Workplace Wellbeing Essentials: Expert Interview #2 with Stefanie Heiter

In this Expert Interview, AdvancingWellness CEO Mari Ryan is joined by pioneer in the field of dispersed teaming and leadership Stefanie Heiter. This is Mari and Stefanie’s second conversation, see the first one in this earlier blog post.

This interview is reposted from an article on the AdvancingWellness blog. This is Mari and Stefanie’s second conversation, see the first one in this earlier blog post.

In this Expert Interview, AdvancingWellness CEO Mari Ryan is joined by pioneer in the field of dispersed teaming and leadership Stefanie Heiter.

Mari Ryan: Welcome to the Workplace Wellbeing Essentials Series. I'm Mari Ryan. I'm the CEO and founder of Advancing Wellness. It is my pleasure to welcome you today to this expert interview where we explore topics that impact employee wellbeing. My guest today is Stefanie Heiter.

Stefanie is the founder and partner at Bridging Distance and has helped pioneer the field of disbursed teaming and leadership since 1997. Stefanie is among the nation’s leading thinkers and consultants on the human side of virtual work. She has authored numerous published articles in the area of virtual leadership teams and communications and created six training workshops. You can bet she’s been busy in the past year as the world has moved to virtual work. When not consulting and conducting research Stefanie looks after her own wellbeing by hiking, canoeing, and biking.

Stefanie, welcome. I’m so excited to have you here with me today.

Stefanie Heiter: Thanks so much for having me. It’s always a pleasure to work with you, Mari.

Mari Ryan: Thank you. As we know in the last year the world of work has changed significantly and as a result of the pandemic we’ve gone from traditional work as environment and showing up in office places to a distributed model. Now employers are really at that place where they are having to plan for the future of their workplaces. As a result this is causing a lot of anxiety amongst employers as to how they are going to make the most of bringing their workforce back, if indeed they even do.

Today we are going to explore this impact of remote work and how it impacts the wellbeing of the workforce. One thing we know for sure, and Stefanie, you and your team are going to be really busy as a result of this, we know that remote work is here to stay. Employers are taking many different approaches in their planning steps when they look at where their workforce will actually work. Some might be completely remote, some might be in the office, creating what we are now calling this “hybrid model,” and a few are bringing all of their employees back, whether they want to or not, which is one of the things we should talk about. What should employers be thinking about as they are creating this virtual work enablement strategy?

Stefanie Heiter: The first thing we are seeing to consider is that there are a number of companies, Boston.com just did a survey of close to 2000 people in the Boston area recently and they found that 60% of employers still haven’t communicated anything about what their return to office strategy is. What is amazing is that prolonged uncertainty is causing a lot of stress for people, the unknown. We fully understand that this is new territory for lots of people, but the lack of communication is really profound and has an impact on what people want to do, and it’s a potential talent drain.

What we recommend is first of all in that case is to at least recognize what are the criteria we are going to use to make that decision. Is it things like location, seniority, job function, where we are, all of the different aspects in terms of what are the criteria that companies are going to use to make those decisions. Is it voluntary or mandated, so that people at least have some awareness in that.

Then in doing that, if you can, use some real time surveying. There are lots of tools out there to do a quick survey, just a quick pulse, particularly for your high-performing talent, the key talent that you want and need to retain. You need to find out how they are doing, how they are feeling, and what they are thinking.

We are also seeing that sometimes this has become an HR initiative, when in fact we recommend it be a cross-functional initiative so that you hear from the various factions. HR has one perspective, and at least if it’s only HR then you’ll also want to make sure that you're bringing in that real time data and the feedback and then at least running the plans by.

So a couple of other considerations is to see if you can in fact have some kind of a cross-functional task force. It doesn’t have to be lengthy because one thing that we also know in uncertainty is you want to have, you want to build in flexibility to the plan. What we are seeing is there is almost two camps. There are people who are being thoughtful and strategic about their plan, thinking it through and trying to get some criteria out there and think about it and make sure that they understand it has to be flexible and iterative. Then there are others who are taking a wait-and-see approach. That wait-and-see, we’re predicting is going to backfire because people aren’t going to want to stay in that. Then there are the kind of “let’s just go for it,” what we call the “wing it” approach to just come in and do it. I think the latter two cause a tremendous amount of stress because people are not certain and that makes a really big difference in terms of what you can do. So again, making sure that you are taking into account what people want and how they are going to work and being able to communicate that becomes really important.

In terms of wellness, what we’ve seen over the last year is this work-life fusion or integration where things are blurred and people are set up that way. Being able to understand and set up the structures for people to be able to be valued and goaled and add value based on what they are performing and what they are doing, and some of those elements to it.

A last piece is this concept of fairness and equity, which people are really struggling with. How do you make it fair? I’m not a compensation expert, but there are some things around fairness, around compensation, as well as ways in which to make that work.

Mari Ryan: I’d love to explore a little bit this idea, as your first statistic, that so many employers haven’t made publicly acknowledged what they are doing with their workforce. No doubt that is causing stress and anxiety for people. This whole hybrid model and managing a distributed workforce seems like it requires some different thinking and that it’s much more complex. I’m curious, from your perspective and with all the research and work you’ve done, what are the complexities that exist when trying to build this model of a distributed workforce?

Stefanie Heiter: The complexities are that if you are not careful we go back to having “haves” and “have nots.” People who are remote might feel digital isolation. We just finished some research at looking at the impact of digital isolation and loneliness on workplace productivity and what we found is the overriding word that came up again and again was “connect” and “connection” and ways in which people can do that. So you want to be able to do that both synchronously so that in real time connection, but also asynchronously and being able to use the technology tools for people to feel like they are engaged and having conversations.

The most critical aspect to being able to make hybrid work is to formalize the informal, to set up structures so that people are able to be successful regardless of where they are. The challenge is those people who are returning to an in-person situation, full time or even more than part time, don’t necessarily understand, or need, or recognize that they need to have those formal structures in order to be successful. We’re talking about things like, how often are we going to meet? How are we going to find each other? Aspects of creating visibility because we know that visibility and transparency create trust. We know the absence of that actually depletes trust. We’re drawing down our trust checkbook balance just by doing nothing. So we know that those informal interactions, what they sometimes call “conscious collisions,” a term that’s come up a lot. A company I worked for several years ago actually moved their bathrooms to a central location so people would have those opportunities to interact.

So we have to formalize those informal collisions where people can do that. There’s a ton of tools out there – you can google any of it. Really, the aspect of this is from a leadership perspective to make it happen and from an organizational perspective to recognize the need, otherwise we go back to what we used to have pre-COVID, which is either a proximity bias, which is we are biased towards those who are located with us, and with COVID we find that has morphed into something called temporal bias, which is those who are closer to or at our own time zones. Those become critical to be able to navigate that.

What we sometimes do as teams and individuals is to be able to say we need to be able to create dense social networks for in person and remote people to be able to reach out to each other. It has an impact on onboarding, for example, how do you onboard somebody? And then to be able to say for example, Mari, this month I’m going to meet with you and we’re going to spend 20 minutes just having a chit-chat, just getting to know each other because that also breaks down some of the silos that we’ve seen built that have become impenetrable in COVID because we’re just interacting with people on task.

Mari Ryan: I’d like to go back for a moment to this topic of what you describe as the “haves and have nots.” How can employers who are embracing the remote work and giving their employees the flexibility in their places that they work, how do we avoid creating these two classes, if you will, of employees, the office employees versus the remote employees. How do we avoid that?

Stefanie Heiter: The most basic thing that needs to be done is to be able to recognize there is that bias towards those that are in person and to be able to talk some about that. The other thing is one of the concerns that we often hear is if my people aren’t in the office with me, how do I recognize who my top talent are, and how do I make sure I am keeping them, and how do we make sure we are mentoring them and that we are able to move them along. Being able to formalize processes, to recognize how we are rewarding, what we are rewarding and making sure that that’s aligned with our company values. If we are rewarding task completion, virtual and in-person interactions, so interactions in general regardless of how they are, which means we need to take into account asynchronous, or non-real time interactions when we evaluate, and then the ability for people to share with each other.

When I was talking about formalizing structures, one of the things that we came across a lot in early COVID  is that companies that have a culture of having information people’s heads as opposed to keeping minutes and this is how things are done … if you remember way back in the 80s we had that knowledge drain where people were being replaced by folks that were cheaper and younger, but what they didn’t realize is that they also let go of people who knew how to run the company. The more that you can formalize that and have a company playbook that is iterative and has links that you can share with people, Mari, if you and I were in the same office and I can tap you on the shoulder and say, Mari, can you help me with this, it doesn’t matter because it’s in your brain and I have access to it. But if I am in Germany or South America, I can’t find you. That means first of all I can’t benefit from your knowledge, you don’t get to share that, and we don’t all grow together.

There are a couple of ways in which that can be done, but I think the first is to make sure there is parity across remote and in person so that people don’t feel slighted. If they do, talk about why. Earlier I talked about the criteria for our decision on how we are going to move forward and how do we manage this messy middle. If we don’t talk about why some people are coming back and why others aren’t then we create that disparity.

One last piece; many years ago we used to – I don’t know if you remember this – but sometimes companies have names or nicknames or letters for different locations, so Dak* used to have that, a lot of the different ones. You could also create for people, so you go to this location, you go to the Boston area, or you go to Andover, or you’re up in Belfast, Maine, or wherever it is, it’s a code. You could also create a remote worker code and create a cohesion and a cohort, a set of compatriots there who are all working remotely and then sometimes if they are dispersed, like three hours apart, they can meet every quarter for golf, or pizza, or something to be able to have those informal interactions.

Mari Ryan: That’s great. You talk about some of these processes and formalizing them and being really intentional about them. As I’m thinking about this, I’m thinking about the managerial viewpoint. Managers are probably going to have to start changing their mindset about how they manage their employees. There’s no more management by walking around. This was a big thing in my career is you could see these managers walking around and that was how they managed. That mindset is going to need to change to it’s not just is somebody there from 9 to 5. I think the 9 to 5 workday is probably history. How do we support managers to adapt to this new way of working?

Stefanie Heiter: The best thing that you can do is what we call “creating presence” for people. Presence overcomes all kinds of distance. The aspects of creating presence is not just about walking around, it’s how do you walk around the globe or the country, or even just New England. The way to do that is both synchronously, but when you have multiple time zones, so if you have a team where people are in California and Europe, that’s nine time zones. It’s hard to be awake that long.

What we want to do is think about asynchronous ways too. Having chats, being able to comment on documents, being able to make short videos that you send out to your team, even if it’s 90 seconds of hey, just wanted to check in with you guys and I wanted to give you a quick update. We have a virtual leader model that we just revalidated and we are about to release the new pieces of it. It has three scales to it: creating ommunity, directing digitally, and engaging electronically.

The creating community is the team piece of it, directing digitally is how do you do managerial operational stuff in a digital format, and engaging electronically is the one to one. The critical aspect is another way leaders can do that is in creating community we talk about managing the environment and building the team. Virtual leaders need to also recognize and understand if people are remote from home or if they are in another location, they can create visibility and presence by getting resources or understanding something about the location.

Again, it used to be – and kind of still is – if you see somebody posting a lot on LinkedIn and they're inside of a company, you think oh, they are looking for a job. Now we are seeing more and more robust LinkedIn because people are recognizing from a virtual leader perspective, creating those dense networks inside the company and out. So if I can create somebody’s [indecipherable – 17:36] Marge, you’re my manager and you’re here in the Boston area, and I’m working from Mexico City, you might want to see what you know about Mexico City, who do you know in the company and get to know that so you can have some camaraderie with me.

There’s that ability to gain resources and the other danger we have to be aware of is the ways in which leaders are communicating and is it equitable, or they’re not just having a hallway conversation with somebody. Are communications fair and do people with access to the same information at the same time? Then those leaders have to be good translators of information coming from the team out to the greater world about how great their team is and the good stuff they are doing uniformly, but also being able to filter information from the broader organization to the team in terms of what they need, again equitably and uniformly, not so that you overwhelm people, but so they are informed and know what to do.

Mari Ryan: Your virtual leadership model sounds fabulous and I can’t wait to learn more about that. I noticed you mentioned earlier and you mentioned there in your model that there is a lot of elements around this idea of connection and community. Connection and community are two core elements both of who we are as humans and how we function in a workplace, but they are also core to our wellbeing. How will we create a workforce that can have strong connection and collaboration, and I am also curious about what role culture plays in this. You did talk about communication, obviously, but with its distributed workforce, how is this going to impact us on connection and community?

Stefanie Heiter: I think some of it starts with the mindset that informal connection is valuable to the team and to the company, and it’s an activity that has flown below the radar in an in-person setting and now we have to bring it up and elevate it a little bit to formalize that. It means when you do virtual team building or playing games together or being able to share, again, that permission. I just think about for years we’ve always started our meetings with a check-in question, favorite color, vacation spot. Mari, you went on vacation. Show us your photos, the best photo you took there. Those things breed connection. Something to consider, being able to have those things be informal.

The other aspect is when you talk about connection, you’re talking about trust building. Trust building in virtual settings, there’s two types of trust that we talk about. I did my master’s thesis in the 90s on trust in global teams. We isolated two types of trust. The first is what we think about as trust building and that’s called relational trust. That’s trust based on how we get to know each other, how we learn how informal, coming back and the things that we miss just to say, hey, I know your kid was in a soccer tournament, how did she do? Or, what’s happening with the car, did you get a new car? Whatever it was and we have those informal things.

That’s how we get to know each other based on commonalities and experiences. That’s the traditional team building where people shoot each other with paintballs or jump out of trees or whatever it is. But in a virtual setting, often it’s called transactional trust and that’s trust built based on the way in which we execute our tasks. In virtual settings the people who don’t know each other that well, we start to build trust and expectations of people based on how they complete their tasks on time as expected, do they respond to each other? We know that relationships diminish across relationships and power. Technology can dehumanize those relationships. So if I don’t have a criteria that says I’m going to respond to my team member who is nine hours away first, because I know that she can’t do the rest of this task if I shut down for the day.

When we have formal criteria that we are looking at in terms of who gets communicated to and when, those connections can happen. Again, we want to formalize informal connections and give permission and structure so that people can get to know each other. That trust becomes really important around the visibility. I think it’s going to become particularly important because I hear a lot that people are thinking oh, the hard part is over. We got through COVID and we did this suddenly remote, but I speculate we are about to enter the hardest part in something we call “the messy middle” and that’s where we’re all trying to figure it out and some of us want to go back to the way it was and some of us want to move forward, but we don’t know in which direction and so there’s going to be a push and pull that leaders are going to have to surface and talk about.

Mari Ryan: All good suggestions there and I appreciate that. I’m curious from your perspective, when you think about the wellbeing of the workforce and especially for many of us in this distributed model, there are two schools of thought about this: there are the folks that say that wellbeing has improved for those who work from anywhere because now they are not commuting, they have more flexibility in their workday, and they can take more time perhaps, replace that commuting time with time that they might focus on their own wellbeing. Then there’s the school of thought that says wellbeing has diminished because people are tethered to their computers, we don’t have those natural breaks, such as commuting time, and so now we’re getting stressed, anxious, and burned out because we are never disconnecting.

I’m curious, from your perspective as an expert in this field, what are your thoughts about where we are in terms of wellbeing for the employees and how can we make sure that we look after the wellbeing in this new model of work?

Stefanie Heiter: First of all, I don’t think it’s an either-or, I think both of those can be true. I think that lots of people have become more productive at home because they don’t have the commuting time and they’re working more hours. But there’s a particular level, there’s a lot of talk about how women who have children at home are actually really struggling and many have left the workforce because they can’t manage it. That’s obviously not for the wellbeing of that woman who has had to put her career on hold.

A couple of things, one is first of all to understand for each person’s perspective how much connection do you need to people, and if that connection is important to you around being productive, how do you make those happen in terms of that. So understanding a little bit about your own style – extroversion, introversion, whatever that is – and the need for that. The other aspect in terms of productivity is we have a model on why hybrid is the most complex, and one of the things that we ask people to rate is how much interconnection do they need in order to be successful, how much collaboration do they need in order to be successful. If you have a team that has a shared task and they need to interact a lot, then you need to make sure those structures are in place.

From a wellness perspective, if those structures are not in place and these meetings aren’t taking place then the people are going to feel left out and get burned out more. There’s also a recognition that not everything has to be a meeting. We have something we call “meeting-itis” which is the first thing we do is we have a meeting without thinking about can we put a discussion up for 48 hours and get everybody to weigh in. I think that’s something people are going to have to learn, what’s our criteria for when we have a meeting and what we do asynchronously.

The other thing is not everything has to be a Zoom meeting or a Teams meeting. You can have a meeting walking around with your earbuds in. I have some clients in the south that have – I haven’t been there in a year, obviously – they have pathways around their buildings. If you have 30 minute meetings, start here and you’ll be back in 30 minutes. If we can get to an overall aspect where the organization recognizes that people were productive working remotely because they have the ability to leave and then giving permission for people to leave. One thing that we saw a lot is that companies were measuring people’s productivity by how long they were logged into the VPN or how much activity they had on their computer, which research prior to COVID and even now have said that’s actually a terrible indication because it promotes a lack of wellness and a stealth where you are going to say to my kid, hey, move my mouse every five minutes so it looks like I’m busy. Nobody wants to work in that kind of setting.

The more that we can recognize and know what’s good for our employees – again, surveying will help – what kind of wellbeing do they want, and how much connection do we really need, and being able to recognize all the ways in which we can communicate with each other. Sending fun things to each other, a quick little video or something is also connection, and so therefore we don’t have to do a drain. A year ago nobody wanted to use video and now it’s becoming mandatory and so we have to recognize when it’s okay to not use the computer, or is it okay to do it at the beginning and say “hi” to each other. As long as you are not multi-tasking, it’s okay. Is that what you were looking for?

Mari Ryan: Yes, thank you for those insights with how we can support employee wellbeing. That’s really helpful. Is there anything you’d like to add, Stefanie, in terms of the work you are currently doing, or some of the research you’ve completed? Other thoughts you’d like to add?

Stefanie Heiter: You had asked about culture, and what was interesting is we just completed a research project on the impact on the ways in which culture – we started with national culture but then we broadened into organizational culture – impacts technology adoption. So our choice of technology and use of technology. We’re just about to release that data. That’s something we can learn about because people aren’t going to jump on airplanes to solve issues of culture anymore.

So that’s one thing, so stay tuned for that. Secondly, one thing that will enable people to be successful remotely or wherever is thinking about what does your culture stand for. If we had a culture that says, “we value people” and let’s go back to your wellness question in the work that you’re doing, Mari. If we value people and that’s one of the things that we value then we need to make sure that the ways in which we are valuing people happen at each of the locations and if people are working from home and that has to translate into take time off when you need to, or work a flexible schedule as long as you are meeting what you need to do in your requirements. The moving from a perception of how hard you are working to actual real time data about what you are producing and this idea of taking people into account. That what we call the portability of culture. So the ways in which our culture is portable from one location to another can ensure people’s wellness and their ability to add value and to stay connected.

Mari Ryan: There is certainly a lot to look forward to in terms of your research and so many complexities so I can see why you are such a value to the clients that you work with why so many organizations should be working with you and your team. Stefanie, if our audience wants to learn more about you and the work you are doing, where can they find you?

Stefanie Heiter: Our website has a lot of stuff, the Bridging Distance website has a lot of information for people. We have a blog. You can sign up for our tips, we do free webinars every month. We also do a lot of posting on LinkedIn, some preliminary leaks of some of the things we found in our research, and so look for that in terms of following the Bridging Distance LinkedIn page, or you can connect with me there.

Mari Ryan: Great. Thank you so much for being here and sharing all of your vast experience with us and with the audience today. As always, it’s a delight to spend time with you, Stefanie.

Stefanie Heiter: Thanks, Mari. The same goes for me. Take care.

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