Ep 40 - Corporate Culture Clash: Remote Work and Office Realities

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Ep 40 - Corporate Culture Clash: Remote Work and Office Realities Video and Podcast Transcript

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Dave Dougherty: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Enterprise of Minds. Everybody is here, Alex, Ruthi, and Dave. Alex, you're going to kick us off with today's topic.

Amazon's Return to Office Policy

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, talking about the future of work. So a couple of news items I've hit recently. One was Amazon pushing for all the way back in person. So killing off hybrid, remote, and all the rest.

I was looking at some of their numbers. What, 400, 000 corporate employees, you know, it's like 1. million total employees, but corporate employees about 400, 000. So those folks who may have gotten hired or the last couple of years, they now need to find an Amazon location to start showing up at, or they're done.

So that's a big of a shift.

Cost and Productivity Considerations

Alex Pokorny: So think about that from a, just a cost perspective. This is the thing that kind of got my mind working through this was, okay, you have so many studies out there that say work from home is more productive. You're in the office, you're getting a lot of interruptions. You're walking from meeting room to meeting room.

You're not just, you know, clicking to the next meeting and you're in it instead. You're. You know, actually have to get there on top of all the other kind of little things that happen within an office and the annoyances and issues of commutes, getting your coffee and your lunch and everything else. So some group at Amazon made a bet that they can disrupt that many people's lives.

Potentially lose a whole bunch of people who are going to quit now that they can't get to work that they're going to leave specialized talent thinking about, you know, usually it's 2 to 3 X a person's salary is their cost to even replace that person. It can be pretty really expensive to find somebody to replace somebody.

The more specialized, of course, the worst is higher up. It is worse. It is. I mean, it, it gets pretty tough. So we're going to shift that many people. Because of the equation that must work out, that productivity will increase. And Amazon being already a profitable company, they think that they can get even more.

Cultural and Relocation Challenges

Dave Dougherty: Didn't the CEO talk about how it's more of a culture focus? I didn't hear the news on that, but okay, the reports that I had heard was an interview with and it's Andy Jaffrey. Right? He was talking about how this is a cultural play and we think that you can work well in Amazon and build a better Amazon if we're all together.

Now the thing that comes to my mind immediately is are they providing relocation or is it you're done if you can't great question. I

Real Estate and Facility Costs

Alex Pokorny: Just think about it from a real estate side to have a lot of real estate that was unused probably for a period of time that they could have gotten rid of.

I mean, there's. It's not just purchasing a building. It's the maintenance cost of it. The janitorial cost of electrical. I mean, all the other kind of little elements and pieces to that staffing it the cafeteria that now must, you know, figure out how many employees are going to be there on a given day for how much food they're going to use.

I mean, all the rest of those kind of like little contracts and costs, right? They're continuous costs. I mean, that's just you keep the building open. You're going to need a security team. You're going to need an X whatever team to keep on doing all the little things I keep on doing. And that again, I cost worth it.

I mean, resurfacing a parking lot. How often do you want to really do that? I mean,

Dave Dougherty: do they have their like Amazon fresh grab and go surveillance system set up in their cafeteria?

Ruthi Corcoran: They do. It's great. I've been there. Fun fact. If you go to Seattle, you go downtown just by the big domes, which you can't go inside and tour anymore.

They apparently couldn't be pre COVID. I really wanted to go see the greenhouses and the domes, but you can't, you can just look from the outside like a plebeian. But A beautiful landscaping on the outside, too, even though you're downtown Seattle, but they have the sort of Amazon grabbing and go and your average Amazon customer can also use it.

You have to consent to your sort of face being scanned and things because it's part of the, you sort of walk in and walk out and it'll automatically charge you. It's very cool. And there's definitely a lot of Amazon badges using that, that particular little store. So fun fact. I don't know. I'm thinking about your comments.

I think you bring up a really good point, Alex, which is the all the little things that have associated monthly costs with them. So, it doesn't make sense for you to maintain those sorts of buildings, those sorts of facilities and amenities if you're going to do. Hybrid to some extent, because you also need the scale to make those affordable.

I think about some of the corporate cafeterias. It's really hard to maintain a corporate cafeteria that accommodates the variety that people want with a very small group of people and. With that balance, it's sort of a, and it can be a virtuous cycle of the more people you have, the better it gets or a vicious cycle because people go, Oh, you don't have cheese pizza out today.

Cause I'm the only one of the building who likes it. So I'm going to go elsewhere. I'm not going to buy from you. And so I think some of those. The monthly or the fixed costs make sense. If everybody is present, they start to make sense. No sense with hybrid. And so then if there's some productivity gains to be made by having people in office, and then you offset it by having some of these of scale facility costs, maybe that's part of the equation too.

Personal Experiences with Hybrid Work

Dave Dougherty: I don't know about you guys, but at least for me, my experiences post COVID going to work and being in person, for very long specific project based like workshops, it's wonderful because, you know, you get to reconnect with people you haven't seen or meet people that you've only met online. And, and it's intense, but it, it's really good, right?

Cause everybody has specifically set aside that time to work on that. On the other days when it's just a, Hey, come in, you know, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday are your anchor days. Like, you know, pick one and come in kind of thing. I was keenly aware of just like how much time was lost talking in the hallways.

Now, granted, I love connecting with my coworkers. I love, the idea exchange that happens with that. But also if you look at the to do list. None of the conversations that I had in the hallway actually moved the needle on any of the to do lists, right? So I know a ton of people who are coming in and they write off that one day that they come in to the office as the sort of networking brainstorming kind of days and then you do work the four other days that you're at home.

Does that sound familiar? A similar experience? Or where are you guys on that?

Ruthi Corcoran: I guess…

Alex Pokorny: Similar. I do, typically one day a week in the office. And on that day, if there are people to catch up with, I definitely try to spend time toward that because I use time while at home to kind of catch up on work. So that, that gets, that can happen.

The other piece about it is I've had projects over the years, I would say, definitely not like on a weekly basis, but over the course of years, absolutely, where somebody sees me and they run over and they're like, Hey, I totally forgot we're going to do this kind of project like this. Does that involve you and your team at all?

And the answer always is yeah, yeah, totally. Talking for like the last three months. But. Okay, you know, let's at least get on the same page today and we'll kind of keep moving things forward or somebody comes through and they're like, Hey, there's a weird idea. Somebody was talking about this. Is that something you're interested in or something that you've worked on or something?

And a lot of projects have kicked off that way too.

Networking and Isolation in Remote Work

Alex Pokorny: So there's an element of isolation that I've definitely noticed with remote where I meet. I mean, if you think about it from like a networking, think of like a spider web, I'm at the center and how many like little touch points of people that my, you know, interacting with on a given week, my spider web is tiny.

I mean, it's the same people over and over again. I bet it's 15 people on a frequent basis for a high frequency basis. Maybe 30 ish on a less frequent basis. Now, when I was in the office, I would have said like numbers like 50, like there's no way that it was like just a few people, because I ran into lots of people on a routine basis just to, I knew their name and they were in the same department or something like that.

So, I mean, there's at least some sort of contact there. Maybe it wasn't, you know, work related, you know, I'm on a project, we're in a meeting or something like that, but also like. The meetings I went to and the number of people and weird projects and stuff like that was way, way larger. So I've also found, I don't know if it's more frequent or not, or maybe it's just the situation that I'm in, current role, that kind of thing, that I have been running into projects that I've been on for some period of time, and then I find someone else has been doing the same one somewhere else in the company for some time too.

 And that, it frustrates me so much because it's like, It's just me randomly thinking like, Hey, maybe, maybe there's a person in sales who has tried something like this and I reached out to them and they were like, yeah, I've been working on this for like three months. I was like, Oh, same. Great.

Ruthi Corcoran: And how much more effective would you both have been on your projects?

Had you had a conversation three months ago or bumped into each other or?

Alex Pokorny: Would have been done like, oh my gosh, like, we're just starting now. It almost feels like we've restarted now. I mean, there was, I always had a joke at 3M that basically like, first month of any project was a joke because you kept meeting with the wrong people.

You know, set up a meeting and then be like, Oh, this. Is technically under my role, but actually this part of it isn't. So you need to be meeting with these people instead and be like, Oh, okay. And then you reschedule it and you finally meet with them. And they're like actually, no, we're, we're half the team.

You actually need to involve at least three other people from these other three groups. Cause you know, legal is involved here. And this is the person that needs to be involved for something. And then it's like, okay, then I'll finally meet again. And then finally at the end of the month, you finally meet with the right group and then the project finally kicks off.

Like it took a while because of just. Corporate, you know, matrix kind of style things where somebody's role is minutely kind of broken up into three other people's role and you met with the one person, not the other one or something like that. So getting through that movement. Still happens in person. So I want to say like just on a fairness aspect, like that still happened there as well.

Part of that I think was just basically based on organizational structure and titling and a bunch of other kind of elements like that too. So there's ways to kind of correct some of

Dave Dougherty: that is the interesting thing, especially you jump on LinkedIn and you look at people's titles at your competitive companies around whatever your company is in and all of a sudden you see like. Demand generation, integrated marketing, marketer, senior marketer. It's like. Aren't you all just doing the same thing like really honestly, you know, or God forbid you see these like digital ninjas and like, Oh my gosh,

it's a basketball league at this point. Apparently,

Ruthi Corcoran: a few thoughts on. Some of what you just described Alex about, you know, talking to the same 10 people where when we were a full time remote, you encounter 50 or so, just by having having them in the hallway.

I wonder if you guys have been doing the same have been working off of. The human capital that I've sort of, or the social capital that I've developed over the last, however many years. And so I have a network of people that I know that I've cultivated, that I've worked with or built relationships with over time.

And so the shift to remote, working on those big projects that are going to cross a bunch of teams. Hasn't been a huge issue because I already knew the people to reach out to. So, okay, I got to talk to this person. Like, the exposure was already there to know who I need to reach out to, to at least ask the question.

I. Wonder, especially in the companies that have shifted from in person to remote and therefore didn't have some of the cultures of the environments established to enable that in the remote space. If that has been much harder on new employees of large companies, whereas if you're in, if you're at a newer company, who's.

Been remote from the start. You have some of that built into your, your way of working, right? Because you've had to be remote the whole time. You've had to solve it. I think we're perhaps some of the issues come in our. Large companies going from in person to remote and not having some of the cultural foundations in place to enable that.

And it doesn't, like, as I think about, I'm throwing out this as sort of a. Idea. I don't know if it's correct. It could be total nonsense, but it doesn't surprise me that Amazon, for example, is one of the companies that saying, Hey, we're going to go back. And the reason I say that is because the turnover at Amazon I'm given to understand is quite high.

So they would have learned much more quickly than other companies. What the negative productivity gains are from not having those in person pieces, because they would have had the higher turnover. Whereas yeah. We work at companies where the turnover is much lower. And so it's going to take you a much longer time to see the productivity drop.

Communication and Management Issues

Dave Dougherty: That is an interesting point, because I do think, throughout the pandemic through today in the last five years, We've seen all those headlines of, keystroke monitors, or, mouse movement monitors that the companies are implementing and then, you know, so like, to your point about the culture piece, like straight away, your company doesn't trust you to be doing what you need to be doing.

Well, yeah, that is so much more company culture issue than it is. Particular manager issue.

Alex Pokorny: I have so many issues with that. I do too. I used to offshore, managing a couple of different offshore teams, writing, editing, data entry, a couple other ones kind of like that, software. And that was common that basically you had this screen monitoring software.

So you could check in anonymously, apparently into any of your workers and see exactly what's on their screen or mouse movement, tracking, or keystroke tracking, or whatever it is to basically employee tracking to try to prove that this person is working. And there was always, it was always really disappointing to me from the idea of, If you have, and a lot of these hires were project based hires, so it was a contract, like, write the one article, you get paid X number of dollars, that's the end of the contract and stuff.

 Like, it was that kind of turnaround thing, and so it was much more output based, and if you can't take your work and say, okay, this is the goal, and this is what we're working towards, and this is how we should work towards this goal, and break it down in a way that basically people know what they're supposed to be doing, and They're clear on that.

The communication is good on that. There's also communication back up when they have questions and concerns so that things get clarified quickly so they're able to keep moving instead of just stalling out and kind of waiting or, you know, guessing on something. There's so many issues with that. I mean that that is purely a managerial fail.

If you're down to that point, either you don't need the staff and they're sitting around waiting again managerial fail, or they're unclear on what's going on managerial fail. I mean, it's across the board. It's not on that if you have an employee who's faking it, and there's fraudulent stuff. Fine, that's a whole different kind of HR side of things that still does happen, but that's a really small percentage of the time.

Dave Dougherty: And that's always been a really small percentage of the time.

Cultural Adaptations and Tools

Ruthi Corcoran: I think some of the other cultural pieces to write that.

Is your organization much more email dependent? Are they more chat dependent? Does Slack work? Does it not? Do you have the actual tools or the subscription to the tools to be able to do the types of goal creation, exercises, workshopping, brainstorming, road mapping, if, You need people and probably said this on the show before you need the tools, but you also need people who know how to facilitate in those spaces.

And that's a, that's a skill set as well as their skill set. And there's culture, right? There's. How do people work? How do they seem to be working effectively? What sort of the natural ways in which they behave and operate together? What are the learned behaviors from working at your organization?

And then do you have the skill sets to be able to work in different, different situations, different formats? I mean, I remember for the longest time. It's working spot and it was so exciting when you found somebody with a mural license, because all you could do the whiteboarding you needed to be able to do in a remote setting, like if that's not part of your bread and butter, then all of a sudden switching or working hybrid is very difficult or all of a sudden, you know, you have whiteboard based meetings, but you've got this one employee who lives somewhere else who has to call in.

There's nothing worse than calling into a whiteboard based meeting, even if you have the camera set up because you don't have the capability of picking up the marker and walking. Yeah, to the to the board and adding your thoughts. There's something about the presence when you're there. And I think that's also part of the challenge.

And Dave, you mentioned this sort of anchor days. There's a reason people sort of do anchor days because the whole point of being there is to be around people. And so those are some of the other pieces I have with or I'm thinking about from the culture angle that are not undoable, but it's hard to shift, right?

Alex Pokorny: There's one other culture piece. It's kind of one of my other jokes of the company was that the, of a 60 minute meeting, the most important 10 minutes was the five minutes before the meeting and the last five minutes. It was the five minutes before the meeting where you're like standing in the hallway waiting for the last group to get out of there so you can get in or not everybody has shown up yet.

So you're just waiting around for the last few people to show up. That was the context. And that is so missing from so many of my meetings because it would be someone sits down and they're like they're looking rough and it's like what's going on like gosh I got this our VP whatever said we got to get this by the end of the month and you know that's five days from now so everybody's just scrambling and the rest of the team's like yeah we're all just trying to figure it out they're like okay all right let's get into this agenda and it's like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa no we're not You guys are stressed as heck.

You're not thinking about what we're doing here in person. You're not going to hit any kind of deadline or timeline that we've already discussed any kind of outputs or, you know to do is from anybody who's assigned from that team, they won't do them. I mean, let's be realistic. We, we already shot this thing in the foot.

So cancel this one. We'll meet again in two weeks and then we'll try to get this thing, off the ground again. Like. The context is so, so important or our budget just got slashed. Hey, so why are we talking about this campaign? Yeah, I guess we don't have to anymore. You know, that kind of stuff, where it's like, those kind of conversations just didn't happen.

Instead, people saw an agenda, and they talk about the agenda for 55 minutes or 60 minutes, and then that's just done. Last five minutes, I always said it was because There's the conversation in the last five minutes, right before you're leaving there, someone was like knocking on the meeting room door and everybody's scrambling to get out of there.

That's when suddenly it was like all the decisions got made. Okay, so who's actually going to be doing this? And then whoever actually gets in, that's like the last five minutes. Actually, it's like it all wraps up to those five minutes. But without that context. I've had some very bizarre situations occur where it was a misunderstanding from like a month and a half ago and it's cycled within this team and when they came back, they were just angry and it was just blew up and this has happened a couple of times now and each time it was, wait, what?

Oh, no, they didn't mean that. They meant this. And suddenly it all just disappeared. But you could tell like that was cycling or you get forwarded some of these chained emails where it's like, man, people got just crazy about stuff. Because there wasn't context and there wasn't consistent communication and there wasn't consistent contact between these teams that could have answered that question, dealt with it.

Change the direction we were going, whatever it was that had to be done, it could have been done a long time ago, but instead it just cycled within these small little pockets.

Ruthi Corcoran: And Alex, this is where that social capital comes in. Oh yeah.

Alex Pokorny: Someone reached out, typically it's like how does he? If you had somebody who

Ruthi Corcoran: knew the different teams, saw the dynamic and went, Oh, I know exactly what's going on, I'm going to mention it to these five people.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, exactly.

Ruthi Corcoran: And that it's ing that you bring, it's much harder.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. It's interesting that you bring this up 'cause as you were sort of pitching the idea for this show I was thinking of the need for over communication.

Balancing Flexibility and Productivity

Dave Dougherty: Yes. You know, because that is something that I've been running into lately where it's, people think they're communicating effectively either via email or project management ticket tool or whatever else. But then, you know it just gets totally lost because there's so much going on and trying to differentiate all the different things that are going on with those things is really, really hard.

For example, I was working with a marketer who recently submitted a tickets for like three different projects, but they were all done at the same time. And then it just became somebody else referenced to all the projects basically as one. So then it went on for a month and then it was, Hey, what's the status of this one?

Like, didn't we do that? I thought we did that. It's like, Oh no, we did the one thing for the one. We haven't even touched these other ones because we were referring, you know, all three of them as project, you know, B or whatever. And I had to go step by step through all the communications to be able to say, here's the status.

Here's what we still need. Here's what, You think we thought we knew, and it, yeah, but that, I mean, that was a half a day of trying to figure it out. And then once everybody, once it was explained to everybody, everybody was quite reasonable, which was wonderful and sort of unexpected. But Yeah, you definitely need to over communicate because just with people traveling or, not seeing each other all the time, you know, to your point, or like, you don't even know how you're going to sit in somebody's head rent free for something that you thought was a throwaway comment, but they latched onto and are just, you know, boiling about.

Ruthi Corcoran: I think the other your over communication comment reminded me of this as well, which is, I don't know if this annoyed you guys, if it maybe annoyed you, but then you latched onto it, or you were all just super nice about it, but once upon a time, we would be in calls or meetings and I would say laptops by exception, which meant you had to put your laptop away unless you had a really good reason.

Dave Dougherty: I love that.

Ruthi Corcoran: You can't, you cannot do laptops by exception in an online meeting, almost by definition. And so to your point about over communicating, I mean, half of the problems I think we see could have been dealt with if somebody had been paying attention in the meeting that they were invited to versus like sitting there waiting for their name and then having, Oh, that is just such a, again, it's one of those.

The one of those interactions that potentially can be solved with the right culture and with a culture that has evolved in a remote space, I think that's a very challenging one to try and solve for.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, the worst sort of modern faux pas for me is exactly that. You're sitting in a room and the presenter has said, you know, I have this slide in future to answer this particular question.

And then somebody looks up from their laptop and goes, have you thought about this? Because I really, and then they start this like seven minute long context thing for their question. And you're like, they said three slides to go and we will get there. Is, Oh my God. And of course, everybody's too nice to say anything where it's just like, okay, that was five minutes that we won't get back.

Thanks. One other one to throw out,

Alex Pokorny: Introverts and extroverts. So there was a point where I worked for a fully remote company but there kind of was that click that basically was all mostly hired from the same state in the U S and then there was a whole bunch of other people from other parts. And it was pretty clear that there was that group and everybody else.

And nobody really felt in with that group to the point where it was the basically anyone who's outside of that state would talk to each other on Slack. And there was like hardly any communication basically to that other group. It was so funny because small company, smallish, I don't know, 20, 30 people, something like that, but not big, but from a cultural standpoint, they had a ton of communication issues because those other pieces, whenever you had new employees, if you're not reaching out to them and they're just quiet.

Could be that they're introverted, could be that they're heads down on a project, could be that they have a lot of questions. But depending on the personality types that you have, either from the management layer or from the co worker standpoint, Who knows? I mean, just think about, let's, let's throw an introvert into that sort of situation.

There's not a whole lot of communication going to them or from them. There's kind of off on an island. And they're not necessarily going to be the one to reach out. Again, kind of that communication piece is like it's it's all over like not just from a little standpoint Not just from an individual standpoint leadership standpoint or something like that It is absolutely everybody has to communicate like crazy which is really hard for some groups and some individuals as well

Dave Dougherty: your spiderweb analogy Was interesting to me because it was like, yeah, you have to have the confidence to reach outside of those immediate contacts, right?

Cause those are safe, you know, or it's the, Oh, I should, I should talk to my, you know, skip level leader or whatever, but. I don't have to because I can easily just turn on Netflix and do Excel spreadsheet work

Alex Pokorny: or they stay kind of, they have a cool idea, but they don't reach out. Right? Or like, we're doing things this way.

 It's not the greatest way to do it. I do know a better way, but I don't feel confident enough to bring that suggestion up or there's an area of interest that they have. But they're going to just stick doing the safe work, the spreadsheet in front of them, even though they know that there's a better way to do things or a different thing or a thing that's about even.

I mean, again, that gets down to a managerial kind of thing there too, but there's a culture piece there and a communication piece there. And I think it gets a lot harder with remote because it's easier to ignore that people exist. I mean, from a management layer, you don't have to talk to your team.

There's nothing forcing you to do it. If you see them, yeah, they kind of do

Dave Dougherty: well that yeah, there's, I've had a number of conversations recently about certain people being in the wrong roles to suggest the right ideas. Right. Having that being an organizational issue, a culture issue, a manager issue, like it would be easy to say if we were all in person, it would be, you know, you have that conversation, you go, well, let's go talk to the leader.

Let's go do like that. It's easy to think that. But really, honestly, how often does that happen? Not very often.

So to your point, Ruthi, like setting up the right tools, making sure that you're actually thinking things through, like how do we actually solicit suggestions from everybody around the company around a particular thing? You know, like most suggestions, you're going to throw away 90 percent of them, but until you get a good one, you should at least be collecting, right.

And seeing what happens. Cause Yeah, it's not necessarily going to be the person who's in the role to think the right thing or, you know, unlock the missing piece.

All right.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

Dave Dougherty: So in summary, after we've thought all this stuff out, are you pro return to office, like the Amazon CEO and leadership team, or are you. Typical marketing workers that say it depends

Alex Pokorny: You got me Dave, because I'm choosing an option.

Because of the things that we've talked about. I think that's one of the struggles is that in person has not been figured out. For as many years as it's been going on, to be honest, there's problems with it all over the place. You can, it's, it's a joke because honestly, from probably the early 1900s to now, we've had office employees with the same complaints.

You know, poor leadership, bad hires, bad management, no goals, like hard to do work, not enough resources and budget. Like things don't change. Like there's a lot of the same issues, annoying coworkers. I mean, yeah, it's probably your spouse. You're stealing your lunch, not your coworker if you're at home, but you know, there's probably some similarities there, but.

Also, remote has also not been figured out. So some of the things that we've talked about here are also communication tools, the usage of those tools, the culture with those tools, the instances of where open communication can occur, and kind of the closed channels that we use the lack of networking and the lack of opportunities for those networks and the lack of kind of consistent contact with regular You know, your regular people, their employee, the post coworkers and close team members.

Like there's quite a few things that we've mentioned here that there are attempts to solve. But a lot of it is honestly up to that individual organizations to kind of figure that out. And maybe it's the next angel is a way that says. Hey, we do a weekly open brainstorming session just so that everybody talks.

Or maybe it's a new version of Slack that allows you to do more posted kind of stuff. So it's a Slack mural thing or something that hasn't been figured out. I think there is so much opportunity with that. I think that there is a possibility with that to work that I think it's still worth going down that route of remote teams find amazing talent, no matter where they happen to live.

Figure out the whole time zone difference thing, because I struggle with that too. I've got to work with a lot of teams that are on the opposite side of the world. Yeah, delayed because they have a question. I have given the answer. They give the question, give an answer. There's 12 hours difference at least.

We got to figure something out there too. I don't know what the solution that one, that one is either, but I think it's worth it to keep trying that to keep doing hybrid at least or remote. Ruthi?

Ruthi Corcoran: Selfishly, I will lean towards more in person hybrid. It's great. Love hybrid, especially. We didn't talk about it, but there is this flexibility aspect to right. We all have lives. You have to take your kid to the doctor's appointment. It's much easier to do that. If you're the rest of the day, you're working from home, right?

Some of the just logistics of being a parent. mean that being able to work from home when you need it is fantastic. So I would, you know, for sure, keep it like that's really helpful. If I could increase the average days spent in office with people by one or two days a week, I would do that.

Dave Dougherty: You're marking an idea based on what you said. I think it would be interesting to talk about Sort of flexible work styles based on where a person is in their life cycle, like doesn't make more sense for hybrid remote for new parents. And then you slowly. ramp them back into the real world over, you know, seven years.

Or what does that, what does that look like? Right. And also, and how does it align to your goals for what you want with your career? I think, if you want to be in the leadership spots, you're probably going to have to be in person more than online, depending on what type of company you work for.

You know, caveat, caveat, caveat. Personally, I like a mix. I like the freedom to do what I need to do. And, you know, to your point, Ruthi, go to doctor's appointments, go take care of school things for the kiddo. But then also have the freedom to get the stuff done that I need to get done. Right.

And that's what I think the keyboard trackers totally miss. Like if I know myself and I'm more productive. After dinner on a particular type of test, then I might leverage, non-traditional working hours to get something done because it just fits my working style better. And you can't account for that if you're only looking at traditional, eight to five.

So I guess undecided long story long,

but anyway, as usual, thanks for being here. Thanks for listening. Drop us a line. You have the email in the episode description transcripts and useful links can be found on the show page which will be linked in the description as well, like comment, subscribe, share all that, all that good stuff.

And Let us know any ideas that you might have on this, any strong feelings or positive thoughts whatever you got, send it our way and we will see you in the next episode.

Thanks.