what was tossed, and things to think about when planning virtual meetups.
When we all started working from home, there was a surge of happy hours/virtual classes/etc. to try and help with company culture. What things stuck and what things went away?
Join us for a powerful, 4-part video series titled, Demystifying Remote Leadership. You will learn how to create solid working relationships in a virtual team with more confidence and less stress!
Marisa Eikenberry:
Welcome to The Long-Distance Worklife. We're here to talk about technology, remote work, and just all the things that kind of relate around it. I'm Marisa Eikenberry.
Wayne Turmel:
And that would make me Wayne Turmel.
Marisa:
And today we're having another Questions and Answers episode where I'm going to ask Wayne some questions, and one of them is even from the audience and we'd love to get your questions in too, so please let us know on longdistanceworklife.com. We would love to answer your questions. So, Wayne, are you ready to get started?
Wayne:
Probably. I kind of know where we're going. Just full disclosure, I know vaguely what the questions are going to be, but I'm hearing them the same time you are so there.
Marisa:
So I thought where we would start and admittedly we're going to talk a little bit about when pandemic and all that first happened in 2020 but we saw this surge of happy hours, virtual classes. People were doing yoga like all of this kind of stuff to try and help with the company culture. And I know that a lot of that has lessened over time, especially as people have gone back into the office and we're trying to figure out this hybrid thing and flexible work.
But I know that companies learned a lot of valuable tips and tricks during that time. So in your conversations with companies, are there any things that have stuck and what things have gone away?
Wayne:
Yeah, so let's take a look at why all of that stuff happened.
Marisa:
Yes.
Wayne:
Right. I mean, you went from a place where the vast majority of people saw each other at work every day, or at least several days a week.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
And the culture existed and the company was there and all of a sudden mandated and we were told it was going to be for a very short period of time. Remember when this was going to be over by Memorial Day? Yeah. And so a lot of organizations and more importantly, the people in those organizations got thrown into the deep end.
And they had never done this before. And their whole life was different. The rhythm of their life was different. They I mean, the average American gets 60% of their social interaction through the workplace anyway, right? All of a sudden that was shrunk.
Marisa:
Well, and some people that lived by themselves like they were home alone. All the time.
Wayne:
I had a client in Germany who left Frankfurt and moved back with her mother in Bavaria because she had this little studio apartment in in Frankfurt that was great when she had a social life and friends and like that. But when she couldn't go out, those walls closed in really tight.
Marisa:
It was no longer a retreat.
Wayne:
Yeah, there is a human need even for the biggest introverts to have contact with other human beings.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
And what we tried to do and we've talked about this on past episodes we tried as hard as we could to replicate the only thing we knew, which was the office. And so we had the same meetings at the same time that we had in the office.
We tried to bring people together and with the purest of intentions, tried to overcome the distance. We pushed people to use webcams prior to the pandemic. A lot of people wouldn't use webcams for a lot of reasons that we've discussed in the past. All of a sudden it was like, no, we need to do this. We need to maintain our culture on a gut level.
People understood that this was important. What we didn't understand was how much of this can we do and what's the right mix? And how do we do this?
Marisa:
And company cooking classes are probably not a thing that has to happen all the time.
Wayne:
But there was Zoom Church. I mean, the funniest sketch Saturday Night Live has done in a very long time was Zoom Church.
Marisa:
At some point, you and I should have a conversation about online church, but that's a different conversation entirely.
Wayne:
Yes. So we tried to compensate. Right? And we used what was available to us.
Marisa:
Absolutely.
Wayne:
And as always, sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. And so that led to, you know, at the office we used to have all this unstructured time or we would go out once a month or we would bring pizza in and everybody would get together.
So let's do that. Only everybody's virtual.
Marisa:
Yeah. Here everybody has an Uber Eats card or whatever.
Wayne:
The logic behind that made perfect sense, right? The reality of it, there's a couple of things. One is it can get a little weird. For example, we had a number of lunches in the office where anybody within kind of spitting distance of Indianapolis came together and we had a camera set up in the conference room and everybody could see everybody and we played kind of icebreaker games.
But here's the thing. It was 9:30 in the morning for me. I was not eating pizza. I was not having lunch. I had already had breakfast. So a lot of that meeting was me watching people eat.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
Right? And it's just the reality of the situation. I understood the importance of the event. I played along but watching other people eat is not the most riveting thing. Also, some organizations did it right. They would provide some organizations provided, as you said, Uber Eats Cards or whatever. Yeah, right. And some organizations did that and some didn't. Again, it depended on the time of day.
Virtual Happy Hour for one group, basically meant day drinking for another which may or may not go bad.
Marisa:
I mean, maybe not all bad.
Wayne:
Which may or may not be the positive thing you're trying to present.
Marisa:
May not be encouraged.
Wayne:
And so it was an attempt to create something that existed before. Now, what we have found out through this is that different organizations, different cultures, cultures, work cultures, different people want and crave different things.
Marisa:
Absolutely.
Wayne:
And everybody needs to make accommodations for everybody else.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
I am not a big fan of forced fun just in general. Right. Other people crave it, need it. We work for an org- I'll tell you how this works and how it doesn't.
Marisa:
OK.
Wayne:
A lot of times we have these monthly meetings. This is my kimono on wide open up. Be grateful you are not watching this on YouTube.
Unless you are and then I'm sorry.
We have monthly meetings and most of these meetings start off with some form of icebreaker.
Marisa:
Yes.
Wayne:
And Kevin, bless his heart wants every member- And we've got about 11, 12 people on any of these calls at a given time. And we all have to, you know... What's your favorite movie? What's your favorite- At Christmas it was what's your favorite Christmas memory. It's lovely and we all know each other.
Marisa:
Right? It's a little easier for us than it might be for some.
Wayne:
Because we already know each other and which means it's both more valuable and less valuable.
Marisa
Yes.
Wayne:
Because we know each other.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
If you don't know each other, I see the value in that conversation.
Marisa:
Yes.
Wayne:
Now, Kevin did one that I loved and here was the deal at the time I thought it was silly and stupid and ridiculous and oh dear Lord, we're really doing this. And he had everybody go around. And what is your favorite candy?
Marisa:
Yes, I remember this.
Wayne:
Right? And everybody went, Now I like this and I like this and I like this obscure chocolate bar. And, you know, for me it was Jujubes or gummy bears. It was gummy bears and like that.
Marisa:
Yeah.
Wayne:
And then a week later, unannounced, no label on the package, nothing. This three pound- picture three pound bag of gummy bears winds up on my front porch.
Marisa:
I remember.
Wayne:
Fortunately, it was not August, 120 degrees.
Marisa:
Yeah. You didn't have one solid gummy bear shaped like a bag.
Wayne:
Exactly. And it actually took me a couple of days to figure out who this came from. And it was fun. It was nice. We I actually reached out to a couple of people. Did you get candy on your door? What was that about? Do we know what this is? And then it became what did you get? And it was fun.
It was and that's an ice breaker that worked great.
Marisa:
I will tell you, as somebody who already knew that those packages were going out, because I'm in the office sometimes anyway, it was fun watching you guys freak out because you didn't know where they came from.
Wayne:
Yeah, it was a lot of it was a lot of fun. And that's an example of an ice breaker that it didn't take a lot of time to do. It was very short and it tied to something else and it had a long term effect.
Marisa:
Yes.
Wayne:
And that's the thing about ice breakers. I have a healthy understanding of why we use them.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
And I have a very little patience for when they drag on and on and on.
Marisa:
I would agree with that, too.
Wayne:
The problem is that the people who organize these things are doing the best they can usually with very little guidance. And usually those types of people fall on the side of erring on the side of fun and connection.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
We had a client. This is absolutely true. I was doing a series of webinars for the client and they sent me this question in advance and said, "This is real. Please do not use anybody's name." This team, this woman led the team she worked from home. She begins every 15 minutes with an update on her cat, Mr. Whiskers, or whatever his name is, is actually the co-host of the meeting and sits on her desk frequently walking in front of the webcam and she encourages everybody to give an update on their pets.
And this gets longer and longer and longer to where the first 10 to 15 minutes of the meeting is. Mr. Whiskers and the Pet Update.
Marisa:
OK. Which I'm sure is awkward for some that don't have pets at all, but that's a different story.
Wayne:
Not only do they not have pets they have lives. They have things they need to do. There is work to be done. Right?
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
And the manager because nobody has given them feedback on this. The manager is blissfully unaware that this is a problem.
Marisa:
OK.
Wayne:
Because, in her defense. Nobody said anything so far.
Marisa:
Yeah, OK.
Wayne:
And I enjoy it. So therefore so this is the thing, right? We're trying. And and so you said that at the beginning of the pandemic there was Zoom everything. And in some cases it works. You know that I write novels as well as this. We had a great in-person writers group prior to the pandemic. All of a sudden, a few of us got together and we started working online.
We started doing our critiques online. We had to change the way we do it. We physically had to change the way we did it. But it was a small group of people we were all committed to. And it works great.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
Lots of us have done lots of Zoom things that didn't go so swell. Zoom Yoga. You know, first of all, you couldn't drag my crap to a yoga class anyway, let alone Zoom yoga.
Marisa:
I was going to say, my sister-in-law told me about that one. I think her boyfriend's company was doing it, and I was like, really?
Wayne:
Well, but then there are companies that do yoga classes and companies that don't. So it depends on the culture of the company. Here's the thing is, at some point with any of these connection exercises, there are two things you need to do. Number one is what is the aggregate time that people spend on their webcam on Zoom every single day?
Marisa:
Yeah, you don't want too much Zoom fatigue.
Wayne:
Right? At that point, it just becomes misery.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
The second thing is the golden rule, as we have all been told, is do unto others.
Marisa:
Yes.
Wayne:
The problem with that is we occasionally do unto others in ways they do not want done unto them fair. And this gets to work styles, it gets to preferences. And it's why over time, these things need to be the subject of conversation and coming together and reaching some kind of accommodation with each other. Because one person's bonding time, right?
I'm in this apartment all by myself. And I'm losing my mind and I need to talk to people is somebody else's. Oh, for the love of everything that's holy. Let me get my work done.
Marisa:
Yes, I have also seen some of those too.
Wayne:
And there's an accommodation to be made there, but it doesn't happen unless you talk about it, unless you have some kind of conversation and meeting of the minds where the introverts have to suck it up and, you know, do some playing nicely right others. And the extroverts at some point need to shut up and let people get their work done.
Marisa:
I will say on that line. So it's no secret I'm an introvert haha. I don't like people, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm somebody that's very much heads down, get my work done, whatever. Now, if you want to have a meeting with me, fine, tell me you want a meeting, whatever. And I won't name the coworker. That part's fine.
But I had somebody on our team who had said they had just said, "Hey, I want to have a meeting with you. I want to talk about this tech thing." Well, the tech thing that they had a question on, here's a link from Google. You'll solve it in 3 seconds. It wasn't hard. They didn't really need me on a Zoom call for that.
So to me, I'm looking at it as don't waste my time. And then then they tell me, "Oh, well, I really just wanted a catch up call. I haven't talked to you in a while." Well, just tell me that. And and it was totally fine to then, you know, have that conversation, whatever. But for, for some of you who are more extroverted, you do want to catch up on with these people and stuff.
Tell your introverted team members that that's what you're trying to do. If they have a goal, if they know what the goal is, we tend to be a little bit more willing to play nice.
Wayne:
Well, and a big part of that is just being prepared and knowing what the conversation is.
Marisa:
Absolutely.
Wayne:
If I go into the conversation thinking this is going to be a five minute hashing out of a problem or answering a question, and all of a sudden you're going into, "So how's the dog and what's the weather doing in Vegas?"
Marisa:
It's totally different mindset.
Wayne:
I get a little bit antsy. Whereas if we've blocked 20 minutes and you know, "Hey, I want to catch up, we haven't talked for a while," my brain stops screaming at me and I kind of have allotted that time and I'm good with it.
Marisa:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So just tell your people what the goal of the meeting is.
Wayne:
So here's the thing to wrap up. Yes. What we have been babbling about for 16 minutes. Yes, icebreakers and activities are important. If you are not seeing each other, the group has to have a way to communicate and build relationships and get to know each other and God forbid, have a little fun.
Marisa:
Watercooler channels on Slack are great and we highly recommend them.
Wayne:
And yeah, watercooler channels, by the way. But they also need some guidance and there can be sub-channels. Our team does a great job with the watercooler chat. They come across a funny article, we put gifs or gifs or whatever, little video clips.
Marisa:
There you go.
Wayne:
Says the old man and we bust each other's chops and we have a lot of fun. You can do that in multiple ways. There's, you know, there's family news. There's cool articles that we found there. You know, different companies break it up different ways. Trivia, ongoing trivia things and that's the thing about these events find events that require participation. Watching people eat is not a particularly participative event, but pub trivia contests.
Marisa:
Yeah, people love trivia.
Wayne:
You know, those types of events and don't just dictate them on the team.
Marisa:
Yes.
Wayne:
Right. So there's two things that I would suggest. One is alternate the responsibility for whose job it is to do that.
Marisa:
Yes.
Wayne:
Right. Each meeting somebody else is responsible for how we open the meeting.
Marisa:
That makes sense.
Wayne
That way you get a mix of these. Really, if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?
Marisa:
Oh, God, please don't tell Kevin to use that in the next meeting.
Wayne:
Right. But those types of things that drive me crazy versus legitimate, I have breakers that are fun and quick and high energy. The other thing is talk about it as a team. What do you want? What do you need? What is the accommodation that you can come to that strikes the balance of need for social interaction and fun and function and allowing people to get their work done.
Marisa:
Absolutely. Like more opt in as opposed to requirement?
Wayne:
Yes. An opt in ish?
Marisa:
Yes. Yeah, totally makes sense. I know that we're about out of time today, but Wayne, I just want to say thank you so much for answering my question today. I know that there was a lot of stuff that we could have gone into and we just don't have time for it right now. But that's OK. We'll have more episodes coming up.
So please, like and subscribe. You've listened to podcasts before. You know how this works, right? And review. Tell your friends, share the article. Articles? Share the episodes on your social media platforms. If you would like to get in touch with Wayne or I, you can contact us at Wayne@KevinEikenberry.com or Marisa@KevinEikenberry.com or find us on LinkedIn.
All of our show notes and the transcript will be on longdistanceworklife.com as well as a place for you to ask your questions so we can answer them in future episodes. Thank you so much for joining us this week and we'll see you next time.
Laurel Farrer, the brains behind Distribute Consulting, joins Wayne to discuss the long-term effects of working from home, the impact this has had on communities all over the country, and even how some of the current tax laws don't support a "work from anywhere" concept. Distribute Consulting is an internationally renowned management consulting form that specializes in workplace mobility.
What are the long-term impacts of working from home?
Additional Resources:
Wayne Turmel: Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Long-Distance Worklife, where we take a look at remote work, technology, leadership and generally just surviving the virtual and hybrid workplace. My name is Wayne Turmel. I'm with The Kevin Eikenberry Group and Marisa is not with us today because we have another interview episode and I'm really looking forward to this one.
Things have changed in the last two years, certainly when it comes to remote work. We've moved across the Rubicon and one of the questions that we get asked most often is what do we do now and what's next?
And the truth of the matter is, nobody knows. There are short term things that we know we have to figure out, like what's the return to office policy? But there are long term effects of both the pandemic and just the kind of critical mass around remote work that we've hit that we can't begin to really understand what the long term effects of this are going to be for a while. But somebody whose job it is to keep an eye on this stuff and who I've known for a very long time and she's a very smart lady, is Laurel Farrer from Distribute Consulting.
Without further ado, here's my conversation with her. I think you'll find it very, very thought provoking.
Everybody, I am really, really lucky today. We are going to have some good conversation with Laurel Farrer. She is the brains behind Distribute Consulting.
She is a well-known entity in the remote work space, particularly in government interactions with planning and thinking about this stuff and I'm going to be completely honest. We started a conversation, started a bunch of conversations, but we started a conversation on LinkedIn that I thought would be worthy of recording.
So we're going to talk about the good news. What's going on with remote work? What is the good news? What's the rosy picture? And you'll be shocked to discover I have some concerns that it's not all rosy as we think.
Wayne: And this is the best human that I know of to talk to about this. So how are you?
Laurel Farrer: I'm so good. And I don't think anybody is going to be surprised about you having a controversial opinion, right?
Wayne: Maybe not. I'm trying to shake this whole grumpy old man thing, and it's not working really well at the moment, to tell you the truth. So you'll give us a really quick what have you been working on that started this particular LinkedIn post and we'll link to the post in the show notes.
Laurel: Yeah, well, what we're talking about here is the impact of workplace flexibility in virtual jobs, on economic development, specifically on rural economic development. So it doesn't really take a rocket scientist to figure out that many, many, many people are moving out of urban centers or the decentralization of urban centers and then moving to various scenic destinations in order to work. That was a trend of the pandemic. And now that people are out there, they're tending to stay. And so we have seen this as a really exciting trend for the idea of stimulating dying economies in Midwestern United States and in national parks areas.
So this is actually what we were trying to do before the pandemic. We were working very closely with lots of governments and grants and nonprofit organizations to try to do this, and now it's just happening organically. So ultimately, the conversation is about how virtual jobs can positively or negatively impact economic development.
Wayne: So let's start with the kind of why do we want to do this? Give us the short version. What are the benefits? We'll start with the humans and then we'll go to the communities and the broader conversations. I mean, other than you can be somewhere nice.
What are the human needs that are driving this migration?
Laurel: Yeah. I mean, let's actually look at it from the the community side. So traditional economic development is a very expensive investment for a company or I should say a municipality. So first they have to attract companies, so they have to invest in their infrastructure, in their community programs in order to make it a place that a community
would want to offer to employees.
And then the company comes and they build the building and they bring the jobs, and then the people come. So there's billions of dollars that need to go into even preparing for a company to attract higher income tax.
So what this does is it turns the entire economic development cycle around and attracts the individuals first, and then the individuals bring their jobs with them and then eventually the companies come. So what it does is it really lowers that threshold of of investment that is required for a municipality, a city or a state or a county in order to attract new income taxes.
So what they really want to showcase and that's this is the indirect answer to your question, what people are going towards are opportunities like low cost of living, more affordable housing, outdoor recreation, community opportunities to be involved in city councils and Little League and stuff like that.
They're just looking for more involvement in that small town lifestyle.
Wayne: Well, and so there's a couple of things that I want to come back to. There's another reason that you haven't mentioned, which surprises me a little bit, which is the traditional brain drain that in North America at least has been the story of the last hundred years.
You grow up in a small town, you graduate high school, you've got about a three year window where you're either there forever or you go away to school and never come back. And so a lot of particularly rural towns are, as we used to say, the newlywed and the nearly dead.
And families are separated. One of the things that happened during the pandemic. My daughter manages a bar in Chicago and she's saying we can't find people because everybody went home to be with Mom and Dad. And so there are all these positive impacts and the on the family dynamic and in possibly saving small towns.
What do what do these places need in order to other than. You know, just being pretty. I mean, what do these towns need to do in order to have people come back?
Laurel: Yeah, this is really where we need to see the rise of municipal marketing, which is literally marketing your city and showing off what you have that is different than other cities. So exact same concepts and principles as marketing for a company is now moving into the public sector, which is really exciting.
This is, you know, how company firms are, how cities market themselves to like bring the Olympics to their city. Same concept just on a micro scale. So whatever it is that a company has to offer, they should show it off.
Like, do you have great restaurants? Do you have lots of parks? Do you have a great transportation infrastructure? Are you close to the airport? Are you, you know, whatever. Like every single city has something to brag about. And so it's just a matter of showcasing that.
At a minimum, though, they really need to invest in that digital infrastructure. So we obviously remote workers need Internet and they need strong, fast, consistent, reliable Internet. So that's going to be the one thing that holds any city or county back.
And unfortunately, that's a long and expensive process. So luckily, we've got the U.S. government that's involved in and in impacting that and improving that as much as possible. But that's going to be the biggest barrier to success for any small town.
Wayne: And when people are deciding to go somewhere else and for lots of reasons, I moved and this was not my primary motivation, but I moved from Illinois to Nevada and Nevada has no state income tax. I essentially got a raise.
Laurel: Yeah, exactly.
Wayne: And better weather and that. Means that federally we need to look at, what does it take if you, if the company is in one state and somebody else is in another? There's a lot of paperwork.
Laurel: There are so many laws that don't exist yet. Like, essentially, every company right now is operating illegally. So, like, there's a lot of laws about tourism, about, you know, nexus tax structures, about operational liability for employment laws on a local as well as federal level.
Like there are so many laws that will eventually need to be changed and that will change in order to accommodate more mobility. But right now, they don't exist yet. And so it's kind of a wave for the patterns of migration to help influence those laws before they are formed.
Wayne: Yeah, it's definitely I mean, in its worst case scenario, it's going to be Grapes of Wrath. And people are just loading up trucks and and moving somewhere else, which. It's funny you said people need to market their city.
But I think the cities are the ones that are in trouble. And as we are a increasingly urbanized civilization that is going to be an issue. I mean, one of the things just The New York Times today had an article on how the five biggest cities in America have actually lost population.
And if you are one of those people who's able to pack up and move to Idaho or Nevada or wherever. That's probably nothing you care about. If you are the approximately 3 million people in the city of Chicago who support all the people that come in to work every day.
Laurel: Hmm.
Wayne: And I don't see small town Utah sending Utah U-Hauls to the south side of Chicago saying, come live here.
Laurel: Mm hmm.
Wayne: I think there is a fundamental upheaval that is going to happen that isn't as smooth as just, oh, everybody move where they want to go.
Laurel: Yeah. Well, and we've also seen that as well because like Seattle's mayor just had a big article and called to the community for the major employers in the area to bring their employees back because they're dealing with such a problem of homelessness.
And so the city centers, especially in those hyper urbanized areas, are definitely going to shift because their entire economy has been built, built on the concept of centralized work locations. I mean, that was, you know, commercial districts for the past 200 years have been built on this concept.
So, yes, we are definitely going to have some growing pains and some shock factors. But we also have to think about the pros and cons here of, yes, those those hypergrowth areas are going to decline. However, let's look at the entire Rust Belt that we've been trying to rescue for all of these states and cities for the past hundred years, since since the last major industrial revolution. And now we have a solution that is viable and and inexpensive. So this is a big step in the in the direction of wealth distribution and, you know, disparity between all of our different regions in the country.
Wayne: One of the things that. I ponder is if we look at how businesses have developed, how industries have developed, physical proximity has been a factor, whether it's Silicon Valley, whether it's Detroit at the beginning of the last century, whether it's the financial districts in London and New York, the fact that people are in physical proximity, the fact that they mingle socially, the fact that they interbreed, and they also sit in bars hatching plans and doing things. And you get this critical mass of people with knowledge in a certain industry. What are we seeing or do we have any idea?
How you replace that brain synergy thing that happens in physical locations?
Laurel: Yeah. You know, what's interesting about this is the cities that we've worked with and consulted on projects with are actually coming to us to find a solution to prevent that from happening, because these cycles of similar talent attracting itself and just, you know, becoming more and more and more saturated as a talent pool really affected the diversification of industries in that region.
And so suddenly they only have this very specific demographic and it's very problematic for the sustainability of their economy. So they come to us to say we need to bring other industries towards us so that we can have more diversified industries, a wider range of professional demographics in our in our residents and citizens. And so that's what we try to help them do.
Wayne: I get that. And I think that there is still a there is still a value. I mean, I would not want to be a professional violinist 20 years from now when there is no such thing as a city big enough to have a philharmonic orchestra.
What happens to, you know, because people are going to spend their money and their philanthropy in their own community because that's what happens. And so there's a lot of stuff, but and none of which is going to cure the problem.
And if I'm the one who's getting the chance to move. There's a lot of "It's not my problem" involved in that. So let's take a look at kind of going forward.
Laurel: Mm hmm.
Wayne: What if I'm thinking of ditching the city? I'm bailing San Francisco, I'm bailing New York and bailing whatever. How do I go home to Mom and not lose my mind? I'm serious. People that are used to living, I mean people in red states right now, "All these people from California are coming and screwing up our demographic."
Well, guess what? They are going to vote the way they want to vote and there are going to be changes. So what happens? How do if I'm a migrant, if I'm a digital migrant, and that's the term I've been using these days, again, going back to The Grapes of Wrath and the back of grandma's truck.
If I'm a digital migrant, what do I need to do not to lose my darn mind?
Laurel: Yeah, well, I think it's important to say that. I mean, we don't have to go back to our roots. Right. That for me, I also made the same decision about five years ago. Like, hey, we can live anywhere.
And so where do we want to go? Our decisions were based on whether on education for our kids, as well as how do we get as far away from our families as possible. So I think that's what we get to see is like we get to choose whatever is and is not important to us.
So I think what we're going to see more as opposed to like selecting where we want to live based on industry, it's going to be more of a shift on where do we want to live based on culture.
So what we're seeing right now is a big rise in outdoor recreation and artistic communities, right? So we're seeing like Austin and Denver are just exploding because people are like, oh, that's great, I get to be outside and have a great job.
So I think we're going to continue to see a snowballing effect of something like that, that people are going to create these cultural hubs of things that they are all interested in together, like skiing communities and and, you know, beach communities and things that you can't change like the weather.
And then they're going to migrate to those more often and start to build more similarities based on those. That's my projection. I'm not sure about that. But that's that's where I see us headed as people are that it's like the Great Lake relocation and the Great Resignation are marrying each other.
People are going to other employers because of their culture. And I think people are going to go to a different city because of the culture as well.
Wayne: Well, very quickly, because as fully expected, we are out of time. But let's talk about the employers for a minute.
Laurel: Mm hmm.
Wayne: What are some of the structural things inside organizations that they need to think about if they're going to be an employer of choice for these digital nomads?
What are the things they need to think about because we've got time zones and we've got people who aren't really good at guiding their time. And it's really easy to spend all your time glued to your computer and like that.
So what are some of the things the employers need to think about?
Laurel: Yeah, I think asynchronous communication is massive because of the reason that you just said that. We need to make sure that we are able to operate in a way that is not dependent on sharing time and location. So obviously that's a really big first step.
But more on the compliance side, they really need to be aware of the fact that there is not really such thing as work from anywhere. So these companies that are touting like you could be anywhere and, you know, move around as much as you like and that's fine with us.
Like that is going to spin the company into bankruptcy faster than they can blink. Like it is not sustainable, it is not legal and is not scalable. So while that might work for a very small organization of independent contractors only like that's one thing and that's what we hear about in the media.
But for large organizations, over a hundred employees that and that are employees, not independent contractors, it's a much more serious decision. And there needs to be very careful consideration of where they allow their employees to live and whether or not the employer of records in those particular regions are a good match for the company.
Wayne: So much to unpack and well, thank you so much, because there is a lot of things that we need to think about, right? We need to think about our own individual wants and needs as organizations. We need to think about our wants and needs and staying in business and staying out of jail and all of those things.
And there are large scale seismic changes going on that is more than just I get to avoid my commute every day. So these conversations are going to be going on for a very long time, and I am delighted that you are part of this conversation.
Laurel, thank you so much. We will have links to Distribute Consulting and some other stuff in our show notes at longdistanceworklife.com. Thanks for being with us.
Laurel: Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Wayne: There you have it. I hope you enjoyed the interview with Laurel Farrer. I hope that you have gotten a lot out of it and you're asking the right questions, which at this stage is all we can do. Show notes and links to some of the things that we've talked about are at longdistanceworklife.com.
If you have questions for me and Marisa, we will be taking those. We love audience questions. And of course, if you are a podcast listener of any time span, you know that we'd really love you to like and subscribe and of course tell other people about this.
My name is Wayne Turmel from The Kevin Eikenberry Group and The Remote Leadership Institute. If you have not read The Long-Distance Leader and The Long-Distance Teammate, we recommend that you do. And, you know, we really hope that we're helping you keep the weasels at bay.
Have a good week. We will talk to you next week on The Long-Distance Worklife.
This week, Wayne and Marisa continue their previous conversation about micromanaging by discussing employee monitoring software. What it is, why some companies may be using it, how it can impede trust, and how many are getting around it.
Should we be using monitoring software on the devices of remote team members?
Additional Resources:
Wayne Turmel: Hello, everybody. Greetings. Welcome to the Long-Distance Worklife Podcast. My name is Wayne Turmel from The Kevin Eikenberry Group and the Remote Leadership Institute. With me is Marisa Eikenberry.
Marisa Eikenberry: Welcome back, everybody.
Wayne: And we are going today to do what we promised. I mean, the thing about this show is we are talking about remote work, technology, leadership and generally surviving the whole long-distance virtual hybrid workplace. And Marisa, we started talking about something in our last you and me episode.
Marisa: Yes.
Wayne: That I think we're going to continue. So you want to tell them kind of where we are and what we're going to do?
Marisa: Sure. So on our last episode, our last Q&A episode, we talked about micromanaging and especially on remote teams and how we can try to avoid that. And you gave us some tips to kind of help, but we did determine that there was still a lot more to that conversation. Things about like monitoring software, for example, and how that's used and what we think about it that I thought would really be helpful in this episode.
Wayne: Yeah, it's interesting about this topic because if you've read The Long-Distance Leader and if you haven't, what the heck is wrong with you? But if you've read The Long-Distance Leader, you know that the leadership model basically presumes that leading a remote or a hybrid team is primarily like leading any team, right? Micromanaging is probably not great regardless of whether you're in the same location or not.
But this is where leadership and technology and the realities of remote work and everything. This is where the rubber meets the road is this kind of thing. And this is what freaked people out the most, I think, about the sudden transition to remote work is if you were a micromanager, it is impossible to micromanage by distance. You cannot do it.
Marisa: But they're going to try.
Wayne: Well, you can make yourself and everybody else crazy in the process.
So where does that come from? Right. Is that a leadership problem? Is that a technology problem? Is it? Yes. The answer is yes. To all of those. So where where should we pick up in our last discussion? Where do you want to start?
Marisa: I think one of the questions that we really wanted to get to in this conversation we didn't have time for was about monitoring software on people's computers. You know, I know that I've heard about people all the time. Saying that, "Oh, yeah, I've got this monitoring software. It makes sure that I'm still online." And and with that, I actually saw a TikTok a few weeks ago where somebody had this software installed on their computer.
They had to get up and go do something, whatever it was. So they put peanut butter on their mouse, set it on the floor, and their dog licked the mouse so that way they would still look like they were there. Like, people are finding really creative ways around this monitoring software. But I think the bigger question is, should it be installed at all?
Wayne: Yeah, I think that's a reasonable question. And while the idea first of all, there are three things in what you said there that you know, make my head want to explode. Number one is "I saw a TikTok."
Marisa: I mean...
Wayne: Which is usually a source, a media source that I wouldn't think of. And I don't in my old head, I do not apply great credibility to. But apparently there's stuff going on that I-
Marisa: Believe it or not there's a lot of stuff to learn on there. And more than people think, it's not just dance videos, but that's a different conversation.
Wayne: And number two, I think, is this notion that you can put in all of the stopgaps, monitoring spyware or whatever that you want, and it's going to encourage people to find workarounds.
Marisa: Mm hmm.
Wayne: Like, if you start with the premise that we must monitor this, people are going to find ways to get around it.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: And what does it say as an employer or a manager, that that's important enough that you feel like you need to do it now. In defense of organizations there are legitimate reasons if you are being paid by the hour, if you are a contractor, a lot of places with collective bargaining agreements, unions, situations where both sides need to trust but verify that people are that people are working, that you are, in fact, taking X number of calls a day if you're in a call center.
And that's the expectation. Unless we're tracking how many calls you make, how do we know how many calls you make? Right.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: So there is some legitimate reason for monitoring activity but I'm always intrigued by how that gets position. I remember I was talking to a pretty well-known organization, pre-COVID, and I was like, Use your webcams, why won't you?
And they were like, no, no, no. They only want us to use webcams to make sure that we're working.
Marisa: I've heard that, too. It blows my mind.
Wayne: If that is your default. Oh, the we don't want to use webcams because it makes work more fun to actually see the people we're talking to. And and it's richer communication, and we know we don't want to use them for that reason. We want to use them to make sure those weasely hourly people are doing what they're supposed to do.
Your organization has way bigger problems.
Marisa: Right? Well, and I'm sure from an employee's perspective, to the trust issue, yeah, you already don't trust me. So what can I do now to fulfill that thought process, I guess.
Wayne: Yeah. And that lack of trust is the default position.
Marisa: Mm hmm.
Wayne: Like, it's not. We want to help you work. We want to have you. We want to make sure you're working the assumption being that you won't if we don't.
Marisa: Right. Which is so silly, because we know I mean, yes, there are exceptions to the rule for sure. There are people that if you don't monitor at all, they are going to be watching Netflix or something and not doing anything at their job. That is true. But I feel like for the majority of people, they know that they have to get their stuff done so that they can get paid.
So they would do it without monitoring software anyway.
Wayne: Yeah, I think a lot of it boils down to how things are positioned.
Marisa: Mm hmm.
Wayne: Right. If you are in a collective bargaining situation, if you are in a place where the job expectation is that you are engaging in this level of activity and let's be fair, there are jobs that do that. If you are an I.T. support person. Right. Right. You need to be there. You need to solve tickets. You need to do what you need to do, because that's literally the job if I'm a coder.
Marisa: Mm hmm.
Wayne: As long as code is getting written and getting to QA in time, whether I do that at 10:00 at night or two in the morning or I do it from Starbucks is kind of irrelevant, right?
Marisa: As long as a job is getting done.
Wayne: As long as the job is getting done. So in one situation, having an activity documenting type of system, we'll call it that rather than monitoring. Okay. Makes logical sense.
Marisa: Mm hmm.
Wayne: But I think the way that it's position when you start from a position of we are going to monitor you.
Marisa: Right. Or even just we're installing this software even if they're not. Because this is this is something that I think about too and I feel like I've heard people say this before. Yes. There's monitoring software on your computer. Well, we're not actively looking at it, but does that really matter? The fact is it's still there. And we're talking like for your basic normal office worker that, you know, some of those metrics that you're talking about, they don't matter as much. They're just monitoring are you on your computer at all?
Wayne: Yeah, and it's the equivalent of you get a good performance review because at 8:59, you're at your desk and you don't leave until 5:01. And therefore, you're a good employee.
Marisa: Which is ridiculous.
Wayne: Which is ridiculous. But if you're always 5 minutes late and you sometimes skip out early to catch the train or pick up your kid from daycare, you're obviously not as good an employee as that person that sits there. And it goes back to something Kevin has been writing about in Remarkable Leadership for a billion and a half years, which is are we measuring activity or are we managing productivity?
Marisa: Yeah, I was just thinking about that. I actually think I have a Post-it on my desk at work that somebody else in the company wrote before I even got there. But it says something along the lines of activity does not determine productivity. You know, I can be super active on something, but my project may not move 1% forward.
Wayne: Yeah. Now, this is a bigger problem when you have hourly employees. This is an absolute fact.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: Where there are unions involved in collective bargaining agreements and things where it the whole mood is about compliance and verification rather than just getting on with the work.
Marisa: Mm hmm.
Wayne: And all of these things boil down to something that you said, which is around trust.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: So you want to you want to kind of go there?
Marisa: Yeah. I mean, we can so I mean, I guess if from my perspective, so I've never been a manager. I mean, I've led projects and stuff, but I've never been a manager. And so to me, the idea of being told, hey, we're going to add we're going to have the software on your computer to be able to monitor you. I mean, like I said earlier, it instantly tells me you don't trust me.
They may not really be saying that they you know, it's something that's being pushed across the board. Everybody's got it. It's not something directly isolating to me or picking me out of a lineup or whatever. But that's that's how I'm going to feel about it. And so how does that now change how productive I am? How does that change my attitude about the work that I'm doing?
Because, again, in my head, I'm always going to be thinking, well, they don't trust me to do this, or am I now going to try to burn myself out on stuff because I want to make sure that they know I'm doing my job. And that's not healthy either.
Wayne: And all those things are true. I think, again, maybe it's the writer in me. I keep coming back to the words that we use.
Marisa: Mm hmm.
Wayne: And I think this really matters keep track of sounds different than monitor in my mind. Right.
And it's the same thing when you become involved in a work situation where it's all about compliance and meeting minimum standards. And that is the definition of success.
Marisa: Mm hmm.
Wayne: What you get is compliance and meeting minimum standards, and you get a lot of grudging compliance. Right. You get a lot of I will do exactly what you have asked me to do and no more.
Marisa: Yeah. There's no rock star teams over here.
Wayne: No, absolutely. And so, you know, when we're setting expectations. Yes. You have to set minimums, right? There's a floor. If you are not achieving this level, you ain't getting the job done.
Marisa: Yeah. Goals are still important.
Wayne: Goals are very important.
And what makes people what drives people to me, goals and this is an entirely different conversation because I know we were getting to trust but this is part of it, right? If I am putting in discretionary effort, do I believe that that will be recognized? Do I believe that I will be rewarded for that work, whether that's financially or just with recognition or opportunities.
Marisa: Yeah, kudos or whatever.
Wayne: Promotion, whatever that is you know, what too often leaders do is when there are those minimum standards in place and there are metrics that absolutely tell you where those are. What very often happens in this happens regardless of where people are working, is managers spend all their time on their problem children getting people to meet that minimum standard.
Marisa: Yes. Yes, I, I actually think I just read you talking about that in a blog post recently. I have to find it and put in the show notes. But yeah, it's just you're focusing so much on your problem children do you even notice you're quote unquote rock stars?
Wayne: And it's funny because for a lot of managers, we think, oh, they're doing a great job. They don't need us in their face. They don't need the attention. Just keep doing you know, you keep doing you, and it's all good. But those people want coaching. They want recognition. They want some of the managers mindshare.
Marisa: Mm hmm.
Wayne: Yeah.
Marisa: Yeah. They want to know what they can do better to increase their productivity, increase whatever.
Wayne: Or just that their work is appreciated and it doesn't go unnoticed.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: And so when you are in a remote situation, you have to be mindful about how much time are you spending with each member of your team because you're not going to have those walking through the cube farm and your star performer is beating their head on their monitor.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: Right. Because if you just look at the they know they're making the right number of calls. They're handling the right number of tickets. They're doing just fine.
Marisa: Mm hmm.
Wayne: But they're not doing just fine.
Marisa: Yeah. You have no idea.
Wayne: If you manage by the- and this is unfortunately where I think we have to wrap up today. If you manage through these metrics and that is your only thing is what the machine tells you is happening you are not picking up on the human things that may be going on. You don't know that Marisa is experiencing problems until her numbers fall.
Marisa: Mm hmm.
Wayne: And then it's too late.
Marisa: Right? Yeah. There was an opportunity to check in way ahead of time, and you missed it.
Wayne: And by the time things get bad enough that they show up in the monitoring software, it may be a reparable.
Marisa: Right? Absolutely. And as we talked about earlier, too, sometimes what that monitoring software is, is tracking what you think you see may not be accurate. People are, you know, having their dog lick their mouse to show that they're active. They're opening up an email and having a book sit on their spacebar. So that way it looks like they're writing an email for 15 minutes.
People are doing this.
Wayne: I am a little concerned that you have a master list of all the things you can do to beat these things, because none of this would have occurred to this old man. But we are not going to go there because our time is up. Perhaps another discussion for another day.
Marisa: Yes, indeed.
Wayne: Marisa, thank you so much. This is a great topic and I'm really glad and thank you for your insight. We will be back in a couple of episodes with more of our Q&A sessions. So please, if you enjoy the podcast, first of all, you can find the show notes at longdistanceworklife.com. Along with that, you will find a place on the home page to submit your questions.
We want your questions. What do you want to know? What do you want to hear us talk about? Of course, this being a podcast and you being experienced podcast listeners, you know that we also would love you to like subscribe. These are early days for the Long-Distance Worklife Podcast. And once again, the whole purpose here is remote work, technology, leadership, and just surviving this world of work.
So, Marisa, thank you so much as always.
Marisa: Thank you so much, Wayne, for answering our questions today.
Hoyin Cheung from Remo joins Wayne Turmel to discuss webmeeting tools and leading remote meetings. Remo is an interactive virtual event platform that humanizes the online event experience, and brings people together worldwide.
Is it the tools we have for webmeetings that make them suck, or the way we lead meetings?
Additional Resources:
Wayne Turmel: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Long-Distance Worklife podcast brought to you by The Kevin Eikenberry Group. My name is Wayne Turmel. I am glad to be with you today. We are going to look at a subject that is the bane of every Long-Distance Leader's life meetings and events, and how do we do those when we are all in the same place?
We are going to have a really interesting conversation with a young man named Hoyin Cheung, who runs a web platform called Remo. It's an interesting platform check it out. But also we talk about what's wrong with the way we meet online and how we can use it to build culture and create stronger team. So I hope you enjoy.
I am very happy to reconnect with Hoyin Cheung. He is the founder and kind of guiding light behind Remo, which is an online web meeting web event portal. He'll tell us all about that in a second. But really, we're here to talk about meetings and building culture and how do you do that in a remote and a hybrid way?
So again, how are you, man?
Hoyin Cheung: I'm doing awesome, Wayne. And we haven't talked we haven't spoken for a while. So I was super excited that you messaged me and thank you for inviting me on the podcast.
Wayne: We're delighted to have you. And you need to lower the bar on what excites you. But that's okay. I'm glad that you're here. And when I first saw Remo, I thought, "Wow, this is really cool." And it is. I mean, there's some very cool things, but nobody goes into software just to do cool things, right? There's a problem you're trying to solve for.
So, you know, in a world of WebEx and Teams and Zoom everything else. What were you trying to solve? Or what was the problem with humans getting together that you were trying to fix when you created Remo?
Hoyin: Yeah, so when I originally created like I crafted this mission, which is like, how do we create authentic conversations that drive meaningful relationships? And one of the problems that we saw was that you've got great tools like WebEx and all that kind of stuff, but they are mostly designed more for like kind of like like a click, like a call conference, like a phone conference, and so a video conference to emerge from a normal conference call. And so that dynamic is more focused more on meetings.
But when you think about how humans interact, like at a happy hour or at a workshop or whatever, it's not just one person speaking at one time. Like there's multiple conversations happening at the same time. And that kind of human behavior dynamic is actually what we as humans are more used to. And there was no real easy way to create that type of dynamic with the current tools that you mentioned.
And so that's why when we created, we know we really laser focused on making it super easy to have conversations, have intimate conversations, and make have this sort of serendipity and feeling that you can meet people just like you could in real life.
Wayne: Yeah. And so what do you think? Before we began, we were talking about the difference between meetings and events. And maybe you could give me like a short description of how they're different and what when you're trying to build a culture, how do meetings not necessarily fit everything they need to do?
Hoyin: Yeah, that's a great question. So how to find like a meeting is something where like people are having in meetings for productivity reasons, like you're trying to productively discuss or make decisions about something. Right. It's typically a group of anywhere between two and maybe eight or ten people, and it's one person speaking out at a time. There's a very clear objective for that meeting and an agenda you're trying to get to some decisions or, you know, brains or whatever.
But when it comes to an event, event is more casual, more fluid. Like there's many small conversations happening and an event. It also serves like a different purpose, whereas like a larger group and it's not necessarily like productivity like maybe it's training, maybe it's a workshop, maybe it's a job fair, like the the event objective is a little bit I want I don't want to say it's less corporate, but not as productivity focused.
Wayne: And so that's an important visual because one of the things that we're running up against, especially as we begin to go back to work in kind of a hybrid environment where you've got people in the office and people not, it's all about creating the culture itself, of creating the corporate culture. And I know, yeah, I like the way one of the ways that your clients are using this and I found this fascinating was onboarding because I know that onboarding new people on a hybrid or remote team is a real challenge. Can you share what some of your clients are doing around that?
Hoyin: Yeah, sure. So we have we have a client and what they do is they create. So our platform is a map. Just imagine that it's like Google map. You're looking at Google Maps and you're represented by the circle and then imagine you zooming in to the Google map so far that you can see the outline of the building and the individual chairs and tables on there and your circle sits on one chair in one little chair.
And when you double click on a different table, your blue circle then moves that table, except that blue circle has your face in it. So it's like a like an avatar. And so what what what enterprises do is that they create custom a custom floor plan. They can change the background to match their branding so that there's like different table sections.
And each section has a person from a different department or different a different a different sort of station where each person will then go to that station, do the things they need to do in that station and then go to the next table and do this. So it becomes this kind of like little assembly line of people or they go through and try to get go through the onboarding process with them.
There's also what people do is they do like a workshop where they will sit at each person's table and walk through the whole process with them one at a time or or go through that or to even invite other people to come in from the rest of the company. And those people will have conversations with them to kind of get them started to get to know that kind of stuff. So it's it's a very, like, natural and organic way of giving new employee ease a more human experience.
Wayne: I'm curious, as you were laying this out and kind of working with this I'm a crusty old cis hat white guy, basically. Yeah, I am. I know what I am. And whenever I look at new technology, even when it's really cool, I always go, yeah, here's something else. You know, here's something else we got to learn. What have you experienced in trying to introduce this to organizations and to our listeners who are trying to introduce new tech or new tools into the organization.
What advice can you give people when they go, you know, can't we just Zoom this or, you know, can't we just do this on Microsoft Teams? How do you encourage them to adopt a new technology?
Hoyin: Yeah, so what we focus on is creating a human experience, and we create these amazing custom pull plans. Most of the time when people see the custom floor plan or these floor plans, they're like, Wow, what is that? It piques interest. It's visual. So there's no one. You have the peak interest, something that looks different. The second is, is that when creating these events, like we we teach like our our customers when they create the events, is that you're creating an interactive experience.
A lot of people, when they think, I'm just creating an event or I'm creating a meeting, it's just like kind of the physical world. What we do and how we differentiate ourselves is that we can teach you how to facilitate and make the event truly interactive that makes people jump off or simply like, "Oh, wow, this is not something I've attended before."
This is different. And all of the feedback in terms of how Remo has been successful to date is that people have a great experience inside Remo. They tell their friends and they come back to us and say, "I had a great experience that I can actually have a proper conversation with someone," and that's when that just starts to spread.
People just say, "Well, I heard about this and I want to join."
Wayne: That's one of the things that fascinates me because what we're discovering, as you know, people try to figure out what this is going to look like in a post-COVID world is a lot of what we call hybrid is just recreating the existing physical offices as best we can. Right, right? The meeting that we've always had, but with webcams and what you're talking about is thinking differently about what these events need to look like.
Right. It's not a glorified conference call, and it's not being in-person. It's this new thing. How is that received? Because you work all over the world. I mean, you're sitting in Hong Kong today and I'm in Las Vegas.
How does that get received across different cultures?
Hoyin: Well, what's interesting is that a lot of our customers are in the United States, but we also have Europe across Japan. What's interesting is, like, each what's funny about all the different cultures is that human interaction is actually really universal. I mean, if you think about it makes sense. Are we all one interaction to some degree, but how they interact and the agenda and that's different.
But the interaction system and also the floor plans are very different, like Japanese, like more cartoony type for plants and they love it. Western audiences like this 3D kind of asymmetric 3D floor plan and they love that. And so the differences isn't so much on like how the core function remote, but it's more of like how they dress it up.
You know what I mean? And those are kind of like where the key to is, is it really highlights the fact that we're not really that different from a cultural standpoint, like they, they do. There are some differences like the we how like the event is run, for example, but they are aiming for the same thing. Like if you're in Japan, you still want engagement from your employees and you're having breakouts and many employees kind of talk to each other, have these one on one networking speed, networking style.
That's something that works for them. And then they they love that. And so I think it's just it's just some slight differences how they know how to run the event.
Wayne: You know, it does get to an interesting question in this I think we had this conversation when you first introduced me to this a couple of years ago, which is it's easy to think about the technology, but there is a part of me that goes you can use, you know, to smoke sticks and smoke signals and communicate or you can have the greatest technology in the world and not communicate it.
All right. So what do you find? Is it really that we need new tools or do we need to be more intentional about how we communicate?
Hoyin: Yeah. So so the way I see it is, is like you can be intentional, but you will also you can be intentional. And also achieve your goal. You could have a tool, but if you're not intentional enough, the tool may not be can only help you so much. But if you were intentional and you had the tool, one plus one is not too one.
Plus one is like three or four like that. The benefits you get stack on actively, way worse things.
Wayne: I completely agree with you. What do you think? This is a chance to plug Remo now? What do you think is? If I'm intentional about events and you said this is not, you know, for one on one meetings, this is team meetings town halls, you can use it for culture building events like onboarding and others. What do you think is the intentionality piece that would really help somebody use this tool effect?
Hoyin: Intentionality is like really being focused on what? How do you encourage each like the right types of interactions. I'll give you a good example. So in Rio, we have this map view, which I kind of explain. We also have this webinar mode is called presentation but it looks like every other webinar mode out there and that was unique about remote is that you can bounce back and forth between this map and this presentation.
When you enter the presentation. This is an example of really great intentionality.
Like, we have this rule which is like the 10/20/10 rule, which is like you spend the first 10 minutes allowing people to network, and then you spend only 20 minutes talking about a topic which is short and sweet. And at the end of the 20 minutes, you then say, "Hey, everyone, I just spoke about this topic. I'm going to give each other you guys 5 minutes to talk about what challenges have you guys had."
And I want you to share that challenge with each person on the table. And then after that will come back up after 5 minutes and each person kind of shares that. Now, this is a very heavy facilitator, you know, style of of running a meeting. Like typically people don't really, really do that. But I see the next level of hybrid work is being able to have the more people learn how to learn and use these facilitation techniques.
So that they can structure and guide and intentionally guide the conversation and then bring that up forward so that it can become a lot more fruitful. And people can have can have that because it's hard to make these real connections virtually. And it's hard to know what to do sometimes. So you have to provide a little bit more guidance.
Wayne: Yeah. That Venn diagram of, you know, intentionality, human need and technology that enables that is really the sweet spot. Hoyin Cheung, thank you so much for being with us. We will make sure that there is a link to a chance for people to check out Remo. We'll put that in the show notes so that folks can do that.
Thank you so much. For helping us rethink about what we're doing with the technology. And it's just good to see you again.
Hoyin: Thank you so much. I really I'm so happy to be on. Thank you for inviting me.
Wayne: So some interesting stuff there, particularly the 10/20/10 formula that he mentioned. We will have links to that in the show notes which are at longdistanceworklife.com. Hope you enjoyed it if you did, please like and subscribe vibe. I know that's weasely podcast language, but it's important for us to help find an audience and we hope that you will join us again next time.
Until then, I'm Wayne Turmel. You can find us at kevineikenberry.com or at remoteleadershipinstitute.com. Have a great, great day. Don't let the weasels get you down. We'll see you next week.
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