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Unbound is a weekly podcast, created to help you achieve more as a leader. Join Chris DuBois as he shares his growth journey and interviews others on their path to becoming unbound. Delivered weekly on Thursdays.
0:00
On today's episode, we dive into remote work culture, building and accountability. Are you a leader trying to get more from your business in life? Need to. So join me as I document the conversations, stories and advice to help you achieve what matters in your life. Welcome to unbound with me, Chris DuBois.
Dr. Thomas Becker has been a professor of management for over 30 years teaching courses on organizational behavior and HR. In addition to his scholarly work, Dr. Becker is the president of stratify a talent management firm is consulted with many companies large and small, including the FBI, McDonald's Procter and Gamble and AstraZeneca stratifies key goals are to help SMEs improve employee motivation and boost from productivity. Today, we're going to learn how this top Welcome to unbanned
0:53
Hey, it's great to be here, Chris. Thanks for inviting me much. Appreciate it.
0:58
Yeah, this is gonna be another fun one. So let's, let's kick it off with with your origin story.
1:05
Yeah. I'm from St. Louis. Love the Cardinals still do. I grew up in the age of Lou Brock and Bob Gibson. And I went to his undergraduate, university, South Florida, studied psychology and then ended up doing what was people with an undergraduate degree in psychology do which is, you know, waiting on tables. So I did that for a little while, went back to graduate school at Ohio State, got a doctoral degree in industrial organizational psychology. And that put me in on a track to become a professor. And I did that for 30 plus years, as you mentioned, I was at Washington State University, University of Delaware then for 20 years, and then I finished up at the University of South Florida, my alum.
1:53
Alright, alright. And the Enagic get involved with starting stratify.
1:58
Yeah, so that's a great question, not kind of all along the way I was doing consulting, to be honest with you, those consulting gigs just sort of came along, when, as a management professor writes, I'm teaching courses in organizational behavior and human resource management, teaching them to executive MBAs, regular MBAs, undergraduates. So it's very natural for somebody to be in a class and say, you know, we got a leadership issue at my company, or we need a training program for this or that. And yeah, so I ended up doing a lot of consulting along the way, some of the places that you mentioned, for example, and then I got to a point where I could retire from the University of South Florida, I was living, I was living in a community, the Venetian golf and river club at the time, and I don't really golf, so I don't really know how I ended up. But I couldn't see my so I love leisure, but I couldn't see myself, you know, just doing something leisurely for the rest of my life needed some kind of work purpose, and married, been married for many years. And my wife Luann, we got a couple of kids. And but yeah, I just needed to continue work. And I've always enjoyed the consulting. So that was basically my origin story for stratify.
3:17
Awesome. And so today, we're gonna talk a lot about how companies can go remote and the things that they should be looking at, but what considerations should they have before going remote? Yeah,
3:30
you know, I would say the first answer to that is consider the issues. You know, I think a lot of times, we'll COVID kind of pushed all of us into doing it without a great deal of rational thought, right. But now, that's more or less, I'm knocking on wood, you're more or less behind us. And it's time to take a little more of a reasoned approach to making those decisions. And the things you need to consider are, you know, is your workforce ready for it? Are the nature of the jobs and the tasks in question, something that you can do remotely? I really think that's an issue. That last one is one that deserves a lot more consideration than it's been given. And I think maybe that's because many companies, especially small and medium sized enterprises, haven't really done a great job analysis. So their job descriptions may not be as thorough or up to date as they might be. And if you don't have that, it's kind of hard to figure out, okay, what kind of work should be done or can be done at home and what needs to be done here? Yeah, so I'd say the nature of the workforce, the nature of the job, and then also this should be kind of a non issue these days, but just having the technology in place so that it can happen as you and I know technology doesn't always cooperate. But you know, you just have to have the right right pieces in place. Other people can get their jobs done.
5:02
Right? Actually, I want to go deeper on the technology piece right away, because so I was working for a marketing company. And one of our clients, this was like in the midst of COVID essentially provided technology, very emerging industry, but to help company companies like yeah, like spectrum and like those that are going to come out and like service, a router and stuff and then go away, like just quick services, they found a way to do that remotely. But companies were so in the of the mindset that like, No, we have to be physical in this role. Right, we actually have to be there to make it happen. When in reality, if they had just adopted that technology pays for itself in like, two months. And then, and then you're good. But also, I wonder, in your experience, how often our company is just either just not aware that other technology exists, or they're refusing to even look for it, because they're there. So bought into the way they used to do things. Chris,
5:56
I've taught a course in the business school called organizational change, and development and like chapter one, and any book is resistance to change. And was a whole psychology behind that. And it almost doesn't matter what the change is, if people are just used to the way things are going. Unfortunately, this is very true of management, sometimes more so than then employ other employees. But yeah, so the overcoming that resistance, I think part of it is just people understanding how to do it. And then, and then getting used to doing it. I think the big resistance with technology, I saw it too, for sure. In education, part of the resistance was, you know, now I got to revamp the way I'm doing things it's gonna take time and effort I really was used to I was very efficient with the way or at least I thought I was with the way it was been done before. Yeah, so I just think it it takes some time for people to get used to it. Hopefully that changes is we get a little more used to making technological changes more frequently. But yeah, it's a challenge for sure.
7:10
That, and so I guess, a separate from technology, what types of constraints are companies running into now as they're just as they're looking to go remote? What kind of problems are surfacing that would stop them from being able to do that? Yeah,
7:24
I think it's kind of a flip side of what we were just discussing, Chris, for the first question, which is not having a not having a rational approach to doing it. You know, there's, if people are acting, intuition can be great. But if they're acting on their gut, and their gut is kinda like, uninformed by reality, then the intuition isn't necessarily too much good. So you'll see a lot of things now you'll have managers who are just, you know, taking the hardware and just bring everybody back to work, just tell them they have to do it, or we're going to can, um, you know, okay, okay, calm down, you know, let's think through this. And then you have employees, on the other hand, you've got some employees, you're like, you know, if they don't let me keep working from home, I'm just going to quit. And so you got these emotions kind of running high sometimes. And so having somebody with a reasonably level head, hopefully somebody HR or management or something, you know, a leader who can say, hey, you know, let's just walk through it. So I think that's a main thing is just kind of the emotional environment of that decision. And then having an alternative, you know, a way to discuss it, so that multiple goals can be satisfied. At the same time, obviously, the organization wants to see productivity, and return on investment, as well as employee morale. And the employees want to see job satisfaction, a degree of autonomy, maybe more autonomy now that we're used to doing of what we're doing. And, you know, not being treated like children. So yeah, I think those are the constraints. They're not a little overbearing, they can be overcome, but that initial resistance, I think, can be really considerable.
9:13
And that makes sense. So, as we're looking at some of the roles within our companies, and evaluating how they, whether they can be remote, I guess, and then or maybe it's more of a spectrum, right? How remote can they be, now that we got a hybrid model? Yeah. How do you go about, like actually approaching that and making a determination? Yeah.
9:33
So I'm going to try to not make this a sales pitch. But I've been thinking about this quite a lot and stratifying scout up process, but just, you know, taking the sales pitch out of it. It's a pretty straightforward like problem solving issue. I'm going to say the problem is, who gets to work at home? How often and when right if that's really the issue, and the first step, I think in addressing that really is that task or job analysis that I mentioned earlier, because if we've got a thorough understanding the tasks, duties and responsibilities of the job, then we can ask, Okay, which of those can be done at home and which have to be done in the office or in, you know, another workplace? And I think if employees and management work through that together, then neither side feels like it's kind of being shoved down their throat, it's like, no, let's just look at on the job, what can you do here, what what has to be done? Or what can be done at home, then I really think it's critical to have kind of a trial period. Because, you know, this is more of an art than a science, you can come up with some numerical indices about which percent, you know, what percent of your job can be done here and there. And how many hours does that require your being in the office versus at home? But you need that trial period of probably several months, where there's communication and feedback from management and employees. Regarding Is it working, you know, what do we need to tweak? Your management management might discover, actually, maybe we need you in here a little more often, because the culture of the organization kind of can start to dissipate, if people just aren't here interacting face to face. On the other hand, maybe we can, if things are going well, in that regard, we can loosen the reins, if you want to say it that way. It's a little autocratic to think of it that we could say some managers do, you know, so, you know, we could we could try a little more time at home. So, yeah, another kind of absolutely essential factor, Chris is, if we're going to have people working at home, and we've got this idea about, okay, we've got the right proportions, more or less, then you know, how much monitoring has to go on. Because this is a big sort of bone of contention, I think is, you know, the employees, like, look, you know, I'm an adult, I've been working with you for some period of time, I've got my, get my work done, you know, I don't need you breathing down my neck, I don't need some sort of gimmicky device hooked up to my keyboard, counting strokes, you know, and we're now again playing about things, or you're monitoring me on my camera at random intervals, I just think that gets to be so that really destroys trust, you know, over monitoring can destroy trust, I think that the key there is to develop smart goals for as many jobs and task as we can, because then it's not an issue of how many hours should you spend on this, this and this, it's like, Okay, here's the goals, they're reasonably specific and measurable. And, you know, there's a time frame tied to them. So we become more, this is probably a very good thing, we become more gold focused in this system than we might have been otherwise.
13:19
Right on that, when we the world wide remote. A lot of my my friends and people that I knew who were in management positions, were finding it hard to let the team keep running. Like, you stand over them on a daily basis at work, like now, why do you feel need to do it now? But differentiating between checking in and checking up? Right? Am I checking up on them? Make sure they're doing the right thing? Or am I checking in to make sure they're okay. And, and I found the chicken egg goes a long way for the culture and to still build that trust. So people want to work with you, versus checking up all the time and just try to push them for the work?
13:56
Yeah, I mean, I agree. 100%. You know, I think besides the goal setting piece of it, Chris, another key thing that has to happen. And it goes to your point about the checking in versus checking out is the quality of leadership becomes even more important, especially at the lower levels of a company if we're talking about a medium to large sized company, right. So it's not complicated conceptually, but it requires some serious skill development on the part of some people. So, you know, you've seen probably supervisors who were great at the task, part of the job that set the goals who does what, let's put together a schedule, you know, and let's have our, our mini many goals scheduled at a particular time and, you know, make it as specific as we can. That's great. And then you've got some managers who You are not so great at that, but are wonderful at the relationship development part, right? They're benevolent. They want to provide resources to make sure people have what they need to get it done. They're considerate of their employees, what's going on in their lives, what are they, you know what's going on, so that they feel good here. We need managers who do both of those things very well, the task or oriented piece and the people oriented piece, if we're going to make the remote work, work, then we really need both of those skills on the part of managers just being task oriented, that's where the, you know, over monitoring and breathing down, my neck comes in. On the other hand, if you got people who are just nice, then, you know, productivity could suffer. So yeah, I think developing and hiring great managers, great leaders really, is going to be even more essential in this world of telecommuting and remote work.
16:04
Right, then knowing when to like finding that balance and knowing when to apply more on it. Exactly.
16:10
Yeah. Because different employees are differ. I think that's like principle number one, and hrs people are different.
16:18
Right now, thank you, he just did an entire pitch for me.
16:22
That was not planned, folks. It's just, it's just good stuff.
16:28
But so, I mean, I guess going deeper on this, right, a lot of emotions are going to be tied into this decision. And for some reason, people even want to serve making a political, and so they're coming in even harder, because they want to stand their ground on on that side. How can we, I don't know, whether it's using data, whether it's using just whatever facts we have to present, but so that we can pull the emotion out of it, and get everyone on the same page and aligned towards that common goal?
16:54
Yeah, that's a tough one. To try to get down a little bit deeper than just acknowledging emotions, you know, I think what we can do is remove emotions entirely from the equation, while we can do at two different levels, is first, really work to develop that culture of trust that we're talking about, because then some of these problems of us versus them, you know, management versus employees, employees versus management, that if it doesn't go away entirely, at least it's reduced. The other thing is, I think most people, employees, at any level in the organization, understand that date, data driven decisions are usually better decisions, anybody can have an opinion, you know, anybody can feel this way, or that way about working at home or not working at home. And that's why think like doing some data collection, when it comes to who can work, how often at home, and doing those check ins in those adjustments along the way becomes critical. So, you know, many jobs have an element of quantitative metrics that you can attach to it. Those can be overdone, you know, you're just looking at the numbers. And then there's a qualitative part to that, if you disregard it, you miss something important, but to the extent possible, having those quantitative metrics and the qualitative data to support them makes for an environment in which we solve problems here, in reference to data, not in reference to how much power some manager and as, or to the squeaky wheel getting the grease or, you know, who plays golf with a boss or, you know, it's just a really a problem solving, trust enhancing culture. And, and without that, you know, you can you can quibble about 1000 Little things or, you know, try to adjust 1000 Little things, and it's probably not going to make much difference. So, I would say that's the heart and soul of it.
19:10
It's really interesting that we should be collecting this data now, for future decisions that might come up right that proactivity stops a decision from being made for you. And so, yeah, just a really interesting, yeah, got me. Yeah, no,
19:24
that's very true. That's, you know, and this is why, if a company doesn't already have this, I would say, including this, even small businesses, you know, if you've got 15 or fewer employees, you might be tempted to say, you know, we're not going to gather data or I just watch I just see what's going on. Well, okay, observation is great. But a lot of times, you can't see the degree to which goals are being met just by looking around at a given point in time. You oftentimes can't feel or see how Employees job satisfaction is. And that's critical. Even if you're not that touchy feely type, if you understand that, yeah, you know what higher job satisfaction really does mean greater retention of your best employees. So, you know, tie that to the bottom line, there's a good, you know, humanistic reason to care. But there's also a very good business reason to care. So I think even very small employers are, are well advised to collect data, it doesn't have that you don't have to analyze it in some tremendously complicated manner. But, you know, sometimes just a little bit of data can go a long way.
20:44
So, earlier, you mentioned culture building. And one of the reason I guess some companies will say we actually want to be an office is because it does help culture by being face to face and being able to interact, it's just much easier. But what recommendations do you have for companies who are going remote, they have to go remote, but they need to maintain that culture? Yeah,
21:04
I would say step one would be test your assumptions. Because if part of what you're trying to develop is a culture of trust, this situation of deciding who's going to work from home, when and and how that is an aspect of your culture. And culture doesn't reside in a physical space, culture is the values and norms of the organization. And, you know, if your culture is effective, then those values are internalized within the employees. So that's being carried around up here, not in a in an office space somewhere. Yeah, so, you know, most organizations, I think, they may not call it this, but they're looking for a high performance, high involvement, culture, you know, we want people to do their jobs, you know, extremely well, but we want them to be engaged, we want them to be involved, we don't want them feeling oppressed, you know, because we're monitoring them too narrowly, or, you know, we're killing their intrinsic motivation, because we're just throwing carrots and sticks at them, instead of, you know, trying to build them up and working with them so that they can achieve their values by working and aligning with the organization's so yeah, I, I think that's a really important point is that the culture doesn't reside within any particular walls.
22:38
Right? Like, Seth Godin says definition, people like us do things like I like it makes it very simple. Yeah.
22:45
Now, I think it is true, that face to face oftentimes can like reinforce cultural norms, because then, you know, some degree of I guess, I would say, cohesiveness among people, kind of make sure that those values and norms are underscored. And you can see, yeah, we actually share those. It's not just words on paper, if it's just words on paper, it doesn't mean anything. Right. So I think it's, you know, it's a great idea to have, it doesn't have to be face to face, but to have meetings, celebrations. Wherever you can, when I was teaching at South Florida, I mean, we were in a panic that first spring after COVID. You know, we were doing like, all face to face and all of a sudden, it's like, whoa, okay, you know, it was drinking from the proverbial fire. Oh, is it really was. But then as you learn the technology, it's like, okay, well, I can have a conversation with somebody on Zoom, or teams or whatever technology is being used. We can see each other. I was interim dean there for a year. And we saw on Fridays, to save a session where people would, you know, if you wanted to have a cocktail, you'd have a cocktail, you're at home, I'm not going to tell you, you can't have a cocktail. It's not a formal meeting it but it was a great way to get feedback from people because people will say things in his setting that's like, Hey, we're just, it's like we're talking in a bar. It's just me talking to you about what I think you get a lot more depth in that setting than you do in a meeting where, you know, we're sitting around a table having a formal discussion, you know, a lot of stuff does not come out in that setting. Yeah, so, just a few thoughts on that, Chris.
24:41
Yeah, that's going around the conference table with everyone ready to go home anyways. Well, if you're already having your drink. Exactly. So we kind of touched on this earlier to just the need to be able to continuously build trust even in that remote environment. Are there some tips that you have for companies is to actually facilitate that. Yeah. So that they're not just sending people home and crippling everything that they have built? Sure, yeah,
25:08
there's two approaches. This goes for individuals like you and me, Chris, or an organization and managers and employees that have, you know, a more global level, there's two basic assumptions you can make when you start interacting with somebody. One is, I'm going to trust them until they show me they can't be trusted. You know, that's one approach to life and interpersonal interactions. The other one is, I'm going to mistrust you until you prove that you can be trusted. Those are very different starting points. And if if you're interested in promulgating culture, in which trust is a real value and has an effect on people within the organization, I think you have to start with that first assumption. For sure, I mean, bad hires happen, it's almost inevitable that there's going to be some bad hires. Back to principle, number one, people are different. But if you start out with the assumption that most, most people are going to be trustworthy, and you treat them as such, you're not going to be disappointed, because there's a really fascinating thing that goes on here, they call this I'm drawing upon my, my background a little bit here, social information processing, this was a theory that was out quite a while ago. And the basic idea there is simple, that people react to the environment. And when there's norms or values that are expected of them, they tend to act in you know, in concert with that. So each one of us has a variety of ways that we can interact with other people in a in an interpersonal situation, you know, we can be mistrusting we can be trusting we can be, you know, benevolent, we can be malevolent, then we've got the whole spectrum of of emotions and behaviors at our disposal. If somebody enters into an interaction with us, like a manager, and an employee, where the employees working at home, maybe for the first time, or the manager is new, and is starting to interact, you know, if you treat people in a trust, trusting manner, they tend to behave more in an edge trusting manner themselves. It's almost like that law of reciprocity, right? Where, hey, you know, you're treating me well by not assuming I'm a swine, and I'm going to try to jump you out of every dollar. And, you know, I'm going to be off watching television or playing video games while I'm supposed to be working on this report. Yeah, so and then when you find out, you come across that occasional employee who really, you know, you've got the goals set up, and they're not being met. So you talk to them. And okay, we're working through a few things here, some additional resources next week, still not being met, then that's just exactly what you would do in the workplace. Right. And at some point, maybe they have to be let go. But it's going to be a gradual process. You don't start with the assumption. They're just trying to, you know, they're just trying to mess us over. Right.
28:34
And so, I guess, going further along that, what are some of the ways that we can hold teams accountable? Right, as we're going into remote work without having that overbearing nature?
28:45
Yeah, that's a great question. So I think having the trusting culture helps. I think this is especially where having the goals set at the team level. And a division of responsibility to individuals really helped. I mean, again, it's nothing much different than you would do if you were just, you know, having a great manager, managing an effective team in the workplace, within four walls. It's more critical that the manager be good, but the basic ideas are the same. Having the SMART goals, making sure that the individuals in a team know what they're supposed to be doing. You know, I think the big danger here, it's always a danger in an ineffective team. And you probably have to be more sensitive to this in a remote setting. Sometimes in the age of groupism, we assume that just throwing a group at something is going to mean a better outcome. You know, and sometimes that's right, and sometimes it's not right. Sometimes having a very effective group. Working on the task is Rate having a less effective tat group, it would have been better to just pick the most competent person within the group and have them do it. You know what I mean? So, yeah, those decisions have to be made more carefully in order for accountability to be real and present, and people holding themselves accountable. So HR, yeah, just one more thought on it. HR becomes even more essential, because hiring the right people, you want to hire smart people, but you want to hire people of, I guess I would just say, No, it's an old fashioned way to say it. But people have good character, people who have sufficient integrity, so that, you know, they take seriously the idea that, hey, I'm going to give at least a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. Or I'm not going to feel you know, decent about myself, you know, just being careful in hiring becomes even more essential than it is in a traditional setting.
30:58
Right. Awesome. Tom, this has been a great conversation. I got three more questions for you, though. Bring them on. The first one, what book do you recommend everyone should read?
31:10
Yeah, wow, that's a great one. Because there's a lot of good books out there. I guess I wouldn't say Daniel Pink's book drive is really good, because it's not necessarily a whole bunch of new ideas. But it's these ideas put forth in a way that you and I could understand them, anybody can understand them, and they're integrated. So there'll be there's discussion about intrinsic motivation, the notion of, you know, flow, when somebody's really into something, Time passes quickly, if if people are really into their task, they don't require any monitoring at all, they are like, hyper focused, and just into it, you know, not every task can be like that. But you know, that's where job design comes into play. And the other thing is, he emphasizes is that the sometimes the dangers of the carrot and the stick, I'm not going to knock rewards and punishment, in some general way, because sometimes you're very effective and necessary. People like to say, Oh, don't use punishment, because that'll just turn people off. It's like, well, actually, if you're working it, say, do pot, and they've got a safety culture there. Because acting in an unsafe manner can mean a lot of people get hurt, given the nature of their products and and what they do. Yeah, you can get fired there for, for acting in an unsafe manner. They train you thoroughly on safety. So it's not like they just throw you in there. But if you act in a certain way, you're gonna lose your job pretty quickly there. So yeah, I think these are all tools that a really good manager uses in individually leading employees.
33:01
Right. Awesome. Don't grab a copy. Next one is what's next for you professionally?
33:08
Yeah, you know, I started stratify This is three months ago now. And we're getting clients, I'm loving, the variety of the kinds of things we're doing, what I'm really into is, we're developing these products and services that we think are more generally useful. So what we've been doing so far is kind of focused on specific issues and problems that our clients have. But I'll just to give you one example, we've developed something called the Intel a screen integrity assessment. And that's while we were just talking about this, actually, it's a way of assessing integrity, used for either hiring people or promoting them into leadership positions. And it's not, you know, you got to be careful in measuring integrity, because, obviously, if somebody wants to get a job, they're going to sometimes give you the answers that you want to hear. So if you just go, I don't lie very often true or false? Well, okay, we know what the answer is supposed to be. So, you know, this was carefully designed, it's a situational judgment test. So you know, you you respond to these realistic scenarios, and you're given a variety of options about what would you do in that situation? And then the scoring of those is not obvious. In other words, you can't just go okay, that's the obvious answer that they're looking for. So yeah, we're excited about that and other products. And then actually one of our services is working with companies to make this decision about working from home so when you when you mentioned this is going to be a topic was like, Hey, this is this is right there. I really love thinking about it and and discussing it. So anyway, that's what I'm excited about. It's it's a whole nother world of working Direct. Click with businesses, including small businesses, to help them be more effective and to grow.
35:06
Awesome. And finally, where can people find you?
35:09
Yeah, right. So you can get me at Becker. This is my email Becker at stratify llc.org. So stratified LLC, no, spaces.org. I'm on LinkedIn, you can get me there. And we actually have a pretty cool website. That's www.stratified.us. I say cool, because my son's company designed it and they did a really good job. So yeah, there's a lot there about our products and services and the kinds of things that we do.
35:40
Awesome. Well, Tom, thank you for joining me today. It's been a great conversation, Chris. It
35:45
was a pleasure. Thank you.
35:51
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai