EP82 Remote teams that work: A playbook for Project Managers part 2 of 2

John Byrne [00:00:02]:

Welcome to Business Breaks, your project management edge. Here to bring you sharp thinking, honest conversation and practical insights to keep you one step ahead. Whether you're leading complex programs or managing day to day delivery, this podcast helps you stay focused, make better calls, and lead with purpose. So now let's get into it. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Business Breaks. This is the second part of a two part series on remote project working. And in this section we will cover technology as well as balance and productivity.

John Byrne [00:00:49]:

So stay tuned and enjoy the show. Thank you. That's great. And I guess coming back to another topic you mentioned, but let's go into it in more detail. Culture alone isn't enough. When you're working remotely as teams, you also need the right tools. And that being said, too many tools can create chaos and having the wrong ones will actually kill, not help productivity. So what do you do, John, to ensure you have the right setup and make sure that whatever collaboration and communication tools are being applied, that everyone's using them properly?

Dante Healy [00:01:36]:

I do think it's important that everybody's using the same tool, regardless of which tool there is. You know, I have had situations in the past where there hasn't actually been a company policy, there's been a WebEx, there's been Zoom, there's been teams, and everybody is. They had licenses for all three. Everybody had licenses for. Sorry, that's actually wrong. Not everybody had licenses for all three. Some people had licenses for one, some people had licenses for another. Nobody used the one they all had licenses for.

Dante Healy [00:02:11]:

I'm trying to figure out, okay, which one, who am I inviting? What am I inviting them to? That was difficult. So I think it's important to make sure everybody has the same tool and knows, right, for this project, this is the tool we're using for this. This is the other tool we're using for that. You know, it doesn't have to be one tool for everything, but for the same thing, it's the same tool. So for meetings, you're using one video meeting tool, whether it's teams or the Zoom, whether it's WebEx, doesn't matter. For instant messaging, you're using one tool. It doesn't have to be the same tool that you're using for things, but it has to be one tool. For storage of files, you're using one tool.

Dante Healy [00:02:49]:

It's not, okay, this file belongs here. This other file belongs in a different. It's not one tool, one place, one folder, really for your project, that's important. And whatever tools you're using give people Training, don't just assume that they know it. It's. It's not that straightforward. I mean, even tools that you think are straightforward, not everybody will know how to use them because they may not have used them before or they may not have used those particular aspects of the tool before. Yeah, yeah.

John Byrne [00:03:19]:

I've seen people use Jira, for example, and they're just using the backlog view and they don't even know that if you click on another view, you've got the reports. So they manually create reports in the Excel by extracting the tickets and then just analyzing them that way. There's different ways to use a tool and there's an efficient way. And I think if you're not taught that, if you're not aware it exists, that you can just click on the button and get what you're looking for, you might be saving yourself hours over a period of the project and making.

Dante Healy [00:03:55]:

Sure you know who has access to what tool. Because, you know, there was a problem once where I was using Microsoft Project and I had everything in it and I was talking to one of the IT people about the project. They couldn't see the view I was looking at and. But it's there. It turned out he didn't have Microsoft Project, he had access to Planner, and Planner didn't have the same view as this project. So we were both looking at the same project plan, but through two different tools, which meant we seeing it from two different views, both Microsoft.

John Byrne [00:04:30]:

It's just different licensing tiers.

Dante Healy [00:04:33]:

Yeah, exactly. And I just assumed he, he had a better license than I had, and he did actually have a better license than I had, but I was the one who had the project license, he didn't.

John Byrne [00:04:41]:

You had a specialist license.

Dante Healy [00:04:43]:

Yeah, but, you know, so basically once that was copped on, I stopped using Microsoft Project and just used Planner because at least then I'm seeing the same view that the other people on the team were saying. But just to be careful about that, that or, or even with that, we, we are all on license, but there could be different, you know, whatever license, whether you're using Jira or Ban or whatever, if there are different scales of license, make sure everybody's on the same one so that you're. Everybody sees the same thing and who needs to see it? Obviously, you know, we're dealing with something, or you just come up with some way of exporting it into Excel or that. But make sure everybody's looking at the same tool with the same view.

John Byrne [00:05:26]:

Exactly. They have the same information as to where the project is going and plus are able to make the updates for their tasks. Because you don't want to be the project manager who's having to be the middle person who has to be chasing up people to update the project plan. Otherwise you're just wasting time being an admin clerk.

Dante Healy [00:05:50]:

That's it. And make sure that they've got the training to know how to update their tasks. Yeah, that's the other thing that is a problem I did have with Jira before. We were using it as the. For testing or people didn't actually who are doing the testing didn't have a license.

John Byrne [00:06:07]:

So they don't.

Dante Healy [00:06:08]:

They had a license. We was juggling licenses. So they were. We have to get take licenses away from other people who were no longer doing testing and give them. Which was a pain doing the juggling. But then some people didn't have the train, hadn't done it before, so was trying to give them the training because we realized pretty quickly that, you know, there were simple things like just setting the category or whatever. They didn't know how to do that. So, you know, they weren't raising tickets for bugs, they were raising tickets for something else.

Dante Healy [00:06:37]:

And it just wasn't clear. And everybody was doing their own thing almost. So everybody knew their own little the way they used the system and they were using it their own way, but nobody was using it the same way because there wasn't training giving to. To anybody how to use it. I mean, I'm not saying that you've turned people into experts in how to use Jira or how to use any other tool, but just make sure that whatever way you want to use the tool, you've shown everybody how to use the tool that way, even if you're not using it to its fullest extent, make sure everybody is consistently using it the same way. Even if it's a bad way. It's better to be consistently bad than to have everybody doing their own version of that.

John Byrne [00:07:17]:

Exactly. And I think it's so important that you have a very efficient setup. I mean, your three core types of tools would be one, for communication, like Slack or Teams or Zoom. Two, collaboration, where you're sharing documents and you're all updating the same documents and where do you store them and allow your teams to access them. And then three would be, as you mentioned, the project Management PC, Jira, your Microsoft Project. So you can also ensure that everyone's working on them over time. But I guess when you're remote working, there's certain considerations you need to have in place when you're working on using digital tools and there's things like security. So you know, I've seen people who, who flex by working in a cafe but they're on their own laptops and they're using public wi fi.

John Byrne [00:08:14]:

That, that makes me shiver because of the risk of IP leakage. Never mind people. You know, I've had guys sitting next to me with their laptops open and they dis openly discussing business plans and I can see their PowerPoint, who their client is, etc, just by staring over their shoulder. There's also, as you mentioned, tool overload. Make sure you use insane tools, basic set of tools and don't, don't have too many tools at once otherwise you create confusion with your teams. Another thing for me is like. And does this bug you when you're trying to focus and you're constantly getting notifications, whether they're emails or messages, even in meetings. I think teams, which I'm working on right now has gotten better in terms of drowning out notifications.

John Byrne [00:09:02]:

What's your. Whilst you're having virtual meetings or even presenting. Do you ever see that where someone's showing something on their screen and then suddenly you can see a message from a colleague who's messaging them directly? And I think I don't want to see that.

Dante Healy [00:09:18]:

Yeah, it can be a bit of a pain not getting the balance right because it's kind of one of those things you mute everything or everything gets through. It's very difficult a lot of these tools to, to get that balance right that now mute most things. But yeah, I'm expecting a message from so and so let that come true. It's difficult to get that right. But you know, there are the challenges. But you know, I will say this. I, you know, you're selling at the coffee shops. I've seen it in places as well.

Dante Healy [00:09:52]:

The idea when you do go into the office, these hot desk open plan things are ridiculous for certain teams. I've seen stuff on screens in the office that shouldn't have been seen by anybody other than the people who are walking on it. But you know, it's. Yeah, it's just as bad frankly when.

John Byrne [00:10:15]:

It happens in an office that's even worse. More a bigger security risk if it creates, if it reduces team morale. Like you know, you've got the strategy for next year and it's oh yeah, we got to cut half the staff or whatever or double. Double the. The targets.

Dante Healy [00:10:33]:

That's it. Or you know, life. Some somebody is somebody that the payroll person is looking through People's pay slits to make sure everything was calculated properly. But that's a big screen and it's up there on it and everybody walking by can see. You know, you kind of try not to, you know what it is though, even if you can't see the person's name on it, but you know what it is. You know, somebody could easily see that person's name walk up and look new.

John Byrne [00:10:58]:

Or structures and all of that stuff.

Dante Healy [00:11:00]:

Yeah, yeah, that's it. That, you know, oh, we'll be going to have a new boss or whatever. But yeah, it can be. Even in the open plan offices, which I actually hate, we're a passion. Especially when they're hot desks, I just can't stand them. That's why I prefer walking remotely because that's how so much office space is done now. But I think actually that's even worse than, you know, at least, at least in. You could see who the client was and all that.

Dante Healy [00:11:29]:

In the coffee shop there's a certain amount of anonymity.

John Byrne [00:11:33]:

Whereas in who am I going to tell? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Dante Healy [00:11:36]:

But in an office it's like there's no anonymity at all. But, but that, yeah, that, that's the, the issue I suppose, with, with all these tools, but even working remotely or from the, the cafe or whatever, have some kind of a backup as well that, you know, you should be using an open WI fi in a cafe. That's the thing. But I suppose if you're using VPNs and that maybe there's a certain amount of security there, but what happens when it goes down or even your own WI fi goes down and you know, have some kind of a backup there?

John Byrne [00:12:11]:

If you're with a plan. Yeah, a plan B.

Dante Healy [00:12:14]:

Plan B, exactly. If you actually have your home office set up and you're working from home permanently, maybe you need to have, you need to bite the bullet and have two subscriptions to two different broadband providers, just not over the same wires.

John Byrne [00:12:33]:

And you can get these remote WI fi dongles.

Dante Healy [00:12:37]:

Yeah. But even with them, as I was just about to say, that's. Well, I won't say I go as fancy as having a dongle. I just, you know, hotspot with the mobile phone. But there was one, say ages ago, I don't do it anymore. I learned my lesson once and it never, I never repeated it, but I had my home broadband over the cable and I had my mobile, but they were the same provider and what happened was that their servers went down but it didn't matter that one was cable and one was wireless. Their server went down, which meant that I had no broadband, I had no Internet access either on the mobile or on the cable coming in. I learned my lesson pretty quickly then.

Dante Healy [00:13:20]:

And the following day, once I kind of realized, I switched mobile providers. So at least if the cable went down again, I would have a different mobile provider. But you know, if you. So make sure that at least don't. Even though usually you get a better deal if you have your cable, broadband and your mobile from the same provider, don't. If you're relying on it to walk them home, make sure you have a different provider, some way, shape or form, so that one goes down, you have the other.

John Byrne [00:13:50]:

And I would also caveat that make sure that the different provider isn't a subsidiary of your main provider because, yeah, sub providers just rent the network regardless. Yeah.

Dante Healy [00:14:03]:

And make sure as well that your secondary provider is not using the same. So not just subsidiary structure, the same infrastructure. Exactly. Because like here, you know, we basically got two, two cables. If you wanted broadband cable coming in, you've got the cable from the main telecom provider and then you've got a cable from the main television provider. But there's no point in having two. But everybody is going to be sharing one of those cables, most of them here in Ireland, mostly it's the telecom provider everybody uses because the, the cable provider, it's their own property, so they won't use it. But there's no point in having two people using two, two systems coming in over the same cable because if the cable goes down, you've got nobody.

Dante Healy [00:14:48]:

And so make sure they're different, whether it's a wireless provider and a cable provider and make sure they're not the same provider. That would be the only. You know, certainly from an Irish point of view, that was one lesson I learned and I'd imagine it's the same everywhere.

John Byrne [00:15:02]:

Yeah, and thanks, John. That's brilliant. You know, so there's technology in terms of tools, but there's technology in terms of the physical hardware and infrastructure that those soft. That that software is based on. So you just have to make sure both are reliable to the extent that they can be and then have a plan B if you find you're down. I mean, to be fair, I can, I can run my. I did actually once run a teams meeting on my mobile. I had Jira there on my mobile and I was sharing it.

John Byrne [00:15:37]:

Crazy enough it kind of worked. But I wouldn't do it every, every day on a, on a standup. But it was. It's possible.

Dante Healy [00:15:47]:

I'm. I'm lucky enough now, I have to admit, where I live and where my home office is. My mobile connection, especially now since I moved to 4G, I don't even need to worry about 5G. I'm is fast enough that I could actually run my. I could run this meeting over. Mobile might not be the, you know, I might have to.

John Byrne [00:16:07]:

Not the smoothest.

Dante Healy [00:16:08]:

Yeah, might not be the smoothest, but it would work. It would work. So with the tools that I'm using. Cause they're fairly lightweight. But yeah, you know, the, the key thing is though, to have some backup, even if that backup is to move down the road. And, and then I suppose from a technology point of view, the other thing I have done is all my sockets and plugs and all that are all big, big batteries that will give me about an hour's power if the power went down. So I would still have Internet access. It's apart from the fact that I use a desktop when I'm at home.

Dante Healy [00:16:45]:

But even, you know, even if you're using a laptop, your broadband would go down because, you know, they're no longer done over telephone lines. It's all fiber optics now. So they don't carry power. So you need, so have that kind of be. Be thinking that, you know, if you're, if you're a project manager and you're working from home remotely, you do need to make sure that you need the right setup. Yeah, you do need to be thinking of all that. Because if it goes down, if the electricity goes and you can, you know, as I said, my, my power adapters and that the battery backups would only, you know, it's not a huge big thing. It'll last me about an hour, hour and a half or thereabouts.

Dante Healy [00:17:24]:

But that does give me enough time that when the power goes and I realize it's gone, I can still finish out the meeting. I have send emails off, let people know, okay, I might be offline for a while. So you can reach cell phone and, and then, yeah, I have the apps on the phone so that I might not be able to do much by maybe using tools, but things like teams or Zoom or whatever are on the mobile. So, you know, that's simple. Things like making sure you keep your mobile fairly well charged. Don't let it get down too much just in case the hurdles go.

John Byrne [00:17:53]:

Yeah, thanks, John. I guess to wrap up now, last, Last topic on this episode, which is about the personal side. And we're talking about personal Productivity as well as balance. And some people tend to overwork when they're working from home and others struggle to focus. Also, it's been written online that career growth can feel uneven between office and remote staff. So how do you keep things fair, do you think? And also avoid burnout, not just for the project manager, but maybe their team as well.

Dante Healy [00:18:39]:

I think one of the key things is, I think this is kind of something for everywhere. Not just remote working. Focus on what's being achieved, not how many hours are being worked. You know, don't be looking as a project manager at the. At the little yellow or green or red dots on teams to see if people are there or not. It's not. It's not accurate, actually. Do you know the times that I've realized that I'm teams considers me, I'm.

John Byrne [00:19:09]:

Working, I'm working, but not on teams. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it defaults to yellow whilst I'm working on some other application in the background. It's crazy.

Dante Healy [00:19:18]:

Yeah, it's. It's so annoying to the extent that I almost. I'd want to torn teams off so that people just don't know whether I'm ever here or not. You know, you so focus on things that are being done. As we mentioned earlier in the communications, though, make sure that people know what their tasks are. Don't just let them try to figure it out for themselves. Because again, then if you leave people to figure it out for themselves, you've got the two extremes that you just mentioned. Either somebody tries to do too much or somebody just gives up and says, I don't know what to do, so I'll do nothing.

Dante Healy [00:19:51]:

You know, make sure they know what they have to do, they know what they have to achieve, that you're being realistic. Don't give people too much to do. Maybe have core hours where you're saying, right, these are the hours that we'll all be available to each other. And beyond that, I don't really care if you want to, you know, start late and finish late, or start early and finish early, as long as the work gets done and as long as during these core hours, we can talk as needed. I think that's kind of where I would be inclined to say to try and make sure people are all pushing in the same direction at the same time. Without feeling lost.

John Byrne [00:20:38]:

Yeah. And disconnected, because it's easy to kind of lose that personal touch, even in communications. And there is this. This narrating doubt in your mind that if a team member isn't responding to your Queries, you know, chat immediately that they may be ignoring you. That's not necessarily the case. What you probably find is actually they're not a dedicated project resource and they're working on multi, even either a combination of BAU as well as a project or even multiple projects as well on top of that.

Dante Healy [00:21:18]:

And it could also be just that they've muted it. Not muted, you muted the instant focus on deep work. Yeah, that's it. You know that they'll go back and they'll look at it in an hour or two's time and you know that they'll do. And yeah, you have to be willing to accept that that's they walk just figure out that's how they work and don't take it personally that some people just, that that's because, you know, I've, I've. While I don't tend to walk like that but I, I probably should because I, I, I am a little bit too when somebody even emails me, I feel in here that I need to reply and get it done, you know. But it's very distracting when you're in the middle of something to be doing that that, you know, I think that's one of my weaknesses. Maybe I need to get a little bit more like that that I'll check in every once an hour or every, you know, even two hours and reply to everything then you know, to do it.

Dante Healy [00:22:07]:

I think the other thing as well though might be it's getting the balance right to not be annoying but to be doing it. Have little one to one again it goes back to the communications fees but have little one to one meetings with people that aren't about project updates. How are you? Is everything going okay? Yeah, yeah.

John Byrne [00:22:25]:

Not have to have that difficult.

Dante Healy [00:22:28]:

Yeah.

John Byrne [00:22:28]:

Beyond communication, it's about really underlying what are the, what are the emotions that you feel when you're interacting with your team member? Can you rely on them? Are you comfortable delegating tasks to them and are they comfortable being able to tell you honestly if they can achieve it?

Dante Healy [00:22:46]:

Yeah. And you know, when, when back when you used to walk in person, you could kind of read the body language. You could read the person you knew who. Okay, that person is a bit introverted. So yeah, just leave them in peace for most of the time.

John Byrne [00:22:57]:

Or that person, you know, they're twitching when they're telling me something. There may be some inconsistency there.

Dante Healy [00:23:03]:

Yeah. That are the, you know, the people will, you know, you, you'll kind of get to know when people are, how they walk when you know, in a person, you know how they walk best. And the only way you'll get that working remotely is to have occasional check ins with them that aren't specifically about how is this task doing, it's just how are you doing is, you know, is this working for you? Is there something that you can, you know, do you need to tweak if like you just mentioned earlier, if somebody is not responding to your I, well, you're in some messages, maybe it's because they do that. They, they mute things and they just check once an hour or if you have a chat with them just about things in general, they probably tell you that's what they do. And then you know, okay, now I know what's happening. So when I, when I message them, I'm not getting an instant reply, I'll have to wait. And I know then if, if I need them right now, if it's an emergency, well, okay, maybe I need to do something else. Maybe I need to call them that they'll answer the call but they won't answer the instant message.

John Byrne [00:24:10]:

Exactly. And you know, generally speaking, if you've got your system set up correctly, mo having a one to one as a status check in is a bit of a waste of time because you should use the project management tools to track progress. But let's have the one to one to build the relationship, foster trust, understand their challenges because you know, it could be that they are overworked. One of my concerns with remote working and project managing remote teams is really getting a true understanding of what is the real capacity of the team member. How available are they to be getting their work done. Because it's often the times that projects, the tasks on your project board aren't the only tasks they have to do. I keep coming back to that, but you have to really understand where they're getting challenged. And if it ends up becoming a prioritization discussion with their boss or some other senior manager who has an influence on their duties, then you need to have a discussion to say, look, this is holding back what I need to get done.

John Byrne [00:25:21]:

So tell me, how long is this going to continue?

Dante Healy [00:25:24]:

That's it. And in person that can be picked up on fairly easily because in person.

John Byrne [00:25:31]:

You can see them responding to stuff. Yeah.

Dante Healy [00:25:34]:

Whereas when it's remote they might feel nervous, especially if it's somebody who's, you know, more junior or, you know, still building their career. They might not be as confident about.

John Byrne [00:25:45]:

Saying they don't want to see a confrontation between senior people, that they feel they're responsible for they've started.

Dante Healy [00:25:52]:

Yeah. So that's something that you need to be, you know, you can manage that easier in person than remotely, but when you're working remote, you have to figure out how to manage that, how to.

John Byrne [00:26:02]:

Get that trust quickly. Yeah, agreed. So, and I guess in terms of personal productivity, really it's about protecting their time, allowing them pockets to do deep work and just pushing back or at least managing expectations if there is a true capacity issue. I think also the other piece which we need to cover besides productivity is also this idea of balance. And for , John, there's two types of balance. There's work life balance, which is more the traditional approach where a person has two separate, two separate areas of their life, which is work and then their personal life and they're seen as competing domains and the goal is really to set clear boundaries and a common example of that is the traditional nine to five. Right. And this approach is really about people who have managed their work to accommodate their life and make it as easy as possible and also prevent burnout, which is, which is a good thing.

John Byrne [00:27:08]:

But then there's these people who do work life integration which is a, I guess a more modern approach where the work and personal life are blended and the goal is to make sure that they're more flexible and that they can successfully manage both areas by trying to merge the two and have some form of harmony. And again, this is coming back to technology enabling that so that people can work from home if they need to, say, look after their kids for example, but. Or have a break in the middle of the day to go on, I don't know, a medical appointment. And I think this works for knowledge workers who aren't time bound by outputs like on a production line where there's a degree of rigidity, but also there's also a risk there that they can easily switch to being always, always available for work and that can lead to burnout. What do you think? Have you, have you found, have you found that. I'm assuming you're more of the latter. Work life integration. But do you find it's a challenge or do you do work life balance whilst remotely working from home? The book Life Balance, merging.

Dante Healy [00:28:24]:

Merging work and life is not something I would be interested in at all. To me, that reeks of like Google trying to get everybody to live in the Google office by giving. That's. No, that's nonsense.

John Byrne [00:28:36]:

Giving them coffees and beds.

Dante Healy [00:28:37]:

Yeah, that's it.

John Byrne [00:28:38]:

That's actually, it's cheaper than hiring a.

Dante Healy [00:28:41]:

Hotel for Them, Right, no, true, but it's still though, the idea is, oh, your work and your life is the one place. No, it's not. Keep them separate. It'd be my thing. Work, life, balance is good. We're in reason work, you know, just because you, you can't have everything your own way, you know that it doesn't work like that. You do have tasks to do, get them done.

John Byrne [00:29:02]:

If you're too rigid, it doesn't look good.

Dante Healy [00:29:04]:

No, but I, I do believe in being, you know, once the work is done, why should anybody care when you did it or how you did it? Key thing though is don't be walking all the time. Like, you do see that in order to facilitate it, they've put their, their walk email on their phone and their instant messaging on their phone and it's all the time then that they, they, they're getting it. You know, somebody sends an email in the middle of the night, they're getting it in the middle of the night and then they're thinking about it in the middle of the night. How I get around that is I have two phones, I have a work phone and I have my personal phone. I do have the email and the instant messaging on my work phone. So if I am hopping out somewhere, if I'm popping down to the shops, if I want to go out for a coffee or whatever, I'll bring that work phone with me. And if somebody needs to reach me during hours, I'll have it. But once I finish work in the evening, or if I'm going off on holiday or that work phone gets turned off and left and I don't get any messages on my personal phone, that's how I would advise most people to do things like that.

Dante Healy [00:30:04]:

That gives you the flexibility that, yeah, you can pop out during core hours and still be contactable in an emergency for work. Assuming that you haven't blocked off the time. I mean, if you've blocked off the time to go see the doctor, then don't bother trying to reply to instant messages or emails during that time. I think the best way to do it is the core hours where you're available. The core hours with a bit of flexibility, you know, not, you know, I have, I've seen a place where the core hours and they're telling you if you have a doctor's appointment that I don't book it for the core hours. And you're kind of looking at. Yeah, but they're the hours that all the doctors are going to be and dentists are going to be fully booked, you've, you've no choice but to book them in during your core hours of work. It's not like you're going to the doctor or the dentist every week.

Dante Healy [00:30:51]:

So they should have the flexibility to, you know, once in a while. Yeah, you can take an hour off during the core hours, but for the most part, you're available during core hours if you're needed. And that's why it means everybody's available at the same time. I think that's a fair thing. The work's getting done. Give people flexibility, but do try to make sure that they're not overdoing it.

John Byrne [00:31:13]:

Yeah. Either way, they're not. There's a bit of give and take and they're not, they're not given too much freedom to sort of like, create chaos. Because we're working in teams, we have to have some boundaries, but at the same time, allow people the flexibility for things that would make their life so much easier without giving away too much for the team. Occasional breaks, occasional timeouts, as, as you say, as long as the work gets done, then it shouldn't be an issue.

Dante Healy [00:31:45]:

And I, I try to, you know, make sure people are not walking too long either, because I think actually that's, you know, there, there might be a few take advantage of it and just don't do any work. But I think it's the other side of things that's the bigger risk from, from my. People tend to. Because they're walking remotely, they feel they have to prove themselves that they are walking and they make themselves, they walk more than they should be.

John Byrne [00:32:08]:

And it sets a dangerous precedent for executives who think these people have more capacity than they actually do.

Dante Healy [00:32:16]:

Yeah, exactly. So you keep it, keep an eye on that and make sure people aren't doing so little things. I mean, nearly everybody in the organization I'm with, they'll have a thing on the bottom of their email specifically saying, I've sent this email at a time that suits me. I'm not expecting a reply from you until normal walking hours. But what I've. People will still, though, might read that email and feel they need to do it. What I've started doing is if I do think of something outside of normal working hours and I'm sending an email, I'll schedule it to go the next morning. Yeah, during normal working hours.

Dante Healy [00:32:47]:

So then I don't have to worry about anybody getting the email before when they shouldn't be walking just because they put it on the phone and didn't turn their phone off.

John Byrne [00:32:54]:

I've had the opposite in a previous company where people were sending read receipts with their emails just to check how quickly someone responded to it. Oh, Jenny, now I'm glad I'm no longer there.

Dante Healy [00:33:06]:

But yeah, that was even traceable saying, you know, that's just.

John Byrne [00:33:10]:

Yeah, complete grinder culture, you know.

Dante Healy [00:33:14]:

Yeah, no, that's. If you walk for a place like that, I would advise go look for another job somewhere else if you can.

John Byrne [00:33:21]:

As quickly as possible. Don't hang around.

Dante Healy [00:33:24]:

Yeah. And if you're the person putting it for that reason on, then my advice is have a strong, hard look in the mirror and question, why do you need that level of control? Why are you that worried about it?

John Byrne [00:33:36]:

Yeah. Okay. Well, I think that's covered pretty much everything we were planning to talk about and I guess audience. So that's remote working for project managers. So the biggest challenge isn't really about the tools or the technology. It comes back to the people. So really what you need is communication, trust, cohesion and balance. Technology helps, but leadership makes the difference.

John Byrne [00:34:07]:

So if you take one thing from this episode, make it this. Don't wait for culture to happen by accident. As project managers, we have to design it. And when we do, remote and hybrid teams don't just work, they thrive. So thanks for listening to Business Breaks. I'm Dante Healy and thank you to John Byrne. And until next time, keep it. Keep your edge.

John Byrne [00:34:34]:

Thank you, John.

Dante Healy [00:34:35]:

Thanks, Dante.

John Byrne [00:34:40]:

That's it for today's episode. If this sparked something useful, please share it with a fellow professional. And if you're after more edge in your work, stay tuned. New episodes land every two weeks. Thanks for listening to Business Breaks, your project management edge and speak soon.