Remote work

All your employees work from home.

Whatever that corporate culture is, is dying slowly.

In all my years, I've never worked at a company where it said, "We're teaching corporate culture 101 today." Corporate culture is learned in the hallway, in the lunchroom, by the coffee machine.

Additionally, when you're in person, there's an ability for senior management or mentors to recognize the most talented.

But us, the senior leaders, we need to focus on the top talent.

We, we flatline their career trajectory by making them work from home because they become sort of incremental in what they do.

Give you a task, you work from home magically and, and later you present your work, but all of that time in between, we never got to develop a relationship where I can bring you into a different trajectory in your career.

Trajectory matters.

You mentioned mentor, and I think that's one of the best pieces of advice I ever got is find yourself a mentor.

But all this stuff with the leadership and being on top of things has gotten so much harder over the last couple of years specifically because in the post-COVID world, I think it escalated.

But even beforehand, there's been such a hybrid workforce.

When I first started, my mentors were three desks away from me.

You mentioned in the beginning you weren't in Singapore.

You're not touching all those people.

How do you balance that? Or what are your suggestions in this hybrid workforce where we really are international, whether we want to be or not? How do you connect with people? How do you find the mentors? And how do you reach out for help when you're not seeing people and all you're seeing is a computer screen in front of you?

Well, you're seeing a computer screen, but I'm still seeing your eyes.

As you think back over the last decade, is there a trend that you were convinced would last forever, but it hasn't? That's a

I don't think I can name sort of a failed trend directly, but I do think sort of remote work comes to mind and kind of comes closest.

When we first started Talent Wars 10 years ago, remote work really wasn't even on our radar.

We were all going into physical office spaces and remote work, I feel, was definitely the exception rather than the norm.

But in the years, obviously, right after the pandemic, targeting remote workers really became a strategy in itself for communities who might not have been able to compete for new residents the same way as other bigger, more established locations.

So now as I think about it, you know, it's definitely become part of normal work and really sort of almost expected, I think.

But, you know, I do think that that's something that while it still matters, the idea that it would permanently scatter talent anywhere just didn't really hold over time.

but

I think actually where a lot of things have happened over the last five years is when people start working from home.

And, you know, everything's within 10 steps.

So, you know, when you go to the office, you've got to walk five minutes from the car park to work.

So it's not going to be powerful.

Yeah.

It does tend to be a bit situational in terms of, yeah, like what's your stack look like? How great is your data? And like, what's your systems connecting everything else in your company and what's touching your customers? So I think then too, when it comes to kind of like hybrid working and then AI, it is one too where it's a bit like, you have to with your teams, you have to support them in like utilizing AI.

It's a bit too like, I feel like baby steps sometimes because it's like introducing AI and how do you use it? So like, I think the first kind of step is like, oh, this will take like meeting notes for me and agendas and it will like help me with like organize and prioritize my day.

And it's kind of like stair stepping from that.

Exactly right.

Well, hybrid and remote work have changed how relationships develop inside organizations.

Which practices matter most when teammates are not sharing the same physical space every day? That's a great

question.

And yet it's the, in many ways, it's a real entree into that customer in terms of talking about their connectivity because they're all doing it and it's how they do it.

Everything that you've just talked about, work from home, hybrid work from home, flexibility, video versus voice, how does all of that work? Your customers are dealing with that.

How can you help them do it? Because there's so many options out there.

Yeah.

This is a really interesting podcast.

WFH with two guys.

Now here's Benny and Dennis.

You know, I think, Dennis, when I'm talking to my clients and we're talking a lot about artificial intelligence, a lot of the conversation has shifted in terms of what I'm hearing people talk about.