Episode 39 - Remote Work: The Employee Perspective
Craig P. Anderson:
Hi, welcome to Q and A on Breakthrough Leadership. I'm Craig Anderson, and I'm Lou Quinto, on today's episode we're going to turn the tables a little bit from a prior conversation we had about employer attitudes and start to look at the U S worker perspectives on remote work, a Gallop on an organization. I'm sure many people are familiar with has been polling workers throughout this timeframe, and really overall on a, their thoughts and opinions on remote work. And they finished an analysis of the end of May, Lou that found seven and 10 employees are still working remotely and only about 25% of them on a return to the workplace, shockingly enough. And half people would rather work from home COVID aside and you had COVID concerns for people wanting to work from home and that number approach 75%.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah. So we, we thought today, it'd be great to look to see what does this mean for employee attitudes as we start asking them to come back to work potentially. So we're going to talk about three areas today. One, how many workers are reporting? They work from home and how has that changed over time to what does this mean for employee engagement? How's this going to change? How employees feel about the workplace? And then third, when businesses do reopen our workers going to be willing to return. So Lou, why don't we kind of jump right into our first discussion topic here around the scope of remote work. What have we found through Gallup? You're finding that workers are liking working from home and on the majority, initially there may have been some pushback. I don't feel comfortable, but you know, with technology that we've, we've really adapted quite well.
Lou Quinto:
The workforce has really proved that that they've been very agile to be able to adapt to a situation thrown into a situation. And it wasn't just go work from home remotely. It was worked for home remotely. Don't go to the stores, don't go out on the streets, take care of your kids. And so it was, you talk about getting thrown into the fire instead of the fire pan or the frying pan. It was they've proved to be very agile. A lot of people are settling into what I could do this long. And I'm talking to a lot of my friends who never worked from remote before and sort of looked at me, who's really worked remotely or worked from my home for almost 20 years. And they've looked at me and said, I understand why you can do what you do. And it's difficult. At first she'd developed, they've developed the discipline, they've set their hours. They've come up with their workspace in the house and everything. And now they they've hit their group. They're the group because they don't have to, if there was a commute involved that they had to drive into the city, that commute time is gone and they having to dress up to go to work, except for maybe putting on a shirt and a tie, but you got sweats on underneath. I'm not going to stand up.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah, I think a lot. I think a lot of people have found, I like this and it can work even, even people my age that never worked remotely are saying, wow, this is good.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah. I think we're going to see the challenge I think of this remote work has been, especially if they had kids or something like that is you had this kind of like suddenly I had to go set from zero to 60 working from home and you had a lot of these distractions. And so it made it a little hard to kind of focus on it. But longer term is those kinds of issues kind of either get used to, or we get back to sending kids back to school. People are going to kind of reflect on it and say I can get a lot done here and you know, I can do some of it on my own terms with the right employer mindset. They can really find that, Hey, if you're getting the work done, I'm not going to get to down on specific hours, we're going to see people become even more embracing of it over time. The one part we've seen in some other discussions we've had is people kind of miss that collegiality of work. And they miss kind of seeing Bob for coffee in the morning or over at the water cooler. But I,
Lou Quinto:
Some people may be glad they're not seeing Bob at the water cooler at the coffee pot in the mornings. Don't jump to conclusions. Yeah.
Lou Quinto:
That couldn't be the case. One of the challenges has been it wasn't only worked from home, as you said, it was, don't leave your home. So now as people actually get out and they can go to dinner with friends and they can start going back to events obviously limited bits as this grows back. But I wonder if people start getting that social impact outside of the working from home does even that issue go away,
Craig P. Anderson:
It'll compensate. It'll compensate for what they've missed back at the office. And again, going back to this whole thing and you made the mention of being thrust into this all at one time, I truly, we don't, we're human beings. We don't like change in essence, when it comes to just looking at the business model of remote work, it's good that we were all forced at the same time to make that change. There's not that motivation. That's not that fire that sizzle that, okay, I've got to do it now. Forced people to change was really made that thing. Just flip over real fast that, okay, I'm going to do this. So it helped with that mental, that mindset of I've got to make this work as opposed to I'm trying it out.
Lou Quinto:
Right, right. So we'll see how that kind of grows, but it does lead to some questions still about employee engagement. You know, it's such a complicated, complicated relationship between employee engagement and remote work. What some studies have found amplified had done some research that's shot saw workers that have the option to work remotely had the highest engagement, but they had that option when they had no remote option, there was lower engagement. But interestingly, what they pointed out where there's really three things that people needed to feel good and engaged in a remote work situation, one was goal support, right? To understand exactly what my goals are to find success and resources, autonomy, clear direction on goals. And the without a pathway, you will do it this way, this way, this way. And then role clarity limiting work view and connecting daily on tasks, which are all things I think you and I have been advocating for just from a leadership perspective in general. So, so what do you think, Lou, how can leaders start to build and play engagement in this new world?
Craig P. Anderson:
Well first of all, going back to something you said, is it because our business model has always been the carrot and the stick type of arrangement where you provide someone in an incentive or bonus a year end increase if they perform at a certain level. And I think studies have shown that the extrinsic rewards don't work as well as the inner intrinsic rewards. And those intrinsic rewards is my self motivation, me getting the job done, me, being able to focus on a goal for finding that guy I'm going to get to the engagement part here. Now I'll make the transition to what you're going to do is you're going to find that people, because this is more intrinsic versus extrinsic, they're going to make the effort to really create the engagement online through zoom calls and things like that at using Slack and really using technology that they didn't use as much in the office.
Craig P. Anderson:
They're really going to explore and see a lot of the functionality and the benefits of a lot of those platforms that help with teams and engagement. And we're going through that right now. We've got new toys, we're playing with them, we're learning with them. But again, it goes back to that, that the engagement not only has to come from the leader, but I think engagement has to come also from the person themselves. Do I want to be engaged or do I want to feel like I'm out on an Island? And I'm just going to do my work and I don't care about everybody else. People are going to find that in order to do just their work, they're going to have to get other people input. They're going to need to get resources from other people. There's going to get need to get work projects that they need to finish up from other people they're going to just like, we've been forced into a remote work. They're going to be forced into finding ways to maintain high engagement, not being in the office.
Lou Quinto:
Yup. Yeah. I know. I think you're exactly right. It's it falls on both sides of this equation for people to be engaged, right? This is regardless of you're working from home or working in an office, you are spending a lot of your lifetime working in the office. So finding a way to feel engaged and to kind of understand what it is this means to me and how this, how many engaging in the workforce is going to be important. So, so I think it's kind of an interesting symbiotic we're going to see going forward, right? Leaders are going to have to kind of provide that access. And with that kind of freedom comes some responsibility from the man, from the employees to say, all right, I'm going to step up and get things done. So the last thing is you know, we've heard a lot about, and I always enjoy these big news reports.
Lou Quinto:
You know, Twitter and Facebook are going to move to a hundred percent remote work. Well, there's a shock, right. You know, we know it's going to start there. But that's not really a representative sample. You know, when you think about it, most companies are small businesses, right? They're under a hundred employees. And so this, it means a very different thing. Cause they don't necessarily have the same resources to just blow everything out and do work from home right out of the gate. They want, if some employers are kind of going back to this transition and they may want to have some people back in the office, you know what a worker's think about it. And what we've seen from Gallup is 26% said, if it were up to them, they'd returned to work. So it's really I think we've seen this over and over is it's only about a quarter of people are really chomping at the bit to go back to working in an office.
Lou Quinto:
25% would stay home due to COVID concerns. So presumably they're willing to go back into the office if Coke is no longer an issue. And then the rest, the other half said, Hey, man, I'd really prefer to work from home. So how do you as an employer who says I'm good with this work from home, but I'm not great with work from home. I'd love to kind of maybe get to some interim step. How do you think employers should start to look at this when they're smaller and don't have those big resources?
Craig P. Anderson:
Well, again, looking at it from the employee perspective this time they want to be able to work in an environment that they work best in. And as the, as gala pointed out, 50% of people said, I can do this the rest of my life working from home. And you're always going to have that 25% to a third who no, I liked the old way. We did things and I want to go back and, and they just feel that's their comfort zone. There's no right or wrong to that. But that tends to be their comfort zone. You're going to find those 75% of the entire population they're open. Do this work for employers, small businesses. You, you mentioned a hundred I'm even thinking of employers who only have like six or seven employees. Okay. What is it going to what is it going to do to them?
Craig P. Anderson:
Is that something that remote work is they can continue to do? And that goes back to another conversation we had in a previous video is that companies are going to have to look at positions and there are going to be some positions that can't be done from home period. End of story, of financial position where they they've got very sensitive material and documents and cybersecurity becomes a major issue. And to really spread a company's tentacles of cybersecurity into individual homes of workers is I don't think that's cost effective. So I do think you'll find that there will be some jobs that are required to be at an office, but at the same time, I think you're going to find that some offices may reduce their footprint and you may have some open offices, some conference rooms and things like that, that people can come and go. And so they can be sometime in the office. And sometimes we're primarily working remote. You're going to find that there's going to be over time. There's going to be a balance and you're going to offices will not be eliminated. So if you own an office building or in the real estate office the commercial industry, don't, I don't worry about your office space. Some companies will reduce their footprint. There's no question about that.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah. I've, I've I've thought a lot of it, there's so many different things. As I start thinking about this change, as you know, one before COVID, everyone was kind of saying, Oh this whole open office space thing is a disaster. And this whole non assigned desk things is a disaster. Now it's like all of a sudden it, actually, those things probably were a disaster. When you had all the workforce still coming to the office, you could sit wherever you wanted every day. So that kind of changes things up. Right? So maybe that open office concept is still there with kind of the flexible seating. But you might just want to bring Clorox wipes with you when you come into the office every week.
Craig P. Anderson:
Right. But you're also going to find that a lot of companies are going to be taking those protections and those precautions by putting up taller cubicles you know, if they had small cubicles that you could just literally stand up one of those you know, Prairie dogs and looking around for somebody because of the social distancing that you're going to see the return of the higher cubicle wall companies will make significant changes within their office because going forward, we want to be able to prepare ourselves if there's going to be another pandemic lessons learned.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah. It's I, there's so many interesting things. I think right now, I think we're seeing that big swing of the pendulum. Oh yeah. Let's all work from home and we'll see how long it stays away over here. Right. Everything kind of wants to have a tendency to get back to the middle. So I think we'll get some sense of that over the next few years. But you know, as we keep looking with this kind of COVID could come back on the fall, it could be here next year. We don't want to, we don't know how long this is going to last. So I think people have to start making the decisions, but to your point on some jobs having to be in the office what re I kind of was always of the opinion that you can let a lot of things work from home, but you start getting into a call center. That's impossible. And then I look at my clients with huge call centers who have PII data in front of them, and they've got them working from home. So at this point, I'm not sure anything's impossible on the work from home front, but we can see a lot. I think a lot of those kinds of paradigms haven't shifted, they've just been broken. So I it'll be interesting to watch. So
Craig P. Anderson:
You're going to, you're going to find employees that need specialized equipment like E here in Indianapolis, Eli Lilly, the laboratories that you can't recreate that at home. Okay. Architects who have these big CAD printing machines and things like that, they will be spending some time in the office cause they have to use that machinery. If you will find that that where specialized equipment is involved and you can't buy one for everybody to put into their house, it's easy for a company, buy a laptop and a to somebody and say, okay, you're ready to go. As opposed to someone who works in a situation where their equipment is specialized, they won't work from remote. Excellent. All right, well, what are your key takeaways? Lu key takeaways. You mentioned the pendulum has swung. And as we all know, in physics, the pendulum will come. What will come down towards center?
Craig P. Anderson:
What we need to do is it comes down towards center. Is employees really need to look at themselves. First did this work for me? Am I productive? And my meeting my needs intrinsically as opposed to just the extrinsic value of the annual report annual review. When I go in and my boss tells me I hit my goals, but that's great, but is it doing anything for me? And is the engagement there? Is that working with other people and the collaboration there that really makes me happy. If it's not, then that's going to be some of the people that filter back to an office. But I, I, yeah, we'll get back. We'll get back to a situation where we've tried out an experiment. It's worked in many instances. Now what we need to do is figure out what worked, what went well, what didn't go well, and those things that went well, keep those things that didn't go well, we need to toss to the side.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah, I agree. I think my takeaway is really, this is going to be, this is going to be something to watch over time. It's hard. I think we're all, as you said, in another video, we're all still so close to it. And everything seemed we haven't had that opportunity to kind of take a breath and look back D that maybe over the next six or eight months, hopefully as things kind of other priorities kind of move away and leaders will start looking and employees will start looking to say, all right, what's the best way to make this? You know, I could even see situations where some employees may say, well, I don't want really want to work from home. I don't want to go to the big corporate office. Maybe I'll run some small office space just to get that distinction in my life.
Craig P. Anderson:
There's a lot to come on this, but it's definitely something that I think we need to keep watching every week or every few months and check in on this topic. It's almost like Deming's process improvement. You know, where you plan, do check and act, going to be a situation where in process improvement, we need to constantly keep gathering this data asking what's going well, what's not going well, what did we learn? You know, what problems did we incur? How might we be able to do that? So that this way, every time you do those check-ins, as you said, monthly checkins or every other month, check in and say, okay, where are we that you have the data? You just don't have people's memories to say, Hey, this is what we should do. Then you actually go back to process improvement is gather data and keep that data.
Craig P. Anderson:
So that this way you have, as they say in Washington, true facts that you can use to be able to make your decisions going forward. I hope everyone's enjoyed this particular episode of the perspective of remote work from the U S work. If you liked it episode, please go ahead. Like share. We can be found on LinkedIn. We can be found on Facebook. And in addition to that, we can be found as a podcast format on your favorite podcast platform. So until next time, keep your hands washed. Keep your distance. I'm Lou Quinto and I'm Craig Anderson.