Finding the Happy Medium on Remote Work with Gustavo Razzetti

Finding the Happy Medium on Remote Work with Gustavo Razzetti

Sean: While it’s true that some people are amazing at working remotely and are more productive when at home, I think in my opinion and my experience as well. There are still more people who will abuse working from home

How do you manage the work-from-home culture and ensure that more people are the former than the latter? More people would work hard and work well working from home than those who would abuse the benefit and the. Maybe we should call it the pseudo-invisibility of working from home.

Gustavo: Absolutely. I think that, first of all, it’s not one or the other. So my business model or my proposition is about hybrid. And hybrid means there are different ways of doing hybrid. So the full spectrum is not just three days in the office, two days at home.

So many even companies that are fully remote, tend to see their colleagues from time to time when they get together. So even if you talk about remote teams, they see people. It’s not that they work completely from home. Also, remote is not just working from home. It can be working from different locations.

I think that addressing your question, what happens is when someone is breaking, basically taking the abuse of the system, companies tend to react. And let’s put remote work on the side. Many other rules have to do with, for example, unlimited vacations.

When companies do that, they’re just usually a few people that are the ones who abuse the system. So my point is, if people are abusing the system, talk to those people. If you need to do something with them, do it. If you need to fire them, do that.

But don’t put everyone in the same bag. So don’t punish the many for the mistake of the few. And that’s the thing that’s happening in order. There’s a lot of research on this and there are very few people that are abusing the system, but there are the majority of people that are actually benefiting from flexibility and performing well.

So people who have kids, and people who have elderly family members that need to take care of, naturally embrace flexibility. But they are so appreciative because that’s great for them that they’re not going to write it if you know what I mean.

Sean: Now, when there are people who do abuse this work-from-home environment, I want to understand, you mentioned earlier you have to talk with them.

How does that look like if you had an employee who you know for a fact has been abusing the work-from-home culture or unlimited vacations? Is there a sort of system that you use or a process to ask them questions and understand where they’re coming from?

Gustavo: I think that first is how do we detect that people are not doing great work? And I think that the most important thing is not about how many hours, but how many emails they send. It’s more about delivering the work or not because in the end you’re getting paid for delivering the work. It doesn’t matter how many hours you put in.

If you’re delivering, then if you see that people are not being productive, they are not showing up in meetings, they are not sending the report or the presentation or whatever they were responsible for doing.

Every company already has a system in place in which HR, either the team member or their colleagues, starts having a conversation with this person, usually before you escalate it to HR or even higher up. Their colleagues know that one of the things about a team, an effective team, is either we’re all pulling in the same direction or someone is pulling forward and some are not.

So if you’re a team member, you don’t want any of your colleagues not rowing at the same speed that you are. So usually colleagues raise those conversations when they get nowhere, then that’s where they involve their team leader to have a more formal conversation.

And if that team member doesn’t change, either the team leader is going to fire them or they’re going to maybe have the chair involved. Some companies have a process. They call it PIP, which is a performance review process in which they give people some time to adjust their behavior.

Some companies take action immediately. You know, my point is first, before judging, make sure you have the right data. But if you see that one team member is not performing well, then you know what to do.

Sean: So and so one of the questions you mentioned is culture as well. Is there a necessary culture? Because you said that there are companies who have people in the office. Culture is not that great. They’re distant from each other, even though. They are just a few feet away. Is there a necessary culture that has to be established first, or is there a kind of culture that would make for a very good working-from-home or remote team for this to be able to work well?

Gustavo: That’s a fantastic question, Sean. I think the most important thing about culture is, first, defining what type of culture you want for your company. There are different types of cultures. You mentioned Elon Musk. He likes what we call aggressive culture and aggressiveness that it’s all about, hey, if you have to sleep in the office, work 24 hours, do it.

It’s all about results. Doesn’t matter about the people. The other extreme of those cultures are companies that are maybe all about people, very people-centric, very tribal, and sometimes overly protective. Now they’re all worldly people first. Lots of perks.

Make sure that people and then there are many in-between cultures, like what we call the fearless culture is a culture which it’s very aggressive, very innovative. It’s looking for lofty goals. But on the other hand, it also takes care of people.

So it’s not on people not signing on, only business results, finding the right balance. The most important thing is about defining. But second, is how you intentionally create culture. There are things that, for example, if you are a leader, how you model, know your behavior, not just what you say, but what you do shapes the culture.

Regardless if you’re working in an office remotely or a combination of both, you need to spend, for example, between 10 and 15% of the time that you, for example, you’re in a meeting or on a call. Spend that time on building interpersonal relationships, for example, the people that work fully, remotely, when they get together once every quarter or twice a year, that time it’s mostly spent building relationships.

For example, in Slack, some of their teams work mostly remotely. After the pandemic, they decided that they were going to meet a recorder and that meeting is 80% about building interpersonal relationships.

They go out, they have fun, they have dinner. They talk about their issues, their health issues, their family, the World Cup, now, whatever it is. But it’s about the more we know our people, the more we’re going to be better at collaborating when we become distant physically, but not emotionally. Yeah.

Sean: That’s amazing. So what makes a culture? Something that is not desirable or something that is negative or something that is not good for you. You mentioned 10 to 15% of the leaders. Time should be invested in building interpersonal relationships. So is there a kind of culture where you can identify it with one look and say, Oh, this culture is not going to work? If you guys decide to work from home, it’s going to be disastrous.

Gustavo: Yeah. I think that.

Gustavo: The most important thing is culture. When it’s working, you don’t notice it. No. If you think about any kind of thing, think about a company. But you can also now that we’re in the World Cup, think about when you see those teams that are playing nice.

And when someone makes a mistake, people say, Don’t worry, we got you covered versus blame. When someone makes a mistake about passing, people start blaming and making faces and shouting, Well, those are the signs.

Blame and fear are the most important signs. And you can notice this if you go to an office and you interact with the receptionist of the office, you’re going to realize, is that person calm? Is she attentive? Is she friendly or is she afraid because someone is watching her?

You know, those kinds of early signs are easy to take. Another thing that happens during meetings is people can voice their concerns. Can everyone speak or are they just a few people that are taking care of all the conversation, that are taking care of all the air?

Is there one person that spends 80% of the time talking or interrupting others because either they are the leader or they are the louder voice, and that’s involvement for participation? So far when we see that people are afraid of speaking up and bringing their full selves to work, that’s a sign of a not-so-good culture and in many cases a toxic culture.

Sean: Yep, yep. And they are sad, there are more than enough of those cultures and teams. And if there is someone here listening who is a leader in a certain company, maybe a mid-level leader, what do you suggest they do to help turn this around?

Gustavo: I think the most important thing is usually when something goes wrong, leaders tend to blame their team members now. For example, you mentioned, well, sometimes people abuse the system, but sometimes people just simply are disengaged.

They gave up because their ideas were never considered. No. There’s research by Gallup that says that only one out of five people think that their ideas are appreciated in their workplace. So that means that, okay, so I stopped voicing my ideas because no one cares.

So is that person trying to abuse the system or is it a person who gave up? So as a leader, look yourself in the mirror. What can you do better? Is there a gap between what you say and what you know?

For example, leaders say, Hey, we want a culture of innovation, but then when someone makes a mistake, we punish them or someone comes up with an idea and we just hear the idea that comes from the leader because I have the biggest title rather than the best idea.

So for example, Spotify, they have the principle that ideas, not titles win. So it doesn’t matter who brings the idea, it matters which idea is best, and we’re going to choose that, for example.