Get Hired with Andrew Seaman Transcript: Thriving in Remote Work with Tsedal Neeley

Welcome to?Get Hired with Andrew Seaman, which is part of?the LinkedIn Podcast Network! This week, Andrew talks with Harvard Business School professor and author of Remote Work Revolution Tsedal Neeley to dig into remote work – and how to make it work for you. Be sure to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts so you don't miss an episode. Also, rate and review the show to help other people find the episodes.

Andrew: From LinkedIn news, this is Get Hired, a podcast for the ups and downs of our professional lives. I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn senior news editor for job searches and careers. Each week on Get Hired, we'll talk about leveling up, sometimes we'll talk about finding work; other times, we'll talk about excelling where you are right now. And through it all, we'll focus on how to stay true to yourself in the process. The world of work in 2022 is different than any of us could have imagined a few years ago. Today, I'm speaking to you from an office. Yesterday, I moderated a panel for my living room and who knows? Tomorrow, I might go nuts and answer some emails from the couch. The world is my oyster when it comes to workplaces. The point is we're working today in a largely hybrid and for some people all remote world. And for those of us who are still looking for work, understanding that landscape and how employers are navigating remote workers is critical. Today's guest became an expert in remote work before it was on everyone's minds. Tsedal Neeley is a professor and Dean at Harvard Business School and the author of the books, Remote Work Revolution and the upcoming The Digital Mindset. When I started covering the world of work for LinkedIn back in 2018, there were inklings that interest in remote work was growing, slowly but surely. And then March 2020 happened. Here's Tsedal.

Tsedal: What happened March 2020 is that COVID accelerated the virtualization of work. The virtualization of work was very much underway and some tech companies have been experimenting with the idea of virtual work and hybrid work since the 1990s, very early 1990s, and found that people were more productive, satisfaction was higher. So what happened is that COVID forced every single person to experience it, including leaders of organizations and employees, and recognize some key benefits of this format. And once people tasted it, there was no turning back.

Andrew: Obviously, I'm in an office right now, but I know a lot of people who, you know, they have not been back to an office since they left in March. And then I don't even spend most of my time in the office. So what is the landscape and the future that is coming for remote work and flexible work?

Tsedal: The landscape today is the interest to design hybrid workplaces, that gives people a mix of remote work and in-person work because on the one hand, a hundred percent remote work is not attractive for everyone. When you look at surveys across organizations, what you see is about 30% of respondents want exclusive remote work. Oftentimes these are people who are more established in their careers and are more established in their organizations. They know all the players, they know exactly how to navigate these spaces. You find that 10 to 15% want exclusive in person work, which is very tricky because oftentimes, these are people who are entrants of a new organization or new in their careers. And so to work from home in this isolated manner without the social network, without the social capital, without understanding the culture of organizations is really hard. And also needing to learn, learn by shadowing, learn by seeing, learn by doing with others is not as available to them. And the rest of everyone, depending on which survey you look at, 80%, 90% want a mix of remote work and in person work. Just enough in person to make sure that connections and creativity and other things are cultivated and nurtured. And so whether organization want it or not, whether they like it or not, whether they're ready or not, they've had no choice but to contemplate how to design hybrid workplaces.

Andrew: When March 2020 happened and we were all forced home for several months, initially I loved it. And I thought this is great. I get to go for walks in the park and I get some more time back. I don't have to spend it on the subway. But then as time went on, I would say the last five or so months that I was solely remote, I found I want the option to go somewhere else. I want to be able to go to a desk in an office if I want to, if I need to talk to people, if I could say, hey, let's meet in a conference room and go over this together. Does a person have to figure that out for themselves or do you think that there are certain types of people that will thrive in a fully remote setting versus maybe a more flexible setting?

Tsedal: It's interesting because most people are very much like you. They want the option for the in-person. They want the serendipitous contact with others that you can only experience in a physical sense. They want all of that. And part of the reason too is, many organizations and I would say the majority of organizations haven't figured out how to do remote work and hybrid work in a way that feels complete. But the way that I've come to talk about this, Andrew, is that we need to think of our digital technologies as tools. We need to think of technology as a place. So we really need to have a new mindset on how we actually work and what needs to be synchronous, what needs to be asynchronous. When do we need to go into the office as a tool for us to achieve specific uses compared to what are some of the things that work well when we are in this remote environment. So it's an era of being multimodal workers and we need to be competent in all of them.

Andrew: One thing that I wonder is because the success of a person really depends on the relationship with the employer. It's obviously great if you are a self-starter and you could be successful on your own, but it also depends on the environment you're in and as a job seeker, how do you look from the outside into an organization and say, “okay, this is what I see that means it's going to be a place where I could thrive as a remote worker.” What are the hallmarks that people should look for? And how can they sort of get that inside look to see what it's like?

Tsedal: It's such a good question because this is the spot that so many people are in. How do I appraise this environment without being able to walk around to see the formal and informal? You have to interview people to get a real sense of the managers, to get a real sense of the team. And beyond that, to ask culture questions. So understand “what is our shared values? What are our shared norms? How do we work together?” Get references. You know how people get references on you when you're about to get a job? Get references on your manager, ask people, tap into various networks, talk to people who work there, people who have left there. Those are great people to talk to, to say, “tell me the truth. What's it really like?” And the other thing is you ask questions about how the leaders spend their time, what they talk about, what they emphasize, their messaging. That tells you what's important to the company. It's not just them telling you what their priority is, is what are they doing on a regular basis? Are they visiting customers and clients? Are they working on various initiatives that's about expanding, augmenting, the reach, the workforce, the scale, the scope? Truly understanding what they're doing and asking questions about that can give you so much insight into what's important today and anticipate what's going to be important tomorrow.

Andrew: Yeah. And also as a job seeker, what skills do you think make them shine? So when a company is interviewing them or a recruiter's interviewing them, they say “this person has the chops to be a remote worker and succeed in that environment.”

Tsedal: I've been talking for the last two years about the importance of understanding that in a remote world, it's the difference between theater – when we are in person, it's theater, you walk into a room, you have your physicality, you have various ways of conveying who you are and what you need and the way in which you occupy your space – and a remote world environment, it's not theater, it's television, which means we have to have great cameras, get great lighting if you can get great lighting, present yourself in a way that is compelling. The other thing is, if you ever have to do any kind of presentation as part of your job, make sure you can operate the platform that they've suggested and be very smooth and agile. Those are basics. That's like your uniform. That's like your costume.

Andrew: And what about soft skills? So things like people skills, communication, things like that? Because it seems like at least in my experience, it's a different muscle that you're exercising or it's a different part of the muscle that you're exercising when you're remote. So for people who say, “I want to move into remote work or I want to switch into a company that allows me to do that full time.” Is there anything that they should be prepared to exercise in terms of their soft skills that maybe they didn't before?

Tsedal: Absolutely. So you have to be very expressive. You have to be animated. You need storytelling skills, which are very different, right? How do you make sure you convey excitement and energy through your voice? People have to experience you as alive, storytelling to capture people's imagination so that whatever you're sharing with people in meetings can actually stick. Finally, what I'll say is, we have learned so much from video gamers. The gamers have actually been at this for the last decade and they have taught us so much. Now a lot of us do these things too today, but if you want to really enhance your presentation, your actual aesthetics, check out some of these gamers on YouTube.

Andrew: Yeah. Definitely. And also they communicate while they're doing it, which is really incredible. I've only seen a few live streams, but it's so interesting that they actually engage while they're doing all of these other things on another screen. And I know I couldn't multitask that well. We're going to take a quick break. When we get back, Tsedal gets real about the downsides of the remote work revolution.?

(ad break)

We're back with Tsedal Neeley. There's obviously plenty of benefits to remote work. You got to spend more time with your family. You save time and money on a commute, but what are the tradeoffs? Here's Tsedal.

Tsedal: Well, I can tell you what people say they lose, because I've seen a lot of data on this. They feel like they lose the informal serendipitous contact that they would have if you're in an office environment. You go to the coffee cart or the water cooler moment and you encounter people. You have exchanges, whether it's work related or not but you connect more with people. The other thing that you lose is the ability to meet new people, is what people worry about. If I'm remote and if I'm not on the grounds, am I going to meet new people that are not directly part of my collaborators and my everyday work? So meeting new people, expanding their network, and when you're expand your network, usually you have access to more information. That's part of an outcome that people won't get. But the good news, Andrew, is that for remote workers and virtual workers of the last, I don't know, 50 years or so, you may not have serendipitous contact as you would in a particular way when you're in person, but you can build in unstructured time with people in a more structured way. For example, inviting people to get on a video conferencing call and spending the first few minutes connecting informally before you get into the business of the work. At the end of the call, you can say, “Hey guys, I'll see you soon, this was a great meeting, I'm going to hang out here, do some overtime, anyone who wants to linger and connect with me, I'd love to be able to do that. We can take a breakout room and just connect real fast.” So you've got to build it into these micro moments. It happens differently. And so for people who are used to the traditional in-person experience, this is what they lose and you have to try to counter it in different ways.

Andrew: And I assume a lot of that is if you are a problem solver and you know, “okay, my objective is to build connections, build relationships, but I have to do that virtually.” The idea is sort of figure out how to do that and then over time it will become more natural for you. It's sort of like adapting to a new country or there's some sort of culture shock there, but you have to push through it, right?

Tsedal: You have to push through it knowing that it unfolds differently in a remote hybrid environment. So the interest for hybrid or hybridity is this because people feel the remote only, doesn't give them the other benefits of the in-person environment. The problem, however, can be that if hybrid schedules are developed in a way that doesn't ensure that people are around at the same time, then you're not going to run into people. So these hybrid designs have to ensure that you have anchor days or days where most people are around in your group so that you can in fact, see people and connect to them otherwise you're not going to have the serendipitous experience.

Andrew: Yeah. And something that I want to make sure we touch on before we go. And I have a really difficult time wrapping my head around this. And it was true even during the darkest days of the pandemic, is that I feel that there was a great risk with remote and flexible work, that there can be even more widening gaps among social and economic lines because cashiers, they can't work remotely. And you could do that from anything from someone who works in a warehouse to a doctor or a nurse. And as people start to envision this future where people can be in the office, they could be not in the office. They could be home full time. How do we craft it so that way we don't exclude people and we make sure other people have those same opportunities? I have a concern that we're leaving a group of people behind here.

Tsedal: Andrew, I share your concern. And the reason I share your concern is, the reality is, I think the privilege or the option of having remote work is not available to everyone in the way that it's been conceptualized today. And what I have seen work in a number of places is for the people who have jobs that are tied to physical spaces: is there a way that leaders in the organization can think about pooling and rotating so that everyone can have even one day of remote work so that they have access to it. This is in a knowledge work environment. So IT organizations, for example, do you have to have everyone in all the time? When you actually look at the task work breakdown, the answer to that is no, you don't. But in manufacturing and other jobs where it is impossible to do the work without being physically there, giving people remote days to do learning or time off is the only way to do this. And it's actually important to think along those lines and to say, hey, we can't give you any remote days. We need you in because this is a manufacturing site or a retail site, but we want to offer you 10, 15 days this year to do learning, online learning. You can learn from home. Those are days for you to develop yourself. And that's worked in a number of places. And the third component of this is wellbeing. People are being asked to work more, to work longer, to show up physically and even putting themselves at risk. So it's important to make sure that people aren't burned out, that they're getting time off, that they're healthy; there are creative ways to make sure that people feel that they're cared for, even if they can't access remote work. And ultimately, as this digital economy continues to move at lightning speed, as this digital revolution continues to evolve, everyone is going to require some kind of digital skills. A lot of the jobs are going to require understanding of automation and other things. So it's so important that individuals are learning and working on their skills because a lot of jobs are going to transform in the next decade.

Andrew: Thank you so much, Tsedal.

Tsedal: Thank you so much for having me, Andrew.?

Andrew: Building these formerly in-person connections in a remote world isn't always straightforward, but Tsedal says, it's the only way to make this new world of work, work for you. And speaking of making it work, here is our very first job search win of the week, from listener Sarah.

Sarah: Hi, Andrew. First time in my career, I had the courage of negotiating salaries, benefits, and I'm really happy with that.

Andrew: Sarah, that's amazing. Congratulations. If you want to share your job search win, send us a voice memo [email protected]. We just might share it on the show. Remember it's up to you to put our advice into practice. Still, you always have a community backing you up and cheering you on. Connect with me and the Get Hired community on LinkedIn to continue the conversation. You can always join my weekly Get Hired live show, every Friday at noon on the LinkedIn news page. And if you like this episode, leave us a rating on Apple podcasts. It helps people like you to find the show. And of course, we'll continue this conversation next week, right here, wherever you like to listen. Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn news. The show is produced by Michele O'Brien. Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show. Florencia Iriondo is head of original audio and video. Dave Pond is our technical director. Dan Roth is the editor in chief of LinkedIn, and I'm Andrew Seaman. Until next time, stay well and best of luck.