Episode 22
#022 - Returning to Work
In 2019, business was moving forward at a rapid pace while we all were collectively working on-site, in the office, five days per week. Just like the decades before.
In 2020, within the span of around 5 days we all were working 100% remote and have mostly been for the past 15 months.
Now, we're talking about figuring out how to collectively come back to work at scale without the global catalyst that enabled the original shift in the first place making it impossible to collectively shift as quickly as before.
How do we lead our organizations through the long-journey towards some sort of hybrid work model that looks differently across every organization? How do we remain flexible without overcommitting and forcing ourselves to backtrack based on current events?
If I want to work from home more than the average of my peer group, will my career slow down?
Listen to find out.
Thanks for joining us today and don't forget to hit the subscribe button and reach out at [email protected].
Transcript
Tiffany Lentz 0:05
Anyway, what are we talking about today?
Robert Greiner 0:07
I'm going to slack you earlier and it just zoned out. You want to ramble for a little bit on ideas around returning to work? Since it's top of mind,
Tiffany Lentz 0:17
sure. No, yeah, no that the topic, I guess, just being completely transparent with you, and whoever's listening, the topic is gets a little tiring. For me, it is a little tiring. We we know so little, if you sit back and armchair and just watch, I was listening to Spotify this week, and I heard an ad from Accenture, where the CEO of Accenture got on and did the little scripted blurb, and was like something like, we're returning to work somewhere between 25 and 75%. And we're committed to this flexibility, blah, blah, blah, blah, we're doing this by August, I was like, you're going to feel dumb, when that has to change by August, because there's so many unknowns. I wonder why this isn't an opportunity for us to double down on teaching people at large, to be a little bit more fluid, and accept some complexity and accept unknown, maybe I'm just totally pie in the sky with that. But I would rather not have commitments made to me that are going to miss all the time, I would rather not have to set expectations that are going to be missed. When there are lots of unknowns, instead of just saying we actually here are the two things we know. And here are the 25 we don't. So we're gonna operate with these just these two right now. That's all not gonna make any promises or any demands or anything. Maybe that maybe my approach doesn't scale. Maybe my approach is cynical. I'm not sure.
Robert Greiner 1:56
Oh, you're on to something. Okay. Let's dig in. Because I think we see this pretty similarly, which is, nobody knows the right answer. And the other component of what you're talking about that there's like a time component there, too, when we all collectively freaked out. This time last year, we all went remote very quickly and abruptly. And everybody did it. It was like this massive. The Titanic defied the laws of physics and turned 180 degrees and didn't miss a beat. So,
Tiffany Lentz 2:29
so you say, some people's Titanic actually crashed in half.
Robert Greiner 2:33
ng back to how things were in:Tiffany Lentz 3:07
Throw them all in a blender, and then just keep pulling us; words out in the restringing.
Robert Greiner 3:11
no better. We're saying like:Tiffany Lentz 5:53
That hypothesis. makes sense to me with a different past narrative of having worked in a lot of different distributed formats before. So that at one point in my life, I was traveling internationally, nine months a year, my entire team was out, it was in a different country than I was different countries than I was. So all of our interactions were on zoom, I spent a lot of time jet setting to different places to try to connect with clients and teams and subsets of the team. So we got very comfortable with that sort of remote feeling. Prior to that, though, the example you're using of if you're just not around, you don't feel as connected. Or if you're not around, you get over it's not passed over for things, it's overlooked. Because you're not there. That was a reality as well, not saying specifically for me, but it was a constant concern and a constant item that was brought up with different people being present in the office or not being present at a client or not. So there's so many elements of truth to what you're saying. And here's just one of the many unknowns if you pull those threads through, that we're both talking about. We also have, we're operating with a generation, a generational workforce that is very comfortable, communicating, making really good friends over Facebook, just remote in every way possible. So they're the technology is better than it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago, a different wave of people in the workforce have different expectations. So we have to incorporate those changes into both good and bad into some of our past experiences as well. That there is if you think of the depth in my opinion, and think about it the definition of complex and complicated. This is not at all complicated. We're about to true, we are already treating it like it is to set too many degrees. Not we like the Royal way this idea of there is a right answer. That's That's it. This is
this is not there is no right answer here. There is no right answer. There are I believe there are sets of principles that need to be identified for each group and subgroup and adhere those adhered to. But from the outset, like that's going to look chaotic, because it's not going to have a rulebook to follow, it's not going to have a standard imprint, that one can just keep creating.
Robert Greiner 8:29
Oh, principles. That's so good. I was trying to think of a word to use for like ideas on how to approach this coming up. Because we're at the beginning, like we're on the beginning uptick, and it's just going to snowball, and snowball, and when everyone's kids are back in school in August, the appetite for wanting people to come in is going to, or the appetite for letting people work remotely i think is going to diminish in a lot of organizations. Okay, you said principles. If you're a leader, if you're running an organization, if you're running a team, I would submit then that your first principle should be maximum flexibility. Everybody's situation is unique. The last year has impacted every human slightly differently. We've all experienced the same macro event that we interpreted and navigated through in isolation differently. There's no two people who are going to come out of this the same. And so if you're leading the smallest of teams, the largest of organizations, maximizing flexibility for accommodating people's reemergence into work, I think is the number one thing and you should err on the side of grace, maybe Is that the right word of flexibility.
Tiffany Lentz 9:42
I
think it's a good word
Robert Greiner 9:43
and
u don't have to solve this in:problem.
Tiffany Lentz 9:52
I think that's right. That's a great one. I agree with you. 100%. I can't hear maximum flexibility Without thinking that somewhere in another list is set, whether it's number two or below in a set of principles, there hat, there would have to be something around maximum personal accountability. Yeah. There you you can't have one without the other. You would have, you'd end up with a skewing of output, lack of clarity on responsibilities, responsiveness
Robert Greiner:or being overlooked. devolved, right. Just on accident overlooked? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Tiffany Lentz:Yeah, I think those two things would have to would have to go together. So it's interesting, because there's a spectrum here, if you're a
Robert Greiner:leader, yeah, number one principle, maximum flexibility. If you are, if you take your individual, the individual out of it. So if you're an individual contributor, if you're a vice president that has 300 people working for them, this doesn't matter, you You are an individual, you report to somebody, when you distill everything down, I think, for what you're saying, Yeah, it's absolutely right. Like you, you have to be more aggressive around communicating what you're doing, and what your responsibilities are. And you have to be proactive around not only what you're going to be doing, because again, if the whole system is flexible, you should be clear about how you're engaging with it, how it's impacting you. And then there are a lot of things you can control that you have an opportunity to influence because no one else knows the right answer. And so I think even if you're the at the highest rungs of leadership, you are still an individual that has to go and exhibit that. That level of personal accountability. Just like when you start college, you have classes, you have four hours apart between two classes, and you think, Oh, I can just go play pool and hang out. And it's no, you have to prep and do homework, and you have to use that time, because otherwise things are going to snowball against you. And so it's the same kind of thing, you're going to have more freedom, you're going to have more autonomy, you have to make good use of that, through personal accountability. So I think those are the two, like one is group if you're a leader on flexibility, the other one is on the individual. I think personal accountability makes perfect sense. And maybe you could just we could sit with those two,
Tiffany Lentz:Man, there's so they're just some other things that immediately come to mind, though, like I love when you move from flexibility is reliant or dependent on personal accountability. Immediately, my brain goes to are the days of monitoring clicks on a keyboard, and people clocking in and clocking out, Are they gone? are we now? Are we making a major shift toward output? toward like, your example of college is a great one. It is it's your responsibility to get your work done. And to get from place to place. No one's micromanaging us? Or are those are? Is the pendulum swinging away from that type of monitoring? Because it still happens? It's still active, there are still companies that actively track clicks on a keyboard to see when people are working and what they're doing? Or are we making a shift for certain kinds of workers and not others? Just throwing that out there?
Robert Greiner:That goes back into sort of the complexity idea of there's no prescriptive? There's no one right answer,
Tiffany Lentz:What would happen if a sub principle here was a flex ultimate, like maximum flexibility, but around the lowest common denominator? So let's, for example, that would be whatever your working group is, or your team, your level cohort and the people that you interact with regularly to get your job done. What if you as a group had the flexibility to determine what your on site and off site work would be? What your work hours would be? How you would alter them for maximum support of the group accountability and throughput?
Robert Greiner:Yeah, in the same way, no two teams velocity points at the end of a sprint are should be compared apples to apples, because they mean different things. They're different teams, the genetic makeup is just different. You're saying along that same stratification? That's where the discussion around flexibility, the working agreement, the negotiation around who is where and when and what the expectations from the different members of the team can be, should be at that. I guess what that would be the atomic team level, the smallest possible team, but it's not a hierarchical team. It's a the team that actually produces what a unit of business value? Yeah.
Tiffany Lentz:Yes, that's a great expression.
Robert Greiner:So
maybe the marketing room and the development group, those two can't be treated as independent silos. It's the web team. And what how they're tied together. Yeah. That makes sense that's going to require collaboration and agreement in the frozen top. As a leader, you have to be very comfortable with different groups within your organization doing different things, which is blasphemous, I think,
Tiffany Lentz:it is a little bit blasphemous. And I kind of love it. When I think about I like things that force the system to break from time to time. But when I think about the concept that many people want, right now, this concept of no me as a human, No, me as an individual understand my needs without compromising maximum personal accountability, because I believe you and I, are, we stand very strong on the same space there. You can't have one without the other, will there be such a demand for an understanding of the individual that this atomic team concept will be mandatory?
Robert Greiner:Yeah, maybe so.
Tiffany Lentz:I strongly suspect that without something this sort of this is like impressionist painting, right? This is, it's like all painting outside the lines, all sorts of crazy things like that, right now, this is there's no more org charts from the 1920s, or whatever. However long ago, we've been looking at the same sorts of visuals, for what organizations should look like this is very different. And I suspect that people, if not treated with a combination of these things, will, they will start voting with their feet.
Robert Greiner:That's the two huge like metrics
that are out in the world right now. Which maybe we have rough numbers on. One is how much did this whole pandemic cost the US economy, the last article I read was $16 trillion. That's got to be made up somehow, or we're gonna have a massive correction or something like something's got to give, maybe a thing we could do, as individuals as organizations to combat that is increased productivity, that could be cool. So there's that debt, we have to pay down that on, it's like a, like a call option, almost that hasn't been called, right, like we're behind on on something that's going to hit us. And then this meantime, to new job number where there have been people that we work with, woke up one day said, I don't like this situation that I just found out about, I'm going to find a new job put in there two weeks notice, three weeks later, like companies are shortening their hiring cycle, removing steps, accelerating steps, offering above market rates to get people in the door, sometimes to replace other people that they've lost. And so it's really easy right now. Especially if you have an in demand skill set to to get a job, the barrier is lower, the friction is lower, the amount of time it takes is lower. So those two things together, I think you're going to you have to do something. And this flexibility and personal accountability ideas, I think are a step in the right direction.
Tiffany Lentz:The only thing I can come up with it is a tiny sliver mirror that we've seen, at least you and I have seen maybe somebody with 20 years more industry has seen different examples. But do you remember the wave of making offices cool? Do you remember that way? Yeah, it was like we're gonna tear down cubicles. We're gonna bring in ping pong tables and all the snacks and now you can wear your flip flops and bring your dog and this whole way. carwash startup vibe that there's there is a there's a if you squint, there's a feeling of that right now of what is offering a new set of perks. And who the heck knows what those perks would be? Is it going to be enough to get people engaged, committed to go back to what they had, what the firm had what any firm had before, for in terms of physical presence and commitment, when we have now seen that that isn't necessary to do one's job.
Robert Greiner:And the data are a little fuzzy on whether that helped before to begin with anyway,
Tiffany Lentz:It did something. It caused a lot of disruption. I think some of it was good. And some of it was bad. And in general, though, lots and lots of disruption, right? Yeah.
Robert Greiner:Yeah.
Tiffany Lentz:But we also saw, just to pull on this metaphor a little bit further, we saw companies invest in that particular like, buy in that sort of me tooing of that approach, and it backfire on them completely. They couldn't hire and or retain. People weren't using the assets available to them all the perks it didn't seem to matter. So it isn't, insert in many spaces. It wasn't.
Robert Greiner:Yeah, I would point to when it's not enough. It's probably because the people who left their manager really sucked, like they weren't that good. And you can give, and we see this play out in life, right? Like you can have 100 really great things going for you and you have one material piece that's wrong. And it doesn't even matter. It's like it overweights everything else I could see paying above market rates, having all the perks all the dry cleaning, your health insurance is paid for you have everything you could ask for from a job. And the person that you report to is terrible. Like it's not worth it. It's not worth it, people give up a lot to go do something that's much more sustainable for them personally. And so you pair that with I think there was a was a Wall Street journal that said 40% of people in a poll said that they want to leave their job this year. Did you see that?
Tiffany Lentz:I did. I did. I
think it was more.
Robert Greiner:That's crazy. That's it's the thing you can control, change your life change. And it's the thing you can control.
Tiffany Lentz:It's also representative of a and this is something we've not really pulled a thread on. It's representative of reprioritization. I think it's I think there's a number of factors. If you tried to combine them all the idea that somebody would leave and change careers or change companies. It's not just about the standards of I don't want to travel as much or money or whatever. So like, I want a different balance. I found a different interest. Since I was trapped at home and had more time. I really enjoy spending time with my family. And we decided to start a side hustle where there's any any number of different reasons, but I think it's going to be a massive industry upheaval.
Robert Greiner:Yeah, definitely.
Tiffany Lentz:Going back to
Robert Greiner:NPR call is calling it the great resignation. One day agol.
Tiffany Lentz:Wow.
Robert Greiner:There's actually NPR just released it looks like there's a four minute listen, the great resignation, as the pandemic receives millions of workers are saying I quit so that I haven't read it. Obviously, I just searched for it. But I think that's the idea. It's your, you've just been exposed to too much differentness to go back to the way things were.
Tiffany Lentz:Yeah. And this goes back to your original your supposition around maximum flexibility. What would it take? This is like micro and macro flexibility, in order to keep one's people their most precious asset from walking out the door. What are you willing to flex on? What are in and the needs are going to be widely varied?
Robert Greiner:Yes. Are you so rigid in your thinking in preferences, that you're willing to let people walk out the door? to, to fight to keep it one way? Yeah.
Tiffany Lentz:Now that takes when we started, you mentioned flexibility just in terms of the grace to get back into an office and a team and figure out what's working. This is a whole other ballgame. It takes it, it takes perks and extrapolates them out benefits, and changes the way we understand them. This is interesting. I think I think most companies are not able going to be able to manage.
Robert Greiner:Yeah, because it's 100 small things, there's no one to three things you can do. That will be industry standard that are proven and work. You can't even pay people more right now. There's you I don't know that there's any one thing you could do. It's 100 things that if we did them and some other company did them, we would have different results. That's you said complex environment before that's a perfect example of these are non deterministic systems. You put the same inputs in you get different outputs out like this, this is going to take persistent exploration flexibility, you're going to try things and if it works, double down on it, if it's not, if it doesn't move on. And that's Meanwhile, up to 40% of the people that work in your organization, or they're already planning on leaving. That's, that's crazy.
Tiffany Lentz:Yeah. I would like to believe that mid size and smaller organizations can get in front of that by being humble enough to engage in in the levels of conversation and the probing, and then the ultimate flexibility that you're talking about. Let's try some things, and then pull back quickly. What I don't know is if larger? Well, I suspect that I know if larger companies will be able will even be willing to do that. Or if it'll be all lip service, if they'll be able to do it. But will they be able to pivot fast enough? Will their shareholders and the stock market let them experiment?
Robert Greiner:Yeah, good questions.
Tiffany Lentz:I like the idea of envisioning an entire just combustion of so many systems and rethinking and rebuilding without the sacred Cows are what we would refer to in our firm as focusing on the unknown unmet in this space, this could be massive for the economy itself and for the way employees relate to their employers. I don't think the US economy is brave enough to take it on.
Robert Greiner:But that's my sense. Maybe it will evolve into one that is because the companies that do it, well, they'll have an outsized advantage and edge.
Tiffany Lentz:Yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see how many companies try to market and brand, the things they're doing as being super flexible, super edgy, only for that to be empty lip service. Same as so many other sorts of branding exercises. Here's a teaser for another discussion. Maybe next time, I can almost count on two hands, the number of articles I've started to see in the last two, three weeks, that invoke the word trust. And they're all coming from very big corporations that are like we're changing our brand, you can trust us. We're changing this. It's the over use the bloat of the word trust doesn't make you trustworthy. Just because you restructured yourself and called one department trust.
Robert Greiner:Yes, sir. Chief trust officer cuz I mean,
Tiffany Lentz:oh, it's coming. It's coming. Do you
Robert Greiner:have some collateral built up here? Yes, we do. I will never know. Oh, my gosh, could you imagine Oh, not either by luck. Good luck to you,
Tiffany Lentz:you know me well enough to know that I'm actually not as cynical as I'm coming across. I'm really I puzzle at these things, and then always look for the silver lining the half full and hopeful solution. It's, and not but and it's interesting timing. It's interesting to see all of this happen now in the shadow of the statistic you just gave us in the shadow of this entire conversation, like, your employees are peacing out? Yep. What are you going to do?
Robert Greiner:Yeah, has the ice as the as the ship already hit the iceberg? And there? Can you do anything about it? I don't know. Is it too late? We'll see. I hope not.
Tiffany Lentz:I hope not too. I think I'm I am very excited to see what our firm will do with a clever working group and the space. So we're privately held, we have the space to be flexible, I'm going to be very optimistic and very excited to see what we do. I think there's, there's one more I've been jotting these principles down, because I think they're great, actually, we could probably flesh them out further, there's one additional that I think will be important. And there is something around creating an experience, whether that be with perks, or what your office space does or is used for or how you how you create the multi purposes or help people feel like individuals, all the different things we've discussed already, there is something to just opening an office and requiring people to come in will not work that will not work, they will become disenfranchised, very quickly. There'll be one of the they'll be part of the 40%. So how does one rethink experience? In the light of all the needs, the flexibility, the accountability, the atomic team, the focus on throughput, focus on connection? How does one think about the necessary experience as an additional principle? Just throwing that out there?
Robert Greiner:Yeah, I just added so our next to trust is underrated and overused. Like something like that. The overuse of the word trust, and then yeah, focusing on experiences, I think that the experience will in the same way that like when you create something, you learn a lot of things. People have said the only way you can actually learn anything is to build something to create something. If you focus on experiences, that's sort of the the way, the mechanism with which you could be, you could give different people different things within the same organization, like we talked about earlier. Almost like a journey map or something. Yeah. Okay. I'm also where people are gonna listen to this and say, attrition and my company's not 40% therefore, I'm doing good. Which is not the right way
Tiffany Lentz:No.
Robert Greiner:I hope you never say yeah, we only lost 15 this month. We only lost 10% this year. That's never good.Good news. There were only 10 murders in your city down from Listen, Okay, thanks. That's, that's not a great way to look at things so
Tiffany Lentz:Funny. I'll have to I'll have to come up with and shoot over a couple of those articles that I've seen from very big firms and an author that I know I used to work with him at my former firm and then we both since left is writing more about trust. This is this is the two buzzwords I've been seeing are anything and everything around. We're now investing in esgs. We are now we are doubling down. We everybody from I don't know, Bane, we are doubling down on ESG strategy. And the second is we are doubling down on trust. But it doesn't make those concepts real doesn't it doesn't change them. Just because you put a new word a new brand around them doesn't change how you spend your money and how you prioritize and how people feel.
Robert Greiner:Yeah, I saw one that was better together, like the sort of propaganda like 100%. we're better together. Okay. Good luck. I hope it works. Like maybe it will. Yeah, maybe well, for you, but yeah, okay.
Tiffany Lentz:This is cool.
Robert Greiner:I think hopefully this you're not you did not seem excited at all about this topic when we started talking. But I think we got this image.
Tiffany Lentz:No, no, it's not that I wasn't excited I want. I like our conversation. I want a different conversation about this. I want to hear a conversation that is raw and authentic, and very transparent or open kimono. If you're comfortable with that expression. I want to hear a conversation that is around the people in the problem and not around protecting the cup protecting shareholder value. I want, I want to hear a conversation that isn't about going backward. That is definitely a conversation that that is not afraid to break things apart in order to go forward and thrive, or experiment and fail and thrive.
Robert Greiner:This is a new business frontier. Yeah.
Tiffany Lentz:That's the conversation I'm interested in. Because I'm also standing here with open hands. Like I've got ideas just like everybody else I've got life experiences like everybody else, but no one has the right answer. It's the conversations that frustrate me are the ones that seem like they're already figured out. Yeah,
Robert Greiner:yeah. Yeah. If you if you think you haven't figured out I just I don't really trust your advice right now. I just like
Tiffany Lentz:moving
right along to somebody else's by Yeah.
Robert Greiner:Yeah, definitely. Okay. Hey, it was good. Good talking to you about this. We have a few threads to pull on the next few episodes. I think we'll do that.
Tiffany Lentz:Nice. Sounds great. Thank you.
Robert Greiner:Good to see you. Have a good weekend.
Tiffany Lentz:Yeah, good to see you too.
