New Ways of Working: Lessons from the Pandemic

KELLY TETTERTON:
Alright. I think we're good. Alright. Welcome, everybody. This is obviously a very, very cozy group. I know most of you. So I do have some thoughts and opinions or whatever, but please just interrupt. Ask questions. Except you guys can't ask questions. But I did want to start by just talking about why I even wanted to discuss this. Our work life changed quite a bit. Not just for us, but for our clients. But we started out at Clarity Partners as a really almost exclusively in-person in the office company. My founding partners in particular believe very, very strongly in face-to-face interactions. And then obviously we went into lockdown and that wasn't happening. And now we're back to a hybrid model, and I think we're going to be in a hybrid working model really for the foreseeable future. And I would say that for us, I think we're still figuring it out. And us definitely includes our clients are still figuring it out. And so we have to sort of coordinate with them as well. So this isn't really lessons per se as much as reflections, ideas, which again, I just want to encourage you guys to break in with any thoughts or questions that you have.

So really we're going to talk about what did it used to be and what's next for us or what I see as next for us. But first, a little context. And this slide isn't really meant to be like, why Clarity is cool, although Clarity is cool, but really to give some context because not everybody's experience is going to be the same. So I'm just trying to provide the lens for some of these other topics that I'm going to talk about. We are locally based. We do work with a lot of government clients and that for us, that meant our clients had some particular constraints. I think some of my friends who work with consulting firms that are more focused on private sector, their clients were able to be a little bit more nimble. Our clients, I know one of my accounts in particular, like they literally had to provision laptops on the fly. They didn't have any concept of like people having individual laptops. So working from home for our clients was really a challenge as well. The other thing too, in terms of Clarity in our experience and how that I think, reflects what our working life turned into is we're still a relatively small company.

We're 150. That's very, very different, I think, in terms of how we're working moving forward than some of the larger companies, again, sort of comparative consulting firms. The other thing too, that I think is probably true for everybody, regardless of the size, is there was a pretty big shift in terms of company culture that happened kind of inevitably. As I already mentioned, we very much valued and still value in-person experiences. I'm really kind of ridiculously excited that my camp is in person again. And we can't keep all of that. You know, even with a hybrid model of working, not everybody's in the office all the time. You kind of have to coordinate. Well, if that's true if you don't have people in the office all the time, then how do you keep everybody's close connections and sort of a common sense of culture moving forward? It's not always that easy. So that said, just a reminder in case anybody needs reminding or hopefully this doesn't trigger any PTSD. But before the pandemic, as I've already said for our company, everybody was in the office.

If we were having client meetings, they were always in-person client meetings. Either we were going there or they were coming to us. One thing that I think is interesting, it's not really a pro or con, but I would say that before the pandemic there was a lot more privacy in work-life balance. That's really not so true anymore, in part because before the pandemic much more again for our company anyway, there was a much more traditional model of you come in, in the office, it's 9 to 5. I mean, it's consulting. So it's not always 9 to 5 anyway, but it's 9 to 5. And then you go home and you live your life. Now, again, at least for us, the workday has really, really stretched out. Sometimes people are depending on their life circumstances. Sometimes people are up and working at 6 am, which is fine. But then I know there might be a break for that particular person mid-morning because they have to drop off their kids or whatever the case might be, drop the kids off at school. Same thing in the evening.

There's some folks that I work with that are not as available in the early evening because they have family obligations, but they're going to be working later at night. I know about their family obligations now because people kind of have to surface that if they're surfacing what their work hours are going to be. So, again, I don't know if it's a pro or a con or does it matter. But there is really a blurred line between work and private life that I don't think was there before. We used to have in-person design sessions. This photo is an example of that. Again, the clients would come over. We would have whiteboard sessions, papers on the walls. We might have a couple of these over the course of a project. They were really fun. We don't do those anymore. That's changed pretty significantly. Training sessions when we're doing client training, those were always in person. We'd have somebody sort of running through a basic script and you might have 1 or 2 VAs wandering around with the clients helping them.

Again, none of that is happening anymore. And I will also break in and say part of what we're trying to navigate again ourselves is although we at Clarity are at a point now where we're we're happy to have training sessions with our clients. we're happy to have those in-person experiences. Our clients at least are not interested. They would still prefer to have remote Zoom sessions, even for things like training, even though it's a little bit more awkward. So again, some of those things I don't know are necessarily coming back and networking. I mean, mid-camp is an example of that where you would have in-person conferences or you would have after-work events where you would meet people, talk about work, that it's just dropped off the cliff since the pandemic. So you know what gets impacted? Communication. And I'll be talking about communication a lot over the course of this talk. But communication just in terms of the rhythm internally, whether it's daily or weekly or the over the course of a project, our client communication has changed a lot, too.

And I don't just mean in terms of how we're sharing information, although that itself has changed. I do think one of the more difficult things even now is if you're meeting with somebody face to face and you're talking with them. There's implicitly a level of trust that gets established. If I'm talking with you about project requirements, we're having a real-time conversation that is a very different experience that you have as opposed to I'm meeting with my clients. But actually, all of them have their video turned off and they're just little black boxes with their names. That's a very distanced kind of relationship and especially for something like web design project work. I've become hyper-aware over the last couple of years how much implicit trust there is in that kind of relationship. And it's much, much harder to build that backup. And it's something that we still struggle with. And obviously, in terms of impact, like the tools that we use, I think, prior to the pandemic. Had used Zoom before, but maybe literally like twice before the pandemic started.

And now it's kind of like one of these things where I can't imagine living without it. So, we've also had to shift in terms of how we're sharing things with our clients, what tools we're using, because they were used to getting paper artifacts. If we had a project agenda, they were coming over to our office. We were printing out 12 agendas. They would take an agenda, they would scribble on it. They would take it away. That's not happening anymore. So I wanted to run through some specific examples of before we did this after we did this. So interviews, bringing on new people, whether they're interns or new employees with the project meetings look like what the stakeholder meetings look like design development, user testing, office space work events, the whole shebang. I'm going to run through these. But honestly, these are instances where if you guys have a different experience or something worked for you that isn't even mentioned here. I'd really appreciate it if you could speak up, because I think part of why I wanted to go through this is to learn from other people's experiences too.

So onboarding employees. So before say it out loud the obvious. Our interviews were always in person. We never did remote interviews, especially since, again, our pre-pandemic expectations as a company were that you're going to be coming into the office. So you better get your butt in for the interview, because that's like the very first sort of threshold level that you're going to have to pass. And when new employees started or new interns started, there was a lot of basically sitting with the HR folks for like the first day. And then after that, you're basically attached at the hip to somebody in the office moving through. Again, all that changed. I think it was probably three weeks after we went into lockdown. I had my first Zoom interview in part because at the time we were looking to hire a project manager and it was incredibly awkward because nobody had quite figured, or at least I hadn't quite figured out how to work over Zoom. And now it's just it's normal. Everybody's on Zoom all the time, even for interviews, even if you're local to Chicago.

Our recruiter is always talking to people on Zoom first. In part, it's just easier. It's a lot easier to schedule those kinds of things if you can have a bunch of like back to back to back Zoom interviews as opposed to, Oh, so-and-so is coming in for an interview at 10 am. I guess it'll run until 11, but I need to leave some buffer in case they're late. It's a little bit more awkward in terms of scheduling, but everything has to be planned. There's nothing left to chance. This is especially true for our interns. So, again, part of our company culture is we usually have a group of summer interns that come in. There's usually anywhere between 4 to 7 interns. And our intern program never stopped even when we were in lockdown. And the interns, the best that we could do for them is like there were planned periodic daily huddles throughout the day. So I know that for some of our interns who are working on our Chicago police account. There would be a morning daily stand-up and then an afternoon daily stand-up.

And in the meantime, the developer who was sort of tasked with mentoring these interns, what he did is he just left an open Zoom channel all day long so that interns could contact him if they needed to. Now, it's the case, as I said, we're more of a hybrid experience. But even so, we have to plan everything again, especially for our interns, because they're coming to us. This is for me, anyway, been pretty interesting the last couple of years when I've been interviewing potential interns. They are so desperate for the in-person experience because as young people, they were hit with the lockdown the hardest, I think. And they are tired of Zoom. They're tired of remote sessions, which is great. We want to accommodate that. But not all of us are coming into the office every day. So what that means is whereas previously it was very loosey-goosey in terms of planning and intern summer curriculum, if you will. It was Well, they'll start the first week of May. We'll figure out actually what they're going to do the second week.

It just depends on the project work that we have. For my team, we have a design intern that's coming in the summer. There is literally like an almost week-by-week schedule that my lead designer and I have worked out for what she's going to be doing, in part because she's probably going to start out coming in like three days a week in the office. I'll certainly be there when she's there. But if there are specific development things that she needs to learn like if she's going to be working on WordPress. I need to know a couple of weeks out so that I can make sure that our WordPress developers are in the office with her. So that's what I mean by planning is there's nothing that's really like drive-by casual anymore. Otherwise you're just going to leave people stranded. I mean having a new employee start and having that employee be like totally remote the whole time. It's a real challenge. So even splitting the difference is something we have to think carefully about and intentionally about.

Project meetings. So as I've already mentioned before, they were always in person and now they're almost always over Zoom. For whatever reason, it's probably only been within the last 4 or 5 months that my clients are even willing to meet in person. There are other clients that we have that are literally like a block away from us. And I know that they're coming into the office too, and they still don't want to meet in person. So it's good in the sense that there is depending on the people, of course, but there's an option for greater efficiency. If you're meeting between 10 and 10:30, the agendas out as normal. You can just zip through items in the agenda pretty quickly. Boom, you're done. You might even end the meeting early, God forbid. But on the other hand, it does mean that. Not that meetings are always exciting anyway, but Zoom meetings can be really boring. Really boring, especially if, as I've said again, there's a big chunk of my clients that they're just much more comfortable having the video off the black box there.

You have no sense of whether or not they're actually engaged with what you're saying, and so you end up just droning on. So, it can be very boring for everybody. The other thing that's a real challenge, which is just a challenge on both sides of the screen, is when the hell were you on a Zoom meeting and you weren't multitasking? Like there's there's no meeting that I'm on where I'm not. Oh, actually, I'll go on mute. I can still be on video. People can see me, but I'm actually doing something on the side. On the theory that I won't miss something really important. But it happens. And so sometimes it actually does. Even though there's a potential for more efficiency. Sometimes it actually becomes less efficient because you have to repeat yourself because whoever the critical stakeholder is isn't actually listening at the time. I will say about mid-pandemic one of my most interesting client meetings where I was like, Lean into it, dude. He was doing a presentation for his colleagues and some of us at Clarity as well.

And before he started the presentation, he just said, Hey, I know you guys are going to be multitasking. That's fine. Just raise your hand or ask me if I need to repeat something like you just sort of surfaced it for everybody, which actually, weirdly, at the time made it more interesting. But I think that's an ongoing challenge, like figuring out how to break up meetings, break up Zoom experiences. So it's not just the same thing all the time. Zoom fatigue is real. They get really weird about it, in part because more than you need to know necessarily, but a lot of my meetings are very early morning meetings. So I know even without asking, I know that part of the reason that some of my clients have their video turned off is they just rolled out of bed and they don't want to say that. There's still that sort of like, OK, there's a blurring between the public and the private. But I don't want to blur it quite that far. They do get sensitive about. It's another one of those things where like, nobody has rules for it yet.

Like, I have my own personal rule. Like if I'm meeting the client for the first time. I'm going to have my video on regardless. If it's I'm meeting with a client that I've had a years-long relationship with, and I actually am planning on multitasking. I'm going to have the video off because I know that they won't be offended. Where did I come up with that dividing line? Out of my own head? So I'm not brave enough to, like, force my clients to go on video just because I don't know what the pushback would be. But it is weird in terms of trying to interact with people when they're just a black box. Stakeholder meeting. So this is not unusual, but again, just to say aloud, when we're doing fresh Web projects. Very early on in the process, we want to meet with our primary stakeholders just to hear what their real pain points are. What are you trying to solve for with the new website? And I would say that those stakeholder meetings are probably the most crucial. I would say stakeholder meetings and design meetings are probably the most crucial points at which you can establish client trust.

And it's really hard if you're not meeting with them in person, in part because what you have to do over Zoom is try to convince them that you're truly being an active listener. And they're paying us a lot of money to make a new website. They really want to make sure that we've heard their particular concerns or pain points. And how you do that without turning into a TV psychotherapist where you're just turning the questions back on them and saying, like, I hear what you're saying if I can just project it back to you, like that's a little bit false, too. So that's something that I would say that we're definitely still navigating in terms of how best to establish that trust relationship when those stakeholder meetings are remote. I will say one of the advantages though, is it used to be that we could only have maybe just because of budget and time and whatever. We might only have a couple of stakeholder meetings. And then it gets into like, well, do we want them as a group session or do we want to break them apart?

Because for this particular client, some of these people within the same group aren't necessarily going to really surface their concerns because they don't want to piss each other off. Well, now it's just choose your own adventure. You can have a Zoom meeting with five people on it, or you can break that up into five little meetings. It might be a little bit of additional time, but not nearly as difficult as like, we ought to meet at the client's office. We got to travel back. We got to go back again. So there are some advantages to it. But the trust establishment is definitely a huge a huge problem. Design session. So this one, I will say, is I already had the pictures with the sticky notes and the papers on the walls. Those were really, really interactive, but in part because a lot of the times those were using physical artifacts. It did mean that you get feedback from the client and you scribble on the paper and then the designers would rip everything off the wall and then they'd go back and make notes, and then you'd come back to them a week later with a revised approach.

Now it's much more, again, trying to break that up a little bit. It's much more the case that for our design sessions, whether it's going over the sitemap or going over wireframes or actually going over like visual mockups, graphic designs. Our designer is going to be on the screen making changes in real-time, in part as a way of engaging the clients and not just having them be completely passive, which largely works. We've gotten really good feedback about that, but it's also just not as fun as scribbling things on paper. But it's probably the most successful we've been having those interactive design sessions at establishing that trust relationship with our clients. Development. I would say, there was not as much as some of my founding partners would believe. But there was some advantage in having the casual watercooler conversations, the casual drive by like, oh I'm working on this. I'm kind of stuck. And now it's almost all slack. I mean, we have meetings, of course, but like, if you're really communicating with each other over a development issue.

It's probably for us at least, it's probably going to be all slack, which is flexible. You can jump in and jump out. It can be an asynchronous conversation, which is great. But I will say, and this is really for everybody, it can be sometimes too terse because sometimes to explain a problem really requires a verbal vomitorium if you will. And Slack doesn't really necessarily lend itself to that kind of communication very well. But it can also be in addition to being too terse, I guess I'll stick with terse. You sometimes just like skipping bits of communication. So I will say there have been times where I've literally I've gotten a slack from somebody and I will copy-paste it, put it in quotes and respond to that person and say, I literally don't know what you're saying here. Like, can we get on the phone or can you explain it a little bit more? But like, this is just not working. So there is a little bit more. I don't want to say friction in communication, but there's a little bit more effort.

Sometimes it has to go into it, then used to be there. User testing. So this, this one, I just want to be clear. When I'm talking about user testing, it's really if we're doing usability tests. So in the past when we did usability tests. again, it was a very physical artifact kind of experience where you would have visual prototypes, visual wireframes, something, and you would have conversations with the users. They were guided conversations, but they were still pretty freeform. And now those have to be over Zoom as well. So, one of the advantages actually of doing the user testing over Zoom is it's still the case that our designers producing some sort of visual artifact that he wants to direct people through. So that hasn't changed. What has changed is it's a lot easier to schedule. And I say that because a lot of times when in the past we've done usability tests. It's the client's burden to come up with users that we could talk to. So if they want us to talk to Cook County residents representing different demographics, then that agency has to go out and find those users.

That's a challenge all by itself. Getting those users to come into a physical space, that's almost impossible. There was one usability testing session and actually an external vendor was trying to conduct with one of our larger clients is probably like 5 or 6 years ago. And they must have spammed like dozens and dozens of people. They got two people to show up for this usability test. Now, if our designer can actually conduct those usability tests over Zoom if they don't have to leave their house, if it's literally just like this span of time. You can get more users to do that. It's less of a burden for them. It's also really nice because in the past when we were doing usability tests where again, you'd have side-by-side like paper artifacts that people would be manipulating because those were conversations and it was usually the designer conducting the conversation. You'd have to have at least one other person there to take notes because it's really, really hard for the designer to be having a guided conversation and take notes at the same time.

If you're doing it over Zoom, he can just do it all himself because he's going to record that session and then go back over that session and then make notes based on that recording. However, there is also the danger of those guided usability testing sessions can be a little bit too directed. I mean, the reason that you're having those sorts of sessions is you're trying to get feedback from the user. What do they really think? It's really hard to stay away from having questions that are too leading. If you're trying to get feedback on the font choice, for instance, for a page title. It's a little too easy to lean in and say, Well, what do you think of the typeface up here? Like, as opposed to letting the user come back to you with their spontaneous reaction. Office space. So before everybody had to come into the office. We had multiple in-office after-work events. Now as I've already mentioned a couple of times, it's hybrid. People get to choose when they want to come into the office. We actually started with Zoom events which I don't know.

I'll call that like 50% successful. There were some that were fine, that were genuinely relaxing and enjoyable. And there were some that just felt like enforced fun and be like, I've already been on Zoom for eight hours today. I really don't want to be on something else. But now I would say on the on the plus side, it kind of can be the best of both worlds. I myself am coming into the office like 2 or 3 days a week usually, which means I've got a couple of days that are at home. I can relax, I can work at my own pace. Like all the advantages that you would expect from work from home. But I still get to go into the office and still interact with people. So it is kind of best of both worlds. But once again, if you're trying to to get people into the office. You've got to be intentional and you've got to plan it out a little bit more. So if I'm coming into the office a couple of days a week and I really want to meet with one of my developers who's also coming into the office a couple of days a week, well then we actually have to coordinate.

The fact that I'm coming in on Mondays and Thursdays might not be those same days that the developer is coming in just to plan for it. We're also trying to make it a little bit more attractive for people by having multiple events in the office on the same day. So, if we're doing our quarterly development meeting, I might plan that the same day that we're having some sort of like more fun after-work event. So that there's a reason for people to adjust their schedules and actually get on the L and come into the office. I think along with everybody else still navigating how to respect everybody's boundaries. I thought it was interesting when Abby was sort of like running through things this morning. I'll be honest with you, I forgot that there was a request for masking fence, and obviously, other people did too. But it's a case where you can request and you can respect if people are masked or not. That's true in our office as well. We have some people that come into the office, but they're much more comfortable being masked or being distant.

And you have to figure out how to respect that. We also went through our own sort of process of, do you tell people if you got COVID or do we have something more like mid campus setup where you have an anonymous reporting so that HR can share with everybody? Do you ask people to be vaccinated? Is it too intrusive? And I would say again, sort of across the board, that's still being figured out. I went to Google's office in Chicago four weeks ago, for a meeting. And I had been to that office before. So I go up to the front desk, which they're behind glass.I have to give them my name, all that's expected. And then the woman behind the desk says, Oh, and I need proof of vaccination. I was like, what? Again, this is only like a month ago. And I'm like, OK, well, actually do have that on my phone. But it was really thrown off that somebody was asking me. And then I was like, OK Google big international company. They probably have different, bigger concerns with people travelling in and out than little office of Clarity.

So again, still being figured out if you were. So just sort of wrapping up benefits and challenges. So obviously there's flexibility, although I would say with great power comes great responsibility. It does, I think, force us with that flexibility. With that, I could be in the office, I could be at home, I could be available in the morning, but not necessarily in the afternoon for us at least, to still maintain a pretty tight ship. It's asking us to communicate with our colleagues a lot more even than we did in the past. In the past it was, well, if you're not in the office, then obviously you're out today. That's not necessarily true now. You might be out. You might be working. But if I'm out for the day, then I have to tell my team that I'm out for the day. Otherwise, they are reasonably going to assume that I'm actually working. But I've just stepped away from my computer for a moment. So again, great power, great responsibility with that flexibility. I will say for us, we have been able to expand our business footprint in a way that we weren't as successful with prior to the pandemic.

So what I mean by that is, at least again, because so many of our clients are government clients and we're responding to public sector RFP. I have always thought that like if you're doing a web design and development project, why the heck does it matter where you are? And then there are some states, some sectors that believe it does matter where you are. I remember I was responding to an RFP coming out of Wisconsin. This is a couple of years ago. And they actually usually for public sector RFPs. They'll tell you how respondents are going to be evaluated, like you get a point system. And one of their criterion that they were scoring against was, were you within ten miles of this agency's office? Were you within 100 miles of this agency office or were you out of state? It mattered to them. And so even though pre-pandemic we were responding to a lot of non-Chicago non-Illinois RFPs, we weren't necessarily getting very much traction. It's loosened up a little bit. I would say it still matters to a lot of our clients whether or not you're local, even even if you're not ever going to meet in person, it somewhat matters.

On the other hand, we've now been able to expand significant business in New York and California. Because for those agency, they realize it doesn't matter. So we've been able to expand our business footprint in that way. I would also say we've also been able to internally expand our footprint because one of the things that came out of lockdown and then even in our hybrid world is, well, if you're going to be partially remote anyway, then it really doesn't matter where you are. So we've had some of our team, lives half the year in Florida, and she just schedules her time to come back to the office. We have somebody who's temporarily moved to Texas, and he's probably going to come back to Chicago at some point. There was a developer who decided that outdoors are important to him, so he wants to move to Colorado. OK, fine. We'll still work with you. He's about to move to New Zealand. We're still going to work with him because what does it matter? We've been able to open a Japan office. We've been able to work with quite a few South American resources.

None of that was happening before the pandemic. There was a real focus on, even for our internal resources, that people really needed to be in Chicago. And that's just not true anymore. Challenges I've already mentioned establishing trust with our clients is still a big one. And office culture and staying connected. It's hard our HR team now that's part of the job now is to thoughtfully engage and plan events over the course of the year, whereas I wouldn't say it wasn't thought through prior to the pandemic. But it wasn't as something that like somebody had to think about as part of their day-to-day job. And they and they do now. So before I open up to questions, just a reminder, if you can provide feedback, that would be really helpful. Also very important I wanted to mention I'll probably bug Avi so he can mention it to the local Drupal Chicago meetup has been reborn and we are doing another meetup May 18th. So it would be lovely to see folks there in person. That said. Questions. Thoughts.

I don't know if this resonates with you guys in terms of experience.

SPEAKER:
Thanks for the talk. I was curious what your reasons for not just going forward.

KELLY TETTERTON:
So I already mentioned the two founding partners. They came from big consulting firms. They were pre-pandemic. You would never see them out of a suit like it was suit and tie all the way. And even before the pandemic, I had had more than one conversation with them saying, just so you know you're really cramping my style in terms of hiring developers, because especially in the open source world. The whole idea of working remotely, that's been true for like a couple of decades at this point. They didn't care. I don't care if you can't hire somebody. You need to have them in person. So part of the idea of not going fully remote is they can't quite let go of that. Partly for that, and partly because they really truly believe for cultural reasons that it's important to have people talk to each other sometimes. So for them, it's actually a really, really huge deal that they're fine with hybrid like that's as far as they're willing to go and that's they're not going to go fully remote.

SPEAKER:
Was that boredom?

KELLY TETTERTON:
Boredom that's true too.

SPEAKER:
What's the difference hybrid, fully remote if people like myself and around the world it doesn't matter.

KELLY TETTERTON:
So I will say part of the challenge is that it's hard to hire people if it's all fully remote. So, for instance, I'll use you as an example, Matt, like. I don't know if somebody just off the streets of Tokyo had called me up and said, Hey, I would like to work for Clarity, but stay in Tokyo. That was it. That sounds like a great idea. We already had a prior relationship. So very, very easy and quite frankly. Same thing for Annika, right? I wouldn't necessarily have hired somebody else in Japan if there wasn't a personal relationship. And you vouched for him so strongly. I do know that even though I mentioned there are other resources that we use. It's still the case that some of my other partners. They just have a hard time with the idea that somebody is working in Argentina and they can't walk over to his desk and verify that for sure he's actually working today. So I think that there's a cultural hurdle. But I will say to your point, Matt, I think that that's being worn down over time because the way that we have constructed our policies at Clarity is it's OK to work remotely.

It's OK for hybrid experience. Everybody choose their own adventure for when or if you're coming to the office. That's a policy that's temporarily it keeps getting extended. But the idea that it hasn't been made into a permanent policy I think is very telling. Will it become a permanent policy? I think so. There are folks at Clarity that aren't willing to commit to that just yet.

SPEAKER:
Do you have folks that choose to be completely remote and not commit?

KELLY TETTERTON:
Largely yeah. I wouldn't say 100%, but there are definitely folks on the team that like I might see him once every 4 or 5 months. And then for them, it's got to be a compelling reason to come in. And I get it. Like everybody's circumstances are different. I will say I feel very, very lucky that when the pandemic hit, my kids were already in high school or college. Child care has always been a pain in the butt. But child care during the pandemic. Holy cow. Am I glad I didn't have to deal with that crap. So part of it, in terms of like who's coming into the office, including folks that don't necessarily come in very often. They have childcare obligations. I get it. It's not like it's just a completely personal choice. It's I can't leave my three-year-old by yourself.

SPEAKER:
Did you change how you led meetings? I was only at Clarity for a month.

KELLY TETTERTON:
Before it starts. Yeah.

SPEAKER:
I didn't have a great before reference, but like to the point of keeping people engaged during meetings is a little black box. Like if you change the way like interact with everyone.

KELLY TETTERTON:
I would say before, not completely all the way across, but I would say before our in-person client meetings tended to be more formal. There were a lot of like, well, we need to have a PowerPoint presentation this meeting. At this point, I would say a lot of not that we're not getting stuff done during meetings, but I tend to and I've seen our other project managers do this too. I tend to try and personalize it with my clients a little bit. I'm happy to talk to one particular client about the vacation he took or what his kids are doing again, as a way to break through that. So in terms of how the meetings are conducted, I think there's a little bit more informality than was there before. But the substance obviously hasn't changed. But even if you just got a little black box. If I'm talking with the folks from Metro, for instance. Those guys never go on video for whatever reason. But they're perfectly happy to have personal conversations. So, fine, I'll take it. Did you have a question?

SPEAKER:
Well, I was going to say, but as an agency owner, it is I think the one thing that I've tried to figure out with this topic that sometimes it is more of at the end of the day, what we're really talking about is trust. And there's these things that sort of happened psychologically over time. You see physically see the same person over time, over and over again. And having worked remotely for the last ten years, even before the pandemic. But realized when I worked at an agency, now that I run agencies is you have to basically reestablish that trust in other ways. And I think one of the things that is often not talked about is how folks who are leading organizations can be more clear to their team members of what would constitute trust. So and be as specific as possible you highlighted some of those things. So whether it's just let us know when you walk away or if they're going to be gone for a couple of hours or have your status or whatever, or just being very clear of we're shifting what trust looks like to accommodate the remote situation.

But these are the things that are also sort of required in order for us to be able to say as an organization for us to be able to be productive, but also partner with our team members. So they can have a flexibility that they need on the flip side. And again, I'm a little bit biased and speaking as an owner now. I have had conversations with team members when we have been very clear and when those trust parameters are difficult. I think the flip side of you mentioned earlier about not being able to hire someone off the street. I think the flip side of that is you may have more turnover because one of the consequences of trying to create a distributed workforce is OK these are transparent values of what we expect and because we trust things have to be done. And we're making that vetting a little bit smaller because you don't have a location. The consequence of that may be OK, you can't get that trust established quickly outside of previous relationships and when that person moves. The turnover may happen faster.

KELLY TETTERTON:
100%. And that's why I sort of preface this by saying like. I think we're all still figuring this out because there's the trust with employees and colleagues which yeah. If they're I know somebody who's in another situation that this actually isn't pandemic related. Because his company's always been remote but they actually don't do a very good job of communicating with each other with the simple things of like I'm going to tell you when I walk away or I'm going to tell you when I have to take the afternoon off. They just do it. And, their colleagues are madly typing at them like, hey, this thing is broken. Where are you? They have so much internal friction right now because that basic level of trust is just eroded, eroded, eroded, eroded. The other thing that I didn't talk about is I think it's also difficult on the client relationship side because hopefully not that often. But sometimes we have to have really difficult conversations with our clients. Things are going wrong or the budgets getting strained.

If you haven't had that personal interaction, that's an even harder conversation to have. And you can have client turnover then that's a little bit more frequent than maybe would have been before. It's hard. And I think part of it is I think it's a really good idea to be super, super clear about what are those trust parameters. As you said that I realized I don't think I've actually been terribly clear with my team about what those are. I've just sort of assumed that of course, you're grown-ass man. You're going to tell me when you walk away from your computer. That's not maybe the best assumption to have. I should probably tell my team. OK, Let me know.

SPEAKER:
It's helped me only because then we do one on ones and reviews. We're holding each other equally accountable because if I'm basically saying, hey, this works for us. Once you communicate these things, then I'm being unfair by putting crazy timelines or expectations because it's OK if you need to cop away, let me know or let us know let the team know and then I get upset or whatever. Because you did do that and then use that against you in our one on one. We can hold each other accountable and say these are the things you say. Like, you're right, I made that mistake. I apologize. Let me figure out a different way. At the same time, I can hold the team member and say, well, we agree that these are the standards. Like you want this flexibility. In order for us to be mutually successful, we have to align what works for you along with the work for the business which goes back to that transparency.

KELLY TETTERTON:
Exactly. My kids are now just getting to the point where they're going to go into the workforce pretty soon. I'll be curious what their professional lives turn into because again, I think it's going to be mostly hybrid stuff moving forward. Like how do you advance in your career if you're not having face-to-face time with your manager? I don't know that we figured that out yet like culturally.

SPEAKER:
It does seem like it's a lot easier to integrate remotely in your job for ten years versus...

KELLY TETTERTON:
Start right. Starting out fresh.

SPEAKER:
The trust is already built. I think as long as I'm getting my work done, I'm meeting the deadlines. I'll go weeks without talking to Kelly and pretty much anybody. As long as I'm getting this stuff done. They just trust that it's happening. How do you do that when you're really just starting out? Get a skill, get your work done or not necessarily there or the giving that balance doesn't necessarily here...

KELLY TETTERTON:
I know for a fact, at least from my.

SPEAKER:
People are always curious. Hire younger folks out of college and yeah, we spent a lot of New Years where we actually have a team member here who's kind of learned that had that process.

KELLY TETTERTON:
So for the folks that that you've hired out of college, do they want to start like they don't want to have in-person they want to be remote?

SPEAKER:
It's not a hard thing and it's something I struggle with all the time. Because to your point when you're starting your career. I'm mainly focused on I want you to feel happy and excited and things of that nature. And I know when someone said earlier, it's boring to sit at home and work, like if you don't have the thing. Especially when you're starting your life, like just waking up and sitting at a desk with your bed right behind is boring. And obviously, depending on where you are in your life. I like boring like that works great. But like, so to your point comes down to OK, what is it that you need and what are the things that we could be doing to sort of help you and but yeah I haven't seen one or the other. Some are like, no, this works for me because maybe of health challenges or other things that I wanted. So we talk about like, OK I want to accomplish this at this stage of my life and the remote situation will be helpful and we'll say, OK we'll just be mindful that this is really difficult when you're starting off.

There's a lot of writing, a lot of documentation, a lot of forecasting and just sort of checking in. That may seem innocuous and very small, but it becomes like this really big thing over time, which they don't know. They've never done it before. And so they sort of either learn or the like I thought this was going to be great. This is a good fit. And again, like I said, I think I sort of accepted that one of the trade-offs of remote trying to hire younger folks is, OK, they might turn a little bit higher because I'm trying to be as honest and transparent as possible with the trade-offs. But because they're new to being in the workforce, they can assess like, well, this sounds great until I experience it.

KELLY TETTERTON:
I think that's true. One of the things I mentioned earlier is we have summer interns and the interns that at least I've interacted with when interviewing. They're desperate for in-person experiences. But I think you bring up a good point, which is people that do have health challenges or do have other circumstances that might force them into different life modes would really appreciate the remote working actually.

SPEAKER:
That's what we've heard. You've heard it from health. I've actually had a really interesting conversation with one of them who said, when I started doing remote. It's actually helped with some of the discrimination and things issues because I'm able to sort of protect myself what they see is not the initial impression. So then I can establish trust based on my work. And then once that's established and the other things kind of come, it's like, OK, that other thing is...

KELLY TETTERTON:
So there have been a couple of articles about this in the New York Times over the past year. Just in terms of everybody's figuring out like remote hybrid, what do people do? And the the articles, both of them were mentioning that people who might be historically discriminated against. They much prefer working remotely because they had like anecdotal quotes from people in these articles, but they're like, don't have to deal with the microaggressions. Like, if I'm just doing my work at home, doing my thing, I don't have to deal with like the side crap that comes in office cooler talk which exactly the sort of thing that, like is an old white lady. I'm like. I never thought of that before. But yeah, I mean, it matters.

SPEAKER:
Very interesting. A lot of stuff.

KELLY TETTERTON:
Thanks, guys. And thanks for hanging in there. Let's go get some lunch. I think it's all. Thank you.