In this CEO podcast episode, Scott De Long and Vince Moiso discuss the challenges and opportunities related to evolving work expectations. They emphasize the importance of talent retention, particularly in a competitive job market where employees may receive enticing offers. The focus shifts to the necessity of adapting to a hybrid work model to keep employees satisfied, emphasizing the need for clear expectations and agreements for remote work. The conversation also touches on customer service expectations and the need for organizations to consider employee well-being, growth, and connection to the business in the evolving work landscape.
Transcript | Season 1, Episode 7
Vince Moiso
Welcome to the CEO Podcast. I’m Vince Moiso. And I’m here with my friend Scott De Long. And as you know, we are going to talk about a hot topic today. And it’s just the return to work. And we had a previous podcast where we talked about what the new office looks like. And kind of, you know, what people are doing, but this is different, this is different. What we’re talking about here is, man, what are the guidelines? I think, you know, it can feel like that for some entrepreneurs, and I know, I’ve talked to many that it feels a little bit like the Wild West. What the heck am I supposed to do? What can I do that I can make mandatory for employees? Can I make them come back to work, or do I have to allow them to telework, especially if you’re a California Corporation? California is the most stringent when it comes to employment and employment law employees. You know, California, the state is typically on the employee’s side; other states are very different. That said, what are your comments and thoughts on this subject?
My thoughts are going to be a little bit different. They’re not going to be as technical as they are about the people. I have a couple of thoughts on that. There are two schools of business. And which is one, Herb Kelleher that says, take care of the people, and they’ll take care of your customers. And then the other says, take care of your customers, and if you don’t, we won’t have them. We don’t have people; companies can choose whichever one they want. And I don’t think there’s a wrong answer there.
Vince Moiso
Well, I tend to follow the Herb Kelleher model.
Scott De Long
But a lot of my clients don’t. A lot of my clients say we need to make sure the customer experience is the customer experience. And now, how do we do that? Have the employee’s needs and the employee’s needs changed? Based on them getting a taste of what could be?
Vince Moiso
What we’re experiencing right now and again, you know, with a lot of feedback that I’ve received, is you’ve got employees that don’t want to come back to work. And I don’t mean that they don’t want to do the work; they just want to work from home. They’re saying I don’t want to have to come back to the office. And now that, you know, take Southern California or California in general, is as of June 15, everything went back to, you know, the relative norm. And you could start to mandate having people back in your office. And people are saying employees are saying I like working from home. And in fact, what I’ve heard is people are getting fired, they’re getting let go of their company. Now, what makes it challenging, though, is there are companies that are saying, cool, come work for me. I’ll let you work from home, no problem. They’re leaving one company because of the mandate to come back physically to the office and going to work for another company.
Scott De Long
Turnover is going to be a huge thing. In fact, a month ago, I was talking about, no matter what we do, what decision we make as an organization. We’re going to experience a 10% turnover. I think that numbers are low. I now think, based on the things that we’ve been the peep the companies when we’re talking to employees within that, that turnover rate is going to be higher than that. I think it’s going to be more like 20% Because you cannot make Shangri La; it’s not going to be perfect. No matter what we do, no matter how intense. We put into this process and say, Alright, this is the best we can do for our organization. You’re going to have people that are unhappy with that decision. And there’s going to be another company that’s doing it differently. And they will go there. I just saw an article the other day. That said, they say that 52% of your employees have their resume on the street right now. That doesn’t mean that I want to leave. But 52% of the employees have their resumes on the street. That’s a big statistic. What happens if they leave? What happens if just 20% of them leave? How would you replace, you know, a fifth of your workforce or a fifth of the work that’s being done by that workforce? The bigger issue than just the legality and all of that.
Vince Moiso
But let’s talk about some of the legalities. Let’s talk about how we feel about it and what we’ve experienced. If I can, I’ll just start with a quick experience share. And I’d say just for me personally, in the last year, I had a lot of health issues. And it was the irony of dealing with health issues during a COVID year that really allowed me to maintain a high level of productivity because everybody had to be remote. You know, everybody was in quarantine. And it wasn’t just me; I didn’t have to slow down in my business. And that was a big deal. And so then, what did I realize? I realized, well, okay, I can be effective remotely; I can be effective from a virtual place. Now, I don’t think anything’s going to ever take the place of this right here. And that person-to-person that face-to-face, I don’t, I don’t think, and I’ll never suggest that it’ll replace that. What I am going to suggest is this: I know I’m not going to travel as much as I used to; I’m not going to go do the face as much face-to-face as I used to because I don’t have to. That has changed as much. What you talked about earlier was whether you follow that customer model or the employee model. But employees first versus customers first, I don’t care which model you follow; the reality is that customers’ expectations have changed, and employee expectations have changed. Therefore, I’m going to give my very strong opinion on this matter. And I want to preface this with my opinion: the hybrid model is where it’s at. I think you must, as an organization, figure out a way to accommodate your talent and still have, you know, effective office space at the same time and bring back those people that are key to being at the office or want to be at the office. I think you’ll allow that to happen. You also allow this telework or remote working at the same time. In fact, that is what I’ve implemented. And I can let you know, but I want to get your opinion first. And I can certainly share what has worked and what hasn’t.
Scott De Long
Here’s what I wonder. I mean, yours in a word effective. And I’m wondering if the word shouldn’t be efficient instead of effective. Because there’s a difference between efficiency and effectiveness, I think the effectiveness piece might be missing a little bit when we don’t get this face-to-face. Can we be efficient? We can get the work done. All that was missing some of the collaboration. We can do this podcast remotely. You can be at your house; I can be at my house. And we can just do it remotely. It doesn’t have the same impact; why are we doing this? Well, one, because we’re enjoying a beer and having a good time. But the other thing is like on Zoom, it’s just here’s what happens in meetings on Zoom. People are being polite. They wait for someone else to talk to. They sit back, they don’t jump in, they don’t engage. They don’t say.
Vince Moiso
They’re multitasking, and they’re checking their phone and email. They’re not dressed appropriately. And it’s like they’ve taken the meeting, you know, differently than they would if we were faced to face; there are all sorts of criteria and etiquette that I believe must change, and what a business must do to adjust is create an agreement. Let me continue my experience and share a little bit here. The other day with my EO group, as I mentioned to you previously, is that I got to attend this really great lunch, and that was around the legal ease the law, California law, employment law around this whole subject of COVID-19 What that looks like whether you can you know, mandate, vaccination, all that other stuff, and then what telework looks like and you know, Can you force people to come back to the office, you know, can you even do that? The answer is yes. I mean, you can make vaccination mandatory exception being, you know, for religious purposes, or if you have medical reasons for not, you know, things like that. There are exceptions to that, and you can mandate people return to the office. In fact, what I’ve experienced with some businesses is that you know, people are letting people go there, firing people for refusing to come back to work.
Scott De Long
Especially when you’re talking about childcare and all those other issues, then I saw another study the other day on the disparity and the gap, the gender gap that’s going to be happening because of this that’s going to, like women have been trying to break barriers, and they didn’t even close. There hasn’t been perfect yet. But I think this is going to create more of that. Last year, with kids having to stay home and work, doing their school from home made it even more difficult. There’s no great answer; there’s just no great answer. All we must do is evolve. We must evolve that. And humans are built for that. It’s great. We can evolve; we must figure out what’s going to happen. My concern is the turnover rate. Can you really afford 20% of your workforce to leave?
Vince Moiso
Well, forget about that as, like, what about talent? You’re going to let talent go; I give you this key person in a super talented position, that’s effective and efficient.
Scott De Long
That person’s got the resume industry, or at least 52% of those people have the resume on the street, but you’re getting offers from other folks that have this wonderful new vision of what they’re going to be going to pay him a little more because they’re trying to learn from you to keep them what’s it going to cost you.
Vince Moiso
Well, Scott, you and I are believers in people; we believe that people drive the business. And with that said, I think the best thing you said is companies must evolve. And this is why I’m so adamant about creating this hybrid model. Because I think you can find that happy medium with your key people where, you know, they’re coming in two to three days out of the week, and you’re allowing them a couple of days out of the week to work from home. I don’t want to ever diminish the impact of the efficiency and effectiveness of that face-to-face interaction. And being physically in the office. I think all of that is important. And I think you could find a happy medium that keeps your people happy at the same time. Look, here’s the bottom line: a happy employee is a productive employee. And if, we’re going after profitability, you want productive employees. And I’m just a believer that to get a productive employee, you must keep that employee happy. Now they’ve tasted something that they hadn’t tasted before. It’s like having a good beer, having Pliny for the first time in the last episode: Scott, welcome to Pliny, the Elder. That’s not what to drink and right now, but you know. You got your first day supplanting the older, and it’s hard to go back to these other IPAs that you’ve had that you might have thought were good. But that’s what I’m talking about; as you know, you get this taste in something different. And now you’re going to ask him to go back.
Scott De Long
Once you have given somebody something, taking it away is near impossible because they’ll vote for the people who promised to continue to give it to him. The other company, the political process, whatever it’s going to be. Now that we’ve given people something, trying to take that away, there’s a whole other side to that, as well as lonely people. That one interacts. I want to go back to where I want to go back into the office. Because I love people. The engagement, thrill of the debate, and collaboration is important to some folks too.
Vince Moiso
Here’s what I got for you, Scott. I’m happy you had Pliny the Elder in our last episode. You can never have it again.
Scott De Long
What are the customer expectations? We have already said that in the sales world, where we’re going out to meet customers, their expectations have changed, but the customer service expectations have not changed. Customer service expectations have not changed. And they will penalize us if we give them less service than what they think they expect.
Vince Moiso
How do you do that? I also want to give some nuggets right in this conversation. And I think it’s important, and what I’ve learned is in certainly you got to have this telework or this remote working, you got to have an agreement in place, you have to outline, and we’ve talked about this before, how important it is for people to understand and have clarity on their role and responsibility. If you’re going to allow, whether that’s partial remote working, full-time remote working, whatever that looks like, you need to have an agreement in place internally, such that it outlines what the expectations are.
Scott De Long
Including who qualifies, because there may be some employees that I can implicitly trust to be able to be told to do great work. Others I need to manage differently to get the same level or close to that level.
Vince Moiso
Now, you don’t have to have, conversely, you don’t have to have this new agreement about coming back to work. That was in place previously. In other words, if there are certain positions, operation positions, warehouse positions, if you’re into distribution, manufacturing, or things like that, okay, these guys must be on the floor. But you’re touching on a project. You can’t work remotely. There is that requirement for them to be there that was there before. There’s not something new you must put in.
Scott De Long
What is new is that they see those same people who are touching things and see that the others get to be on vacation all the time.
Vince Moiso
There is a perception of that. And I think that’s the other problem that you deal with internally, which is why, as you know, we talked about transparency. Hence, the reason why you must give visibility across the board to everybody on what these policies and agreements are that are in place, why they’re in place, and what those expectations are when people are teleworking, working remotely, is that great? I’ve developed and established what the expectations are for that role and responsibility if you’re going to be remote, and then that gives, you know, some ease to those people that do have to come in and physically be there. They’re not wondering now what someone else is doing.
Scott De Long
I’m working with a company right now that is going through this process and thinking about what is right for the organization, and their method is an organization, first customers, and then the employees not far behind. But the employee’s matter. They think that as well. And one of the questions that came up with this subcommittee that I’m working with was, is this a forever solution? There’s no such thing as a forever solution. We’re going to do the best we can right now. And we’re going to learn from whatever mistakes that we create with this thing that we’ve done. Management’s not stupid. They’re going to say, oh, this isn’t working, we need to adjust that. The good part about this organization is that they’re asking employees now, and management has the right to make the final decision. But they’re asking employees what they think. All right, how does that work? Tell me about the benefits of that. Tell me about the issues that might be created within the organization for that. And what are some of the potential solutions? I’m asking you for the solutions now, so I don’t just want to work from home. Tell me about that, tell me more. How would that work in this scenario, and they’re getting the employees and why I really like this is because back to that word, buy in getting the employees to buy a design thing, Oh, crap, the customer is going to want this, that means I’m going to have to do I can do that. Great. Let’s do it. They’re going to go forward with that. This is a really, it’s going to be a good, good case study. We’re going to have some solutions coming up in the fourth quarter or third quarter into the third quarter. And in the fourth quarter, we’re going to go back and verify, check, and make sure that we’re doing the right thing with this as well. And we’ll report what’s happening here.
Vince Moiso
You’ve got to create the written procedure to, as I say, develop those expectations, you know, putting those expectations on paper and communicating those X.
Scott De Long
But not just paper. Making sure people understand.
Vince Moiso
Like if you’ve got remote employees that are hourly, for example, a big issue in California because what if they’re sending emails at nine o’clock at night? And so, if you don’t establish those procedures, and you don’t establish those clear expectations, and you don’t give visibility around that, it’s not explained. You don’t have to buy in on all of that. You are going to have some challenges because you don’t have a person that’s physically there, and you see that they’re physically there, and then when they leave, you physically see when they leave. This is different. Now it’s very easy because you’ve got, I have these, you know, online platforms that allow you to clock in and clock out. And you know, that’s easy. It’s simple to the procedure itself. It’s simple to implement. It’s all about execution. We talked about it before; it’s all about it.
Scott De Long
I think it’s a mindset as well. If I’m asking you about, let’s say, you work for me, and I’m asking you about a problem with my micromanaging, you are offering my support. Alright. And it doesn’t matter what it is how I say it; it’s how you hear it. There’s going to be a different level of management and a different way to manage these employees. And we need to figure out and find out how that employee needs it versus that employee needs it.
Vince Moiso
Well, I’ll tell you how I handle it. And you’re right, as this is a great part; I feel like we could have a whole side discussion on just that we will because, you know what, there is this level of a different man. And I don’t want to call it micromanagement because it really isn’t. But the management style must be different when they’re out of sight and out of mind versus sitting in front of you. Because here’s the change: the change is I don’t physically see you, and I don’t physically see everything that you’re doing. Therefore, there’s a high level of trust that I’m placing in this employee to work remotely, be professional, and be productive. Now you must create, you know, measures and metrics and things like that that make you feel comfortable that this employee is getting the work done that they say that they’re getting done. And so that’s where I think the buy-in becomes very important. I think creating the environment, the culture, and the expectation goes back to our last podcast; you know, we talked about a culture of accountability. We talked about how we strategic plan. The platform that I use, which is lead with purpose, okay, all of that allows for me to have remote employees and have a metric in place under whether they’re getting the stuff done.
Scott De Long
Here’s the part that might be missing from that. And it shouldn’t be, and we must account for that. And that is the end. There’s not a single organization that I work with that doesn’t have this on their platform somewhere. The associates or employees, however, you want to call them personal and professional growth. There’s now another layer: if I’m not seeing you every day, how am I helping to coach? How am I helping the treasurer craning coaching building so that you can have what we’ve cleaned is personal and professional growth of our associates?
Vince Moiso
It changes the, you know, how you conduct weekly meetings and the frequency in which you have meetings and the one-on-one meetings and, you know, things like that. The dynamic is different; therefore, you know, doing the same thing that you did before is complete insanity. Because you can’t because it’s a different scenario, it’s a different situation. And you’ve got to create ways to communicate at a higher level to ensure that, well, let’s just talk about this because we were talking. I think we’re talking about being very company-centric right now. And let’s be a little people-centric, and let’s put our, you know, let’s jump in the shoes of the person that wants to work remotely and feels like they are productive and efficient when they’re working remotely. Okay, well, great. They also feel that even though they are working remotely, which makes them happy, they’re disconnected from the business. They are. And so now it has become our job to connect them to the business. Well, how do we do that? How are we going to do that? A lot of it is with the one-on-one, the meetings, making sure that they’re in and participating and engaged with the business at a high level. And it’s having that visibility and transparent culture and all this stuff that makes them feel very, very connected. And in fact, I will tell you this because I know I’ve experienced it; I’m going to give you feedback from remote employees that I have, which is they said when I pulled them in June of this year after we had, you know, our second or third, you know, on-site big meeting, where it was virtual, okay. They said they’ve never felt more connected to the company.
Scott De Long
Or you’re doing something right. Hopefully, they’re telling the truth. But you’re doing something right because most people are feeling disconnected. Most of the people that I’m seeing in the studies and the polls that I’ve seen are starting to feel disconnected. And it’s not, you know, people are trying things like the virtual happy hour into this into that.
Vince Moiso
Scott, I’m not doing virtual happy hours; I’m not doing any of that bullshit, and that’s what they think. But that’s not what connects them to business. What connects them to the business is all the stuff that we talk about. It’s giving them clear direction, it’s giving them roles and responsibilities, recognizing them for doing a great job. That’s like giving them feedback and staying in contact. That’s what keeps people connected to the business. And if you’re not doing those things, of course, they’re not connected.
Scott De Long
That keeps them connected to the manager. And now, the manager needs to figure out a way to keep them connected to the business. And I think for me, that is, here’s your effect on the organization, not just within the department. And here’s how you and I are getting along and all of that. But there’s more to that. There’s the one-on-one, there’s the one with the company, and then there’s the one with the Mini because we still need teams. And we still need teams and even cross-functional teams, and that’s going to be the most difficult part. How’s the accounting department working with the sales department? That’s going to be much more difficult; you’re going to start seeing more and more silos unless we solve that? And how do you solve that? You can solve that by connecting folks.
Vince Moiso
That’s right. You have got to cut that off at the neck and get rid of the silos; they don’t work. Here’s the bottom line: it’s a new world. The rules of the game have just changed, and you’ve got to adapt and evolve as a business to keep your people happy and connected to the business. If you haven’t done that, that train has already left the station, you better start running after it because you really must adapt. And I think I’m taking a hard line. One way or the other is not the way to go. You’ve got to be flexible and adapt. That’s really my opinion.
Scott De Long
I’m going to go back to the word that I used earlier. And I like this word, and this evolution is not a revolution; it’s an evolution, and we need to start evolving. For those that, you know, evolution is typically a slow process; we don’t have the time for that. We need to move this forward. And adjust, learn and adjust, learn and adjust, learn and adjust continually doing that. Personal this committee’s question, is this going to be a permanent solution? It’s going to be permanent. We need to change it. That’s what it’s got to be. Until we decide this is not working for our customers, for our people, for our organization. Organization first, great. But we need to do what’s working for the people. If I decide. I found out that 52% of the people who have their resumes on the street left. I made a bad decision. I need to adjust now. I can’t afford the other 48% to leave, either. Because when they find out that there is a possibility, their resumes are going to go straight to. 52% of the 48 are going to be on the street.
Vince Moiso
And it carries over. Well, as always, we want to hear from you about what’s going on with your business. What do you think about this topic? What are you experiencing? And what questions do you have for us? Please ask away and reach out to us. You can visit the website and certainly contact us with any of your questions or comments. Scott, what are you drinking here?
Scott De Long
We’re going to an old stable, and this is Stone Brewery, and this is their stone IPA. It’s a classic. They are one of the original microbreweries that did well. You go down to Escondido. They’ve got the coolest. It’s not just the tasting room. But they’ve got experience. It is an experience. And the downside is it takes an hour and a half to get home from there. Who’s driving? That’s my problem; I went there too often. You need one. It’s a beautiful place. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. We appreciate your listening. Let us know what you think, we want to hear where you think we’re following.
Vince Moiso
Thanks for listening. Cheers.
