This is a YouTube video titled "Joel Campbell talks about his remote working and WFH Policy" containing a conversation recorded in November 2023. The discussion features Mike Richards and Joel Campbell talking about office attendance policies, hybrid work models, and strategies to encourage collaboration and engagement among employees in a corporate setting.
And I was going to go to Joel because. And again, I know that that's changed with you guys. We were just discussing that. What's the balance for you guys now?
Yeah, so we've morphed to three days in the office. Maybe many of you have done that. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are kind of our core days in the office. We've just to step back for a second. We built out an office for 450 people. We have about 450, 475 in Kansas City. So we built out a new office, beautiful new office, really cool spaces that we created to try and draw people back in. On average, we have about 160 to 180 that come in those three days a week. If we have a food event or some other activity, a happy hour, we'll get 200, 225 maybe. I don't think we've seen 250 or above in two years now or in a year and a half that we've been in our office. So the ultimate point there is, as much as we want people to come back, there are a number of people, I think, as Leanne said, that that will never want to come back to an office. They love to work at home, and perhaps they're more productive at home than maybe I see or appreciate. So I think Leanne's point is exactly right. I think, you know, I would term it as I think we have to show some love to the people that work for us. And I think the way you do that is to figure out what works best for each individual person. They still have to meet, you know, standards. They still have to be accountable for their work performance, still has to be there. Like, you can't just kind of shut down and mail it in and work three or four hours a day. So there has to be some constraints around it. But I think at the same time, you have to show people love it. And the way you do that is giving them opportunities to do work a little differently. So the second part of that is we're in three days a week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. As we head into 2024, our private equity owners have asked us to sit to consider how do we get people to be more collaborative? How do we kind of maybe force the issue to bring those reluctance back into the office to be more interactive? So we're likely going to move to a, a core weeks concept. There are a few companies that have done this where you're required, if you live within a certain radius of the office, to come into the office. One week, a month or two weeks, a quarter or something like that. So that we have kind of that more fulsome feeling. Because I will tell you, when we have those days and we've got 225 people in the office, there is a different level of energy, there's a different level of interaction across the whole, you know, the whole group, not just the executive team or some of the back office teams like finance and legal, that we're in all three days, all the time. There's a different level of energy. And so we want to expose people to that by kind of forcing the issue, not being difficult about it, but forcing that issue. And then secondly, for the weeks that you're at home, you have to have your camera on, you have to be presentable at work. Like those kind of just parameters around it to set the stage and the tone, that you have to have a, an office like area. You cannot have kids running around in the background, your cat can't walk across the keyboard, you know, just some of those things to put constraints around it so that people can feel like they're more engaged with us in the office.
