Remote Work Failed! BUT Should Company Trucks Go Home with Employees?

More bosses order workers back to the office as job market shifts. So I'm going to talk about my experience with working from home and what we did last year in terms of hiring almost 40 people virtually for our command center, answering phone calls, sending out estimates, emails. We do payroll for our franchisees. We do like 40 different things, everything from their cookbooks to invoicing to scheduling. It's a whole list of things that we do. And, and last year, 2022, at the beginning of the year, I was very bullish on hiring people from across the country to be our virtual agent. So we're going to look at this article from the Wall Street Journal and I'm going to give my $0.02 based upon the experience that I had last year, because we're changing up the way we're doing things. And I agree with some of the things in this article, but not all of them. All right, so more bosses are wanting people to come back to the office. Honestly, you saw this across the board everywhere from, you know, places like Tesla and Apple, requiring people to come back in the office a lot sooner than other companies. You got Paycom now, big payroll type company, Vanguard Offices, financial Services. But let's dig into this a little bit more. Is there a little bit of a tug of war right now going on? Said David Garfield, global head of industries at consulting firm Alexi Partners, who has worked with executives on how to approach return to office discussions. Employers are not having easy time of it. For much of the pandemic, companies took a fairly soft approach to policy enforcement theory that a too rigid stance on in office work could harm morale or lead a turnover. Executives and advisors said. So this is kind of true and that is that there was definitely a point in time when it was so hard to find people that if they wanted to work from home, you kind of have to deal with it. However, that's not why we decided to go and hire people virtually. We hired. We decided to do this because instead of going after a very small pool which is our local county and maybe 15, 20 minute drive from our office, we decided, look, why not just expand the net and be able to hire in the entire country? Thereby, if the percentage of people available in our markets goes from 5% to 1%, well great, I'll go and get 1% of the entire country. And that's what happened. We literally put up job ads in a matter of 24 hours, had hundreds of applications for a position that we were paying 30 to 40% less on and they were working remotely and we still we offered them a stipend from their, them to be all work from home and pay for their Internet and pay for their office so they could spend $100 a month on their wifi and any sort of office stuff like their computers, anything like that, their headphones, etc. However, the biggest thing that I did not foresee is the fact that quality is, is much harder to keep track of when they're remote and at home. And some people are like, well, you should just record them and record their video of them, or you can have tracking software that tracks what they're doing on their computer. I don't like that. I personally wouldn't want to be an employee if I knew that every motion that I was taking was either being recorded on video or was being tracked on the software. Like, you know which pages you're opening and searching, your web browser. And you know, like, I just personally don't want to have to deal with that as an employee. Therefore, I do not want, as an employer, want to do something that I would never want to do if I was working for my company. And so therefore we decided not to go that route. And that is tracking every movement. However, the problem is if you have one bad performing person or someone that is trying to rig the system and they're trying to take advantage of the system, that means that you've got to create a system that prevents it from really the entire system. That was a lot of system words. But what I'm saying here is if one out of the 40 of those people were doing a bad job of quality, we, that means you have to like record every single phone call, which we paid to do. We can record all the phone calls, that's easy. But now you gotta, you gotta actually listen to those phone calls. You got to spot check them, you got to do extra training. But the thing is, are we going to really listen to every single phone call? Because then it literally wipes out any sort of savings. I might as well just pay someone else 40, 50% more and then train them more and have them in person and pay for the extra cost of an office space, utilities, et cetera. Like there's a lot more cost of having someone in person because you have payroll expenses, you have medical, we pay medical insurance, we did profit sharing. There's a lot more cost of having a big office space and utilities like restrooms and Internet and all these things you got to pay for. And so it makes a lot of sense to have people remote. But, but why in the world are all these Employers trying to bring people back into the office says as the job market shifts under threat of a recession, employees leverage over companies may be slipping. Human resources advisors say empowering bosses to push for changes in work styles. So I actually personally don't think that this for me was a monetarily driven decision. This was a quality decision. And we when you start affecting quality for someone like myself, it means I'm going to throw a ton of resources at making sure quality isn't upheld. And because of that, it actually made it less efficient to have people working remotely. And it costs us way more because now there's way more oversight and management of that labor. For example, you can usually have eight to 10 office people with one person in terms of a lead, team lead or a manager. When you start thinking about how having a workforce that is spread out across the whole country, different time zones, different skill levels and you have to manage them without being able to hear, overhear what they're doing. See when they clock in like walking, in terms of like walking in the office, there's just way more oversight and management. And you might be able to get three or four people to everyone, team lead or manager in that case if they are remote because there's way more oversight that you have to do in terms of upholding quality and without in my opinion being invasive of their privacy. So what we started to do was doing certain types of services that only could be tracked and recorded via recorded phone calls. So like most of our virtual staff now only does recorded phone calls instead of anything else that could be potentially, potentially them being malicious with in terms of tracking too much time or doing a poor job is it's like we know that we record phone calls and that is seems like a pretty fair synopsis. And we're able to track that time and they get paid based on how many minutes they're on the phone. So they want to work slower. They can. If they want to take more phone calls, they can. So we still have a virtual team, but it's not something that I am super gung ho about doing anymore because I realize that training them is harder. And ensuring their quality standards are high enough is also substantially more than management intensive. So we scroll through this. Some of the things that it's saying is that others are asking employees to work full time in an office. These are employers at Oklahoma City based workplace technology Paycom company Paycom. Some members of the technology team were told recently that they would need to work in an office five days a week beginning as early as January According to a memo viewed by the Journal. At Paycom, nearly 80% of the company's employees are already working five days a week at the company's headquarters quarters, a spokesman said. So you can see people are coming, having to be brought back in the office. And some people don't like this. Some people like to only work from home. And I do believe that there are certain jobs that can be done from home, especially salaried positions where it is less based upon production because it's easier to take someone's roles and responsibilities. Like, hey, you were responsible for getting X, Y and Z done in a given week and we're going to pay you X amount per month. X amount per week is your pay as your, your salary. And we just expect these, this checklist of items to be done. It's a little bit harder to do that when it's based on unit measurements, like you're charging people by the minute or you are giving people money and incentive based upon completing certain projects that could potentially be skimped on or quality could be reduced if there's not enough oversight or management, which requires therefore more management in order to keep quality standards high. All right, so Again, this roughly 40 person company work remotely remote. Early in the pandemic, although burnout increased and productivity slipped for some employees, that's something that I think is really interesting too. I think it's so individual and unique to every person. What is their best and unique working style? I truly believe there's some people that would do better working from home. In my personal opinion, the thing that we want to build over the next few years is a somewhat of a hybrid approach. This is going to be better for the team and it's going to be better for the business. Let me explain. What our plans are to do down the road, because we're not there yet, is that the first six months, potentially even a year, they have to work full time in the office. That gets them up to spec in terms of quality, standards, training, the culture, they understand all of that. And I think a lot of the companies, they did really well in terms of moving remote. Were the ones at the very beginning at Covid. Oh man. Like this was, this was easy. This is great. We got more, we're more productive and all the rest of it. Those were the people that were in the office and move to remote. What's a lot more difficult is taking someone off the street that has never been trained, that doesn't know the culture, doesn't know how things operate and getting them up to Speed is much more difficult to ensure that they are actually brought up to a certain standard if it's done remotely. So in my opinion, getting someone up to speed, 612 months they're in the office and then having the option, the option to be able to work two to three days a week from home. So this is something that a few years down the road we'll probably implement at command center. And the reason it's better for the employees, give them better work balance, work life balance. Some of them would probably like one or two days at home, especially if they're, you know, just not doing well or not feeling well. They could, they can stay home, they can work from there. And we expect them to know the standards, have great training, the quality be there, and we should be able to trust them because we see them in the office and we're able to still track certain elements of their performance. However, what's not going to happen is brand new, fresh out of the gate, people learning from remote. It's just very difficult to encapsulate the culture of what the company is doing and ensure that the person is trained up the standards we expect. So whether that's right, whether that's wrong, I think that's the going concern here, is that training people from brand new is a whole lot different than what happened at the beginning of COVID when everyone was like product hub videos through the roof and no one's distracting me. Right, because you were trained in the office, you know the culture of the company. When you go into your Slack channel or use direct message, somebody inside the office, you know who they are, you know all about them. But I think that's going to be a lot different for someone that's brand new. And I truly believe a lot of employers are going to bring back the workforce that was once remote. They're going to bring them back in house once they realize that training and developing new talent in a remote environment is much more difficult. Especially if you're not going to invasive things and start tracking people's devices and whether or not their mouse is moving or have a record recording a video on them all day long. I don't like those things. And to avoid those things, we're going to ensure in the future that we have some sort of remote and we train them in person at the beginning and then let them work remote down the road. Now you might be saying, I don't have an office space, I do lawn care, I do landscaping, I do some sort of construction. The same thing is true when it comes to your trucks and that is allowing them to go home with your trucks versus coming to a centralized shop space. I think this is a great option for potentially having someone your truck instead of having to have a big shop space. This is the benefit of having remote. You don't have to have a big shop space, a big lease, a big office. You don't need those things as much if you have some of your employees working hybrid or working remotely. The same thing is true when it comes to your trucks. If you're having them take them home every single day. You don't need as big of a parking space, you don't need as much of a shop space as storage if that equipment and those trucks are being stored at their houses. And a lot of employees enjoy the ability as a benefit to have that company truck, that company van, that company vehicle sitting in their parking lot to where now they don't. They're not commuting 30, 40 minutes to work. Rather they're going directly from their house to their first job, potentially saving them 40, 60, 80 minutes a day of commuting time back and forth in their shop. Great benefit for them, great for the company, because more efficient to get the guys to the job site much faster. And it's better for the business because they don't have to have a big shop space, office space, storage, all the rest of it. The downsides, in my opinion is the upfront. It is getting them onboarded, trained, making sure that they have a quality standard, they understand the culture, and doing that efficiently and effectively is very difficult for brand new talent. But I truly believe that after someone's been in a culture for three, six, 12 months, that's potentially an opportunity to be able to start cutting back on overhead, giving them more autonomy and allowing them to have some benefits to the, to something close to remote work or working from home. And that would be potentially taking the trucks home to their own house at night.