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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 episode is brought to you by HRDQU.com, and I am your host, Sarah, Learning Events Manager at HRDQ-U. And today we have a Wayne Turmel joining us to discuss a recent webinar that he presented with us last week.

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why your return to office hasn’t gone according to plan and what to do about it. Thanks so much for joining us today, Wayne. Well, thanks for the invite. This is great. So let’s start things off here. Let’s let everybody know a little bit about, you know, who you are, what you do, how you got to where you’re at today. Good heavens. In no particular order. I am a master trainer and consultant with the Kevin Eikenberry Group.

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I have written 15 books total, think three of them, the long distance leader, long distance teammate and long distance team written in conjunction with Kevin. I live in Las Vegas and I have spent the last almost 20 years focused on remote and virtual communication and how people communicate or mostly don’t.

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effectively in this kind of environment. Well, great. Yeah, I’ve had the opportunity to work with Wayne and Kevin and it’s always such a joy working with you both. So let’s get into a little bit about the webinar. us a recap of the webinar that you presented with us, why your return to office hasn’t gone according to plan and what to do about it so that we can bring everybody up to speed, whether it’s a refresher for those that attended the webinar with us.

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or for those that were unable to attend the webinar, can catch them up. So everybody’s on the same page. Sure. Well, essentially, you know, we are, I suppose, at the tail end of the first wave of returning to office after, you know, COVID basically shoved us across the Rubicon of remote work. And it’s been this awkward, weird, nobody

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quite knows when it started, kind of last summer, and it’s been fits and starts, and the very smart people who attended our webinar just said, yeah, we thought we had a plan. Now, I happen to be a pessimist by nature. I’m a firm believer if you want to hear God laugh, tell them your plans, right? But it didn’t go according to Hoyle, and there are some reasons for that, and some of it,

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is just because stuff never goes according to plan. know, the great philosopher Mike Tyson said, everybody has a fight plan until they get punched in the mouth. And everybody pretty much got punched in the mouth. So some of it is just stuff happens, right? When you rely on plans to be 100%, there’s going to be a high percentage of disappointment. But there are also some fairly predictable behaviors that happened.

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And the problem of course is that now we are in this middle ground where we’ve gone through, get your butt back to work. No, it’s the great resignation. No, it’s, you know, okay, we’re quietly quitting. No, we’re, there’s all this nonsense that’s gone with it. And the fact is we all just want to find the right way to work so that companies can be open and serve their customers.

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do good work and stay in business and people can earn paychecks and not get fired and not have the life sucked out of them. Which is kind of capitalism 101. I mean, that’s the story of the last hundred years, right? But there have been very few obvious inflection points and this is one.

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Great, and we had a really great audience with us last week and we had lots of great comments and questions come through. So we compiled the list of those top comments and questions that we received and we have some more to share today. So Wayne, let us know what happens when management sits down and makes all the decisions about the return to office. Yeah, there are a couple of things.

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that happened. And we’re talking about that handful of organizations where the organization said, okay, that’s it. know, COVID is officially over. Get your butts back to the office. We’ve thought about it. We want you back. Make it happen. Right. And there are a couple of reasons that that’s not a great idea. First of all, anytime you’re making giant sweeping policy decisions,

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If the only view you have is from 30,000 feet, there’s going to be a lot of things you just don’t know or don’t think about or even know about. So you want to…

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Certainly, final decision rests with the people with the paycheck, with the power of the purse. We get that. But never a bad idea to consult people throughout the organization and see what’s going on out there. I don’t want to come down too hard. I mean, there’s a lot of senior leaders who have spent their entire careers

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working in the office, there’s one way to get it done. I think about professional service firms and places like that where, you know, finance, there’s one way that this industry has been run for 150 years. You know, you come in, you intern, you’re there all the time, you spend ungodly hours in the office, you’re mentored, you network, you socialize, and that’s how you grow and learn and become good at what you do.

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and you get promoted and that’s the way the business works. And I want my people to be good and smart and promoted. And so I want to go back to what we know work. So I don’t fault them for that, but I think there are some blind spots. And the biggest one of course is that it’s not like the before times.

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unless you worked in the Garden of Eden, the before times were not some fabulous place where there were no problems and everything worked perfectly and good heavens, let’s get back to that. And how do you think that organizations can strike that balance between involving their employees in the decision making while also maintaining a level of efficiency and effectiveness? Right, well, I think…

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One of the things, and this is Kevin’s term, and I wish he had thought of it before the book came out, but he came up with it afterwards, is what we call pilot versus policy, right? Pilot before policy. And that is if you…

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come back and say, starting such and such a date, this is the way it is, stamp, stamp, no more races. It’s gotta be exactly this way. And then we find out things aren’t exactly what we thought it were. It can get really, really messy and ugly and weird. Whereas if you say, we’ve talked to a bunch of people, here’s what we think is gonna work. Here’s what we’ve come up with. Let’s try it.

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test it, see how it’s working, and make adjustments accordingly. And there’s a couple of reasons this is important. One is stuff is going to change. And if you bring people back and say, no, this is the way it is, and then stuff changes, you get this very kind of natural negativity that says, you lied to us. Well, we didn’t lie. We thought this was how it was going to be.

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But it doesn’t matter. You told them something and it turned out not to be true. There is a huge difference between this is how it’s going to be. Oh darn, no, it’s not. And this is how we think it’s going to be. Oh, it’s not. Okay, so let’s make some adjustments. Those are two very different conversations when you’re talking about building trust in an organization or on a team. Absolutely.

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And during our webinar, you spoke about the endowment effect. Can you share with what you mean by that? Sure. This is mostly… Okay, so we’ve been dumping on the leaders. This is the employees issue. Human beings suffer from an aversion to loss. And very often we fear losing something more than we look forward to the possibility of gaining something.

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This is why it’s very difficult once people have something. You know, I’ve worked from home. I don’t spend as much on my car. I get to actually see my family. I, you know, don’t have to wear a suit and tie every day to do this silly job. Whatever that is, right? We’ve gotten used to it over three years. And now it’s like, oh no, no, you have to get up an hour earlier and you have to.

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commute and you have to park your car and you have to not make it home in time for your kids soccer game and you know, thanks for coming.

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And so there’s this notion that by going back to the office, especially going back to the office full time, that we are now giving something up, we’re losing something and not getting anything in return.

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That’s largely a perception issue, but it’s very real. Human beings in general fear loss more than they look forward to gain. And that’s the endowment effect. And so if the company’s approach is, right, great, we let you work from home for three years and now it’s time to get your tail back here.

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that’s likely to be met with some resistance. Even if the company has perfectly valid reasons for doing it. Absolutely. how can organizations effectively address the endowment effect and minimize that resistance when transitioning employees back into the standard office setting? Well, I think there’s on a macro level, you got to talk to your people and see where they’re at. Right?

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And when people are resistant to coming back, is it simply that they are having a knee-jerk reaction to the endowment effect or are they making some good points? For example, a lot of people didn’t work from home before because we didn’t think those jobs could be done. Well, guess what? They got done for three years. They got done surprisingly well for three years. So maybe we don’t just assume that those jobs have to be done.

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I mean, if your job consists of fighting traffic, coming into the office, hanging your coat over the chair, sitting over your keyboard for eight hours, getting your coat and leaving.

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Maybe being in the office 100 % of the time is not necessary. part of it is just having conversations, what’s the… Organizations run on sales, salespeople know, you have to uncover the objection. Why are people pushing back? The second thing is that they need to ask themselves some really basic questions. And this is where we’ve been working with…

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HR and training people and others to kind of create the questions. That’s what our new book, The Long Distance Team does is we just say, okay, first of all, what is the work that needs to get done? What are the tasks? What’s the process flow? Who does what with which and to whom to reach, you know, to service our customers and make money.

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Then you look at who are those people, right? Both in terms of the roles, but also the human beings that are doing them. Some people really, really love working from home and would never come into the office at all except at gunpoint. Others can’t wait to get out of the house and they love being in the office and they love the energy and the sociability and you know, and then there are other people who are saying maybe there’s a mix, maybe there’s a new way of doing this.

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So what’s the work that needs to be done? Who’s doing it? What are the roles? What roles absolutely have to be in the office? What roles could be remote? What roles could be flexible? And then finally, you look at how does the work get done? And this is where you get to things like, the story is that people collaborate better in the office. Well, sometimes they did.

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There is an energy to being in person. There are also office politics. There are time zones. There are things like…

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You know, if I’ve got a team and some of them are in the office, the people in the office generally dominate the discussion and they dominate the meeting and the people who are remote maybe are contributing as much as they could or should. Are there better ways to do this? And I’m thinking specifically about why does everything have to be a meeting, right? We went home and yet we are still on Teams or Zoom or whatever.

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from morning till night. Probably that could be re-examined.

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So what’s the work that needs to be done? Who’s doing it and what are the roles and who does what? And then finally, what’s the best way for that work to get done? And what we’re finding is that yes, there is something to, for example, synchronous brainstorming. People bouncing ideas off each other and sharing ideas and going, no, you idiot, it’s like this. And those conversations are fabulous. But.

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Have you ever left one of those meetings and gone, oh man, you know what I should have said? Well, maybe there are asynchronous things we can do before the meeting to prepare, think about, so that we don’t start the meeting with 20 minutes of background, right? We get right down to it. And then after the meeting, we have time to…

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think about it and re-examine and maybe come up with some other questions that we didn’t think about so that ultimately, yeah, we had two short meetings instead of one long one, but we have better outcomes. Yeah. And what’s happening and what organizations are ultimately struggling with in all this is what is the best way

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for the work to get done and we’re coming up with, people are saying it’s hybrid and most of the time it’s not hybrid. It’s just a compromise. Well, we’ve got some people here and some people there so we’ll use Teams and we’ll try to muddle through. True hybrid work is different. It not only has people in different locations on occasion, but time is used different.

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you get a lot more asynchronous work. get maybe people don’t have to be at their desk at the same time, no matter where they are.

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And in a perfect world, if it’s done right, you get not only better outcomes for the business, that’s the goal, right? We want to be more profitable and sell more and all that good stuff. But also people get some of their life back and they’re not so stressed and they actually want to be there. So you retain people more.

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So this is it. And it’s been this weird period of adjustment. know, we went, people went on and on about the great resignation. Well, it turns out if you give people three years to actually sit and think about what they’re doing with their lives, they might not continue what they were doing before. Absolutely. Or they might want to do it differently. Yeah.

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Absolutely. And during the webinar, you talked about the great mismatch. Can you share more about what is that? What is the great mismatch? Yeah, we went through all this stuff and there were all these things, two week news cycles, right? First was it was the great resignation. Nobody wants to come back to work. Those selfish weasels, we let them work from home and now they won’t get out of their bunny slippers and come back to the office. And people said, oh, you want to drag me back there? OK, here’s my resignation. I’ll go find it.

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job that’ll let me work from home. So that happened. And then everybody else kind of went, okay, let’s go back to the office. And there was kind of a second wave of the great resignation, which was, oh, I’ve been back in the office for six months and I remember why I didn’t like it the first time. So there was like this second wave. The mismatch, when we talk about the mismatch, we’re really talking about

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the needs and expectations of the company around what work should look like now. And the mismatch of people’s expectations, desires, willingness, what they’re willing to do, how much they’re willing to engage. And there have been periods throughout history where this ebbs and wanes. the goal of our economic system is if

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There’s a job to be done and you pay people enough, they’ll do it and that’s how things work. Well, we’re in a period where the labor side has a little more choice than they’ve ever had before.

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Some organizations handle this by cracking down. Famously, Jamie Dimon at Citibank said that you’re welcome to work from home, but don’t expect to get promoted and don’t expect us to remember who you are.

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That’s one way to run a business. It’ll be interesting in two years to see what their turnover is like, what their retention is like, whether they are a recruiter of choice. But it’s their business and they can decide to do that. The majority of companies are saying, okay, how do we strike that balance? How do we strike that

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mix of, because first of all, a lot of senior leaders had never worked from home. And they’ve had the chance not to do it. It’s really interesting if you look at the statistics of people who are returning or not, it’s the managers who least want to be back in the office full time. They understand the value of being in the office and being face to face with their people.

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But they’re not crazy about five days a week, this is the only way to do this. And a lot of them had never worked from home before. they, of course they were against the idea, they had nothing to compare it to. Yeah. And so in achieving a win-win balance between work, remote work, home life and flexibility, know, what key factors do you believe organizations should consider to ensure that employees have a sense of responsibility and

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responsibility and accountability while still enjoying the benefits of the evolving work landscape. Yeah, I think this is the thing, right? It’s not like, oh, I have all the power and I don’t ever want to go to the office again. And so I’m going to hold my employer hostage right on one side. And those ungrateful weasels, you know, they should be glad to have a paycheck. Get your butt in here. It’s not that simple.

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But if you don’t want it to be that, then there are structural things and personal things. Among the personal things are people have to understand what’s negotiable and what’s non-negotiable. I mean, a really simple thing is why do we want you back in the office and why does it have to be X days a week?

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Because we said so is not a compelling argument.

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So can you, if the organization has done that questioning that we talked about, right? What’s the work, what’s the best way for it to get done, all that good stuff, they can make their case and say, no, we have found that this is really important. And in order to support that, we’re going to create a system that makes it easy to be productive. Give you an example. If people are gonna be in the office three days a week,

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maybe those are the days you hold meetings. You yeah, you’re not going to get your TRS reports written that day, but you’re home two days a week and you can bang those out in no time if you’re not being interrupted. What work gets done where is an important discussion. If collaboration and all of that is the important thing about getting back together, then when you’re together, that’s what you should be spending your time on. So,

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that needs to be done from the company’s And then finally, from an HR training standpoint.

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Are you allowing people, if they’re taking advantage of this flexibility, if they’re going to be remote more often than not, are you engaging them, bringing them in and making them part of the organization? And there are things like succession plans and performance management. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that says people in the office get more and better feedback than people who work remotely.

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that has an effect on those working remotely. People in the office get first choice of assignments and delegation and cool gigs. Well, if I’m working remotely and the people in the office are getting all the treats,

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I’m probably not going to be the most engaged, grateful, fabulous human being that’s ever worked for you over…

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So the performance management system and the training of people needs to demonstrate we value you, we want you to be engaged, we’re going to reward you for being engaged, and there is a career here if you want it.

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Now, the other side of that on the employee’s side is if, you know, the thing about employee engagement is there’s only so much employers can do. You know, if you just got married, you know this, if I’m with somebody and I asked them to marry me and I get down on one knee and I buy them a rock and I treat them good and all that stuff, that person is not engaged until they say yes.

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It’s the same thing with employee engagement. I can be a benevolent, well-paying, sympathetic, empathetic employer, but the other person has to choose to engage. Yeah, absolutely. It goes both ways. And here’s the thing. If you know what the career path is and you know that there is a fair and equitable performance management system and you know there’s a career path here if you want it,

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it’s incumbent on you to do it. You know, you can’t just put your head down and not get involved and say, don’t listen to office politics, la la la la la. Nobody has ever been promoted without knowing what’s going on in the company.

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Right? You have to network. That’s on you as an individual. Yeah. Yeah. And now taking a step back and looking at the learning and development space as a whole, what changes do you see happening right now? I think what we need to do, just as we have a hybrid approach to work, I think we need a at least balanced and at best hybrid approach to training. For example,

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there was a wave of, well, if people are gonna bring remote, we’ll do all training remotely. And we’ll give them e-learning and they can do it on demand. And I hate to say this, e-learning, except for very small, specific tasks, is not universally loved and doesn’t work all that great. Why? Because there is a social component to learning.

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We learn by talking things out with our peers. We learn from asking questions and getting answers in real time. We learn from peer pressure and going, well, I didn’t think this would work, but everybody else seems to be with the program, so I guess I should do that. So striking the right mix of in-person social live training.

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virtual instructor led training, on demand training in various ways, mentoring, peer coaching, finding the balance of that is ultimately L&D’s job.

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Great, and let us know what exciting things are you up to next? Oh, good heavens, what am I up to? Well, by the time you see this, Kevin and I will have been to the ATD conference and we were both speaking multiple times. I hope some of you get the chance to meet us while we’re there. But the big thing is what’s exciting is as we’re rolling out

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the book, The Long Distance Teen.

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We’re having more and better conversations with organizations about their culture and what do they want to be when they grow up. And those are exciting conversations. Yeah. Yeah. I’m sure it is. And my final question for you today is where can the listeners go learn more about your work and hear from you? You know, we are not that hard to find.

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Very obviously, me personally, you find me on LinkedIn. I’m there, Wayne Turmel, T-U-R-M-E-L. Our organization, the Kevin Eikenberry Group. Some of you may be familiar with the Remote Leadership Institute, which has been merged in, so we’re all under one umbrella now. The kevineikenberry.com is the absolute best place to find us.

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You know, and if you’re interested in the book, longdistanceteambook.com is all about the new book and there are free resources and all kinds of special deals and things that you can find there. Great. Yes. Make sure that you go connect with Wayne over on LinkedIn and check out kevinikenberry.com.

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And Wayne, it’s always a pleasure connecting with you and working with you. I love to hear all the knowledge and stories that you have to share. So thanks so much for your time today. Well, thank you for having me. really, Kevin and I really enjoy our partnership with HRDQ. And we hope we’re bringing value to your members. That’s ultimately what this is about.

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It is, yes. And thank you all for tuning into this week’s episode. We hope you enjoy listening to the HRDQ-U In Review podcast, available on all major streaming platforms. And if you did enjoy today’s episode, make sure that you give us a follow and leave us a review. Like and subscribe, darn it. You know how this works. If you’re listening to podcasts, you know, just like and subscribe. Catch y’all next time.