The Future of Modern Work Podcast: Making Remote Work Work

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Narrator

Welcome to Navigating Forward. Brought to you by Light Consulting, where we explore the ever evolving world of technology, data and the incredible potential for artificial intelligence. Our experts come together with the brightest minds in AI and technology, discovering the stories behind the latest advancements across industries. Our mission to guide you through the rapidly changing landscape of tech, demystifying complex concepts and showcasing the opportunities that lie ahead.

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Narrator

Join us as we uncover what your business needs to do now to prepare for what's coming next. This is navigating forward.

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Nora Willgren

Hi everyone. Excited to be here today. My name is Nora Will again. I am a leader within our management consulting studio here at Launch Consulting. And joining me today is another leader from launch, Pete Salvo. And we're joining here today to talk as part of our Navigating Forward series on modern work about the future of remote work, specifically something that has become a hot topic over the previous years and continues to to mold and redefine itself.

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Nora Willgren

So excited to spend some time today to dig in a bit, talk about, what are the challenges and kind of areas of interest here still? And then what are some of the best practices we found, at launch, working with our customers, across the board that we want to share a bit broadly. Before we jump in, though, Pete, let me give you a chance to introduce yourself.

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Pete Salvo

Yeah. So as, nor mention my name is Peter. I'm, the senior director of global studio leader for software engineering at launch, which is a mouthful, but what it really means is that I manage the software engineering team here within launch. And, yeah, we work in a lot of different disciplines, a lot of different areas.

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Pete Salvo

We have architects, we have software engineers and test. We have classic software developers like, you know, myself, and then we have lots of different folks that work in different areas within the industry.

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Nora Willgren

Great. Well, well, thanks for joining us today, Pete. And, you know, excited to hear your perspective as well from the world of software engineering and, and developers as we think about this topic of remote work. So as I mentioned, remote work kind of came fast and furious into the picture as we were in the pandemic, already four years ago.

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Nora Willgren

It certainly wasn't a new topic, but but came into the forefront. Very much so at that time, it feels like it's still not necessarily a hot button topic, but something that is controversial in a lot of ways. It feels like there still isn't a clear cut, you know, remote work, hybrid work, fully on site work.

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Nora Willgren

That's a clear answer for for everyone. So curious, Pete, just to get your perspective on, do you continue to hear it as a kind of challenging or controversial topic? Do you see that changing any time soon, or do you think we're already in a space where there is more openness and awareness of the benefits of remote work overall?

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Pete Salvo

That's a great question, Nora. You know, I still hear a lot of contention around the topic. You know, it's often referred to as RTO when they when they issue it, a return to office mandate. And and there's a couple of reasons for that that we've observed over the years. One of them is that individual contributors, those are the folks that are kind of in the trenches.

00;03;34;01 - 00;03;53;22

Pete Salvo

They don't always understand what the needs of leadership are and why leadership might be making a decision for an RTO situation to come back to the office. And conversely, some leaders don't always understand what the needs of their ICS are. So the folks that are actually writing the code or doing the development work day in, day out will argue that they don't really need to be in the office.

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Pete Salvo

They can wear their pj's, they can get as much work done as possible from their living room or couch, but they don't see that perspective that leadership is doing, you know, strategy planning, trying to plan out quarters at a time. So it really I think part of the reason we hear a lot about it is that, we, we help organizations kind of close the gap to say some of the people that are on your team, the individual contributors probably don't need that office time.

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Pete Salvo

So you have to communicate to them why it's important to you, and not just because you have a fancy building or campus and you pay a lot for the landscaping. You you really need to explain the value of bringing folks back to the office.

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Nora Willgren

I think that's great. I fully agree with you that so much of it is at times just a disconnect in terms of the various pros and cons at the employer level versus the employee level. And sometimes it's hard to understand what the other is, is thinking through. Right. So communication around whatever the policy is from an employer perspective is certainly key to make sure that everyone is on board with why we're doing what we're doing, whatever that approach may be.

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Nora Willgren

I guess going more deeply than Pete into some of what you were starting to talk about, which are the pros and cons of remote work. When you think of that, whether it's specifically in the world of software engineering and development or even more broadly, what do you think of as some of the key pros versus cons? For employers or employees, for remote work?

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Pete Salvo

Yeah. Great question. Probably one of the biggest cons is that those organic conversations that typically happen in hallways or in between meetings or might be over a lunch or a coffee don't seem to happen with, you know, 100% remote teams, but they happen quite frequently when everybody's in an office space. And some of those conversations can lead to great ideas, even great products.

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Pete Salvo

There's that sense of community that's also lost when you're when you're distributed, you don't get a chance to kind of chat with folks on a personal level. And really, the setting makes a big difference. You know, if you're having a one on one with somebody and you're both remote, you're 1000 miles apart and you're talking through zoom or teams, it can be difficult to pick up body language.

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Pete Salvo

It can be difficult to understand, you know, hobbies or activities or interests outside of maybe your your typical one on one types of conversations. Whereas if you're sitting down to a cup of coffee, people are a little bit there's less stress. They don't feel like they're putting on a performance or on camera. So that's probably a couple of the bigger cons.

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Pete Salvo

In terms of pros, though, this is a very big one. It's probably the one I hear the most for I'm 100% remote associates or employees, which is remote workers get to skip that commute, and that really does leave them more time for personal tasks. It leaves some time with family time at the gym, their hobbies and so on.

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Pete Salvo

And and as a result, they typically have a better or a healthier work life balance. And really, to get to the crux of the point here, if somebody is happy and they're remote and they have that additional time, maybe a couple hours a day of their commute time, if they're in a, you know, high density area, they can be more productive.

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Pete Salvo

So, so really, the folks that are 100% remote actually will tell me I usually exceed an eight hour day because I, I've absorbed so much time back and I don't have to, you know, whether it's put on their makeup or put on their, you know, button up shirt and go into the office. They use all of that time, actually, to be more productive at home.

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Pete Salvo

So that's one of the big pros for it, I guess. One other pro that I hear a lot about is is the environmental footprint. So this kind of goes both ways. If you own an office or lease an office, you obviously have to pay for cost to heat and cool it. You have security, probably you have electricity to run computers and phone systems and even landscaping fees.

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Pete Salvo

And you got to do the math here. The office is typically occupied about 35 to 40% of the time. So you think. And Monday through Friday, that's about, you know, 60 hours a week. If you keep it open 12 hours a day, that's really less, you know, there's 168 hours in the week. So think about that.

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Pete Salvo

That's a lot of time for that building to sit vacant. So a lot of cost. So the environmental footprint is pretty substantial. If you own an office and you're leasing that space. And when I said I wanted to see both sides of it, some folks that work from home 100% have argued that the cost has been shifted to them, because now they're paying to heat and cool their houses while they're at home and and to pay for internet and phone and everything else.

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Pete Salvo

So, you really, I guess the, the piece there is the environmental footprint really just got shifted. It didn't vanish altogether. But overall, when I hear people say, are you willing to pay, you know, a few more bucks a month to heat your your house or to, to get a high speed internet connection? They're more than happy to make that, exchange for not having to drive in traffic every day.

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Nora Willgren

Yeah, that's that's an interesting point. I mean, it's all, you know, give and take, right? It's not just all good from remote work. There are sacrifices that folks are having to make, probably upgrading their, you know, desktop and work environment to be able to be more productive. Maybe they're getting that double monitor set up that they had in an office before, you know, to your point, maybe better internet connectivity.

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Nora Willgren

They're probably also saving on, commute costs in addition to time. Maybe there's a different child care option that they can have since they have more flexibility. So I and it's very individual. Right. In terms of, what you're giving and taking there and, and the pros and cons. But I do agree I typically hear that from an individual perspective.

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Nora Willgren

Those costs are typically outweighed by by the benefits and the flexibility as well. I think the productivity piece is interesting. I feel like at the beginning of the pandemic and a big driver for this auto return to office kept hearing these statements around, well, we're not as productive as employees if we're remote, right? And productivity increases when you get back to the office, I do feel like that, based on everything I've read, that that sense seems to have been debunked a bit, and there's very little data to actually support.

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Nora Willgren

That productivity does drastically increase across the board. Returning back to the office. Oftentimes it's the other way around because folks are spending less time on commute to, they're able to focus better, etc.. But I'm curious to hear from your perspective, as you do typically see productivity increasing, or if there are areas where productivity does actually get hit in in a remote and work environment.

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Pete Salvo

Yeah, absolutely. And I guess what I'll say is it kind of varies for the different disciplines within within our industry, within software. So the creative you know, user experience, user design types, the folks that I've worked with over the years who are much more talented than I am, quite frankly, they they've told me that they really enjoy that office time because they collaborate, you know, and there's really no substitute for a dry erase board and a half an hour with a colleague where you're just kind of quickly sketching out things.

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Pete Salvo

So what ends up happening with 100% our distributed team is, you do that over a course of meetings or series of meetings and what you would normally accomplish in person in a, you know, in a kind of a creative endeavor might take a couple of hours in person, and yet it ends up taking 2 or 3 weeks over the course of several meetings, because people are kind of scattered to, you know, trying to work it into their schedules.

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Pete Salvo

So the in terms of efficiency, it's just it's generally for that particular that's for the industry. It's generally best if they're collaborating in, in person. Now on the same token, it also depends on the experience level of some of the folks on your team. So at launch, for example, we have interns and and they being an intern is already frightening enough, yet they're in a new environment.

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Pete Salvo

They're getting their first professional job. And and they're kind of trying to land and two feet figure out navigate the organization. Well, if they're 100% remote and sitting at home, it's a pretty scary and daunting thing. And I will also say, you know, early career, first few years as you're trying to navigate, how to be a good software engineer or a good asset or architect, it benefits you to be able to kind of just, you know, reach over the wall and say, hey, Bob, do you have five minutes?

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Pete Salvo

I have a question for you. You end up doing all that stuff through, you know, slack or teams or other thing in the back and forth. The delay can definitely impact your productivity now. And on the other end of that spectrum are folks that have been working in software for 20 years, and they don't really need a lot of guidance there.

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Pete Salvo

They're able to kind of go heads down and get a lot of things done for those folks. The productivity and I see this time and time again and some of my closest friends and colleagues have, we've talked about this over, over a beverage. They don't need really to be in the office and, they find it a bit of a distraction.

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Pete Salvo

The very same things about hours mentioning kind of the water cooler talks and organic conversations. They don't want to have those. They'd actually prefer to listen to music and go heads down and and write software. So sorry for not really answering your question, but really it's, it can go either way within disciplines. It can go, you know, you might find more productivity.

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Pete Salvo

With those senior folks, the junior folks are definitely going to need a little bit more support. And I guess the last thing I'll say is, if you are a senior software engineer and you've been at it for 20 years, part of your job is to be a coach and mentor to those up and comers and the next generation of engineers that are behind you.

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Pete Salvo

And so while you may not like to be in the office, the folks that are kind of learning from you and following in your footsteps would prefer it because they can, you know, learn the industry that way.

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Nora Willgren

Yeah, a lot of great points you made there. And I think just listening to you and and taking that all in, it's clear that there's no one size fits all type of answer, right, even within one organization itself, and may depend on the department or even the individual themselves, the role they're playing as to what makes the most sense.

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Nora Willgren

And so I'm curious, from your perspective, what do you think of as the best ways to really evaluate the right approach, whether it's for, you know, a large company, a midsize company, or a department within an organization, what are the some of those things that you would recommend, that a leader considers in trying to right size that approach for, for their organization?

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Pete Salvo

Yeah. Great question. Nora. And a shout out to a friend and, and mentor who taught me about data driven decisions rather than using my emotions, which I'm pretty good at. His his counsel was always, Pete, use data. Get me the hard facts, get the numbers here. So in software development, you know, we can measure the velocity of the teen.

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Pete Salvo

We can measure the number of defects that are created. We can measure the number of features that are completed in, you know, a given sprint or given iteration. And so using that data will tell you are we being effective as a team? Are we still as effective as a team as we were six months ago. So constantly measuring, the progress and, and I guess what I would say is if your project is starting to slip behind and you have a remote team try in office for a little while, see if that doesn't get things back on track.

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Pete Salvo

Another good practice that I recommend for 100% or distributed teams is try and get into the office at least once a quarter, you know, to talk about the team goals, talk about objectives or OKRs, and try and do that in person, because it it really does give people a chance to get to know each other in an informal capacity.

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Pete Salvo

Well, you know, in between meetings and that kind of thing. And it's not all that expensive. You know, if, if you, if you want to have them even in a neutral space, you don't even have to continue with your lease. You could find, you know, a colab space, or you could rent a, hotel, ballroom or something like that, just to get your team to kind of collaborate and spend a couple of days working through really big, you know, milestones or quarterly deliverables.

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Pete Salvo

So that's something that we constantly recommend for our 100% distributed folks. It's something we practice at lunch, I, I try and get out to see my colleagues a couple of times per quarter, if not more frequently than that. A couple and I guess a few other best practices. And I would, I would really recommend this to any leader, whether they're using a distributed or remote team or they're back in the office, but have have those weekly and biweekly one on ones, make sure that you're you're really supporting your folks and you're listening to their concerns and their needs because they'll tell you what they need.

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Pete Salvo

And, again, that's a that's kind of a staple of every good leader, provide them with the tools that they need to be successful. Right. So if they if they need to certain administrative rights on their laptop or some other thing and you don't do that for them, the, the culture and community that you're trying to build is really going to suffer.

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Nora Willgren

I think one of the things that I'm hearing from you is that it also be something that continues to evolve. We need to, as with anything we recommend with our clients, continue to iterate, get, have our feedback loops in place and then adjust as as needed. And tied to that, one of the things that I've read about is that while during the pandemic, we obviously shifted significantly to fully remote work, there has been more of a shift over than the following years 2023 2024 to these hybrid types of work, solutions as well.

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Nora Willgren

Right? So having 2 to 3 days in the office, whether it's mandated specific days, making it flexible per person, some of it is definitely employer driven, but I do believe some of it was also based on feedback from employees of desiring that connectedness and ability to be working hand in hand, better able to support teams. If you're a manager but are able to create the community, have access to information, etc..

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Nora Willgren

And so I, I'm curious just to get your perspective on that hybrid work environment as well. I know a lot of what you were just talking about was the remote work concept, how to maybe still create opportunities for in-person connection, even there, but for hybrid models specifically, is that something you've seen success in over the past years as well?

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Nora Willgren

Yeah, it really.

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Pete Salvo

Depends on the organization. Again, there's like you said before, Nora, there's no one size fits all solution. I will I want to step back though and go to when Covid first hit the United States and the team I was managing at the time, within the first couple of weeks, everybody thought it was great. They were able to work from home, wear their PJs, you know, or hop on a meeting or one on one.

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Pete Salvo

But within a few months, I started to hear from my team that people were really getting lonely and, and, and it's kind of silly. I actually noticed that people stopped shaving. In some cases, men stopped shaving in there. I had and really have to be camera. I don't have to see anybody. I had lots of, folks coming to me and telling me they were a little bit depressed.

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Pete Salvo

And when I'd ask them why, they'd say, well, I, you know, I really did enjoy going to the food carts or I really did enjoy going to lunch with so-and-so, and now I don't get to do that. So back to the question about hybrid. You mentioned some of it's employer driven, some of it's employee driven. It really I've heard both, you know, I've heard it from both sides of the coin.

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Pete Salvo

Some people say two days a week, some people say five days a week or four days a week, something like that. But it's it comes back to that, that point I was mentioning previously with data, somebody within the organization has looked at the data. They've they've, you know, maybe they've done surveys and chatted with their, their individual contributors and managers and leaders and determined that, hey, people really do want to come in and they want to, you know, have coffee and, and chat through things in a, in a less formal environment.

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Pete Salvo

I guess the answer there is, it depends. And I know that's not a great answer, but there's there's no one one. Right. You know, no silver bullet on this one.

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Nora Willgren

It depends. The, classic consulting answer. I feel like right now, but but that's a great point. And I, I do think at the end of the day, that is the the punch line. It depends. Not a, one size fits all. And also something that, you know, the onus is on leaders to continuously evaluate and see where the organization is at from the perspective of culture, mental health of employees, as I think the point you were just making and just overall better ways to to work as an organization, I think with that, I'd love to shift a little bit.

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Nora Willgren

Pete, just, talking about when we are working remotely, whether it's in a hybrid fashion, it's a few days a week or if it's fully remote, what are some of the best practices for how to make a remote organization a remote team as efficient, effective, productive as possible? What are some of the methods that you've discovered?

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Nora Willgren

Best practices, lessons learned along the way over these past four years or even before that?

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Pete Salvo

I would find, some of the things I mentioned earlier about measuring the effectiveness of your delivery and kind of keeping an eye on things. And that includes keeping an eye on your your engineers not like looking over their shoulder, but more like looking over their, their goals and their one on one conversations. And what kinds of things come up.

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Pete Salvo

That's always I would recommend that for any leader, not just folks that have a remote team or a hybrid team. Another thing to to look for is, create trust and make sure that you're giving room for your team to accomplish their task. So a good example here is you really want to avoid meeting overload. And when you do have meetings, you want to run those effectively.

00;21;01;08 - 00;21;21;02

Pete Salvo

You know, there should be an agenda. There should be a note taker. You want to follow up with action items and assignees and dates and and again, that's it. That advice would go for a remote team or an in office team. I guess can you to turn you on this theme, set OKRs and goals for your folks and and talk about those goals on a pretty frequent basis.

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Pete Salvo

You know, there's all kinds of books on leadership and, performance management. And when you're not in the office, sometimes it can be hard to remember, I need to do this performance management. I need to do it year or quarterly performance reviews or even end of your performance reviews. So that's always a best practice, again, for either remote teams or in office.

00;21;41;00 - 00;21;59;01

Pete Salvo

And then I guess the last thing is it's figure out ways to create culture. And again, you know, applicable to remote teams as well as in office, but have team events, you know, enable your team members to meet each other, in, in neutral places, you know, a hotel lobby or a hotel ballroom or something like that.

00;21;59;04 - 00;22;19;03

Pete Salvo

Look for ways to inject the human element. So if if, if somebody buys a house on your team, that's a great moment to send them a little housewarming gift. It maybe a that's their birthday or they're getting married. Those personal moments are are worth sharing. And kind of not with the team, but with the individual to make sure that they recognize like, hey, outside of work, you're still a person.

00;22;19;03 - 00;22;42;01

Pete Salvo

And I'm going to respect that. I always like to send a book for anything that is a big life event. When people ask me, you know, what should I read? That's a common thing that I do with my team is we exchange books. We literally have book clubs, if you can believe it. But just kind of those, those are organic ways to, to have the water cooler talk that would normally happen in office.

00;22;42;03 - 00;23;16;23

Nora Willgren

Yeah. That's great. And I think those are great points. Right. So it's around finding ways to to manage delivery even in these remote settings, especially with maybe some of your more junior resources, how best to support QA, etc.. It's around really setting those OKRs and goals. It sounds like both at an individual level, but also making sure that as a company or an organization, you're being articulate about the vision of the company and making sure folks feel connected to that, which can be a little bit more challenging in remote environments as well.

00;23;16;25 - 00;23;41;06

Nora Willgren

And then to your point around culture, for sure, there's always we want to be focusing on culture, right? No matter if we're fully, remote, fully on site. But it puts a little bit more again of that ownership and, necessity for foresight on leaders to think about how we're intentionally creating culture where we might be able to do it with that natural water cooler talk.

00;23;41;08 - 00;24;04;11

Nora Willgren

If we were in the office. One question I have is around tools specifically, are there any specific tools that you've used with your teams that have really enabled you to collaborate even more effectively? I know there's a million out there, but curious if there's any that come to mind specifically for you.

00;24;04;13 - 00;24;24;11

Pete Salvo

Yeah, well, I think everybody knows, slack at this point. It's, it's well established as so many plug ins and integrations. It makes it super powerful, not only for building communities, but for just managing the day to day stuff that's going on within your organization. And of course, there's teams, you know, Microsoft's kind of answer to that, and it works as well.

00;24;24;13 - 00;24;41;00

Pete Salvo

We've all probably had a zoom call at some point, you know, that during Covid that was kind of the joke, the zoom happy hour or so. So that stuff is, is ever prevalent. But, I always like to tell people to look at a real time collaboration and tools. So there's Miro, there's storm board, there's another one called

00;24;41;02 - 00;25;04;29

Pete Salvo

But the nice connection point and and those when I say real time collaboration tools, I am often reminded of the quote, A picture is worth a thousand words. If you can get your entire team on to a miro board and kind of sketch out whatever it is that you're trying to solve, that visual representation is so much better than scheduling half a dozen meetings and PowerPoints and people, you know, falling asleep trying to figure out what's going on.

00;25;04;29 - 00;25;28;09

Pete Salvo

So I look for those real time collaboration tools and visual, visual presentations, I guess. And then finally, you know, I think we've all heard of like Google and G suite, all the products from Atlassian, all the office products. Each one of those has some element of collaboration and kind of, you know, mutual dry erase boards or mutual, ways to collaborate.

00;25;28;09 - 00;25;46;20

Pete Salvo

And it really it comes back to being a visual tool. And then the last thing I would say is, and again, this is applicable if you're in office or if you're working in remote leverage AI, there are a lot of different ways that AI is operating the same benefits as, you know, if you're in the office, you can automate a lot of tasks.

00;25;46;20 - 00;26;05;14

Pete Salvo

You can sort your email. For example, I use AI driven, elements within a Microsoft tool to basically schedule meetings. For me, it it goes and finds the the next available time slot so that I don't have to sit there and look through calendar after calendar when I'm trying to schedule a 100 person meeting, for example. So, use I leverage it.

00;26;05;14 - 00;26;10;07

Pete Salvo

It's it's continuing to become kind of a force in our industry.

00;26;10;09 - 00;26;35;18

Nora Willgren

Yeah, I know we could spend another hour talking about AI specifically and how to utilize that as a, as a tool. But as I think about, again, some of the collaboration tools you shared, I mean, it's clear that over the past four plus years, with the pandemic necessitating so much remote work, we've been privileged to now have a lot more of these collaboration tools.

00;26;35;18 - 00;26;56;15

Nora Willgren

They continue to advance. We continue to have more features and, you know, different use cases, that they present. And so even for us, I think it's a reminder just continuously to to be on the lookout for new tools that we can be using. If we're trying to find ways to do something we would do in-person, normally, remotely.

00;26;56;15 - 00;27;13;11

Nora Willgren

Instead, there's probably there's only an app for that, right? There's probably a tool for that. So there's certainly things that are at our fingertips that we can utilize. And one of the points you made earlier is, you know, the zoom calls and the camera. I know at times it can be tiring to be on video all the time.

00;27;13;11 - 00;27;29;00

Nora Willgren

And, you know, sometimes you can take like video free Friday afternoons or something like that. But I always tell my teams that the default should be to have your camera on, right? That is the closest replacement we can have to being there in person. And there's something about seeing the other person's face.

00;27;29;02 - 00;27;31;01

Pete Salvo

You pick up body language, you know? Yeah.

00;27;31;04 - 00;27;56;03

Nora Willgren

Yeah. It's about finding those ways to really create relationships and connection and seeing somebody face being able to ask them a question about the picture on the wall behind them, or the guitar on the floor. Right. Those are ways that we create connection when when one kind of human question at a time. So always a recommendation, even if we do sometimes sometimes need breaks from, from the camera as well.

00;27;56;06 - 00;28;23;18

Nora Willgren

The other things that come to mind, as I consider best practices for remote work, are really about ways that we just create effective organizations overall, but they come to light again in remote work cultures. So I feel like there's heightened importance on making sure roles and responsibilities are really clear, because you have less kind of sitting next to someone and awareness of what they're doing hour by hour.

00;28;23;18 - 00;28;44;06

Nora Willgren

It's just really clear to commute. Really important to clearly communicate expectations for individuals, make sure they know who to reach out to if they have questions, who their escalation points are. We also want to make sure we have the right rhythms of business in place. Right? So you mentioned one on ones earlier in addition to the one on ones.

00;28;44;06 - 00;29;10;26

Nora Willgren

What are the other ways that individuals are getting the right information, the right exposure that they might get in some of those in-person meetings if we were in the office? The other piece is organizational tools. Right. So what are the those data driven decision making platforms that we have? Again, these are things that are important even if your organization is fully in the office.

00;29;10;29 - 00;29;36;03

Nora Willgren

But they are even more important in a lot of ways. If, if part or some part or all of your organization is is working remote. And then I'll just emphasize again that that goals piece, I think even more than ever, it's so important to set those organizational team and individual goals. And that's where we create a sense of connectedness kind of across the layers of an organization.

00;29;36;10 - 00;29;48;06

Nora Willgren

Even if folks are working around the country or around the world in their on their own computers, at their own homes, everyone feels connected and is part of that larger equation of success for an organization.

00;29;48;08 - 00;30;12;26

Pete Salvo

Agreed on all points. Nora. Yeah. Okay. Nora. Now, I have a question for you. You know, if I'm running an organization and, I'm not sure whether or not I should have a return to office policy or continue to support 100% remote. What are some of the kind of KPIs or indicators I should be looking at to determine whether or not I, you know, I send out that big email that says, hey everybody, you have to come back to the office three days a week.

00;30;12;28 - 00;30;40;06

Nora Willgren

Good question, Pete, and I'll give you I'll shoot it right back at you. It depends. I think overall as we work with organizations, departments, oftentimes it's not just the question of remote work. And how should I be approaching this? It's it's broader conversations we're having with leaders around how they can continue to build more effective teams. Maybe they're seeing, to your point, around data driven decision making.

00;30;40;06 - 00;31;19;06

Nora Willgren

Maybe they're seeing some drops in productivity. Maybe they're starting to see, increased attrition. Maybe they're having trouble, catching some quality issues with their developers or having a hard time finding the right rhythms between their, their sales teams and others to have a really cohesive type of working relationship. So it often comes from really trying to analyze what are the what are the root causes, what are the issues we're seeing, and then something like a return to office policy or improved remote or remote working policies might be a part of that solution.

00;31;19;06 - 00;31;50;10

Nora Willgren

But it's rarely just that kind of one size fits all. That's what we jump to. So it's more of these broader conversations around what are our pain points, where are we trying to go as an organization? What are the value drivers for the organization? And then figuring out if there are things that we need we should be doing in person as part of that organization that could help some of those metrics like productivity, like working more cohesively between different departments.

00;31;50;12 - 00;32;18;03

Nora Willgren

But other times it may be other things we need to solve for instead. Maybe clearer roles and responsibilities, maybe clearer processes or improved processes, maybe more automation. So I think I'll again give you that. It depends answer. We certainly work with companies to think about that broader picture and make sure that we're not trying to jump to a solution before we've really thought about all of the different components that are at play.

00;32;18;06 - 00;32;41;06

Nora Willgren

That's probably one of the the main value propositions we often provide for our customers as well. Oftentimes when you're in the trenches trying to look through all of this data, figure out what is the root cause of the problem. It's hard to have the time and ability to really look at the big picture, and that's where we oftentimes come in with our clients.

00;32;41;06 - 00;33;21;22

Nora Willgren

We want to help them be those partners. For them to look at the big picture as well as the details, and come to some good recommendations based on all of our knowledge of, you know, what are the best approaches based on the problem that we're trying to solve. So that's a great way that we partner with our clients and then are able to also long term, help support them in implementation of different tactics and continue to think of ways that they can then build in the muscle memory of these feedback loops, creating best practices around how to continuously monitor for ways to improve as they continue to mature as an organization as well.

00;33;21;22 - 00;33;45;10

Nora Willgren

So certainly type of work we love doing as an organization. It's it's fun. It's valuable. I mean, it can make a huge difference for organizations as well. Again, going back to the remote work topic here overall, I mean, one of the huge pros for employers that I continue to hear about is just ability to hire and retain great talent.

00;33;45;10 - 00;34;05;13

Nora Willgren

Right. And and that's what it's all about. We want to have a workplace where we are both efficient and effective, but we also can have great folks who are excited to be working at the company that we're at. So that's what we like to partner with our customers to do is create those types of cultures, environments and and teams.

00;34;05;16 - 00;34;30;02

Nora Willgren

Pete, anything else you would add? Just as we wrap up for today, I feel like we've we've been on a great journey together here, really thinking about the evolution of of this topic. And it certainly is something that over the coming years I, I'm sure will continue to evolve. So will be interesting to see in five years from now where we're at, maybe we can, you know, put it on our calendars to have a part two and see how things have evolved.

00;34;30;02 - 00;34;38;14

Nora Willgren

But anything else that comes to mind that you really want to end with, or a key thing maybe we didn't get to in the conversation today.

00;34;38;17 - 00;35;03;17

Pete Salvo

I think one of the key things to remember, and we we can all pretty much agree on this, is that remote work might change and evolve, but it's not going to go away entirely. And there's still industries where, you know, I use an example here about customer service. You know, you traditionally would have these big call centers, and people would drive out to the call center and jump on the phone and answer the phone all day, that that industry has evolved dramatically so that people can now do it from their living room.

00;35;03;17 - 00;35;19;02

Pete Salvo

They don't even have to leave their house. And you, the end consumer, get the same experience. So that the Tldr the short answer to that is, just know it's not going away. It will continue to evolve and stay on top of the tools because as it does evolve, there'll be better and better options for remote teams.

00;35;19;02 - 00;35;37;00

Nora Willgren

I love it. Well, thanks Pete for the time. Today has been really great to hear your perspectives. Some of the pointers I know I'll be taking this away with a fresh look of how to continue to support my team best as they work remotely as well. So really appreciate the time and we'll we'll talk to you next time.

00;35;37;01 - 00;35;38;05

Pete Salvo

It's my pleasure. Thank you Nora.

00;35;38;07 - 00;35;38;21

Nora Willgren

Thank you.

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