The Challenges of Hybrid Offices with Barbara Lee

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My name is Johnny Campbell. I am the host of today's Shortlist show and the CEO and co founder of Social Talent. Welcome to the show. Today's topic is one that genuinely really excites me to the point of you will want to end this if it's a four hour podcast or show, but I promise, I promise it won't be. We'll do our best to focus on the really, really meaty parts, get it all done in 40, 45 minutes, as we always do here in the shortlist. But we are talking about this massive shift we've seen in our economy, in the world of work, towards remote working and particularly what a lot of people are talking about, hybrid working. I'm really excited to be joined by today's guest who is not only somebody who has a really, really important role to play in a very large enterprise organization around this type of thinking. She very coincidentally a neighbor of mine who lives only down the road. And although we tried to go for a walk with a cup of tea in the park a few weeks ago, which my family's Covid situation didn't allow us to do, she's someone who's become a good friend of mine over the last few years. I really value her opinion, her thinking it's fresh, it's new in the talent acquisition world, but she comes from a much broader HR and talent background and that is the fabulous Barbara Lee. Barbara is SVP of HR and Global Talent Acquisition at Nielsen. Nielsen, some of you might know, might ring a bell. But Barbara is going to tell us a little bit about her background, how she ended up in talent acquisition and what that is, and maybe tell us a little bit more about Nielsen. For those of us who don't know about this. Before you do though, Barbara, I just want to remind our audience that if you like the shortlist, if you enjoy the show, you can subscribe@SocialTown.com for and you can also find a recording of this and links to our podcast. This is a podcast available on Apple, Spotify and wherever you get your good podcasts. And you can find our previous shows, future lineup and of course this show by going to that site. We welcome your comments. Barbara's going to be available for the next 40, 45 minutes. Take your questions on remote and virtual working as well. But before we go further, Barbara, tell us about Nielsen. Tell us about yourself and your own background.

Okay, so for those of you who are not familiar with Nielsen, it is a global market research company. You might be familiar with the concept of TV ratings And Nielsen has been the leading provider of TV ratings around the world for a number of years. We're actually in the process of splitting ourselves in two as a company. And so the media site where the TV ratings happen is going to be at one company. And the side of the company that I will continue to work on is the consumer side. So everything related to market research for the FMCG industry, working with manufacturer clients and retailers. I've been at Nielsen for a while so I celebrated my 21 year workaversary this summer and I have had a variety of different roles, as Johnny said, in the HR space. So I've worked locally, I started here locally in the Dublin office at Nielsen. I've worked in multi country clusters. I've worked across the European region in global roles with our commercial business, with our, the operations and technology side of our business. I've worked on the media side for a while and three years ago I took on the CoE role of TA and it was, it was different, it was new to me because I hadn't done a COE role and I hadn't worked deeply in talent acquisition before. And what was kind of interesting and exciting about it was that it was a transformation role. So that's how I ended up moving into talent acquisition at Nielsen to lead a transformation of our teams.

And Barbara, Nielsen is not a small company. Many employees in the combined businesses today.

So total business about 45,000. And when we split off the consumer side that I am staying on will.

Be about 30,000 employees and kind of roughly mental countries. You operate in over 100, so pretty much everywhere. Yeah, you'd expect a large enterprise, multinational with scale. And I'm going to come back to that because you know your experience for the last 20 years, since you were 12 years of age, my goodness, you beat me there as being in a large enterprise. And that's what I want to get into. I want to talk about today's subject in an enterprise context. But Barbara, because it's the shortest show and because this is the time of the show that we always do this, it's time for the news. First article I want to discuss is comes from Fast Company. I was really thought it was a fascinating read and it was an analysis of, of what extreme transparency and incredible remote working look like. Particularly from the case study of an organization called GitLab who maybe many of you think you might have heard of. You might have heard of its kind of competitor GitHub that Microsoft purchased for $7 billion about two years ago. But this was a Great article. And a hat tip to Hong Lee, who shared this out on Sunday in his newsletter I thought was a fascinating approach to extreme working from extreme remoteness and extreme transparency from a company who claimed to be doing this for 10 years. What are your thoughts? I have tons of thoughts on this, but I really would love to hear your thoughts. What interested you about this? What did you feel was something you could relate to that maybe you agreed with, didn't agree with? What did you take from this article?

Yeah, there were a couple of things. I loved the article as well. I thought it was great. A couple of things that really stood out for me. One of them was this concept that remote working or working from home, however we want to phrase it, it's a learned behavior, right? And we've just been like the world has just been kind of catapulted into an extreme version of remote working. And it's not something that you can just switch on and off. You don't go from being in a hundred percent or heavy office environment to working from home and get it perfect all the time. It takes some learning. And if I think back to so I've been remote working for over a decade now at this stage, but when I think back to when I first started to work remotely, there was an adjustment period. And you kind of have. You're used to being surrounded by people in an office all the time and suddenly you're not. There's almost a loneliness adjustment to getting used to being in an environment where you don't have people around, you're not meeting someone at the water cooler or doing a coffee run for other people. So I thought that was interesting that they're calling out that there is an adjustment period. And as GitLab hire new people in who come from an office environment, they have to help them through that adjustment. And I think if we think of it in the context of the last few months, as we've all been adjusting to this new kind of global work from home or remote work environment, maybe at the start where we thought it was going to be for short term, a number of weeks, maybe it would have been possible to just not come into the office for a few weeks. Now I think we're at the stage where we really need to be thinking about how do we work differently and what's the impact on our ways of working. Because you can't just say this is how we did it in the office. We'll do it this way, we'll just do it at home. I think you need to rethink processes and how things work, ways of working, how interactions happen, what systems and technology are used to facilitate those interactions. All of that needs to be rethought and kind of redefined in this new remote or even if we get to hybrid, you know, in a post Covid world, if we can get to hybrid, it all needs to be rethought. So that was one of the things that kind of stood out for me and the other area that I thought was really interesting in this is the focus on collaboration and the fact that GitLab, who work in this environment all the time have realized and kind of leaned into that importance of collaboration. Because at the end of the day, if you really think about why companies exist, it is for collaboration, right? If we didn't need collaboration, everyone would just work on their own. The whole point of bringing people together is to do more with the collective than you can do with the individual, right? So collaboration is everything and if we don't get that right, things are not going to work properly. So those are the kind of the two things for me, that collaboration point and then the fact that working remotely is different and requires a different kind of approach that maybe has to be learned by people who aren't used to it.

I'm going to make a shout out at this point, just maybe for our live listeners and viewers. I'd love to hear what you think has been the biggest challenge in removing to remote work and then also what tips you might have to share with the audience. What I love Barbara, with this article, I love lots of things. There's the transparency piece which I'll park for a second because you either agree with that or you don't. And may this this is a company with extreme transparency, which I think is a separate topic. Related, but separate. Two things just really have stood out to me since I read this on Sunday. One as a tip, one is the way that they onboard staff, which I thought was beautifully simple. They describe this hundred tasks and it's both a way to onboard you but also a way to habituate you into the way they actually work, which is a task oriented type type structure which you know when you join you have to literally complete your hundred tasks which are quite detailed and listed for you. And when you get to 100 you can start work that takes about two weeks I think they estimate to get through that. Which I thought was a lovely simple structure where a newly onboarded staff member could go, okay, here's my tasks, I'll start working through them. Things like organize a coffee with this other colleague.

I like the fact that that was built into it as well. It's not just, you know, read this document, do this training course. The fact that they've built in the social element as well I thought was nice.

And it's what you said it's considered. They'd obviously done this for some time. They've learned what works and what doesn't work. And your second, the second thing I loved as to your point around teamwork and collaboration and this hit me because I don't do this, but I think it's good advice. This is an organization that use Slack and it's not about Slack. I think it's any collaboration software. They're saying that they encourage people to, to not do one on one messaging to try and make sure that they have the threads around the themes and that you're, you're, you're, you're mentioning people that you want to talk to into this group thread. And it's kind of this, I think a lot of people have written about this who've done remote working for a while. It's the culture of documentation because you're moving away from things being live and understanding that people might be in different time zones might jump on later. And therefore it's better to have a narrative that's more visible to more people that they can jump in on collaboration on documents, et cetera. Because I do agree with you that a lot of us who went online in March and went, you know, went virtual for the first time. We kind of just took our office routine and put it online. And I think, you know, the GitLab story and many others tells us is that it isn't exactly the same. There are actually a lot, there's a lot more to it.

Yeah. And I, I think that it shows that like we were talking, what I was saying about working remotely being a learned behavior, that idea of documenting instead of verbally discussing things, that's a pretty significant change in behavior for people who are used to an office environment. That's exactly, I think the kind of thing we should all be thinking about in this new, more remote, however long the kind of 100% remoteness lasts. But even when we get to hybrid, if we get to hybrid, I think that's, those are the kinds of things we need to be thinking about. If, if steps ABC worked in an office environment, how do they translate into a remote environment? And it's, it's definitely not ABC, right?

Yeah. And we got, we got a LinkedIn viewer who's shared with us their story. This is Claire Johnson. Claire saying the biggest challenge she's had will be getting into a similar work, working day structure as you would in the office, minus the environment of being with colleagues. I think I, I totally resonate with that. A lot of people have said that to me. But it's also, I think about the fact that it's not quite the same. It isn't quite like for like, you know. Aaron. Aaron Dillard. Hey, Aaron. It's great to have you. Aaron's a regular listener to the show saying she started a new job while working remotely. Getting to know team members on a personal level is more difficult because the water cooler conversations are not a thing. And she's had to be more intentional about making time to connect with team members. Right. Virtual coffee, quick check ins gifts to make people smile. Actually, my colleague Kat, who's our head of marketing, Barbara, who you've met over the last few weeks, you know, Kat was telling our leadership team last week about how she, she did a virtual lunch with her team. As in they brought their laptops down to wherever they eat lunch and they just opened the laptop and, you know, drunk soup and ate sandwiches together and just chatted. And she said it was ridiculously good. It was actually really simple and easy and that lack of structure. But just saying this is what we used to do in the old world really worked nicely. Did you ever find yourself doing something like that in the last decade? Other colleagues, you know, respect the fact that you were working remotely if they weren't.

So I have several times ended up eating my lunch on a conference call. Other people aren't necessarily, but I do, I've made peace with that. I think that's great if everyone's in the same time zone. It's trickier when people are in different time zones. And so you have to find different ways of doing that. Because when I'm having lunch, somebody else is maybe having dinner or breakfast or depending on where they are. So some of the things that I've done with my team is we've done kind of office treasure hunt at home. So one of the members of my team has set up, we did like a quiz and then we did a competition where people had to go and find random items in their home. So go and bring me a bottle opener or a pair of slippers or something like that and you have to go and run and get the thing. So that's what we've done instead because my team is global and so it's morning for someone. It's Late night for somebody else. So meals or drinks or cocktails don't necessarily work in the same way because cocktails at 8am in, in Malaysia, not so good an idea. But we've done things like quizzes and treasure hunts and fun activities like that to get that social aspect.

I'm going to ask now maybe to bring up our second article Barbara and this is from the Guardian Blue sky thinking is it time to stop work taking over our lives? Which kind of is a bit of a book review if I'm being honest, more than anything else. But. But I guess this is a much bigger, I guess philosophical article that talks about work life, balance, the 40 hour work week and so on and so forth. What are your thoughts on what this article is proposing is in the summary of the book and that kind of wider perspective of Has Covid perhaps changed the way that people are looking at a work week?

Yeah, what I thought was really interesting about this is the fact that some of the discussions we're having now about you know, should we be working 40 hours a week, five days a week, those are not new discussions.

Right.

Those discussions date back centuries at this stage and that I thought was fascinating. And the fact that the technology has existed in some way or other for several decades now for us to work from home and still we have a pre Covid had heavier weighting on office work. And so the fact that this has forced our, you know, globally this has forced our hand to try more working from home and maybe get towards a hybrid that's more heavily weighted to remote working I thought was interesting because it just made me challenge why did it take this for us to do it? If the technology has existed, if the will has been there for decades and for centuries, why did it take this now to be fair, I guess broadband, the evolution of broadband has made working from home easier. I do remember trying to work from home with a dial up and that is a special, special thing all in and of itself. But yeah, I think that the fact that we've been forced into this even though the the will has been there I think is really interesting. And then his concept around the idea of why do we want abundance all the time and why are we looking to work more and more, to gain more and more, to buy more things, to have more things when it's maybe not necessary and it's maybe not making us happy, I thought was really interesting concept. A lot of food for thought and it's one I'll be thinking about for some time.

I think it's a Funny. I was at breakfast this morning with my four boys, my eldest, Aaron, who's 12, we were talking about, I can't remember how it come up, but we were talking about boys and girls and I was commenting to him, I said, you do know Aaron, that girls on average have higher intelligence than boys, certainly in school. Known fact. I said, and they are also generally more mature. And he said, so dad, do they earn more in life? I thought was very interesting that you know, this, this in at such a young age. It was like earnings and earnings. You're kind of like. I said, I said, I said lots of people who are stupid are rich. I said, lots of people are very intelligent, don't have much money. I said, they're not always the same thing. I said, so it doesn't translate quite like that. I think there is this an obsession with successes, you know, measured by the amount of dollars or zeros in your salary.

And you can sometimes be down to pure luck.

Yeah, it can be. And you know, if you look at the surveys of happiest people in the world, you know, it always comes back to, you know, societies that are more egalitarian. Yes, they have a certain level of income. Right. It's usually not poor, very poor societies, don't get me wrong. But it isn't the ones that have the highest gdp, it isn't the ones that have the highest earnings. They're probably, you know, it's higher middle and it's societies that are more involved who have lower hour work weeks like the Nordics and stuff like that have more balance between family and work. You know, I think it's an excellent point. It is a, it's something that I think we're all challenging because we're having to figure out. And you know, again, you mentioned such an international team. I know I often forget here in Europe, we're in Ireland, Barber, our kids are going to school every day. I'm on the phone with, with a lot of American customers and colleagues and friends and the majority of them, depending on their town or state, they're still doing a mixture of homeschooling and virtual and their kids are still there in their homes and they still live this world of it's not quite back to normal. And you know, maybe that's a good thing in some respects because it does shake up this whole idea of the 40 hour workweek, the 9 to 5, that maybe, you know, maybe we'll, we'll live on. It won't be something that we, you know, revert back to the old Ways we kind of grow up a little bit.

Yeah, yeah. I certainly think it will be difficult if not impossible to revert back to, you know, completely office based. And I guess like the world wasn't completely office based before COVID and I don't know what the percentage was but it was heavily weighted towards office based. I don't think the world, I don't think we the people are ever going to accept going back to that in the way it was before COVID So it's, it has forced that I would love if it forced broader discussions on how many hours we work a week, how many days we work a week and the necessity of that, you know, and, and whether or not it is almost becomes kind of self fulfilling because we work these hours then you know, work expands to fill time, feel we need to work these hours and if we, we force it back, you know, what would happen, what, what would explode or fall over or not work if.

We did that and that hybrid world and what happens next Brings me to our third and final news story. And this is from Forbes. It's a loaded title. Hybrid work. We all know it makes sense but they talk a lot about Google and what Google have done and I sometimes it's great to look at what the company like Google has done. I think there's a danger perhaps because not every company relates to Google and they don't see themselves as being the same as Google or being able to do the same things as Google or want to do the same things as Google. Google. But what, what is your opinion on maybe the good and bad of what Google have begun to do over the last six, seven months or at least what's reported that they're doing.

Yeah, I think I agree with your point. I think you know, Google is probably in a league of their own in terms of what they can afford to do versus many other companies. But for me, what I, I see a connection between what this is talking about and one of the points from the first article about, you know, we can't just take ways of working from an office and transplant it to home, that needs to change. I think similarly the whole office environment needs to change because if we go to a hybrid culture where people are coming into the office more for that focus on collaboration then having offices with, you know, banks and banks of open plan desks, it's not going to be relevant anymore because people aren't coming in to sit and tap at their keyboard all day long. So that whole layout I think needs to change. And so creating collaborative spaces and creating, you know, even if we think very specifically about COVID creating spaces with antimicrobial surfaces, with screens that can be opened and closed depending on, you know, what level of severity pandemic outbreaks are out in your country, like, I think all of that is going to become really relevant and that ties in with the ways of working. So the way I'm kind of imagining it in the future is when we get together, when we come into offices, it's specifically for collaborative work that can't be done remotely or that's done significantly better in a face to face environment. And therefore offices are going to need to change how they're laid out to focus more on collaborative spaces, meeting spaces, and not the tiny meeting room for four people that you squeeze agent to, that's not going to be socially acceptable anymore. Right. So I think bigger spaces or maybe spaces that can be, as I said, like folding screens that open and close, that sort of thing. But again, back to the point that like Google is probably different to most other places. You know, this article talks about Google offering an option of both. So you come in whenever you want, you stay home whenever you want. To an extent, I don't think most companies will be able to afford the that level of luxury of choice because, you know, the investment that's made in setting up a work from home and effective work from home structure is going to have to be offset by maybe a smaller real estate footprint or something like that. So I think there's going to be a degree of change and maybe it's, you know, you have the option, but not necessarily as openly as Google can provide it because I just don't think many companies have the means to do that.

We have Saren Cliff commenting now that we've been living with COVID for six months. I think it's absolute time for companies to start taking remote working seriously and building their business goals and people's strategy around this. It will open up a whole world of opportunity, particularly for resourcing and talent management. Exciting times ahead, I'm sure. Barbara, you've thought about that last piece and thanks, Saren, for that comment by the way. Thanks to Nigel Byrne, who's loving the discussion. Um, you know that piece around the opportunity. I listened to a HBR podcast from late March when I was driving back today for this broadcast. And even back then, six, seven months ago, they were talking about a professor from Harvard who was, who was being interviewed was talking about how this opens up so much more opportunity for talent for both companies in terms of Perhaps the potential pool of talent became much bigger, but also employees, the potential pool of organizations you might be able to work for and the jobs you can do just became bigger. What are your thoughts on that and what have you perhaps seen in the market or different workplaces outside Google that you think is interesting around that or even what are the challenges, Barbara, around that?

Yeah, I think it is interesting. I've seen lots of articles about how if we work remotely, it opens up this greater pool of talent. And I completely agree with that. And I've seen lots of articles, I guess, in the first one that we talked about today, talking about kind of almost like a nomad culture where you work remotely doesn't necessarily have to be from home. It could be in your local coffee shop, it could be, you know, at your mom's house if you're going there for the weekend, that sort of thing. I do think there are things that companies need to take into account when we look at that level of flexibility. So if I'm employed in Ireland on an Irish employment contract, can I decide that I'm going to move to France or Australia? And, you know, what's the impact of that on a company? So I don't think we can be quite as nomadic as maybe the romantic notion is, but certainly I think we can give that flexibility and we can therefore open up more talent pools to ourselves and maybe move away from this concept of the urban areas being the center of all kind of corporate activity and multinational activity. And that's spreading out a little bit more broadly. So I think that's an option. But you know, there are lots of factors that companies need to take into account with that. Because if you do spread that broadly, you know, we talked about a hybrid environment where people occasionally come together to work together. If you spread too broadly, then you kind of take that option away from yourself as well. And I think I do. Like, I don't see us getting to a point where nobody ever meets face to face. I don't think this is like the death of face to face meetings. I still think there's value to that. And if I look at how I've worked in the last kind of 12 or 13 years, since I've been working from home, it has been quite hybrid. So when I'm in Ireland, I work fully from home in my home office, but I used to travel a lot and I had a lot of face to face meetings in other Nielsen offices or at events, etc. And so the idea of kind of spreading everything and having no kind of office space for people, I think might be a little bit too far because it's going to, it's going to make that collaboration quite difficult. Maybe not because GitLab have made it work, but certainly a significant jump for us as a, you know, as a society as a whole, I think would be tricky.

Another organization that, that there's several, several lot of people in Ireland is Shopify who have this kind of remote model and have done for many years and big organization on scale, bigger than the GitLab, but they've managed to make it successful. But your point around the legalities and tax jurisdictions and all those things is great. I was talking to a friend of mine who works in LinkedIn and he was telling me that in their Irish business, in March they told all their staff, which is largely international, non Irish staff here in Ireland, that they could work from their home country, whatever that was, and feel free to work remotely. But then I believe there was a panic in September when they recalled them all and said, you got to get back. Because they realized that the six months.

Was going to an end.

Yeah, for tax purposes, you got to be back in the country, otherwise you won't be legally resident and that's going to be a problem. And for those employees, they're like, but like I was doing fine. Like, why am I being recalled? This is silly. It's not silly because there's a legal reason for it. But I can, I can get that people get upset because they don't. It doesn't, it doesn't compute in their heads. And people maybe haven't no one thought it would last that long.

Yeah. And it's back to the fact that we need to get organized around this. We need to think about different ways of working. So what you've just described was an immediate problem that came up that required an immediate solution. And the only immediate solution is get back to the country now, quickly so that we can make this right. Long term companies like LinkedIn or whoever else need to be making those decisions. Of are we okay with instead of everybody being in Ireland, them being all over the place? Can we live with that? And if we can, what does it mean then? If we need to have a meeting, get everyone together, are we prepared to invest in the expense of 100 people traveling to a single location two or three times a year or whatever it takes? Those are, those are kind of long term decisions that need to be planned out.

We've got a great question from James Maley. So James is asking, you know, many organizations leverage their Culture as a key selling point to new talent. How do you think hybrid work will affect this? You know, because I guess culture people think about as quite a physical thing. Certainly they traditionally would have thought about as a physical thing. It's a. It's a feeling in the place that everyone works in. What are your thoughts on this? It's probably a challenge your team have to probably address with the employer branding of the organization. In terms of trying to represent your culture. Have you seen anything that works or do you think it is actually a problem? Is there a difference?

Yeah, you know what? I actually think there are two aspects to this because you've got all your existing employees who were in an office environment who understand the culture that existed up until mid March before everyone got sent home. And for them it's how do you continue to maintain that culture in a remote environment? And then you've got all the new people who've been hired in since, who've never stepped over the threshold of an office and who don't know what that office culture is like, and how do you kind of teach them or embed them into a culture that they've never tangibly experienced. So I think you almost need to think of it in two ways for maybe something kind of more intense almost for the newer people. But I've seen things like ideas around, you know, this is not a new idea, but the idea of buddying up the new people who come in with existing teams and just maybe leaning more on that to say it's not just someone to show you in the office environment where the cafeteria is at lunchtime now, it's really somebody to kind of spend more time with you and really help you embed into that culture. It's one thing to walk up to a group of people in an office and start chatting. You can't just randomly show up in someone's zoom call and start chatting to them. So it's again, a different environment and we have to figure out different ways of doing that. So I do think there are two aspects to it. And then there's that aspect with the external people. Back to your point on employer brand. How do we position our employer brand and how do we engage candidates who are interviewing with us who normally would have that experience of coming into an office, meeting people face to face, even catching a glimpse of the office environment and how people are interacting? And if they don't have that, how do we recreate that virtually so that they can get a sense of what it's like to work here and what the culture feels like and I think those are things that we have to take into account. And employer branding is going to be very important on that because we have to do more now to push out what the internal environment looks like.

Eugene Lum is watching us live on YouTube and he's asking with remote and hybrid working, the future of work, how can organizations or teams be more engaging with team members as being remote for an extended period of time could affect mental well being. I'd love to know Barbara, specifically, perhaps within your team, what have you done around that in terms of how do you have you what has worked to successfully engage your teams and kind of, you know, work on that mental well being piece of and maybe have stories to share what didn't work as well. That'd be interesting.

Yeah, yeah. I think again, really important point and get my personal situation, you know this Johnny. I've spent the last three years building a hubbed environment for our recruiting team. So centralizing a lot of our recruiters into specific locations because we wanted them to be co located. And we saw that benefit of, you know, kind of an cohesive office environment and people being able to chat and interact, to work together and get up and go to a meeting room and discuss things. And obviously we've lost all of that in the last few months as everyone else has as well. And so I think what I'm finding the managers in my team are meeting more regularly and more of that not quite stand up meeting, but you get the sense of what I'm talking about just making sure they check in regularly and having, having more scheduled meetings than they maybe would have had in the past to make sure that everyone's okay and everyone's kind of engaged and we've had, you know, again I talked about some of the stuff that I've done with my direct team, but my, my leaders teams are doing things like cooking hour together. So somebody will pick a recipe, send out the ingredients to get. Everybody gets on and they'll cook together and they'll share photos of what the output looks like, some good, some bad. But that's the sort of stuff that I see my team doing and I see other teams around Nielsen doing as well to make sure that they stay engaged. And I think again back to what we saw from GitLab, just that more kind of formalizing the communication I think becomes more important because you can't rely on those casual interactions that we could rely on in an in person setting. So yeah, I think that's the communication and that kind of formalizing the communication has to be key.

It's funny, we in social talent, we announced back in April, late April, that we were going to move to fully virtual. As in sorry, virtual first I should say. And we did a whole bunch of things, changing our office structure so that we used a co working space for those individuals who wanted an office space to give them more flexibility whilst putting virtual first as our policy. Easier to do a smaller company in software, don't get me wrong. And we surveyed our staff only last. Only this week on Monday and overwhelmingly, really, really positive about the changes. Productivity, all that thing. The thing that we failed on, the one thing that really jumped out was that we haven't cracked the inter. The personal bit, the kind of making friends, you know, doing non work stuff, the social part of it, we just haven't cracked that. And I think that's. I think it's one of the hardest things to crack. And it's great to hear your team and others in Nielsen are doing, doing those things. I think a lot of us are looking for that because you can do business really well. I'm convinced of it even more productively over zoom and teams and all these tools. But it is harder to just get on with somebody, get to know somebody, be informal because it takes.

Turning vid work on, I think is a big plus on that. Yeah, just having your video on and doing kind of as a matter of course, I think it helps just to again try and recreate the office environment in a different way. At home, if you can see people, it makes a difference. And again, like I'm. You can see my slanted roofs here I'm up in my attic, my converted attic. If I wasn't doing video calls all day, I think I would find the walls kind of closing in on me a little bit. And I think seeing people and engaging and seeing body language and facial expression helps to build those relationships. There are tons of people that I work with all the time, that I've worked with for years, who I've never met face to face, who I would count as friends. So it's to your point. It's definitely doable. You can build those relationships, but it is different when it's remote and you have to kind of be aware and maybe work a bit harder at it when it's remote and make that effort to brush your hair in the morning so you can turn the video on and things like that.

But I think you're right though, you know, you can have very, very deep relationships with somebody you're seeing on Video every day. I, On Monday night, I had to go into the old office and move some studio equipment with my colleagues and I bumped into another one of our leaders who I forgot I hadn't seen in seven months because in my head I have. I see her every day.

Yeah.

Five days a week on our morning call. And while some other people would talk about, gosh, but it's so different seeing someone in person. I don't know about you, it's not massively different. Like, of course it's a better experience, but it, you know, it would be remiss of me to take away from the virtual experience of this, what we're doing here. You can get a lot out of that, you know, and it is really positive. I've never had so much face time with people as, as, as I have in the last seven months because I spend all day doing this. Now maybe this is, you know, this is, this is my privilege in the job I have. Maybe in the job you have. This is what we tend to do. Maybe if your job is to just get stuff done and it doesn't require as much interaction that maybe that isn't there. Right. So maybe this is selfish of me and maybe you to kind of assume everybody's day is like ours and our diary has the same amount of meetings. I don't know. Right. I know my wife, who's a teacher, was starved for this. Know, she just didn't have the interaction and it killed her. You know, she really, really, really didn't affect her mental health. Well, not being able to go out there and interact and we're all different. Like we're not all wiring necessarily the same. So I think that is, that is something that's interesting by the couple of comments just to throw in. Just Gary said, Gary, Bernie's listening. He said, you know, their clients are adopting the buddy system that you mentioned via employee referrals as well. So that's a thumbs up to that piece of advice as well. Which is, which is great. Great.

Sorry, Barbie, but I was, I was gonna make a comment which I think I've now forgotten because you changed my train of thought. Yeah, I was going to talk about the technology and the evolution of meeting technology. So as long as I've been working from home, there's been some form of online or, or, you know, virtual meeting technology. So it used to be dial into this number. Right. Then it was due over the Internet, but video wasn't great. Now we're at the stage where video is pretty consistently reliable. And so in in the period of time that I've been the, the decade or more that I've been working from home, I've noticed a difference in that technology in terms of how effectively I can work from home. And in the last few years while we've had stable video, that's made a big difference to, to me and as I mentioned, you know, helped me to, to form strong relationships with people who I've never met in person. I think what's happened this year is now forcing, as we've seen with Zoom and with Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts, etc. It's forcing an acceleration in the development of that type of technology. And I was looking at something recently about, I won't mention which one it is, but one of the pieces of video collaboration technology where they're able to take your kind of headshot out and put you in a virtual meeting room and so the attendees don't show up in tiles anymore, they show up in a virtual meeting room that's coming in the next few months. So where will we be two, three years from now with that level of acceleration in that technology? It's going to be a lot better than it is now and it's going to enable what we're trying to do. I think, you know, the outlook and Google should be looking at how we manage calendars. So right now you kind of set your office time. It's 9 to 5 or 8 to 4 or something like that. I think we need to be looking at I work maybe 9 to 12 and then I don't work 12 to 4 and then I work again 4 to 8, something like that. I think we need to be thinking about that because that flexibility in how people work is going to become more and more important, I think. So the technology is going to help us to accelerate in a big way, I think.

I think there was other great lessons about the use of technology that is existing. In that first article we mentioned the Fast company piece on GitLab. Definitely recommend it for anyone listening. We'll post that again for those of you who are on LinkedIn or YouTube to check it out. But they talked about rules guides for people for whom this is new to. For example, if it takes three emails back and forth, you should have an in person call because email no longer suffices, which is really, really important. Don't do that. But then there's some things don't need a 15 minute meeting, so you should use slack. And what struck me was that GitLab had invested so much in building guides for this that they constantly update. And I get that because it's good to have rules. If you like that, say, this is the guide to communication. We've experienced what works, what doesn't work, because the technology is fantastic. But sometimes the problem is that you're using the wrong medium for the, for the, for the kind of the interaction. It's like, this is a slack message. This isn't the meeting. Don't wreck my diary. We've Niall, my colleague, just chiming in there going, I'm definitely part of the less meetings, more having to get things done crowd. You know, maybe now I would like more meetings, but maybe with different people than the meetings he's been forced to have. You know, not everyone's the same. But I do agree with about the diary piece. It's really important and so many times I've talked to some colleagues even about just basic calendar management. There's a great, a great podcast in education I listened to. It was the, it was the A. A16Z podcast, the Andresen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley guys and the VC firm. And they were talking about how in third level education, one of the things that going to university does for somebody is it teaches them schedules and it gets them into the kind of discipline of what work will be. And at the moment, you know, university students don't necessarily have that. And is there any good tech for that? And Mark Andresen answer saying, yes, I discovered a brilliant piece of tech for that a few years ago. It's called Google Calendar. And he's like, you know, you schedule your things to do in your diary, not as a to do list. And you block out time, such as, I'm going for a run, I'm watching tv, I'm having lunch, I'm picking up the kids. And I think in a virtual environment, it's. It's so essential to have that because then your colleagues can be more respectful for your time. Don't leave blanks, because blanks will be taken by everybody else. Right. As, oh, look, Barb is doing nothing between two and four.

Like, sorry, that's not quite true that time.

Yeah. But I think it's part of the documentation culture in this kind of more hybrid world. I think that's the one theme that I've taken out of everything we've looked at on this, on the show in the last 40 minutes, is that you have to move towards more of a culture of documenting things, making them more visible and transparent. That's a big, big lesson, lesson for me, by the way.

Just to pick up on your. I was going to pick up on your student, your comment on students. I think an interesting discussion I've had with some of my colleagues internally recently is like, we're talking about two things, right? We're talking about COVID right now and how we react to Covid, and then we're talking about the long term implications for what that does to how we work. But if we think about what Covid is doing right now, it's meaning that people who are just starting their university journey are, a lot of them are in a virtual environment. So they're not going into lectures, they're doing it online. If that continues over the next, you know, three or four years, while those people are doing their degrees when they graduate, what are they going to expect from the workplace? They might not have the same expectations that you and I had when we graduated, coming into the workplace because now they're very used to this virtual environment. And so I think over the course of the next few years, it'll be really interesting to watch what people are looking for in a work environment. I struggle to imagine that people who've gone through three, four years of university in a virtual environment will then be looking to come in 40 hours a week, five days a week, into an office environment. I think that expectation for a hybrid environment is going to be much stronger even in that generation graduating than we've seen up to now, 100%.

I think there's a big point here is that what I hear from lots of people is if you are doing it online remotely for, you know, four months, three months, whatever, you know, your lockdown period was in your country, when your employer says, okay, return to the office, the employee says why it's worked, you know, and I don't think a lot of employees have. Employers have a good answer to that. And the only, the real answer is because this is what we used to do. And I, I feel insecure and want to have you back. And I manage by observation. I don't manage by outputs because I'm not a great manager and I've never been trained in how to do this. You know, it's a great question, why.

Change in the ways of working, right? The ways of managing performance has to change for a virtual environment. I do think there's a flip side of that as well, though, because there are people who do want to come back into the office and there are employers who were saying, hey, this works, why would we bother? We don't ever need an office again. So we have to get the balance, right. Because, you know, I'm lucky in this environment where I have my own office, I can kind of lock myself away from the rest of the house and do what I need to do. If my home working environment was balancing on the end of my bed with my laptop on a cardboard box, you know, or if I was sharing a house with multiple other people and there was no kind of area where I could work, I would feel very, very differently about it. And so, you know, there are all sorts of situations out there. And that's, I think, why the hybrid model is, is probably where we're going to end up going forward because there is no one single solution that's going to work for everybody.

I've given a lot of thought to this over the last seven months and I think we're going to see a really interesting next decade ahead. But I think when you, when you look at the word hybrid, which we started the show with, I think my opinion is that if you're going to go hybrid, you have to have a, have a preference for one of those. As in, you have to as an organization, say 5050 is just confusing. If you say we're primarily an in person with the option of homeworking or we're primarily online with the option of office working. And you have to try and pick one of those as your prime because things like, amazing if the meeting is, you know, if it's hybrid, well, is the experience being designed for online or is it being designed for the people in person because they're different and you have to arrange it differently. So I think in organizations, all the organizations will have to start thinking about, okay, we're going to, if we're going to go hybrid, which is our primary, you know, and, and then commit to that wholeheartedly. So you're making, you're, you're, you're saying this is our default because the world used to be default in person with some, some allowances for online. And that might be still what organizations want to do. But I think the other alternative is to be primarily online with allowances for people who want to be in an office space and want to go into your co working space or whatever that might be. It's different. I'm going to ask you because I can't believe we're at time. It's that point. We're way past that point in our show. But hopefully for those of you listening, you've really enjoyed the conversation and Barbara's insights. One last insight I'd like you to share with her audience. BARBARA we ask all of our guests from for their insight to add to our shortlist of insights from our great guests. And I absolutely would love to get your insight, Whether it's an insight that you'd like to give to our audience or has been given to you in the past. What would you like to leave us with with today?

BARBARA that's a really tough question. Can I do two? I'll do. I'll answer one of each of those.

You can do three if you really want to.

The insight that was given to me years and years ago that has always stuck with me from a female leader who I respect a lot, was say yes. If there's an opportunity that's coming up, if there's something to get involved in a project to get involved in, just say yes, because you'll learn something from it, you'll gain something from it, and just be that person who's always willing to kind of jump in and get involved and stuff. That's my kind of mantra that I have lived by over the last number of years. What I would say, maybe more with a TA focus, is I always say to my teams, understand and value your own expertise and use it to be a consultant and to consult with the hiring managers and the business leaders who we work with. And what I mean by that is I think sometimes, you know, in a most kind of office environments or corporate environments, work environments, recruiters are working with managers who are more senior than them. And there can be a tendency to say, well, you know, this person knows better. They're more senior than me. They've been working at this company for longer. But I think what we sometimes miss is that the recruiters are the experts in recruitment, and they have far more knowledge and understanding of recruitment than the average hiring manager has or the average business leader has. And so I think it's really important that we understand and value our own expertise. And I think now more than ever, because we're out there in the market talking to candidates, understanding how the dynamics are shifting, because they're shifting enormously at the moment. And I think that insight that we can bring to the conversation with the hiring managers is really, really powerful. And we shouldn't underestimate how powerful that is. And I think that's what helps us to make that shift from order takers that none of us want to be to consultants and partners that I think we all do want to be. That's my piece of advice, either two.

Great pieces of advice we've seen in Social talent since March. The the consumption of our content around being a talent advisor and being more strategic went through the roof is still really high. It's become so popular. I'm so glad it has because it's exactly what you're talking about, that more consultative approach. And I love the just say yes. You know, I feel like we need to outro the show with Snow Patrol is just say yes, we'll be appropriate tonight. So and our audience saying Emma, Emma Craney and others saying great insights, Barbara and I think our audience loving the show and loving your advice and comments. Barbara, thank you so much for joining us. All the way from the other side of Lucan in Dublin here. Bit of an Irish show today, but that's no harm. Thank you so much for joining us. We'd love to have you on again and maybe kind of get an update on where you're going and what else you've seen in the market, what Nielsen are doing post split and what your role is and some of the insights you can provide us. They've been great today and thank you again for your time, Barbara. We'll see you soon.

I'd love to. Thank you.

And for everyone else, we have a fantastic show coming up next week. You can find out more information@socialtalent.com the shortlist but I'm going to be joined next week by the fantastic Christoph Niebel. Christoph is a German man living in Manhattan who has recently joined as president of Pontoon Solutions, one of the biggest RPO and MSP providers in the world. Christoph's insights are very different as he's come from a very different non recruiting background. Christoph is joining Pontoon Solutions from sister company Le Hak Tarasen where he ran their global sales organization and he's come in with just some fresh mind, fresh insights and a great perspective on what he calls talent beyond acquisition. Really looking at the challenges that we're trying to solve in the world of talent. And Christoph's a great guest. He's a super bright guy with tons of ideas. Really looking forward to that chat. That's going to be next week, Wednesday 14th of October, that's 4pm UK Ireland time, which of course is 11am east coast, 8am west coast US or 11pm in Singapore and lots of Asia. So please do join us. That don't forget you can always capture any of these shows on podcast, on Spotify or Apple or other podcast mediums and you can find us on YouTube, on LinkedIn, but you can get all the links to that@socialtalent.com the shortlist. Until then I hope you can take Barbara's advice and just say yes.