Scott Lyons, with Greenlink Payroll, joins Wayne to discuss how technology is improving Human Capital Management to create a culture of learning and aligned values within an 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!
Wayne is joined by Dr. Mary O'Connor of Vori Health to talk about what remote teams can learn from telemedicine. Vori Health is an remote business and Dr. O'Connor discusses how it's possible to practice medicine (traditionally something very hands-on) remotely as well as how telemedicine rose even before the pandemic.
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!
00:00:08:02 - 00:00:33:03
Wayne Turmel
Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Long-Distance Worklife podcast where we try to make sense of remote work, hybrid work, work from home, all of that foolishness to keep the weasels at bay. Thank you for joining us, as always. This is a Marisa-less episode because I actually have a guest today and I'm going to introduce her now.
00:00:33:04 - 00:01:02:23
Wayne Turmel
This is Dr. Mary O'Connor. She is the brains behind Vori Health. And what I thought we would do today is talk less traditional remote work and more how other fields are dealing with what all of us are dealing. And nowhere are we seeing more of this radical change than in the area of telemedicine. So Mary, if you would, just introduce yourself real quick.
00:01:02:23 - 00:01:06:18
Wayne Turmel
What does very help do and then will get into the discussion?
00:01:07:13 - 00:01:36:09
Mary O'Connor
Great. Wayne, I'm just delighted to be with you and your listeners and viewers today. So my name is Mary O'Connor. I'm an orthopedic surgeon. By background, I am the chief medical officer and co-founder of Vori Health, and we are a virtual musculoskeletal medical practice, meaning we take care of people with spine and joint and muscle problems, which, as you know, are extremely common, especially as we get older.
00:01:37:01 - 00:02:06:23
Wayne Turmel
As I sit waiting for my knee replacement, I can completely understand. Here's the thing that fascinated me and why we wanted to have the conversation. There are two things. One is that you are a completely virtual business, and that is fascinating. The other thing is when we think about knees and backs and that kind of thing, we always think of this as very hands on like you need to be there right up.
00:02:07:16 - 00:02:15:05
Wayne Turmel
How do you do orthopedic work and not be in the room with the joint that you're talking about?
00:02:15:14 - 00:02:46:00
Mary O'Connor
So I know that's a great question and one I get frequently, and the answer's pretty straightforward. There's a tremendous amount that you can do through virtual only interactions with patients. Number one, the first thing that a lot of patients and people don't know or recall is that the majority of the decision making process by their doctor in terms of what their doctor thinks is going on, is based on the patient's history.
00:02:46:17 - 00:03:14:16
Mary O'Connor
So the history is really important. How long was your back hurting? Did you injure it? What makes it worse? What makes it better? Those kinds of things. The physical exam is still important, but there's a huge amount of it that you can do actually. You know, virtually. So there's there's very little limitations. And most of the decision making process is going to be based on the information that you can obtain virtually.
00:03:15:01 - 00:03:40:18
Mary O'Connor
And when my orthopedic surgeon colleagues challenged me on this point, I will give them a perfect example of it. Someone who injured their knee. Okay. And the question is, did they tear their anterior cruciate ligament? That decision on whether to get an MRI scan of their knee to prove if they had a tear is going to be based 95% on the history of the injury.
00:03:40:23 - 00:04:09:16
Mary O'Connor
And looking at the knee, you don't have to put your hands on to do some ligament testing to drive the decision making about the MRI. So we're the first to say not all care can be delivered virtually, but a surprising amount can. And where that becomes so important is particularly for your audience, because working people just don't have time like it is.
00:04:09:21 - 00:04:30:00
Mary O'Connor
It is a huge amount of time to actually go in to see your doctor or your physical therapist out of your workday. And so offering these virtual services is extremely convenient and time efficient for patients. And they they really appreciate that.
00:04:30:00 - 00:05:12:11
Wayne Turmel
There is and I was thinking about this interview, there is a real corollary between a lot of the remote work that we had to do suddenly when COVID hit and the move to telemedicine, one of those things is there's a lot of skepticism about can it be done right then in you've already addressed some of that. Tell me what happened kind of in the xigaze is the wrong word, but it sounds impressive and it's the only one I can think of what shifted people's thinking when COVID hit, because that really pushed telemedicine over the Rubicon like it did so much remote work.
00:05:13:11 - 00:05:46:15
Mary O'Connor
Well, obviously what happened is people were afraid to go in for in-person services and clinics shut down. You know, I was at work where I was working at Yale at the time. And, you know, we literally just shut everything down except for true emergency services. And that was really challenging because patients still needed care. And so it was a phone call or we started doing Zoom calls, right.
00:05:46:22 - 00:06:21:03
Mary O'Connor
Because because the the technology and the functionality of telemedicine existed long before we got into the COVID pandemic. But it was never embraced by the medical profession for a couple of reasons. One, change is hard. Why change if what I'm doing, you know, I just want keep doing what I'm doing. And secondly, and what was very important is that the federal government, Medicare and commercial insurers were not paying clinicians for telemedicine services.
00:06:21:12 - 00:06:38:06
Mary O'Connor
So when the pandemic came, the legislation was introduced that basically said, okay, everybody is going to now pay for telemedicine services. And that was obviously critically important.
00:06:38:06 - 00:07:03:01
Wayne Turmel
One of the things that I find really interesting about this is there was this when telemedicine started, part of the resistance was, well, it's making the best of a bad situation, right? I can't go into the doctor, so I guess I'll get to see the doctor. And there's this mindset that just there's a lot of remote work was, well, we can still get our work done, but it's not as good as being in the office.
00:07:04:02 - 00:07:26:20
Wayne Turmel
You actually have identified some real advantages. I mean, one of them is the convenience to the patient. But in terms of the way that your team works together, there's been some real advantages to telemedicine, which makes this not just, you know, making the best of something, but actually making it better when.
00:07:26:20 - 00:08:01:20
Mary O'Connor
Absolutely. So, you know, what we can do with a virtual platform is something that actually cannot realistically happen in the in-person settings. So when patients come to us and we're very I'll digress for a moment, we're very focused on what we call the bio psychosocial model, because we we understand that the patients are like whole beings, right? And their health is influenced not just by their injury or their back pain, but by their sleep and their nutrition and their mindset.
00:08:02:05 - 00:08:37:11
Mary O'Connor
And so we know that we have a much better chance of getting that patient better in our model if we are focused on many things that influence that patient's health. So I'll just do back pain as an example. We know that upwards in some studies, 50% of low back surgeries are inappropriate. That is a shocking number. Now, I am not saying that my spine surgeon colleagues are evil or bad people, but I'm a surgeon.
00:08:37:20 - 00:09:07:00
Mary O'Connor
And when patients would come to see me, it's really kind of a binary decision. Do you need surgery? Can I do surgery to help you or not? And surgeons see patients through the lens of that viewpoint. Surgeons are not typically well trained on non operative care these days, so there is a bias towards patients getting surgery that could be avoided and that's what the research shows.
00:09:07:08 - 00:09:32:00
Mary O'Connor
Right. So we said, well, we should do something about this one. It's really bad for patients. It harms patients. 7.6% of those patients that have low back surgery are back in the O.R. for a second operation within the first year. That's just like astonishing in this tragic way to me. So we bring patients in and we give them a care team.
00:09:32:06 - 00:09:56:15
Mary O'Connor
Again, you can do this in the virtual environment. You cannot do it practically in an in-person setting. So they have a health coach in the first 60 minute visit. You're going to see your health coach, you're going to see your doctor, you're going to see your physical therapist. And we're going to get you started on a care plan that focuses on what matters to you, not just what is the matter with you.
00:09:57:01 - 00:10:19:17
Mary O'Connor
So we maybe what the what is the matter with you as you have back pain, but why does that matter to you? It matters to you because you want to play with the grandchildren or you want to get out there and walk after dinner, right, with your wife or something. And so we focus on getting you to do those activities that bring you joy and add value to your life.
00:10:20:04 - 00:10:49:07
Mary O'Connor
And that allows us to actually incorporate your preferences, the patient's preferences and the patient's values into this whole process. You can't and then and then we deliver it all through your app or on the web, however you want to access our virtual services. So it allows a virtual platform, allows us to innovate in the delivery of care in ways that you simply couldn't in an in-person setting.
00:10:49:22 - 00:11:15:20
Wayne Turmel
In a really minor example. So maybe it's not so minor. One of the things that a client told me is it's easier for them to coach people because you see them in their natural habitat, right? You can see what their homes look like. And are they working at a decent workspace or are they at the North End of the dining room table on a folding chair?
00:11:16:01 - 00:11:23:01
Wayne Turmel
You know, you can you can see what their environment looks like. And that's got to be an advantage in medicine as well.
00:11:23:04 - 00:11:40:05
Mary O'Connor
I mean, it absolutely is. For example, we have I'll just use an example, we have a fall reduction program because falls in the elderly. I know I don't like to use I should I rephrase that in the older population are home.
00:11:40:08 - 00:11:44:11
Wayne Turmel
What you want are elder and you know for the population.
00:11:44:12 - 00:11:49:14
Mary O'Connor
As I get closer and closer to that category, I become more sensitive to the label.
00:11:50:02 - 00:11:53:07
Wayne Turmel
Your definition of what is older certainly takes a beating.
00:11:53:16 - 00:12:18:18
Mary O'Connor
But having personally operated on, I don't know, a couple thousand people with hip fractures. Right. And how devastating that is to the patient and their family to fall. Prevention is huge. And so when we can see patients in their home, it is so much easier to help them to help them craft an effective fall reduction program. That's just one example.
00:12:19:05 - 00:12:21:01
Mary O'Connor
The other point that only and.
00:12:21:01 - 00:12:25:06
Wayne Turmel
Just to be clear, you're talking about things like take your phone and show me what your tab looks like.
00:12:25:06 - 00:12:54:00
Mary O'Connor
Well, take your particular laptop. Show me show me what your living, living room looks like. Right? Show me, show me where you walk in your house. Right. Let's look at those rugs. Are they trip hazards? Let's look at your bathroom. Do you have, you know, is it safe? What's your risk of falling there? But the other thing that I'll mention is that I think that we innately feel more comfortable in our homes, in our own environment.
00:12:54:12 - 00:13:24:20
Mary O'Connor
And I think the more comfortable the patient is, the more forthcoming they are with their their really trusted personal information. Because, you know, health care is a very personal interaction. You know, you share things with your doctor that you don't share with anybody else. And the more comfortable the patient is, the more likely they are to share important information.
00:13:25:11 - 00:14:00:23
Wayne Turmel
Well, this is really critical and maybe the last really deep dove part of this conversation is the level of trust required to make this work. And it's interesting because your population is more demographically advanced since we're playing Euphemism Theater. Right? But they're generally older people who are less comfortable with technology generally and certainly have lived 50, 60, 70, however many years under the traditional medical system.
00:14:01:06 - 00:14:19:05
Wayne Turmel
So this is a pretty radical change. How do you, as clinicians, prepare to help build trust? I mean, other than the fact that they're in their own environment, which helps. But how do you actively build trust with clients to help overcome that resistance?
00:14:19:11 - 00:14:46:10
Mary O'Connor
So just a couple points. We take care of a lot of young people to I mean, we see patients 18 years of age and older and then next year we'll move into pediatrics. Okay. So we take care of plenty of people and and, you know, of course, as a general statement, I know I'm biased, being biased here. But in general, younger individuals are far more comfortable with technology and a lot of virtual interactions.
00:14:46:10 - 00:15:19:05
Mary O'Connor
Right. But listen, there's plenty of 20 and 30 year olds that hurt your back or have knee pain or shoulder pain that love what we do. The key to trust in my in what we do and in my experience is being a doctor and surgeon for many, many years is first the patient has to know that we're really supporting them and that work, that we are committed to doing the best that we can for them.
00:15:19:20 - 00:15:42:22
Mary O'Connor
So that is the essence of trust between the patient and the doctor. Right. I am there and you I am advocating for you. I am not focused on doing something the insurance company wants me to do. I'm there to give you the best care that I possibly can. You can establish that through a virtual connection, just like you can't in person.
00:15:44:00 - 00:16:16:19
Mary O'Connor
Secondly, I really do believe that our model, where we're focused on and that biopsychosocial approach and looking at that the individual more holistically helps, helps reinforce that trust. Because for example, when in the lower back pain example, right, if you know, if I was the queen of the universe and I could take everybody with low back pain and simply improve their sleep right now, no meds, no nothing else but improve their sleep.
00:16:16:20 - 00:16:48:18
Mary O'Connor
I would lower their back pain. So our health coaches will help patients focus on that. But in the real world, setting doctors, spine doctors and surgeons and physical therapists, they don't talk about that. They don't use that lever to help drive improvement. Why? Because we don't have the infrastructure to do it right. They don't have a health coach to say, okay, Mary, let's let's talk about your sleep.
00:16:48:18 - 00:17:18:08
Mary O'Connor
Let's talk about little small changes that you can make that are going to add up over time. Right. Because we use a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy models with our health coaches interacting with patients because you have to make the change doable for people and then and then they can do it. And then when they see success, it's easier to get to the next level.
00:17:18:08 - 00:17:45:13
Wayne Turmel
Thank you so much, Doctor. I'm hoping that our listeners have been able to kind of connect the dots because they sound like, you know, I'm a project manager, I'm a coder, I'm whatever I'm doing that's different than medicine. But if we look at how do we collaborate, how do we build trust, the advantages of meeting customers where they are, I think there is a lot to be learned.
00:17:45:13 - 00:18:10:00
Wayne Turmel
And I, I know I did. And I hope that our, our listeners got a lot out of that. For those of you who were interested, maybe, you know, you thought is that bio psychological? What we're going to have notes. We are going to have a transcript available on our website. Long distance work like dot com as we do with all of our shows.
00:18:10:14 - 00:18:32:14
Wayne Turmel
If you are interested in learning more about remote work, if you visit like this longdistanceworklife.com. We have a four part video series on demystifying remote work that we would love you to take advantage of. And if you have questions that you would like to have answered on the show or ideas for subjects or people, but you'd love us to talk to you.
00:18:32:18 - 00:18:53:01
Wayne Turmel
Drop us a line. You can reach me. Wayne at Kevin Eikenberry dot com or Marisa at Kevin Eikenberry dot com. And you all listen to podcasts you know the drill like and subscribe so other people can find us. Doctor Mary O'Connor, very health. Thank you so, so much for being with us today. I really appreciate your time.
00:18:53:20 - 00:19:12:11
Mary O'Connor
My pleasure. Wayne. And wishing you and all your listeners and viewers great health.
Wayne and Marisa discuss how to make small talk on a remote team less awkward and what role GIFs play in remote communication.
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!
Lance Cummins from Anyvoo joins Wayne Turmel to discuss why you should be mindful of your background on video calls.
Anyvoo provides instruction, coaching, and products that transform how remote workers interact in professional settings on video calls.
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!
Rajiv Ayyangar, CEO and Founder of Tandem, joins Wayne to discuss hybrid work and the tools we need to make it happen.
Tandem is a virtual office for remote and hybrid teams.
Join us for a powerful, 4-part video series titled, Demystifying Remote Leadership. You will learn how to create solid working relationships in a virtual team with more confidence and less stress!
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.
Wayne Turmel talks with Ian Parkes from Stockpress.co about document management, workflow control, and generally collaborating over distance. Stockpress is a file management platform for teams who want to spend less time looking for their files and more time using them. Stockpress allows teams to organize, manage, collaborate and share - any file type, from anywhere in the world.
What is the problem with the way people share information on remote and hybrid teams?
Additional Resources:
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!
Transcript
Wayne Turmel: Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Long-Distance Worklife Podcast. My name is Wayne Turmel. I'm your humble host today. We are Marisa-Free because we are going to talk to Ian Parkes, who is one of the muck-a-mucks at a company called Stockpress. Here on the podcast, we talk about remote work, technology, leadership, and generally just surviving this remote work thing.
And I had a really interesting conversation with Ian about document management and workflow control and generally collaborating over distance. I think you're really going to enjoy it. So have a listen. Hey, everybody. This week on the Long-Distance Worklife Podcast, we are talking to Ian Parkes from Stockpress.co and our topic today is workflow and collaboration getting stuff done.
Ian happens to head up a software company that tackles that problem. Why don't you tell me a little bit about you and Stockpress and then we'll get to the guts of this conversation.
Ian Parkes: Sure sounds good, Wayne. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, we run a company called Stockpress. We're a cloud file sharing and management platform for teams. We created the platform off the back of a need that we had ourselves, and I think probably to explain the story of stock press in the best possible way. It requires to go back a couple of steps, and I will try and give you the Reader's Digest version of this, as opposed to the lengthy one.
Ian: But for a long time now, I've been running an agency with my colleague, Jess. Jessica story. We've also got a couple of co-founders who we've run that business with as well, Bart and Camilla. We have worked together probably collectively for about 12 years. In that period of time, Jessica has met Bart and Camilla twice. They live and work in Poland.
Jessica grew up in New York. And moved to Florida a couple of years ago. And myself, I grew up in the UK, lived in the U.K., and kind of got to know Jess through an old friend of mine. So we all came from very different backgrounds. We all do very different things. We like to say collectively that between us, we kind of make one good person and one kind of make a person, as it were, and kind of bring different skills to the table with the agency we do in a lot of digital development for people, lot designed for people, but it was always remote.
And I think the biggest thing for us was that it wasn't just our team that was remote, it was our clients that were remote and very much scattered around the world. So I think what we found is an agency was that the biggest challenge we had was that we were in the delivery business, and as an agency we were very focused on delivering to the brief of the client and actually giving them the things that they needed.
So the client relationships very interesting when you're in an agency because you do the dance to try and win the business of the client. Then when you get the client on board, really all they want to know is where are the things that we've requested? Where are the things that we've asked for? And we got involved in this kind of consistent battle between 1,000,001 platforms to be able to share the deliverables with the clients or for the clients to be able to share the deliverables with us and to deliver.
Wayne: So I will stop you there because there's a couple of things that I want to show in that, right? One is that you are living proof, as are we. Kevin Eikenberry Group, Remote Leadership Institute, that it is possible to build really solid working relationships when you are not kind of in the same place at the same time. Is there a long period of time?
It's entirely possible. The second thing that I'm hearing is it's this idea of and I'm going through this with several clients at the moment where we use this platform, we use this platform, we're using this over here and there isn't one ring to rule them all. And so, I mean, you have to solve the problem yourself. And that's where this software came from.
Can you, you know, very briefly tell us what exactly the problem was you were solving for and what was the solution.
Ian: Certainly.
So the problem that we had was that because clients because clients were using different platforms to share things with us and were running different platforms themselves, we kept getting road blocked by things like file size limits, being able to transfer site files of particularly large sizes through the platforms that they were using. A lot of the platforms that the clients had were kind of like per user license based, which presents a problem in the first place because you have to then decide who you're going to add into your platform.
And do you want to do that because there's extra cost involved? And I think the single biggest problem above and beyond all of that was the duplication of files, unnecessary duplication of files, which effectively means that in any platform the storage increases and actually the cost increases So we have those three kind of central things that we wanted to look at to make it easier to bring people together.
So actually, rather than send the files out to the people, a key tenant of what we thought is actually let's bring the people to the files, a much better way of doing it, a more centralized approach. And I think the third thing was taking from some of the industry players that we look at and we've got this term respect our elders look up to and our this just happened to be Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive from the kind of file management end of the market.
And then when it goes to the kind of enterprise level you're looking at kind of a brownfield. But now those guys do something very clever, which is you have one file that can live in multiple locations without ever being duplicated. On the file management side of things. Dropbox Box, Google Drive, that doesn't tend to be the case. If you want to share things with people, you have to duplicate the file, put it in a new folder that means there are then two versions or more versions of the same file.
So they with the kind of the big things that we want it to to solve.
Wayne: Okay. So let's. That sounds fascinating. Of course, we urge folks to go to stockpress.co if they are in fact, you know, interested in that. But let's talk about the nuts and bolts. You work with organizations all the time. What are the biggest challenges in collaboration and information sharing that you see on remote and hybrid teams?
Ian: Yeah, absolutely. I think there are some really interesting trends that we're seeing at the moment. I think one of the key trends is around people's routine. I think what we've seen with people going more remote, more hybrid, is that their daily routine and the times at which they like to be able to work are actually becoming more and more important now than ever before.
So if you were going into an office, you were there in 95. Everyone was kind of on the same page to begin with. But I think what actually has happened is the kind of boundaries have been blurred between working from home, working kind of anywhere and not going into an office is that people are trying to work better around their own schedule.
For instance, I know that I work much better in the morning than I do in the afternoon. So I try and get certain tasks done in the AM rather than the PM. And I think why that's important is that it's about making information available to everyone on their schedule, and that means making it centralized. It means basically being able to get everyone in and around that information and being able to work on with within on that information in their own time, but in a way that everyone can kind of touch it, see what's happening.
And I don't all get on the same page. And I think fundamentally what we're doing with remote work and we are a part of the tech stack, this is the way that we view ourselves is that we're trying to recreate an office, albeit we're doing it remotely from everywhere in the world and give people all of that technology that allows them to feel like they're experiencing the office environment, being very close to people, but to achieve it in a more efficient way, that suits these new routines that they're trying to create and live by.
Wayne: Well, let's use your example. I mean, you've got people in Europe, you've got people in the U.K., you've got people on the East Coast of the U.S.. Yeah, those of us who live on the West Coast. No, the business day was not designed for the likes of us.
Ian: Absolutely.
Wayne: It's Europe in the East Coast can co-exist. It gets really ugly when you dial us all in. If that's to that point of flexible work, how do you as a company decide here is information that we need to share and work on asynchronously. Here is when we need to get together. How do you guys make that that call?
Ian: It's a very interesting question. And actually, I think it comes back to something that you said early on about the fact that we've worked in a remote organization now for the best part of ten years. Obviously, COVID very much changed that situation. I think, you know, in business, you have to have that moment where you get lucky and I put massive inverted commas around getting lucky.
I would 100% wish the pandemic hadn't happened. It just so happened that we were in a really interesting spot for our software to become more kind of important at the time.
Wayne: But we're in the same boat at Remote Leadership Institute. People go, Oh boy, you guys are really lucky you were in the right place at the right time. Yeah. I go, Yeah, okay.
Ian: And and here's, here's a very human example of that. I haven't seen my parents for three years because of the situation, because of that that kind of, you know, with everything that's going on with a trade that in to be able to go and see them versus the luck that we had at this moment in time. 100%. But you know, we'll roll with it and and actually, you know, I think we we look at our business in a very different way now.
But to come back to the question, I think it's about creating trust and the one thing that working remotely has done is it's brought each everyone into each other's homes in a very strange way that accelerates. Well, certainly what we found is that accelerates two things, accelerates trust between people because I think actually you feel like you get to know someone a little bit more because you can see a background, you can kind of get a sense of life going on around people.
I think the other thing is it does is it accelerates relationships because actually when you're speaking one to one in a video call, there isn't that kind of distraction around you. You know, you tend to get to the heart of the matter much more quickly because, you know, you've got no one around you that's chipping in to a conversation or you know, you tend to talk one on one and be very honest about each other.
So I think what we take from that into our working practices that streamline nature of it and and actually we try and reduce the amount of meetings that we do. And I think this is a key trend that we're going to see going forward since fewer meetings more action based kind of collaboration. So like not talking about the task, working on the task together.
And I think that's really where we're trying to fit into this landscape is to be a tool that allows people to have everything they need to be able to use to work on a task together much more efficiently. So fewer meetings, everyone being able to access the information according to the role that they play within the organization. But just making it very easy to have arbiters of the information that can allow people in.
So that's the central tenet of it, is how can we support actionable collaboration as opposed to having meeting go away, do something, then come back to another meeting and hope that it's right.
Wayne: You just said something that is super critical and sent a shiver up my spine and that is this idea that somebody needs to be the arbiter of who has access, where it is stuff set, that kind of thing. And I know that one of the hardest things on team collaboration is where is this, who's in charge, who has access, who doesn't Can you give us a very short kind of description of how do you decide who that arbiter is and what are the guidelines that they have to put in place?
Ian: So we have a saying Stockpress, which is configuration, not customization. And I think this is a big thing that hopefully answers that question is that within an organization there is always going to be someone that plays the role of traffic cop, the person that's moving things around and facilitating the way that people work. So we understand that within an organization so certainly the way that we did that would stop presses is we try to make as much of the kind of toolkit for managing and sharing those files as flexible as possible.
So we have unlimited users in all of our packages, which means that you can get everyone into a platform to begin with when those people come into the platform, they can be assigned a certain role and the administrator of the platform can choose what that role looks like. They can make it as flexible as they want and according to the access that people needs and the capabilities that people need, they can also be assigned to a team.
So what we're trying to do with that with file management is bring in some of these kind of themes from kind of Slack, where you can be in a wider channel with people. You can do one too many communication of something. Not a lot of our management platforms have that, if any. So again, I think that's how you organize the people in the first place.
Then it's about being able to be flexible around what they can see in the first place. And then the third part of that element is what can they do with those files? Because for us and this is a live example, bearing in mind we kind of run our agency for three years while we're building and then using stock press to make sure that it did exactly what we hoped it would do is to actually, you know, those roles kind of play out.
They do change that very fluid and the ability to be able to change them kind of on the move because actually someone needs to be able to have additional responsibility or, you know, additional kind of role to play within a task or a project. You want to be able to change that yourself and on the go rather than be limited by either limited roles in the first place or having to reach out to the software platform and say, hey, could you customize this for us?
Because actually it doesn't quite fit our needs. So the only reason that we could build the platform in this way and look at configuration in the first place was that we knew what it was like to work in this kind of agile way. And actually we didn't really realize it at the time when we're building it. But the agile nature of our business, I think, is something that a lot of people are kind of coached around it's just the default was to be job as opposed to, you know, have these kind of stringent kind of parameters set around us.
Wayne: So we are at the end of our time. But there's one thing you and I in our pre recorded conversation talked about something real quick naming conventions.
What is the biggest mistake people make with naming conventions? And what's one thing that we'll hear is the problem right now?
Ian: Such a pertinent question? So we've just written an article about this, actually. So number one thing is, is actually having the capability to be able to apply naming conventions to the files in the first place. And this is where we hope to straddle and we think we do this this kind of line between traditional file management platforms and digital asset management platforms at the enterprise level, it's the ability for people to apply you data to those assets.
Whether it's through manual tagging or whether it's through AI, we have so many tools in the platform to be able to do that. But the main thing that we see is that people get very excited about the ability to apply extra data to things to make them searchable. The tendency is that they go too far so they're going to tag everything.
They're going to have a million custom categories. And actually what we find is that keep it simple, work out who the people are that are going to be searching for it, and think about the kind of behaviors within the company and the kind of language of the people that are using the technology, because then you can really help refine that search as you go along.
And I think the key with it as well is it's a living and breathing thing. Return to it, see what people are searching for see what people are finding and refine the language and the naming conventions that are around files to make it more refined as you go along.
Wayne: Thank you so much. That's so important. I'm afraid we're at the end of our time. All right. Thank you so much. Ian Parkes from Stock Press. I really appreciate that. For those of you listening, I hope you heard what he said, which is you don't just set up a naming convention and thus is it. So for the rest of time, you have to keep going back and asking, does this work and what could work better?
And all all of that good stuff. Ian, thank you so much. We will have links to your bio and Stockpress and all of that good stuff in the show notes. For those of you looking for a solution like this, come visit us at longdistanceworklife.com. The show notes will have links to all those things Ian thanks for being with me now that.
Ian: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Wayne: That's it. Thank you to Ian Parkes from Stockpress.co. Thank you for listening. If you would like to find links to stock press or anything that we've talked about along with transcription and show notes, join us at longdistanceworklife.com. Of course, if you want help keeping the weasels at bay, we urge you to subscribe.
And like you guys, listen to podcasts you know how this works as well as tell your friends. Word of mouth is really what spreads these things. So thank you for listening. My name is Wayne Turmel. Thank you for listening to the Long-Distance Worklife. Have a great week.
In this month's Ask Wayne Anything episode, Marisa asks questions about the use of Zoom and how it has almost replaced a phone call. They also discuss when webcams should be used on a Zoom call (the answer may surprise you), Zoom fatigue and etiquette around the use of virtual backgrounds.
When should you be turning off your webcam during a Zoom Meeting?
Additional Resources:
Marisa Eikenberry: Hi. Welcome to the Long-Distance Worklife. I'm Marisa Eikenberry. And joining me is Wayne Turmel. Each week we're talking to you about technology, how to work remotely, develop your leadership skills, and also just survive this new remote thing that we've got going on right now. This week, we're doing a Q&A episode where I'm going to ask Wayne questions and he's going to answer them.
If you would like to have your questions answered, make sure to go to longdistanceworklife.com and fill out the form and we'll get your questions answered on a future episode. Okay, Wayne, you ready for some questions?
Wayne Turmel: Yeah, bring it. I kind of know where we're going, but not really. So.
Marisa: Yeah, so I thought today that we could talk about Zoom and, you know, Microsoft Teams, I mean, whatever you want to call it. But these video chat softwares that we've been using a lot, the last couple of years, and I know we've been using them longer than that to Skype and all that kind of thing. So one of the first things that I kind of wanted to talk about was it occurred to me recently that some of the times that we would normally pick up a phone and have a conversation that way about a project or whatever, Zoom has almost kind of replaced that.
And I'm kind of wondering what you think about that. Have you thought about it and what are the implications of that?
Wayne: Have I thought about it? Let's see...
Marisa:
That may have been a stupid question.
Wayne: What book number is this? Yeah. I spend a lot of time worrying and it's funny because I started thinking about this stuff back you know, in the early 2000s. So this has been obsessing me for a while. Webcams are a beautiful thing. And it's funny because the first umpteen years of my career in this space, I was like, "Use your webcam, use your webcam" because on the surface, it makes perfect sense.
It adds richness to communication. I can see you nodding your head. Right now. Right?
Marisa: Adds body language.
Wayne: Body language. You can tell as you're talking. You can tell that I have something I want to say and that makes it easy to direct traffic and all of that makes perfect sense. It doesn't mean, though, human beings have never invented the technology, they can't suck all the fun and usefulness out of it.
Marisa: Yes.
Wayne: And this is a perfect example we get. It used to be "I didn't want to use webcams because..." and the list was pretty long. "I don't have the bandwidth."
Marisa: That's fair.
Wayne:
So that, you know, I look like I'm in a Japanese monster movie because my mouth and my words are not matching.
00:02:46:10 - 00:02:47:10
Marisa
Right.
00:02:47:10 - 00:02:48:20
Wayne
It made the meeting crash.
00:02:48:21 - 00:02:52:14
Wayne
All of this is true back in the before times.
00:02:52:14 - 00:02:54:11
Marisa
Mm hmm.
00:02:54:11 - 00:03:20:21
Wayne
They crashed a lot and it was a pain in the neck and it slowed up bandwidth. So that was a legitimate excuse. As we've talked about and former shows. It wasn't like, Oh, Magic Box will steal my soul. But there were people suspicious of using them because, oh, the manager just really wants to know we're paying attention on meetings, and it's not about the positive results.
00:03:21:00 - 00:03:21:09
Marisa
Right.
00:03:23:15 - 00:03:37:01
Wayne
Generally speaking, the richer the communication, the better. So you would think that I would be saying use your webcams all the time, and that is not the case. There are plenty of reasons not to.
00:03:37:01 - 00:03:38:01
Marisa
Mm hmm.
00:03:38:01 - 00:03:44:02
Wayne
One is, if you have to be on Zoom for every thing, you lose mobility.
00:03:45:02 - 00:03:45:10
Marisa
Right.
00:03:45:16 - 00:03:55:01
Wayne
Sometimes you're in the car, sometimes you're going to your next meeting. Sometimes you're in the kitchen making sure the kids are eating. I mean.
00:03:55:12 - 00:03:57:23
Marisa
Are you just walking around your office when you're on a phone call?
00:03:58:08 - 00:04:18:13
Wayne
Exactly. The fact that you can get up and wander around and not worry about the camera is really important. So sometimes the speed of the communication, the fact that it's going to be a two minute call I mean, I'll give you a perfect example. You and I haven't dealt with this because I deal with you at civilized hours most of the time.
00:04:18:17 - 00:04:42:06
Wayne
But because I'm on the West Coast and you're on the East Coast, I had a call with a coworker this morning. It's 6:30 in the morning my time. Yes, I can talk to you. Yes. This is an important conversation. No, I'm not turning on my camera. Nobody needs to see my bedhead and my AC/DC t-shirt. That does nobody any good.
00:04:42:17 - 00:04:44:04
Marisa
To be fair. Sounds like a cool shirt.
00:04:45:11 - 00:04:49:00
Wayne
The fact that I rock it is not the point of the exercise.
00:04:49:01 - 00:04:50:01
Marisa
No pun intended. Right?
00:04:52:12 - 00:05:22:20
Wayne
And I think we overdo webcams or use them inappropriately for a couple of reasons. One is that we are lonely and we don't see other human beings. And remember, in the glorious before times, we received regardless of where you work over 60% of your social interaction for the week will take place through work.
00:05:23:04 - 00:05:23:10
Marisa
Mm hmm.
00:05:23:21 - 00:05:43:19
Wayne
Working with coworkers is dealing with people in the office, customers, whatever We are largely cut off a lot of us. We may not actually speak to other human beings when we do. There is a need to make it as rich as possible.
00:05:44:07 - 00:05:44:14
Marisa
Mm hmm.
00:05:46:09 - 00:05:55:01
Wayne
Some of that makes perfect sense. You want higher quality communication. Some of it is just, "Oh, dear God. Let me see another human."
00:05:55:17 - 00:06:05:14
Marisa
Especially when we were all in lockdown. I mean, I was like that. The only person I saw every day was my husband. So if somebody was like, "Okay, we're going to get on a Zoom call." Oh, thank God.
00:06:06:07 - 00:06:11:07
Wayne
Well, and even an introvert like me who isn't that fond of other human beings.
00:06:11:07 - 00:06:11:17
Marisa
Amen.
00:06:11:22 - 00:06:14:22
Wayne
Had a need for that.
00:06:14:22 - 00:06:16:10
Marisa
Just to see somebody else.
00:06:16:15 - 00:06:30:22
Wayne
Exactly. And and some of that stems from and we will have this conversation someday. There was a book called A World Without Email. Okay. And the author escapes me. Very smart guy.
00:06:31:09 - 00:06:32:13
Marisa
Wasn't Cal Newport was it?
00:06:32:21 - 00:06:33:22
Wayne
Yeah, it was Cal Newport.
00:06:33:23 - 00:06:34:03
Marisa
Yep.
00:06:34:19 - 00:06:35:18
Wayne
Nice job.
00:06:36:05 - 00:06:37:12
Marisa
I have read some of his stuff just not that one.
00:06:37:13 - 00:07:06:19
Wayne
A bigger book nerd than me. That is hard to find, but I love you. But his thing, I don't agree with everything Cal says. But his point is that there is this hivemind mentality where even when we are not working together, we're desperately trying to recreate that office environment, in that office environment where you can just pop in and talk to people.
00:07:07:00 - 00:07:22:22
Wayne
That office environment where you actually see and engage with human beings in engaging in human ways We have stream of consciousness conversations. We work together, which is why email threads get miles long.
00:07:23:03 - 00:07:23:12
Marisa
Right.
00:07:24:17 - 00:07:31:13
Wayne
If somebody walked up to us in the office and started talking to us, we wouldn't say, Wait a minute, I'm on Do Not Disturb.
00:07:32:10 - 00:07:32:21
Marisa
Fair.
00:07:33:04 - 00:07:45:10
Wayne
Right. We would respond. That's why we feel the need to respond to every email that comes in, because it's the equivalent of somebody stopping by our desk to tell us something and it would be rude to ignore it.
00:07:45:10 - 00:07:47:01
Wayne
Mm hmm.
00:07:47:01 - 00:07:57:07
Wayne
And the same is true of webcams. I think we have two things have happened number one is we have this need to connect things like, oh, thank God, another person.
00:07:57:23 - 00:07:58:09
Marisa
Right.
00:07:58:14 - 00:08:20:17
Wayne
Right. I think that's part of it. But there's also we are trying to recreate the meeting. And of course, in the meeting, we sat around the room and we all saw each other. And we could do that. And that's great. And we're trying to recreate that, forgetting, of course, that in the before times, our biggest complaint was meetings.
00:08:21:02 - 00:08:38:06
Wayne
Right. They sucked they wasted time. Now they get to suck and waste time. And oh, by the way, I'm on them nonstop from morning till night. We used to go home to work because we could get away from all that stuff. And it has followed us well.
00:08:38:06 - 00:08:58:12
Marisa
And that's where the Zoom fatigue that, you know, you've talked about many times before, And something else that just occurred to me while you were talking a difference between meetings in the before times and now is I don't know about you, Wayne, but sometimes when I'm on a webcam in a meeting, I almost feel like I'm on the spot a little bit more because all of us are right there.
00:08:58:23 - 00:08:59:05
Wayne
This leads-
00:08:59:13 - 00:08:59:22
Marisa
We're all up there.
00:09:00:03 - 00:09:18:06
Wayne
This leads to the fatigue part and this is where there are a couple of things. And this is neurological and biological. And it sounds like it's not a big deal. And it actually is. There's a few things. Number one is we are staring at screens.
00:09:18:06 - 00:09:18:11
Marisa
Yes.
00:09:18:11 - 00:09:22:07
Wayne
Blue infrared, blue spectrum light.
00:09:23:17 - 00:09:24:21
Marisa
Yeah. Which we all know is not-
00:09:24:21 - 00:09:50:11
Wayne
It's not good for us. Is not good for us. Right. We should not be staring at screens all that often. And yet here we are. So there's one thing that is physically exhausting. The second thing is, if I'm on camera I'm on camera. I have to watch what I'm doing. Yes. I'm less likely to answer my email or answer a text message or something.
00:09:50:11 - 00:10:08:03
Wayne
And I suppose that's a good thing that we are at least offering the illusion of paying attention. But it's stressful. We have to be constantly on guard, you know, what we're doing is constantly being monitored, whether that is the intention or not.
00:10:08:12 - 00:10:08:22
Marisa
Right.
00:10:10:01 - 00:10:25:12
Wayne
So that's part of it. When you have the gallery view and you see everybody in the meeting, your eyes get strained because you are actually bouncing all over the screen. You aren't just looking at one thing.
00:10:26:16 - 00:10:28:06
Marisa
That was something that I hadn't really thought of.
00:10:28:07 - 00:10:41:17
Wayne
You are constantly monitoring and every time somebody on screen moves, I mean, one of the things that I have said for a long time and has frequently gotten me in trouble is that people are a lot like raccoons.
00:10:42:14 - 00:10:44:13
Marisa
Okay. I'm not sure I've heard you say this yet.
00:10:44:13 - 00:10:49:16
Wayne
Okay. Perhaps I need to explain. We are attracted by color, light and motion.
00:10:50:04 - 00:10:50:13
Marisa
Okay.
00:10:51:11 - 00:11:02:03
Wayne
So when we're supposed to be doing something and something is colorful or moving or changes on the screen, we reconnect with it.
00:11:02:17 - 00:11:03:09
Marisa
That makes sense.
00:11:05:12 - 00:11:08:12
Wayne
The more stuff that is moving on the screen.
00:11:10:01 - 00:11:12:15
Marisa
Yes, the more eyes go. That makes sense.
00:11:13:01 - 00:11:31:16
Wayne
So it is physically draining and people who have taught visual or lead virtual meetings will tell you, I used to be able to stand at the front of the room all day and actually get energized by it. Yeah, this is just exhausting. There's a reason our classes are 2 hours long and not a minute longer.
00:11:32:06 - 00:11:45:19
Marisa
Yeah. It would be a way to not only you've got you know, people can only pay attention for so long before, you know, yada, yada, yada. But yeah, that totally makes sense. I mean, if you've got an eight hour day, that's a quarter of your day.
00:11:45:19 - 00:11:46:06
Wayne
It's draining.
00:11:46:06 - 00:11:50:12
Wayne
So so the question then becomes when do we use the webcams or when do we not?
00:11:50:13 - 00:11:51:10
Marisa
Right, right.
00:11:52:02 - 00:12:05:07
Wayne
And look at me anticipate where we're going. I think there are a few things. Number one is when does it add value and when does it not? Right. If this is a quick question.
00:12:05:19 - 00:12:06:05
Marisa
Mm hmm.
00:12:06:23 - 00:12:35:05
Wayne
Hey, I just need a quick answer to this question. You can send a Slack message. You can put something on Teams. Hey, I need an answer right now, and you're not at your desk. That would be a good time to call. Right. Pick up the phone. This is where the grumpy old man in me goes on about how these darn kids... My daughter is 28 years old and perfectly intelligent and I have to keep reminding her that these transmit voice.
00:12:36:17 - 00:12:39:15
Marisa
Yeah. Okay. I will admit there are times I am guilty of that as well.
00:12:40:00 - 00:12:45:18
Wayne
So. Right choosing the right message, right tool for the right message.
00:12:45:20 - 00:12:46:15
Marisa
Absolutely is.
00:12:46:15 - 00:12:57:22
Wayne
Important. Secondly is when does adding a webcam to the conversation add value. I would warrant that the bigger the meeting, the less need there is to have everybody on camera.
00:12:58:16 - 00:13:02:07
Marisa
Really? That's not something I've heard yet.
00:13:02:07 - 00:13:24:15
Wayne
Having a bunch of little pictures at the top of your screen. And by the way, if you've got a big enough meeting, you don't have everybody there anyway. So you don't know what is going on. There is a distraction that frankly you don't need as a presenter. I always switch to speaker view, so that the person who is speaking shows up on mic
00:13:26:02 - 00:13:27:09
Marisa
And not everybody else.
00:13:27:15 - 00:13:42:14
Wayne
So if you if I'm teaching a class and you have a question, your face pops up. Oh, okay, Marisa. And I can interact with you and talk. Having everybody on camera paranoid about where they're looking and can I eat a sandwich and.
00:13:43:05 - 00:13:44:09
Marisa
Can I take notes?
00:13:44:09 - 00:14:12:04
Wayne
And can I take notes without somebody thinking I'm doing something else doesn't really add value. And it's just a distraction. So what I would say is at the beginning of a meeting when everybody is joining and saying hello, you can semi replicate that feeling of walking into the conference room before the meeting starts. And you see people all "Oh Marisa, I forgot to give you this" and "Oh, Bob, I got to talk to you about this after the meeting" and.
00:14:12:07 - 00:14:13:07
Marisa
How was the game last night?
00:14:13:07 - 00:14:41:12
Wayne
How was the game last night? Right. Those things can happen. But once the meeting starts there's no need for everybody to be if it's a town hall meeting. And I'm just going to be listening and oh, by the way, it's 3:00 in the afternoon in Indiana, so it is noon in L.A. and my tummy is grumbling. Nobody needs to watch me eat.
00:14:41:21 - 00:14:42:06
Marisa
Right.
00:14:42:06 - 00:14:43:06
Wayne
But I gotta eat.
00:14:43:15 - 00:15:04:05
Marisa
Right. Absolutely. So real quick, I have a question based on that. So if you're in a quote unquote town hall, kind of meeting and maybe there are multiple presenters, you know, two or three whatever, do you recommend that just that person who is speaking have their webcam on and everybody else shuts off and then basically turn it on when it's your time to speak?
00:15:04:19 - 00:15:10:13
Wayne
I think the goal is to tell everybody to put it to speaker view.
00:15:10:13 - 00:15:13:18
Marisa
Okay. I will have to try that because I am somebody.
00:15:13:18 - 00:15:22:21
Wayne
We forget that there are multiple views and are almost always our default is to gallery because we want to see everybody We don't need to see everybody.
00:15:23:19 - 00:15:24:17
Marisa
Absolutely.
00:15:25:08 - 00:15:44:02
Wayne
Once when we're joining saying hello. Absolutely. It's a social event. Say hi to everybody. You know, do all that. But when the meeting starts or the presentation starts, I switch to speaker view so that I'm not distracted by all that stuff.
00:15:45:11 - 00:15:48:10
Marisa
I will definitely have to try that at our next all team meeting.
00:15:49:08 - 00:15:52:15
Wayne
Yeah. It's a very, very simple thing.
00:15:56:00 - 00:16:21:19
Wayne
And we can get control of this. I mean, I jokingly said earlier that, you know, human beings have invented anything that we haven't completely ruined. And this is true. But also almost everything that we've invented, we have more control over it than we think we do. And I think webcams are a perfect example of something that got invented, got thrust upon us.
00:16:21:23 - 00:16:31:22
Wayne
We were told to use them, and we were never given the criteria to make intelligent, critical decisions about when do we use them, when do we not.
00:16:34:03 - 00:16:57:18
Marisa
Moving on from that. So speaking of times that we don't know the right thing to do and what the etiquette really is, I do want to talk a little bit about virtual background etiquette, so I know that those have become really popular. I believe Zoom launched them right around the time that we all went on lockdown. And so you see a lot of people using them sometimes not successfully.
00:16:58:04 - 00:17:08:19
Marisa
So I guess my question is like, what's okay? What's not okay other than the obvious make your picture appropriate. And when should you avoid using them?
00:17:08:19 - 00:17:13:10
Wayne
There are no hard and fast rules, but it's not so much rules as it is guidelines.
00:17:13:10 - 00:17:13:21
Marisa
Right.
00:17:13:23 - 00:17:43:05
Wayne
And this will be the last. This will be the last thing for this session because Tempus Fugit. But I think the goal is to communicate if what is going on around you diminishes that communication or distracts from that communication. It doesn't work. Now, when we all got sent home, not everybody had a place with a door and a neutral background that they present in front of.
00:17:44:14 - 00:17:49:11
Wayne
You don't want the world to know you're working from the north end of the dining room table,
00:17:49:11 - 00:17:50:07
Marisa
Right.
00:17:50:07 - 00:17:58:02
Wayne
You don't need to see the kids running around behind you and the dog doing whatever the heck the dog is doing. And right.
00:17:58:02 - 00:17:59:19
Wayne
We have all kinds of horror stories.
00:17:59:20 - 00:18:05:05
Wayne
So the notion and you know, we've all got our favorite that showed up on the news, right?
00:18:05:05 - 00:18:06:05
Marisa
Yes.
00:18:06:05 - 00:18:24:22
Wayne
So having a background, I mean, in this case, for those of you who are listening to this, you can't see this. We both have perfectly boring, neutral blank walls behind us that work fine for this. We have the option of choosing something.
00:18:24:23 - 00:18:40:15
Wayne
Now, sometimes if it's a casual kind of thing, I will do it to be silly. There is a background in Microsoft Teams that looks like a like you're inside a cartoon spaceship with robots. I have used that.
00:18:41:05 - 00:18:52:20
Wayne
I have used that in Zoom. There is a photo of the Las Vegas sign that I use as my background fairly frequently. It's a topic of conversation.
00:18:53:04 - 00:18:53:12
Marisa
Right.
00:18:53:22 - 00:19:05:21
Wayne
It is casual. It takes it doesn't look boring. It- a lot of people are amused by the fact I live in Las Vegas and it starts conversations, always starts, "How's the weather," that kind of thing.
00:19:07:01 - 00:19:30:15
Wayne
What I would tell you is your background needs to be appropriate to the communication that's taking place. Yes. And it needs to not be a distraction. So some people put up, you know, they'll put photographs up and you can use any photograph. All forms allow you to just upload photographs, which is where I get some of these things from.
00:19:31:22 - 00:19:55:14
Wayne
But be aware that it works like a green screen. And so if you move your hands or you're holding something or you're trying to demonstrate something, it blurs out and looks weird. So when you are using a background do not use a new background for the first time when the vice president is on the line.
00:19:56:17 - 00:19:57:13
Marisa
Yes.
00:19:58:05 - 00:20:27:08
Wayne
Test your background. Make sure it's appropriate. Make sure that it is not distracting. And make sure that you can do whatever you need to do. Right. If you're holding things up and they disappear because of the way the green screen works. That's going to be a problem. So my attitude about this is exactly about technology, which is you use the least amount to accomplish whatever you want to accomplish.
00:20:27:18 - 00:20:30:01
Marisa
Right. It's part of your 80/20 rule. Right?
00:20:30:12 - 00:20:53:16
Wayne
Well, it's just part of me not being all that crazy about technology. And so at the same time, I'm lazy and want to be effective. So I will use the technology to the point where it becomes more work than it's worth. So I think where we're going to leave this around the backgrounds today is it's got to be appropriate.
00:20:55:03 - 00:21:01:01
Wayne
It can't be distracting and it can't diminish your credibility.
00:21:01:11 - 00:21:01:20
Marisa
Yes.
00:21:03:02 - 00:21:05:10
Wayne
And test it before you use it.
00:21:07:04 - 00:21:43:10
Marisa
Sounds great. So that's all for today. I want to thank you everybody who is listening for joining us today. Thank you, Wayne, for answering our questions. If you have any questions you would like us to answer in a future episode, make sure to go to longdistanceworklife.com. That's where you can also see show notes for all of our episodes. Watch videos. If you're listening to this on your podcast app. And you can ask us questions and we will answer them on a future episode. Thank you so much for joining us. Please make sure to like and subscribe. Tell your friends about us, rate and review. You've heard podcasts before. You know how this works. So thank you for being here and we'll see you next time.
Pilar Orti, founder and director of Virtual Not Distant, meets with Wayne to discuss tips for new managers on a remote team, having conversations around how to use tools effectively, thinking about "remote-first", and how silence doesn't necessarily mean things are okay.
Virtual Not Distant works with leaders, managers, and HR professionals to create a "remote-first" environment whether you're planning to stay remote or becoming a hybrid organization.
What is one pitfall that managers need to be aware of?
Additional Resources:
Wayne Turmel: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Long-Distance Worklife, the podcast where we talk about remote work, technology, leadership, and generally just navigating and surviving this crazy world of virtual and hybrid work. My name is Wayne Turmel. Marisa will not be joining us today because I have an interview with a very smart person named Pilar Orti. Pilar is the founder and director of Virtual Not Distant.
Most of her work is done in England and the European Union and I think she brings a really interesting perspective to remote work. And so I wanted you to experience that. Of course, you know the drill. Listen up, take good notes. We will, of course, capture and transcribe that in our show notes. And for right now, I want you to enjoy the conversation with Pilar Orti.
I am really excited today to be with Pilar Orti. Our trails have crossed a couple of times over the last couple of years. She does really good work. Her company is VirtualNotDistant.com, of which she is the founder and director. Really quick, Pilar. What do you guys do?
Pilar Orti: Well, mainly we help managers of remote teams through either training or by providing a listening ear sometimes. And we have the 21st Century Work Life Podcast, which aims to support anyone who is interested in leading teams and working online.
Wayne: So obviously she's a direct competitor and must be destroyed, but she does really good work is the point. And I wanted to introduce all of you to her because you cannot have enough smart people in your orbit. Pilar, you've been in this space a long time. Let me ask you this. When a manager is taking on a new position, especially if there's a remote component and they have never done that before.
What kind of is Job One? What is the first thing that they need to do?
Pilar: I've actually got two answers to that. So I think that there's always two elements for me in leading a team. One is what we do as individuals and how we connect to the team members individually. And the other one is how we look after the team and how we support the team to continue all the time building that team and and supporting them.
So I think that the first thing when we are new, either we might even be in our team and become the team leader or we might come in for a new team is to communicate our availability and how we communicate, how available we are to people because especially we are remote, we sometimes we assume that if we say, "Oh, I'm available all the time," that people are going to look for us when they need us.
And actually there's when you can't see whether someone is busy, working, etc. you more reluctant normally to interrupt them.
Wayne: I think that's a really, really important point, which is one of the things that the people on the team struggle with is I don't want to bug the boss I don't want to bother them. And what that means is the manager is saying, "Hey, I've got an open door policy, come talk to me" and nobody's coming to talk to me.
So I think that's a really interesting point.
Pilar: And the equivalent of having an open door policy as well could be if setting hours, setting open door hours during which you sit behind your computer. If you're if you're at that time and you open a meeting and everyone has the link to that meeting, are you just there? And people can literally drop in? That's one, one thing that you could do.
So communicating availability. And the other thing I think is to be aware of and this takes a bit more time, is to be aware of the team's rhythm of communication and how that fits with the tasks we're doing and the need to connect. So, for example, our experience working remotely might be of being in a team where everyone pretty much gets on with their work because that's the best way of doing it.
And suddenly we might land in a team who are used to being available a lot, sending lots of messages backwards and forwards during the day. So it's this awareness and then making sure that that rhythm fits the task and also the need for connection. So one is something very immediate, and I think looking at the team takes a little bit more time.
Wayne: There's two things that you said there. One is the idea of creating office hours, for lack of a better term.
Pilar: Yeah.
Wayne: Where regardless of where you are in the world, you know that at this time it's okay to bug your manager.
Pilar: Yes.
Wayne: And I think that's a really simple and yet effective tool. The second thing is this idea of the rhythm that the team works. Generally speaking, we are not starting from a blank sheet of paper, right? That the team already exists, the boat is in the water and we need to adjust to it.
What is what are some of the things that managers bump their nose against when they take over an existing team like that?
Pilar: I think it's sometimes it's an assumption that we are using technology in the same way. So it could be that. And if we are a remote team, we're using technology to communicate. So it could be that we use a platform that we've used before, but we're used to using it in a certain way and the team is using it in another one.
And not having that conversation at the beginning of how we're going to use the technology. I think this can be one of the biggest things and one of the biggest differences assuming back to that.
Wayne: We'll come back to that question for those of you listening. The reason Pilar stopped talking is because I got this look on my face and she realized my head was about to explode. Um, I want to talk about that notion of using tools differently because you work with teams and primarily you're on the eastern side of the Atlantic with your clients, with tools like Microsoft Teams, like Slack, with these kinds of tools.
What are you seeing in terms of how well people use them and actually do what the darn things can do.
Pilar: Yeah.
So there's there's lots of things. And I think that we cannot ignore the pandemic, which meant that everyone started using the the tools.
Wayne: Well, and also, yeah, Microsoft threw Teams out in the world two years too early.
Pilar: Yeah.
Wayne: Isn't this a-
Pilar: Good.
Wayne: Win?
Pilar: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That it is also true that when you go for it and very interestingly. So I started using Teams with a client before the pandemic and we rarely met on it on Teams. We used it mainly for asynchronous communication. We used all the other tools. So I think that one of the things that we're seeing is that tools that can be used for asynchronous communication, like Teams are only being used in the video function and they're being used mainly to communicate in real time.
So I think that that is the main thing I'm seeing is that there's not the tools haven't been embraced as a space to give us a bit more breathing space and to be able to communicate in a slower pace. And so that being used to communicate quite rapidly as though we were in the office next to each other.
Wayne: I'm glad you went there because this is actually a question that I've been struggling with and why I'm looking to very smart people who can look at this. A lot of what we're dealing with it seems to me too many meetings, too much email, all of that is because we're trying to recreate the office environment.
Pilar: Yeah.
Wayne: And as especially as we start to think about return to the office, and most of that is going to be some hybrid mix.
Pilar: Hmm.
Wayne: Right. People in the office and people not. And some people in on Tuesdays and not on Wednesdays. What what do we need to think about differently instead of just trying to recreate the office or worse going back to defaulting to the office?
Pilar: Yeah.
Wayne: Right? Where everything, you know, the sun revolves around the Statue of Liberty. And so everything has to be done on New York time regardless.
Pilar: Yeah. Yeah.
Wayne: What does this new as we're thinking about creating something new, what needs to be new and different?
Pilar: I think I'll start with two things. One, which leads from the use of tools that we were just talking about. So we need to have some kind of conversation. And this is very difficult because we need to have some conversation about how are we going to communicate. And this means maybe setting some agreements and we might not be used to this because communication, why do we need to, to, to set so many parameters?
But for example, if you look at how email has been used, some people use it as almost instant message. Some people think it's okay to wait three days to reply to an email. Some people are like, "Why didn't you reply to my email that I sent 2 hours ago?" Because email was introduced without having a conversation around it in most organizations.
And so now everyone uses it differently and sometimes it causes some chaos. So some stress, rather. So I think that first of all, is we need to talk about how we are using these tools and have some agreement, some parameters. Even if it sounds easy and even if it sounds like we are removing all spontaneity from human contact, we need that.
And then the other thing specifically to hybrid work, which involves maybe some people being in the office, others not or people using the office at different times, is that if we think of hybrid as a subset of remote, it means that essentially the office becomes one more tool, one more space where we do the work it becomes one more place where we communicate because we also have the video tools.
We also have asynchronous platforms and if we think about it like that, then we have a chance of creating some kind of cohesive way of working rather than ending up where, well, if you're in the office, you work like this. If you're online, you work like this. Lots of us are in the office all the time, so we work in this way.
A lot of us are remote all the time, so we work in that way. So I think that mindset of hybrid is a subset of remote, because in the end, the space that is common to every knowledge worker is not the office, it's the online space regardless of where you are. So initially that mindset shift and then the practicalities, of course, that are harder.
Also, you know, nothing is easy, but you need that mindset initially rather than thinking, well, we are office based and some people work from home some time.
Wayne: And wow, I'm really glad that you stated that so succinctly that the default is no longer in the office. Right. It used to be in the before time's the blessed before times when most people were in the office and we let some people work from home. And so basically the office is how this works. And now the default is the kind of cyber space as opposed to the office.
And that changes how we meet when we meet and yeah, who works on things and. Yeah. And like that. The second thing you said, by the way, and I don't think there are enough icky conversations, icky being the highly technical term for slightly uncomfortable and weird and I don't know why they're uncomfortable. Over 70% of our workplace communication happens in writing.
People that have been listening to this podcast are already tired of me saying that my business career ties perfectly to the intro from the introduction of email to wherever we are now. So I've watched this thing occur. Well, if there is something that we spend 70% of our time doing and it's already existed when most people are in the workplace, why do we not talk about it?
Like, how can we not give people better training how do we not have the conversations about when do we use what? And no, you know, when you're on your eighth thing in an email thread, pick up the phone.
Pilar: Yes.
And I think it's because it's assumed that, of course, everyone knows how to do it. This is one of the resistances I used to get and maybe but everyone has preferences and everyone has a legacy from another time and everyone and everyone thinks that something is the common sense to do. I think maybe that said is that it is common sense, but our way of saying common sense is different.
So we need to agree, agree on that. And especially as you were mentioning earlier, especially if there are different cultures than our points of reference, we're working across the globe. Our points of reference are going to be different as well because we've grown up in different contexts we've worked in different contexts. So we can't really assume that we all think that common sense means the same thing.
Wayne: Wow. That is absolutely true. So, okay, we are almost at the end of our time because I knew that this would happen and- One pitfall that managers should be wary of. Just what if you could give one warning if you could yell out, stop to the managers out there, what is one thing that you think they need to be aware of today's warning.
Pilar: I would say that don't assume that silence means everything's okay.
So I'll leave it at that and everyone can. Can I leave it at that?
Wayne: No, it's absolutely true. I mean, there are a couple of things associated with that. One is we tend to, as managers, default to spending most of our time on our problem children. And so we assume that if we don't hear anything, no news is good news. And that creates some interesting dynamics changes. But the other thing and it goes back to setting those office hours or making yourself available as people are not as willing to be proactive about reaching out as they could or should be.
Pilar: Yeah. And in the end, all you all some people need is how is everything going? That's all they need. And then they'll open up. But actually, they might not think that the time is ever right to bring anything up if they don't ask. So I think that's especially when you're working at a distance with different kinds of people.
I think that the interpretation of silence you've got to be very careful with.
Wayne: And the way you ask that question, how's everything going is very different question than is everything okay?
Pilar: Oh, yeah. Yes. Because is everywhere. Is everything okay? It's really easy to answer regardless. It's very difficult well, it's very difficult sometimes to say no. You know, it is there with you. No, it isn't. Yeah. Yeah.
Wayne: Excellent. Thank you so much, Pilar Orti who is the founder and director of Virtual Not Distant. So good to talk to you again. Lovely to talk to you. And thank you for being on the Long-Distance Worklife.
Pilar: Thank you very much.
Wayne: Thank you so much for joining us on the Long-Distance Worklife today. I trust that you enjoyed that conversation. You will find links to Virtual Not Distant and Pilar's work on our show notes. Those, of course, are on longdistanceworklife.com. Join us next week when I will be joined by Marisa. We will be doing one of our Q&A issues.
We really, really want your questions and your comments to guide where our conversations go. So please visit longdistanceworklife.com. Drop us a comment. You know, if you listen to podcasts that it's really important that you like and subscribe so other people can find us. Thank you so much for joining us. We hope that we are helping keep the weasels at bay and we will see you next episode.
Thanks so much.
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.
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