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Nov. 30, 2021

Okay Everybody ... Back to the Office!

Many of us are working from home and are doing a *great* job! Most find WFH more productive and rewarding. So why are many employers mandating that people come back to the office - often with no explanation?

This is the one about the possibility of returning to the office, or your place of work, after many months of working remotely, from home, or anywhere. Are you ready to go back? Or are you in what appears to be the majority of people who figured out how to work productively at home, and now see no reason to want to go back? 

Employers and employees are stressing over this, and there are good reasons why this is not a simple change for anyone.

In this episode, we talk about the pros and cons of remote work for both the employee and the business. We look at how most businesses survived through Covid because of the hard work, dedication, and resourcefulness of hundreds of millions of employees who transitioned from in-person to remote work all over the world. We analyze the very good reasons why it will be extremely difficult to just snap back to the way it was before Covid.

We also explore the very bad reasons some businesses are concocting in an effort to not make a change to remote work - even though it's crystal clear that remote work has and will ... well ... work just fine!

We finish up with a chat about what we and some are calling The Great Resignation of 2022, and why we believe this is a likely event that will be disrupting many businesses that do not adapt quickly or at all.

This episode is so important that we allowed ourselves to break our "about 20 minutes long" rule for the podcast, so please enjoy a slightly extended 30-minute episode.

Visit the official My Job Here Is Done website to learn more, to contact us, and to sign-up for very infrequent non-spammy tidbits by email if you'd like. 

Best wishes!
Dave and Kelli

Transcript

"Okay, Everybody … Back to the Office"

Transcript (for general use only – machine-generated and it may not be accurate)

Dave [00:00:00] For whatever reason, are your panties in a bunch about eventually having to go back to the office

Kelli [00:00:06] Maybe a little bit

Dave [00:00:07] Does it seem like a majority of leadership and business owners out there would just like to get their employees asses back in the seats they had early in 2020, but really have offered no good reason? Is any of this fair and productive?

Kelli [00:00:22] Well, we can say with a great deal of confidence that both employees and employers are in for a stressful and confusing couple of years as we sort this out.

Dave [00:00:31] So pump your breaks and pace your pickle, kiddos,This is going to suck for a while.

Kelli [00:00:39] Okay, everybody, it's back to the office. Come on and move along everybody. Nothing to see here. Stop dragging your feet.

Dave [00:00:47] Hi, I'm Dave.

Kelli [00:00:48] And I'm Kelli and this is

Chuck Fresh [00:00:50] My job here is done.

Kelli [00:00:53] If you really want that next promotion or you're a rising star entrepreneur, we have some stories to tell and that will absolutely help you.

Dave [00:01:02] I've been starting and running businesses all my life,

Kelli [00:01:05] and I've worked for the man like a dog for decades.

Dave [00:01:09] Together, we'll share stories, ideas, and notions that will help you absolutely soar past that cruiser sitting next to you.

Kelli [00:01:17] And if you're grinding forward with your growing business, we know where the landmines are. Let's find them.

Dave [00:01:23] Hey, it's only about 20 minutes. What do you have to lose?

Dave [00:01:27] Nothing!

Kelli [00:01:27] Or Everything.

Dave [00:01:32] Hi there, and thanks for joining us today. I'm Dave.

Kelli [00:01:35] And I'm Kelli,

Dave [00:01:36] and welcome to the podcast.

Kelli [00:01:37] Before we get started, just a quick reminder that you can learn more about the podcast, listen to all the previous episodes and interact with us at our website,

Dave [00:01:47] Dub Dub Dub.MyjobhereisDone.co

Kelli [00:01:51] Do we need that dub, dub, dub,

Dave [00:01:53] Can't we just do My Job Here is Done.com

Kelli [00:01:58] That's what I'm saying.

Kelli [00:01:59] OK, this is the one about working from anywhere, not just home, but anywhere

Dave [00:02:04] and how businesses and employees are both setting up for a gladiator battle of epic proportions.

Kelli [00:02:11] Why is working from anywhere worthy of a gladiator battle?

Dave [00:02:14] Well, that may be a stretch, but I can say this. We will find out that it was much easier to put working from anywhere in place than it will be to reverse it. If the trend continues to go in the direction that we've got to reverse this, which I think is just silly.

Kelli [00:02:32] It wasn't all that easy to put in place, either.

Dave [00:02:35] It wasn't. And you know where the credit goes

Kelli [00:02:39] Yes I do - to the employees

Dave [00:02:40] You bet. Because leadership had no idea. In most companies, leadership was caught off guard. Big-time... but Employees pulled it off.

Kelli [00:02:51] Right. So talking about reversing it, should employees who were temporarily remote due to office closures, et cetera, and worked tirelessly to figure out how to transform their in-person jobs to remote basically overnight and now are comfortable and prefer working remotely - Should they really be mandated to now go back into the office?

Dave [00:03:13] Well, you know, that's the big $100000 question that a lot of employers are asking themselves, and I think that this is going to turn into a battle of epic proportions.

Kelli [00:03:23] OK, now I get it.  You know, the thing is, people are comfortable now at home and they almost feel unappreciated. It's like I went through all of this, and now you don't trust that now that things have changed a little bit in the world that I could continue to do this. Why? What's the purpose of dragging people back into the office when they don't want to go and they're just as productive as at home?

Dave [00:03:48] You have to ask this question, too, if COVID would not have happened. Would you have the same mindset about working in an office as opposed to working at home employees?

Kelli [00:03:56] Many employees, like myself, would not have had the opportunity to test that out on a full time basis. Yesterday you worked, you did your job from in the office today and many, many days going forward, you're going to be doing it from home, right? Figure it out. Yeah, how are you going to do it?

Dave [00:04:15] And you never got any guidance, right?

Kelli [00:04:17] So not at the get go because remember ,and you remember me saying to you, Dave, I may be home for like two weeks.

Dave [00:04:24] No. Yeah, I knew that it wasn't going to be two weeks. I was I figured a couple of months,

Kelli [00:04:29] everybody came home with the idea of, Well, we're going to kind of ride out the storm for a couple of weeks and when everything settles down, back we go. So when I say temporary, it really was in everybody's mindset. The employees and I think a lot of employers, especially employers who did not embraced a work from home situation before because they they didn't have to.

Dave [00:04:54] And more so because they didn't want to. And I can tell you that from my own experiences. I think it could be years before this whole thing settles down.

Kelli [00:05:03] Oh, I agree.

Dave [00:05:05] Let me give you an example why I think it's going to be years in order for businesses to adapt to a new labor cost model. There are a couple of really unmovable expenses that are in there things that you can't necessarily control. And one of them is office space and the leases associated with real estate.

Kelli [00:05:22] And you know, I think not only will it take years, I think it has to be years. And businesses that didn't embrace remote work prior to the pandemic, which

Dave [00:05:32] was most of the

Kelli [00:05:33] are now kind of catching up in that mindset and figuring it out because they have to.

Dave [00:05:39] It's glacier like for a lot of businesses to go from. Everybody in the office to most people at home is not easy for the business. But it was super easy generally for the employees, and it really goes to show how well our workforce, not only here in the U.S., but all over the world were able to adapt to this because we kept businesses running for the most part,

Kelli [00:06:04] right, and I think everybody wanted to make it work. It wasn't like an us versus them.

Dave [00:06:09] It was a collaboration between employers and employees. It was wonderful. And you know what's happening now that's being fractured

Kelli [00:06:16] because some employees are now feeling like I proved that I can do this at home. I enjoy it for these reasons, which we'll talk about. What's the deal? Why do we have to go back into the office?

Dave [00:06:28] So I think it's time to do a quick history of remote work. So if you look back 20 years ago, we didn't have the telecommunications and teleconferencing equipment that was affordable and easy to deploy like we have today.

Kelli [00:06:42] There was no Zoom or Teams or WebEx or any of these platforms that we now take for granted.

Dave [00:06:48] Well, I can say that leadership was very much against, as a general rule, remote employees. There was the old theory that all they're doing is they're staying at home, working in their pajamas, and they're just not getting anything done. And I've worked for people and been involved with companies where leadership thought those things and they're just so wrong. It was easy to prove that you could take a remote employee, equip them with the proper tools and have them integrate just as well as a regular employee in the environment. But you had to do some things differently, and we'll talk about that in a little bit.

Kelli [00:07:26] Let me just take this opportunity to say congratulations to all the employees out there who did it, who worked really, really hard to make this all work and to figure it out with very little instructions and that fire in their gut. That said, I'm going to do this. We're not going to just close up the office and throw in the towel. We'll make this work. And we did.

Dave [00:07:47] Business owners listen to that because employees got us through COVID. It wasn't our leadership as executives that did it. There are people out there that, you know, figured this out at a leadership level. But I can tell you, looking at hundreds of companies over the course of the last 18 months, the vast majority had no clue what to do. They just sent people home. They hoped they'd figure out how to use their own home router, how they would connect their computers. Yeah, the IT department had to scramble. You know, there were security concerns. There were all kinds of stuff. The employees themselves figured out how to interact with each other. Things like Slack bloomed and blossomed during that time as we accepted a new technology to make this odd situation work. So I agree really kudos and big applause to all the employees all around the world who got us through COVID.

Kelli [00:08:40] Absolutely.

Dave [00:08:41] So today we have the technology to make remote work work. Do we have the mindset, both employees and employers? Do we have our mind right on getting this stuff to work? Here are some quick statistics. 16 percent of companies in the world are 100 percent remote. Should I've started that with only? 44 percent of companies don't allow remote work at all. That's almost half. And there's a lot of companies that are in that half that are going to be offering remote work in the future because it's the only way they're going to be able to compete.

Kelli [00:09:17] The employees that are working there now may not be working there for long.

Dave [00:09:21] One of the reasons why is because 99 percent of companies do not embrace major change. Now I made that number up, but I can tell you right now it's true.

Kelli [00:09:32] You made it up.

Dave [00:09:33] I get it. I made it up. 99 percent of companies do not embrace major change.

Kelli [00:09:38] So we thought about the pros and cons of working from anywhere, and we'd like to share our thoughts with you about that.

Dave [00:09:43] So, first of all, huge pool of talent and the way to do this is to take out a map

Kelli [00:09:49] made of paper,

Dave [00:09:49] made of paper, OK, and then and then put a pin right where your building is and then draw a circle around it that represents, oh, let's say. Maybe up to an hour drive,

Kelli [00:10:01] comfortable travel distance

Dave [00:10:04]  to your building and then look in that circle and say how many employable people are in that circle, right? And then say to yourself out of those employable people in that search circle, how many of them would fit this position? Hmm. And then out of those, what are your chances of getting somebody to actually come and work for you? Yeah. And you watch that number go down and down and down. Right now, imagine if you didn't need that map and you could look at the entire world, every corner of it and say that there’s somebody out there that's got the right situation and has the right talent and the right fit for me and I don't care where they work. Your talent pool is endless.

Kelli [00:10:44] It's amazing and mind blowing, actually.

Dave [00:10:47] And that's a pro for employers and employees.

Kelli [00:10:51] Sure, both sides of the coin. Absolutely.

Dave [00:10:54] Think about the cost savings. Remote workers are saving around seven thousand dollars per year in transportation, food and childcare costs, according to TECLA. Now that's interesting because that's like a raise.

Kelli [00:11:04] It's a huge raise, actually.

Dave [00:11:05] And the good news is that 64 percent of recruiters, according to IWG, say that being able to pitch a work from home policy helps them find high quality talent.

Kelli [00:11:17] Some other pros for employees include flexible schedules. So if you have a doctor appointment, you can go ahead and go to your appointment whatever time during the day.

Dave [00:11:26] Yeah, But I'm going to interrupt you for a second, because that's a big problem. That's what leadership doesn't like. That's what we're worried about at the leadership level. You're going to go off at two o'clock in the afternoon to a doctor's appointment right in the middle of the workday. How does that help?

Kelli [00:11:39] Do you think employees don't go to doctor appointments when they're in the office?

Dave [00:11:42] You ask permission and then you go.

Kelli [00:11:44] Not really. So here's the thing with appointments and flexible schedules. When you're working from home or working from anywhere, the hours of your workday are blurred. You know, if you want to talk about Work-Life Balance, this is a pro and a con, because when you're working outside of the office, you don't stop working at five o'clock, you're checking the emails, you're reading texts. So I think that makes up for that hour you may be out for a doctor's appointment.

Dave [00:12:17] Oh, I know it for a fact. I've watched the behavior of remote employees for over a decade and recently sent about 200 people home, and there was a big fear that we would have less productivity from those employees, and it was 100 percent the opposite.

Kelli [00:12:32] Exactly. You know, speaking of productivity. Seventy seven percent of remote workers say they are more productive when working from home, and I'm one of those 77 percent. Now we're kind of going into the office sometimes. Some employees are doing kind of a hybrid thing. You find that when you're in the office, you don't have the stuff you need anymore. Your office is at home,

Dave [00:12:54] which means is hybrid a good idea?

Kelli [00:12:56] I understand the idea of the hybrid work environment for businesses who are not used to remote work.

Dave [00:13:03] Yeah, but I think there's two types of hybrid here. I look at it like appropriate hybrid and I'm afraid, hybrid. So appropriate hybrid, I think, is what you were just sort of articulating. You have to go in the office every once in a while in order to see somebody, but you don't have to be there all the time. But you know, when you've got to go in,

Kelli [00:13:22] yeah, you plan it. OK, you know what? Monday, I'm going to go in for a variety of reasons. You may have to meet someone and and talk to them in person for whatever reason.

Dave [00:13:32] So I consider that to be appropriate hybrid.  Hybrid in fear is I want you to come in three out of the five days a week and you ask the question, OK, why? Well, we just feel that having employees here in the building is better than not having them here in the building. And I think that's complete bullshit and that's what's going to create and is now creating what we're going to talk about in a minute. And that's the great resignation or the great quit that is in process now. And if you think it's bad now, you wait until 2022.

Kelli [00:14:03] So getting back to the pros, there are a lot of cost savings for employees that are working from anywhere or working from home, such as fuel or wear and tear on your car.

Dave [00:14:12] You know, one study showed that remote employees collectively save sixty three point five million commute hours per day.

Kelli [00:14:19] Yeah, it's huge.

Dave [00:14:21] That's a scary amount of greenhouse gas savings. If you're into the whole climate change thing, you know, this is all positive effects, right?

Kelli [00:14:30] When you're sick, you're not exposing yourself to other coworkers. And I can tell you from personal experience the few times that I haven't felt well during the pandemic while working from anywhere I still worked, I still monitored and checked important emails and responded appropriately where that wouldn't have happened otherwise. When you're going into the office and you call in sick because you're not feeling well, you completely turn that off. Another pro kind of health wise, people generally have is a happier attitude.

Dave [00:15:01] Well, one of the things that I'm noticing is when I talked to employees at businesses that are either hybrid out of fear or just mandating a come back to the office posture, these employees, for the most part, are not enthusiastic because they don't know why this is happening. They can't understand why it has to change back for them. Now, remember, the mechanic knows, right?

Kelli [00:15:25] It depends on the situation. Exactly. And I think the employees who went out of their way to make everything work worked really hard and have a real sense of accomplishment now feel unappreciated. They don't get it

Dave [00:15:38] For the employer, The benefits are huge. You'll do a cost shift of labor. So in some areas, you're going to see an increase in your labor enablement costs. You're going to have to do some technology differently. You're going to have to modify health insurance and some of the benefit plans, especially if you have employees that are working in other states. But these are going to be offset by other cost savings, such as not needing as much real estate. You can let those office leases expire. There's going to be a lot of businesses that don't need their office here or their office there, and they're going to be able to save that money.

Kelli [00:16:14] So some cons for employees include, like I said before, about the work life balance. You put yourself On-Call 24-7, always checking your phone and your email. You don't end your day at five o'clock anymore. Another possible con can be decreased collaboration.

Dave [00:16:30] Yes, but that also has an answer. Not all collaboration needs to be in person. And if you just agree with that, you can use the tools like Slack and Zoom and the rest of them out there to be able to provide a good collaboration environment. You just moved the water cooler.

Kelli [00:16:48] I think part of that is just a culture change. People just aren't used to collaborating from afar.

Dave [00:16:53] So Kelli for most of your career, you worked with people in an office and you didn't work remotely. And then all of a sudden, you’re remote. Did you find yourself feeling isolated or missing the camaraderie and the real water cooler?

Kelli [00:17:08] Yes and no. It depends on the timing of when the remote work started. So in the beginning we were so busy and we communicated a lot just trying to figure out how to do day to day things. But once we figured that out, because remember, we've been doing this a good 18 months now, is when the isolation starts setting in because you're not walking by people's desks and just stopping for 10 minutes and saying, how was your weekend, what's going on with you?

Dave [00:17:38] How did you make up for that?

Kelli [00:17:40] One of the things that I do is prior to a scheduled meeting, say I have a meeting at 10 o'clock with the rest of my team. I will make it a point to log on early. And then as people start remoting in, I'll take that time to check in with the

Dave [00:17:54] To dovetail on that, when I needed to send 200 people home at the beginning of COVID, One of the things that I made sure that I did was allow them to use the tools that we had for business, for personal use. So we happened to have selected Zoom as our video conferencing platform. And I told all the employees, Make sure that you're talking to your family on Zoom. Use it at night. Use it on the weekends. Use it when you're not working. Use that corporate account that's all set up for you to be able to continue your life going forward. So does that cost us, you know, a little bit of extra money.  The goodwill went fa

Kelli [00:18:34] That is so awesome because remember, in the beginning of the pandemic, we were trying to figure out how to stay in touch with everybody, not just our work colleagues, but our friends and our family as well.

Dave [00:18:46] So today it's a little different because we are a little bit more flexible as long as COVID doesn't reemerge again and who knows what's going to happen, so be prepared. You know, we have started to get that work life balance back again. But the big thing is the work balance has shifted the mindset of the employee who can do a better job. And you know it employers - employees who can do a better job at home should not be mandated just to come back into the office because you think that that would be what is most comfortable for you because what's going to happen is you're going to find a retention problem. And right now, statistics are saying that 74 percent of employees would quit their jobs to work at an organization that allows them to go remote more often or all the time, even if their salary remains the same or benefits were even slightly reduced. This is the catalyst for what people are calling the great resignation of 2022.

Kelli [00:19:46] Absolutely. So remote work is now that benefit every employee wants. They want the option to be able to work that way if they so desire.

Dave [00:19:56] That's an excellent point. It's the new number one benefit. You bet.

Kelli [00:20:00] So if that means they have to switch jobs and go somewhere else and make the same amount of money. Who cares

Dave [00:20:07]  Here's something else that's interesting if you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Standards in the U.S., the median tenure for employees in 2020 was 4.1 years. Now that's for all employees 4 years, essentially in the same job. But if you look at the 25 to 34 year old demographic that was only two point eight years, this is to say that people are not staying in the same job before COVID.  As long as they were in the past, we all remember, you know, the I work for Bethlehem Steel my entire life and my grandpa worked there and his grandpa worked ther

Kelli [00:20:49] People just don't do it anymore. Don't give them another reason to leave. They're already going to leave in three years.

Dave [00:20:54] Exactly. And if you think that you have not calculated the costs of retention into the costs of changing an employee, you better sit down with your pencil and paper because you invest so much money when you bring a new employee in to train them, to get them into your culture, to get them associated with your customers of your product or your service. When they leave, they take that with them. You don't get that back. You don't get to bank it. You get to start all over again. And that can be very expensive.

Kelli [00:21:23] You bet.  You know, Dave, you talked about technology and how that enabled us to be able to work from anywhere. But I also have that in my personal con list as an employee because depending on technology, sometimes leaves you hanging. Sometimes you can't remote in, sometimes you have those technological blips on the radar that are frustrating. So while we depend on technology, it's great when it works. But you know that old saying, it's great when it works right?

Dave [00:21:54] And you know, I'm going to blame leadership again, and I don't want people to think that, you know, I’m down on the way companies run because I'm actually not, as everybody should know, I'm very pro on how to make good companies run better. So this is just really good advice. Some people just aren't thinking about this. You send people home to work from home and you don't give them the right tools or you don't help them enable the right tools and you're going to artificially cripple them. And it'll sound like a program failed. You may have to pay for internet access. You may have to help them get the proper Wi-Fi set up in their house so that they can work upstairs three floors up where they didn't have to do that before. You're going to have to be flexible in enabling that technology, or you might cripple the employee based on that. And it's really not difficult. All you're doing is you're shifting your IT resources from inside to outside. Now all of these costs, yes, they're going to add to the cost of labor. But remember, there are subtractions from that cost of labor

Kelli [00:22:51] There's a lot of savings as well.

Dave [00:22:54] So this brings us to the great resignation of 2022. And why is it being called the big quit? So again, let's jump into a couple of statistics. Harvard Business Review recently reported, “According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, four million Americans quit their jobs in July of 2021. Resignations peaked in April and have remained abnormally high for the last several months, with a record breaking ten point nine million open jobs at the end of July.

Kelli [00:23:26] It's crazy. So heads up employers, your employees are looking around, especially the ones that are worried that their remote option is going to go away. I see this happening with colleagues

Dave [00:23:38] and that's the great resignation of 2022, and it's happening right now. It's fear, uncertainty and doubt that we are creating as leaders when we are not clear with our messaging to employees, when we're not clear about why we want them to return to work, especially when it's very, very clear that they've been doing the job themselves at home or wherever as good or better than it was at the office. As we talked about earlier, the people who know that they need to be there, you know, the folks that work in a data center, they have to physically pick a server up and put it into Iraq. They know they need to come to work. But for those who know they can do their job as good or better in this new world, in this new remote environment, if you want them to come back to the office, they need to know why. And it's got to be a good reason or they're going elsewhere.

Kelli [00:24:24] It is absolutely confusing to people who know they've done a good job as to why suddenly it's no longer enough and they need to come back into the office.

Dave [00:24:33] So given what we've talked about so far, is there a way to do this right? And I think there is for the employees, you pretty much have three very easy choices, right?

Kelli [00:24:43] You can go back to the office and conform. You can try arguing your case, which works pretty well right now.

Dave [00:24:48] Yeah, because I think you've got some leverage

Kelli [00:24:50] or you could go find a new remote friendly job who will pay you the same amount or maybe even more and allow you to work remotely.

Dave [00:24:58] Those are pretty much your options. Employers, thankfully, you have more options, you can recognize the employees and the job roles that are truly remote and make sure those employees are allowed to select whether they want to continue to work at home or whether they want to come back into the office,

Kelli [00:25:18] make it their choice.

Dave [00:25:19] Absolutely. This does not have to be a one way mandate, so it gives them the option - you can come in, uou can stay home or you can hybrid. And we will give you the technology for you to be able to do both. That's good messaging that will inspire

Kelli [00:25:36] and you know, people will make the right choice. People know if they have to be in the office to do their job.

Dave [00:25:41] Do you have to set some ground rules? I think so. I think some people like to see a sheet of paper that says, here are the rules, and that's OK. So like, here are the rules.

Kelli [00:25:49] Well, there's always rules. There are rules for working in the office as well. So why would that be weird?

Dave [00:25:54] You just need to sit down with your leadership team and make sure that the rules make sense, right? Here's something else to think about. You want to make remote invisible to your culture. Think about that for a second. Here are some things that have worked for me while I've done meetings where we've had remote employees and normally are in the conference room. In your order, you know a couple of pizzas for everybody. Everyone has a pizza delivery service near hem. Ask the employees ahead of time. What's your favorite pizza and what is your local delivery service?

Kelli [00:26:24] When we knew we had a lot of remote participants in a meeting, I sent them DoorDash codes so they could order whatever they wanted from DoorDash. You don’t have to have it delivered to their house at a certain time, they don't have to worry about paying for it and you don't have to worry about who doesn’t eat pizza or any other dietary restriction

Dave [00:26:49] That's actually a great idea.

Kelli [00:26:50] You have your code for the meeting, order your food. We're going to sit here and we're going to have our lunch. Whatever it is, we're having pizza in the conference room. You can have a hoagie

Dave [00:26:58] You Made my point better than I was going to make my point. Think about what Kelli just said, because that's exactly the way you make culture invisible. Here's another thing that I think is extremely important and actually should be a hard and fast rule. It cannot be broken. Everybody on video, you can't be invisible when you're in the conference room if you're sitting there, right? So you can't be invisible on Zoom. And that's something that I think is really, really important to keep culture and camaraderie alive. And to be quite honest, it makes everybody level up a little bit. And then the last thing is, you're going to need to learn how to measure productivity differently. And you know who can teach you

Kelli [00:27:38] your employees

Dave [00:27:39] because they've been doing it for the last 18 months? You bet. They've been measuring their own productivity. They've been trying to figure out ways to make sure that they're not forgotten.

Kelli [00:27:48] And not only that, even though they're working super hard, they feel like they have to prove it.

Dave [00:27:53] But because of the environment, that's what they're doing. So how do you learn how to measure productivity? Get all of these people that have been home for 18 months on a Zoom with leadership, have a remote meeting, send them DoorDash codes, get them all together and ask them, How did you measure your own personal productivity during the last 18 months? And you're going to get some amazing input. It will help you create a measurement program full of KPIs and all the other cool things that you're used to doing today.

Kelli [00:28:23] And you know, from the employee perspective, check in with your employees to make sure they're doing OK. Everybody's working super hard, but I can tell you from experience, some employees are reluctant to share really what's going on in their heads or how they're feeling. Because if you're one of those companies that have dangled remote work in front of them as a carrot, you need to behave a certain way or this is going away, they're not going to tell you what's going on with them.

Dave [00:28:51] And while you're remembering the employee's unique situation, Also, think about the employees, family and their unique situation. Extend your gratitude to the entire family occasionally. And when you do, you'll make huge points and you want to talk about excellent messaging. There you go. So after all of this, what happens if we don't get this right? I'm just going to leave that rhetorical.  Pause and think, what happens if you don't get this right? So drumroll, please. Working from anywhere has been born. It's alive and kicking, and it's super healthy. There's no going back now. Embrace it and win.

Kelli [00:29:37] Thanks for listening today. Share the fun and tell a friend about us. Check out our website. It's easy. Myjobhereisdone.com

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