Context Beats Location and Culture's Role

Five years post-COVID, are we any closer to knowing what kind of work environment actually works best? Brian and Lance dig into the real drivers behind return-to-office mandates, remote productivity myths, and why "context beats location" every time.

Overview

The return-to-office debate isn’t over—it’s evolving. In this episode, Brian Milner welcomes back frequent guest and fellow Agile coach Lance Dacy for a wide-ranging conversation about remote work, in-office mandates, and the big question: what actually boosts team performance?

Together, they explore what we’ve learned (and what we haven’t) in the five years since COVID reshaped the way we work. With studies offering conflicting conclusions and executives often leading with personal preference, Brian and Lance unpack how leaders can navigate decisions that impact morale, productivity, and long-term value delivery. From context-driven collaboration to psychological safety, this is a nuanced take on one of Agile’s most pressing modern challenges.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Lance Dacy
Excerpt from A Leader's Guide to Agile eBook
Scrum, Remote Teams, & Success: Five Ways to Have All Three by Brian Milner
#61: The Complex Factors in The Office Vs. Remote Debate with Scott Dunn
Using a Task Board with One Remote Team Member
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast

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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Lance Dacy is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®. Lance brings a great personality and servant's heart to his workshops. He loves seeing people walk away with tangible and practical things they can do with their teams straight away.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian Milner (00:00)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. We are back. Thank you for bearing with us for a little bit of a break there. If you notice, we have not been releasing episodes the past few weeks because we've been practicing sustainable pace, but we are back and we are ready to dive into some really, really gritty topics, some things that we think will be really beneficial. Who better to kick us back off to bring us back around than a friend of the show, Lance Dacey, who is with us today. Welcome in, Lance.

Lance Dacy (00:25)
Right now. Thank you, Brian. How was Hawaii, that big sabbatical y'all took in July?

Brian Milner (00:34)
Yeah, Hawaii is always great, right? Hawaii is awesome. Absolutely. Isn't that what everyone did in July? ⁓ Well, we're glad to be back and we're excited about what we're going to talk about today because we figured why start with something that was not controversial? Why not find something very controversial?

Lance Dacy (00:36)
My tie's on the beach. That's where you over. I mean, I didn't see y'all there, but yeah.

Brian Milner (00:58)
and just set ourselves up to receive lots of disgruntled emails that we're probably going to get this wrong. We're probably going to get awesome feedback too. But I'll just go ahead and start by saying, hey, we hope you give us a little grace on this topic. We're just talking from our experience, our opinions. And I know there's lots of opinions on this, but we wanted to focus on the fact that

Lance Dacy (01:06)
No, awesome feedback, Brian. Awesome feedback. We're going to get awesome feedback.

Brian Milner (01:25)
Hey, we're five years removed from the COVID outbreak. And when COVID happened, that was a massive disruption in work. We all had to learn how to do work in a different way, but five years in, what have we learned? What's changed? And now we're seeing lots of things like return to office mandates and hybrid working agreements. You must be here for this many days a week or other things.

Lance Dacy (01:44)
and

Brian Milner (01:50)
or companies that say, no, we're now fully remote and we're doing things this way. But I saw this kind really interesting question that made me think about this. If you were designing the workplace from scratch today, would anyone build cubicles? And I thought, well, that's a really interesting question. So Lance, what do you think we've learned in the last five years? Where do think we are today with this whole work from home versus return to office?

Lance Dacy (02:16)
I tell you what, Brian, I sit there and think, man, five years is a long time to have empirical data. And I don't believe we have data. Let me say it this way. We got the data. What does it mean? You know, so and I'm a data guy. You all know that. And I'm sitting there trying to look at it going, I don't know how much we've learned. think what we've learned is there's no right answer.

Brian Milner (02:22)
Yeah. Yeah.

Lance Dacy (02:39)
And everybody's, especially organizations, we're looking for the right answer. Just give me the answer and let's go for it. You and I, coach and consult and people hire us to tell them sometimes what they need to do. And sometimes we're like, no, we're not going to tell you what to do. We're going to learn what the issues are. And then based on that, what should we go from? And I find, you know, if I had to sum up what we've learned, remote can be great, right? Office can be great. neither is a silver bullet. That's what I want. So I'm going to go back to my coaching stance and say, well, let's define the outcome, measure with a multi-focus, multi-factor, multi-dimensional metrics of what we're trying to actually accomplish with our people, experiment, and then keep an eye on the team health. I still feel like that's what we're doing. Five years sounds ridiculous that we haven't figured that out. But I think it was so disruptive that five years isn't enough. And I think the work on top of that is changing so radically. have too many variables up in the air. So for now, if I had to make a decision, I lean toward co-location. When the work is ambiguous, when relationships are important or new, that's another one. If we've got a lot of new people together, working remote is going to be a very difficult thing for a while. So, you know, I'd say, hey, if I'm starting a company and the work is ambiguous, you know, kind like a software product company, the work we're not quite sure what we're doing and needs a lot of collaboration and and a lot of hands on, you know, trust with each other, then I'm probably going to say, let's let's be in the same area sometime. You know, I'm not saying every single day, but. That's how I'm gonna lean towards. And then I'm gonna say if your work is predictable, repeatable, doesn't require a lot of that, and you need intense focus, well then maybe remote is fine for you. So how's that for an answer? I don't know.

Brian Milner (04:32)
No, think that's a look. I don't think there's ever I don't think you're ever worse off by by being able to admit that right to just say, you know what? I don't know. And I think sometimes that's part of the problem with the way that we approach certain issues is that people are reluctant to say that right. They're reluctant to just admit, you know what? I don't really know. I don't really have the answer on this yet. And I think you're hitting on something that's really important is that there is

Lance Dacy (04:39)
Right.

Brian Milner (04:59)
You said no silver bullet. I also think there's no one right answer. I don't think that there is a right answer to this question of should you be in the office or should you be remote? think, right.

Lance Dacy (05:12)
confidence interval, right? I mean, it's like, there's no, it's not it's not binary. So I agree with you.

Brian Milner (05:16)
Right. Yeah, there are certain industries, certain products, certain job types that I think are better in the office. And there are others that I think are better remote. And I think what you got to do, and I think I love your return to kind of a coaching stance and looking at this. What's the goal? And I think that's what you have to try to distill it down to is what's the purpose? What's the goal we're trying to reach here? If it's productivity, then let's talk about productivity. If it's morale, if it's enhancing communication, it starts from there. Define what it is that we want as our end goal, and then we can start to find data. We can start to find empirical evidence that either supports or detracts from whatever hypothesis we think we have about this. And that should be what leads us.

Lance Dacy (06:10)
And it could change, you know, that's the other problem. One quarter, it may be better the stuff we're working on. We're in the office more often. The next quarter, maybe we agree too much. Now, the problem is you go survey people. Let's talk about productivity. You ask, let's say a programmer. Okay, I'm just going to say garden variety programmer, highly skilled. You ask them where they are most productive and most of them, I'm not going to indict everybody, most of them will say,

Brian Milner (06:22)
Yep. Yes, let's do it.

Lance Dacy (06:39)
I want to be left alone, no meanings, in silence, coding on my keyboard. They may be going a direction completely opposite of where we need to go, and we won't know that until they come together. And so the other problem with this is we're asking sometimes the wrong question with the wrong people. You ask a single programmer where they're more productive. It's sitting in my office being able to go get a coffee when I want, not sitting in traffic. Hey, I'm all for that. Who's productive in traffic other than, I'm listening to books, you know, so I am growing myself. But nobody, I'd be hard pressed to find anybody saying I love sitting in traffic. So let's put that to the side. Nobody wants to drive two hours a day to their office and back home. That's terrible. But if you ask a programmer that, would you concur that most of them would say, I'm most productive, just leave me alone. Let me write all the code I want.

Brian Milner (07:16)
You

Lance Dacy (07:30)
What do you think of that? So now that's the wrong question then, because now we're working in an agile type, let's say in an agile context, where we're working in an empirical nature, which says we don't know what we're doing. So the more iterative and incremental feedback, the better we understand, are we on the right path or not?

Brian Milner (07:33)
I think that's probably true. I think most developers would say that, yeah.

Lance Dacy (07:52)
And so if I was to say, it more productive to let the individuals be efficient at what they're doing and then come together later to learn that we got a big gap where we were from? Or do we sacrifice individual productivity with a lot of collaboration, which they may term as meetings? I don't like to call them meetings, they're working sessions, right? We had a backlog discussion about this, I believe, you not long ago. Backlog refinement is not a meeting. It's a working session to say, hey, customer needs this. How are we going to do it? You know, and What is it that they need? So I find, I'm debating with people on LinkedIn a lot, I love this, so this is why it's top of mind, is even if the customer knows 100 % of what they want, which let's just say they won't, but if they did, you do not know how to build it. One programmer may, but when you got four programmers, some testers, some database people, architect, all these cross-functional skills, how can you sit in a vacuum and do that? So if your work... requires multiple skills to come together and you're trying to build a done increment by the end of one, two, three or four weeks, having an individual productivity to me could be harmful. you look, I told this guy on LinkedIn that I don't believe productivity is one dimensional. So he referenced a Stanford, let's see, this was in 2023, that he was saying that, you know, the Stanford study showed that people were more productive working at home. Well, it was actually a 10 % decline for call center staff, by the way. So that work is not as collaborative, I would say, maybe. That same study, though, found 35 % lower attrition, higher employee satisfaction, which raised the long run throughput. So while they declined in productivity at home 10%, most executives would go, no, I got to come to the office. We can't have that. But what if I told you, you say 35 % on whatever the number is, attrition and employee satisfaction in the long run, would you rather take that gamble or not? know, Gallup did the same thing. He was referencing a state of workplace and they find, you know, customer loyalty and margin was better for people that were in the office. They may be less productive individually, but the customers saw a better outcome. So what are we measuring, right? So Brian, that's what I look at. with these productivity debates, I'm like, my gosh, what does productivity mean? Are we optimizing for delivery to the customer flow, or are we optimizing for the individual utilization of the people on the teams? And I think executives have to make a choice. And I say executives, because they're the ones who influence heavily, whether we, I'll talk about culture in a second. But I find that, If people steer towards individual productivity, we might be sub-optimizing, right? We know this. mean, we know flow and systems thinking and, you know, all the things that we read in books with lean and inefficiency and cross-functional teams. But what is productivity? I don't know. You have to define that. So that's where I go back. What are you trying to achieve? Individual utilization, work from home. Let's go. You want delivery to your customer? Maybe not. Right.

Brian Milner (10:54)
So. Right. No, you're making an excellent point. so I'll throw maybe a massive curve ball into this discussion because I would propose that we may not, if we're looking at productivity as whether in an agile organization, we should return to office or not, we may be looking at the complete wrong thing because Productivity, I would propose, and I say this all the time in classes, productivity isn't the answer. What do we hear all the time now about AI and developers is that AI is enhancing productivity. It's allowing them to do more in less time. Well, that's great. Individual, right. But that's a volume.

Lance Dacy (11:42)
Individual productivity, individual productivity.

Brian Milner (11:48)
calculation, right? When we talk about productivity, that's usually we're referring to a volume type calculation. But that's, you and I both know very well that the missing gap there is actually the value gap. And so the question is, if we're producing a larger volume of work because we are remote, does that matter if the volume of work that we're producing is things no one cares about? We're all familiar with all the studies that show, I've seen multiples, it's somewhere between 64 to 80 % of what people produce in software is rarely or never used. depending on the study that you follow there with that, and if that's true, exactly, that's my point. Right. And so if that's the point, does it matter if we are more productive from home? Does it matter if we're less productive from home?

Lance Dacy (12:30)
If that's half wrong, it's unacceptable. So it doesn't matter.

Brian Milner (12:43)
I don't know that it does. think what matters more importantly to an agile organization is are we more producing more value in a remote environment? Are we producing more value in an office environment? And that's something I don't know that there is a study on.

Lance Dacy (12:59)
Well, how would you study it, right? Because we were just talking about this before we were trying to debate, you know, what is it exactly that we're going to cover? Because we just, it's too big, right? It's maybe a multi-part thing, but it's like, even if you did the study, who are you surveying? Is everybody the same? Like we go into organizations all the time. Yes, the organization's unique. Y'all do unique things. You're great. Your problems are not unique. How we approach solving the problem, we can borrow from other things that we've done. But when you go do a survey,

Brian Milner (13:08)
Yeah.

Lance Dacy (13:29)
Are you really ensuring that you're getting all the different psychological profiles? Because I'm going to wrap that discussion up by saying somebody's preference may override everything. who are you serving? Are you getting a good sample that mimics what you might see on a team? So going back to that Stanford study, you have to ask the executives, would you sacrifice 10 % lower productivity for work from home call staff? And I know that's different work than software, but let's just, these are real studies out there. If that same study found a 35 % lower attrition and higher employee satisfaction, what if your people are happier working but less productive and it saves you in the long run from attrition? Is that metric matter? Your CFO would argue yes. You know, it costs a lot of money to hire somebody, bring them on board and you lose all of that knowledge. So yeah, I have the problem of working at home. This is me. I don't like working at home. Okay, I do it for a living.

Brian Milner (14:19)
Yeah. Yeah.

Lance Dacy (14:28)
And I have my own little office and I try to shelter myself away, but I love to compartmentalize work or else I'll work all the time. So when I work at home, just nothing, it's hard for me to have barriers. That's just a discipline and rigor thing. When I went into the office, I could hit it hard. You know, I'd go in early. I wouldn't take lunch. just, I'd put in my time, be very productive. I'd leave four or five, be home. And then I was done. You know, of course you answer emails and stuff like that, but that's me. So are you surveying me?

Brian Milner (14:57)
Right.

Lance Dacy (14:57)
Would you rather have me happy and be at home and, I'm going to go run this errand right now. I was less productive today because I chopped up my time and lost flow and context switching, but I'm a happier employee and I contribute a lot to the bottom line. So what are we measuring? Right. So I feel like all that to say is I think you hit it on the head. What is, what is it that you're trying to measure? If it's just productivity, yeah, they'll go in the office because this study says 10 % less, but the same study says.

Brian Milner (15:17)
Mmm.

Lance Dacy (15:25)
Better attrition rate, higher employee satisfaction. Do your people matter? Well, if that's the case, are you going to sacrifice 10 % productivity? I would. I want happy people working for me. But I don't want that.

Brian Milner (15:30)
Yeah. Yeah. No, no, that's a great point. And, and, know, happy people do a better job. Happy people, you know, take care of your customers better. There's, there's a enormous benefits from that. And there's, know, there's lots of, lots of speakers and authors out there that will point you to the fact that in leadership, the job is to try to put your employee first and take care of the employees. If you take care of your employees. the employees take care of your customers and that's what you want them to do. And I agree with that. I think that's a good approach. yeah, I think you're right. There's impacts here across the board. And as you said, it's a really broad topic.

Lance Dacy (16:20)
Well, let's go back to that other thing just real quick. Lance would rather go into the office.

Brian Milner (16:25)
Right.

Lance Dacy (16:25)
Let's say Brian, I don't know, haven't dove into your preferences yet. Brian wants to work at home. He wants to be with his kids, pick them up at school. That's right, you know, that's a righteous thing. I love that. All right. So the company would value having both of us. So now what do we do both? You know, we allow an office space and pay for the real estate and all that to let Lance come in because that's what he likes. And we also let Brian stay at home. And then at some point, where do you get them together to solve big problems? I mean, that's the age old.

Brian Milner (16:27)
Yeah.

Lance Dacy (16:54)
issue is I think the organization based on what they're doing for that set of time in the initiative has to define what is it is most important to us. And you might even have to shift people around to different work to do that. Say, well, Brian's not a fit for this new thing we're working on because he likes to work at home. So do we have a mechanism and offices to do that? I don't think we're good at doing.

Brian Milner (17:17)
Yeah.

Lance Dacy (17:17)
We just hire people and say, here's your job and your pigeon hole for it and career growth and get so busy. It's hard for managers to focus on that. You know, I don't know.

Brian Milner (17:25)
Yeah, I mean, the thing that I've heard most from people who have been on one side or the other side of this issue is kind of the frustration that they feel sometimes with mandates one way or the other, that they're not based on fact, they're not based on anything but one person's preference who happens to be then the leader, right? So if Lance is the leader and Lance prefers to be in the office, then Lance might say, That's it, everyone's come back to the office because I just think that's a better way of working. And, right.

Lance Dacy (17:56)
I mean, how many leaders are like that, right? It's like they mimic that preference. you know, it's such a hard thing. think of the other thing, this debate I was having with this gentleman on LinkedIn, really good one, by the way, I love debates. I'm always wrong. I'm okay with that. But I feel like how we would sum that up is that context beats location. So you got teams. So Microsoft, let me find the study here. Microsoft did a study called the New Future of Work. This was just in 2022, by the way. So it is a little bit older, but they said teams with tight, rapidly shifting interdependencies, so things like early stage product discovery, like a lot of us do, they pay a coordination tax when every issue becomes a chat thread. I loved how they said that. There's a coordination tax. I've always said in software, there's a release tax. You know, what's the tax of the release to actually get the software into the hands of the user is usually pretty big and it doesn't reveal itself until the end. So coordination tax exists for those kinds of teams. Now conversely, the study says work that lends itself to deep focus, just like you said at the kickoff with asynchronous handoffs, like a good parallel flow, like a relay race type thing, sees a gain of 15 to 40 % with remote workers according to active track. 2023. You can find, by the way, any study to support your view. Let's just agree with that, that confirmation bias is rampant in this discussion, we're, Brian and I are actually trying to be, what's the word, neutral as much as possible with our own preferences to just showcase. So go find a study that matches what you want and you're going to be fine. But the really smart people are going to find the ones that argue against your point.

Brian Milner (19:17)
Sure.

Lance Dacy (19:40)
and then let you figure out, just like what you do with stakeholders, there's a trade-off. There's not one perfect answer. You want this or that? You can't have it all. So, I don't know.

Brian Milner (19:48)
Well, if I'm a leader in an organization today and I'm trying to make this decision, should I bring people back to the office, should I not, I know there's lots of things to think about. Did we sign a 20 year lease with this building that we're gonna be paying for anyway? That's a consideration. Right, right, that's obviously a concern. Now,

Lance Dacy (19:55)
about the office today. We're paying $180,000 a month for an empty building.

Brian Milner (20:11)
from the counterpoint that you can say, that's your fault. Why did you make that decision that was a bad decision, right? And maybe that's true, I don't know, but that's certainly part of that decision is, hey, this is part of our bottom line.

Lance Dacy (20:23) Would you rather have a job or tell me that that's a bad decision? Because if we pay $180,000 a month, you're not going to have a job. We're out of business. You know, it's like...

Brian Milner (20:30)
Right, right, but what I'd be trying to do is find what's the best thing for my company, for this set of employees. That's really the question that's the most important. And I think there's, we talked a little bit about this before as well. And we discussed it a little bit that there's preferences, but there's also the psychological impacts of doing these things and what that kind of reflects on your workforce.

Lance Dacy (20:41)
Yeah.

Brian Milner (20:58)
I know I saw the study that was from McKinsey. This was from 2021. their study showed one in three American workers felt their mental health worsened after returning to in-person work. One in three. Now, again, let's stop, right? That's a statistic, but let's look at even what this said. One in three felt that their mental health worsened, right? And that's... That's not an objective fact. That's a feeling that is one person feels this way, the another person feels that way. It is something you can track with a statistic, it's still kind of subjective when you think about that kind of thing. I think probably a lot of people I would assume feel like people's mental health is in general.

Lance Dacy (21:32)
Yeah, you did something you can try and try.

Brian Milner (21:49)
better without commuting and being at home that they would tend to towards that overall. But like we were saying before, there are some negative impacts of working from home as well. You're less connected, you're more isolated. don't get feedback as often as you would. You don't learn.

Lance Dacy (22:04)
your I'm getting in love.

Brian Milner (22:15)
as much because you don't have just the ability to have some of those things. ⁓ There are people who miss the structure, the routine that comes from being in an office place. You mentioned the work-life balance thing. I think that that's true as well. We often tend to think work-life balance only is if you're remote, that that's a better work-life balance. But yes, that is real concern as well. I work out of my house, so I am always at work.

Lance Dacy (22:19)
But who do you he asked? Or who like?

Brian Milner (22:40)
I'm expected to always respond to emails. I'm expected to always finish that thing. Right.

Lance Dacy (22:43)
Yeah. Somebody believes that right somewhere. you know, going back to the study you just cited, when you ask somebody or when you say, hey, you're not learning as much or disconnected, the individual may be OK with that. They're like, yeah, that's great. I don't have to do all that. But then what you're sacrificing is the is the is the actual ROI of whatever it is you're building. So I want to go back to you just said something. This is amazing. First of all. 2021, we were still in the pandemic. Mental decline was already, you know, everybody was probably stressed. I hate to use the word everybody and always, but that was a hard time for a lot of us, right? So your mental condition in 2021, I would argue is already affected and clouded. Now I'm going to tangent a little bit with the discipline and rigor of exercise and eating healthy. Okay. So let's say that I want to get better and I'm going to go to the gym. you know, five days a week for 30 minutes and just try to get in that habit. If you were to ask me three days after going to the gym, you know, how do you feel? I'm going to be like, it's terrible. I heard I'm getting up at 430. I'm lacking of sleep. So it's a recursive problem. You got to get good sleep to lose weight and get physically fit and all that. But I'm losing sleep. I got to learn how to go back to bed. But you asked me early on, I'm probably miserable. with any kind of change effort. We know that, you know, we're in the change effort business. Rarely is anybody like right at the beginning of the change going, yes, you know, it's like it's so I feel like that's a little bit biased as well. Of course, they're probably saying, this is terrible because I'm used to being at home all the time. know, it's like, yeah.

Brian Milner (24:21)
Yeah. Well, and we were talking before to even the productivity kind of studies, right? And please, I feel like that if you're listening to this, you may think that I'm trying to make a case for one versus the other. really am not. I think, right. mean, well, what you said earlier, you tend to like more of the opposite. Well, I'll share them. I tend to more like the remote. I'm more of a remote person. ⁓

Lance Dacy (24:33)
Would you like So I had that right.

Brian Milner (24:46)
You had it right. You definitely had it right. But like even some of the studies that are on productivity, the question or if you read what the data is showing, it's saying they're asking employees, do you feel more productive if you're in the office or at work? And even there, the workers will often say, no, I feel more productive at home. And the managers will often say, well, my employees, I feel my employees are more productive when they're in the office than when they're remote. And that's a feeling that's not a hard data point. It's a data point of people's emotional kind of feeling in relation to it. But it's not a data point of what the actual productivity is. And so even there, think we have to be careful. My favorite phrase I use all the time in class is data or didn't happen. when you... when you read statistics, I think it's really important for us to zoom in on it, say, what exactly is this showing? What's the question that's being asked here? How was the data collected? Even there, was this a scientific study or was this an internet poll where anyone who could come online could take the poll and it's not a scientific sampling, right? There's several of those in our industry. How many people prefer this in Agile versus this in Agile? But hey, go to the website and fill it out and sign up. Well, that's not a scientific survey. know, people could create bots to go in and answer it a certain way a million times. And all of a sudden, hey, data shows. No, it's because you didn't do a scientific survey. So I think it's always a valid point, especially in these kind of really hotbed kind of issues and discussions, to really question the source of the data and say, What is the point behind it? What is it that we're trying to, what's their end goal? And if there are studies, what was the methodology of that study? Is it really proving what I'm trying to decide here or was it proving something entirely different?

Lance Dacy (26:40)
really critical to the science of design. just like a new prescription or something, right? You wanna go read who bought the study because it's like a lot of times that can affect it as well. But I think what you mentioned, know, we haven't, the points I was starting out with were productivity, context beats location. So instead of asking, should we be at home or in the office, say, what's the work we're doing? There is no doubt when we say, hey, Brian and Lance, Lance likes to go to the office, Brian likes to stay at home. There's no doubt there's times where there's no traffic walking up the stairs and into my office and I can crank out three hours worth of productive work, just focus. But imagine if you're solving a hard problem stumbling with something and if you just hopped on a 30 minute Zoom call or if you went into the office and brainstorm, you might would have saved eight hours of productive work. So I think a lot of times people have this stigma about meetings and that's why I like to change them to they're not meetings, if you're going to a meeting, that's maybe one thing, but the stuff we're trying to do, like in Scrum or something, you know, the Sprint Review, the retrospective, the Daily Scrum, those are not meetings. Those are collaborative working sessions that have a general outcome. But what you just talked about, I'm going to call it culture, is a force multiplier on this thing as well that can also change based on the type of work we're doing. you know, Amy Edmondson does a lot of great work in this, her book, Fearless Organization or something like that. She talks about this concept that psychological safety can predict error sharing and innovation, whether you're onsite or remote. So it doesn't matter. and you know, Jeff Sutherland does a lot of talks about this, that as far as scrum's concerned, the, the small cross functional, you know, co-located teams, that was a workaround because of the technology they had back in the late eighties and early nineties. You know, I remember the days of ISDN lines where it was $400 a minute to get on a video.

Brian Milner (28:30)
Yeah.

Lance Dacy (28:35)
Well, there's a lot better tools these days that we can still collaborate remotely. just don't, had this argument that I, with the guy on LinkedIn, that I think a team sitting together has osmotic communication as well. Just sitting in the room hearing things sometimes can help you. But of course, if you're just working on something that you need focus in, that's a distraction, right? So I think we can simulate much of that stuff as far as the culture's concerned. only if we have norms though. So the other thing is working agreements. Can we have an agreement as a team that we're going to have cameras on, that we're going to have rapid feedback? You know, they need to be explicit and that might be the solution. You know, so you have to build a culture around whatever mechanism you're going to use. And I still think hybrid is probably the answer. So you can just say we're going to go hybrid and it depends on the work for the quarter of the year, whatever your planning cycle is, and try to mix and match teams to do that. I think we've reached a maturity especially in the product development world, we're less distracted about the technology, let's focus on the people. That's the hard thing now. The hardest problem is the people coming together, not are we going to be cloud or whatever? Those questions have been answered. So I think the culture is a force multiplier is the third angle to this, that you just need working agreements, you need norms, you need agreements on it. And then that way you don't have these people building resentment, because I can't tell you how many people I talked to that they're like, my company's asking us to return to the office. Well, if they would tell you why and you had a say in it, or if they, you I don't know. just, it's such a hard thing for executives to deal with.

Brian Milner (30:05)
Yeah. Well, it's the old thing from a parent point of view as well, right? When you tell your kids, hey, do this thing. Why? Why am I going to do it? Because I said so. know, if the parent, right, if your parent says just because I said so, how do you feel when you're a kid and you hear that you think, well, that's not good enough. I want to know the logic behind it. I want to understand that it's justified. And I think as we mature, that's even more the case, we don't want to do something just because someone dictates it to us. We want to understand why it's important and what value comes out of it and that it's a valuable use of my time. I mean, that's the thing I would say to any leader that's listening is if you are going to make a decision one way or the other on this, make sure you share your reasoning. Make sure that it's not just, hey, because this is my feeling personally on it and you just got to go along with what I say.

Lance Dacy (31:01)
Well, the kids, you know, I can understand. We'll go back to the shoe-haw-ree thing, right? So at some point you're raising your kids. You're like, first of all, you just do what I say without delay or challenge. I remember teaching my kids that because there may be a time where I say, don't run out in that street or stop. And I don't want you to turn around go, well, why I want to do this and that? Like, well, because there's an 18-wheeler flying by. I don't have time to argue with you. Right. So you start building that, that discipline. I can understand that, but we're way past that with professionals.

Brian Milner (31:01)
have some reason, right?

Lance Dacy (31:29)
that are working in the workplace. If any executive feels like that their answer, just like you said, because I even hated it as a kid, I want to know why. I can support it. Maybe I disagree with it. But if you tell me why you're doing like, well, that makes sense. And now I can be your biggest champion. Right. So so many executives just do it because I said so. I'm your boss. Well, you need to find a new job, sir or ma'am. You know, so I don't I don't necessarily I think we have have to grow beyond that. So that's a great point.

Brian Milner (31:50)
Yeah.

Lance Dacy (31:57)
that we have to mimic that along with culture. I think, you know, the angle to that as well, as far as context beats location, the fourth one I was gonna, told this guy on LinkedIn, that experience matters as well in this debate. So if you're brand new versus if you've been doing the work for a long time, I think we'll call them veteran developers, know, veteran people who do so. they develop what's known as a tacit bandwidth, right? The ability to read the room, see what's going on. I've seen that problem 100 times. They intervene early. There's a book out there called Team Genius, and they talk about this tacit bandwidth that veterans have. a lot of people find that easier to be done in person, and junior colleagues actually learn faster that way, if they can see it and be gravitating towards that. Whereas, you know, the people that are brand new and they don't have that, it takes them a lot longer to solve a problem. So again, what does productivity look like? You want individual productivity or you want to solve big problems together as a team? And I think that's how we kind of wrap this whole thing up is it depends. How about that? We're consultants a lot of times and we don't have the right answer. We have to learn what your goals are. That's why I went back to the coaching stands because that's kind of how you start with coaches. You know, they embrace and give you a hug where you are. Say, I love that you've accepted that. Now, where do we want to go? And you have to make small iterative incremental slices to get there. So I don't know that there's a good answer for this debate.

Brian Milner (33:22)
Well, I think your it depends is the right answer because, you know, and if someone's frustrated with the fact that, you know, we tend to fall back to that a lot, you know, just it depends, depend, no matter what the question is. I think that's the right approach. That's an agile approach is to say it depends because, you know, the opposite is, is we're going to have one right way. And that's always the answer. And imagine if when you were a certain age kid, everyone's going to do this job. Well, I don't want to do that job. I want to do a different job. Doesn't matter. This is the right answer. What job should I do? This job. That's the answer for everyone. And that's the approach sometimes people take with these kinds of problems is, should we have remote work? Should we have in-office work? Here's the right answer. That's never going to be the case. There's a right answer. in that one scenario, that situation, it's going to depend on all the particulars of that situation.

Lance Dacy (34:18)
Well, for the organization, because the other side to that is now I got to worry about attracting talent that fits my model. Right. So make your decision. know, who's who's here to say good or bad? Just say as an organization, we believe in these things and that's why we're going to do this. Put that mission statement out there. And if I'm looking for a job and I don't fit with that, I just don't work there. You yeah, you lost talent. You'll find somebody else. Somebody needs a job somewhere. So. You look at these studies like the GAO case study we were debating a little while ago, know, the quit, I'm going to read just some stats here and then you have to take those and say, what are we trying to do? So the quit rate drop when staff get two days remote. Okay. So there that's a down 33%. That's cheaper than a retention bonus. And it works instantly. That's something people can do right now and say, you know what, we'll get two days remote. And that number pops, right? Commute time that is saved per teleworker is 55 minutes a day on average. That's a bonus week off every year without any payroll cost. So you can make an argument that that's a good byproduct of doing the remote work. And we're talking about CFO level type things here, Productivity jump for or bump for jobs with clear outputs is 12%. So same payroll, more widgets or user stories, whatever, 12 % better. Office footprint after going hybrid, 50 % down. CFOs suddenly love facilities again, right? Disability employment since mass work from home is 12 % and 40 % in tech roles. That's the biggest lever that a lot of people aren't talking about. They're not having disability on the job, right? And then company that forced a five-day return to office lost 50 % of its workforce, including top performers. That's a painful, painful case study from the federal news network. So a company that forced five days RTO lost 50 % of its workforce. Well, you could say, fine, that's what that company wants. Go rehire the other 50 % that want to work there and let's move on. Yeah. I don't know. know?

Brian Milner (36:24)
Yeah, no, I agree. so I think that that all comes back to what's the purpose. And in our scenario, in our situation, what's the what's the driver? You know, we started this by that quote I found that just said, you know, if you were to design a workplace from scratch today, would anyone build cubicles? If I'm starting it depends on the business. If I'm starting kind of a software as a service business, you know, We're going to build software. I'm probably not going to have an office and probably not going to have an office for quite a while if I'm an entrepreneur who's starting a new business. Because quite frankly, I can get better talent. I can have cheaper cost. And I don't need it. ⁓ There's probably a time when I might switch that. But

Lance Dacy (37:05)
Or I'd have, you might have increases somewhere else, but you they may be, but you could go find some space, right? You say, two days a week, we're going to come in like a, work or, you know, whatever those, those, workspaces are. So I totally agree with that. It's like, well, first question you have to ask yourself, what do we want to accomplish? You know, what gives us happier people go find that data. What helps us to be more productive in the way of outcomes, go find that data, broadcast it, say, here's what we're doing. If you like it, stay on board. If you don't. Go find somebody else that has a style that you want. We've been doing that for years. This isn't any different.

Brian Milner (37:41)
Yeah, yeah, I agree. Well, this has been a great discussion and I know that we only can kind of scratch the tip of the iceberg in this. again, for anyone, yeah, yeah, again, for anyone listening, please offer us a little grace in this, right? I know we're not covering every aspect of this and I know people have very strong opinions on this. from my perspective, I think that anyone who's making a decision needs to take into account all these factors, take into account the mental.

Lance Dacy (37:49)
We'll more episodes.

Brian Milner (38:09)
health aspect of your employees and the morale of the employees and the gains they get from one way versus the other. And if you cannot balance it out and make the case that, there's more gains in one way versus the other, I don't think it's the right move to make to make a big switch in this until you can say, here's why. All right, well, Lance, thanks very much for coming on again. It's always great to have you.

Lance Dacy (38:33)
Always a pleasure. Maybe next time we'll bring a CEO or something and get their perspective because we'd love to hear executive standpoint from this too.

Brian Milner (38:41)
That's an awesome idea. Yeah, let's make sure we do that. Thanks, Lance.

Lance Dacy (38:44)
All right, thank you.