WLP298: Towards Equality in Your Hybrid Team
Having different clusters of people distributed against locations increases the chances of them not being treated equally. In this episode, Laurel Farrer talks through the mindset and strategies that can help us level the playing field for our employees, regardless of where they are based.
We welcome Laurel Farrer to the podcast, to talk about how to lay down the foundations to provide an equitable experience for our employees, in a hybrid setup. The conversation was inspired by Laurel’s article 10 Habits to Ensure Equality in Your Hybrid Team.
But before we get into the content of the article, we hear from Laurel about her aspirations for the adoption of remote work. In her LinkedIn profile, she says that she “leverages the power of workplace flexibility to impact business operations and socioeconomics.” She named her company “Distribute Consultancy” - they’re not just talking about working with people who are physically distributed, but they also champion the opportunity to distribute wealth and opportunity. Enabling remote work is about changing the way we work, and changing the world at an economic level.
Laurel reminds us that the kind of work that happened during the pandemic, was not “remote work”, it was a contingency plan. This has led to controversy about whether this has helped or hindered socioeconomics.
How does “hybrid” fit into this? Laurel’s research shows that the number of workforce requests from those who want to work remotely and want workplace flexibility has not increased since before the pandemic. What has changed is their negotiation power, having shown that it’s possible to work productively even when you’re away from the office.
This can lead employers to feel pressured into offering flexible working, and offering this from a point of fear, they will be resentful. Whereas if they truly understand the benefits, like more efficient outputs, it can be a great option for everyone.
10.53 MINS
Let’s get to Laurel’s article now and discuss the habits she mentions, under different themes.
Mindset
Management resistance is the first barrier to success in adopting remote work. There is a danger of people being seen as more committed just because they choose to work from the office and this can lead to proximity bias, where those closer to you are perceived as more valuable.
In order to be successful as a hybrid team, we need to operate as a remote team. We need to stop talking about “location”, it shouldn’t be a factor in how your work is recognised. The more we can employ the principles of “virtual first”, the more successful we’ll be. The office can be seen as a tool, somewhere else where we can get the work done.
It’s not always the remote workers who feel left out. Laurel quotes Lara Owen, talking about the “coffee vs pants debate”, where each type of workforce thinks the other side is better off.
One of the conversations that is currently missing is why people need to come into the office and when, even if they’re being given a choice of when to do so. Team members start to make decisions on where to work from, depending on personal life factors (e.g. having to pick up a child at a certain time), rather than thinking about what tasks and conversations are best had where. These conversations create a new type of value for the office, and the different environments.
20.55 MINS
Blending workspaces: designing consistenT workplaces
We’ve been working in offices for a very long while and so there are aspects of the workplace we take for granted, like health and safety regulations which also make us more productive.
If we shift from the carefully curated environment of the office to our home, (or a noisy coffee shop) we run the risk of being less productive. So as we are talking about having a choice of workspaces, organisations need to make sure that people working away from the office can still be safe, connected and access the resources they need to do their work.
At the same time, office spaces need to be comfortable for people too, which is tricky as different people are comfortable in different environments. (e.g. Pilar is always cold in offices with aircon!) Some people might prefer to work from home, even if they miss the social connection, because they’re more comfortable than in the office, so what changes can we make in the office so that it becomes a place where people want to work from? This is also a conversation worth having with employees.
27.32 MINS
Collaboration practices
In an office, one of the greatest channels of communication is implicit communication and observation. We can make small changes, so that remote workers don’t feel left out of the hybrid experience. Having more explicit announcements and communicating in public channels rather than direct messages (e.g. in Slack) and paying attention to how we’re using the technology, rather than what technology we’re using.
We need to be more deliberate about how we communicate, and pull back on its spontaneous nature, so it’s difficult, and it’s easy to resist it. However, what feels natural after many years of working in the same way, was at some point also intentional. In a way, we are creating our new “organic” way of working. We can still be emotional in our interactions, and facilitate empathetic leadership, but it requires intention.
We are innovating in the ways we communicate and collaborate. And just because we used to do things in one way (e.g. monitor presence rather than output) doesn’t mean that they were the right ways of doing them. Something for change advocates to hang onto.
36.08 MINS
Inclusivity
We are different in many ways, more than we’ve been used to thinking about. How we like to communicate, what tech we prefer, where we like to work from. Maybe before they weren’t relevant, or that visible… eg many people are now asking themselves how to engage introverts in online meetings, whereas they’d never considered how this was being addressed in the in-person version…
How can you design your rituals, communication practices etc to be as inclusive as possible? Global and standardised tools, including asynchronous communication, etc. We can let go of some of the systems and ways of working that might have held certain people back.
Diversity needs to be turned into inclusion, by making sure different types of people are being recognised. When we talk about flexibility rather than “remote” or “hybrid” we can also look at the flexibility possible in jobs where location-independence is not an option. Schedule flexibility, access to the same digital tools and documentation as remote workers, etc are being explored by manufacturing companies worried about creating a gap between the different types of employees. Then we start to look at true equality.
To wrap up, Laurel shares her thoughts and experiences on how remote work is being adopted by large organisations. Her company Distribute helps organisations explore high levels of flexibility, through helping to evaluate their tools, write handbooks and policies, create training programmes etc. Key to making the change scalable is how success is measured. By being clear in our success metrics, we can evaluate whether hybrid work works.
You can find out more about Laurel through her website https://www.distributeconsulting.com/ or connect with her on LinkedIn.
She also appears on episode 212 on Remote Work and Social Change, episode 189 where she talks about information isolation, and the series on Connection and Disconnection on Remote Teams.
Looking for the transcript? You can find it further down…
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Transcript for WLP298: Towards Equality in Your Hybrid Team
Pilar Orti 0:00
Hello, and welcome to the 21st Century Work Life Podcast, where we talk about leading remote teams, online collaboration and working in distributed organisations. This podcast is brought to you by Virtual not Distant, where we help managers and teams transition to an office optional approach. Find out everything we do over at Virtual not Distant dot com. And check out our show notes and pictures of our lovely guests on the podcast page. It's great to have you here, listeners, let's get on with the show. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the 21st Century Work Life Podcast, where we talk about leading remote teams, online collaboration, and working in distributed organisations. And today, we are talking hybrid. And I'm sure my guest will have lots to say about this as well, but for us at Virtual not Distant we continue to see hybrid as a subset of remote work. And when I say we, I mean others are Virtual not Distant, but also other people in the remote advocacy space. And yeah, and so what better person to expand on this theme than Laurel Farrer. Hello, Laurel.
Laurel Farrer 1:24
Hello Pilar. It's so nice to be here again. I always love our chats.
Pilar Orti 1:29
So for those of you who don't know her, Laurel is the CEO and founder of Distribute Consulting. And she's also a regular Forbes contributor, and in fact, much of today's episode, well, Laurel, you've made my life so much easier by having an article that we could hook the conversation around because it is a big thing. Laurel is also an international remote work expert. And if you can explain this LinkedIn tag, which I really like, you say that, you leverage the power of workplace flexibility to impact business operations and socio economics. Laurel, please explain.
Laurel Farrer 2:07
Yes, well, this is where the name Distribute came from, when I was starting my business. Yes, we are distributing people, right. We're known as distributed teams, because we're not centralised. But I also love the play on words that we're also distributing opportunities, opportunities to people that wouldn't normally have access to sustainable employment or have access to growth opportunities within their organisation, or the opportunity to stay employed as if they needed to move away from a certain area. So this is one of the most passionate reasons that I love remote work is because, this is so much more than just a convenience for people to be able to live a more flexible lifestyle. Remote work at its core is about changing the way we work, and in so doing, also changing the world on an economic level. It's very, very exciting.
Pilar Orti 3:10
And that's why it was time to have you back. So listeners, Laurel was part of Episode 212, remote work for social change. And she also contributed quite a lot to the loneliness and connection and disconnection series. And also, we've also got, you're talking about information isolation. So do you think Laurel before we go into the meat of the episode… Well, I feel like the agenda of using remote work for socio economic change to distribute opportunity, I love that, do you think that's been lost during the pandemic? And do you think we can recuperate it?
Laurel Farrer 3:46
That's a very good question. Because as you know, and I know, but a lot of other people don't, what was happening during the pandemic was not remote work at all. This was an international contingency plan to maintain business continuity during a global crisis. So it was not workplace flexibility in its optimal form. And so because of that, we're starting to see a lot of controversy about did this help? Or did this hinder socio economics? I think restaurants are a very great example of this, that they're like, restaurants died because of remote work. And we're like, no, no, restaurants died because of the pandemic, because of social distancing, because of health precautions, and nothing to do with remote work. In an optimal state remote work and workplace flexibility can actually stimulate local restaurants on a higher level. So what we're seeing during the pandemic is not typical. And so we, as frustrating as it is, to not have two years of data to rely on. We kind of do need to start fresh in our opinions from this point forward to identify, is this good? Or is this bad for our local economy? And chances are in most lanes of both societies, as well as economics, it's going to be an improvement, just because the circumstances of the pandemic were so extreme.
Pilar Orti 5:22
Another side, that I'm so glad you brought up the point about restaurants, et cetera. because also the rhetoric that I've heard is that in office centres, a lot of hospitality business was suffering. But actually, if you look at the coffee shop across my street, I live in a neighbourhood that's a little bit outside of the centre of London, that one was thriving. So I think that there's been a shift even in that industry of who were the people who were doing well, and who were the people who unfortunately had to close down.
Laurel Farrer 5:49
Absolutely, we just can't make blanket statements. Because this is such an unprecedented phase of history, we need to stay very level headed and open minded as we form opinions.
Pilar Orti 6:02
Yeah, thanks for that. And so starting to go into hybrid, how do you see hybrid emerging? And how do you see it becoming part of or independent of the whole remote worksphere? I mean, this is a very broad thing, but just what are some of your thoughts around that?
Laurel Farrer 6:19
Right, well, I think the most common myth that I used to hear from employers and still do most often is that they're considering whether or not they should adopt a hybrid model, is that this is being driven by workforce requests. And I think that that's one of the most interesting statistics that I have access to with our internal research, and data, and case studies here at Distribute, is that the workforce requests and the number of professionals in accelerated economies in North America, as well as EMBA, the number of requests from professionals that want to work remotely and want to have access to workplace flexibility has not changed, it is the exact same number from 2015, 2017, 2020, 2022, that number has always stayed almost exactly the same. In fact, it's decreased just a tiny bit since the pandemic started. So what's changing is not the number of professionals that are asking to work remotely, what's changing is their negotiation power. So what's changing is the employers ability to have excuses of “no, this doesn't work for us” or “no, that's not a possibility”. Now that ball is in the court of the employees, and they can say, “you can't tell me that this is not possible. I just proved that it was possible for two years, it kept our business alive, I was productive. Now, what's your excuse?” And the employers don't have any, that's what's changing in hybrid teams is it's not being driven by the workforce requests. But that's what's cornering the employers in order to make this decision, and to really identify and admit that, “yes, this is a possibility”. So what we're watching is a lot of employers feeling very pressured, and feeling very backed into this corner. And if we make decisions from that place of fear, stress, and pressure it's not going to be a successful or sustainable change for the organisation, we need to make sure that leaders understand how beneficial this is, so that they have leadership support. Because if they're coming at this change from that place of fear, they're always going to be resentful. They're always going to be resistant as I was forced into this, and I don't like this. And as soon as we can, this trend passes, we'll get everybody back into the office. And it's always going to keep them in a negative mindset. So the more that leaders can open their minds and understand the incredible organisational benefits of flexible working, the more that they will feel motivated in order to want to make this change for the company's benefit, not just the workforces benefit. So that's where they can start to see the value of things like productivity increases, and real estate, and overhead cost decreases, and more efficient output, and more streamline software expenses. There's huge financial benefits that organisations can access, if they do it the right way. But if they come into it begrudgingly, and you know, with a minimum level of effort, they'll never see those benefits. So they have to do it the right way.
Pilar Orti 9:50
Thanks for that Laurel because you're mentioning so many things and the importance of that mindset in which we're coming to it, and I agree with you that I'm also hearing, I hadn't actually thought of fear. But yes, there's resentment in a way that, “oh, we've got to do this or else”. And what you mentioned, which I don't think I've heard or read before, but the nuance of it's not that there's more requests. But it's actually that now, it's very difficult to turn them down just because we think it's not going to work. And I think that is really important to understand if we want to move forward. It's also important as a society to know that not everyone wants to work away from the office now, which is what we're being led to believe sometimes when we just consume a lot of articles. But actually, that has not increased. And that's really important, because it means that still a lot of people want to go into the office. And we've got to acknowledge that. But that is so interesting, the fact that yeah, what's changed is that it's now very difficult to put a case against the fact that I can do it like tha. So with all of that done, we could hook the following conversation, it makes perfect sense along this, alongside one of your recent, not your most recent, I mean, we're recording 10th of March. So it's not your most recent article, but one of them. And the title is 10 Habits to Ensure Equality in Your Hybrid Team, and it's in forbes.com. And it's from the 20th of January 2022. And I thought I'd rather than going through the 10, because also listeners can have a good read of the article. I picked some themes that I thought I could just ask you to share. And, the first one that I've got in my notes is mindset, and you've already started to touch on it. And it covers some of your habits, one of which is to adjust productivity tracking and then seek frequent feedback, can you speak a little bit more about those two.
Laurel Farrer 11:57
So management resistance is always a common barrier to success in any change management process. However, when we're talking about adopting a flexibility model, specifically, it is by far, I mean, like, way far, like a huge gap here, I can't emphasise that enough, I'm talking with my hands a lot, but you can hear it in my voice. So far, the number one barrier to success in adopting remote work is management resistance and leadership support. This, if anything is going to go wrong in your company becoming a hybrid or distributed team of any model. This is what is the most likely to go wrong. Especially because we have this return to Office messaging that's happening all throughout our society of “it's time to get back to work, and we got to go back to the office” and that it has tones within it of “well, we haven't been working for the past two years. So anybody that is willing, and prepared and supportive of coming back into the office, like our mid level managers and our executives, the people that are coming back into the office, those are the ones that are really loyal to the brand. Those are the ones that are really going to be productive and are supportive of the company getting back on track”. And that's just ridiculous. First of all, that is completely insulting to your hundreds of employees that have just worked so hard, during an unprecedented emergency to keep your business alive and in very stressful circumstances. But it also creates a discrepancy of people that are in the office are harder workers and the people that are out of the office are not working, they're out of sight out of mind. And there's a disconnection in loyalty and a disconnection in productivity and, and it just creates a huge biassed mess. And this is where the term “proximity bias” comes into play. That the people that are closer to you are perceived as more valuable. So what we want to do is prevent that from happening. And this circles back to exactly what you were talking about in the beginning, how hybrid work and remote work are very closely related. That's another myth and misunderstanding that a lot of employers talk about, and ask questions to me about is, well, no hybrid and remote are two different things. We're not a remote team, we're a hybrid team. So I think it's important to clarify the context here that if we want to be successful as a hybrid team, we have to operate as a remote team. That's why they are so closely connected, because if we are a hybrid team, and some of us go back into the office, and some of us don't, and there's this proximity bias that comes into play. And employee experience is different for those people that are in the office. And those people that are not, that is not sustainable. That's exactly the error that we saw companies make in the 90s, like IBM and Yahoo that had to retract their policies. That's why they had to retract them, because they continued to maintain location, as part of the equation that they were concerned about was where you were. So the solution is to stop talking about location, to stop worrying about location completely, and to say, “well, no matter where you are, whether you're in the office, or in a home office, or client's office, or a coworking space, no matter where you are, we are empowering you to be equally as productive, equally as recognised equally as creative as you possibly can be, because work is something that we do, not somewhere that we go”. So the more that we can, as hybrid teams employ the principles of virtual first mindsets, and fully distributed operations that don't have location as part of the operational equation. That is exactly where we will see success.
Pilar Orti 16:24
And you're right, I mean, thank you for that. The location is leading the conversation, how many days in the office? How many are at home? So that's not where we're trying to go? And also, I think that, for me, the office is not a location, it's a tool. It's an enabler of doing certain kinds of work, and having certain kinds of conversations and types of connections. The place plays such an important part in our conversation. Where we're never going to be happy. And one thought as well, have you come across because the… I hear a lot when we're looking at proximity bias, and who's being left out, it's usually the remote workers in the conversation, but I'm thinking that could also flip it. And in some organisations, the remote workers might be having a much better time than the people in the office. Have you seen this or thought of it?
Laurel Farrer 17:26
Absolutely, Lara Owen, who used to be the head of people ops over at GitHub, which prior to the pandemic was one of the largest hybrid teams in the world. She talked about this extensively. And she called it The Great Coffee Versus Pants debate. Because one or the other, either the onsite workers or the offsite workers were always going to be unhappy. So the onsite workers were saying, “Oh, you remote workers, you don't even have to wear pants, you've got it made”. But then the remote workers were saying, “Oh, you people onsite, you get free coffee, and you've got an in house barista, like you guys haven't made”. So no matter what the grass is always going to be greener. And so yes, this eternal struggle with hybrid teams is making sure that everybody's happy. And everybody understands that there are pros and cons to both sides. So honestly a lot of directors of workplace flexibility or heads of remote that work with large hybrid teams, they really do need to be playing a very strategic peacemaking role, and making sure that everybody understands why their roles are designated to be where they are, and why we're asking people to come back and forth between the office that I think is the greatest conversation that's missing, because so many employers are just so tired of change management, that they're just like,” Okay, we're gonna make this as easy as possible. Everybody comes into the office at least two days a week, come and go as you'd like, there you go”. They feel like that is empowering their workers as much as possible. But it's not because what's gonna happen and what does happen already, that we work with our clients, it is that the workers do not understand exactly which tasks are supposed to be done onsite and which are not. They start to make decisions based on personal factors like, “oh, Thursday, I've got to pick my kid up from karate that's down the street from the office. So I'll go into the office on Thursday”. So they do their normal work that they usually would at home in the office on Thursday. And then what happens? They sit down at a desk with nobody around, and they're just working independently and they start to feel very resentful because they're like, “Why in the world am I here, I'm working alone on my laptop, just like I would be at home. This is a waste of time, this is a waste of money. And I'm bitter that my employer is requiring me to be here for no reason”. So what we need to do instead is have very clearly recorded and very transparent conversations about when is the best time to come into the office, and what types of tasks are better done at home. So we can start to create a new type of value for the office. And most employers are seeing that that is collaborative work. So we come together, we get to have the classic whiteboarding experience, we have a lot of group conversations, and creative conversations, and culture development activities in the office. And then at home, that's when you get your asynchronous independent tasks completed. So that there's a division of their value in each type of environment. And the entire premise of remote work and workplace flexibility is that you get to choose the type of environment that is right and best for each type of tasks that you need to complete.
Pilar Orti 21:15
Excellent, and so we're almost in the second, you've taken us into the second area that I wanted to look at. And it's this blending workspaces. You've got a couple of points around standardising meeting experience, designing consistent workplaces, and coordinating team schedules. What do you… can I ask you to expand on designing consistent workplaces?
Laurel Farrer 21:39
Yes, so there, we just have to realise that everything that we know about business is a derivative and a byproduct of hundreds of years of experience, right? Since the industrial revolution, we have been working together in colocated environments. And so we have to recognise just how many factors are very, very innately designed and just inherently designed into our experiences. So one of those is workplace safety, workplace Health and Safety is so carefully, very, very meticulously controlled, and inspected and enforced in office environments. So health and safety regulations have existed for about 50 years by now, workplace accidents, injuries and illnesses have been cut in more than half since then. And so these little decisions in office environments about how bright the lights are, and how tall the desk height is, and what length the carpet is, and how far away the bathroom is from the elevator, are things that we never think about as employees. But all of those are very, very carefully designed and inspected for our protection. And all of those things make us inherently more productive, because we work in that type of environment. So when we go from that very carefully curated bubble of incubated productivity, and we go into our home environment, and we work on a beanbag all day, and we're slumped in our chair, we're not taking breaks, we're not getting exercise. There's lower natural light, there's lower air circulation, all of those things mean that physiologically, we're not able to be as productive. And then you add on top of that the fact that we're working on a cheap, $100 laptop, and we're working on spotty internet at the coffee shop. And there's blenders in the background, like how can we possibly measure the performance of one employee that is working in a meticulously designed environment, and another one that is working against technology and environment and physiological barriers, and measure their performance equally, it's just ridiculous and completely impossible, and will be a contributing factor to discrimination in the future, especially over time. So we need to make sure that as we are having conversations about the workplace, it's not just “oh, work from anywhere you want”. No, we need to still be very careful in making sure that our employees are safe, that they're supportive, that they are working in conditions that will support their mental clarity and focus, and that they are able to access information, and files, and resources, and other people just as much as their people, their counterparts on site are able to do we really need to think about how to equalise those workplaces, not only for the sake of you know, employment perks, but most especially for the sake of equal performance measurement.
Pilar Orti 25:04
Yeah, and I think at the same time, this is such an important set of factors and even conversations to have also when we're looking at asking people to come and use the office as well. Because immediately as you're talking as well, I'm thinking about the temperature. For example, I'm always cold in offices, because there's no aircon in my home. I love it, it's so great. And things you're talking about like desks having proper if we are going for the hot seating option, having proper setups. My husband was telling me about… He's not a knowledge worker, but they've got an area for hot desking, not hot seating, hot desking. And there's nothing to make it comfortable for yourself. Whereas I remember working in an organisation that had activity based working, where the desks were adjustable, they had proper monitors, you just locked yourself into the computer. And it was all designed so that you had the flexibility of working from different places, but as you say, so much thought had been put into that experience. So I think as well that we need to understand sometimes why people would prefer to work from home. And as you say, give them all those, making sure that they're safe and using their workspace properly. And also understanding, and not missing out on the opportunity of the office being more comfortable so that people don't want to work from home because they're not comfortable in the office. They might be dying to be surrounded by people and they might not mind actually the noise. But, the chairs are not comfortable, or the temperature, or there's something in the air that makes them uncomfortable. I think it's another opportunity to be more inclusive of people who actually before haven't even thought about why they weren't comfortable there.
Laurel Farrer 26:53
I love that, it's such a profound conversation, isn't it? What changes can we make to our environment to make it into a place that you want to be, not just working with an interior designer to make it look cool and great in a magazine spread. But what was preventing you from coming into the office? Because there are so many perks and benefits for working in a colocated workplace. I mean, you and I are definitely some of the biggest champions of remote work that have ever existed. And here we are saying things like, “yeah, there are some days that I would love to go into an office, that would be wonderful”. So having conversations with your employees about conversations like that, what can we provide that would make it better for you and easier for you to come in here and be more valuable, so that you as employees are getting a return on investment for your commute?
Pilar Orti 27:55
Excellent, so we've got that. So we've looked at the workspace. Now let's look at some work practices. And in particular, sound collaboration practices, you've actually got three that I've taken the liberty of lumping under the Working Out Loud banner, which are used public channels, digitise all resources and repeat important announcements. Which one's your favourite? Which one do you want to expand on Laurel of those three?
Laurel Farrer 28:22
They all kind of come together, because here's where they all come from. In an office, one of the greatest and primary channels of communication that we have is not explicit communication, it's implicit communication. It's observation, we just walk into the room and look around. And we are learning a whole lot about what's going on just from watching and listening. So we can see who's working on a project together, we can kind of understand the general temperature and status of that project, we can understand if there's kind of a buzz and an energy and a lot of people are chatting in the break room. That means there's a big announcement coming up. There's just little nuances to that observational opportunity that communicates so much to us. And when we don't have access to that as virtual workers, it actually creates an imbalance in informational accessibility, that the people that are onsite have access to all of that information, that they can implicitly learn and the people that are offsite don't. And so already, we're creating a disconnection in employee experience. So the more that we can pay attention to little teeny tiny habits in our communication, that help replace that observational opportunity, then that helps equalise that experience of our hybrid teams. So if we are repeating information, so we're telling people that an announcement is coming up, we make the announcement. We remind them about it after that's kind of replacing that experience of hearing about it in the break room than attending the meeting. And then talking about it with somebody afterward, with somebody in the hallway. Same thing with using public channels on Slack or Microsoft Teams, instead of direct messages or emails, that gives other people an opportunity to watch your conversation or kind of eavesdrop on your conversation, without actually participating in it. So that they understand what you're working on and who you're working with, and what the status of your project is. Same thing with dropping into project management tools, and collaboration systems, that all of those are asynchronous opportunities for people to have that same observational opportunity. So you're really strategically leaning into the tools that we use to stay connected as distributed and hybrid teams, and paying attention to not just what tools we're using, but how we're using them. That's the key to I think all three of those points that you mentioned.
Pilar Orti 31:05
Yeah. And it's been difficult as well, because if you think about people who are not used to working in this way, and who were forced to work in this way, and now we're going to say, “okay, with the hybrid way, there's also some adjustment”. And I think what you're mentioning is always pulling back in a way from our spontaneous communication, by which I mean that we need to be a lot more aware of how our communications have been structured, rather than “okay, I'm just talking, I'm just saying this. I want to say this, but actually, who else might need to hear this? Where is the right place?” And that can feel so unnatural if you've never done it before. And I think that for us who love communication and working in this way, it's really exciting to break down. And that's what we do. But for the people who are doing their job it is not to pay attention to how they communicate. It's something I think that we haven't quite embraced and communicated enough that it's that extra skill. And this, maybe this is an extra thing we need to be doing.
Laurel Farrer 32:08
Absolutely, all of this is about intention. And most people feel resistant to it, because they feel like “oh, this is so hard, like this is unnatural”, just like you said. This is unnatural. However, we have to remember that what feels natural, actually isn't inherent in any way, it was intentional as well. But it was just the byproduct of hundreds of years of working in an office and a colocated environment together, that along the way, we developed little teeny tiny strategies like lowering the office walls or the cubicle walls, we lowered those in the 80s and 90s. So that people could see more and have more opportunity for observation. We started traditions like drivebys of the managers so that they could have more quick and frequent agile touchpoints with their employees so that they could understand how they were doing before and after in between meetings, there's little teeny tiny things that feel very natural, but they're not those were carefully constructed as well over time. Just because we have a longer history of them doesn't mean that they were ever organic or inherent. So now what we need to do is just understand that we are now in that same innovation process. In a new environment, there are just as many ways to identify patterns and working styles and get emotional and more cognitive feedback from our employees. There are just as many ways to facilitate empathetic leadership and, and trust based communication, all of those can still exist, but it's going to require intention. So we can do this, we saw this in the pandemic, but in 2020, all of these companies were like, “well, how in the world do you develop culture”, and then, us that had been in the space for a while, we're like, “Well, you just, you just have a party, like, What are you talking about? Like you just hang out together?” And then all of a sudden, they're like, “Oh, we can have a party”. And then all the virtual happy hours just exploded way out of control. By the way, they took that way too far.
Pilar Orti 34:18
That's all we do.
Laurel Farrer 34:21
It's like reign it in guys, reign it in. But it's just those little tiny realisations of “No, we can recreate those experiences, they might look a little bit different than they did. But you just have to take the time and space to actually create that space in your virtual work environment”. So slowly but surely people will realise that it's not as terrifying and unusual and unique as they feel like it is, it just requires a new mindset.
Pilar Orti 34:51
I love how you put it, the fact that we're innovating now. I think that is such a much better phrasing then. Then we've got to do it this way. I love it. I love that actually for anyone who is really wanting to champion new ways of working, that will make remote work and hybrid work within that more sustainable, I think it's a really good way of putting it there. We need to innovate, we innovate in our products, we innovate in our processes, we innovate in our communication to the external world. Now, we need to pay a bit more attention to innovating, in how we are working together. So quite an exciting, uplifting message.
Laurel Farrer 35:30
Absolutely, I'm also noticing that the way that we were doing it before, that might feel more comfortable and familiar, but that doesn't mean that it was the right way. So I mean, productivity measurement is the classic example of people who looked really busy in the office, but were we actually collecting accurate measurements about what they were producing? No, we were just paying attention to their presence, not to their productivity. So that was a problem that needed to be solved, with or without remote work that has been a problem for a long, long time. Now, we are just being forced to innovate because we do not have the opportunity to monitor presence at all, I mean, without legal compliance issues. So yeah, we have to think about different ways. Period, just as a responsibility to be creative and innovative and not default to what is familiar, and misinterpret that as correct.
Pilar Orti 36:33
And so this leads us to your points, which I've clumped under. Well, the whole piece is about inclusivity. But I think those two specifically for me talk even more to inclusivity. And there's something that you were saying now, I think that even when we're thinking of inclusivity, we need to think about that differently now. Because as we were saying earlier, we've realised that we are different in a lot more ways, that we've been used to thinking about from how we like to communicate, where we're comfortable, where we're comfortable with other people to little things like what's your favourite tool online. So all these differences, which before… they were there, but maybe they weren't relevant, maybe they weren't visible? Maybe we didn't even have time to explore these differences. Now they're there. So your last points of diversifying company rituals and offering equal rewards, in addition to everything else, I think start to take us into this. This inclusivity is broad now.
Laurel Farrer 37:39
This is absolutely one of the most common questions that I get asked during q&a sessions after webinars and speaking events is, how in the world do we get introverts to participate in virtual calls? And I always have to give kind of an awkward response of saying, “Well, what did you do to get them to participate in meetings in the office?” And I just kind of reflect back on them and say, “well, do it exactly like how you were doing”. And that's sometimes a very embarrassing and vulnerable moment for most managers, because they realise, “oh, I wasn't doing anything in the office”. So that's where we need to take this opportunity to innovate and realise that, “hey, what we were doing before, may not have been the best choice? So what can we do in the virtual business world in the physical business world and our rituals and our tools? How can we use this new space to do everything and anything better?” And inclusion, I think, is a massive part of that. Because we have so many ways of working in a virtual business environment, things like measuring productivity equally, like we talked about using asynchronous communication, using project management systems, because of those nuances of virtual operational infrastructures, they actually opened the door for much, much wider diversity rates to be much stronger. So we see women in leadership roles and distributed teams at 40% higher than they are in person, in corporations and companies like, that's a staggering statistic. Same thing with minorities, same thing with neurodiversity, because people have more cognitive processing time, they don't have to be quite as spontaneous and think on their feet as they do in a shared and synchronous environment. So there's so many opportunities to diversify our workforce and create, well, I should say tear down the systems that have been holding certain demographics back. However, this is about how we're working. This is the key to everything. So here's this door that's wide open for diversity, it's up to us to walk through that door to turn those diversification opportunities into inclusion. So if we do not use these tools strategically, if we do not create the right rituals, if we do not train our managers to be more empathetic and emotionally intelligent leaders, then that diversity will never turn into true inclusion, we need to make sure that we are not just seeing those numbers rise, but making sure that all people of all backgrounds, all qualifications, all industries, all feel recognised, appreciated, valued, productive. That's what a truly inclusive culture is about.
Pilar Orti 40:50
And I'm going to pitch in with something, just here in this last point about inclusivity. Is that while we're looking and going right back to your very early points about socio economic change, and also you were talking a lot about flexibility, rather than remote work, at the beginning of the episode. And I think that this is also an important reminder that while our knowledge workers might be getting some flexibility and a lot of attention, maybe at the moment of how to make their processes and their work better, that there might be people in the organisation, especially the larger ones, that will not have flexibility in location. However, this inclusivity that you're speaking of is also about that. And so we've got to be looking after both sides of the workforce at the same time, and rediscovering maybe what flexibility means for people who are not knowledge workers.
Laurel Farrer 41:41
Absolutely, remote work will cease to be a term in the next five years, because remote work will just be work. So this whole moment, this whole revolution is about how we're working, not where we're working. So if we break that down, and we say, “Okay, how are we working? Well, we're working with location flexibility, with geographic flexibility, with asynchronous communication with global and standardised tools, you know, we break that down into smaller elements of ``how are we working in a way that is different?” then those individual components are much more easy to adapt to a variety of different industries and working environments. I love what I'm seeing for very empathetic and innovative companies in the manufacturing industries, because they're saying, “well, whoa, we're just… if we allow all of our office workers to work from anywhere overnight, and all of our manufacturing workers are stuck in a factory that's just gonna make that gap between blue collar and white collar workers that much wider like, we can't do that”. So I love when they're coming to us as consultants saying, “What can we do? And we break that down into? Well, is there a way that we can offer certain workers or certain departments more schedule flexibility? Or is there a way that we can give them access to the same digital handbooks and tools and documentation systems that we have for the distributed teams?” give them access so that we all are using the same company resources and have more information accessibility for all of those different layers of workers. So when we break it down into those ways of working, that's where we can see the true standardisation and just expansion of what it means to participate in the future of work.
Pilar Orti 43:42
Yeah, thanks for that. So we've covered adjusting productivity, tracking standardised meeting experience… Well, listeners go and look and read the article and bookmark it and use it almost as a checklist. But before we wrap up, you've already started to bring in some of what you're seeing in these larger organisations, because it's always distributed organisations. Remote work has always been seen as relatively easy to adopt in smaller organisations. However, now we are asking larger organisations to consider it. So I do wonder whether before we wrap up, whether you could share with us, either some company you've been working on, and how they've been changing as they approach hybrid, or something you've heard just a little bit to bring that to wrap it all up.
Laurel Farrer 44:30
Yeah, So to clarify exactly what Distribute does, we are responsible for virtual organisational development. So that is helping the companies that are exploring higher levels of flexibility, helping them convert operations from physical to virtual, so we're helping them evaluate their tools and build software toolkits. We're helping them write handbooks, we're helping them write policies. We're helping them create training systems and programs. That's what we're doing is that really unsexy change management process. But we love it. So in all of that analysis and construction of the change management process, something that we really love, and the conversation that has been happening more often lately that we are really celebrating is that measurement of success metrics. And this comes back to our conversation before about these leaders that are feeling cornered into this, and they just say, like, “Oh, why are we doing this?” Because the people are asking for it like, “Oh, that's not enough of a reason”. And I agree, I come from an entire career of being a COO. And I completely agree that just a workforce opinion is not enough of a motivator to facilitate change, we need to be able to see how this is benefiting the organisation. So that's my favourite conversation to have. And I'm so excited that more employers are ready to have this conversation as well. How do we measure success? How do we know if hybrid working is benefiting our company? How do we know if we're getting a return on this investment, and we will know in six months to a year to two years, if this risk or this terrifying chance that we took was actually worth it. And we can use internal data in financial reporting. And in engagement survey data, we can prove that there is organisational value to this. So that's the conversation that I want everybody to be thinking about as they are considering and often feeling pressured into becoming a hybrid team. Is to understand that there is a right way and a wrong way to do this. But we're only going to know if it's the right way or the wrong way for our organisation, if we are measuring data, if anybody wants help doing that, please have them reach out to me, but at the very least, it can just be a conversation with your senior leadership team to say, “what are our goals here? What outcomes are we trying to see from this? And how will we know if and when we have achieved them?”
Pilar Orti 47:24
Yeah, so going back as well to change management as we know it to some of the ways in which we look at this business as we know it is just this context, but different. But we can use the same language to measure it as well. So listeners distributeconsulting.com. We'll put the link in the show notes. If you want to get in touch with Laurel. Laurel, you do also speaking, so it'd be… so listeners, if you want Laurel to come and speak to your people, then you still do speaking webinars, everything, don't you?
Laurel Farrer 47:56
Yes, absolutely both virtual and physical, which is fun to do, again, fun to be back on the speaking circuit and getting back on planes every once in a while. It's been a long two years.
Pilar Orti 48:09
So distributedconsulting.com. Also, if you want to check out Episode 212, which is all about remote work for social change. 189 Laurel talks about information isolation. And also we have the whole connection and disconnection series from 2021. Laurel, anything you want to say to our listeners before we wrap up?
Laurel Farrer 48:30
No, this has been a fabulous conversation. Thank you so much for having me and for as always, for your wonderful thoughts as well. I just love advocating the good cause with you.
Pilar Orti 48:42
I am privileged to have a show because every time I have a conversation, especially with people who are just so much more articulate than I am, and my mind just has to race and it's “Oh yeah”. And then yeah, my brain explodes. So listeners, we would love to hear your thoughts. You can find the contact form over at virtual not distant dot com my email if you prefer that form of communication is. And once more if you want to check out Laurel checkout, distributeconsulting.com.
Pilar Orti 49:19
And a big thank you for listening to the 21st Century Work Life podcast, produced by Virtual not Distant. If you have something to add to the conversation, let us know through the contact form over at virtual not distant.com I have been your host Pilar Orti, and I'm signing off now. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, enjoy.