CAVO Ep. 89: Using Hybrid and Remote Work to Improve Retention and Productivity While Cutting Costs

In this engaging, interactive, and entertaining podcast, you will learn how to dramatically improve your ability to use hybrid and virtual work as an instrument to improve retention and productivity while cutting costs. Many leaders rely on traditional office-centric collaboration and leadership styles in managing hybrid and remote teams. Yet, research conclusively demonstrates that instead of incrementally improving on the old-school office-centric approach, the best outcomes in managing teams come from adopting a flexible work model. Gain insights from Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, a consultancy focused on the future of work, and CAVO Visiting Virtual Expert. Dr. Gleb, known as the "Office Whisperer" and "Hybrid Expert" according to the New York Times, engages in a conversation with Dr. Gary White, professor in the School of Business and Economics at National University, about leveraging hybrid and remote work to enhance retention and productivity while reducing costs.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:02

Welcome to the Center for Advancement of Virtual Organizations podcast, using hybrid and remote work to improve retention and productivity while cutting costs. I'm Dr. Gary White, professor in the Department of Leadership and Management at National University, and I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Gleb Sapersky, who has been lauded as office whisperer and hybrid expert by the New York Times for helping leaders use hybrid work to improve retention and productivity while cutting costs. He serves as the CEO of the Future of Work Consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. Dr. Gleb wrote the first book on returning to the office and leading hybrid teams after the pandemic, his best seller returning to the office and leading hybrid and remote teams. He has authored seven books in total and is best known for his global bestseller, Never Go With Your Gut, How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters. His cutting edge thought leadership was featured in over 650 articles and 550 interviews in the Harvard Business Review, Inc. magazine, US Today, CBS News, Fox News, Time, Business Insider, Fortune, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His writing was translated into Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Korean, French, German, Vietnamese, and other languages. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for Fortune 500 companies from AFLAC to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, with eight years as a lecturer at UNC Chapel Hill, and seven years as a professor at Ohio State. A proud Ukrainian American, Dr. Gleb lives in Columbus, Ohio. I should mention that Dr. Gleb is also our Cavo fourth quarter visiting virtual expert. So welcome, Dr. Gleb, and thank you for taking the time to come and chat.

SPEAKER_00: 2:33

Of course, Dr. Gary. Thank you so much for inviting me.

SPEAKER_01: 2:36

Dr. Gleb, I'm excited about our topic of conversation today and to learn more about leading hybrid and remote teams. But to get us started, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself other than what I already mentioned?

SPEAKER_00: 2:52

Well, I've been really passionate about making good decisions ever since I was a child. And I grew up in the earth in the I was born in 1981, and I turned of age 18 in 1999 when there was the dot com boom. Companies like Pets.com, WebVAN, and so on were doing really great. Then just a couple of years later, all these companies, when I was 21, they all went bust in 2001-2002. But you know what? The Wall Street Journal and other business papers were praising the leaders in their decision making in 1999, and they were criticizing the same leaders in their decision making in 2001-2002, but they were the same people making the same sorts of decisions. So that helped me realize that leaders don't really know how to make good decisions, and business observers and analysts don't know how to assess leaders making good decisions. And that's why I went into academia to research decision making, how to make the best decisions in the future of work. And so that's, as you mentioned, I was at UNC Chapel Hill at Ohio State, researching these topics, teaching about them, writing about them, publishing about them. At the same time, I spent a lot of time consulting and training for companies around these topics. So the future of work has been a dynamic field, and ever since the pandemic, the major topic in the future of work has been hybrid work and remote work. So right now, 90% of my consulting, good conversations, training, presentations, books are writing is about this topic. I've helped by now over two dozen companies figure out their transition to hybrid work, flexible work, return to office. Of them, 23 chose a hybrid first model, and two chose a remote first model. And we can talk about that. But that's my background, that's what I've been doing. And I worked for a number of Fortune 500 companies, as well as smaller companies that have something like 50 or so staff, so and everything in between.

SPEAKER_01: 4:53

Well, that's wonderful, Dr. Gleb. And uh, you know, speaking of uh hybrid and remote work, uh what what are some of the mental blind spots that you see around uh remote work?

SPEAKER_00: 5:06

So for context, my area of expertise in decision making is around these blind spots, cognitive biases. And these cognitive biases are the dangerous judgment errors we make because of how our brain is wired. Because we aren't wired to connect together small squares on a zoom screen, right? That's not what we're wired for. We're wired for being living in small tribes in the ancient savannah, when we lived in small tribes of 50 people to 150 people. That's why you see companies getting over 50 people, that gets into a different stage of the organization. And many leaders are unable to make that transition effectively. And so that's that's something that really changed drastically in March 2020 when we had to make the very rapid change to not be in these smaller tribal units, but to exist as small squares in the Zoom screen and connect with each other. And what you overwhelmingly saw was that companies did not adapt the way that they led in a hybrid and remote setting. They used office-based processes and practices. And that's a very big problem. So let's talk about some of the dangers of what's going on here. They didn't adapt to that situation, and now you're seeing companies demanding that many of their workers return to the office. In fact, there was a survey by KPMG showing that 64% of the CEOs who they surveyed, and these are CEOs of companies with over 500 million in revenue, so large companies, by 2026, these 64% would like their workers back in the office five days a week, like nothing happened in the pandemic. And so this is a big problem. And that's called the blind spot. Here is called the status quo bias. The status quo bias. It's where we prefer what we intuitively feel to be the status quo, what we intuitively feel to be the right way to be. In the Savannah environment, in the ancient savannah, that was very important because if we changed the environment, if the environment changed, that meant something dangerous. Our life was very precarious. So if the environment changed, it was very important for us to try to bring back the environment to its previous state, to its status quo. But in the current environment, that's a very bad idea because we have a lot of disruptions going on. Whether it's the pandemic, whether it's the 2009, 8, 2009 fiscal crisis, the rise of the smartphone, the war in Ukraine, and the war in Israel, all of these disruptions change the dynamic, and we can't just function as though they didn't happen. But our intuitions are to function and to try to get back things to the previous status quo. That will never happen. We can't just get back to the status quo. But many leaders try to do that, and that's a big, big problem. So that's the status quo bias. So that's one of the three blind spots I wanted to mention. The second blind spot that I see going on in a lot of leaders, and this is what I the status quo bias, by the way, is what I see a lot in companies when I consult for them, and leaders keep saying that they, why can't we go back to January 2020? And I have to explain to them why not. Another problem that I see in companies is what's called the empathy gap. The empathy gap. So it's a lack of empathy for those who don't share your perspective, a lack of understanding of other people's emotions and the importance of other people's emotions. Literally yesterday I was talking to an executive director of a sizable nonprofit, and she told me that, you know, she really enjoys her one hour and a half commute. Hour and a half there, hour and a half back. It really helps her clear her head, it really helps her rethink her priorities and really prepare for the business. So it's very helpful for her. And she just can't, for the life of her, understand why others are so down on the commute. And she thinks that they shouldn't be so down on the commute. Now, when you look at surveys, you see that 79% of people name the commute as the top reason they want to work in a flexible modality. So clearly, people really don't like the commute, but she has trouble empathizing with them. And that's what I see very often: that there's a lot of trouble with empathy among leaders who are hostile, unhappy about flexible work. And the last of these cognitive biases, the blind spots that I want to mention, is called functional fixedness. Functional fixedness. It's kind of like the hammer-nail syndrome. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So when you learn one way of functioning, one way of leading people, one way of collaborating, one way of innovating, one way of mentoring, one way of brainstorming, whatever it is, you'll tend to apply that technique to other contexts. So in March 2020, as I mentioned, there was the major transition, and companies still kept applying office-based methodologies to leading hybrid and remote teams. And even now, so at that time most teams were remote, now most people are hybrid, and still companies are not adapting, not training their managers on how to lead in a hybrid modality. They're not changing their processes, their culture for leading in a hybrid modality. And there are still some people who are remote and they're not adapting to that either. So this is a huge problem. That's why you're seeing one of the big reasons you're seeing a lot of CEOs demand that their staff come to the office is because they haven't learned how to manage teams in a hybrid modality or in a remote modality. And that's why they're trying to get their staff to the office five days a week. And this is a huge, huge issue, a huge blind spot. So this functional fixedness causes a lot of problems for companies, for leaders, and for their staff.

SPEAKER_01: 10:45

So true, Dr. Gleb. You know, so it makes me wonder uh is hybrid and remote work, in your view, more productive or less productive than office-centric work?

SPEAKER_00: 11:00

So it's not my view. When we look at the research, we see that hybrid work is unquestionably more productive than office-centric work. It tends to be more productive depending on the industry by one to several percent. So several percent more productivity. And it's kind of understandable why. When we look at the research, when we look at why people are more productive in hybrid modality, it's because they don't have to do the commute on some days. And on those days, when they're not commuting, they are spending more of their time, they're spending some of the time that they would have spent working. Well, they would have done the unpaid labor of the commute, they're spending some of that time actually working, on average of around 40% of the time. So when people are working from home, so let's say somebody comes into the office two days a week, and three days a week they work from home. Some of the time that they would have spent commuting an hour there, an hour back, or even an hour and a half, like that, um, executive director, so three hours a day or two hours a day, they would spend a significant amount of that time, like around 40% on average, actually doing work. So that's one factor that adds to productivity. Another factor that adds to productivity is that people can focus on doing the work that's best done at home, at home. And what kind of work is that? Well, that's the kind of work that requires individual head-down time. So that's work like writing, like coding, like analysis, well, like doing various Excel spreadsheet work, marketing design, all of this sort of stuff that requires head-down focused work, report preparation, editing. So that's kind of one area. Another area is doing asynchronous messages, things like Slack messages, Microsoft Teams messages, emails, which takes up a great deal of time for many people. So that's the second type of work. Again, head down where you don't want to be in the office and distracted by other people while you're doing that. Finally, video conference calls and phone calls. There's no reason to be in the office to do those things. You could very easily do that at home, and you don't want to come into the office and sit on Zoom calls all day, and people really complain about that, and you're going to be distracting people around you and you're distracted by them. Much better to do that from home. And again, we're talking about the large majority of people who have a reasonably comfortable home office. So that's much better done at home for the large majority of people. The things that are better done in the office for most people are going to be collaborative activities that require more intense forms of synchronous collaboration. So things that are harder to do on a video conference meeting, like make nuanced and complex decisions, as one example, plan strategy, figure that, do some problem solving. Then nuanced conversations, one-on-one conversations like about performance management or conflicts, where it's important to read body language and evaluate it. Socializing and team bonding, not so fun to do on Zoom. I mean, some people make it work, but it's more engaging to do it in person. And finally, mentoring and on-the-job training. Those activities, it's valuable to build up trust for those activities. It's easier to do that in the office. So those are the activities that are most productively done in the office. So when people do separate and they act, they actually do the things that are most productively done in the office and at home, that's when you get the rise in productivity from hybrid work. So that's hybrid work. But let's separate that from remote work. And we can talk about hybrid work separately. Remote work is a more mixed bag because if you're working fully remotely, then you have to do things at home, the collaborative activities that are overall more efficiently done in the office. So it either the things are not done as well if you're using office-based methodology, in which case you actually lose productivity. So we do have research showing that if one of the reasons if you there are some studies finding that there are lower productivity in remote work for collaborative tasks that involve collaboration. Things like learning, mentoring, and so on, some you lose some innovation if you use traditional office-based methods. There's other research showing that if you actually use remote first methods, so methods adapted for remote work, you could do collaborative work effectively. And you can have higher productivity than if you work in the office of in an office-centric modality. So remote work can give you higher productivity, but you need to use different methods for it to give you higher productivity. So you need to relearn things, use different processes, some different cultures, some different techniques. Whereas in hybrid work, you do definitely need to do some training, but even without any training, you get a slight boost of productivity. With training, you get a significant boost in productivity. So that's what the research shows pretty clearly about hybrid work and remote work and the productivity implications of both. And I'm happy to double-click on any of that if you'd like, Garrett, Dr. Garrett.

SPEAKER_01: 16:00

Interesting, interesting. Yes, you mentioned the research, Dr. Gleb. And I'm wondering here, what exactly does the data say about how employees feel about hybrid and remote work?

SPEAKER_00: 16:12

So there's no question that employees, remote capable employees strongly prefer to do at least some remote work. Not, I mean hybrid work. And many, something like maybe 25%, depending on the survey. Different surveys show different things. Maybe it's somewhere from 20% to 30% would like to work fully remotely. Now we know that fully remote job openings get a lot more interest than hybrid or in-office work. So for example, LinkedIn has data showing that something like 13 to 14% of job postings in recent months were fully remote work, but over 50%, they attracted over 50% of the job interest. However, when we do surveys of what people actually want, on average, people want something like 20 to 30% of them want full remote work, something like 50 to 60% of them want some kind of hybrid modality. Usually something like under half the work week spent in the office. So maybe go into the office something like one or two days a week. And that's the preference for the large majority, so that 50 to 60%. And then the final something like 15 to 20% of remote capable employees would like to work in the office full time. So that's the general breakdown. We also have some demographic breakdowns. So demographically, let's get a little bit into that. When we look at generations, so when we look at younger people, younger people tend to want to work in a hybrid modality the most. There's they have the low, so the youngest people, what we call generation Z, so people who are approximately 20 to 30 or something like 30-ish or something like that, they have the lowest desire to work in the office full-time. They have the highest desire to work in a hybrid modality. They don't have, there's certainly a significant proportion of them who do like to work fully remotely, but many of most of them would not like to work fully remotely. The next category of people would be millennials, people from the mid-30s to the late 40s. So millennials, we pretty clearly see they have the strongest desire to work fully remotely. So all the demographics, the largest desire to work fully remotely, and then a large number of them would like to work in a hybrid, and a smaller number, pretty small number, would like to work fully office-centric, although a little bit larger than the previous generation, Gen Z. And then the same, then Gen X, the next one would be people in their 50s, would like to, there's a little bit of a stronger desire to work in the office, and finally the baby boomers, 60s and over, would have this still over half of them would like to work in a hybrid or fully remote modality, but you would have more of them wanting to work in the office full-time. So that's demographics in terms of age. Another important component is underrepresented groups. Any underrepresented group that you survey will have a larger desire to work fully remotely than white males. That means women, unfortunately, women still have more of the care burden in our society, so they have more of a desire to work fully remotely to address the care burden and the chores burden, whether it's child care, elder care, and so on. You also have the same thing finding for, let's say, African Americans and people for they naturally in the office they still face some microaggressions and discrimination, so they report that they have a much stronger desire to work in a hybrid modality or fully remotely. Very few of them want to work in a fully office-centric modality. And of course, people with disabilities have a given that they have many of them have mobility challenges, they very much strongly prefer to work either fully remotely or in a mostly high in a hybrid modality, whether you may be coming in once or twice a month or something like that, rarely. So maybe once or twice a week, depending on the people, very few want to work in the office full-time. And also other people with other disabilities, for example, associated with long COVID, like fatigue and brain fog, and we have a lot of these folks definitely have a stronger desire to work fully remotely and in a hybrid modality compared to white males with no disabilities.

SPEAKER_01: 20:36

Well, that's a fascinating look at the demographic information, and uh uh by and large, quite possibly not surprising. But I'm wondering here what approach works best for hybrid and remote work then? And and can you tell us a little bit about the psychology behind that?

SPEAKER_00: 20:55

Sure. The best approach to hybrid and remote work is a team-led model. And so the team-led model involves having team members work together to figure out when and how often to come to the office. And we have extensive survey evidence showing that this is results in the highest engagement. So when you look at the engagement levels of people who have a team-led model modality, so there are four options basically. Who makes a decision on when to come to the office? Is it the top-level management team that sets the guidance for everyone? You know, that says come to the office on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. That results in a lower level of engagement. What about if it's your direct supervisor? That results in also not that high level of engagement, probably about the same as if the company set that guideline. If your team decides together, of course, with your manager participating, that results in the highest level of engagement. And then the next highest level of engagement is if the person individually can decide when and how often to come to the office. And you know, people are surprised to hear that. They think that, well, the highest engagement comes when people can decide when and how often to come to the office themselves, because that seems like, well, the most autonomy. But the thing is, if you come to the office, if you want to see your colleagues, most people want to come to the office for the purpose of collaboration. But if you can make the decision yourself on when to come to the office and your colleagues can make the decision themselves, then you're not really going to be coordinated. And then you're coming to the office and your colleagues aren't in the office, that doesn't serve you well. So that that that results in a lower level of engagement. And then if the team decides together on how often to come to the office. And the psychology behind it is pretty simple. When a team decides to come together, then you have mutual investment and buy-in. So people actually feel and know that they have investment and buy-in into this process on the very local level. Like it's where it's you know, six people coming together to make a decision on when to come to the office. You don't you don't get more local than that, where people are actually making that decision, where they're having a strong investment into okay, I made this decision as part of a group. You know, maybe the group didn't fully agree with my perspective, but I was one of the six people who had the vote and had the participation, and I still influenced the decision. And so you have a lot of investment and buy-in into the decision. And that's one aspect of the psychology that encourages people to actually align and be engaged with this modality. The other aspect of, from a psychological perspective, as you asked Dr. Gary, is that you have social pressure in a kind of a positive way where you have mutual obligation and you feel like, okay, I have mutual obligation to these people to come into the office on a certain schedule, and I made a commitment and I made a promise, and I know they made a commitment and they made a promise. So I can rely on them and I will be reliable to them to come into the office on the schedule that we decided for the reasons that we decided. And it's important as part of this team-led model that you're able to reassess this. And what I advise my clients to do is to reassess this once a quarter, to have surveys to see how well it's working, and then to reassess this. And if you need to come in less often than or more often, then you could easily do that. So that's what I tend to find works best, and that's what the research shows.

SPEAKER_01: 24:23

Yeah, those are excellent suggestions. So then how do we facilitate collaboration then uh in a hybrid and work uh uh environment?

SPEAKER_00: 24:33

So you want to facilitate collaboration by using native to hybrid modalities. And native modalities, first of all, in the fur when you're already decided on how to work in a hybrid modality, you're already coming to the office to do collaborative activities. That's great. But you're still beneficial to do some collaboration, of course, when you're not in the office. So what I advise my clients to do is to adopt a technique called virtual co-working. So virtual coworking is where you dial into a video conference call along with the rest of your team. So let's say six people team, and you start by sharing what you plan to work on. These are going to be individual activities, you're not going to be collaborating, you're not going to be intending to talk about collaborative projects, you're going to work on your individual tasks. So you sign into a video conference call, you turn off your microphone, you leave your speakers on, and your video is optional. Then you start working on your tasks. And if you have any ideas that you want to get feedback on, if you have a problem that you need to solve, maybe a question you need to answer, you turn on your microphone and share. And then everyone else can anyone else can turn on their microphone and respond to you, or they can do screen sharing, they can do whiteboarding, virtual whiteboarding, whatever is needed to explain the situation, maybe brainstorm, solve the problem, they can have a little bit of a chit-chat, and then you stop that and you go on back to your tasks. And when I facilitate this, I usually see this happens maybe three, four times an hour. And then you at the end of an hour you finish by sharing what you worked on, what you accomplished during this time. So this is a very motivating activity. It helps people feel motivated and it helps people feel connected to their teams even when they're not working together. So that's a very good beneficial aspect of it. Another beneficial aspect of it is that it really helps junior staff members get onboarded, get mentoring, get on-the-job training, which is essentially being able to answer, ask and answer questions, get your questions answered very quickly. So this is a really useful activity that I find. So virtual coworking would be what I recommend for effective collaboration in hybrid work.

SPEAKER_01: 26:46

That's excellent information, Dr. Kleb. And I'm also wondering, aside from collaboration, uh, we we can't overlook the importance of uh promoting innovation. So uh likewise, I'm wondering what are some of the ways we can facilitate innovation in the hybrid and uh remote work environment?

SPEAKER_00: 27:07

So especially this is especially useful for remote teams, but also for hybrid teams. What you want to do is instead of the traditional brainstorming of the team, and brainstorming folks know what this is, people get into a room and they start sharing ideas about a specific problem they need to solve or some innovation they want to create. Now, this doesn't work very well in a virtual setting, in a video conference setting, because you kind of step on each other, it's hard to brainstorm in that setting. So what instead works very well is something called virtually asynchronous brainstorming. And this is a modality that specifically, we already knew that there were some problems with traditional brainstorming. And the problems are that it's called one is called production blocking, where when you have an idea and other people are talking about a different idea and you find it hard to get your idea across, which is especially a problem for junior folks, lower status folks, and people who are more introverted. Another problem is evaluation apprehension, where you're worried about other people judging you for your ideas that it seems too out of the box, maybe implicitly criticizes someone. So this is something that's again a problem for junior folks and also for people who tend to be more pessimistic. And we already knew that this was a problem and we were already developing techniques to address it before, long before the pandemic, in the early 1990s. There was this technique called asynchronous brainstorming developed. I took this technique and I developed it into a more full-fledged technique for remote work, for hybrid work called virtually synchronous brainstorming. And I have a Harvard Business Review article on this topic. So, what this involves is you first generate ideas anonymously and separately. So you have some kind of innovation you want to pursue or a problem you want to solve, you get something like a Google Form, Microsoft form, or a mural if you want to do something visual. And you generate ideas independently and separately from each other. That prevents production blocking because you're not being blocked by other people. So that's really helpful for junior status team members and introverts. And you also want to make it, you can make it anonymous so that you don't know who created the ideas. And that really helps the people who are pessimistic and also junior status team members, junior team members. So you generate a bunch of ideas. Let's say you have six people, you have 10 ideas per person, and the the let's say 10 of them are duplicative, so you have 50 ideas left. Previously, 60, 10 of them duplicate each other, you have 50. So you clean up the spreadsheet, whoever's facilitating this cleans up the spreadsheet with the ideas that appear in Google Forms. You get a spreadsheet, and then you send a spreadsheet with to everyone to evaluate the ideas. That's step two. So you evaluate the ideas, and you can give a score of zero to 10 for each idea on how innovative, creative, and exciting you find each idea to be. So now each idea has a score of 0 to 30 for each person, and you have six people. So now you have each idea having a score of 100 of anywhere from 0 to 180. So 30 times 6 is 180. And then you can also leave anonymous comments on each idea. So you combine the scores, you combine all the comments, and again, that's the facilitator doing that. And then you just choose the top ideas that float to the top. So you just say, well, we'll only be considering the ideas that get 160 or above, with the maximum being 180. So you only choose the best ideas, the ones that got the most points from everyone, and you discuss those ideas, and that's a synchronous meeting. So the previous are asynchronous, you do them separately from each other. Now this is a meeting that's happening at the same time, either remote or in person. If it's a hybrid team, I recommend doing this in person. If it's remote, you do it remotely. And you just discuss the top ideas. You might have like three or five top ideas that flow to the top. And then you discuss the implementation. You only focus on the implementation of these ideas. So improving them, you have a number of comments on them, you think about improving them, and you discuss which ideas you want to implement, how to do so, and who gets to implement one of the next steps for implementation, assigning responsibility. And the nice thing is that you can save the rest of the ideas for later. Traditional brainstorming, the ideas get lost. But here you have a bunch of ideas. You have 50 ideas that are rated. Some of them might be really good ideas, they're just not coming at a good time, so they might not be very practical. But maybe six months they'll be very practical. You don't have to do redo all this work, you can just revisit it and go back to the idea. This is a very helpful technique, virtually synchronous brainstorming.

SPEAKER_01: 31:58

Those are very useful techniques, Dr. Gleb. Thanks for sharing those. And I'm also wondering, you know, uh, aside from collaboration and innovation, uh how can we also facilitate accountability in a hybrid and remote work environment?

SPEAKER_00: 32:15

So the key here is to switch over from the traditional once-a-year annual performance evaluation to many frequent, much smaller-scale performance evaluations. The typical reasoning of managers that they have been taught the way to manage is to manage by walking around and seeing who appears to be working, and then at the end of the year you give them a good score. That obviously doesn't work in a hybrid or remote modality very well. So what you instead want to do is create many frequent small-scale performance evaluations. Where what you do is you meet on a weekly or a bi-weekly every two weeks or once-a-month basis, depending on how independent the employees and how senior they are. More junior people, less independent, you want to meet with them more frequently. And so what you do is at each of these meetings, you create three to five goals until the next meeting. And those three to five goals, during that time, the employee works on those three to five goals. They might, of course, have plenty of other tasks, but you focus on those three to five goals as the accountability mechanism. And you tie that to your team's broader KPIs, key performance indicators, or OKRs, objectives and key results, whatever you tend to use for your team. So you tie those three to five goals to the broader OKRs or KPIs, and that each individual knows that okay, here's for the next two weeks, next week, next month, these are my top three to five goals that I really need to work on and hit. And a day before the next performance evaluation, they send the employee sends the manager a report on how well they did on those goals, any problems they faced, how they solved those problems, and a self-evaluation. At the performance evaluation, the employee and the manager discuss their performance, discuss ways they can improve their performance, how well they did. Maybe the manager coaches them on solving the problems better, the manager affirms or revises their performance evaluation, and then they choose three to five goals for the next time. So this is a very helpful technique because it helps the employee always know where they stand. It prevents them from overworking and burning out due to anxiety about their career, gives them psychological safety to know that, hey, they made some mistakes, but they'll can, it's okay. The manager doesn't criticize them or judge them harshly negatively for those mistakes. They can feel better about that, and it gives them a better relationship with their manager, which is really important for career retention for retention and career growth. And the manager, of course, it's very helpful for them because now they have accountability, they know what the employee is doing and how they're contributing to the broader team KPIs, and they can know who to give projects to, who to give promotion to, who has more free time, who has less free time. So it really helps them coordinate and manage their employees better.

SPEAKER_01: 35:06

Yeah, that's very useful, Dr. Gleb. Uh you know, another issue we tend to face has to do with um uh fight proximity bias uh in the workplace. How how can we fight proximity bias uh in a hybrid and remote work environment?

SPEAKER_00: 35:25

So proximity bias can be really challenging. Uh and I have another Harvard Business Review article on this topic. It's the issue that employees who are not in the office can be overlooked and forgotten by managers and not given projects and promotions and so on. And this tends to be a serious problem. And of course, another aspect of proximity bias is the haves and have-nots, that people who are working in the office who have less opportunity to work remotely, they might get jealous of people who are working more time remotely. So this is a serious problem. And well, how do you address proximity bias is first of all through the performance evaluation mechanism that I just discussed. That really helps address proximity bias. Another way to address it, and which needs to be done complementarily at the same time, is a strategy of a culture of excellence from anywhere. The typical approach to doing work is to focus on how the work is being done, where it's being done, and the manager assesses things by walking around. Instead, there needs to be a change in the culture, in the organizational culture, to be really focused on outcomes, not on how the work is done, not on where it's done. So an excellence from anywhere means that anyone just looking at the is looking at outcomes, not where the work is being done. And that enables people to not care about, hey, where are you when you're you're doing your work? You can be working from home, you can be working from a client location, you can be working from a Starbucks, you can be working from the office. It doesn't matter. It's just about the outcomes. So focusing on outcomes is much more objective, fair, and it really helps address that proximity bias by reducing jealousy from workers who are working in the office because, okay, they don't have to work from the office, it's just their role. If they need to be in the office to access physical equipment, well, that's just their role. It's how they get their outcomes met. And the same thing for people who are working remotely, if they know that they're judged on outcomes, then they don't have to be worried that people who are in the office will get preferential treatment.

SPEAKER_01: 37:37

Yes, I see. And you know, in light of what we've been discussing uh on a very practical note, uh how should companies uh react or what should companies do about office space uh in shifting to a remote and hybrid work environment?

SPEAKER_00: 37:57

So what companies need to be thinking about is how to change the office space of their employees, the whole concept of office space for their employees in such a way as to maximize productivity. And there are two elements here. So when you're thinking about your employees and what they're going to do, most employees are right now working on the hybrid modality. That means that, so let's talk about that first, that means that they're coming into the office to do collaborative tasks and they're working in their home office to do their individual tasks. So they're working for the company in both spaces. That means the company needs to address both spaces. In the office, it the company needs to reduce its office space because it's not being used as much, and focus much more on collaborative space. So transition a lot of the space that they used to have that's devoted to individual work, they need to transition it to huddle rooms, maybe some soundproof phone booths for the inevitable Zoom calls that people will still have to take in the office, even if they mostly are doing it from home. But most people still occasionally have to do Zoom calls and video conference calls of various sorts from the office. But video conference rooms and huddle rooms and lounges for more informal collaboration should be the main space in the office. And there should be some hoteling, hot desking for employees who do need to do some work while they're in the office or who don't have a good home setup. But most employees will be doing very little of their individual tasks in the office, they'll be just doing their collaborative tasks in the office. And the companies at the same time need to fund the home offices of their employees. Again, for hybrid employees, they're going to be doing their individual work, which is most of the work. Most of the work that employees do is individual, not collaborative work. And all of the work for fully remote employees is going to happen in the office, their home office. So companies really need to fund the home office effectively. And that means good equipment, of course, tech equipment, video con for video conference calls, so lighting, mics, headsets, all this sort of stuff, fast laptops, all of this sort of equipment that they that people need. But also thinking about ergonomics. So things like a standing desk and nice chairs and so on. So creating nice environment for their staff. And if their staff are unable to have a good home office, which happens occasionally, then they should think about investing into a co-working pass for their staff. So having an option of co-working or home office setup. And the nice thing is for full remote companies is that they can get rid of much or all of their office space. So they save a lot of money. So they can just use flex space and co-working space to bring their employees together once a quarter for trust building activities and collaborative strategic planning activities. They don't even need their own office. Or they can still retain their office but just focus on a smaller space for those occasional rare times when employees come to the office. So that's how companies need to adapt their office space.

SPEAKER_01: 41:05

Terrific recommendations, Dr. Klebb. Thank you for sharing those with us. So my final uh question is then where can our listeners find your book?

SPEAKER_00: 41:16

Great places to find on Amazon. So return to the office and leading hybrid and remote teams. They can also find it on my website, disasteravoidance experts.com. Again, my website is disasteravoidance experts.com, and you can find the book there as well.

SPEAKER_01: 41:33

And I recommend that everyone do just that. This is such an important topic uh in today's uh uh uh post-pandemic environment. So Dr. Gleb, in closing, uh I'd like to uh uh thank you for for being here with us and allowing us to uh connect with you today. It's been a pleasure uh chatting with you, and thank you for joining us uh in support of the Center for the Advancement of Virtual Organizations. We truly appreciate your insight and know that our listeners will benefit greatly from your experience.

SPEAKER_00: 42:08

Thank you, Dr. Gary. It's a pleasure to be the visiting virtual expert for Keval this quarter, and I'm happy to collaborate together. Thank you very much. It's appreciated.