The question I can see many financiers asking is: “if we performed (or even outperformed) our goals while forced to work remotely, why are we paying hundreds of thousands each year for office space?” Actually, it’s already happening. My counter-question is: “are those performance results sustainable or simply a product of our temporary environment?”
My LinkedIn and Twitter feeds are inundated with polarizing opinions on the future of remote work—there’s the “we’re never going back to the office” camp vs. the “we can’t wait to get back to the office” camp. Typically, the “never office” promoters fall into two categories: either they were already working from home/are in the process of transitioning to fully remote work; or they’re selling products or services that solve remote-based work challenges.
On the surface, both categories are misleading. On one hand, there are obvious self-interests involved in selling remote-work solutions and having the opinion that remote-work is right for everybody. And then there are businesses that have already built remote work into their culture, or were already on a path to a remote work model and COVID-19 accelerated an existing well-thought-out strategy. Neither one of these should signal that going from fully office-based to fully remote-based is the right decision without a thoughtful process in place.
My fear is that these narratives will put some organizations on a path to skip the most critical step in the wake of COVID-19: speaking with the whole team. I’m afraid that leaders will only use the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) collected during quarantine in an effort to cut costs.
KPIs should be used as one of many data points, but it’s equally important to have candid conversations with your teammates. Our job as leaders is to create and manage the company culture that best aligns with the values and goals of the organization. Company culture serves as the framework for every decision in the organization (whether consciously or subconsciously). I put our team first, so they can put our customers first.
Here’s our current approach to the future of work:
1. Review company KPIs during the impacted period. Softening demand isn’t necessarily an indicator of workplace preference or organizational productivity, but on-track/off-track milestones are—and so is the quality of work. It’s critical to accurately weigh KPIs that ultimately impact the decision to transition to remote work. This is an on-going process since we’re all still working remotely, but we understand which KPIs we’re weighing more heavily:
- Rocks/Milestones (are we shipping product, features, technology and campaigns on-time?)
- Net Promoter Score
- Customer Satisfaction
Measuring economic-based KPIs like revenue, total paid subscribers, and customer acquisition costs (CAC) are less important to us in this process because we consider them to be external or uncontrollable due to COVID-19.
2a. Survey teammates about preferences and ask them to self-grade productivity. We know that these results could be skewed due to eight weeks of quarantine, but it provides a good starting point. We survey our team on a quarterly basis and we added these new questions to our Q2 2020 Survey:
2b. One-on-one conversations and deeper insight. Initial results reflected that over 80% of our team preferred a hybrid work from home/office model or working from an office. Less than 20% wanted to work from home permanently. A hybrid model is broad, so we’re continuing to drill down with more specific surveys and individual conversations. Our CMO, Shawn McGehee created these questions for our Seattle-based marketing team:
3. Review all KPI/survey results/conversations, make a decision, build a plan. In full transparency, we’re not at this point yet. But as we move towards this stage we’ll be asking the following questions:
- How did the company perform in this environment?
- How did our teammates perform in this environment?
- What is our teams’ preference for the future of where and how we work?
- What will Hunt A Killer look like in 5 years?
- What workplace strategy best supports performance and preference over the next 5 years?
We’re currently on step 2 and are having thoughtful conversations with our team to confirm early indications. I believe the future of Hunt A Killer will consist of a hybrid work-from-home/work-from-the-office model. It’s a premature prediction with the volatility of the current market and CDC guidelines changing so rapidly. We anticipate being slower than most to reopen—the health and safety of our team is paramount.
P.S. If you’re interested in our results, I’m happy to share them with you. Just drop a connection request and message me.
Thanks so much!