Episode 4 - The Digital Landscape of Work, the Status of RTO, and Using Cultural Sensitivity in the Global Workplace with Special Guest, CEO Zach Wright

In this episode, I'm joined by Founder & CEO of Grapevine Software, Zach Wright. 

Key topics:

✔️ The news stories telling us that remote work is dead, RTO is king, and that all employees now somehow prefer hybrid arrangements. 🤔 Is this true?

✔️  Dag believed that leadership was about service, not status. In a fully remote environment, how can leaders make sure that employees still feel seen, valued, and appreciated outside of the typical brick-and-mortar office?

✔️ Some companies rely on AI for feedback and/or they toss out a $5 gift card and assume that's enough to say, "You've done a great job." How can organizations use technology yet not become impersonal?

✔️ When working with a global team, how can you practice cultural sensitivity? 

Links:

You can find Zach on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachary-wright-mba/

And Grapevine here: https://www.grapevinesoftware.io/

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📖 Pick up Decoding the Unicorn today on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0D9xM3b. 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Remote work, digital landscape, cultural sensitivity, hybrid work model, performance management, AI in leadership, employee recognition, virtual HQ, communication tools, team collaboration, global teams, work-life balance, employee engagement, future of work, leadership strategies.

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, Hello and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to episode four of decoding the unicorn the podcast. In today's episode, we'll be covering the ever increasing digital landscape of work. What is the current status of remote work, and what does the future of it look like, as well as cultural sensitivity, as more and more companies work with more and more people around the globe, how can we ensure that cultural sensitivity is an appropriate part of the workplace. It was certainly something that Dag believed in and something that he was practicing all the way back in the 1950s I'll be joined today by my guest, Zach Wright, who is the founder and CEO of grapevine software. So let's get to it. 

So what's new with you? Work sucks. My boss acts more like a tyrant than a manager, and my co workers are just caught in the mix. Oh, I know more than half of them don't seem to know what they're doing. They just toss buzzwords around. It's a joke. I feel like those 90s infomercials. There's got to be a better way. There is a better way. Every manager should be required to read Sara Causey book, Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld. It's an amazing book about an even more amazing man. I usually don't read biographies I've tried in the past, but they're often so academic and boring. Nope, not a dry biography. You should check it out on Amazon. I think you'll like it. I will. Thanks for the suggestion. Decoding the Unicorn by Sara Causey, available on Amazon.

So I'm joined today by my guest, Zach Wright. He's the founder and CEO of grapevine software, and so Zach for the listeners who may not be familiar with you may not be familiar with grapevine. Please give us what I like to call the proverbial Tencent tour of your background and why you started the company.

 Yeah, so, like a lot of us, in 2020 I started working 100% remote, and that gave me a different experience than obviously being in the office. And from that, I've always been in strategy and operations, and with the shift to remote work, it kind of tapped into these different challenges that I started seeing. And so I started realizing that SaaS is a good place for a lot of companies and departments, but whenever you go remote and your teams are in these different locations, it actually creates these information silos and disconnected employees. And so what we're really doing at Grapevine, and what got me into the idea of grapevine, is to how to overcome the communication, the collaboration and the connection problem, not in multiple tools, but in one so that's how I got here. Strategy, operations and remote work kind of fell into my lap.

 Yeah, well, that's a very cool story. I I've seen a lot of news articles lately, I would say, really over the past couple of years, although they've ramped up a lot since the change in administration, but they're rather sour and dour about the current status of remote work. Future predictions around remote work. And I saw a poll on LinkedIn not that long ago that claimed that 60% of workers now prefer some kind of hybrid arrangement. And, you know, it used to be called the hell of half measures, so I sort of I saw that poll, and I just rolled my eyes like Tony Stark and the Avengers. Since you have a front row seat to remote work. What do you make of all of this?

 Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of headlines can take the attention of a lot of people. So whenever you hear about Amazon, JP, Morgan, Chase Dell, the federal government talking about return to office. That makes it seem like we're going back into the office five days a week, because that's what they're pushing for. But what we don't see is the follow up, which is a lot of these places, Amazon has 350,000 corporate employees that need to go back into the office. They don't have enough desk space. You would think that that would be talked about and discussed before it happened. Same thing is happening with the federal workers, right? And so that's where I'll start, is these RTO pushes. They might make these big headlines, but they're not actually following through. In fact, I can't remember the exact number, but it's more than half of employees typically ignore the RTO from the employee or from the employer, so that's something that we have to consider. The other part is that a lot of people think that remote work is dead because of these RTO pushes, and that's just not the case either. We see that even now, the remote. Percentage of people working remotely is higher than it was pre pandemic levels, and the office occupancy is lower than pre pandemic levels. So it's it's the big headlines, but the actual data behind it is showing that it's not a reality, and it's kind of where you're talking about, the companies are following through with that hybrid approach, because it kind of gives you the best of both worlds, in the sense that leaders, because I do think that there's this disconnect where leaders, especially executives, might want people in in the office, where the frontline workers or the middle managers don't necessarily want to be there, or at least not five days a week. And so what we're seeing is this shift into the hybrid work model, where people are kind of coming into the office a couple of days a weeks. There's there's structured hybrid, and then there's flexible hybrid. I mean, they kind of sound with sound like what they are. So flexible hybrid is you kind of come into the office whenever you want to, and then structured hybrid is maybe we're going to come in the office Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and we're going to have remote time Monday and Friday, right? So to me, that's the best of both worlds, because if you have an extrovert in the office and they like to feed off of that, you're not taking that away from them, right? But if you have an introvert or an ambivert and they're just not feeling like going into the office, or they feel like they get work done better at home or in a coffee shop, then let that happen too. And so yeah, I think we're gonna fall into hybrid being the the norm, quote, unquote. And these RTO pushes from the big companies is is kind of a distraction. And performance theater is what I would call it,

So much of Corporate America is performance theater. So I think that's very true. Well, something else I want to ask you about Dag Hammarskjöldr believed that leadership was about service, not about status. And in remote work, in these situations where you have a 100% remote company where leaders aren't physically present, how can they still make employees feel seen, valued and appreciated?

Yeah, so a little selfish plug is grapevine can help with that, because what we're really doing is is creating that virtual HQ that allows people to be seen, even if they're not in a physical location. But beyond the tools is, how can you have consistent check ins with your employees? That's a huge thing. I've seen a couple of CEOs and founders out there talk about, we don't do one on ones, and they actually talk about it as, like, a a happy thing, or like, I'm proud of this. I actually think that's embarrassing for them. Like, as a leader, you should want to check in on your employees. That doesn't mean that you're micromanaging them, right? And the way that you make sure that you don't micromanage, but you consistently check in is bring in some type of performance management framework. In a previous company, I ran the OKRs, or objectives and key results program for the entire company, and so what I would do is I would manage by goals, or manage by the objectives that the team came up with, and that allows me to say, in these one on ones, hey, tell me about what's going on with OKR number one or OKR number two. And it's not it's kind of like checking in on a project status, right? I mean, you could do that asynchronously, asynchronously. You could do that synchronously, but it's just this framework or this approach that allows you to continue to check in with your employees, and it also it all it almost becomes this type of performance management feedback loop where you're doing it every single week or every other week, opposed to the 360 degree feedbacks that we get once a year, right? And so the reason that I think this is so important is because we see people like Mark Zuckerberg saying that they just fired poor performers, right? That wasn't actually true. What they did was they over hired in the pandemic, and now they need to right size it, and then AI is helping them not have, or not need the employees that they have. So I think there's some legalities in there that they're trying to get around. But I digress. The point being is that instead of having the employee wonder if they're doing well or where they stand, what is their status in the organization? Whenever you have those performance management metrics or frameworks in place every single week, you get to have a conversation with your employees, and they get to understand, I'm doing well right here. I need a little bit of improvement here, or they get to talk about it every single day. Or every single week, sorry. And so that is how you can manage your employees without the need of, I need to see you with your butt in the seat eight hours a day, because that's not actually productive. That's just people looking busy again. Performance theater.

Yeah, absolutely, yes, I get it. So some companies you mentioned technology, I was definitely thinking about this. Whenever you're talking about Facebook and meta and AI, some companies have turned to technology, obviously, for employee recognition now that can be automated messages, digital rewards, some kind of AI driven feedback. And in fact, when I was looking for podcast guests to get into this topic, I was throttled throck Told by sales people who wanted to promote gift cards. And I'm like, yeah, no, I So again, I'm sitting there like Tony Stark in The Avengers of my eyes going all the way back in my head. Like, that's really not what we're talking about. We're talking about real appreciation, not here's a $5 gift card. Go buy yourself a coffee, and with inflation, $5 won't even do it anymore. So do you think that the technology tools help, or do you feel like there's still this risk where appreciation starts to just feel too impersonal?

No, I definitely think it's at risk if you're not intentional, right? I think that, I mean, you hit it spot on. There's so many AI companies that are being developed right now for so many different use cases. And in some cases, whenever the human is is involved, they're taking away that empathy that only us as humans can express, right? And I was, it was funny. I was on a different podcast talking similar about this. They were asking about feedback, and how can we use AI to not take out the the emotion, but still have improvements to there? So I think that the way that we talk about this in the in the sense of rewards and recognitions and feedback is the input has to be from a human. This is my opinion, the input I think, should be from the human. They physically typed it or spoke it depend. I mean, you choose which, however way you want to deliver it, but then AI can come in and do data analysis on it. And so if you, if we, if we kind of blend these examples together with OKRs and those one on one check ins and then rewards, recognition and feedback. I mean, you're talking about meeting with someone every single week or every other week. So that's either 26 times or 52 times out of the out of the year, minus holidays and that kind of stuff. And so if you take 52 data points and you can analyze those in one year, that's actually more beneficial to a 360 degree review versus a biased opinion from a manager. Now you can blend all those together, but that's how I think AI can come in and help, speaking of bias, take out certain bias elements and make sure that maybe it suggests that we promote this person based off of the conversations and the data points that we have. And maybe it doesn't just come from verbal feedback. It also comes from the way that you track metrics. So maybe that gets fed in there. And so basically, the human element is the real feedback coming from a real person, and then the AI is on the back end, analyzing the data and then making suggestions for maybe this person is ready to be promoted. Maybe this person needs help in this training area. Maybe this person needs a mentor, and then this person over here is the mentor that you can connect them with. So hopefully that makes sense, but that's how I think AI can really improve how we do feedback, rewards, recognition and yeah, not just giving them a gift card, because it has to be real. It has to be clear. And if they don't have that, then it doesn't really make sense. If you tell somebody Great job, you have to say, great job. Own XYZ. It helped us do ABC, and now we can do I've ran out of letters, JFK, right, like, like that. That is what we need, and then AI will be there to help us process it a little bit faster than we can as humans. Yeah?

And what you're talking about is really like a teamwork effort, yeah, that the human being is still involved with the other human being, but then you have AI to help facilitate it. So it's not about turning the whole thing over to an AI program. It's about the human beings are still actually involved in the workplace, right?

100% because, if I mean on that other podcast that I mentioned, if you go with AI creating the feedback, and then AI interpreting the feedback, and then a. I applying the feedback, it's literally AI talking to AI, and then we get to the conversation about, do we need people in the workforce anymore? Which I think we do, and it doesn't benefit anybody if you if you take it that route, that's why it has to be balanced and intentional whenever you're using AI, specifically with employees and in the workplace, balanced and intentional. 

Love it that can be applied to so many things in life. Yes, so your team spans multiple continents and many leaders in today's world. They have employees as well as freelancers and contractors that are working across all kinds of different time zones, different locations, different cultures. Dag was really a champion of cultural sensitivity a long time before that term became part of the modern parlance. And I'm wondering, you know, based on what you're seeing, based on your experiences having this kind of a company where you're working with people all over the globe, what are some of the key cultural sensitivity challenges that you think leaders should be aware of when they do have to manage a global team?

Yeah. I mean, the thing that comes to my mind is just the understanding of different cultures, and that's one of the things that I really love about remote work, is because the majority of my time being a leader and a manager, I have managed someone in a different continent, in a different time zone. So it could be in the UK, it could be in India, it could be in Pakistan. The majority of our team right now is in Pakistan, so they're like, nine or 10 hours ahead of us. And so there's again, the balance has to be there and the trust has to be there, but the only way that you can really form that is if you take the time to build those relationships and understand who that person is, and that means holistically, not just who they are as a an employee or a worker at your organization, but who are they outside? Do they have a family? What is their religion? Do they celebrate different things? Do they this is like, this isn't even just a cultural sensitivity aspect across like different continents or countries, but you think about somebody, this is a simple example, but you think about the happy hours that we used to have, and I was, I worked at a company. This is just a side note. I worked at a company. A lot of people weren't showing up to the happy hours. They made them mandatory, which don't do that, just, that's terrible. Um, side note, but let's say that you have an alcoholic in your right, in your group, right? Not everybody is a drinker, right? And so you have to think about these things, and that kind of feeds into the smaller or the micro aspect of cultural sensitivity, but it's these things that people don't often think about, like right now, Pakistan is celebrating Ramadan, right? And so they're working fasting. And so I can imagine that. I mean, if I didn't eat for a long time, my brain would probably slow down a little bit. And so just understanding that is is a better way to engage with your employees. And during Ramadan, they actually shift their hours just a little bit. And so the culture sensitivity, piece of it is, in simplicity, relatively speaking, is just getting to understand who your people are. And that always helps with being becoming a better leader and a manager. Because if you're managing someone, cookie cutter, copy and paste approach you're going to, I mean, offend maybe isn't the right word, but kind of you're going to offend people just by trying to, like, Sara likes to do this, and Zach likes to do this. If I manage them the same way, you're going to get different results, right? And so that that's kind of my answer there, but I can, I can dig in deeper if you have any other questions on that one

Well, so there's, there's a fine line between. And we talked touched on this before, when we were talking about AI and a human being working as a team, as opposed to turning, turning AI into its own echo chamber, which to me seems rather frightening, as frightening, not more so than human beings having an echo chamber and getting that but so there's this fine line, I think, between using technology to enhance leadership, like what we're talking about, versus allowing it to really subvert or totally replace human connection. And then also, we're talking about being in the digital landscape, being remote only. So where do you think that these lines fall? And then, how can people in leadership or management roles not become too reliant on digital tools?

Yeah, that's a tricky one, because the way that AI is talked about today, if and. Just digital tools is that it could either enhance the human capability or it could replace the human capability. And I think both are true, right? And the thing that we have to understand is, where do we want AI to replace certain capabilities or digital tools to fill in gaps, and where do we want humans and people to continue to communicate, build community, collaborate, connect, and I think it's going to be different for each company culture. It's going to be different for each company industry, and maybe even different cultures in the world in general. So I think the way that we do this is we kind of go back to the basics. And the fundamentals of business and companies, is, what's your vision, what's your mission, what's your core, core values. And so if you can have those conversations and really take the time to to do this, a lot of a lot of executives and leaders will say, well, we don't have time to do that, because we got to do XYZ. Steve Jobs, I just re watched a video of him, and he was talking about how every like, he takes the people that he hired and he lets them make their decisions, like he had one decision maker for each department or each product or whatever, but every single week, he would take three hours to have a conversation with all of them. And if, if somebody who's running apple at that time could take three hours in a week to discuss all this, you have time to be able to do this. So I would say, like kind of start from the beginning with this new landscape of the world of work, and ask yourself, Okay, where do we want AI to play? Where do we want digital tools to play? Where do we want humans to be the forefront? And then I think once you have a better understanding of what it is that you want in your organization, then you can actually create policies around it. And I know that a lot of people don't like the word policies or procedures or processes, but that's how companies, great companies, are built. And so that's that's my kind of takeaway. Is, what do you want to be and what are the things that you're willing to do or not do to allow that to happen. And with the specific question, you're going to have to talk about it from the digital tool aspect, the AI aspect and the people aspect,

Oh yeah, your story of Steve Jobs reminds me of a story that David Bayer tells on his podcast, that Gandhi used to say, I meditate for an hour a day. But if I'm really busy, if I'm really stressed out, then I meditate for two hours. And we have the tendency to think that, well, we don't have time. And I have heard this, you know, I recently retired from my career in staffing and HR to really focus more on being a writer and a creative but my God, over the years, I heard so many times we don't have time. We don't have time to fix this. We don't have time to get rid of bottlenecks in the hiring funnel. We don't have time. We don't have time. And I think one of the things that scares me is when we look at the advent of AI, and we look at all of this delicious and tempting technology that we have, it's like, do you think that these leaders and these company owners, they're going to be looking at this as I don't have time, therefore I will outsource it to AI.

I can 100% see that I again it all it always goes back for me is, what type of person are you? What type of person do you want to be, or what type of company do you want to be? What type of career Do you want to have? And it doesn't mean that you don't use these tools to get ahead, but what it does mean is I'm actually working with a LinkedIn person. He's in our industry, and I still use AI a little bit for the captions, but it's more so to make it a little bit clearer, but I always have to put my voice into it right? And the reason that our bring that up is because AI can generate as much as you want it to, in writing, in captions, in you name it. There's a lot of different use cases, strategy planning, all that kind of stuff. But it's going to be right now. It's going to be generic. It's going to be what the world has given it through the internet to whatever learning language models that they're using and whatever resources that they're ingesting into AI. And so that means that it's very inauthentic. And so there's only one way to be authentic, and that's to be yourself. And for you to do that, you have to ingest your own voice and your own mechanism of maybe that's not the right word, but who you want to be, what you want to be known for, and all that kind of stuff. And so to kind of like circle it back around you. The I just think that it always comes back to balance, yeah, and and understanding who you are and what you want to be. And if you're okay with AI doing everything for you, that's good. I don't think that it's going to be great in the long run. I think that if you for businesses specifically, and I say this all the time, if your differentiator is AI, you're going to lose, yeah, because it's going to be table stakes in the long run. But if you actually have the foundation, and this is how we look at it, at Grapevine building, the product is like, we're building the foundation so we can live in the long term. And yes, we'll ingest AI and we'll have these different things about it, but that's not going to be our differentiator. Our differentiator is going to be who we are, what our voice is, and how can we inspire other people to ultimately reach our own vision, which is make the work place better for everyone.

Yeah, oh, Amen, that's hitting on the right notes for me. So as we wrap up, I want to ask a little bit of a two parter here to close it up. I want you to give us the elevator pitch, if you will, about grapevine. And then if somebody hears that message and it resonates, they want to find you, or they want to learn more about the company, tell us about the company and then tell us about how can people get a hold of you if they want to?

Yeah. So just simple. Our value prop is grapevines virtual HQ helps streamline how your teams work together, so you can go from scattered work, so that means information, knowledge and disconnected employees to one single source for everything. And so basically, what we're doing is we're taking a lot of these different tool capabilities that are scattered through multiple applications, and we're bringing it into one virtual HQ or virtual office, so your teams don't have to go through this searching a bisque sav scavenger hunt, because it's a huge problem for organizations. Employees span about 2.5 hours per week just searching and trying to find information. That's if they find it. So that's more than 20% of the work week. So that's the problem that we're solving, and the unique thing that we do is not just with the productivity tools that we have, with information hub and spaces, we also bring in the people element. So we have employee profiles, we have a directory that we call connect, that you can connect with people, not just on a professional level, but also on a personal, personal level, which is very important for remote teams, so they don't feel isolated or disconnected. So that's the I know I kind of went a little bit longer than the elevator pitch, but that's what we're doing. We're streamlining how your teams work together. And then if you want to find us, we're very active on LinkedIn, so you can look up grapevine software, or you can find me. My name is Zachary Wright, MBA. I do have the MBA at the end. I've always thought about taking it away, but it's there. And then we're also active on YouTube. So grapevine software, you can find us there every single week, we typically put out something called The Future of Work weekly report where we're going through these insights, these trends that are happening in the future of work, and kind of breaking them down. And there's a thing out there called RTO return to office that we talked about. We have a slogan that we call RTO, because we're trying to redefine the rules of work, and that's what we talk about. So that's kind of our motto, and how we think about the product, how we think about the future of work in general.

Awesome. Well, I know that you're busy running this company, and I just wanted to very quickly thank you for taking time out of your day to join us and give us your insights.

Thank you. It was a lot of fun. 

Awesome.

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