Bringing People Home

And so for those who want to keep working remotely, they’ll be now part of that distributed workforce. How do you give them explicit authority to lead without those in-person meetings or agendas are handed out and you have that direct communication every day?

So I'll give you a good example. We have a lot of calling centers that we have consolidated. We handle half a million calls a year from the military because there's crisis at home. Get my son home from, South Korea, his father's on his death bed kind of calls. Or get my husband home, he's about to become a father. We handle about 500,000 of those a year. Because of COVID, we brought everyone home and we're using technology to take calls. And we're scratching our head and saying, why would we ever go back to those buildings? They're getting the job done. How do you lead? Well, the technology tells you if they decided to unplug their headset and go for a three hour walk, you're going to see how they're doing using the same metrics to measure them client satisfaction, did you handle the call correctly? So, I think you can lead this way if you've got the right metrics and the right attitude and the right leadership skills. What I worry about is will people start feeling remote? If they don't have a building to go to, will they start feeling remote? And that's where we need to have fun virtual meetings. My daughter works at MIT and they're all working from home right now. And they have Thirsty Thursdays where everybody gets a cocktail and all they do is talk about their week. We have to figure out other ways to do that, where you don't talk about work, you just see your colleagues and you have a fulsome heartfelt conversation with them. And I think it's doable. I tend to think people are going to want to come in a couple of days a week just for that human need, the way you just described it. But if they can work at home and they're happy, then we're going to honor that.