Hybrid Workforce: The future of work requires leaders to embrace flexibility

Bill Heffernan (Bill)

Hello, everybody. My name is Bill Heffernan and I’m here to host this episode of HR Solutions for Big and Small Organizations.

I’m the founder of ScreenSafe, and a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor, and a Certified Employee Assistance Program professional. I bring that experience to my work with you today. In addition to specializing and training programs on sexual harassment and drug, we also do work around drug testing programs for employers of all sizes.

We’re fortunate today to have two panelists with us. Lesa Hammond, who’s the co-founder and CEO of Attaché, a platform that eliminates the pain of disorganization for small businesses as they grow. Lesa holds a PhD in transformation and learning and has been a small business coach and mentor for the past six years and has consulted with organic companies throughout the United States on human resources, organizational design and development.

We’re also fortunate to have Cindi Epstien, founder of People by CFE, a trusted human resources professional and consultant with many years of practical HR experience and consulting work in the insurance brokerage field. She is licensed in property and casualty and Life and Health Insurance.

Our description that our presentation today we’re going to talk about the hybrid workforce the future of work will require leaders to embrace flexibility.

The post-pandemic work environment demands a radical flexibility to apply for work policies, and work patterns and an office design focused on enhancing the employees experience executive leaders and doors to future by implementing a flexible work model that meets the evolving employer and employee needs.

If we can, why don’t we take just a minute and Lesa, why don’t you introduce yourself and when she’s done Cindi, why don’t you introduce yourself? Just make sure people hear your voices and connect your voices with your name.

Lesa Hammond (Lesa)

Well, Bill, you did a great job of introducing me so I don’t know what else to say about myself. But I’m happy to be here.

Cindi Epstien (Cindi)

Thank you, Cindi. I am Cindi Epstien and I’m happy to be here as well. And I’m excited that we are conducting this podcast and so that we can help people understand and learn more about the hybrid workforce.

Bill

So, I have a series of questions I’m going to ask you about within. Cindi, thank you for that.

It was interesting as we prepared to do this podcast today, we got into discussion right away.

Changes and the difference, the intersection of some of those changes and how they’ll affect work going forward. So, let me start off by just asking, and I’m not sure which of you want to take this question but who is back at work?

Cindi

I can take it. It really depends on the company and from my experiences. There are so many variations of what companies are doing.

For example, I worked with a digital marketing company and they work totally remotely. They had a lease and then the lease was up during the pandemic. And they never renewed it. So now you’re working totally from home, which I think is really interesting.

I also work with a law firm and with a law firm they had a bit different situation. Because again, you know, somebody has to be in the office to answer the phone get the mail, they’re doing a hybrid. Most of the administrative staff come into the office every day and the attorneys work from home a few days a week and they also come in. So, it really depends on how the organization puts the policy in place. How many days we’ll be in the office, how many days we’ll be working from the home, but it should be consistent and to be scheduled so that people do not make changes all the time. I think that’s key.

Lesa

Yes, I think one of the things that I’m seeing is that a number of companies are starting to work from home that actually thought it was impossible. They were saying things like, “You know, people won’t work if they work from home.” And some are still struggling with it. I’m sure we’ll talk about that a little bit, but they are realizing that people can work from home and some jobs that they thought had to be done in the office actually can be done remotely.

Obviously, there are things that can’t be done remotely like if you’re in a restaurant, you can’t have people working from home for the restaurant. And if there’s a lot of collaboration that’s being needed face-to-face for some reason, then that needs to happen and can’t be done remotely, but so many jobs can be done remotely and a lot of places are still, as Cindi said, a lot of places are actually giving up the leases that they had and reducing the amount of space they’re taking in terms of their building space. So, it’s saving them money in many ways.

Bill

This is a point in time when I’m really grateful that I am not in the commercial real estate business.

Although I will say, I’ve read a number of articles that talk about the fact that some companies are renewing their leases and actually taking up more space so that they can socially distance their people. And the age of open workspaces seems to be evolving now where offices are coming back into the popularity and bigger partitions instead of just having a big worktable where everyone’s working together. I think that’s interesting as you look at this and think about people coming back, how many days are optimal in terms of having people in the office?

Lesa

We know that there is a move toward the four-day workweek. And as that movement is happening, I think there are a lot of questions being asked about it. You know, some European countries, that’s what they’ve had for many years, and I see there is benefit to it. But I also see that it could be a strain on an organization; just in terms of the way people work. Think about marketing, think about getting services done, and things like that. If it’s a four-day work week and people get off every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, then getting services actually becomes more complicated because you have to figure out where  and when. There’s just a lot to think about from just a cultural standpoint, in terms of how we get things done.

Cindi

I agree with you, Lesa. I really believe that from the companies that I’ve spoken to in the life insurance industry, you know that especially the brokerage business, they’re still working from home but when they plan a staff meeting, or client coming in, you know, when that’s a different story. Those meetings have to be scheduled. What I’m seeing a lot of maybe two days a week, coming into the office, but not really more than that. From what I’ve seen throughout the industry.

Lesa

I know, I’m in California and there’s the bill out there that for a four-day workweek for companies that have over 500 employees, having a four day workweek. It’ll be interesting to see what happens, there have been many times in California where I’ve said, “That can’t happen. That is not going to pass, and it does.”  …very interesting to see what happens and how it works and how it impacts small businesses. As you know, I work with a lot of small businesses and for the small businesses, there are a lot of non- exempt employees and having non-exempt employees, paying them more to work less for a small business can feel, even if it is not, cost prohibitive.

Bill

Alright, I do think it will be interesting to see how this plays out. As we talked about before, there are some jobs where you know, if you’re an hourly worker and you know, what we seem to understand is that people are more productive when they’re working four days a week, they actually get 10% to 15% more done in a four-day workweek than they were getting done in the five day workweek.

But the challenge is for people who are hourly employees who are producing things, it’s not as if suddenly they can produce 10% or 15% more of what they were producing, whether it’s doing work on a construction site or, or making hamburgers. It’s just a very different work environment compared to someone who’s a salaried person producing in other ways. So, what does the future look like in terms of employers’ office? Is it a hybrid? Is it home off-site offices is that people just go out and get their own offices near their homes and how what does the future look like?

Lesa

I think over time the future is going to be very different than what we see now. And it’ll probably be everything that you’ve just said, Bill. It’ll be people getting their own office. It’ll be people working from their home office. It’ll be people going in a couple of days a week, like Cindi said. And there will be those offices where people still go in every day and there are those jobs that they have to; a store can’t run with remote employees. The hospital can’t run with remote employees. So, there will definitely be jobs that still require people to go in.

Cindi

I did some research and a survey from enterprise technology. Research expected the number of employees working from home to double into 2021 and the after the eventual post-pandemic and the landscape. In their directions 2021 Virtual Conference IDC predicted employees will have a choice about including a hybrid workplace model, and with about 33% of employees still having to work on site full-time.

So that was some statistics that I thought were important for this session.

Lesa

Yes, that actually looks like almost broken into thirds from what you’re saying.

Cindi

Exactly.

Bill

And so much of this is so dependent on the person too, because you know, your introverted employees, they’re at home and they’re saying, “What’s the problem? I’m just doing great.” And then your extroverts are miserable because they’re not having the human interaction and the contact with other people that that helps motivate them helps drive them and it’s so it’s such a different kind of experience.

I know personally, I’ve been working from home now for two years. I’ve actually thought about renting an office near here just so I have a place to go to get out of, you know, without driving all the way to our office 30 miles away, having a place to go that’s close by where I can just get away. I mean I think it’s going to be so many different kinds of permutations of how this looks going forward.

Cindi

Exactly. I have to say I’m a people person. Of course, I like to socialize a lot, but I liked being in the office when I was but now to be honest with you, I’ve really gotten used to it. I think it’s a matter of time. It’s a matter of setting your priorities every day and then trying to get up also to meet people, you know, not just stay in your home. So, I plan meetings out of the office as well or launches.

Lesa

Well, it’s interesting. Yeah, I’m an introvert. And when I get into the habit of going out meeting people and networking and things, I can do it, but since we’ve been isolated so much and in the house now thinking about getting out it’s like, “Oh, I guess I really need to do this.”

Bill

Because you need to see what the sun looks like.

Lesa

The sun is good and people are scary.

Lesa

I actually enjoy people when I’m out there, but I think for those of us that are introverts having been really isolated, makes it harder to reach out again. And that’s one benefit of actually being forced to go back into the office.

Bill

Recently, I went to an event where there was probably 400 or 500 people. And I thought, wow, there’s a lot of people here it was kind of overwhelming to go from, you know, very limited contact two or three people at a dinner or lunch to being in a room with several hundred people is overwhelming, and I have to acknowledge that at least for a moment. But there are some people who for whom they’ve never stopped going to work. I mean, I have a family member who’s a trades person and he’s been going to work throughout the last few years in person on a job site. So, it just I think some of us have it’s different for each of us depending on our roles. So, as we think about people being remote, what kinds of systems have to be in place to make remote work effective.

As I mentioned earlier, when I worked at a company that went remote, we had a dashboard that allowed us to check and see how much time they spent online. And some people felt like that was big brother and didn’t like it. Other people knew that that was just part of the deal, and didn’t mind. So, what are your thoughts in terms of how do we assure ourselves that that works getting done?

Lesa

Well, this is one of my favorite topics. And it really is, because I have so many people asked me, “How do I make sure they’re doing the work?”

I’ve seen many different iterations of what people have done. There’s a program called Teamflow that people are on all the time, there’s Slack, where people can communicate with each other very easily. I know Upwork has a program where they can actually monitor the person on the computer and then take snapshots of them at specific times. Not snapshots of the person, but of the work they’re doing.

So, there are a number of ways to monitor if you want to. I think, from my perspective, the best thing to do is to create outcomes, create more accountability, do OKRs, have key performance indicators, and hold people to those and make sure that they’re following that and how ever long they take is not really as important. Sitting down at the computer is not as important as what they get done. And it’s almost a shift in mindset because people come to work and you don’t know what they’re doing at their desk half the time. So just because they’re sitting in a seat doesn’t mean they’re actually productive. So, you can actually have more productive employees from home if you structure it right.

Cindi

And another point that I wanted to make, I was talking to my husband about this, it’s so interesting because I actually am more organized and more focused working from home because people don’t call you. They set an appointment with you. It’s like when somebody wants to talk to you, they send you an email saying, “When would you be available?” So, I think that has helped tremendously because when I was in the office, the phone would ring all day. Now it’s not like that. So that’s one big change. That I think has been very valuable.

Bill

Have either of you had customers who have been very concerned about monitoring their employees and you know, and I don’t mean to be pejorative about this, but it kind of much more big brother-ish and you’re comfortable with or is that something you’ve not seen?

Cindi

I haven’t seen it with my clients to be honest with you. It’s not something that they’ve talked about or said that was an issue. It’s more about you know, credit standards of performance for that.

Lesa

What I have seen is companies were not prepared when they went remote. It was very loosely structured and didn’t have outcomes-based work for employees to do. At that point, they started saying, “Well, what are these people doing at home? Are they just watching TV?” Because they didn’t have structured things for the employees to do when they were at home? And then they wanted to pull back and really monitor. So it was a matter of having them think about okay, “Why don’t you set weekly goals and make sure the person is, completing these weekly goals and if they’re completing the weekly goals, then if they spend, you know, a half-an-hour here or half-an-hour there doing something else, as long as they get those things done. Isn’t that what’s important?

Bill

I hear what you’re saying, but I can imagine for some that was really a hard adjustment for some people to go from seeing people in their chairs, in their offices, to then just saying, here’s the key performance indicators, if you get this done, takes you 40 hours greater than 30 hours. That’s fine. Here’s what I expect from you this week.

Lesa

You know, it’s interesting. You know there are certain jobs, obviously there will always be non-exempt hourly jobs, but also, with this, it makes you want to rethinking what really needs to be based on how many hours you’re doing the job. versus how much you’re getting accomplished. I think there may be a need to reclassify some of these positions.

Bill

Can you talk more about that? I’m not sure I completely understand what you’re saying.

Lesa

Well, so for example, you know, the non-exempt the hourly jobs that a person actually has to be sitting where they are, doing the job in order to get it done. It’s one thing, but there are jobs that are technically non-exempt. Hourly, that by law have to be hourly, but it really doesn’t require the person to be there to do the job. One person might be able to get the same amount done in a shorter period of time than somebody else who’s sitting there for eight hours doing what another may be able to do in four hours. And because of that, it feels like those jobs should really be reclassified for this remote workforce. And if they’re thinking about four-day work week, the same thing.

Bill

Cindi, Did you want to add anything to that?

Cindi

I was just thinking about non-exempt versus exempt, and really, you have to look at how many how many decisions they’re making on their own before it becomes exempt. There’s a lot of other factors that you have to look at to make the job exempt. You know, if they’re not making decisions if they need to have certain kind of a judgement, all to make a decision that would help that classification as well.

But I’d have to look at all the standards that are in place for the state of Illinois in terms of wage and hour laws.

Lesa

Yeah, I’m just thinking, you know, think about like the accountant, who is technically probably non-exempt. But one person who’s doing accounting can probably accomplish the same thing in four hours that another person would accomplish in eight hours. So if it’s outcome based versus how long they’re sitting there doing the job, then that actually makes more sense to me, it makes more sense for it to be a job where it’s based on the salary, especially if you’re going to move to something like a four-day workweek. Something like that based on salary, will have the outcomes that are required, the person is working toward those outcomes.

Bill

So interesting. I mean, because I’m sure all of us know, someone who can get something done very quickly. Give them a task, they can think about it, conceptualize it and execute, and there are other people can—including myself in this—who will overthink things much longer than is necessary. Outcome will be good but it took longer, right.

One of the things that’s really interesting as we as we look into the future is how do we build teams now? How do we create organizational culture? How do we set build the sense of an esprit de corps? I mean, if we’re all working remotely if we’re all in different locations, and we don’t see each other or we maybe we see each other once, how do we build the teamwork and the sense of team that helps organizations really thrive?

Cindi

That is a hard question to answer. But, I think the manager has a lot to do with that as well. I mean, it really should be a weekly meeting. When I was in the office, we had weekly meetings. Even if they are on Zoom, something should be scheduled every week with the entire department. So those departments could go through a list of what they’re all working on. They can collaborate, you need help on this. So, I think that works well to get teamwork and also, having, you know, orderly staff meetings, I mean, the management team really has to do a lot to motivate all these people as well. And there’s so many different types of teamwork, games that you can play engagement and so on and so forth. And we did that a lot when I was at my last job, to keep everybody motivated. You can also have training, you know, for instance, something through your employee assistance program. You might have a stress management class and then the discussions relative to that right after the session. So, there’s a lot of different things that you can do, but you have to really plan it and make sure that it’s scheduled on the calendar for the entire organization.

Bill

Yeah, one of the things that you’re talking to, that comes to my mind, is people are learning to work with each other on the internet all the time and on the phone and remotely.

Lesa

I met my husband on Match.com and he lived 300 miles away and we developed our relationship remotely. So, it can be done. I think that it’s just a matter of people having the desire to stay connected and work with each other. And having team projects is another thing you know, having projects where people are working together as opposed to everybody working in isolation. Or, having some kind of buddy system or accountability partners for work would be another way to develop that.

How much work or how much teamwork and camaraderie takes place by just people eating together at work at the office. I know they always talk about the water cooler, which doesn’t exist anymore, but the coffee machine or something, and people just running into each other in the hall. You almost have to create those kinds of scenarios. So, things like Teamflow, which might feel like big brother, in one way, it actually can help to build that team relationship too.

Cindi

I agree with you.

Bill

Good points. That’s it’s really interesting because I think it’s the kind of the same, there are some people who really are quite comfortable connecting via zoom, being remote, and are good with that, and there’s others who need more of an in-person contact so this will continue to evolve and be such an interesting time.

I do wonder, what about meeting. Let me just expand for a quick second. What if we move to a four-day work, and everyone gets to work from home for two days and work in place for two days. How do we get all the meetings done? Because that’s what everyone hates, those meetings.

Lesa

Yeah, that may actually be a good impetus for stopping a lot of the meeting. We don’t actually need to meet as often.

Bill

Exactly. I think that’s certainly something I’ve been aware of is how many fewer meetings there are now and also become a huge advocate for short meetings. You know, in the old days, you’d say we’re going to meet for an hour or you’d set aside an hour for meeting. And now I think it’s really quite good if you can say we’re going to meet for 10 minutes, maybe 20, and here’s our agenda and it moves very quickly. And there’s  not the storytelling and if anybody wants to do storytelling and kibitzing, they can do that at the end when everyone else can go ahead and go on with their day.

Anyway, all right. So, I think we’ve covered the material we were hoping to cover is there anything anyone wants to add?

Cindi

Well, we were going to talk about what systems that need to be in place. And I was going to bring up that fact, because I think this is really important. You need to update your cybersecurity policies. Just to mention one of them. Provide security training. You need to do more of that with your technology department. You also have to establish a separate network. I mean, technology is key. So, whoever is working with you and technology, corporate person, then it has to be integrated into the system, an audit of corporate devices that remote hybrid workers use, and maybe simply limit data as well, if you want to keep it secure.

Also talk about workplace safety. I mean, you know, because I’m in the insurance industry, workers’ comp is an issue, or can be an issue. So safety training is important as well.

Bill

Those are really good points. I mean, I think we touched on the systems a little earlier just thinking about monitoring, but I think since you’ve made a really great points.

Bill

Are your your software systems up to snuff? Do you need a VPN? Do you have a VPN? How are you exchanging data in a way that’s secure? How do you know you are protecting yourself from malicious hackers and people who are trying to access your system, or to just mess with your system? I know that I believe our school board recently had an event where someone got on was able to hack into the Zoom.

I’ve come to appreciate that that was just someone sharing a password they shouldn’t have shared but someone hacked into the Zoom and started showing things that they shouldn’t be selling to a group of people.

So I think those are all really great points to make sure your security is up to snuff.

Cindi

And I want to make one more comment. I just thought of it. You should also have a telecommuting policy in place because I’ve written those for my clients. Everybody knows exactly what needs to be done in terms of who’s paying for what expense, you know, the mobile phone, this, the internet, I mean, these are all questions that to be answered. So, it should be documented in telecommuting policy.

Bill

That’s a such a great point. I mean, and what as you’ve written these policies, what have you seen so they are people? How’s that playing out in terms of mobile phones and internet connections and things like that?

Cindi

Well, I think companies really have to decide to spend on this, you know, but again, they’re if they don’t have a lease they’re saving a lot of money too as well. So, I mean, company phones depends on whether they give them a phone, or whether they have their own personal phone. They should pay a portion of that fee per month.

Bill

Yeah.

Lesa

Yeah, this is a great topic, Cindi; and one of the things in California, there actually are rules around paying for people’s phones if they’re using their phone for work purposes. So, you have to know what your state laws are in terms of that kind of thing also. And, talking about technology, that’s what our platform does. Is it helps people to manage all of the paperwork and things, whether it’s a remote work setting or just keeping things electronic so that you’re reducing the amount of paper that’s being passed back and forth. So that’s, one of the pieces of that so I appreciate you bringing up.

Bill

So, the system that you’re that Attache supports is a system where you can do everything right there and store all the documents and transfer documents securely.

Lesa

Exactly, and it has it has eContracts. So, all those things are right there and everything, so people can very easily access things.

Bill

So, Cindi writes the policies and then you put them on your platform and everyone has access to them.

Lesa

There you go.

Cindi

So, if you need help with policy writing, let me know that’s one of my forte’s, because I like to stay to make sure that companies are compliant with state and local and federal laws.

Lesa

Excellent.

Bill

Excellent.

Well, thank you both for your time today. I think we have a very fruitful discussion. And I look forward to our next gathering.