S4E43. Ignoring Your Instincts with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

From the desk of Crate Media

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts and the author of several books, including Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage. He joins the show to lay out just why we can’t rely on our guts to tell us how to approach bringing workforces back to the office.

Through confirmation bias and the disconnect between higher management and their workforce, it can be very easy to make the wrong decisions when it comes to structuring a company in this new, post-COVID world. Thankfully, Gleb has studied the data extensively and he knows exactly where people are going right and where they’re going wrong.

A great example Gleb relays is how managers love Zoom happy hours as a morale booster and team building exercise while staff are separated. But the data all suggests that staff don’t enjoy these sessions and, if anything, they lead to more disconnect than before. 

  • A very small minority of employees want to return to the office full-time and, in many cases, they will look for work elsewhere (and even accept pay cuts in the process) if a company forces them to fully return to a physical building.
  • Employees hold a lot of power when it comes to this particular negotiation and it’s something management is still waking up to in a lot of places.
  • Everything from pay to office size will need to be reevaluated as a result of these changes.
  • Management teams should be placed in a position where they are forced to justify each day an employee is made to come to the office individually.

Ultimately, Gleb’s philosophy is about studying the numbers and looking at what people are actually doing. It may be counterintuitive in places, but that’s why it’s so valuable to hear what he has to say.

The superpower Gleb wants to teach us is learning to love discovering when we’re wrong. That way we can ensure we actually get things right. So think to yourself, now… What am I doing in my work right now that might not be the right way to do things?

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