The way we work is forever changed, in this episode I share my thoughts and experiences on the subject and why this is an opportunity for leaders.

[Transcript]

It's time to go back to the office! Maybe? How do you feel about that? Excited? dread, what, it's probably a mix of all of the above, right? Some of us are anxious to get back to the office, we miss our colleagues. We like that routine, we probably never thought we'd say that, that we missed it. But we actually do. Some of us don't want anything to do with going back to the office. Going back to the office, as we once knew that culture and environment to be has been changed forever, it will never be exactly the same. All of us are leaders. And we're faced with this challenge now of how to make that happen. And as I think back on my career, you know, we were always looking for this cookie cutter approach to handling employees. If you did something for one person, you couldn't do it for one person, because you had to do it for everybody. And it would be considered unfair. And yeah, there's some logic and sense to that. But that really has changed dramatically. I'll give you an example. In one of my corporate roles, I was a company that consisted of a merger of a couple of different companies. And some legacy employees had some flexibility that others did not. So they were essentially grandfathered in. And they were women, young mothers that had children, and they were allowed to work from home a couple of days a week. And because they were grandfathered in the other people did not any other people didn't like it because they felt that it was unfair. And I can understand that. But what we're missing is this idea of focusing on the individual. I'm not going to argue the fact of course, we need some overarching policy or guidelines, but at the end of the day is going to come down to the leader of the team, to understand their people and give them the flexibility that they need. There's going to be so many things to consider. Some of us are more concerned about health and safety, about being back in the office than others, we'll have to be prepared to deal with that. Some of us may be caring for either sick family members, or perhaps young children. It depends a lot depends on what happens with the schools, if the schools are going back full time, that makes life a little easier. But then what about families that have two working parents? How are you going to handle childcare? Lots of questions to be asked and answered. what it's telling me is this, that as leaders, we have to be more flexible, we have to get away from this idea of one size fits all, for our team and for our employees. And the best way to figure out how to do that is not to sit in a conference room with a whole bunch of senior leaders and try to figure it out and assume that you've got all the answers. And then try to be the tough guy and say, Well, I think we should have everybody back in the office or only one day a week working from home. And that's it. No, that's not going to be the way that we need to approach this. The way to do this is to talk to our people. I know it sounds so simple, right? But can be challenging because first of all, we have to be very comfortable in our own skins to be able to throw that question out there to our teams and say what do you want and recognize that that's going to change? What you may need as a young mother is different to somebody who is perhaps at the end of their career. Many different times in our lives, we need different things. And we're gonna have to be ready For that, we're going to have to be flexible, we're going to have to take this word flexibility to heart and make it a reality. And it's not going to be easy. And then we've got to be ready for change. And we've got to be ready for a crisis. So if there is an outbreak in the office, and we have a percentage of people back in the office, how are we going to handle that immediately? I know we've all been working on crisis plans, and we've probably got some good ones out there already. Making that transparent making sure people understand that. So I think the bottom line and going back to work as this, there is no one size fits all, as leaders, we have to talk to our people recognize that the answer that we have today may change and it's all going to be okay. I do see a back to the office situation occurring. I see it happening from my own personal experience. Yes, I've loved working from home. And I love the flexibility, of course. But I don't like doing the dishes all the time. And I don't like having to cook all the time. And I've missed the camaraderie of the office. I signed up with bamboo. For those of you who are not familiar with bamboo and are outside of the Michigan area. It is a co working space. It originally started in Detroit. And recently Amanda Luan opened a second location in Royal Oak, Michigan. And I have to say, I love it. I feel safe there. We wear masks, when we're up from our desks and walking around the office. protocols are in place visitors who come in are asked the the typical questions. And when I'm sitting at my desk, I am distanced from other people. And then when I get up, I put the mask on, I feel safe, quite frankly. And I love just being in that work environment. There are conference rooms there that I can take meetings I've had face to face meetings where we both wear masks and set, you know somewhat distance at least six feet away from each other. And it all feels okay. It's a little weird at first. But when we get used to it, and in December of last year, I ran two workshops with clients. And we respected the protocols. And we wore masks the entire time. And it was okay. Yes, it takes some getting used to. But it can happen. So I see a definitely see a hybrid approach. But we have to be extremely cognizant of the people on our team and how they feel. And we can't have this idea of people feeling that there's a threat to their job, or somehow they're considered weak, if they want to stay home because I just don't feel safe about coming into the office, we've got to make sure that everybody's needs are taken care of. And that's going to put a lot of stress on the leader, but you're up for it. I know you are. We can do this. And this is also a great opportunity. Yes, it is to reestablish our vision with the team, the coming back to the office or whatever you want to call it, call it the post pandemic startup. There needs to be a name for it because we have to emotionally psychologically, we have to have some event some milestone that says this is the end of the crisis. We're now starting in I hate to use the term new normal, but we're starting to define what the new working world will be. And that milestone also opens up the door for everybody to put their vision out there, reconnect with purpose and reconnect with their team. For those of you heard the last interview that I did with Jason Stein, publisher of automotive news, I asked him, I said, Jason, of all the people that you've interviewed, and he's interviewed so many great leaders in the automotive industry over a long period of time, what's the common trait that you see for successful leaders? And he said this, and I quote, they all come with the laser focus. They all know exactly what they want. And they're prepared to rally their teams around that mission. They're clear. This is it. This is the opportunity right now, to get clear, as a leader on who you are, what your team is all about what your mission is. Get them all in a room and talk about about building the foundation for the future. The foundation for a high performance team starts with making those very, very deep personal connections. And it's going to take time, we've had time over the pandemic, to talk to people on a more personal level, and connect in a more informal way, I'm sure you've all done some of that work already. Now's the time to step it up, take it to a whole new level, then I will talk about strengths. I love talking to teams about their individual strengths, because it's often something that they don't take the time to do. And when you do that, you build, you build trust, you build clarity, you build understanding. And now you're starting to build a foundation, where people understand individual strengths, so that they can get to that multiplier effect. And get into that high performance realm. This kind of work is not hard. It's not difficult. It takes time, it takes focus, it takes commitment, and it takes a leader who's committed to their people. But this is the time to do it. So I would encourage all of you to think very carefully, which I know you are about the going back to the office and what that routine is going to look like. But see it as a great opportunity to talk about vision mission, galvanize your team. If you need help. I'm here for you, you know that the Jason Stein interview, I found fascinating on many levels, one of which, of course, is the fact that he was the other side of the microphone. But something else about this interview is that it pushed us past the 10,000 mark. Yes, we celebrate 10,000 listens on the podcast, I never thought we would be here. I knew he would be here at some point. I didn't think it would be this soon. So as you know, we've been running the podcast for just over a year now. And I have grown to love the podcast medium, the audio platform, people seem more comfortable with just audio than when you add video. I know people love to watch video. But with a podcast. Not only are people listening when it's convenient for them, whether they're driving somewhere, they might be in the gym, or not so much these days, or they're doing some housework, they might be working out at home, you know, who knows, podcasts is a great medium for people to consume audio, the way that they want to consume it when they want to consume it. The other benefits of a podcast, we produce a transcript, we don't have all the transcripts up on the website yet our about 70% there, within the next six weeks, we'll have 100% of the episodes that will have a transcript that you can print or read because some people prefer to read the written word rather than Listen, and that's okay. There's other benefits to a podcast. And I have often said that if I were to go back into the corporate world, no plans, I can assure you, but if that should happen, I would start my own podcast to drive employee engagement. And to further what we've just talked about, which is to explain and communicate the mission, the purpose, and to make people more human more relatable in the company, particularly these large global companies. And if you're an automotive, there's a lot of us out there in the tier one and OEM business. And I would make it informal, I wouldn't make it this huge production that goes through, you know, marketing and communications and has a script, no offense to marketing communications people, I love you. But it doesn't have to be this big, massive production. It could be very informal. And so I have a client that I'm working with right now to do exactly that. We are developing an internal podcast to highlight different people in the organization. We're still working on the focus, but it could be something like how do you practice a value that you have in your culture in your organization, getting to know the personal side of some of the key leaders, what's important to them, what's going on, what's the mission of the quality department, the sales department, so many things that we can do, to communicate in a more informal, more frequent way that's more meaningful to people to increase employee engagement, and to galvanize people around the mission. When we put out these corporate communications, they're all beautifully written. But they're in corporate speak. And even though I've been trained in corporate speak my entire career, I'm moving away from it. I'm moving more into this realm of just normal conversational talk, words and phrases that and a vocabulary that people can relate to. In fact, so much so that I've also revamped the website, it's not ready yet. And you'll see that it's much more conversational in nature, I've had to provide more clarity to my product offerings. One of the episodes that I produced a few months ago, I talked about being clear and how important it is. And I've got that clarity. Now, I know, I am crystal clear that the gravitas workshop is about building a strong foundation for high performance teams. It is a workshop that you will need early on, when you take a new job as a leader with either a new team and a new company, or maybe the same company, or maybe you're launching a brand new program, and you need to galvanize the team quickly. It's all about building this strength as quickly as possible. That's my workshop mission. The accountability lab is the personal accountability that's getting individuals into the high performance realm for their professional development and personal lives. Then, of course, the speaking part of my business that I absolutely love, and and then the podcast. That's it. I know who I am. Now I know the areas of focus for my business and getting that clarity. If you think that I just woke up one day and got that clear on everything. No, it took a long, long time. It's taken over two years really to get this on my entrepreneurial journey to get to this part, and to put a website out there that has copy in it. For those of you who don't know what copy is because I didn't know what it was the words that you actually put on the website and the wireframe, again, new technology to me, I didn't know that how you lay out your website. And it's taken a long time to get there, but I feel good about it, I guess time will tell. And here we go on the journey onward and upward. So thank you to all of our audience, thank you for pushing us past the 10,000 downloads threshold, and I wish you all the best in figuring out how we get back to work. As a leader. you're up for it. I know you are. I'm here to help you have a great day.