In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the ongoing challenge of managing remote workers in the PR and marketing agency world.

Five years after most agencies leaned in to remote or hybrid work models, many owners and managers continue to struggle with finding the right approach to managing employees that they don’t see in person every day.

Chip and Gini address misconceptions about remote work, emphasize the importance of clear communication and trust, and highlight the need for detailed expectations and accountability. They advocate for flexibility and open dialogue between employers and employees.

Using real-world examples and personal experiences, they present a balanced view of remote work’s benefits and challenges.

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, you know, I think that we shouldn’t do this remotely anymore. We need to do this podcast in person every week.

Gini Dietrich: Can we do it with drinks?

Chip Griffin: Well, I mean, I, I, if we were doing this in person, given our distance, I think it would be necessary to, because that would be a lot of travel.

Gini Dietrich: I think so too, it would be a lot of travel.

Chip Griffin: Either that or one of us would have to move permanently, and I don’t think that would work too well.

Gini Dietrich: No, I’m not moving. Sorry.

Chip Griffin: No, and I have no desire to live in Chicago. Sorry. I don’t mind some of the sausage there. It’s, you know, you got some good food there. Oh, well, sure.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, we do have good food here.

No, I don’t blame you.

Chip Griffin: So, but we are going to talk about remote work because we seem to be in a period where there’s this itch that a lot of businesses, I wouldn’t say there’s much in the agency world, but a lot of businesses, and so therefore you assume that there are probably agencies thinking along these lines too, itching to have people back in person.

And I think it’s largely because despite five years now of being largely remote in the agency world, agency leaders haven’t really figured out how to appropriately manage remote workers. And so I think that it’s, it’s the, it’s the safety blanket of, of old people like me who are like, you know, just in the olden days, it worked so well when we were in the office, which is frankly misremembering the past.

Gini Dietrich: Right. Yes. By a lot. Yes.

Chip Griffin: Because the same people who complain about remote workers complained about in office workers 10 years ago. Correct. But so let’s, let’s spend a little bit of time today talking about the effective management of remote workers. And also, frankly, let’s debunk some of the myths because there’s a lot of sentiment that people who work remotely, even again, after a five year experiment in this.

It’s just not as productive.

Gini Dietrich: At all. And yes, so I am a big believer of being able to work remotely. I don’t think that you have to see people in the office to be able to do your work, but it does take a different set of skills to lead those remote employees. And I think that that’s the biggest challenge that we see right now is like Jamie Dimon last week released a statement essentially saying.

It was profanity laden and it was not nice, but essentially he was saying, I don’t care what you, what employees want. I want everybody back in the office. And when you read between the lines, really what he’s saying, which of course is not what he, he, he said, but really what he’s saying is I’m not going to take the time to learn how to manage remote employees. It was much easier for me to have them in the office. And it, you know, we have, we have a mortgage and we have, or we have a lease or whatever happens to be, we have all this office space. It makes more business sense for us to be back in the office, whether or not that works for the employees. And I think that that’s largely what’s going on.

is people don’t want to take the time to learn new skills to be able to manage and to lead employees that are remote.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I think if I recall correctly, one of the things he specifically said was that he didn’t like the fact that if he called someone on a Friday afternoon, he could never get them on the phone immediately.

Okay. Whenever he wanted to. Well, nobody can get me on the phone anytime because I don’t answer it. Right. And I haven’t in many years. Right. And to me. I just, I think we’re in an age where you don’t just randomly call people anymore. I mean, first of all, there’s a lot of indication that you should, at least from an etiquette standpoint, text before you call.

But regardless, you need to manage your teams more effectively than I’m just going to sit here and go randomly dialing people to talk because that’s incredibly disruptive and not particularly effective. But we’ll, we’ll set that aside for the moment because he’s, I mean, I think he’s representative of a lot of business leaders.

Gini Dietrich: For sure. Yep.

Chip Griffin: But I think that, you know, as we think specifically about our audience and, and agencies. You know, the vast majority of our folks are not going to be wanting to bring people back in because they don’t have offices, by and large, today, anyway. Most have shed them, if they had them back in, in 2020. Some still have a small presence, but I, I think that it’s, it really comes down to figuring out how you manage effectively a workforce that you don’t see physically every single day. And it is, we’ve talked about this many times on this show, it is absolutely a challenge, particularly for those of us who grew up in an office environment.

For a lot of the younger workers who have never experienced an office, it may be different. But, but if, if that’s what you grew up with, if that, if those, if the mentors you had were, you know, in office managers, it certainly is different. And as someone who has worked largely remote since 19… August of 1998, I think was the last time that I had an in office job full time.

So what, 27 years now almost?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, that’s a long time.

It’s a long time.

And, and I know it’s, I mean, it is because I, I did it before it was a thing and it was challenging on the remote side of it, let alone the management side. And so you do have to think about these things, but I think it really comes down to good practices that we should have had in office, and we just need to apply them now.

Because even when someone was in the office, you weren’t sitting there looking over their shoulder all the time. And you shouldn’t. Right. But we sort of feel like we have to now that they’re remote. Again, after a five year, I mean, we are just about at the five year mark.

Gini Dietrich: Five years, yes, five years. One of the things that I’m hearing from friends who have been required to go back to work at big companies, is that they go into the office, they sit down at their desk, they open Zoom or Teams and they get on a call, on a call that way, a video call, like what’s the point?

And that’s, I think the frustration is there’s no point to that because you can be sitting here at your desk at home and doing the same thing. And have far more flexibility, be more productive, save commute time, like all of the benefits that you have when being remote that lead to better employee engagement, more product, productivity on their part, more loyalty, at least all of these greater benefits when you give them that kind of flexibility. And guess what, treat them like the grownups they are, instead of saying, you have to sit here for eight hours a day and make sure that I can see you.

Chip Griffin: Right. And I think treating them like grownups that that’s really the starting point is you have to, you have to treat your team, like they are adults, not children, even though I often say you have to sometimes, you know, treat employees or think of employees and clients as if they’re toddlers, you know, they, they need some, some, some coaching, shall we say, to get the behavior, the desired behavior. But, but you do need to start with that, treating them like adults, or is something I wrote about in, in my SAGA newsletter recently, you need to have trust.

Right. For your employees. Yes. And, and so if you, if you start from a position where you’re not trusting them to do the right thing and to put in a full work week and those kinds of things, you need to address that first. There’s no system and, and practices that you can put in place if you don’t have trust.

So ask yourself if you trust them. If you don’t trust them, deal with that. If you do trust them, okay, now show that trust and allow them to do the job essentially how and when they want. I mean, employees have become a lot more like contractors and that’s not a bad thing. We just need to understand, we need to have open conversations with them to understand what they are accomplishing, but that doesn’t mean we need to know exactly when they did every little thing.

As long as they’re meeting their deadlines and completing the assignments that they’re given and doing a good job at it. That should be enough.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think it, it comes down to that. It’s, it’s detailing exactly what your expectations are. It’s detailing exactly what their job entails. It’s saying, okay, these are the things that we need to accomplish this week, and them getting it done.

And it’s, like, it does, it does for sure take an extra step of detail and organization to make sure that everybody’s on the same page and that your expectations are aligned. It does require that. But once you do that, you can, like, I don’t care. Do I want you to show up at client meetings? Yes. Do I want you to meet your deadlines?

For sure. Do I want a client to have to wait for you for 24 or 48 hours if you’re supposed to be working? No. So those are my expectations, right? And if you follow that, I don’t care if you leave at 2:30 in the afternoon to go pick up your kids, or you go to the gym at lunchtime, or you like to take your dog for an extra long walk.

Like, I, like, I don’t care. If you’re doing your job. And I think that’s the difference is if you’re in the, in an office, you can’t do those things. And I think generally people don’t appreciate being told you have to sit in this seat for eight hours, no matter what. I mean, there are funny memes and there are videos on TikTok where it shows people are just sitting at their desk playing Solitaire because they’re sitting at their desks, right?

And they got all their work done already. That’s ridiculous. That’s dumb.

Chip Griffin: I, I mean, I think that, that the communicating expectations is essential. And again, that’s, I think, part of the challenge that, that managers have is that they’re not clearly communicating what their expectations are. They’re expecting the, you know, instead the employee to intuit what those are.

And so you need to have clear and open communication about what your expectations are. You need to make sure that the employee is free to push back against those expectations if they believe that they are unrealistic so that you can resolve them, right? You don’t want to, to set out expectations that are unreasonable and have the employees stew that they can’t…

You’ve got to come together and there’s got to be a meeting of the minds on those expectations. Just like if a client says to you, we expect this, that, or the other thing, you don’t just sit there silently if you know it’s not possible. You got to push back. You got to have that conversation and you need to invite your employees to do the same.

Because if you have a meeting of the minds on expectations, then you can be disappointed. You can work with them to resolve those expectations, but it’s, it’s very difficult to do that if you never communicated what you wanted in the first place. Right. And, and if those expectations are being met, great.

If they’re not, deal with it. Right. And, and it doesn’t mean that you need to know every little detail of how they’re doing it. Which is, you know, I think that that’s, a lot of larger companies have you know, come up with these ridiculous things to do keystroke tracking and things like that just to make sure that somebody’s logged in.

You know, and, and I’ve had agency owners say to me, you know, I, I don’t really know what so and so is doing. Well, then talk to them. Ask them.

Gini Dietrich: Are they getting their job done? That’s all you need to worry about.

Chip Griffin: Well, no, you do, you do need to have some understanding. And that’s one of the reasons why timesheets are important.

You do need to understand how long it’s taking them to do things. So you know what their capacity is.

Gini Dietrich: For sure. Yes.

Chip Griffin: And I will tell you, and I think I’ve said this on the show before, but this was a challenge I had when I first started managing remote workers 20 years ago. I didn’t make sure that I was doing enough to understand how much of their capacity they were actually using.

So I had at least one individual who was really untapped and it went for a long period of time because I was assuming that certain tasks were taking a lot longer than they actually did. And so as I learned that, I was able to address that. And, and so this employee suddenly became much more productive.

And you can’t really expect employees to voluntarily come to you all the time and say, you know, I’m only working about 20 percent effort. Some will, most won’t. That’s where timesheets come in. That’s where weekly one on ones come in. That’s where open communications come in. That’s how you figure out if you’ve got capacity issues in either way, that you’re overloading them or that you’re underloading them.

Have those conversations. Deal with it.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Same as if they’re in the office.

Gini Dietrich: I think that’s exactly right. I think it’s, it’s understanding. It’s, it’s on the owner’s side it’s understanding what you want and expect out of the job. It’s ensuring that timesheets, even if you don’t bill by the hour, that those are created and kept up to date so that you can track effectively both from a prospecting standpoint and a capacity standpoint.

And it’s really, it’s, to your point, it’s, it’s having open communication so that everybody understands this is what is expected. We went remote in 2011 and in the beginning I was brand new at it, so I was trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t. And we had a daily stand up, and in that stand up everybody went around the room and said I’m not available during these times.

I have a doctor’s appointment, I’m doing kid pick up work. And I found, for me personally, that that pissed me off. Like, I didn’t want to know that you weren’t working three hours a day. I didn’t want to know it. It’s it was better for me to say, Okay, I’m not gonna be available between this time and this time.

I don’t need to know it’s because you’re walking the dog, or going to the gym, or running to the grocery store, or whatever happens to be. Like, if you do that, that’s fine, as long as your work gets done. So I, I stopped that practice. I was like, no, we’re not doing this anymore. I don’t want to know the nitty gritty details because that it, it actually really made me mad.

So I had to kind of figure out how to meet in the middle on that one where let, let me be clear about what my expectations are in terms of you getting the job done and you don’t have to tell me where you are every minute.

Chip Griffin: Right. And that’s a great point. I mean, there are some things where it’s, it may be better off not knowing rather than allowing yourself to get annoyed.

And so, you know, one of the places to think about this is to the extent that you have a shared calendar access. Do you really need to have shared calendar access that shows details versus just for your busy? And I’ll tell you that my policy over the years has always been, you know, if I have a shared calendar, it will show free/busy.

It will not show.

Gini Dietrich: Mine too.

Chip Griffin: What those things are.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yep.

Chip Griffin: Unless you are my executive assistant or my wife. Yep. Those are the only two people who have read access to, to what’s on my calendar. And people, and, and I, I know a lot of owners who make their calendar available to their employees. I think that’s a really bad idea.

And I’ve, I’ve told a number of owners that. I, I think that it’s very risky because inevitably at some point you’re going to have a confidential meeting. And you’re going to forget, and someone’s going to accidentally see it. Correct. I mean, it’s like, an old boss of mine, 30 years ago, he had, he decided that he was going to quit, and he wrote his resignation letter on a, and saved it on a shared drive.

So the entire office knew that he planned to do it. Because it was right there in the shared drive.

Gini Dietrich: What a dummy.

Chip Griffin: It wasn’t that he was a dummy. He just, it was the early days, you know, of shared drives and didn’t understand how they, I mean, it was whatever. It, you know, but those things will happen if you are over sharing and, and certainly free/busy is useful for the team to know, but that’s all that’s useful to know.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I totally agree with that. I don’t think that anybody needs to have the actual details of what you’re doing. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and to, I mean. You know, as an employer, I wouldn’t, honestly, I would not want that if, particularly if someone were putting personal items on the calendar, because then I potentially start getting knowledge that can put me into dangerous territory from an HR perspective. You know, that if I accidentally know that someone’s got a medical appointment or something like that, you know, now it could be construed that some decision I made is because of that knowledge.

So you have to be really cautious about some of those things for reasons other than just good management practices.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree. I, I think that it, to the point earlier, it’s a different set of skills that you need to be able to manage remote employees. But if you do it and you do it effectively, you can run that business with remote employees just as well, if even not more productively than you did with, with them in the office.

Chip Griffin: I mean it, you know, unless those remote employees have, you know, dogs, of course, in which case, you know, that, that can interrupt productivity. But.

Gini Dietrich: She can’t find her ball. So she’s barking because she can’t, she’s like, I can’t get my ball. I need you to get it.

Chip Griffin: I’m sure we’ll get rid of some of the barking in post, but so if we’re that good and you haven’t heard any barking, then you just think we’re crazy.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: But my guess is some of those barks are going to get through. So it is what it is. But yeah, but look, that that’s the, it’s the world that we live in. And, you know, the little things like that, you can’t allow them to annoy you in 2025, whatever year this is.

You need to figure out how to work with them.

And so as a manager, you need to, to give your employees the space to perform in the way that they can perform best. And you need to measure their performance, but you shouldn’t be obsessing with how and when they’re doing it. And get yourself all wrapped around an axle and decide that you need to change policies. Or worse, that you need to let someone go because you just you don’t understand what they do all day.

If you don’t, have that conversation. And, and if you ever find yourself not trusting that someone is doing the right thing, call it out and say that, I mean, don’t necessarily say I don’t trust you. That’s not a good thing in general, but say, hey, you know, I just need to understand where your capacity is at right now.

I need to understand, you know, why we’re not hitting this expectation or that expectation, have an open dialogue, be always open to what you hear back. Don’t go into it with the mindset that you’re just going to force, you know, through a particular lane, you’ve got to listen and make adjustments to your own expectations if necessary.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I think that that goes back to what Jamie Dimon has said is essentially what he’s telling employees is I don’t care what you want. I’m not listening to you. This is what I want and this is what we’re doing. And I think the big difference in ensuring that you have employee engagement and employee loyalty and massive amounts of productivity is listening to what they want, where they are and how you can meet them in order to get things done. Whether they’re remote or in office.

But if you’re working remote, you have to take that extra step to be able to ensure that your expectations are met.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And can I also just say. If you’re listening to this, you are not Jamie Dimon,

Gini Dietrich: No, none of us are. 

Chip Griffin: And so Jamie, Jamie Dimon has a lot more freedom and flexibility to say and do things that, that don’t make a lot of sense in the rest of the world.

And it’s more likely that, that there are people who work for him because of the size of their paychecks, they’re more willing to go along with it. Sure. And, and so, you know, if, if you reach a Jamie Dimon place in your life, and if you are paying your employees at your small agency those kinds of, of salaries and benefits, well then, you know, maybe you can revisit how you do things.

I wouldn’t advise it, but, but you probably have a whole lot more runway to work with than most of us who are in small agency world and trying to, you know, balance everything and, and, and do our best with, with the teams that we have. You, you’ve got to be a lot more mindful of that, and you have to, to err in the employee’s favor a lot more frequently than at a Wall Street bank.

Gini Dietrich: And trust me, from an owner’s perspective, it’s so much nicer for you not to have to be in an office every day, too. Like, you get that benefit as well.

Chip Griffin: I mean, look, I, I think there are pros and cons to offices. I’ll, I’ll be the first to say that. But, having flexibility is the main thing.

Absolutely. Yes.

Almost everybody values flexibility. I’d be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t.

Gini Dietrich: That’s right.

Chip Griffin: All right. Well, we don’t have a lot of flexibility in this show.

We try to keep this show to right around 20 minutes or so, because we figure that’s about all you can tolerate of our banter and we generally exhaust anything useful we have to say sometime around the 12 minute mark. So, you know,

Gini Dietrich: Eight minutes of nonsense.

Chip Griffin: Eight minutes of nonsense.

And we start, we start with two minutes of nonsense, then we get into about 10 minutes of substance, then eight minutes of nonsense.

With that, we will wind up this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.