Cracking the Code of Hybrid Work | Wayne Turmel | Ep 193

Wayne Turmel  00:00

What if we got really smart about what work has to happen? Does it matter that everybody logs on at the same time in the morning and logs off at the end of the day? Virtual work has taken some of the cool factor out of because I haven't actually travelled internationally for work for a very long time, I used to go cool places, and now I just get up at ungodly hours of the morning and talk to people through webcam, which is not nearly as glamorous.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:41

Welcome to another episode of Better Business, Better Life. I'm your host, Debra Chantry Taylor, and I'm passionate about helping entrepreneurs lead their ideal lives by creating better businesses.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:57

I'm a certified EOS implementer, an FBA accredited family business advisor and a business owner. Myself, with several business interests, I work with established business owners and their leadership teams to help them with their ideal entrepreneurial life using EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. My guests come on the show to authentically share the highs and lows of business, but they also come on as experts to share their knowledge around a particular area. Today's guest was a stand-up comic. They moved to LA to become a big star, and they'll openly tell you that didn't quite work out as planned. He has written 16 books, six of them are actually novels, and 10 are business books. He had his own consultancy for 10 years before being bought out by another group, which he's now still part of and he is one of the subject matter experts for remote and evolving workplaces. So he's going to share with us how you can make hybrid workplaces work, and it's not quite what you think it is. So introducing Wayne Turmel, subject matter expert for remote and evolving workplaces of the Kevin Eikenberry Group. Welcome to the show. Wayne, it's lovely to have you here.

Wayne Turmel  02:03

Well, thank you. It's lovely to be here.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  02:07

So you're joining us from another part of the world, right? Where? Where are you based? At the moment

Wayne Turmel  02:11

I am in Las Vegas. At the moment.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  02:15

Las Vegas, fantastic. I love that place. That's such a, it's so catchy, it's so beautiful. I love it. But you're you work all over the world, don't you?

Wayne Turmel  02:24

Well, yeah, I mean virtually. I work literally everywhere. It's actually virtual work has taken some of the cool factor out of because I haven't actually travelled internationally for work for a very long time. I used to go cool places, and now I just get up at ungodly hours of the morning and talk to people through webcam, which is not nearly as glamorous.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  02:49

No, no, but it does show that the whole world has changed in the way that we can engage in life change too. So we were just talking before the podcast, and you've got a really fascinating story, because you started life as a stand-up comic, right and then take us from there.

Wayne Turmel  03:04

I did. I grew up in a small town in Canada. I right out of high school, I started doing stand-up comedy. I put myself through school. Toured North America for the better part of 1718, years, found myself in Los Angeles, met my bride, the Duchess, and managed to ruin both of our careers. She was an actress and I was a stand up, and before we knew it, we were like parents with a kid and jobs and stuff, and when I realised I needed to get a big boy job, I got very involved in presentation skills training, since it was the one thing I knew how to do. And from there, got not only interested in the training and development field, but in communication. And about 18 years ago, I started specialising in remote and virtual communication, it started with things like, how do you do a webinar and how do you give a persuasive presentation on WebEx?

Because nobody was teaching the skills to do that. They were teaching you which button to push, but they weren't talking about, how do you come across effectively, and what's the difference between that and talking to a human and so I had my own consultancy for a number of years. I wound up talking to a colleague of mine who I'd known a long time, Kevin Eikenberry, who had a business that was teaching leadership, traditional leadership classes and skills, and I was teaching virtual communication and remote and he was getting a lot of questions about that, and I was getting questions about leadership and teams and so in good, collaborative fashion, rather than. In two different wheels. We merged, and he bought my company, and I now work with and for Kevin, and we've written three books together in that time, the long-distance leader, long distance teammate and long-distance team. And now the second edition of long-distance leader is out, which is in seven languages, and it's very cool.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  05:24

That is very, very cool. I'm very impressed. I'm fascinated. Because, I mean, you said 18 years ago, you started getting involved in this whole, you know, working remotely or being online, and it wasn't big back then, right? It was probably in its very, very much in its infancy.

Wayne Turmel  05:38

I remember the exact moment when it happened. I can't tell you the day and time, but I remember the instance, I was teaching a presentation skills class, traditional stand at the front of the room, make eye contact, right? And somebody said to me, you know Wayne this speaking at the front of the room stuff is great, but I only speak to real people, like three times a year. And I said, Well, what do you do the rest of the time? And she said, there's this thing called WebEx. This is how long ago it was. Nobody had heard of WebEx. And I was like, Well, you know, tell me more. And I discovered it, and I went, Holy cow. A, this is going to change how we work. But B, it's a different animal. It's different presenting to a camera and to not have your audience in the room. And there was a lot and then shortly after that, the world changed forever. On the day that Oprah did a show that basically showed every housewife on the planet that they could speak to anybody in the world on webcam for free with this thing called Skype. Well, but I'm old enough to note that's Jetsons. That's like, that's science fiction stuff, and you could just push a button and I could talk to somebody on the other side of the planet with and so I very early realised this was going to be a thing, because I'm so fascinated with how people communicate or don't, as the case may be, This not only makes it easier to communicate, it's easier to communicate poorly, and you need to be mindful of how technology changes the way we communicate. And as a business owner, you know it's going to be part of your environment, whether you like it or not, it's best to get ahead of that.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  07:42

Yeah, okay, so that's where it all started from.

Wayne Turmel  07:46

You asked.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  07:48

Yeah, no that's great. I love it because I actually remember back to the days of, you know, ICQ and instant messaging and all that sort of stuff. And then, yes, Skype came up and it was, it did just change.

Wayne Turmel  07:56

Here's what's fascinating, and I'm glad I'm on here without Kevin, who I adore, but he doesn't understand why I'm so fascinated. My business career is exactly as long as email. So my first big boy job was rolling out email to the company that I worked for, and in that 30-ish years, we are now, for the first time in human history, at a point where 70% of workplace communication takes place in writing, instant messaging, text chat. You started talking about ICQ. I mean, yeah, I go back that that long too. But think about the possibilities that that is opened up for businesses, but also the constraint, right? If you're not talking to people, are you communicating with them in the same way? And so one of the big things in our book is it's imperative that you choose the right communication tool for the right job. You know the worst example is absolutely true is my wife was once fired by instant messenger. Excuse me. Oh yeah. Serious is a heart attack, I swear. And now it's interesting, because somewhere, somebody is listening to this, going, can you do that? Cool? Because you don't want to deal with the now, you know, most sentient human beings would agree that that's not the right way to handle that particular task, but it got the job done and it made one person's job ways. Now let's take that to a much more common example. It's Thursday afternoon. It's four o'clock. I've got to give Debra some feedback. Oh, and you know what? She. Like, so I'm just going to send an email and I'll deal with her tomorrow, right? It might not be the exact right tool for that right communication purpose, but, man, it's fast and man, it's easy and man, I don't have to deal with her at four o'clock on a Thursday.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  10:19

That is scary, though, because even just non, non-issue type emails that get sent can sometimes be misconstrued, just because you don't get to see the person's face and so imagine sending something that like that that is so important via email. Well, that

Wayne Turmel  10:36

Well, that in our book, and it's not our research, it's a full disclosure, European researcher named Bettina Büchel came up with this concept. But it's the idea that all communication is a balance of richness and scope. Sometimes you want very rich communication, right? You and I having a cup of tea over a desk, chatting is very rich communication. We're getting body language and tone of voice and, and it's probably not too formal and, and so it's very good for deep communication. It's not always practical, and it's not always necessary, right? I don't have to go around the office and go it's Alice's birthday. There's cake in the break room, right? An email will handle that. Scope is far more important than richness for that particular message. But all communication and as a business owner, how do you interact with your customers, and how do you handle your staff, and all those things require very conscious, intentional decisions about the balance of richness and scope that you want in that instance.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  11:46

Perfect. So you're doing a lot of work now about, you know, how you manage this, this hybrid environment, so getting the right communication tool is one of the first things. But then, for some people struggling with this, aren't they? They're struggling with this whole hybrid workplace. And how do I actually because I must admit, if I had a choice, I'd much rather have you sitting in a room with me right now, in the podcast room, and chatting to you face to face. But it's not bad. This is not bad compared to being.

Wayne Turmel  12:10

Well, it’s not bad, and you're not the one that has to spend 18 hours on an airplane to get there. So of course, you'd prefer but here's the thing, we're at a point where we're kind of working it out. And what most people call hybrid work really isn't. What most people call hybrid work is not so much a strategy as it is a hostage negotiator.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  12:36

Tell me more.

Wayne Turmel  12:38

Okay, let me that probably requires some explanation. For the most part, employers go on, how much can we make them come back to the office before they quit? And employees are going, how much can we whine about going back to the office before they fire me and they settle on, well, you can come in three days a week, and we kind of negotiate it, and kind of sort of works, and so we'll go with that. That's fine. I mean, it's a compromise, and it kind of works, and as long as it's working for you, I guess that's okay. But what you really want? I used this example just a little while ago. Do you want a mule or do you want a platypus?

Okay, so here's the explanation. A platypus, while it's kind of adorable and cool and it's got a bill and it's got poison toenails, and it's kind of nifty, right? But it's an evolutionary dead end, it kind of just kept evolving due to the conditions around itself, and it's constantly threatened. And every time something changes in their environment, it's harder on them, and there are fewer of them around, because it's just kind of evolved on the fly based on circumstances a mule is a true hybrid. You take two different animals, a donkey and a horse, and it creates a third, very distinct replicatable beast, a mule as an old farm boy. You know, there's a difference between a mule and a horse and a donkey. They are their own unique thing, and every mule that comes along will have very similar characteristics. You can replicate a mule.

Wayne Turmel  14:32

That's what you want. You want a strategy. You want something that is because we're working in ways that we've never worked before. We want something designed for that environment that is going to have the desired characteristics. And what happens very often is that we think of hybrid work as who works, where? Right? Do they work? The Office. Do they work at home? But true hybrid work involves the factor of time. It's who works where and when that work happens, and suddenly it's you don't really have hybrid work if some people are in the office or some people at home, but everybody logs on at nine o'clock, and everybody logs off at five, and everybody's available all the time.

And so we're on Zoom meetings from morning till night, and the people in the office complain because they can't get any work done because there's noise and people, and it's Alice's birthday, so there's cake in the break room, and then they go home to work and they're on meetings all day, a truly hybrid approach. Says, Okay, if we're going to have them in the office three days a week, what's the work that should happen when those people are together and they might not get their tasks done? You know, if you think about what did you accomplish today? It might be a short list, but they'll be having the conversations, and they'll be having the meetings so that when they're not working, they're getting stuff done.

Wayne Turmel  16:10

They can think, they can concentrate, they can work when their body clock is on. It doesn't matter where they are in the world at that point, you know, a hybrid workplace that says we want to hire the absolute best people and they need to be in the office three days a week has really said we want to hire the absolute best people who live within a 30 kilometre circle of The Office. That's true. Yeah. So as we start thinking about what should the workplace look like, and let's be honest, for the listeners of this podcast, if you are a startup, this is infinitely easier to do than if the boat's already in the water, right? You don't have sunk real estate costs. You don't have employees that you hired based on certain promises. I mean, one of the big challenges for employers is they hired people during covid who were very happy working remotely, and then they got told, okay, now you got to come into the office every day. That wasn't the deal when we got hired, right? So we're in this state of flux, and I feel bad, especially for smaller and kind of middle sized businesses, because we're in the middle of one of the most seismic changes, maybe since the 1920s and 30s.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  17:39

It’s transformational right? This is, actually is changing completely.

Wayne Turmel  17:43

Well it is. I mean, think about 1920s and 30s we went from and almost every industrialised country went through this primarily rural, agricultural kind of thing. Suddenly we were becoming urbanised, and the idea of the commute and going to the office became a thing, and the eight-hour work day and the 40 hour work week, and that was a huge change at the time, and it was communism, and it'll be the death of business as we know it.

But then for the next 80 years, that's what we did. And now we're in the middle of a change. Where do we need central locations for the work we do to be done and the problem is there's no one size fits all solution to that, because it depends entirely on what your business is, right? I remember during the pandemic, the woman who cuts my hair asked me what I did for a living, and I was feeling a little guilty because long distance leader came out in 2018 so 2020 and 2021 were pretty much the best years of my life. I was feeling a little survivor guilt about that. And she said, Well, I wish I could work from home, but people can't mail me their heads. Yes, right? If that's your business, if you run a salon, if you run a chain of salons, your approach to hybrid work is going to be very different than an accounting firm. So, you know, there are ways that you can get your heads around and kind of decide what's the right structure for your business, but you be very clear on what your business is, and how do you serve your customers, and how do you get the best possible outcome? And then you can decide what happens where?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  19:41

Sure, maybe that's the key thing too, isn't it? It's like it has to be delivered around the customer needs and wants as well as the business. So it's not just saying, hey, we want to go and work hybrid, because the customers may want you to be in person. But on the converse side, it could also be that maybe we've just always done it this way. And have a question. And what is the way that the customer would prefer?

Wayne Turmel  20:04

Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny, sales departments have been doing this for a very long time. Even a company that is always in the office in a central location probably had sales people out in various territories to work face to face with the customers in those territories, and you sold where you had sales people, and you probably didn't have much market share where you did. And so that was kind of the beginning. So we've proven it can be done. Right? Companies have been doing it for a long time, but nobody thought that the admin staff could do it, or the marketing department, or whatever. And organisations, and it's usually the most successful organisations that have been around the longest, that are having the hardest time with it. I remember Jamie Dimon from Citibank gave a gave a speech, and he basically said, okay, the remote work thing was fun, and it's over. Get your butts back into the offices, and if you don't, if you continue to work from home, we won't fire you, but you do not have a career, you have a job, and we will pay you to do your job, but you ain't getting promoted, and you're going nowhere because you can't be bothered coming in to the office.

And people kind of lost their minds about that statement, and I found myself in the unusual situation of actually cutting the head of Citibank some slack, and I'm the last guy that I thought would ever do that. But the reason is, people in positions at very established, especially old economy type businesses, that's how things got done. That's how they became successful, that's how they stayed on top for 200 years. Is because that's how it works. And there is something to be said for strength of relationships and mentoring and being in the environment and working too many hours with the same people, that creates kind of a foxhole mentality, right? That creates business results. And so I get it. I understand now, 10 years from now, when they're having trouble recruiting people, and people are having nervous breakdowns and quitting for jobs that allow them more flexibility, and they're going into territories, or they're just spending so much money on real estate that they can no longer function. Let's see if that changes.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  23:02

Interesting. I watched a movie last night with my husband called the Bank of Dave, and the Bank of Davis is it's a British movie, and it is about a guy up in northern England who decides that he wants to open a community bank. And at the time they decided he wanted to do this, they hadn't actually allowed a new community, that new bank of any description in 120 years, and the but the basic premise of the movie was, there were all these old men who have built this community of banking, people who have set all the rules, have decided how it's going to run, who have this complete that's not a monopoly, but they have a certain way of doing things, and they just don't want to change. And the whole movie's premises, you know, this guy's challenging the way things are done, and wants to show people there's a different way of doing it. I suppose that's what you have to do, is you've got to be able to think differently.

Wayne Turmel  23:49

And some of that thinking differently is voluntary, and some of it is not. You know, like most change, some change is voluntary. Usually changes thrust upon us, and it goes back to that change in what's going on right now, which is we couldn't work from home before because we didn't have computers and cell phones and Wi Fi, and we never thought about it because it wasn't possible. And what happened with the pandemic is we got pushed across the Rubicon. And some people realise, no this needs to be done in person. But other people went, Oh my gosh. I didn't think we could do this, and I didn't think this would work. And the people most surprised by it were the senior leaders when we did the research for long distance leader, one of the questions we asked managers was, Do you worry that your people are working or not? And the answer was not, really. I mean, some of them did, the ones that tend to be micromanagers, were worried. But they said, you know, my people work from home. Somebody's got a sick. Kid, they take a conference call at home, they get home, they go home to work on a project. Stuff gets done. I'm not worried about it. Their bosses were incredibly worried about it. When covid hit and they sent everybody home. Was like, this is never going to work unless we're watching them. They're going to slack off unless they come in every day. They're going to lose the esprit de corps. They're going to lose engagement. This is going to be a disaster. And then it wasn't, as a matter of fact, what they found was, in the first half of the pandemic, employee engagement actually went way up over what it normally was productivity in most cases, in most industries, did not particularly suffer. Turnover was tough.

Wayne Turmel  25:51

Yes, turnover was hard, but there was more turnover when they got told they had to come back to the office than there was during the pandemic. So it fooled a lot of people, and the people most worried about it, and again, I have to cut old white guys some slack. It's because they'd never done it from the time they were young. They schlepped to the office and they did what they did, and they put in the long hours, and that's what they expected. That's what was expected of them, and that's what they expect from people coming up, because that's how it's done. Most of them had never seriously worked remotely or from home before. Now cut to 2024. The CEO of Starbucks doesn't live in Seattle. The new CEO of Starbucks lives in New York. Now. It doesn't mean he doesn't go to Seattle. He can certainly afford the airfare, but that would have been unthinkable for somebody at that level not to live where the work is.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  27:01

I think we've seen it certainly in the EOS community. We see things like fractional integrators, who are effectively responsible for running the business planner and the senior leadership team to keep them all on track and keep the drums beating and whatnot. And I had a client where they had 120 staff based all around New Zealand. Their integrator was a fractional integrator. He didn't actually even live in Auckland, where their head office was. He lived out in a beautiful part of the wine country, and he, one day a week, he managed that entire business from his home in the wine country. And yes, occasionally he'd come into the office to actually have some, you know, face to face time. But he didn’t need to be sure.

Wayne Turmel  27:38

So it's, it's a seismic, confusing time, right? So the question then becomes, well, that's fine. I mean, some people are good with ambiguity. I have the attention span of an Irish setter, so change doesn't bother me, right? It's like I'm worse when stuff remains the same, that's when I get dangerous. But, but you know, so how do we navigate this? How do we make sense of it? How do we make good, conscious decisions?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  28:14

And how do we remove our biases that we already have as well? Because I must admit, you know, I'm 54 years old. I've had a certain amount of time on this planet that I've done things with. Done things in a certain way, and so I've undoubtedly got some conscious and unconscious biases about the way things should be done. So yeah, if you're listening in on this.

Wayne Turmel  28:32

I’m willing to bet you like human beings way more than I do.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  28:37

Maybe, do you not like them?

Wayne Turmel  28:40

I find them overrated. For the most part, I'm a stealth introvert. I can put on the face and do the thing, and you know, when I'm teaching a class or I'm meeting a client, I'm relatively charming, but when it's over, I'm done with them. Thank you very much. But you know, when do we have to interact? When does it make sense to get together? Those questions are really important.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  29:09

I think you made that point before in terms of, you know, when they're in the office, there are certain tasks that are just done better together in an office, and certain tasks where, I mean, I have a challenge because I also have the attention span of a NAT and get, you know, when I do get focused on something, I get really focused on it. And so I would often come into the office and I on my mind, I'm like, I'm going in there to work on this particular rock. I've got this stuff to get done. I'd walk into the office and suddenly everybody would come rushing over to me, because I've just arrived. And can we have your be your time? And I would unconsciously show it in my face. I could never play poker, right? My face is not good for poker. And so I would go to go, oh shit. I was here to do X, Y, Z, and now you're all bothering me. And of course, that then created an issue with the with the team, and they would get upset. Because I was upset, they just created this, this stuff that didn't really work, but that's exactly it.

Wayne Turmel  29:56

But that’s exactly it. When I said before that the thing about hybrid work is it's not what work gets done where, but when. Right. If you come, if your job consists of coming in, fighting traffic, coming into work, putting your coat over the chair, putting your head down, banging on your keyboard till 4:30 standing up, putting your coat back on and leaving. Maybe the office isn't where that work is best done. And we hear this all the time. You know, I can't get any work done in the office. People are poking their head over the cube like a meerkat, and they're talking to me, and somebody wants a meeting, and it's Alice's birthday, so there's cake in the break room, and I can't get anything done. And then when I go home to work, I'm on Zoom meetings from morning till night, and I can't get anything done. Well, what if we got really smart about what work has to happen?

What work is best if we're going to insist people come together for two three days a week. What should happen during those two or three days that doesn't happen the rest of the time, and what should happen the rest of the time that is independent of that. And a really simple thing is, when do we expect people to get their work done? Does it matter that everybody logs on at the same time in the morning and logs off at the end of the day. I live in a very large country. My boss is 1-2-3, time zones away from me now. Fortunately, I start work at six in the morning, seven in the morning, which is 10 o'clock in the morning in Indianapolis. So we're synchronously together a lot of the time, but he doesn't care. I mean, there are certain meetings that I need to be on, and the rest of the time he doesn't clock me in. He doesn't care when I start my day or when my day ends, as long as the work gets done and we're synchronous enough of the time that people can reach me if they need me, and I can be on meetings, and the rest of the time I do what I do based on customers and my body clock and all of that, which is a hard thing for entrepreneurs to get comfortable with.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  32:18

But it makes sense, though, because there are certain times when you do, you just have the capacity and the energy to do certain things, and other times when you don't. And so being forced to work within a time frame of nine to five doesn't actually make a lot of sense.

Wayne Turmel  32:31

Yeah, do you do your best thinking in the morning? Or are you a night owl? Right? If I'm wanting you know if I I'm a morning person, I bang stuff out. I get more done the first four hours of the day than most people do in a full day's work. In the afternoon, I'm useless. I know that about me. I'm an old man. I've been around a long time. I know how I work right? That's why my day starts when it does. If somebody does their best work after dinner, when the kids are in bed, I don't care. Is it in my inbox in the morning? Because that's all I care about.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  33:16

I actually have, I have my EA is based off in South Africa, and their time zones quite different. So as I'm logging off for the day, she's logging on. It's actually working really well, because it means I can kind of give stuff to her, do a quick briefing, leave her to it, and she just gets on with it without all the constant interruptions from me.

Wayne Turmel  33:32

Which must be good as an employer, as a boss, as a manager, you are comfortable with. These are the tasks you are responsible for doing this is how we know when they're done well, and I'm going to check to see if they're done well and if they are. This is working great.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  33:49

But that’s the challenge. Is that going? Because I'm very fortunate running EOS in my own practice, we have regular meetings. We know what our measurables are. We know what we have to achieve. We know what our rocks for the quarter are. But if somebody's listening in on this and kind of going, but I'm not sure I can trust my team, or I don't know how I know. How would you suggest they start thinking about that? You know, knowing what is important, whether it's being done properly. What do they do to get to that point?

Wayne Turmel  34:13

Yeah, you know, people always worry about culture, right? One of the reasons we don't like remote work is the culture will fall apart, and we won't have the same but culture is actually made up of very identifiable behaviours in the book. Is this originally was in our book, The Long Distance team, but we've added it to the second edition of leader, which is when you want to identify a culture, there are three com three things to identify, how do you communicate? That's, what tools do you use? How often do you communicate? What style of communication Do you have? Communication is the first thing set. Main thing is collaboration. How does the work get done? Who does what, with which and to whom to make the work come out the other end. And then there's cohesion, which is, how do we stick together as a company? Right? What's our purpose? Do we have the same mission? How do we treat each other? And every organisation is going to be different, because every business is different, right? In terms of collaboration, if you are a professional services firm, where you have your clients and you just serve them, and that's what you do, and there's not a lot of interaction with your peers, there's a manager, right? You all answer to the same manager, but I don't interact with my peers a lot.

Maybe an in office 100% of the time, workplace doesn't make as much sense as we thought it did. Do we need to brainstorm and work together as a team? Well, there's more synchronous work there. Now, can we do that via zoom or whatever? Maybe, and maybe not. Okay, you know, how do you think about your company? A lot of entrepreneurs, when they're starting their company, it's literally their baby. They take a very family approach. They want to keep people close. They want people from their community. They want that closeness, physical as well as social and psychological. Well, that's very different than the company's been running for a while, and we've got salespeople all over the place, and they're getting the job done, and it really doesn't matter where I sit. So if you can look at those three pillars, there's obviously more in the book, but if you look at those three pillars, you can start to see, what kind of company do we want? How often are we going to interact with each other. It's, it's, we're in this period of time, and nobody really knows for sure, but we're starting to see some things that are working better than others. I think, I mean,

Debra Chantry-Taylor  37:12

it's also just about thinking about your entire way of working, because you mentioned right in the beginning. You know, we went to this 40 hour, five days a week. That's what business looked like. And I've one of my friends is actually responsible with a four day work week and talking about the four day work week, and they've proven that actually people working for four, four days, rather five, being paid for five, working for four, actually are more productive because they have a day free to do all their other stuff that they would do normally throughout work time. So in the four days they work, they're generally more productive. So isn't it time to question everything we're doing and going, what are we doing? It this way.

Wayne Turmel  37:48

It probably does. Now I will tell you for me, nothing good will happen if you give me another day with no responsibilities and no guard rails on my life. Now give me six-, four- or five-hour days, that's great. I can get my fat butt out of the chair, and I can get to the gym. You know? I can handle my clients. I can teach my classes. I can do whatever I want to do. There's nothing sacred about Saturday in my world, right? My wife's retired. It's not like you know when it when both of us worked five days a week and those two days were our only time to really do all this stuff. I'd be better with six five hour days than four long ones, but that's me, which kind of gets to the point, right? Anytime somebody tells you this is the absolute optimum way to do it, I'm not sure I buy it, but for the first time, we have options. For the first time, we can actually make conscious decisions around what's best for our company, what's best for us, and where we find middle ground is where things really rock.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  39:12

Perfect. Okay, so we've covered the three things. So communication, collaboration, cohesion, are the three things that we need to sort of be thinking about in terms of somebody listening to this podcast is thinking, Hey, I'd like to explore this further. Where would they get started? What would you recommend they do to help take action?

Wayne Turmel  39:28

You mean, besides purchase and enjoy, the long-distance leader revised rules for remarkable remote and hybrid leadership. You mean, besides that?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  39:38

Well, that is definitely the number one tip, but it's in version two. So I'm getting there's a whole lot of new stuff in version two as well second edition. But yes, that's the first one.

Wayne Turmel  39:49

It’s about 20-25% and most of the new content is around hybrid work. It's what do we do now? Right? But I think right after the pandemic. It was a really chaotic time, because people had had two years to stop and think. You know, when you give people two years to think about, what am I doing with my life? Do I really want to go back to the way it was? They're going to make decisions, and they may not be the decisions that you want them, but that thinking time is so important, one of the things in we have this in the book, and there are downloadable resources that people can get from us. I'm trying not to be a shameless shill, but you have to stop periodically and think what's working, what isn't working, What haven't we tried yet, that somebody else is doing that looks really cool. What would we never want to do under any circumstances? And you need to stop and ask these questions periodically, whether it's you and your board or and whatever going away and thinking, whether it's you on the beach, whether you stop and actually ask your employee. Here's a wacky notion, ask your employees what's working and what's not, and don't judge the answers. Just listen for them, right? What's working and what isn't what would you love to have happen that is not possible, or at least you don't think is possible, and what would you never want to have happen under any circumstances? And when you ask those questions, you'd be shocked at the answers that you get.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  41:40

Yeah, I think it’s one of those things that, as leaders, we often don't spend enough time. We call them clarity break, but just actually being still, being calm, thinking about what's possible rather than what's really going on. So I think, yes, the what's working, what's not working is practical stuff. The what would we love to do is that bigger picture thinking that starts you getting thinking about things that you may never have thought of before. But I also think that a think that I love the last one, you know, what's the one that you never want to do? It starts to set those boundaries around what's, what's, what's important for the company, well.

Wayne Turmel  42:10

And it speaks to your values. It speaks to your values. It speaks to who are you, what are you comfortable with? What are you not comfortable with? You know? And so it it's fine to have big picture thinking and sit on the beach, but some of us, you know, some of our brains need to be corralled a little bit and channelled, not controlled, but channelled in a certain direction so that we can do that kind of thinking. Perfect.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  42:40

Okay. One last thing from you, Wayne, before I let you go, what would it be? The last thing you recommend to people to do, read the book, stop and think, ask those four questions.

Wayne Turmel  42:48

I think one of the things that I would do is talk to your staff about the communication tools that you and your team are using? What do you use well? What do you not use well? And what are the things that you suspect you could do better, but you're probably not, and some of that is obvious, right? Are we using webcams? Are we not using webcams? Do we use teams? Do we use Slack? When do we use email. When do we send a text? That's the easy stuff, the little stuff. Napoleon once said that if you want to avoid war, you avoid the 1000 little print pin pricks that lead to war. The status update is a very powerful tool. Do you use the status update on your teams if you're in a meeting? Do you say I'm in a meeting?

Leave me alone, or do you show green? And so people are trying to reach you and you're not answering, right? If your head's down on a project, a lot of people are reluctant to put on Do Not Disturb because they're not technically working, except we know they are right, but then people are free to interrupt them, and then they get annoyed because they're being interrupted. Or do you set the Do Not Disturb and you take the 30 seconds it takes to type an explanation that says working on a project available after two o'clock. And it's those little things that if everybody on the team, because some of the people on your team are doing it, and some of them aren't, and some of them are choosing to use one. You know, some people are addicted to email. Some people overuse teams. If as a team, you talk about, when do you use an email? When do you send a text? When do you pick up the phone? When do you use your webcam? When do you get in the car and show up at the office? And the expectations are clear and. Everybody knows those expectations, things move much smoother.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  45:05

It's boundaries, right? I mean, I talk about this a lot with people. It's like, actually, as humans, we like to have boundaries. We like to know what, what those kind of guidelines are, because then we can not only know when we're stepping over the line, but also we can celebrate when we're doing things really well too, right?

Wayne Turmel  45:19

But also, when we're irritating the heck out of people, without meaning to you're probably shocked to find that I irritate people very easily because I make assumptions I live under the ridiculous notion that everybody thinks like I do. And so if I say email is the right way to do this, and I can write that email, and I think it's perfect. And you know that email took me 30 seconds to write in three days to apologize for because maybe that wasn't the right time to send that particular message. If everybody understands, you know, what's the response time on an email versus a response time on an instant message, those little things can make teams work so much faster, and it makes it easy to judge performance, right? If people are not returning emails in a timely manner, you know what that timely manner is? It's just, hey, you're taking too long to respond to emails is not useful feedback. You know, there's a 24 hour turnaround and you're not doing that is a very specific piece of feedback that people can actually work with.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  46:33

Beautiful. Wow. Okay, that's been fantastic. Thank you so much. So there's a number of things in there. So obviously the book covers the 3C those which communication, collaboration. Thank you. And then obviously, stop and think, ask yourself four questions, what's working, what's not working? What would we love to be able to do that maybe other people are doing, and what we would never do? And then, yeah, talk to your staff and your team about the tools that you're using, how you're using them, the expectations of them, and what we're using, well, what we could be using better. So you can get explicit. Specific feedback about what is important. So that book, again, is…

Wayne Turmel  47:07

The Long Distance Leader, Revised Rules for Remarkable Remote and Hybrid Leadership,

Debra Chantry-Taylor  47:14

And it's the second edition, which has got 25% more content in it. So it's all good. Hey, Wayne, thank you so much for your time. I really, really really appreciate it. It's been a pleasure to meet you.

Wayne Turmel  47:23

Thank you  so much for having me. Debra, I really enjoyed it.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  47:25

Yeah, no, I did too, and hopefully the listeners did too. Thank you. We'll talk again soon.