1713 – Strategies for Thriving in a Remote Work Environment with Dan Michelson

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0:58with us right now it's dan michelson dan you are the founder of uh in common your website is in common.com and you're the author of the brand new book just hit the store shelves holy shift moving your company forward to the future of work dan thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, I appreciate it, Josh. Well, I have you kind of share the work that you do. Again, we can kind of talk about the, we'll definitely talk about the book, but what is your work that you've been doing historically and, you know, with In Common? Yeah, so In Common was started a year ago. So I had a 30-year career building and growing companies.

1:43One company, I was the chief marketing officer. It was a public company. We grew it from about 50 people, Josh, to about 5 ,000 people. So one of those wonderful growth stories, not always easy. Most of the time it wasn't. But we built a pretty exceptional company culture, pretty exceptional reputation in the market. So I rode that wave for a little bit over a decade. Then I got a chance to run a company on my own. So it was a company had just been acquired. They were looking for someone to come in and take it to the next level. It was about a 50-person company, so that might resonate with some of the folks in your audience.

2:21We grew it to about 500 people over the course of the next decade, and it became a real foundational part about how U.S. healthcare gets run and managed. So the first half of my career was really on the clinical side of healthcare in terms of technology. Second half of the career was more on the financial side of healthcare. Yeah. And so the work you do today with In Common, are you a consulting firm? Is that what you do? So, you know, with my background in technology, the one thing that I really emphasized throughout my career was using culture as a way to grow companies, right? Right. So really think if things from a long term perspective, if you can create an environment where people love a place where people love to work and a company that customers love to work with, you're going to have a pretty good built to last kind of story.

3:11And it proved to be the case. We became one of the top companies actually in the world, Josh, in terms of culture. So Glassdoor is a rating system where people leave their valuations of the companies they worked for or work at. And we were one of the top 20 companies actually in the world at the time. But then COVID hit and things started to change. And I became very interested in one, taking a new challenge. And this seemed to be the challenge to take on. And my kids were coming out of college, going into the work setting. Things had fundamentally changed. the reason why this book is called holy shift is like holy shift this is the single biggest and fastest change in the history of how we work period and we one the one thing we know for sure is when our work changes our lives change because they're so intertwined and so the question isn't like what's the road back a lot of people are talking how to bring people back to the office question is how do you bring them forward to the future and that's really what i was interested in So in common is think of it as the tool set that people can use from a technology perspective to automate and animate the things that happen that bring people together.

4:20And think of holy shift is more or less being the mindset, right? So you have to, in order to solve a problem, you first have to understand it. And that's really what the book is about. Yeah. And so, you know, it's really interesting. as of when we're recording this right now, this has been in the news all year long about, and it seems like the common storyline is some employers are fed up and they want people to come back to the office. Employees are saying, we're not having it. We don't want to go back to the office. We're seeing some examples where they're coming up with hybrid solutions, you know, come, okay, at least come in two days a week or whatever, right?

5:02Where do you, I mean, do you see this settling? You know, again, to me, I think to your point, the toothpaste is out of the tube, and this is a new reality. And I think that there's just going to be, you know, it's, you know, as an employer, it's a give and take, right? And there's, you know, kind of pros and cons to each of these. How do you see this all shaking out? Well, that's what I became consuming booth was that question. And also what I was looking for, and I did a ton of research on this, Josh, I interviewed 1 ,700 CEOs in over 97 industries across 47 different countries, right? To try to get a foundation for how people were looking at this.

5:45And the reality is we're, you know, the one thing that all companies in the world have in common is there's essentially a crisis of competence when it comes to company culture. Things have changed. So what people have done historically when change happens, as you know, is they try to bring things back to the way they used to be. People don't like change. Even leaders don't like change that they don't bring about. The reality is in order to be a leader, your real test is when things change, whether it's from a regulatory perspective or a competitive perspective, or in this case, from a culture perspective, how do you recognize the flow, the shift that's occurred, and how do you take advantage of it instead of trying to swim upstream?

6:24So that was what was super interesting to me. So there's really three ways to attack this, Josh. And you're totally right. The one thing that people are doing right now, tactically speaking, is they're trying to bring people, quote, back to the office. The reality is it's going to sell somewhere in the middle. And in our research and in all the research that you'll find on this topic, different parts of the country are taking different approaches. Different industries are taking different approaches. Different companies are taking approaches. Different size companies are taking different approaches.

6:54So there's not one solution for the future of work. That's the first myth that needs to be dispelled. The, you know, the kind of the step back of what's really happened here is there's been three fundamental, what I call them, shocks to the system, right? Changes to the way things used to be. We've gone from a concept of what I call workflow, where everything in our life revolves around our work, right? To life flow, it's all integrated together. So you can't separate one from the other. If you're unhappy at work, You're going to be unhappy at home. And the opposite is true. We've always known this, but we've never really characterized it.

7:29The second one, and during COVID, we all know that those two things meshed together and they were, you know, you couldn't break them apart. So that has been a permanent change. Those two things are now integrated. Second thing is we've gone from something called what I call factory mode, where work is defined as a time and place. So Josh, you and I are both working in very different ways than we did three or four years ago, much less 20 to 30 years ago. So work used to be defined, whether it's schoolwork or work professionally, is you have to go to this place at this time, and that's when work gets done.

8:04Think of a library as an example. My daughter just graduated from college. She happened to do very well. I'm proud of her. I don't think she spent any time in the library at all, Josh. We know you need to go to the library to get work done. In the same way for over half the people in the world, not for everybody, but for over half the people in the world, they don't necessarily need to go to a certain place at a certain time to get work done. There's other things that are a benefit from being together. But just getting the work done, no, that actually can be done in many different ways. So that's the second thing that's changed.

8:38The third thing is we've gone from work being a collective kind of experience to an individual experience. So it's me in the circle of people around me. that's what really affects me the most. So those are the three fundamental shocks of the system that have taken place. Now, the question is, is, you know, when things change, how do you bring about change? The next thing you do is you have to change your mindset. So that's really the second part of the book. And the third one is you got to put things in motion. I call it makeshift happen. So there's fundamental things that really correlate to a great work experience or getting people who are, you know, I call it the big three from the employee experience.

9:16They're engaged, they're productive, and they're staying. They're retained. You're going to retain them. It turns out there's a number of things that directly correlate to driving that. So going back to your question, the thing, the mistake that people have made is thinking that the tactic of just forcing people back, you know, or mandating people back to the office will improve their culture and the experience of running their company, when in reality, you know, you can have a bad company where people are together five days a week, you can have a great company where people are together five days a week.

9:46So, you know, the reality is we're now in this flex mode reality, where once again, different approaches for different companies, we don't need to paint, you know, everybody the same, there's a very different need for a technology company where they maybe are hiring people all over the country, maybe they're used to working in a distributed fashion, maybe they go out and acquire two or three companies over time. So geographically, there's no way that they can all run and operate in the same way. Very different from a manufacturing company where people are fundamentally, you know, working directly in or in a service-based setting like a hospital.

10:20And then the rest of the team might feel even though they can do their work remotely, it may be hypocritical or send the wrong message if they're not on site as well. So, you know, it's actually very simple, but people are making this more complex than it needs to be. You know, you find what's right for you and make it work. Yeah. And I wonder if there's, you know, obviously it looks like in your work for this book, you also kind of looked at history. And I'm curious if you can think of any precedent or any examples in history of where maybe some employers adapted quickly, others didn't. Is there anything that you can think of that maybe we can learn from history where we are today?

11:04To me, that was the most interesting part of the research I did in terms of what I came across. So I'm really glad you asked it. So it turns out that pandemics have a funny little or actually not so funny, very big impact on the way we work and live. So the first labor movement in history actually started during the bubonic plague. So I didn't know much about it. honestly, they call it the, you know, Black Death or the Black Plague. You've heard different references to it. But during the time, between one out of three, one out of every two people in Europe died. So think about that now from a human perspective, but then we'll quickly pivot to it from a work perspective.

11:44Well, there was a labor shortage. So what happened? Well, people who were living on the land of the Lord, the landlords, and they were serfs or servants to some extent, and they lived there from generations, all of a sudden they started to move to different places to work. So job mobility. Also, they were asking for better conditions. So benefits. And then the third thing is they wanted more money. So the average raise during the bubonic plague was 300%. 300%. So then you go, well, that was 600 years ago, but only 100 years ago, the Spanish flu hit. One of every 50 people died in the world. And that caused another labor shortage.

12:24And all of a sudden there was a labor movement, women started to ingrate much more emphatically into the workplace. And you had strikes and you had lockouts, right, during the 1920s. But during both of these times, actually change really happened on a human level, on a social level as well. So during the bubonic plague, there was a renaissance for hundreds of years after. During the, you know, after the Spanish flu, there was a roaring 20s. So we're living in a time of just stunning change. And And what history has proven is when you jump on the wagon of what those changes are, yeah, you can absolutely catalyze not only a company, but even create an industry around it.

13:04And that's really what In Common is focused on, is now that we have this problem where people aren't as connected in as much of a community of work as they used to be, what are some things that we can automate that would make those introductions and those connections intuitive and super simple to happen in the workplace? So Dan, you have a website for the book. It's theholyshiftbook.com. It's available right now, published by Simon & Schuster. Congratulations on this. But, you know, I'm wondering, do you also provide consulting? Do you work with companies? Do you speak? week. What else do you do outside of what I would say your academic work and your noble work on the pages of your book?

13:51Yeah, in common, the way that the application actually works is it automates a lot of the concepts that we talk about in the book. So the big concept is something called core, which are the four things that correlate the most with engagement, retention, and productivity from an employee perspective. So community, feeling a sense of belonging, opportunity, feeling like you of a future, relationships, feeling like you have trusted versus toxic relationships, and experiences, like tangible experiences that are actually helping you grow. So what our application does is help automate and simplify those things for any size company.

14:26Yeah. Well, I'm just wondering if there's someone listening to us that might or should connect, or maybe they know someone that might be able to engage with you. any examples of folks that you've worked a little bit more directly with? Yeah, so the companies we're working with now, the real change that they're feeling, Josh, is this change that's happening from a cultural perspective, which is challenging for companies with remote employees or companies who are working in a distributed setting. Just our ability to create trust and connection between those individuals within those companies has been pretty extraordinary.

15:03So that's really the work that we're doing is taking things maybe that an HR team used to do and making that very simple for any company to automate within their company and across their company. That's wonderful. Dan Michelson, again, your website, incommon.com. To our friend that's listening, you can go to this website for the book, theholyshiftbook.com. You can pick it up. It's available for sale right now. Any plans for an audio book? Yeah, no, I'll be putting out an audio book. Maybe we can use this feed and we'll figure it out together. But that's coming soon. Excellent, excellent. Dan Michelson, again, congratulations on the launch of the book.

15:47And again, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh.

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