The Expert Podcast

So let's talk about work from home, remote working, or back to office. Over the last 5 years, there's been a huge shift in the actual working arrangement for many employees. Employees that don't have to be on site— for example, in a factory or construction—those have to be on site, obviously. But office, administrative, clerical staffing, many of those jobs went to work from home during the pandemic and afterwards. Not all of them came back to the office, but now there's kind of a pushback from some companies that you have to come back to the office. There's a big debate about this.

Great article that showed up in some of the business publications where there was a viral video where a worker said it's bad to require employees to drive to work every day because it's not productive. That driving time is not productive; the employee's not doing anything, they're not being paid, and they're not doing any work that benefits the company. They're just driving and wasting time in a car and gas and money and everything else. So why not just do everything work from home? Why don't companies just go to work from home?

Well, there's an obstacle that needs to be overcome by both parties—by employees and by companies—and that has to do with productivity. Here's where that happens: In our company, we have a hybrid arrangement where we have an office, we have a location, but not everybody has to be there all the time. Think about if you work in an office, how often do all the people need to be in the same place? Do you have a few meetings every week? Sure, depending on your company, you may have a meeting, you know, three or four times a week where different departments get together and you're all in one room sharing information, and that's valuable, that's important. But most of the time, isn't it that each person is just sitting in their office working independently, working alone anyway or at their desk where they have headphones on, or they're not talking to other people? You're not sharing back and forth that often. So why not work from home?

Even in offices where everybody is in the same place, you might have some chitchat, some water cooler talk, you might walk into somebody's office and say, "Hey, what about this?" and ask a question. Most of those interactions can be done by email, text, phone calls, Slack, any of the other technologies. You don't have to physically be there. And you might feel like, "Well, that face-to-face camaraderie is important." And it is. But is it important enough to have all the extra footprint of space and rent and overhead to have people in the office? Probably not.

But here's the invisible factor: there is, for both the employer, the management, and the employee, a factor of kind of responsible obligation. If you're in an office where you're being overseen and you're being observed, you're not going to kind of walk away for 20 minutes and pet your dog in the office. You're not going to walk away for 15 minutes and play Facebook. You're not going to walk away and go outside and drink a cup of coffee. At your job, at your office, where at home, even if you're a responsible employee, those opportunities are going to come up. No matter how responsible and honorable you are, it's not that the company doesn't trust you; it's just going to happen. We all know it, and that's okay.

I think where companies need to adjust is to go to a more productivity model. I remember a story that happened many years ago, even before the pandemic. There was an employee of a large New York finance company who had a remote job. This person was making $400,000 a year at the time, and they supposedly had a remote office either at their house or near their house that they went to and they worked every day. They were the head of a department and managed a few other people who were also remote. It turns out this person was the top performer of that job in their company. They were the leading performer of that job in their company and they were getting all kinds of awards and bonuses and incentives and commissions because of how good they were doing.

The company discovered after a few years that this person was actually traveling. They were going to the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and Europe, and working while they were on vacation and only working a few hours a day. So what did the company do? The company fired them. And at the time, I thought that was the stupidest idea in the world because who cares how many hours you work if you're getting the job done? Then that's enough. In fact, it's genius if you can get the job done in 3 hours a day. Everybody else takes 8 hours a day. That person is not somebody to be fired; that person is somebody to be a consultant. You need to have that person show other people how they did it, how they did the magic trick. In fact, don't fire them. Give them more to do. Maybe you kind of work out an arrangement that you have to work a few hours and we'll observe it, but we want to get more done.

The problem is how do you manage productivity? Right, if you have somebody who you pay just on productivity, well, then you know if they're not really productive, you can't really pay them anything. And you can't, somebody can't work for free. There's minimum wage and there's certain salaries. If the only way you're managing outcome is by somebody micromanaging the employee, then maybe you need to change the management style. On the other hand, as an employee, if you're just selling and renting your time and who cares how productive you are, then that's not a long-term plan either. If you are actually getting things done—not things done that are busy work but things done that help the company succeed—then you should get paid a lot of money.

So if you're just trading your time for money, it's not going to be very fulfilling for you and it's not going to be long-term fulfilling for the company. But if you can find out what the company actually needs from you, what they need you to provide, to deliver, and get those things done, and you can prove you can do it in less time, a good, intelligent company will say, "I don't care how many hours you work. You want to work 20 minutes a day? If you get all this done, we'll still pay you your salary." That's a little bit of exaggeration, but you see what I'm getting at. So productivity and results are the real measurable. And I hate to use the word productivity because it sounds like what companies use to beat you into getting stuff done and working harder. It's more about efficiency.

The key to being an employee—which I hate that word—or a partner or a colleague in a company to being valuable is figuring out what the company needs from your efforts and figuring out a way to deliver that in the least amount of effort and time of yours, the least amount of aggravation, the least amount of drudgery. Because here's the thing: Many people's jobs, I'm sure you feel the same way, you feel like you sit there 8 hours and it's boring and you're doing nothing and you're just like doing paperwork that means nothing, and you can't imagine, doesn't matter what the money is, you can't imagine why you're doing this. It's a dead-end job; it's not your life's calling. It's not something that makes your life more vibrant. But if instead of just trading dead time for money, if you could trade actual deliverable for time, figure out a way to do it quick, boom, and then you're done, you're out the door.

And that's where work remote versus work in office, I think, is having its moment of conflict right now. Managers are seeing it. I just want to know you're doing the time. I want to be observing you. I want to make sure you're actually working and not playing Facebook or shopping on Amazon. They don't know how to deliver inspiration. They don't know how to deliver project management. They're just somebody who knows how to watch somebody. You don't want a watcher to be a manager. You want an inspirational person to be a manager. And if you're an employee or staff or whatever you want to call yourself, if your direct supervisor is just a watcher, you're in the wrong job. You want somebody who knows how to deliver your efforts to the company and help you know how to deliver the efforts that are needed in the least amount of aggravation, the least amount of stress on your part.

Food for thought. I know you have an opinion about this. If you are a manager, if you're a supervisor, if you're an employee, let me know what you think about this. Work from home is great, but there's also responsibility to make sure that what needs to be delivered is delivered. And if you can find a way to do that without being bored, without being dishonorable to the company. Wells Fargo just fired a bunch of people because they had mouse jigglers. They were jiggling their mouse and that mouse jiggler made their mouse move around. So employees that were working from home that were not being managed directly made it look like they were actually doing work, and they got caught and they got fired.

So, tell us your thoughts on work from home, work from office, what the future holds, and what your personal opinion is on it. Thank you for watching another video at ActualHuman.com and subscribe. TV. Remember, if you have questions or comments about our videos, put them in the link below. Also, remember that you have availability and access to live one-on-one question and answer consultation with a licensed expert in a number of fields: investigations, insurance, surety bonds, civil court mediation, even things like real estate records research, real estate brokers, real estate mortgage lenders. In addition, you're going to find that experts are available in business segments: business development, marketing, advertising, certified licensed experts. So if you do find this content valuable and you want to delve more deeply into a subject, you can't ask YouTube a question, right? But if you want to talk to somebody live and actual human, use the link below. Thanks for watching.