Hybrid Work – Ask Me (Us) Anything

So much has happened in the past year and there are still significant changes on the horizon. Many organizations will open up their offices in the upcoming weeks and months. While each team will have unique challenges, many of us will be confronting a new reality: hybrid work. With some employees eager to come back in the office and some loving working from home, we are now tasked with how to meet the needs of a more diverse workforce.

In this Ask Me Anything webinar, Adam and Becca chatted with Worksighted CEO, Mike Harris about the challenges and opportunities organizations face and took on questions like:

• How will employees meet when some are in the office and others not?
• What kind of conference room tech do we need?
• Will employees need two PC setups?
• How do I balance security and productivity?

 

Adam Devereaux:

We’re here in an AMA style, which for those of you that don’t know, it means ask me anything, or in this case, ask us anything. We have a topic in mind, which is around hybrid work, which is a key topic for us and something that’s affecting us a lot at Worksighted, but also a lot of our customers. But really it is ask us anything, so feel free to … If you have other questions that you have a burning need to ask, then go ahead and put those in. But we want to talk a bit about hybrid work and what that means. Becca, you want to start us off?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah, definitely. Just wanted to note here at the beginning that, like Adam said, we want this to be super interactive, and so much so that we will mail you a You’re on Mute t-shirt if you ask a question. So, we’re hoping that this is super interactive. We did have some questions that were submitted previously that we’ll go through as well. But there’s a chat function, you can ask a question there, or the Q&A function as well they’re there. But first off, I wanted to get started with a quick poll. So, it looks like maybe you already have access to it. What’s the status of your workforce currently?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Looks like we’ve got some people answering here. 67% said there’s hybrid, looks like 30% mostly in the office. So, we are currently at … Yeah. Mike, do you want to talk a little bit about what Worksighted is doing right now and how that’s shifted and changed over the past year?

Mike Harris:

Yeah, for sure. I do want to encourage everyone, by the way, that’s a great t-shirt. So if you haven’t seen our You’re on Mute t-shirts, it’s the most relevant t-shirt of the last 12 months. I definitely want to stress to everyone to make sure that you ask us. Really I really am fine, anything, if you want to ask about the company, what we’re doing, can be related to this, it can be tangential a little bit, I’m totally happy to field, whatever. I’ll just put that out there. Yeah. What we’re doing as far as hybrid work is we’ve made the decision to go to 100% hybrid permanent policy for our company.

Mike Harris:

We’re going to be opening the offices, backup, following all the rules, all those things, but we made the decision that, if folks can work from home, if they can work remotely and do their work effectively, then we’re fine with them working from home, or being in the office if that’s what they want to do. So, that’s the direction that we’ve decided to go as a company. We’ll get into it as the conversation progresses. But it’s really opened some unique opportunities for us embracing the remote work mindset and what it means for expanding our company, what it means for finding talent, what it means for finding really strong culture fits for our organization.

Mike Harris:

I’ll just put out there that when we ended 2020, we were 100% Michigan-based workforce. As of today, just a few days before June, we now have staff in eight different states. So, that’s opening some really big doors for us. But that’s the direction that we’ve chosen to go as a company.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Well said.

Adam Devereaux:

For those of you that are looking at the real estate market in West Michigan, as you know, it’s crazy right now. But I’ve had multiple conversations with people, or been aware of people moving into the area of trying to buy houses in West Michigan that they’re coming from out of state. They’re moving from Colorado, from California, from the East Coast, from Washington. It seems like it’s not just because they’re pursuing employment here, but they’re allowed to work remote, or they’ve shifted to 100% remote workforce environment, and so now they’re willing to look at moving anywhere. For some reason they’re looking at West Michigan. So the market’s really hot.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, exactly. We’re here, it’s Worksighted. It just shows that, I think we’re dealing with a pretty permanent and significant change that’s still being felt about employment, who’s the potential employer and employee pool for organizations.

Mike Harris:

Yeah. I’m hearing a lot of different business owners that I talk to, leaders, things like that, everyone’s got some different philosophies around this and the approach they want to take with their organization. Nothing’s one size fits all, obviously. But the one thing I do see is, there are folks out there that really want to get it back to what it was. I just want everyone to, in the back of your mind, as we’re talking through this, and we’re having this conversation, think about all the opportunities that this could present. While there are some challenges as far as learning to work in new ways, et cetera, don’t try and force things to be the way they were because that really could actually put you in a really difficult spot when it comes to what I would call is the talent market.

Mike Harris:

I even think from a sales perspective where we’re selling our goods and services, those markets are going through, they’re going to be going through a process of finding a new equilibrium, which is really going to change the game as far as, one, where you’re looking for talent, but also, as Adam alluded to earlier, where talent’s looking for opportunity. All of a sudden, all of these forces that we’ve had in play that have driven our businesses and driven our business models for decades if not centuries, which is, what I charge for my products and services and where I sell them and my costs, specifically related to people, which is the number one cost in most businesses, those are intimately linked to geography, and where I’m at, and how it works, and what are the costs.

Mike Harris:

All of a sudden, businesses are able now more than ever to deliver their products and services. If you look at a company like us, we can deliver our services anywhere in the United States, we really can. There’s just a small percentage of the work we do that requires physical presence, but that’s a very solvable problem. All of a sudden, we’re able to take Worksighted and the services that we have, take them into locations elsewhere in the country and compete against businesses that are operating off a very different cost model. So all of a sudden, we can go into Miami where services like ours might cost 50% more because their costs are so much higher. We can do them based on our cost model, which can be much more efficient. So, you really have to be thinking about this because the market is going to go through this process of equalizing wages and all these different things based on more of a nationwide scale. What do you think about that, Adam?

Adam Devereaux:

Well, I think it’s equalizing in a lot of ways. I think it’s going to be around employment, but also even housing, and some of those costs. I think a lot of times big market costs are due to housing costs. That’s one of the biggest factors. If you look at government jobs where they add a multiplier, it’s often tightly linked to housing costs in the area. Cost of living is more often housing because the other stuff, gas and food, it varies a little bit, but not nearly as significant. You’re already seeing this shift away from some of those major metropolitan areas, even if you live around Dallas, maybe not in Dallas, if you live around, people are going even further away because commute is becoming less and less of an issue because they’re able to work from home most of the time or all the time.

Adam Devereaux:

You used the word equilibrium, which I think is a constantly changing thing now. We’ve talked about this where the new norm is always going to be adjusting. We’re going through such an incredible period of change. I mean, we have over the last year, five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, the pace of change feels like it’s accelerating and a lot of signs point to it accelerating. I’m pretty confident that the next 10 years are going to be even more disruptive yet. A lot of times, things happen from a technology standpoint that the effects of it, it takes a while for them to be fully felt and fully realized. We’re still adjusting, things are still changing with digital technology. So, the problem, I think here is that this has been a period of rapid change and a lot of us haven’t fully incorporated or fully understand, what does that change going to truly lead to, and what is it going to look like in another 12 to 18 months.

Adam Devereaux:

It’s changed expectations, I think for a lot of people around work for both employers and employees. Many people, especially parents and caregivers, they’ve seen the positive impact that remote work has had on their personal lives. It’s enabled people to pursue higher education goals. It’s enabled businesses to offer new services, or new ways of interacting with their customer bases. So I think we can’t, like Pandora’s box is open for a lot of organizations. They could have gone remote years ago where that didn’t have, the companies out there that didn’t have any remote work capability, or didn’t allow people to work remotely.

Adam Devereaux:

It was, well, we can’t do that. And then they had to to survive and now everybody knows they can. You can’t just put the cork back in and plug it all up again that easily, you’re going to have impacts. You will lose people potentially if that’s the model that you go down. Maybe that’s fine, and ultimately that works better for that organization. We have to acknowledge, there are a lot of businesses out there where a certain part of it requires on-site work or in building work, and manufacturing, and a lot of other spaces. I think it’s definitely changed people’s expectations. I think it’s going to be a huge, huge factor in employment decisions for a lot of people.

Mike Harris:

Absolutely. It’s changed customers buying decisions too, and the criteria they use with buying. So that’s what I really want to be stressing to those of you that are on here that have to make these decisions. Anytime we’re dealing with change, which we’ve just gone tons of it, it’s scary. But there are opportunities here to, if you’re in front of this, and I think you’re willing to think about the fact that all of a sudden, customers just, all of our customers live through a time when things like physical presence to something, proximity didn’t matter anymore. Whatever they needed, however they could get it, then they were fine with that.

Mike Harris:

All of a sudden, we saw with new business that those customers were far less concerned about us being local, even in the same state anymore as where they were. They wanted the best fit, the best provider, wherever they could find them. So, this strategy of opportunity for your business on the sales side, and the growth side is really linked to this idea of remote work, and where can I hire employees? Because all of a sudden, now you can strategically start to look in certain sections of the country or wherever that might be opportunistically to grow your business. I think if you’re closed off to the idea, and you want it to be, like you said, Adam, you want to put Pandora’s box, you want to close it and put it all back in there, you want it to go back to the way that it was, and that’s not going to be the trend.

Mike Harris:

I think what we’re going to see is, as the talent market and cos and all these things find a new equilibrium, there’s way too many options for your employees to easily find an alternative.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. You have to ask yourself continuously, am I going to be at a competitive disadvantage if my competitors are allowing this, or they’re pursuing a flexible hybrid organic policy? I think that’s true in a lot of other ways because ultimately this comes back to we are creating digital versions of our organizations. Going back to the early days, I’m sure you remember that when companies had to decide, do we want to create a website? And then they’ve created their first version of the website, and it was a static HTML page. It’s like, here’s what we do and here’s our address. But you can also look at the adoption of software and software-based processes is the digital version of your business processes.

Adam Devereaux:

But now, the digital version of our organizations, it really has, or has to extend to all aspects of operations, all aspects of customer experience, and now as well, the employee experience, and the collaboration spaces that we create. We have physical collaboration spaces have merge with those virtual collaboration spaces. That’s really a crux about some of the things we want to talk about with collaboration, room technology, and how do you outfit your offices to be optimized to support a truly flexible hybrid policy?

Adam Devereaux:

There’s a analogy out there of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs tied to IT hierarchy of needs, and there’s a white paper that’s out there, if you care to read it, that’s really good. But at one of the levels they define it is competitive differentiation, when the technology platform or the technology you’re offering to your potential customers becomes a decision point and a reason why consumers and customers pick one company over another. Examples are things like one bank versus the other based on their banking application. You might pick which bank you have based on how good their website and their app is. I think that’s extended into so many more businesses at this point that how good our digital experience is can define our success.

Adam Devereaux:

I think if you look at the restaurant industry, it used to be that dining, in many cases, it still is, but the dining experience was so Senator on the physicality. You went there, you waited, you sat at a table, you interacted with staff, you were in that physical space. It’s flipped for so many restaurants just to survived through all of this. They had to create a digital version of themselves in a way to create an ease of ordering and an ability to either have delivery or pickup that was smooth and provided good communication. I mean, I might pick one pizza place over another based on how good their app is.

Mike Harris:

Yeah, exactly. This idea of presence, at a high level, I think of it as, it used to be that the office was the core of everything and we had technology so that people could remotely connect into the office. It was, I’m going to connect in from home, or I’m going to join this meeting from home. But the hub was the office and everything else was the spoke. What’s changing now is we need to realize the workplace needs to be digital, whether that’s a product, a platform like Microsoft Teams or whatever you’re using, the workplace needs to be digital. However, you connect into that digital environment, that’s really your new office, if you want to think of it that way.

Mike Harris:

Whether you’re at home or you’re in one of your physical buildings, that has to attach into that environment. That’s a great segue that concept, Adam, into some of this tech, and how do people need to be thinking about outfitting their facilities? What’s necessary to enable, no matter … We just had this conversation the other day about all the meetings we create now as an organization, everything’s a teams meeting and it’s irrelevant me, whether you’re in one of our facilities because you’ll join from one of our rooms, or you’re at home, I don’t have to know, and I’m not really worried necessarily where everyone is. But you have to have the technology to facilitate that. What do you see as some of the key elements people need to be thinking about? Becca got a finger out.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. Well, I just want to make sure that we can get to some questions. I know that-

Mike Harris:

Go ahead because I don’t the little open, so you can just interrupt me and-

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah, I know. You can keep talking for hours, I’m sure. But-

Mike Harris:

It’s like, hey, Mike, shut up we got some questions.

Rebecca Zaagman:

I know, trying to find-

Adam Devereaux:

That’s why we’re here after all.

Mike Harris:

Yeah, go for it.

With a rapid increase of malware, ransomware, and viruses impacting businesses, what does an organization do to make sure that the remote user does not infect the organization using their own equipment to access servers, etcetera, versus being on-site where controls can be tighter?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. I just wanted to know, again, we don’t have a ton of people on this call, even people listening, you can pop on your video and your mic and ask a call live if you’d like to, otherwise the chat and Q&A. Yeah, we’ve got one that is coming from Tori over at Hospice. With a rapid increase of malware, ransomware, and viruses impacting businesses, what does an organization do to make sure that the remote user does not infect the organization using their own equipment to access servers, et cetera, versus being on site where controls can be tighter? A little bit of that, those questions around the BYOD trends. We’ve talked about this in some of our security webinars as well, security first, that walled garden and approach. Yeah.

Mike Harris:

Do you want to ran with that one, Adam?

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. I think security can be a complicated topic, and a bit customized for every organization. But there are definitely some primary trends. There’s understanding the end points. As you said, Rebecca, the the old walled garden mindset moving to a zero trust mindset is, you have work resources that people need to get to, and so how do you give them secure access to those, your information, your software assets, everything else? There’s a couple of key trends. One is a BYOD, and that can be divided into two categories. One is BYOD mobile devices, and then BYOD desktops and laptops.

Adam Devereaux:

On the mobile devices side, if you’re using like Microsoft, I’d really recommend looking at mobile application management policies to sandbox the corporate information when people add those apps to BYOD devices. When you talk about the people using personal devices to connect in, in some way is a little bit more limited in terms of the controls that can be put in place. So you have to really decide is that the direction that we want to go or not. Using something like remote desktop can be a really good advantage versus a VPN client. It’s like there’s a layering of risk. To me, the riskiest thing first is VPN because if I allow somebody to have a VPN client on a home computer and remote in, now that computer has exposure to my network. Typically, that means my domain environment where my servers live and other computers are and everything else. So if they have malware and something on their computer, now that computer has access to the network.

Adam Devereaux:

But then RDP is a better version of that still connecting directly into the server environment, into the software environment that’s at my data center, wherever that happens to be, but it’s in a more restricted controlled way. I’m remoting into some resource and operating that resource rather than me downloading stuff to my computer and opening it there. When you talk about on the cloud side, let’s say you have files in Microsoft 365, and people are accessing Teams. You have some innate security around people using the web resources just going to Office in the web browser because there still is some exposure there, but at the same time, it’s more secure.

Adam Devereaux:

But anytime somebody has ransomware and a problem on their remote computer, it is a risk, and that’s why some organizations choose to say, you can’t do that, we don’t have policy. We’re going to try to put as many technical controls in place as possible to say you can’t access these resources unless you’re coming from a known device that we have some administrative control over. We have insight to whether or not antivirus is installed and working, if there’s any security alerts or events that are popping up. We’re going to check those things before your access to these resources is granted, and that’s in the Microsoft 365 world called conditional access. You can create these conditions, these gates that people have to pass through and confirm check, check, check, known device, good IP range, you’re not doing impossible travel, like having traffic coming from west Michigan, and then suddenly coming from Eastern Europe. Your antivirus is checking out, you’re compliant to all these things.

Adam Devereaux:

There’s steps along the way to how secure and locked down you want to be, and that’s a convenience factor. But I think the biggest thing that I would say to get rid of is try to move away from having to have a VPN client to connect in, that’s the biggest thing I have a concern around. Make sure you have multi-factor authentication in place around user accounts. If there’s compliance and specific requirements and restrictions that you have in place, then make sure that you’re understanding the implication of those things and how to meet those compliance requirements.

Mike Harris:

I think folks have to that if your security model is still the old model, which is the building, so this is totally relevant to this conversation because we’re talking about returning to our physical workspaces, and what does that mean. If your security model is everything inside my building as long as it’s in my building, it’s safe from a technology perspective. Yeah, we’ve got our firewall and we’ve got all these different things, and so we’re safe, is referred to as the traditional walled garden model, the problem with that is that it blew up completely as this happened because everything went home, everything left the organization. You have to recognize that that’s a totally different security paradigm where as you’re talking about, it’s more about, now, how do I know you are who you say you are when you access these resources? How do I control at the resource level?

Mike Harris:

So as you talk about, if people have migrated to 365 and they’re going to access their data files, the way you get at them is different. Maybe I’m coming in through my browser, or there’s levels of authentication. What’s happening on my system can’t necessarily go up and infect the Microsoft Cloud-

Adam Devereaux:

Exactly.

Mike Harris:

… and things like that versus a VPN and the more traditional models, which a VPN is literally no different than you running a really long cord from the computer at home and plugging it into the wall at the office and whatever’s happening on there gets into the system. The other thing is things like ransomware and crypto, the more you’ve migrated to these cloud solutions, it’s not that you’re not susceptible, but it is very different than those that are in the more traditional. On-prem walled garden model are way more susceptible to crypto and ransomware attacks than those that have made a significant moves to the cloud. Would you agree with that?

Adam Devereaux:

I totally agree. I was going to make that same point, which is that we see the attacks changing, and it’s exactly as you said. It becomes more about securing the user’s identity because that’s one of the keys to get in and get access to resources. So, we see a real shift away from ransomware attacks that can take down the entire environment and cripple things to needing to protect that user identity that you’re giving people. Also, trying to expand that user identity. The reality is, we don’t just give our, our employees one identity, we give them 10 identities into all the different pieces of software. So there are strategies with cloud identity platforms to try to consolidate that, but secure it more at the same time

Mike Harris:

Becca, do we have anything else in there that we need to answer?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Not on that specific question, unless, Tori, you want pop in the chat, if there’s anything specific to your organization that you’re wondering about, feel free to follow up. But we do have a couple more questions. Is there something else you wanted to add-

Mike Harris:

If you can just post all of your passwords right there in the chat, that’d be great.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah, Tori, that’d be great. Well, I don’t think you guys mentioned security awareness training for users as well. Just a little plug there. We’ve got an awesome training team here at Worksighted that can help deploy that and help train your users to protect wherever they are, save them are first line of defense. So, definitely got a security awareness training.

Adam Devereaux:

I totally agree.

Mike Harris:

Yeah, I totally agree. Educated users, never clicking on that link, or never actually falling for the social engineering and all that, that’s the number one way that these things are happening. Educated users are definitely your best and last line of defense really.

How do we plan for increasing bandwidth needs for remote workers?

Rebecca Zaagman:

All right. Doug Taylor from Gillson asked, how do we plan for increasing bandwidth needs for the remote workers?

Mike Harris:

It’s a good one.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, I think it comes down to, what are they accessing? For some organizations, it increased their need for bandwidth at the office, and it also increased their need to consider and think about what kind of bandwidth and what kind of services and network do their employees have at home? But for a lot of organizations, the more cloud-based software systems, the … I look at it as like an ecosystem of software that you have, as well as where your files live, where your business identity and computer identity lives. So for some, it almost eliminated the need for bandwidth at the office because nobody was there. The bandwidth at the office was irrelevant because nobody was connecting into the office to get to things. So, the answer can vary depending on what we’re talking about here.

Adam Devereaux:

If you have on-prem software, like ERP systems that are big database systems, you’ve got files, you’ve got maybe remote desktop, each one of those can have different impacts. VPN, again, tends to be the most bandwidth intensive, and also some of the poorest performing when it comes to on-prem software. If you’re looking at remote desktop, that can be a better paradigm to control bandwidth impact. But what we recommended to people before this hit was enterprise fiber connectivity. So that’s typically synchronous fiber, meaning that your upload speed and your download speeds are the same. Maybe you were at 100 megabit before, now, organizations are having to scale up to 250, 500 megabit or gigabit internet connection speeds.

Adam Devereaux:

The internet connection is all the more and more critical, and it boggles my mind sometimes because I think people just have this expectation of consumer class costs. So I’m going to challenge that mindset a little bit and say like, okay, so your internet ALM is $120 a month or $50 a month or $70 a month, or whatever the price may be, that’s just serving you and your family. Now you have an enterprise, an organization that has all this revenue that’s attached to that, serving dozens or hundreds or thousands of employees, and you expect to pay the same prices and still get good results, that’s not going to happen. Then at the same time, these organizations are paying 5,000 or $10,000 a month power bills and not blinking an eye, but bumping the internet speeds and the cost from $400 a month to $1,000 a month is too much to consider. It’s like, this is one of the most critical services that your organization now has invest in it appropriately.

Mike Harris:

Yeah. The more things were moving to the cloud, it’s about, as you’re saying, Adam, it’s, where’s the stuff? What am I accessing? Before, as you said, we have been talking to customers for a long time about you really need to have fiber, especially with moving to the cloud because when everyone is functioning in the office and things like that, you got to have a reliable connectivity because if your connectivity is going up and down or it’s … because it’s not just about slow, it’s about quality of service, reliability-

Adam Devereaux:

Exactly.

Mike Harris:

… outages, and all this stuff. The more things move to the cloud, the more that connectivity is really, really critical because if it goes down, you can’t access your ERP systems, or whatever that might be. In addition to that though, organizations, when you do make that move to higher bandwidth, higher quality service, you do have to be ready to upgrade security and edge devices because oftentimes, the things you were using in the past aren’t capable of processing packets and inspecting them and doing the things they need to do at the rate that new bandwidth was coming.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, I totally agree. You got to make sure you size all that equipment. But what’s interesting is, for some orgs, just to summarize it, they had to increase their bandwidth needs, and especially making sure they have sufficient upload speed for all the people that are working remote to access resources that were in the building. For other organizations where now their stuff is in the cloud, you actually had the other way around where you have to increase your bandwidth for when everybody’s in the office, and now they’re frustrated. They’re like, “I might as well just go work from home because the internet is faster at home for me to get to my stuff. When everybody’s here, and we’re all trying to do video and all this other stuff, the former connection that was fine, it’s no longer good enough.”

Mike Harris:

Yeah. One last point there, Becca, is that I do think that, what you’re getting at there is, it’s going to be interesting connecting this back to working hybrid where some people are going to be in the office, some are going to be out. One of the benefits that hybrid work is going to deliver to an organization is that the investments you’ve made, think of it as just like your real estate investment. If only at any given time, 50% of your people are going to be there, that investment is going to scale nicer for you and longer, and then investment’s got to last. So, if you think about some of these things, it’s going to be interesting to see how some of them play out.

Mike Harris:

But folks may find that, hey, instead of trying to get this high bandwidth, but low quality or coax connection into my building, maybe I’ll go for something slightly lower, but I’ll go for fiber that I can scale very easily, is a higher quality, and that investment is going to last longer for my business is, there’s a lot of things, I think right now that fall into that bucket of investments that we made before thinking they were going to only last so long, are going to scale.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. Redundancy as well. Not to belabor the point of that, but also connection, it impacts the internal, thanks, Doug, it impacts the internal equipment as well. Do you have sufficient wireless? Do you move away from having as many access ports? Do you move away from having desk phones? Maybe I don’t need to invest as in as many switches and as many switch ports, and I need to invest in higher quality access points because people aren’t going to be working more wirelessly in the office anyway.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Doug, did you want to chime in on that? I know that you put something in the Q&A, but I also saw your video pop up.

Mike Harris:

He was giving us the thumbs up.

Rebecca Zaagman:

He just wanted to let us know we’re doing a good job. Hey, Doug. Looks like you’re muted.

Mike Harris:

Yes, I think you’re muted.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Let me unmute you.

Adam Devereaux:

Wait, you need the shirt.

Rebecca Zaagman:

There you go.

Doug Taylor:

I wasn’t muted, you were muted.

Rebecca Zaagman:

I am muted.

Mike Harris:

That’s a new t-shirt.

Doug Taylor:

Yeah, that is a good t-shirt.

Mike Harris:

You had me on mute.

How do we deal with our remote employees using consumer-level ISPs?

Doug Taylor:

Talking about the fiber needs between … I totally agree, especially with the synchronous speeds. But the struggle that we’re having is having so many remote users using all of these home consumer level services. In the past, we wouldn’t do that. But now we’re counting on 40 or 60 people, how many different ISPs that is, probably six, troubleshooting. It seems like a lot of the times that the issues that we’re troubleshooting, and working on are transient, they just come and go and we never really know what the issue was. Moving forward into this next phase since this is going to be an ongoing, permanence situation, how do we ever deal with all of these consumer level ISPs? That’s our struggle a little less so in the past couple of months, but originally that was our main gig, and especially, I won’t say any names just to keep it less awkward.

Adam Devereaux:

Comcast, ATNT, Frontier, let’s not even talk about Frontier.

Doug Taylor:

Well, the ones I hate, I won’t say.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, okay.

Doug Taylor:

You hate one of them.

Adam Devereaux:

I think that’s a really good point. It is interesting because our troubleshooting domain grew to people’s homes as part of this whole shift to remote work. The things that people asked us to help them with, now was home networks. So there’s a couple of things. One is the quality of the physical gear, it became more necessary for either employees themselves, or employers to work something out for people to invest in better quality wireless network systems, like the Netgear Orbie or the Google Home Wi-Fi. There are these good quality mesh network systems that can help you get good connectivity throughout your whole house.

Adam Devereaux:

One other strategy you can look at too is some sort of edge firewall device. So like in the Meraki space, the Z3 device. What is nice about that is it can at least give you some visibility into that network connection problem and show you like, latency was spiking, we had lost packets. The connection was down for a while, so that can help. But I think as the larger pressure we’re seeing, this is why there’s so much talk around broadband and internet connectivity as a utility, why there’s more focus on investment in it because people are also going to figure out and plan of where they’re going to work based on the internet connectivity. We’ve already seen that be a thing. We’ve seen people move. As part of their moving criteria, they’re questioning, what kind of internet is available here? How good is the internet here?

Adam Devereaux:

I’m dealing with getting ATNT fix wireless internet at my camper basically, so that I can have better quality internet there. So, hopefully Starlink will just be fantastic and it’ll make everyone’s lives better there.

Mike Harris:

Adam, I think that brings up another interesting topic that’s connected, which is that, as a business owner, I want to make sure that our team is using, when they’re working at home or whatever, Doug’s point is well taken it, you want them to have quality connections because they’re on calls with customers. They’re trying to work. Things need to be reliable. When you think about the equipment aspect of it for a second, now let’s put aside the connection part of it, for us, it was everyone’s got equipment issued by the company that they can use at home and we’re giving them appropriate setups, and making sure that things are done consistently.

Mike Harris:

As much as possible, we’re trying to keep them off of their equipment at home for security reasons, but also just for consistency and quality reasons. We want to make sure that everyone has what they need and they can work comfortably, and all those kinds of things. A lot of businesses, over the last year, everyone took their stuff from the office and they’re using it at home and now they don’t have the stuff at the office. So, you and I have talked about this. Well, how does that work? Because now if they’re going to be, let’s say half the time in the office, or maybe two days a week, they’re going to come in the office, do they have their desktop and their nicer set up at home, and they just have some laptop, something that’s … just so that when they come into the office, they can access things. Are they accessing back to their environment at home? It’s almost like it went from, I have some stuff at home to get by with, and my good stuff’s at the office, it’s flip-flopped, hasn’t it?

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. What’s your primary workspace? Yeah, absolutely.

Mike Harris:

I think it raises some questions that I do think businesses have to think about it, and I don’t know what the right answer is. It’s probably not right for everybody that you may find you’re issuing more devices when you talk about at least laptops and things like that-

Adam Devereaux:

Agree, yeah.

Mike Harris:

… than you did previously.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, the trend is towards laptops. So when you have laptops, now you can have docs, you can have redundant resources easier because you can shift more of your physical spaces to be hoteling so that you have just a doc and dual monitor and mouse and keyboard set up there that anyone can use that you just can bring your laptop from your home set up, plug it in there, and now you’re back. Maybe you’re not fully 100% everything exactly how you like it, but you’re pretty productive. That’s how I have it set up now. I have an older doc that’s still compatible in a couple of monitors in my cubicle. But we have people that primarily use a desktop, even on my team that primarily use a desktop and multi-monitor. So there’s that question of like, hey, is there a loaner laptop I can use? Is there a computer station there I can use?

Adam Devereaux:

There’s a lot further on that too that we can go in terms of like, how are they then able to get to their stuff? Are you using enterprise, identity sinking and having one drive known folder move and sinking, and all sorts of things that?

There’s so much tech available so quickly. Some people have struggled to catch up and understand all the devices and apps now working out there. How do you best help alleviate a team member’s frustration who may not be super tech-savvy feel more comfortable?

Rebecca Zaagman:

That sounds like a rabbit hole, so I’m going to stop you there, Adam. But it actually is a good segue to Brynna’s questions. She asked, I’m so curious, there’s so much tech available so quickly. Some people have struggled to catch up and understand all the devices and apps now working out there. How do you best help alleviate a team member’s frustration who may not be super tech savvy feel more comfortable? I think there’s part of that question about hesitant users, but also there’s a huge shift that had to happen. We’ve seen a lot of companies switch over to Microsoft Teams and some do so very reluctantly, or have only been using a certain portion of it.

Rebecca Zaagman:

But those can really impact an employee’s experience. One of the things we like to talk about, we had a webinar a few months ago talking about your technology needs to work for your employees. It’s not technology just for technology sake. But how does your technology actually help your employees do better work and feel more connected to the company? So, a couple of different ways we can take that. But-

Mike Harris:

Well-

Rebecca Zaagman:

… Mike, do you want to hit it first? Adam, got it.

Mike Harris:

I was going to tell Adam, you can talk. He already had the answers. I was going to say, go ahead.

Adam Devereaux:

Well, I just wanted to start by saying, I think this is a pretty serious, and it’s a bigger topic in some ways too because it starts extending into the realm of accessibility and inclusiveness where we have a lot of different factors to consider there. We can’t deny the fact that, I think there are people that have retired from the workforce because of some of these trends. There are people that say, “I don’t want to have to learn all this technology and relearn how to do my job. I’m just going to move on at this point.” So, that is not a minor issue. But I think that training resources available is a big one. Figuring out ways to provide them support with what they need. There are platforms like Bigger Brains and others, and ways that you can create more of a learning pathway.

Adam Devereaux:

When we start talking about training within the workforce, there’s directed training that is like, here’s how you do your job. So here’s the thing you have to do to learn how to do your job, or train with this person, or whatever the case may be. And then there’s the, can we give our employees resources for them to do self-directed on-demand learning? Hey, here’s access to this library of content and you can choose to take this online class about Excel to improve your Excel skills, and extending into professional writing, and lots of other spaces like that. So that’s, I think one big area.

Mike Harris:

Yeah. I’ll add on that, Adam, and say that one thing that’s important, I think when we … training is huge. There’s definitely a trend towards, when people are deploying apps and their ability to get some quick rapid training that gets them moving right, and gets them started in the apps. But it’s important for organizations to know that with all this new software, not only do people need to be trained how to use it, but you need to know how you want them to use it. So as an org, power you … We talk about something like Microsoft Teams, we as a company, you both know, we have ways we use Teams. There are places for things, there are standards, there are …

Mike Harris:

These channels are used for things. This is the kind of content that goes here. This kind of content, we use it heavily to drive culture and social engagement. So we have social channels in Teams that our HR team owns and drives the content, and we’re running in the background in Teams. We’ve got things, events that we’re running in our digital office essentially-

Adam Devereaux:

Just had a virtual lunch yesterday.

Mike Harris:

Yeah, but there are standards around how that happens. So I would encourage everyone listening to this that it’s not just, here’s how you use the app and it needs to also be, here’s how we use the app, and here’s where we put things, and here’s our standards so that you can drive those outcomes that you’re really trying to get.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. Not many software applications are just set it and forget it, you have to walk with your team members around it. One thing we encourage, especially with Teams adoption is having champions in each department so that they can help their team understand and onboard into that program because if people learn on their own, they’re going to learn a very small portion of it, and they’re probably … Yeah. Brenda, feel free to follow up in anyway if you’ve got more specific questions along that, but it’s going to be probably pretty specific to the software that you’re implementing. But I do want to make a nod that we’ve recently, maybe in the past year, launched a training department here at Worksighted because we’ve seen this gap for our clients.

Rebecca Zaagman:

We offer blitz trainings specifically around Microsoft Teams, security, and that’s an ever-growing profile, and ever-growing team, because exactly what you said, you can install a new application, but if your team members aren’t using it and aren’t using it correctly, then you’re leaving a lot of stuff on the table.

Mike Harris:

Yeah, definitely.

Adam Devereaux:

I just wanted to return just a quick bit to that inclusiveness and accessibility factor too because in some cases, some of this technology and adopting it in the right way can improve access and improve collaboration. An example is, we have multiple clients who the use of the transcription feature and making sure that they could enable the real-time transcription in Teams meetings, and speaker attribution was a big enabler for them because they had employees that were hearing impaired. This was actually an improvement to their ability to collaborate in the organization versus being in person physically because now they could be a part of meetings where they had a better understanding of what was going on and being said in those meetings.

Adam Devereaux:

Their digital version of themselves was able to be more productive and collaborative with their coworkers than what they were when they were in person. I don’t think it’s limited to just that. I mean, even when you look at attention difficulties, things like people that would have a high need for physical activity, and they could do things like work wall on a walking treadmill, or being on the treadmill while being in a meeting, and it helps them to focus on it better, being able to more self-govern their own breaks, like taking clarity breaks and mental load breaks and things like that.

Adam Devereaux:

I think what we’re going towards is where the workload is more flexible, where the workload is more based on these virtual workloads or these digital workloads that people are able to self govern how they get that accomplished in the way that works best for them. For some parents too that means maybe from 8:00 to 10:00 at night, that’s some of their most productive time, and it’s not over time or a problem for them, it’s because that allows them to shift their time priorities and be productive when they’re best able to do it.

Mike Harris:

I think that’s a really important point, Adam, and connects earlier. I think at the beginning we mentioned just don’t try to force the old way. We’ll see how this all plays out, but my gut instinct is that if you’re trying to force things to be the way they were, we’re going to mandate this, or require you to be here and do that. There might be reasons why jobs would require that, and that’s a totally different story, but if that’s not the case, if the flexibility you’re describing and the idea that my digital office, I can do this anywhere, I’m flexible on time, that organizations are going to offer that.

Mike Harris:

If your workers aren’t able to get access to things like that at your organization, it’s going to become infinitely easier for them to find someone else who knows where in the country that will offer them that flexibility. There may very well be organizations that they can find. As I said, we’re looking all over the country and it’s allowing us to find really strong culture fits that have exactly the things we want because we’re fishing with a bigger net. You don’t have to go crazy with it, but you want to be flexible for people, and you want to try to embrace this because I think if workers see, hey, my org isn’t going to embrace this and they just want it to be the way it was before, it’s very easy for them to find alternatives.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. If you’re cutting yourself off from a large potential labor pool. There’s going to be a class of percentage of the workforce that wants either full remote work or hybrid flexibility and self-governed hybrid flexibility. And then if you don’t offer that, you’re going to cut off a pool of the workforce, period. And then the other thing is, how well is an organization due then enable that? It goes beyond things like, we talk about the physical impact to buildings, like hoteling spaces that are conference room collab technology, making sure people are outfitted with things like good quality webcams and headsets or other ways for them to participate. But also I think it extends into, what other tools are you using to help people understand who is going to be in the office today, who’s working remote today? Where are people today?

Adam Devereaux:

We talked a little bit about the old in-out board with the stickers of the magnets that you’d move in the old days. There’s ways of accomplishing that now in the online space so that you can get an understanding or booking spaces too, the platforms that we were talking about, like Robin Powered, or there’s a few others that we were talking about as well that allow you to create book ability, like self-scheduling of hoteling spaces and conference rooms and other pieces of technology, loaner laptops, and things along those lines as well.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah, that’s actually a great segue into another question that we had submitted. Sorry, I lost my screen. Really quick, where did you go? Someone asked, how can we utilize technology to level the playing field and change assumptions about remote workers? That’s a little bit about the old way of looking at people who worked remotely as not part of the core unit. How do you make that shift and change to … Mike, you said the end of 2020 everybody was in Michigan and now we’ve got employees across eight states. How do we make sure that people are feeling included, that they feel like they can collaborate on the same level no matter if there’s three people in the office and three people remote? So I think there’s a technology aspect there and there’s also a culture shift aspect of it too.

Mike Harris:

Yeah. One thing that I think is really powerful with this, so we just talked about this, I think I talked about it in an all hands meeting when we were talking about how this is looking for our organization. I was very deliberate about pointing out to everyone, this is the direction we’re going. I mean, our organization, our brand is far bigger than anyone building place, presence, whatever. Organizations, there’s a big brand piece to this. You really have to make sure that your employees understand your brand, the messaging, they’re connected to it. They have a sense of connectedness with it. That could be everything from, we’re always sending things out to our all of our staff, not just the remote people, but everyone.

Mike Harris:

Here’s t-shirts or things that … water bottles. Everything they can have that brings them connectedness to your brand is going to be really, really important so that your organization starts to transcend these physical walls, and these physical buildings that you’re used to being in, and it becomes something bigger than that. That’s why these digital technologies are so important, things like Teams, and really in your mind recognizing that that is the new place people show up to work, that’s where they’re showing up. Maybe you’re also physically over here in this office or you’re at home, or you’re at a customer’s office or wherever you are, if I need something, if I need to communicate with someone, if we’re going to collaborate, we do it there. We’re tying in our physical buildings to that.

Mike Harris:

But as leaders, you have to message that, you have to be deliberate about it. You have to take steps to make sure that everything you’re doing it’s not like, here’s what we’re doing at the office, and the remote people because-

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, technical class citizens.

Mike Harris:

Yeah. I will stress, I really think this is a huge opportunity for businesses, a huge opportunity to find the workers that fit your organization, your culture, or the skills, wherever they happen to be because there’s nothing magical. It’s the assumption that we’re all born within 20 miles of the person we should marry. Really? Is that how that works? So, think about it this way with business and with your workers. There are people who would fit your culture, who would be really passionate about what you do. Who knows where all over the country? It will take strength of brand though in the recruiting process and everything else to attract them. I really think that strength of brand being deliberate, talking about it, messaging it, is really, really critical to making sure that you’re pulling those people in, and it’s bigger than physical location.

Adam Devereaux:

Well, and a big part of that then too is, you have to have an employee engagement and employee experience that exists within that digital space. It can’t just be a half-hearted attempt. I have so many of my coworkers that I haven’t seen physically face to face in a year, but I still feel connected with them because of the efforts we’ve made. Sometimes that means deliberate efforts on our part as employees as well to try to connect with people, but through some of these ways of creating a primary employee experience and engagement experience that exists within that digital space, and then that’s augmented by the physical. There is no direct replacement for face-to-face, but the more that your organization embraces that as the primary, the more expectations shift and people start to not feel like they’re lacking something as much.

Adam Devereaux:

I think it is in that question I hear a slightly different take on it too, which is, how do I convince my leadership that this is the direction that they should go and empower people to do? I think generally it’s the selling the positive, the opportunity. Also, the fact that for many organizations, they really don’t have good metrics around productivity and workload. They can’t tell if people are really doing their job or not. So, they substitute physical presence to proxy for productivity. Well, they’re there in the office a half hour early every day, they’re a great employee. Doesn’t matter that they really don’t get much done, they’re here, so that’s what really matters. I think that’s-

Rebecca Zaagman:

They’re playing Minecraft.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. That challenge is that then there’s this perception that sometimes happens in some organizations, like the people that work remote, they’re just slackers, they’re being lazy and not really getting anything done, they’re not equal participants. It’s a big organizational shift, mindset shift. I think sometimes leaders need to see it and feel it in another organization before they really realize why that’s an advantage, and why that can be something that they should embrace and adopt themselves. Just because you have one negative, or one problem along the way, doesn’t mean you give it all up. I’m going to make any bones about it, I think organizations that are stuck in the old mentality and just can’t get over this hurdle, some of them are going to really struggle to survive over the next few years. It’s going to be a critical factor in their success, period.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. That was a lot. Thanks everyone for all of your participation and questions. That was a lot of good stuff. If you have any other questions, feel free to shoot them over to us. We’re always happy to help, especially these big picture questions, we love that. Thank you for joining. If have you asked a question today, I’m going to send you a free t-shirt, so I will follow up with the forum so you can give us your address for that. Otherwise, good luck in your transitions. If you’re transitioning a little bit of your workforce back to the office, ours are opening back up on, I think June 7th. Some of our people will be coming back into the office, some of us will be staying remote. So, we’re right here in the trenches with you all. So, thank you for joining. We will release our next webinar coming up soon in the next week or two.

Mike Harris:

Awesome.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, really appreciate it. Thanks, everyone.

Mike Harris:

Thanks, everyone. I appreciate it. (silence).

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