Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Exploring how humans connect and get stuff done together, with Dan Hammond and Pia Lee from Squadify.
We need groups of humans to help navigate the world of opportunities and challenges, but we don't always work together effectively. This podcast tackles questions such as "What makes a rockstar team?" "How can we work from anywhere?" "What part does connection play in today's world?"
You'll also hear the thoughts and views of those who are running and leading teams across the world.
[00:00:00] Dan: Are you trying to figure out how to work best with your team, making the most of remote and in-person opportunities, or are you just curious about the state of play in remote and from home working? While this episode of We Not Me is for you, as we're speaking with Jose Barrero, assistant professor at ITAM Business School in Mexico City, who leads one of the world's biggest research studies on working from home. He'll share some fascinating data and help us to see what the future of work might look like.
[00:00:28] Hello and welcome back to We Not Me, the podcast where we explore how humans connect to get stuff done together. I'm Dan Hammond.
[00:00:39] Pia: And I am Pia Lee.
[00:00:40] Dan: You know, Pia, the day we were going to record this interview today, I had a couple of meetings that just brought it all home to me. This idea of working from home and remote working that we're going to be zooming in on and looking at some data on, I, I met someone who was a senior executive. They got into the last stage of three interview processes and missed all of them because they weren't prepared to go to London for two days to be in the office every week. Just couldn't do it around family.
[00:01:12] And then I went to a meeting, another one where people were talking about trying to get people together in this, this community to try to work on projects and they were sort of debating uh, you know, in person is really great, but then do I want to travel to, to, to too far to do that? So all these questions seem really live that day and so to, it's, it's really interesting and I know you and I have talked a lot about this and kept an eye on the news and, uh, around um, what's happening in sort of work from home and remote world and it seems still to be quite dynamic, I think.
[00:01:45] Pia: And our guest today, Jose Barrero, is he brings, um, due to his academic background and his research into this, a lot of data. And this is what I think we need actually, because I think there's a lot of confusing agendas. Um, and I think we can also personalize this. I think we actually need to get some data and, and, and be a bit more evidence-based so we can actually have an objective conversation. So I, I, I'm really looking forward to, to, to getting that insight so that we can draw out some, some perspectives and views from it.
[00:02:21] Dan: Much as we say to teams that it's really hard to unpick what's actually happening in a team until you get some data with Squadify which is our sort of day job. So, uh, yeah, let's go over now and hear from Jose Barrero..
[00:02:37] Pia: And a really warm welcome to Jose Barrero. Welcome Jose.
[00:02:41] Jose: Thanks for having me.
[00:02:42] Pia: it's a pleasure. We're gonna have a great conversation. I think you know the drill though. You have to go through the Pressure test. um, and receive a, an interesting question from, from Dan. And then, uh, and then let's dive into this topic because I think it's a, post Covid, it's a really rich one. It's, um, and quite a contentious one too.
[00:02:59] Dan: Indeed. It seems to be. Um, so, Jose, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here. Um, I've actually found a red card for you, which is supposedly most difficult, but the things that keep me awake at night.
[00:03:11] Jose: Yeah, so I'd say that like every good academic, every now and then there's a problem that I'm working on or some data that I don't seem to be able to square what's going on. And, and, and so like every good academic, you'll, you'll keep thinking about that problem once you go to bed. And keep thinking of how, how to code the code differently, how to, uh, how define the variables differently and, and basically have a terrible night's sleep.
[00:03:35] Dan: And are you a sort of, stay awake thinking about it? You'll wake up in the night thinking about it, sort of person
[00:03:41] Pia: Yeah. What, What's, your time?
[00:03:42] Dan: What's your time? What's your neurosis?
[00:03:45] Jose: No. So I think usually how this happens is I'll hit up on the problem some at some point in the evening and I'll work on it, work on it, work on it, and then eventually it is way too late to be up. And so I decide, okay, it's time to go to bed. But then when I go to bed, my brain hasn't switched off.
[00:04:02] Dan: You, you think it's time to go to bed. Your brain doesn't, so.
[00:04:05] Jose: Exactly. And so, so it, it's, some of those nights can be a little bit painful, yeah.
[00:04:10] Dan: Yeah. Wow. Okay. Excellent. Well, we are, we hope to be hearing the fruits of your, of these nocturnal sort of struggles actually through, through this conversation. So, um, and I've been reading your newsletter for a while now, and it is Jen, it's. It's really superb. So the, uh, you know, obviously it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make that you're having, um, sleepless nights over it 'cause it's, it's, it's really good data. Um, but Jose, tell us a little bit about you. What's your bio? Uh, little short bio of, of you? Bio in a box.
[00:04:40] Jose: Yeah, so I'm assistant professor of finance at, ITAM Business School in, in Mexico City. So we're, we're one of universities in. in Mexico, and in Latin America. And, and basically, so my job is, obviously I do some teaching, but, but the core of my job is to conduct a academic research and topics related to basically business economics and finance. So, I, I have two research agendas, so, so I think we're gonna talk a lot about my working from home agenda, but I also work on using surveys to figure out how business managers make forecast. So how do they think about what their potential sales are going to be over the next year? What is kind of the high scenario, the low scenario? And so I have, I have a good chunk of research on that topic.
[00:05:23] But in 2020, with this experience of having done surveys with a couple of collaborators who, who I'd been working with before, we decided to start asking people about working from home, using online survey platforms. And so basically the, the reason was this was May, 2020. We were maybe a couple of months into lockdown, and it was very clear that everybody was working from home and there was very little data on it at the time. And, and actually, so, so again, this was May, 2020. We thought this is gonna be over soon. We're probably late. We're not gonna gather a lot of useful information, but let's do it anyway.
[00:05:58] And then so, so, so it turned out okay, and then in one or two months later we said, let's, let's do another round and another round and another round. And so basically since May of 2020, I think we've only skipped one month, which was June of 2020, and basically been gathering one of the more comprehensive data sets on, on working from home in the US and, and, and we've expanded. So we've collaborated with other people to do a global version of our survey. So this one is not, not as frequent as maybe once a year.
[00:06:26] And I mean, part of, I think, what has been useful is, is because we were academics sort of reacting in real time and trying to put out data in real time, we were, at least for a long time ahead of government led survey efforts. So in the us the US government for example, was asking a couple of questions about remote work, but they were very slow updating those to the situation. So, so, once we stopped being locked down, the question that they were asking wasn’t so useful anymore. Eventually a couple of years later, they, they turned around and, and changed it. But, but I mean, I think this dynamic and this ability to sort of change on the fly and be a nimble operation of basically a couple of people really made it useful for us to be the main data source for working from home.
[00:07:11] Dan: Apart from academic curiosity, what made you want to dive into that work from home thing at that point?
[00:07:18] Jose: in 2020 when we were all working from home, because it was basically the only way that knowledge workers could, could do their jobs, so it was everybody's experience and everybody had anecdotes about how it was working out and what they were doing and, and so on and so forth. And like I said, there was very little hard data to go with that. So there was tonnes of discussion, in the media, and ultimately it wasn't clear what the facts on the ground were. And so, so in, in some sense, this is academic curiosity, but that's, I think, the specific form of academic curiosity that motivated me and my, and my collaborators to start doing this.
[00:07:52] Pia: We started the business a year before the lockdowns. So we too, were gathering data, looking at teams, looking at how, how they worked, completely oblivious to the fact we were gonna be in a a worldwide pandemic and probably one of the biggest shift to the way that of working in our lifetimes. And we've been tracking the data ever since. and looking at the trends and looking at what people regard as being important that they would like to have in their teams and what they have as present. And it's been a, it's fascinating and it's ongoing and my sort of subtle, or my simple view of things is we're still feeling the aftershocks of that big change. What were you interested to find out, and what was a surprise?
[00:08:39] Jose: One of the hypotheses that eventually bore out in the data that we had when we started working on this project was that this was going to be game changing and that it was probably going to persist. And so, so here's what I mean by that. All of the technologies that enable working from home now existed five years ago before the pandemic. So file sharing, remote video conferencing services, email, electronic communications, what have you. And so, so it was technologically possible, but it, it just wasn't the norm. It, it wasn't what most people did. And so, so for most businesses, it made sense to just conform to the norm in order to recruit talent to build a network of suppliers and clients.
[00:09:26] Uh, so, so I mean, kind of the example that, that we think about is imagine you are a top law firm in New York. Lawyers are, can pretty much do their job remotely. They, they, they need a laptop and, and maybe some access to, to, to research. But if you're a top law firm in New York and you start up a new law firm, with all of your employees remote or partly remote, in a world where you, your clients expect to come into your glass office in the 40th floor, whatever, in Manhattan, and all, all your competitors are doing that, it's just not tenable for you to take that risk of, of, of starting a remote first law firm. And I, and I think that was the experience for, for most businesses.
[00:10:08] What the pandemic did was basically it forced us to try it out and to try it out altogether. And that's basically what shifted the norm. And, and so we find things like people telling us that working from home turned out way better than they expected. And this was in 2020 and 2021, where in many places, especially in the US for example, schools were still closed, so many families with children still had the complication of working from home while homeschooling was going on. after being forced to try it out and try it out en masse, they realized that it actually worked quite well and that it was potentially worth rethinking how organizations structure their working arrangements now that we've figured out, we figured it out that, that this actually can work.
[00:10:53] Dan: , I, I only realized the other day, we're approaching four years since the UK first lockdown, and that's in sort of very close to four years of your data. Walk us through those years, could you? How would you describe the dynamics as we go through that time?
[00:11:07] Jose: So our, our main measure of working from home, which is the share of paid days that are working from home days. In our May, 2020 survey when we first started this out was about 60% of all paid days. i mean, this extremely high and it's partly super high because a lot of the economy that needed to be in person just wasn't operating. So of the people who were operating a larger share than normal would've been in knowledge jobs and being remote.
[00:11:32] Since then, the share of paid days working from home basically dropped over time, and, and, it persisted at a higher level than our best estimates from before the pandemic. So before the pandemic, we estimate something like five to 7% of paid days were, were working from home days. And so, so, so from there we went to the jump during lockdown of about 60%. And that has basically dropped and now stabilized at just below 30% of paid days in our US data.
[00:12:03] So what's, what I think is not so obvious is that that stabilization, we see it since about the middle of 2022. So after the last big waves of the virus in, in early 2022, we reached something like a steady state and, and, and basically the data have been flat since then.
[00:12:23] Now behind this process, there's, there's another trend that I think is super interesting, which is one of our key variables that we've been tracking is coming from a survey question that asks people in the long term and, and so this and, and whatever the long term is, we've, we've changed over time. So, so we first, we said after the pandemic in 2021, we were very optimistic. Then we said, how about in 2022? And eventually we said, just kind of looking forward, say a year from now, how much does your employer plan for you to work from home?
[00:12:54] And that series. is already elevated relative to 2019. So, so that series in, in the months after lockdown already implied some persistence of working from home. It implied that we were gonna work from home maybe 20% of paid days, but then as the pandemic extended itself, as we got the multiple alpha delta whatever, variant waves and, and, and basically knowledge workers continued to work from home, that number started going up. And up and up and up. And until it eventually, it also stabilized at basically the same number as the act, as the actual measure of working from home days. So this one started out at about 20%. It went up and up and up and again, in, in around the middle of 2022, it stabilized at about 30% of paid days.
[00:13:37] And so, so to me, what this process is, is basically business managers, many of them realized that, that this was a viable shift in 2020. But then eventually, as the lockdowns extended and the economy basically got used to working from home, they realized they couldn't force people to come back as strongly as they wanted.
[00:13:56] And so they, they, they started embracing that a post Covid world meant a world with more working from home. For many organizations, certainly not for everybody, and not for every job. But for many of them, and this was sort of a gradual process.
[00:14:08] Dan: And you, you mentioned there, forcing back to work. What's the, talk to us about this, the love of the office you could call it, but also I think there's a difference isn't there, between the views on remote working between what's loosely called sort of senior management and the, the rest of the workforce. Could you sort of unpick that for us a little bit by persona, if you like?
[00:14:31] Jose: Yeah, that's a great question. I'd say so let me say a couple of things. Again, grounded in data. The typical worker in our dataset says that they feel more productive when they're working from home relative to when they're working in the office. When you ask managers or similar questions, senior managers, they tend to say the opposite. So it, it's not obvious that there's a true disagreement there because the definition of productivity is, is kind of fuzzy and how people feel does not necessarily reflect what you can measure. So, I'm, I mean, I think this is a little bit fuzzy..
[00:15:02] So what I can tell you is, is I think the patterns of working from home that we see now, basically reflect that there are good reasons to work in person in, in some situations and good reasons to work remote in other situations.
[00:15:17] So for example, uh, this 30% of paid days working from home that we're seeing now in the US is, I mean, there's basically two kinds of people there. There's people who are actually fully remote and people who are in what we call hybrid. So, so they come into the workplace 1, 2, 3, 4 days a week and the other days they stay home and, and, and do their work from home. This second group, the hybrid workers, there's about three, almost three times as many as as in the first group.
[00:15:46] So, uh, a lot of what we learned in, in 2020 and 2021 was a lot of the tasks that we do on a daily basis, especially as knowledge workers can be done efficiently from home. But other tasks like being in a meeting, discussing, brainstorming, getting to know your colleagues, who are also generating ideas for your organization, those are often better done. in person. And, and, and it doesn't have to be an either or. So so, so I, and I think that's why hybrid is so popular.
[00:16:16] So absolutely. I think we, we keep seeing, say, stories in the media that certain companies are trying to bring back their employees, uh, and so on. But at the end of the day, the fact that there's still so many people working from home is evidence that it works on some level or another.
[00:16:33] Dan: So 30% is the share of paid days that are working from home. If you look at the United States, for example, how many people are, are getting at least some time working from home?
[00:16:45] Jose: Yeah, so among full-time employees, a little bit over 40% have some amount of working from home, so that 40% has maybe 11, 12% who are fully remote. And then the rest. So the vast majority of the people who have some amount of remote work are in hybrid, so it's, it's close to 30%.
[00:17:04] Dan: Got it. So these are knowledge workers, aren't they? This is not trying to reflect the whole of the workforce, am I right?
[00:17:12] Jose: No, so this, these numbers are looking at basically full-time employees in the US. So if I zoom in on knowledge workers, then there is a lot more hybrid. So hybrid is almost half of them. And then fully remote also rises. So, so the biggest group are, are hybrid workers. Then the second group is, is fully on site. And, and finally fully remote is, is is the smallest group.
[00:17:38] Dan: so it's sort of settled on at the moment, 50 50. If we look at working from home big time, it's sort of 50% do, 50% don't, um, do any sort of thing. So, so that's quite an interesting settling point. Yeah. Interesting. And final question from me getting of the data, and this might be something that doesn't come out of the data, but strikes me, looking at this debate that seems to be raging actually. And as these banks are coming and saying, right, you need to be in the office X days a week, it seems to have risen again in the, in the public, uh, consciousness. The two factors for why people want to, why sort of those senior managers want people back in the office seem to get conflated.
[00:18:16] One is, um, yes, there are some things that are best done face-to-face, collaborative. You connect with people, you look at people in the eye, we're humans. And on the other side is control. So, you know, you know, we want you back so that we can keep an eye on you. If you, do you have any data or, uh, even opinions on, you know what, what's, what are the drivers here? What's driving the desire to get people into the office would you say?
[00:18:40] Jose: Yeah. So I mean, tho those are great questions. I think, I don't have that much data on this. I I have more opinions on, on what might be going on here, and I think. So it, it has to do with exactly how do you monitor your workers? How do you incentivize them? So in a pre pandemic world, when everybody came to the office and you basically, you can observe what people are doing to some degree, you don't really have to incentivize your workers, right? Because you can observe them and if they're not doing their job, but they're sitting right in front of you, you can basically figure it, figure that out.
[00:19:12] With remote, you just don't have that option. So with remote, what you wanna do is, is you wanna manage your workers in a way that gives them incentives. So, for example, you, they have a certain amount of tasks that they do that they need to do, that there's some difficulty across those tasks and you, and you track how long they take to complete those tasks, and, and you can reward them based on the quality and the quantity of they accomplish. So, so sometimes people call this output management.
[00:19:38] And so by the way, kind of even before the pandemic management research, including one of my co-authors, uh, Nick Bloom has a lot of papers in, in this area, suggests that firms that use this sort of output management are a lot more efficient, a lot more productive, a lot more profitable on average. And so the thing is, before the pandemic with a fully remote workforce, you could sort of get away with just observing whether people are, are working in front of you. With remote, you can't.
[00:20:05] So I think companies can change how they manage their workers. to be able to, to make remote work more successful. But that's also costly to the managers, right? So, so they need to rethink how they incentivize their workers. They need to set up different systems, they need to organize how they supervise their workers differently and, and that's also costly. And so in many places, I think it might be just easier to say, Hey, everybody needs to come back and full stop, and, and, and that's it.
[00:20:34] Pia: There's a lot of corporate strata, and what does corporate strata, these huge investment in real estate and offices, what impact does that have on our economy? And If they've got empty buildings, with no one in them and they have to send everyone back, what impact does that have on our economy? Is that, so I'm wondering whether this is partially to do with productivity but actually, you just follow where the money goes, and actually there's a bigger reason for this.
[00:21:03] Jose: That's a good question. I, I, do think many firms have realized after the pandemic that they probably have too much office space, especially if they're letting some of their workers work from home. And you're right, a lot of these are long lived contracts. And so in the short term, these firms have higher fixed costs than they need to.
[00:21:25] I mean, that said, I think there's actually a lot of evidence that firms have reoptimize how much space they want. And so as these leases come due for renewal, there's a lot of evidence that demand has gone down. So, so there's a very nice, set of research papers by Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, Arpit Gupta, Vrinda Mittal, that are looking exactly at this. And so they document this decline in demand, especially, so they're looking specifically at New York City real estate where there's obviously lots of offices for knowledge workers.
[00:21:55] And so I, I mean, I think managers have a choice to make there. They can wait it out and try to reduce their space when once they get a chance or they can try to get people back in. The reality is, is so there's other research. So for example, there's papers by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington that shows that even among say, call center workers, the potential costs of productivity, of lower productivity when you have remote workers, are smaller than what you can save in real estate costs. So I'm, I'm highly skeptical. I'm highly skeptical that, that companies don't come out ahead when they, when they enable some form of remote.
[00:22:31] So I mean, if the productivity benefits are positive or nothing and they save on real estate, they're, they're, they're coming out ahead. Even, even if there are costs, I'm skeptical that those costs are big enough that they don't justify a reduction in real estate costs.
[00:22:45] Now there's, I think there's, there's a bigger issue and there are some rumblings out there in the markets because there are some banks, at least in the US that are very exposed to office real estate mortgages, and so yes, absolutely, if there are buildings that basically stop getting lease revenue and, and then so they can't afford their debt. There's, I mean, there's a potential that, that, that could impact the banking system more widely. I mean, I've, I've read a bunch of articles about this and I don't, I don't see anything imminently yet on, that front, but I, maybe there's something hiding out there that, that I, that I'm not aware of.
[00:23:22] Dan: So looking ahead, if you had to describe it, let's say another four years time, we are 2028, May is the eighth. You, you're raising a glass of the eighth anniversary of your, uh, your studies. What, what do you think the picture's gonna look like?
[00:23:37] Jose: So my guess is the rate of remote work, at least in in the developed world will be a little bit higher than what it is now. So now that we've figured out how to do it, any improvement in the technologies that enable remote work are gonna have a lot of pull for people who try to do it, right? So I think maybe, maybe this is looking farther ahead than 2028, but, but imagine augmented reality allows you to have remote meetings with full holograms and, full holograms of people. And it's basically just like interacting in person. In, in such a world, I think we, we would, we will see a lot more working from home than we're seeing now.
[00:24:16] And actually, so, so this was work done by my co-authors, Steve Davis and Nick Bloom early on in the Pandemic, and, and they've since updated it, but they've showed that since the start of the pandemic, the amount of patents related to remote work, basically the amount of technological discoveries that enable remote work, started going up, it started skyrocketing relative to the pre pandemic trend.
[00:24:38] And so this is an excellent piece of economics because what it says is, look, in 2020, we all locked down. There's a lot more demand for these technologies that enable remote work. Inventors respond to that demand by actually developing more remote work technologies remote. And as those technologies improve, they additionally enable more people to continue doing remote work, especially in the long run.
[00:25:01] Dan: Yeah, I think this is a very interesting, um, thing here, which is a Meta's investment in the Metaverse. And they're saying he's being saved by AI, but it, but it sounds like this, you know, 30% of full-time workers are actually working remotely then that's a market, isn't it? That is a market for making that world more real, more human and uh, better, more, better connected.
[00:25:27] Jose: Yeah, absolutely. Although, I mean, it seems like the technology at least that Meta has been developing is not quite
[00:25:32] Dan: Not there, not there, but it's interesting bet, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely.
[00:25:36] Jose: I mean, I think maybe a better example is, is Apple's headset. I mean, there are some kinks to it, but my, my sense is the take up and, and the reviews I've seen of that are a little bit better.
[00:25:48] Dan: Yeah, it was gonna put us in the right place. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. As ever, apple, a little bit longer, but they've seem to be nailing it. Um, Jose, thank you so much. Wow. It, it's just wonderful as I'd hoped to speak to someone who is so informed and, uh, we really appreciate it, um, on this, on this really hot topic,
[00:26:08] So two final questions for you, Jose. If you, what, what's your advice to someone who is, uh, let's take someone who's a team leader or a business leader. It's tricky because obviously they're in difficult situations. What's your overall guidance for them? The things they can, should consider when they're thinking about their policies here?
[00:26:25] Jose: Yeah, so I think at the end of the day, working from home is very valuable to employees, so they consistently tell us that they value it as a non-trivial percent of their salary, somewhere between five to 10%. A lot of that has simply to do because they saved time during the day, commuting back and forth from home to work and, and also to some extent grooming and getting dressed in the morning is much simpler if, if, if you're working from home than if, than if you're coming to the office.
[00:26:53] So I think if you are a team leader and your workers are doing tasks, that at least some of those tasks can be done remotely, it's very valuable to think, can I set up my team in a way that, in that allows you to do that? And, and, and so to spell that out, what, what does that involve? It involves trying to have anchor days in the office, in the workplace, which are the days where you conduct, uh, your meetings, you do your discussions, make presentations, give each other feedback. And leave a couple of days where your employees can work from home. Maybe there are a couple of one-on-one meetings that can be done via Zoom or something like that, but those at home days are mainly devoted to doing individual work like reading, writing, analyzing, which are tasks that don't require collaboration.
[00:27:43] So the worst kind of hybrid setup that you can have is one where you ask people to come into the office x number of times a week, and on the days that they come into the office, they're on video calls the entire day. That completely defeats the purpose of being there. And if you're struggling to get your people into the workplace, I think it's, it's important to think about why do you want them to be there? And making sure they see the value of coming in right ?Again, if there's gonna be a team meeting and interacting in person and and having lunch together, it's a much easier case to make than if you're just asking them to come in for free donuts at 9:00 AM.
[00:28:20] Dan: Yeah. Got it, got it. Hey Jose, do you mind before we go to the final question, just something you said there sparked something for me. Did I do, I remember seeing, talking about the commute. So I, I think I might, in saying that this is something that's highly valuable to workers. Could you talk a little bit about that?
[00:28:38] Jose: Yeah, so I mean it's, it's highly valuable I think, I think to the workers. And also if you think about it to the economy. So the typical US worker spends a little bit short of an hour commuting back and forth from work. If you add how much time the typical worker saves in the morning when with the extra grooming that they have to do when they come into the workplaces, it's a little bit over an hour that they save for every day that they work from home.
[00:29:02] So this correlates positively with how much working from home they want to do. So people with longer commutes tend to say that, that they want to work from home more often. And, and I mean, that makes total sense if, if you have a 45 minute commute versus if you walk two blocks to your office, I think the case for, for working from home days is, is, is very different.
[00:29:22] The other thing, and, and this this goes to some of the productivity questions, is if you think about it, that si that time saved from commuting is big and it it is an in some sense. Giving us extra productivity that is not captured by government statistics.
[00:29:38] Here's what I have in mind. In 2019, pre pandemic, everybody had to sink, say that extra hour in order to do their job. Now we live in a world in which you don't have to sink that hour a day in order to do your job. And so the effective output that you're doing during that workday per the amount of time that you have to devote to the job is now higher simply because you can do it remote.
[00:30:04] So we've, we're working on, on some estimates of, of the productivity impact of, of working from home. And a big component is this. So, so if you, if you start taking into account these commuting time savings, the productivity estimates can even if, even if you think they're positive or, or you think they're zero, they, it makes a big difference. It, it can multiply the productivity impact of working from home by maybe like three,
[00:30:27] Dan: Just because the amount of the input is, is less actually.
[00:30:30] Jose: Just because the input is less.
[00:30:31] Dan: And of course that hour can be spent, I guess, you know, being a carer, a parent, whatever, doing, going, building your physical health, mental health and so on. So, uh, there are side benefits.
[00:30:42] Jose: People also tell us that, That on days when they're working from home, they seem to do more chores during the day, like a little bit more childcare during the day or chores at home that I think basically make them have a more efficient day at the end of the day. They, so, so I'll tell you what they don't tell us. They, they basically, they're equally likely to tell us when they're at work than, than when they're at home, they're equally likely to goof off on the internet or play a game on their phone or something.
[00:31:13] Dan: Yeah, I'm sure. So Jose, just leave us with a final recommendation for a, a book podcast, anything, Netflix series, whatever, some sort of media recommendation. Where, where would you point people to?
[00:31:25] Jose: Yeah, so the Economist has obviously a bunch of podcasts and I'm a big fan of their American politics podcast, despite not being American. Uh, and so, so that's called Checks and Balance. It's out on Fridays and it's, it's, it's really great. And, and obviously this is a very hot year to look at this because there's elections coming up in, in a few months.
[00:31:45] Dan: That's a perfect recommendation as the, the running order is just lined up, isn't it? So, uh, that's perfect Jose. And thank you so much for that. But thank you for being on the show and sharing this amazing work that you're doing so, so, important for us right now.
[00:31:57] Pia: and really valuable data. Just great, great to actually really get us a, a really factual view of what everything is, where, where we are on that journey. It'd be fascinating to bring you back in a year's time and see, see how things are evolving.
[00:32:11] Jose: Yes, absolutely. I'd be glad to.
[00:32:13] Dan: Thank you so much for joining us today, Jose.
[00:32:15] Pia: Thank you.
[00:32:19] Gosh, you must have been in data heaven there with
[00:32:22] Dan: Oh my word.
[00:32:23] Pia: all those percentages. I could see your, your eyeballs widening. It's like a David borough of the workplace. We're seeing what's, what's actually happening to us, you know? And then after the, covid pandemic, what do the humans do? You know, it's one of those ones. So I find it, I find it fascinating.
[00:32:42] Essentially it was what a third, a 30% share of paid days and really how that translated was that half, half of knowledge workers are working in a hybrid way. And you really have to ask yourself, is that, is that gonna be permanent? And I think in spite of some organizations trying to make it mandatory that we go back, I don't think you can make it mandatory for five days a week. So that hybrid is going to remain, which has an implication for the way that we lead.
[00:33:10] Because I think that we are trying to retrofit it, that we get people in one place, it makes it easier, and then we can lead our teams from that space and that that is not, it's not gonna happen folks. That's not gonna happen. It's going to be this gray and we've got to be deliberate and have specific choices about why people are in, like you said, you don't want them in for a day of Zoom meetings. I mean, that would just be a complete waste, waste of time.
[00:33:40] So you've got to, I think that's actually part of sort of like the the employee value proposition, it's got to make sense. It's gotta make sense of why you're in it and that the, and the company is thought about how they do this.
[00:33:52] Dan: and and deliberate. And I, I, I think some of the announcements I've seen recently of some of these big banks bringing people back to the office, it was really like reading something from the eighties, to be honest. And, uh, and I think that that thoughtful, that deliberateness is, is essential because it's very easy to come up with a simple solution to a complex problem or almost sort of a complex opportunity.
[00:34:15] Because this working from home has opened up, um, the opportunity to give more flexibility to people, which is motivational. It includes more people in the workforce. It brings in talent from a wider area than is sort of reachable by train, which does seem a little bit industrial revolution really. And then it, it's eliminated the commute.
[00:34:37] Um, and on the other hand, it seems that people want to get together. We're humans and it's good to, you know, when you get together, you innovate quickly and you can do things better face-to-face. But these are all factors playing in on these decisions. And I think it's the, the danger is to oversimplify and just sort of right, this is what we're gonna do. And also that it does look a little bit like control.
[00:35:01] And as I've often said, if you can't pretend to work in an office, you lack imagination. I think people really think that because they're in, everyone's in an office, they're working harder. I, I, that's not my, that's not my experience uniformly.
[00:35:14] Pia: A hundred percent agree. And I think he talks about that hour that we've all got back. So, you know, but by not having to do as much commuting. And, and that's a very crucial hour, particularly for working parents with kids, or looking after elder members of the family.
[00:35:30] I think there was something about our commitments in the community to our family community have, have become really important here. And then we're not stereotyping it that hey, that's the male role, they don't have to do the drop off or, you know, I mean, I'm exaggerating.
[00:35:45] But I think it's, it is just, we're still probably in a state of flux trying to work it all out, but we have definitely moved into a different space, which is what Jose's, all his data is showing. We are moved into a different space and it, and it looks different. I, I can't remember what he said as the stat before 2019, what the percentage of working from home, but I think it was more in the teens
[00:36:08] Dan: Five to 7%,
[00:36:09] Pia: well, there you go. They're much smaller.
[00:36:11] Dan: Yeah, tiny
[00:36:12] Pia: to 50% of hybrid. So that's a, that's a huge shift.
[00:36:18] Dan: a massive shift and it's benefited a lot of people and uh, yeah, I'm sure this is, this has gotta be permanent and yeah, we're still in this state of flux, aren't we? But there, there are exciting opportunities for working differently. And of course, learning to work better remotely is a skill that we need to be picking up. We need to work out on how to work in a team effectively when we're not eyeballing each other.
[00:36:40] Pia: And I was gonna ask you that. So you know, based on your leadership experience, so if you are developing a leader today to lead a hybrid team, what are the skills they need to be able to do this? 'Cause there's a big disparity between what managers would like to be having here, which is everyone in the office whoop, we can see everyone to what the team leaders are are wanting. But that's unlikely. So, so therefore, leaders of the future need to have a slightly different skillset or leaders now, actually. But you need to put your mind into it. What, so what do you think, what do you think they, they need to know?
[00:37:13] Dan: I mean, o off the top of my head, I, I, I think there's an area which is how we can form deeper connections remotely, so that how do we, how do we actually share emotion and build deeper relationships, um, remotely, which we're just not, we don't seem to be very good at. I think there's another piece around how we actually collaborate. You know, are you able to use, even if not technically, are you able to sort of use things like virtual whiteboards and post-it notes or murals and things like this to actually bring teams together instead of just talking? Um, you know, I think there are, they're the two that spring to mind how you deepen relationships and how you in, in the sort of, it's sort of in the climate area really how you deepen the relationships, build trust, but also how do you have processes and ways of working that are collaborative.
[00:38:03] Pia: No, I, I would agree. I agree. The, the capacity to facilitate. And to use questioning in a powerful way virtually is really, really, really important. Because what we've, what we've got used to is the, I'm sitting here, I, and everyone's looking at me as the team leader and I'm now, I'm now gonna give my, my, my thoughts. And I think it's actually different. I think there's a much more drawing things out. Getting curious, being really observant about where people are at and feeling, um, emotionally strong enough to actually be able to say how are you? Or, I'm not so good, or whatever those, whatever that is.
[00:38:44] Dan: No, exactly. Exactly. It's really interesting what you say about facilitation because it's a skill that few leaders had in an office environment. Actually, I, I remember, you know, I very rarely saw people genuinely facilitating as a leader. Um, as you say, those hub and spoke conversations happen. There's the, we're all going to say things in this meeting in the hope that a decision will plop on the table. Um, but actually genuine facilitation skills. So we were sort of caught out a little bit with this move to working from home because we, we couldn't facilitate, so we definitely couldn't do it virtually. But there, there are some definite opportunities there for people to do things differently. So, uh, incredible to hear the data though. Um, so good to, yeah, I mean, I've certainly waxed lyrical on this topic without any data, um, in my back pocket to support what I was saying. So I've now feeling a little bit more armed. But, um, just wonderful here to hear from Jose.
[00:39:38] But that is it for this episode. You can find show notes where you are listening and at squadify.net. If you've enjoyed the show, please do share the love and recommend it to your friends. And if you'd like to contribute to the show, you can just email us at wenotmepod@gmail.com. We Not Me is produced by Mark Steadman. Thank you so much for listening. It's goodbye from me.
[00:39:59] Pia: And it's goodbye from me.