Making Hybrid Work Really Something New

Sarah  00:34

Communication Style online assessment and training course, communication skills are critical if your organization is going to perform at its best, definitely dramatically improve communication skills of your employees through a better understanding of personal style and the effect on others. The what’s my communication style assessment is just 20 minutes to an aha moment, learners engage in a proven process that identifies their dominant communication style and the communication behaviors that distinguish it. Then it teaches them how to flex their style with colleagues for optimal communication. Learn more at HR DQ store.com/w MCs, where you get to take a free test drive of the online assessment. Today’s presenter is Wayne Turmel. Wayne is a writer, speaker and co founder of the remote Leadership Institute. For 25 years he has been obsessed with helping people communicate effectively to lead people teams and projects. The last 12 years he’s focused on learning the skills necessary to survive and thrive in the complex world of remote work. Wayne is the author of 12 books, including meet like you need it A Leaders Guide to painless and productive virtual meetings, and the long distance leader rules for remarkable remote leadership, which he co authored with Kevin Ikenberry. Thank you for joining us today, Wayne. Well, thanks, Sarah. Hi, everybody. Greetings, welcome.

Wayne Turmel  01:55

A couple of things. Before we get started, I know that you’ve been on a lot of these webinars, and you’re probably multitasking. But there we go, we got people going in the chat, the chat is live, I would love to take your questions and get your comments and your vicious personal attacks as we go. In terms of the introduction that Sarah gave me, most of what we’re going to talk about today is some of it comes from the long distance leader. Some comes from the sequel, the long distance, teammate, but really, we are looking at what’s next in terms of work. So I will be taking your questions as we go, I’d prefer not to just taught for the next 50 minutes or so. Let’s take your questions. As you go. Sarah will be watching and where they’re relevant. She’ll just drop them in, I will also gladly take questions at the end as is traditional. What we’re going to do is we’re going to talk a little bit about hybrid teams. What are they? Why do we care and what makes them challenging, and particularly for those of us in the HR, OD learning and development space, there is a particular challenge for us. And it’s a chance for us to really come to the table and help our organizations. Because the goal is not to just make make hybrid work, but make it something entirely new. And welcome from Iran, thank you for joining us. We’re going to talk about all the different roles involved in making hybrid work and truly making it something new from the organization to the individual to hrs. And we’re going to leave you with five tips. And what I hope will happen is that in the chat, we will get you sharing your best tips and what’s worked for you. So that’s what we’re going to do together. First, I guess we need to define our terms. You know, what is hybrid. And there’s a lot of talk about hybrid right now before in the before times, before COVID. A few organizations had what we call blended teams, you had some people in the office, some people working remotely, some working remotely full time some once in a while. And we call that a blended team, but it wasn’t a true hybrid. When we talk about hybrids, hybrids are actually taking two different things and creating something new it’s not just a blend, it’s actually something new. There are actually dozens of types of popcorn for Example. Different hybrids have different traits, the stuff they use in the movie theater is a different hybrid type of popcorn than what you throw in the microwave at home. A mule is yes, it’s the offspring of a horse and a donkey. But it’s entirely separate thing. It has certain genetic traits. And it has, you know, certain behaviors that are neither donkey, no horse. And of course, hybrid cars have different types of a local motion. Right now somebody’s asking about sharing, learning types with hybrid teams, and I’m going to try to do that if you will be patient, I’m hoping that we will get there. A lot of organizations are talking about going hybrid when they come back to the office. And some of that is by design, some of it is because a lot of people are refusing to come back or refusing to come back full time. And so while a lot of organizations thought, oh, as soon as this COVID thing is over, we’ll go back to being in the office, they’re now realizing that no, they’re not. And the problem is that there isn’t a single, there isn’t a single definition of what a hybrid team is. Some of them are going to be people who are in the office all the time fully located, some are going to be working remotely, whether they are in the same city and just not going into the office, or they’re somewhere completely different. And a lot of hybrid teams are looking at, maybe we have people in the office at assigned times, some organizations are looking at we’re gonna have people in Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, they can work from home Monday, Friday, others are saying you have to come into the office a certain number of days a week, and I wish there was a magic bullet, I wish there was a single One Ring to rule them all. And there just isn’t, it’s so much of it is going to be organization to organization. The thing that we have to bear in mind about hybrid work is that hybrid is two separate things coming together to create something new hybrid is not recreating the office, or it’s just the office. But with webcams. And for those of us in HR. That’s a very big deal. If you think about the before times, there was often an implicit, if not explicit expectation that yeah, you can work from home. But you know, if you really care about your career, you’ll come into the office. Right, those who work in the office will you know, if you work from home, I get it, you can do a good job. And that’s great. But career advancement, succession planning, how we think about you is going to depend on how much time you spend in the office. Hybrid work really understands that everybody on the team needs to contribute equally, they need to add equal value, but they need to be allowed to contribute equally, and they need to be allowed to present value. And they need to be rewarded and recognized and valued. Even though they are sitting in home office. And up until now, a lot of the processes performance evaluation, systems, learning and development systems that we’ve created are essentially around recreating the office. If you think about some of the problems we have collaborating in hybrid teams right now. When do we have people come into the office? Why are we on Zoom meetings from morning till night? Why is email overwhelming us and driving us crazy? It’s because we’re trying to recreate that office environment when people were always on call. And you could tell if somebody was there and you could pop by their desk and say something and you could grab a couple of people and brainstorm a problem. And we’re trying to recreate that. And ultimately, it doesn’t work very well. If we think about what we’re seeing in terms of burnout, in terms of people struggling to set time around their schedule, you know, we’ve told people, yes, you can work flexibly, and you can, you know, set your own hours, but you better be on that meeting at 11 o’clock. We’ve talked a good game about blending, remote work, but we haven’t really created that something new. And that’s what we’re trying to do. Hybrid work will in fact, be different. And our goal is not just different, but actually better. How do we do that? And someone was asking about learning styles. For example, how do you take somebody who is essentially a Social Learner, somebody who’s an auditory learner, for example, and help develop them, when they’re very often feeling isolated? These are the challenges that we’re actually going to be facing. So when we’re talking about making it better, what does better look like? And these are some of the things that we have to keep in mind that I want you to be thinking about, and especially kind of using them to benchmark your organization. The first thing is that flexibility, time, flexibility is a feature, not a bug. It’s built into the way that you’re going to work. In other words, we have to find ways to allow people to get their work done. And get the best work from them. But they may not be at their desk at a certain time. When we’re talking about our processes, and our performance metrics, and those types of things, one of the biggest challenges for leaders is going to be proximity bias. Proximity bias not only affects the leaders, right, we tend to value the people that we see more often we tend to think about them for delegation and career development, we tend to give them different and better feedback. But even among teammates, there is a problem of, for example, cliques forming where the people who are in the office all the time become their own thing. And the people who work remotely don’t have the chance to work together as often as frequently or as well as the people who share space. Certainly, we’re going to need to re examine what time means. Unless we are paying people on an hourly basis, we have to get away from measuring behavior, like when do they log on? And when do they log off? And more to what are the products that they are producing? What is the quality of those products? Are they on time, those types of things, we need to re examine what it meets what is the workweek, for example, we can’t keep killing ourselves on Zoom. We can’t keep holding teams meeting after teams meeting, we need to hold fewer synchronous meetings, but they need to add more value when we hold them. And we what that means is there’s going to be more asynchronous work. But that also includes asynchronous brainstorming and collaboration, ideas sharing. And a lot of organizations aren’t prepared to do that, when in doubt, they think that everything must be immediate. And when you’re trying to allow people flexibility of time, but also demanding their presence. That can create a challenge. We need to get the right people involved at the right time. One of the reasons we’re having meetings is everybody gets invited to the meetings and when do people need to be involved in these conversations? When do they not? All of that being said, right? There is a value to FaceTime. Whether or not that FaceTime is you and I sitting across having a cup of coffee or being on webcam. There is a time and organizations have to decide even if we’re going to allow people How to work wherever and whenever they want. When does it make sense for us to be together? Even organizations that are completely remote first plan ways to get together regionally, nationally, whatever it takes. But that needs to be done intentionally. If your organization is thinking that once they go remote, we never ever have to get together again, you are likely missing an opportunity. And as organizations save on real estate space, because they don’t have people all together, they need to think about how do we get people together? Do we need to think about off sites? Do we need to get third space working situations? Those types of things are going to be very important. Do managers need to travel to the employees rather than the other way around? It’s about intentionality. One of the challenges and I’m guessing that you’re going to find this and somebody was just talking about their organization being a government agency. There’s a real challenge, where what Kevin and I called the nuclear team, your immediate group of people function really well. Regardless of where they are, the relationships are good, the work is good, you’re really tight. But what organizations are struggling with is access and visibility to other parts of the organization. cross function, intra organization, communication, very often suffers, because there’s so much focus on the nuclear team. And finally, the way that we hire and select people is going to matter. And we need to hire and select people with this new hybrid model in place. So it’s interesting, we’re looking at some questions about generational differences. I will address that as best I can, if somebody has a specific question, ask it. And I’ll try to answer it. And thank you, by the way, good comments and questions in the chat, I am digging that. One of the challenges, particularly for HR is onboarding teams. And there’s an interesting challenge. Right now, not only are we hiring people who haven’t worked with the people they’re going to work with, they haven’t worked with their new teammates, they aren’t familiar with the organization. But talk about a generational challenge. There’s a new one here, too, which is we used to say working remotely, is just like when we’re in the office, right? You can still reach out to people you can still do. It’s like working in the office. But we’re not. Here’s the problem. As remote work expands, hybrid work expands, as we’re hiring people straight out of college. We’re hiring people who don’t know what it was like in the office in the before times. To say, Oh, it’s just like when we were in the office doesn’t help if you’re new hire has never worked in an office. And that is a really, really big paradigm shift. So as we’re thinking about onboarding people to hybrid teams, how do we get them up to speed quickly? One of the things that needs to change is we need to look at our bootcamp approach to bring people in this notion of bringing people in for two weeks and indoctrinating them and sheep, dipping them and then sending them home. bringing them into the office doesn’t help if nobody else on the team is around the office. So we need to look at examining that model. How do we integrate people into the culture? Right? And again, they can be really good at getting to know the nuclear team, but how do they know the entire organization and that’s going to involve things like more cohorts of learners, where perhaps you form cohorts across divisions, rather than simply All people in the same team or discipline, connecting people to the team and beyond needs to be done intentionally. Leaders are going to have to figure out how do we give them access to us. Now, a very simple thing that a lot of managers are thinking about doing is setting up office hours. Where for an hour a day or a couple of times a week, there is time blocked, where the people who aren’t in the office know that the manager is there, and can be accessed. And you can ask for questions. And you can ask them, ask for their time. But that needs to be sacred. Because one of the challenges on a hybrid team is unequal access to the leader. And it’s really important that everybody have the same vision of what this hybrid work is going to look like. Roseanne asked about mentoring, let’s put a pin in that Rosanna. I’m going to MIT mentioned mentoring in a moment. But one of the things that we need to look at is how does mentoring traditionally work? You’re the newbie This is Bob Bob has been here a million years, I want you to follow bob around, I want you to look over his shoulder sit in on meetings, just Bob’s gonna mentor you, and you can shadow Bob. And through Bob, you meet the other people in the team and you meet people in other parts of the organization. In a truly hybrid environment, maybe that job of mentoring doesn’t go to one person. You, Bob will mentor you around company culture, and the way things are done here. But we have somebody in the Denver office who is an expert in product and maybe you need to spend some time with Alice. And we’re going to have you hooked up with a partner for kind of immediate questions and answers and break up that role so that you are not reliant on one person and physical proximity. But mentoring by role and intentionally creating those connections that happen organically when everybody is in the same place. One of the biggest challenges that we’re going to have, and Sarah, I’m going to ask you to keep an eye on the questions and, you know, keep me honest, because we’re getting killer suggestions in the chat. One of the biggest problems that leaders are going to have to deal with and that this impacts, performance evaluations, impacts, career development, succession planning, retention, all kinds of things is proximity bias. And there have been studies going back to the 70s, that show that if you’re looking at the relationship, the engagement, willingness to interact with other members of the team, the farther you get away from each other, the less strong those bonds are the the original study, as a matter of fact, took place in an engineering firm in the 70s. And what they found is every 30 feet from somebody’s desk, phone number and quality of interactions goes down. And if you’re on a separate floor of the building, you may as well be on the moon. But this also impacts things like feedback. People who aren’t in the Office report that they get less feedback than people who are always in the managers line of sight. And the type and quality of feedback they get is very different. Who do you assign tasks to? Right? All those things can very, very, very easily be chopped up to proximity bias. And here’s what we need to know about that. It’s natural. It is something that happens totally unconsciously. It’s natural, but it can lead to the perception of favoritism. The boss likes the people in the office More than they like us, right people in the office, get pizza in their meetings, and they get to sit around and you know, they get to just have access to the manager anytime they want. And we don’t get that. It can impact the relationship. And it creates this perception of inequality. Using webcams can help. Webcams absolutely help, there is more and more evidence that when used correctly, and not beaten into the ground, our natural need for human contact, our need for visual connection with people needs to be fed. And so as you’re thinking about policies, when do we use webcams? When do we not? Do we in-city? I hear a lot about do we mandate webcams. And I am particularly of the mode that anytime you mandate anything, you are going to create problems that perhaps you didn’t have now. Roseanne just asked about generational differences with IT experience. And the digital divide. Some of it to be sure is generational. tell you a story real quick. I am exactly as old as email. My first job. My first big boy job in a corporation was rolling email out to my organization. In the 30 years since then, now the average knowledge worker does 70% of their communication in writing text email teams messages. That’s a very big deal. Right? Never in human history have we had that percentage of our communication take place in writing. And I was on a panel with a young man who’s the CEO of a company. He’s literally half my age. And he said as kindly as he could. Yeah, old man, you’re worrying about nothing. Because we grew up with the texting generation, that’s actually our preferred method of communication. And we don’t view it as a problem. However, I have a 28 year old daughter, and I’ve seen her go through enough texting drama in her life that could have been solved with an actual conversation that the digital divide falls into two camps. The first is do we know how to use the technology. And younger people are generally pretty good at knowing which button to push, and how do we do that? Not necessarily. There are people like me who are more tech savvy than others. But just because you know technically how to use a tool doesn’t mean you know how to leverage it doesn’t mean you make good decisions about what tools do we use under which circumstances. So the digital divide is a great opportunity for things like peer mentoring, right? It’s a great way to get your new hire, and the person who’s been around forever working together often enough that they’re learning from each other. Not only how do I leverage the tool? When do I need to pick up the phone and actually talk to somebody? So yeah, the digital divide is not just around, I like this tool, or I don’t like this tool. It goes much deeper than that. And for a hybrid workplace to work, everybody needs to be on the same page about things like which tool do you use when proximity bias just to finish up this this slide is it’s not just around physical proximity. It’s around time proximity. How do I get time with my manager when we are in different time zones without my manager being on duty 12 hours a day. These are the types of things that we need to take into account if we’re going to make this work. So as an organization, the organization is responsible for setting the overall reaction and the strategy. Janet is asking in the chat about, you know, there’s tax and workers comp and all sorts of things. That’s about the managers problem. That has to happen at the organization level, the organization needs to make those decisions. And I am willing to bet that even those organizations that have people scattered around the country, they’re probably out of compliance with the actual laws, because laws haven’t caught up yet. That’s the organization’s role. The organization needs to set the direction and the strategy, they need to provide the resources. Now, in some cases, this is equipment, things like that. You’d be amazed how many organizations don’t have a process around who buys paper for home offices. Right, who pays for the printer cartridge? You know, I’ve got a bad back, I need to buy a ergonomic chair. Is that my responsibility? These types of things need to happen at the organizational level. You know, set expectations for integrated work, when is the expectation that you will attend a meeting? Cindy just asked, you know, language and culture differences, and it’s not English as a second language, it’s, you can do that. You probably don’t want to call the Senior VP dude. But this is one of these things in the office, you pick that up? When we work remotely, the formality level tends to drop sometimes precipitously, right. So there are things like your DNI policies.Those types of things come from the organization. And when you’re talking about the organization, is probably dealing with more people over time zones and distance than an individual team. Administration, core learning curriculum, those types of things need to be directed, if not set at the organization level. The leaders have some things that we need to be able to know. I just saw something out of the corner of my eye. Coleen just said something, they won’t allow us to print from home. So it’s not to have to incur costs. There’s an example where, when people were working from home once in a while, we all knew we could sneak paper out of the office. Or we could have a home or you know, we could have a printer at home, or we didn’t have to print at home because we could put it on a USB stick and printed next time we went into the office. If that’s not the case, we need to look at how are people expected to get their work done. I have written before that I was teaching a class and somebody was ready to quit the org, it was very obvious. They were disengaged from the learning they were ticked off. And I said, What’s the problem? We were talking about working from home. And he said, I hate working from home, because I work on a laptop with one of those little Duma hickeys, to use as a mouse and I hate it. And I said, Why don’t you use a mouse seemed like a reasonable question. And the person said, well, the company won’t pay for it. And there’s a part of me that when you can go to the drugstore and buy a mouse for $9. If we were in the office, you there’s somebody with a big drawer full of equipment, you could probably just go and ask one and get one. Is the problem really $9 for a mouse or is the problem that the person doesn’t feel like the organization cares whether or not it’s easy or hard to get their work done? Are those kinds of things what you can do because of security and what you can’t? Who’s responsible? What can you print? What can you not? Those types of things are an important part of how the team works. Manage managers need to be aware of what’s going on, they need to be aware of proximity bias, they need to facilitate the work and not do the work. Barbara says something I want to put a pin in that Sarah, Don’t let me forget what Barbara just said in the chat. Our job is not to do the work, our job is to help people do the work and get the heck out of the way. We need to be available. When we add value, we need people not to be reliant on us that means part of the leaders role is facilitating the work between the team members. And we need to check in frequently. One of the things that we don’t often think about is that people that we see all the time we see them we interact with them, we don’t think that qualifies as time. I asked a lot of leaders, okay, how much time do you spend with each employee and they say I give each employee 45 minutes a week, I have a one on 145 minutes a week? Does it matter whether they’re in the office or remote? Nope, they get the same amount of time. Except we know that they don’t. I can walk by my boss’s desk and see that she’s there and poke my head and and get an answer to my question. If I’m remote, I may be reluctant to do that. Or I might not know whether I can even expect a response today. Frequency of communication matters. And as we’re thinking about developing leaders, teaching, the difference between checking in and checking up, is really important. When people complain about micromanagement from their leaders, it’s usually because they feel like they are being monitored, like they’re being checked up on. I remember somebody in an organization once they were having trouble getting people to use webcams. And I asked the people in the class, what’s going on? And they said, Oh, they only want us to use webcams so that they know we’re working. Wow. If that’s the case, can we assume that there are larger and larger issues at play than whether or not people should use their webcams? And, you know, we do entire classes on leading and performance management and things. But when you check in with people, it’s scheduled, it’s expected. It’s done in a way that is obviously supportive. When you check up on people, it’s surprise inspections. It’s mandatory monitoring, it’s a lot of other things it affects. It’s a mindset. When you work apart from each other, shorter, more frequent communication is critical. So one of the things you need to do is agree to how often are we going to meet one on one? And how are we going to do that? When do we use webcams? When do we not? When do we check in synchronously? When do we check in asynchronously. I’ve talked to my boss Kevin almost every day. Four days out of five. It’s a one line text conversation. We live on different ends of the country. I get up I start my day very early, because I’m on the West Coast. Every morning I send him a message hey, how you doing? Is there anything I need to know? Most days he sends back a message? Good morning? Nope, go to it. Every once in a while we find out that there’s something Oh, I do need to talk to you about that. That’s an agreement he and I have. He has people in other parts of the country that he doesn’t talk to as frequently or that he has to actually talk to more often than he talks to me. Webcams do matter. But so does maximizing your technology, both synchronous and asynchronous methods of communication, learning to brainstorm a synchronously so for example, we think of brainstorming as a synchronous experience. Everybody meets in the conference room or they meet online or somewhere in conference room and some are online. And we grab a whiteboard and we brainstorm. Those meetings can take a while. And we don’t always get equal input from everybody. What if we examined short meetings to set the goal allow people a synchronously to think contribute, add to the conversation and kind of review what everybody else has said before we have another synchronous meeting so that that meeting is more focused and shorter. Using tools like teams groups, and various mind mapping tools, and whatever you’re using, is going to make a difference to how many meetings and what how much flexibility do people really have in their time? Active listening, and empathy is the key to a hybrid team. If I’m sitting in the room with somebody, I can see them banging their head on their monitor, and I can go over and go Is everything okay? But if Becky is banging her head on her monitor at home, and I say Is everything okay? And she goes, Yeah, fine. If I’m not really actively listening, well, she said she was fine. And you have to have ways to monitor the pulse of the team. So as HR is supporting leaders, we need to help them be aware of proximity bias and how they set up we need to help them set clear expectations. What, why, how and help them help their teams keep the big picture in mind. Because again, it’s really easy to get tunnel vision and focus on the nuclear team. Here’s something that we do. We have a hybrid team at Kevin Ikenberry group, we are not perfect, but we’re pretty good at what we do. And we’re fortunate in that we have a fairly small team. But when somebody joins our team, the most important thing they can do is that we mandate a half hour webcam conversation with every member of the team, whether they are likely to interact with that person every day or not. I might sell them deal with Erica in graphics or Lisa in accounting. But my first job when I get there is a half hour webcam conversation with every member of the team. Why? Because what happens when somebody joins a team, there’s a meeting Hey, everybody, this is Sarah, she’s the new person, everybody say hi. Hi. And then the people who are in the office might see Sarah every day. But she might not interact with Becky or Tom, for days or weeks. If you’re trying to create a hybrid team, we need to jumpstart those relationships help people get to know everybody not just on a what’s your function and where do you go to school basis, but take the time to learn a little bit about so that the next time I have a question, I am less intimidated by reaching out to Lisa.

43:50

The team and by now I’m talking about the teammates, everybody needs to be part of the onboarding effort. We’ve already talked about.

44:01

Mentoring and shadowing.

Wayne Turmel  44:05

You know, and that’s both formal and informal, is a big piece of that. Teammates need to be really proactive. One of the things in our book, The Long Distance teammate, is we were stunned when we did the research how often the word proactive shows up in the definition of a good teammate. Teammates offer support and help without being asked is an expectation of a teammate and build new relationships. You know, value short meetings, individual meetings that help people get to know each other. Not everybody needs to be on every call. And as a matter of fact, the more people on a meeting, the less value it adds in terms of getting to know everybody for the individual, we talked about hiring for hybrid, and hiring people for that hybrid experience. We need people who are proactive, who are not afraid to ask for help and ask the questions. They need to move beyond proximity bias to saying, hey, I need some time. Hey, I need an answer to this question. I am not going to rely solely on my relationship with my manager, I am encouraged, facilitated, and in fact held to account for my willingness to reach out to the team. And it’s my job to stay connected to the big picture. I need to know how the organization works, I need to fit into the corporate culture. And finally, there’s HR and l&d Creating cross functional cohorts will go a long way to helping establish and develop the culture and helping people become part of the bigger picture. Less boot camp, you know, there is some synchronous training necessary, absolutely. But perhaps less of that and more self directed or small group Virtual Learning pre and post. When people are together, they should be spent in social learning, getting to know each other activities and learning that is interactive, not just everybody sitting quietly in a chair in the same room. We need to train the mentors, much better than we did. I’m looking at something Cindy said here. One potential challenge is mentoring on a peer to peer level and not seeing improvement. Yeah, that’s the thing. But what do you do about it? Right? I’m working with Sarah. And you know how she is and things aren’t improving? Where does it go from there? Do people know? Have they been taught how to mentor? When do they bring others into the conversation? Right. Less fire hose more trickle irrigation is how I like to think about problem with the bootcamp approach is we bring people in, and we give them big thick binders of stuff and give them two weeks to kind of learn everything most of which slops over and is lost forever. And then we send them to their assignment. But one of the things that can be done is that we intentionally create ties across the organization, which on an organizational level, speed up work, build relationships, help your pipeline and your leadership succession, all the things that we’re responsible for. All right. So I’m going to ask you, and we’ve seen some of this. And Sarah, I’m going to ask you to keep an eye on it. Use the chat for, you know, what are some of the tips that are really important, I’m going to give you our five, and then we’re going to take q&a, and all like that. The first thing is for a hybrid team to work, you need equal access to your teammates. And that doesn’t just mean specific time and place doesn’t mean you can just pick up the call and get an answer anytime. What it means is, do I have access to their brain? Am I free to ask them a question or engage them in conversation? Or if the rest of the team is on a different time? timeframe? Can that person and I get together? Equal access equal does not mean the same. And it doesn’t happen organically, particularly when there is a tenure imbalance or a power imbalance. So organizations need to jumpstart that process. We’ve already talked about mentoring and shadowing. That breaking it up by location and function. And those types of things can be more effective than just assigning a mentor. Laurie just said be intentional about inclusivity. Absolutely and intentionally creating those bonds is a great way to do that. You need to mix your synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. Repeat after me not everything needs to be a meeting. And yet, we want to gather information. We want feedback. Are you using surveys and polls? Are you using your chat groups strategically to gather and collate information? Meet less often and more effectively. And here’s the thing get together when it makes sense. Here’s an example of it not making sense. We are going to mandate that people are in the office, three days out of five. We don’t care what day but three days out of five do come into the office two days you can work from home sounds like a great deal. Here’s the thing. What are they expected to do on the days that they are in the office that are different from the days they work at home? If My job consists of fighting traffic, getting to the office, hanging my coat over my chair, sitting at my computer all day, getting up picking up my jacket and leaving? Why does that need to be done in the office? If my job is to do tasks, I guarantee you I will be less effective when I’m in the office. Because there are other people there. That’s when we should be meeting. That’s when we should be brainstorming. That’s when we have to recognize that tasks, checking stuff off the list probably won’t happen on those days, because there’s other work that can add more value. If you’re going to have people who are permanently remote at some point in the course of the year, do you invest in getting them physically together? There is a value in that. Yes, it is an expense. Yes, it is time consuming and it eats up money. And it creates differences. So, you know I am looking at these are just five examples of things. By the way, if any of you’re going to add next week, and you want to corner me and continue this conversation, I would love to do that. I will be in Orlando. But now let’s get your questions in here, Sarah, I’ve tried to address some of them out of the corner of my eye as best I can. Okay, thank you, Cindy. That’s so kind. What’s in here that we need to talk about in the couple of minutes that we have left?

Sarah  53:21

Keep this back to me. Oh, can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yeah, I can now. Okay, here we are. So the the first thing I’m what you said just to keep in mind and you know to keep that comment pin because when you were talking about the mouse and someone not feeling comfortable or didn’t want to purchase purchase the $9 mouse. And we had a comment come through from Barbara who said the person may not be assertive enough to ask what they need. And that was something you wanted to keep on our radar. Yeah, absolutely. Here’s the thing I, I don’t

Wayne Turmel  54:02

like to break it down to assertive or non assertive so much as proactive and not proactive. One of the first things that my one of my first managers said to me, and I took it to heart, especially when I became a manager is he sat me down and said, I am really good at a lot of things. Reading your mind is not one of them. So there are two things that come to mind with that. Number one is as a manager, I need to ask, right? Do you have everything you need to do the job? What can we do for you? The second is encouraging the kind of trust where people can say hey, I don’t have what I need and that has happens in the one on ones. This is more training that managers require to succeed in this environment is that the one on ones, especially if they don’t have the body language and the nonverbal cues tend to be very transactional. I get an hour with Kevin every week. So I have a Kevin list, he has a waiting list, and we check off our list. And we don’t leave whitespace in the conversation for what else is going on? What can we do to make your job easier? What do you want to do? What do you want to work on? Those conversations happen in the office? Not nearly often enough, but more than happen with people who are remote?

Sarah  55:54

Great. And we had another question here back when you’re talking about onboarding new hires, and doing that remotely, from Colleen, who was just looking for clarification, if those meetings that you were speaking of, were individual meetings, one on one meetings with the remaining there, you know, the rest of the staff?

Wayne Turmel  56:14

I think I understand the question. Here’s, here’s the thing. I am all about written the fewer people involved in the conversation, the richer those meetings should be. So I am less concerned about somebody having their webcam on if there are 10 people on the call than I am if you and I are having a conversation. Right, Kevin, and I rarely have a conversation that isn’t on webcam. Because it’s Richard, right? When he says something, and I roll my eyes or you know, give him the Scooby Doo face. He knows that he needs to check in with me. The richer conversations should be supported by webcams and by open mics. You know one of the things culturally, Oh, you want to see the Scooby Doo face? Do you ever have anybody give you the Scooby Doo face? Yes, you have? Yeah, it’s it’s all about richness of communication. And so the one on one conversations, they’re just so critical. And they don’t happen enough when we work remotely. And I know that didn’t answer the question. And I’m sorry. And I think we have time here for one final question before we close up our webinar today. And that’s coming from Lisa. And Lisa would like to know if you have any tips for conducting meetings where some people are there in person and tend to continually jump into the conversation while the rest are just joining virtually. Yeah, so what about those people who are over contributing, for lack of a better, better word. There’s always that dynamic. There’s that dynamic. in a conference room, there’s that dynamic online leaders need to be more comfortable setting the expectation that everybody needs to be heard from. And you can do really simple things like let’s hear from someone we haven’t heard from yet. Not a very subtle approach. But it’s better than Bob for crying out loud Shut up. Posting the agenda visually, visually. So that people can see that time is fleeing. And people can say, hey, we need to get back on track and the team will police itself. In a perfect world. The team takes ownership for the meetings and police each other and hold each other accountable. But leaders need to be more proactive about not so much shutting people down as encouraging other people and leaving less room for people to over contribute. I’ve written a lot about meetings over the years but and we teach classes in it, obviously. But yeah, that’s a big deal. I know that we are at the top of the hour and people are bailing. So Sarah, whatever. Like I said, if anybody’s going to be an arena, Lando, next week, come see me. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I want to hear from you. I am eager to do so. But Sarah, it’s your show. Close it up. Yes.

Sarah  1:00:05

Well Thank you Wayne for such an informative session today and today’s webinar was sponsored by the HR DQ what’s my communication style online assessment and training course. Take a free test drive at HR DQ store.com/w MCs, and learn how you can flex your style for optimal performance on the job and maybe at home too. And if you’d like to learn more on topics like today, HR DQ memberships offers over 200 Human Resource webinars, keeping you in the know with industry trends, as well as workforce virtual seminars on key training topics for your employees. Learn more at www dot h rdq.com/memberships. And that does conclude today’s webinar. Again, thank you very much for joining us today Wayne.

Wayne Turmel  1:00:50

My pleasure. Thank you, Sarah, for inviting me. And thank you, everybody for your time and attention and your really good feedback in the chat so much good stuff.

Sarah  1:01:01

Yes, thank you all for participating in today’s webinar. Happy training.