00:01

Welcome to this week’s episode of the HRDQ-U In Review podcast, where we bring you the latest insights and practical tools for enhancing soft skills training in your organization. This podcast is brought to you by HRDQU.com, and I am your host, Sarah, Learning Events Manager at HRDQ-U. And today, I have Wayne Turmel joining me to discuss the webinar, Do You Have a Hybrid Work Strategy or a Hostage Negotiation? Thanks so much for joining me today, Wayne.

00:29

Well, thanks for having me, Sarah. This is fun. And Wayne, you have done many webinars here with me over at HRDQ, but we have yet to do a podcast together. So for those folks that haven’t heard you over on our webinar features over there and maybe weren’t able to attend this webinar, could you tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to focus on hybrid work strategies? Sure.

00:57

I have been in the training and development space for carry the three 28, 29 years. And that whole time, interestingly, I’ve been either remote or on a hybrid team. The very first team I ever managed had some people in the LA office and others scattered all over the West coast. And,

01:23

As I developed, most of my work was in presentation and communication skills. And I realized very early on that people were starting to work remotely, that timing of the beginning of my career was the advent of email, the introduction of cell phones. So remote work was becoming a thing. And I didn’t see anybody addressing the issues specific to it.

01:51

You know, people were being given WebEx licenses and told here, try not to hurt anybody. But they weren’t being told how to use it effectively as a tool. And so very early on, probably 18 years ago, that became my focus, is remote and hybrid work and how people communicate or sometimes don’t in the workplace. And it’s been very…

02:20

It’s been very rewarding and interesting and somehow I’ve carved a niche out in the world in this space. And wait, before we start to get into the nitty gritty of some content questions based on our webinar, what do you have going on? What new things do you have happening over there that you want to share? Well, Kevin Eichenberry and I, six years ago we wrote The Long Distance Leader, which has been

02:47

wonderfully successful. It’s in seven languages. But it came out in 2018, you know, and the world has changed a little bit since then. So we are just this month releasing the second edition, which has the same title, Long Distance Leader, but the subtitle is Revised Rules for Remarkable Remote and Hybrid Leadership.

03:13

Sort of reflecting what the world post-COVID is coming back to. Yeah. Oh, wow. That’s going to be an interesting read. I think so, but who am I? And Wayne, how many books has that put you out that you’ve published now? Personally, I have done 16, six of which are novels, so they don’t really count, at least for this conversation.

03:40

Kevin and I have written three in the long distance series, long distance leader, long distance teammate, long distance team. So we’re keeping busy. Yeah, very busy over there. No downtime, huh? Not really. And so getting back to the hybrid work and you had mentioned that you’ve always had either virtual hybrid, some mix of that.

04:07

What was your first experience with hybrid work and how has your perspective on hybrid work evolved and changed over time? Well, the perspective is that what we have called hybrid work for the last whatever usually isn’t. It’s a bit of a misnomer and I’m happy to go down that rabbit hole. But even really early on when we had and sales teams have experienced this for a very long time.

04:35

where you’ve got a mothership, but then there are people out in territories, for example, who work remotely and they usually worked out of either satellite offices or out of their homes. And so the challenges of creating one team and for leaders being fair and equitable in how you treat your team members, right? And helping everybody get what they need, whether they’re in the office or not.

05:04

is a very real thing. Now, of course, we’re starting to realize that, especially as we return to the office post-pandemic, what we’ve got is, and you used the phrase earlier, they’re not strategies, they’re hostage negotiations. What we usually wind up with is some kind of compromise that

05:31

doesn’t really make everybody happy, but the work gets done and we can get on with our lives, right? The employers are like, how much can we make them come back to the office before they quit? And the employees are going, well, how much can I whine about going back to the office before they fire me? And so, okay, so fine, come in three days a week and we’ll all get on with our lives. Which is fine, it kind of works.

05:58

But we’re starting to realize that that may not be the optimal way to build your business or to construct your team in a strategic way looking to the future.

06:15

So that’s, you know, that’s the thing. What we call hybrid work, when I ask people what does it mean, it’s basically, well, what work gets done where? Well, they can take it, they can do that Zoom call from the office or they can do it from home and they can work at home, but they got to be logged in at nine in the morning. And they kind of replicate the office environment while accommodating distance.

06:45

Real hybrid work, if it’s going to be a true hybrid, is not just what work gets done where, but when. And it really examines what work needs to be done synchronously, what work can be done and maybe even done best asynchronously.

07:08

you know, does it matter that everybody is on Microsoft Teams at the same time every day? Yes, it matters some because people want their answers in real time and it might make sense for brainstorming and things like that. But does it make sense? You know, I’ll give you an example, the three days a week thing. One of the things we hear is, I can’t get any work done. I fight the commute, I go to the office.

07:37

and people are poking their head over the cube wall like a meerkat and it’s Alice’s birthday, so there’s cake in the break room and there’s noise and I can’t get my work done. And then people say, well, I’m supposed to be working from home, but I’m on Zoom meetings all day. And that’s an over-reliance on synchronous communication. Now, here’s the thing. We need to get smarter about what work gets done where.

08:05

You’re right. If your job is sit at my desk, pound out content, get stuff done, and check stuff off my task list, the office is probably an objectively bad place to do that. Conversely, if I need quiet, focused time, I want to talk to my customers and not have the world going on around me, maybe that should be done.

08:34

at other times in other places than a busy office. But if the point is we want to make sure you’re working so you need to have your butt in a chair three days a week, are you optimizing the work, the talent, the time? Like that. So real hybrid work takes time as an important factor.

09:00

So then have you seen over the past few years, you know, with COVID and, you know, hybrid becoming, you virtual and then hybrid becoming a more common and popular workplace? Like, you seen them adapt their approach to hybrid work strategies over years and improve? What have you seen? What have you seen in your time now? Yeah, the one thing that we have learned is that nobody got it right. Yeah. Coming out of…

09:28

COVID, the people that were determined to return to the office or the people. There is no one size fits all. And because we’ve never worked in this way before, we’ve never really had the capability to work this way before, nobody’s done it exactly, perfectly right. And so we’re in this experimental stage. We need to be comfortable with that. And I know nobody likes ambiguity.

09:55

Nobody likes, well, maybe we’re doing this wrong. Well, so in three months, take a pulse. And how’s it going? And what’s working and what’s not? It’s going to be incrementally learning. It’s also, there isn’t any such thing as one size fits all. A lot of what we assumed to be the case with hybrid work isn’t. The demographics of hybrid work are completely different than we thought they

10:23

The original thought was, well, those darn kids don’t want to be in the office and they want to work from the beach and they, you know, no, the youngins, the new hires, the people straight out of school, the people new in their career actually want to be gathered more often because they have so much to learn. They need to learn about the company. They need to learn about the work culture in that company. They need social interaction because

10:53

The social groups that they’ve had in high school and college have blown up and they don’t know anybody in this part of town. And so the young people in those new hires need more in-person time, maybe need to be part of a more traditional office environment. The people really clamoring for hybrid work are those

11:20

established in their careers in their middle years who want some work life balance and who say, Hey, I know how to do this job. I don’t need to have somebody standing over my shoulder. I’ve been doing this job for 10 years now. I can do it in my sleep.

11:37

And I don’t need to go into the office to do it. And by the way, I’m not interested in being the CEO. So, you know, there’s a lot of networking and stuff that isn’t part of my job. So it really is critical if you’re going to think about this in a strategic way to start with basic principles, right? What is the job that we do? What is the work? What are the handoffs?

12:05

And then you can start to make decisions about, does everybody need to be in one location for that to happen? Does everybody need to be logged on at the same time of day?

12:19

Maybe we have better discussions over time when people have time to sit and think and contribute. When we have meetings, do we need to have meetings and how can we maximize them?

12:37

That’s when it becomes strategic and not just, well, I guess this is the best we can do. And when you kicked off our webinar, you said that hostage negotiation was going to be a controversial term here. So I would love for you to explain what you mean by that and why the comparison is important.

13:06

You know, it’s a cheap attempt at getting people’s attention. Let’s be brutally honest here, right? We want people to attend the webinar. We want people to read our book. But really, you know, when we talk about this kind of blended workplace, nobody’s 100 % happy with it. They’re kind of OK. And like I say, we don’t want people to quit and we don’t want

13:35

to get fired, and so we reach a kind of negotiated solution which works. But that’s not optimizing it. That’s making the best of a bad situation, or at least the best of the situation. And so we just want people to be a little more mindful about the long-term strategy of making the work happen. And again, it’s so dependent on

14:03

company, it’s so dependent on the work. But here’s an example of an unintended outcome. We have decided strategically we want to hire the absolute best people that we can find.

14:18

and they have to be in the office three days a week. Well, what you’ve said is you want the absolute best people you can find who live within 20 miles of the office.

14:29

It might be a perfectly valid decision, but don’t tell me you’re looking for the absolute world-class people if the geographic consideration is more important.

14:45

Yeah. Does that make sense? mean, calling it a hostage negotiation, there is very little gunfire involved. Hopefully. I guess I shouldn’t make jokes like that. But it can feel constricting. And it feels like we are making the best of the situation rather than looking for the best situation. And that’s what we want people to be aware of. Yeah.

15:14

And so then what would you say the biggest mistakes are that companies make when they’re implementing their hybrid work strategy? Well, it’s the same mistakes they make when they’re implementing any work strategy, which is they usually measure behavior versus outcomes. You know, one of the reasons

15:34

that we want them in the office three days a week, besides the fact that we’re paying for office space. And it makes the CEO crazy when she goes in there and the place is echoingly empty, right? There’s some real emotional financial panic going on there. But, you know, it’s, well, we want people in the office, so they’re in the office at 8.30 or nine and they leave at 4.30 and five.

16:03

And so the ones who show up on time and leave on time clearly are good employees and valuable. And we know that’s nonsense because we all know people who show up on time and leave on time and don’t do a darn thing during the course of the day.

16:21

But if our measure of success is they’re there.

16:26

There you have it. Are you measuring the right things? If somebody isn’t logged on at exactly nine o’clock in the morning on Teams, what the heck are they doing? Well, it really doesn’t matter what they’re doing as long as the reports are on time and they’re done to the right quality and people are responding to their teammates. And that’s the stuff that we need to be measuring. That’s what allows us to determine if we’re doing good work.

16:58

But we’re using these outdated first half of the 20th century rules for determining what kind of workplace we’re going to have. Yeah. And so you were touching on this a little bit earlier about how when you have a hybrid work model, it allows for a little bit of flexibility within the employee’s lifestyle. How can organizations balance the flexibility for employees

17:27

with also making sure that the structure and productivity is there in this model? Yeah, well, we need to have conversations about what are the expectations, particularly when we’re hiring people for this. The problem is, one of the problems is that the arguments, the employer says, this is why we want people in the office. And the discussion on the employee’s side has been, we want

17:57

time with our family and we want work-life balance and you know maybe we might do better if we don’t show up cranky from a commute every day but it’s all about them and we need to make the case to each other right your boss doesn’t care about your work-life balance unless it impacts the work you do for them

18:26

Not that your immediate manager isn’t a lovely human, but the business is not in the business of creating happy, well-adjusted humans. So if you come to me saying, want to be a happy, well-adjusted human, the company’s response is, that’s nice. Are you going to get your work done?

18:45

It’s funny, one of the things that we get a little bit of heat over is that we actually place a fair amount of responsibility for this on the employees, on the people that are seeking to change the way the workplace is. Kevin and I call it the Spider-Man paradox, which is if you know your Spider-Man geekdom, you hear with great power comes great responsibility.

19:15

Well, for the first time, workers, at least knowledge workers, a lot of us, have some power, right? We can decide, hey, I’m going to go work for somebody that’s going to give me this flexibility. I want to work 100 % remote, so I’m taking my talents elsewhere.

19:36

But if you’re going to work in a hybrid environment, yes, you get more time. Yes, you’re flexible. Yes, we can work to your body clock or whichever time zone you’re in. And you have a responsibility to your employer.

19:52

And when both parties are aware of their responsibilities and take them seriously, really great things happen.

20:02

if both parties are kind of, we’re gonna do the bare minimum to keep this together.

20:11

Uh, it doesn’t work. mean, one of the things that we have found and we found it during the pandemic and it freaked senior managers out is that at the beginning of the pandemic, when people went home, employee engagement went way up. Well, how is that possible? They’re not in the office. They’re not all together. Well, because their mindset was there’s a crisis. We got to pull together. I want to make sure the company stays open. So I have a job.

20:41

I want to make sure my colleagues and teammates are supported and that we all get through this crisis together. And it turns out when people give a hoot, they do really good work and they get stuff done.

20:57

As the pandemic went on, it started to kind of revert to normal kind of levels. But what we have found is that the people who either work remotely or have flexible, satisfying flexible arrangements are the most engaged employees you have. They’re not going anywhere. And they’re going to do really good work because they want to

21:25

keep their job and they like the work they’re doing and they like the company they work for. Now, when you have people who work remotely or who have lots of flexible time and don’t care.

21:40

They’re the most unengaged employees that you have.

21:46

Yeah. So we need to make sure that we’re focusing on the right things in order to make this new work place successful. Yeah. And then so bringing in communication, how does that play in creating a work environment that benefits both employees and employers? Yeah.

22:15

You know, the conversation around hybrid work is what does it do to the culture? What does it do to the culture of our company? And if you get into the HR nuts and bolts of it and you ask HR people to define culture, they will give you the very pat, perfectly correct answer that culture is how we do it here. Right? We do it differently than another company, than a…

22:43

But where you get down to the nitty gritty and where you can actually be intentional about that is what is the it that you do. And here’s what I mean by this. have in the book, Kevin and I have identified three things that if you can define them, we’ll tell you what your culture looks like or what it could look like. We call it the three C’s.

23:09

communication, collaboration, cohesion. Communication is how do we talk to each other? And that’s what tone do we use? It’s how often do we talk to each other? It’s what tools do we use to talk to each other? Do we talk to the people in the office differently than we talk to the people who are not in the office so much? Communication is really important, and that’s

23:37

both the mindset around communication and the actual nuts and bolts of the tools that we use. If we never use webcams, for example, that says something about the culture that we have. The second pillar is really the most important one for senior leaders, and that’s collaboration. Do we know how the work gets done? Do we know what has to happen for our customers to be served?

24:07

Do we know who does what role? Do we know whether they need to be physically together for that to happen? Somebody has to load the truck. You can’t do that remotely. So do we know what parts of the work need to be done where and when in order to create great work? And then finally, cohesion is.

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How do we decide how we come together as an organization? Does it matter, for example, that we have fun? Some organizations are kind of fun proof, but they’re highly efficient. That’s who they hire for, and that’s how the work gets done. Other places are really fun, and maybe they’re not the most efficient place in the world, but people like working there, and we like to have fun. So let’s make that happen.

25:06

communication, collaboration, cohesion, if you can break those down and identify the parts and then decide what you intentionally want that to look like in your workplace, that’s how you create a culture and that’s how you create ultimately the organization that you want. Because all companies have a culture. It’s just whether it’s the one they want and whether it formed intentionally or just kind of morphed.

25:37

Yeah. And so you talk about the importance of engagement and an engaged employee. What advice would you give to managers who do struggle with their team engagement and collaboration when they have these virtual settings of, you know, their team? Yeah, I mean, there’s a couple of things. One is that the most corrosive thing on a remote team or a hybrid team

26:06

is the feeling of exclusion, of not being included. That’s when people disengage. When people are included, when they’re valued, when they feel like they are adding value to the conversation, they tend to be engaged because they get psychological and neurological rewards for that. So are you actively engaging? You know, it’s funny, we talk about employee engagement and there’s only so much

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employers and managers can do. You can create the environment that people can choose to engage with or not, but ultimately they make that decision. So one is, are you creating an environment that people want to engage with? But the second thing is, are you having the conversations with people? Real conversations with people, where you’re discovering what’s important to them. know, Sarah, you were really

27:04

quiet on that movie, on that movie. You were really quiet on that meeting the other day. What’s going on?

27:13

Now it could be you just had nothing to contribute to that meeting, which is fine. It could be, well, does it really matter what I say because nobody listens anyway? Ah, that’s a problem. We got to pay attention to that. You know, I’m sorry, my kid’s sick and I really didn’t have my head in the game. Okay, you know, that’s a one-time thing and now I know what’s going on.

27:40

But in the office, right, I can walk past the cube farm and I can see Alice banging her head on her monitor and I can go, Alice, are you okay? I can’t see Alice banging her head on her monitor if she’s at home. And when I say how she’s doing, she says, fine.

28:02

Yeah. Wow. Well, this was a lot of really great information, I’m really engaged. Well, thank you so much. I’m glad. Hopefully your listeners were engaged too. so Wayne, before I let you carry on with the rest of your Friday, can you let listeners know where they can go learn more about your work and connect with you? Absolutely. Well, first of all, they’re welcome to engage with me on LinkedIn.

28:31

I am a big LinkedIn, just a walk and hug. Everybody’s welcome. Of course, I am employed at the Kevin Eikenberry group, kevineikenberry.com. If you go to longdistanceworklife.com, that’s our podcast, longdistanceworklife.com slash LDL will take you to the new book and we have

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all kinds of free resources and things that people can take advantage of as a result. Okay, that’s great. Well, thanks for sharing that. We will make sure to link all of the information there below. And if you haven’t had the opportunity to check out the webinar that Wayne just presented this week with us, make sure that you do that. We’ll also have that linked below as well. He shares a ton more information over there about hybrid work.

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And we hope you enjoy listening to the HRDQ-U In Review podcast available on all major streaming platforms. If you did enjoy today’s episode, make sure to give us a follow and leave us a five-star review. That’s how we’re able to share this content with you every single week. Thanks so much, Wayne, for your time today. Thanks for having me, Sarah. Always good to partner with you guys in HRDQ. And thank you all for tuning into this week’s episode of the HRDQ-U In Review podcast brought to you by HRDQU.com.