In this bonus episode of the One Next Step Podcast, I share what benefits business owners and leaders fail to think about when it comes to the hybrid remote model.
One of the things that I learned pretty fast is when you're engaging with somebody in a virtual work arrangement, accountability is totally different.
Accountability requires less emotional energy in the context of more modern staffing approaches.
When you’re in person, you’re focused on being emotionally intelligent, engaging with people, building relational capital over time, and building buy-in. In a more virtual experience, there’s more ease and almost a value proposition with your employees.
There's more comfort for employees to grasp, ‘OK, this is your expectation of me and you pay me that? OK, great.’
It's a value proposition.
And so I think that, as a leader, when you think about how many direct reports you can manage, how many people you can handle when you need to bring on other managers to scale or things like that, the idea of allowing people to work remotely does allow you to change things.
When I was at North Point, my virtual assistant started in person, and then she had a baby.
She was so great that I didn’t want to lose her. So I tried having her work remotely – my first time leading someone that way.
And I found that when she went home, she was more productive. She was easier to work with. She shed the burden of my emotions and my kind of leadership style and was able to just be really tactical and, honestly, that’s what she wanted.
That’s what was best for her, and it became what was best for me, too.