Something You Should Know - The Founder of Netflix Reveals His Secret of Success & The Problems of Working From Home

Episode Date: October 31, 2019

When someone meets you, the first thing they likely notice are your eyes. But do you know what they notice second? Or third? Or fourth? This episode begins by explaining what folks notice and how they interpret what they see. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/first-impressions-are-everything-new-study-confirms-people-with-straight-teeth-are-perceived-as-more-successful-smarter-and-having-more-dates-148073735.html The success story of Netflix is legendary. It was a little startup that became a huge success. Today every business school and entrepreneurial seminar likely spends some time talking about the extraordinary success of Netflix. So you might find it surprising that the founder was leaning towards starting a shampoo-by-mail and a custom-dog food-by-mail business before he decided on renting videos. My first guest today is Netflix co-founder and first CEO Marc Randolph who tells the Netflix success sage firsthand. Marc is the author of the book That Will Never Work: The Brirth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea (https://amzn.to/2WjwPeb). Nothing brings a family together more than spending time together. However, WHERE you spend that time is really important. Listen as I reveal whether it’s better to spend family time at home or whether going on trips helps strengthen family bonds. http://time.com/4526901/home-time-key-to-family-happiness/ More and more people work from home or work remotely. This means a lot of employees are working with people who they have never met and will never meet. That can create a lot of problems according to Jason Morwick. Jason is a certified Project Management Professional, author of the book Making Telework Work (https://amzn.to/36eUsZW) and he is publisher of a newsletter called "Open Kimono" www.theopenkimono.co which delivers business management research. He joins me to discuss the challenges faced by the people who work remotely and by the people who have to work with them. He offers some great advice for individuals and businesses to mitigate those problems so everyone feels part of the team no matter where they actually are.  This Week’s Sponsors: -Les Mills On Demand. Try the fitness app FREE for 21 days by going to www.TryLesMills.com/something –Airbnb. To learn more about being an Airbnb host visit www.Airbnb.com/host -Babbel. Get 6 months for the price of 3 when you use the promo code SYSK at www.Babbel.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, when someone meets you, they likely first notice your eyes. But what do they notice next? Then the founder of Netflix tells his amazing story of success and how renting videos was not his first choice for the business. One of my favorites was actually doing customized dog food. Another one was

personalized shampoo delivered by mail. And then one of the other crazy ideas was, I wonder if we could do video rental by mail. Also, one of the powerful secrets to a happy family and the inherent problems when people in an organization work from home or other virtual locations and don't actually meet. There's some studies done that show that people working virtually tend to be more task focused. And when you have a team that's strictly focusing on a task, there's a lot less cohesion or trust within that team. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world,

looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology.

That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

Hi, and welcome to Something You Should Know. When you meet somebody, what's the first thing you notice? Well, most people, according to research, notice a person's eyes. But what's next? After eyes, what do you notice next? Well, it turns out you notice a person's teeth. According to a study by Kelton Research, not only do we notice a person's teeth, we form subconscious opinions about the person based on their teeth. People with straight teeth are perceived as happier, friendlier, more popular, and more trustworthy than people with crooked teeth.

And if you've got crooked teeth, hopefully you have a good complexion, because that is what we notice next, followed by your nose. And that is something you should know. As I'm sure you're aware, there are a ton of books and seminars and articles and TED Talks about business and leadership and success and entrepreneurship. And in all of them, there is typically talk of some legendary people who started companies that beat all the odds and became dominant forces in their industry. And that list typically includes Apple, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines.

And usually, somewhere in that top 10 list is typically Netflix. A little startup that began by renting DVDs through the mail. And despite being overshadowed by Blockbuster that had stores on every corner, Netflix became a huge success and a real player in Hollywood. Now instead of having some success guru come on and talk about it, I have with me that guy from Netflix who actually did it. Mark Randolph is the co-founder and first CEO of Netflix, who, along with Reed Hastings, was there from the beginning. And he joins me to not only tell this amazing story, but to also discuss the lessons and takeaways from

this incredible tale of success that we can all use. Hi, Mark. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks, Mike. Pleasure to be with you. So as I'm sure you know, the story of the success of Netflix has really become legend. I'm sure every business school, every business speaker, every entrepreneurial seminar probably spends some time talking about what you did at Netflix and how amazing this

success story is. How do you look at it, though? Are you so close to it, or do you have such a different perspective on it that the story is entirely different from where you sit. You know, when you start these things, you certainly don't ever envision what sometimes happens. Because what happens certainly with Netflix is so unbelievably rare, that to have dreamed that this might possibly happen and have that be what you're aiming for means that what you know every time you know 99 million out of 99 million and one you're going to be disappointed so for me this was just um curiosity you know i wanted to see if i could figure out how to do dvd rental by mail which is what it was at the beginning um but it turns out that this little puzzle kept on getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

So obviously, it takes a whole book to tell the story. But briefly, tell the story of how this all happened. So in a nutshell, I was losing my job. And not in a bad way. I was losing my job because the company I worked for was being acquired. And it was a company that happened to be have been started and was being run by Reed Hastings. And both Reed and I were going to be out of a job once this merger finalized. And Reed was going to go and change the world of education.

And I wanted to start another company. And I had started five previous companies. So to me, this seemed like the natural next step. going to go and change the world of education and I wanted to start another company and I had started five previous companies so to me this seemed like the natural next step. And Reid and I lived in the same town and had been in the habit of carpooling together and we decided the best way to make this work was that Reid would be my angel investor and that we come up with an idea together and that I'd start it and run it and then off we'd go. And thus began this process of brainstorming, what do we do? And at the time, the only real restriction I had was that I knew I wanted this company to involve selling things over the internet. You know, I'd been a direct marketing guy for 20 years. And when I saw the

internet coming along, I kind of immediately realized how powerful a tool this would be for communicating with people as individuals. So we began playing with what's the right thing to sell. And we had all kinds of crazy ideas. You know, one of them, one of my favorites was actually doing customized dog food. Another one was personalized shampoo delivered by mail. I did a lot of research into whether I could use a computer-controlled milling machine to make custom baseball bats. And then one of the other crazy ideas, even more crazy than those, was I wonder if we could do video rental by mail. And when we told people this idea, whether it was people we wanted to put money in or whether it was employees or even my wife, the common refrain was that will never work. And they said

that because one, there was a blockbuster on every corner back then there was 9 000 blockbusters but also because they everyone thought there was just a matter of days or weeks before uh movies were going to be downloaded or streamed but anyway it turned out the idea was terrible because at the time this was all vhs cassettes but the breakthrough came about two months later when we heard about this new technology called the DVD that it did movies, you know, and it was thin and light and small. And we realized this could be the missing puzzle piece in that old video by mail idea we had been batting around. And so we, mid-commute, turned the car around and went back down to Santa Cruz where we lived. And you couldn't buy a DVD back then it was still in test market so as a proxy we bought this little music CD and then went a couple doors down and bought a little pink gift envelope like a greeting card

would come in and we mailed a CD to Reed's house in Santa Cruz and when it got to his house in less than 24 hours for a first class stamp, we realized that this actually would give us a shot at potentially disrupting the video rental industry. And when that happened, when you decided to abandon your dog food and shampoo ideas to go into the DVD rental business, was part of it because you knew of people's dissatisfaction with Blockbuster? Was that part of the decision? We were way beyond that. It wasn't like Reed and I were walking around grumbling about how much we hated Blockbuster and, oh, wouldn't it be great if we could figure out a way to do better?

We brainstormed all kinds of different ideas, like I mentioned, but this one was attractive because people hated it. I mean, if you're going to compete against a $6 billion a year company, there's a huge advantage if people hate that company. And people hated, hated late fees. And Blockbuster had, as one of its central tenets of its philosophy something they called managed dissatisfaction.

And if you're going to compete with someone, it's certainly helpful when they all acknowledge that their main business principle is managed dissatisfaction. So it wasn't like we did it because of that, but we gained confidence. So we just might be able to gain some ground because of the fact that we were going up against someone that people didn't like. And we also realized that they had a fundamental barrier that would prevent them from responding, which is that, you know, I said that we had 9,000 stores. So that was a very, very big footprint. But it also meant that they were locked into leases and they had employees and DVD was just coming out. So each one of those stores maybe had two people in the neighborhood who had DVD players. So we knew it was a long, long time before they decided to get into DVD, which would give us, hopefully, this long runway of non-competition for us to begin to, A, figure it out, and then hopefully, you know, get a little traction.

And so how long did that take? About a year and a half. It was terrible you know when everyone said that'll never work they were right because uh renting dvds by mail was a terrible idea because at the beginning the innovation was purely having this centralized company you know one store accessible via the internet and yeah we made it much easier to find a great movie. So, you know, we had the classic, you know, e-commerce term back then was infinite aisle. You can have as much as you want. We had every single DVD compared to a Blockbuster store, which had zero. But we still mailed it to you and it took two days to get there and then two days to

get back. And we had due dates and late fees. Not surprisingly, no one did it. But you know what's interesting? People talk about Blockbuster and the late fees as if that was the big dissatisfaction, and perhaps it was, especially when you returned it on time and you still got dinged. But to me, it wasn't that so much as it was that you'd go in there on a Friday night and they never had anything good because all the good movies had been cleaned out. And that infinite aisle thing is the infinite aisle is the answer to that. It's one piece of that. Blockbuster dealt with the fact, and every video store dealt with the fact that they did not have Infinite Isle, was they would put all of their new releases together on a new release wall.

And essentially, that was the high-grade ore. You could walk into a video store and you knew that that little square footage, you had never seen any of them. And so everyone gravitated to those. But they weren't good. I mean, it wasn't like those were the best movies. And we realized that fundamentally, the thing that Netflix needed to stand for was not being the world's fastest shipper of plastic, nor was it going to be being the best streamer. It was about helping people find movies they love. And we realized early on that new releases wasn't necessarily what you really wanted to watch, that there was some great movies that you had never seen, that you'd never heard of, and that if we could bring those up and present those to you, that would be an even more powerful way to compete with Blockbuster. So it sounds like, maybe you're lagging a little bit behind, but you're kind of paralleling the technology as it's developing, ready to jump on the train as soon as it's ready. Yeah. When I said before, we didn't want to be the world's fastest shipper of plastic.

There was also a strategic reason for that, because we realized before we didn't want to be the world's fastest shipper of plastic, there was also a strategic reason for that because we realized before we even launched that all the people who also said that'll never work because eventually they're all going to be streaming movies, they were right. They would eventually be delivered digitally. We just were a bit more cynical and we realized it would take a long time. So if we had built this thing about DVD delivery, eventually our business was going to go away. But if we couldn't, we couldn't at that point position it as we're all about streaming because there was no content and there was no bandwidth. And so we positioned it orthogonally, you know, maybe delivery agnostic, if you will, where we didn't care how you received it. We just wanted you to think of Netflix as, oh, those guys always help me find something great to

watch. And going back to what you just said, at first, that was purely by having every single DVD available and making it easy to find it. And then it began, how do you have deep content? And how do you arrange these in some manner that makes it a little bit more intuitive to find them? And then, of course, we began developing the algorithms for taste prediction. And, you know, then the natural extension many, many years later is proprietary content. But it's always been about finding great movies. And it was and it was DVDs. It is when it's streaming and it's going to be when it's, you know,

beamed into your fillings or whoever people get movies in the future. I'm speaking with Mark Randolph. He is the co-founder and first CEO of Netflix, and his book is called That Will Never Work, The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea. Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues

and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The heresies of Redolf Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know,

you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy,

it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named the Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Mark, how long was Netflix strictly a DVD-in-the-mail rental service before you became a downloading service? Yeah, 10 plus years.

People imagine that Netflix sprung forth, fully formed into this global streaming behemoth, you know, forged by some late Vienna movie. But we struggled for a long time. into this global streaming behemoth, you know, forged by some late Vienna movie. But we struggled for a long time. I mean, Netflix was a tiny startup. We were in an old bank building. We had the DVDs in a vault, the old bank vault. We had card tables as desks. We were bringing in our own chairs from home.

We sat on beach chairs. It took a long time before we, A, figured out what the business model was for shipping DVDs, and even longer before the world was ready for us to begin streaming movies. And wasn't there, as I recall, wasn't there at least one or two times when Blockbuster could have bought you out and didn't? Well, there was one time certainly that we were aware of it because we were pushing it. You know, I mentioned that it took us a year and a half to finally figure it out, and we eventually figured it out. And we figured it out with this completely counterintuitive,

crazy idea where we had no due dates and no late fees, and you paid a subscription, and you made a list of what you wanted to see so we could ship them automatically. And that was so confusing, we decided to give everyone their first month free. You know, my prior life, two of my startups were magazines, so I really understood subscription marketing. And the problem with giving people first month free is that on one hand, about a year and a half to two years in, once we'd finally tested this thing and it took off, it was fantastic. We were getting hundreds of new orders a day, new customers a day.

And I was excited about that. But I was also totally panicked because every one of those orders was costing about $50. And you spent all your money on acquisition up front, and in a subscription, you recover it over time. And so we were going broke being successful. And even worse, this was in the fall of 2000. And Mike, I don't know how old you are but fall of 2000 was just past the uh popping of the dot-com bubble right and so whereas a few months earlier you could just basically go out and wave down a truck which was full of money and it would just back up and they just pour it all out into the driveway you know now if they saw you at a dot-com in your name that truck sped up and drove away so there was no

money to be had. And we got in that position of going, oh my gosh, we're finally successful and we're going to go out of business. So in the beginning, everyone told you, and it's the title of the book, that this will never work. And from the story you're telling, you're going along and you're having all kinds of problems. Why didn't you throw in the towel? What kept you going when you were told in the beginning it wasn't going to work? It looked like it wasn't going to work. Problems kept coming up, and you just kept going. Well, the thing is, it's never black and white is the problem. If we had spent a year and a half and had every test be an abject failure,

yeah, we would have given it up. Because after a while, we would have given it up because after a while we would have said, this is no longer interesting. This problem is that we're not getting anything. The thing is though, you do these tests and they fail, but there's almost always this glimmer of hope. There's this one little piece and you go, wow, that was interesting. That's not what I expected. And out of that idea that didn't work, springs three or four more things to try. You know, I always tell people that it's not about falling in love with your idea. It's about falling in love with your problem because that never ceases to be interesting.

And especially once you get into it, once you've had kind of this middling success, and now you have customers, and now you have lots of employees, all of a sudden you realize this is not selfishly about me. I have investors who this is their dream. I have all these employees, this is their dream. I kind of owe it to them to keep going. And in some way, that's why the Blockbuster thing was so disappointing, because we thought we had finally found a way out. That this huge company might buy us for $50 million, which would at the least take our problems and put it into someone else's hands. Someone hopefully was a bit more deep pocketed, but they said no. And in some ways that reinforced our interest in finishing because we realized the only way out now is through. Didn't Blockbuster actually then try to go into the streaming business yes and they took several swings at it but the problem is they never put their a team on it until the end eventually they

did but understandably because it's the exact same thing that big companies always do is they have six billion dollars of revenue coming in through this store channel and why would they put their very very best engineers on this little thing which might be half a million dollars and so each of their initial attempts was an abject failure and by the time they finally woke up and realized who cares how small this is this is is the future. We have to respond. It was too late. And they really had a chance to get us. We realized early on that a big vulnerability we had against Blockbuster is if they had come up with a program which took what we were doing, in other words, using the internet and doing mail delivery and coupled it with their store footprint,

that would have been extremely compelling. Do you ever think what would have happened? Because obviously the streaming technology was the technology that was going to overtake going down to the store and renting a video. If Netflix hadn't been in the mix, what would have happened? I think about that all the time. You know, we had, we, I talk in the book about the trip we took up to Amazon when Amazon expressed interest in buying us. And I wonder what would have happened if that had taken place. And that's easier because they would have never pursued the video rental by mail. And so I'm not sure when or how it would have come up. The Blockbuster one's more interesting. Blockbuster had more

problems than just us. So even if they had sprung for the $50 million, would they have kept Reed and I interested? Would I have worked there six months and left? Would they have done the same things we did? Who knows? So when people talk about Netflix as this amazing success story of the 21st century, is it, as you stated in the beginning, so unique and so unusual what happened to Netflix that it's just a story to look at and say, wow, or are there applicable principles from what you went through with Netflix that apply to other businesses as well? No, there's huge applicable principles. The error is not in saying, are there applicable principles, because there's tons of them. And in fact, that really fundamentally is why I wrote the book,

is I wanted to show people that all these tips and tricks and secrets that I learned over 40 years as an entrepreneur are not just used for something like Netflix. They're used for anyone who has an idea, whether it's a startup or not. The lesson here is not that Netflix is this unique thing. The fact that it's successful is extremely rare, but not because the things we did were so unique and rare. I wanted people to really see what it's like in those first six or seven years in a company. And you'll see, these are not things that are superhuman. It is not like Reid and I were these unique visionaries. We just kept on plugging away at it, trying things, testing things, being flexible, focusing, not getting distracted. And the rest of it, there's a lot of survivor bias here.

But all of those things that I did are the exact same things that anyone could do if they wanted to start a company. The subscription model, as opposed to renting a DVD and paying for it and being done with it, it seems to me that that would run into, as I recall having conversations about it, that there was kind of a, wait a minute, well, what if I don't rent anything? I'm paying for this subscription. And then every time you raised your prices people were really upset well we never positioned it that you were thinking about it in an a la carte scenario we thought you were paying for the convenience of always having a movie ready to watch because in some ways the big thing we had big problem we had with

blockbuster was that there was immediacy you want a movie jump in your car drive down get it you have it in 20 minutes but once we figured out the no due dates no late fees thing we realized that we now could have a movie sitting on top of your television so now when you wanted to watch a movie, it was 20 seconds away, not 20 minutes. And it reversed that whole competitive dynamic. And what you're paying for is that convenience. And then you started doing something else where instead of just movies, now you've got TV shows, now you're producing your own stuff.

Was this just a natural growth of the business, or was this some sort of strategic fundamental idea, or what was that? Well, strategically, it goes back to the very beginning when we said the brand value we build here has to be about finding great entertainment. And so to some ways, it stems from that. The other thing, though, it just stems from the natural evolution of the streaming landscape, which is at the beginning, you could make a deal for exclusive content. You could be the only person who had the entire stars catalog. But then, of course, the studios and content owners got smart and said, why are we just selling to one?

We may as well make it day and date that everyone gets this movie when we make it available for streaming. And once that happens, the only way to differentiate yourself is to have content that no one else has. And as the prices began going up dramatically for getting exclusives, it very quickly began to surpass the actual cost of producing the content yourself. Well, it is such a great story when you think about how small you were when you started and how Netflix has become, you know, it's pervasive. Everybody, not everybody, but an awful lot of people have Netflix. Everybody's heard of Netflix. Everybody's probably used Netflix at some point. And it's really interesting to hear the backstory

of how it all came to be what it is today. Mark Randolph has been my guest. He's co-founder and the first CEO of Netflix, and he's author of the book, That Will Never Work, The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea. There's a link to the book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Mark. Well, listen, thank you very much, Mike.

Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games,

and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners. Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me,

we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. One of the big changes in the workplace over the last several years is this concept of working with people who are not in the same room with you, sometimes not even in the same building or even the same city.

You have people who work from home and then other people who are in different cities or offices. And these people actually never meet, never talk, never look each other in the eye, but they're working together. That can be a problem. It can actually cause a lot of problems because so much is lost in the communication, facial expressions, hand gestures, and just that sense of connection that I think humans like to have that you can never get if you never actually meet a person. Consequently, it can affect your work, your sense of accomplishment, and a lot of other things. Here to discuss how to fix this is Jason Morwick.

Jason is a certified project management professional. He is an expert on telecommuting, and he is author of the book Making Telework Work. He's also publisher of a newsletter called The Open Kimono, which delivers business management research in an entertaining way. Hi, Jason, welcome. Thank you, Mike. Glad to be here. So let's start by talking about the scope of the issue, because I know a lot of people work from home, at least some of the time, but I also see a lot of people on the road in the morning driving

to work. So how big an issue is this? Well, according to recent research, it's estimated that about 70% of the American workforce is working about one day a week from home. And even if you're not working from home and you're going into the office every single day, chances are you have to work with people that are in a remote location and not located with you. And so what are the problems that result from that? Well, there are the obvious problems, such as when you can't see someone, it makes it very hard to effectively communicate with them. You miss out on a lot of the nonverbal cues, such as body language, facial expression, that sort of thing. Anyone that's ever been on a conference call, and that's probably the majority of people working today, you notice that there are audio collisions where people are talking over each other. So, for example, you will always

get to a point on the conference call where there's this awkward moment where no one is talking, and then everyone tries to talk at once right on top of each other. Then everyone will pause and say, oh, no, no, no, you go ahead, you go. And they'll all say that at the same time, and the cycle will repeat. And because of that, it makes it more difficult to collaborate, to communicate with one another when we're working in what's called a distributed team, where not all the team members are working together at the same location. So I've had that happen, and I find that so annoying because everybody's talking at the same time or nobody's talking, and it wastes a lot of time and it's hard to understand people.

So what's the solution to that? One of the easy solutions is to use video whenever you can. I find it interesting that many companies have invested in these great software platforms, whether it's WebEx, Zoom, Skype for Business, etc. But very few employees use all the capabilities that those applications have. Sometimes they just use the conference call information just to conduct meetings where they could be using video. Video solves a lot of issues, and there are studies that back this up, and it's no surprise that people perceive the value of their interactions as much better when they can see someone even on video. And of course, the value of their interactions as much better when they can

see someone even on video. And of course, the quality of the video also matters. In those same studies, people felt better about their interactions as the quality of the video improved. But even if you can't use video conferencing, there are other things that you can do if you're trying to just run a basic conference call. And this is going to require you to be a little bit more mindful and a little bit more structured than you probably would be if you were all just meeting face-to-face in a room. So by that, I mean you have to have someone that is a good moderator, someone that can pull information from people. There are some people that may be part of the meeting that like to process information.

They may be more introverted or simply just want to digest the information before providing a more thoughtful response. And the challenge with that is those types of folks kind of get lost against the people that are more vocal and tend to dominate the conversation. So having someone that's a good moderator that can really pull information from all the participants is very helpful. And having some basic ground rules to kind of run the call or run the meeting is also helpful as well. So a lot of times we tend to jump into meetings and just be very, very task-focused and just try to get right down to the meat of things, where we should actually take a moment to set up what the norms or ground rules should be and how we're going to run that meeting. So how would you set that up? So you would say what to everybody at the beginning of the meeting so we don't have everybody talking

over everybody? This is the rules that I would like to put in place for this meeting. So we don't have everybody talking over everybody? This is the rules that I would like to put in place for this meeting. So we don't have everyone talking over each other. What I will do is I will follow the agenda. I'm going to explain some of the items. Then I'm going to open up to the floor. And if you don't mind, I'll just go around the call in this order and just make sure that I get all the responses from everybody so everyone has a chance to participate. So something as simple as that can help things run a lot smoother. You mentioned it at the beginning, but let's talk a little more about the quality of the communication. Because I can imagine that the quality of any communication between people who never meet, who aren't in the same room together, is going to be different and perhaps not as good as when people are in the same room. Interestingly, there's some recent research that

points out that we tend to communicate less effectively when we're not seeing each other face-to-face, even though we communicate more frequently. So that means that many of these distributed teams are communicating a lot over email, instant messaging, text, what have you, but yet that's not adding any sort of real value. In fact, it's actually confusing or adding to some of the communication problems. So we have to be cognizant of the types of communication that we're sending out and the medium that we're going to use. We have so many options available to us today, whether it's video conferencing, whether it's email, whether it's instant messaging or texting, etc., that a lot of people get bombarded with all this information. So if you set up some group norms of, hey, look, we'll send an email out, but it has to be five lines or less. Anything else, we're actually going to have a meeting for.

Or I'm only going to use text messaging when it's an absolute emergency and I need an immediate answer right now in the next 15 minutes. That way, by having those norms, everybody doesn't feel like they're constantly chasing down their electronic communications. When people work together in an office, something happens. There's a social bond. You can't not be social. And relationships develop. And none of that can happen if everybody, what did you call them, a distributed team, if everybody's remote from everybody else, that connection can happen. There's some studies that have been done that show that distributed teams or people working virtually tend to be more task focused. And that's tough, too, because when you have a team that's strictly focusing on a task, there's a lot less cohesion or trust within that team. That's primarily because there's not a lot of social interaction.

When we meet face-to-face, we tend to talk about whatever, the weather, how your commute was, how your children are doing, various things that help increase our levels of social interaction and increase the social identity within the team. But when we're working virtually, we ignore all that. We just jump immediately into the task at hand. If we just take a few minutes, say at the beginning of a conference call, to actually get to know the other participants, to talk to them about something other than work, then that helps increase the team's cohesion. It increases the bonds of trust within the various team members. It would seem that one of the problems people have when they work from home is simply not getting distracted.

There's so many things in your house you could be doing, from watching TV to cleaning the closet to whatever, that it would be very easy to be distracted and not stay focused on the work. That's absolutely correct. And working from home is not for everyone because some people cannot adjust to that environment. They need to be in an office environment that's more structured and give them that break from the home environment.

If you are working from home, there's basically three things that you have to keep in mind. It's your office space. It's distractions and disruptions. And I consider distractions and disruptions two different things. A distraction might be, as someone once said to me, I can't work from home because the allure of doing my laundry and the other household tasks keep me away from my work. And like you said, it's hard for some people to remain self-disciplined to say, look, I'm just going to focus on work for the next eight hours and not have to worry about any of those other household tasks that are all seem to be floating around me. So you have to keep those distractions at bay.

And then there are disruptions. Disruptions are all the things from kids to dogs to the Amazon Prime delivery man that shows up at your door. Those things interrupt you when you're in the flow of work, and you have to try to think about how are you going to handle those situations as well. You can't outsmart the disruptions. You have to acknowledge them and figure out a plan of how you're going to mitigate them. For example, I used to have a very large dog at home, and I thought I was pretty smart because I could work the mute button on my telephone pretty well between yelling at the dog and then, you know, hitting myself off of mute and then talking calmly to the people on the phone that were on my team,

then hitting the mute button again to say something to the dog. Well, I was doing this back and forth one day and I remember my dog doing something and chewing on the power cord and I started yelling, no, don't stop that right now. And there was a pause and I heard somebody on the phone say, Jason, I'm so sorry. Please tell me what I'm doing wrong. And I won't do it again. I realized I had not outsmarted the mute button. So basically in those situations, what you have to think about is I know I have young children at home or I have a dog or I frequently get visitors into the home. How am I going to mitigate that? I had one colleague that created a game for her children so that they knew that when mom was on the phone, there was a little red sign outside

the door and that was time for the quiet game. And then when she took it off, that meant it was okay for them to come in and she would reward them so that they would know this game over time. And that was effective for her. So whatever you have to do to try to mitigate that and make that effective will make your work life a lot better. One of the things that I know people worry about when they think about working from home, I don't know how big a deal it actually is for people, is just that sense of loneliness. That when you work in an office, there is the camaraderie of, you know, let's go to lunch, let's have a drink after work. And if you're sitting at home all by

yourself, it can be lonely. One of the key challenges is social interaction. A lot of people who work from home miss the fact that they're not around co. You know, we always talk about the proverbial water cooler. And when you're in an office environment, you get the opportunity to be around other folks, talk to other adults about things that are not necessarily related to work. But that social interaction, again, it helps you be more effective over the long term as an employee because you feel more attachment to the organization and that helps increase your engagement, which ultimately turns into higher levels of productivity. you have to kind of find something to fill the void. How are you trying to meet other employees? Again, you could do it over video, or you could go into the office every now and then for, say, specific events, or just to be around other folks to make sure that you have the bonds with your other coworkers.

Even though we've been talking about working remotely, working from home, working with people who are not in the same room, I would imagine that making an effort to actually meet those people you're working with, even though you don't see them regularly, but to at least meet them once or twice would make a huge difference in the way you work together because now you're working with people, you know, who are real. Social identity shows us that, or social identity theory, I should say, shows us that we behave in a manner in line with the interests of the group, putting our own needs and desires aside. So when you have greater identification with the group, that's going to lead to greater trust and cohesion and ultimately translate into higher levels of productivity. So when you think about being part of a team, especially in the early stages of team development, how are you welcoming other team members? How are you bringing them on board? Are you trying to at least get the opportunity to meet face-to-face? Are you doing things that help increase the social bonds

by doing things that are not necessarily work-related and leaving a little bit of room and time for that socialization? That can all be very, very helpful. And ultimately, like I said, it translates into higher productivity down the road and higher team performance. Well, it's interesting. I know people who go to work every day who are envious of people who get to work at home. And then I also know people who work at home who don't have and who miss that camaraderie of working in an office.

And I think it's really important that people in businesses take into account all the things you've been talking about, about how we communicate and how we work together and how it's different when you're not in the same room. Jason Morwick has been my guest. He's author of the book Making Telework Work, and his newsletter is openkimono.co. If you'd like to check it out and read the latest business management research presented in an entertaining way and there's a link to his newsletter in the show notes thank you jason thank you mike it's been a pleasure thanks for having me sometimes it seems that a happy family is one that's always out and about doing things together. But research indicates that family time spent at home is a better predictor for family happiness. Yes, trying new experiences

and visiting new places can be great for bonding with your kids, but when researchers at Baylor University surveyed more than 1,500 people about the types of family leisure they'd taken part in in the past year, they found that those who stayed home and participated in familiar activities were actually happier than those who had ventured out and been more adventurous. The theory is that when you're out together, you're more focused on the experience and the activity, but being home together is a more structured and predictable environment that allows you to focus on the experience and the activity. But being home together is a more structured and predictable environment that allows you to focus on the relationships. And that is something you should know. Hey, you could help us out by spreading the word. All you have to do is share

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