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  Today in Health It this story is another day, another remote work article. This one is from the Wall Street Journal with a click baby title. Bosses still aren't sure Remote workers have Hustle. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping Health IT staff current.

And engaged. We have no show sponsor for today. So if you're listening to this, you know the Power of Podcasting, our show, which started in January, January 4th to be exact, has already achieved over 12,000 downloads, and that number is only going to grow. In fact, our daily average continues to grow. If you wanna get your message in front of a targeted healthcare audience, send an email to partner at this week in health it.com.

By the way, thanks for listening. All right, here's today's story. Bosses still aren't sure remote workers have hustle. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Here's, uh, some excerpts for you. More than a year into America's great work from home experiment. Many companies have hailed it largely as a success.

So why do some bosses think remote workers aren't as committed as office dwellers? Recent remarks of numerous chief executives suggest. The culture of workplace. FaceTime remains alive and well at the Wall Street Journal, CEO Council Summit. This month, JP Morgan Chase's, Jamie Diamond said remote work doesn't work well for those who want to hustle.

Goldman Sachs, CEO, David Solomon has called it an aberration that we are going to correct as soon as possible. WeWork, CEO, Sandeep Mathani, whose business relies on office space, sparked an uproar on social media and beyond. After he said, employees who are uberly engaged with their companies want to go to the office at least two thirds of the time.

So did CEO of the Washingtonian Media, which publishes Washingtonian Magazine when she wrote in an opinion piece that business leaders had a strong incentive to change the status of staffers, . Who are rarely in the office from full-time to contractor. It's interesting 'cause soon after Ms. Merrill's op-Ed was published.

The Washington Media, CEO sent her magazine staff a memo assuring them that the employee status and benefits were safe, and that her intent had only been to write about concerns that she and other CEOs have about preserving company culture. Washingtonian staffers staged a one day strike in protest, so you can see there's a lot of different opinions on either side, but there's a lot of passion on the employee side.

Lemme give you a few more excerpts. Companies are trying out hybrid models, as we all know, in which people divide their work between office and home. Some are giving workers the option to work remotely full-time, as with Facebook and Twitter and others. Those companies, I think, are an aberration when we're talking about healthcare because they're not, I.

Physically based. They're not big buildings, campuses and those kind of things. And so sometimes we get lumped into those in larger conversations and we have to split those out a little bit. Yet plenty of bosses view five days in the office as proof that employees are ambitious and productive, suggesting that in some workplaces, two classes of workers could emerge.

And I think that is one of the . Risks that exist. There's a great example. Uh, actually this article is loaded with good information. This way. There's just a lot of stats and facts and figures using an array of metrics for 7,000 workers, such as email and other cloud-based tools. Productivity software company, Procore, Inc.

Remote and hybrid workers also reported in larger numbers, feeling comfortable taking risks and testing ideas. Junior employees and self-described extroverts, however, were more likely than others to say that physical office space was important for learning and brainstorming. In fact, I think there was a commercial

From extra gum. And it was really interesting. My daughter found it hysterical, so she showed it to me yesterday and it had people coming out of their, their homes for the first time and they need extra gum. 'cause for the first time they're gonna be physically near each other and they need to have fresh breath and that kind of stuff.

So it's a really, it is a funny commercial when you get to see it, but there was this scene where people, . Burst into this obvious lobby of an office building and they, they kissed the floor and they were so happy to be back. And you have to recognize that there, some of those people do exist within your environment, so it goes on.

At companies where remote work was less common, telecommuters won fewer promotions. Many bosses say they want people in the office and thus prize workers who feel the same because they worry about losing the creativity and spontaneous collaboration that comes with physical proximity. Some also fear a two remote workforce won't be able to put in the FaceTime with clients to win business and be competitive.

Another reason some bosses have doubts about remote workers dedication lies. With just how difficult managing far-flung teams can be. Research suggests in survey findings published last summer in the Harvard Business View, 40% of 215 managers from around the world said they struggled to lead remote teams in the pandemic.

In turn, roughly as many said they believed remote workers usually perform worse than those in the office and doubted remote workers could stay motivated long term. Likewise, in a KRC research and BCG survey of 9,000 managers and workers conducted last fall on behalf of Microsoft Corporation, more than one third of bosses said it was hard to keep teams engaged under remote work conditions.

Some home bound workers have struggled too in the comments section of Ask a manager. An online advice column for workers hosted by Alison Green. A thread about missing the office garnered hundreds of posts, many lamenting the loneliness of at home life, along with a lack of energy and tech support.

In an Ernst and Young survey of more than 16,000 employees this month, 90% said they wanted flexibility in when and where they worked. Post pandemic, more than half said they would consider quitting their jobs if they didn't have that flexibility. Many have already made choices that would entail at least some remote work.

A Pricewaterhouse Cooper's. Survey of 1,505 workers this spring found nearly one quarter were considering or planning to move more than 50 miles from their office base on top of 12% who had already done so. Interesting. So a lot in this article and a lot to talk about. Let me give you my so what, as you know with these articles, I do a, so what?

Why does this matter? Or really, what is Bill's opinion on this? Give you a little, I don't know, starter on the conversation that you could have in your office. This is gonna be one of the most important transitions that many organizations make coming outta the pandemic. It'll be framed as remote work options by employees, but it will have connotations of how much do you trust your staff?

How much autonomy does your organization provide, and how forward thinking is your organization? I've already heard some healthcare CIOs. Start to frame it in that light. I'm not sure these are fair assessments, but I, I stand by my thesis. I think this is how it's gonna fall out. I think on the one side, you're gonna have people talking about how do you maintain the work on the other side.

It really is gonna be viewed as, do you, trust me, your staff is gonna use this as a litmus test for how much faith you have in them, how much you appreciate the work they've done over the last year, and how much you value them as people who have lives outside of work. You'll get my best when you gimme freedom to become my best self.

The obvious thing to address here is work arrangements. Any mullet can do this. Three days on two days offsite, you choose. You don't get to choose doing a trial to see how it goes. You get the picture. The blocking and tackling of what our policy is going to be is not going to be that hard, to be honest with you.

Strong leadership teams, however, will identify the bigger challenges. How do we create fairness with the employees and roles that don't have options? These people have to be on site. Will there be added compensation or other benefits that aren't flexible work? What about the concept brought up in this article where onsite workers are given preference for pay and promotion?

Are you going to track this and guard against this? This is a culture killer. What about managers who can manage onsite but lack the finesse to handle remote work? Will they be trained? Will they be evaluated in a different way with a different set of criteria than they were before? Then? There are the issues that no one really wants to talk about too much, and, but they're touched on in this article.

I've worked from home for over a decade in my career with various companies. The motivation gap is real. The isolation gap is real short-term, flexible work is wonderful. I get up at 5:00 AM I record this podcast. I get most of my work done by noon. I have the afternoons free to do whatever I want, group your work days and have mind time, strategy days, and all out operational days.

These are great benefits, but I will share from my personal experience the isolation is real. vec Murthy, surgeon General of the US said this at Chime and in several other interviews, and these are quotes from an actual interview. When I began my time as Surgeon General, I started to recognize that many of the stories that I was hearing from people in small towns, big cities, all across America were stories about addiction, about violence, about depression, about anxiety, but behind them were threads of loneliness.

And people wouldn't say to me, my name is Megan. I'm struggling with loneliness. But they would say things like. I feel like I have to deal with all of these problems by myself. I feel like we're out there all alone and no one's looking out for us. I feel like I'm invisible. And time after time when I began to hear this, it stuck with me that there was a much deeper pattern here, a pattern that it began to see as loneliness.

And when I delved into that data, I began to see that this was not just me that was observing this. But that researchers who had been studying loneliness and using rigorous scales to assess the degrees of loneliness that people were facing had found in fact that large percentages of our population, more than 20% in fact of the adult population in America, admits to struggling with loneliness.

That's more people than have diabetes in our country. That's more adults than smoke in the us. And so that's when it dawned on me that there's something much, much bigger happening here. Then I had previously thought . He goes on to talk about what loneliness actually does physically within our body and that it can be considered a chronic illness.

I share these comments from Vivek Murthy because we have to be aware of this. We have to double down on building community and identifying those that are isolated and feel alone. Those that feel like, uh, the whole world is on their shoulders. They're the only part of it. We have to build team structures and community that they understand that we are doing this together as a team.

Re-imagining healthcare, rebuilding what healthcare can be in the future. To be fair, this can happen in the office as well. We had a suicide on my staff when I was a CIO at a healthcare system. And when the person's story finally came out, the most acute pain for those that worked with the person was that they had no idea what he was going through, even though they worked and interacted with him on a daily basis.

I. The forward-leaning companies are going to address this isolation gap that exists when people work remotely. I wanna touch on the motivation gap quickly before I close. I found that it is a rare person that self motivates the person that can renew themselves with a mission, a passion, a purpose. In fact, I've found that most people.

Having taken the time to identify their personal mission statement, their personal purpose, these people require a manager, a system, a culture that provides them motivational hits, a motivational fix, if you will. Inspirational talks a pat on the back accessory posters. This is why we do recognition events and no one does more recognition events than healthcare.

My guess is that over 70% of your staff needs this kind of external motivation. To perform at current levels. The question becomes how are you going to provide this to a remote workforce over a long period of time coming out of this pandemic? This is a critical stage of transition. Those who do this without addressing the larger challenges will continue flexible work for a period of time and declare it not working, and slowly re it back in.

Those that think it through, review the research and engage the staff will have a solid plan and potentially . Gain a long-term windfall of talent. That's all for today. If you know someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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