#26 - Sotos Poulimenos - The Future of Work - Navigating "Hybrid-First" as Grown Ups

Sotos Poulimnos is a Director at Sun Life, and an expert in global talent management, learning, and transformation.

This episode is perfect for leaders and anyone interested in understanding how workplace culture is shaped by people and their sense of belonging, rather than physical office spaces.

During our interview, Sotos discusses the rise of hybrid work models, the impact of the pandemic on work-life balance, and the dangers of strict return-to-office mandates. He shares insights on the benefits of remote work, employee incentives that can attract and retain high performers, and the influence of corporate giants.

About Sotos Poulimnos

Sotos Poulimnos is a passionate talent management professional with rich cross-industry experience and a track record for leading complex transformations. As a Talent Transformation Leader, Lifelong Learning Architect, and DE&I Advocate, Sotos excels in full project lifecycle management, stakeholder engagement, and team coaching. He is deeply invested in the intersection of learning, leadership, and the bottom line, helping organizations lead significant transformations in their work, workforce, and workplace.

Find Sotos Poulimnos on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sotospoulimenos/

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About Your Host

Hi, I'm Shelley Doyle, a Social Wealth Strategist and Connection Coach, helping remote and hybrid leaders who are struggling to retain their high performers, with tools and strategies to reconnect their distributed teams.

I also help people who move or work remotely, to elevate and sustain their social wealth, online/offline - everywhere! Discover More

I am currently working on my MA thesis, combining cutting edge research on social wellbeing and digital health, with two decades in corporate communications, to deliver mind-shifting talks, workshops, and programs around the world.

Find me at TheCommuniverse.com and on LinkedIn.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

The office cannot be, and never was, a driver of culture. It never was the driver of culture. The physical space was never the driver for culture. Right, it's the people that make the culture. It's how you feel the sense of belongingness. Now, how does that play out after COVID? Well, we demonstrated very clearly for three years that we don't have to be in the office to perform. Why are you telling me to come back to the office? For what? To do what? Because it's good for our culture. Guess what's going to happen if you bring people by force under the threat of punishment or missing a know, missing a promotion or, you know, decreasing your pay. Guess what's going to happen to the culture of your company in this same office where you're bringing people to.

Speaker 2: 0:55

Resentment, discontent.

Speaker 1: 0:57

I don't think it's going to go well.

Speaker 2: 0:59

Hello and welcome to Rediscovering Connection. My name's Shelley and today I'm with Sotos Poulimnos. Oh goodness.

Speaker 1: 1:09

Go again, it's easy.

Speaker 2: 1:13

Sotos Poulimnos Perfect, okay, great Been practicing that one. Who is here representing himself but is also the director of a global insurance company called Sun Life, which is kind of one of the more future looking organizations out there. They're leaning towards a hybrid first model, which we will go into. What hybrid first actually means, maybe how this is different from traditional hybrid, how this is different from remote work, and then the office based environments. Sotos and I caught up a couple of weeks back and delving into his work. I'm really curious about this for my master's thesis, which I'm currently doing at Royal Roads University, and I really just felt like we needed a chance to go deeper, so I'm really thrilled to have Sotos here here also as a. Would you still call yourself an expat or would you call yourself an immigrant?

Speaker 1: 2:09

I don't know something. I don't know, maybe both. You know, I'm not an expat in the in the sense of, you know, I wasn't working at a company and then that company sent me to work for them somewhere else. So you know, I just left my home country, greece, and went for my studies to the US and then found myself in Canada.

Speaker 2: 2:29

So yeah, Well, we will unpack this journey a little bit, because I think that's why we connected really nicely when we did. I seem to really resonate with people who have traveled a lot, lived in a lot of different places. We seem to speak the same language, so thrilled to have you here, sotos. So, first off, why don't we talk about how your experience of the workplace has changed pre-pandemic and then going into the now?

Speaker 1: 3:01

There's so many things that happened in such a short time frame that it was a bit of a shock for all of us, right as humanity, as people. You know, our collective psychology, our organizational psychology, was impacted. Nobody could say that. You know, the before and after covid are the same. I think one of the big differences is it has to do with with the fact that we were exposed to very, a very different reality that made made us reconsider certain certain not just about work and the workplace, but also about life. So these two are interconnected.

Speaker 1: 3:52

Work is part of what you do when you live, unless you're very lucky and you never have to work.

Speaker 1: 4:00

So I would say that people have started to look at especially the younger members of the workforce long work hours as a badge of honor, Valuing well-being and mental health and physical health a bit more than a certain amount of money and in terms of expectations from the workplace.

Speaker 1: 4:45

We knew from before that, as generations change and the information becomes more democratized, people have access to free learning everywhere and they can learn just by Googling something or going on YouTube or TikTok or any of these platforms to learn things. People have started to put more value and have certain expectations when it comes to their own development at work. So we don't see the traditional loyal employee that you would see, you know, in our, in my parents generation, where you know they would start and would stay for 25, 30 years with the same employer and the employer is going to take care of me, right? For a couple of reasons. Number one the economy is very different now than what it was then. You cannot afford a house, a cottage and a boat on your dad's salary with your mom and two siblings. That doesn't happen anymore. So people are naturally chasing after money. So it's more likely for them to jump. One of the factors that change that that can change that is development and learning at work, along with a host of other things.

Speaker 2: 6:31

But that's one of the things that we definitely see a trend with regards to people that are either entering the workforce or people that are leaving a certain company for a different one, for sure. But one thing that does come to mind for me when I was entering the workforce and I was in PR agencies in London. They say that now people don't go to work on a Friday, but for me back then, as a young 20 something, fridays were like the best day to be in the office. It was like drinks trolley came out at 4 pm. It was like let's get ready for the weekend. It's like have we lost that?

Speaker 1: 7:04

we can. We can still have that. I think that now we have to be a bit more strategic about when we're having these things happen in the workplace. So more of an approach that has to to do with the milestones or the important times that you need to get together, that you need to go to the office and throw that party, have that strategy session and then have a nice lunch or dinner.

Speaker 1: 7:40

Things like that, I think, are increasingly becoming important and, frankly, I see many companies that are imposing strict mandates around return to office three days, four days, five days in the office, and there's research again and again and again and again showing that if you do that, you're gonna lose people, and the people you're gonna lose are your high performers, because high performers know they can do their job anywhere and they know, because exactly they're high performers, that if they need to be in the office to perform, they'll go to the office. If they don't, why would they just to sit in front of a screen or to be interrupted by everybody around? Because you know they want to chit chat or just sit at your desk with your headset on, like noise cancelling right, and nobody talked to me. What's the point of that?

Speaker 2: 8:39

right. So when people come to the office, we need to create meaningful in-person experiences so they can connect with each other and not just be in back-to-back meetings that they could have just been in their home office for.

Speaker 1: 8:56

To a certain extent, yes. So make it a meaningful experience. Make the office a hub for collaboration, for creativity, for innovation, for celebration. The office cannot be, and never was, a driver of culture. It never was the driver of culture. The physical space was never the driver for culture. Right, it's the people that make the culture. It's how you feel the sense of belongingness. Now, how does that play out after COVID? Well, we demonstrated very clearly for three years that we don't have to be in the office to perform. Why are you telling me to come back to the office? For what? To do what? Because it's good for our culture. Guess what's going to happen if you bring people by force under the threat of punishment or missing a promotion or decreasing your pay. Guess what's going to happen to the culture of your company in this same office where you're bringing people to.

Speaker 2: 10:01

Resentment, discontent.

Speaker 1: 10:04

I don't think it's going to go well and that's it.

Speaker 2: 10:07

Certain teams, like I know when we spoke before and you said the sales team do tend to come in together quite frequently like they, maybe they they really thrive off the energy of each other and that's kind of just natural. That team has chosen that they want to be more present in the office. But I imagine there's other teams of people who are much more likely to just get in, get the job done and actually their need for the office is very low. I guess a question that's coming up for me is remote first Companies, so they actually don't have the office base at all. What do you think about the difference between that way of doing things and actually having an office? So there's an option there for employees.

Speaker 1: 10:55

If it was a discussion around personal preferences. I prefer to have an office and the option to go to it when I feel that I need to go to it. But I don't that I don't have to go to it because I just need to show my face and punch my card to say that I, that I went to the office, right, so I, I want to have a physical office, the option for a physical office Also. It's a good thing. You change your environment. Not all of us are lucky to have, you know, their own office at home and and isolated like. Not not all of us have that. I don't have that, so I like it.

Speaker 1: 11:35

Today I'm in the office. I came to the office because I had a couple of meetings that you know. I talked to the people and I was like I was like do you, do you want to come to the office for that, or were you planning to go to the office? And we were saying you know what? That's actually a good opportunity. Let's go to the office, let's meet, let's grab lunch together, right? You see how different the interaction is there. How you add meaning to it and weight, special weight to the interaction, it becomes something more than just we're getting on a Zoom call, for example. We can do that right, but why don't we grab lunch, so we can have the meeting in person and then grab lunch together and we can laugh and drink something right.

Speaker 1: 12:19

So it's very different. I've never worked for a company that was remote, only granted before COVID. I don't know many companies that were. There were some, but not many. As you mentioned. There are certain teams, again, not just at my company.

Speaker 1: 12:44

In general, this is such a. It's a very personal matter. You know your team better than anyone else. You know whether your team prefers to be in person or not. You know whether the function that your team performs needs to happen in person at the office or not.

Speaker 1: 13:01

If there's a question mark there, this is your opportunity to question a little bit the status quo and say do I really need to bring them into the office three days a week? What if the entire team is distributed across different offices? Does this mean that each person needs to go as a unit, single unit, in the office even though they're in different offices, because I've seen that? Or does Shelly need to go to the office when in downtown Toronto, when her leader is in the United States? So, regardless of whether they're in the office or not, they're not going to see each other physically. What function are we serving by bringing people in the office? And these are not easy. I don't have the answers to all these things, but what I do know is that, as an adult professional, I know when it makes sense to come in and when it doesn't. I know what I can do from home and what I should be doing at the office.

Speaker 1: 14:15

And another thing is productivity when working from home. There were, like certain researchers that came out early after you know, the big covid waves right went away and companies were starting to talk about return to office. There were some researchers that came out that were talking about oh, when you're at home, you're less productive. A lot of these companies clearly demonstrated ties. There was a conflict of interest, let's say, between who was pushing for these research papers to come out. This is public information. I'm not calling anyone out specifically, but you can look it up.

Speaker 1: 15:02

And it was really weird because you would hear these things. You would hear that, oh, this research came out and said that people working from home are less productive. And I was thinking to myself. I was thinking well, when I'm working from home, a, I'm less tired in the morning because I don't have to wake up two hours earlier to drive or to take the subway. Right, I spend less money because I can cook at home. I can eat something at home, and not only that. But I most likely won't close my laptop at 4.30 or 5 and say, okay, I'm done and done, I'm not touching it again. What usually happens is I pause, I'll make something to eat, I'll go back, I'll take a walk with my dog for 20 minutes, I'll come back. And these are the recharge interims that help you keep going.

Speaker 1: 15:59

Interim's that help you keep going, and this is why I find myself sitting with my laptop on my couch watching TV, responding to emails at seven, eight. If I were in the office, I, having woken up at 6.30 am, come to the office by 8, 8.30, then leave the office by 5, traffic, et cetera, et cetera, get back home at 7. How many hours of productivity have I lost there that I?

Speaker 2: 16:35

would otherwise. And then you're done Like there's no time. And then I'm done. I'm not like once.

Speaker 1: 16:39

I shut my laptop at work and I'm in the car. That's it. I'm done Like it's not opening it, like it's not turning on again, right? So these are things that and again these are. There's always kind of we need to think about the context here in every situation. I'm not saying there's like one blanket solution for everyone.

Speaker 2: 17:04

What I'm saying is that we need to consider these opportunities to tailor the employee experience depending on who the employee is every newspaper article as factually correct and bring all of your employees back into the office, because you've seen one stat that says about productivity and maybe looking at your, looking at your organization, and how productivity has has shifted a lot of it is, you know, like monkey.

Speaker 1: 17:37

See monkey do so. If, if the alpha monkey, the googles of the world or the microsoft of the world or you know whatever, depending on the industry come out, amazon, and say we're mandating people back to the office because that's the most productive thing, people won't even ask, won't even question it. That's the alpha monkey doing something. You're just gonna follow because they know something. Well, guess what. Going to follow because they know something. Well, guess what? Most of the time they know something, but it's not what you think. It is right. There's so many different things. There's so many different. As I said, there's a lot of money to be made by maintaining the status quo and there's a lot of money to be made by challenging it.

Speaker 1: 18:25

It's just different types of money, I think.

Speaker 2: 18:30

I was surprised that Elon Musk was in the camp of bringing people back. I don't know why that surprised me, but it did.

Speaker 1: 18:38

Yeah Well, I think that he has a very interesting leadership style. Um, do I agree with elon musk's leadership leadership style? Not necessarily, but then who cares, right? Um, all I'm saying is elon, if you're watching this.

Speaker 2: 19:02

We all love you.

Speaker 1: 19:04

I don't love you, elon, but but it's OK, and you don't need to love me either. Maybe if we get to know each other, the what I was going to say is, again, it all, it all has to do with the decision maker. Right? If the decision maker has their mindset on a certain way there's two there's not many things you can do to change their opinion on the matter.

Speaker 2: 19:30

If someone is used to working in an office with all their employees like looking at the bullpen and having them all there, and that has been their way of working for the past 15, 20, 25 years, and that's how they were successful, because they were controlling and commanding like this guess what they're gonna they're gonna want to have to go back to yeah, no, that's really evocative actually, because I know like when I deliver workshops in person and I have a circle of people around me and I'm delivering for like 90 minutes, I leave that workshop feeling, feeling elevated, really feeling the energy. So I can almost empathize with the experience of wow, yeah, not having the people that you have worked up your corporate ladder to um to to work with.

Speaker 1: 20:31

Yeah, that's, I hadn't really felt that but surely this conversation you see, this is a great comment that you're making. Here's the big difference working every day at the office has nothing to do with your experience when you're going into a finite workshop. These are two different things. Nothing can replace in-person interaction, nothing can. Nothing can replace in-person learning, nothing. We're not saying this should not happen. We're just saying that now we need to be smart around when this is happening. We need to have a purpose, right.

Speaker 1: 21:16

If you have a workshop yeah, don't do it virtually, depending on the type of workshop, to be honest. Yeah, don't do it virtually, depending on the type of workshop, to be honest, but more likely than not, you'll get more value out of bringing these people together. It's similar to the thing, it's similar to, you know, before COVID, when we were doing these big in-person events, learning events, right, and you would bring 100 people and you would say this is a great training with 100 people. It's not. This is a great training with a hundred people. It's not. It's not a great training with a hundred people. And also, they didn't need to be in person to do this training this 100 people, right. It's a different thing to bring 10 people, 15 people, up to 20, let's say, together to reflect, to mentor each other, to learn from each other, to try things out there tangibly and fail together. And a different thing to create a town hall and bring everyone in just to say that this is an in-person event.

Speaker 1: 22:17

Right, there are so many variables that that we need to consider and a lot of them have implications behavioral implications, learning implications, psychological implications on the participants that we tend to not really think about. Because why? Because this is how it's always been done, that's how we did it before COVID, so that's how we're going to do it after, how it's always been done. That's how we did it before COVID, so that's how we're going to do it after. There's a very, very important moderator there between the before and after, and that's the three years of COVID that really taught us many, many things about ourselves the way we operate, the way we can run a business, the way we learn, the way we raise our children right. So many things.

Speaker 2: 23:06

One of the really beautiful initiatives that you shared with me when we initially spoke was this new opportunity for employees to work from anywhere for a month. Is it a month a year, or is it just a one-off?

Speaker 1: 23:24

yeah, many companies are are offering similar um, similar um, let's say benefits, because that's what it really is, um, it's a really good benefit. I won't lie to you. Today I was talking to someone from a different company, um, the other week I was talking about it with someone from the UK actually and they were telling me their company allows that as well. So I see more and more companies providing that kind of benefit the work from everywhere benefit. For, you know, as long as you have the appropriate work permits, right, and as long as you're going in a country where your organization, um, doesn't consider a risk, right, so, for example, a war zone, okay, you're not, probably not, allowed to work from a war zone, um, or you cannot really go, for example, as a european citizen. You cannot really go, for example, as a European citizen. You cannot just go to the US and work from there if you don't have a work permit.

Speaker 2: 24:26

Right, okay, yeah.

Speaker 1: 24:28

So there are some limitations and depending on the legislation you know, tax mandates of each country, some countries are 20 days a year work days a year, some are 10, some are 15, some are five right Depends on the country and their own kind of legislation and tax system. But it is something that it helped me a lot personally when I needed to take because I didn't use it to necessarily vacation and work from my home country, greece. I went there during the winter because there was a family emergency and I was going to take a leave of absence and essentially not get paid during my absence, and my leader came to me and said listen, did you know that? We have? This policy was new. You can actually work from there. If you have the appropriate, you know work permits, which I do. You can just go and work from there. We'll figure out how you're going to be working, what hours you're going to be working. It's going to be working. What hours you're going to be working. It's going to be core.

Speaker 2: 25:45

Canada hours. It's going to be how, however, you know that would be working yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 25:48

So, but you know what? We made it work and it worked beautifully and I got to spend time with uh, with those family members that otherwise I wouldn't have, um, and that was all thanks to this policy and so you hadn't heard about the policy before you suggested is is that policy now something where that, that Sun Life is promoting, or is it more a?

Speaker 2: 26:12

as people hear about it, then they might start asking to take it up there was.

Speaker 1: 26:17

There was a promotion period that apparently I missed out on, like I didn't see that not reading all your internal comms?

Speaker 2: 26:25

yeah, um, so um I used to be in internal comms, so it was it was it was promoted internally.

Speaker 1: 26:34

But yeah, it was, it was somewhere. So I think benefits like that kind of spread like wildfire after a few people that are the formal or informal leaders in the organization have used them and are happy with them. Similar to learning programs and you see a list of learning programs. Like which one should I go to? Oh, you know, shelly told me this one is really good. I really trust shelly, I'm gonna go to that one similar with that. So I talked to people about my experience doing that and guess what, like a bunch of people, because I talked about it, went and did it amazing, and I bet they really thanked you for that as well well, they thanked the company yes because I didn't make the policy um.

Speaker 2: 27:21

So social well-being is an area that I'm particularly interested in and that's really what I'm delving into in my thesis, and I do wonder, like anecdotally personally, has the shift like during and post pandemic had had much bearing on your social well-being? Like are your social needs? Was the work environment kind of satisfying a lot of your social needs or have you managed to find a balance, kind of outside work and being in the office enough to satisfy that?

Speaker 1: 28:01

Well, that's a great question. I I can't really tell. I'll tell you what. Before before covid, I was working in consulting. I was a traveling consultant. So every week I would, from monday through thursday or sometimes friday, I would be wherever the client was. I I would get on a plane, go there, live at a hotel. So I wasn't really at my company's office with my colleagues. I was wherever the client was three months here, six months there, four months the other place, a year somewhere else, year somewhere else. So I didn't really crave. You know the traditional let me go to my desk thing, because I didn't really have it for a long time and I thrived not having it. So I don't know if that answers, partially at least, the question for me personally, I don't think it changed.

Speaker 1: 29:07

I did miss seeing people during COVID. Everybody did. Even if you're the most introverted person, you miss seeing people. You need to talk to someone else. You have your partner at home and your kids and your dog and that's all you see all day because you have to work from the kitchen table, right? So you want to see people. Did that necessarily change the way I think, the way I feel about socializing and the way I socialize, not really. I think it actually reinforced my, my, my preferences with regards to that because, then I got to bring like I love hosting people right during COVID.

Speaker 1: 29:48

We couldn't do that. Now I got back to doing that and I'm I'm thinking you know that's great, like I missed that. I love doing that again. So it was more, more like that for me.

Speaker 2: 30:03

So it was more like that for me. Okay, so last real topic that I would love to run by you is emerging technology, and you know there's a lot of debates over which way it's all going at the moment. I like to think of everything happening for the good of society, so I really try and keep my mind on the positive. Do you think that we can embrace emerging technology to enhance, enhance connection, enhance, um the way that we work with our teams, whether it's in person, remotely? Do you think, do you think we, do you think technology can help us?

Speaker 1: 30:49

are we talking about ai or, in general, technology?

Speaker 2: 30:53

and the metaverse as well. The metaverse is something that I've been really interested in, like pre-ai. It kind of took a back seat as soon as ai took off, um, but the metaverse is certainly an area that I see us spending more time like. I was reading an article yesterday and it was saying how, just walking around the, the old office, the office of the old days, when you had your own desks and you'd have like a picture of your partner or your dog and as people walk by, or you might have a picture with a soccer jersey on it and people walk by and know that, oh, you support that team and like starting to be able to paint a picture of you based on your desk.

Speaker 2: 31:30

And it just got me thinking about, well, when we're, when we all have our offices in the metaverse, then we could totally like make it ourselves and make it so people can walk up and, um, I'm uh, I'm very connected with a company called so work and they, they're currently doing this. Um, it currently um it looks very gamey. It doesn't look like this beautiful aesthetic office that I have in my mind Imagine. It does feel a lot more lifelike. So I don't think we're there yet in terms of technology, but I think it's coming.

Speaker 1: 32:13

I have conflicting thoughts about, specifically, the metaverse. We know that Meta or Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg who, mark, if you're listening to us, I don't particularly like you either, but we can meet each other and maybe this will change. What I was going to say is we know that they spend a lot of money and effort and brains and blood, sweat and tears in creating something that didn't necessarily have the roi that we're expecting, so that's not. That should not be the only indicator of where these things are going, because sometimes society is not ready or technology is not there yet.

Speaker 1: 33:05

I do think that it could replace, potentially, part of how we do our job, similar to how zoom replaced us getting in person but it will never replace and I will go on record saying that it will never replace the real life experience that you have with people, and even if we feel that momentarily it replaces that, in the long term we'll see things that start popping up because you're lacking, start popping up because you're lacking. You're lacking this tactile experience of touching the nice couch in your office or hugging a colleague, or smelling someone's perfume, or going to the cafeteria and eating together. You're missing out on these things and these are core behavioral. You know know, these are like schemata that we have in our in our brains, around how, how the world works. Our brains are not evolved to be in front of a screen the whole day, and that's why we talked about covid fatigue and Zoom fatigue. Right, because our brains are not there yet. Our brains are more this in person, not what we're doing now on Zoom. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2: 34:32

Totally yes. Yes, and kind of that's delving into kind of digital wellbeing. And I wonder if you found any practices yourself so that you're not when you're working from home, so you're not staring at a screen from the moment you start work to the moment you kind of put your laptop down. Do you have any practices where you're like, ok, I can read this offline, I can plan this offline. Do you put any kind of digital boundaries on yourself for your the health of your eyes, if nothing else?

Speaker 1: 35:04

boundaries on yourself for your the health of your eyes, if nothing else, well that's. That's a tough one, because, no matter whether you're, you know you can be at the office, you can be at home, you can be in your car or on the beach, as long as you're working. You have to work with a screen most of the time. Right 90 of the time there's going to be these meetings that you don't need a laptop, but even in these meetings you'll have your laptop in front of you taking notes or finding something, so you're going to be looking at the screen. So that's why it's a tricky one. What I do is like an exercise that someone taught me from my previous job when COVID started and we started to work from home my previous job when COVID started and we started to work from home, and they taught me to focus somewhere outside of my immediate environment. So look at the window. It doesn't need to be beautiful. It can be literally an ugly building across the street. Just focus on one tiny detail of this building, for example, and spend about a minute or two just looking at that and thinking about that particular, one particular window. That's very dirty and I can see it from here, and there's a curtain that's half hanging there. How can it be inside the house, the apartment, who lives there? What does it smell? So you think about it, you get yourself out of the, the environment for a minute or two and then you come back. So you've done two things you've given your, your brain, a break by thinking something completely different. Creative. You, you wonder right. And your eyes, because from the near focus on the screen, the crystals on the screen, you're focusing on a real life thing that exists right there. So it has helped me a lot.

Speaker 1: 37:00

I'm lucky enough to have a. We are relatively low in the condo that we live, we're like on the fourth floor. So the trees, the surrounding trees, we can see them from our windows and you know we have squirrels and we have little birds and all that. So that's what I do and all that. So that's what I do. I just take a minute or two every now and then to just focus on something else, think about it, fantasize. And then also, what people do, and I try to do as well, is don't sit for too long If you're on a call and you're working from home and you don't need to be on camera, I don't know, pick up a duster and, while you're on the call, dust and you'll see that you'll be even more focused when you do that on the call, by the way rather than actually just being on your phone.

Speaker 2: 37:57

But they can't see because they've got the screen there and you're just like exactly so sounds like a better use of your fine.

Speaker 1: 38:05

Exactly, find opportunities to to move, and for people with with ADHD, it actually helps because you you're doing something you know with with your hands, which means that your brain can focus on what's being discussed.

Speaker 2: 38:21

So that's another thing that I've found useful totally, and I was just thinking of those instances where, you know, on a on a meeting, maybe there's going to be you know three or four presenters, but then there's a whole field of faces and it's like why? Why do we need to have our cameras on at these points? Is it just to show presence or to show reaction, so the speakers don't speak, feel like they're speaking to no one?

Speaker 1: 38:50

there was definitely that debate going around because some people would just always have cameras off and some people would always have them on you remember how we said that coming into the office should become part of the experience and we need to be mindful around when we're bringing people to the office. Just because the office exists doesn't mean that it needs to be full of people all the time. Similarly, when you're getting on a Zoom call, just because you have the opportunity to turn on the camera doesn't mean that you should have the camera on all the time when there's a speaker, and when there's four speakers, hello sorry, so just one sec.

Speaker 1: 39:32

You just need to grab something I I love these impromptu kind of like I'm here and I just going to tell you what I need to tell you, and it makes me smile and this is another benefit that we get Right now. We just had this wonderful break when this little one came in and said hey, I need to move this. What was it like?

Speaker 2: 39:55

a chair or something, just a stool Right. Can you help?

Speaker 1: 39:58

me, mom Right, and look at you smiling. Look at all the chemicals that are coming through from your brain to your body right now, just because we had this experience.

Speaker 2: 40:11

So I don't even remember what we were talking about. I don't know, but it's just bringing me back to that vision of the desk with the photo and it's like, well, you've just had a live photo of, you've got an insight into my life.

Speaker 1: 40:19

Yeah, so yeah, now I remember it because you said so. We were talking about cameras on versus cameras off. So if you have a meeting with up to, let's say, if it's an intimate meeting and you know when a meeting is intimate, don't try to quantify it. Don't say you know, oh, if it's like five to 10 people, then it's intimate. If it's like 11, it's not intimate. That If it's like five to 10 people, then it's intimate. If it's like 11, it's not intimate. That's not how it works. You know when a meeting is intimate. When you know when a meeting needs to be intimate, that's when you need the cameras to be on.

Speaker 1: 40:49

If you have a meeting with 30 people, 40 people, a hundred people, right During COVID, let's say, and you're just asking a hundred people to turn their cameras on, first of all, this is going to destroy your bandwidth. Number one, number two you're not going to be able to focus on anyone because there's so many. Why don't you just spotlight the two main speakers and whoever comes on mic, you know, turns on their mic to say something or ask a question. You spotlight them for like these two, three seconds and then you take them off again and people don't even need to have their cameras on, because what's the point? Right, it's not an intimate setting, doesn't need to be an intimate setting. If you're doing virtual coaching, group coaching, that's a very intimate setting. You need to have the cameras on, but that's exactly what we say that group coaching, for example, cannot happen with more than 12 people. It's eight to 12 people. We don't do more than that, because then you know, either in person or virtually, it becomes a town hall.

Speaker 2: 41:55

So, as we begin to wrap up this beautiful conversation, I wonder in an ideal world? So right now you have heaps of flexibility, which sounds perfect In an ideal world. Given that flexibility, how often do you tend to want to be in the office? And, as a build to that, how often would you love to have all of your team and potentially kind of the whole team in one place, and that doesn't necessarily have to be the office environment? But how many touch points do you think like per month or potentially per year, to really feel like you are one team together?

Speaker 1: 42:53

like you are one, one team together. I will respond in a typical consultant way, saying which is it depends um a good rule of thumb in would definitely say get together once a month. Personally, I come into the office because I want to, not because I have to, and it's quite the drive for me to come to the office, but still, you see, I'm coming because there's a reason. Once a week, for sure, sometimes two. Last week I came in four days because every day there was something that I needed to. I was meeting someone, or we were celebrating something, or there was a workshop thing or there was a workshop.

Speaker 1: 43:48

So I think, again, as I said it, it really depends on the phase that you're in with your team, with your function, the time of the year here in canada, you can't really expect people to travel when it's snowing like crazy, no matter how many days you have mandated. Even before covid, when it snowed, people would stare right and they wouldn't work at all. But now they have their laptops, so at least they can, they can keep working, you see, so there's something that everybody's gaining from this, right let's, let's be honest about that and and find a middle ground that that works for everybody and how did you feel after those four days, because I imagine that that's quite unusual for you to actually be in the office four days did you?

Speaker 1: 44:28

how was your?

Speaker 2: 44:29

how was your energy?

Speaker 1: 44:31

because I wasn't in the office for four days, even before COVID, I was not, I wasn't at my office, I was wherever the client was, and then on the plane and then a hotel, right. Um, it was exhausting and it made me appreciate again. You know, I thought how lucky I am to be working, because I paid about $80 in gas just to drive back and from, from and to, plus $25 a day for parking, plus whatever you would eat, plus whatever you would eat. So we're talking about a substantial amount of money. And then every time I would take about an hour each way.

Speaker 1: 45:36

So put that together and cumulatively it really dawns on you and you're thinking, wow, I can't believe that people used to do that Right, and I was happy to do it because it was, you know, the circumstance required. I was actually talking to a friend here about this and I was saying you know, whenever I come to the office, I make sure to know at least one or two people that are in the office too, so that we can grab lunch or we can grab dinner afterwards, because these are the things that get you going right, motivate you.

Speaker 2: 46:19

A hundred percent. And interestingly I'll just share a friend of mine. Their company has mandated two days in the office. She's got two young children, so on one hand she's kind of frustrated but on the other hand, um, she doesn't live in in central London anymore so it's forcing her to to go back into London and then she does then arrange things with friends for afterwards to like help motivate her. So she's almost she knows that she wouldn't be going into the office if it wasn't mandated. But actually she's a little thankful because it's giving her that balance of life that otherwise she would just be, you know, doing, doing nursery school pickup and all that kind of thing.

Speaker 1: 47:07

You know I'll say everything fades away. Nothing stays new forever. Working from home fades away. Working from the office fades away. Coming to the office and then having drinks with friends that fades away too. So it's part of the natural evolution of human behavior. We always want to change things around or we're very comfortable keeping things exactly the same they are if they work for us well. I just think we need to be flexible and open to figuring out what's needed at each point in time. Having our ears open to listen right to the environment, kind of these cues that sometimes it takes a double take for you to figure out what's happening there, because these are eventually the moments that matter in the employee experience. That's how I see it.

Speaker 2: 48:12

So, tos, it's been a pleasure to get to know you, to get under the skin of how you're working, how you're thriving in this new way, the new normal, as we were all calling it a while back. So thank you so much for your time. I really hope we'll stay in touch. I'm excited to see and learn what happens next in all of these kind of different ways of working.

Speaker 1: 48:35

Thank you very much for having me, shelley. It was an absolute pleasure and, yes, we will stay in touch and keep talking.