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!
Marisa and Wayne answer a question posed by Tony Hartsfield asking how to be productive on a multigenerational team. They discuss their experiences on a multigenerational team (and a multigenerational podcast duo), things to keep in mind no matter which generation you're in, and how to ease the tension between everyone.
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!
You may have noticed some people talking about running out for an errand during their work day or moving some of their work to a time when they're more productive. Marisa asks Wayne about time shifting, or asynchronous work, and how to do it successfully in your organization.
Join us for a powerful, 4-part video series titled, Demystifying Remote Leadership. You will learn how to create solid working relationships in a virtual team with more confidence and less stress!
Marisa Eikenberry: Welcome to another episode of The Long-Distance Worklife. We're here to discuss and answer your questions about how to lead, work and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Marisa Eikenberry. Joining me is Wayne Turmel.
Wayne Turmel: That would be me. Hi.
Marisa: If you have a question that you would like us to answer, you can contact us on our website. Longdistanceworklife.com or e-mail. Email me directly at Marisa@KevinEikenberry.com. Wayne, today we're going to do one of our one topic episodes and I think we should talk about time shifting or how I've also heard somebody at GitLab describe it with asynchronous work.
So we're going to talk about what is it? When is it okay to do that kind of thing? Are you ready?
Wayne: It sounds vaguely science fictiony, right?
Marisa: Well...
Wayne: It's like we're going to time shift. You cannot do that, Captain.
Marisa: Yeah. Sounds like are about to jump into a time machine.
Wayne: Yeah. Basically, time shifting just means in our brains for the last hundred years, we've had this notion that a workday is 8 hours long and it starts at seven, eight, nine. Whatever time we start and it stops at three, four or five based on when you started. And regardless of where you work, every buddy that you work with is essentially on the same time schedule.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: Right. That's kind of been the way it works. And for a lot of people with remote work, this means that people like me start work at 6:00 in the morning so that I am on pace with those of you back East And what we have found as people work remotely and they're working from home and they want more flexibility is that it is a mixed blessing, that kind of scheduling.
Yeah. And so people want to be able to work when it makes sense to them. Some people are morning people. It really doesn't bother me. Starting work at 7 a.m.
Marisa: Well, you're already your morning person, so that makes it.
Wayne: I'm already a morning person. And otherwise, you know, I'm sitting around for a couple of hours doing nothing until my workday starts and my body at 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon. Is that quite enough of that?
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: And so for me, I've actually been time flexing for a while. And, you know, if I have a class at 4:00 in the afternoon, I will take a couple of hours in the afternoon and take the dog for a walk or run my personal errands or do whatever. A lot of this has been stealth flexibility.
Marisa: Yes. I've seen that a lot, like on LinkedIn or something. I know that, you know, people say, hey, I'm going to go take a couple hours to go run an errand or they go on a walk or something. Somebody else I saw they they basically shift their day, kind of like what you were talking about earlier. And so they went outside and worked on their sidewalk in their yard for a couple of hours.
Because they're more productive at night. So they just kind of shifted everything over.
Wayne: And what it boils down to is what is the company's approach? We were talking a couple of shows ago about remote friendly versus remote first. It's the same thing with flexibility, right? You can have all the flexibility you want but if I'm in the office at 9:00 and I want to reach you and you're not there.
Marisa: Right? Yeah. It's not possible.
Wayne: Is your work really?
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: And so this is actually a pretty fundamental shift for a lot of organized machines, especially as they start to grow. Right. Because you start your company and you're living wherever you live. And, you know, you might have to adjust for customer time zones, but basically you work whatever time you work.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: But now you hire somebody who lives in another time zone. Hmm.
Marisa: Yeah. Really changes everything.
Wayne: You know, and so when you think I mean, it's interesting because you work from home a lot, but I know that you maintain kind of traditional workplace hours. Yeah. Tell me, is that a conscious choice, or do you think you ought to do that?
Marisa: I think it's a little both. So, I mean, you know, for those of you who haven't joined us before, like working here at the cabin, I can bear group. This is my first job out of college. Like, I graduated on a Saturday, and my first day was Monday, so I don't really know any different. So when I first started there was definitely this idea of I start my day at eight and it ends at four.
Like, that's it. And I have kind of adjusted that sometimes a little bit as needed to like, you know, OK, I do have to go run an errand super quick or especially when lockdowns and stuff were happening, but you could like get out a little bit. My husband and I would jump in the car, "Hey, let's go get Taco Bell because we've been sitting in our house for two weeks."
Like, let's just get out somehow.
Wayne: For those of you listening, I am all about taking your spouse to lunch. I'm not sure that that would necessarily fit most companies health and wellness policies, but for sure.
Marisa: For sure. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, just little things like that. And I do know that there have been times that I have seen, you know, coworkers and stuff. Hey, I'm going to take the afternoon off or I'm going to, you know, jump off for a couple of hours. I'm going to come back on at night. I did this a little bit when I did work remotely full time many years ago, but it was for a particular project.
And it was just because the majority of the stuff that I was working on, I was working on at night, mostly because I couldn't get interrupted at night. So but that was that was a little bit of a different story. So I do think there's a little bit of I think for me, I like having a set schedule.
I like knowing that I'm going to start at eight and I'm going to stop at four. And that that's just it. I'm going to, you know, take a lunch break at noon. I personally like schedules, but that's just me.
Wayne: Now, I would say that it also helps that you are in the same time zone as the majority of people in the organization.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: So that it's very easy free for you to live on that schedule. There are three I wrote down three things as you were talking. The first is when we're talking about asynchronous work, it kind of raises the issue of how much synchronous work do really need. So if your job is leave me alone, let me get my work done, and I don't need to interact with other people in order to make that happen.
It matters less whether I am sitting at my desk at a given time right Absolutely. What matters and this has to do with a whole approach to leadership and managing performance is are you measuring behaviors such as when do you show up and when do you go to work? Or are you measuring the work that gets done? If reports need to be done Friday, and you don't need my input on that.
I don't really care what time of day you work on it. Yeah, depending on your family situation, depending. In this case, it's just you and Parker, so you want to sync your schedules so that you are both available at the same time and yes, free time. So that is part of the equation. You know, this whole idea of what is the work that needs to be done and what's the best way to do it.
Right. A lot of us started working from home so that we can get stuff done.
Marisa: Right? Yeah. Because the work still has to get done.
Wayne: So you know, when you're thinking about it is what's the work that we're doing? When do we need to be synchronously available? Now, that's going to depend on the job, right? If you're in a customer service job, you need to be available when customers expect you to be available, whatever. Right outside that is, you may have internal customers that you need to be immediately responsive to.
So that's part of the discussion is you setting up what are my work hours, how flexible can I be? Is what are the things that have to happen in order for the work to get done?
Marisa: Yeah, and I think with that, too, I mean, you were mentioning like customer service hours and stuff, and there's a small and small. It's not really quite accurate, but there is a piece of my job that is customer support. And so I have to be around to answer support tickets and stuff like that because, you know, when I'm not doing that, well, somebody else is doing that and that's OK because that's his business.
And, you know, he answers them in the off hours. But to your point, like I try to make sure that I'm available during those hours expecting that that's when I'm going to get the majority of those support tickets. But most of my other projects, it doesn't really matter what time I'm doing those.
Wayne: Yeah. And so the other thing that you said to me, which is kind of interesting, is I take an hour for lunch or I do this. The problem with working from home for a lot of people is they have this in their head that they've got to work. They but they take that to the point where they always have to be available.
And so there are a lot of people who don't take the breaks that they would take in the office. They don't take an hour for lunch. They don't get up from their desk every hour and a bit and stretch their legs and get some oxygen and do what they need to do. So that notion of wanting to be responsive to customers, wanting to be responsive to their teammates.
Afraid they're going to miss a message stops people from actually leveraging the flexibility.
Marisa: Yeah, I was you know, when you're talking about that, I was guilty of that when I first started working for Kevin and you. Yeah. I was gonna say, I know I was and I've gotten a lot better since I got married, but, you know, I know that I was somebody who was in and I accidentally trained the team to expect this of me, which was my fault entirely.
But just this idea of, well, I'm tech support, so I have to always be on well, first of all, nobody's dying in tech support. Like, it can wait until later, almost always. But, you know, so I was setting this expectation up that I was available all the time. So if you sent me a Slack message at 7 p.m., I was going to answer you.
Why? Because I lived alone and I didn't have anything better to do. To be quite honest about it, you know? And so once I got married and I went to remote working full time, one of the things I knew that I had to do was I'm going to walk into, you know, we had a bedroom set up for our office.
And so when I walked into that room, OK, I'm starting my work and at 4:00 I'm leaving and that's it. And I had my Slack set to do not disturb and all of that stuff. I mean, yeah, there were occasions that somebody might message me and I might still respond, but now there's, you know, a new culture essentially that I had to train everybody with for myself personally, that if it's after 4:00 and you send me a message, I'm not seeing it until the next day.
So if it's really important, you need to call me and that's almost never happened.
Wayne: Well, and even if I do see it, I can guarantee and I'm going to answer it.
Marisa: I'm so thankful for the Slack remind feature because there are some times where, yeah, I'll see it, but it's right at the end of my workday. And so it's like, you know, I see this, you know, I might respond, but I'm not taking care of this until the next day. And some Slack will remind me about it the next day, and I go from there.
Wayne: Well, as so often you've said a couple of things just in passing, like does that actually require some thinking? Right. If you're going to time shift as a policy for an organization, for example, what time is everybody else working? You know, if the goal is somebody has to be there to answer the phone or somebody has to be there if you've got three people on your IT Team, all three people don't have to be available at the same time.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: Right. So if you've got somebody on the East Coast and they start their day earlier and somebody on the West Coast who can finish up at the end of the day, great. Make a work absent. You've got somebody who's an early bird is up early anyway. Let them work when they're good and somebody else. As long as the mission critical things are covered.
Marisa: Yeah, it reminds me, I know I mentioned this slightly in passing a little bit ago. So you know, we sell DISC assessments with the Kevin Eikenberry Group and discpersonalitytesting.com and I do customer support on that site and there are only two people on the customer support team. It's me and one of our co-founders. And so, you know, I try to take care of the tickets between eight and 4:00 so that way that can free up him to do the stuff that only he can do.
And, you know, I just message him if I need to, if there's a support ticket that I just don't know how to handle. But after 4:00, that's all him because, you know, A, it's his business. So that makes sense. And then he can adjust and decide, do I want to take these at night or not, you know? And so, I mean, there's also even a little bit of training customers to know like you send me an email 2:00 in the morning because you're in Australia, we're not answering it until 8 a.m. at least.
Wayne: That's, you know, my friends customers in Australia.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: Or clearly.
Marisa: We love them just the same.
Wayne: Right? It's just the reality of the situation. And as the workplace changes, we need to make those kinds of decisions when is it important that somebody be there immediately to respond? And when does a reasonable time frame to respond makes sense? The whole idea of we have to be available to each other synchronously is what is leading to people putting in too many hours and people being on Zoom meetings from beginning of the day to the end of the day.
One of the things about hybrid work and we've talked about this before and we'll continue to say it until people figure it out.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: Is that hybrid is not just like the office, but with webcams.
Marisa: Yes. Even though people are trying to make it seem that way.
Wayne: Well, and they always have because that's what we know. That's how we've always done stuff is we get together and have a meeting.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: For hybrid work to truly work for flexible workspace time flex to work to be able to really happen, we need to reexamine how the team works together. And that means leveraging asynchronous tools. You mentioned whether it's Slack or Microsoft teams, we do a really good job, although it's time to go in and do a cleanup of having very mission specific groups.
Marisa: Yes, yes. Specific channels for different things.
Wayne: So that if you have a question about something that the whole organization doesn't have to be on the clock. In order to answer that, you just need to know that the other person in that conversation is going to answer you.
Marisa: Right?
Wayne: That is much easier to negotiate.
Marisa: Well, and I think our team is also really good about using the Do Not Disturb features in general to to let you know, everybody know, hey, I'm heads down for a couple of hours, I'm going to change my Slack status. And, you know, if you really need me, call me or you know, like I said, I end my day at 4:00, my Slack goes in a Do Not Disturb mode and you can see that I'm not available.
Wayne: The other thing that you said just kind of in passing and I can't stress this enough because this is traumatic for a lot of people is this notion that we teach people how to work with us.
Marisa: Yeah, absolutely.
Wayne: We teach people it's like if I am constantly if I tell you I'm in a meeting, but I'm still answering your messages and answering your emails, I have told you it's perfectly OK.
Marisa: Yeah.
Wayne: To bother me in the middle of a meeting whereas if it says Wayne's in a meeting till 2:00 and you hear from me at 205, the message is I was in a meeting right? As time shifting and flexibility becomes more important, not only do we have to get better about setting boundaries, right? The other people on our team need to respect those boundaries.
Marisa: Yes.
Wayne: And that is it's funny. People will be much better about respecting those boundaries than we are about setting them just right and one of the reasons for burning out when you work from home comes from a bunch of guilt and wanting to take one for the team and being a good teammate to the point where you are draining your own resources and for flexibility to work we need to be able to set expectations for the company.
I mean, let's start with you're getting paid to do a job. Absolutely. So the job is going to have certain expectations. Yes. Now, with that, what requires you to be synchronous with the rest of the team? What does we figure that out? What is the expected availability? What is the expected response? Time to messages and whatever what are the tools that we are expected to use?
Marisa: Right, Google Drive, Slack, whatever. And I know there's a lot of asynchronous tools coming out all the time, too.
Wayne: Yeah. And new tools every day. And that's a whole other a different. That's a whole other source of service that we don't want to get into. But, you know, these are the things that we need to determine. These are the things and they may be up for review.
Marisa: So with that, I know that you're mentioning a lot of stuff that, you know, us as workers can do and, you know, ask our leaders about. But I guess from a leaders perspective, how do you set these boundaries? I mean, you know, are some people just waiting until they come up? Should we be trying to make that culture ahead of time?
Wayne: There are a couple of problems that's a fabulous question. Yes. The organization should be thinking about this. And if you are in HR or you are in operations and you're trying to figure out how do this work, start doing your research. There's plenty of good work out there. Long distance leader or Teammate.
Marisa: Links in the show notes.
Wayne: And in bunches of other content which will tell you what you should be think about. The problem is that a lot of senior executives have never worked in a flexible environment. They've always worked sometimes literally nine to five.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: But they've always worked in a highly structured environment. And so if you're coming from that environment and you're trying to adjust, you don't know what you don't know that's true.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: So having the company make all the decisions makes no sense, right? What needs to happen is you need to sit with your team and you need to say, OK, what is the work that needs to get done? What is the mission critical work that absolutely has to be done synchronously what can be done asynchronously with a giant asterisk and what doesn't matter where it happens and when that happens.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: Set those boundaries, set those expectations and let people tell you how this works. And then and this is the part that people stress about just because you set a policy doesn't mean that's written in stone by a month, two months, three months. Is the work getting done? Our customer complaints rising is there you know, is working with the other parts of the organization, creating a problem and then reexamine it and do the process again until you find something that works?
Marisa: Yeah, we always reserve the right to be smarter.
Wayne: There you go. I think looking at the time, good lord, as always, that's probably it. But, you know, if you're looking for the the nutshell of this whole thing, it's what's the work that needs to be done, really not your preference, what really needs to be done synchronously and asynchronously.
Marisa: And sometimes meetings are not it.
Wayne: Not it. And sometimes they are right right. So here's the thing. If you have, if you're in the middle of your flex time and there needs to be a meeting, does it matter that you are in a baseball cap and t shirt? Probably not.
Marisa: Yeah.
Wayne: Right. Do the meeting. Do what you need to do and go back to your life up until it's time for you to do more work. So this is going to be an ongoing process. We're going to constantly be learning about this, and we need to be open to constant reexamining in order to find the optimum way to make time shifting work sounds great.
Marisa: Thank you so much for answering this question today, Wayne. I think we had a great conversation today.
Wayne: Well, you answered as much of it as I did, which is the way this is supposed to work, frankly.
Marisa: Again, we're getting smarter all the time. So thank you so much for listening to another episode of the Long-Distance Worklife. If you'd like, we'd love if you would write, review and subscribe and tell your friends about us. We're on YouTube and everywhere that you get your podcasts, you can also connect with us at longdistanceworklife.com.
And we would love to answer your questions in a future episodes so you can either contact us on the website or email me directly at Marisa@Kevin Eikenberry.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
Abhinav Chugh from Peoplebox joins Wayne to answer the question, "Why do people resist using technology designed to make managing easier?"
Peoplebox is an OKR & Performance Management Platform that help you solve for alignment, team performance and engagement to drive exceptional business outcomes.
Join us for a powerful, 4-part video series titled, Demystifying Remote Leadership. You will learn how to create solid working relationships in a virtual team with more confidence and less stress!
Wayne Turmel: Everybody. Welcome, welcome once again to the Long-Distance Worklife podcast. I am your humble servant, Wayne Turmel. This is the podcast where we look at remote work, technology, leadership and just surviving, thriving, keeping the weasels at bay in this crazy world of remote work and all the changes associated with it. This is one of our Marisa-free episodes not that that makes it better, just different because I am talking to a longtime colleague of mine, somebody I've known for a while, and I think it's high time we had this conversation.
So I am being joined by Abhi Chugh, who you should be able to see on the screen. There he is. And we are talking about the metrics that managers need to follow and how do we do that and how does software play a role and why does that freak people out? So that's what we're going to be chatting about.
Joining us from Bangalore, Abhi, my friend, how are you?
Abhinav Chugh: I'm great. Thank you for having me.
Wayne: Thank you for being had. So very quickly, tell the folks what Peoplebox does.
Abhi: Thank you. So what our vision is to build an operating system of strategy, execution for high growth companies. And that sounds like a very complicated setting. So I'll make it very simple a lot of time in companies, and especially as remote heads of companies, people, different departments are very misaligned, you know, are not really sure what are their strategic priorities, what our key goals.
So just imagine a central system in the company. Any company is going pretty fast or and in that central system, all your strategic priorities, all your cross-functional goals, all your initiatives are aligned tracked and achieved. And that is a system we are trying to create or we have build, which helps companies execute their strategy faster and get get better business results.
Wayne: Now, that, of course, sounds fabulous. Like all technology sounds fabulous because you're building it to solve a problem. And Lord knows misalignment is a problem as you roll it out in companies, especially remote first and hybrid companies, what are the misalignments? What are people missing out on that they need the help with?
Abhi: I think I think it's a great question and a lot of times people don't understand what exactly is misalignment. People think that a misalignment is all about a lot of leadership or the employees not knowing what our number one goal is. And I don't think that's true because a goal is usually a number. It could be a revenue, it could be a user margin.
It is generally a number and leaders make sure that they communicate that number so frequently that everybody knows you want to achieve hundred million dollars in revenue. We want to achieve 3.5% margin or we want to be on a team of 50 million monthly active users. That's very easy. I think the misalignment happens when people don't know what our focus is.
So if you and this is what I always to say to the founders that are top leadership in the middle of the night and ask them What are our top three priorities for this quarter? And see how they answer it and how misaligned they are, a lot of times you can come back and say, What are our leaders?
Our founders are misaligned, all while our one of our co-founders said this and we said this. So a lot of misalignment happens on what our focus or strategic priorities is and what is actually made. It really was is the whole pandemic and the remote one because no longer now employees are in the same room, they're working from home and misaligned is now more visible.
Wayne: And yeah, I think there's a couple of things that have happened. And you point out the pandemic. It's kind of the the watershed moment, right? There was the before times and now there's now there's now in the before times you had misalignment across teams, across functions. But I think with remote work, people become very focused on their nuclear team and rightly so.
Right. We're trying to get the team through this and stay in communication. But the cross-pollination with other departments and other teams doesn't happen the way it did when you had to look at each other in the cafeteria.
Abhi: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that the the place where we come in, which is to build that central system where across the line goals are tracked, it fragmented. I would say two things which change this. I mean, imagine maybe five or ten years ago and think of any company like that the bold tracking happens in silos. Every department has their own maybe a spreadsheet or a dashboard on a PPV and usually more where you can't find or go to a place where you see how stated goals are aligned with the product goals.
Our design goals are aligned, but it just doesn't happen now. Four things really changed. This one was this whole introduction to the framework of OKRs. You know, primarily invented by, of course, Andy Grove and Intel, but made famous by John Deere and Google. And then you see all these amazing hypergrowth startups like Spotify, Twitter, LinkedIn, adopting it, you know, and startups are usually at the forefront of adopting it because again, for them, execution is everything they have, everything right.
Wayne: OK, so for for the uninitiated, let's not we try on this show not to go down the jargon road. OKR stands for.
Abhi: OKRs are goals framework stands for objective and key result. So it's, it's, it's drastically different from the traditional goals like KPIs, which is key performance indicators or PR which is key results area. What ours make sure is that your goals also have strategy in it. So to give you an example that suppose you are a company who are at stage $10 million revenue and you want to in the next one year or two $20.5 million.
So you will put your number one company goals at $25 million revenue from current $10 million that's a typical KPI. OK got it what. OK and goes and says no that's not a great goal. The reason why that's not a great goal is because that doesn't answer the question how, how are you going to do that? What is it that you want to focus on which will help you achieve?
So primarily breaks the ball into two different pieces. One is the objective where do you want to go and what are your focus on strategy? Around it? So, you know, that could be like become the the most customer centric company in India or become the fastest stay CRM system. So it is your strategy, which is underline it could be anything for Amazon.
It's customer service for Google, it's innovation. What what they actually highlight is the focus OK? And that's make it really different. And then the result is just the number. How do you measure it? How do you know that you are going to go and achieve that? So again, it is it's a very famous very one of the fastest growing sort of framework.
Almost every company now from start ups to the Nike's and the IBMs and the, you know, cap Gemini of the world are adopting it. And that's what I see. So that was the sort of the first step towards building this growth aligned goal system. OK, but so.
Wayne: We're going to start I'm going to stop you there because that's fine at a high level. We're talking about strategies now we need to take it down to the managers.
Abhi: Yes. Yes.
Wayne: And so the company has goals and strategies and we've got stuff in place and now it's dropped in my lap as the manager. What I know that people box has the structure and the the ways of putting all this in, but it's always what problem are you trying to solve? Right. So what are managers and teams not doing?
They get in the way of executing that. Absolutely. And aligning it.
Abhi: I think you ask a really good question. What is the problem you're trying to solve? And ultimately, when you look at either the managers or the the leadership or the business heads that are going to try to solve what we call the class, the results and the retention, which is everybody is aligned from an employee to his or her manager to he's our manager to each other of the leadership.
They all want this do we want faster results? They want better retention. OK, well, when it comes to managers, you know, what are the challenges that they face in achieving better results? And retention? And the number one challenge that they face themselves is misalignment, all the employees aligned or our fear about how their work is aligned for the overall company purpose.
Are they all working towards what are the companies number one, focus on Friday, you know, and having that clarity is very important. When we run engagement surveys, one of the very important questions we ask is how happy are you working at the company or how motivated are you working under the manager they're a very high level question. But when you dig deep on why they are unhappy working with the company, the number one thing comes is the work God.
If they are not really clear about their role, they're not really clear about their job description. They're not really clear that they're really amazed by the company vision, what the company is doing, but they're not really clear that how the work, the day to day tasks that I am doing, how's that blind to the word confusion and that problem is solved.
If somehow you can build a system which makes sure that any employee, even an intelligent company, is able to align his or her work all the way to the company's strategic priorities or their overall mission. And that's the challenge we try to solve, and that helps manage it to a great level because that makes sure that we are all going in the same direction that the work doesn't happen in silos.
There's no chaos. And we all you know, while you are collaborating or while we are, you know, working in a unit, actually, we all are working towards the same people.
Wayne: So it makes perfect sense on some level. If, you know, I'm struggling to do this on my own, it makes sense that there is a structure and there are steps and procedures to help me do that. And and whenever a company puts in a tool like this, I have seen it time and time and time again. That everybody agrees this is a problem.
Everybody agrees that this would solve it, and they immediately fight the technology they immediately resist having to follow the procedures, even though what was happening before wasn't working. There is just something about codifying and making this that much of a process that seems to make people crazy. What has been people's experience? Not just with PeopleSoft, but you've been in this business a long time.
Why do you think there is that resistance and how does an organization overcome it? If they want people to use the darn thing?
Abhi: I think that's a wonderful question. And I agree with you that the one of the biggest challenge in software, and especially in software, would change if it's bring some sort of a change management is a huge resistance. And I think the only way to go and solve that resistance, if you understand that where that resistance coming from. And I just think our example, you want to build a system where all your cross functional goals which means your marketing, your company goals, your initiatives by the product and engineering that all at once.
OK now what does that mean? Does that mean that if I'm an engineer who is working in say to like JIRA or if I'm a sales guy who's working in a CRM system like a sales for the HubSpot are we going to double entries? I have to go in a built in Salesforce and then I have to go and do it in incentive system that just bad.
I mean, I would myself resist that because you are just increasing my job. Oh, and one of the major challenges happens when some of these software systems create more or heads and more work for the people, you know, just to solve a certain problem. And that has been our experience that if you ask people to do some things so that it solves a larger problem, you are sitting on a failure.
And what we try to do there is to make technology. Your friend and not the fool any more and say that is the best way to go and solve that problem is through some magically easy tracking of goals to deep integration. What that means is that imagine that you are a sales guy and you use sales force and you go and enter everything you know, all your ideas, all your leads or all your theories into the sales for the moment.
You do that through the integration, through an invisible software. The central system is automatically updated. That's a really, really welcome move because now I don't have to go and double one. And in fact, when I present to my leadership, I don't have to call people, so I don't download. I don't have to export something and pasted in a PDF or a spreadsheet.
I already have already made data available for me. So but the answer to this adoption or the resistance challenge is to how do you make it so magically easy for people to do their work and reduce the time? I give a very good example. Let's just take a simple example of business use in companies. Almost every company they go through this monthly business reviews on a quarterly business review, and that generally happens on PowerPoints, you know, parties and theme starts creating the people.
It is two weeks ago they have to put the narrative they have to put again, they have to go to different tools, take the screenshot, copy pasted, and many of the time when they present the data, it's obsolete. It's like one record, OK, and a lot of effort goes out. Intention is that how can we make this new or happen within hours and make the data really light?
So it sounds both the problem. It's not the leadership problem, but the data is naive and it tells the employees and the business heads or the managers problems that they don't have to work. And that's our way of solving and overcoming these challenges.
Wayne: So certainly having to stop the redundancy in the multiple thing, I mean, even even having multiple passwords to remember is enough to make people crazy.
So let's as as we get to the end of our chat here, talk to me about the two or three main behave was that if there was a system, obviously they should use minimal box, but assuming that they have some other system or there's something in place, what are the two or three behaviors that managers can change or perform that will help with alignment that maybe they aren't doing now?
Abhi: Yeah, I think I think the first thing that we have learned, and it's a very top down thing, I think I think managers have to have a certain constraint there because if from the leadership they don't have a way to align their cross-functional goals, there is very little managers can do. You know, if I'm a sales head and there is no way I can go and align my goals with the product team or with the design team or with the operation team, there is very little my sales manager or the product manager can do about it.
Wayne: And it's very natural and it's very natural then to control what you can control. Right. And the team becomes more insular and more nuclear.
Abhi: So so one of the things that we try and do is to go to the leadership or go to the business heads and say that OK, this is this this needs to start from you. When you set your goal to that are quarterly goals or semiannual goals and you've got to set it in a more aligned and collaborative and that results will be magical.
And then look at all the companies who have adopted opioids or any on any cross align frameworks. But once that happens, then it is so magically for the managers because now they have the visibility that just wasn't. I give a very simple example that is a problem in every company so salespeople in every company are dependent, acutely dependent on product.
They want a certain features because their customers or their leaders are asking. But they have no way to view what is the status of that particular feature. So you pick an example, let's suppose you are of your sales person in a software company and all your want to be customers are hot leads are asking for, say, Microsoft integration.
So you call a product manager and say, Hey, we need that environment. You say, OK, we already have it in the roadmap well, there's no way for you to know what is the status of that because that project is being run in Dev Toolset JIRA or Microsoft Azure, which as a sales guy I don't have access to, you know, so the only option now I have is to keep calling the manager, keep calling the engineers and say, Hey, what's the status?
And if for some reason, if this is delayed, there's no way for sales guy to know. And I keep promising people it's going to come in, bite me back very bad. Now, the best impact of this central system, Federal Budget Alliance, is that I as a sales guy, can go and see everything, whatever happening in any department without even me having an nexus and that creates this unbelievable visibility and focus so that we all go into the same direction.
OK, so as a manager, because I have this system I'm now no longer working in Silo, the collaboration improves, the alignment improves, and that obviously makes sure that there is focus and everybody goes into the same direction nor does that just imagine I as a manager, when I do my one on one, I have a clear eye. And on all the goals, you know, how they are aligned.
What are the red flags that these flags are coming from? They may be coming from different departments. When we are doing our performance review, we are goes out of the center of it. So any system that holds as an input performance reviews, incentive management, rewards management one on one, you now have that system on a platter. You don't have to follow up people who update your goals, update the progress that system is already made.
So as a manager, my job to become very easy as an H.R. My jobs become very easy.
Wayne: Well, and of course, one of the problems with goals is that because we aren't looking at them, we don't have a simple way to check them. Right. It tends to get lost in the conversation of just the regular one on ones. And the larger goals often don't get covered. Abhi, I can't thank you enough. This has been really, really eye opening.
I mean, first of all, the whole problem of alignment. And then second of all, why people resist tools that could help, i think is is just worthy of raising the issue. If nothing else. Thank you very much. We are going to have links to Peoplebox and to your contact and all that sort of thing on our website and on the show notes.
If you go to long distance work life.com, you will find all of this. We will have links to Peoplebox and to Abhi. Thank you for listening to the Long-Distance Worklife. If you have questions, comments, vicious personal attacks, but especially questions we urge you. We have a spot on our website. Get your questions in and we will answer them in one of our Q&A sessions like we're going to have next week with Marisa you know the deal.
If you listen to podcasts, please like and subscribe tell people about it. We really, really want others to hear these really good conversations. And of course you can reach me Wayne@KevinEikenberry.com or Marisa@KevinEikenberry.com and all of our episodes are available on long distance work life dot com. On behalf of Marisa, on behalf of Abhi Chugh thank you.
Thank you for joining us and we hope to see you on the next episode of the long distance work life.
Returning to the office is inducing some anxiety for people who haven't been back for the last couple of years, but what if you have never been to the office? Marisa joins Wayne to discuss what new workers might expect and how you can help them be successful when they're just starting out. (Or have only been remote before.)
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: Hi, everybody. Once again, we are here with the Long-Distance Worklife podcast. My name is Wayne Turmel. With me is Marisa Eikenberry.
Marisa: Hi, everybody.
Wayne: People get very upset when Marisa isn't here, so we're very excited that she is. This is the podcast where we talk about how to work, lead and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. And there are a lot of questions about those things, and that's what this episode is about. This is one of our Marisa gets to ask Wayne anything questions.
And I kind of sort of know what we're going to talk about. But not much. So Marisa have at it, lady.
Marisa: Yeah. So I thought, especially in this whole idea of, you know, we've got return to office is a hot topic right now, just like, you know, and people are graduating and all that kind of thing. I mean, we're recording this in May. So I wanted to talk about what are the expectations of new workers now. You know, people who are just now entering into some of these remote teams or they've been around for a bit, now they've got to return to the office.
So I thought we could kind of touch on that a little bit, maybe like what they expect and what's professional and what's not, that kind of thing.
Wayne: Yeah, it's really interesting, actually. The last couple of years has created some havoc. And as we're returning to the office and and this is information coming to us from our clients you know, it was originally when people got sent home during the COVID Diaspora, we got- they said, well, it's just like working in the office except.
Marisa: And if you've never worked in the office...
Wayne: Well, that's the problem is over the last two years, we have brought in a whole group of people who maybe don't have that experience.
Marisa: Yeah. Or they've only done an internship. So it's not quite the same thing.
Wayne: Yeah, exactly. Right. And so, you know, you can't say, well, it's just like when you were in the office and they go, Yeah, OK.
Marisa: Exactly.
Wayne: And it's interesting because this often falls under the generational differences problem, right? And the grumpy old guys like me are like these darn kids don't know how to, you know, how things are done and they don't know how things are done in the office and and we're not wrong.
Marisa: But how can they know if they've never been there?
Wayne: Yeah.
Marisa: So I think we're not giving them enough grace either.
Wayne: When you're absolutely not giving them enough grace. That's that's a grumpy old man problem.
Marisa: Yeah. "OK, Boomer." Kind of deal.
Wayne: Going back to the dawn of time, right? But it's a real thing. And one of the ways of combating this that organizations are doing, which makes a lot of sense, is that they are allowing remote and flexible work based on how long you've been around. So when you are new to the organization, we're going to want to keep you close to the mothership.
We're going to want you to meet people. You're going to want you to see how things are done here. We're going to want you by mentoring and by just osmosis. It's amazing how much stuff we suck up out of the air around us that nobody ever says out loud. But if you work here, you just know.
Marisa: Yeah, you figure it out.
Wayne: We talk about culture a lot, and culture is a $10 word for it. This is how we do stuff here.
Marisa: Yes.
Wayne: The problem is that here the definition of here has taken a beating.
Marisa: Yeah.
Wayne: Do you mean this is how we do it in the office at 8021 Westover. Or do we mean this is how we do it as the Kevin Eikenberry group as an organization. And a lot of this hasn't been planned. I mean, leaders were thrown into the deep end. We're trying to make it work. We're hiring people.
You know, the people we're hiring know technology better than we do in some cases. So we assume that along with knowing how to use the technology, they know how to use the technology. And that's not necessarily true.
Marisa: Right. You've talked about this in previous episodes that. Yeah, just because you know how to how to technically use a program, email, whatever, doesn't mean that you know how to use it effectively in an organization or professionally.
Wayne: Exactly. Right. And so if we think about new people coming into the office and working from home, right?
Marisa: Yes.
Wayne: When somebody comes into the office for the first time, they often have to adjust. What is my working schedule like? It's a little bit unfair to take somebody who has never worked nine to five and let them send their own work schedule.
Marisa: Right. They don't really have anything to compare it to.
Wayne: You don't have anything to compare it to. You don't know what works real well and what doesn't. You don't know you're probably betting that more things can be done asynchronously than probably can fair. And that's assuming that you know what you're doing and you don't have the kind of panicky questions that newbies at any job are going to have, let alone people who are brand new to the workforce.
So I'm actually fairly sympathetic to organizations that say no, when you come to work for us, you're going to start in the office and then we're eventually going to take the reins off. And assuming your productivity is up and your professionalism is maintained and all of that stuff, we're going to then let you have more flexibility and get your life back.
But we want you fairly close at the beginning.
Marisa: Right? That absolutely makes sense there.
Wayne: I have a lot of sympathy for that. It does create an issue, though, when you are hiring people who are remote first. You know, as we start to the beautiful thing about being able to hire remote workers is that you are not bound by geography.
Marisa: Yes.
Wayne: Right. If the best available person is in Denver or Belize or whatever. Right. And more and more people are choosing to be digital nomads that's great. The thing is, what a lot of people are telling us is when we're hiring remote first we are not taking kids out of school.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: We are refusing to hire anybody who hasn't already worked remotely for a couple of years.
Marisa: Yeah. So that way they kind of know what they're doing a little bit.
Wayne: And so we've created this black hole in the middle and it's you know, it's the time honored tradition. We only hire people with experience. Well, how do you get experience if you don't?
Marisa: Exactly.
Wayne: And this is a very big deal if you're talking about diversity and inclusion and hiring nontraditional people in your organization, yes. Whether those are people with physical disabilities, you know, people who culturally have not been part of your organization, and that's a very real thing.
Marisa: Yeah, I've seen a lot of people talk about that recently as far as inclusivity goes, especially with people who, you know, have some sort of physical disability or mental disability or something that working from home or working remotely is more inclusive to them, even though they're not in the office all the time. So you might think that's the other way around.
Wayne: Yeah. Theoretically, remote work should be more inclusive. The fact of the matter is, though, if you are concerned about cultural fit, if you are concerned that they need to have X amount of experience you are no longer going to people who aren't already in that job pool, which defeats the whole purpose.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: So how do we then help these darn kids who don't know what it's like to work in an office? And we forget, for those of us that have done this our whole lives, that it is a completely unnatural experience. And we need to learn things like doors opened, doors closed, you know, when you just walk down the hall and bother somebody in accounting and when you go through chain of command.
Marisa: When do you pick up the phone versus the Slack message?
Wayne: Exactly right.
Those types of things which you often pick up kind of in the air or you start to do something. And old Bob, who's been there 20 years you know, gives you the hairy eyeball and you go, Oh, maybe I shouldn't do that, right?
Marisa: But you don't know any better.
Wayne: But so what happens in this is the point I think that we're trying to get to with this question is it's important that you work with your new employees to say These are the things that absolutely need to happen. How are we going to quickly involve you in the real work of the team and help you get to know people and get you comfortable to the point where it's OK to ask people questions and people will be proactive about mentoring you?
Marisa: Yes.
Wayne: And that kind of thing, I think and I know we've talked about this before, but I'm also not foolish enough to think that everybody slavishly listens to every one of these episodes.
Marisa: Fair.
Wayne: One of the things that we do at the Kevin Eikenberry group that to me is so natural and so many people don't is when somebody joins our organization, the first thing they do, their first job is to individually reach out to every member of the team and set up a half hour. Webcam conversation has to be a webcam conversation, and it has to be with every member of the team, regardless if you're going to work with that person or not.
Marisa: Absolutely. And well, and some of us who I know, I work in Indianapolis, so when I started, I was in Indianapolis. And so there are a few of those people. I actually did those conversations face to face. But we're also talking about pre-COVID times.
Wayne: Well, and you know, when you can do that, the problem with the face to face piece is that it usually happens much earlier than the rest of it. Yeah, I mean, think about what happens we have a team meeting. Everybody's in the building. We have a team. Hey, everybody, Marisa's joined the team. Everybody say hi to Marisa and everybody says, "Hi Marisa" and then they scatter and some are working in the office and some are working remotely.
And Marisa may never talk to the people who work remotely until they come back into the office.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: How do we intentionally jump start those connections? How do we intentionally identify the people that Marisa is going to be comfortable going to? I can assign somebody as a mentor, right? Oh, Bob's been here a million years. We're going to make Bob her mentor.
Marisa: But if we don't click, that could be a problem.
Wayne: But you don't click, you know, for whatever reason, right? Right. And it doesn't have to be anything traumatic, really, does it? You just don't.
Marisa: We just might have different communication styles.
Wayne: Exactly. Right. So, you know, makes sure that the more people you're interacting with as richly as possible and then identify who are the people. You know, one of the things that managers don't do is debrief those conversations. So what did you learn? And you're going, what is Wayne's problem? That's where I or you know, I really like Angie.
What's her story? And that helps me as the manager to think, aha, maybe we need to foster this relationship, which I wouldn't normally think of.
Marisa: Yeah. Because clearly those people click. Yeah, absolutely.
Wayne: And also talk to the people who, you know, she seems really but she doesn't have a lot of experience in this or she was asking a lot of questions about a certain topic that should tell me a ha. We need to bolster her experience and her training in that particular area. It's really interesting when people join the workforce, they come in at all kinds of different places some have.
I was lucky my mother was a secretary back in the days when there were secretaries and she taught me what it is to work in an office. Even though I'd never worked in an office, I knew how to take a phone message.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: Right. Even at home. We answered the phone. Wayne Turmel speaking, Who do you wish to speak to.
Marisa: So you were ready.
Wayne: And you knew when you take a phone message, this is what I knew, that when I got into the office, I was like, OK, I'm going to take a phone message.
Marisa: Yeah.
Wayne: If you if that wasn't part of the air you breathed.
Marisa: Then you'd be at a disadvantage for sure.
Wayne: Be at a disadvantage. And then people think you're an idiot, which is not fair, right? You can't you know, you can't say a bear is smarter than a fish because a fish can't climb a tree.
Marisa: Right. Kind of in a similar fashion. You know, in your case, like you learn how to work in offices beforehand, like I watched my mom work in nontraditional environments and small businesses my entire life. And so for me, you know, thankfully, I started working in an organization that technically is a little bit nontraditional. I went to the office.
The office is a house. Nobody lives there, but it's a house, you know, and so some of those little cultural things, but not corporate things I was already used to anyway. It's a different thought process. It's on the opposite spectrum, but it is kind of similar in a way.
Wayne: So I think to, you know, make this practical for people because they're not that fascinated with our childhood furniture. Although why? Why not? I say I think if we're going to make this practical for people, a couple of things. One is find out what is what experience do people have working in the kind of environment that you work in.
Ask them what their concerns are yes. You know, during the interview process, having the interview process may not be the right time necessarily. Simply because people tend, oh, I have no flaws, you know, what's.
Marisa: Maybe onboarding.
Wayne: What's your biggest flaw? I care too much. Oh.
Marisa: I'm a perfectionist.
Wayne: Yeah, you know, it's not. But we've been trained to answer these questions. But as part of the intake process, you don't take the time to ask people what has been their experience with. And this is where experience based interviewing is so important it's not just your attitude, it's what have you done? Or in this particular, you know, if you're working on something and you realize that there's a problem, who's your first call?
Gotcha. Right? Those types of things will help set this up. And if you're in h.R. Or learning and development, these are the kinds of trainings that people are going to need and they don't some of it should be done in a class environment, whether that's a virtual or an in-person, because the social learning component is so important and there's so much to be said for learning in cohorts for working across the organization and building relationships and all of that stuff.
But really, as we're bringing in people who don't have that workplace environment, listen for where there are gaps in the knowledge.
Marisa: And maybe also kind of think about what those could be. And, you know, as an example, you know, I've been working for this organization now for eight years but when I hit right around year five, year six, it never occurred to me that I should have been talking to my manager about, Hey, I've been working here for five years now.
Like, you know, do people get more days, more days off at this point, or are there other negotiations that need to happen? That would have never occurred to me because this is my first job. And I had another coworker who had talked to me later and she was like, oh, my gosh, I didn't even think about the fact you wouldn't have even known to ask this.
You know, here's what you need to do next time or something like that. So, I mean, even if they're not, quote unquote, new, you may want to consider those things as well.
Wayne: Well, one of the things that we do and we're near the end of our time is when we set up mentors. We assume that people are only going to need those mentors for the first month month and a half.
Marisa: And even after.
Wayne: And then the mentor gets.
Marisa: Don't know.
Wayne: The mentor gets sprung to go back to work and not have to worry about, you know.
Marisa: Mentor somebody else.
Wayne: And suddenly you're expected to fly instead of doing what I should do is make you somebody else's problem.
Marisa: Yes.
Wayne: Because the mentoring and the learning and the things that we need for our careers and such are ongoing forever. So that's probably if again, if you're taking stuff away and looking in our show notes and you should jolly well be looking on our show notes at longdistanceworklife.com, that's the thing is how long does your mentoring go on?
And, you know, at different stages of people's onboarding and career, do we need to reexamine who does that for that?
Marisa: Absolutely. Yeah, it needs to be an ongoing conversation.
Wayne: Speaking of longdistanceworklife.com, that's where you will find the show notes for this show. You'll also find on that page at the bottom a place to ask questions. And Marisa is actually doing a great job of scanning these every week and picking out the questions that might become one of these ask, me anything kind of interviews so in the meantime, please, like and subscribe.
If you have not yet read The Long-Distance Letter and The Long Distance-Teammate, that's probably a really good place to start. You can buy those Amazon or wherever fine books are sold. You can also reach out to me Wayne@KevinEikenberry.com or Marisa@KevinEikenberry.com. That is this week's episode of The Long-Distance Worklife.
Marisa Anything you want to say before we release people into the wild?
Marisa: I do also want to say that we also have a free video series called Demystifying Demystifying Remote Work, correct?
Wayne: Yes. Yes.
Marisa: It's a four video series. Sorry, I forgot the name for half a second. It's a four video series. It's totally free. We'll also have a link for that in the show notes too, to help you guys continue to live and thrive in a remote and hybrid team.
Wayne: There you go. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next episode.
Have you ever dreamed of being a digital nomad but felt like it was unattainable? It's not always lazing by the pool and soaking up the sun in Bali. Wayne interviews Kevin Eikenberry Group teammate, Angie Thompson, who has been traveling with her husband in an RV fulltime since 2019. They talk about what led to the decision to become a digital nomad, some of the concerns that had to be discussed with her boss, as well as her advice to those who would like to pursue being a digital nomad themselves.
What are the things you would tell someone who would like to be a digital nomad?
Join us for a powerful, 4-part video series titled, Demystifying Remote Leadership. You will learn how to create solid working relationships in a virtual team with more confidence and less stress!
Wayne: You're right.
Angie: I have an official title. There's my cat in the background. I have official title of director of process engagement. And what that means is I build process automation to manage our clients, both our clients and our team members. So I help our clients get connected to what they need online, and I help our team members stay connected to our clients with digital information, database management, that kind of thing.
Wayne: Now, first of all, she has been doing this for a very long time and extremely well. But the important thing is about a year and a half, two years ago, you made the decision, which shocked the heck out of everybody, given the job that you do, which sounds very much like you should be holed up somewhere in a secure facility or maybe even in the office with access to the boss.
But you decided to do something two years ago and tell everybody what you did.
Angie: So it was kind of a strange convergence of events, and it all actually came together at the same time, which was odd. My husband and I first of all, I am not a camper. I don't like the outside. I don't like bugs. But my husband and I decided we wanted to maybe think about RVing and we bought an RV and did the weekend warrior thing and absolutely loved it.
And then we started following all these people on YouTube who live in their RV full time and they travel around full time. And boy, wouldn't that be great? What an exciting life. And I don't know how we would ever do that. And in 2018, the 2018-2019, basically school year we were empty nesters. We had two kids at college, one a senior and one freshman and loved it.
Some people hate being empty nesters and we just really kind of found our groove and really enjoyed it. And then that oldest child graduated and moved back home.
Wayne: As, as one does.
Angie: You know. Yeah. And, and I love her, love her to death but we kind of got used to in that short year being empty nesters. And the more we watched the YouTube stars that were doing it all the time, you know, the bigger the dream became. And all the while in the background was the memory that in
February 17th of 2006. My dad retired at age 59 from his coat and tie sales job. Didn't have to work, but was planning on learning some woodworking skills. He found a handyman he was going to work with and redo doors and window frames and maybe make some furniture like he was going to dig in with his hands and really enjoy it.
February 17th, 2007. My dad passed away after fighting stomach cancer for ten months. He and my mom had planned for a great retirement and saved and they'd been really smart and the thing that they couldn't account for and save up was time and since then, that's just been brewing in the back of my mind of why put it off?
What can I do to make sure that that doesn't happen to me? My mom a few years later was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and she's now in an assisted living facility, and has to have help caring for herself. So neither of them got to live their retirement dream of what a great life it was going to be once you didn't have to work anymore.
And they saved the money. And, you know, there were a lot of things they went without so that they could save the money for retirement. And then they didn't get any. And so my husband and I kind of looked at each other and said, "You know what, 'traveling around in an RV is something retired people do.' Is a load hogwash! Let's just do it." You know, why not?
So we we did a lot of research and we did a lot of planning. And three days after Christmas in 2019, we left our house in central Indiana. And in the terrific care of my daughter and her then boyfriend who is now her husband, they rent our house that's one of the things that full time RVers struggle with.
How do you afford both kinds of things? Well, that's how we afforded it because our daughter and son in law are paying rent now.
Wayne: One of the other ways that you've afforded it is that you kept your job, which, as I say, is central to this organization. I am not kidding when I say Angie is largely the glue that keeps us functioning as an organization. So you're very tight. You have your finger on a lot of buttons that are important to me.
I have to be. But seriously, I know how seriously you take your job. So what were the things that you were concerned about? First of all, in thinking about doing the job you do, which is very connection heavy with being this gad about RVer.
Angie: Oh, it's entirely connection heavy. There's nothing I can do with my job that doesn't require an Internet connection. So that was the first thing prior to actually going on the road. I had worked basically from home for Kevin for ten years, so I already knew that I could do my job anywhere. I wanted to. And we had actually tried a couple of trips where I didn't take the full week off.
We went to Pigeon Forge or someplace, and I worked a few days and I took a few days off and we adventured in the evening, and my husband kind of sat out by the campfire and just enjoyed his days in the peace and quiet. And so we had done a little bit of remote working from the RV, but the, the the biggest single unknown factor is the Internet connectivity.
A lot of parks have free Wi-Fi, but it's not very good. It's not very strong it's not very reliable. And so we prior to even doing this, that was one of the very first things we researched. OK, how's the best way to get a consistent Wi-Fi connection? That's just hot spotting from your phone because everybody knows that's going to run out eventually, you're going to get either cut off on your data or throttled.
Wayne: OK, so that's the WiFi connection.
Yeah, the Wi-Fi connection is part of it. Now you have to go in and you are blessed in that. Kevin, besides being a fine boss in general, you know, we literally wrote the book on remote work. So you know, he was predisposed, I'm sure. But how did that conversation go? What were your concerns? What were his concerns? How did that talk go?
Angie: Well. I did the best I could to try and pre think, what are all questions that are going to come up? What will be his concerns and how can I address them? How many of these can I address in advance? And and basically presold and when I Kevin and I have the great relationship that's not superior subordinate I'm not exactly an equal peer but he doesn't treat me like, you know, a slave in the galley. There's respect and there's consideration and he's known for a long time- I mean I started working for him shortly after my dad passed away.
So he's known all about how my life has progressed. And we've had personal conversations about things going on in each other's lives. And so we're kind of on that level. To be honest with you, I didn't ask for permission. I said, "Here's what we're thinking about doing and here are the challenges that it could create. And here's how I think I can solve the ones I've come up with. And what do you think?"
Wayne: Give me an example of one or two problems that you had to kind of preemptively address in order to make him feel better?
Angie: Well, I did have to. I mean, of course, the connectivity was an issue, like if I can't get on the Internet, I can't do anything. We long before that had centralized file storage on Google, on Google Drive. So all my files, all of all of any of the work that I would be doing is accessible by anybody else at any given time.
We had also long before that implemented Slack. So we had a lot of communication techniques in place standards because almost all of our team is remote anyway. They're not on the road they're in their houses. But almost all of our team works from home at some point, most of them. Right? So we already had established when do you tell people that you're not available?
How do you do that? Do you email them? Do you slack them? Do you call them? When were we going to travel what if what if we were actually traveling on a workday? And how was that going to work out?
And I quite honestly said it's going to take some more diligent communication on my part to tell the team when I am and am not available. And it's going to take some more diligent reading of those notices on their part to know and that's, you know, just some of the stuff that probably right now the single biggest issue I still have is that because of my Internet connection, it is cellular based, but it's not a cell phone.
It's a cellular based router. I still don't get great bandwidth to move large files. So our other tech expert, Marisa, your co-host, when I need to move a large video, she helps me out. Moves the large video, and it's done in 5 minutes when it would take me 3 hours to download it and re-upload it to wherever I need to be.
That's the only so far, knock on wood, the only place I really need assistance still from somebody who's land based.
Wayne: So let's talk about working with the team. Has there been an appreciable change in how you work with all of us? I mean, I'm always an idiot, so I still need help, and I still need you know, what I send up a flare, I need to find you. But has there been an adjustment in how you work with everybody else?
Angie: Well, I don't think so. You'd have you might want to ask some of my teammates. I mean, maybe you could chime in on whether or not it's changed anything. But again, because we're we're almost all remote and hardly ever down the hall from each other, co-located, as we say, communication always, almost always starts with a slack message, an email, a text message, a phone call, just normally.
So whether I was slacking from home or slacking from my RV, you can see I'm in my RV right now.
Kind of didn't matter. I don't think.
Wayne: Now, there were some prosaic things that have to happen when we talked to Laurel for a couple of weeks ago, she was talking about the fact that there is a lot of paperwork and, you know, tech stuff and things that need to be figured out. If people are mobile, you basically have a state of residence, right? Or you're still listed as an Indiana resident? OK, so for tax purposes.
Angie: I'm registered in Indiana. I still own property in Indiana. But you might my kids are just paying their money to me. They're not they're not they haven't taken over my mortgage. I haven't sold their house. Sold my house. So I'm still a property owner and registered to vote. And my mailing address is Indiana and all that.
Wayne: Well, I think, you know, the important thing for those listening is it's not just, oh, I'm going to pick up stakes and get a check. There is some paperwork. There are some things. Right. You're an Indiana resident. I'm a Nevada resident. Regardless of where our butts are at any given moment, there's some very prosaic paperwork needs to go on in order to make this a win win and not put a burden on the company. From that.
Angie: So we've been relatively paperless for a really long time because of the inherent remote nature of our team. Anything, it didn't make sense to have papers to pass around. That's why we have Google Drive to be able to pass files back and forth. And, you know, at the end of the year, when Kevin does my W-2, I can just download it.
Wayne: So Angie gets to take somebody by the shoulder who is thinking about becoming a digital nomad, and you get to have the heart to heart with them. There may or may not be a beverage involved in that conversation. What do you tell people thinking about this besides, you know, make sure you have an Internet connection? What are the things about structuring your time, about focusing your work?
What are the things you want to tell people who are thinking about doing this?
Angie: The first thing I would say is that it's absolutely doable.
And it's not without its challenges. It's I can't just you know, we're in Tampa right now. I can't just it's I can't just pick up on a Thursday afternoon and go to the beach. I have to work. I can't just suddenly decide, hey, we're going to up and move to, you know, Fort Myers today. Let's go. Nope. Got to work.
Thanks. So, you know, there's it's not as carefree and randomly nomadic as you see some of the people on YouTube who I don't know how they afford it. I don't know when they work. They don't really show that part, but they seem to just be on the go all day, every day, wherever they want to go. I'm sure that's because that's the part they want you to see on YouTube.
I don't really have that all that freedom, but I would say do your research try and pre anticipate what what kinds of issues might come up. When we were getting ready and we were, you know, thinking about what we were going to do with a I prepared an entire folder that is now our office that's got our birth certificates, our Social Security numbers, our Social Security cards, all of our insurance information, like all of the things that you keep in your file cabinet at home for important stuff.
I have it with us just in case. I haven't needed it, but I have it and I don't have to worry about how am I going to get that if I need my Social Security card for something, who knows? So but it's it's the biggest thing for me is just don't don't put off life or your job. I love my job.
I love working for Kevin. I love what I do and I'm loving my life outside of work so much more now than I did. And I didn't dislike it before. I just like it that much more now.
Wayne: I think that's a great place to leave it. I mean, as remote work and hybrid work becomes more common and people have had a couple of years of enforced quiet to think about what they want to do, let's not underplay the role that covered and all the changes have played in that people are doing the kind of math in their head that you've done.
And I want to thank you for coming on and not doing the glamorous, you know, sitting in Bali by the pool version of what it takes to make this work and we do make it work. So I want to thank you very, very much. Angie Thompson is part of our team here at Kevin Eikenberry. Group. Thank you for listening.
Those of you who are listening to the Long-Distance Worklife Podcast, you can find transcriptions, links, all of that good stuff. We'll also get a couple of our favorite videos and put links to those on our website. So visit us at longdistanceworklife.com if you want to.
Angie: You can follow us on YouTube and you can follow us on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Empty Nest Roadshow.
Wayne: There you go. There will be links to that. I guarantee it. If you have a question, a comment, a vicious personal attack you can reach Marisa and I. Wayne@KevinEikenberry.com Marisa@KevinEikenberry.com. You're a podcast listener. You know the drill like subscribe, tell your friends, blah, blah, blah. I want to thank Angie for sharing her story with us.
I want to thank you for sharing the last 18 minutes or so with us. And please, please, please let us know how we can help keep the weasels at bay. Have a great day. We'll see you next show.
In this Q&A episode, Marisa asks Wayne about what companies learned from doing virtual happy hours, courses, and other virtual meetups at the beginning of the pandemic. They discuss what stuck, what was tossed, and things to think about when planning virtual meetups.
When we all started working from home, there was a surge of happy hours/virtual classes/etc. to try and help with company culture. What things stuck and what things went away?
Join us for a powerful, 4-part video series titled, Demystifying Remote Leadership. You will learn how to create solid working relationships in a virtual team with more confidence and less stress!
Marisa Eikenberry:
Welcome to The Long-Distance Worklife. We're here to talk about technology, remote work, and just all the things that kind of relate around it. I'm Marisa Eikenberry.
Wayne Turmel:
And that would make me Wayne Turmel.
Marisa:
And today we're having another Questions and Answers episode where I'm going to ask Wayne some questions, and one of them is even from the audience and we'd love to get your questions in too, so please let us know on longdistanceworklife.com. We would love to answer your questions. So, Wayne, are you ready to get started?
Wayne:
Probably. I kind of know where we're going. Just full disclosure, I know vaguely what the questions are going to be, but I'm hearing them the same time you are so there.
Marisa:
So I thought where we would start and admittedly we're going to talk a little bit about when pandemic and all that first happened in 2020 but we saw this surge of happy hours, virtual classes. People were doing yoga like all of this kind of stuff to try and help with the company culture. And I know that a lot of that has lessened over time, especially as people have gone back into the office and we're trying to figure out this hybrid thing and flexible work.
But I know that companies learned a lot of valuable tips and tricks during that time. So in your conversations with companies, are there any things that have stuck and what things have gone away?
Wayne:
Yeah, so let's take a look at why all of that stuff happened.
Marisa:
Yes.
Wayne:
Right. I mean, you went from a place where the vast majority of people saw each other at work every day, or at least several days a week.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
And the culture existed and the company was there and all of a sudden mandated and we were told it was going to be for a very short period of time. Remember when this was going to be over by Memorial Day? Yeah. And so a lot of organizations and more importantly, the people in those organizations got thrown into the deep end.
And they had never done this before. And their whole life was different. The rhythm of their life was different. They I mean, the average American gets 60% of their social interaction through the workplace anyway, right? All of a sudden that was shrunk.
Marisa:
Well, and some people that lived by themselves like they were home alone. All the time.
Wayne:
I had a client in Germany who left Frankfurt and moved back with her mother in Bavaria because she had this little studio apartment in in Frankfurt that was great when she had a social life and friends and like that. But when she couldn't go out, those walls closed in really tight.
Marisa:
It was no longer a retreat.
Wayne:
Yeah, there is a human need even for the biggest introverts to have contact with other human beings.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
And what we tried to do and we've talked about this on past episodes we tried as hard as we could to replicate the only thing we knew, which was the office. And so we had the same meetings at the same time that we had in the office.
We tried to bring people together and with the purest of intentions, tried to overcome the distance. We pushed people to use webcams prior to the pandemic. A lot of people wouldn't use webcams for a lot of reasons that we've discussed in the past. All of a sudden it was like, no, we need to do this. We need to maintain our culture on a gut level.
People understood that this was important. What we didn't understand was how much of this can we do and what's the right mix? And how do we do this?
Marisa:
And company cooking classes are probably not a thing that has to happen all the time.
Wayne:
But there was Zoom Church. I mean, the funniest sketch Saturday Night Live has done in a very long time was Zoom Church.
Marisa:
At some point, you and I should have a conversation about online church, but that's a different conversation entirely.
Wayne:
Yes. So we tried to compensate. Right? And we used what was available to us.
Marisa:
Absolutely.
Wayne:
And as always, sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. And so that led to, you know, at the office we used to have all this unstructured time or we would go out once a month or we would bring pizza in and everybody would get together.
So let's do that. Only everybody's virtual.
Marisa:
Yeah. Here everybody has an Uber Eats card or whatever.
Wayne:
The logic behind that made perfect sense, right? The reality of it, there's a couple of things. One is it can get a little weird. For example, we had a number of lunches in the office where anybody within kind of spitting distance of Indianapolis came together and we had a camera set up in the conference room and everybody could see everybody and we played kind of icebreaker games.
But here's the thing. It was 9:30 in the morning for me. I was not eating pizza. I was not having lunch. I had already had breakfast. So a lot of that meeting was me watching people eat.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
Right? And it's just the reality of the situation. I understood the importance of the event. I played along but watching other people eat is not the most riveting thing. Also, some organizations did it right. They would provide some organizations provided, as you said, Uber Eats Cards or whatever. Yeah, right. And some organizations did that and some didn't. Again, it depended on the time of day.
Virtual Happy Hour for one group, basically meant day drinking for another which may or may not go bad.
Marisa:
I mean, maybe not all bad.
Wayne:
Which may or may not be the positive thing you're trying to present.
Marisa:
May not be encouraged.
Wayne:
And so it was an attempt to create something that existed before. Now, what we have found out through this is that different organizations, different cultures, cultures, work cultures, different people want and crave different things.
Marisa:
Absolutely.
Wayne:
And everybody needs to make accommodations for everybody else.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
I am not a big fan of forced fun just in general. Right. Other people crave it, need it. We work for an org- I'll tell you how this works and how it doesn't.
Marisa:
OK.
Wayne:
A lot of times we have these monthly meetings. This is my kimono on wide open up. Be grateful you are not watching this on YouTube.
Unless you are and then I'm sorry.
We have monthly meetings and most of these meetings start off with some form of icebreaker.
Marisa:
Yes.
Wayne:
And Kevin, bless his heart wants every member- And we've got about 11, 12 people on any of these calls at a given time. And we all have to, you know... What's your favorite movie? What's your favorite- At Christmas it was what's your favorite Christmas memory. It's lovely and we all know each other.
Marisa:
Right? It's a little easier for us than it might be for some.
Wayne:
Because we already know each other and which means it's both more valuable and less valuable.
Marisa
Yes.
Wayne:
Because we know each other.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
If you don't know each other, I see the value in that conversation.
Marisa:
Yes.
Wayne:
Now, Kevin did one that I loved and here was the deal at the time I thought it was silly and stupid and ridiculous and oh dear Lord, we're really doing this. And he had everybody go around. And what is your favorite candy?
Marisa:
Yes, I remember this.
Wayne:
Right? And everybody went, Now I like this and I like this and I like this obscure chocolate bar. And, you know, for me it was Jujubes or gummy bears. It was gummy bears and like that.
Marisa:
Yeah.
Wayne:
And then a week later, unannounced, no label on the package, nothing. This three pound- picture three pound bag of gummy bears winds up on my front porch.
Marisa:
I remember.
Wayne:
Fortunately, it was not August, 120 degrees.
Marisa:
Yeah. You didn't have one solid gummy bear shaped like a bag.
Wayne:
Exactly. And it actually took me a couple of days to figure out who this came from. And it was fun. It was nice. We I actually reached out to a couple of people. Did you get candy on your door? What was that about? Do we know what this is? And then it became what did you get? And it was fun.
It was and that's an ice breaker that worked great.
Marisa:
I will tell you, as somebody who already knew that those packages were going out, because I'm in the office sometimes anyway, it was fun watching you guys freak out because you didn't know where they came from.
Wayne:
Yeah, it was a lot of it was a lot of fun. And that's an example of an ice breaker that it didn't take a lot of time to do. It was very short and it tied to something else and it had a long term effect.
Marisa:
Yes.
Wayne:
And that's the thing about ice breakers. I have a healthy understanding of why we use them.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
And I have a very little patience for when they drag on and on and on.
Marisa:
I would agree with that, too.
Wayne:
The problem is that the people who organize these things are doing the best they can usually with very little guidance. And usually those types of people fall on the side of erring on the side of fun and connection.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
We had a client. This is absolutely true. I was doing a series of webinars for the client and they sent me this question in advance and said, "This is real. Please do not use anybody's name." This team, this woman led the team she worked from home. She begins every 15 minutes with an update on her cat, Mr. Whiskers, or whatever his name is, is actually the co-host of the meeting and sits on her desk frequently walking in front of the webcam and she encourages everybody to give an update on their pets.
And this gets longer and longer and longer to where the first 10 to 15 minutes of the meeting is. Mr. Whiskers and the Pet Update.
Marisa:
OK. Which I'm sure is awkward for some that don't have pets at all, but that's a different story.
Wayne:
Not only do they not have pets they have lives. They have things they need to do. There is work to be done. Right?
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
And the manager because nobody has given them feedback on this. The manager is blissfully unaware that this is a problem.
Marisa:
OK.
Wayne:
Because, in her defense. Nobody said anything so far.
Marisa:
Yeah, OK.
Wayne:
And I enjoy it. So therefore so this is the thing, right? We're trying. And and so you said that at the beginning of the pandemic there was Zoom everything. And in some cases it works. You know that I write novels as well as this. We had a great in-person writers group prior to the pandemic. All of a sudden, a few of us got together and we started working online.
We started doing our critiques online. We had to change the way we do it. We physically had to change the way we did it. But it was a small group of people we were all committed to. And it works great.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
Lots of us have done lots of Zoom things that didn't go so swell. Zoom Yoga. You know, first of all, you couldn't drag my crap to a yoga class anyway, let alone Zoom yoga.
Marisa:
I was going to say, my sister-in-law told me about that one. I think her boyfriend's company was doing it, and I was like, really?
Wayne:
Well, but then there are companies that do yoga classes and companies that don't. So it depends on the culture of the company. Here's the thing is, at some point with any of these connection exercises, there are two things you need to do. Number one is what is the aggregate time that people spend on their webcam on Zoom every single day?
Marisa:
Yeah, you don't want too much Zoom fatigue.
Wayne:
Right? At that point, it just becomes misery.
Marisa:
Right.
Wayne:
The second thing is the golden rule, as we have all been told, is do unto others.
Marisa:
Yes.
Wayne:
The problem with that is we occasionally do unto others in ways they do not want done unto them fair. And this gets to work styles, it gets to preferences. And it's why over time, these things need to be the subject of conversation and coming together and reaching some kind of accommodation with each other. Because one person's bonding time, right?
I'm in this apartment all by myself. And I'm losing my mind and I need to talk to people is somebody else's. Oh, for the love of everything that's holy. Let me get my work done.
Marisa:
Yes, I have also seen some of those too.
Wayne:
And there's an accommodation to be made there, but it doesn't happen unless you talk about it, unless you have some kind of conversation and meeting of the minds where the introverts have to suck it up and, you know, do some playing nicely right others. And the extroverts at some point need to shut up and let people get their work done.
Marisa:
I will say on that line. So it's no secret I'm an introvert haha. I don't like people, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm somebody that's very much heads down, get my work done, whatever. Now, if you want to have a meeting with me, fine, tell me you want a meeting, whatever. And I won't name the coworker. That part's fine.
But I had somebody on our team who had said they had just said, "Hey, I want to have a meeting with you. I want to talk about this tech thing." Well, the tech thing that they had a question on, here's a link from Google. You'll solve it in 3 seconds. It wasn't hard. They didn't really need me on a Zoom call for that.
So to me, I'm looking at it as don't waste my time. And then then they tell me, "Oh, well, I really just wanted a catch up call. I haven't talked to you in a while." Well, just tell me that. And and it was totally fine to then, you know, have that conversation, whatever. But for, for some of you who are more extroverted, you do want to catch up on with these people and stuff.
Tell your introverted team members that that's what you're trying to do. If they have a goal, if they know what the goal is, we tend to be a little bit more willing to play nice.
Wayne:
Well, and a big part of that is just being prepared and knowing what the conversation is.
Marisa:
Absolutely.
Wayne:
If I go into the conversation thinking this is going to be a five minute hashing out of a problem or answering a question, and all of a sudden you're going into, "So how's the dog and what's the weather doing in Vegas?"
Marisa:
It's totally different mindset.
Wayne:
I get a little bit antsy. Whereas if we've blocked 20 minutes and you know, "Hey, I want to catch up, we haven't talked for a while," my brain stops screaming at me and I kind of have allotted that time and I'm good with it.
Marisa:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So just tell your people what the goal of the meeting is.
Wayne:
So here's the thing to wrap up. Yes. What we have been babbling about for 16 minutes. Yes, icebreakers and activities are important. If you are not seeing each other, the group has to have a way to communicate and build relationships and get to know each other and God forbid, have a little fun.
Marisa:
Watercooler channels on Slack are great and we highly recommend them.
Wayne:
And yeah, watercooler channels, by the way. But they also need some guidance and there can be sub-channels. Our team does a great job with the watercooler chat. They come across a funny article, we put gifs or gifs or whatever, little video clips.
Marisa:
There you go.
Wayne:
Says the old man and we bust each other's chops and we have a lot of fun. You can do that in multiple ways. There's, you know, there's family news. There's cool articles that we found there. You know, different companies break it up different ways. Trivia, ongoing trivia things and that's the thing about these events find events that require participation. Watching people eat is not a particularly participative event, but pub trivia contests.
Marisa:
Yeah, people love trivia.
Wayne:
You know, those types of events and don't just dictate them on the team.
Marisa:
Yes.
Wayne:
Right. So there's two things that I would suggest. One is alternate the responsibility for whose job it is to do that.
Marisa:
Yes.
Wayne:
Right. Each meeting somebody else is responsible for how we open the meeting.
Marisa:
That makes sense.
Wayne
That way you get a mix of these. Really, if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?
Marisa:
Oh, God, please don't tell Kevin to use that in the next meeting.
Wayne:
Right. But those types of things that drive me crazy versus legitimate, I have breakers that are fun and quick and high energy. The other thing is talk about it as a team. What do you want? What do you need? What is the accommodation that you can come to that strikes the balance of need for social interaction and fun and function and allowing people to get their work done.
Marisa:
Absolutely. Like more opt in as opposed to requirement?
Wayne:
Yes. An opt in ish?
Marisa:
Yes. Yeah, totally makes sense. I know that we're about out of time today, but Wayne, I just want to say thank you so much for answering my question today. I know that there was a lot of stuff that we could have gone into and we just don't have time for it right now. But that's OK. We'll have more episodes coming up.
So please, like and subscribe. You've listened to podcasts before. You know how this works, right? And review. Tell your friends, share the article. Articles? Share the episodes on your social media platforms. If you would like to get in touch with Wayne or I, you can contact us at Wayne@KevinEikenberry.com or Marisa@KevinEikenberry.com or find us on LinkedIn.
All of our show notes and the transcript will be on longdistanceworklife.com as well as a place for you to ask your questions so we can answer them in future episodes. Thank you so much for joining us this week and we'll see you next time.
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.
Marisa asks Wayne about the difference between remote-first and remote-friendly and what phrases companies should be using depending on their circumstances.
What's the difference between 'remote-first' and 'remote-friendly'?
Additional Resources:
Wayne Turmel: Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Long-Distance Worklife Podcast. I'm Wayne Turmel.
Marisa Eikenberry: I'm Marisa Eikenberry.
Wayne: Yes, she is. And this is the podcast where we look at remote work, technology, leadership, and just trying to survive the way the workplace is changing. And keep the weasels at bay. Welcome. Welcome. Today is a joint Wayne and Marisa one-topic episode. Marisa has chosen the topic. So, Marisa, go ahead, lady.
Marisa: Absolutely. So one of the things I thought that we could talk about and I know we talked about this a little bit before we started recording, but this idea of remote-first versus remote-friendly and maybe some of the other buzzwords that we hear about in this remote world right now. But I know those two specifically, I see all the time and I know there is a difference and we should probably talk about it.
Wayne: Well, we probably should. The first thing to remember is that we track the buzzwords so you don't have to. Dear listener, I have been in this business in the virtual remote work space well over 15 years and listened to the way things change. I remember when we used to telecommute and before that or after that, it was teleworking.
And the government actually has big binders full of telework policy that they then had to go in and do a search and replace because now it's work from home or WFA. And one needs to be very careful with the acronyms when you start using those letters in some combination. So there are a bunch of buzzwords that we should probably tackle.
But let's start with remote-first and remote-friendly. Remote-friendly basically means we're open to the idea of people working remotely. It suggests that there is an office, there is a central location, but we've got people that work elsewhere and we do our best to not make it suck.
Marisa: So in a way, it's almost kind of saying we're a hybrid company, kind of.
Wayne: Well, you're willing to be a hybrid company. Remote-friendly kind of presumes that the default is the office. But we will still love you if you don't come in every day and you work somewhere else. We're going to talk about hybrid, I suspect, in just a minute. Remote-first basically means we are set up as a remote company.
Marisa: So the primary is remote.
Wayne: It's primary remote. We hire people with that notion. We build our systems around that. There may or may not be an office where a couple of people sit, maybe an admin or two, but basically we are a remote company. And where you see that a lot is in engineering and especially I.T., coding, those types of companies.
Marisa: Yeah, I just saw that Robinhood recently advertised it. I say recently it may have been a few months ago but that they are now advertising themselves as a remote-first company.
Wayne: And it's interesting because just for the record, for Canadians, we are talking about the banking app, not about the flower company, Robinhood Flower being very near and dear to my heart.
That's a really good example because there are certain industries. I'm trying to remember, I think it was Bloomberg just did a report on which industries are more likely to have remote work. And if you look at financial services and I.T. services, it's well over 75% of the jobs associated with those tasks could be done remotely.
Marisa: Gotcha.
Wayne: Which is interesting because I.T. companies have embraced it and financial services companies have kind of freaked out and rebelled, even though they have the largest percentage of jobs that theoretically could be done remotely. I mean, as we've said before, if your job is fight traffic, get to the office, hang your coat over the chair, sit at your computer, get up at the end of the day, pick up your coat, get back in the car.
There is a pretty good chance you could do that remote at least part of the time. But that's the difference between remote-friendly and remote-first. Remote-first recruits sets up systems, processes. They assume that everybody's going to be remote. And if you want to come into the office and say hi to people, that's great. But that's not the way that they are built.
Marisa: So I guess as an add-on question, and I know that companies like Buffer are like this, what's the buzzword now for a company who's entirely remote? Or is there a buzzword for it yet?
Wayne: They basically have embraced remote-first.
Marisa: Okay, because I know that companies like Buffer, I think WordPress might be also and have been since way before pandemic even happened, but they were remote only. There is no office to go to. Everybody's remote.
Wayne: Yeah, absolutely. And so they've embraced- This week the word is remote-first.
Marisa: Gotcha. I know I've seen it a lot more lately.
Wayne: If you look at our good friend Chris Dyer, who has been on VLC and will probably be on this show eventually.
Marisa: For those that don't know, VLC is our conference Virtual LeaderCon, which we do once a year and we'll do again in September of this year, 2022.
Wayne: And Chris has built several virtual companies, and they used to be virtual companies. That was the buzzword. Right?
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: And all of a sudden, he started using with his company, and I can't remember the name of it right now, or I would say it. [Chris Dyer's company is PeopleG2.]
Marisa: We'll make sure it's in the show notes. Yeah.
Wayne: Make sure it's on the show notes. Thank you. All of a sudden, you know, he was a we are a remote-first company, so that's the buzzword du jour.
Marisa: Okay. So it's getting companies encompassing both processes, essentially.
Wayne: Yeah. But it's a different mindset.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: It's a different mindset. It's, you know, as we choose these buzzwords. Right. Telecommute. Presumed that you were kind of somewhere else, but you were coming into the office that there was a central hub.
Marisa: Okay.
Wayne: And that's where the buzzwords can get a little muddled. And the most muddled word at the moment is hybrid.
Marisa: Okay. That makes sense.
Wayne: A hybrid is getting, you know, it's kind of like the Princess Bride. You use that word a lot, but I don't think it means what you think it means. You know, hybrid often gets conflated with blended or flexible work or a bunch of other terms.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: That basically imply what you had said earlier on. This notion that there is an office and some people are in the office and some people are out of the office. And that's kind of what it means. It usually means that there's some mix of that.
Marisa: Okay.
Wayne: What we need to do, though, I think when we focus on this notion of the office and then others.
Marisa: Mm hmm.
Wayne: It does a couple of disservices and people that are listening to that. Please. You know, we'd love your comments and your questions about that. The challenge is and if you've read A World Without Email by Cal Newport, you know, his thing is the reason we get in trouble with too much email and too many meetings and Zoom Fatigue and all of this stuff is we're trying to recreate the office environment.
Marisa: Right?
Wayne: When we do that, we create constrictions around time. Yeah. I joke that in America, if you live on the West Coast, you better be an early morning person because the sun revolves around the Statue of Liberty and everything is based on East Coast time, no matter where you are. Well, that kind of takes out the flexibility. If you need to be available during East Coast hours.
That's not true flexibility. If you default to the home office in your systems, you know, yes, you can work anywhere you want. But as so many organizations used to say quietly and now places like Morgan Stanley are saying, the quiet parts out loud. Right? If you can't be bothered coming into the office we will continue to hire you.
And you can do good work, but don't expect to be promoted and don't expect to be on the fast track.
Marisa: Which is so unfortunate now that we're getting more and more data all the time about productivity is going up. And some of these people who are working from home and I realize it's not everybody but some people who are working from home are thriving and doing so much more work, so much more engagement than they ever did when they were in the office.
Wayne: Yeah, far be it from me to defend senior leaders ever. That is so not my default position.
Marisa: That's a great place to start.
Wayne: I am at heart a bomb throwing radical who's just found himself with a job title. But the challenge is you can't take something that has made a lot of people really rich and really successful and has entire cities built around it. Mm hmm. And say, Oh, we don't need that anymore and expect everybody to be cool with it.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: And, you know, you can't just say, "Hi, London and New York, it's been real. But, you know..."
Marisa: Yeah, absolutely.
Wayne: I'm moving to Montana, and here's my IP address. You can't really do that.
Marisa: Right. And that's some of what you talked to Laurel about in the last episode, too.
Wayne: Yeah. This notion that it's all going to be utopian and whatever. And that's the thing about hybrid work is hybrid started out being just this messy blend. And I guess that's what that kind of traditional arrangement is, is a blended approach, a true hybrid. If you if you look at the biologic definition of a hybrid is it's two species that are brought together and they actually create a new species that is capable of breathing among itself and.
Marisa: Doing other things.
Wayne: Doing other things. And so that's the Holy Grail. Now, for companies that want to have a physical presence and want to be remote-friendly.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: Right. They're not going to be remote-first as long as they're building buildings and investing in infrastructure, physical infrastructure.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: But there's this new thing that we have to find ways to. For example, right now, we have an overreliance on synchronous communication. The reason that I have to be functional at seven in the morning is because people insist on being online at seven in the morning. And if I'm not there, I'm losing out.
Marisa: Mm hmm.
Wayne: Are there ways to collaborate and meet and share information asynchronous so that the amount of time we actually have to spend connected, talking, holding meetings, doing that kind of thing, it's a different form of workflow. Right. It's a different expectation on how people should work.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: And it's a brand new thing. And like all hybrids, it hasn't existed before. We may do and some people have said we're going to be remote-friendly. And others have said, well, we're going to do this blended thing and we're going to. And what happens when you blend like that is the default goes to the office, almost always the default right to the office, the systems, the times that you meet.
Marisa: Where the meetings happen.
Wayne: Who gets a promotion where you hold the meetings? When you do get together, where is it?
Marisa: The birthday celebrations.
Wayne: You know, there's cake in the break room. It's a long drive to the break room. So you don't get cake or you don't get to eat cake with everybody else.
Marisa: Mm hmm.
Wayne: And then by the way, the weasels in the office get cake on their birthday, and I don't. And so they, like, you know, mom likes them better than they like me.
Marisa: Absolutely. Almost breeds a feeling of resentment, too.
Wayne: Well, it can. And we actually should do a conversation about that dynamic, right? Yes. Don't actually create something new. What does that? Because there's a whole show and conversation about those potential landmines, but that when we talk about hybrid, we're still trying to define it.
When we eventually define it, it will become a buzzword and then be out of fashion in about a week. And we'll have to find something new because that's the way it is with everything.
Marisa: So given this given this, you know, hybrid, remote-first and all that, and I know that we've talked a little bit about when companies maybe should use certain options, but I guess if companies have not necessarily said which option that they should use yet, what should they be thinking about? As they're trying to create their remote-friendly, remote-first, hybrid, blended, whatever, as they're trying to think through those processes and figuring out, okay, this is the word we're using.
Wayne: Come back to me in a year when The Long-Distance Team comes out and.
Marisa: There we go!
Wayne: We can have this conversation because Kevin and I just finished that book.
Marisa: Love it.
Wayne: Nice plug.
What should they think about? I think it always starts with what is what do we do? What is the job that we do? Right. What are our outpits? Outpits? Outputs. What are the tasks that create those outputs? What are the roles that are necessary to do the tasks that create those outputs? And then once you and I would suggest visually mapping that and then once you've mapped it you start looking at is that a place that needs people co-located or at least synchronous at some time?
Marisa: Okay. That makes sense.
Wayne: And this is not. You mentioned the conversation with Laurel, and we're going to have a link in the show notes to that previous show because I am less rosy about a lot of this and I am less focused on remote-first. Remote-first is great. If you have the kind of company that can do that.
Marisa: Okay.
Wayne: If you have chosen to have a company that can do that, right. There is something to be said about being a small group of people co-located working together in physical proximity. It is not like that is evil and must be destroyed.
Marisa: Absolutely.
Wayne: But it's a choice.
Marisa: Yes.
Wayne: It limits who you recruit. It puts constraints on what you spend money on because you need a location. It it needs to be a conscious decision. And it's not always a wrong one.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: But that's the thing. What is the. It always starts with what is the work? Form follows function. What's the work that needs to be done? Who needs to do it? Then you get to what do those people do and where do they need to be when they do it?
And that is about all the time we have for what could easily be a three beverage conversation.
Marisa: Before we end, though, I do want to ask you. So you mentioned that you're not as rosy about remote-first, which I'll admit surprises me given, you know, the blog posts that you've done, the books that you've written already, and we'll have links to those in the show notes as well. But why are you not remote-first, are you more remote-friendly then?
Wayne: I am very remote-friendly that that is my default position and I have benefited from everything.
Marisa: Absolutely we both have.
Wayne: Right? The fact that Kevin works in Indianapolis. You work in the office with him at least part of the time.
Marisa: Yes.
Wayne: You have a very flexible working arrangement there. And when I was in Chicago, the dynamic was different. I could pop in the car and in 3 hours be in Indianapolis.
Marisa: Very true.
Wayne: Right. I can no longer do that. Without hopping between COVID and the laws of physics. I have not been in Remarkable House in quite some time.
Marisa: Right.
Wayne: I just think here's why I'm not rosy and the reason I'm not rosy about most things, and it's the reason that I am a grumpy old man is I there has never been any system, product or tool invented by humans that they have not managed to make suck.
Marisa: So engineers out there, challenge for you.
Wayne: It's just that everything can be used for good or used for evil, and it can be thoughtfully applied and maximized or you cannot think about it very hard and take the easy way out and get less than optimal results. And that's just the way human beings operate.
Marisa: That makes sense. And I know that you've had some conversations about similar stuff, not only with me, I think also with Pilar recently too, about this idea that we're implementing these technologies without really having any idea of how to implement them. And so it's backfiring.
Wayne: Well, and time is flying away. And this is another conversation that we should definitely have. And we are actually going to have with some of the people who make the technology. We've done it with a Hoyin Cheung at Remo and some others, so we will continue to do that. Which brings us to we really, really, really need to wrap this up.
Thank you for listening to worklife. Long-Distance Worklife Podcast. Please, if you've enjoyed this like and subscribe and most importantly, tell your friends we will have show notes as well as and this is important a place for you to ask your questions. Marisa is coming up with killer questions and I'm digging these conversations, but we want to know what you want to know.
Marisa: Yeah, I'm not the only one out there that has questions. I know that for sure.
Wayne: So on our show notes page is a place to get questions in queue. Please take advantage of that. You can reach Marisa and I at The Kevin Eikenberry Group. Wayne@KevinEikenberry.com. Marisa@KevinEikenberry.com. That's it. Thank you for listening to the Long-Distance Worklife podcast. We really, really, really need to go. Marisa, thanks as always.
Marisa: Thank you for answering my question today.
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