Chief Change Officer - Wayne Turmel on Remote and Hybrid Work: Would you return to office 5 days a week?

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

Would you return to office 5 days a week? Author of The Long Distance Leader, Wayne Turmel and I dive into a crucial topic: long-distance leadership in an era where communication technology is rapidly evolving for both workers and leaders. Yes, you read that right—long-distance leadership, not long-distance relationships. Just like with any relationship, maintaining, nurturing, and fixing long-distance leadership is far from straightforward. This conversation couldn’t be more timely. When we recorded this episode, Amazon’s CEO had just announced their RTO (Return to Office) policy for 2025, and so far, the media narrative surrounding it hasn’t been exactly positive. How can Wayne and his team provide solutions as remote and hybrid work models continue to change shape? Episode Breakdown: 2:30—From performing on stage to helping leaders perform at work 4:54—Long-Distance Leadership: More Than Just a Long-Distance Relationship 8:06—From Pagers to Zoom: How Tech’s Evolution Transformed the Way We Lead and Manage Teams 13:51—New Challenges, New Solutions: What’s Different in the 2024 Edition Since the 2018 Release? (Book Link) 25:16—Amazon’s 2025 RTO Shuffle: How to Make the Office Comeback a Win for All Connect with us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Wayne Turmel Chief Change Officer: Make Change Ambitiously. A Modernist Community for Growth Progressives World's Number One Career Podcast Top 1: US, CA, MX, IE, HU, AT, CH, FI Top 10: GB, FR, SE, DE, TR, IT, ES Top 10: IN, JP, SG, AU  1.3 Million+ Streams 50+ Countries

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation. Today, I'm sitting down with Wayne Turmal to dive into a crucial topic, long-distance leadership, in an era where communication technology is rapidly evolving for both workers and leaders. Yes, you heard that right. Long-distance leadership, not long-distance relationships. But just like with any relationship, maintaining, nurturing, and fixing long-distance leadership is far from straightforward.

This conversation couldn't be more timely. When we recorded this episode, Amazon's CEO had just announced their RTO return to office policy for 2025. And so far, the media narrative surrounding it hasn't been exactly positive. So how can Wayne and his team provide solutions as remote and hybrid work models continue to change shape? Let's find out. Thank you for having me. This is really exciting, Vince. Wayne, let's start with a bit of your background. How does your past experiences

make you the perfect fit to write several books about long-distance leadership and communication for leaders? Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to intentionally stop myself from going down to the rabbit holes because it has been a long winding trip. But the short answer is that I'm originally from Canada while I was in school studying journalism as a stage performer and eventually, like most stage performers, had to get a real job in the real world. And I started in the presentation skills arena because I learned at the age of eight how powerful it was to be able to communicate that the number one factor in how you're perceived as an executive as an employee is your ability to communicate I was always fascinated by that and that's where I started

from and I started in traditional stand at the front of the room presentation skills. But about 20 years ago, realized that electronic communication at the time WebEx was the main tool, was going to change how we work. And so while I was teaching and studying leadership and other things, the electronic communication really became my focus. So I've been studying that for over 20 years. And then about 10 years ago, Devin Eikenberry and I merged. He bought my company. We merged his expertise with traditional, what we think of as leadership skills and my expertise in the remote and electronic world. We now have three books later, established ourselves really as leaders in the field, if that doesn't sound too arrogant. I was just going to say, the big thing for me is that I learned so early

that how you communicate is how you're perceived. And so many people are subject matter experts. They're incredibly smart, but they struggle taking what's in their head and putting it in the minds of their customers, their employees, and other people. As consultants, you know your business. My job is to help you communicate that to the world. What exactly does long-distance leadership mean? How would you define it?

Yeah, we get awfully hung up on, are my people remote? Are they in the office? Long distance leadership is taking what we know makes good leaders and always has, and applying it when you are not always or sometimes ever in the same physical space as the people that you lead. And it's funny because there has always been some version of long-distance leadership. Genghis Khan ruled half the world and never held a WebEx meeting. Julius Caesar did great out in the field.

It's when he went back to the office that things went a little bit pear-shaped. So we've always had to find ways to do this. And as technology has changed over the years, it's becoming both more common and easier, technically easier to do. But technology changes how we as humans communicate. And so if we aren't aware of those dynamics, it's very easy to get you do, because if you think about the roles of a leader, a manager, an entrepreneur, you need to hire, you need to train, you need to delegate,

you need to coach. Yep. All those things need to happen. But how we do it becomes different when we're mitigated and mediated by technology. So our job is to help leaders understand the nuances and adjust their behavior based on the circumstances in which they find themselves. The communication tools we use have changed multiple times over the years. For the benefit of our younger listeners, perhaps you can give us a quick overview how the communication technology has changed over the last 20-something years? The technology changes all the time. 20 years ago when I began, there were 120 web meeting platforms out in the world. And people were constantly stressed about which tools should I use? Should I use WebEx?

Should I use Skype for Business? A dozen tools that no longer exist. And even before COVID, the list of tools available to us was different than it is now. So the tools, which button do I push? Should I use this tool or that tool, is really less important than how well you use the tools at your disposal. How have these changes helped or disrupted the way we lead and manage teams? In other words, how have you seen long-distance leadership evolve? What changes have you noticed in terms of how it works, how fast it's changing, and the direction it's heading? Our first rule in our book is think

leadership first, location second. We believe if you think of what you need to do as a leader, you'll find a way to make it work. If you are not need to do as a leader, you'll find a way to make it work. If you are not confident in yourself as a leader, if you do not exhibit great leadership behaviors, remote is going to make it harder because if I struggle to give people feedback on a regular basis, if I'm in the office with them, I'm going to physically see them and my brain goes, aha, that's Vince. I should talk to him about X. If we're working remotely and I don't see you, I may not give you the feedback that you need in a timely manner. That's going to impact the quality of your work. It's going to impact the quality of your work. It's going to impact the

quality of our relationship. And ultimately, it's going to impact the quality of the team. So we have to be more mindful of including all the members of the team, no matter where they are. And we don't get the benefit of physical proximity. So I still need to coach you. I still need to include you and delegate you tasks and check on your work. And all those things still need to happen. But I need to be more mindful and intentional

about making that happen. Or we had a conversation a week ago and our next team meeting is two weeks from now. And I may not communicate with you during all that time. A lot can happen. If I have not developed a relationship with you where you're comfortable coming to me, if you have a question, I'm going to assume that everything is fine because you didn't say anything. As I said, what we have to do, the individual tasks that we have to do as leaders are the same as they've always been. But there is this piece of intentionality and making sure that we have the information flow that we need, but also the relationship that we need.

Trust, proactivity, avoiding micromanagement, those kinds of things are different in degree in a long-distance work relationship. And as we begin to settle into what we're calling hybrid work, which usually isn't hybrid work, but that's a different discussion, where you've got some people in the office and some people not, and some are in a couple of days, we develop another layer of challenges, which are things like proximity bias, where the people in the office get our attention. The people in the office are given perhaps more opportunities and considered more valuable than the people who are not. And that can impact the team negatively as well. One thing that we found before COVID was the rules for how do you get promoted and how do you get your performance evaluation? All those things favored the people who were in the office most often, intentionally or unintentionally. And in a little bit, I think we're going to talk about some instances

where companies make very specific decisions about these things. If you're consciously deciding that the people in the office get the advantage, that's fine. That's a legitimate business decision. The problem is when it's not a conscious decision, when you think you're being equitable to all your employees, no matter where they are. And yet the people in the office feel very differently than the people who are working remotely. So there's a level of intentionality and mindfulness to remote work that good leaders are probably doing very well anyway. And poor leaders are the ones where the gap becomes wider and wider

between the good leaders and the poor. Everybody listening to this has worked for people who are okay, or maybe they're not okay. But we also immediately have those leaders in our lives that we go, that's the guy, right? That's the person that we want to follow. And when I say that guy, that could be gender neutral, of course. But that's the person I want to follow or that's the kind of leader I want to be. The first edition of the book came out in 2018. What we were really trying

to do was help leaders realize that as stressful and different and unusual as this can feel, you can apply all the things that make you a remarkable leader in this new environment. We want to help you be the leader that people point to as exceptional, interesting, and excellent. You've released a second edition of this book. Why now? What's changed since the first edition came out in 2018? That's a great question because the first edition, of course, came out pre-COVID. It came out in 2018? That's a great question because the first edition, of course, came out pre-COVID. It came out in 2018 and it was very well received. It sold very well. We're in seven languages, including Cantonese and Mandarin and Korean and Polish and Lord knows what all else. But the world has changed a little bit. I think there are two, maybe two and a half primary things.

In terms of the book itself, it's about 25% new or updated material. And it falls into two areas. The first, as you say, is the technology. Technology has just changed. When we wrote the book, Zoom was not a thing. Skype for Business was Microsoft's enterprise tool. Now it's Microsoft Teams. So while we are not a technology book and we don't want to get hung up on the technology,

the way that we work is different now than it was six years ago. So the technology is certainly a piece of it. The second piece is that now that we've gone through this change, more people in North America, for example, 50% of the workforce worked from home at least part-time some of the time during COVID, which means that people have a lot more experience now, including senior leaders. Pre-COVID, many senior leaders had never worked anywhere other than the office before, so they had no frame of reference to say, oh, people can be successful. They can be productive. And so a lot more people have experience. So as we started to say, are we going to return to the office? Are we not going to return to the office?

We're in this state of flux. As I said, we're in the middle of this seismic change that we're all trying to figure out. And the answer for many people has been, we're in the middle of this seismic change that we're all trying to figure out. And the answer for many people is then we're going to get people to come back to the office some of the time. The word that they use is hybrid. It's not really hybrid. What most organizations have done is not so much a strategy as it is a hostage negotiation. The company says, how much can we make them come back to the office before they quit? And there's too much turnover and too much chaos. And the employees are saying, how much can we resist going back to the office before we get fired?

And I guess we've settled on three days a week. And there you are. That's a compromise. It might be working for you, but it's not really a strategy. Hybrid work in its most effective form, and we're seeing this in organizations, is more than just what work gets done where. It includes the concept of time. What work gets done where and when. For example, do you really have a hybrid strategy

if I'm working from home, but I have to log on at the same time as all of my peers in the office get there and log off at the same time as all of my peers in the office get there and log off at the same time. Does it matter if I'm doing deep thought analytical work that I do that between the hours of nine and five New York time? We are a hybrid organization with the Kevin Eikenberry group. I'm three hours time difference from Kevin in Indiana. There are a number of hours a day that we overlap, that we're synchronous.

But he doesn't manage my time. If I want to start very early in the morning and knock off in the afternoon, as long as my work gets done, as long as the clients are getting serviced, as long as my teammates can reach me in an effective manner, that works for us. And that's where what we call hybrid work really becomes something different, the balance of synchronous and asynchronous work. What we're hearing from our clients, for example, is we want people to come in three days a week so that they have time to collaborate and get to know each other and brainstorm. That sounds great in theory. What we're hearing, though, is people are complaining when they go

into the office, oh, I can't get any work done because people are talking to me and there's noise in the office and people are stopping by my desk constantly. And there's cake in the break room because it's Alice's birthday and I have to go deal with that. And then when I work from home, I can't really get any work done because I'm on Zoom calls from morning till night. That's the result of not being intentional about what work gets done where, when. You're right. If your job is to check things off your task list, going into the office may not be the best way to get those tasks completed. It doesn't mean there isn't important work that has to happen there. So how about you decide all the meetings that I have, or as many as possible, are going to take place when we're all together, right? As a leader, I'm going to do my coaching sessions when people

are in the office and we can be face-to-face. And on the days when they're not in the office, I'm not going to have them on meetings from morning till night because that's when they're going to do that task completion, getting stuff done, deep focused thought that is best done uninterrupted. And if they want to do that at eight o'clock at night when the kids go to bed because they can think better, I don't care. As long as that report is in on time, it's up to the quality and standard that we expect. And you are available to your teammates and adding to the value of the team. Now that's a hybrid solution as opposed to merely a compromise. Earlier, you mentioned how long-distance leadership has evolved over time, especially with intentional leaders who know what actions they need to take. But on the other end, they are the team members, junior staff, operational roles, anyone within the team structure. From what I

understand, your book primarily speaks to leaders, those in senior positions. But what about the team itself? Even if a leader is highly intentional, skilled, and experienced, the communication framework can still break down if the team isn't fully aligned. Sometimes team members may not be trained to listen effectively, or they might not operate on the same wavelength as the leader. So no matter how much effort the leader puts into being intentional, if the other side isn't receptive or equipped to engage, the impact may fall short.

How do you address this? Do you also work with teams to ensure that both sides are part of the holistic solution. On the shameless mercenary front, after we wrote Long Distance Leader, we quickly wrote the Long Distance Teammate and the Long Distance Team. The Long Distance Work Life series of books is designed to address this holistic approach that you're talking about. I think that in terms of the teammates, leaders have to involve people in the conversations. The secret to making remote work happen is very clear expectations about what's expected, how things will be measured, and all of that. And that's important, right? You can't do that.

You can't just rely on the good intentions of the employee without guidance, honest conversation, lots of feedback. I think, though, it's important to realize that we are in the middle of, and COVID moved this forward but wasn't entirely responsible, we're in the middle of maybe the most seismic change in the worker-workplace relationship since probably the 1930s. In the 1930s, we settled on a 40-hour work week and five days a week. The office began to be a thing and we, the Western world at least, became less rural and more city. People developed commutes for the first time in their lives. And now, almost 100 years later, the relationship of what does it mean to have a job and what does it mean to go to work and what's the relationship between the employer and the employee

is changing more than ever. And one thing that we are very clear about, particularly in the long-distance teammate, is that when the Spider-Man movies they talk about with great power comes great responsibility. As a remote employee, you have more power than workers in your position have had in a long time. The power to have a little more work-life balance, the power to choose when you work, the power to not have to be on an employer's schedule. But there's also a responsibility to that, which is a level of proactivity, a level of professionalism, a level of going above and beyond communicating with your manager in order for the work to be done successfully. This is one of the reasons for the return to office is leaders were feeling, especially senior leadership, was feeling a lack of control. Like, we don't know what these people

are doing. And that's less a function of where the work is being done as to how it's being measured, the expectations and the leaders coaching, giving feedback and getting good data. Super timely, especially with Amazon CEO announcing that starting in 2025, corporate staff will return to a five-day work week. There's been a lot of buzz around this. So far, the reaction has been mostly negative. Some people say it's the end of remote work. Others say they will quit over it. What's your personal take on this? Or let's imagine if Amazon invited you to help with this transition. How would you apply your leadership models to this situation?

Maybe you can give us a quick overview of your models and how they could fit into Amazon's latest development? Okay, so the first thing is to say we can help them because even though I'm here talking about long-distance leadership, the Kevin Eikenberry Group as a whole focuses on leadership. And so there's all of Kevin's remarkable leadership, which is in the DNA of our remote content. And our remote content is totally consistent with the remarkable leadership. So we can address anything. The second thing is that we often get lumped in with the remote work zealots, the people death to the office and the four-day work week, and all of that. And while we certainly embrace that as an option,

we believe that every organization is different and needs to do what it does. Amazon intentionally has a very 20th century factory model. The nature of what they do, it's 90% warehouses and deliveries. Those are in-person, pick it up, stock the shelves, in-person functions. They also, by the way, have 150% turnover every year. They churn and burn people and have throughout their entire history. That is their business model. And so if they decide this is what we're going to do, it's easy to say we're coming back to the office and so we have no remote employees. But that's not true.

If I am a regional manager, I might have employees in 12 different warehouses. We are not physically together. We might be working the same hours, but I can't see what you're doing in each of those locations. So it's really important that you get back to that you don't get hung up on the fact that we're not all in the same place. If we are in the same place, great. We need to think like leaders, right? We need to coach and present the vision and give feedback and all of that stuff. And if I have people who are in different locations, I need to exhibit those exact same behaviors, adjusting for the difference, the distance. And so we would go back to, why do you have 150% turnover every year? We know that people don't quit jobs, they quit bosses. We know that when leaders exhibit good coaching, good feedback, fairness, all the things that good leaders do, those teams tend to have less turnover and less chaos. So let's improve the leadership mindset of everybody from the new supervisor. The skills of moving from a employee to a leader need to be trained and coached and

carefully defined. And then as you become a leader of more and more people, there's likely to become a distance component. It might be physical distance. It might be that Amazon is a 24-hour operation. If I am the warehouse manager, I'm going to have leaders and teams that are working when I'm home in bed. How am I going to establish the expectations, establish the standards, coach and develop people so that the operation is running when I'm not there? We're on a 24-hour clock. Okay, we have to make sure we're communicating between the different shifts.

How are we doing that? I have 12 warehouses that I'm responsible for. Okay, how are you going to communicate, set the expectations, manage the performance with the people in those different locations? And once we get back to what is leadership, what is good leadership, what do good leaders do, the specific circumstances you can adjust. Here's my personal experience. Except for the first few years of my corporate life, most of my career has involved a good degree of remote or hybrid work.

I've worked with colleagues and supervisors scattered across different locations. So I got used to working with people across time zones, staying up late or waking up early to make it work. I've also experienced the evolution of technology from working without a BlackBerry, then with a BlackBerry, and later moving on to other devices. Now, as an entrepreneur, to work with people from all over. I've noticed that in the U.S., remote work has become a very contentious issue. Whereas here in Asia or in Hong Kong, it's a different story.

Hong Kong is a dense, highly populated city. And the concept of remote work doesn't carry the same weight. Many people just head back to the office, as the living spaces here are typically smaller than in the U.S. For those with families or children, the office actually becomes the preferred place to get work done. Again, what are your individual circumstances? The remote work conversation in the U.S. is very different than it is in Western Europe and Asia, because you're right. People in the U.S. say, I have a spare room and that's where I do my office. If I live in Tokyo, what's a spare room?

And it gets back to Amazon. Even in Amazon, I talked to somebody in Seattle yesterday and they went, oh, great. If Amazon really does this, I don't work for Amazon, but they've just added 15 minutes to my commute because the traffic around the Amazon headquarters is already a nightmare. It's going to become so much worse. So the people that say, I have to drive to work and now it's an extra half hour out of my life, may decide to work from home more often. There are ripple effects. And this

goes back to what we were talking about, that nobody really knows what the new normal is going to be because we're going through these changes. The second thing that is really important to what you said is I've always worked remotely because of my circumstances. And that's really critical. We've always been able to work, make it work. I believe William Burroughs said, the future is here, it's just not widely distributed. And what we found during COVID was the people like you, like me, who had always been working remotely due to our circumstances,

what's the big deal? But people who had never worked in that environment got lost into the deep end of the pool and had to figure it out. We're going through this period where the people who learned it during COVID got very surprised. A lot of during COVID got very surprised. A lot of senior leaders got very fooled. They said, oh, there will be no employee engagement. People are going to get their work done.

In the first six months of the pandemic, when more people went home, employee engagement actually went up. Productivity did not drop off nearly as much as people expected it to. So our assumptions pre-2020 are now being examined and tested and applied in different ways. And so it's going to be very interesting for the next few years while we figure out what work looks like. Jamie Dimon made a very famous speech. He said, starting immediately, we want everybody back in the office. If you choose to work remotely, we will continue to pay you as long as you do your job. But you have taken yourself off the career track.

We are no longer thinking of you as the same kind of valuable employee as the person who comes to the office every day. There was massive outrage and all the remote work people lost their minds. And I found myself in the strange position of cutting him a little slack. Because if we think about high finance, for 200 years, the business model has been one of mentorship. It has been one of long hours in close proximity. That's how you learn the business. That's how you network. That's how you do those things. And so the people in the

leadership positions in high finance only know one way to do this. Now, there are some companies that are experimenting and asking, okay, this is how it's been done for 200 years. Is it the only way to do it? Great. Come here. We're trying this new thing, which is part of seeing how all of this shakes out. With Amazon, a lot of people are going to quit. Amazon is planning next year a 15% reduction in their middle management. They are increasing by 15% the number of direct reports each manager has. The fact that people are going to quit, I suspect, and I don't know this, but I'm guessing, is as much a feature as it is a bug, right? They're going to lose a certain number of people, but they were going to lose a certain number of people anyway. So let people select whether they're the ones that lead. I agree with you on this point. Corporate decision makers,

CEOs, CFOs, HR leaders, they don't create or change policies just to keep an eye on you or monitor your work. There are deeper motivations at play, such as cost savings, accounting concerns, economic pressures, and digital transformation initiatives. While employee engagement and culture are critical, these leaders also have to balance the needs and risks of various stakeholders, including investors, employees, directors, and customers. It's not a simple black and white decision. Yeah, I think what you just said is exactly what we can help do for our clients.

Because let's be honest, chaos is chaotic. We don't always think clearly when we're in the middle of massive change. We don't always know clearly when we're in the middle of massive change. We don't always know where we are and how does what I'm experiencing match what the rest of the world is experiencing. Okay, stop. Let's figure out where you are and help you and your people be intentional and mindful about where we go from here instead of just flailing around. We are constantly surveying the landscape. We are taking the best practices and bringing them to people who are in the midst of change and don't have access to all of the resources, best practices, wisdom that we're picking up, because that's our job. Your job is to do your job. Thank you so much for joining us today.

If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.