Productivity

Staying Focused Amidst Craziness

“If you’re not stressed, you’re not paying attention.”- Miles Davis

Look, making a living is stressful. As my father always pointed out, “they call it work for a reason.” But if you’re feeling more stressed than usual, you’re not alone. According to the American Psychological Association, more than three-quarters of us Americans are reporting higher levels of stress than usual. (The numbers are higher than usual elsewhere as well. Everyone has their own reasons.)

Whether you’re worried about the economy, the political situation where you live, or your kid failing algebra, we all have reasons. And it’s hard to keep these things separate from work, where stressors like meeting quota, finishing a project or upcoming performance reviews are ever-present.

Stress and its impact on focus doesn’t care if you work remotely or in an office. Some studies show that remote workers suffer more work-related stress due to blurred lines between home and work duties, and potential isolation. Others say that commuting and dealing with in-office politics and relationships make working in an office more stressful. Complaining that your lot is harder than someone else’s isn’t productive.

Here are some tips for staying focused on work in crazy times:

  • Identify your stress triggers. You know the old joke, “Doctor it hurts when I do this. So don’t do that?” Same thing. If you know that talking to Bob is going to distract you for the rest of the day or he won’t shut up about Elon, that’s what the “do not disturb” button is for.
  • Stay off the news and social media (and avoid stressful non-work conversations.) If you work at home, it’s tempting to use social media for breaks and to take care of personal communication. These days it’s also a considerable distraction, not only in terms of the time but what it does to your thinking and long-term focus. The same is true of political conversations with co-workers (and these are sometimes even harder to avoid!)
  • Get involved with your teammates on a project. Working in isolation leaves you alone with your thoughts. That can be great for focus, unless the voices in your head are becoming negative and distracting. Interacting with others and reaching a tangible outcome is great for getting us back on track. Whether in person or over Teams, interaction with others on something useful helps.
  • Get your butt out of your chair. When your body and brain change what they’re focused on, your focus shifts as well. If you’re in the office, take a walk to another department and ask a question instead of sending an email. If you’re at home, do a simple task like unloading the dishwasher or taking the dog for a walk. Mentally organizing your thoughts while walking is a proven way to refocus and banish unwanted distractions.
  • Pick another project to work on. When we work on a single task too long, we slip out of “flow state,” and our brains find other ways to amuse themselves. By switching focus, you put more attention on that new thing until it’s either finished or you have done enough for the moment. We can really only focus for 40 minutes or so on a task before we begin letting distractions in.

It's easy to say that when you’re at work, your mind should be on work and nothing else. It’s also nonsense. It’s not so much that things aren’t stressful, it’s where you choose to focus.

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Leadership, Personal & Professional Development

The Evolving Workplace- 5 Things Leaders Will Need to Do

This blog post is the sixth and final part of our six-part Evolving Workplace series. To hear more thought leadership, check out series episodes on the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.

At the Kevin Eikenberry Group, our focus is on developing leaders. Over the past few weeks, we’ve studied the Evolving Workplace and what all that change might mean. We started with how we got here, then focused on where we believe business and technology are going and what organizations and individuals need to do to prepare themselves. All of this was context for this, the final installment. What does it all mean for leaders in the next 1-5 years?

Leaders. Managers. Supervisors. Whatever you call the role, we are at the center of change and progress. Organizations rely on us to execute their strategies; individuals look to us. But what do leaders in the second quarter of the Twenty First Century need to focus on to be effective and successful?

Here are five areas in which we’ll have to be competent:

1)  Embracing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Integration

AI is rapidly transforming various aspects of work, from automating routine tasks to enhancing decision-making processes. Leaders need to understand and leverage AI tools to improve productivity and innovation within their teams. This involves reskilling employees to work alongside AI and ensuring ethical AI implementation.

One of our biggest tasks will be learning and unlearning the skills ourselves, and coaching employees not to take the answers AI provides at face value but applying their knowledge and judgment.

2)  Navigating Multigenerational Workforce Dynamics

Are you familiar with the term, “Generation Alpha?” That’s the latest demographic block entering the workplace. Technically it’s anyone born in the twenty first century, although it usually means those born in 2010 and later. The point is that, while we’ve had multiple generations in the workplace since, well forever, we have more older workers than ever before. That means more distinct generations working together. This is not just a question of age and work experience, but technology literacy, social dynamics and learning styles.

Leaders will have to not only learn to communicate across generations but must facilitate the conversations and help develop systems to make work happen.

 3)  Coming to grips with what it means to be professional

Dress codes. Reporting structures. Working from home or reporting to the office. How workers talk to each other and interact with customers. What do people expect of their employer and vice versa?

Leaders, particularly middle managers, will find themselves in the middle of a maelstrom of changing norms and expectations. It’s not just generational, but each company will decide for itself what their culture is, and how employees fit in—or don’t. Our role as coaches, not just for performance but for career success and cultural fit, will be more important than ever.

4)  Enhancing Virtual and Hybrid Team Management

The prevalence of remote work has made virtual team management a critical skill. Even if you supposedly work in an office-only environment, you will have people who aren’t in the same place as the rest of the team. If you have even one worker who is remote, or only comes to the office occasionally, you have a remote team. Leaders must establish clear communication channels, build trust without face-to-face interaction, and utilize technology effectively to manage dispersed teams. Organizations will depend on leaders to engage their team regardless of location, and keep people engaged. Succession planning will be hugely impacted by the ability to maximize talent wherever it sits. This includes setting clear expectations, fostering team cohesion, and ensuring equitable participation among all team members.

This matters for leaders, because if we don’t develop a pipeline of talent, our own career trajectory may be stalled.

5)  Developing Agility and Flexibility in Leadership

In an era marked by rapid technological advancements and market fluctuations, leaders must be flexible, embrace change, and foster a culture of continuous learning and innovation. This approach enables teams to quickly adapt to new challenges and opportunities, maintaining a competitive edge.

No kidding.

The problem with talking about mindset, is that we often look at it wrong. You don’t just decide to change your thinking because you want to. A lifetime of habits, experience and social norms dictate how we tackle our roles as leaders. But with the rate and scope of changes we are facing now and for the next few years, we’ll need to adopt different ways of thinking to tackle different problems.

It’s important that we understand what is required to deal with a specific set of circumstances. The answer might be right up our alley or require a completely different set of coping skills than we’ve used in the past.

A great new resource is Kevin Eikenberry’s newest book, Flexible Leadership. This resource, and the training and resources attached to it, are designed to help leaders recognize the dynamics of a given problem and then apply the correct actions to address it.

It introduces the concept of “flexors,” specific actions to address problems depending on whether the source of the problem is clear, complicated, complex, or chaotic.

Whether you take advantage of our tools and leadership development opportunities or find other ways to address your competence and mindset, these five trends will likely determine your stress level, and ultimately your success, in the constantly evolving workplace.

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Leadership, Personal & Professional Development

The Evolving Workplace- 5 Mindsets Individuals Need to Develop

This blog post is the fifth part of our six-part Evolving Workplace series. To hear more thought leadership, check out series episodes on the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.

Last week, we looked at the five biggest challenges facing organizations in the evolving workplace over the next five years. Today, we look at skills, behaviors and mindsets individual workers will need to develop in order to be successful in the new environment.

We did it in this order purposely. If you are looking to be employed, or to develop a successful career inside organizations (as opposed to becoming an entrepreneur and doing your own thing), you need to know what employers are looking for so you can provide it.

To be blunt, the future belongs to those who can provide value to their employer and make sure the employer recognizes that value.

Develop comfort and facility with new technology, especially AI

Most technology comes at us in fits and starts. At the beginning of Covid, most people were unfamiliar with Zoom, for example. They may have used web meeting platforms but mostly as passive consumers, rather than presenters. Webcams became normalized. Collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams came into use.

Now the challenge for most people will be maximizing the power of those tools. Remember, the rule in software development is that eighty percent of people use only twenty percent of the features available with any given tool.

Most importantly, Artificial Intelligence will become ubiquitous. It’s already being built into almost every tool we use. Don’t shy away from using things like the transcription or note-taking tools in Zoom, for example. There are two important skills that will separate high-value AI users from the rest of the pack.

First, users must craft queries that get the results you need (not necessarily what you want.) More than almost any other tool, AI is designed to give you exactly what you ask for. If you ask questions that are too narrow in scope, or ask for data that meets your predetermined criteria, you may miss out on important context and answers that provide more value.

The second part of “AI-Literacy” is using the information provided but not relying on it. This is for two reasons. First, as silly as it sounds, Artificial Intelligence often hallucinates. If it doesn’t know an answer with one hundred percent certainty, some platforms will make educated guesses. This can result in factual errors or defaulting to the simplest, least creative solution.

The value humans bring to an AI-heavy workplace is to help craft the questions, but also to provide insight and innovation. Anyone can cut and paste the answer a machine produces. Can you recognize warning signs such as “most likely answers,” or solutions that don’t match your very personal experience? Valuable teammates can spot errors, rephrase the answers into something more easily communicated and understood.

Cultivate adaptability and flexibility

According to the financial times, ten percent of the jobs being filled today have titles that literally didn’t exist fifteen or twenty years ago, and those that do probably don’t bear much resemblance to the same job in the nineties. Think about the role of bank teller or administrative assistant. The job title says is the same, but the responsibility, work outputs and skills required to succeed are very different.

What this means is that being hired for a role doesn’t mean you have to (or can) stay in your lane. Not only will you need to change and be willing to stretch what it means to hold your current position, but if you have an eye to the future, it’s critical to know what new opportunities will exist in years to come.

Kevin Eikenberry’s new book, Flexible Leadership, is a great resource even if you aren’t currently holding a designated leadership position. (Yet. 😊)

Develop communication skills for the evolving workplace

What has been true forever is that those of us most likely to be considered valuable—those that regularly add value to their work—are people who can communicate most effectively. The evolving workplace requires a new mix of oral, written and listening skills.

Whether you are remote all the time, in-office, or in a hybrid environment there will be an increased need to communicate in real time, to a variety of audiences. Being as comfortable and effective in an in-person meeting as you are on a Zoom call will be essential. More of your work will be done asynchronously, so the ability to communicate in writing (without relying on AI) will matter more than ever and be prepared to write in a variety of modes. Reports are different than emails which are different than Teams or chat messages. Remember, whether you are speaking or typing, your value rests in how you interpret and communicate your thoughts and ideas.

Your ability to communicate your thoughts depends on the willingness and ability of your audience to hear you out. Listening and understanding who your audience is has never been easy (or come naturally to many people) but it will be more complicated in an increasingly dispersed workplace.

Build new relationships and (ugh) network effectively

Especially in a remote and hybrid workplace, it is easy to develop very strong relationships with your immediate teammates and colleagues. The problem is that your next position likely will come from somewhere else, inside or outside your current team and organization.

Building strong relationships is not only important to getting your work done now, but since most people hear about opportunities or are referred by someone they know, like and trust, the wider your circle of trusted colleagues, the better. This kind of relationship building and networking can be formal (LinkedIn, online groups, in-person events.) It can also mean taking advantage of being in the office to connect with more than just your immediate teammates.

If you’re going into the office a couple of days a week, are you using that time to meet people, learn what’s happening in other parts of your organization? Do you put your head down to work on tasks and avoid conversations? Be intentional about meeting others and, you know, talking.

Understand your employer and potential employers

We started this article by saying employees need to add value to the employer. But do you know what’s valuable to someone else?

Certainly, workers need to meet whatever requirements, KPIs or goals are set. That’s a standard condition of employment. In a perfect world, everyone else is doing the same thing, so simply “doing your job,” won’t make you stand out. If that’s the case, you are no more or less valuable than anyone else.

Knowing what’s important to an employer is the key to providing value. Let’s take a simple example. Many employees want to work from home at least some of the time. When they request this, the reasons are valid. Less commute time (and expense), better work/life balance, and a better attitude.

Those are great from an employee’s perspective. But does the organization really care? Sure, it’s nice if your workforce isn’t miserable. In reality, productivity, work quality and serving customers profitably are far more important.

Tie your goal of working remotely to those issues that matter to your employer, and you’ll increase your value. Can you be more productive out of the office? Will a flexible schedule allow you to be more responsive to customers in other time zones? That’s far more interesting to a prospective boss than you not having to fight traffic.

This means you’ll have to do some work. Read that company newsletter. Follow your employer and your industry on your newsfeed and alerts. Don’t just space out on all-hands meetings.

You can’t provide value if you don’t know what the other party cares about.

These five mindsets don’t come naturally to most people. It takes work and focus. If you’re looking for resources: The Long-Distance Teammate- Stay Engaged and Connected While Working Anywhere is a good place to start, even if you are in a traditional office environment.

We’ll dig more into this topic on an upcoming episode of our Evolving Workplace limited podcast series.

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Long-Distance Leadership, Organizational Leadership, Personal & Professional Development

5 Important Challenges for Organizations in the Evolving Workplace

This blog post is the fourth part of our Evolving Workplace series. To hear more thought leadership, check out series episodes on the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.

What are the important choices organizations need to make in the next few (less than five, probably sooner) years to stay ahead of the competition? In some cases, these are things they must do to survive and stay in business. As part of our ongoing series on the Evolving Workplace, we’ve taken a look at how we got where we are in terms of remote, hybrid and in-office work. Now we have to ask: so what now?

In coming articles, we’ll look at what all this change means for individual workers and for leaders in the 21st Century. None of those will make sense if we don’t look at the context in which those jobs take place. What are the organizational challenges employers must address? Only then will those decisions make any kind of sense.

Here are five important trends that will impact the choices organizations make in the next few years.

The use and increased power of AI

We are probably all sick of hearing it, but AI is going to drastically increase the individual power of the user-employee while eliminating millions of existing jobs. Without being alarmist, we’re already seeing this in customer service jobs. Chatbots have replaced live humans in most interactions until only the most complicated challenges get kicked to real people. Some jobs will be impacted more than others.

The best example is bank tellers. To look at raw data, the number of people employed in the traditional role of “teller,” has dropped over 60% since the introduction of the ATM. Add in smartphone apps and you’ll see that banks are opening fewer, mostly smaller branches as in-person banking is dropping at about 20% a year.

The people who do work in customer-facing roles are filling the traditional role of a teller (mostly for older and poorer customers who don’t or can’t work with technology.) AI and other technology have made the individual far more productive. They handle far more customers in a shift than their counterparts a decade ago. More importantly, since they aren’t needed to perform simple tasks, many front-line bank employees are now opening accounts and handling services that used to be performed by more senior, experienced workers.

A similar change happened after the introduction of the PC, and laptops in particular. In 1993, six percent of the US Labor force was involved in secretarial or admin positions. That is now down to less than two percent and dropping. 75 million jobs just disappeared in less than a decade.

Organizations have a choice to either adapt to and benefit from the power of AI (knowing it will have huge impacts on staffing and services) or continue to pay more for labor costs, among other things.

Reaching customers has changed forever and Sales needs to adapt

No company can survive long if it doesn’t bring in revenue. Traditionally the role of Sales in an organization has been pretty well defined: people either take orders (inbound) or reach out (outbound) to prospects in order to get them to buy from the company. With fewer people buying from brick-and-mortar stores or interacting with sales people, this sounds like a job for automation and AI. The problem is that most people now use cell phones and screen (and then block) calls from anyone they don’t already know. Parents of millennials and gen Zs know that even if they don’t block you, few people check (let alone act on) voicemails.

Email outreach is largely considered spam and is becoming less and less effective, even with the help of AI in crafting the most targeted messages possible. What will your organization’s sales efforts look like five years from now?

Finding people to do the work

Finding, employing, and training good people has always been a challenge. It is about to become more difficult than ever. The paradox of current employment is that there are plenty of human beings to fill jobs, but they either aren’t trained to do them (resulting in big salaries and an inability to grow organically) or salaries make those jobs undesirable. That can lead to trouble finding good employees or keeping them. Current retail sales jobs have a Sixty percent turnover rate, meaning almost two thirds of people quit their jobs within a year.

Some employers are mandating return to office or hybrid work with a few days a week on-site. That addresses some of the demands for flexibility and work-life balance, which attracts talent. On the other hand, it still limits recruiting to the immediate vicinity of the workplace.

This doesn’t even begin to address the issue of public policy and changes in society’s approach to things like Diversity Equity and Inclusion. On the one hand, some employers will celebrate having the limits taken off on who they can hire and rid themselves of the costs associated with those efforts. This will cause a rise in the cost of hiring certain people, especially in middle management roles. Others will continue to find ways to leverage talent pools that are largely ignored or not accommodated. Employees, especially women, visible minorities, and the disabled, will likely suffer short-term upheaval in their roles.

Facilities, real estate, and operating costs

How much space do you need to operate at full capacity? What if you want to expand? If you let people work from home, do you need to have enough space for them?

How much floor space do you need for work to get done efficiently? What if some of those roles go away due to automation, AI, or increased efficiency? If you’re in a hybrid environment, your office will be empty some days and packed to bursting on others.

The return to office movement makes sense to employers on many levels, but the economic impact is real, especially with leases on many offices due to expire in the next three years. Allowing work from home makes more sense if you look at it on a square foot per revenue basis. If you are going to have a traditional office space, how will you accommodate hybrid work so that it maximizes collaboration while not resulting in empty cube farms several days a week?

Increased consolidation of the business environment

In times of uncertainty, many entrepreneurs and business people find it easier to sell to larger organizations. Whether this consolidation of industries in a few hands is a long-term good thing or not, it’s happening in a lot of industries.

It's easy to say that “organizations have to choose” how to address these challenges. But organizations don’t do anything but exist. It is the people, particularly the leaders, who must be willing to understand and adapt to a changing work and business environment. Resilience, leading through change, and a capacity to accept some sunk costs and shift to the challenges of a new economy will be the key.

We will examine this topic in an upcoming episode of our limited podcast series, The Evolving Workplace. You can also learn more about how to help the people in your organization make sense of what’s happening and adapt to the changing workplace by visiting KevinEikenberry.com and learning how we can help people be better leaders.

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Leadership, Long-Distance Leadership, Teamwork & Collaboration

5 Tech Trends for the Evolving Workplace

This blog post is the third part of our Evolving Workplace series. To hear more thought leadership, check out series episodes on the Remarkable Leadership Podcast. 

This is the third post in our Evolving Workplace series, where we try to make sense of what’s going on in the workplace as of today, how we got here, and where it’s going (near as any mortal can tell.) Today we are looking at what technology will do for (and to) us in the next five years.

If you think about all the new technology that we’ve dealt with in the last five years, it’s pretty daunting to think the rate of change will continue to be that rapid. After all we went from “what’s Zoom?” and “What is this Microsoft Teams thing?” to having this tech just be what we use every day. As always, some people use it well, others make do, and some are still lagging behind.

If the notion of another five years of this makes your stomach clench and your head spin, don’t panic. As with most such periods in history, we’re probably going to go through a period of retrenchment and refinement with one major exception.

Let’s take a look at five of the most obvious changes and what it will mean to leaders.

Enhanced AI

Let’s start with the exception. Artificial Intelligence will be built into more of the tools we already use and will become a more common part of our everyday workflow. Some of this we’re already seeing (although not everyone is taking advantage) in things like the AI summaries and assistants built into tools like Zoom and Teams. We can get language translated, create transcripts, take notes and increase the overall effectiveness and retention of meetings and training.

Some of the work will be done automatically, but the big change for many people is learning how to access the information they want. AI information is only as accurate or useful as the questions you ask.

AI will play a critical role in communication, task prioritization, and training/onboarding.

Virtual and Augmented Reality

Virtual and augmented reality will play more of a role than ever in training and practicing key skills. We will become more comfortable interacting with avatars and virtual spaces. The speed at which this is adopted will have less to do with organizations and more with people. The most impressive use of this technology right now is in the consumer space. As gamers, shut-ins and tech nerds use this technology at home for entertainment, it will impact the workplace. Gear will become less expensive, and the learning gap will be shrunk as many workers will already know how to use it. The best analogy is when AOL hit in 1993, and more people had email at home than in the workplace.

Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity will become more important to companies than ever before. Data must be protected, and it’s an arms race between hackers and bad actors, and those of us just trying to get our work done.

Most of the enhanced cybersecurity will be invisible to workers and hidden behind the scenes. It will impact how we use our own devices at and for work and is a surprisingly big driver of the return to office movement.

Cloud Infrastructure

Like cybersecurity, most of us won’t spend much time worrying about exactly where the information we use and need sits. It will make a difference to employers. One expected change will be increasingly simple user interfaces so more people can access or share information that will interact more with Artificial Intelligence.

Customizable Hybrid Work Platforms

This is where a lot of the refining and retrenching of existing tools will take place. The introduction of brand-new tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and similar tech will likely slow down while these are tweaked, upgraded, and adapt to a hybrid workplace. They will become increasingly customized to both companies and individual workers. This in turn will enhance their productivity and create more consistent work and information flows.

So, what now?

For leaders this will mean a few important changes in focus. First and most important, upskilling themselves and their teams must become a priority. How to use the technology will be important. How to maximize its impact (especially around AI and Hybrid Work Platforms) will be equally important. You can’t assume everyone on your team will use the same tools in the same way for the same results.

At a higher level of leadership, investments in technology will go hand in hand with changes in the traditional office. Most corporate leases will be renegotiated in the next five years. How much office space will you need? If you’re a truly hybrid organization, do you need to reorganize who gets desks?  What will the physical workspace need to look like if you’re maximizing technology and workplace flexibility?

You can learn more about this topic from our audio podcast series on the Evolving Workplace. It is a new part of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.

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Leadership, Long-Distance Leadership, Organizational Leadership

Remote? Hybrid? In-Office? 3 Ways Forward (So Far)

This blog post is the second part of our Evolving Workplace series. To hear more thought leadership, check out series episodes on the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.

So, Covid has gone away (except it and a host of other respiratory diseases hasn’t according to the CDC, but that’s another topic) and we are settling into the “new normal.” The problem is that nobody seems to agree on what that is. Depending on what you do for a living, and who you work for, you may work remotely full time, some of the time, or not at all.

It looks like we have settled into three general ways of tackling (knowledge) work. The three ways are (in no particular order) Remote First, Hybrid, and In-Office First. They all have their pros and cons, and only you and your organization can know what’s right for you. The challenge is to make the right decision, and ensure it is done strategically and supported by policies and leadership behavior.

This last part is important. Many decisions about how organizations work are made for emotional reasons (people LIKE working one way or the other, the CEO HATES seeing empty desks) or for expediency (It’s too disruptive to our systems to have everyone remote, if we make everyone come in people will quit or whine about it so let them do whatever they want as long as the work gets done.)

Let’s take a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of each system. Then we’ll circle back to some truths that apply to all of them. These are NOT in order of preference or success rate.

Remote First

This way of working makes remote work the default standard. There may or may not be a physical headquarters, but the assumption is that most people will not come into physical contact with each other on a daily basis.

Advantages:

  • No budget (or very little) is spent on physical infrastructure. Leases, furniture and property taxes aren’t a problem.
  • Hiring can be done with a “talent first,” approach. Find the right people, no matter where in the world they are.
  • It’s easy to accommodate time zones, languages and geographic territories.
  • Leaders must use different metrics and social approaches than they do in the office.
  • Remote workers who are engaged and productive are REALLY engaged and productive.

Disadvantages:

  • Remote first companies tend to suffer a branding problem. They aren’t perceived the same way as companies with their names on buildings or attractive offices.
  • Customers can’t come to you.
  • Hard (not impossible) to create valid metrics for employee attendance and productivity.
  • There are few big-name companies to benchmark against.
  • Forming a “one-company” culture can be tricky and time-consuming.
  • Leaders (especially senior leaders) are often not used to working this way and their discomfort can result in either micromanagement or benign neglect.
  • Work relationships can often become transactional.

In-Office First

This way of working is the default for most companies. It’s the easiest to implement, because it is the way we have worked for most of the last hundred years or so.

Advantages

  • Physical proximity should make communication and relationship building easier.
  • Everyone working in the same place at the same time means systems interact easily and information more easily accessible, especially tacit, “unwritten rules.” Traditional metrics like attendance and hours in the office are easy to track.
  • Onboarding and training are simpler.
  • Synchronous work is the norm. Systems like HR, succession planning and employee development are understood with best practices in place.
  • Leaders are comfortable with (or at least used to) the way things work.

Disadvantages

  • Physical space, furniture and infrastructure are expensive.
  • Little flexibility when head count goes up or down.
  • Hiring and recruiting are limited to specific geographic areas.
  • Recruiting may be difficult in middle management and more experienced employee levels.
  • Favoritism, individual employee requests, and circumstances often result in “stealth remote work,” regardless of official policy.

Hybrid/Flexible Work

This is becoming the default for many companies. 77% of Fortune 100 companies have some form of Hybrid or Flexible Work arrangements, and 43% of the general workforce. This doesn’t mean it’s being done well or strategically, just that it’s happening.

Advantages

  • Employees enjoy the flexibility and opportunities flexible schedules provide.
  • Managers and long-time employees have made this the most requested (non-pay) perk.
  • There are fewer interruptions from natural as well as personal events.
  • It is somewhat easier to recruit experienced people.
  • Having people together at least part of the time should make synchronous work easier.
  • Social relationships are more easily formed and maintained.

Disadvantages

  • The physical costs of office space and equipment are often the same as full-time in-office, with more empty desks.
  • You are still likely restricting your hiring based on proximity to the office, since they have to be physically present some of the time.
  • Scheduling may be based more on perception (the CEO wants to see people working) than actual output and productivity.
  • People report it can be hard to get some kinds of work done in a busy, noisy office.
  • Knowing who is where at what point in time requires effort and coordination.
  • Scheduling tasks may be more difficult.
  • Many leaders default to the in-office mindset. Proximity bias can impact how they interact with their team.
  • A move to reduce space by hoteling or strategic scheduling may meet with resistance.
  • The perception of fairness between remote people and those in the office must be carefully managed to avoid problems such as proximity bias.
  • Remote work can impact training, development, and delegation opportunities. HR processes and leadership behaviors need to adjust and be supported at all levels.
  • Those who do not have flexibility may complain that it’s “unfair” for others to have that option.

As we can see, there are pros and cons to each type of working system. Few of the advantages apply to every organization, and most of the disadvantages can be mitigated with thoughtful policies and intentional, flexible leadership.

It is clear that one-size no longer fits all. It’s incumbent on leadership at all levels to recognize what works and what doesn’t, and to match the approach to the needs of organizations, their customers, and their employees.

At the Kevin Eikenberry Group, we specialize in helping develop leadership skills that work in all three environments.  Visit www.KevinEikenberry.com to learn how.

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Long-Distance Leadership, Organizational Leadership, Teamwork & Collaboration

A Timeline of Remote Work: Would a 34-Year-Old Have all the Answers?

This blog post is part of our Evolving Workplace series. To hear more thought leadership, check out series episodes on the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.

It’s tempting to think that remote work has been around long enough that we have figured it out. But there are differing opinions: It is a lifesaver. Unless it’s a disaster and everyone should get back to the office post-haste. Maybe we think it is a mess but we’ll figure it out. Why haven’t we found a magic bullet yet?

Let me ask you: If you were creating a policy for building your organization (or team’s) culture and business model, would you turn to someone who was thirty-four years old? 

This sounds like an arbitrary number, but it’s really not. Remote work as we recognize it really dates only back to the early 1990s. Then there are major milestones and seismic events along the way that impact how we look at working from a distance. If we look at how quickly we accepted this new way of working, it shouldn’t be a surprise that we haven’t got all the answers.

Let’s start in 1990

In 1990 we had land lines, fax machines (in the offices, few people had them at home) and the internet was in the hands of scientists and computer geeks. If people had computers, they were huge clunky things with monochrome screens and very little memory. The first dial-up internet was invented.

What remote work there consisted mostly of salespeople in remote territories who conducted work by phone and fax and traveling to meet their clients by car or airplane. A few tech companies also allowed their best and brightest to plug away at code in their homes away from noisy offices and prying eyes.

It was… not optimal.

1993 was a sneaky important year. (Only 31 years ago, if you’re counting.)

In 1993, IBM began experimenting with letting some of their employees work from home, at least part of the time. They were the first large company to even consider such a radical idea. This was partly due to the fact that six months earlier, in 1992, they released the ThinkPad. It was the first truly portable (which is debatable if you ever had to schlep one of those bricks around) and internet-capable laptop computers.

Most of the early adopters were busy managers or executives who had to travel to various offices, or salespeople who used it to keep up with their customers, also while traveling. Few homes could support dialup internet and VPNs became a thing.

Email was starting to be a thing but used sparingly.

Two critical things that were mostly thought of as consumer applications appeared which lit the fuse for internet-based work:

  • Microsoft Word 6.0 was released, making word processing, editing and writing simple for the computer illiterate
  • America OnLine (AOL) became available to Microsoft/Windows users for the first time. Suddenly a critical mass of the workforce had internet access in their homes.

What’s important is that remote work didn’t really even seem possible until people began playing with the internet for entertainment and email purposes. There was a time when some people had way better computers in their homes than they had in the office. Working from home became possible (and in some cases, preferable.)

1999 (it took a while to ramp up to the next big step)

For 6 years, the ability to work remotely snuck up on us. Salespeople were given laptops first, and for the first time were responsible for their own communication with customers, rendering office steno/secretary pools largely obsolete. (Whether it was a good idea or not is another argument.) Microsoft Office products like Excel and especially PowerPoint became the standard, so everyone could talk to everyone else.

This made for a computer-savvy populace. More and more people were starting to work from home (a whopping 4% of the population in 1994, 5% by 1999.) Internet speeds were picking up. Then came the next quantum leap in workplace communication.

In 1999, WebEx became widely available. Originally requiring special studios and equipment, a laptop-friendly version became available at the turn of the century. Webmeetings, webinars, Virtual Instructor Led Training suddenly was widely available, if very expensive and used only by “experts.”

2000 Things pick up fast from here.

In 2000, Skype snuck over from Europe. Free video calls were available. Laptops began having cameras built in. The age of asking if you really had to be on camera for this meeting had started.

While there’s no hard evidence, this is about when people realized they could get at least some of their work done outside the office. Childcare, bad weather, working through the sniffles became more common. The age of Stealth Remote Work was here.

2013- The numbers jump

By 2013, the US Dept of Labor says nearly 20% of white-collar workers had worked from home occasionally. The numbers kept rising and people became more comfortable with it. Some companies created formal policies (then like Yahoo, uncreated them because it got too confusing and they didn’t know how to handle the chaos.)

Over the next seven years or so, companies allow remote work, sometimes to hire the best talent, sometimes to ensure work continues during personal crises, bad weather, or business interruptions. Only 10% of companies have formal remote work policies in 2018, although most recognize the need for it.

Not coincidentally, 2018 sees the release of The Long-Distance Leader, Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership. It is eventually published in seven languages.

2020 Covid happens and we get pushed across the Rubicon

You all know what happens next. The weekend of March 17, 2020 becomes a watershed moment. Suddenly 35% of knowledge workers are working from home full (or mostly-full) time. Functions and people who never considered themselves remote-work-capable found they did it with little training and far less loss of productivity than expected. Products like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and others had been there for a while, like the rodent-like mammals hiding from the dinosaurs, but suddenly became ubiquitous.

Remote work became practical, and many people said it was the future of work. People began moving out of the city to cheaper places, where commutes didn’t matter. Employees were hired with less focus on their location than their talent. The great remote work revolution had reached critical mass.

2023 Not so fast, hotshot

When the immediate threat of the pandemic died down, many organizations wanted to return to how things were. Some people were able to maintain remote work, others couldn’t wait to go back to the office. There was the Great Resignation, (people quitting rather than return to work) then the Great Return (we don’t care, get back here). Return to Office mandates were chaotic, inconsistent and often didn’t work as planned. Many companies went back to Stealth Remote, which kept employees happy but didn’t solve many of the systemic problems like succession planning and fair employee evaluations.

2025 You are here

And so here we are. 77% of large corporations allow flexible or hybrid work (although it’s inconsistent and largely unregulated). 25% of the general workforce works mostly remote, while 32% of the general workforce is in the office full-time. There doesn’t seem to be a consistent, successful, replicable model for people to follow.

That brings us back to our original question. If remote work as we know it is barely thirty years old (and for practical purposes more like twenty-five), are we really surprised that most of us are still figuring it out. Years of ingrained, programmed behavior has changed. The way we physically do our jobs has shifted radically within a single generation.

The point here is that there are more questions than answers about remote work. Even though it appears the boom is over, the need to have people working effectively regardless of location has not (and will not) change.

Leaders and organizations must be intentional about their goals and expectations, while finding new ways of collaborating, communicating and executing in order to survive in the evolving workplace.

We are here to help.

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Long-Distance Leadership, Organizational Leadership, Teamwork & Collaboration

Welcome Back to the Office. It Hasn’t Gotten Better.

A new year brings a lot of changes. One is that more companies have decided to go back to the office and reduce the amount of remote or hybrid work. While there are some solid arguments to be made for this, there are questions that need to be addressed if it’s to succeed in 2025.

Here are four questions that need to be answered with more than, “because we said so.”

1.   Is this really a new policy, or simply pretending it’s 2019? New times call for new ways of working and incorporating lessons learned. Too many of the RTO mandates are calling for setting the clock back to pre-covid policies and rules. The same physical setups, the same policies for clocking in and out, and reducing flexibility in the name of collaboration and culture. Does anyone remember the culture in their office in 2019? I’m going to go out on a limb and say it wasn’t an idyllic time of nought but peace and love. It likely could have been better in a number of ways. Pretending the last five years hasn’t happened and that we’ve learned nothing about work, productivity or ourselves is probably not a recipe for progress.

2.  Do you have a compelling case for returning to the office and can you explain how things will be better? Any time you ask someone to go through a change, there is one thing that will increase the odds of success or failure: is there a compelling argument in favor of the new thing that the person making the change will accept? They don’t have to like it, necessarily, but it should make sense and offer a chance that something will be better (for everyone, ideally) than the status quo.  

Complaining about all the money the company spends on offices and infrastructure only to have nobody use it may be legitimate, but is that the staff’s problem? They didn’t negotiate the lease or guess wrong at how many people would be in a given location. It will be interesting to see what happens to RTO policies when leases negotiated in 2019 are up for renewal. Will there be more changes?

Leaders making the argument that corporate culture is better when people are physically together but don’t take into account the negative impact of locking surly people who feel insulted for eight hours a day in a confined space are going to get an identifiable culture, but it may not be the one they expect or want. Insisting that productivity is better in close quarters but ignoring problems like too many meetings, constant interruptions due to a lack of quiet or privacy, and poor ergonomics may undermine whatever positive outcomes you hope for.

Ignoring this can sound an awful lot like, “thanks for upending your life years ago while maintaining your productivity, and we know it’s going to cost you more money and inconvenience to come back to work, but rules are rules.”

3.  How has technology changed how you work in the last 5 years? It is staggering to think that five years ago, Zoom was a free tool that few companies used, and Microsoft Teams was still Skype for Business, when it was used at all. The way we collaborate, communicate, and share information has changed, likely forever. Will the new RTO policy take that into account, or will you have the same problem we had when email was our main tool: people sitting two desks away, starting at their screens communicating electronically rather than face to face? How is that improving the culture or creating innovation? AI will likely reduce head count in at least some departments, will you really need all that space and what will you do then?

4.  What does the new policy say about trust, communication and employee empowerment? Employees have grown accustomed to managing their own schedules and priorities. Micromanagement erodes trust and morale. Studies have shown that allowing flexibility in work schedules leads to higher employee engagement. (To be fair, employees that have proven they can’t be left unsupervised or are deeply disengaged aren’t getting the job done remotely and may do better in an in-person environment. Maybe.) There are ways to negotiate flexibility or employee autonomy but many of these new policies don’t even attempt to make it a conversation. This, of course, assumes that this is an important consideration for the employer.

All of this presumes that things like employee attraction, retention, and satisfaction are important to employers. Some have shown they are more concerned with compliance than buy-in, and in fact are counting on those employees who don’t like the new rules to self-select out and save the employers the headaches of firing them or dealing with severance packages.

None of this means there aren’t legitimate reasons to bring people back, at least to a degree. But ignoring the problems with culture, productivity, and collaboration that existed before “everyone went home,” will likely not be a long-term solution.




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Long-Distance Leadership, Organizational Leadership, Personal & Professional Development

Absorbing Remote Work Into the Way Things Are

For years, remote work has been a hot topic in conversations about the future of work and the evolving workplace. The pandemic acted as a catalyst, pushing organizations to adopt remote work models almost overnight. Now, as we settle into a post-pandemic reality, one thing is clear: remote work hasn’t disappeared. Instead, it has been integrated into the way we work today, creating a new hybrid model that can, if done correctly, blend the best of in-person collaboration with the flexibility of remote and “third-place” work.

The Evolution of Remote Work

Remote work is no longer seen as a temporary fix or a luxury for a select few. Instead, it has become a foundational part of workplace strategies across industries. Companies have recognized that work isn’t about where you are but about the outcomes you deliver. This shift in mindset has led to a blend of remote and in-office arrangements, tailored to meet the needs of both employees and organizations.

Microsoft has demonstrated an openness to hybrid work. The company has embraced flexibility by allowing employees to work remotely for up to 50% of their time without manager approval, depending on the department. This policy acknowledges that not all tasks require the same environment. Creative brainstorming sessions might thrive in person, while deep-focus projects often benefit from the quiet of remote work. Microsoft’s model demonstrates how organizations can create a structured yet flexible framework that empowers employees to choose the work setting that best suits their needs.

The Business Case for Hybrid Models

The integration of remote work into daily operations isn’t just about employee satisfaction—it’s also about business success. Studies have consistently shown that remote work can boost productivity, reduce overhead costs, and expand talent pools beyond geographic boundaries.

Consider companies like Shopify, which adopted a “digital by default” model. This approach allows employees to work remotely while reserving office spaces for collaboration and community-building activities. By rethinking the purpose of physical office spaces, Shopify has managed to cut costs while fostering a sense of connection among its workforce.

The Employee Perspective

Employees, too, have expressed a desire for more flexibility, although not everyone wants to be full-time remote, and younger workers crave the social connection and mentoring opportunities that in-office work provides. Many now expect some level of remote work as part of their job. Flexibility is no longer a perk; it’s a necessity. This new way of working—and the leadership required for success—depends more on trust, communication, and clear deliverables rather than micromanagement.

Yet, challenges remain. Maintaining team cohesion, ensuring equal access to career growth opportunities, and combating burnout in remote settings are all issues that organizations must address. The key lies in continuous adaptation and a willingness to listen to employees’ needs.

Looking Ahead

As we move forward, it’s evident that remote work isn’t a passing phase. It’s a lasting change that reflects how the modern workforce operates. Companies that view remote work as an integral part of their strategy will be better equipped to attract and retain talent, foster innovation, and stay competitive in an ever-evolving business landscape.

Remote work has not vanished, although it often isn’t called that any more. Location flexibility has simply found its place in the broader tapestry of how work gets done today. By embracing its possibilities and addressing its challenges, organizations can build a more inclusive, productive, and flexible future for all.

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Long-Distance Leadership, Long-Distance Work, Organizational Leadership

Remote Work Needs a Unicorn

Is there a remote work unicorn out there? A lot of people need to know, and fast.

In promoting our updated version of The Long-Distance Leader, I have done over 50 podcast interviews and I’m getting a lot of questions about what the future holds. Is remote work dead? Is hybrid work just another word for in-office with a little flexibility? With Amazon and other companies demanding full in-office attendance, was it all just a phase/fad/fever dream?

Remote work zealots are in full panic right now, and I don’t think they need to be.  While it looks like people favoring a more flexible work life are swimming against the tide, there are two things I know:

  • The genie is out of the bottle, and more people than ever are seeking the flexibility and advantages of remote and (truly) hybrid work. It will never disappear completely.
  • It’s easier to follow the example of large companies than to blaze your own trail. This is important because businesses and the people who run them are inherently (small c) conservative. There aren’t enough widely recognized companies that work remote-first or truly hybrid for people to emulate.

What people need is a remote work unicorn they can emulate.

In business terms, a unicorn is defined as “a startup company valued at over US $1 billion which is privately owned and not listed on a share market.” Why does that matter?

People want role models. If I’m starting a business, I want to know the best practices, systems and philosophies of successful predecessors so I am not groping blindly into the future. There are a lot of companies who have become successful with an office-first model. Until a unicorn is discovered that has a remote-first approach, many entrepreneurs will be tentative about how they structure their workforce.

We may be getting close to discovering a remote unicorn or two. There are two very hot companies that are remote-first that may serve as examples for future startups.

One of the most admired, and fastest growing, companies today is NVIDIA. They are based in Silicon Valley and have some snazzy offices there. The majority of their staff, though, works flexibly or fully remote. CEO Jensen Huang is fully supportive of those efforts, as long as work gets done. There are no strict mandates about attendance or days spent in an onsite location.

The second potential unicorn, and its early days, is Bluesky. This upstart competitor to Twitter/X started as an invitation-only social media experiment started by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Since the US Election, it has grown by a million users a week.

What makes it worth watching is that it currently only has twenty employees, and they all work remotely. Rapid growth may challenge this (at some point you need to be a grownup company) yet it’s rare to have a company scale with no past systems to follow. At the moment, all staff are focused on the technical aspects of the platform. Let’s see what happens over the next few months.

To determine if a remote-first approach is possible for growing companies, customers must be satisfied, goals met, and outputs achieved. The more companies who can grow successfully in this way, the more companies will emulate them.

Remote work isn’t dead. It’s looking for a way forward. And a unicorn may lead them.

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