As so many are struggling with their businesses in this new reality we call COVID, we have all been confronted with the reality that the world has changed and a crisis is upon us.  I wanted to share a chapter from a friend who has written a series of books on the subject of entrepreneurship.  Called the “Decision Series,” Randy Nelson has authored two books (with two more on the way) on helping us navigate the business owner cycle.  Here’s a chapter on crisis leadership, and what Randy learned from his time as submarine XO and later successful exit of two companies on how to deal with crisis.

I highly recommend his books for all business owners out there, especially his “Second Decision” on operating your business well. If you read Randy’s chapter or tuned in from my last post on the strategic essentials of working from home, we covered communication and how essential it is for a successful transition to at home work, as an element of the broader need for great leadership for successful outcomes.  Vision, strategy and culture are all critical components of leadership as well, but these are items that really must come from the heart of the leadership of one’s business or division.  Further, countless books have been written on these subjects that could cover these topics far better than I (see Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why,” Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” on strategy and culture and overall leadership, “The 17 indisputable laws of Teamwork” by Thomas Maxwell, and many more).  All of them are well worth the read.

But the one facet of leadership, and one I see most lacking in many businesses, that is particularly crucial when your workforce is more virtual (and covered really well in Randy’s book), is metrics.  As one CEO friend told me years ago, when he asked what my key metrics were and I didn’t have a good answer:

“Brett, if you don’t know the metrics of your business, you’ll never know what makes it successful.  Talking financials only tells part of the story:  what items [that are measurable] that drive those financials are the keys to your business.”

Too often I hear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) referenced by others as financials.  Profits, revenue, cash flow, these are all very important, but are often data that only you and your CFO or Finance Officer know. If you want to share that data with your employees, I strongly encourage it, but that too will take time and a lot of process.  Jack Stack’s “Great Game of Business” and Geno Wickman’s “Traction” are great reads and systems to consider when going down that path.  They also only tell the outcome, they don’t share how you got there.  Knowing what causes your business to generate profits (revenue is nice, but without profits it’s vanity) is what will lead to high performing teams, as you build out the metrics that enable each teammate to understand where they fit into the bigger company picture.

The ability to know what number(s) each of your teammates should be looking at is the first crucial step in creating a culture of accountability.  The Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) has regularly published survey results that show employees seek, in this general order:

1. The ability to influence their working world;
2. Clear expectations as to what is expected of them;
3. Being valued and appreciated;
4. Fair compensation.

Notice compensation is last. Yes, everyone wants to paid well, but so long as their compensation plan is fair, employees really want to know how will the game be played, what part of the game are they expected to play/influence, and what does winning look like?  I like to compare it to games because most all of us grew up playing games of some kind.  Sports, cards, Monopoly, we all know the rules, and we all know what winning looks like.

I find these four elements very intertwined and critical if you are to create an accountable culture.  To me, it starts with #2:  clear expectations.  To have clear expectations, one has to have data, especially when your people are working from home, when all you have is the ability to see the final work product or financial outcomes.  Simply put, your teammates crave objective analysis, because when it is clear to them not only what is expected of them, but also what they are involved in defining, together you both can determine HOW to accomplish it. This also addresses #1, their ability to influence, and even #3 being valued and appreciated, as you will find it easier to value them and show appreciation if you can objectively see they’re helping you make a positive difference.

Once employees feel you both are on the same page, you will begin establishing trust, which is essential between business leaders and their employees to achieve success.  You will get a lot less “why are we doing this?” if they understand what drives the business, and how what they do influences it. This of course gets back to communication we discussed earlier, but you’ll find you spend a lot less time explaining things as you establish trust.  Telling your teammates “Trust me!” is something I found never worked!

Clear expectations thus, derive from metrics that allow you to create a scorecard between you and your employee.  Taking your goals for the year, you can reverse engineer your business to determine what each departments scorecard will look like, and in turn how you will develop the KPIs of each employee within those departments.

If you’re thinking “Yeah sure, it’s so simple!,” you’re right: it’s not.  Considerable thought needs to go into your metrics as a company and what’s driving your success (or what needs to change to make it successful).  From my experience, you’re likely to make a few mistakes as to what you’re measuring, and change the metrics up.  But good news:  my experience is when people see you trying to figure it out and working smart to enable both the company and employees to be successful, they’ll be a whole lot more willing to put up with these mistakes and help solve the problem to make the company successful.

As we all adapt and reimagine our businesses in this new reality, metrics and communication will be crucial as companies consider being more home-based.  In addition to Randy’s Decision Series, I also highly recommend “Traction” by Geno Wickman, as you consider how to thrive in the months ahead and put better metrics and communication systems in place.  If I had one thought to close, it would be don’t let the productivity of your teammates these past few months lull you into a sense of false security.  Many companies have reported seeing their teammates productivity equal to, or increased, during this COVID crisis.  Seeing the job market run high with unemployment and the quarantines forcing people to stay home may be creating “false positives” in productivity.  Make sure your metrics are strong, and you’re constantly evaluating how you can communicate  better in order to ensure everyone in your company is on the same page.

As a follow up to my post last week about communication, I discussed the 5 key tools that we used to help get everyone on the same page to become a remote workforce.  In addition to those, I thought it would be useful to share some of the software/tech tools we use at L&E. So here they are, a few tools we use in our daily work, plus a few things we do as a company throughout the year to enhance our communication with one another.

• Video Meetings – We hold all of our meetings via video and a good HD webcam on each employee’s laptop enables us to do so. Whether the video platform is through 8×8, Zoom or GoToMeeting, video provides a human connection and dynamic that can’t be achieved through phone/conference calls. We are able to see the background of one another’s homes (and the occasional pet, spouse or child ). This keeps things real, we are human and we LIKE seeing each other’s lives. I have found for new employees this also gives them more familiarity with their new colleagues and helps them get to know one another better before they have the chance to meet in-person.
• Online Chat Tool – We use G Suite and Google Hangouts is a chat feature within Gmail. Having a chat function available makes it easy to get a quick answer without having to worry if someone is busy, or if you missed a call. Furthermore, it reduces the amount of congestion in inboxes and is a great internal communication tool.
• Shared System – I mentioned Smartsheet specifically in the last blog post. It’s a shared workspace tool that everyone can access and make changes to in real time. It solves the problem of not having the most current document that may have been shared or emailed back and forth multiple times. It’s where we set our goals and metrics, discuss issues at hand and create our to-do’s. It’s something we come back to in each meeting to guide us and help us so that we are held accountable in actions following every meeting.

Example of Smartsheet workspace below:

• Small Team Meetings – Keeping our team meetings smaller helps us stay focused on the goals/metrics of the departments we work within, makes it easier to bond in a smaller group setting and for the most part keeps our meetings shorter and within our desired time limits. We have cross-departmental meetings (which are small as well), but these are with each department head vs. the whole team. This makes good use of each team’s time and when there is something pertinent that needs to be passed down from the department leader they are then able to regroup in their own small teams.
• Polaris Learning System – This is an online learning academy that our team has been utilizing since 2017. While you may wonder how this is part of communication, there are courses in the following chapters (and yes, communication is one of the courses!): Self Development, Communication Skills, Time Management, Decision-Making Skills, Goal Achievement and Leadership & Management. You can check out the Polaris website and learn more about the coursework offered with this sample course module.

As many on our team have written about tricks to help your day-to-day strategy on working from home, in this blog post –  I’d like to talk more about the overall company and its approach to working as a team.  So for those leading teams, or even companies and are dealing with a virtual workforce for the first time in this new “normal,” I’m talking to you!

For many, this rapid transition from working in an office to working at home has led to a lot of challenges.  I am sure everyone is quickly realizing that the things that were likely taken for granted when everyone was in one space are now “oh wow” moments that have presented new challenges to leaders as to how to get their teams to continue to be productive, as well as measuring effectiveness.

Prior to diving deeper into the challenges of the virtual workforce and building effective teams virtually, it’s important to highlight what all businesses must have throughout the organization to be successful:  leadership.  It took me years (and some embarrassing experiences) to realize leadership wasn’t speeches or “larger than life” personalities.  Leadership is action that people commit to daily in order to inspire and comfort others, and this results in people’s comfort following their lead.  While there are varied attributes, I have ascribed to the six following elements of leadership:

• Authenticity: I’ve been around orators, and I’ve been around people that might have said five words in a meeting.  Some spoke with their hands, and some looked like they barely had a pulse.  Leaders come in all different forms, but the key is authenticity, being true to themselves.
• Vision: knowing where one wants to go, what goals are to be set out and accomplished.
• Strategy: how do we intend to get there?  What’s the plan?
• Culture: what are the common beliefs we all agree are the principles of our team?  Many often use words like “integrity” or “compassion” or “teamwork”:  noble principles, but don’t forget there was no integrity witnessed in “Wolf of Wall Street,” although they were a tightly bonded (and highly successful) team.  And Blackbeard likely had little compassion for non-performers or those disloyal to him and his ship, but the loyalty of his men was notorious in those times.  Culture is the environment that teams agree to embrace, and not tolerate from others that don’t embrace it.  It’s also a big part of the language, the common reference everyone on the team understands.
• Metrics: humans perform as a result of the rewards they will receive for achieving those measures (and rewards come in many forms and aren’t always financial). Our ability to agree on what those rewards will be, and what each side (employer and employee) must do in order to earn those rewards, how to measure what a “great job” means, is critical.

Finally, the one I will focus on in this post is communication.  If your team does not know what the vision is, the plan to get there, what we all agree are the rules and expectations, and how we all know when the journey will be successful…you don’t have anything.  Simply put, ensuring the team knows what is going on is crucial, but probably the least thought out and most poorly executed within companies.

As a backdrop, when L&E made its transition to a virtual workforce in 2009, we shortly thereafter made our first expansion in Tampa, Florida.  There were two main employees that were added to the team, and roughly 10 employees overall to our existing team of 30.  My biggest surprise was discovering how often the team was having “miscommunications.”  Balls were regularly getting dropped. Misinformation was as common as accurate information. The success of our new office was genuinely in jeopardy.  Clearly, we had some problems to solve if we were going to succeed.

Fortunately, over 400 employees later, we did figure it out.  For effective communications, we implemented 5 key tools to help us get everyone on the same page.

1. Meetings: first off, let’s be clear that meetings are useless unless they are effective. You can learn all you want about effective meetings from “Traction” by Geno Wickman.  I can’t endorse his business operating system highly enough.  It’s a short read, and overall not an overly costly system to follow, even with outside help.  But I’ll just share that the keys to effective meetings break down into 4 parts:  they must have an agenda, they must require people are engaged (e.g. not doing email while they are meeting), they must have action items that result from the meetings (who’s going to do it, who’s responsible for it, and when’s it going to happen) and finally, they require a leader who is going to follow through and hold people accountable to those action items.  If something is more intense, you may require greater meeting frequency, but for typical department operations, once a week I find works well, and must include what Wickman calls “cascading messages”:  data that should either go outside the meeting to others, or sometimes messages that should be conveyed to the team prior to meeting start (which would be part of the agenda).
2. Company surveys: good communication isn’t just about telling people things; in fact, it is more about listening to what others have to say.  Sometimes it’s to better form strategies; sometimes it’s to get buy in, and sometimes, it’s because people need to talk, and a leader’s job is to listen, and to empathize with your teammate. But I find an annual survey (and I also like a short “pulse check” 6 months later) of how happy your team is, and finding out what they think would make the company better, is an instrumental tool in your listening tool kit. In time, assuming companies are acting on the survey, teammates will trust their leaders more.  That leads to teammates thinking about how to make the company better more regularly:  they’ll take ownership of the business and its outcomes. This goes a long way to having an engaged team, one that cares about the business and its success.
3. Use a commonly accessible system where information can be stored. Don’t think emails out to the team are going to be effective forms of communication!  Just like your inbox, your teammates email box is full of…emails!  They get deleted, they get overlooked and sometimes even more crippling, they can lead to “reply all” conversations that don’t solve problems (in fact they usually create more). Email is the most overused, and most abused, and least effective, method of communication.  Unless it’s a short response or confirmation of action, email should always be avoided.

Instead, use systems that can document and keep permanent record of the goals sought after.  There are considerable systems online out there one can use to track and post content for teams to reference. Google docs and spreadsheets, Smartsheets, Microsoft has a full suite just to name a few, the point is to have a place where teammates can go when questions arise, what they should reference.  And a “Wickman” rule I really like: document 20% that covers 80% of your business.  But remember unlike your in-office days, no one can knock on your door to ask a quick question, and that absence of convenience (beyond the normal stress of what is COVID-19) is likely to result in more people not being productive. And if I can implore you to remember one thing, it is this:  your team is stressed, and productivity is not going to be normal (both the new environment and stress): be patient!  People will settle in, but it will take time.

4. Regular “broadcasts.” Leverage tools like Zoom or GoToMeeting or others and once a quarter, talk to your team and answer their questions.  Tell them what’s going on, share the vision, the strategy, emphasize the culture, and then answer questions. I also like to visit teams regularly. Despite having nearly a dozen offices, I visit them all at least twice a year. But with the current crisis, having the team SEE you, HEAR you, and watch you respond and answer their questions demonstrates your willingness to share, to listen and to engage. Your team needs that, which leads to my 5^th communication key.
5. Repeat yourself…a lot! A famous quote from a Fortune 500 CEO when asked what he spends most of his day doing, his answer was “repeating myself.” Remember what you said probably only a few people heard. Whether it was because they’d never heard you say it before, or because humans generally need several impressions for the message to stick, repeating yourself becomes an important strategy. And a hard lesson I had to learn: be consistent. I’d try to say the same thing, but use different words or analogies, convoluting the message (still struggle with this actually, working to be better!). Saying it the same way, focusing on the same key points (3 is recommended), reinforcing the message to everyone consistently and being concise is most effective in getting people on the same page and, working together.

And if after reading this you’re thinking “I don’t run my company or my department, so what can I do?”  remember that you can be the biggest influencer of policy, as you are a member of the team.  All of you have good leaders where you work: those leaders will not only need your support during this harrowing time, they’ll also be listening for good ideas that they can implement. This gets back to good communication: good leaders want to hear your opinions, just make sure you offer them the right way.  That means you aren’t telling them, you’re sharing what you are seeing, how you care and want to see the company succeed and demonstrating respect for their position.  In other words, you aren’t complaining, you’re problem solving.  And another favorite word of mine, you’re being PROACTIVE.  You want to help and you’re volunteering to help implement whatever strategies leadership decides to implement. As Mark Cuban says: “[People] who reduce my stress, become invaluable to me!”

One of the things I’m most proud of at L&E are our employee happiness measures that show over 4 in 5 employees would highly recommend working at L&E to friends and colleagues (as a comparison, most companies in the services industry according to the Society of Human Resource Management are in the 50s to low 60s).  Good communication is critical to that end. And happy teammates are productive ones that embrace the company’s best interests. I hope this content has been helpful in creating a more effective virtual team in your organization.

Next time I’ll share what we have learned at L&E about metrics, and how to create measures that allow you and your teams to operative effectively, regardless of your location.

We are in week #3 of our blog series, hopefully you are settling into some sort of routine to help you make your work day a little bit more manageable. Our focus this week is stress relief because let’s be honest, the amount of stress and anxiety in our lives is quite high right now. We know you aren’t going to meditate on top of a mountain (unless you live in the mountains!) like the stock photo we used for this blog post, but this is a fantastic visualization tool and/or image to look at daily. Some of us have probably never dealt with this kind of uncertainty so we wanted to share a couple “de-stresser” tips from our employees.

Take a few deep breaths and read below to learn what helps L&E employees relieve stress:

• Watch a funny or inspiring clip from a favorite TV show, a good laugh always helps us de-stress. A favorite of ours is from the wonderful John Krasinski : SGN Watch this week’s clip – Scott Johnson, St. Louis Client Services Manager
• And who doesn’t need more than one clip to brighten their day, here is another favorite from our team. This clip was sent over from Tyler Johnson, Client Relationship Manager
• Connect with your teammates regularly, it always helps talking it out. Specifically during these times, utilize video technology to stay in touch! – April Leonard, Medical Project Director
• Make your space extra comfortable – buy a plant so you have some greenery on your desk and turn on an essential oil diffuser (lavender works as a natural anxiety reliever). You can control the atmosphere so try to make it as stress free as possible! – Kaitlin Plave, Account Manager
• Take a lunch break:  One of my favorite WFH benefits is the freedom to prepare lunch at lunchtime (as opposed to packing a lunch before going to the office), or simply heat up some leftovers.  I also try to walk my dogs during this break time – a midday “fresh air” break is very relaxing and gets me on track to finish the day.  The important part is to simply get up and take a break! – Kelli Hammock, Senior Client Solutions Manager
• In addition to taking some time daily to laugh (or cry), exercise is always a great stress reducer to help balance body and mind. – Brett Watkins, CEO

Be on the lookout for our next blog post in this series coming next week!