Making "Hybrid Work" Actually Work

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1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

1:58Have you ever heard of productivity paranoia? It's a real thing, and apparently a lot of people have it. Microsoft Research termed productivity paranoia, where they found that up to 87 % of people managers have difficulty trusting that their workers are productive when they're working remotely. 87%. And that's now. In some ways, the conversation about remote work feels old. It's like, ah, we've been doing this since the pandemic. But, you know, we're still trying to figure out how to really do it well. What does it mean? What's the right balance? And that guy who you just heard a second ago, his name is Gleb.

2:38Dr. Gleb Cyporski. And he is like the go-to guy on how we work now. I've been doing this for over 20 years, since 1999. and I run a six people consulting company called Disaster Avoidance Experts. I wrote a number of best-selling books, most notably for this topic, one called Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams. And he's a regular contributor at entrepreneur.com and also in the November-December issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. He has this really interesting piece. The headline is, Hybrid Work is Not Two Kinds of Work. The argument that he's making is that we think of hybrid work sometimes is just, it's a little bit of in-person work and it's a little bit of remote work.

3:20But he says, no, it's actually a third kind of work. It's like, we have to think of it totally differently. But anyway, let's go back to this thing about productivity paranoia. Because at the heart of this conversation that we're having about how to work and how to change the way that we work is this question of how do we understand each other in a new way of work? How do we trust each other? And how do we work together when working together doesn't look the way that it always did? Even though, and here's the craziest thing about it, this new shift, this shift that so many people distrust is driving a lot of success.

4:04There's a particular challenge in terms of coordination. These managers feel that their workers are not producing tasks in a timely manner when they want them to produce them. And that's at odds with a lot of research when I do focus groups with Swether and I do focus groups with employees, when there's a lot of external research showing that employees are actually quite a bit more productive when they're working remotely. So for example, the last five quarters, we've seen a decrease in productivity associated with the return to office drive. Prior to that, early in the pandemic, we saw a boost in productivity when people went fully remote.

4:41So it's kind of very clear that remote work is associated with more productivity. Which is an interesting problem, right? How do we bridge these different divides? How do we make sure that we're getting the best of people and that we're structuring work in a way that works for everyone? That is what we are talking about today with Gleb, and it's all coming up after the break. Hi, I'm Emily Washkovic, Yelp's small business expert and host of the podcast Behind the Review. We're back for season two, and this time we're keeping everything you love and adding so much more. Get ready to find out what happens behind the scenes at those businesses that everyone raves about.

5:26You know the ones. Learn how owners swallow their pride when getting critical feedback and what they do to turn around that unhappy customer. And don't forget the reviewers. We'll find out what inspires them to leave those rants or raves in the first place. Get ready for buzzy new guests like restaurants from Yelp's famed Top 100 lists and new short Biz Bite episodes. Just a few minutes of advice on how to set your business up for success and create connections with customers, both online and off. Subscribe, like, and follow the show to hear new episodes every Thursday. All right, we're back. I'm talking with Gleb of Disaster Avoidance Experts about how to, well, I guess, make sure that new ways of working aren't a disaster.

6:17And let's just pick up on what he was saying just before the break. So we learned that there's this thing called productivity paranoia where managers or leaders worry that their team members are not working as hard as they used to because they can't see them. But in fact, well, that last point that we heard Gleb make caught me by so much surprise that I just had to restate it back to him. So let's pick up there. Let me just restate that back to you to make sure that I understand what you just said. In other words, as we move to more remote work, objectively speaking, workers were more productive.

6:54They did more work. But at the same time, managers were complaining that the workers were not doing as much as they used to. So there was a separation between the perception from the managers and the actual work that was getting done. And then as more people have been choose your verb, forced, enticed, convinced, welcomed back to the office, we are seeing, objectively speaking, statistically, that productivity has actually started to decline. And I would imagine that managers are probably now saying that their workers are more productive. So is there now a kind of reversal of that split where productivity was up and managers thought it was down and now productivity is down and do managers think it's up?

7:47Managers don't think it's up. Managers are concerned about the productivity of their employees for the period of time that they're spending working from home. So that's why you see people like JP Morgan, so leaders, Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan, asking all their bankers to come back five days a week, an increasing drive to return to the office. There's a concern about, okay, how do we make workers more productive? Naturally, managers think when they come to the office, they'll be more productive because we can see them and therefore they'll be more productive. When you look at the research, when people are in the office, the amount of time they actually spend working is about 36 to 39 percent, depending on the survey.

8:28So in the office, they're actually not that productive, comparatively speaking. And when they work from home, a big reason why they're more productive is that they're willing to work a large part, about 40 percent of the time that they used to spend on commuting. They're willing to work actually for their job. So that's a big reason why they're more productive. Another big reason they're more productive is they're much less distracted. So at home, they can do a lot more focused work. They're much less distracted. That's a big reason why people are more productive. And there are other reasons, but those are the big two that we see for people being more productive.

9:02And we see that not simply in broad statistical surveys. I see that in focus groups I run with clients and actual measurements of productivity and in peer-reviewed studies. There was a study by Stanford University on Trip.com, which is a major travel agency, as you can tell from the name. They did a randomized control trial where they assigned half of their staff to full-time work in the office and half of their staff to hybrid work. So part-time in the office, part-time at home. After six months, they found that they had 35 % better retention in the people who are hybrid. 35 % better retention.

9:36It's hard to imagine that huge number. and they found that those people were 8 % more productive on specifically, for example, the programmers who we can objectively measure the lines of code they wrote. They wrote 8 % more lines of code and you had similar productivity statistics that were a little bit softer for people like marketing, call center agents. So very clearly, and then they, of course, naturally assigned everyone to that half time in the office hybrid schedule because they saw it was much more productive. So when you actually see data get you very clearly see that, hey, people are more productive.

10:12But when it's just up to the intuition of managers and what they feel is going on, they feel that they can have more control in the office by this strategy of walking around. And it has to do with managers not being trained and not being given appropriate guidelines for how to manage performance, evaluate their teams and lead their teams in a remote setting. Okay, so let's talk about that in just a moment, because you've laid out a very interesting problem. And the solution would seem to be to somehow bridge this gulf between what is actually happening, statistically speaking, with productivity, and how managers are perceiving it, and therefore, how they're pushing for change or how they're trying to manage their employees.

10:58But before we do that, let's just address one question that the managers who are against hybrid work might bring up if they were on this call. I am not one of them. I am a manager who believes very fully in remote work. But if I were to channel a manager who does not, they might say, Leb, so far, all you have talked to me about is productivity. And yes, productivity is important, but it's only one measure of success at work. because when you're hybrid, you're also perhaps not building important relationships and career development might be stunted. And there might be all sorts of other things aside from numbers of lines of code that we need to take into account.

11:40So before we talk about bridging this gulf between statistics and manager perception, what can you tell me about whether or not that critique that measuring productivity by itself is not really a measure of whether or not hybrid work is good is true? Yeah, and that's definitely a very valid point. And I tell the managers, that's a very valid point. In fact, there was a recent research paper put out that found that when you have programmers sitting next to junior programmers versus sitting separately from junior programmers, the programmers who are not juniors, who have been in the company for a while, they get quite a bit more work done, but they comment less on the code of junior programmers.

12:20Whereas when they sit together with junior programmers, they get less work done, but they comment more on the code of junior programmers. So that, of course, means that they mentor more and they teach them more. So you get definitely more productivity from them, but you get less mentoring. That's definitely a concern. So this is why I never say that it's a good idea for everyone to be all remote. I mean, there are some companies that can make it work when you have a very good, deliberate, structured program. So I work with a couple of them. Most of the clients I work with actually have a hybrid modality.

12:49So what they do is they figure out what kind of work is actually best done in the office and what kind of work is best done from home. So from home, it's very clear that individual head down work like programming, design, writing, reporting, research, trading, all of that is better done from home. You have asynchronous communication, emails, Slack messages, Microsoft Teams messages, much better done from home. And by the way, that takes up usually about two hours of time for the average worker. And then video conference calls, much better done from home than from the office where you're going to be distracting everyone with your video conference call and you're going to be distracted by them passing in the background.

13:25And that takes up about 85 to 90 percent of the typical worker's time. Now, the other parts are very high value, but very low time. These are more intense forms of collaboration. These are nuanced conversations about performance reviews, conflict, chill conversations, maybe strategy conversations where the leader conveys strategy to team members. These are socializing, building team bonds, and finally mentoring and on-the-job training. These are very important activities, but they take up something like 10 to 15 % of a typical worker's time on average. So it's good to come into the office occasionally, maybe once a week, to do those activities.

14:04What I really focus on with my clients is how do you structure the time of your employees to minimize their commuting time? Because nobody wants to waste time commuting. And if they're commuting, they're not spending time working on their individual tasks. So you need to structure their time. Ideally, so they come into the office no more than once a week, maybe twice a week if they need to mentor people. You need to have a good mentoring program, a structured mentoring program. And you need to make sure to fit their collaboration activities, mentoring activities, nuanced conversations into those one to two days a week, closer to one day a week.

14:37So that is the best approach. So we very clearly see that that has the best result in performance, collaboration, mentoring, on the job training, and so on. Got it. Okay, so thanks for that. So now let's move into the managers. What you're saying reminds me of something that had come up once I had talked at this Future of Work conference. And we got into the complaint that I think a lot of people have, particularly if you're an employee who has a manager who really wants them to work in a way that you, the employee, do not want to work, which is this perception that managers are really just trying to hold on to control and that hybrid work feels like to them a loss of control and they don't like that.

15:22And so they're trying to reassert control in a situation. And somebody said, you know, it's not really the manager's fault. It is that they were trained in one way of working. And now their training doesn't apply to the way in which a lot of people are working. And I thought that was a really important point because it humanizes people. Managers are not just power hungry, power porters. They just want to make things work and they want their teams to function. And if you came up in a world of work that looked one way, you don't necessarily know how to apply it to another way. So talk to me about how we can start to actually help managers understand how to manage in this environment.

16:07You had just given some guidelines about what works and basic structures, but on a day-to-day level, as managers are keeping up with their teams, what should they be thinking and how can they learn in a way in which we're really going to be able to maximize the flexible work lives that we can have. Yeah, you pointed out a very important dynamic, Jason, which is called functional fixedness. So that's kind of like the hammer-nail syndrome. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you learn one way of functioning, you tend to apply that to other contexts. Even when previous ways of functioning that were functional now become dysfunctional, right?

16:41When you're working, you should not apply office-based methods of leading in a hybrid setting or in a remote setting. So for example, Microsoft researchers, when they're looking at assessing hybrid work, they found that 81 % of employees say it's important for managers to help them, the employee, prioritize their workload, but less than a third, 31%, say their managers give them clear guidelines on prioritizing their workload. So that's just one tactic that we're talking about, help your team members prioritize their workload that doesn't depend on managers being with their team members in person.

17:19So they can do that remotely, they can do that in person, whatever. That's dynamic. And that's building on top of that. The key thing is for managers who are leading hybrid teams or fully remote teams, but we're focusing on hybrid, who are leading hybrid teams, they need to have a much better system of performance management. So meaning tracking performance and coordinating with their employees, with their team members on the work that's done. A really effective technique for that is to integrate performance management into the weekly one-on-ones that good managers should already be having with their team members.

17:56So not one-on-one, you set the team member and the manager set three to five weekly goals for the team member. And this should be as smart as possible, specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and timely. So quantitative, but qualitative if you can't get there. Then about 24 hours before the next weekly meeting, the supervisee sends their supervisor a report on the goals that they got accomplished, challenges that they had, and the self-evaluation. At the weekly one-on-one, they talk about the challenges, how to solve them better. The manager revises or affirms the self-evaluation, and then they set three to five goals for the next week.

18:34That way, the manager gets to see what's going on, how the team member is performing. They get to have that sense of making sure that their teams are functioning without the micromanagement and the hanging over the shoulder management by walking around control. You don't need that because now you know you have a weekly pulse on what's going on with the team member and you have coordination. So coordination is a big problem in hybrid work. That's one of the big problems that's lost, challenges that's lost from the office setting. This helps reintegrate coordination. So you have much better coordination.

19:09The manager can help their employee prioritize and they can get on the same page about what needs to be done. And another good thing about that is that you can see which employees are doing well, which employees need help and support. With some of my clients, what we do is that we actually tie in rewards of more flexibility for the employees who are able to perform better when they work more time remotely. If the employee is not able to work, perform to the extent that they need to when they're working remotely, then they're asked to come to the office more and work under closer supervision because some people benefit from that.

19:44So you have ties into actual rewards and flexibility from this performance management. This system really gives managers a sense of more confidence that their team is working well and gives the employee a sense of psychological safety about where they are right now, their situation in the company. It addresses proximity bias with some people coming in more often and less often because each employee knows where they are. It gives them a sense of career progression. So having that weekly cadence is very helpful. I remember interviewing a guy once who said that managers often measure the wrong thing, which is that they measure input instead of output.

20:22They measure the number of hours that somebody is working or somebody is there for something rather than the thing that they're producing. And I found that to be very interesting. But of course, it's hard to measure the thing that they're producing unless it's literal lines of code that you can just account. And so I like what you just said there, because what you're really offering, and I'm putting this to you to respond to, make sure that I'm right, but I feel like what you're really offering there are things that are measurable, other things that are measurable that you can take regular temperature of that a manager can feel like they can track and understand and have a sense of what somebody is doing and whether they need help, but in a way in which you aren't just stuck measuring what were always pretty useless, I don't know how to have a word for it, things to measure anyway, because who cares how much time somebody spends or who cares whether somebody's at their desk at a certain hour.

21:21We always all knew that that was garbage, but it just happened to be a thing that was useful as a shorthand when you're all in the office together. So what do you make of that? Is this really in part about finding things that can be tracked and measured, not in a creepy way, but just in a way in which we feel like we understand what's happening with other people? Absolutely. So this is about performance to outcomes and measuring outcomes. Because when you're measuring what are the goals that you want to achieve, those are the measurable goals. Those, you know, whether you talk about OKRs, some of my clients have OKRs, or objectives and key results, which they break down into those sort of weekly cadence, which is great.

21:59Some have different methods of measurement, KPIs, key performance indicators. But those three to five weekly calls, you can find that you should be able to find that for any employee who you're dealing with. And then the key thing is that you align with the employee. You as a manager and you as the employee, you align and have shared expectations about what you need to be working on, what the outputs are, how you're measured. And then you can work to make sure that you achieve those outcomes, that you achieve those measurements. So that's a very good approach and make sure that the employee and the employer are on the same page and have shared expectations.

22:36It's really all about expectations, aligning on expectations, measuring the expectations, and having the desired outcomes that are going to then be aligned with whatever the manager's goals are, and then which are going to be aligned with whatever the company's goals are. Well, this has been really helpful and you've given a lot of big, holistic things to think about. If a manager is listening to this right now and thinking, you know, I am struggling with how to feel like and know that my team is being as productive in one measure, but also healthy, sustainable in other measures. What's the first thing that somebody should do?

23:17What's the first thing that somebody should think about or address or start to build towards? Actually have a conversation with your employees. That's always the first step. You want to actually find out what your employees are feeling about this. So your team members, because before you institute such a performance measurement system, you want to get on the same page with the employee and have a conversation a bit. What do you perceive employee to be the goals that you're working toward? And make sure that they are actually aligned with the goals that you want the employee to be working toward.

23:46And make sure that the employee feels, okay, are they performing? Are they underperforming? Are they overperforming? What's going on? So that is really the first step. I really see that happening very rarely, that managers have a frank conversation with their team members one-on-ones actually about their performance and what they're seeing, not in terms of like, you're doing great, like I'm actually evaluating you, but hey, what are you perceiving? What are you seeing as your goals? How do they align with a company? How do they align with a team? And how should I, as a manager, measure them more effectively?

24:21What do you as the employee think are the best ways of measuring your performance? And how can we align on this measure to effectively go forward together? Communication. So simple, but we don't do enough of it. Gleb, if someone wants to communicate with you, how would they do that? Well, of course, I'm an entrepreneur contributor, so you can check out my bio there. My website and then contact information is going to be at disasteravoidanceexperts.com forward slash contact. So you can check that out. Disasteravoidanceexperts.com forward slash contact. And if you want a copy of my book on returning to the office and leading hybrid and remote teams, that's exactly what it's called.

25:00Returning to the office and leading hybrid and remote teams. Can't get easier. Gleb, thank you so much. Thank you so much for inviting me, Jason. And that's our episode. I would love to hear what you think and maybe even about a problem that you solved. You can find me at my website, jasonfeifer.com. J-A-S-O-N-F-E-I-F-E-R.com. Also, I have some more useful stuff for you. I write a newsletter about how to future-proof yourself and become more adaptable and optimistic. I would love for you to sign up. It is at jasonfeifer.bulletin.com. Also, check out my other podcast. It's called Build for Tomorrow.

25:37In each episode, I take on some belief that we have that holds us back from progress and show you why it is not as bad as you think. Problem Solvers is a production of Entrepreneur Media and comes out every Monday morning. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode. Thanks to Deepa Shah for production. My name is Jason Pfeiffer. See you next week.