Latest / Humanity Working / Remote and Hybrid Work Benefits with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

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Remote and Hybrid Work Benefits with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky · Humanity Working

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: Leaders really have the status quo bias, but it's coming from a place of fear and anxiety.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_02: They are worried, they're fearful about whether they'll be even functional in this new environment of hybrid work and remote work because they don't know how to lead in this new environment.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: They don't have the skills, they don't have the knowledge.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Hey everyone, welcome to Making Remote Work, where each episode we take a realistic look at remote and hybrid work.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: What works, what doesn't, and what to do about it.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Today on the pod, I'm really excited to share with you an interview I did with Dr.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Gleb Sapersky.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Sapersky is the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, an organization that empowers leaders and organizations to avoid business disasters.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: He's also the author of a really fascinating book, now in its second edition, called Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams, a manual on benchmarking the best practices for a competitive advantage.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, we're going to discuss some of the most interesting findings in the book, including what the data tells us about productivity and employee engagement in remote and hybrid settings, why many leaders have a distorted view of remote work, and how to drive innovation when there is no office space to gather.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: But before we get into all of that, just a couple of quick items of business.
• 1:27
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• 1:33
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• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let's get going on this great interview with Dr.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Gleb Sapreski.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the podcast, Dr.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Gleb.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for inviting me, Paul.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's a pleasure.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: So first off, I have to say that I would uh I would thoroughly recommend uh recommend the book.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: I've got it uh here on my uh here on my Kindle, really enjoyed it.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I'll say that the research you've collected together is is totally in line with what we've seen in our work.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm really relishing the opportunity to uh to talk to you about it in some depth today.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um I particularly love the the detailed research and the way you combine that with practical uh steps that organizations can and and should take in this environment.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um so let's start with one of the main premises of the book that hybrid and remote often does correspond to competitive advantage.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love for you to explain what you found with regards to that.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: What is the evidence that that is actually true?
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: So my context is that I helped by now 22 organizations figure out their long-term hybrid remote work arrangements.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so I combine research, you know, with my PhD, background in behavioral science, behavioral economics, spent 15 years in academia, with consulting and training for organizations.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so looking at what kind of competitive advantage you get from hybrid and remote work, there are several types of competitive advantage, but let's talk about them in turn.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_02: One is retention.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: So retention, retention is age of the great resignation and high quit rates.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: This is a huge benefit for my clients, that they definitely get higher retention than competing firms in the same industry, same size, and so on.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: And to add to that, they have better recruitment.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: Now, a second big competitive advantage is higher employee engagement.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: So we talk about quite quitting.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: And there's pretty clear research that quite quitting is strongly associated with mandating an in-office return.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: And we can talk about that research.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: So quite quitting is definitely decreased by people having more flexibility.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: Next, a related note is productivity.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: Very, very clear research that hybrid and remote work facilitates productivity.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_02: So people are more productive in hybrid and remote work.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_02: And finally, hybrid and remote work is better for cost cutting.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're thinking of reducing your costs in a whole number of domains, hybrid and remote work is a great tool to do so.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's really helpful.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think what's interesting about some of those pieces of evidence that you cited, and we've looked at that uh that evidence too, and some of it's pretty compelling.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of it actually doesn't jive with what people might intrinsically or intuitively think.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: So if you think, for example, about um the uh employee engagement, for example, right?
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: There's a there's a theory that I think a lot of people who, particularly who were brought up in um an environment whereby people were in the office and maybe they had a highly engaged office, and then they they intuitively think about what it's like to sort of, you know, paddle, you know, sort of put a paddle down your hallway in your pajamas and sit in front of your uh and sit in front of your computer.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: They they think, how on earth can somebody be as engaged on a day-to-day basis when they've moved from this vibrant, dynamic office to a uh to an environment where they're just kind of wandering down their hallway.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: So do you like the evidence is there, as you as you mentioned, but do you get resistance when you're uh when you're actually uh making these points to leaders?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: And when you think about it, what I talk about in the book is something called cognitive biases, which are the kind of errors we make because of how our mind is wired.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you think about the kind of errors we make with our intuitions, leaders have been successful for 20, 30, 40 years, they're leaders because of that in the office.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: So they're very comfortable with that style of management, with management by walking around and so on, and touching people on the shoulder, looking over their shoulder, communicating, collaborating with them.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's very comfortable and intuitive.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: So that is something called the status quo bias, where we prefer something that we see as the right status quo, something that we are comfortable with.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: And that is not necessarily the right thing for our business, for our teams.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: Why is that?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: Well, think about the experience of the employee.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: They are, let's say there's a mandate to come to the office, they have to not simply put on their pajamas, they have to put on their uncomfortable clothing, which they had to pay for dry cleaning and so on, and you know, buy new clothing since they were out of the, they weren't going to the office during the pandemic for the you know a couple of years.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then they have to get in their car, they have to drive sometimes for over an hour to their office, they have to find parking, they have to get into the building, they have to pass security, you know, go up the stairs, that all takes additional time, you know, get situated and the transition time takes them time to get situated wherever they are in the office.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: Then the office, they can't do all the tasks that they've been used to doing during the pandemic, taking care of their kids, taking care of their pets, taking care of their grandparents, of their parents or grandparents or whoever, be doing, being able to hang out with their husband or wife during the time that they're working, being able to do some house chores.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: And they have to sit there and do work, which of course is much less engaging to do work without taking breaks.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so they're doing work, then they're coming to the lunchtime, and they have to go out of the office to get an expensive lunch at a local deli that would be like three times as much as what they pay for in their groceries and the kind of lunch they can make, and it's less healthy.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: And they have to keep sitting there, you know, drinking not very good office coffee and whatnot.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: And they have to do everything in reverse and you know, come back to their home.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: Now, if you think about that experience, there's a lot of miserableness in that experience.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and there's a lot of higher payments, things you're paying for that you wouldn't be paying for.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_02: You wouldn't be paying for the gas, you wouldn't be paying for those shoes, you know, cleaning and clothing, dry cleaning, you won't be paying for the sad office lunch and whatnot.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: So, all of those sorts of things cause a great deal of resentment when people go to the office and they do the same thing that they would do at home.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: And this is something that Gallups, I'm not talking about simply myself.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: I definitely find this in internal focus groups and companies when I do focus groups, when I do surveys, but also external surveys like Gallup has found this information that they are fine that if forcing people to come to the office creates disengagements, creates frustration, creates anxiety.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: There was a recent Gallup engagement survey, so for which looked at engagement, came out in late January 2023, which found that the group of people specifically looking at hybrid work, remote work, the most disengaged group of people were people who are remote capable, who can do their work remotely, but who are forced to work in the office, especially full-time.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: So that is the most disengaged group when you're looking at engagement.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, you know, when you're going to the office and you're just sitting on your computer and working on emails, or doing video conference calls, or writing reports, or doing graphic design, or doing programming, or whatever other thing you can be doing at home, that is a very frustrating experience for people.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: So that creates a great deal of disengagement.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not simply the office and how nice it is.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's people feel frustrated, they feel angry, they feel resentful, and they leave those sorts of companies that force them to come in to the office to do the same thing that they would be doing at home.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the crucial thing.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what I tell my clients.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: I don't recommend that they do always fully remote work.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: You know, for most of my clients, we figure out a flexible schedule that's hybrid first for most people who come in maybe an average of one day a week.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_02: But the only reason to come into the office is to do specific things that you can't do at home.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_02: And that averages out for most people to no more than a day a week.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's a good schedule for most people.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so we can talk about that, but that's the crucial thing for leaders to recognize.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: You never want people to come to the office without a purpose that would be different from what they're doing at home because you're putting the high burden on them of commuting and paying for all of these things that they wouldn't be paying for otherwise.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just to kind of back that up, I will say that you know, we've done our own interviews, focus groups on this stuff, and and uh there's one comment that that uh came up in an interview recently that really stuck with me, which was you're talking we were talking about the the pain and the gains associated with the with both scenarios.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, what are the pains and the gains associated with working where you want to work, and versus what are the pains and gains associated with working with where your employer would want you to work?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: And in this scenario, where you want to work is like from your home or from a coffee shop or whatever, and where your employer wants you to work is from the office.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the way in which it was put to put to me in in this particular uh situation was somebody was saying, um, you know what?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: My office has to have an awful lot of gains to put up with all the pain that I've got to go through in order to physically be there.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that is that that's that's a that's a key thing that almost like summarizes everything that you're talking about as you relate the entire journey.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost as though what happens in the office is is, and the way we traditionally thought about it, has been this incredibly isolated thing that is disconnected with the other, you know, 14 to 16 hours a day that we have.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas whether, you know, we'll get on to whether people have the skills to do this really well, but work does happen in the context of the rest of your life.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: And if the idea of like going to work negatively impacts the rest of your life and and physically being elsewhere impacts that less strongly, then of course that's gonna change how people feel about the experience of working, uh, working from home, working from where they want to versus where their employer would prefer them to.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, really, really interesting stuff there.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: I want to And so just to add to that, let me add uh a little point.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: So when employers are thinking about this topic, I think it's really important that what you're pointing out in terms of how employers are thinking, oh, these you know, nine hours that I have the employee here is separate from the rest of their life.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's not.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: Again, they have to get there, they have to have which is really a hassle.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: When you look at the the thing that people hate about coming to the office, 79% hate they say they hate the commute.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: They don't hate their colleagues, you know, they don't hate that interaction, they hate the commute.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so that is the biggest, biggest cause.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there was a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, which credible external group, which found that in order to get someone to come to the office rather than have a remote job, that's a 30-minute commute away.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: So that's over an hour each way, considering the transition time, they would have to be get paid 20% more to make it equivalent to fully remote work.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_02: If it's a hybrid job of halftime in the office, they would have to get paid 10% more.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: So people are voting with their salaries very clearly, and they are willing to take lower-paying remote work positions because of this and going into the retention and recruitment, because of their desire to spend more time working remotely and their frustration that they come to the office to do the same stuff that they would be doing at home.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: So, here, the key thing that employees don't think nearly enough about is employee experience.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you think about user experience, you think about client experience, customer experience, the customer journey, but they're not thinking about the employee experience, the employee journey.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_02: What is the employee's experience throughout the day?
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_02: What are their pain points?
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_02: What are their frictions?
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: If you want to keep your employees, you want to retain them, you're going to decrease their pain points, their frictions, and only cause them pain in the form of commuting when the benefits outweigh it.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: And there are only certain things that really outweigh these benefits in terms of the activities that you can do in the office that you can can't do at home as well.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um so we talked a little bit about um in the lead-in here, we talked a little bit about um the perspective of of the CEOs.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: We've spoken on this part actually quite a bit about Elon Musk and and then also the Apple policy and the these various um attempts to kind of square the circle on this, and then specifically some very high-profile um leaders that are considered to be very smart people um kind of going in a different direction on this.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I know you talk about the the Elon Musk situation in the book a little bit.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: You've already discussed cognitive biases, but I think it might be surprising for people that they would be like, really?
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Do like people that we consider to be like geniuses who run these companies, are they really subject to all of this kind of stuff?
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Why aren't they thinking about it rationally in the way that you're talking about it?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Is it really rational or do they know something that you don't?
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm curious as to um as to what you feel what you feel about that.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um and specifically, do you feel that people that actually have gone through this this lengthy period of time and as you pointed out, like have been successful in a certain way, does that make it inherently more difficult for them to be able to see it, uh, see a different path than the one that makes sense to them?
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's it takes a lot of pain for someone to see reality if they don't want to see it.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_02: So with Elon Musk as a great example.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: So he, in the summer of 2022, he said that remote workers are only pretending to work, and he obliged everyone at his companies from Tesla to SpaceX to come to the office, you know, 40 hours a week plus.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: Then he took over Twitter, and in November he obliged everyone at Twitter to come to the office, whereas the previous policy was fully remote.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: And that resulted in a number of people quitting, just as some people quit from Tesla and SpaceX because he forced them to come to the office.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: Very bad for retention and recruitment.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so what happened later?
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Elon Musk is, as folks know, losing a lot of money at Twitter.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not going to go into all the details and all the reasons, but he's losing a lot of money.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: And what is really interesting about him losing a lot of money is that when you think about the costs that he has, of the first cost, of course, is staff time, and the second cost is office expenses, so rent.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so he cut down a lot on staff time, somewhat more than he wanted because he was forced people to leave.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: Some people left because of the remote work policy, so some people he didn't want to let go.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: And then he still has a lot of costs associated with the office.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so he's under a lot of pain.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: And what he did a couple of weeks ago is he said that, well, you know what?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: We're just going to close our Seattle office and we're going to close our Singapore office, and we're going to tell all other workers in Asia, which is based around Singapore and in the Seattle area, to work full-time remotely.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a fascinating situation where he says that remote workers are only pretending to work, right?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: But now he's telling the Twitter employees to work full-time remotely.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so what you're seeing here is the way that people get over cognitive biases is when they're really faced with the pain of the cognitive bias.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: And when it's really like they're putting their hand in the fire, like, how long are you going to put put you hold your hand in the fire?
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_02: So you can overcome a cognitive bias if you're not aware of it, if you are keeping in the situation that keeps your hand in the fire for a while.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_02: But most people aren't in that situation.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of a one-time decision.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: You know, do I buy a certain stock or not?
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: Do I fire a certain employee?
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: Do I go to work in a certain company?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: Do I impose a full-time, like let's say Bob Iger, coming back to Disney and saying everyone must now go back to the office four days a week?
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm sure he lost pretty lots of talented staff who are don't want to go back to the office four days a week, but he doesn't yet have that frustration, doesn't yet have the pain, but Elon Musk has.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: So what I'm suggesting, and what I think will happen, is if we do end up going into a recession and companies are forced to really think about cost-cutting measures, seriously think about them, then I think we will see more companies doing more remote work and letting go of some of their offices because that just makes dollars and cents.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's really interesting.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and the the aside that I would add to that is that I think for many organizations, when the pandemic hit, then remote was something that they had to do out of necessity.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when we shift into, assuming we do shift into a recession, then sort of the nature and the appeal of remote potentially changes because it then becomes a solution to a problem, which is like, okay, how can we uh how can we effectively as an organization thrive in a uh in a world where we have to cut certain costs?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, one of the ways in which you can do it is obviously have less real estate, or even if you don't have less real estate, you might heat buildings less or whatever it happens to be.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: But there'll be certain things that you can, uh certain line items that you can get rid of that look pretty effective.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, we've started some, we've just seen, I'm sure you have too, we've just seen little um shoots of that.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: I was having a conversation recently with um a senior leader at a company whereby they had basically during the pandemic taken uh taken everybody, they've moved them remote, they actually got they actually got rid of some space, some excess office space in the with the assumption that they'd get a new deal on some new office space um at some sometime in the future when they brought everybody back in.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now the problem was they got the they they adjusted their budget basically based there you know based on what the the new reality for them was with no i.e.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: not having any office space.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: And now they have now they are gonna buy some new office space or rent some new office space, they have to justify that additional expense.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty difficult if you start from the perspective of not having office space to go and get it to justify that expense, and they're finding that difficult.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a it's it's really interesting.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: It kind of relates um to um a comment that we had um or a previous guest we had, Phil Living, on a podcast.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: And he said to me something I thought that was really interesting, which was he said, a lot of this depends upon where you start.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: And do you start from the perspective of I want to create the best remote work organization that I can?
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: Or do you start from the perspective of I want to get back to the good old days?
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: You touch on this in the book, which I think is really interesting as you sort of like refer to this as back to the, you know, back to the past.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm curious what you've seen in terms of how organizations regard it.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, whether they they're thinking about it in terms of, you know, how do I make myself the best organization that I that I can be, and what role does remote and hybrid play versus How do I bring everybody back in?
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I definitely see CEOs like Bob Iger having the attitude of how do we get back to the good old days when everything was nice and fine and I know how to manage in that environment?
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: So I think the key here is how managers, how leaders feel.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: And we need to empathize with them.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: So leaders really have the status quo bias, but it's coming from a place of fear and anxiety.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: They are worried, they're fearful about whether they'll be even functional in this new environment of hybrid work and remote work because they don't know how to lead in this new environment.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: They don't have the skills, they don't have the knowledge.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_02: They know how to be good managers in an office-centric environment.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: They know how to be good leaders, they know how to get people to collaborate, to innovate.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: So no wonder.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, it's natural for them to try to get everyone back to the office to create a situation that's comfortable for them.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_02: You know, when you talk about companies doing making rational decisions, that's of course not true.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: Let's BS.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: Companies overwhelmingly make decisions, leaders make decisions that are emotional, intuitive, their gut reactions.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: That's what they go with.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: They go with their gut, they go with what they feel.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's only after they experience pain, like Elon Musk experienced pain, that they have to face reality.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: Or when an activist shareholder, another form of pain is when an activist shareholder takes a large position in the company and demands various forms of cuts.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: Or so, or when the CFO says, you know, like a like you had with your client who had trouble with the budget.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: So you have to, they have to really face discomfort before they overcome these negative intuitions and say, okay, what's actually best for my bottom line?
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_02: Because when they actually look at what's best for their bottom line, what I teach my clients, what I show my clients is that, hey, let's start with customer centricity.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: What's best for your customers?
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: So let's think about the customers, what kind of needs do they have, and let's work back from those needs the problems that you're solving for the customers, the job that you're doing for them, and figure out what kind of work arrangements are going to be best for that situation rather than starting with the what worked in January 2020.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: So let's figure out what will work based on what your customers need.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_02: And having that conversation overwhelmingly results in a very flexible arrangement because you can maximize the productivity of your workforce, their engagement, their attention, their recruitment, cut costs so you can really focus on the needs of your customers in the most cost-effective way.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: So that's actually a great segue into the second part of this discussion.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I really want to get into the specifics of what some of those things often are.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with something really simple, which is like the the number of days that that um organizations need to have people spend in the office.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: So you've referred to this as being, you know, in many cases it's a you know, anything more than one day in the office um needs to be justified.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about that in a little bit more, uh, a little bit more detail.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um so obviously a caveat here, we should state that that there are some organizations for whom at least part of the organization functionally has to be in a specific space.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: So if you've got like a manual if you're doing manufacturing, for example, or if you're a traditional bookseller and you're gonna sell books, right?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and uh and people are gonna come into your store or your restaurant, you need service, right?
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: So we obvio we obviously understand that.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um and for the folks that have um that are new to the pod, they'll um we actually uh discussed that in a previous uh previous episode as we're looking at the different models that require people to PM versus the optional.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: But all of that said, right, for the for the people for whom it is an option, right?
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: And for the uh for the situations where um there is no requirement for people in the office, you say that as I say that um organizations need to think about whether they need people in the office more than one day a week.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: So go into what your findings have shown you with regard to that and why that is in a bit more detail, please.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: Sure, happy to.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: And again, this is both with clients and externally.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, there was a Harvard Business School study which found that one day a week creates the best engagement.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: So when you're looking at worker engagement, that creates the best engagement.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: And that's compared to more than one day a week or less than one day a week.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: So the people who are most engaged.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: So can there's external research backing this up?
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_02: But it's also what I see from my own client service.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: And by the way, I have clients like let's say Applied Materials, which is a Fortune 200 high-tech manufacturing company.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: So I know very well the kind of and they allowed me to talk about their work and so I can name them.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so they I know very well what it's like to figure out hybrid work for a large manufacturing company of over 30,000 employees.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so what you really want to be thinking about, I use the one day a week because people often talk about one, two, three days a week.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_02: But what I really talk to my clients about and focus on is task-based activities in the office.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: So, what is the office good for?
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_02: The office is not good for doing emails, it's not good for doing virtual meetings, it's not good for doing head-down works like report writing or designing.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's good for certain things.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's good for more intense forms of collaboration, it's good for team socializing, building culture, it's good for mentoring, certain forms of mentoring that are harder to do virtually.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's good for performance evaluation conversations.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: So when you think about those sorts of activities, those are the activities, some forms of more in-depth training, intense training.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_02: Those forms of activities usually make up less than 10% of a typical employee's time.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so, what you want to do is think about okay, how do we minimize the amount of time that people spend in traffic?
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: They spend doing the thing that they hate most.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, let's the way to do it best is to figure out no more than one day a week when those activities take place in the office.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: And that doesn't mean everyone has to come in on the same day.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: A good way that my clients found to maximize an office space is to have different people come in on different days.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_02: Well, of course, the team as a whole needs to come in on the same day.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: So you can collaborate with your team members.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: But different teams from different departments, you know, accounting, there's no reason for accounting to be coming on the same days as software programmers and marketers, for example.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_02: So you can have that way to maximize your office space.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: Now, the key thing is to figure out what activities are really needed to do in the office and arranging them for people so that they are not, don't need to go in on different days of the week to do, you know, meeting with a manager one day for half an hour, meeting with your colleagues and another, your teammates another day for you know for an hour or something like that, and meeting with your mentor for another third day for another hour or half hour.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: That is not a good idea.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_02: You can very much figure out in companies, there are a number of systems to figure out how to squish that all into one day a week.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: And that one day a week provides a really good pace for people.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_02: So people seem to be happy enough with that one day a week when they're coming to the office for justifiable activities.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I can see where that would not be as engaging, not as fun, if it's like socializing, going out with your colleagues, doing various activities, various forms of collaboration, talking to your manager in a more nuanced conversation.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: So those, that's why I strongly recommend for my clients to have no more than one day a week in the office.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's really helpful.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what's intriguing about it is that it does almost like flip the script on it.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's not um, it's not basically saying, okay, our default is in office and maybe we'll let people work from home on Fridays.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: What it is instead is is like starting from the perspective of what is that work that does happen well in an office environment, and then making the assumption, which is an accurate assumption backed up by research, that um that for the rest of the work that you're doing, you're probably going to be as effective or more effective outside of that environment.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um obviously this translates to uh to a change in how the physical space is used.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: You touched on a little bit of that.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but maybe go into that in a little bit more more detail.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: What is it what what should a what should an office of the future look like when, on average, you got about 20% of your workforce um in it at any one time?
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so you're definitely going to cut down on your office space quite a lot.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're going to have 20% of your workforce there on average, you're probably going to let go of 50% or more of your office space.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_02: You're still going to need some meeting rooms for collaborations, for training and so on.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_02: But the vast majority of the work that your workers are going to be doing is not going to be individual head-down work.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_02: So there's no reason to have individual private cubicles.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: There's no reason to have individual private offices except for some closed-door conversations.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_02: You can keep it for leaders who need those conversations and so on.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_02: The rest of the people, they can there's hotdesking available for the small, very small amount of time that they will spend actually working in the office.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: Now, there is going to be something like I see it different companies, anywhere from 5 to 10 to 15% of the people who prefer to work in the office because they have a very poor home office, or because they have a mindset if they're if they're if they're baby boomers or something like that.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: For some of them, it's hard to separate the home and the office, and they really want to prefer to go to the office.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: And some of some people just have a very poor home office.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_02: You'll have the youngest and the oldest wanting to come to the office to work full-time in the office just because that's their mentality, or poor office space.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_02: And for them, you can retain individual desks.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: But for the rest, hot desking is great because they don't really need an individual desk.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_02: And what you need to do with the rest of the space, so you need to kind of flip the switch.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_02: Most of the space in the offices is dedicated to private work right now.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_02: Something like 70-80% need to flip that and have most of the space dedicated to collaborative work.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_02: Because overwhelmingly, the kind of things that people will be doing in the office, as you know, as I described earlier, is collaboration conversations.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: Those are the things that people will be doing in the office.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: In order to do that well, you need to have good equipment and good space, of course, for people to collaborate.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_02: So meeting rooms, lounges of various sorts, social spaces, and you need to have very good AV equipped there because one of the big pain points for hybrid workers, of course, hybrid meetings.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: We can get into that.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_02: So having good AV is very important.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_02: So those are the kinds of things that you're new, you'll need to change around in your office.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think you touch on something super interesting there as well, which is this idea that some of the people who go into the office are going into the office to either because they're used to it, historically, they're used to it for a particular generation, or in some cases because there's it's really difficult for them to work optimally out of their uh out of their home environment.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so the one piece of context I'd like to add with that is obviously there are multiple ways of solving that problem as well.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so for many organizations, actually, um, once they've made the leap to kind of like support hot desk scenarios, they start to think about well, where does that hot desk need to be?
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have to be at the office that I've paid for, it could be at a shared uh at a shared workspace, for example.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: And particularly for people who are in larger cities, um, this happened um uh when I was at Microsoft, for example, they started granting a Wii Work membership for uh for the New York-based employees because they knew that the New York commute was just horrendous.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: And if people uh and also that many New York apartments were super small, so it wasn't necessarily suited to work from home in that environment.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: But maybe you were a 10 minutes commute away from a Wii work where versus an hour and a half commute away from the from the office.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is once you start down this path, you can start to get very much more creative in terms of how you solve what is a very simple problem, ultimately, which is how do you give people the best environment to allow them to do their best work?
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer to that question can be much more flexible than uh than just simply, well, we create a great office and we get everybody to come into it.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um let's uh we we talked about the physical piece.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: I want to transition now to to a um an area I think of strong shared interest.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: So as you know, Abillian Minds is all about giving remote workers and hybrid teams um the skills they need to be awesome while working from anywhere.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: So um you talk about skills in your book.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: So um I wonder if you could outline just some of the skills that you see that um that people need to hone in order to be able to work in this new environment.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: Think about it from the perspective of the employee, but then also from the manager as well.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, one of the key skills, of course, differentiating remote work and hybrid work, one of the key skills that hybrid workers specifically need to develop is learning what tasks are best done at home and what tasks are best done in the office.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_02: And then given that if if their management adopts an effective hybrid policy, which is where people only come to the office to do the things that are best done in the office, then they need to know how to prepare effectively for coming to the office, because the office time is going to be much more precious.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_02: So with my clients, it's something that people have feel surprised by when they start this down this journey, because the intuition is that, well, if I worked all that time in the office, if let's say they're coming from a position of working full-time remotely, transitioning to about one day in the office.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: Their intuition for how to work in the office is off because they are used to the idea that, well, you know, if I'm not so prepared for that meeting, it's not a big deal.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: I'll run into a colleague later and she'll explain it to me, and maybe I'll talk to my boss and whatnot.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: But you really are not going to have that opportunity nearly as much.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: So you really need to be much more prepared for the kind of activities you do in the office and much more focused on doing those work.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: So that's an important element, learning what to do best and figuring out how to prepare well for the office.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_02: Now, the next point is effective virtual collaboration.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: And there are a number of techniques to do so, but you really want to be thinking about how do you communicate effectively virtually with your colleagues and how do you collaborate with them.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_02: And something super basic is I mean, if you're not using collaboration software like Microsoft Teams or Trello or Sana Slack, I mean, that's time to do it to use that.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_02: Though it's much, much more convenient for people who are, especially for people who are working in a hybrid and remote modality, to use those software.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_02: Then, you know, once that's taken care of, you really want to be thinking about how do you communicate effectively with others.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_02: I've seen a lot of organizations, when I come into organization, some people are going to be using email, some people are using Slack, some people are using text, some people are using voicemails.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_02: You really can't, should not be using all of those different things.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: You need to figure out what's going to be the tool, what are the tools that you're using and have a culture, norms around using each tool.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_02: Now, if you're an individual employee, it's going to be harder for you to develop that culture.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_02: But you can see what others are using and try to target your communication to what those other people prefer.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_02: Ideally, from a manager perspective, you would work within your team and ideally on the whole larger company level, and I work on the company level usually, is to develop an understanding around what tools to use for what purpose.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_02: For example, you can use email for more complex longer messages, you can use Slack messages for quick, shorter messages.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_02: Email, you can have an expectation that email will be answered within 24 hours.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's not urgent.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_02: Slack messages, you can have an expectation that they'll be answered during the same workday, or something that I often do is set up a common time for people to work for 11 a.m.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_02: to 3 p.m.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_02: is something that that's a popular common time.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_02: And then during that time, you respond to a Slack message or Microsoft Teams message within half an hour, something like that.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: So having those expectations and having people know what's things like where the files are and how to how they're organized.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_02: So those are all things that you really need to effectively learn how to collaborate together in that hybrid and remote setting.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_02: So those, and there are some techniques for team.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not going to go into, we can talk about team collaboration and team innovation.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_02: Those are really important techniques, and we can talk about them.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_02: But for individual employees, these are the things I talk about.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, for communication, you also want to learn how to communicate effectively when you're doing video conferencing and when you're, especially when you're coming into a room into a hybrid meeting.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a bunch of skills that are associated with effective video conference communication.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_02: And that has to do with something as simple as looking at the camera instead of looking at the screen, if you are trying to make a point.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_02: It means knowing when to keep your video on and when you can turn it off.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_02: So for example, keeping your video on creates what's known as zoom fatigue when people are drained, especially the case for people who are more introverted.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: So people having challenges, people who are experiencing anxiety.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_02: Women and junior staff tend to experience more zoom fatigue because they feel more judged and more on.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: So often clients tell me that they would like everyone to keep their videos on.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I tell them that if you do so, then people are really going to be trained and they're going to be less effective in their work.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_02: So instead, the best practice is to have people be trained on when they should keep their videos on, and then keep about all of these ideas, and then have them know that they should keep their videos on when they're talking or when they're about to talk, because other people want to see their cues, visual cues, and within some more intense meetings.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_02: So the manager at the beginning of the meeting or the meeting lead should flag that, hey, this is a meeting where it's just more intense.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_02: You know, this is not something that should happen regularly, but this is a more intense strategy meeting, collaboration meeting.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_02: We should really keep our videos on for this one.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_02: So because the point is for people to read your visual cues.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_02: So what you're trying to communicate.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, you also want to learn how to use chat and emojis like hand gestures and so on very effectively in terms of when you're communicating by video conference and to also create norms around how, so that's by video conference, also create norms and rules of etiquette around how you interact with people who are in the room when you're coming in as a virtual participant in a hybrid meeting, and when you're an in-person participant in a hybrid meeting, how do you in turn interact with virtual participants?
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a whole range of skill sets, and we're not talking about team-level skills and techniques that people really have to learn if they want to master effective hybrid work and remote work.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_02: And especially for remote work, people who do choose to work full-time remotely, one of the things I teach in that context is to be a self-advocate for their career, because there's a thing called proximity bias, where people who are working remotely, especially, tend to get overlooked and left behind, unless they become advocates for themselves and really try to promote their own career within their organization.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_02: And you can learn how to do that, especially if you have the support of your manager, but you need to learn those skills, how to become a self-advocate in a remote context so that you are minimally impacted by the proximity bias and that you can actually have a good career within that organization or other organizations that you join.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: Excellent.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, completely agree with all of that.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: There was one thing you mentioned there, though, just to finish us off here, um, that I would that I'd love to dive into a little bit more detail.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: You talk yeah, you just touched on um on innovation.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is one of the areas where um these cognitive biases that we've been discussing really, really kick in.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it's centered around that, that the idea of being innovative in a world where we're not physically in the same room.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: Many leaders have a very specific picture as to what it takes to be uh to be innovative.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it's typically centered around get a bunch of people in a room, throw a bunch of ideas on a board, um, and and then just communicate in in some cases ad hoc, in some cases a guided way, in order to in order to be able to get to a solution.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then of course that's also related to other uh conversations that people have about serendipity, right?
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: Where is the serendipitous connection between person A and person B in a hallway?
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen organizations like Apple and Pixar and so on that have even like built their uh built their companies around spaces that allow these serendipitous connections to happen.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: So if that's gone and you're not just a company that is just executing against a business model that has existed for a hundred years, there's very few of those left now, right?
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you actually and and part of your survival requires consistent.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Continuous reinventing and um and some continuous innovation, I should say.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: How do you can you do that?
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_02: Let's start with traditional brainstorming, and we can go on to spontaneous hallway conversations later.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_02: So the first thing is traditional brainstorming.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_02: Now, traditional brainstorming has a lot of strengths where you get people in a room and you have them talking about an idea, you get social facilitation, which means you have ideas because you have ideas that are motivated by the energy of people being in the room.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_02: So you're excited, you're sharing these ideas, it's fun.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_02: You have another benefit that I'm talking all about the research on this topic.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_02: Another benefit is called synergy.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_02: Not in a corporate speak synergy.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_02: When scholars talk about synergy here, they mean specifically that when someone has an idea that inspires you to have an idea that you wouldn't have had without their idea.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_02: So those are definitely big benefits.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_02: But there are also a lot of problems.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: And this these problems with traditional brainstorming were already visible in the 80s and 90s.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_02: And these problems are called evaluation apprehension.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: So that's where you have an idea, but it seems a little bit off the wall, or maybe you're it's implicitly criticizes another team member's domain, and you don't want to share it.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's especially a problem for people who tend to be pessimistic, so seeing lots of negativity, and for junior status team members who are newer on the team, which is particularly unfortunate because junior people who are there recently tend to be the most innovative because they have the freshest perspective.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_02: Another problem is called production blocking.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_02: That's where you have an idea, but people are talking about another idea, and you're reluctant to interrupt, and then the conversation goes away in a different direction, and you forget your idea.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_02: And that's especially a problem for people who are introverted, and again for junior status team members.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_02: So already in the early 1990s, there was a technique developed to address these problems called asynchronous brainstorming.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I adapted this technique to specifically hybrid work, remote work, to function in remote environments.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_02: So it's called virtually synchronous brainstorming.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_02: And you can, whoever is listening to us, can check out my Harvard Business Review article on this topic.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_02: So what that involves is having people virtually, asynchronously, not at the same time, in different spaces, have ideas and put them into something like a Google form or Microsoft form or mural if you want to have a visual form of putting it into something.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_02: So put those ideas, and you can do it if it's a small project, you can do it over 10 minutes, you can do it over an hour, you can do it over a day, you can do it over two weeks if it's more major.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_02: So there's plenty of time for you to do it if it's a more important, significant activity.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_02: And you put that into a Google Form or something like that.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_02: And as folks may know, Google Form is completely anonymous.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so what I do, there are two forms of doing it.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_02: What I usually do is I let people put their names in and their ideas, and then I strip away the names before giving the ideas to everyone else.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_02: So that way there's still ability to identify and reward people who come up with the idea, but then nobody else knows where the idea came from.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_02: So that provides anonymity, and that's very, very effective for evaluation apprehension.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_02: So again, junior status team members and people who are pessimistic.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_02: Also, because you're doing it independently, separate from other people, there's no production blocking, which is great for people who are introverted and junior status team members.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_02: So you do that.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_02: You now have a list of it.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_02: So let's say a six people team does that.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I did that at uh Applied Materials.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_02: I did that with something like 400 global leaders at the strategy kickoff meeting for the CEO strategy kickoff meeting.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_02: So that's 400 leaders and it's 30,000 people company.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_02: So each of the leaders, as you can imagine, has like about 100 people under her or him.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_02: So they're kind of not the lower level management, they're middle management and above.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_02: So pretty senior level leaders.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so they all created ideas, generated ideas in this format virtual synchronous brainstorming during the session.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_02: So you can have hundreds of people doing this.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_02: But usually you'd have a six to eight people team.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so let's say you have per person, you have 10 ideas.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so you have 60 ideas now, and you take a spreadsheet.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_02: The second step is you get a spreadsheet from the Microsoft form or Google form, you combine all the ideas, so 60 ideas, filter out the duplicates, let's say you have 50 ideas left, and then you give it to everyone, a separate spreadsheet.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_02: Then they all anonymously again rate each idea on a scale of one to five, a number of criteria, like how innovative and how practical and how exciting it is, or whatever other criteria you want.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_02: And then they can also comment on each idea.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_02: So now, after this, you have a bunch of ideas, and each one is rated 0 to 15 by six people.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_02: So you have up to 90 points for each idea, 50 ideas with anywhere from zero to 90 points each, as well as additional comments.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_02: And it's very clear which ideas are now floating to the top.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_02: You can say any idea that's 75 or above is going to be something we consider.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_02: And then you have a synchronous, um, finally a meeting that's synchronous.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_02: For teams that are hybrid, I recommend doing this part in person, because again, that's more of an intense conversation.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_02: For fully remote teams or distributed teams, I mean, applied materials, because it's a global company, they find this technique to be especially helpful for their distributed teams.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_02: So some people in Singapore, some people in Texas, some people in Santa Monica, so Santa Clara.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so you what whatever you want to do, you have that meeting, and then you decide on the ideas that you want to implement from these ideas that are clearly floated to the top.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_02: You can also use the comments that are on them to improve the idea, so talk about it, working on the idea.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_02: And this is super helpful.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_02: You also have all the rest of the ideas to put into an idea bank because some ideas might not be practical right now, they might be very exciting, they might be very innovative, but they're not very practical.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_02: But maybe they'll be practical in six months or in 12 months, who knows, with the situation, the economic situation improves, for example, or market changes.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a very, very helpful technique.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_02: And research clearly shows that as a result of this technique, you get more ideas in total and more novel ideas as rated by external evaluators, third-party external evaluators, compared to traditional brainstorming.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_02: Very effective technique.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_00: Great for hybrid teams, great for remote teams.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_00: That was super, super helpful.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we will leave it there.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I want to recommend uh the book again.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: We will also uh put a link to that HBR uh article that you uh that you mentioned there as well.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_00: We'll put those in the show notes.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: But once again, the book is um Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams, a manual on benchmarking to best practices for competitive advantage.
• 51:02
  unknown: Dr.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_00: Glad, thank you so much for your time today.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: I know that our uh listeners will really appreciate it.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for inviting me, Paul.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a pleasure.
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