Managing Hybrid Work Schedules for your Small Business

The small business show episode 336 for Wednesday, July 14, 2021. Greetings folks and welcome to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co the show by, for and about small business where you can find us small businessing every week week here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton and here in.

Lafayette, California, I am Shannon Jean.

I was so happy with my phrase there about where you can hear a small businessing every week that I neglected to do what I would normally do in that next slot. Between saying that and saying here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton and that is to tell you that our sponsor is Streak S T r e a k.comsbs where you can get 20% off your first year. We'll talk more in detail about that in a bit, but I just wanted to say that as we get rolling.

Here, looking forward to learning more about it. Yeah, good deal. So here. How was your Independence Day holiday?

You know, we, I have a bunch of family over in, in Booth Bay Harbor, Maine, where my great grandfather had this vision. He was a turnaround guy like, like big time. Like General Foods was one of his, his successes. Right. And so he did very well for himself, earned a bunch of money. But family was always super important to him. And he had this vision, like many people do, that he would create a home where family could come for generations. So he started buying a bunch of land in Booth Bay Harbor. Now, most of the time when that happens, you're able to pass the land down, but if you can't pass the desire to put family first down, it falls apart. Like it gets. Maybe, maybe one generation survives and then the next generation is like, all right, let's split it up and know, take the money and run because there's fighting and infighting and all that stuff somehow. And, and I, he had a lot of successes. I, I really do credit his greatest success as somehow infusing this importance of family into the minds of people he never met. Like, I met him when I was very young, but like, my kids get this and. Yeah, and so my, we had 35 people, 35 family members at our, at my aunt's house on Sunday. And it was not a family reunion that we had planned, you know, a year in the making or something. It was really cool. Yeah, it just, it just happened. Like we, we knew we were going to get together at our place because we were all going to sort of be in town. And then when we were there, we're like, wow, this is really amazing. Not just amazing because it's been a year since we've seen each other because of COVID but also, like, look what we have here. So. Yeah. So my mom's siblings all owned property up there that all was sort of. Kind of, sort of chopped up from the large pieces of land that my great grandfather bought and really have stayed in the family. It's wonderful. It's great. So, yeah, we had a family reunion without planning a family reunion. And I got to tell you, that's the best way to do it, because we just showed up and it was like, well, we're just here to eat for a few hours. There's no huge pressure on us.

Yeah.

But as we were. There was like, there's a lot of us here. Like, whoa, this is the biggest number we've had in a long time. So it was cool.

And I. It was good. And I should add, we are recording this show a week early on the 7th, so it's right after Independence Day. So when you hear me ask that.

Yeah, no, that's a fair point. Yeah. But it's pretty cool to see that. You know, we talk about a lot of different types of success and especially success in business here. And I. Like I said that's. It's amazing. I'm still not sure how he did it.

Yeah, that's a real definition of success is when you keep your family together like that. I think it's.

He wrote it. He wrote a book that we call the Red Book in the family that. And. And it actually, I think it's available online. I gotta look. But I think the Mormons have indexed this book, and it's online in their database. But the name of the book is Nana and Granddad, and. But we just call it the Red Book, and it's his story of his life and their life together. But throughout the book, they refer to themselves not as, you know, their first name. I mean, they certainly put their names in the book, but. But they refer to themselves as Nana and Granddad. And I. You know, like, I think making family first, sort of the thing that permeated all of his life is part of what the part of the magic that. That allowed this to pass down, which is interesting. If I can find a link, I'll put it in the thing. It's really probably only interesting to me, but.

No, no, I think it's probably interesting more people than you think.

No, there's. And there's a lot of good business lessons in there, because, like I said, he was a very successful turnaround guy and started at the bottom. So, yeah, it's pretty cool.

Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, I had a great, you know, long weekend as well. We were up in Tahoe with a bunch of family people as well. And. But, you know, nice to be back home getting back to work. And you know, speaking of getting back to work, let's segue into let's do it. What our topic is today, which is kind of this hybrid concept or how we're going to get people, you know, back into the office. You know, your business, you may have switched from, in, in person to work from home during the pandemic, and now you're or have been working on a plan to get people back into the office. And you know, there's lots of different ways to do it. What's the best method to start in person? Schedules. How do you transition people that love being at home maybe don't want to come back and trying to figure out these kind of schedules. So I'd love to dig into that.

Yeah, I'd like to dig into this too. I, you know, my businesses have almost all been remote all the way through, like for decades. So I have some thoughts on this. But, but it's, you know, that's not without its challenges either, so. Yeah, yeah, all right, I agree.

And I think one of the big challenges like you mentioned is doing or coming up with a system that is right for your business. Right. But also really takes into consideration what your employees want. Because I think there are certainly people on your team that have fallen in love with working from home. While there also may be people that don't want to work from home, you know, a single. More. A single day longer than they have to.

Yeah, I have, I have some thoughts on those people. Do you want me to share them now or do you want me to wait?

You can cheer them now too. Yeah, go ahead.

Okay. Well, you know, it's about being productive. One of the things that I started doing during pandemic was, you know, I'm always about mind hacks. Right. And so as listeners know, I've tried to stop using the word busy and instead use the word productive. And I think that is especially true when we're talking about people that are working from home. You have to be able to and prove that you can be productive in a work from home environment. Some people are great at this and some people are terrible at this. There are people that can be super productive in the office, but as soon as they lack that structure around them, that literally that physical structure, but also that structure of Humans and everything else, when that's not around, they wind up just checking boxes throughout the day, but not actually producing valuable things. Valuable results, I should say. And that's that as a manager, but even as a person, like, I have to be aware of that because I can be busy at my desk all the time.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Not get anything done. And so it's, you know, it's all of our tricks about the to did list and all that, and then teaching your employees to use those and really monitoring. Because I've been through this. We've been, like I said, we've been remote for decades, for the most part. But even recently, like, literally last week, I was having a conversation with, you know, one of the people I work with about how I could see that they were in a rut of being busy without, like, zooming out and thinking, oh, how can I be productive? And really, I think that's a thing. Everybody. It's helpful to have all of us check each other. Just because I'm focused on it doesn't mean I'm good at it. Right. It means that I want to be good at it. And so being aware and checking in with your employees and finding those people that are more. Tend more to. Towards the. I know that I need to be busy for X number of hours. That's how my. That's how I value myself. Changing their minds so that they are valuing themselves based on the work that's done. And, and, and really, as a manager, the way you do that is focusing on the work that's done. I don't care how many hours this took you. I mean, yeah, but it's, it's, it's not about the hours. It's about, what did you do? And I noticed somebody that was like, performing a task that really should be about 10 minutes twice a week, and they were doing it four times a day. And I'm like, well, what's the value of that? They're like, well, it's safer this way. I don't have, you know, I'm like, how much safer? Like, what's our exposure? If you were to wait several days before checking in with this particular thing. And we, we did the math, and it was about $20,000 a year. If it went completely, like, off the rails and was never adjusted, now we would notice it after three days instead of 365. Right. So the chances that it would get to $20,000 was completely, you know, preposterous that anybody would let it get that far. But that's what the math was, was like, okay, well it's not worth you detaching yourself from your other tasks to go do this thing, you know, three times a day when you could do it twice a week. And, and it was not immediately well received by this person. Well, because I think they had their value in how many.

Measuring your value based on that.

Based on, yeah, how many, how many tasks or, you know, how many widgets did I, did I stamp out this hour? But we're not making widgets here. There's no value in that. And that was it. It's like, what's the value to the business in this? Not necessarily the value to you, and, and turning that around a little bit. And I didn't say it that way to this person because I don't want to insult them by saying, you know, it's not, yes, it's valuable to you, but no one cares. It was more, let's look at the value to the business. And then they, you know, they brought themselves around to it and was like, oh, I see this. Okay, yeah, let's try it. It was like two week experiment. Let's see what happens. We might really screw it up and that might cost me a lot of money. And that's okay, you know, let's, let's do it. Absolving them of the responsibility of making, of the financial cost of making that mistake. And yeah. And yeah. So I don't know, I realized that was sort of a tangential thing. But it's important when you're not there to, to continually, not that you would continually look over their shoulder, but those, you know, managing by walking around, check ins don't happen by walking around when you are remote because no one's walking around in anybody else's office.

Yeah, that's true. Well, I read a really interesting study in the Harvard Business Review and kind of in a nutshell, about 30% of employees, they surveyed about 30,000 people a little bit more than that. And over 30% of them had said actually they never wanted to return to the office again. And they tended to be more likely families with young kids and people that live in the suburbs or remotely. Sure. And then on the flip side, about, you know, a little over 20% of the people never wanted to work from home again. And these were typically single younger employees or empty nesters that were more often located in cities. And you know, there's a few options here, one of which is if, like with your businesses, Dave, you've always worked remotely and distributed. But if, you know, if Your company's changed what they did and people have started working from home and that works great. You know, keep doing that. There are some other issues that come up, I think with that, that, that we can dive into as well. But if you do need to get people back in the office for in person work, there seems to be two main options. This kind of mixed mode hybrid method where you let the employees choose what days they want to come in and work. And a similar hybrid method, but where you or the managers decide when employees come in to the office. And let's talk about. I'd love to talk about both of them.

Yeah.

Could be some, some pros and cons that are pretty significant that, you know, some of them, they seem kind of obvious, but some others I was a little, you know, surprised to learn about.

Yeah, I like. No, this is. Yeah, yeah, let's go.

Yeah, yeah, sounds good. So this hybrid thing where employees choose it sounds great. Where you're like, look, you guys are all adults. You can manage your time. It's based on productivity, just like you said. The problems that come up with that is that it's hard to get people and teams together at the same time to be productive. Like when you need to get together and work on projects where it's very, you know, you're going to benefit from being in person. You're going to have some in the office, some at home.

Home.

And you know, the, the work from home, people miss out on those in person connections. Like when you have a meeting, you break your meeting up. When you're in person, folks stand up. There's always a little bit of talk. Okay. Oh yeah, we decided on this, Decided on that. Maybe you go grab a coffee and keep things kind of keep going so it spreads out and it's a little bit more powerful and personal.

Yeah. The ends and beginnings of meetings aren't as tightly defined when they're in person. That's right. Yeah.

And sometimes they're really productive because of that.

Right. Often, you know, I'm not a fan of meetings. Well, because they just waste time multiplied by the number of people that are there.

But yeah, they can't.

Yeah, yeah. But working on a project or something there obviously there are times when having a meeting makes sense. But you're right, it's that, that, that time, you know, kind of getting into and out of the meeting that often has those little sparks of, of, you know, the answer that's going to come down the road later.

So, yeah, something off the side that comes in and you know, some Companies have started saying, okay, well we're not going to, even if you're at the office, you're gonna, we're gonna log into Zoom and do it from your desk. So the folks at home and everything. But, you know, it, it, maybe that doesn't work quite as well. And I, I, you know, I taught.

That class last semester. You heard me complain about trying to manage that. I mean, and that really was. It is whoever is doing it. So the employees in this case and then the managers all need to become experts at managing a hybrid work environment if that's how things are going to be. Right. And yeah, I am not that expert. Even though I've been managing a work from home work environment for decades. It's very different when now there's some people literally in the room. They would immediately, everybody would get each other's attention in the room and we would all very quickly forget about the people on Zoom until there was this, you know, ghost voice from nowhere was like, oh crap, there's like 15 people over there. Shoot. I forgot about them because you forget about them. And it's not the same level of engagement. No way. No way.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah. And the other thing is it, you tend to get a less diverse group in the office when you let people choose, because the people that show up are the ones that want to work more in person in the office. Right. And perhaps if you're a parent with, you know, young kids, you, you want to work from home more. And so it changes the dynamic of what's going on in your workplace when you let things go. I think another issue comes up is that I was, I was really surprised to. That I hadn't thought about it before was that studies show that there are lower rates of promotion and advancement for people that work from home than ones that come into the office all the time. And it's, I think, based on the fact that you're just maybe they're not seen and heard as often and they miss out on promotions or opportunities that they didn't perhaps know about, that it gets them kind of on the manager or the owner's radar. And those folks tend to advance more and more and people that stay out of the office more often kind of get left behind.

That makes. I never thought about that before, but as soon as you said it, it was obvious that of course that's going to happen. You're not, you're, you are. When you're working from home, you become the person. It's almost like you're a Contractor, regardless of what your employment structure looks like on paper. Right. Because you're, you're over there and we're trusting you and you are productive. Right. So everything's super productive.

Yeah, that's right.

But you're, you're, you're a contractor that provides that service, not someone engaged with the company that is growing with the company. That's really interesting. Yeah.

And it was this guy who, from HBR that did this study, Nicholas Bloom. You know, he had studied this concept over, over several decades based on, you know, not just based on the pandemic, but just work from home in general, and has found that, you know, you really have to be aware of that because some of your best talent can be left behind.

Totally makes sense to me, man. Wow. Really interesting, huh?

It is.

That's. I always love to learn things that, that it's good.

And so, you know, we'll talk about the manager or the owner deciding the schedules for a minute, but I. Or in a minute, but I think you have a word from our sponsor.

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Yeah. And here's some reasons why you as a business owner or if you want to break it down, to let your managers or supervisors kind of manage your teams. And that was one thing in this research study which we'll link in the show notes talked about was if it may be better received if you tell your employees, look, we're going to let your department head, your supervisor, manager, whatever you want to call them, they're going to decide on what your work from home schedule is based on the need of your department, your team instead of just a company wide blanket. Everybody's got to work these days.

Yeah.

So it can kind of be fine tuned a little bit because you're looking for this middle ground.

Right.

You want your employees to look at it and go, okay, yeah, I understand. I'm, you know, we're going to come in these days because of course if, if you know which three days a week seems to be pretty common coming into the office, what two days do you think people are going to want to work from home?

Well, it's going to be Monday and Friday, isn't it?

Of course. Yeah, yeah. So you're going to be, you know, left. The office is going to be, you know, desolate on Mondays and Fridays, but you're just going to be all jammed up. So that's one of the benefits is that when your managers get to choose, it's a better use of facilities. Right. If everybody wants to work from home Monday and Friday, it, it, it's going to be, you know, empty. And so when you spread those out, it allows you to better manage and maybe you could reduce your space. Right. Because you're like, okay, you know, we, we're going to manage just how many people in we have on, on average. But one of the largest and main reasons to manage and let, or let the owner, manager take care of when people are going to come in is connecting with people and with your teams. Everyone on the same team shows up on the same day.

Yeah.

So if you say, look, we're going to work from home Wednesdays and Fridays, you know that, you know, Mondays and Tuesdays you're going to plan whatever it is, research together. Maybe you're, you know, maybe you have to have those meetings, maybe you're planning a trip that you have to do some kind of thing so you can manage connecting those people when they can be all together. Also this concept of cross pollination. Steve Jobs, when they famously built this Pixar massive building after they had success with Toy Story, one of the design principles that he really believed in was this, making people get up and walk around so they run into each other and building a big central area where the food was or the restrooms were so that people would get up out of their desks and walk around and run into other people. Well, you can't do that when some of us are in the office and some of us are at home. So by scheduling the time when people are together, you get this cross pollination and teams get to work on projects together that, you know, one department and another, the results are going to be better.

I like this. Yeah. And I like that. As you were talking about, if you're, if you're saying three in, two out, you know, work schedule, I came up with the exact same thing that you mentioned, which is Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, start the week together. Yeah.

Give, think it's important.

Yeah. And then, you know, give yourself two days in the office to get things rolling. Wednesday is, is kind of that nice reprieve. You don't have to, you know, get up and get like office dressed. You don't have to get up quite as early. Maybe, you know, without the commute and all of that, you're home a little earlier maybe because again, you don't have the commute, then you're back in the office, you recharged a little bit, you get Thursday and then, you know, you end the week on Friday. That schedule works really well. It can become a four day workweek. So bear that in mind, you know, and. But you might get more productivity out of your mind.

Yeah.

Doing that. So that's not necessarily a bad thing. But I like that Monday, Tuesday, Thursday thing. I mean, can this sort of, as we're talking about this, it sort of reminds me of a, you know, I play in rock bands and the, when you said hybrid employees decide, that's like trying to decide when to have band practice because you need everybody together to have a productive band practice. Right. You can't have. We all did it on our own and. And now we know the songs. It like, that happens, but it doesn't work as well because you're not collaborating with each other. You're not actually playing music. And the same is true in business. And so it often, even in bands that are, you know, officially, democratically run, and there's no, you know, leader that. That runs with the iron fist. There is almost always someone who is the de facto leader that says, all right, how about we get together on Tuesday at 7? Now, if somebody can't do Tuesday at 7 and they say, no, I'd rather do Wednesday, everybody can be receptive to that and. And you can adapt. But without someone Saying Tuesday at 7, what happens is everybody's like, God, you know, whether or not I'm available on Tuesday, you know, that's kind of the night that I would prefer to watch this show on tv. So I wouldn't suggest Tuesday. You'll rarely get everyone suggesting the same time, even if they're available at the same time. So you need someone to say, this is the time, and then wait for somebody else to come in and say, whoa, I can't do that. Okay, great. Now when can you do. Can we all do that? Great, we're on board. You know, so get the commitment. Get the commitment. But you got to start with the. Here's where it is. Even if that's not, you know, the. The iron fist ruler, someone needs to be the organizer, if you will. So. Yeah, I like that. Yeah.

And another aspect of this, you know, where managers are deciding when everyone comes in, is for talent scouting and making sure that your best people aren't missed, you know, and missing out on promotions or other opportunities. You know, if, you know, hey, everybody's going to be a Monday, Tuesday, you know, that's where you get to watch and view their interpersonal skills. And are they becoming a de facto leader? Right. Even though maybe they're not, but. But are they stepping up and managing you? You'll be able to interact and watch them because you'll know we're all going to be there on this day, you know, and you don't want your best people to be forgotten just because they're, you know, working from home and you're not speaking with them in person or watching them interact. So that. That's a, I think, a really big benefit of you deciding, you know, when everybody's going to be in. I thought this was really interesting, too. Another suggestion from the HBR study was that when you Bring in new employees. Those people should work an extra day each week for their first year so they get a chance to bond with new people that you're hiring with. You know, that new employees that come in along the same time as they do, but also with existing employees, so they get to, to mix it up. And it'd be an interesting that, you know, when you first hire to say, okay, we're going to do this three day thing, but because you're new the first 12 months, we want you here for four days.

Interesting. Yeah, I suppose that could work as long as they're not alone in the office, right?

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, you got it.

You got to apply it to your business. But yes. Yeah, yeah.

Well, the idea is, yeah, maybe you're shifting around and have different, you know, different groups coming in.

Sure. Oh, yes. Yeah, right. Yeah.

Yeah. And then the last thing that, that I thought was, you know, fascinating is there. You also can kind of build. Build up some resentment from people that can't work from home.

Right.

There are certainly jobs in your business that need. You need people to be there. And those folks could have been working there during the whole pandemic. You know, you have an administrator for a grocery business and they're at home, great, all that stuff. But the people in the front line are sitting there, you know, stocking shelves and checking out.

Well, and there's also people whose job could be, you know, functional and productive from home, but if, if they live. You know, you talked about the difference between the. The single person maybe living in a studio apartment versus the parent that has maybe a larger house that that parent might have an easy time finding room at home where they're very comfortable working, whereas the single person in a studio apartment, sure, they could do it, but now it means giving up your dining room table or, you know, like your couch. So you have to be sensitive to that part too. Does it work for you? Do you have a space? I remember when we hired, we went through that hiring process that resulted in us bringing Sadie on board. One of the questions I asked was, are you comfortable? Do you have a spot that can be your office at home where you don't have to clean up every day at 5 o' clock to then go make dinner. Because I just wanted to know that going in and if it was the absolute right person and they needed, you know, okay, fine. But I didn't want it to be like, oh, yeah, I'm not quite set up yet, you know. Yeah, okay, all right, good to know.

That's True.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so in the HBR study in the survey, they came up, you know, asked people what the value of being able to work from home on this flexible, you know, schedule was, and they said was about 6% of their salary. They felt it was a perk. And so the suggestion was that you may need to compensate those folks that are not able to work from home and say, hey, look, you know, we realize you have to be here every day, and so we, you know, we want to increase and give you a bonus, you know, some kind of perk that will help offset that. You don't want that feeling of resentment when everybody comes rolling in Tuesday night, it's time to go, and you're like, well, I got my day off tomorrow, you know, or at home and, you know, everybody else. So I thought that was an interesting thing to consider.

I would, I would do it. If you're going to consider this factor in the idea of doing it as a separate stipend. Right. Because if, if you give a person a raise, the day you give them the raise, everybody's nodding their heads as to, okay, this isn't actually a raise. This is just us giving you 6% more because you're coming into the office and you're not taking advantage of this work for from home thing or we need you here, whatever it is. Right. You know, we're giving you this, but six months later, maybe even six days later, that 6% is now my money. You know, like that you can't take that away if and when you decide that they can work from home. But if you offer it as the, you know, full time in office stipend of 6%, well, now it's very easy to make that go away when the employee says, oh, I, I think I can do my job from home. Yeah, no problem, no problem. Okay, well, as you know, the 6% stipend will go away. Right. It's listed as a line item, like really, really separated out so that you don't find yourself in the scenario of people using that against you, even if it wasn't their intention to do so.

Yeah. And they see it like to your point, they, they, they're reminded of it if they look at their, I mean, you get their deposit or something.

Yeah. But their email or whatever taste of.

Their email comes up says, oh yeah, that's my, my work from home, you know, my benefits, that's my stipend. Fascinating stuff. And you know, I would love to hear the, you know, how you with your small business has managed this working from home and what kind of system you came up with. Feedbackusinessshow Co. Please, you know, reach out. Let us know what works for you. And if you want to learn more about this research, we'll put a link in the show notes. Go to businessshow.co. you'll find this episode right at the top of the page and you'll see the link to the research.

Absolutely. Make sure to check out streak@streak.com SBS, of course. And you can find that link@businessshow.co. too. Thanks for hanging out with us. Keep living that charmed life.

We'll see you next week.

Thanks, Shannon.

Thank you, Dave.