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Do you desire enhanced communication and improved quality control in your remote work environment? In this episode, our hosts, Jason and Steve will reveal the key strategies and techniques that professionals in remote work environments can implement to elevate communication and ensure top-notch quality control. Prepare to unlock a new level of productivity and success in your remote work setup.

 

In this episode, Steve and Daryl discuss:

  • The Importance of Quality Control in Remote Work
  • The Communication Challenge in Remote Work
  • Nine Best Practices for Quality Control in Remote Work
  • Compensating for Immediacy in Remote Communication
  • Matching Communication to the Need

 

Key Takeaways:

  • Improve remote work quality by implementing effective communication strategies
  • Overcome challenges in remote communication to enhance productivity and collaboration
  • Strengthen remote teams by bridging the communication divide and fostering better connections
  • Compensate for the lack of immediacy in remote work with efficient communication techniques
  • Enhance quality control in remote work environments through streamlined and effective communication

 

“Pick up the phone when in doubt. Sometimes a quick conversation is all it takes to clarify a situation and maintain quality control.”
-Jason Abell

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Jason and Steve - Quality Control in Remote Work


Hello, good morning., good afternoon to everybody, and welcome to the Rewire LinkedIn Live event for this Thursday. Jason, I so wanted to say welcome to our podcast because as you and I both know, we're sort of cross pollinating these things.

Podcast and LinkedIn Live, yes, yes.

But it's always great to be live with people, and that's just kind of cool to do it over this medium. It adds a funny dynamic. I know that we record our podcast stuff and then when we do a LinkedIn Live, like, I don't know, I get a little nervous. It better be good because we're live.

My gosh, I know. We are live. So welcome to not only the insight interviews, but welcome to LinkedIn Live.

Absolutely, I'm your host or I'm one of your hosts today. This is Steve Scanlon. I'm the CEO and founder of Rewire and my faithful, awesome business partner, Jason Abel. We own the company together, and I think you have more titles in the company than I do.        

But we draw straws to figure out who's going to do what on these things. And today I get to play sort of the host and question asker because you actually came to me and had this super cool idea and something that you've actually been working on live with groups around the country. And it's popular demand. It's been really met with some high acclaim. So with that being said, I think it's fair, like we do in journalism, I say we- I'm not in journalism-I've understood that journalists do a thing called, they talk about not burying the lead. You're going to write a story about politics or whatever you tell people. This is what the story is about. So, Jason, tell us about what our LinkedIn Live event today is about.

Well, if anybody looked at our post, which was this, we're not bearing the lead. I mean, we're going to be talking about quality control in remote work. And the reason that we're talking about that today is we had clients ask us about it over and over again. And so, some of the different industries that we serve, mortgage and real estate are certainly two of the top ones, but we serve organizations in the nuclear energy sector. We serve industries in financial planning, retail, and what we heard over and over, especially since into the pandemic, out of the pandemic, maybe out of the office, is, man, it's cool that people work remotely, no problem. We figured out a way to still make them productive. But man, quality control seems to be a bit of an issue. What can we do about that? And we heard that, I don't want to say over and over again, but we heard it enough where we started to do our own research and we started to ask our own clients, what are you guys doing?   What's working there? What's not working there? Where do you see little fissures, little cracks that are happening? And we put together a program of what some of the best organizations around the world are doing to really maintain quality control, high, high level quality control, even when everybody's not physically in the same building.

Well, I have a question. I didn't plan on asking this question, but can I go? I got one just for clarity for me, maybe the whole audience is going Scanlon’s an idiot, but when I hear quality control, I start going, okay, QC, because QC within manufacturing companies is a very particular and I like you're using quality control in a broader context. Will you clear that up?

Yeah, all those things that you described are certainly important and there are certain standards that need to be met in certain industries. But what we found is, yeah, more on a global, broader scale. There'll be details that are sometimes missed because we're not in the same room together. There's some body language and some nonverbal things that happen or get lost in translation over a text or a chat or an email, and there are some nuances that don't happen when we're in a remote environment, and organizations were like, we don't have these big, gaping quality control issues. One client put it last month, we have these pebbles of sand and we don't want them to turn into big rocks of quality control gaps. And so we'd like to get a handle on that now. And I thought that was a really good illustration of that. So, yeah, it's the broader sense of quality. But the quality of our communication, the quality also of our output, right? I mean, the quality of whatever output or results, but you're going to go into and give us some feedback. And I like what you said in a lot of ways. We've done a little research. We can't help as a coaching company, but we get to do research because we're working with so many dang people around the country and our coaches are and when we come together, we noticed, if I heard you right, this was a big issue. And so, you began a quest of going, hey, tell us more about this.   What have you done that really works?

Yeah, and we found some really neat things as a result of it. And I have a feeling if you're tuning into us right now over LinkedIn, or maybe you watch this video later, or when you listen to this particular episode of the Insight interviews, if the title Quality Control in a Remote Environment was something that you said, I should probably listen to that, you're probably in a situation where you know what we're talking about, like you're dealing with that challenge, and you're exactly who we want to speak with. And so, if that's the case, yeah, I would say we’re probably at the point in the program, Steve, where we can dive into some best practices, some stories around there, and anything that you as the listener or the viewer can glean from it, whether it's like that exact best practice that you're going to go use as soon as you finish watching this or listening to this, or it produces an insight for you to go, oh, man. maybe we can do this a little bit differently with my team or my organization. That's what we're looking for. So, a lot of the challenges come from a difference in communication. That's really where it stems from.        

In fact, when I'm live with a group, Steve Scanlon and our director of programming, he did such a good job where we do this exercise, Steve, where we play a game of password. And if anybody knows the old password game, I think Jimmy Fallon's doing a new version of it now on TV. But there's two people that are facing one another, and they're giving one word clues to what the password is, right? Well, in the example that we do live, instead of having the people face one another, we have them face away from each other, and they're not verbally allowed to give clues for the password. They actually have to write it down on a little piece of paper and then pass it behind their back to the other person, who then reads it, has to then write down what they think the password is and pass it back.   And you can only imagine most people just don't get the password that way because they're not looking at one another. They're passing it behind their back on a sheet of paper with only one clue on it. And the whole point is, that's kind of like remote work, right? Like, we used to be face to face or meet each other in the hallway or get together in the conference room. Well, we're not doing that anymore.      

                                                                                                     
"We're relying on emails, texts, maybe video, like you and I are doing right now, which is a pretty good second place. But it's not like being face to face where you can see entire body language and those types of things."

                                                        
Yeah. And right out of the gate, I'm thinking that really would be a cool new game show, to not have each other face each other. It probably wouldn't work very well on TV because they like all the facial expressions and stuff, but it would really make your ability to articulate really well in writing a necessity.       
             
And already I'm going, well, who does that really well?

Well, yeah, and we're going to get to some of that in the best practices. Then the second part of the exercise, we allow them to face one another. We allow them to verbalize and look at each other. Well, guess what? They guess the passwords a lot more quickly that way. And over and over we've done this and it's like the numbers are dramatically different. So, one of the first observations we had when we started to dig into this is, it's not an issue of quality control, it's an issue of communication. And that's where the key is. And so, we could end right now and go just communicate better. Boom. End of story. Well, there's a lot more nuances than, than that.

Although that's not wrong.

It's not wrong, but we've got some very specific best practices here and some of them I'm going to tell stories and give some nuances around and some I'm going to roll through just because we only have so much time. But for those of you that are listening right now, I've got a slide up and here are the nine best practices that we've got. And then I'll go through each one.
So, one, over communicate. Two, rhythms and cadence. Three, merging the divide, which I'll explain. Four, it's not that different, compensating for immediacy, which I'll explain, matching the communication to the need, be like an air traffic controller with no assumptions. This is one of my favorite ones. Pick up the phone when in doubt, and then this idea of self-care and we'll concentrate at the end. So over communication, what in the world does that mean?        

I'll give an example of this. It's kind of a personal example, but way back when and Steve, you know this and those of you that have known me for any length of time know my wife and I have a couple of kids. Well, before a couple of kids came around, my wife got pregnant a few times. We had a few miscarriages. And anybody that's been through anything like that knows that that's just not good, and when you are pulling out of that type of an experience, there's emotions, there's chemicals that are going on in the brain, there's lack of sleep, there's all kinds of things going on. And one of the pieces of advice that was given to us that we still use to this day and I've used it in business a lot, especially with coaching, that type of thing, is this idea of over communicating. Well, what does that look like, over communication? Well, what it means is that my wife and I, during that time, our definition of over communicating was not just checking in with one another once a day, how are you doing today and what level are we on, and checking in with one another, but like hour by hour because things change.        

And I'll quickly move to a work example. When you're working on a project and there's a deadline coming up and there's emotions involved and maybe some anxiety, we're not really sure if the deadline is going to be met and if it's going to be met perfect, or if it's going to meet the client's expectations, things happen. And so, this idea of not like, well, I sent the email or I checked off the to do item, but really over communicating with one another, whether that means, hey, let's get on a quick zoom with one another. Let's pick up the phone. Let's check in with one another more often than you think you might need to, where you're really over communicating with one another.        
          
And I've just seen this idea when a project deadline comes up or when there's really in the weeds type of information that needs to happen between one another, over communication is something that we've just seen that's helped and elite teams in remote work environment to close that gap of quality control, really use over communication.

 

                                                   Untitled design (30)

And I love that one, really quickly, and I know you got to get to eight. I can just hear some of my clients going, yeah, but dude, I don't have the time to do that. Right? Isn't that something that we hear?

You don't have the time not to.

Exactly.

I'm going to short circuit that one just by saying you will spend more time avoiding the overcommunication than you will if you just over communicate. And for the purposes of our time today, I just need you to trust me on that one. We could do a whole episode just on that theory and the data behind it, but it bleeds right into the next one, which is rhythms and cadence. Steve, you tell me, how many of our elite clients, when I say elite, like high productivity, great relationship with their team, how many of them have a very regular cadence of meeting with the stakeholders that are important to them, their important team members? It's not ad hoc. It's not when we need to. It's boom, boom, boom. Like, it's every morning, every week. What are your thoughts on that? What do you observe?        

I'm really trying to rack my brain to think of any that don't when you define it like the, you know, again, we work with pretty high-end folks anyway, but it's all of them. It's all of them. It's not ad hoc. Every once in a while, I suppose if there's a new team member and they're trying to build that in again, I'm not trying to just make it a lay down and go, oh, it's all of them.              

It's all of them, yeah. And so, if you're listening to this and with the stakeholders for you or the important team members that work around you or for you or with you, if you're not meeting with them regularly, not just like when you need to do it, I mean, Steve, you and I do it, every Friday morning.

Yeah, I was gonna say, how long have we been doing that? Better part of ten years?

And it's a biggie right.

And do we run out of things to say, are we ever bored on that call?

Well, I'm bored. I don't know about you. No, it is very important.        

In fact, I know you can't make it this week and we had to have a whole thing about that. Like, what?

Yeah, I think we're a really good example of this. We talk every day anyways, but there's things that happen on those Friday morning meetings that just makes a big difference.      

Merging the divide. So, what in the world do we even mean by that? When you're remote, you're divided, you're away from one another. And so, things that you can do to bring that divide together, sometimes it's a handwritten note, sometimes it's getting on a quick Zoom, sometimes it's picking up the phone. Whatever you can do to merge that divide, to bring it together is something that you just want to think about rather than, well, he's over there and she's in a different time zone, or whatever it is, like just being cognizant of that, and anything that you can do on your end, not expecting them on their end, but anything that you can do on your end to merge that divide, you'll find that when you do that, it's met with the other person merging the divide. And now you're closer together than you would have been otherwise. This next one of it's not that different. Here's the thing. Here's what Steve on our team says. You know, though, even if you're recruiting and interviewing in a remote work environment, you still have to dot your I's and cross your T's. You still have to make sure that you're hiring the right people. You're still needing to make sure that you've got practices and procedures in place. Like, you can't shortcut that thing just because you're not seeing the person every day. It's not that different.  We still have a job to do. We still have relationships to be had. We still have to honor processes and procedures. And so sometimes we've heard of organizations where they take so many things for granted because they're each working out of their homes and whatever. No, no it's not that different.        

This next one of compensating for immediacy, there's this whole thing called speech act immediacy, which starts to get a little bit academic. But basically, any type of communication that we have, there's an element of immediacy or not immediacy to that. Like right now, Steve, you and I are live, we're together. It's immediate.       

Things that are happening are immediate. If you and I were doing the same exact thing but we are doing it via email, it's not as immediate, right? And so, if I'm sending you an email and trying to express best practices for remote work, boy, I need to write that email very differently than even the words that I'm using right now, voice to voice. So, compensating for that. Maybe being a little bit more clear in your email, maybe reading that email before you send it, maybe asking yourself, if I was receiving this email or this text, would I fully understand it? Or do I just understand it because I have my experience, my assumptions, my things. So, compensating for that. Does that make sense when I say, I mean you're hearing that for the first time?

Well, it does because we do this work. But again, that last one of asking yourself, like you said, we could spend an entire LinkedIn Live just on that because there's a bias there. So, if you ask yourself, gosh, are people going to read this? You talk about the lizard brain that we speak a lot about, you know, your own brain is going to go, of course. And you weren't really asking because that just gets into Daniel Kahneman and everybody else's work on confirmation bias. So, moving past confirmation bias and actually asking hmm, how is that going to sound outside of what? Because everybody's ways seem right to them. And so unless you genuinely and without bias ask that question, I suspect that your brain is going to go, of course it makes sense. So, I really like the way you put it. Asking yourself and your tone when you did that was like really pausing, because if you don't do that pause and really ask, you're probably just going to go through some confirmation bias and think that the note or email that you wrote was great.

And it goes back to what you said about over communicating. Some people say I don't have the time to do that. I would argue that you don't have the time not to compensate for that immediacy because you say, well, Jason, reading an email after I wrote it, that takes an extra three minutes or four minutes. I don't have that. I got to go. It's much better that three minutes than spending 30 minutes or an hour and 30 minutes trying to clarify or make up for the assumptions that you made.        
            
                                                                                                
 "Some people say I don't have the time to do that. I would argue that you don't have the time not to compensate for that immediacy."


I want to suggest that we're doing this because this is relevant for people. And it's relevant because there are many people that have had to clean and mop up for hours and they're like, I want to figure this out. And so, one of the things overarching you're saying with some of these is when you feel yourself not finding the time, realize that you're going to spend time one way or the other. You're probably even less doing it up front than in the mop up factor.

Right on. Yeah, right on. So, then we're moving to match the communication to the need. Texting somebody about where to go for lunch, that may be fine. Or some informal communication, that may be fine, but texting somebody what the new algorithm is for the whatever on the big project that you're doing? Probably not right. And so, think about the importance, the urgency, the amount of quality control that needs to happen with the particular communication that you're happening and just make sure to match those the same way, right? If you're making a joke or relating to somebody in some way, maybe a text or an instant message is fine, but when we're finishing a project or we're getting the thing to closing or whatever it is, maybe the phone, maybe video, maybe we do need to make an appointment in person. Just thinking about that and not just depending on, well, I just text everything and we're good. Maybe not, just thinking about that again.                  

Yeah, so good.

Then, this idea of air traffic control and no assumption. Steve, you and I were on a jet a couple of months ago, and I still thank you because you figured out a way to get me in the copilot seat next to the pilot. And one of the things that I noticed on that ride was the way that the pilot communicated with Air Traffic Control in the way that I don't remember our tail number, let's say it was NJ9. I don't know. The pilot would say something to Air Traffic Control like, Nancy John Niner at 20,000ft.        

And you would hear Air Traffic Control say, Nancy John Niner, 20,000ft, we'd like you to drop you down to 10,000ft. And it wasn't like the pilot didn't say, okay. No, the pilot said: Nancy John Niner. Down to 10,000ft. So, it was like an exact repeat of what the instruction was and the reason that they needed to do that was no assumptions, no nothing. We're repeating back and forth everything, and it was a perfectly closed loop. And I can't tell you how many times I've seen that in business where an email has come across or I heard something in a meeting.

Yes. How many times has that happened? But when you are doing the air traffic control deal, where it is like I received an instruction, I'm repeating the instruction and confirming that I'm doing the instruction just that way, boy, it makes a big difference.

Another example of this, and then I'd like to hear what you have to say about this is a lot of times in interviews you'll hear this, hey, I remember being prepped for an interview one time and they said, hey, we're going to ask you a question. When you answer it, don't just go into answer mode. Repeat the question and then answer. And I thought that that was brilliant. One, to make sure that I've got it, do I understand the question? Two, there's some video things and whatever, but I just thought that that was good. If I repeat the question, guess what I'm going to answer? I'm going to answer the dang question as opposed to going off in some tangent.

Love it.

Yeah. Air traffic control. The last two, you know, when in doubt, pick up the phone and self-care. I don't know, man. I feel like these two could encompass all of the other seven. So, I can't tell you how many times when I was in mortgage banking, I'd have a loan officer come into my office, and something like the underwriter just doesn't understand. I've been emailing them all day and back and forth, and I copied the world, and we've been doing this, and he or she just doesn't get it. One of the first questions I would ask is, have you picked up the phone and talked to her? No? All right, well, why don't we pick up the phone? And we would pick up the phone right then and there, and the problem would be solved five minutes later. Because there's nothing like face to face. There's nothing like picking up the phone.

And that’s so intuitive. And again, I'm very sensitive to the time. I know you got to get the self-care. It's so intuitive, and I don't know that people are listening, going, oh, that's like rocket science. It might not be, but it's still going on. So, dude, if you can in 30 seconds, why is something so intuitive still, like, is it because it's just easier to do that? Is it because there's too much conflict in picking up the phone we can avoid? Why do you think we don't?      

Yeah, I'll go quickly on this one and be very blunt. One, I think it's easier not to pick up the phone, and you could hide behind email. We see it in social media all the time, brother. Hiding behind comments and pseudo names or whatever. Pick up the phone. If you're an employee somewhere and you're tasked to work on something, when you pick up the phone and solve it and get it done right then and there, you're serving yourself better, you're serving the organization better, and you're serving your clients better. Again., we could have a whole episode just on this.

Yeah, not to mention sometimes I've heard it recently said that the phone has become an app on people's phone that they rarely use.

Right, exactly right.

Remember that app that we used to use? So, like, we're back then. All right, tell us about self-care.


Yeah. When in doubt, pick up the phone. Self-care the most important one if you are taking care of yourself really well. And yes, we do need nutrition, enough sleep, drinking, enough water, moving your body, all of those things, you're able to show up as your best self. And when you're not doing those things, you just show up differently, and you communicate worse. And when you're communicating worse, you're missing things. Your quality goes down. So the self care piece is just huge. And I think in business, we lose that fact often. No, I punched in the clock. I'm there. I'm doing the thing. No, take care of yourself. And if you hear that and you think to yourself, even if it's to yourself yeah, then this is your sign that you can do better in that department, and we encourage you to do that.


                                                                   Untitled design (31)


And the number one reason that we hear as coaches of why, you know, practicing good self-care is what, Jason?

Time.        

I feel like that's become a little theme today.

Yeah. Again, maybe another episode. There are so many things that if we do them proactively, like these best practices, you will have time to do those things. I will contend that. Man, I feel like we could go another hour. I want to do a couple of things, Steve. One, I want to put this up on the screen. And for those of you that are listening audibly to our podcast, I'm just putting up our website and how to connect with us. Grow@rewireinc.com.        

If you are to go to this QR code, you'll be able to connect with us and gosh. We'd love for that to happen. It'd be great for you all to connect with us. If this topic or similar topics appeal to you, reach out to us. We're happy to help you.        

If you just listen to this and you gain value from it, we're happy campers, we're good. But Steve, quality control in a remote environment.

I only wish we had more time.

Great way to end it.

And we will cut it right here, Jason, even from a coaching perspective, our idea is to offer things where people gain insights for themselves. The insight that you gained by doing this is far more powerful than even Jason's thoughts and his own insights. So, we hope you have some and when you do, you win. We're happy to be helpful to you. We thank you for showing up today and we'll see you next time here on LinkedIn Live. Jason, thanks so much. Great job.


So good, Steve. Peace. Bye.        

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