Deciphering the Dynamics of Hybrid Work with Henry O’Loughlin

00;00;08;02 - 00;00;39;29
Wayne Turmel
Greetings, everybody. Welcome to the Long-Distance Work Life Podcast. My name is Wayne Trammell. I am your host today. We are without Marissa, but that means we have another cool guest joining us and we will try to stir the pot a little bit with Henry O'Loughlin in just a moment. This is the podcast. For those of us trying to thrive, survive, generally make sense and keep the weasels at bay in the world of remote and hybrid work.

00;00;40;02 - 00;00;48;20
Wayne Turmel
Welcome. Welcome. I am going to bring in our guests now Henry O'Loughlin is with Build Remote. Hey, Henry, How are you?

00;00;48;22 - 00;00;50;24
Henry O'Loughlin
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Wayne.

00;00;50;26 - 00;01;09;20
Wayne Turmel
Well, thank you, man. We are going to have, I suspect, a very fun discussion about whether or not we have, in fact, reached peak hybrid. And I'm going to leave that there as a teaser for the audience. While you tell us a little bit about you and build a remote. Yeah.

00;01;09;20 - 00;01;28;12
Henry O'Loughlin
So I ran a fully remote marketing agency for six years. I worked there for eight years. So this is going back way before the pandemic. And we in my mind, we tried something and then always it was a mistake. And then we'd try something new and it was like that second or third try was the right way to do it.

00;01;28;13 - 00;01;52;22
Henry O'Loughlin
So we learned a lot about how to run a remote company for years before 2020. 2020 came around and I saw a lot of bad advice about how to operate remotely, how to work from home. So I started building remote just as a way to talk about that. And now that's my full time work and company. And what I do is I help small businesses operate remotely.

00;01;52;24 - 00;02;18;06
Wayne Turmel
I want to talk before we get into the subject that we supposedly are talking about. I want to talk a little bit about the early days, because you said something very unashamedly that most people don't want to cop to, which is this notion of we're going to change the way we do business and we're absolutely going to get it right the first time and everything everybody tells us is going to work.

00;02;18;08 - 00;02;25;10
Wayne Turmel
And you said that didn't happen. Give us tell us where you bumped your nose so we don't feel so bad.

00;02;25;12 - 00;02;50;17
Henry O'Loughlin
Yeah, I think the you're not physically together. So if you come from an office and everyone is used to working that way, then you go to remote. You sort of want to. The instinct is to build back the way of working in an office, but over the internet. So your instinct is to meet more, to be more available online, on Slack or email, to show that you're there at your desk working.

00;02;50;19 - 00;03;11;08
Henry O'Loughlin
So you want to respond to emails quickly. You want to respond to Slack quickly, you want to have more one on ones. You want to have more stand up meetings. And we did all of that stuff as well. And all of that actually is sort of the opposite of what you want to do remotely in my mind. You don't want to fill a day with Zoom meetings.

00;03;11;08 - 00;03;20;14
Henry O'Loughlin
That's miserable. I'm a huge advocate for remote work. Sitting on Zoom for six out of eight or 9 hours a day is not fulfilling.

00;03;20;16 - 00;03;41;27
Wayne Turmel
Okay, so let me stop you There, because this is a really it's a vital point. And I agree with you in most ways, because the problems come when we're trying to replicate the office environment and we're not. Right. But what did you learn, given that you had to onboard people and hire people and do all the stuff the companies have to do right.

00;03;42;00 - 00;03;51;08
Wayne Turmel
What were one or two key things that you went, this isn't what we thought it was going to be, either for good or evil.

00;03;51;08 - 00;04;14;06
Henry O'Loughlin
One big one would be Slack. So we implemented that without any rules or guidelines in the way. The way I talk about Slack is that it will set your culture for you if you don't put guidelines on it and you may not like the culture. And that's what we went through. So. So for the example of Slack, it can turn into like a digital punch clock, which is not what we were looking for at all.

00;04;14;06 - 00;04;39;16
Henry O'Loughlin
We don't care at the time we're running this business. When people are online, we just care about them doing their jobs well and providing value to the company through their jobs. If that means they're not online from 1 to 2 p.m., that's fine. But Slack. Basically you have the green, yellow, red buttons. People want to be green just innately to show that they're there.

00;04;39;18 - 00;05;05;24
Henry O'Loughlin
They want to respond and quickly to show that they're there, which in my mind that switches the priority from important work or deep work to shallow, urgent work. And so if someone's just receiving Slack messages and responding, they're perceived as super helpful and a great teammate, whereas really they're just interrupting their their more important work throughout the day.

00;05;05;27 - 00;05;26;05
Henry O'Loughlin
So we had to like reverse our communication expectations on Slack rather than saying we started out like, That's great. Everyone comes on and says hello. Then we had to switch it to, You can do that if you'd like, but you don't have to. And then if somebody is online and responding quickly, it would be we actually encourage you to get off of Slack.

00;05;26;07 - 00;05;35;02
Henry O'Loughlin
It's a distraction. So we had to basically still use Slack, but switched the communication expectations completely. That's the one that stands out the most in my mind.

00;05;35;06 - 00;05;57;22
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. And, you know, for the record and, you know, in case anybody's a shareholder, we're not saying that Slack is inherently evil and don't use it. It's like everything else. It's it's Are you conscious and intentional about how you're using it and how you use it to form the culture, not the other way around. I love the way you said that.

00;05;57;25 - 00;06;21;28
Wayne Turmel
So let's get to the topic that we're discussing today, which the title is intentionally. I don't want to use the word, but the word disturbing is in the sentence. You know, you are stirring things up a bit when you say we have reached peak hybrid. There is a lot of discussion about this. Why are we at peak hybrid and why?

00;06;21;28 - 00;06;27;06
Wayne Turmel
Or is this kind of as much as it's going to get and be? Yeah.

00;06;27;09 - 00;06;47;09
Henry O'Loughlin
First, I probably want to start defining hybrid because that could mean a ton of different things. So when I say that, I mean in the current form or current definition of hybrid work, which in my mind is people are near the most people are near an office, they go in two or three days a week and they work from home two or three days a week.

00;06;47;11 - 00;06;55;20
Henry O'Loughlin
That's sort of how I would define hybrid work right now. That's what I'm saying has peaked out. That will only decline from here.

00;06;55;22 - 00;07;20;28
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, And and that makes sense because what you're talking about is not a conscious way of working. It's we've reached some sort of agreement where we'll bring people into the office as much as we can without them quitting and yeah, and give people the illusion of control over their time while still insisting they come into the office. And that is what a lot of people are calling hybrid.

00;07;21;04 - 00;07;23;14
Wayne Turmel
But it's not really hybrid work.

00;07;23;17 - 00;07;28;07
Henry O'Loughlin
Yeah, well, how would you define hybrid work when how?

00;07;28;15 - 00;07;55;20
Wayne Turmel
man, this isn't supposed to be my interview. I think hybrid work does have components of you meet and get together on occasion. And what's different is right now we're kind of who works where is kind of where hybrid sits. And I think true hybrid also includes the factor of time, which is who does what, where, but also when it happens.

00;07;55;22 - 00;08;04;17
Wayne Turmel
And that creates the flexibility and a different mindset to me. Yeah, you're the one who started this with the title, You tell me.

00;08;04;20 - 00;08;24;06
Henry O'Loughlin
Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I would just say it's currently three days in the office, two days at home. Everyone essentially is supposed to live near an office and you work partly remotely, partly in the office that that's the one that is peaking. And I can kind of take you through my thoughts on why. But yeah, please.

00;08;24;08 - 00;08;25;14
Wayne Turmel
If there are three.

00;08;25;14 - 00;08;48;20
Henry O'Loughlin
Basic work models, remote hybrid or office based hybrid to me has the the most issues of all of them. One is that it's it's essentially remote but with an office so it's it's not quite its own model it because everything has to have a digital component since some people might be there on a monday and some might not.

00;08;48;20 - 00;09;18;24
Henry O'Loughlin
So you're essentially remote anyhow. You're just calling it something different. That's that's the first. The second problem is it's the hardest on communication, internal communication to me, because if everyone's remote, you know how to communicate. It's zoom for meetings, it's slack for quick messages, it's Gmail for for longer messages. If you have if you're hybrid, you don't know if the meeting should be in person, should be on Slack or should be a combination, which is the hardest.

00;09;18;24 - 00;09;38;27
Henry O'Loughlin
You don't know if decisions should be made over a project management board on the Internet or they should be made in a boardroom, then recorded somehow and moved to the Internet. Three You're inherently running two systems at once, which is hard. So you're you're having to operate both ways and you better be good at both or neither works.

00;09;38;29 - 00;10;03;11
Henry O'Loughlin
The biggest one of all to me is it it reduces your talent pool greatly versus remote work. That's probably the biggest thing about going fully remote is your talent pool switches from We can hire within a 50 mile radius of our city that's office to we can hire anywhere in the country or the world. That's that's the huge promise of remote work.

00;10;03;17 - 00;10;34;20
Henry O'Loughlin
When you say you're hybrid, you still want to hire near an office, but you don't want to use the office as much, so you're greatly reducing your talent pool essentially. Then finally, I think I'd say is that another way to define hybrid work in its current state is unused office space. So if people come in three days a week, that means you're 40% unused office space, two days a week, 60% unused office space, and that just companies don't sit on expenses.

00;10;34;20 - 00;10;47;24
Henry O'Loughlin
They don't need long term to compete. You have to essentially drive out the waste of your operations, and that will inherently push people to reduce office space, pushing them closer to remote.

00;10;47;26 - 00;11;16;18
Wayne Turmel
That's so I mean, your points are all really well taken. I don't disagree at the core with any of them. So why do you think we've settled on hybrid right now? Is it purely a matter of we don't know what the alternatives look like? Is it purely this is a gateway drug to more remote work? Yeah. What what's going on?

00;11;16;21 - 00;11;31;09
Wayne Turmel
That we are in this hybrid state? Because I think there is particularly on the part of business owners and and bosses, just a big sense of we have no freaking idea what's going on.

00;11;31;11 - 00;11;54;17
Henry O'Loughlin
That's what it seems like to me too. Yeah. So I think the reason is it's been like one great concession. If you were to paint with broad brushes, most of the people want to work remotely. Most of the time, and most of the managers that have some sort of sunk cost into office space want people to come in and we sort of end up in the middle.

00;11;54;20 - 00;12;00;06
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, most of what we call hybrid work is in fact just kind of an uneasy compromise.

00;12;00;06 - 00;12;02;02
Henry O'Loughlin
That compromise. There you go.

00;12;02;05 - 00;12;31;22
Wayne Turmel
That is true. Yeah. Is it true that everybody wants to work remotely? I mean, right now I think the number is about 25% Do it. I know plenty of people who never mind whether the bosses forget the bosses for a moment. There's the individual workers. Not everybody wants to work from home. I think that's an assumption that the remote work kind of advocates zealots like to throw out there.

00;12;31;25 - 00;12;33;18
Wayne Turmel
How true is that?

00;12;33;21 - 00;12;53;09
Henry O'Loughlin
No, it's not true. So I was just painting with a broad brush, trying to say the surveys that say like 65% or 80% would like to work from home. Part of the time or, you know, those like big numbers, which most of the people most of the time. No, not everyone wants to work right now. Everyone wants to work from home all the time.

00;12;53;09 - 00;13;17;07
Henry O'Loughlin
That's absolutely true. And there's a lot about it. But it could depend on your phase of life. Right. So I've said it before where I moved to a new city when I was 23, and I was glad I worked in an office with 600 people. I made friends, I met my wife. It was great, right? I wouldn't want to work from home 23 with three roommates sitting in my bedroom the whole day.

00;13;17;07 - 00;13;41;02
Henry O'Loughlin
That's that doesn't sound fun. So there's absolutely scenarios where remote workers or working from home or specifically isn't right for people, but generally with like the compromise of two or three days a week in the office, you can kind of see that most of the people would like either the flexibility or the option to just not be coming in the office all five days anymore.

00;13;41;03 - 00;13;43;14
Henry O'Loughlin
That seems to summarize it pretty well.

00;13;43;17 - 00;14;12;19
Wayne Turmel
I think the word that and and this is why I added the concept of time, but that's Wayne's definition of it. I think it's the flexibility. Yeah, that makes hybrid kind of the middle option. Yeah, I've talked to me if I'm the business owner now, I mean, you're the business owner. I probably have very real concerns about hiring people who aren't in the office all the time.

00;14;12;25 - 00;14;32;01
Wayne Turmel
Some of them are, you know, plantation mentality. You got to keep an eye on them or they'll slack off. Some of it is legitimately. That's how I grew up. That's how I learned business was done. I can't imagine it being any other way. How do you have conversations with business owners about this?

00;14;32;03 - 00;14;49;24
Henry O'Loughlin
Yeah, well, I would I would want to add one thing that I think is a key point that I don't I don't think a lot of people talk about. So you have two, two ways of operating in the office work and remote work. And let's say your company and you do operate a business. Your company was fully in the office.

00;14;49;26 - 00;14;50;10
Wayne Turmel
You've.

00;14;50;12 - 00;15;18;26
Henry O'Loughlin
Built all of your processes, systems, communication around physically being together, and you're good at that system. 2020 comes around and you are forced to switch to remote work. You haven't selected it proactively, right? And you're bad at that system. So you're you're good in the office and you're bad at remote. So essentially there's a big conflation going on that the office is good and remote is bad.

00;15;18;26 - 00;15;40;26
Henry O'Loughlin
But really it's I'm good at the office and I'm bad at remote. And that's a huge distinction that we're not talking about right now, is that you're bad at the new system and you're good at the old system. So your inherent bias would be to go back to what you're good at. So I understand that completely. And it doesn't mean remote work can't be done for a company.

00;15;40;26 - 00;15;46;10
Henry O'Loughlin
It just means that your skills have been and processes have been developed for the office.

00;15;46;12 - 00;16;01;20
Wayne Turmel
So what do we need to learn or unlearn if that's not going to be the sticking point? Right. If we're going to make conscious decisions about where we work and when we work, how we work, what do we need to learn or unlearn that makes us currently bad at remote?

00;16;01;23 - 00;16;05;05
Henry O'Loughlin
Yeah, it's a it's a great question. I think the.

00;16;05;07 - 00;16;06;06
Wayne Turmel
Big, big.

00;16;06;06 - 00;16;43;28
Henry O'Loughlin
Difference is that is that part you said if I'm the biggest judge of people's performance is just like seeing they're seeing them, they're at their desk for a certain amount of time and having quick conversations that seem to move something forward. All that has to go away with the remote. Unfortunately, it the way you operate your company remotely, if it's if it's going well in my mind, is that you understand what each role is supposed to bring in value and what sort of output it's supposed to do, and you sort of get out of the way and the people need to do the work and do the work well.

00;16;43;28 - 00;17;04;04
Henry O'Loughlin
Companies that are switching from the office to remote need to think about understanding what value each role needs to bring a lot more than just watching people do the work that that's the big shift. And it's it's really hard. It took us years to make that shift.

00;17;04;08 - 00;17;29;02
Wayne Turmel
Okay. So we're nearing the end of our time and the premise here is that right now hybrid work is kind of the catch all, and it's where everybody's settled while we figure out what we want to be when we grow up. You what do you think ultimately the balance is going to be between fully remote work and fully co-located?

00;17;29;06 - 00;17;52;02
Henry O'Loughlin
I think for all desk jobs, knowledge workers, whatever you want. Anyone who can work this way, I think most of them will be most remote, all or most of the time. At some point, I think. I think the niche will become 50 to 200 people all in one city working on the same project from one office. I think.

00;17;52;02 - 00;18;20;02
Henry O'Loughlin
I think it basically flips from where it was in 2019. Let's say. And I think in that transition you're going to see this massive commercial real estate crash because the value of real of office space is so much less than we thought it was. I think what happens is that price plummets, leases run off, companies reduce space or get rid of space altogether.

00;18;20;04 - 00;18;43;10
Henry O'Loughlin
The cost to lease these split offices goes way down and companies start to scoop it up again as a place for people to work outside of the home. But it's not their operating model anymore. It's essentially like a co-working space for your people in certain cities. That's that's where I think all of this is is going.

00;18;43;12 - 00;19;17;14
Wayne Turmel
There is a three bear conversation I would love to have, though. I'm sure active on cities, on right, countries on all kinds of things. I don't think we've figured this out yet. But your premise that what we're calling hybrid, which may or may not really be hybrid, but what we're calling hybrid is really a placeholder until we figure all this out and I don't really think you're wrong on that, which makes lousy podcasting, but lovely conversation.

00;19;17;16 - 00;19;40;13
Wayne Turmel
So thank you so much. Henry LOFLAND We build remote. Thank you for being with us. For those of you who are listening, you know how podcasts work. If you enjoyed this conversation and I can't believe you didn't, please like and subscribe. Tell your friends word of mouth matters unless you didn't like it. In which case it's just a little secret.

00;19;40;15 - 00;20;12;29
Wayne Turmel
You can find links to Henry's company. You can find links to Henry, all kinds of good stuff on our website. Long distance work life dot com. You can find transcripts and recordings of past episodes. And if you are confused about how do we lead in this new world of remote and hybrid and whatever the heck you want to call it, I urge you to take a look at our Long Distance Leadership series.

00;20;13;02 - 00;20;41;12
Wayne Turmel
It's available for organizations, but it's also available as open enrollment. Anybody from anywhere can join these live virtual instructor led training sessions. The link is below my face. It's also on the website and we urge you to join us. Thank you so much, Henry. Thanks for being with us. Man. I really enjoyed this conversation and I trust our listeners did too.

00;20;41;15 - 00;20;43;09
Wayne Turmel
Got to do it again sometime.

00;20;43;11 - 00;20;45;17
Henry O'Loughlin
Sounds good. Thanks a lot, Wayne.

00;20;45;20 - 00;21;00;02
Wayne Turmel
And remember, every week we have new episodes. Marissa will be back next week. I think we are doing pet peeves, which is always amusing. Have a great week. Don't let the weasels get you down.