Returning to Office with Kevin Eikenberry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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