David Burkus On Remote Teams

Welcome to Peer Innovation, the podcast with Leo Bottari and me, Randy Cantrell. Building on our previous shows, The Year of the Peer and What Anyone Can Do, we turn our attention to helping business leaders build high-performing teams. We'll talk with a diverse group of thought leaders who will share stories and insights that will help you and your teams achieve new heights. If you believe there is strength in numbers and that meeting the challenges of the future can only be achieved if we do it together, then join us for the conversation. Today's guest is David Burkus, an author, speaker filled with forward-thinking ideas. David is the author of 4 bestselling books plus 1 audio-only book to help leaders and teams do their best work ever. His newest book may be the most timely, Leading from Anywhere: The Essential Guide to Managing Remote Teams. We welcome David to the show. Welcome back to another episode of PeerNovation, the podcast. The website is peerinnovation.co. He is Leo Bottari. No, he is Leo Bottari. And our guest, special guest today is David Burkus. We've been really excited to have David on, and his new book is ridiculously timely. So Leo, kick us off.

Yeah, very timely. David, welcome. Just great to have you here. Love your work and really wanted to talk today and probably just kind of begin end the discussion, like we mentioned a little bit before we got started, which is, you know, a lot of your focus, which has been really great to read about in terms of not just people who are on the teams, but the difference between leaders and how they have to lead teams nowadays. And so I guess when we think about leading teams in that traditional kind of we all come in the office type format versus leading remote teams, tell us a little bit about you know, like I said, a short answer, right, about what's the same versus what's different.

Yeah, well, first of all, thank you all for having me.

And I will say y'all. Randy's Texas Southerner thing is already coming out on me. So there you go. In terms of what's changed and what's different, I mean, it really— I feel weird saying this. It really depends on whether or not you were good at being a manager or a leader, right? Because The fundamentals of good team leadership didn't actually change, just the tactics did. But what happened is that it got a whole lot harder for sort of mediocre or bad managers to still survive.

Like, I'll give you an idea of what I mean, right?

For the longest time, and this is actually a rallying cry that I've had for a number of years, even before the great work-from-home experiment, there is this subtle proxy in people's mind, this subtle equation that presence equals productivity, right? I can see you, therefore you're working. Ask your IT department how much bandwidth is spent on Facebook or YouTube or Amazon.com, and they'll tell you, like, there is no correlation in a knowledge work world between presence and productivity. But a lot of places still had that. There was still that expectation. And that, when the great work from home experiment started, that drove a lot of managers crazy, right? Because they were either calling Zoom meetings all the time, and then we all got Zoom fatigue within like 6 weeks. Or they were tracking things like responsiveness instead of productivity, right? How quickly are you replying to my emails? How quickly are you or how active are you in the Slack channel we set up or things like that?

And that really, in my mind, what should have happened and what happened and is slowly happening for a lot more leaders as this thing drags on way longer than 15 days to slow the spread, right, is that equation between presence and productivity is finally breaking in a lot of people's minds. Now, now, you know, smart leaders, savvy leaders, people who led from a place of trust and autonomy, who said, let's, let's look at what our deliverables are, let's co-create meaningful objectives, and then I'm going to trust that you know how to do that best, including where to do that best. Well, in those situations, not a lot has changed. I mean, the tactics change. How to run a good Zoom meeting is a little bit different from how to run a good in-person meeting. But that fundamental idea that I'm trying to leverage people's knowledge, skills, and abilities fully, that ends up meaning that you need to give them some say over where and how they do their work. Now, of course, it's actually kind of weird. Like, we call the book Leading From Anywhere because I think that's where we're headed. It's not a question of work from home versus work from the office. It's a question of allowing people to work from anywhere because they know what works best for them. So for those leaders, not much has changed.

Right.

But if you've been really, really struggling, I would suggest in the nicest, kindest way possible that maybe some of that struggle is that leftover mentality that if I can see my people, I can trust that they're working. You're going to have to trust that they're working no matter what, deal with the 2 or 3 people that, that aren't and move forward. And so, you know, it really depends what's changed and what's different depends on how you managed before and whether or not it was all that effective to begin with.

Yeah, I definitely feel that, you know, it was interesting for me because even leaders who I felt like had all those good sensibilities, right, people came to the office and all that, but they weren't micromanaging. They weren't on people in that way. They had a lot of that freedom. But at the same time, Many of those leaders were really surprised, actually, that in many cases productivity was up when people were working from home. However, a lot of the leaders, I think, and I think rightly so, said this may not be sustainable. I really need to be concerned about burnout and people feeling isolated or, you know, I've talked about being insulated or feeling obscure, you know, that they're just not off the face of the earth, right? And they continue to be inspired. So when you talk about the tactical aspects of things, how and what What have you seen out there for leaders who have effectively pivoted, recognizing that there are some things they may have to do differently going forward?

Yeah. So, I mean, let's, let's take it one at a time, right? Because we got a lot to unpack. The burnout thing, for example.

Yeah.

So the data is actually really clear on this even before Corona, that people who work remotely are, you know, all things being equal, are more effective and more productive than people who work from an office. And there's a couple reasons for that. Some are good, some are bad. There's less distractions. You can find it easier to be in focus time. Now, that's not necessarily true if your kids are also being Zoom schooled, etc. But before Corona, when it was a choice, right, that was true. They also work longer hours. They tend to start their, their workday when they would have started their commute. They tend to keep working until their commute is over, but they also tend to have a blurred boundary between work and life sometimes. And that's the type of more productive that ends up kind of leaning to that burnout. So there's a couple of things that I think a lot of leaders need to do. And by the way, even, even on an individual individual level. We know from studies of people who move into a remote environment that what they go through on an individual level is kind of like what we went through as a, as a globe in terms of when burnout hits, right? So they go through an initial burst of productivity that lasts 2 or 3 months, and then they hit the burnout wall because the productivity was actually from a lack of boundaries. And then eventually they come out of that and they find a rhythm that actually works for them. And if you're working with a team that hasn't found that yet, that's the best place to start. This is a, having those conversations about where people's boundaries are. Now, that might mean as a team, you need to commit to what are our working hours. They don't have to be Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. They don't even have to be the same for the whole team. We just need to know what they are so that when I send an 11:30 email, I know, okay, there's a chance that these two people will see it before tomorrow at noon, but most people are already, already out for the day, right? Instead of— and it drives me nuts how often this would happen in the early days of the pandemic— you'd get one leader sending a 10:30, 11 o'clock night email. The next day we've got a 9:00 AM Zoom call. And the first thing out of his or her mouth is, did everybody see my email?

No.

For some people, their workday started with that call. So of course they didn't see the email. Right. So having those conversations about the boundaries thing matters. And then also paying attention to your people, especially the subtle signals that they're leaving you.

Right.

You're looking for deviations from their working norm. If they're suddenly sending— if they're suddenly not as responsive as before, that might be a sign. But it might also be a sign of they're more responsive than before. It might mean that there's something else going on and they're using work as a coping mechanism, et cetera. So it's all the more important to get a sense of what your team's on and off hours are, what their calendar looks like, what their work rhythm looks like. I often call this a sense of shared understanding so that you know how everybody on your team prefers to work. And then you can pay attention to the deviations from what you thought you knew about them to make sure, hey, is everything okay? Like, you're actually really active in Slack these last couple of days and you're normally not. Is everything okay? Those kind of questions only pop up if you pay attention to those signals.

So conversely, let's say, let's say we have this leader who's really used to having everybody there and, you know, does the walk around the office after 5 o'clock to see who's still here and who isn't and who's working and all that kind of fun stuff. So that leader all of a sudden now has got a remote work team. They're doing well. But they're like this, right? They can't help themselves. So now what you end up having is people kind of imposing new levels of accountability because they got to figure out some— make up whatever metrics possible to kind of keep track of everyone because it just makes them feel better at some level, but yet probably sows seeds of distrust among an otherwise productive group.

I don't know that there's a probably there.

Yeah, well, exactly. But so what, you know, what advice do we have for leaders like this who really have to get used to, have to take a breath and get used to this team not being someone they have line of sight on, if you will?

Yeah, well, the big shift in focus has to be from activity to outcomes, right? And actually becoming an outcomes-focused leader rather than just when are people working, when are they responding, etc. And the best form of this, and this is, I have half data and half of an opinion on this, so I'm just going to fully disclose and I got some good data on this, but the rest is my opinion. The best form of accountability, I think, on a remote team is the team itself. In other words, you need to be leading the conversation about how we're going to keep each other accountable on project updates, how we're going to keep each other accountable on requests for help and give each other feedback. And you need to do it in a much shorter timeframe, right? We're used to like the annual performance review and maybe a quarterly check-in. I don't mean that. I mean like a 1-week or 2-week increments.

Right.

And if we're doing that, and it doesn't mean we need to have daily standup meetings like Scrum, although it's not a bad start for a lot of teams to have a daily, what did I work on yesterday? What am I working on today? Where do I need help? But you do need to declare as a team what that period is, what people are supposed to be working on on that period so that everybody knows. And then it actually becomes obvious that people aren't delivering the outcomes. If you shorten that timeframe to 1 or 2 weeks and you have a situation where any given employee is missing their deadlines multiple weeks in a row, then you have a problem and you don't need tracking their activity to prove it, right? So that tends to be a much better system because it's co-created, because it's something that the whole team sees, and it's something that the whole team can hold each other accountable for. I mean, the irony of all of this is that done well, remote work makes teamwork more important, not less so. And if you ignore that team dynamic, you end up feeling like you're actually managing 12 individual relationships instead of a team of 12. So I often call this teaching the team to work out loud. That would really be where I'd start, is let's have that conversation about how we're going to work alone, but we're going to work out loud so everybody knows what's going on.

Nice.

David, I coach a number of people in city government here in the state of Texas, and leaders— that, that just happens to be a space that is meeting-intensive. I mean, it is meeting, meeting, 6 or 7 years ago when I began, I asked them, I said, when do you guys actually do work? Because they're meeting all the time. In the pandemic, it's been fascinating to watch some of the leaders as maybe the majority of the team is working remotely, but a skeleton group on premises and leaders are tempted to have even more meetings. Because of their own feeling of being disconnected or maybe their own feelings of, I got to make sure I'm contributing. I'm curious your observations or even best practices as it pertains to remote work, the impact on meeting culture.

Yeah. Well, the thing that I hear the most often is some form of the phrase virtual meetings don't work. Work, which I find kind of funny because most people think most meetings don't work, right? So there's nothing all that unique about virtual. I will say things like Robert's Rules of Order are a whole lot harder to do in a virtual context, which unfortunately in a city government context is really difficult. Even the agenda, I think, changes. A lot of organizations, be they for-profit, nonprofit, governmental, etc., are used to the idea of meeting on an interval basis and then collecting everything that needs to be addressed into a very diverse agenda. And in a Zoom meeting context or a Microsoft Teams meeting context, that's really a recipe for two things. One is Zoom fatigue because you're just staring at a screen, or, and let's be honest, you're staring at a little pixel screen of yourself. Most of us are checking our hair half the time, maybe not Randy, but most of us are checking our hair. Most of the time, etc. I know, right?

Shots fired.

It's a benefit, actually.

You can be more present and more attentive to other people.

Exactly right.

Usually I wear my sunglasses for these meetings.

So it can lead to that fatigue. But the other thing it can lead to is a feeling that the purpose of the meeting is to be presented information instead of discussion, right? So in a virtual context, to me, the focus should always be on discussion. People are working different schedules now, not just the 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, because they're building— they're integrating their life better. Most of them. I mean, some of them are still trying to make it, make it work in those normal schedules. That creates a problem. If you're asking people to sacrifice an hour and coordinate at a specific time, then the purpose ought to be to tap into people's brainpower, right, to have a discussion rather than just present information. So I think that means a lot less on the agenda. I'm actually a huge fan of one purpose per meeting. And that means as the leader, you might be in more meetings throughout the week, but your people are saved from having to sit through a 2-hour-long meeting where they're only relevant to two different agenda items. Right. You got six things that would normally be on the weekly all-hands agenda item. Do six different meetings at six different times about that one topic and then tell the people that you don't think are relevant, hey, you know what, I'd actually— you can— you're welcome to come on, but I'd rather you save yourself some time. I don't know you know, how much there is for you in this discussion. So, you know, whatever you want to do is fine. You'll find people actually like, you know, appreciate that. So, so that one purpose per meeting, focus on discussion. And the big thing I think for— and this is true whether in-person or virtual meetings— is just a simple remembrance that the cost of a 1-hour meeting for a team of 10 people is not 1 hour, right? It's 10 hours plus or minus some lost productivity on the way in and on the way out. And if you plan your meeting to be focused around discussion, if you plan it on one, maybe max two different things to discuss in a meeting, you'll be saving a lot of hours over time because you're spending your people's time wisely.

When we think of the burnout with the Zoom and the Microsoft Teams meetings, but is it lost on people the impositions of Slack channels and all these other tools that are absolutely beneficial for remote work, but boy, has it been amplified.

Yeah, well, Slack is great as an asynchronous communication tool, but unfortunately people don't use it that way, right? They use it as a chat room they feel like they're always supposed to be in, and that's a problem. And there's a number of, I mean, thank goodness they actually went to, and this isn't specific to Slack, but a lot of them went to threaded comments so you could have real discussion forums. But when it was just a blitz of comments, It was, unless you were in it all day, it was incredibly hard to keep track of. And my advice to most leaders is actually, if you're going to use that tool, the best thing to use it for is as your water cooler, meaning your place where you have non-work discussions or celebrate personal milestones or things like that. But when you're talking about an actual project we're working on, that's either in a tool like email, which even that's not optimal, or a tool like Basecamp or Trello or Asana, some project management software. That's helping you. So, because you're right, I mean, asking people to keep a Slack window open on their desktop is like asking them to be at an all-day meeting where people are going to pop in and out randomly, speak in sentence fragments, right? Then you never really truly know. It's like having a meeting in a Chuck E. Cheese, right? It's just not a good idea.

And so I agree, and it should count as another kind of meeting.

So I think the best place is keep it asynchronous and make it about lighter conversation. Make it a place where everyone feels they can drop into, but no one feels obligated to be in. And people's experience will be a whole lot better.

You know, David, you mentioned about productivity and how people may tend to begin their day earlier without the commute and may end their day about the same time they might get home. At the same time, I think another thing that has been noticed by a lot of CEOs I've talked to is that their people are more collaborative and more cooperative with one another because they're not all coming to a central workplace and just seeing each other as fellow employees. Like, they, they see people's backgrounds and they see little artifacts on the walls. They see the they see those kids running in the background, they see their dog, you know, coming in for a cameo appearance. You know, all these things that has tended to get people to tap into their shared humanity a little bit and see each other as people, not just fellow coworkers. I'd like to get your comment on that and maybe any other things that you think have also driven productivity other than the time and some of what I just mentioned.

Yeah, I totally agree.

In fact, my number one kind of little, you could call it an icebreaker activity with teams that I work with is a virtual tour, like show me where you're working. Pick up the webcam, show me around what you're working in. And it does two different things, right? The first is that you get a sense of people and their real life and what's going on. You also get a sense of the context that they're working in, right? So like, I'm really lucky. I think all three of us on this are really fortunate. I'm in a 10 by 10 room in the basement of my house. I can occasionally hear my two boys who are homeschooled from— who are home from school because of the snowstorm that has covered almost all of America. Except Leo. They are running around upstairs, but you can't hear them, and I'm isolated from them by a closed door. Other people for the last year, like, bought a folding screen at Lowe's and stretched it across the corner of their dining room, and they're hiding behind it while their kids are at the dining room table being Zoom schooled, right? And if you don't do a little thing like a virtual tour, you don't get a sense of that context. Now, if I'm, if I'm teammate 1 and I'm in this room and teammate 2 is in that dining room setup, You expect teammate 2 to be a lot less responsive than me, right? Which is fine. This is a short-term situation that we're all dealing with. But long-term, we still learn a lot about each other's context and what we can expect from each other because of it. So we synchronize better. And that's not the only place where teamwork makes collaboration much more important. You know, we used to be able to— we used to be able to smooth things over easily. We used to be able to just walk down the hall and ask a quick question, or if we were misunderstood, make a little sort of quick apology. And now everything must be much more deliberate. And I wouldn't say that makes every team more productive, but the teams that take it seriously, I think, are much more productive than the teams that just relied on location to be a part of that. And then the third, and this one I do have data for, I love— it was one of my favorite studies of all time. There's a proximity in collaboration study of academics that showed that academics are much more likely to end up co-publishing papers with people who are on the same floor and are closer, like their office door is closer to the other person's office door. Even if there are faculty members on campus whose work is more relevant, even if there are people who are studying the same thing but in a different city, I'm still more likely to collaborate with the people that I work near. And now we've smashed that to pieces, right? Now it's anybody on the team, whoever's most relevant, because everybody's equally distant. And I think that taps into a better level of brainpower than what we used to do when we were just sort of lazily relying on proximity.

One other question I have, and I know Randy wants to jump in in a second too, and that is kind of in some respects the dreaded meetings after the meeting, right? So, you know, everyone's in their one big meeting usually when they're coming into the office, and then you have all these side things that kind of tend to happen. They don't get brought up at the table, arguably where they should have been brought up, but they just kind of happen here. So do the meetings after the meeting happen just as much, um, when we're working remotely, or does it eliminate some of that?

So it really depends on the culture of the team. Um, if you spend the time building a culture where there is a sense of psychological safety, where people feel free to speak their mind, etc., then the side meetings and side conversations happen much less. Right? Because I feel comfortable speaking up on that.

If you don't, they happen more often because they're easier to do.

It's easier to just jump on the phone after a meeting and vent to someone about it. Or, or you can get again in a crappy team culture, you can get the— it's not even a, it's not even a meeting after the meeting. It's a meeting during the meeting because I'm sitting there on my phone texting someone else who's in the meeting with me and we're both making fun of what's happening, right? Those things can happen if you don't build that. Yeah, you guys are texting each other right now, right?

So those things can definitely happen.

Happen if you're not focused on building that sense of psychological safety, that sense where people feel like they can actually speak up. And when they do, you respond with gratitude and with an invitation to kind of at least test their ideas when they present them, et cetera. So I will say one other thing about the meeting after the meeting, though. There's a great thing a lot of virtual teams do that I love, which is that the meeting after the meeting is actually us leaving the line open on Zoom after the meeting's concluded, just so anybody can kind of hang out. It sort of replicates that chit-chat that we would have as people were collecting their stuff and filing away. And there are teams that'll do that on either end. And I just, I love that because there's a lot of places in the office where we have those non-work conversations, those let's find little things in common, or even just talk about the, you know, the Super Bowl game that just happened or whatever that don't really happen in a remote environment unless teams make deliberate space for them.

Yeah, I can imagine that scenario though, where they wait for that one person to drop off and then they go, oh, we can talk now.

Yeah, usually the boss too. That's what's ironic, right? Yeah.

And to go on the record, Leo and I, the only thing that Leo and I will occasionally chat when we have a guest on like you is Leo will say, okay, you get the next question, you know, so we don't step all over each other.

We don't do like, who is this guy? You know, we're good.

Where did you find this dude? He's crazy.

And we don't even do that very well, by the way, that kind of off the line chat. Hey David, a leader, whether it's a leader or a work or the workforce to make a distinction there, tyranny, the word is tyranny. I feel like password. The word is tyranny. So in a remote environment, I'm curious what that looks like versus what it looks like when we're all together. Is it amplified? Well, because, you know, we can hide behind keyboards and it's just different when you're toe to toe, belly to belly with somebody. You know, I'm just, I'm just curious.

Yeah.

I mean, that's an interesting question. I think, again, it sort of goes back to the first question we asked about what's different and what's the same. If you are already a tyrant, right, this has been really hard for you and you may have responded by becoming less of a tyrant. And you may have responded by becoming more of it. I mean, I know people who work in remote environments who are expected to email their boss at the end of every day with, this is what I did, right? Notice I said a week or 2 weeks as my interval, right? Not every single day. I know other— I know a lot of companies that actually— I mean, sales of spy software, right? Monitor keyboard monitoring software skyrocketed in April and May. And I want to be clear here. There are a couple situations where that's valid if you're paying someone you know, by the hour to do coding for you or something like that, it's worth monitoring and making sure they're actually working for the hours that they're charging you for. But if you're paying them a salary, like, it makes zero sense, right? Because presumably you pay them a salary to deliver certain things. So just measure whether or not they're delivering them. So I think, I think in some regard, I wouldn't necessarily say it's easier. It's certainly easier to use your physical presence to be tyrannical. But I feel like people who were already in that micromanagement mode responded by really crunching down on that rather than just walking the office, making sure people are working, etc., until exactly 5 o'clock. Now they're asking for bigger ways to keep accountable that can lead people to feel micromanaged. The irony here as well, and this wasn't true in the beginning of all of this because of the global recession and that sort of stuff, is it's also easier to escape a tyrant, right? Remember back in the day when you wanted a new job because you had a terrible boss and you had to like make up dentist appointments and lunch breaks and whatever? Now you just go, right? Because all you're doing is flipping on a different Zoom call and doing the interview that way. So it's never been easier to leave a bad boss, which I hope is good news for the future.

Well, when we were younger though, you would typically just leave one tyrant for another, you know, because that was the prevailing management style, uh, just about, you know, anywhere you would get— you'd go. Um, but yeah, so that, that was a bit of an issue. I will say though, um, and I'd like to think I'd love to get your thoughts on this as well. In fact, I had a CFO mention this to me, which just to be really stereotypical about this, when you hear the comment, you're thinking, really? It wasn't like the HR person or some communication person who said this. And what the CFO said to me was, it isn't just about this idea of not just being a CEO, but being a human being. He said, but it's being human. And I thought, well, how great a turn of phrase that was. And this idea, like I mentioned before we start, you know, more and more CEOs are beginning meetings or team leaders are beginning meetings not with, hey, where are we? What's going on? It's how's everybody doing? And you just go around and you just get that temperature around the room of just how everyone's dealing with a lot, not only trying to do their jobs in very different circumstances, but juggling things like homeschooling and worrying about elderly parents and any other, you know, number of things that people are struggling with right now. So have you seen some of that change even