Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Hello, and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Brian Strauser, principal and chief executive here at Brey Path, and in episode 185, I want to talk a little bit about remote work or distributed work, or hybrid work, whatever you wanna call it, and about managing outcomes as opposed to managing the process. And this is a topic that's been ruminating for me for a long time, longer than a decade to be, to be exact. In my, in my prior role prior to to founding Bright Path, I was, um, a, a senior leader in a corporate security organization for a Fortune 30 retailer. And in that role, um, over time, I took on global responsibilities and had a team that was based in India. So in the United States, I owned three functions and had three teams reporting into me, all related to resiliency. It was crisis management, including two global security operations centers.
Speaker 0 00:01:01 I had business continuity, I had global intelligence. Um, after two and a half years in position, we created an India version of that, which was how I was gonna deliver services, uh, more effectively to the eastern hemisphere, to Asia, to Europe, to the Middle East, Africa, and Australia. And that team, of course, was going to be somewhere else. It was gonna be based on a Bangalore, and they were gonna have their own set of travel and stuff. So I had to, to learn how to kinda manage this distributed work environment. And I think those lessons, really, the lessons and the difficulty in that, that I had in, in helping my peers understand how to make this work, uh, I think have really factored into how I think about, um, distributed and remote work today. And I think something that is something that we've managed very successfully here at BRE Path.
Speaker 0 00:01:50 So I wanna share some of those lessons, uh, with all of you and talk about how you can do the same, uh, in your organization. On our careers page here at Breit Path, we say very clearly that we fully embrace a distributed work environment. And I mean that, we mean that very sincerely when we state that here in Minnesota where we're based, we're based in Shoreview, just north of Minneapolis. Uh, that's, we're a second ring suburb. Uh, and I live in a closer first ring suburb. Um, half of our team is here in Minnesota. Um, so there are three of us, uh, soon to be four of us that come into the office. Uh, I come here every day. Um, but, but some of our other employees work from home three quarters of the week, I would say, and then come in, uh, occasionally and use hotel space, or one of them has a dedicated, um, office here and is here more frequently. But the rest of our team is elsewhere. Um, I have folks working for Bright Path today that are in Idaho, that are in Indiana, that are in New Jersey. And as we're looking to expand the team, most of the people that we're looking at hiring are not here in
Speaker 1 00:02:58 Minnesota either. In fact, one of them, uh, that we may hire is, uh, expat in another country, um, but is, uh, you know, would work as a part of our, our, our US based team. Managing this means that as a leader, I have to have a skillset. I've had to teach myself a skillset and learn a skillset where I can lead to the business outcomes that we are trying to achieve without seeing that person moment by moment, day by day, sitting in their chair. And I think this is a crucial part of how the workplace has changed for us over the last decade and was accelerated during the pandemic. The big shift here is that the way that we used to engage with our teams, the way we used to lead now has to be different. It changed during covid. Now there are, are exceptions to this.
Speaker 1 00:03:49 If you're in manufacturing, for example, you still gotta come in, you've still gotta have hands on or hands on the equipment to build the thing that your company sells. If you're in healthcare delivery, uh, there's no way around. See, I mean, yes, you can do telehealth, and yes, that has changed some things, but a physical exam is a physical exam. Um, and being able to treat someone, particularly in an acute situation, requires them to be in an er, in a clinic, in a hospital, and be able to do that. I understand this clearly. I'm, I am an E M T and have been for several years, and I volunteer in that role. And I see this on a regular basis. I can't do that job remotely, right? If you're in a medical emergency, I need to be there with you. I need to have access to my equipment.
Speaker 1 00:04:35 I need to be able to intervene in order to stabilize you and get you to an emergency room where you can receive the lifesaving treatment that you need. I can't do that remotely, but for a lot of us, particularly in business continuity and crisis management, we don't necessarily have to be in the same room with the teams that we are leading or supporting or managing. And that's where we have to really shift our mindset as business leaders away from this very synchronous idea of butts and seats. And everyone works during the same time period. And that's the only way that things can get done. And we all have met leaders that do exactly that. If they can't see the staff at their desk, they can't figure out how to lead them. This whole idea of first to arrive and last leave mentality of time spent at the office to determine who is productive is ridiculous.
Speaker 1 00:05:30 And it is so 19th and 20th century in our thinking, this whole in my mind, this whole idea that we even have to be on the same, you know, clock, uh, is an idea that in a knowledge economy, it just doesn't apply anymore. As you think about leading a remote or a hybrid or a distributed team, then you have to think about outcomes. You have to think about the fact that your team that you're leading is not responsible for working 40 hours a week or eight hours today, or in a lot of cases being available between eight and four. It's about the service or the end product that you're providing to the customers. It's the result of all of that work. So we should be evaluating and thinking about the work that our teams do based on that work, based on the quality of that work.
Speaker 1 00:06:19 After all, we're all working towards the same company result, right? No matter what our small part in the process is for you, it's not about measuring productivity based on our, that doesn't tell you how successful your team is other than just being successful at showing up. Now, if you're in a service position, if you're in a role where there is some element of I need to be available between these certain hours, that's slightly a different ballgame, right? But generally, we want to be prioritizing outcomes. And that starts by establishing a culture of trust, uh, of a culture of trust that prioritize those outcomes. That we give our staff the freedom and the autonomy to get their work done. We want them to feel supported. We want them to feel trusted, and that's a two way street. We have to trust them. And you need to create a situation in which your team trusts you.
Speaker 1 00:07:14 That trust in the workplace leads to better speed. It leads to better efficiency and performance and productivity. And companies that have high trust culture, according to Gallup, have lower turnover. They have higher returns and increased satisfaction by their clients. So it requires you to think about exercising your manager leader skillset differently. You have to communicate often. You have to assign engaging in meaningful work, and you have to clearly define those outcomes and expectations. And those outcomes only work if we all agree on what those expectations are. What is the business impact and what changes with this outcome? How much by how much, and how can we measure success? And what is the timeframe for that goal? And then you have to let go of some control as a leader. Strict schedules and ways to monitor and track employees time can create a culture of distrust and inflexibility.
Speaker 1 00:08:11 So we want to avoid micromanaging our t our workers' time and workload. Now here at Bright Path, we do track time. We don't track time for productivity purposes. We track time more around helping us understand our pricing and margin on an engagement. We don't, um, most of the time, 99% of the time we don't bill on an hourly basis. We have fixed fees tied to specific outcomes and deliverables. And so we're really tracking to that deliverable. We use the time tracking to help us understand did we price this engagement properly, good or bad, high or low, you know, are reheating kind of those financial targets. The fourth thing that we have to do here is we have to embl embrace. <laugh> embrace. We have to embrace flexibility. Um, we want staff to be focused on results rather than ours. And we have to understand that that process might look a little different for everybody on the team.
Speaker 1 00:09:05 I can tell you as a leader, you know, outside of, uh, meetings that we have, we're folks, you know, mean, you got, you have to be in, you know, certain meetings and client engagement meetings and weekly staff meetings and things like that. I don't really care when the work gets done. I don't care if our comms team, uh, writes a fantastic article and does it tonight between 10:00 PM and 1:00 AM because that's when they feel the most creative and productive. I don't care. What I care about is the result we're aiming for to internally developed articles on a monthly basis. We're looking for, you know, management of some freelance writing workload. We're looking for certain results from a search engine perspective. Those are the outcomes that we're aiming for. How and when are comms team work? Doesn't really matter to me. What I want is the outcome.
Speaker 1 00:09:56 So when you're thinking about remote work, you want to really aim remote, distributed, hybrid work. You want to really aim for that outcome and then find tools that enable your team to work asynchronously. And by that meaning, I mean, we don't have to sit in a Zoom meeting every day for an hour to figure out where we are on work and projects. Um, and, and in that way, instead, create tools that allow the team to input that and then go look at that information. So here at Bright Path, we use Slack for internal communication. I don't expect an immediate answer. I expect an answer, but it doesn't have to be on my working hours. We use, um, a, a collaborative note taking and project management tool called Notion. And that's where we track, for example, our content calendar. I don't need to be in a meeting with my comms team to know where things are at with content.
Speaker 1 00:10:48 I can go into Notion, I can go to the content planning section and I can see exactly what's coming up schedule wise and the status of those articles in the writing process. And I can tell at a glance, are we on track? Are we ahead of our schedule? Are we off track? And then I can contact the team and correct that discussion. So these are some of the ways in which using some of these tools and some of these methods can help you manage to the outcomes instead of managing the work that your team is doing. That's it for this edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. We'll be back next week with another new episode. Be well.
