Phone cojones

I was watching a rerun of Two and a Half Men the other night, the one where Alan Harper's ex-wife is getting remarried, and it stuck with me. Alan is on the phone with Judith listening to her usual crazy demands, when he man's up and tells her what he thinks. When he hangs up he says to Berta, the house-keeper, "Oh boy, I'm going to pay for that." Berta responds back with "You know what your problem is? Phone cojones." After a little banter about what that means, Alan says "Good to have a name for it."

I'm glad there's a name for it too, as it makes it easier for me to talk about it!

So what is it exactly? It's basically when you say things on the phone that you would never say to a person's face, either words or sentiment by way of tone and expression. It's easy to stand behind a phone and deliver bad news or tell someone off because you can hang up and walk away from it. You don't have to witness the facial expressions - the red faces, the tears, the crossed arms, the steely eyes. You don't have the awkwardness of being in close proximity after the conversation and trying to act cool. It's almost as if it didn't happen!

Oh... but it did. And because you didn't have the physical guard rails to keep you in your lane, you threw it into the gutter big time. You put up a big zero with those on the receiving end, and now that is how they perceive you, as a big zero.

Sure you can apologize and try to make nice after words if you screwed up, but you can never turn back the clock. You can never suck that moment back in. It's out there forever. The zero stays on the record books, and while you may throw strikes from here on, that zero will always weigh down your average and you will always be fighting against it.

We've all done it. Heck, I think I did it this week. I'm not proud of it. Sometimes those buttons get pushed so hard that it's almost a protective instinct. But you won't feel good afterwards. And the receiving end won't either. It's a no-win situation.

This becomes an even bigger problem when you work remotely. When 100% of your interactions are virtual, the opportunity to throw a gutter ball increases. It is important to remind yourself of something: You, and only you, control your reaction to a situation.

During each virtual interaction (email, phone, video, etc.) ask yourself these important questions:
- Would I respond like this if we were in a room together?
- Is this the lasting impression I want to leave with this person?

If the answer to either of these is "No", then you need to reset your course. Restack the pins, bowl again, and keep it in the lane. It doesn't always have to be a strike, but stay out of the gutter. You are the only one rolling that ball - You control where it goes.

With phone cojones, your balls end up in the gutter.

No, I won't be there in person

Usually I like to write articles that help the remote worker be the best at their job while away from the office. But today, I'm writing for you in-office folks.

When a person is full-time work at home, they will NOT be attending your meeting in person.

Read that one again: They will NOT be attending in person. Period. 

It is up to work at home people to be fully engaged in their job, with their teams, and with their customers. This requires extra effort and attention, making even the easy meetings tougher. But we do it because we love what we do, and where we do it. We're willing to burn extra calories and put in more time to make it work.

But it's a two-way street!

We need the people in the office to put in a little more effort in on the meetings they schedule. If you are only meeting with a handful of people, you should be able to look at their work locations (or even time zones for that matter) and select a meeting medium that works for all parties. If it's a larger meeting or you didn't have time to check that, you need to assume that someone typically cannot be there in person and always offer an alternative.

It's also not enough to give offer a phone number and expect that everyone receives a fair ability to participate. It's up to the host of the meeting to ensure that all participants can properly hear, see, share, and participate. Some tips to help:

• Ask if listeners can hear, and make sure you can hear them.
• Ask if listeners can see your video, and make sure you can see them.
• Ask if listeners can see your shared screen, and vice versa.
• Talk slow enough to allow for people to inject comments. There may be phone delays, or people just waiting for a pause in conversation.
• Purposefully pause to check in with listeners.
• Announce where you are when presenting materials, so that if there is a delay people can speak up.
• Eliminate in-room options from the meeting. Commit to an all-virtual meeting to keep everyone on equal footing.

It's a common misconception that people working from home are really in-office people electing to be at home that day. Employees that are truly work at home are there full time. All the time. They are not "popping in" to the office today because of your meeting. Don't treat these workers like second class citizens because they are at home. And don't insult them with comments like "in case you could make it in." They won't.

Is Work At Home working?

To tell if you Work at Home program is working out, you ideally need measurements on how well the in-office situation was working out for comparison. Without these, most of your analysis of the situation will be based on conjecture and subjectivity. Not that conclusions cannot be made, but they won't have the WOW punch you're looking for.

Some measurements you should know about your team, regardless of your work location include:

• Engagement scores - Using some sort of periodic survey, through a 3rd party or your own, that measures how actively committed your associates are to your team, your product, your company, and your mission. 
• Sick days - Average number of unplanned time off for physical or mental health.
• Turnover - Average number of associates that leave your team in a given time period. Be careful with this measure! If an associate leaves because they received an internal promotion or opportunity based on their desired growth path and your support for them, that's not negative. Make sure you have a means to separate turnover into subcategories to tell those stories.
• Requisition Fulfillment Rate - Average length of time it takes to hire someone in to any open positions in your team.
• Diversity - This can be tricky. There's privacy issues involved. And you don't want to appear to be driven by a quota or some equal opportunity ratio. While you may not "measure" this, a diverse team is a stronger team, and worth bragging about. 
• Budget - Comparison of your actual spend to your budgeted cost, and how well you meet that budget (or hopefully come in under!)
• Delivery - Comparison of your actual delivery dates to your scheduled delivery dates, and how well you provide on-time service (or ahead of schedule).
• Quality - This can be two-fold. There are hard numbers, such as the number of incident tickets you receive, the amount of downtime, etc. But there are soft numbers, such as how well the service actual meets the customer's need, the ease of use, etc. Ideally, you would measure both.
• Net Promoter Scores - Customer loyalty metric, which basically assesses the likelihood that your customer would recommend your service.
• Customer Satisfaction Surveys - Other measures of how well you are meeting customer expectations, providing them with innovative solutions, being a trusted partner for their needs, and so on.

I'm sure you can think of more. For those thinking this doesn't apply because you don't sell a product or "face the public", I challenge you to open your minds a bit. Each of us is providing a service to someone else, a customer, or else you wouldn't have a job!

Now that you have all those numbers, what next? You should compare those numbers while you were in the office to the results after you have been at home for a while. Work at home should have a positive impact on at least one of those categories, while not negatively impacting any. If work at home is really working, you will see improvement in multiple categories and no setbacks. 

If you are seeing a little setback, you may be able to address this through education and support. Sometimes it takes a little while to get the hang of work at home, so don't be too quick to judge or overreact. But, if you are seeing multiple setbacks, or significant ones, it may be time to re-evaluate.

If everything is the same, where you've seen no setbacks but no gains, then it is still not working. Work at home should be driving something, or you wouldn't be doing it. You might as well stay in the office if you can't improve by being at home.

Don't you... forget about me

One of the questions I hear most often from associates considering working from home is "Aren't you afraid you will be forgotten?" My answer is always the same: NO. How could anyone forget about me?

But seriously, I don't worry about it. Why not? Because I manage my own PR (Public Relations) campaign, and I mean I really manage it. Whether you are in the office or hundreds of miles away, people will forget about you if you let them. It's up to you to own your brand and market yourself. This is increasingly important if the old adage of 'out of sight, out of mind' has any truth to it.

So how exactly does one do this? You start by putting yourself out there. Why do you think I have this blog? As you are reading my pearls of wisdom, you can't help but have a little seed planted about my awesomeness. This is one part of my overall strategy for keeping my name in the front of you even when my face is not.

Managing your PR campaign is not the same as doing your daily job. You do your daily job to do this to be paid today. Your PR is about your job tomorrow, next week, next year. For your daily job, it may be enough that only your boss knows you do quality work. But if you boss was gone tomorrow, what would you do? When you have a wider reputation for great things, you can use that street cred to help you through the unknown of tomorrow. That net you are casting will be there to catch you.

Here are some tips on ways to make your name known at your company:

• Teach a class to others on a topic in which you consider yourself an expert
• Write (and publish) a blog on similar topics
• Volunteer for pilot initiatives, special programs, and new ventures
• Be active in social media (internally and externally)
• Get engaged of member of a club or group
• Become a mentor or mentee
• Don't be afraid to put your name on your work and take credit for it

Since I have been work at home, I've received awards from my peers, expanded my team, increased my responsibilities, and been financially rewarded. In fact, I believe a far wider and diverse group of people recognize me now than ever before. Why? Because I own it.

Don't give people the opportunity to forget about you.