M+E Europe

Erin Stafford, a sustainable peak performance expert and self-described “burnout survivor” has a solution for organisations keeping their workforces engaged, the author and frequent keynote speaker said Oct. 19, during the “Zendesk Women in Leadership Series” webinar “Re-engage your remote workforce.”

During the fast-paced session, Stafford laid out the process she used to keep her remote workforce of 50,000 clinicians and 3,000 corporate employees at the nation’s largest healthcare staffing company connected and engaged during the pandemic and now in the ongoing remote work environment.

Introducing Stafford, Jeannette Leong, VP of marketing at Zendesk for the Americas and executive sponsor of the company’s “Women in Leadership” program, said: “Today, we’re talking about how to re-engage, reconnect and reinvigorate your remote workforce. I’m really excited about this because my team is fully remote and sometimes I struggle with how to create an environment where my team can fill my energy and feel invigorated as well.”

A poll of the webinar’s viewers found that about 50% of them were working remotely all the time. While 35% were mostly remote but hybrid, Leong noted.

“At Zendesk, we’re actually 100 percent remote, with in-office work optional to all of our employees,” she said.

Leong added: “So the remote landscape has definitely opened up. It’s new roles of opportunities like new hires in other parts of the country. We have different ways of working but it definitely comes with its challenges, right? There’s so many nuances, like: How flexible [do] you allow the work day schedule? How do you keep employees engaged and present? How do you break down silos cross functionally? So there’s so many challenges. They’re endless.”

Taking another poll of viewers, she said responses indicated managing a remote or hybrid team was more difficult than managing an in-person team.

“I think the key takeaway here is that if you’re aware of the challenges in managing the remote team, then you can get better prepared to address those needs,” Leong said, calling that a “perfect segue to introduce our guest speaker,” Stafford.

“Let’s start by backing up a second … and just coming to grips with the fact that these last few years have been a doozy,” said Stafford. “I don’t care what industry you work in, where you live, these last few years have been insane…. When we were about, I would say, a year into the pandemic, I was sitting at my desk, staring blankly at my computer in my home office, just zoning out. I couldn’t concentrate. My mind was numb. Emails would come in and I would just forward them on to one of the 45 people on my team. Never to think about them again. I was not delegating. I was straight up abdicating all of my responsibility as the head of marketing for the largest healthcare staffing company in the country during a pandemic – you know, kind of when you should be paying attention in healthcare staffing.”

She recalled: “It was difficult. I was on conference call after conference call, as I’m sure you guys are every day. But I wasn’t paying attention. I was just aimlessly scrolling Amazon or Instagram. Buying more crap I didn’t need. God forbid somebody would actually ask me a question during this time. I would make up some excuse…. But the reality is I wasn’t paying attention. I was always doing the mouse jiggle. You guys know the mouse jiggle? Where you’re like sitting at your desk and you’re there, but you’re not really there. So you just sort of like jiggle your mouse every now and then just to make sure it looks like you’re active on Teams or Slack or whatever system you use.”

Meanwhile, she pointed out: “Our employees, our teams are doing that as well. And I have so much stuff going on at the same time in my personal life. Not only was I the head of marketing for this hyper growth, crazy healthcare company, I had spent the last few years trying to get pregnant, had been through multiple rounds of IVF, miscarriages…. My husband’s dad got sick and died during this time. We had to put our 14-year-old dog down. It was just one horrible thing after another. And I tell you this because it’s no surprise I wasn’t really performing at work. I had all this other crap going on in my life.”

And guess what? “Our teams are no different,” she said, explaining: “As leaders, as women in leadership, we’re struggling. Sometimes we’ve got a lot on our plate with these great jobs we have. But we also have so much happening in our personal lives. And for our teams, it’s the exact same thing. We cannot expect them to show up 100 percent fully when they’re also dealing with all of this other stuff behind the scenes. And maybe you guys have felt some of this too, as women in leadership roles. We’ve got a lot on our plate. We are trying to juggle all the things. Your days, Jeannette and I were just talking about this before we started, your days are longer. Because all that time that you usually spend commuting, you’re now just sitting at your desk doing emails and taking additional phone calls.”

Meanwhile, “maybe you feel like you’re alone because you’re no longer in an office and it can be lonely because we miss all the fun, the banter, the jokes,” she said. “Catching up on just the random stuff people have been up to on the weekends. It’s hard. We miss that. We feel like we’re alone. Maybe you are just constantly asked to do more with less. You’re asked to continue to produce and have demands that just keep coming. But you don’t have the resources or the added headcount or team members to really make that happen. And there’s just no shortage of ways that you’ve been tested and you continue to be tested. But maybe you keep showing up, just hiding in plain sight, looking like this happy, beautiful, fun, executive woman that’s got her life perfectly together.”

However, “maybe you’re struggling inside with some of the stuff that I was struggling with,” she said. “Maybe you’ve got your own problems and issues. We all do, by the way. We all have things we’re dealing with, and it makes it sometimes hard for us to… show up for our teams and make sure that we’re really giving them everything we’ve got so they feel seen and heard and connected, engaged.”

On top of all that, we’re also dealing with digital disruption, including artificial intelligence bots, new technologies that may or may not be helping us improve. Anybody who’s gone through implementing a new, a new technology knows.

This can all “leave our teams feeling a little bit disengaged,” she noted, stressing the need to re-engage those people.

She then went into three steps she said “really help re -engage and reconnect those teams. “The first one is really to connect with the core. What does that mean? So often, as leaders with teams, we just instantly focus on the problem. When we have our one on one, our team meeting, our monthly check in, our biweekly check in, whatever it is, we tend to really just go straight to the problems. What’s not working? What do you need help with? What can I do to help? We want to shift that a little bit to thinking about starting with the person instead of the problem. So one thing that we did at my company that really helped was we started doing mental health and wellness rounds. Now, anybody who’s ever been to the hospital,” including doctors and nurses “come through and check on you in their rounding, every now and then. Couple times a day, they have it … at a set cadence. They’re normally checking on what the problems are and how can they help. We wanted to start doing this from a wellness perspective.”

“Another great thing that we’ve done is we started really digging into” employees’ paid-time off, which many were not using and really needed to start using, she said.

“Another thing we did is we did a huge research study with thousands of our clinicians and employees and the number one thing that they wanted people to ask them was ‘are you ok’? It’s just such a simple question. It’s so easy, but they were like, ‘nobody asks us if we’re okay. I just would love somebody to ask me if I’m okay’.”