Greetings, everybody.
Welcome to the Long-Distance Work Life Podcast.
My name is Wayne Trammell.
I am your host today.
We are without Marissa, but that means we have another cool guest joining us and
we will try to stir the pot a little bit with Henry Olaughlin in just a moment.
This is the podcast.
For those of us trying to thrive, survive, generally make sense
and keep the weasels at bay in the world of remote
and hybrid work.
Welcome. Welcome.
I am going to bring in our guests now Henry Olaughlin is with Build Remote.
Hey, Henry, How are you?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me, Wayne.
Well, thank you, man.
We are going to have, I suspect, a very fun discussion
about whether or not we have, in fact, reached peak hybrid.
And I'm going to leave that there as a teaser for the audience.
While you tell us a little bit about you and build a remote.
Yeah.
So I ran a fully remote marketing agency for six years.
I worked there for eight years.
So this is going back way before the pandemic.
And we in my mind, we tried something and then always it was a mistake.
And then we'd try something new
and it was like that second or third try was the right way to do it.
So we learned a lot about how to run
a remote company for years before 2020.
2020 came around and I saw a lot of bad advice
about how to operate remotely, how to work from home.
So I started building remote just as a way to talk about that.
And now that's my full time work and company.
And what I do is I help small businesses operate remotely.
I want to talk before we get into the subject that we supposedly
are talking about.
I want to talk a little bit about the early days, because you said
something very unashamedly that most people don't want to cop to,
which is this notion of we're going to change the way
we do business and we're absolutely going to get it right
the first time and everything everybody tells us is going to work.
And you said that didn't happen. Give us
tell us where you bumped your nose so we don't feel so bad.
Yeah, I think the you're not physically together.
So if you come from an office and everyone is used to working that way,
then you go to remote. You sort of want to.
The instinct is to build back
the way of working in an office, but over the internet.
So your instinct is to meet more, to be more available online,
on Slack or email, to show that you're there at your desk working.
So you want to respond to emails quickly.
You want to respond to Slack quickly, you want to have more one on ones.
You want to have more stand up meetings.
And we did all of that stuff as well.
And all of that actually is
sort of the opposite of what you want to do remotely in my mind.
You don't want to fill a day with Zoom meetings.
That's miserable. I'm a huge advocate for remote work.
Sitting on Zoom for six out of eight or 9 hours a day is not fulfilling.
Okay, so let me stop you There,
because this is a really it's a vital point.
And I agree with you in most ways,
because the problems come when we're trying to replicate the office environment
and we're not. Right.
But what did you learn, given that you had to onboard people
and hire people and do all the stuff the companies have to do right.
What were one or two key things that you went,
this isn't what we thought it was going to be, either for good or evil.
One big one would be Slack.
So we implemented that
without any rules or guidelines in the way.
The way I talk about Slack is that it will set your culture for you
if you don't put guidelines on it and you may not like the culture.
And that's what we went through. So.
So for the example of Slack,
it can turn into like a digital punch clock,
which is not what we were looking for at all.
We don't care at the time we're running this business.
When people are online, we just care about them doing their jobs
well and providing value to the company through their jobs.
If that means they're not online from 1 to 2 p.m., that's fine.
But Slack.
Basically you have the green, yellow, red buttons.
People want to be green just innately to show that they're there.
They want to respond and quickly
to show that they're there, which in my mind that switches
the priority from important work or deep work
to shallow, urgent work.
And so if someone's just receiving
Slack messages and responding,
they're perceived as super helpful and a great teammate, whereas really
they're just interrupting their their more important work throughout the day.
So we had to like reverse our communication
expectations on Slack rather than saying we started out like, That's great.
Everyone comes on and says hello.
Then we had to switch it to, You can do that if you'd like,
but you don't have to.
And then if somebody is online and responding quickly,
it would be we actually encourage you to get off of Slack.
It's a distraction.
So we had to basically still use Slack, but switched the communication
expectations completely.
That's the one that stands out the most in my mind.
Yeah.
And, you know, for the record and, you know, in case anybody's
a shareholder, we're not saying that Slack is inherently evil and don't use it.
It's like everything else.
It's it's
Are you conscious and intentional about how you're using it
and how you use it to form the culture, not the other way around.
I love the way you said that.
So let's get to the topic that we're discussing today,
which the title is intentionally.
I don't want to use the word, but the word disturbing is in the sentence.
You know, you are stirring things up a bit
when you say we have reached peak hybrid.
There is a lot of discussion about this.
Why are we at peak hybrid and why?
Or is this kind of as much as it's going to get and be?
Yeah.
First, I probably want to start
defining hybrid because that could mean a ton of different things.
So when I say that, I mean in the current form
or current definition of hybrid work, which in my mind is
people are near the most people are near an office, they go in
two or three days a week and they work from home two or three days a week.
That's sort of how I would define hybrid work right now.
That's what I'm saying has peaked out.
That will only decline from here.
Yeah, And and that makes sense because what you're
talking about is not a conscious way of working.
It's we've reached some sort of agreement where we'll bring people into the office
as much as we can without them quitting and yeah, and give people the illusion
of control over their time while still insisting they come into the office.
And that is what a lot of people are calling hybrid.
But it's not really hybrid work.
Yeah, well, how would you define hybrid work when how?
man, this isn't supposed to be my interview.
I think hybrid work
does have components of
you meet and get together on occasion.
And what's different is right now we're kind of who works
where is kind of where hybrid sits.
And I think true hybrid also includes the factor of time,
which is who does what, where, but also when it happens.
And that creates the flexibility and a different mindset to me.
Yeah, you're the one who started this with the title, You tell me.
Yeah. Yeah.
So I mean, I would just say it's currently
three days in the office, two days at home.
Everyone essentially is supposed to live near an office and you work
partly remotely, partly in the office that that's the one that is peaking.
And I can kind of take you through my thoughts on why.
But yeah, please.
If there are three.
Basic work models, remote hybrid or office based
hybrid to me has the the most issues of all of them.
One is that it's it's essentially remote but with an office
so it's it's not quite its own model it
because everything has to have a digital component since some people might be there
on a monday and some might not.
So you're essentially remote anyhow.
You're just calling it something different.
That's that's the first.
The second problem
is it's the hardest on communication, internal communication to me,
because if everyone's remote, you know how to communicate.
It's zoom for meetings, it's slack for quick messages, it's
Gmail for for longer messages.
If you have if you're hybrid, you don't know if the meeting should be in
person, should be on Slack or should be a combination, which is the hardest.
You don't know if decisions should be made over a project management
board on the Internet or they should be made in a boardroom,
then recorded somehow and moved to the Internet.
Three You're inherently running two systems at once, which is hard.
So you're you're having to operate both ways
and you better be good at both or neither works.
The biggest one of all to me is it it
reduces your talent pool greatly versus remote work.
That's probably the biggest thing about going fully remote
is your talent pool switches from
We can hire within a 50 mile radius of our city that's office
to we can hire anywhere in the country or the world.
That's that's the huge promise of remote work.
When you say you're hybrid, you still want to hire near an office,
but you don't want to use the office as much,
so you're greatly reducing your talent pool essentially.
Then finally, I think I'd say is that another way
to define hybrid work in its current state is unused office space.
So if people come in three days a week, that means you're 40%
unused office space, two days a week, 60% unused office space,
and that just companies don't sit on expenses.
They don't need long term to compete.
You have to essentially drive out the waste of your operations,
and that will inherently push people to reduce
office space, pushing them closer to remote.
That's so I mean, your points are all really well taken.
I don't disagree at the core with any of them.
So why do you think we've settled on hybrid right now?
Is it purely a matter of we don't know what the alternatives look like?
Is it purely this is a gateway drug to more remote work?
Yeah.
What what's going on?
That we are in this hybrid state?
Because I think there is particularly on the part of business owners and
and bosses, just a big sense of
we have no freaking idea what's going on.
That's what it seems like to me too.
Yeah.
So I think the reason is it's been like one great concession.
If you were to paint with broad brushes, most of the people want to work remotely.
Most of the time, and most of the managers that have some sort of sunk cost
into office space want people to come in and we sort of end up in the middle.
Yeah, most of what we call
hybrid work is in fact just kind of an uneasy compromise.
That compromise. There you go.
That is true. Yeah.
Is it true that everybody wants to work remotely?
I mean, right now I think the number is about 25% Do it.
I know plenty of people who never mind whether the bosses
forget the bosses for a moment.
There's the individual workers.
Not everybody wants to work from home.
I think that's an assumption that the remote work
kind of advocates zealots like to throw out there.
How true is that?
No, it's not true.
So I was just painting with a broad brush, trying to say the surveys that say
like 65% or 80% would like to work from home.
Part of the time or,
you know, those like big numbers, which most of the people most of the time.
No, not everyone wants to work right now.
Everyone wants to work from home all the time.
That's absolutely true.
And there's a lot about it.
But it could depend on your phase of life.
Right.
So I've said it before where I moved to a new city
when I was 23, and I was glad I worked in an office with 600 people.
I made friends, I met my wife.
It was great, right?
I wouldn't want to work from home 23
with three roommates sitting in my bedroom the whole day.
That's that doesn't sound fun.
So there's absolutely scenarios where remote workers
or working from home or specifically isn't right for people,
but generally with like the compromise of two or three days
a week in the office, you can kind of see that
most of the people would like either the flexibility
or the option to just not be coming in the office all five days anymore.
That seems to summarize it pretty well.
I think the word that and and this is why
I added the concept of time, but that's Wayne's definition of it.
I think it's the flexibility.
Yeah, that makes hybrid
kind of the middle option.
Yeah, I've talked to me
if I'm the business owner now, I mean, you're the business owner.
I probably have very real concerns about hiring people
who aren't in the office all the time.
Some of them are, you know, plantation mentality.
You got to keep an eye on them or they'll slack off.
Some of it is legitimately.
That's how I grew up.
That's how I learned business was done.
I can't imagine it being any other way.
How do you have conversations with business owners about this?
Yeah, well, I would I would want to add one thing
that I think is a key point that I don't I don't think a lot of people talk about.
So you have two, two ways of operating in the office work and remote work.
And let's say your company and you do operate a business.
Your company was fully in the office.
You've.
Built all of your processes, systems, communication around
physically being together, and you're good at that system.
2020 comes around and you are forced to switch to remote work.
You haven't selected it proactively, right?
And you're bad at that system.
So you're you're good in the office and you're bad at remote.
So essentially there's a big conflation going on that
the office is good and remote is bad.
But really it's I'm good at the office and I'm bad at remote.
And that's a huge distinction that we're not talking about right now,
is that you're bad at the new system and you're good at the old system.
So your inherent bias would be to go back to what you're good at.
So I understand that completely.
And it doesn't mean remote work can't be done for a company.
It just means that
your skills have been and processes have been developed for the office.
So what do we need to learn or unlearn
if that's not going to be the sticking point?
Right.
If we're going to make conscious decisions about where we work and when we work,
how we work,
what do we need to learn or unlearn that makes us currently bad at remote?
Yeah, it's a it's a great question.
I think the.
Big, big.
Difference is that is that part you said if I'm
the biggest judge of people's performance is just like seeing
they're seeing them, they're at their desk for a certain amount of time
and having quick conversations that seem to move something forward.
All that has to go away with the remote.
Unfortunately, it the way you operate your company remotely,
if it's if it's going
well in my mind, is that you understand what each role is supposed
to bring in value and what sort of output it's supposed to do, and you sort of
get out of the way and the people need to do the work and do the work well.
Companies that are switching from the office to remote
need to think about understanding what value each role
needs to bring a lot more than just watching people do the work
that that's the big shift.
And it's it's really hard.
It took us years to make that shift.
Okay.
So we're nearing the end of our time and the premise here is that right now
hybrid work is kind of the catch all, and it's where everybody's settled
while we figure out what we want to be when we grow up. You
what do you think ultimately the balance
is going to be between fully
remote work and fully co-located?
I think for all
desk jobs, knowledge workers, whatever you want.
Anyone who can work this way, I think most of them
will be most remote, all or most of the time.
At some point, I think.
I think the niche will become 50 to 200 people all in
one city working on the same project from one office.
I think.
I think it basically flips from where it was in 2019.
Let's say.
And I think in that transition you're going to see this massive
commercial real estate crash because the value of real of office
space is so much less than we thought it was.
I think what happens is that price plummets,
leases run off, companies reduce space or
get rid of space altogether.
The cost to lease
these split offices goes way down and companies
start to scoop it up again as a place for people to work outside of the home.
But it's not their operating model anymore.
It's essentially like a co-working space
for your people in certain cities.
That's that's where I think all of this is is going.
There is a three bear
conversation I would love to have, though.
I'm sure active on cities,
on right, countries on all kinds of things.
I don't think we've figured this out yet.
But your premise that what we're calling hybrid,
which may or may not really
be hybrid, but what we're calling hybrid is really a placeholder
until we figure all this out and
I don't really think you're wrong on that,
which makes lousy podcasting, but lovely conversation.
So thank you so much.
Henry LOFLAND We build remote.
Thank you for being with us.
For those of you who are listening, you know how podcasts work.
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In which case it's just a little secret.
You can find links to Henry's company.
You can find links to Henry, all kinds of good stuff on our website.
Long distance work life dot com.
You can find transcripts and recordings of past episodes.
And if you are confused about how do we lead in this new world
of remote and hybrid and whatever the heck you want to call it,
I urge you to take a look at our Long Distance Leadership series.
It's available for organizations, but it's also available as open enrollment.
Anybody from anywhere can join these
live virtual instructor led training sessions.
The link is below my face.
It's also on the website
and we urge you to join us.
Thank you so much, Henry.
Thanks for being with us. Man.
I really enjoyed this conversation and I trust our listeners did too.
Got to do it again sometime.
Sounds good. Thanks a lot, Wayne.
And remember, every week we have new episodes.
Marissa will be back next week.
I think we are doing pet peeves, which is always amusing.
Have a great week.
Don't let the weasels get you down.