79 | Navigating the Challenges and Benefits of Remote Work | Chris Dyer

Welcome to the Building Better Cultures podcast, where I talk to leaders about how internal communications, engagement, and leadership all play a key role in creating amazing and successful cultures.

People ask me all the time, how do you know people are working? And I start laughing at them. That has literally never been a problem for me. My biggest problem is they don't know how to turn off. They don't know how to set the boundary between working from home and like, you know, going outside of the office and now they're with their family.

I spend almost all of my time helping Hello there and welcome to this episode of the Building Better Cultures podcast with me, Scott McInnes. Uh, first of all, before we get to today's guest, um, my usual little thank you to our friend and supporter workvivo.com. A little more from them later on in the episode, but if you are looking for a way to engage your staff, particularly as you move to hybrid or remote working, then their platform is well worth a look. You can find more about them at workvivo.com. Those of you who are frequent listeners to the pod will know that I love to get in expertise because I love getting people on who have a deep knowledge in a particular subject area, and I love bringing them on, and I love challenging them to come out with some really practical insights that hopefully you guys can all take away and apply back in your businesses tomorrow or the next day or next month or next year or whenever you end up listening to this episode. So I'm delighted today to have on a guest who is Scott McInnes, an expert on company culture. He's a best-selling author of a book called The Power of Company Culture and Remote Work, and that's probably brought him into work more recently. And I'm going to let him talk a bit about himself in a second. Work more recently around the whole remote working area over the past few years, and I guess that's become much more sharply into focus in the past maybe 12 or 18 months than it ever has before, because back then it was just a thing on the side that maybe we did or maybe we didn't. Now it's become an actual thing. So Chris Dyer is today's guest. We're talking to him from California. Chris, hi there.

Hi, thanks so much for having me on the show.

You are very, very welcome. And even though today is a beautifully sunny day here in Dublin, you still pip us at the post by being about 14 degrees hotter than it is here. But I'm sure you've got aircon and we don't have any such things. We just have a big pool of cold water in our gardens to dip our heads into occasionally.

Yeah, you'll probably hear the air conditioning pop on at any moment.

Yeah, like a hurricane.

Right.

Chris, what I love to do at the start of all these podcasts is just to give listeners a sense of who you are, what you've done, your background, and what you're up to today.

So the pretentious version of that would be is I'm a speaker, I'm an author, I'm a CEO, an entrepreneur. I mean, that's sort of all the buzzwords I'm sure a lot of people use. And I think that maybe— more real human version of that is that I have for most of my life been a jack of all trades where like I'm pretty decent at a lot of things. And it wasn't until maybe the last 9, 10 years that I accidentally kind of became an expert around culture and remote work. And when I say by accident, it was like, well, let's try this. And it kept working and I kept learning more about it. And because it was being successful in my organizations, because I was seeing a lot of success from it, I kept wanting wanting to learn more, talk to more people. You know, I have my own radio show and writing books and stuff. And so it's sort of funny to hear people refer to me as an expert. I never thought I would be an expert in anything because this idea of like some old man sitting around like woodworking his whole life, like, he's an expert at woodworking, is like, well, is that really what I want to do, right? I kind of want to know a lot of things. Um, but that's sort of what's happened, um, by accident, I guess. Um, and maybe that's a good thing because it I wouldn't have planned it maybe exactly that way, but that's who I am. So I'm just, uh, I'm a practitioner, but also someone who's constantly studying culture and how we work, um, and also specifically and how we work remotely.

Brilliant. So as somebody that has studied culture for years and years and years, because I think that people still see culture— in fact, they don't see culture, they don't really know what it is. It's still a bit of an amorphous kind of smoky, cloudy thing, but Why don't you define it for me? Define culture and tell me what an amazing culture looks like to you.

Well, that's probably an hour answer. I have an entire presentation on that, but let's try to boil it down to some simple stuff. Um, what is culture? Culture is the norms. It is the, the way in which we work. It's how we meet. It's all these like little things that are seen and unseen. So if you are on— if you started a new job and it's like, well, everyone's very hierarchical here, right? I can't ask for a meeting with my boss's boss, I have to go to my boss first, I have to get 19 levels of approval. Like, that's culture, right? In my organization, that would never happen. You show up, you want a meeting with me, if I'm the right person to be on the call, we get a group of us together. There is no hierarchy in that regards, right? We, we're very cautious of each other's time, but we're also like very open and free. So that's culture, right? There's very different ways of working. Both are good, both are necessary in those examples based on what you're doing or you're creating or you're selling or how big your organization is. But it's how you get stuff done. I will tell you, my co-author on the recent book Remote Work, she argues with me and says, no, culture is how it makes you feel. For some people, that definition works well. I think that's more of an outcome, right? How you feel inside of the culture, I think, is more of an outcome. But, um, what makes a great culture? Well, my first book really focused on that. We studied a lot of organizations. I had hundreds of people on my radio show, and we kept asking them a lot of the same questions. And there were some very distinct, consistent answers back from the best organizations. Vocabulary changed, right? Not everyone described it the same way, but they were saying the same things. And there's these 7 pillars of great company culture that I've identified. And you can look at any organization, can compare Amazon to Google and Facebook to, you know, uh, General Motors. You can— you look at these different companies, we might say they have great cultures They've been around a long time. What is it they do really well that's consistent, even though they do it differently, right? So transparency is one, that's a pillar. Positive leadership, being good listeners, celebrating what makes us unique, not what makes us the same. So uniqueness is really important. And a lot of organizations do a good job of focusing on their uniqueness and their value prop, like to their customers, but celebrating that internally is really the organizations who get diversity and inclusion right. They get, um, you know, they're looking at how being different is better. Great organizations have recognition programs that work really well. So look at my recognition programs. It's really simple. We give green flags to people. It's not measured, it's not monitored, it's not salaried. And then you can flip and look at Caesars Entertainment, which we studied and has a case study in my book, and they literally pay people like in gifts. And like there's this entire gigantic program that works so well. Totally different, just as equally good, right? They have a, they have a program that works well for them. Um, and, and so if you look at all these different, um, pillars, um, and, uh, oh, I think I forgot one, which was mistakes. So the last one I think is mistakes. So how do you deal with mistakes inside the organization? Are you Someone makes a mistake, do you kill them? Do you fire them? Do you punish them? Or do you celebrate the mistake, figure out how to make it better, talk about it, celebrate it, you know, um, learn, learn from it? I mean, 3M is famous from this, right? I mean, people— most people know the Post-it story that literally a really crappy glue was documented. No one fired the scientists for making the world's worst glue. Instead, they documented, put a database, and later on someone else came along. He needed a way to keep his paper on his choir stand when he was singing in a choir. And he found— I wonder if anyone else has a really crappy glue— and found it and put it on the back piece of paper and put there, that's Post-its.

Bingo.

Bingo, right? So if he hadn't internalized that, if they hadn't thought about it, they wouldn't have ever had— they would have fired that scientist. That experiment would have gone away. We would have never had this Post-it. So—

And of course, that idea of making mistakes and how you deal with mistakes ties in beautifully to the whole area of, of course, psychological safety.

Right, exactly. And, and a lot of people usually get a little weirded out when you start talking about mistakes. So I always want to preface this and say I'm not talking about errors. So if someone consistently makes errors— they can't use a calculator, they keep getting payroll wrong, right? They're making errors that should not be— based on the training you've given them, the schooling they've had, and their capabilities, they should be able to do these basic things. Errors, in my opinion, come from bad processes, from multitasking, from stressing people out and lack of, you know, proper work environment. There are ways in which we can impact to lower the amount of errors. Mistakes are, hey, I'm trying something new, I'm trying something awesome. I, I, the client had this really weird, you know, request of me and I didn't know how to do, so I did my best to make it work. We can evaluate that, right? We can say, well, yeah, I could see why you would do that and that was a really good choice, or I can see why you did that, but privately That was a really bad choice, and let's just talk about why. Let's figure out how to do it better next time, right? And that's the difference there.

Yeah, interesting. What would you say is the most— of those 7 things, was there one that popped out, do you think, as being the kind of the top of the tree, the top of the pyramid, if you like, in terms of the most important one? Or maybe actually even the other way around, the bottom of the pyramid as a foundation stone that if you didn't have this one, all the rest are completely irrelevant. Was it— was it— were there one or two of the seven that—

yeah, yeah. I mean, I could tell you the one that I always start with because I think it's the most important. However, uh, before I tell you that answer, I will say that organizations should look at themselves and look at the seven that I said, and they may say, geez, we're really good at these four, right? And then say, but we're not good at these three. And I would say, pick the one that you're the worst at and start there, right? Have the biggest impact first. But not knowing anything about anyone's organizations, I would say transparency is hands down the one. Because I could tell you a little story. My kids were a little much younger, we went to this place called the Safari Park in La Jolla, California. So it's kind of an un-zoo, meaning that most of the animals are somewhat free. The prey animals have a huge Serengeti area. I mean, you can't even see the whole thing when you're standing there. And the predators are a little bit more tied down tied in, but they have some freedom to move around and they can see the prey animals. It's sort of like a, you know, small version of a real-life scenario. Um, and you, you can stay there overnight. And so we stayed overnight. The scientists were showing the kids these animals, and we're learning. And they brought us this funny-looking animal with these big ears that look like a rabbit and big legs that look like a kangaroo or some sort of marsupial, right? And They asked everyone, well, what is this animal? And half the kids said, well, half the kids said kangaroo, half the kids said rabbit. And the adults started making jokes about the rabbit and the kangaroo maybe having a baby. And of course we were all wrong, right? We were all totally wrong. The scientists said, this is one of the fundamental problems with the human brain. When we are presented with something new, we can only take information in our brain to explain it. And when I heard that, I went, oh man, that explains everything what's happening in work right now. People don't know enough and they're making really bad assumptions and really bad conclusions because they only have a limited subset of information. They don't know everything I know. And I keep asking them to make better decisions, but they don't have all the information I have. How can I possibly expect that? And this is why people tend to go the negative way. A simple example is if we had got on this podcast and before we started, if you had been kind of gruff with me, I went, well, geez, maybe Scott doesn't like me. Now, it may have been that your spouse just got done yelling at you for doing something, right? And you were— and I don't know that. I don't know you just had some bad interaction right before this. I could just say, well, Scott doesn't like me, right?

You're filling the gap.

I'm filling in the gap with bad information. And so transparency fundamentally fixes this issue, right? We tell people what our P&L actually looks like. We tell people what our goals are. We tell them what we're trying to do. We share information. Interdepartment goals. We share our goals of individuals on the same team because what we find is that if we realize that Tom on my team has totally different goals than I do, and he may be incentivized by them, he may be on a career track by them, and here I am trying to do something totally different, I'm going to understand why Tom's not, not that interested in helping me get my goals done, right? Or as, and when he's got totally different ones. Or we realize we're not aligned. We have opposing goals and only one of us can actually be successful and the other one can't. And usually that's unintentional. The organization unintentionally negotiates goals with people and things, and you don't realize that you're competing with each other in a way you shouldn't be. So getting all that out, it's all open. It's all, you know, out there, really being able to have conversations with people and sharing as much information as what's legally and practically possible. Again, we share our P&L every single month, whether it's good news or bad news. And so people know. When it was COVID, we told them exactly what was happening. We talked to them exactly about what we were doing with the government programs and how long we thought we could go until layoffs might happen. I mean, could you imagine hearing from someone, we have a 2-month runway and we had better have these programs in place or we're going to make tough decisions?

Yeah, and that's, and that's not about scaremongering. That's about just being, as you say, transparent, open, honest. Because you know what might happen? People might buck up their games. They might actually turn it on. They might, you know, go that extra mile, use that discretionary effort. You know what, I'm happy to take a 20% pay cut if we think that can make us go for an extra month, because, right, we're in it for the team. Because you've created that environment, you've created that culture in your organization.

Yeah, yeah. And, and so that sort of is the baseline for me. That's where it all starts. If people don't know, you know, good information, they don't understand it, they can't possibly make better decisions. And they can't think about when they're in a scenario where they can't ask for help and they can't get their boss's opinion, right? It's like, how do you make that best decision with what you know? And employees are in those spots all the time, far more than we want to admit, right? Whether out on a lifeboat by themselves trying to make good decisions for clients or vendors or are for the company. And we just got to share more. We got to be— and that's— it's tough to do sometimes. We're moving a million miles a minute. I will say the most transparency I've ever seen happened during COVID And it really was because companies had more to talk about. They realized they had better start sharing. We're all in this crazy mess together. And they actually had the time to share, meaning we didn't— we weren't so busy anymore, were we? We didn't have so many meetings. We didn't get on so many planes. We didn't have We weren't stretched thin, and we were noticing leaders actually sitting down and having longer conversations, deeper conversations, and senior leaders reporting back to us saying, this is the most connected I've ever felt to my team. I've been managing these 6 people across the world who I maybe would see once every 3 or 4 years, and I feel way more connected to them because I'm on video with them all the time. We're talking all the time. So it, it is fundamental. I mean, I could make an argument for all 7, but I think that's where start not knowing anything about, you know, the average company.

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It's interesting that you picked up there on one of the benefits that's come out of COVID One of the things that I keep hearing is executives— and it's generally maybe executives that aren't comfortable with the whole hybrid thing, that they just want people back in the office— so they're clutching at straws to try and find reasons to get everybody back in the office as quickly as possible in a kind of an Ebenezer Scrooge kind of— right, I, I just picture it as that, the high desk at the front and, and everyone sitting in rows of desks down below. And one of the, one of the excuses, one of the reasons they'll use is, well, you know, it's going to have a really big impact on our culture. Our culture is going to really suffer as a result of people not being in the office. The water cooler moments, the cups of coffee, all that stuff. What are your thoughts on that? Is culture going to suffer?

No.

Good culture is independent of location. So there are how many great organizations that have offices all across the country or all across the world, right? I mean, they're not all in one place. You have these subcultures inside of organizations. But if you have a great culture— I mean, we consistently win awards at my companies against company for culture. Against companies who have all their people in one giant office, a cubicle farm, and they can't keep people because their culture is so bad, right? But they tell you, they'll tell you the same thing. Now, I hate to be sort of this blunt, but I think any leader that's using that, it's saying that they are a terrible manager. Maybe they could be better one day. I don't think they're a terrible person, but I think they're a terrible manager or a terrible leader because they don't know how to lead without seeing the person. And this gets into old cognitive biases, right? There's things called like the halo effect where someone dresses nice and they look nice, we assume that they're good at their job. That's not true, right? Just because someone did a good job on one project doesn't mean they're necessarily the right person for another project. And we like to overuse our high achievers and our people who we think look good and, and make us feel good as leaders, and we'll overuse them in projects until they burn out and go away. People often go find a new job just to get a break because they're so stressed out and overwhelmed at the one they've got, even though the pay is good and they like the company. They've been overworked by their leadership. So I think that's a cop-out. People want to see people walking around. They want to be able to judge them on how many meetings they're in, how much paper is rustling, how many times the stapler clicks. And that's because that's what they've learned, right? That's the command and control, the old sort of assembly line management that they learned from their parents and their sports coaches and their teachers, and then their managers. And they haven't ever maybe read a few books or realized or taken the chance to experiment with this new type of leadership, which is, you know, be open and honest with people, set good KPIs and really good goals, figure out how you're actually going to measure them, and then let people go do their jobs, you know. And, and if they don't do their jobs, have the guts to let them go. This is another thing I think leaders avoid. They don't want to— they're avoiding having this bad interaction when they have to let somebody go or to admit that maybe they didn't hire the right person, uh, and be willing to celebrate it. So I can tell you that people ask me all the time, how do you know people are working? And I start laughing at them and they're like, why are you laughing? I'm like, that has literally never been a problem for me. My biggest problem is they overwork. My biggest problem is they don't know how to turn off. They don't know how to set the boundary between working from home and like, you know, going outside of the office and now they're with their family. I spend almost all of my time helping them set boundaries, cutting down the amount of work they're doing. I don't want them overworking and burning out. It's never that somebody's eating bonbons on the couch and just faking it. That's never happened.

And if they are, sitting on the couch and eating bonbons and watching Oprah, right, during the day, then so what? Because if they're actually getting the work done at night when their kids are in bed asleep, or at the weekends when their kids are away at camp or football or whatever they're at, if they're getting— how do you know that people are working? Because they're delivering what you agree with them they're going to deliver, right? When and where and how they do it is, is for me entirely their shout, you know, as long as they're available for a team meeting on a Tuesday morning at 10 and a staff catch-up on a Thursday afternoon at 3, or whatever those things are. Actually, just empower, hand over the ball and let them go and score the goals. Just let them go and do it the way that they know best.

Yeah, and I think the problem is it takes a bit of work. It is hard work to figure all that out. What do we really value in this person? What are the KPIs really going to be? A lot of organizations haven't ever done that. They have some loose idea, well, you're in customer service and people should be happy. What does that mean? Like, are you actually measuring ticket response Are you— I mean, we actually measure that stuff down to that granular level. And we can very quickly, we look at it weekly, we look at it at a deeper meeting monthly by department. We have those key things. And if we see something falling off, well, then we go back and have conversations with people, try to figure out what's going on and immediately help them triage. Is it a people person problem? Is it a client problem? Is it something else that's not their fault? And we try to figure that out. But to be fair, there are other jobs where it's really hard. I will tell you, like, my, you know, head of research, like, I mean, how do I, how do I— she's not really doing the thing, but she's managing the people. So are the, you know, what is the KPI that can look all the time? Well, the people happy and the work's getting done right. Like, there can be with management and stuff a little bit harder to figure that out. And so you have to have deeper conversations with them and with their team to figure that out. And that's where it gets to be— I think people get a little uncomfortable because they have to kind of go into uncharted waters with how we're going to measure this person.

There's a couple of things that just popped into my head as you're talking there. The first one, I think, is absolutely right, that we are just rubbish at having difficult conversations with people, particularly when they're not performing. And we help them if they're not performing, and we triage, as you said, and we find out what's going on, and we try to support them. But Actually, it might just boil down to the fact that this isn't the best place for you to continue that career. And I think that me even saying that line will make some listeners' toes curl because they're like, right, oh my God, how could you even say that to somebody? But actually, what benefit are you serving them? What benefit are you serving that individual by keeping them in your organization where they're not able to be their best self? Yeah, surely you're better off letting them go a bit like a canary in a cage. Free the canary, let them go off and be amazing somewhere else. Don't hold on to them because you don't have the, you know, the balls, the gumption. Yeah, to have that hard conversation. And then the other thing that popped into my head as well as you were talking was this whole idea of kind of poor leadership. And I do think that— and we hear middle managers particularly described, and you've heard all these, you know, described as the marzipan layer or the Permafrost, or, you know, other disingenuous names, because they're getting pressure from both sides, right? They're getting pressure from the people they work— that work for them. They're getting pressure from the top. They're not in people leader roles and recognized as experts in their field because they have to do a job as well, and the leadership piece is on the side. So, so I wonder sometimes, is it the fault of the organization that people leaders aren't better people leaders because we're not giving them the time and the space and the opportunities to be amazing?

Well, if you have a systematic problem where you have multiple leader— leaders that are failing or doing it this way, and you're the CEO, absolutely, it's on your watch, right? You need to be working. So I spend 90% of my time worrying about my employees as the CEO, meaning I'm thinking about how can I make the lives better and how can I clear away the crap, right? You know, use my machete to clear the jungle for my average employee. But I'm also spending a lot of time working with my senior team and making sure that they understand and they know what I expect and what's important, and talking to them about what's going on with them and making sure I'm giving them coaching and counseling on where I think they should, you know, how we should be dealing with that in a conversation, not in a dictatorial way, but having conversations over and over and over again. So again, they can go back on their own and then make better decisions on how that needs to go. But sometimes they just need that really direct leadership, and I can give you an example of that. So I have a policy that I created several years back, and I realized that I hadn't talked about it in a while, partly because of COVID but it was time to bring it back up again. And, and everyone was sort of reminded, and it was good. And what we do for vacation, anyone who takes like, let's say, 5 days or more vacation Right? We have a big problem in the United States where we don't— people just don't take vacations, or if they do, they're still working. I mean, they're not really breaking free. We have a very un-European view of vacation. I don't personally, but the average American. So what we did was we talked to our employees for a while and said, you know, why aren't you taking your vacation time? We worked through some of the different issues, but one of the biggest ones was that they didn't want to come back to this giant pile of work. They had all this anxiety and, and just fear and loathing around the 300 or 3,000 emails that were going to be waiting for them, right?

Yeah, I'll just get rid of the emails and then at least that's gone off the desk on day one. It's only the emails I'm checking. It's only the emails I'm checking. You hear that all the time for sure, right?

Right. And so what we do is we ask them to put in a very, very staunch out-of-office note while they're gone that says, hey, I'm out.

I—

your email's already been deleted. I'm not going to read this email. I will be back on this date. You can resend your email if you need me to help you directly, or here's a list of people in the organization who can help you, right, if you need help right now. So the person is communicated with and they're set. And then on day 1 when they come back, we do 2 things with the employee. We One, have what we call an ostrich meeting with them, which is, it's a help me get my head out of the sand meeting. So they meet with their team and say, what did I miss? What do I need to know? What's going on? What's the scuttlebutt? You know, all that kind of stuff, right? And the team fills them in and then they share their screen and they show their whole team that they select all their emails and they delete them all, right? On day one. And it's this really, really empowering moment of I trust my team, they took care of it, right? I don't need to sit here on day one and just be like absolutely overwhelmed. I can come back from vacation and keep that great vacation feeling of like, I'm, I'm loosey-goosey now, I'm feeling better, I'm more relaxed, and I don't have to immediately be right back into threat level midnight of anxiety because I have all these emails. So you were talking before we started, I was on vacation and I came back to 9,000 emails. And I deleted them all. And so I went back and showed my team again, and I had to have this conversation again with my senior leadership. And they were like, oh yeah, I forgot you wanted us to do that. I'm like, what do you mean you forgot? Like, well, it's been— no one's really taken vacations. It's been a year. We've been COVID. Like, it hasn't been a thing. And so I had several senior leaders and several people have taken vacations. And again, it's reinforced internally, we care about you taking vacations. We care about your mental health. We care about You know, and we mean it because we're going to systematically approach this in a very— we're not just going to ask you in the honor system to do this. We're going to put things in place to help you execute this and be really, really successful. And those are the simple kind of tactical things people have to think about doing. It's great to have a great idea, but how do you put in levers and things inside the organization to make sure it happens so that you get the benefit every time?

Yeah. And how do you then— so first of all, I love that idea. And I said at the top, we love practical ideas and thoughts on this podcast. And if you If you haven't written that down, I'm gonna chastise you right now, listeners. Write that down 'cause that was amazing. I'm gonna start doing that. I'm going on my holidays in 2 weeks. What about the people who get the kind of the FOMO, the fear of missing out and all that stuff and they go, "Oh no, no, I don't wanna delete my emails. I want to read them." Right. I presume you leave them, they have a choice. No. Oh, okay, they don't have a choice.

They don't have a choice. They don't have a choice. Now, we have a few carve-outs, right? So first, the reason we have that ostrich meeting is so they don't have that FOMO, right? They can come back and their team can fill them in on the high level what's been going on. If there's a really important issue that's going on, their emails are still in their deleted items and they could go access them for a specific issue. If there's a specific client have a specific issue that now they have to jump in, they can go back and read just those emails to get caught up on what's happening if their team couldn't give them enough detail. So they have access to those carve-outs, right? They can always get back to those if they really, really need to. I will tell you that almost never is that ever needed. They, they think they need it, but then they almost never need it, right? Um, secondly, we do have salespeople that have said, listen, I'm going on vacation, but like this giant deal I've been working on is supposed to close next week. Like, I, I need, I need some way to be connected. And so we'll promise them, listen, don't check your emails, be on vacation, your, your boss or your partner on your team, we will text you if this thing lands. If this thing happens to hit and you're the only, you know, you're the one, yes, we will let you, you know, come in and save the day. Because you've been working on a, on a closing a deal for a year and a half. You don't want to miss it because you were gone for 5 days, right, on in Yosemite with your kids and no cell service. So I do have a couple caveats that help people in certain situations, but No, we don't make it optional because again, they will choose the bad path. People will often go down the wrong road, right?

Yeah, for sure. For sure. At Inspiring Change, we help our clients to implement sustainable change and drive business performance by putting their people first. We do that through a focus on strategic internal communications, employee engagement, and leadership consultancy. If you're struggling with change or getting your people aligned behind your purpose, vision, or strategy, then get in touch. Simply visit our website at www.inspiringchange.ie for more. I think a lot of the stuff that we've talked about here is how we're going to do things differently in a hybrid world, how we need to just tweak what we've done what we've done before in order for it to fit into what perhaps a future world of work looks like. I hate that term, new world of work, um, but that whole idea of kind of a future different world of work looks like. And I've— if I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times in this podcast, that we spend so much time trying to force the square peg of what we used to do in the office when we were all together into the round hole of what do we do if Chris and Jimmy and Sarah are working at home and we're in the office, how does that work? It doesn't work. And I know that I saw an ebook on your website the other day, we'll talk about that in a minute, but you've got kind of 5 secrets of thriving as a remote team. What are they from a very practical perspective?

Well, you know, there's lots there to unpack. So I would say the first thing is, to your point about trying to force, you know, square peg in a round hole, That's what hybrid is. So if you're running around saying we're gonna be hybrid, honestly, it's problematic. So the only way to really make hybrid work, 'cause hybrid is the most difficult system to make work. Everyone in the office is easier and everyone working from home is easier. Because you could have so many different complexities. You could have people that are consistently in the office and people who are consistently out of the office. You could have rotating schedules. I mean, that's just a nightmare, right? If you treat hybrid work as remote work, meaning if we're going to be on a meeting, we all get on a Zoom call. It doesn't matter if we're both in a cubicle next to each other, or if we're, you know, 10,000 miles apart. If you're going to have a meeting, everyone gets on the same system, Zoom, Teams, I don't care, conference call, and just pretend you're all working from home.

Yeah.

That's the way to do it. That, that, and you don't have the hallway conversations. Don't have the lunch meeting conversations about work and on your teams unless you're willing to write those up and communicate them to people, right, that they were had. So we don't have people missing out on things. Um, you know, to be really successful in remote work, how you meet really, really matters. And I think you have to fundamentally change how you meet. So what I mean by that is I, I call these things signposts. So if, if we were in a traditional office, you know, this beautiful Silicon Valley glass wall, you know, office, just put that in your brain, right? And I walk in and there you are Scott's my boss, and he's standing in this beautiful conference room in front of a whiteboard holding one of those smelly dry erase pens, and he waves at me to come in the conference room. It's a clear signpost. There's a meeting happening. I'm wanted in the meeting. I'm going to go into this meeting. We're probably going to brainstorm. There's 100 things that I can just pick up by being there, by seeing it, by looking at physical, you know, actions, and I can just jump right in. But if you ask me to a meeting, Scott, virtually, right, and you don't give me an agenda and you don't tell me what we're going to do, I have no idea. Do you want me to listen? Do you need me to help you solve a problem? Do you need me to fill you in because you don't know something? Do we need to brainstorm? Are we going to be on a— on a— this is a webinar. Am I— is this a training? Like, I— and I have—

you know nothing.

I know nothing. And I'm just showing up. And of course, then once it ends up happening is we have a meeting about another meeting we're gonna have to have. 'Cause we say, well, oh, thanks for everyone being here today. I called this meeting because I feel like we all need to get better trained on Office 365. And everyone's like, oh, that's what we're meeting about? Okay. And then 3 people say, well, I have some experience in that. One person says I have certification. One person says I never use that, I use Google Docs. Okay, well, let's have another meeting. Maybe we should talk about getting a trainer. That's stupid. Well, why not send out an agenda, right? This is what we need to talk about, this is what we're gonna do. And so we name our meetings different little cute names so people remember them. And that gives everyone the rules of engagement. So a cockroach meeting is a 15-minute meeting and we're gonna solve one problem, right? You have a cockroach in your bathroom, it's a small problem. You may not wanna be the one to clean it up, that's okay, but it's a small little thing, right? Ostrich meeting, which I mentioned earlier, it's just help me get my head outta the sand, help me understand something, a 15-minute meeting again, right? Those two are optional for people to attend. No more than— it's 5 to 7 people, super fast, just rapid fire. We're not talking about our kids, we're not even barely saying hello to each other. It's, hi, what are we talking about? Okay, you need the help. Boom, boom, boom, off the call, right? It's all business. Then we have other meetings like a Tiger Team meeting. Now, if you have a tiger in your bathroom, it's a much bigger problem. Think about everything that would go into place to get a tiger out of your bathroom. You might need animal control, a dart gun, a crane, or a lot of really strong people to carry this animal once we've tranquilized it. I mean, we might need someone to clean up after the tiger if it's been in there for a while. I mean, there's a lot of things that could go into the— the same thing. I call a Tiger Meeting. It's mandatory for you to be there. There's a full agenda. You're going to have to have prepped in advance. You're going to be showing up with probably something really big to contribute to the meeting, and we may talk for an hour or 2 hours, or this may be an all-day session with breaks built in. You know, this is a big, big deal. But we have curated the experience for people. We've told them how to operate, what to expect, how long they're going to be on the calls, right? We always start on time. We always try to end early. We never go late. We never add items to the meeting that aren't on the agenda. And that kind of curation allows us to have a really thriving and excited culture because we're not constantly in the dark or like just showing up to be surprised. I mean, that, the anxiety of that and like the— I just get annoyed, right? If I show up to some meeting, I've been called to some meeting outside my organization, I have no idea why I'm supposed to be there and I have no idea what they need from me. And I'm like, oh, if you just told me, give me 30 minutes notice is what you need to do, I could have been prepared and really delivered you content. And instead you asked me to be here to basically tell you we need to have another meeting because I'm not ready.

And it's win-win. It's better for you, and it's better for them.

Right.

So why wouldn't you do that? It's such a fundamentally basic thing, arguably. Just tell me what you want from me. What was the fourth one?

And the last meeting is the tsunami planning meeting. So there's some really great books out there. One that I love, David Marquet's books, Turn the Ship Around and Leadership is Language. And he talks about how— You know, if you think about it, let's just use sports for a moment. Anyone who's ever been on the sports team or practiced a sport, you practice like 99% of the time, right? If you're gonna play a tennis match, you're practicing every day or every couple days your serve and all that stuff. The actual competition, the actual doing of the event in a competitive manner is 1% or less of your activity. You may not even do a competition. You may just enjoy practicing the sport. And yet in work, it's the complete opposite. We expect people to show up and perform at a competitive level without ever practicing how we expect them to act. And so our tsunami planning meetings are these fake meetings where once a month every team gets together and does a 30-minute meeting on a fake prompt. What would happen if— could be a good thing, could be a bad thing, right? Maybe we double in size, maybe we lose half of our clients, maybe regulations change. What if the CEO dies? What if our What if our team leader dies? What if— I mean, right, whatever. Just come up with these different scenarios. And people practice arguing, debating, and creating psychological safety that my team isn't going to get mad at me if I disagree with them. My team isn't— my leader isn't going to laugh at me or fire me if I don't agree with them. And the leader gets really, really good intelligence to say, geez, I'm noticing these 3 people are really active, but these 2 people aren't talking. Why? And then you can go back to them and say, hey, I noticed in that tsunami planning meeting you were pretty quiet. What was going on? Well, maybe there's somebody new. Well, I didn't really feel like I could really talk. I didn't really know a lot. Okay, well, next time, here's what you might want to try. Here's some suggestions, or here's some things you can do. And we work ourselves into this better spot so when it is the real deal, when it is time to perform, they know how to act and they know and they feel safe. And And that kind of thing is like, I don't ever see people doing.

No, nobody practices. Nobody practices. We just expect to be good at it all the time, right?

Right. And we're not.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, we're not because we don't practice, because we're just dropped in the situation and we've nothing to fall back on in terms of prior experience or understanding or examples or anything. So, you know, very interesting. Listen, conscious of time, one last question. That I think this whole remote working hybrid thing that's been kind of perpetuated by COVID has made people think that this is all about whether people that work for me work in the office or work at home. And that's kind of what it's boiled down to, which to me is such a complete waste of a massive opportunity. So how do we get across— how do people like you and I get across to business owners that this is about so much more than just where people work. The potential for them to look really carefully at their businesses and see opportunities for change that just arguably weren't there before. And of course, the one that always springs to mind immediately is, is the talent opportunity. You know, before you had talent, you know, you might pick people that lived within an hour of your office, or they may choose to work for you because they lived now I could hire you in California or somebody in Borneo or, you know, anywhere, Malaysia. It doesn't matter. That's the one that always springs to mind for me. How do we get across to business owners that the opportunity is so much bigger than just people working at home?

Well, I kind of don't want to answer the question because it has been my silver bullet for many, many years. It has been what has allowed us to be so competitive against much larger organizations with more money and sexier better, you know, marketing and everything. But we've been able to compete with them because, to your point, I can hire someone who's really awesome in a market that the cost of living is much lower. So I end up paying less for that same great person that's maybe my competitors paying twice as much for. I can allow for flexible work. So I've been able to take advantage of stay-at-home parents, military spouses, people who are physically disabled, who, who either need to work from home most of the time or all of the time. And so giving them that option, or at least a— the flexibility to work when and where they want to work, or at least where they want to work— I mean, when isn't always possible, but where is really possible— that kind of flexibility gets me into entirely new talent pools. I've had times where people have said, I just can't find anyone to hire, and I go, 'Have you ever considered a military spouse?' And they go, 'Well, I couldn't do that because then if they're going to move—' Well, it doesn't matter to me. I don't care where they are. They're in Louisiana today, they're in Kuwait tomorrow. I mean, whatever, wherever their military spouse is taken, if they need a job, they can work for me anywhere, right? And so it's about changing that mindset. But flexibility really is it as the advantage for the employer. Now, the advantage for the employee, which is part of the stickiness, right? If you want to keep good people, you need to remember nobody likes commuting. Nobody likes sitting in a cubicle. No one likes staring at the same white wall in your office. Nobody likes Tim who reheats salmon at lunch and makes the whole office smell. No one likes all of this just human minutia of crap right, that we completely eliminate by staying home. I can control my thermostat. The temperature is always perfect at work in my office because it's exactly what I want it to be, right? My lunch is always exactly what I want it to be, and I can eat healthy and save money and all that, right? There's so many advantages to me as the employee that we've had people stick around that were offered jobs, better jobs, more high-paying jobs, but they weren't remote. And so We just— the layer of protection around our top performers has been insane, all because it's flexible. And, and yeah, there's a little bit of work to do. It's not the same. We have to kind of unlearn some bad habits, learn some new good habits. But it really is, uh, I think, the better way to work for most people in scenarios where that's possible. Of course, you have to be in the vineyard to make wine.. You have to be in a hangar to make an airplane. You have to be— there are jobs that will never be remote, that will probably get replaced by robots before they're ever remote. But for everything else, if you can have somebody be remote, it really is a really good scenario for them. And for anybody who can't handle it, there's always going to be jobs where people will be stuck in offices and want to be the puppet masters and think they can control everyone and do all of that. And that will always be there. It's some bit of human nature.

So Yeah, yeah, listen, that's a great place to finish. Um, if you want to find out more about Chris and the work he does, you will find him at chrisdyer.com, or you'll also find him on LinkedIn or Twitter @chrispdyer. Before I go off and delete all of my emails, which I'm going to do shortly, um, if you need to get me again, you can, you can email me again, by the way, everybody. Um, thank you very much, Chris, for, for coming on the podcast today. I've really appreciated your time. Um, Your insights have been brilliant, and I really appreciate it.

Thanks a mil. Thanks, Scott.

Thanks for listening. To hear from other leaders in our podcasts, to read our blogs, or to find out more about the work that we do at Inspiring Change, please visit inspiringchange.ie.