Employee Retreats for Remote-First Teams
David recommends regular in-person company-wide gatherings for remote workers as an opportunity for creative agencies to help build their organization’s culture in our post-pandemic economy where online video meetings continue to fill our calendars and working from home is the new norm.
Links
"Investing in Ee Retreats at Remote Firms" by David C. Baker for punctuation.com
Transcript
Blair Enns: David, our topic today is, checks the screen, investing in EE, which is-- what's an EE? Employee?
David C. Baker: The people that don't want to work for you.
[laughter]
Blair: That's a lot of people. Investing in employee retreats at remote firms. We've talked around this. We've touched on this a little bit lightly here and there when the subject of remote work comes up. I know you have a strong opinion on it. You've written a post on it. I've just read the title of it. We're going to get into the details of how you make remote work before we get into this. Has your opinion on remote work changed at all in the last couple of years or since the last time we've talked about it in a podcast?
David: Yes, it has.
Blair: What is your opinion on it?
David: Yes, it's actually hardened against it, honestly. I've come to the point where it's unfightable. It's not a fight you're going to win. What did they say? You can't put it back in the bag? What is it that's out of the bag?
Blair: The genie out of the bottle.
David: Yes, you can't put the genie back in the bag. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Once you've allowed people to move, for whatever reason, or you've hired people from outside your geographic area where you're not going back to-- I've had all kinds of principals tell me, "I can't say this publicly, but I'm tempted to close my firm down and open up a new one and have everybody in-person." None of them are really going to do it. When I say I'm hardened on it, I'm hardened in the sense that we can't put the genie back in the bottle, but I also feel like we are missing a lot by having all remote teams. I really believe that. Yes, even though I work remotely. What's your perspective on that?
Blair: We've been hybrid for a while. Right now, there's only two of us here in the office. We just sold the office building because there's only two of us here in the office. I think we're going to work from home. I don't know. I'm with you on the hardening of the position on it. I would have previously stated it as, yes, I think my preference would be to have everybody together if that's possible. Now, if it's not possible, you let some people move away, then at some point you start to hire people not based on the location. That's obviously an advantage. We'll come back to that.
You can't really change your mind, to your point, the comments that you're hearing from your clients. The only way to undo this would be to shut down the firm realistically and open a new firm where the policy is everybody shows up to the office at least a certain number of days of the week. That, to me, might be the sweet spot. I also think I would have a small number of exceptions. I don't know. Maybe I'm just trying to argue both sides of the same argument.
David: I know I would be very flexible. If somebody wanted to go live in Italy for three months and work from there, fine. It would either be all remote or all in-person, with a lot of flexibility if it's in-person because I'm very sympathetic to how difficult that is for people. I've had lots of thoughts about this.
Obviously, I've been doing this for long enough that I was here during the whole transition because of the pandemic, obviously. That came up a lot. What I hadn't done is finished a research project where we did a deep survey of 168 firms. When I finished that, then I thought, "Okay, I need to write about this." I need to make specific recommendations because it's very rare to see a firm that is in-person anymore. How do they adapt to this new world? How do you maintain culture when you have a remote-first environment? That was the question I was trying to answer.
Blair: That was the impetus for the post and then ultimately this podcast. You make the point right at the top of your post that we still haven't really adjusted to the post-pandemic world. Do you want to explain why or in what ways we haven't adjusted?
David: The easiest way to understand that, I think, is, now, before the pandemic, there were a lot of firms that were remote. The pandemic came along and there was disruption with their client base, but there was no disruption with their employee base. They'd already been remote. Then there were a lot of firms that were working together and then those people scattered to their homes in the same city. That wasn't that big of an adjustment either.
What I think we didn't understand was how difficult it was to incorporate a new employee who hadn't been there before into a remote-first culture. They couldn't learn by sitting next to somebody, by listening to their phone calls, by just passing them to and from the break room and so on. This is going to be even more difficult, I think, when we talk about incorporating entry-level people who have never worked in a real business environment before, and you're expecting certain behaviors from them, and they don't even know what those are, much less how to learn them, how to incorporate them into their work lives.
There's that. There's eroded work-life balance. People are working from home while their kids are there or their kids are home from school. How does that work? I don't know. It just goes on and on. I think it's probably going to be another 10 years before we really exist in this environment and thrive because we understand exactly how to operate in it. I don't think we figured out how to operate. Incorporating new people, especially, is the one that keeps coming to mind all the time.
Blair: Yes. That one really hits home with me. Our most junior employee is my youngest son, who graduated from coding school right after the pandemic into this new world order, and he didn't get work in the first couple of months, so we snapped him up temporarily. He's still with us temporarily. He's still looking to move on. He's an incredible asset to have around, but every day, I'm keenly aware of the fact that he should be in an office.
He's working remotely in a different city. Happens to be the same city as his brother, so they get to see each other, who also works for us. I'm just so keenly aware of the fact that he should be in a business in an office sitting next to other people, learning via osmosis rather than learning bad habits from his shitty manager father over the distance. I feel for him and people in his situation because I think the fastest way to get up to speed on what it is that you're doing and the business that you're working for and the clients that you're serving is to be in an office with your colleagues in the trenches doing battle and building that camaraderie. Sorry, that's a lot of time on the setup here.
David: Can I mention one other thing too? This is a smaller thing, but I see confusion out there. In the pandemic, when we first went remote, we were hungry for person-to-person interaction, and so we naturally gravitated towards video meetings all the time, is something we wanted. It was like, "I see a human out here. Oh, there's other people. We haven't all died yet." Now it's become the norm, and I see people asking a very legitimate question, it's like, "Why does every meeting have to be video? What happened to the old conference call stuff?"
Apart from my own sensibilities around that, which are weird, but just normal people, not me, normal people are saying, "We're sitting in a chair looking at a screen all day. We were more mobile when we were working in person." It's just an odd thing that I think we haven't adjusted to yet.
Blair: I'll build on that. I was just on a video call with my video guy, and he made the offhand comment that video is the most intimate medium. I didn't correct him, but I don't believe that to be true. Marshall McLuhan certainly didn't believe that to be true. I know, as somebody who produces a small number of videos, who does in-person events, who's met some of my clients, and who podcasts, most intimate medium is an audio-only medium.
That is more intimate to have somebody in your ears than it is to have them in your ears and looking at them on a screen, and McLuhan would make the distinction between a hot media and a cold media and basically say audio is a hot medium, and then there are various types of videos. Some are hot, some are cold, but the idea is you think about the concentration of a message within a channel. When you're spreading it out over multiple channels or medium, audio and video, you're diluting the intensity of that message.
I think we adopted the technology and we thought, "Okay, well, let's look at each other," and here we are looking at each other. I don't have the objection to it that you do, but I don't agree that it is the most intimate way to do this. I think phone calls, good old-fashioned phone calls, are more intimate than video calls.
David: I do too. For the people listening to this, we never do video when we record this.
Blair: Yes. We're not looking at each other right now, are we?
David: No. I find that I listen far more intently to a client call when I'm not on video. Anyway, it's just another thing that I don't think we've really caught up. This hasn't settled. One of the things that hasn't settled is how do you continue to build culture with a remote-first team? I think there's ways to do it.
Blair: That's the part of your post where you call countering remoteness, and it really is about getting together in real life, and you have a certain cadence, certain recommendations, but I want to go back to what you alluded to fairly quickly and moved on. You did some research on this recently. Talk about the firms that you surveyed. What did you find when it comes to how to counter the deleterious effects of being remote?
David: I found it was all over the place. That was the most interesting thing. The ranges were all over the place. Firms that have been working remotely for a decade, way before the pandemic, that don't ever get together. That just really surprised me. Then you have folks who do it very seriously. It was actually hard to synthesize the research because there was very little commonality between firms. It was hard to find this. We ended up, instead of just reporting the averages or the medians, we decided to actually make specific recommendations, too.
This comes from the fact that years ago, before people worked remotely, we had to set a benchmark standard on how much they should spend on their facility. It was always all in. It was facility, cleaning, security, taxes, insurance, and so on. All of that should never be more than 6% of your AGI. Then when people decided to sell their facilities or not renew their lease, immediately their mind went to, "Oh, this is 6% that will drop to the bottom line." We kept saying, "No, no, no, that's not how to think about it. You should use this money to build the culture that you're losing because you're not working face-to-face."
That wasn't very scientific. We just said, "Don't drop that to the bottom line, spend it on culture." It's like, does it really need that much money and so on? We wanted to put together some specific recommendations. It's not like these are in stone, they're just a starting place. You have to decide. You may have clients over in Europe, and maybe you're in California or something. You have to adapt these to yourself. After interviewing 168 firms, we decided to say, "Okay, this is how much you should spend per person, and this is the cadence of how you should get together, and then modify that for whatever works for your firm."
Blair: Start with the budget. How much should you spend per person?
David: $5,000 to $8,000 per person. It'd be interesting to hear the reactions from people when they listen to that. I wish we could. I wish this was a two-way medium. I imagine some firms are going to say, "What? That's way more than we had budgeted." Other firms are going to say, "No, we spend a lot more than that." I'm talking about the cost of getting together in person. You're going to pay for hotel, you're going to pay for airfare, and rent facility, food, that kind of thing. $5,000 to $8,000 per person per year to cover all the times you need to get together.
Blair: Let's talk about the cadence of these in-person get-togethers and maybe how they should be structured.
David: Yes. I think there should be two get-togethers, one primary one, and that would be the minimum. If you can't get together twice a year, you really should get together once a year. That's the primary one. If you can add another one six months later, that's great, but it wouldn't be as big or as expensive. The big yearly gathering, think of it as three days together in some central location, a place that's fairly easy to get to.
It's not three days of meetings, though. This is three days of being together. It's a mix of updating people on maybe a positioning change or a new service offering. Then carve some time out for people to get work done for clients, but people are hanging out together as they do that. Maybe they're on a call together with a client or something. There needs to be work stuff happening for clients, not just work for the firm itself. Then lots of play time that's unstructured so people can just gravitate to the folks that they feel more comfortable chatting with, hanging around with, and whatever you want to do. Your company has its own unique culture, so you figure out how to do that.
Ideally, it's at some large Airbnb where everybody can stay in the same place, if not probably at the same hotel, so that you can eat together and all of that. One big yearly gathering, and then a shorter in-person one, if you can swing it. Then at the three-month intervals, you would have an online meeting that's maybe three or four hours with lots of breaks in it where you're covering very structured stuff that is suited for everybody to hear at once. Introductions from new people, new initiatives. You're not going to struggle to fill this time. In fact, you're going to struggle to overfill it probably.
Just do the things that only work best when everybody is there. Reporting on financial performance, all those things are pretty obvious. One big yearly gathering, a small in-person one six months away, if you can swing it. Then between those three-month intervals, some online meeting. That's how I would do it. There's lots of software tools out there. Some of them are good, some aren't. I don't really keep up on all the best ones, but you could use some of those as well to structure online casual gatherings and so on. Is that what you were expecting me to say in terms of what you would want people to do, or would you want people to get together more frequently than that?
Blair: I don't know. I think depending on how distributed you are, you could have little reach and meetups too, like how large and how distributed the firm was, you could have regional meetups too. I know firms that have a lot of, say, developers and content creators in the Baltics, as an example, or South America, maybe they could have their own meetup. You're pretty adamant that the big one every year, it's mandatory. This is a delicate question. How do you enforce compliance? Not everybody's always going to be able to attend, but what do you do to deliver the highest certainty that most people will attend?
David: In online discussion groups, I see this pop up a lot, where you have people on the extremes, like on one side is mandatory compliance and on the other side tends to be empathy. You're going to pick something that fits your personality, but it's either required or it isn't. Let's say that somebody's close relative gets sick right before, well, obviously they can't come and you have to, bless that, help them any way you can.
If something always comes up, even if it's a mental or emotional health or something, frankly, I think the job requires you to be with your people except in extreme emergencies. Something comes up and you can't come. Something comes up the next time and you can't come. We're putting an ankle monitor on you now. This is a part of the job. If that is difficult for you to do because of your life circumstances, we're not being cruel, we're just saying, "This is what's required for the job. If you can't do this, then we're going to have to move on."
You've got to put your foot down. That's going to be very awkward in today's environment because of the expectations that employees have. You need to be very specific about this when you're interviewing somebody so that they understand what they're signing up for. Then you also need to give people lots of advance notice because they live very complicated lives.
Most of the time, the other spouse or partner is working. There may be kids involved that they have to work around. You want to be sensitive to schooling schedules, to weather patterns, that kind of thing, and just pick it and stick with it. You're only going to get maybe 80%, 90% of the people there. They better not miss two in a row unless it's something really extreme. That could happen. I think you've got to be comfortable being firm. Otherwise, these things are just not going to have the result that you want.
Blair: Do you have a point of view on whether or not spouses should be involved, kids, et cetera, or do you think that's a firm-by-firm basis?
David: I think it would be fantastic, but I don't know how you make it work, because if you are in one central place where everybody lives and it's not remote, but it's an in-person culture, then I would absolutely involve kids and spouses and partners wherever you can. In this case, no, I don't think you can afford to do that, which is why you need to not have them gone more than two or three days because it's difficult to be away from family for much longer than that.
Blair: Then you wrap up this post saying you should have a standardized debrief, like an after-action review on that. Any context or detail you want to add to that?
David: Just learn from it. Don't just plan this from the top down, but explain what are we trying to accomplish here, and then use the team to come up with something that really works for them, involve them. Then say everything is up for grabs. "After each one, we're going to have a feedback form, we're going to have a quick meeting, and if something doesn't work, then we'll just scrap it and we'll do something else." It's okay to have standards, but it's not okay to have rigid standards that you don't re-examine all the time.
Blair: You said earlier that there's different software that can help you to plan these events. Are you aware of any venues that are specifically going after this market, or even like a party planner category, corporate retreat planner person who maybe even has a venue? I would imagine that if these things aren't popping up yet, they will, but have you seen any?
David: I haven't. I've written about it extensively, though. If I had stupid money, I would build something like this. It would be a campus that's built specifically to foster this kind of working retreat, where you have outdoor stuff, you've got indoor stuff, there's a kitchen, there's a list of people you can hire to come cook for you, there's transportation.
Blair: There's David Baker showing up to do a keynote talk.
David: Yes, [unintelligible 00:19:34] obviously, with the highest tier room.
Blair: It's actually not a bad idea.
David: Yes, I think it'd be really cool. I don't see anybody doing it, which must mean it's not a very good idea.
Blair: Do you remember a few years ago, I think it was in the middle of the pandemic, one of my stupid ideas was, "Hey, why don't you and I buy a small hotel in Palm Springs, and we'll do that?" We got really excited about it for about two or three hours, and then it was like, "Yes, no." It'd be fun the first time. Maybe the second time. After that, it'd be like, "Let's dump this turkey." This was really helpful, David. Thank you. We're not going to do another episode on it, but I'm sure, once again, it's one of these tangential topics. It's going to come up again. It's going to get a lot of mentions, too. Thank you.
David: Thanks, Blair.