WFH doesn’t have to mean loss in productivity for sellers

Quotes

• “I think what we’ve done from a remote perspective to develop having normal connection points and try to build that into our process. It’s kind of crazy, people are going home and visiting their family, going to places they have never been before and working remotely and we have seen a pretty good increase in productivity.” -Dustin“The question to me was, ‘what value does being in the office bring?’ because the technology in being remote has been consistent for the last four or five years. We’ve all been able to do it and one of the reasons why an office makes sense a lot of times is these watercooler conversations.” -Dustin“It’s interesting to me that you’re talking about needing to set up a time to talk about certain things that you don’t necessarily have in meetings. That seems a bit like an oxymoron. How do we schedule watercooler time? The fear for me and the reason why most people would’ve thought distributed companies are going to be less productive is the endless meetings.” -Ben“We definitely leverage blocking to get work done. That is an element that is super important. But as far as scheduling the watercooler conversations, it’s a time to get riff with your team about new ideas or things that you should be doing and it typically happens in passing. The idea is just to get a pulse on the team.” -Dustin “I think it’s the element of having this direct relationship with your team, understanding where they want to go in their career, and tying everything they do on that on a daily basis to that objective.” -Dustin“So being outside of the office, being a remote workforce forces managers to have to think of KPIs and ways to evaluate their workforce and it allows everyone to have key metrics from a career perspective that they can point to, to show others that they are succeeding or failing.” -Ben “There are so many dynamics that people have to deal with at home that you have to have some type of empathy and I think that it’s also understanding the individual’s situation if you can.” -Dustin“I saw the value of having the flexibility in autonomy when I went independent. Now it seems like the corporate world is kind of going in that direction as well. Hopefully, these are some of the forcing functions that are coming out of the coronavirus as well. That it is moving the working world into a place that has more balance and allows people to figure out how to work the way they want to.” -Ben “For us, it is about using knowledge and skill tied back to performance data. That’s the most effective way to kind of coach remotely.” -Dustin“Basically, when you are training a group of a sales team you have to control what they say and when they say it and how they say it and that is a lot of variables that you have to manage across different types of personalities.” -Dustin“The piece that is important as a leader in this new environment is to wrap your head around that, say it’s okay. Abandon all of your normal, micromanagement activity-based metrics and step away from it for a week.” -Dustin