How To Maximize Productivity In Remote And Hybrid Teams With Shane Spraggs
Tom Dardick and Shane Spraggs discuss the benefits of remote or hybrid work, emphasizing the need for work-life balance, team engagement, and intentionality in businesses. They also highlight the importance of strong relationships, facilitation, and intentional communication in remote work environments, citing the success of their personal experiences and the failures of many companies during the pandemic. Lastly, they explore the potential of webinars, seminars, and podcasting as tools for personal and organizational growth.
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How To Maximize Productivity In Remote And Hybrid Teams With Shane Spraggs
On the show, it's my great pleasure to welcome Shane Spraggs to the program. Shane is with a company called Virtira. They help organizations with their remote and hybrid work models, train managers to be better facilitators, and help organizations elevate their culture. It might sound familiar to you. That's what we do with the High Power course through greater respect, greater trust, and greater skill with the management team, how they communicate, align and engage their workforce.Shane has the chance to share a number of great insights as it relates to this thing with us. Let's welcome Shane to the program.
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The workplace is radically different. Not stylistically but in very fundamental ways that we either adapt or we're going to suffer the consequences.
It's changing the ways that are giving employees more opportunities. I heard it. To put it very well, remote work or hybrid work gives companies a perk they can give to their employees that they haven't had before. There are not a lot of perks offered, certainly not to people in North America in terms of working conditions and vacation times and whatnot.
If you can offer the opportunity for someone to work from home for 2 or 3 days a week, then that gives them more flexibility with their home life. That's one of the big changes that happened over the last few years, especially during the pandemic was, “Life is short. Let's not waste it at the office.” A large percentage of people woke up to that, like, “I can spend my time building my career but in that process, I miss my family growing up and other things that are more important to me in this short life we have.”
Adapting Work Conditions
I experienced that. I worked at Disney from 2010 to 2015. It was 60 to 70 hour weeks. I have photos from my family at that time that I'm in that I don't remember. I've got no idea where this was. I'm sure you've experienced this as well. Your brain shuts down in certain areas when you're exhausted and tired. Memory is one of them. It's not important. We'll find another one of those eventually. Let's not bother remembering that. Unfortunately, that's five years of my daughters growing from 6 to 11 that I'm not going to get back.
That is a tough pill to swallow right there and times. However many millions of people have experienced something like that or far worse than that where they weren't physically there. They were physically absent. As it relates to the human condition, we know what's important in life because everybody is on their deathbed.
No one's saying, “I should have spent more time at the office or I wish I'd gotten that promotion or I wish I'd brought this project home.” They're focused on their relationships, “I wish I was closer to my son. I wish we'd been able to do that.” It all comes down to our people. That's the currency that matters to us. Do we just see it the same way, Shane?
I have a bit of a different spin-on as well. Over the years of my experience, I see that the people who are more productive take that into consideration. The companies that recognize that, you're not going to get eleven hours out of somebody. You're going to get eleven hours of them sitting at a desk, but not necessarily eleven hours productivity. There’s been many studies that show.
I started in software development. Back in my day, it was pretty common for you to code for hours on end and feel productive but that doesn't take into account the number of mistakes you made, the quality of the work you created, the ability for you to collaborate with others and work together on something.
Another good experience or example was, I remember at one point, being up at midnight working on something. I was at the office at the time. I was there. I was having a productive coding session, then I looked up and it was 2:00, so I lost two hours. I realized at that time that if someone was watching me, they would have seen me doing this. For my mind, because I was exhausted and tired and on his own, I was going. I don't know if the work I created that night was valuable or used or had bug free.
It certainly was a stark reminder to me that you need rest. We are machines to a degree but any machine, we need fuel and need to be taken care of. The oil has to be changed occasionally. It's important for employers to consider the mental well-being and physical well-being of their employees if they want more money out of them. To me, that's the connection that I try to make with employers is that, "What are you trying to get out of this? You have these individuals who are here? How do you make them more productive?"
We are machines to a degree but like any machine, we fuel, we need to be taken care of, and the oil has to be changed occasionally. Employers need to consider the mental and physical well-being of their employees if they want more money out of them.
Productivity, that's a very well-studied topic. You’ll be getting the most out of your teams and how do we expand our performance levels and so forth. There's a reason that movies are two hours long. There's a reason for physical limitations and it gets a little skewed because we remember the stories from the ends of the spectrum. Everything's paraded distribution. There'll be those individuals that, given certain seasons, can do heroic efforts. We say, “So and so can work straight for six hours without a break. Why can't you? What's wrong?”
This is a classic trap everybody falls into where reductionist thinking. We think we understand the presenting issue because it's this or this factor. These factors and we're blind to the twenty other factors that we aren't considering. Our picture then becomes a caricature of the world rather than a model that helps us navigate the world better. That's just thinking across the board whether it's productivity or anything else we want to consider.
One of the best teams I was on was a small app development team. We didn't necessarily have any super standout coders on the team. They're all good but we work together so well that we were highly productive. Everyone understood their role. As I said, everyone understood the assignment, which was when we had our daily stand-up, they weren't listening there to provide their update. They were there to listen to other people's updates. Those little nuances that got everyone working together produced a very successful product. We were quite proud of the work we created because it was exceptional.
Relationships are a key for companies to work together.
What you're introducing there, seems to me, Shane, is the factor of engagement and how people are motivated. When you're part of a highly functioning team and you're emotionally invested in everybody else’s mutual respect. You don't have to like or love them as individuals. You have to be rooting for them. You have to be wanting them. You want to contribute to their efforts. You want them to contribute to yours and you're engaged in the overall output of the product.
That's how the military functions. When life is on the line, you want people rooting for the other people and they've got each other's backs. They'll be self-sacrificing and the values that they're judging everything by is the group and the mission more than, "Do I feel like it? I did it yesterday, or, that person said something I don't like so they can just wait." Whatever it might be. It's those human dynamics that we ignore at our own peril.
As you started the conversation, having a purpose that everyone can line under is key to that.
Trust And Empathy
Let's dive into some of the sage words of advice you might have for our audience. What are some of the ways that you see leaders fuel that function of the highly functioning team? Either going back to your example where you are part of that team. What did leaders do to fuel it or what do they do to destroy or erode that feeling, Shane, would you say?
It's as irrespective of where they work. Location doesn't matter. I'm sure you've experienced this as well. It comes down to trust. How much trust do they have in their teams to go and do the work that they've been hiring to do? That, for me, I follow very closely. I follow along with the self-determination model that was proposed by Richard Ryan and Deborah Desi back in the '80s. Part of that is they talk about autonomy, competency, and relatedness.
What trust comes from is if someone's competent and you feel a relationship to them and you relate to them. That's where trust comes from. People are a lot more willing to let them work on things. Unfortunately, for many leaders, they don't form those relationships with their team. They don't understand their abilities to do the work. They see them as numbers and work. They're people who are fulfilling their needs.
For a leader to develop and trust their team. They need to have significant amount of empathy and high emotional quotient with their high EQ with their team members, then have ways to monitor it and have some guardrails so that there's some adequate feedback loops from the employees up to the leadership team so the leader can get the information they need to do their job.
The adequate feedback loop is an interesting focus in terms of what gets in the way there. How do leaders develop leaky loops or blind spots?
It goes both ways. You can either micromanage a team, but you can also ignore a team. That also creates dysfunction as well, especially if you don't give them the information they need to thrive and the feedback they need to know they're on the right track. Predominantly, it comes down to purpose and the objectives you're trying to accomplish to achieve that purpose and the work that. If it's done well, the work that's identified to accomplish those objectives and in all. Any individual should know the work that they're doing, how it ties into the purpose of the company.
Remote And Hybrid Teams: Any individual should know the work they're doing and how it ties into the company’s purpose.
That's easier said than done, but I find companies will often do a lot of work to establish yearly goals. I'll say, they have about five goals or five rocks they're working on for the year. Yet, “This department over here has a couple that don't roll up underneath that.” It's like, “What are they doing? Why are they doing those things? When they're not?” From a leadership standpoint, they have to be aware of the goals they're trying to accomplish or whatever you want to call them, the priorities of the year and make it their responsibility to execute on those as opposed to getting too involved in the day-to-day.
I'm sure you've encountered this as well. They'll spend lots of time at the start of each year, maybe a two-day offsite to put together a plan for the year, but then they don't revisit it for months. If you're not looking at this regularly, you're not staying in touch with what's happening on the ground and whether it's on the right track to accomplish the things you set forth in the early plan.
It's all very fundamental. It's very basic. We hear about it all the time. Sometimes, the least sexy thing needs to be done and that is to follow up on the plans on a regular basis and see where people are and have them explain to you in their own words how they feel about the progress they're making and have some evidence. They can share and give you some confidence that they're on the right tracks and metrics. All that's doable but it all starts with having some real clear goals. Clear goals that people agree with because they're realistic and applicable to where the company is in the direction they're headed.
The thing that I was thinking about as you're laying that out, Shane, is the job of leadership to focus on alignment. Being clear. It seems the things you were pointing at, the phrase that came to my mind was the vagaries of personality. In other words, we get pulled off of alignment because either my individual alignment is not lined up with the group or it might be external forces like a market or a customer demand or a reality from a vendor or some other strategic relationship that gets us a little bit off center.
It pulls some people off and maybe not others then you can get discord as to what the priorities are and why. I always go back to the covey quadrant where it's getting urgent. The urgent but not that important and putting our priorities there as opposed to the very important but not urgent. That seems to be one of the battles in this realm that we're talking about that we can get a little bit off track.
Intentional Team Building And Effective Meetings
Let's take it to an area where you're specifically versed in and expert as it relates to remote work and the modern organization where some of this alignment work. It's a lot easier when we're proximate. When we're there each day and we have the chance to have uncountable little interactions that we communicate small things that over time, end up being big. You take those things away and people can tell the difference for sure. What are some of the things that you see that leads to success in this specific dynamic of team alignment and engagement?
I'm a big fan of having some fundamentals that people can keep in the back of their mind. Along with what you're basically talking about is, in the office you have the opportunity for organic interactions. Remotely and even for most hybrid businesses, that has to change to intentional. I want to take it one step further. Organic in many ways is luck. It's a chance.
If you are not intentionally looking at the processes of the business that you want, you want to have to be successful, then you're leaving things to chance. If you take an organic business and put them into a remote work environment and you do nothing else. Things like innovation will suffer and communication will suffer. People will have challenges, career paths, and performance improvements and learning and development.
There's a lot of things that slowly start to wither on the vine if you take as a lot of companies found out at the start of the pandemics. They continued doing business as usual and then didn't make any changes that were necessary to support the type of company that they ran. The secret from my standpoint is that if a business makes these important things more intentional, then it's a superpower for that for any business. Whether it's in the office or not.
Take innovation, for example. How does innovation happen at a company? If you're relying on the water cooler to ensure that innovation happens, you're going to be left behind by somebody or by a company that's going to have plans in place to establish innovation. There's a myriad of things you can do. It could be everything from having a skunkworks team to having a period of time each week where people can work on their own stuff or you set up intentional quarterly meetings with people to get together and discuss topics.
It might mean that you are investing in somebody to look into the marketplace so that they can bring back information of what's happening in the marketplace to the team. There's a whole pile of things you can do to foster innovation. As I said, you have to do that in the office as well as remotely. That's one of many processes that need to be established when you're a remote team. If you do it well, it's a superpower for you.
There's lots of companies out there that are thriving remotely. There's a product here in BC called the Jane App. They are a health scheduling software where you can get a scheduled massage or massage or chiropractor. They have this product that could sell those small businesses. People can subscribe to that and book their meetings or sessions for that. It's doing quite well.
They're taking off all over Canada and they're moving into the States now. You might see it soon. Four hundred people working together remotely. They have some home offices. They bring people to the field. They've got Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal as well. People can get together. They have plans for that but for the most part, they hire from anywhere. They have to take advantage of the best of both worlds.
The other thing I was wondering about as you were laying that out, Shane, is you mentioned as far as that organic versus intentional zeroing in on the innovation. One of the things I've thought about a lot is the relationships and the connections. For instance, when you mentioned some of these things are chance. They are chances but also, we gravitate towards those people that we feel emotionally connected to. I used the phrase vagaries of personality earlier, it can be that way too, where you can get clicks or you can get people that are naturally tuned to the same channel.
Those connections are part of what drives at least some aspect of engagement. I know there's some research that indicates that people leave because of the relationships or they stay because of the relationships they have. It can hit our turnover rates and somewhat the level of our engagement. Besides innovation, what are the things that you see in terms of when we get wise about our intentionality of the remote workplace, the other areas that we can see dividends?
I'll go on to relationships. That's a key one for companies to work together. The first thing, I'll point out is that there are people who don't enjoy working remotely, simply put. In fact, there was a study that if you took ten people, two of them would want to work remotely. One of them wants to work full time in the office. The remaining seven want to work some amount of 1 to 4 days in the office. That's fine.
I'm not suggesting everyone should be forced to work remotely. We're going to see that as a thing going forward when you select the company you work for. That'll be another criteria to choose. If you're in a small town like I am. That's not going to necessarily connect into a lot of large businesses. I might be looking for a remote job. If I'm in New York, maybe I can come into the office once in a while. Maybe I don't want to go downtown New York. Maybe that's a good reason why you want to do it once a week.
We're going to see a lot of variety of businesses going forward. For me, I'm looking at what in general makes a business successful. You're right, relationships are vital to businesses. I had a great experience. I went to a reunion with some of the people I used to work with at Disney. There's 40 of us in a pub. We all got together again. Many of them I hadn't seen in many years.
I was able to pick up the relationships with them just as if they were left off. We had very comfortable conversations. It wasn't awkward. As I was leaving there, I was like, “What was it about the relationships I had with those individuals that is similar to the ones I have with the people at Virtira?” There's people at Virtira who I've never met in person, but yet I have similarly strong bonds with them.
It's no different than a lot of younger generations who might be playing Call of Duty or other online games. They have friends that they have very strong social bonds with who they've never met in person. We've all seen these videos of the friends getting together for the first time after five years of playing the same game that they never met. Sure enough, there are some drivers that you can manage.
One of the key things about this is you do need events, team building events. Why? These team building events have to be facilitated by their person or computer. This was the big mistake that, again, a lot of companies made when they first hit the pandemic. They continued trying to do things the way they normally would. Instead of doing, “Let's have a happy hour.” We're all sitting around on Zoom, staring at each other.
I'll tell you, the larger portion of the population is more introverted than they like to believe. It's only a handful of people who will start a conversation. You end up with, let's say, you have twenty people on a call. Maybe two people are trying to make things happen. Most are like, “I don't want to deal with this. I'm going to sit at the other end of the call.” Staring at people and possibly eating lunch. It's an awful lot of experience.
Again, there's some intentionality to it. You have someone whose job is to facilitate that conversation and run an event. It could be any number of things that you can do. We've done exit style experiences. There was a company that unfortunately just closed down, but they were allowing people to remotely control laser-guided RVs that you could drive around and shoot each other. It was great fun.
There's a number of these kinds of products and services out there that do this or you can try to do it yourself. The interesting thing I find is this same concept works in the office as well. If you are not an extrovert and you go to an office party. For many, it's painful. The best office parties are the ones like the secret Santa's.
There's an event where people can focus on it and not each other. I like to use the example of, again, back in the day when I was in the office. It wasn't uncommon to go out for lunch with say fourteen team members. You try to sit all across one big long table. There's people on that table you don't talk to at lunch.
You get stuck next to it and it becomes, “Where am I going to sit? I want to sit next to Aaron. I don't want to sit next to Frank or across. I want to get next to Nelly because I have a good relationship with her.” That's what happens in real life as well. If you had someone facilitating that conversation, those lunch meetups would be far more successful and productive for people. People would enjoy them more.
That's freaking brilliant because it plays in all aspects. I was thinking about going on vacation for instance. I'm 1 of the 2 in the 20 that would be talking. I'm in that bucket myself but most people I know are not. I had a couple experiences that popped into mind as you were laying all that out, Shane. One was when I was on vacation with my brothers and my nephew. We were on a cruise with a lot of bands. I was seeing concerts all day.
With all the bands there, you get a chance to meet the musicians. We're all musicians. We get to meet the musicians that we respect. It's super great and fun. I'm the one who drives all that because I'll go talk to anybody. They were uncomfortable a lot of the time. It's like, “Why are you uncomfortable?” It's a completely different experience. The next year, those guys were all taking a break and I'm going by myself. That's one.
The other one was I was on a corporate retreat. I was one of a few external consultants that were invited to this. Among the attendees were their sales team and their relationship managers. All different territory throughout the Eastern United States. You can imagine that the relationship managers generally speaking are going to be on the extroverted side. Not all of them but most.
When you get to a table like that, maybe you have half the table sucking up 100% of the oxygen. I look around and I'd see the people that weren't like that. There's no space for them to participate. They're just sitting there. If it was facilitated in the way that you described, you'd at least minimize that to some degree and the people that feel like they're choked out of the conversation would at least have some manner of way to be heard and to participate.
Another company I worked for had these massive summer parties with all the entire team. You could tell that there was a large portion of them. The people who went to the party did their job and showed up the first hour or two then went home. It was a very clear cliff where at some point in the night, a large portion of the people left. They went and did their own thing. The party remained for the people who had enough to drink or were naturally more inclined to hang out and enjoy the event that was put on.
Unfortunately, that translated into the office environment and how people interact with each other. The same groups held their own spaces and didn't necessarily collaborate as much as they could. I would argue that certainly relationships are important, but they also can do damage as well and cause other people to leave.
It can cause problems if the whole bad apple spoils the bunch. One of the things I do like about remote work is that there's far less drama. There’s more people who focus on getting the work done. I like to believe that most people want. Maybe there’s another thing for leaders to think about. If you would think that most people want to be there to do their job, then you're going to treat them differently than if you believe that they are there to take your money.
Early on in my first little while at Virtira, there was a book I have, a virtual team building game. I set aside an hour every two weeks for us to go through them. We had this plan to, “Let's evaluate all these books. We're a virtual company, we should do this well. We should have some insight onto which ones work.”
What happened was that we all enjoyed each other's company and learned a bit more about each other. We had a stronger relationship going forward sometimes because of how stupid these games were because we shared that experience. The other thing I would strongly encourage is simple things that are often dismissed. Icebreakers are vitally important for remote workers. If you have a large meeting, I hope it's been lots of time. I’m talking about mediums as well.
If you are doing a large meeting and you can have an icebreaker at the start of it. You want to be tacked on. You don't want to turn it into the Walmart greeting. I'm sure you've heard about this when the people come to work at Walmart first thing in the morning. There's a workout routine in a cheer or a chant they do. We don't want to do that to your company. We don't want to force people to do things they're uncomfortable with.
Simply asking them a question like, “What did you guys have for breakfast this morning?” It doesn't feel like an icebreaker, but you give everyone a chance to say it. You learn a little bit about somebody because you're going to expand on it, why are you doing that? Why did that happen? One of my favorites is sharing a smell that reminds you of your childhood. There's a lot in there. People tend to like to talk about it. What happens with icebreakers, it's a shortcut to the kinds of conversations, the information you learn from somebody after you have the small talk. It's that information that fosters relatedness.
Icebreakers are a shortcut to the kind of information you learn from somebody after you have some small talk.
It's almost like you're throwing mooring lines of connection like if we were ships. We were throwing lines of connection so that we're together in that way. That's a great point, Shane. I like that. I know we're running a little bit short on time. A lot of what you threw out there, we could delve into in depth. You mentioned, for instance, group remote meetings where you can't tell whether people even sometimes turn their video off. In that case, I figure they're not even there if their video is not on.
Investment In Training
For the little bit of time we might have left, if you could give us a little bit of your wisdom as it relates to a couple of things that people might pay attention to if they're participating or putting together a meeting of more than 5 or 6 people that they might pay attention to. Icebreaker is one of them. What other things might they pay attention to maximize productivity?
I'll take a step back. Companies who are with remote workers, they need to invest in facilitation training. Everyone who runs a meeting needs to be able to run a meeting. It's not a skill you are born with. Maybe some people but generally, it's something you need to learn. It comes down to having a host who can both listen and interject. Having someone because they, “Tom, just two seconds. I want to give Eric a chance to finish what he was saying.” That type of thing.
You don't have people taking up too much of the bandwidth.
It's very easy to let someone talk for two thirds of the meeting and you get nothing done. We did a study in 2021 on Zoom fatigue then we redid the study in 2023. We found out based on the change of the data that it was not talking about Zoom fatigue. We're talking about meeting fatigue. Meeting fatigue is the challenge. We pulled 1,500 people across 12 countries and 15 industries. A good split between hybrid, remote, in office, manager and employee.
What we found was that people have too many meetings in general. In those meetings, almost half the people felt that the meetings that they were having were not necessary in the first place. I could dive into spending quite tons of time talking about meetings but looking at cameras, for example. Having a camera on is great for situations like this. I've never met you up until this point. I can see your face. You're nodding. You're interacting with me at a level that's not just audio. That's valuable to me when we're having a two-way conversation.
If you're presenting to a bunch of people and you're not relying on that information from people. Does the camera need to be on? I'm flipping around and in fact, I firmly believe that forcing people to sit there and stare at a camera for an hour long meeting is a bit tantamount to torture. Some strong words there, I understand. You're forcing someone to sit there and stare whereas in an office, if I'm sitting in an office and I'm listening to someone present.
Forcing people to sit and stare at a camera for an hour-long meeting is a bit tantamount to torture.
I'm checking the clock. I'm looking around. Maybe looking out the window. I'm fidgeting in my chair a bit. Maybe paying attention to other things but I'm still able to follow along because it doesn't take much to follow what someone is presenting. YouTube has the ability to speed up presentations. I can watch a TED Talk one and a half times and get as much out of it. You can't tell me that a meeting that Jason created that morning is going to be any more well-presented than a TED Talk I zoomed through.
We have to think about meetings in a new way. In the office, meetings are set up just because of laziness. People don't do the work they need to do to get the work or to bring the results they need to have a conversation. The best one, for example, is talking about yearly priorities without looking at what the market's saying, feedback from your employees, your customers, and doing proper strengths and weaknesses. People are like, “Let's get through there and talk about our priorities.”
Before long, you were way back introducing new information into the conversation and people are no further along than they used to be. We advocate doing a lot more upfront work, “We're going to have this conversation. I need you to bring this to the table.” If you're simply just communicating, is the information interesting to them? Do they want to listen to it? Do they need to hear it? all hands, for example, or all staff, there's some important things there that people need to hear. Can you also put that in an email? Can you also maybe record portions of it and allow people to digest it asynchronously?
I encourage people to rethink how they communicate with people because a meeting is useful when you have a purpose such as making a decision or developing a plan, being creative, and brainstorming. I believe the tools available are things like Miro and others that you can use remotely. It has equal, if not better, conversations virtually with people. If you're just there to listen, it's time to rethink that.
That's good. I couldn't help smiling at the images of the Office. I don't know if you ever saw that show where Michael Scott, anything that comes up, “Meeting. Everybody in the conference room,” at the drop of a hat. All the mistakes that you are pointing to, they are getting captured in every episode of that show.
It's a brilliant show from that standpoint. It’s sadly outdated now.
The psychological traps remain. The way that you said it, rethink how you communicate. It's the thread throughout our conversation, so maybe this is a good way to tie it all together, Shane. Back to that word that you used of intentionality of being aware of, what is the output here? What is the best path to get that output? Not just rely on habit, convention, and the easiest path and what I saw another person do necessarily. Be intentional about getting the best.
That goes back to what you were saying earlier. I'd say you started with the concept of trust in terms of developing high-functioning teams. That starts with respect. It’s almost impossible to build high trust, and respect if you don't have that habit of wanting and being the best and looking at, “It's respectful to not want to waste the person's time.”
It's disrespectful to say, "Come here and get here. I need to tell you this real quick." To click my box regardless of what it's doing for you. It does come down to that respect. I see respect and trust being very close together. I see them as ingredients that are non-negotiable if you want to have the highest level of culture in an organization. Those are the ingredients you have to have. It looks to me.
The people who need to understand and learn these skills are managers. They're time and time again, the most poorly trained in the skill set in any business. Someone does well at building the widget they build. You can go manage the people who do those things. We don't invest enough in management training. I got some management training over the course of my career but a lot of it was learned by being curious and listening to shows and doing my own learning for it.
In the pareto curve, you were out on the tail. You were proactive in investing in yourself. That's not everybody. Not everybody's going to do that.
I was told to do one-on-one. I got to learn how to do one-on-one before. I don't want to do it wrong. Di don't want to waste anyone's time. That's one of many things that managers need to know how to facilitate meetings. They need to know how to handle conflict. There's tons of things. It's got to be more than just a one-off conference or a seminar. For remote teams that think that they're saving money because they don't have an office. They need to reinvest that money into training, learning and development for their team, especially their management side of things. They'll get paid back in spades.
I have an episode that I'm working on. Some of my episodes are me talking. That used to be what the show was and only in the past half a year or so, have I gotten into the interview format, which I do love. I still spot sprinkle some content. One of the ones I'm working on is on the thing you said about webinars and seminars.
You have to be careful. You're not just checking boxes and things. They're good. That's information but without the context and all the things that we've been pointing to. Is it worth the effort? Is it worth that expense, energy and time? Oftentimes, the answer is no. Thank you. You shared a whole bunch of wisdom with us, Shane. For anybody's reading that wants more of that, what can people do to find you and gain more knowledge?
I appreciate it. The easiest thing is to buy my book.
There we go.
We launched it in 2023. Probably the worst-timed book in history. I'm part of the history, but we just came out. The Power of Remote came out in February of 2023. Right around the time, the return of the office started becoming a big movement. Remote work is dead. Return to the office as King. That whole sentiment lasted until about September or October of 2023. Since then, we're starting to see far more information about more people warming up to the idea of not just remote but hybrid as well.
If you're doing a hybrid, it's remote first. Not hybrid, which means you can work with anybody at any time, anywhere, whether you're in the office. I'm a big proponent of some of the benefits of meeting in the office, but only if you do it well. You don't want people going to the office to work remotely. Our website, Virtira.com has lots of information on it.
Closing
We have tons of blogs and stuff we put up there. I welcome anyone to come. Connect with me online on LinkedIn, Shane Spraggs. There's very few people named that. You'll find me pretty quickly. I also do presentations. I was presenting to, in all hands, for a company not too long ago about these sorts of topics. Feel free to invite me to your business. I'm more than happy to share my knowledge in person.
Shane, thank you so much for being with us. I very much appreciate your knowledge and your giving spirit.
Thank you. It was great to be retiring with you.
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Shane, thank you so much for being with us. I appreciate your insight and your knowledge. You're willing to share them with us. I'd like to highlight a couple of things. The idea of a high-functioning team based on trust. That's something we tied back earlier, high trust and high respect. The question is, how do we do that? Respecting self-determination is what you'd pointed to, the idea of autonomy, competency, and relatedness.
I thought that was pretty powerful. I had always thought of trust as two petals of the bike with competence and character. Those are contained but I like the model with three. Autonomy where you trust people to do what they know how to do, competency and make sure they are good at what they're doing and constantly getting better. Relatedness, making sure that they're connected to the people on the team, as well as I would say the shared mission.
That's the job of the leader. The idea of having adequate feedback loops, I thought that was good to find the communication balance. You're not over micromanaging or over monitoring, but you're also not absent too in letting things drift. That's an important thing for managers to keep in mind who highlighted purpose, objectives and context. I thought that was great.
The overall theme that emerged for us is that intentionality. Not just allowing the easy thing or the whim to dictate how we communicate and how we schedule and run meetings. Being intentional about what it is precisely we're trying to achieve and what the best methodology might be to do that. That's something that more managers and leaders could pay attention to and improve the dynamics on the team quite significantly.
You mentioned the Jane App. I thought that was something that people could look into. I thought that was good. Facilitating, making sure things aren't left willy-nilly, especially things like happy hour or things that are designed to be team building type stuff. Don't let it up to chance or let the bigger personality dominate the scene, which is what's going to happen unless you have a facilitation and a program that leaves bandwidth for those that might not naturally step forward.
The idea of breaking the ice, in all meetings. Quick easy ways to get those tethers between people. Very important. The idea of everybody's a facilitator, this is a skill. We're not just born with it. We have to learn it. Investing in that and paying attention to that is a strategy that's going to make sense. The idea of Zoom fatigue, which turns into meeting fatigue. Too many meetings, whether necessary or not. Again, often, it's out of laziness or a lack of paying attention to, what are we trying to accomplish here? That's a very important part of it.
That's something to pay attention to doing that upfront work, both for the organization and whoever's going to participate. The thing that I'd like to leave you with is to check into Shane's book, The Power of Remote. We could all pay attention to whether we have a hybrid or workforce. You're probably going to interact with organizations that do. Therefore, you're going to participate in that culture no matter what. To understand the dynamics and be in the position to do better, would benefit nearly everybody. Thank you again, Shane. I very much enjoyed our conversation. It's super valuable. I appreciate you.
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About Shane Spraggs
For over 25 years, Shane Spraggs has been driving successful projects for a variety of notable media and software start-ups and some of the world’s largest brands, including Disney. As CEO of Virtira, Shane’s focus on productivity has generated immense value for our Fortune 100 clients, and he plays a vital role in developing and implementing cutting-edge systems and strategies that consistently boost the performance of their remote-based teams. Shane is often praised for his ability to evaluate complex organizational challenges and implement solutions that ensure sustainable success with continuous oversight and improvement. He challenges himself and the team at Virtira to constantly identify areas that will improve productivity for our clients.
In 2023, Shane co-authored the best-selling book The Power of Remote, an essential guide to modern team management.