To download the Reboot Guide, SWOT Discussion Guide, and to schedule a Power Hour head to worksighted.com/reboot.

About this Webinar:

Live Webinar filmed on June 18, 2020.

We have always been on a journey towards the future of work and the events of the recent past have accelerated that process. This “new normal” that we are headed towards is filled with unknowns and as business leaders and managers we need to prepare our teams to thrive in this transition. But how do you do that and what role does technology play?

Adam sat down with Worksighted CEO, Mike Harris, to talk through three areas of our return to work strategy:

• Return: The nuts and bolts of returning to the office and how you need to prep.
• Refocus: How to shift your culture and technology to keep pace with the rapid changes.
• Evolve: How this new way of work can be an opportunity for your organization moving forward.

Meet the Team

Adam Deveraux:

Well hello everyone. Welcome to another Worksighted NXT. I’m your host, Adam Deveraux. I’m cloud security manager here at Worksighted. With me today is Mike Harris, our CEO and co-founder.

Mike Harris:

Welcome everyone. Glad to be here today.

Adam Deveraux:

For those of you that have watched Worksighted NXT before, you may have seen our webinar which is on our YouTube channel regarding what we were seeing as important things to consider going into the current time that we’re in and all the changes that have happened.

So we’re kind of circling back around on that, wanted to talk about what we’ve seen, what we think you should be thinking about for the future, and kind of the impact on business. We have a Q&A process, you know. You can submit any questions that you have that come up, any concerns or thoughts that you have either going into this or provoked by the conversation and we’ll get to those at the end, after we kind of go through our sections.

Mike Harris:

We took kind of a three-part framework approach to this conversation: Return, Refocus and Evolve. First, we’re going to approach it with Return. The Return piece is really kind of the event of getting our employees back to work. Then we’ll shift to Refocus, this is where we’re really just reassessing our new reality and trying to understand how those things have changed and identifying gaps. The Evolve section of the conversation, which is really how are we changing and adapting to that new reality so that it’s not a conversation about surviving. I see a lot of business owners, they’re very focused on surviving. At some point you have to shift that conversation to thriving, so what do we need to do to evolve and thrive.

So that’s the structure we’re going to take in today’s conversation. Why don’t we start off with return?

Adam Deveraux:

Yeah. That’s the first one.

Evolve

Mike Harris:

For a lot of our customers, obviously being in the technology space, they’re looking at us specifically on technology-related items as it comes to the return. So maybe, Adam, you can speak a little bit about the major tech challenges that we’re hearing about from customers as they start to kind of physically return to work?

Adam Deveraux:

Yeah. And really this section is primarily focused on that as like an event, right? What do we do with the immediate need that a lot of businesses have to allow work to return to their office spaces? There is an adaption in many cases for remote work for a lot of organizations, so when we look at this change it’s what happens now when some or all of our workforce is coming back to the office?

There are some specific technical things that we’re seeing as trends to keep in mind. One is devices that may have changed, so whether people took their desktops home or they were given a laptop. That latter category we’ve seen happen quite a bit, so they may not be fully situated to be functioning when they come back to the office.

They’re just working off a laptop at home. When they come back do you want to have them continue using a laptop, get a dock, have dual monitors? How do they need to be outfitted?

There’s things like, just from a practice standpoint, like making sure that people realize that they don’t need to connect the VPN if they were. We want to clean and sanitize equipment coming into the building. There’s probably some help and assistance that people will need to make sure that they get hooked back up again properly and following best practices.

But another big one is more on the technology trend side, is around the fact that these spaces are really going to be used for many organizations in a hybrid capacity. We just had this… You and I yesterday going to a meeting and we are both together in the office here, but we have a remote colleague that we need to collaborate with, and a lot of conference spaces in buildings aren’t really designed for that kind of a thing.

Do we call from somebody’s laptop in an office and have a really poor experience around video, like we’re trying to be on the webcam at the same time? Do we take an entire conference room? So that’s just an example of the fact that there’s a new type of collaboration that’s often happening.

The reality is there’s going to be more video conferencing, more remote collaboration, so with it’s your colleagues or external parties, how do you revamp your space to enable that kind of work? What kind of hardware do you want to outfit?

So things like USB speaker phones, Bluetooth speaker phones, webcams, there’s cameras that can be really wide angled, so you can actually have it in your office but actually get everyone that’s at your desk. You may even want to think about yes, the collaboration room specifically, and having more like what we’d call huddle rooms, or even smaller like single person phone booth style rooms or two party rooms.

But then what kind of hardware do you want to give them at their own desk? Really good microphones on headsets are another example where… You know, I’ve had the experience already where I’m sitting in kind of a cubicle space and multiple people are all on a different call at the same time, or in some cases we’re on the same call and literally 10 feet away from each other, so you got to have good equipment to not have people talking over each other.

Mike Harris:

Definitely. I think that meetings, they often used to be either in person or virtual, and now we just need to understand that they’re hybrid, so we need to have the platforms available that the people… Folks may be in the office, they may not be in the office, we’re not sure.

But you’re right. We’ve had several instances where you end up with five people all joining meetings remotely when you’re all sitting in the same building. Some of that you’re going to need for social distancing and things like that, but we have to have a hybrid mindset in many ways, and we’re going to really circle back on that hybrid working concept. Hybrid mindsets are going to be really important as we move into the future.

What about security? What about security issues during this return to work event? We had a lot of folks using maybe equipment from home or taking equipment from the office and taking it home and using it at home. What security concerns might we have as we return to work, and in the context again we’re using this word hybrid, where not everybody is going to return to the office. Their return to work really in many cases might be that they’re going to operate 80% remote most of the time. What are you seeing on that front?

Adam Deveraux:

I think what I’m going to consider is the rapid changes we often made, right? There’s a journey that a lot of organizations have been on technology-wise, and we’ll definitely touch on that more, because it’s kind of a lengthy subject, but the reality is that there were a lot of rapid changes that organizations made to accommodate the need to have people work remotely that weren’t before.

So looking back, whether it’s rapid adoption of cloud services, enabling remote access for a larger group of people that didn’t have it before… Those are new potential security vulnerabilities, so we want to think about more strategically how do we leverage protection technologies like multi-factor authentication across all of those access platforms, so not just having multi-factor into let’s say our email, but having single sign in into all of these different applications, being able to protect maybe remote desktop or VPN via multi-factor authentication, and moving further down the road of cloud-managed endpoints, cloud secured endpoints, and having a larger information visibility.

This is part of a much larger trend towards what we call a zero trust mentality in security, where previously we had a walled garden trusted network and that’s what we were protecting. Now our information is accessible from all over the world via multiple methods, and so having a security protection layer and a business identity control plan where we can secure those users and how they’re accessing things and be constantly looking at all these signals, the signal intelligence of whether that’s a valid request or not.

So it gets to be a fairly complicated subject potentially, but it’s something that we need to start thinking about, because we are already seeing across the industry where attacks are successful or happening because of changes people made to accommodate.

Mike Harris:

This walled garden concept is really the one where as long as you’re physically inside my four walls, then once you’ve gotten through the door you’re sort of assumed to be trusted, correct?

Adam Deveraux:

Exactly.

Mike Harris:

And we can let you have access to anything. The problem in today’s world is that we’re operating in this hybrid capacity, where our trusted users are working from home or remotely in some capacity, and so it’s very difficult to insure the traditional mindset mentality of security, which is this walled garden mindset.

Adam Deveraux:

Exactly.

Mike Harris:

This brings up a great point that I think we’re going to touch on probably a few times as we go through this, but customers that were… Well, just businesses in general that were farther along this curve of digital adoption, digitizing their business, moving to cloud platforms, enabling remote work, had a much easier time making this transition and thriving during this time than those that were kind of further behind that curve.

So specifically with security, those that were moving toward zero trust mentality, those that had a lot of these security protocols in place, had a much easier time making this transition because they didn’t have to be as much concerned about security. Do you think that’s fair?

Adam Deveraux:

I think that’s fair, and as well they were able to do so in a way that they were more confident knowing what their risks and liabilities were. As we poke holes in that wall, if all the information is still in there we need to be mindful of our new risks.

But the reality is for most organizations most of their important business information isn’t just behind that wall anymore. It’s in all sorts of cloud services that are managed by third parties, et cetera, et cetera.

I think the greater trend of that digital transformation and that journey that companies are on is a good segue into refocus, and our intention here is really… This is where once you’ve solved some immediate problems, how do we learn from what’s happened?

Mike Harris:

Yeah. Definitely. One thing I want to mention, because I want to add this before we move on to the next section here is that we also can’t forget though, there’s the technology side of all this, but when it comes to returning to work there’s the very practical side of getting back, right?

So from a business perspective, I want to make sure that we’re definitely open to questions that have to do with the complexities of getting our workers physically back into our office.

Adam Deveraux:

And current regulations.

Mike Harris:

All the regulations. How are we handling office furniture, office space, policies, procedures, practices? That just at the end of the day kind of the less fun part of returning to work and all these changes we’ve had to put in place.

We put a lot of time here into making sure that we were being thoughtful and very kind of mindful about how we were facilitating that return for our employees. So I do want to make sure that we let everyone know that if you go to worksighted.com/reboot you can find our guidebook, which I’ll hold up here.

Mike Harris:

This is the guidebook we created internally for our return to work and it covers everything. It covers our policies, procedures, practices, our phased approach to how we’re bringing employees back. We’re going to share that for free. We had a task force internally that helped put that together.

Just take a peek at that. Hopefully… Again, you know, that’s just something that we’re using internally. Our approach to this was to brand it and kind of create a theme around this process so that our staff felt that the leadership at the company was being very intentional about how we were approaching this.

Our revised remote work policies are in there. Those are big changes that we’re making. We’re moving the company from… We’ve always been remote capable, but we’re moving to a 100% remote policy as far as if your job can be done remotely and you want to do it remotely and you can do it remotely, you’re allowed to do it remotely.

So it’s a big shift, and these are things I think just from a practical perspective a lot of companies are facing these challenges right now, because your employees were suddenly allowed to work remotely and they’re looking at leadership and saying why can’t we continue to work remotely?

Adam Deveraux:

Yeah. The genie is out of the bottle, right?

Mike Harris:

You got it. You got it. So I just want to make sure that… From a practical perspective take a look at that guide. There’s a lot of great stuff in there, and anyone on our team that was on that task force is happy to spend time with you, chat about the practical side of what we did and why we made the decisions we made.

One thing I want to encourage there is that be thoughtful. One thing I’m seeing from a leadership perspective with a lot of other companies is be careful where you let the pendulum swing, because I think that there’s a… It’s human nature to want to react with every possible thing that we can put in place and all these procedures and policies, which you’re trying to do for the good of the employees and to protect the business and things like that, but you can overdo it I think.

Mike Harris:

So you have to kind of just be mindful and make sure that you’re… I think just being thoughtful and intentional about what kind of decisions to make.

Refocus

Adam Deveraux:

Taking this opportunity to assess where your business is at and the changes that you’re going to make in the future. So looking at the next two sections, refocus and then evolve. But really the purpose behind refocus is how can we take stock of what’s happened, the good and the bad, try to analyze that in some sort of way, and then use that as input into that next phase.

Mike Harris:

One thing in this refocus section, there’s one thing I really think… This is kind of the non-tech side of this for me, right, is that I hope businesses are taking stock of is some of the cultural aspects of this. If you had a strong culture going into this crisis, if you had… Simple things. Do your employees know the values of the company? Have you hired to the values of the company? Do we have performance metrics in place for our employees? Do we share these? Do we talk about that? How do we facilitate one-on-ones with our employees? Do we have one-on-ones with our employees?

Mike Harris:

A lot of these kind of cultural things are really, really… In my opinion became critical when this happened, because they tend to be things we kick the can down the road, we’ll deal with this later, we’ll put that in place later. But in my opinion companies that had these in place really, really did much better going through this crisis.

Mike Harris:

When you talk about working remotely, how do I work remotely and stay connected to my team if I don’t have methodologies in place for doing things like facilitating one-on-ones, et cetera?

Adam Deveraux:

Right. It’s survive versus thrive. There are organizations that survived during this time, and then there’s organizations that had little to no impact, or even thrived in it. To be honest, we’ve seen that.

Adam Deveraux:

I think I in many ways was surprised, or I think a lot of us were surprised at how quickly we were able to adapt to it, and this is part of a digitization of work, right? So not only because we’re an IT did we have a lot of digital aspects to what we do, so our remote engineers, our remote support, all of these other functions were able to just work pretty much exactly as they were from a work standpoint in the software and systems that enable that, but because we had made efforts over the last few years to really be intentional about developing our employee engagement platforms that were also software based digital that allowed us to continue that, and because of platforms like teams and collaboration and social engagement in many ways we I think realized that we could move to a different sort of remote mentality, and that’s opening the door for us, and we see that with other organizations as well.

Mike Harris:

Definitely. I a couple of cases we were getting questions from customers that were asking things like what kind of software can I put on somebody’s computer to know that they’re doing their job?

Adam Deveraux:

It’s not that simple.

Mike Harris:

We’re looking back to the customer… It’s like time out, time out. If you want to put something on somebody’s system to watch what they’re doing you have a whole different problem. All this is really doing is bringing to the surface a completely different problem than how do I watch my employees. I would argue-

Adam Deveraux:

Who was there before?

Mike Harris:

Yeah. I would argue how did you know they were doing their job when they were sitting at the desk?

Adam Deveraux:

Well, they punched in from 9:00 to 5:00 so they must be productive, right?

Mike Harris:

Exactly. For many leaders that I think have struggled making this transition, you can call it generational, you can call it digital transformation, call it whatever you want, this kind of discontinuity, this event really brought a lot of this to the surface, and I would say that’s good, not bad.

Mike Harris:

It’s an opportunity right now to figure out how to really address those. If you don’t have things like simple score cards, do you have numbers and things that people are watching, it’s like driving a car without gauges, right?

Adam Deveraux:

You have a way of knowing are your users, are your employees being productive? Are they getting done what they need to get done, especially for parents? I mean the reality is is that for those that have young children, over the past few months they’ve had to adapt to working when they were able to work in many cases.

Adam Deveraux:

In some industries it’s harder than others, but if you’re able to know that that employee is doing what they need to do and you’re getting the output that you need, then you can support that. But if it’s like no, you need to be available from this time till that time and everything has to be buttoned up in a certain way, it just wasn’t possible for some people.

Adam Deveraux:

So how do you shift to a mindset of more like here’s your responsibilities, here’s what I need from you, here’s how you can meet expectations, and here’s how you can excel, and can you metric that?

Mike Harris:

Absolutely. And metrics around things like are managers having one-on-ones every week with their people, those… In our company, that KPI role is up to our executive team, so we know if… And there was a time during the transition when all of a sudden we saw one-on-one engagement fall and so we addressed it immediately and we were able to bring it back up. That helps us make sure that our employees are doing the things they need to be doing, but they’re also getting the things they need during a time like this.

Mike Harris:

One of the major things here to take away from refocus is there is an opportunity to do a lot better for many of us as we’re refocusing and looking at this. I was chatting before the webinar down here with Becca and we were talking about what we learned from going remote with our kids and learning platforms and things like that.

Mike Harris:

In many cases for me, in my personal experience, was that the kids had what they needed from a technology perspective-

Adam Deveraux:

And the teachers too.

Mike Harris:

And the teachers too. But… And so they went remote, and we were able to kind of function, but it was very haphazard. We weren’t getting the necessary levels of performance. We were inconsistent in far as kids getting their work in. We couldn’t figure out where things were at.

Mike Harris:

Then when the school came together over spring break and got everyone aligned to do everything the same way, here’s how we’re going to report, here’s how we’re going to know if your assignments are turned in, this is what we’re going to do, all of a sudden it became much easier and we were able to be pretty successful.

Adam Deveraux:

So it was consistency of adoption?

Mike Harris:

You got it.

Adam Deveraux:

And having the platforms, but then everyone using them. So this falls under the category of like we saw… It was fascinating to me, because we saw where technical readiness was a thing, right, where some organizations were more readily able with the technical readiness to allow remote work, right?

Adam Deveraux:

For those that were predominantly in the cloud, already had remote access capabilities, it was just okay, do it. Others, you had to make changes, implement a remote desktop server, enable a bunch of people to use a VPN. But the reality was that that was fairly easy to correct, fairly straightforward. It was the business readiness that really was a differentiator, and those that had the platforms and the right systems in place where they could work in software and knew how to track their work on the digital platform side of things, that enabled them to be much more successful in our experience.

Mike Harris:

For sure. Simple things. Do our employees understand the values of the company? If they do, they’re likely to uphold those values, whether they’re inside your four walls or not.

Mike Harris:

Do we have structured one-on-ones and communication between managers? Do we know how to track that and assess it? All of these kind of… And scorecards. Do we have scorecards? So many businesses have no scorecards.

Adam Deveraux:

No business intelligence.

Mike Harris:

It doesn’t have to be complicated, but what are the super critical things that… You know, it’s your dashboard for the business, the super critical things that you need to have that allow you to understand whether or not things are functioning okay. You can’t… When you’re driving a car without a dashboard, yeah, it goes, but you don’t know how fast you’re going. You don’t know if you’re overheating. You just don’t know anything about it. You don’t know when you’re going to run out of gas, et cetera, et cetera.

Mike Harris:

Simple scorecards. Don’t over-complicate it. One for the executive team and one per department. Those simple little things and companies that have them and manage to them… Because I always tell everyone as soon as you start talking about a number it magically gets better.

Adam Deveraux:

And it influences behavior, right?

Mike Harris:

Absolutely.

Adam Deveraux:

And in for better or worse. Make sure you have the right metrics. And what’s interesting too is like if you look at an organization as like an organism, or using the car analogy, those metrics, those dashboards, they need to be based off from reliable intelligence.

Adam Deveraux:

This is where, again, if more of how you work is digital, is in software and tracked in software, then you can get true intelligence out of it, because you’re tracking the actual data output. If your metrics are based off from self-reporting it’s less reliable, just to be honest.

Adam Deveraux:

Do you want an odometer or speedometer that’s actually based on how fast the car is going or how fast somebody is telling you the car is going? So that’s… Again, were you able to get data that was accurate, that was updating quickly, that… Like you mentioned, we were able to make fairly quick corrections because we were actually seeing the actual data. It wasn’t based off of people reporting. It wasn’t this two week, four week lag behind when this came out.

Adam Deveraux:

It’s difficult, because every organization is different, but we’d rather track… It’s kind of like in medicine too, do you want to manage it based off of tests you can run and see what’s exactly going on or do you want to wait for the symptoms to kick in?

Mike Harris:

And this idea of kind of do we have cohesion, right? It really is… It all comes together with cohesion. Are we all moving in the same direction? Value the same stuff? Do we have the same metrics, objectives, et cetera, et cetera? It’s all about cohesion.

Mike Harris:

One thing, again, it’s… One thing I found interesting about this whole event is it’s the digital, the technology side of it, but it’s also the physical side of it and we’re dealing with both of these.

Mike Harris:

So one thing in this refocus conversation is also be rethinking your physical spaces. How does my physical space play into the interaction with my staff? Again, so many things have changed. The water cooler conversations, so many of these things have changed. Your meeting spaces, how we’re facilitating our kind of… These hybrid meetings. So many things are hybrid.

Adam Deveraux:

It’s kind of like marrying the virtual collaboration spaces with the physical collaboration spaces. How do we get an actual cohesive strategy that people understand and can use effectively, and keep reassessing that.

Adam Deveraux:

I think the question I have is how do you think organizations… What can they use to keep stock or to try to assess what’s been good, what’s been bad, where the gaps are.

Mike Harris:

Yeah. I’d recommend a SWOT. We uploaded another simple resource for you. Many of you probably know what a SWOT is, a strength, weakness, opportunity, threat assessment process. We’ve uploaded a simple little guide for you that you can download.

Adam Deveraux:

There’s a lot of other ones out there.

Mike Harris:

Yeah, there’s a lot, and this is nothing new. We didn’t invent this. Companies do them all the time. This is a simple thing. I can tell you that our executive team conducts a SWOT analysis at least annually. The important thing about this is it’s a great opportunity and it’s a great framework to actually kind of conduct this refocus process.

Mike Harris:

In there it’s just a simple worksheet that you can fill in, but more importantly there are some questions in front of it. There are some things to think about as you go through the process, just questions to ask to start to kind of reflect on-

Adam Deveraux:

Yeah. These are just example things to be thinking about, questions that we found to either be useful for ourselves or for industry in general. There’s a lot of other questions you should probably ask yourselves, and this is really a collaborative thing internally. You want to have stakeholders from different parts of the company represented in this process, and be honest with yourself, right?

Adam Deveraux:

The goal is to understand what changes did we make that we want to keep, what changes do we need to make, what do we need to… Can we shed that we used to do that maybe we don’t need to do anymore? Just understand the larger impact on the market that you’re in.

Adam Deveraux:

I mean the reality is is that I think we want to go to a new normal so quickly. People aren’t very comfortable with the fact that we’re in a very disruptive age. But if we look back at recent history, like this last century, the last four decades, have been a rapidly accelerating transformation of a lot of businesses, and there’s lots of examples that people have talked about before, like the adoption of the cellphone and the disruption of the land line industry.

Adam Deveraux:

If we look at video, this is continuing to accelerate. Not only is there a trend, this business trend that was already occurring, it’s been accelerated because the theaters have literally been closed. So we go from theaters having some troubles in the market and having to innovate and come up with new ways to get people to come into them, but now feature films are literally coming out on Netflix, right?

Adam Deveraux:

How fast did we go from buying DVDs… This always boggles my mind sometimes, where not that long ago we had those towers of DVDs and people would buy tons of DVDs. Now it’s like a DVD? What’s that? Why do I want to bother?

Adam Deveraux:

So that’s an example of an industry that went through a pretty rapid transformation, but I would argue almost every industry on the planet is going through some level of transformative curve from what can be enabled through digital platforms, whether that’s simply more efficiency, attracting a more diverse work pool from wider geographic areas, or an actual literal transformation to the way that you do things.

Adam Deveraux:

So it does seem like the organizations that were further down the path of mature adoption of platforms that enable them to embrace that transformation are already accelerating a win.

Mike Harris:

Yeah. So going through a SWOT process, it’s one kind of tactical, tangible exercise you can take your team through, but I would encourage you be honest when you go through that process. Really what were the things that you’re doing well? What did not go so well?

Mike Harris:

And think about your competitors. Think about what well for them. Did they gain ground or did you gain ground on them? How have my customers changed? We talked a lot about… And this is going to move us into the evolve section a little here soon, but how has their buying mentality changed?

Mike Harris:

I tell our sales team… I’ve been telling them for the last few months as soon as we started going through this process you need to understand that the buying criteria of our customer changed instantaneously. They’re focusing on different things. They’re thinking about different things, and it’s really important that we don’t try and take… I hear it said often… Business leaders want to figure out how to take the things they were doing before and get them working in this kind of changed reality, and that’s the wrong mindset.

Adam Deveraux:

Yeah, how do we get back to where we were?

Mike Harris:

Yeah. You can’t do that. You can’t do that. We need to kind of burn the ships and we need to go forward, so that SWOT process is a good one.

Mike Harris:

And one last thing to add about that, we always as an executive team talk about macro trends too. It’s not just… When we talked about some of the opportunities and threats, those external pieces that… You know, strengths and weaknesses are internal. Opportunities and threats are external.

Mike Harris:

We talk about macro trends, so we’re talking about economic trends. We’re talking about geopolitical. We’re talking about social and all these-

Adam Deveraux:

Financial.

Mike Harris:

Financial. What’s the financial outlook for the world and are we expecting this? Are we expecting that? Do we need to raise cash? Do we need to do this? Those things are important, because I believe that companies that were having those discussions also probably fared a bit better through this crisis because really we’ve seen this… I would argue that many of the things we’re seeing, economic, health, social, geopolitical, they’re not off trend from where they were before, they just took a gigantic leap forward.

Adam Deveraux:

This is a catalyzing event, right?

Mike Harris:

You got it.

Adam Deveraux:

It’s a selection pressure, right?

Mike Harris:

Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I would encourage you not to skip that part. But the output of that process feeds the input of kind of this discussion around how do we evolve. How do we move from surviving through this even to thriving on the other side of it?

Adam Deveraux:

Yep. And going back to… You had mentioned thinking about your competitors. Another thing you might want to think about is if I was starting a new company doing what we do or targeting our market would I do things differently? Where would you start from now?

Adam Deveraux:

So we mentioned essentially now you have this function, and there’s a lot of different business analysis tools you can use, gap analysis tools, but when we look at evolve it really just feeds right into that. The line gets a little blurry. We can easily walk over that.

Evolve

Adam Deveraux:

We talked about some of the things we want to talk about in evolve around kind of the history of the impact that computers and software are having on the world, it isn’t finished yet. It’s still in progress.

Adam Deveraux:

One thing that I think a lot of organizations had is they knew some of this stuff was down the road, but they had to focus on the immediate, right? So how strategic was the organization thinking and how much did they allow because it will help us in the future to actually be a strong decision weighing point now?

Adam Deveraux:

Not every organization is like well, three years down the road we’re going to be thankful that we made this change, we made this change to a cloud based phone system, or we changed the software platform that we’re using, or we made a change to cloud based file storage, but a lot of organizations were glad in a very short timeframe that they made those changes.

Mike Harris:

Absolutely. The events we’ve been through over the past several months… I said it several times within our organization, there was different ways to look at it. You could be kind of deer in the headlights, crisis mode-

Adam Deveraux:

Reacting.

Mike Harris:

… or you could look at it as opportunity. My argument is that if you look at it the right way this could… It presented a lot of opportunities. It presented leadership opportunities, and again this-

Adam Deveraux:

To make changes that maybe you were waiting on or you couldn’t make before. Yeah.

Mike Harris:

Absolutely. Did you make strong decisions? Did you communicate well with your team? That was a huge one.

Adam Deveraux:

That’s a big one.

Mike Harris:

One of the number one things that we got from our team was that we amped up our communication big time, our messaging and internal communication, to make sure that our team knew what we were doing, where the company was at, whether that’s financially, whether it’s strategically. We were communicating all the time. Transparency, 100% transparency. Here’s where we’re at. Here’s what we’re thinking about.

Adam Deveraux:

We’re in this together.

Mike Harris:

Yep. These all I think were opportunities. You can’t catch all the opportunities. You miss some of the opportunities. But when you look back on this, look at what were the opportunities and did you grab them or didn’t you grab them?

Mike Harris:

There is going to be a lot more opportunity coming out of this when we think about how to evolve our businesses. I really, really encourage you to… When it comes to thinking about your customers, it’s not important strategically to think about what you would do. It’s important to think about how is your customer… Put yourself in the mind of the customer, because I promise you that they’re making decisions differently now than they were before, and if you can figure out what that looks like you can grab hold of that opportunity and I think create a huge gap between you and your competition right now.

Adam Deveraux:

And user experience… I mean, again, accelerating things that are already happening. Just move to eCommerce, just move away from physical shopping. I think there are some shops out there that will thrive post this time period, but they’re going to have to figure out a new way to have a better experience for somebody coming into the store.

Adam Deveraux:

There’s lots of ways that consumer behavior has changed. It’s that evolving to the new reality. Again, the trend was moving in a certain direction. This was like a cold snap, but the weather is getting colder, right, or this was a hot spell and the weather is getting warmer. How do we evolve for that further change down the road that we’re going to have to be at?

Mike Harris:

Absolutely. So I would… I know we’re getting a little tight on time. I want to encourage you… We’re happy to contribute to that process for your team. So, again, if you go to worksighted.com/reboot there’s something up there called a power hour. For us, a power hour is just… It doesn’t cost you anything. It’s just time with some of our subject matter experts.

Mike Harris:

So go through your SWOT process, think about where you could have done better, what are the opportunities for us, et cetera, and there are some areas there that our team can likely help you with.

Mike Harris:

There’s the technology pieces, but there’s also the business pieces that we’re happy to share, as you can see, share the things that we’re doing. We’re happy to share our business decision making processes, HR policies and processes, engagement platforms and things we’re doing.

Mike Harris:

If we can help, we would love to do that. So go on there, do your SWOT, schedule a power hour, and I think our team would be really happy to support you in that process.

Adam Deveraux:

Yeah. This kind of gets to the heart of what we enjoy doing in a lot of ways. What here at Worksighted we’re about is the people that are using technology, not just the technology itself. That’s fun, that’s exciting too, but helping people to find new ways to use it, to transform how they work, to improve lives, that’s really at the heart of what we do here.

Mike Harris:

Absolutely. In my opinion, if you take away nothing else just take away the fact that through all of this there’s great opportunity. There is great opportunity. You’ve probably grabbed some it, you’ve missed some of it, but right now is the time to… Don’t be dogmatic about how you’re doing things. Nothing should be sacred. You should review everything. Everything should be on the table for change.

Mike Harris:

Change is difficult. Nobody likes change, but oftentimes… You can either be in control of this process or you can be along for the ride, and if you’re in control of it and you accept the fact that you need to make some changes, there’s a ton of opportunity to digitally transform your business, engage your workforce.

Mike Harris:

You think about things like hiring… I mean if you’re doing this right all of a sudden you’re hiring nationwide. You could be serving customers nationwide, because their buying decision and buying criteria has completely changed. They don’t feel the need to be next door to you.

Mike Harris:

There was a time when you would have had to have convinced them to do that. That’s gone. All of a sudden all these opportunities start to present themselves, so don’t be dogmatic. Look for the opportunities and those bright spots. So as a reminder, worksighted.com/reboot, you can download our reboot guide. It’s got all our policies… You know, the things we did practically speaking as we kind of physically returned to our offices.

Mike Harris:

SWOT… Go on there, download SWOT. It’s got some great questions to get you thinking. Don’t use it, use your own process, but I would encourage you to do kind of a after action review of how did your business fare through this, and be honest about that, and then lastly a power hour.

Mike Harris:

So the output from that, if there’s areas that we can help, we’re happy. We’d love to do it. We love to engage and help other businesses in any way we can.

Adam Deveraux:

Yeah, and there’s a couple different specific areas that we’ve called out regarding engagement, collaboration. You talked about communication. Having a communication platform in place is so essential for that. So we have a couple different categories, but if you just have a specific general area you’d like to talk about, we’d be happy to schedule that and discuss that as well.

Adam Deveraux:

So, again, go to the website, reach out. We are going to continue to have more webinars in the future on a variety of topics, some more technical than others, some more general and business focused than others, and you’re going to continue to see us talk about this side of the coin, really how do we use the platforms effective, how do we make sure we have the right software in place, the right platforms in place?

Adam Deveraux:

So I think with that we’re coming up on our questions. Or producer, Rebecca, here is behind the scenes and being our Q&A moderator. So do we have any questions Rebecca?

Rebecca Zaagman:

We have one that’s come in so far. In relation to the discussion with you on what struggles you’re facing, what questions you have, anything from technology to business leadership to culture.

Rebecca Zaagman:

The first one that’s come in was Mike, you did PT video update for your company. Did you find this to be helpful? If so, what kind of technology do people look at if they want to do the same?

Mike Harris:

Yeah. I adopted a policy of weekly video updates, and specifically I went for video because I wanted the whole team to see me, and if we’re not seeing each other in person I wanted to be able to get the messaging out just in a visual manner where they could see me.

Mike Harris:

I did that through Teams platform and Streamed. So I used Microsoft Stream. I just record the video literally on my phone or whatever I wanted to use, upload it to Microsoft Stream and then push it out through Microsoft Teams.

Mike Harris:

So that created… For me it was… That’s a new practice that I’m doing now forever, a weekly video message. You miss one here or there, but generally speaking routine video messaging.

Mike Harris:

We also moved our all hands meetings to live streams, so we do those as live streams. We try to have a lot of events that we’re doing through video platforms and things like that now.

Adam Deveraux:

And I think that video is going to continue to be more important for organization. Again, your customer base might be more broad. You need to have a more virtual presence, both internally in your organization, how do you enable that culture to exist in a virtual environment and how do you engage with your customers and the world at large in a more direct virtual way that gives you a higher engagement, and I think video is clearly… Whether we’re talking about training or whether we’re talking about like sales processes, there’s way that it can be hokey. Don’t get me wrong, not every idea around video is good, but things like that are great ways to stay connected with people.

Mike Harris:

Yeah. Great question. I’d recommend for any leader weekly video messaging, super easy way to stay in front of your team and it allows you to be transparent as well and just keep them updated on what’s going on.

Adam Deveraux:

Yeah. I would say, you know, it’s interesting, specifically in video too, like videoconferencing, different organizations seem to have a different level of adoption of it. There’s kind of like we use it when somebody externally invites us, we sometimes use it, and then there’s the we fully embrace it and we require it, or we strong encourage it.

Adam Deveraux:

Whether it’s internal communication or internal and external communication, I found… I was surprised by how much of a difference it kind of makes even. We’ve all used video conferencing and video meetings before, but to feel connected with people and to have a sort of presence with them and communication in a way that it definitely kept the relationships at a higher level through that process, whether it was with clients or with coworkers.

Mike Harris:

Definitely. Great question. Anything else Becca, or does that cover it?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Can you expand on the hybrid conference room tech you mentioned?

Adam Deveraux:

I think one of our next webinars will be on that very topic of some specific technologies. One is platform. Do you have a clear understanding and a universal platform for collaboration inside your organization?

Adam Deveraux:

If I’m going to conference with a coworker, do we both know exactly what it’s going to be and do we have the right tools in place? Teams was a massive enabler for us and a lot of our clients in that regard, and we move to Teams Communications, Teams video calls, audio calls, almost as like the default method of communication, like the predominant method of communication internally.

Adam Deveraux:

If I’m going to call a coworker or talk to a coworker we’ll just do a quick video call. It’s like all of a sudden you’re FaceTiming with everyone. When you’re in a business environment, it’s not annoying in that regard, like FaceTime calls can be, but really a way to reinforce those… But you have to start thinking about now if we now a platform, we decide on a platform, we’ve enabled everyone to use it, and if you’re in Office 365 I’d highly recommend that you look at Teams and adopt Teams, because it’s there and available for you now.

Adam Deveraux:

Two, then how do we tie our physical spaces into that in a way that’s effective and usable by our employees, and not only in like the two conference rooms, but how do we enable more spaces in our office for that and how do we enable people at their offices.

Adam Deveraux:

It can be as simple as just making sure everyone has a webcam and buy them a budget but decent quality USB headset. Those two things alone and getting them to your existing users where they are now can enable people to start being comfortable with that new reality much, much quicker.

Mike Harris:

Yeah. My suspicion is that the boardroom is dead. That’s my suspicion. So for us, you know, our executive team meeting is probably going to be one of… You know, as far as number of people in one room together… But even then we don’t know… I said it today. Our executive team meets Thursday mornings.

Mike Harris:

So we met this morning, and we all happened to be in the office, and literally I made the comment when I walked in, “Oh, we’re all here today.” You just don’t know, and that’s the point. So I suspect from a physical space perspective it’s going to be more small… Mid… You know, maybe four person… You know, you’re going to have one or two people that are going to want to pop into a conference room to join a team’s meeting or join whatever your platform is. You’re going to see a lot of that.

Adam Deveraux:

Yeah. We’re seeing that demand go way up. Smaller space-

Mike Harris:

Yeah, screen share capability, things like that.

Adam Deveraux:

And video that covers that whole space in a high quality way. We don’t want grainy, tiny video or like one person on their webcam and there’s four other people that the audio experience of just trying to use the builtin speaker and microphone, it might be good enough when you’re at home and you’re sitting in front of… Or I would argue it’s still not great. Just get a decent headset, you know. But when you’re in the office and you’re trying to share that resource it’s just really ineffective.

Adam Deveraux:

Another thing to consider is how do we maybe revamp some of the rooms that we have, or even partition off certain areas so that we can create… I think this is part of a larger trend as well, because I’ve had the opinion for a while that this whole open concept workspace that’s kind of been pushed… And there’s a lot of research backing us now, that it isn’t as effective as what people were saying it was going to be in many ways.

Adam Deveraux:

It impacted productivity as much as it enabled it, and that’s because people have collaborative workloads where they do need to collaborate with someone else. That doesn’t mean it’s always your co-bunkmate basically. But you also have cognitive workloads, where you need time to work on things, and now we’re seeing definitely a lot of remote collaborative… Again the people you need to collaborate with aren’t sitting next to you half the time, so how do we have more spaces in our building that enable people to quickly, effectively, easily collaborate?

Adam Deveraux:

So room systems, like Teams room systems, Zoom room systems, depending on which platform you have, there’s a lot of new options now that you can enable quick and easy use of those resources. Training is still important in that regard as well, but that’s something we’d love to help you with as well, is develop a strategy for your buildings to effectively allow your people to work just as efficiently, no matter where they are.

Mike Harris:

And I’ll add one thing to that, which is that I don’t think the… You know, there’s a lot of conversation around well now everyone is just going to work remotely and et cetera, et cetera. There’s a happy medium here.

Mike Harris:

Office space is not dead. It’s not. It’s getting retooled, retasked, rethought. But even those folks that are going to work from home mostly, they still need a place to come to. They still need… We’ve even seen it now where folks come into the office, they’ve been working from home a lot, and that is nice reprieve for them. They re-energize, because when they step into the space they get the colors, they get the values, they’ve got the artwork, they’ve got the cultural-

Adam Deveraux:

Connectiveness, right?

Mike Harris:

Right, cultural connectiveness, because they’re missing that in their home workspace. So it is kind of a… I think it’s a re-energizing thing for them.

Mike Harris:

Again, this goes back… In the beginning I talked about being intentional on your return and not just letting the pendulum swing in another direction.

Adam Deveraux:

Everybody is doing this or-

Mike Harris:

Yeah, or we need to go crazy with all our… That’s the only thing we’re worried about. What you do now has these longterm implications and you need to be intentional about what you’re doing.

Adam Deveraux:

Yeah. So I would say, going back to the question on hybrid, that I would define hybrid meaning that what we’re probably seeing is a lot of organizations needing to be flexible, to allow employees and their managers to figure out what’s right for them for what they need to do, and when and how they’re going to do that.

Adam Deveraux:

So enabling that is really what we mean from a hybrid standpoint, do we have the systems in place that enable workers and their managers and all employees to have more flexibility around what’s right for them at that time? Because we’ve done surveying internally. One of the social engagement things that a lot of… Like how has this affected you, is it working for you, all those things, and it was mixed. Even for me, I would say some workloads, working from home I can be as productive, but other ones it was a challenge.

Adam Deveraux:

I’ve got three boys, and just the household environment, with the workspaces that I had, I prefer to come into the office for some days and some things I needed to do. But we had some coworkers that were like I loved it. I get more done. I can think. I have time. I’m so productive. So enabling people to have that flexibility I think is the future.

Mike Harris:

Absolutely. You mentioned one thing in the survey. We didn’t mention that earlier, but if you haven’t surveyed your staff to see where they’re at in this process… We surveyed our staff before building what we call the reboot guide book, kind of our return to work plan, and we asked questions. When do you want to return to work? Because some people want to get back right away and others don’t. They want it to be… For various reasons. It could be for health reasons or-

Adam Deveraux:

Right. So people are really concerned still, and for good reasons. But a lot of other people are bottled up and ready. So it’s like how do you work with both and support them?

Mike Harris:

So ask those questions. And we also surveyed our customers, to ask them where they were at in their returning to work strategy, what were they concerned about, what was changing in their business, so that we could understand. So make sure you’re asking and not just assuming, because we definitely got some surprises back in that process.

Adam Deveraux:

Yeah. And there are simple tools out there like a lot of different online survey tools that are out there, SurveyMonkey and the rest, but if you have Office 365 or even with G Suite there’s built in form functions so that you can quickly survey people internally. It looks like we have a couple more questions?

Rebecca Zaagman:

What type of laptops should we be looking at investing in to support remote work?

Adam Deveraux:

Yeah. So I would say that with the latest generation of devices, when we look at 10th gen processors, modern GPUs, you can get very powerful laptops in very slim form factors. Look at like the new XPS line from Dell. Those are kind of a no compromise type laptop in my opinion.

Adam Deveraux:

It’s taken years for us to get to that point where we say no compromise laptop, but the reality is is you can drive three displays, you can get easy docking with Thunderbolt or USP based docking. I’d encourage to have docking and a docking standard across your office and allow people to have docks at home as well.

Adam Deveraux:

I would say that laptops… I would probably trend towards laptops. There are certain workloads or certain cases where a desktop still makes sense, but it’s less than what most people think. Even a lot of CAD users out there, depending on what industry you’re in, it’s still basic CAD in many cases. Not a lot of CAD users are necessarily doing simulations. There are those that are, and they need really, really powerful devices. A lot of other people can do their workload on a modern laptop with the right resources in place.

Adam Deveraux:

So getting to where you can just have a laptop, have a dock at the office, have a dock at home and be able to use it remotely wherever you are, have the same workspace, and then dock when you need to and now you’ve got your multiple monitors, you’ve got your wireless keyboard and mouse, and that also enables jump spaces.

Adam Deveraux:

So going back to that hybrid, are we going to where there’s less assigned cubicles? Is it an efficient use of our space? Where can we get space to turn into some of these collaboration rooms and partitions, and I would encourage people to look at some of the literally portable partitions and things that you can bring in, where it’s like a phone booth style, rooms where you can put three of them in and it’s like a little booth at the restaurant. You can have multiple people in them.

Adam Deveraux:

You may have to give up cubicle space. How do you reclaim it? Having jump stations and having docks and the ability for people to work from home or the office is one way to do that.

Mike Harris:

And it’s also smaller… A nice byproduct of it is less stuff at the desk, less mess, less… And it’s not somebody’s home, that they keep everything at. A byproduct is you tend to have a more organized, cleaner, sharper office space.

Adam Deveraux:

It kind of comes back to even trends on things like cloud based phone systems and all these other… Like do you really need a desk at somebody’s phone, or can you enable hot desking? These are conversations we’ve had before on other webinars.

Adam Deveraux:

I would rethink the technology platforms as well. We’re really focused on the software and all that, but rethink things like do we still need the phone system? Do we need a phone system? Do we need the server in the way that we did before? How can we just move away from that in a faster way that enables us to be more productive?

Mike Harris:

Any others Becca?

Rebecca Zaagman:

The last one, how do you feel about companies subsidizing employees’ home internet connection who work from home?

Mike Harris:

Is that one for me?

Adam Deveraux:

Yeah. That’s an interesting question. We deal with subsidy around cellphones, but home internet connections… I know if we’ve ever been in that situation before.

Mike Harris:

Yeah. I can only tell you what we do as a company, which is probably for now is a reflection I suppose. We don’t subsidize home internet connections. I think it’s a little different than a cellphone, et cetera, et cetera.

Mike Harris:

Because we do provide the offices, we do provide the office space, we’ve made the decision for now that we’re not subsidizing home internet connections because I think that starts to open a can of worms. Most people have a home internet connection. That’s something they already had. They didn’t need to go make upgrades, et cetera, et cetera, whereas on the office end, on the head end, we often have to actually amp up because now we actually have more traffic coming into the facility and into the office.

Mike Harris:

I guess it’s one of those things where I would look at it and I would… You always hope that everyone is reasonable and you have trade offs on things. The trade off, employees, you know, they have to pay for their own gas, and now they don’t have to drive to the office so much anymore, so they save a big expense there.

Adam Deveraux:

It comes down to cultural things sometimes too. There’s interesting dynamics around subsidy around some of these things. Even with cellphones, I would argue that it’s not as big of a deal anymore. It’s easier to assume nobody is really… Very, very few people have plans where minutes and texts come into play. It’s really more around data usage, and generally most people’s home internet connections have either no data cap, or it’s such a high data cap that it’s not really a factor.

Adam Deveraux:

But the other side of that is it creates kind of an interesting… I’ve seen in organizations where they have a subsidy around cellphones where some people have it and some people don’t, and the people that don’t then have this mindset of like well, I don’t get it, so I’m not going to put that on my phone or I’m not going to use it in this context.

Adam Deveraux:

It’s interesting, as you look at a lot of other organizations where it’s just not even a thing and users ask to put their email on their phone because they want it as a convenience to them. So it kind of depends on where you are at from a mindset standpoint. If you’re already subsidy heavy, I could see people requesting that, but you have to be careful, because if you start to go down that road, you know, you may have opened Pandora’s Box.

Mike Harris:

Yep. Exactly. One more?

Rebecca Zaagman:

One more just came in. Is there someone at Worksighted that I can talk to about doing live presentations such as high quality teams and the necessary lighting, microphones and equipment to set up a room to do that?

Adam Deveraux:

Yeah. Absolutely. We have a few different people here involved in our production efforts. We’re not necessarily a video production company, but our focus on the technology is to help enable other companies ultimately have a technology platform, high quality cameras and things like that, but also in a way that’s easy to use.

Adam Deveraux:

So that’s an ever evolving thing, but we definitely love to chat with you about that. It’s something that we’ve already done now. Webinars and that type of content is something that we’re getting a lot of questions on, doing training videos and things like that.

Mike Harris:

So yeah, if you’re a current customer contact your client success manager if you have one. If you’re not a current customer or if you don’t have a CSM you could request a power hour on worksighter.com/reboot, which I talked about earlier, and we will facilitate that right away and give you a hand with that, so definitely.

Adam Deveraux:

For sure.

Rebecca Zaagman:

That’s it for questions, and you guys it’s 12:30 on the dot, so-

Mike Harris:

Perfect. Worked out.

Adam Deveraux:

Well, thanks everyone for joining us. Thanks again for your time. Hopefully you found this interesting and useful for you and hopefully we’ll be talking to you again soon.

Mike Harris:

Thanks everyone.

Adam Deveraux:

We’ll see you next time.

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