Doing Remote and Hybrid Right with Wayne Turmel
Watch/Listen here or on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts“I believe as the leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the company. So if you don't have that consistent and significant sustainable growth, you've got some work to do.” — Mike Goldman
“A hybrid team, … in most cases, is not a strategy, it's a hostage negotiation.”
–Wayne Turmel
Wayne Turmel has spent 26 years studying workplace communication. He is the author of 16 books, including The Long-Distance Leader and The Long-Distance Team. He is a remote and hybrid workplace expert for the Kevin Eikenberry Group.
The Importance of Candor in Leadership
Candor: Key trait for effective leadership. Should be honest but also kind and fair.
Sacrificing candor for harmony: A team cannot perform at its best if honesty is sacrificed for the sake of avoiding conflict.
Remote candor: Remote settings can sometimes foster more openness, but expectations must be clearly communicated by leadership.
Challenges and Pitfalls of Hybrid Work
Hybrid meetings: Often poorly structured, with in-person attendees dominating.
Hybrid work misconceptions: Many companies treat hybrid work as a compromise, not a strategic decision.
Lack of strategy: Hybrid work often becomes an unintentional mix of in-person and remote work without a clear goal or structure.
Strategic Hybrid Work Approaches
Intention vs. Compromise: Hybrid work should be strategically planned, not just a negotiation between employee and employer preferences.
Office work vs. Remote work: Certain tasks are better suited for in-office days (e.g., meetings, brainstorming), while focused work can be more productive remotely.
Productivity focus: Organizations are shifting from measuring hours worked to evaluating results.
Defining and Maintaining Company Culture Remotely
The Three Cs of Company Culture:
Communication: Tools and methods used (e.g., email, in-person meetings, video calls).
Collaboration: How tasks are completed and how teams interact.
Cohesion: How teams foster relationships and maintain a sense of belonging.
Challenges of Remote Cohesion: Informal interactions, such as hallway chats, are lost in remote settings, requiring deliberate efforts to build relationships.
Leadership in a Remote Environment
Measuring productivity: Shift from monitoring hours to evaluating tangible outcomes.
Feedback in remote teams: Positive feedback tends to be less frequent. Leaders must proactively provide both positive and corrective feedback.
Communication channels: Leaders should choose the most appropriate methods for communication, using video or phone calls for sensitive or complex conversations instead of email.
Building Relationships in Remote Teams
Intentional relationship building: Remote employees need structured, intentional interactions (e.g., one-on-one meetings) to replicate informal office conversations.
Team-building activities: Fun, casual moments (e.g., virtual icebreakers or personalized gifts) can enhance morale and team cohesion.
The Future of Remote and Hybrid Work
Seismic shift in work: The move to remote and hybrid work is one of the biggest changes in the workplace since the 1930s.
Generational preferences: Younger workers may prefer in-person interactions for training and socialization, while more experienced employees value remote work for flexibility.
Thanks for listening!
Apply for a free coaching call with me
Get a Free Gift ⬇️
🆓 The limitless organization short video course
Connect with me
www.instagram.com/mikegoldmancoach/
www.facebook.com/mikegoldmancoach/
www.www.linkedin.com/in/mgoldman10/
I invite you to assess your team In all these areas by taking an online 30-question assessment for both you and your team at
-
Mike Goldman: Wayne Turmel has spent 26 years fascinated by how people communicate. or don't at work. He's the author of 16 books, including the long distance leader, revised rules for remarkable remote and hybrid leadership. That's the tongue teaser. He's the remote and emerging workplace expert for the Kevin Eikenberry group.
He lives in Las Vegas and I am super, super interested in talking to him because obviously over the last few years, I'm not sure a subject like remote and hybrid work. I'm not sure there's a subject that's come up more often than how do we deal with that stuff?
So I'm super excited. So Wayne, thanks for doing this.
Wayne Turmel: Thanks for having me, man. Let's do this.
Mike Goldman: Love it.
So first question I always ask is from your experience, what do you believe is the one most important characteristic of a great
Wayne Turmel: leadership team
On a leadership team, probably the most important thing is candor. And I don't mean, you know, brutal honesty, although it might be that. you can be very candid and very honest and still kind and fair and those types of things. But if you are sacrificing what you really think or what you bring to the table on the altar of collegiality, Or, you know, just so we all get along, and I don't want to upset Bob, you are not working as a team at your highest possible level.
Mike Goldman: First off, screw Bob. I'm sick of him. I'm not worried about upsetting him, but so I'm going to take, I'm going to take your answer. And I love that. I'm going to, from the very beginning, link it
Wayne Turmel: I'll
Mike Goldman: our subject here and ask you a question that is, have you found, is it easier or harder? To be, to have that level of candor, that level of brutal honesty, or I had a client tell me I needed to change that to courageous honesty.
And I thought that was
Wayne Turmel: go with that.
Mike Goldman: it, but is it easier or harder to do that on a zoom call or a team's call in a remote
Wayne Turmel: environment
Okay, I'm gonna be a weasel and say it depends, and here's what I mean by that.there is some evidence that there are teams that are more candid and more able to contribute where they come from. In a remote environment because you're not sitting across the table from Bob who is shooting you daggers and daring you to speak.
there is some evidence that people who normally get shut down in in person meetings, people who are physically smaller, shyer, maybe have less tenure, are a little more willing to speak when they don't have to deal with the idea of getting cornered in the hallway the minute they leave. But it's only going to work if the expectation of that candor is set in advance.
There has to be the expectation and there has to be evidence that you really mean it. Which means, if somebody's kind of talking over somebody on a Zoom call, somebody needs to call shenanigans on that.
Mike Goldman: so what's the leader's role. So again, I always go back to the leadership team. What's the leader's role? How should they be setting those expectations to make sure, Hey, it's okay to call BS on me, or it's okay to disagree with the group or give tough feedback or say, I'm sorry. Or say I made a mistake.
What's the best way for a leader to model
Wayne Turmel: first of all, the best way for the leader to set that is to actually say it, right? Say it out loud. Don't expect that everybody knows the rules of engagement, particularly if your team has settled into you. Yeah. whatever norm it is, and that norm isn't what you want it to be. In other words, things have kind of settled, people have gotten complacent, this is what it is, and until something shakes it up, this is what you're gonna get.
So stating expectations and getting everybody's buy in is really important up front. I think another part of that is that you need to model it, right? And I'll give you a really stupid, simple example.
You're in one of these painful hybrid meetings. Some people are in the conference room. Some people are dialing in on Teams or whatever.
And unless you really are intentional about it. The people in the room run the meeting because we follow our eyes, right? And if I see that Alice wants to say something, my instinct is to go, Alice, you want to say something? Meanwhile, you know, Terry is out in the provinces trying to get a word in edgewise, and inevitably, Okay, what do the people online think?
Well, all the good stuff is taken, it's already been said, or now I'm ticked off and I'm not really, you know, up for having this fight right now. so, it really seems like Starts with being explicit about what's expected and then supporting it. Like I say, if somebody is running roughshod over somebody else, you know, it is, if the leader is running the meeting, it's the person running the meetings job to go, Hey, hold on a second.
Bob's talking.
Mike Goldman: Yeah, I've only, I've actually gone so far and tell me if you think this is a good idea or a crappy idea is I have gone so far if I'm in one of those hybrid meetings that are tough, some are in a room and some are separate, I've actually said if we can do it, stay in your own office and do it from your laptop, we're either all remote or we're all together, half and half is
Wayne Turmel: Well, yeah, hybrid meetings are hybrid. Anything is tough. And I don't know if you want to go down this rabbit hole.
Most of what we are calling hybrid work is not really, and so we're just kind of compromising our way through.
Mike Goldman: What does that
Wayne Turmel: Okay,
Mike Goldman: that.
Wayne Turmel: what we have in most situations post COVID is people say, We have a hybrid team, which means we want people in the office three days a week and the other two they can work from home that in most cases is not a strategy, it's a hostage negotiation.
The company says, how much can we ask them to come back to the office before they all quit on us? And the employees say, how much can we whine about going back to the office and still get paid? And they settle on two, three days a week. And they kind of Work it out from there and it kind of works because people are intelligent and mean well and try, right?
But a hybrid if you're gonna get really specific and we're gonna think hybrid as a strategy going forward. A hybrid in biological terms, he says geeking out now, is two beings that Come together to form a third entity, and that third entity is its own thing. Classic example is a mule. A mule is, yes, it's a horse, and yes, it's a donkey.
But a mule is a mule. Anybody who has done time with mules knows that they are neither a horse nor a donkey. They are their own thing. And what you want is you want to say, We want a mule, and that's going to require. Doing very different things than say, and here's an analogy you've never heard. However many episodes you've done of this show, I guarantee you've never heard this.
What you want is a mule, not a platypus.
Mike Goldman: Oh, I've heard that
Wayne Turmel: Okay, for those not familiar with this analogy, allow me to explain. A platypus is kind of a cool animal, right? It's got a beak like a duck and a tail like a beaver, and it's got poisonous toenails on its back legs. It's kind of a, it lays eggs. It's cool. But it is an evolutionary dead end. That type of animal just basically kept adapting to major changes in its environment, but there was certainly no plan and no thought gone into, why do we need poisonous toenails on our back legs, right?
It just, it's an evolutionary dead end, apologies to all creationists, but it just, it's been allowed to just kind of happen. And as a result in the places where it lives, it's doing okay, but it can't live anywhere else. And it certainly isn't expanding its territory. It's just,
What you want is something that is intentional, that's replicatable, that has some thought into why are we doing it this way? And are we going to get what we want if we do it this way?
So there's the when I say hybrid, this Kind of negotiated settlement thing isn't really a strategy, it's a coping mechanism.
If you're going to be strategic about hybrid work, and this is, senior leaders need to listen to this, it's not just what work gets done where, right? It's not just, well, sometimes you can work at home, sometimes you can work in the office. That's part of it. But it's also what work gets done where, when. So, I'll give you an example of how this works.
On a platypus team, you know, we've negotiated they gotta come in three days a week. And what I'm hearing is, I can't get any work done when I'm at the office. I'm trying to get my work done, people are stopping by my desk. It's Alice's birthday, there's cake in the break room. People are having conversations all around me.
I can't get any work done. And then I go home and I can't get any work done because I'm on zoom calls from morning till night. Well, what if we didn't try to get things checked off our task list when we went to the office, those are the days we have our coaching conversations. Those are the days you have.
As many meetings as you can have that day. Yeah. You're not getting work done. Quote unquote, you're not getting stuff checked off your task list, but it's the stuff that is best done human to human. The brainstorming, the thinking. When I am not working in the office, leave me the heck alone to focus to get my stuff done.
And by the way, if I'm not in the office, why are you insisting that I log on at 9 in the morning and log off at 5 o'clock, right? Does the work that I am doing need to be done synchronously with everybody else? Or, as long as that report is done, in your inbox when you want it and it's of the right quality and it's good work, what do you care if I choose to work on that at 10 o'clock at night and go to the gym in the morning?
Mike Goldman: imagine that, that might depend on the role, right? There are some roles where it's like, Hey, as long as you get it done and other roles were like, Hey, I need you to be around for X, Y, and Z. But it's thinking strategically about that. And I love what you're saying because I have seen so often, and I love the picture of, you know, being strategic or is it a hostage negotiation? what I've seen in organizations that is frustrating for everyone involved. Is I've got to be in the office two days a week. Because that's the policy and all that means is I'm doing the same crap that I could have done at home. You've now just added 90 minutes on to my commute and people are knocking on my door and bothering me.
Like I could have done a better job of that at home. But I love the idea of saying let's have when you're at work, that's coaching. That's meetings. and, you know, the only thing I want to be clear of is it's say, well, those are when you're not taking stuff off your to do list, I think, especially for leaders, the meetings and the coaching, that's some of the most important
Wayne Turmel: Absolutely.
Mike Goldman: right?
That's where the big decisions are made. That's where you're helping grow your people. But I love the idea of thinking about how we, how and when we use that time best versus just, I need you in the
Wayne Turmel: Yeah, because the question, you know, if you start digging, it's like everything else, you know, this, it's like everything else when you start, well, why do you want them in the office? And it kind of falls into two buckets. The first bucket is Well, I want them talking to each other. We want that spontaneity.
We want to build relationships. And it's not that stuff can't happen remotely, but I understand the desire to do that. And in some ways it is best done human to human. The second bucket is I'm paying for this office and you can fire a cannon off in the middle of it and nobody's there. And I'm in the office, darn it, and I am here all by myself.
That's not a great reason. That's actually a really good reason to start analyzing your real estate strategy.
Mike Goldman: Yeah. The other thing I see too, is I want people in the office be, and they may not say it exactly the way I'm saying it, but they say it all the same. I want them in the office. Cause I don't trust they're productive when they're at
Wayne Turmel: it's funny at the beginning of COVID and I'm going to behind the curtain, dear listener, understand that very few senior leaders actually believed that was going to work. They did not for a moment, but they did it because they had to, and we don't know what else to do. And so they pushed everybody across the Rubicon.
And you know what happened in the first six months of remote work? Employee engagement went up and productivity either went up or stayed the same. And they were at a loss as to how to explain this. The first line managers could have told them. When we wrote the original version of Long Distance Leader, one of the questions we asked was, what are you most concerned about as a leader?
Are my people working? Was like number five. on the list. Because the individual team leaders knew their people. They knew when people worked from home, they got stuff done. They weren't worried about it. Senior leaders had mostly never worked from home. They'd never worked remotely. If I'm being generous, and I like to think I'm a generous soul, I cut them a lot of grace.
Because if I am a VP at a bank, from the time, the day I graduated college. The way it was done was you went to the office, you network, you met with people, you had mentors. It was 60 hour days and all that craziness. And that's how you did it in this industry. That's how you got ahead. And so a lot of these leaders are like, I want my people to get ahead.
I want them to be successful. And the only way I know to be successful is to do it the way I did. So cutting them some slack and some grace for that. Yeah. I totally understand, and as you said, it depends on the job you do. It depends on the industry you're in. It depends on a lot of stuff and, you know, now that it's over, I remember Jamie Diamond at Citibank coming out a year and a half ago and saying, okay, get your tails into the office and if you don't come into the office.
we will continue to pay you, but you are, on the job track, not the career track. Do not expect to get promoted. Do not expect stellar performance evaluations. if you want a career, get into the office. And everybody lost their minds. And predictably, there have been changes to that original policy, depending on department, depending on the fact that it became really hard to hire people to Citibank.
And so they made some changes. Now, Amazon has come out and said, everybody's going back to the office. stamp, no erases, no remote work. This is it. Okay. You're Amazon. You can do whatever you want. I don't need to tell Jeff Bezos how to run a business. And let's see in a year and a half from now, are you keeping your good people?
Are you attracting new people? I mean, this is one of those hybrid things, right? We want the best absolute world class talent, but they got to be in the office three to five days a week.
Mike Goldman: Where I want to hit on this. I'm glad you went in this direction. Cause it's exactly where I wanted to go and kind of stepping back. Cause I do want to get a little bit more of your sense, you know, as of this.
Wayne Turmel: Yes.
Mike Goldman: Amazon, as you just said, announced just last week, everybody's got to come back to the office starting January one or whatever it is. Starbucks didn't make an announcement like that, but evidently Starbucks came up with something where their CEO said, Hey, we gotta be where the work really gets done. And he was kind of hinting like something else is going to
Wayne Turmel: Well, okay, but let's just put a pin in that because the CEO of Starbucks who said that is no longer the CEO of Starbucks and the new CEO of Starbucks lives in New York and is not moving to Seattle.
Mike Goldman: I thought I could be wrong, but I thought this came like, Last week from
Wayne Turmel: that might be news to me, but if the new CEO is not moving to Seattle, A lot of people are going to tell him to pound sand.
Mike Goldman: he's getting, yeah, well, so here's my question, regardless of the Starbucks thing is what, you know, I have clients have just gotten to the point where they're like, this is the way life is. and it's always going to be remote slash, you know, some hybrid. I've got my daughter who's 28 years old, who has been remote since pandemic. loves it that way, as I think of a lot of 20 something and early 30 somethings like you know, my guess is, and I hope her boss isn't listening to this, my guess is if they said, sorry, you got to go back to work even three days a week. She probably started looking for another job. Like there are people that are like, this is going to be the rest of my life, the rest of all of our lives. And then I get other clients that are like, at some point, we're all coming back into work because this is BS. It doesn't work. And you've got Amazon's announcement.
What's your view of kind of what's the state of remote. Slash hybrid now. And do you have a sense of three to five years from now? Is it still remote and hybrid or are more people back to work?
what do you, where do you think
Wayne Turmel: Okay, if I had that kind of foresight, I would be sitting on a beach cashing in my OTB slips. So, I'm not. And therefore, take this for exactly how much you paid for it.we are right now, at this moment, in the middle of maybe the most seismic change in the way we work since the 1930s. And by that I mean the 1930s, unions were starting to get things like the 40 hour work week and the five days a week and, we were commuting all of a sudden, right?
We were leaving the farm and we were moving into town or, you know, It was a very fundamental change in what it meant to work. We're going through one of those things now. What does it mean to go to work? Does it mean in fact you have to go to work? And it's always going to be a little bit messy because depending on the business you're in, Clearly.
I mean, Amazon has a 20th century factory mentality because with the exception of its computing power, it is a 20th century factory. There's stuff in a warehouse needs to be put on a truck and delivered and more stuff needs to be put in the warehouse. There is a logic to having people there to do that.
depending on the business you're in, but it's also going to be what do people want out of their job, right? It's interesting. You mentioned your daughter. What we're actually finding is that people just out of school want to spend a little more time in the office. And there's a couple of reasons for that.
One is they don't know their job yet. Right? You need to get trained. You need to get on boarded. You need to do that. They have just left school. Their entire social structures have been blown up. The people they've hung out with since they were seven are now working other jobs in other parts of town or other cities.
I don't know anybody, right? There's a social component to work that at that stage of your life is very important. But if you're a 15 year veteran or a middle manager and you know your job and you don't need somebody standing over you to do it. Those are the people that are saying, yeah, let me work from home so I can actually see my wife and kids and spend time in the house that I pay for, you know, have something resembling a life.
So it's going to take a while to kind of shake out. We're going, we learned during the pandemic that there were jobs that we didn't think could be done remotely that are just fine done that way. Thank you.one of the people on my podcast, the long distance work life, was the CEO. He just recently left, but he was the CEO of a probably top 20 accounting firm, not one of the big five, but a good sized company.
And. He went completely remote with the exception of a very small handful of office staff. And I said, well, why did you make that decision? I mean, if there's an industry that is tradition bound and, you know, you don't think of as terribly innovative. He goes, what do most CPAs do all day? They sit at their desk.
They talk on the phone with their clients. They all have their own list of people. They talk on the phone to their clients. They don't interact with their peers very often. And when they do, we have a meeting. Why am I making them schlep an hour and a half a day to come into the office to sit on the phone and not talk to the people around them?
And it was Like a bomb went off in the CPA industry because people were like, this is crazy. Dogs and cats living together. It's just madness.
Mike Goldman: How do you, so in a situation like that and accounting firms and consulting firms and law firms, maybe a little different because they're. Even when they're at the office, they're talking to their clients, they're out working with their clients. It has some impact on culture. and I want to dive into a culture question how as leaders who are a remote and or a remote or a hybrid environment. How should we be thinking about building and maintaining culture
Because that's the one thing, especially as we onboard new folks and they're not necessarily in the office, you know, with the, you know, with the historian of the company
Wayne Turmel: Right?
Mike Goldman: and doesn't do too much, but knows
Wayne Turmel: Right.
Mike Goldman: know.
And that's the guy you want to talk to in the cafeteria or the proverbial water cooler. And you're not getting that. So as leaders, How do we think about building and
Wayne Turmel: you just use the two words,
Mike Goldman: in
Wayne Turmel: which are build and maintain. And those are active verbs, right? We think of culture as something that just evolves. Like if we all work together long enough, we're going to develop a culture. And that's true. The question is it the culture that you want? So when you're thinking about culture and we introduce this concept in long distance leader, but we go into a lot more depth in the long distance team, we actually had a big, long conversation about this.
And we said, okay, what is culture? Well, the approved HR smart alakey answer is culture is how we do it here, right? How we do it here is going to be different than another company. So our question was, okay, what is it? What are the things that you do that make you different than somebody else?
And we basically boiled it down to three components, communication, collaboration, cohesion.
If you want to understand your company, look at how do we communicate? And that could be the tools that we use, Right? Are we, an email heavy kind of company? do we have a lot of one on one conversations? Do we communicate as a team a lot? all those kinds of, when do we hold meetings? When do we not?
Those are communication questions. Style of communication is really important. The second one is the mother of them all, and that's collaboration. How does the work get done? If you look at the workflows, who does what with which and to whom, where the handoffs are, how do we get the end product out the door to our customers?
How do we collaborate? And what a lot of places find is, you know, we don't actually have that many events or that many moments where people are actually talking to each other a lot. There's a few of those. And then there's a bunch of work that people just go off and do it. Okay. If you're not getting together every day and you're not having these, maybe you don't need to be in the office every day to have that.
But that's the important one, right? Because nothing happens if the work doesn't get done and the product doesn't get shipped and the customers write the checks. Finally, the third C is cohesion, which is how do we stick together? How do, what's it going to be like on a personal, social, psychological level to work here?
And it's amazing how different places can be. Some places put a premium on fun. Fun is important. We like to have fun. Other places are like, nope, we're super serious. I talked earlier about candor. This is where companies really start to struggle a little bit with culture because
is this the kind of place where it's really important that you don't rock the boat or make anybody feel bad and so everything needs to be kind of negotiated and settled and we're really big on collaboration and
No conflict. And other places are like, screw conflict, buttheads all day long, super competitive.
But that's a choice, right? We choose to set up our systems and our promotion systems and all kinds of things, and that, if communication, collaboration, cohesion, if you can define those things, you've defined your company culture.
Mike Goldman: but here's my concern.
I think you hit on it now and I want to dive a little deeper into this, the communication and collaboration. Got it. The cohesion part, which I think is super important. It's why it's one of the three, but it's the cohesion part where I have seen the biggest
Wayne Turmel: impact negatively
Yes.
Mike Goldman: of remote and hybrid, because. In a room when you're remote, you get on your zoom call or your team's call, you have your meeting. You're now off the meeting. You move on to the next thing. You don't have the conversation in the hallway on the way to the meeting. The conversation hanging out for five minutes after the meeting. Let's go grab a lunch.
Let's grab a cup of coffee and talk about it. You don't have, as I kind of alluded to before, it's a real situation where had a software company I've been working with for many years. They had a leader who was in his late seventies or early eighties, did not have a super important position. Executing in the company anymore, but was so important from a culture standpoint, because he knew everything that happened.
He'd been with the company 50 years. And people went remote, his value dropped to near nothing because you didn't see him in the hallway and have those casual conversations. So how do we better build that cohesion when we're
Wayne Turmel: and it is difficult and it's going to take some flailing around and some people were naturally good at it and other people kind of melted down and didn't do so well during COVID. But I'll give you an example of this. We just recently, we're a 15 person Ish company slash team, and we just hired a new sales guy.
Well, the new sales guys first assignment beyond, you know, get hooked to the network, his first assignment was you need to reach out to every other member of the team, every one of those 14 people and set up a half hour, one on one webcam conversation with every one of them. Now, that sounds like a nice, soft, mushy kind of thing to do.
Why would you do that? Well, first of all, you get to meet every person on the team. What happens on a lot of remote teams is, it's the monthly team call, Hey everybody, this is Bob. Hi Bob. Bob's going to be the new guy. Okay, and then that's the last time I talk to Bob until the next meeting. So we have a half hour, which is a fair amount of time you get to, you know, you might not work with Lisa in accounting a whole lot, but you find out that she's got two kids and she's a fan of whatever she's a fan of.
And she lives in Indianapolis and, you know, she went to that school and, Hey, that's where my wife went. All the conversations that happen in the break room and that happen fairly spontaneously when we're together need to be jumpstarted. And then once you have those conversations, there are things you can do and they're not going to make everybody happy.
I'm going to tell you, those of you listening to this on audio do not realize I am a grumpy old man. And I communicate like a grumpy old man. And we have a monthly team meeting and as part of this team meeting, which is very well run and very productive, but there's always an icebreaker at the beginning, a little team.
Thing and it generally makes me cringe, right? If you were a tree, what kind of tree would Oh, kill me, but we do it. and I understand,
Mike Goldman: hold on. I hold on. I want you to answer that question. If you were a tree. Nah,
Wayne Turmel: it's been so long since I've been asked that question. I didn't have the answer handy. But here's the thing. It's only a few minutes out of the meeting, and everybody gets a chance to talk. It's non threatening. It's not big. And Kevin did something really cool with this one particular meeting. He started the meeting.
What's your favorite candy? When you were a kid, man, what was the, what was your favorite candy? And everybody, and I went, okay, and I gave him my answer. Well, three weeks later, there's a three pound bag of gummy bears at my front door. And you know, I live in Las Vegas. I needed to get it in the house before became one giant three pound gummy bear, right?
We take it in the house and there's no note, no who it from, who it's from, anything like that. And I had completely forgotten. That we had this conversation, but pretty soon the messages start, Hey, did you get something on your front door? Yeah, I got gummy bears. What did you get? And it was this really cool moment.
where people were reaching out to each other and laughing and kind of having fun, not wasting days at it. I mean, you know, but just a couple of minutes of what did you get? What did you get? And it was this really nice kind of thing that didn't take a lot of time to do, but it had a ripple effect. You know, the social component of work is really important.
When you and I were lads. Until fairly recently, two thirds of long term relationships began at work. You either dated somebody from work, shh, don't tell HR, or somebody had a sister,
Mike Goldman: or
Wayne Turmel: or somebody had a sister, or, you know, because at a 24 hours a day, you spend a third of it at work. And even including weekends, human beings get 60 percent of their social interaction for the week in the workplace.
Well, if you suddenly stop doing that, right? But here's the thing. Now, a third of long term relationships begin online.
You're in a chat group. You're in the same Facebook group. Somebody meets somebody. So you do some kind of texting back and forth and kind of feel each other out figuratively before you go and have your date. And it kind of works. You can do that. Now you still need to get together. You still need to interact in real time, but you can keep the plate spinning for a lot longer remotely than we used to think you could.
Mike Goldman: Yeah, I think the key in what you're saying is there are things you have to be proactive about that may have just been more natural if we were in person, where you don't have to say if you were a tree, what cry, because you'd have a conversation before the meeting started after the meeting ended. so I think it's just finding out for you what works, because I remember, you During the pandemic and for a while after the pandemic, people would do these, you know, let's do a happy hour and we'll get on for an hour and
Wayne Turmel: Oh, there is nothing sadder than a virtual happy hour. Oh,
Mike Goldman: and hated it. So, but I think, so here's the other place I want to go. So culture is one that I think continues to be a challenge, but you bring up some great points about being proactive, even with some of the little things.
The other thing I want to ask you about is leadership. which is a big word, but how should we think differently about? Leading others. And I'll give you one example of what I've talking about, which I actually think is a positive thing is, although we know this is a ridiculous concept, most of us productivity by looking at how long and
Wayne Turmel: yes.
Mike Goldman: was working. Which is a silly way to do it. It has nothing to do with results. And by the way, you may be working long and hard because you're incredibly unproductive, or you just may be trying to impress me with how long and hard you're working. when we became remote, people realized. crap. I guess I need some real ways to measure productivity because I can't see them anymore.
And I think that's a positive thing. So in that kind of realm, how should we be thinking about leading differently
Wayne Turmel: Well, what you touched on is super common, which is the easiest way to manage is by activity. Are they there at the start of the day? Are they still there at the end of the day? Do they leave their desk? That's what we used to measure, and you know, and I know that there were people that showed up on time every day and never did a darn thing.
We know that is true.so, we need to start measuring output. Is the report done? Are you talking to X number of customers a week? Are you getting your appointments? Are you, right? What are the metrics that, leads you to be successful. And then as leaders, how do we help people hit those? Well, we know we need to coach.
Well, coaching is different in a remote environment, right? In the office, I can see you going to the coffee machine and my brain goes, Hey, that's Terry. What do I need to talk to Terry about? Hey, Terry, good job in that meeting last week, right? We get all of these visual and nonverbal cues, and so we do things kind of spontaneously and organically.
I still need to give Terry that feedback, but it's kind of hard to do. When he's not right under my nose and I'm not getting those cues. And this is important because remote employees say in huge numbers, I don't get the same quality feedback and certainly not the same positive feedback from my manager that I got when I was in the office.
Doesn't mean they can't just means they don't because to see you walking to the coffee pot, and I raised my hand and go, Hey, let me give me a second. And we have a quick chat is different than sitting down and typing the four scariest words in the English language, which are. Got a minute?
Mike Goldman: Oh God, am I getting fired?
Wayne Turmel: A completely innocent request for information, right, I need to talk to you, is this a good time, is causing all kinds of drama on the other end that was not intended. So if I want to give you feedback, I actually have to sit, or grab my phone, and I have to type it out, and I have to wait for your response to see if you're there, and so it doesn't happen.
nearly as much. And when it does happen, it's usually more negative or corrective because that's when something is wrong, we get really proactive. About addressing it and talking to somebody. We're far less proactive when all we really have to say is attaboy. But cumulatively, it adds up,
Mike Goldman: So again, we need to be proactive. And I also think there are times and man, when I talked to the 20 and 30 somethings, they shoot me for this because they never use the phone to
Wayne Turmel: actually talk
right?
Mike Goldman: on the phone, but I think there are times just picking up the phone and calling somebody. And even if you're leaving a voicemail and said it got a minute and
Wayne Turmel: Yep.
Mike Goldman: out of somebody, even leaving a voicemail and saying, Hey, I thought you did a great job at that meeting.
I'd love to talk to you more about what I saw that I loved. Give me a call back when you get a chance. Like you could actually use the
Wayne Turmel: Yeah, I have a 31 year old. I have a 31 year old who does not understand that those devices transmit voice. I completely understand. But that's a really good example.
And this is where leaders need to put on their big girl, big boy leadership pants and say, Hey, we need to talk about this as a team.
What are the expectations? Because it's not just generational. Those darn kids won't pick up the phone. That crazy old man is always trying to call me. Never mind that. We have a chart in the book and it's not my chart. Bettina Buchel, European researcher. It's her.
brain job. But it basically says all communication is a balance of richness versus scope. right? Let me give you an example of a bad communication choice. My wife was once fired by instant messenger.
Yeah, see, you just said ouch and you made the ouch face, which is the correct response, by the way. Any
Mike Goldman: Thank you.
Wayne Turmel: sentient human being listening to this went, Ooh, that can't be right. There are some lousy managers who went, Can you do that? Avoid crying and dealing with them? That would be easy, right?
Mike Goldman: could do that.
Wayne Turmel: But let's take a look at a far more civilized, more normal advancer.
And we've all done it. It's four o'clock on a Thursday afternoon. I've gotta give you some feedback, but God, you know what you're like. So I'm just gonna send you an email and I'll deal with you tomorrow.
Very human thing to do, we have all done it. But every Communication choice has a couple of factors to it, right? Do I know what I want to say? But also, what is the best way to send this message? And are you intentional about it? Well, guess what, Gen Z hotshot?
This email thread has gone on for ages, and there's too much text drama, and we just need to get on a meeting and talk about this. I don't care if your head explodes. This is the right thing to do.
But so many teams have not had I've been using this example a lot. Napoleon once said, if you want to avoid war, you avoid the thousand little pin pricks that lead to war. Well, the way that we communicate is just full of little pin jabs, that if we don't address it and get proactive about it, can make us crazy.
What is the correct response time on an instant message or a text versus an email, right? If you're sending an email and sitting there drumming your fingers waiting for an answer, you're using it wrong. I don't care that it's your preferred method, it ain't the right method for that choice. if we've texted back four times and we haven't solved this problem, guess what?
You're getting a phone call or you're turning on your camera and we're going to have a chat about this because that's how you solve this problem. And if we're having a coaching conversation, you want to believe that's going to be on the days when you're in the office and we can be face to face, nose to nose, having a cup of coffee.
And if we can't for sure, we're going to be on webcam one on one so that you can see my body language. You can see my face. I can see yours. I used to hate the days when my manager would call me for coaching conversations because it was Tuesday and we always talked on Tuesday and she was in a airport lounge somewhere and every four minutes our call would be interrupted by a flight announcement.
Yes, She booked time with me. Yes, we had a call. I guarantee it wasn't the same kind of coaching conversation that they were having with people in the office.
Mike Goldman: Yeah. So important. I love all that. This is such important stuff. Tell me a little bit more.
So the KevinEikenberry group, tell me more about what you guys do and who you
Wayne Turmel: specifically do it
Sure.
Mike Goldman: for.
Wayne Turmel: We're a training and consulting company. So we, if you go to KevinEikenberry.com yes, we have classes people can sign up for. Bud to Boss, which is for new supervisors, the long distance leadership series, which is For what we've been talking about, leading remote and hybrid teams. and most of our work is done on site for clients, either virtually or in person, but we're a training company and we have a lot of free content, downloads, blogs, newsletters to help organizations share this information with their folks and actually help to develop leaders.
That we're in the leadership development business, you know, and, the books are certainly part of it. Kevin has a saying that's been beaten into all of us that learning is a process, training is an event.so we try to help people learn in as many ways and as many different ways as we can.
Mike Goldman: And this'll be in the show notes, but tell us where should folks go? If they want to
Wayne Turmel: Yeah. you know, Our podcast, Long Distance Worklife, is longdistanceworklife.com. If you go to longdistanceworklife.com/LDL you'll find information on all of the books in the Long Distance Leadership series. KevinEikenberry.com will give you the courses that we teach, upcoming events.
All of that good stuff. And I'm on LinkedIn, Wayne Turmel, and I am a social butterfly. I love connecting with people online, so
Mike Goldman: butterfly and a grumpy old
Wayne Turmel: well, the nice thing about social media,
Mike Goldman: almost
Wayne Turmel: it is platypus like, except that with social media you can choose when you want to respond.
Mike Goldman: love it.
Hey, is such important stuff. I always say, if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. Wayne, thanks for helping us getting closer
Wayne Turmel: Mike, thank you for having me, man. this was a lot of fun and I hope your listeners found it valuable.