A group of the country’s leading voices in remote-work innovation came together recently for a unique think-tank event called reLead Summit. Organized by Remotely One, a membership community for remote professionals, and hosted at the hotel venue citizen M Washington DC Capitol, the summit’s participants explored new ground in remote and hybrid-remote concepts and identified key emerging work-life trends. The following is an edited transcript featuring highlights from the roundtable discussion, a far-reaching conversation moderated by journalist and author Jason Feifer.
Jason Feifer (JF): I’d love to hear a little more from some of the participants about what kind of conclusions you have drawn about the direction that we’re going and maybe the largest problems that we’re facing.
Hampton Clarkson, Education Services Consultant, Dell Technologies: One thing we talked about about in several of our discussions was how some folks still have this mindset that we’re going back to the way things used to be. And it’s just not true. So, it’s like folks are just stuck and they can’t think of another way to do what they were doing effectively in this new world. And so they keep going back. Our challenge is, how do we get them to think of new ways to do what they used to do, more efficiently?
Chris Dyer, Author: There are four areas where we can look at work, and that’s people, process, tools, and technology, and we’re overly focused on the process and trying to get that part right. And probably that’s where you’re looking at examples of people feeling disconnected. There’s probably a bad process and there’s probably something going on in that. And I think that’s where most of us are really focused.
Skye Osunde, Leadership Coach + Facilitator, CBS Creative & Consulting: When we’re having these conversations about remote work, most of the world thinks of this as a workplace change. And it’s not; it’s much, much bigger than that. A workplace change is something that is focused on making your people work better. But when we’re talking about remote work, it’s much more [of a change] on an operational level.
This is an operational model that helps businesses work better, including their people. So, we really need to zoom out and focus on what is going to make this sustainable – [which is] to stop thinking about location. Even that language of “going back to the office” is still geographically centric, right? We’re going back to a place. And so, the conversations that we’re having are about not just where we’re working, but how we’re working in a way that really breaks the barriers of time and location.
JF: With the rise of remote work, how are companies winning in their strategy to build high-performance teams?
Anebi Agbo, Founder and CEO, Eikon Labs: Many companies still struggle with the idea of colocation, right? It’s so easy. You can go check on performance. You can go see what work is being done, but when folks are remote, how do you track, how do you measure, and how do you equip those teams to continue to perform at a high capacity? And how do you even measure good work? How do folks feel that the work they’re doing matters and that it plugs into the overall mission of the organization? So for me, that’s where I start – dialing in the organization of the entity and making sure your folks understand that.
Then you can cohesively move towards that [goal] and then give them the tools to do good work regardless of where they are geographically, and help them be able to measure that iteratively and get better at it. Organizations need to trust their folks and we need to put good solid processes in place to help people measure the work they do, and just work better.
JF: Is there a framework or process to put in place to equip remote teams to understand the goals of the company and work efficiently to achieve them?
Nikhil Paul, Founder, We R Human: I’m a leadership coach [and I talk] about this a lot. Purpose is the first thing I think every great leader has to be able to disseminate within an organization, from the top to the bottom – being able to empower a group of people to come together, to feel like they’re moving towards a moonshot purpose.
The second part is culture. What does culture look like when you are remote? Well, a lot of it is on how we interact and what we don’t say or what we do say, especially in meetings. Meetings are kind of the crucible of culture for remote organizations. You create rules, so you don’t leave it to the good intentions of the people in the room. And the structure helps empower every single person around that room.
And the third part is execution. Objectives and key results (OKRs) are a big part of our conversation. And making sure from the top down, everyone knows what their objective is, how much progress they’re making. And what does success look like at the end of the day? So that’s an easy three-part framework.
JF: How do you get executive buy-in and commitment to actually change their own behaviors, as well as invest in the resources to support employees’ behavior change as well?
Tammy Bjelland, Founder and CEO, Workplaceless: We know from our work, as well as from research, that the positive and successful results come from organizations that have buy-in from leadership and have leadership that really believe in a new way of working. And they don’t just talk about it with their words.
They also model it. They model that behavior and they model that growth mindset where they can try things out and fail and that’s visible to the entire organization. And so everyone from a leadership level down to, you know, an individual contributor, they feel comfortable, and they feel safe. They have that psychological safety to also try things and fail and then try again.
We don’t see as much success with organizations with executives who don’t feel like they need to make any changes, but in which everybody else in the organization has to commit to a certain type of training or other intervention program. We see that as a consistent challenge. But the trick is opening the door to those conversations.
JF: I wonder if you could speak to a story that I think we tell a lot about leaders in this kind of transition. And [the story is] that those leaders don’t really know how to transition their leadership in a different environment.
Laurel Farrer, CEO, Distribute Consulting: Since the industrial revolution we’ve been working off of optics as managers, especially mid-level managers – it’s very much a sensory supervision role. And so when we don’t have that capacity to fulfill, we feel lost. So, we just have to redefine that. However, we need to replace that instinct to supervise with a habit to support.
The more that we can focus on retraining and upskilling our managers to not be focused on sensory supervision, but to be focused more on skills that we’ve been talking about, like emotional intelligence, psychological safety, upskilling their direct reports – the more that we can focus on that, the more that it is very clearly communicated that mid-level managers are not just secure in their roles, but they may be more important than they ever have been.
JF: What are important things to consider when measuring team performance and productivity?
Mary Brown, Culture Consultant, Steelcase: I think one of the challenges we have is that we have to go back to how we originally started this conversation – about the need to reframe how we’re viewing a lot of these different things. What are we measuring?
When you’re in that little five-by-five box, I can’t see your nametag. I can’t see any of that when you’re virtual. I have to know who you are in order to know that you’re in a position of authority. And I think that is creating the crisis in leadership of identifying “who am I as a leader and what does that mean?”
And so the only thing I had was to measure other people’s productivity and their activity. And what does that mean? And also my company was competing based upon a lot of that – we anchored ourselves with “our people are productive, and we performed very well.” And now we’re kind of all in the same boat, right?
And the contested waters are becoming more collaborative waters, and leaders have to look at “where do I collaborate? Who do I anchor to and collaborate with,” versus always going to the north star of competition.
The reLead Summit’s thought-leader group of remote work advocates is brought together by Kaleem Clarkson, the chief operating officer of Blend Me, Inc., a remote people operations consultancy that helps startups and small businesses transform into high-functioning remote or hybrid-remote workplaces. Clarkson is ranked by LinkedIn as “one of the top voices on remote and hybrid work,” and has been featured in Harvard Business Review.
Ernest Lee, the chief growth officer of citizenM, worked to develop the reLead Summit concept. Known for national and global innovation, Lee oversees growth initiatives for citizenM, a hospitality and lifestyle company. He combines his work on pioneering products including mycitizenM+, launched in March 2022, with leadership in hotel real estate and construction in major cities around the country.