The “Better Normal”: Capitalize on Lessons Learned from COVID-19 and Level Up Your Business

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the JMARK Business Innovation Technology Experience.

Todd:

I’m excited to be here again. Today we’re going to talk about something we’ve been discussing for a number of weeks now. We’ve all kind of been… I don’t know what the right word is, uplifted. It’s been a shock and all of sorts to the economy and to business as usual. We started to see this term, the new normal come into play and everybody talking about that. Last week during our discussion it just came out of blue the idea of a better normal.

Todd:

And so the idea, today’s discussion is to talk about what are some of the things the lessons learned from the COVID-19 situation as we are beginning to now see a light at the end of the tunnel. What are some of the things that we can do as individuals and organizations to ultimately in a way capitalize on a strategy that will help us to create a better normal or a better future? I know that we’ve all seen examples of behavior changes and companies that are modifying their tactics and strategies. Why don’t we start out by sharing some of those thoughts and some of those things that we’ve seen and how that could potentially change their business models moving forward.

Dax:

One of the things I’ve seen, I think I might’ve even mentioned this last week when we were discussing the idea of getting back to the office. But I know a couple of people I’ve talked to, they’re kind of moving into a mode where they’re taking a really hard look at what can be done at home, still, what has to be done at the office and sort of readjusting now that they’ve seen that they can be successful with having people work from home and readjusting their expectations on that and then making new plans around that, which I think is a really good thing. It’s exactly what we’re talking about.

Dax:

They took something that they had never tried because they were skeptical and suddenly they were forced to try working from home. And they found that it succeeded and so now they’re what we’re talking about, they’re building this into their plan moving forward rather than simply abandoning it because they can now.

Pete:

Yeah. I saw something Dax, I think it was yesterday about Twitter about encouraging older folks, their ability to work from home because they’ve been successful throughout this process on it. I think one thing as far as a lesson learned was while some companies had the technical plans mapped out. I think a lot of companies didn’t really anticipate the emotional and psychological side of working from home. Especially those of us that work from home for years now, it’s easy to take for granted what it would be like to do this day one. And do it without a lot of planning, basically saying, “Hey, look, we have to do this, now let’s make it work.”

Pete:

So I think in the future what is going to happen is forward thinking companies that think about not just the technology needs but also the emotional, how often do teams meet in person, check ins, a forum for coworkers to submit problems going on. I think all those things are going to be part of the better plan going forward. I think it has to be actually,

Kristina:

Yeah. I have two examples that came to mind. The first one was what Christie brought up last week, and I’m going to butcher this because I don’t remember the details, but it was a local, I think, sandwich shop who is now basically selling their meats as if they’re almost like a grocery store. And that’s how they’ve innovated throughout this time and stayed thriving. And then what Pete said made me think of, I’ve seen big companies like Starbucks who are now offering a large number, like 30 therapy sessions a year for their employees and their employees families who need it.

Todd:

I think what you mentioned Dax, about the remote behavior, I think we’ve learned a lot about what works remotely and what doesn’t work remotely. And I think that is going to potentially change in big parts, the behavior as the operational strategy as organizations before it. There’s a technology that has had to be implemented quickly. Whether it’s Workplace by Facebook, whether it’s Teams by Microsoft, whether it’s Zoom, whether it’s WebEx, all these different tools. We’ve come to see that a lot of companies have been forced to utilize these tools because of the situation. But by doing so, they have come to realize that these tools have actually maximized connectedness within their company or maximized culture within their company.

Todd:

It’s been able to help increase fun even potentially, which is almost strange. And as people or as organizations come together to figure out what’s our new better normal? That is so vital because a lot of organizations just think we got to meet in an office or opposite. It’s distributed and I think it’s a hybrid approach that that is going to potentially affect organizations and improve their culture and improve their connectedness through all of these technology tools and processes that they’ve kind of had to learn during the COVID situation.

Pete:

How do you talk about… oh, sorry.

Kristina:

[inaudible 00:06:27].

Pete:

You talk about hybrid. I think one opportunity I haven’t seen written anywhere is recruiting. Is now a lot of companies that maybe aren’t as comfortable or haven’t been comfortable in the past with remote workers. This has proven that it can work. So I think what’s going to happen is you’re going to see a larger pool. Maybe I’m in Midwest, but now I’m willing to entertain somebody that’s working in the Southeast for example, knowing that people can be productive that work from home. It’s going to open up a very large pool of candidates, I think for these companies.

Dax:

Yeah, it’s interesting, Pete. I was thinking about that before, I arrived before Todd started talking that exact point, that I’ve always been lucky in having managers who trusted me and trusted their people and the sort of over the years I’ve worked offsite and at home and they’ve always sort of known that just trusted that I was doing my work and waited for proof of that and stuff. And I think that has happened for a lot of managers. And I know I’ve talked to friends and family who their managers suddenly realized, “Oh, I can trust my workers and they are going to get up everyday and do their work and do a good job.” So it’s facilitating exactly what you’re talking about, which is this willingness to, I think that was one of the barriers to working from home.

Dax:

So I think that’s going to be built in hopefully, companies are going to build in that trust, whether they continue working from home or whether they move back to the office and use it to build better collaboration and teamwork through trust with their teams.

Todd:

Yeah, I think, and it also goes a little bit the other direction in the sense of wow, managers and leaders have had to learn to trust and there’s also the side where we’ve talked about before where workers who work from home tend to work a lot of hours. As part of the lessons learned, having that in mind in terms of making sure that employees are vibrant and invested and making sure there’s some limitations put on working from home so that people don’t just burn themselves out and work 20 hours a day just to [inaudible 00:08:52]. So I think it definitely can go both ways. There’s definitely for sure negatives that have come out of COVID’s situation and there’s lots of positives as well and we have to take both of those into account to figure out a better strategy to move forward.

Pete:

I think our managers are also going to have to start looking at clarity around assignments with a work from home kind of relationship is. Okay, so my person is working from home, you want to build in that trust, but trust but verify, right? So exactly what are the outcomes that I’m expecting from this employee. So I think some organizations might start looking at that a little differently going, you know what? It’s not just about the hours you’re putting in and getting these tasks done, but ultimately the employee has flexibility to get it done, especially within our client base and they’ve got a little more flexibility to figure out when it gets done. What do I want to see as an outcome? What do I want to see is the deliverable?

Pete:

Because goodness, there are times where I’ll go three, four hours, take an hour break or so go outside, relax. Bust a couple hours, wife goes to bed, get back up, knock a couple hours out. It’s not the hours I’m putting in, but it’s the outcomes that I need to deliver on. And I think that’s a good thing, it just takes a little bit of time, I think, between the supervisor employee to figure out what their cadence looks like.

Todd:

Absolutely.

Dax:

I think there’s also, we’ve been talking here about the takeaways that working with your employees and remote employees and internal takeaways. But also I think there’s a lot to get back to Kristina’s point that she brought up, which I guess was originally Christie’s point last week about the butcher shop that was selling their meats in another way and they had found another avenue for their services.

Kristina:

[inaudible 00:10:42].

Dax:

Sorry, what was it?

Todd:

I think is a deli shop, right? Deli.

Dax:

Oh, Deli. Butcher.

Todd:

Butchers are supposed to sell meats.

Dax:

Yeah, that’s true. But, they found a new market, a new way to sell their products. Todd and I talked a little bit about this yesterday in the world of banking where this idea that people are getting used to doing video calls now, that banks are looking at expanding their services to offer them through video chat rather than going in to talk to a loan officer. You can do it online through video chat. I think this is another huge opportunity for businesses that are dynamic and innovative to find ways to offer their services to their customers in ways that they’ve never done before and capitalize on a change.

Kristina:

Yeah, I think opportunity is the key word. I think that with everything in life, it’s through the lens of your own perspective and how you see. So as a business leader, you have to be right now viewing this as an opportunity, you have to realize you can come out stronger afterwards than you even were before.

Todd:

That’s part of the technology aspect of lessons learned in video. I think another lesson learned is how important it is to have a plan. We’ve talked to and seen so many people who are just thrust into this situation and had just no idea what to do. Their phone systems wouldn’t even transfer to outside of the office. And for JMARK, it was just like, okay, go home because we had a plan and we have the technology that’s organized right. And this isn’t a stroke towards JMARK, but the point is that as we move forward, we don’t know if there’s going to be another wave. We don’t know if there’s going to be another disaster. There’s always something hitting the fan and some part of the country or the world. So it makes it even ever more important to come out of this and go, “Okay, one of our primary strategies is we need to have a mobilization plan for if we aren’t able to come into the office anymore.”

Dax:

And test those plans. You mentioned Todd that we were able to at JMARK just sort of send everybody home. But the part of the story you didn’t tell is that we actually had a plan to do a test, and once this COVID-19 thing started rising up, we had planned to do a test and it was like a week out and within that week’s time, that’s when everything suddenly flipped to going home and our tests suddenly became, we’re just doing it. But it is important to lay your finds out and then test them to make sure that they’re feasible and that they’re going to work in the real world.

Pete:

Then be humble enough after it’s over or after things go back to the better normal, is to look at that and say, “Okay, great, it worked, but how could we have done it differently? What can we do better next time?” Just because it worked doesn’t mean we can’t optimize. Like Kristina said, it’s a great way to look at through the lens of opportunity is, how can it be better next time? How could it be smoother for the employee? I think that’s the exciting part. I think that’s really the exciting part is, is that Kaizen approach and continue to improve it.

Todd:

Absolutely.

Dax:

I think that’s the key, this idea of innovation and looking for opportunities. We were discussing briefly before they started companies that jumped on opportunities that have now become huge companies that other people didn’t see. Going back over the last 10 years from the recession of 2008 where Netflix have been around before that, and Netflix had already started morphing from the red envelopes, DVDs in the mail into streaming. But they took that time, and a time when a lot of people were sort of contracting their services. They seized that opportunity to say, “Look, people are looking for a way to save money, we’re going to expand these streaming services and give people a way to cut their cable bills and save money on streaming video.” And look how it’s worked out for them. There are other companies we talked about that saw that opportunity and jumped on it and I think it’s a great time for people to look for ways to do that.

Todd:

Absolutely. We just got a question from Robert that says, many times when people or companies are forced to do business in a different they’re unable to adapt, they struggle to come out stronger on the other side. What advice can you give to help workers to overcome this and embrace the better normal? We’ve been talking about all of these coming up to a better normal from a company standpoint, but we haven’t talked about how individuals adapt to a better normal because that’s often harder.

Dax:

I think one thing I would say is, and I guess this goes a little bit away from the individual but for managers to look and say, okay, and be willing to listen and hear their teams. And some people are going to say, “I loved working from home and it worked better for me.” Other peoples are gonna say, “No, I struggled with it and I work better in this situation.” And to look for people and look for ways to help your teams, any of the individuals on your team where possible work in the way that works best for them.

Dax:

It’s not just because if I work from home well and say, “Pete said, Hey, I’m struggling a little bit or something.” It doesn’t mean that there’s a weakness in one place or the other it simply a difference of the way that we work and the way that different people get things done.

Todd:

I think it was interesting, we talked about this a few times before, but when everybody went remote at JMARK there was a concern by some managers who aren’t used to managing remote employees, that there was going to be a lack of productivity. Then the numbers really started to come out and found that that really wasn’t true, the productivity increased and people were starting to come out and say, “I really love working from home because I’m so focused and I don’t have the interruptions that you would typically have in an office environment.” But I think there’s a lesson there and what did we do to make sure that there were less interruptions at home?

Todd:

There’s certainly things to interrupt you at home. So as companies or individuals, as individuals actually are moving back to the office. What are those lessons that you learned at home? Is it listening to some music while you work? Is it putting up a sign and saying you’re unavailable until such and such time? Or is it blocking out certain time on your schedule or whatever the strategy is, taking those lessons learned and making yourself more focused, more successful in an office type environment.

Pete:

In one of the meetings I had recently, in the past it was some people connecting remote, some people in office. There was always this people talking over each other, interruptions. We didn’t really have a great plan between people who work remote and in house. And then the last meeting we had, this is the Culture Crew for those that follow that. Is we found that with everyone being remote, it went a lot smoother. So what we’re trying to figure out going forward lessons learned is when people go back in the office, how do we make it as smooth as that? How do we go ahead and bring the lessons learned and the great experience we’ve got from everybody being remote and move that into more of a hybrid environment? And I think that’s the big challenge.

Kristina:

Yeah. I think to back to Rob’s comment about some people being unable to adapt is the way that individuals view change. A lot of people say, I hate change, but to me the way I view it is do you want to be in the exact same place you are a year from now that you are today? Do you want everything to look the same in your day to day work? You have to view it from that lens and that can maybe help with the adapting process.

Dax:

I think a lot too about sometimes and when I start a question from Rob and talked about one of the things he says, they struggled to come out stronger. And I think people start hesitating, like struggling is a problem and the growth is usually a struggle. And we also, sometimes we start struggling and it makes us uncomfortable and we want to stop. But it’s okay if it takes you longer to adapt to a new situation than somebody else, as long as you’re still pushing forward. Like what you were saying, Kristina, my thought is always if I had a goal to make it 15 steps forward from where I’m at, but it was harder than I thought and I only made it 10, I still made it 10. And that’s not a loss that’s still a game.

Pete:

This is my response to all you guys. I think this is a really exciting opportunity for an employee to go in and talk to their manager and outline what worked great, what didn’t. I’m sure there’s a lot of self discovery going on. I know even me who worked remote for many years, just in this situation, I found some things a little bit different that optimize it, made me happier and more productive. I think that’s a great opportunity for employees to go down and sit down with the manager and as a team figure out how do we go forward to make sure that not only am I more productive but I’m more relaxed and the environment’s correct so we all do better. That’s the ultimate goal, right? Between the employee and the supervisor is, how can we figure a way that everybody wins? And I think those conversations are going to be happening, at least I think they should.

Todd:

Absolutely. I’m thinking about some of the organizations that I’ve seen adapt over the last a month or two have a longer spin. And what’s interesting is that there are companies like Zoom who have just taken over the market and Zoom is now almost a household word and everybody knows what whatever refers to. But in the same standpoint, there are great platforms out there. There’s companies like BlueJeans and Google has a video platform and go to meeting and there’s many different platforms. What was so different about their strategy that they didn’t get into this game?

Todd:

I’m sure they’ve had successes and things have gone up for them during this time as videos become so important. But as we go into the long tail of this, video is going to be a big part of, I think most organizations’ strategy moving forward, whether that’s video communication with customers or whether that’s video communication internally. Being a company that takes advantage of this, these companies got to be looking at know what do we got to do differently in this long haul that could take a while? What did these companies that are innovating do that we didn’t do? Whether you’re BlueJeans or WebEx or whatever.

Todd:

And that same lesson applies to us. You mentioned [inaudible 00:23:34] backs, I think video between employee to employee and between employee to customer. Loan officers to people is going to become so important. We’ve seen a massive uptick in electronic banking over the last couple of months. People who loved to go into the office or go into the lobby of a bank and bank that way face to face are now often enjoying the electronic experience and finding it quicker and less taxing and don’t have to go anywhere, they don’t have to waste gas.

Todd:

And that translates down to many areas, when you talk about video, you’re talking about potentially changing some of your infrastructure internally. It could be as simple as getting a webcam for people, it could be as simple or it could be as complex as having to have new whether it’s bandwidth or infrastructure to support that. And those are the adaptations that people really need to be thinking about as we move forward and looking at what is going to be affected. Now, if you look at the coming out of COVID-19, as people start going back to the doctor, we’re potentially going to see a really big uptick in specializations in industry.

Todd:

As transportation moves beyond just grocery items and necessary items, we’re going to see manufacturing hit up again. We’re going to see people potentially… I saw somebody post on some social channels, “I really wish there was a drive in movie theater around me.” That’s like coming back now. So we might see different types of entertainment come up and we’re already seeing fights in delivery of entertainment. Warner Brothers is talking about making all of their shows have a digital opening and movie theaters are fighting back.

Todd:

It’s how do movie theaters need to embrace the changes and how people are operating and how their behavior has changed to make sure their organizations are vibrant and successful and innovative and moving forward. I think that’s the challenge and the lesson in having, what we’re kind of originally started talking about this idea of a retrospective, the outcome of these lessons have to produce tangible success.

Dax:

I’m thinking, Todd, as you were saying that as you were talking about movie theaters and actually, two of the examples you gave, movie theaters and banks. I think the key with making this change is that some of the companies that struggle to do this is because they’re looking at, we want to do something this way. This is how we do it. This is how we’ve always done it. We want to do something this way and they forget to look at it from the perspective of their clients and customers. How do I serve what they want? The companies that thrive in times like this, are the ones who are saying, “This is what that guy wants, how do I get it to them?”

Todd:

Right. It’s not about what we want as an organization, it’s about adapting to the behaviors of your customers.

Dax:

And a good example with the banking, and that’s a good example. You mentioned people that like to go into the lobby and do their banking. My mother loved, she would do that for everything. And she is out, I know she had a call, I was on a call with her a couple weeks ago for a banking matter. And part of what made that successful was the bank figured out how to make sure that she felt comfortable with the new technology. It wasn’t just, “Here’s the technology, good luck.” But they figured out the process to make sure to meet her where she was comfortable and help her adapt to.

Todd:

I think that’s going to be a challenge that we have to figure out too is, if we know, for example, that video is going to become a part of a lot of organizations strategy, we can’t assume that our customers want that. We can’t assume that they are going to know exactly how to use it. So we potentially have to take this behavior change and build on it. And that may mean training for your customers and examples of how to work with you and it’s just potentially, it’s a big change in strategy.

Pete:

I think security is going to be a big discussion going forward. Things like with employees accessing information from home with VPNs. Now that hackers of course realize that all these folks that aren’t very familiar with the technology you’re now remoting in, I think it’s opening up some holes, some vulnerabilities in possible networks. So I think going forward companies have to discuss not only are we going to offer video and we’re going to allow employees to access information internally, is how do we best secure that information from those that want to do something bad with it.

Todd:

At the beginning of the whole COVID situation, there was this lie going around and it was being broadcast all over the place about how hackers were going good and then they were going to pause hacking during COVID-19. And so they wouldn’t hack certain organizations and stuff like that. That was the biggest lie that I think I’ve ever seen. We have seen more security issues in the last couple of months in such a rapid fire manner than we’ve seen in such a long time. We always are seeing them, but they have been just going after everybody. No mercy. And it’s just gotten worse and worse. You’re right Pete.

Todd:

That’s kind of have to be a part of people’s strategy. It’s easy to say no to a strategy that potentially isn’t customer facing. That’s something you do to protect your organization and protect your customer’s data. But you have to think of it as a strategy because if you’re one of these companies that gets hacked or one of your employees clicks on some stinking email and gets everything infected, how’s that going to look for your organization? And it’s not going to look good. So it has to be it has to be thought of as a strategy to protect your customers and protect your employees not just liability.

Pete:

Yeah. I’d go even deeper that I think sometimes things like firewalls, proxies, they give up maybe a false sense of security. We’ve seen the last few months how complicated, how in depth these hackers are going. I think companies going to have to really whether it’s your internal IT teams or third parties, they really have to do some deeper assessments on what the new attacks look like and how to best protect your organization. Because even over the last six months we’ve seen these attacks have got so much more complicated, so much more involved. The vulnerabilities are out there. And that’s not to scare anyone, that’s just a reality. Even as a tech company we see this firsthand.

Pete:

My fear is companies going forward to like, well, we’ve got the video, it’ll work through Zoom. We have a software VPN. We have a firewall up. We’re good. I think if you’re going to have a majority of organization work remote, it’s going to take a much deeper dive into how do we protect the organization. Because, one miss click on a link can bring an organization down. We’ve seen large MSPs over the last year that have been in business for quite a long time, they weren’t able to recover and that’s scary. As an employee, I’ll tell you right now that is scared because that’s my job. I think that’s something organizations are really going to need to look at.

Dax:

I think though that this is, again, coming back to the theme of the better normal. People might hesitate because it’s security and it’s a drain. Nobody wants to talk about security, nobody wants to think about it. But taking the time to do that, again, leads to this better than normal. We’ve seen that with clients of ours where they start locating, recognizing and fixing holes in security and people that come in that come to be our clients. And through the process of that, that also helps them find weaknesses in their processes and weaknesses in their workflows and in ways that they can improve that the end result is not just better security, but it’s a better normal for the way that they’re doing business and the way that they’re operating every day.

Kristina:

So talking about better normal and coming out of this better than we’ve been before. To do that, you have to look at what you’ve done, what we did before and what we’ve done during this process. Pete, I think you’re probably the best one to talk about that process and what a retrospective looks like.

Pete:

Sure. So there’s a lot of different ranges that retrospectives companies can do. But the general gist is that, is you want to get together with core members of different departments and you want to talk about during this time what went right, what went wrong, what adjustments we made, and basically what adjustments do you want to make in the future. So the big thing about a retrospective, I think some companies get wrong, at least I’ve seen in the past, is they look at it more as a reporting tool.

Pete:

It’s like, okay, well let’s go ahead and write down everything that went wrong and let’s log it in case in the future we need to reference it again. And that’s good. But here’s what the great do, when they go through and figure out what they want to do going forward they create an action plan and they don’t leave that meeting until they have an actual plan of what they’re going to do and then how often they’re going to check up on that. So maybe, what are the three major things we’re going to do in the next 30 days? Have it listed somewhere, have somebody responsible for it and then come back together after that 30 days and talk about did it get done? Did it not get done and why didn’t it get done? So what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to make in such a way that the next time this happens, you’re able to operate quicker.

Todd:

I think the one thing a retrospective is essentially an opportunity to look at the past to improve the future. And it’s an opportunity where you got to bring in as many people as possible in the organization so that you’re not making assumptions from a leadership standpoint and you’re taking into account the lessons that your employees and staff have learned and figuring out what worked, what didn’t work. What can we bring forward? What can we not? What should we not bring forward?

Todd:

Mike on Facebook [inaudible 00:35:49] he asked if we think people are going to have as many face to face meetings or if they’ll be more temporary. I’m sorry, I got mixed up rather face to face meetings. That’s kind of an example of do we need face to face meetings as much? We are essentially having a face to face meeting right here and that’s what a lot of people are considering face to face now. And it might just be we’re having a meeting, you’re in the office or you’re not, connect in, show your video and let’s do this. So it’s possible that just as the smallest things as a meeting could potentially change to become more video oriented whether you’re in the office or not.

Pete:

Yeah. Other things you’re going to look at in retrospective is, were you able to access all the tools you want in house? Were there any problems with connecting to anything that you’d get on your day to day in house? And maybe it got fixed maybe it didn’t. But going forward, how do you make it as seamless as it was when you’re in house? I think that’s a really important thing to bring into these retrospectives.

Todd:

And I think that often those who hold retrospectives or those that might be listening, sure you can do it as a onetime event, but I would start having them now. What are the lessons that are being learned? What’s not working? And doing them in the moment when we are in the thick of things and keep them going on some type of a scheduled basis. So that you’re really documenting everything that’s going on and how that’s going to change. And then the other part of a retrospective that we kind of talked about earlier, but we didn’t talk about it in the sense of a meaning is, there’s got to be somebody that looks at the macro environment of the business. Somebody that looks at the clients and the trends in the economy and the behaviors that clients are changing.

Todd:

It might mean having surveys go out to clients and customers. It might mean having one-on-one meetings with customers and talking about their experience and what they liked, or didn’t like, and how we served them during this time. There’s just so many of these areas that are going to potentially transform companies both from their internal operations to their external go forward strategy. These retrospectives, these meetings to figure this out are the key to getting started on that path.

Kristina:

I agree. I think that something like doing a retrospective is something that a lot of people can easily brush aside and think we’re too busy for that, especially right now, but especially right now is when you need to start.

Dax:

I think too what you said, Todd, about going out and talking to your customers. And I think that to me sparks the thought of a super important thing that we forget is unless it goes for life in general, but retrospectives specifically right now, is retrospectives aren’t just about like talking, but also for all of us listening and especially for leaders like listening to your customers or your employees, and actually listening to what is being brought up, not just adding the things that you wanted to bring up that worked or didn’t work. Make sure we’re listening so it’ll work, learning the other perspectives that we might not have, and the things that we might not have seen ourselves

Pete:

Dax that’s a great point that not only the people participating in the retrospective, but making sure that those lessons learned are spread out throughout the company I think it’s absolutely critical or you’re missing a piece of if you’re not sharing that with the entire organization.

Todd:

Pete, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this referenced in regards to a retrospective, but there is a way that a facilitator for a meeting or a leader can kind of steer the meeting in the way they want it to go. The retrospective is absolutely not that meeting. What advice would you give to leaders to keep it open ended and keep it so that you’re getting valuable, true, honest feedback.

Pete:

Sure. I’d say experience, but that’s not going to help if you don’t have it yet. I think the Agile framework for retrospectives really do a great job covering different ways that a facilitator can lead a discussion and get proper reporting. So I don’t have a magic bullet on that. It is just trying to find some of those best resources like from Agile on how to lead the discussion because you’re right, that’s a really challenging piece. It’s real easy to get tunnel vision as a facilitator for these. That’s why what you mentioned earlier made a lot of sense to me.

Pete:

I think it’s important is getting folks from different departments, making sure all different departments and areas are represented. So you’re getting the truth. It’s really easy if you bring all management in to have one perspective. I want the people that are doing the work today to tell me, you know what? This sucks. This absolutely sucks and here’s why, and here’s how I’d fix it. You want that. You want that real harsh or real direct feedback if not, you’re blowing smoke and you’re wasting time.

Pete:

So I think one thing, kind of going back to the step a facilitator needs to do is ensuring safety. Safety in the organization is critical, that it’s okay to say, even if it was me creating the process, that if it is broke, we want you to come out and say, “Hey, this is terrible and here’s why.” But I think a lot of that has to do with company culture. If I was facilitating that’s something I would first and foremost, want to get across that, be as blunt as you need to be, if you can offer solutions, fantastic.

Pete:

But if not, tell me the truth, because once we have the truth, once we have clarity around it, we can operate. Without that, then we’re just kind of going through the motions, we’re just impressing our bosses and doing the whole company thing. This is not that time guys, retrospective is, this is the truth as I see it.

Todd:

And I don’t think it’s a time to give solutions. I don’t think it’s the proper time for a leader to potentially even offer solutions. It is a potentially a time to brainstorm solutions, but what’ve seen leaders do is you may have an example… I haven’t seen this in this example. But an example of COVID-19, you may have some people who love working remotely, and you may have some people who absolutely hate working remotely. The leader has to not take sides. It’s about what’s best for the organization and in their mind they’re thinking is there strategy that can help both sides?

Todd:

And in the end, business is business and it’s the leader’s business, and they’re going to do what they want to do. But if we want to get the employees to really be moving fast and moving hard, we want to do everything we can to make sure that they’re happy and focused and productive.

Pete:

Right. The idea is everybody has a voice, but not always a vote.

Kristina:

Scott made a really good on Facebook too. He said, “You could have someone else facilitate besides the leader to maintain objectiveness.”

Todd:

That’s really true. Having an outside company come in and do the facilitation would be really good. Being a leader kind of moves into the participant role and is on the same playing field as everybody else, and that can help people to actually be more open.

Dax:

I think too, I don’t remember which one of you said this, but this ties into this that somebody mentioned that the retrospective start now, and it’s not just necessarily one meeting. I think sometimes we go into this idea that, okay, we’re going to have this meeting, we’re going to solve the problem and then when the meeting’s done the problem’s solved. And this happens in the retrospective, somebody brings something up and like Todd was saying, that’s not a time to start taking sides and offering solutions, it’s the time to be listening.

Dax:

I think especially leaders, it’s what you want to do is you want to solve problems, but sometimes you’ve got to take the problems in then come up with a solution as you go, not just try to solve it right then and there. A retrospective is the time to be taking the problems in and the good things. I think I don’t want to get into this, the retrospectives are only about looking at the negatives because they should also be looking about the positives too.

Pete:

To go back, when I said solutions, I mean more about the employees giving their feedback on what went wrong and what they might do differently, but you’re absolutely right. The facilitator certainly should not be solving things at that point. To make sure I clarify that.

Todd:

And just to clarify Alicia asked or mentioned the postmortem in our Facebook comment, we are actually talking about a postmortem, but in the Agile model it’s referred to as a retrospective. And we decided that with all of the COVID situation that’s going on right now, that postmortem probably wasn’t the best term to be using, but we essentially are talking about the same thing of what worked and what didn’t work and how do we fix it. Good comment.

Dax:

I think it’s important just to remember that the entire goal, like you said, Todd was not just a fix what didn’t work, but to take what did work, continue doing it, take what didn’t work and improve on it and keep moving towards this better normal, that regardless of the specifics and exactly what you’re doing, but that’s the entire goal of the retrospective is to move your company towards this better normal through improvements and continuing to good things.

Kristina:

I will say too this is probably obvious sounding, but make sure that you have a plan in place to actually implement these things that you’ve talked about. Because I know from experience that it’s really easy to talk about, okay, what worked, what didn’t work, what are we going to change? Moving on, we leave it there and things get busy and we forget about it. So, put that plan in place to actually implement.

Pete:

Have an owner for the tasks, that type of thing. I agree we want actual items at the end, who’s going to own it and then how are they going to present whether it worked or didn’t work? Is what I recommend.

Todd:

Pete, feel free to interject here, but in retrospectives I’ve been in, generally you talk about the good news, what worked and you throw in as many ideas into what did work. Then you move into what didn’t work. So you’re moving a little bit into the negatives, and then we’re moving into ideas or strategies on how to change. So once we’ve gone through this retrospective, we do these retrospectives in marketing on sprints and we may have a list of, oh my gosh, 150 items, whether good, bad or ideas. It can be just massively overwhelming and I have no doubt that doing the retrospective on COVID-19 will produce a potentially a lot of different to-do items.

Todd:

So we’re at this point where everybody has given all these ideas, everybody’s given all these examples and bad ideas. It’s potentially, we’re looking at rebuilding, we’re looking at getting everything going back again, whether that’s marketing, sales, operations. And then now on top of that, we have this massive list of things that we need to try to figure out how to incorporate it in our strategy. How do we make sure that the retrospective doesn’t turn into what you just said? You mentioned a little bit ago just a meeting that ends and it doesn’t keep going.

Pete:

Sure. So sometimes in larger retrospectives, you’re going to have to do a followup meeting because you’re going to have to talk to different department heads to see if there’s enough allocation on resources to get these things done. So, for example, when you’re looking at a massive one like you talked about. You might say, “Hey, this is not just going to be a 30 day fix. This is going to be a two quarter fix.” Okay, so if we’re going to go in and stretch it along those lines, what people need to get pulled in to do these ideas and do they have the time available?

Pete:

So in that case, you’re going to have different discussions for different departments that are affected. But ideally what you want to make sure is whatever your immediate action items are, you limit them to just a handful. Things that can get done and something that is going to be the most impactful.

Todd:

Impactful, yeah.

Pete:

Because every case study I read in the Agile world is, as you start going past five, six, seven items the likelihood, those things are going to get done and get done to completion just plummets.

Kristina:

Yeah. That reminds me-

Todd:

I think that’s the key.

Kristina:

Too many [inaudible 00:50:00] kill a business. Because none of them [inaudible 00:50:03].

Todd:

Right. But I think that is the key is work on the ones that are most impactful put energy towards them. And then also it’s important to rely on others. We talk about resources within an organization, we also need to be thinking about our partners and resources outside of the organization. One of the things JMARK does is we meet with our clients to help them strategically think through from a technology perspective what they want to achieve and how to achieve it. And we take that load off of them from the technology side on, this is what you need to achieve that strategy.

Todd:

We have insurance agents and bankers and all different types of partners and resources that we go to when we have initiatives and strategy that we need to implement and see what help they can provide. And oftentimes like us, there’s somebody at their organization back and talk through things and to strategize with us. Sometimes they bring a lot of value from the standpoint of oftentimes an external resource might have access to data and trends and things that you might not. So relying on your whole ecosystem of resources I think is key to making sure you move forward and execute on strategies that will help you to make a better normal.

Pete:

Yeah. I agree with that. Todd, also on the list of things to do, and Kristina, to you as well, talking about the list of action items. I think one thing you have to fight as an organization is the idea of that maybe one or two things would be a lot more impactful than getting six or seven things done. I don’t know about you, but I love crossing things off a list. Oh goodness, nothing makes me happier. In fact, sometimes I’ll write on paper and cross it off just to feel good. I do. I’m done with this. But you really want to do in these retrospectives when you go for the action items, is what are the couple things that are going to be the most impact? They might take longer, but getting these two or three things done is a lot better than getting 10 things done that are easier. Right. And the whole idea of this is, how do we make it better next time? How do we go in and improve on what we’re doing? Yep.

Todd:

Okay, great conversation. For all of those that joined us on Facebook thank you very much. Thanks for adding in some questions, and of course this will be up for replay for anybody that wants to watch it. But just to emphasize coming out of this experience with COVID-19, it’s vital that we take the time now to really learn what we can do better, what didn’t work, really put in place my plans, whether that’s mobilization plans or just recovery plans, put in place strategies that have changed because of customer behavior changes all are vital and important and important for our economy as a whole.

Todd:

And as we all come out of this ahead that ultimately is a trickle effect on the whole economy and helps other organizations and individuals and the whole economy improve as a whole. So until next time stay safe and have a retrospective. Bye.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for attending this podcast. We hope it has been informative and help convey that at JMARK, we are people first and technology second. To learn more and discover additional content relevant to your business, please visit us online at jmark.com. Or at LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. You may also call us at 804-44-JMARK. Thank you for your time and we look forward to seeing you again.