Good morning. And everybody, thank you for joining our
webinar today. Hosted by Igloo Software
with guest speaker David johnson from
Forrester. We're about to kick off our
webinar, "What employers can learn from the great
resignation." Should you have any questions
throughout this webinar, please feel free to submit
them via the chat function.
Now I will throw things over to our guest speaker,
David johnson for an introduction.
Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Listen, um
Yeah, I'm a principal analyst here
at Forrester. Been with the company for about 10 years
and for 8 of those have been studying employee experience,
employee engagement. And so for
me, that's right at the intersection between organizational
behavior and psychology and technology.
So how does technology affect
people's motivation and willingness to do the best work
that they're capable of? How do policies change
that? How do we do remote
work well? And what does that mean
for their willingness to bring their best
selves to work? So those are the kinds of questions
that I wrestle with and work with our clients on.
And it's an honor to be here today, Thank you for
for listening in.
Well, David, thank you so much. We're really happy to
have you. I know we've had some great conversations
over the last few months and
I think this is a topic that's really top
of mind for a lot of Igloo customers.
For those of you that don't know me, I'm
Sean Duffy. I'm the VP of Product Strategy
here at Igloo Software. Been with the company
for about 4.5 years. I've
spent about 20 years in enterprise software.
Did a long stint before this in
CRM space before moving into
the digital workplace realm. So
really happy to be here today and to talk
about a topic that I think is, again, really top
of mind for many of you
out there today.
So I think maybe
one of the first things we can kind of kick off with here, David
is, you know, some of the factors that have contributed
to this, so called 'great resignation.'
Yeah. So this is, as you can imagine,
one of the most popular inquiry
topics that I have right now. And for those who don't know,
inquiries are
one of the ways that our clients interact with us as
analysts is they'll set up a half an hour of time on
our calendars to talk through some challenges that they're
having. And usually that takes 2 to 3
weeks. And so by the time they finally,
you know, gotten on our calendars — their questions,
they already exhausted Google right? Their questions are usually
pretty good. And so they're really wrestling
with something that they don't... have not been able to find really
good, clear answers for. They're really looking for that
industry perspective. So,
you know, one of the things
that they're most concerned about right now is why
so many of their good people are leaving. Why
they don't want their... people that they don't want
to leave frankly, you know, and
so what are the underlying reasons for that?
Well,
to some
extent it's a bubble. To some extent
what we're seeing is the delay of resignations
that would have happened last year, but
that only explains part of
it. The rest of it is what we've also
seen is burnout has increased
14 or 15 percentage points
over a year ago as people have spent
more and more time working on
their own, sort of independently, a lot more alone.
Not much interaction with others.
They're not as much interaction with others as they had
before. Also spending a lot more
time on meetings. And so
the nature of their work has changed and
the resources that they would need to help
counter that burnout and stay engaged
just aren't there. And a lot of companies
have focused on doing a good job
of at least getting people
able to connect and communicate with
others and collaborate with others as best they can.
Providing as much stability as they can.
But that's not the same thing as
necessarily treating
the entire experience around the employee
and helping to compensate for some of those things
that have changed that are really significant that contribute
to burnout. So, you know, that leads
to decrease morale,
lower satisfaction with their work, and
in some cases they
also are not willing to continue offering
hybrid work to employees. And a lot of employers
are saying, "you've got to come into the office
for two or three days a week." And for a lot of folks
that just doesn't make a lot of sense. So
that's really what's driving it from our side, and over
to you Sean to comment as well.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that we've
seen over the course of this pandemic
is this original shift towards,
"hey, work from home is great. Everybody can do
it. We're going to shut down physical offices."
and I think now we're starting to see the long term
implications of what that is.
And it's really
been difficult for a lot of organizations to
adjust, as you were saying David, the
way that they work, the way that they make information
and content available, and the way that they
connect their employees to each other.
This whole idea of, you know,
every meeting is a formal meeting on zoom.
I don't have the information architecture
set up to quickly and easily find
the content and information I need to do my job.
Definitely takes its toll on
workers in the long run.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
So, you know, one of the things that,
you know... if we go on to the Yeah, perfect...
You know,
one of the things that we usually
begin these calls with, I'll ask a few questions
about what their perception is on why people are leaving.
You know, what have they been able to glean
from their own internal sources.
And most of the time it starts with, well,
you know, these companies are coming in offering
our employees more money and so that's why they're
leaving. And in some cases employees are saying
that in their exit interviews as well
because that's an easier answer
than getting into the real problems that are driving
them out of the company. Because that could
be painful. Could
also burn a bridge if they're not careful.
And so it's much safer to say that they're leaving because
of money, but that's not the truth.
So this is a great, great set
of survey data. This is
on the left hand side decision...
or decision makers. Leaders, managers
surveyed as to why they think people are
leaving. And 89% of the time they say because of
money. But they they also surveyed
employees who had left their organizations
and ask them why they left. And guess
what? It's not because of money,
right? Only 12% of the
time is because of money. So you have this big gap between
what managers and leaders and companies
think and what's actually going on. And so until
you can reconcile that and deal
with what's really going on, you're not going to solve
the problem. It's not just more money.
It's one factor of many and arguably
one of the least important.
Yeah, and I think we've we've heard about this hyper
competitive job market that
that's opened up as people have
gone to work from home and they've had opportunities to
work for organizations without having
to necessarily uproot their family and
move to a physical location so
they can be near an office. But for me,
this is a, you know, in some ways a hopeful
indicator in that it implies that there's
ways that employers can
make changes within their organization
beyond simply, you
know, opening up the checkbook and paying more money
to improve the experience that their employees
are having and improve their retention
over time.
Very much. And
you know, it's a value proposition from
the employee's perspective. What is
the total value proposition for them and their careers
and their lives and their overall,
you know, success? And so
if we look on to the next thing, well, next slide...
we'll show the reasons why people
are leaving.
So first is...
again, we talked about burnout. And these
are the kinds of things that lead to burnout, and we're
gonna go into that a little more detail... but
not having the feedback, first of all. We're
just talking strictly about burnout here, we're not talking about
engagement yet, we're just talking about the things that are draining
their energy currently.
But not really having great feedback
from their peers, from their manager, and others
about how they're doing leads to a sense of "doesn't
really matter how hard I work, right? Doesn't
really matter how much time I put in
if nobody seems to notice or care right?"
And that also
leads to a lack of development opportunities.
So feeling like they don't have... because they're not really
being seen and recognized for what they uniquely contribute.
They're also not having the opportunity to develop
in their careers and grow either in position,
or experience, or knowledge,
or in any other way. They feel kind of stuck
right where they are.
And again, that leads to feeling unrecognized
as well. So lack of recognition for
those long hours and that hard work and accomplishment.
And also
some organizations are, what I would describe,
as dumpster fires, right? In terms of trust
levels, They will get rid
of people for no apparent reason or
it's just difficult to discern the reasons
why people are being let go. And so trust
is low. And there's a lot of other reasons why
trust can be low in the organization as well.
Manager behavior could be one of the factors.
And then also if all these things come
together and they're also feeling like they are overworked
and they don't have any control over
their workload, really, and
it just feels like they can't stem the tide. Then
they're just going to continue to burn out. When that happens
it's not long before they're gone. Our data is really
clear on this as
to the reasons why. So anyway,
Over to you Sean. Yeah. No. And I
really like the way this is this is cyclical
because I feel that a lot of these factors,
you know, they bleed into each other.
And at the end of the day when you look
across these these key
elements, a lot of them boiled down
to communication. And the fact that
when employees and their leaders
and their co workers are not are not in
the same office, when they're not interacting
on a daily basis, you're losing
that connection right? You're not getting
that feedback in the hallway. "Hey, I saw that,
you know, that presentation you gave the other day.
Great job." And I think a
lot of our customers have been looking for ways
to substitute those in-person
interactions through things like their
digital workplace, right? providing the ability
to present kudos, to
provide opportunities for
employees to recognize each other,
to increase communications because
people aren't getting that natural
flow of information throughout the
office and making sure that there is a trusted
source of communication. So people understand
why decisions are being made, how they're
being made, what changes in policies
are coming along. And I think just
that overall feeling of overwork
or burnout... David, one of
the things that that I've been reading a lot about lately is
this idea that leadership...
people in leadership positions within organizations
are feeling a lot of that burnout as well.
In some cases even more so
than individual contributors within
an organization. How is that impacting employees
feelings? It's huge. If we
say that, you know, employees burnout
has gone up 14 or 15 percentage points,
we can probably say the same is happening to their managers.
From a psychological perspective, when people
start to burn out,
they no longer have the energy to give,
right? And from a manager's
perspective,
it really feels like you're giving all
the time. It's almost like it feels like you are...
you can never give enough. And yet
you're being asked to give more because your employees
are burning out and they need more from you.
You have to double down anyway. And
so that's one of the challenges, you know, as
managers burn out they're not really giving people
that kind of feedback, They're not really thinking about
what these people need to be successful in what
they're being asked to do. And so
that causes them to withdraw a little
bit, which only exacerbates the situation. You end up
having not a circular loop here, you've got
a downward spiral, right, going on.
So psychologically, anyway, that's
what's going on. Managers
and employees both burning out, and so interrupting
that cycle is the key.
And, you know, looking at the...
at this...
next slide — I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time
getting a slice to advance from my side —
Our data on this is really
clear. The top burnout
predictors — as far as I know, we've got the only data set
of burnout in the industry
across 15,000 people in the global workforce.
Unfortunately we did not ask these questions
in 2020, but we did in 2021
again. And so what we're looking at here
is 2019 data because we're still working through
the 2021 data. But either way, the
these burn out factor's are going to be roughly the same.
They have been in all of our surveys up to
up to 2019 anyway. So even
if there's a little bit of change one way or another and some of these
relatively speaking, they're going to be the same.
But lack of recognition for hardworking
accomplishment. We saw that in the, in the cycle, I mean...
20... anything more than about 25
is statistically significant to burn
out. And we started with a really good scientifically
valid measure of burnout and worked
backwards to find out what most strongly predicts
it. But this is huge.
You know, And the analogy is if a tree falls
in the woods and nobody's there to hear, it doesn't make a
sound? Well if people are working hard day
in and day out and nobody seems to care how long
are they going to do it for? It doesn't seem to matter. They're in
a bit of an echo chamber.
And also recent organizational changes
that affect them have been feeling down. Well,
a lot of companies have had to go through a
lot of change in the last year,
year and a half.
And if people don't have the opportunity to weigh
in on how those changes are going to take place,
they don't get a chance to communicate with each other
and share ideas about how to do things
in a better way, or they don't feel recognized
for the work that they're already doing. They're more
likely to feel like a victim of those
changes rather than a willing participant
and leader of those changes.
This is the kind of stuff that if people start feeling
this way —
not being recognized and
a victim of change — will burn them out, not just
for a little while, but potentially for years.
And it also is the seed that will start
breeding the seeds of contempt as well in
here. And so once people start feeling contempt
toward the organization, it's really
hard to recover that. It's really hard to
recover that, but you can intervene in
these areas and, again, we're just talking about burnout
here, we're not talking about the things that really engage
people which we're going to get to in a second. So, you
know, dealing with this, you've got to deal with burnout as
part of the entire strategy for getting people
to stay. Yeah. And and there's a big
drop off here between these first two
predictors and the
remainder that are there. But I mean looking
at these first two, the ability for
other employees and for leaders within
an organization to recognize work
and being able to communicate
and allow your employee base understand
changes...
Again, this boils
back to this idea of how do you... how
do you bridge that gap
when people aren't there in person and make sure that they
are there in the loop and they feel that they're
part of the story and that they have a voice.
Both, you know, top down communications,
but also having your employees feel that they have a voice
and being able to communicate up to the leadership
team. And then being able
to share the experiences that they're
having and connect with their fellow
employees on a day to day basis. That's
exactly right. I also want to point out
one of the little detail in this data, the
role that technology plays in burnout.
So for example, can't find,
or access tasks or critical information that they
need to do their jobs effectively. One
of the unique things about our data set is, I think,
we're the only ones that not only looked at burnout, but also
looked at the role of technology in burnout.
So we were, you know, looking at that very
closely. Pretty strong predictor of burnout,
by the way, to not have the ability to be successful
or feel like we have what we need technology wise
to be successful.
Yeah, I mean, I think all of us
are hired to do a job
and very few of us are hired to
find information, right? It's part of
what we need to do. The information is necessary
to complete the task, but that's
not what we hire people for. And I think
just having that frustration... and I've seen it in
large organizations that I've worked in before
as well, where you have information silos
You know that information is out there somewhere,
but you don't know which
site to go to. You don't have credentials.
You don't have access to that information
And you might not even know who the right person
is that you need to talk to. So
I feel like this kind of extends sometimes beyond
just, you know, reading a wiki article
or finding a whitepaper on
information that you need. But it also goes
towards finding the people in your organization
that you need to connect with, especially when you're working
in a large enterprise org. You
might know the role of the person that you're
looking for, but you might not know who they are
or who owns a particular function
that you need to consult on.
That's right. It's funny, you know, the analogy I
use is knowledge work in general
is pretty unstructured, right relative to other things
you compared to manufacturing. Imagine
if factories that make cars work the
same way as we do with knowledge
work where every employee had to go run
around and search for and find each
and every part that they need to put on a car and
they might have to log in four or five times to get
that right one. They might have to ask two or three other people
where that part is, how many cars will we make?
Right? None. It'd be really
inefficient. So there's so much more that
can be done to improve effectiveness
and knowledge work by improving the underlying technology.
And that gives us an opportunity to turn the
corner a little bit and talk about
what really drives engagement
in people.
One of the most important
insights from all of my time researching
this entire area came from
a professor at the Harvard Business School who I interviewed
early on. Her name is Teresa Amable
and when she discovered fascinating...
was fascinating to me, it really changed my
thinking. It was that really what
most of us think we know about what engages
people at work is wrong.
She found that when she would survey managers
and asking to rank in order of importance, what mattered
they would say things like recognition, or
paper performance, important work,
or great colleagues and we can see the reasons
for that because we just saw that recognition is
one of the strongest predictors... or lack of recognition
as one of the strongest predictors of burnout. So managers and actually
believe that that's what's going to drive engagement is that we recognize
people more. Well, you know, protecting
people from burnout and helping them recover from burnout
is not the same thing as engagement, right? What
really drives engagement is something completely different.
And that thing is something that managers
will rank dead last in those surveys.
And that is being able to make progress
every day in work that they know
is most important. Being able to get things
done. And employee experience peaks when people
have had a good day at work. So
let's say they're not burned out, right? Let's say that they
are able to be engaged and willing
to be engaged. Um and
uh that ability to be able to use
that energy to make progress and daily work
is where the good stuff comes from, right? That's where that
really good sense of engagement comes from. So
that's important to understand. And that means
creating an environment where being able to reach
and sustain what we call flow,
and stay focused
is a prerequisite for being able to do
that deep work for many... for most of us
as knowledge workers. And so, um,
you know, technology really plays
a critical role in their ability to be able to
do that. And I think that...
that insight in terms of creating an environment
where people are more likely to succeed than fail,
when they have the resources within themselves or within
the organization to do that. That
is the key to employee experience.
I love this slide and I think
it goes really well with with the slide
earlier on where you were talking about
the motivations for people leaving, right?
And a lot of employers feel that
it is compensation is the main
motivator, but really it's not,
that's not what employees are reporting
when they move on. I think as
leaders in organizations, one of our biggest
roles is to be a multiplier.
To make sure that our teams are
successful and efficient and able
to successfully complete
their tasks. Um and
I think it's it's really reassuring to hear
that, you know, what employees are saying is that's
their primary motivation as well. I'm here
to work, I'm here to work hard, I'm here to
complete the task that that's going to help make
my team, my company successful.
Um and I think, again, as leaders,
it's really up to us to define
ways that we can engage those employees
and provide them with the tools that they need,
and the support that they need — because it goes
beyond what software you're using, but
providing that support, that recognition,
and that tool set that helps you on a day
to day basis to get your job done.
Yes. And underlying what you're saying
Sean is a concept called
psychological safety. We're all
trading time in our personal lives to be at work,
to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table.
So fundamentally we need to know
that we are succeeding um and we can
succeed. If we don't feel like we can
and we don't have any indicators that we really are succeeding,
Um then uh then we're more likely
to burn out and disengaged and so on again. So
but yeah, that that that those resources
are so important to double click on that a little bit.
Let's take a look at the next slide.
Well, again in our index survey,
we started with a really
good measure... scientifically validated measure of
engagement as well. And then
work backwards to find out which factors most
strongly predict engagement. Now this is just the
technology related factors.
And what you're looking at here with the gold
bars on the right hand side, is the
top 20% of the most engaged
respondents to our survey. Those that scored highest
on that engagement metric. We
then looked at how they answered other questions.
Right? And so from those we were able to determine
which of the other things most strongly predicted
engagement that were technology related.
These two... these two or
three on the top, really stand out. So
first of all, satisfied with their internal
collaboration technology right? That it
works well for them for what they need to do to collaborate
with others. Second is that they
feel like it's easier for them to search for and find
the information that they need to do their jobs. Again,
what we're looking at here is that
you know, those core resources to be able to stay
in flow right? To be able to
to get to get important work done,
right? So this all hangs together really well.
All the science and our data hangs together
beautifully. And third,
satisfied that their company's security policies
don't hinder their ability to get things done. So all
these things, right, are when we have really
engaged people. They really need these
things and these things are important to them. But conversely
if we look at that aqua colored line
on the left hand side, that's the next 30%
down on the engagement scale. And
not only are they dissatisfied with these technologies,
they're really dissatisfied with these. And so
the bigger the spread between that gold bar and
at a local bar, the more important that
technology is, the more decisive
that technology is for engagement.
So if you've got people who want to be engaged
and they can't be because they are hindered by the technology...
Boom, right? There is a push
toward burnout and then you've got to do a whole bunch of recognition
to recover them. So yeah,
I mean I think we've seen over over the last 18
months, Um
really this pandemic is shine a light
on how important that technology
aspect is. A lot of us went from being
in the office on a friday to working
from home on a monday for an indefinite
period of time. And I think it was
it was a pretty quick realization
for organizations whether or not
they had the tool set in place
um to be able to enable their employees
to maintain these connections,
to find content and information. And one
of the things that I've seen over the last 18
months in talking to customers is just
a lot of shift in terms of what the conversation
is, right. A lot of it has now shifted
towards things like corporate culture,
information architecture, being
able to find and connect to information.
And as well looking at the integrations
between collaboration tools are making sure that
employees have the
tools at their fingertips to be able to
have a conversation quickly on the
fly with someone. And I've seen a lot of organizations
starting to try and look at ways
that they can replicate some of those um
serendipitous interactions
that happen when you're walking down a hallway
in the digital realm as well. So it's
been really interesting just seeing that evolution
in the way that customers are talking
about these problems over the last 18 months.
Yeah, really, I completely agree. I
completely agree.
And uh it's permanently changed now,
Right? It's permanently changed. We're going to
have three times as many people working remotely.
Uh you know, through, you know, long
after the pandemic that we had before. Um
not that the pandemic is really ever going to go away.
It feels like this virus is gonna be with us for a long time.
But you know, again, it's become
such an important criteria for people to be
willing to stay with their employers. So what
can you do about it? Well, one of the things
right, is invest in the kinds of technologies
that are going to help people who are working
digitally, primarily now, working
remotely, be more collaborative
with each other, and get their work done, and
be able to find the information that they need.
It also means focusing on
creating a culture of
recognition and positive feedback,
general feedback, positive and negative, but creating
a culture of recognition that will help
support and drive engagement and protect people
against burnout. Right? Those things
come together. A lot of my inquiry calls
are about how to do that. One of the things to
focus on to do that.
And then also focusing on
improving the way that you do hybrid
work. Hope is not
a strategy, right? So by just setting
a policy and hoping that it's all going to work out
is not viable. Right? So you have to be
deliberate about how you, how
you
uh shape behavior and
uh and how you uh
resource people
so that their hybrid work experience is
as effective if not more so
than working in person. And it can be
more effective than working in person for many,
many types of roles.
So um just a few thoughts
there. Yeah, no and I like that
point you made David um the
tools themselves are not the silver bullet,
they're not the solution. There has
to be a strategy, there has to be um
a design
and a process around rolling
those tools out ensuring that you've got adoption
engagement within your organization and ensuring that
you're using those tools to deliver
solutions to your employees that
are solving the problems that they have. And
you know, at Igloo we've been working on this
for almost 13 years now
and our philosophy is really around trying to
make people's lives better at work. and
what we're seeing now is this
idea of a digital destination, a place
that you go to, you know have all of your
employees connect, to have
them find and share knowledge and
content and information, to
do things like digital onboarding. Um
this is becoming mission critical
for organizations. They're seeing the value in these
types of solutions and these types of products.
Where they're not just a nice
to have anymore. But they're something that they
really are recognizing it
is important to retain their
employees and to ensure that their employees
are happy and able to do their
jobs on a day to day basis.
Yeah, I'm fond of saying that when employee
experience finally appears... when customer experience
finally appears over the crest of the mountain is going to find
the employee experience has been sitting there all along.
And so as companies are trying to improve
their customer experience initiatives, they're finding
that investments in employee facing technologies
are a key part of that as well, and
enabling their people to do that. People can tell the difference
between how they are being treated versus how customers
are being treated. For example,
there needs to be good harmony there. Um,
and so a big part of that.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that we've seen
as well as just this idea that, you know,
when we all went to remote work, um,
that kind of put everybody on a level
playing field, everybody is working remotely.
Everybody's, you know, leveraging zoom for their meetings.
And now we're moving into this hybrid
model where you've got some people
in the office and some people at home that
introduces a whole other dynamic to how
organizations support their
employees, right? How do you ensure that people
feel that they've got a voice when they're the
person on the zoom in a meeting with
the rest of the team, is there in person? Or
when do you go into the office? And and is it
real value on those days when you go into the office
making sure that the people that you need to collaborate
with our physically there as well.
Yes. And I've had a lot of phone calls with
executives and and it's a little
bit... inquiries can be a little bit like a confessional,
right? Where, you know,
it is things like, you know, "we just
don't have that kind of unplanned interactions
that contributes so much to how we build relationships
with people. You know, I miss the water cooler "
and so on. You know, I think
there's real negatives to working from home, we've seen productivity
drop. And so they're zooming in on these areas
where it's not working well, but what's happened and... what
the reality of what's going on is
there always has been a disparity between
people who are in the office and people who
are working remotely right? So we have
not worked to create an environment where
people working remotely can feel included,
can feel like they've got the same chances for advancement
and success that people working in the office do.
that's the problem, right? It's not the physical
distance, that's the problem. It is the fact that when
we've got, you know, two classes of citizens,
basically working inside of organizations and until
you level that playing field, it's not
going to solve itself.
Absolutely, yeah.
These these fears really represent the
kinds of comments that we hear from executives.
and most of them been brought up in another time,
right? Where being in the office or being
on the factory floor or whatever, where they can see all the machines
running, see all the people doing their things.
It's just what they really needed to feel safe and secure
as managers. But the reality is, that's an illusion.
So
the science behind this is also pretty
interesting. Let's take a look at the next slide and I'll
lead into this.
There's a scientist
named Karen Sobel Lojeski who
has done a great deal of PhD, done a great
deal of work on this. Has been studying remote and hybrid
work for more than a decade. Uh
15 to 20 years in fact. And
um there's other scientists as well, but this is
really a nice summary of what we know
what science knows about hybrid and remote
working. First of all, there's three kinds
of distance um Physical,
operational in relationship. and of these,
Physical is the most... is the least important
to outcomes. So physical means things
like spatial distance as well as temporal
distance between people. Operational
is how much does our work intersect
with the work of others? How often do we have to work
with others and collaborate with others in order
to be successful in our own work. Right?
So that's two, and then three is relationship
or emotional distance. How close
do we feel emotionally to our colleagues?
Um Do we feel like we know them as humans
as individuals? Do we feel like
we have an opportunity to really develop empathy
and care for them and for each other?
Do we have that type of environment and working relationship
with people? Well, it turns out that
is the most important of all,
right? How close we feel. and then also
secondly how much our work
intersects with others and how easy it is for us to
collaborate with others is another
way to to think about it. So shrinking
emotional distance and operational distance should
be priority. The priority is number
one and number two. And then shrinking physical
distance really doesn't matter that much anymore
to outcomes. So I think that's important
to understand that perspective. A
matter of fact there was a study done on the physical distance...
several studies done on this,
where beyond about 30 meters
physical distance doesn't matter. They might as well
be 33,000 miles away. Um
You know, we have this illusion that when we're in the
office, so we have all these incidental connections. Well, yeah,
sure we do. It turns out none of them really are all that meaningful.
Right? So
uh so that's important to know. and
it also studies were done that showed that when people
were brought into offices and
and sitting at long tables and all
that physical distance was shrunk to as close as possible,
That face to face interaction drops
by about 70% because psychologically
we still need to have a certain amount of distance between
us and the people around us to be able to concentrate
and focus. So, you know, that's interesting as
well. The illusion of physical
distance.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, as
this correlates really well with
again, what we're hearing from a lot of
our customers and employees
that we speak to. And
the first thing that we often hear
is how do we maintain those relationships
between people? How do we connect
people in a way that um
they haven't had to connect
in the past, right? Where again,
if you are in the office and you walk
by someone's desk and you say 'hello', how
do I enable people to feel that
they're still, you know, part of the same
corporate culture that they have
these relationships with people. And we've seen a
lot of organizations leverage
more social interactions
within the workplace, social responsibility
forums to bring employees together
around particular themes
and issues. Um
and really trying to again foster
those connections in a way that they haven't
in the past. So it's really interesting to see
this, I'm sure there's gonna be a whole generation
of people earning their PHDs studying
uh and revising
some of these studies from from before the pandemic
and looking at what the impact has been
psychologically on employees and
and workplaces coming out of this.
Yeah, there's really never been a better time to study
this than right now. So
that's exactly what's happening. A
matter of fact, I worked with
one of my colleagues just earned his PhD in the last
in the last few months, so
yeah,
yeah, this this idea of shrinking
virtual distance and the role that technology
plays when we're all staring
at screens, you know, at least knowledge workers anyway,
staring at screens for most of our days, it
can't be you cannot overstate how important
the right technology environment for collaboration
and information sharing and things
like that is.
Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that's really important
to put into perspective here is that we do have
tools at our disposal there, the
technology, the level of technology that we have
today are I,
for one I'm really thankful for and I think all of
us in the room are really thankful
for it that we're able to have these types
of connections and interactions based on,
you know, the tools that are out there,
the high speed internet that we have
at home. And I think, you know, as
leaders in organizations, um it's
our responsibility to look at how we can leverage
these technology tools to provide
the best hybrid work environments
for our employees. Yeah,
that's exactly right. And
the recommendations that I make to our clients
around this into helping hybrid
work succeed,
you really have to work to uplevel
your asynchronous collaboration game. Get people
out of meetings. So many companies,
you know, um I think... I don't know whether it's driven
by executive anxiety or what's going on,
but you know, people in 5, 6, 7
hours worth of meetings every single day is
just not sustainable right?
They're going to burn out. So,
you know, maybe about half of that, three
hours max of meetings in a day and
then the rest of the time for being able to get the
other work done that needs to happen is
really important. And also helping people set
boundaries
effectively so that they don't have to
be expected to work 11 o'clock
at night. They need help with that and they need
permission to do that. That's part of the culture. Yeah.
And I think we've seen a shift in work-
life balance for people as well,
right? I have to go and pick up my kids or drop
them off at school or get to hockey
practice. That's always been there. But you know, people
have had the opportunity to be able to be more
engaged with family over the last year and
a half. And I think that's becoming a really important consideration
for people in where they work and
what type of environment they want to be a part of.
I just think it's funny that that that type of arrangement
that everybody thought was so many people thought was impossible,
it's actually working quite well. you
know, people to be able to do that. So, you know,
you know, check your biases, right?
Uh also
one of the things we're seeing from... and again, there's
about 30 companies that I've interviewed here specifically
around hybrid work collaboration.
What were the things that they were doing over
a number of years trying to really make this work well
for them? Is there a lot of companies, especially in tech
and so on that have done this really well? Um
redesigning the in-office technology to foster
inclusivity — and what I mean by that is think about
the conference room.
um you know, setting the... setting
the expectation that there will be one
screen and one camera for
every person and putting
things like laptops stands into conference rooms
to remind people that that's the policy, right? That's
the expectation. you have to set
the expectation because of inclusivity.
And so helping people who are outside
not feel as though they are at a disadvantage. Really,
really important. And that
also cannot be overstated.
And we're also uh
seeing companies start to do things like nudge
managers toward better check-ins. So
if you have the ability to keep track of,
you know, how often managers are meeting with their
employees or you know, how often they're
communicating with the people on their team, things
like that, and you're seeing a drop in that type
of communication. That's a little bit... "say, hey, you know, we
see you haven't talked to
Sean in um, you know,
three or four weeks, it's time to have a meeting. Can
we schedule that for you?" Right, that kind of stuff. Those
are the kinds of things that are sort of, companies
are starting to look to now to help nudge people
in the right direction. It's not so much force
as it is a nudge.
Yeah, no, absolutely. We we've
seen a lot more uh
where we've had a lot more conversations around
the idea of analytics
and understanding what people are doing. not
so much around, and I know there's, you know,
there's been some attempts to kind of
quantify productivity, which I
I think is maybe the wrong direction,
but really looking a little bit more into how
can we shape behaviors, right? How can we understand
what people are doing and how can we help them
be more effective in their jobs
and the tasks that are performing on a day to day basis.
That's right. And there is no
reliable way to measure productivity and
knowledge work by the way. You have to know something
about the difficulty of the work that person is doing.
and then also offering always on
collaboration spaces, places where people can go
whether it be a virtual world or whatever that there's
just always there. That they'll find other people,
they can bump into other people, things like that really helpful.
Um and uh and also
um you know being able to all these always
on spaces to find
information um and
uh and you know that that curation
process that really should go into making
that work well. um
There are also... we're seeing them invest
in so that's that's important, also.
yeah, I mean I've seen the benefit
of this as well, not just in
the fact that employees aren't physically
in the same location, but as we start
to, as you said, up-level asynchronous
work, employees aren't necessarily working
at the same time. So how do you provide
them with the ability to communicate asynchronously,
access information asynchronously,
so that you have that ability
to flex and to
to balance your work and
your home life at the same time.
Right. Very important. Right.
So this has been a great conversation,
David. I mean I think there's a number of
areas that we've touched on here around communication,
collaboration, knowledge management, culture
and engagement. Again, as
I said earlier, you know, we we've
been working on these
problems, these challenges for organizations
for a long time now and
I feel like over the last 18 months
we've just seen this escalation in
terms of how important and how critical
organizations see these challenges.
Um it's not just about...
um it's not just about
enabling employees on a day to day
basis to do their job. It's really about making
sure that they've got those connections that they feel
part of, part of the whole, that they
understand the people that they are able to connect with
on a work basis, but also on a personal
level as well. Whether that's remote or
whether that's in person. Um and
I think it's a lot of it is about efficiency
and as you said earlier, making sure that employees
can do their jobs and they have all of the
tools that are necessary to be able
to succeed. Um so
this has been a great, a great chat.
I really appreciate all of the
content and science you
brought to the table here today.
And I hope this has been valuable to everyone. I
think we might have a couple of questions
on the line.
Right? Uh huh.
Recording,
Oh, someone asked David if you
could repeat the name of the researcher that was working
on hybrid work?
Yeah. Karen Lojeski,
L O J E S K I
if you search for Karen Lojeski
you'll find her stuff.
Really good stuff.
Um and there's another question here,
from our perspective, what strategies
can organizations moving to remote
or hybrid implement to make people
that are remote feel more included and
recognized to the same level as those working
hybrid or in the office?
I love that question. The first thing you gotta do
is smash the notion that working remotely
is a privilege.
Um, and that'll start squashing some
of the behavior that kind of goes along with it. Um,
you know, a lot of cultures are highly competitive internally,
where people feel like they're competing with each other and it's
very hard to have empathy for coworkers
when you feel like you're competing with them. So some of this,
there's only so much you can do in the culture, but...
excuse me... smashing that notion
and setting the expectation that people will
treat people who are remote included as...
you know, as included, but also
you have got to promote remote people, right?
It's been a long, it's been the dirty little secret of remote
work forever that you're not getting it promoted if
you're not in the office, right? You've got to kill that
as well and make sure that the people who are
remote can get promoted and can have the
same career opportunities as everybody else.
Um,
really, really important. So those are
just a few things that come to mind. Yeah. And
I think one of the things that we've seen as well is it's
not just a top down
effort. It's really an organization
wide effort. Opening up channels for your employees
to recognize each other. Um,
and provide that feedback on
an ongoing basis. Um, is
really important. And you know, to
kind of some of the conversation that we've had as well,
Um,
there are digital ways, there are ways to kind of bridge
that gap and provide tools for your employees
to be able to provide that recognition.
So it's really important to make sure that those tools are in
place and that employees know to use
them and know how to
engage with each other through those
venues.
Yeah,
Yeah, that makes that's exactly right.
Um, I see one last question
here, just also keeping an eye on
time, but as someone who works
in HR what is the number one thing to focus
on, fast to stop the bleeding
on resignations? I'll give
you my answer and then Sean, I'm sure that you
have one here too.
In my opinion, there is no more
important thing than any manager can do
than to find out what is important to each individual.
Listening, finding out what is
it that's important to you. How do you know what's important to you
in your career? What do you think is important
for us to be doing is a company that we're not? What are one
of the things that we really, you know,
that you really
are passionate about really want to do? And
then find some way to help them achieve
that. Make sure that the career path
for them is in place. Make sure that
uh that the other things that they need,
right, and that they're passionate about
it are there for them to be able to do. That's probably the most
important. But that's just a general
prescription. That's like a doctor prescribing
medication without really understanding
what... where the pain point is in the patient. Um
I don't know, you know, within your organization, what
pay's like and other things. Pay may be
a factor if it is, you
know, if it is not enough for them to survive
on. And uh and so that's the only time
we're really more money matters is when it's
it's not enough for them to be able to live
the way that they need to live. So,
but you know, that could be the one time
when pay will matter, but it really doesn't matter most
of the time. But that listening,
And that understanding from managers, and then the recognition
and feedback. Giving them, you
know positive reinforcement for
the great work that they're doing, helping them feel
uniquely seen and valued
for what they do. Really important.
Yeah. I don't think I can top
that answer, David. Um You know, one
of the things that we've talked about quite often
is that need for bi-directional
communication within an organization. It's
not enough for leadership to talk
to or at employees, employees
need to feel like they have a voice and they need to feel like
they're being heard. And that goes everywhere
from the one on ones that you have with your
employees on a weekly basis,
um to the opportunity for employees
to chime in when decisions are being
made, to comment and feel
that their voices being heard. So
um echo everything that
the David said there.
Yeah. Thanks.
Excellent. Um, well, that was all the questions that
we had online. Um really just
wanted to thank everybody for taking the time today to
join us. Thank you, David, for
taking the time and for providing
us with some really great insights and
and understanding around the current
pandemic and really what
employees are are looking for
when we talk about 'the great resignation.'
So, thank you very much. David,
appreciate you joining us today.
Thank you as well for the opportunity. And thanks to everybody
who attended.