Innovative Work Models for the Future with Chris Dyer

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:15)
Man, I feel like I want to give a warning to people about gym pools. Hey people, just go use the bathroom or something. We're here talking about swimming and hiking before the show, and Chris and I both got deathly sick after swimming at one point. But anyway, welcome back to the show, everyone, where we explore empathy, connection, and purpose, and how they transform business from the inside out. I'm Stephen, joined by Tullio Siragusa, my co-host and our guest today. According to a 2020 for McKinsey report, organizations that embrace flexible work models are 28% more likely to outperform their peers in employee engagement and productivity. And as remote and hybrid work has become the norm, the companies that win will be those that rethink systems, not just their schedules. Our guest today, as pioneered remote work strategies and is an expert in building cultures of trust, autonomy, and performance, Tullio, please introduce our guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:23)
Yes, very excited to have Chris Dyer with us, Culture Catalyst and entrepreneur. Chris is a globally recognized expert in company culture and remote work, whose companies have been named a best place to work and ranked five times on the ING 5000 list of the fastest growing companies. He's been best-selling author of The Power of Company Culture and Remote Work, ranked as the number one leadership speaker on culture by ING magazine and named a top 50 global thought leader, top 40 change management guru, and a top 101 global employee engagement influencer. We are not worthy. I love this. And as a keynote speaker and advisor, Chris inspires audiences and organizations to transform how they lead, communicate and build systems that support high-performance culture. Chris, great to have you on the show. Thanks for a welcome to the show. To get us started, what originally inspired you to commit to building innovative and people-first work models? What was that drive that got you in this direction?

**Chris Dyer** (2:33)
Well, to be honest, it was completely screwing it up, right? So it was 2008, 2009, and the big recession hit. And in my infinite wisdom, I had doubled down on mortgage companies because they were hiring a lot of people. And in the business I had at that time, like our job was to service people and help companies when they were hiring. And so here I'm going after the mortgage companies because they're just doubling, tripling. I mean, they're just going crazy with how many they were hiring. And like I said, so they were great for business until they went out of business. And here I was standing in front of thousands of people, telling them, the company might close, you might lose your jobs. And like, we need big ideas, we need to figure out how we're going to survive. And they all just stared at me.
And here I am thinking, are they stupid? Are they incompetent? Do they not care? And after a couple of days of being really grumpy, and looking at myself in the mirror, I realized that we were in this place because of me. The way in which I ran the company, the way in which I was feeding the culture, the way in which everything that we had done, which worked really well when there was like 10 people in an office. But like when there's thousands of people now involved, it didn't work. And I had continued to do things that way. And ultimately, I had to figure out how to change the organization. And that's when I got really interested in, well, what's the right way to do it? Right? If I'm going to change the culture, I'm going to change what I'm going to do. What's the right way? And it turns out, it's that people-centric approach. And so I got really fascinated and read every book and did everything. And we did every experiment that we could. And we figured out what worked really well for us, which, as I put it in my books, in turn, in general works really well for most companies as well. There's a pretty standard blueprint of what you need to do, what you need to think about, and most of it's free. So it's pretty easy to go and be more people-centric and have higher performance, higher productivity and higher profits.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:45)
You know, it's interesting how often some big events, when we're talking to business leaders and thought leaders, like the pandemic or, you know, the 2008 recession, or even for me, going way back to the 80s recession with my parents and how that influenced me when I was a child. But I really appreciate your self-awareness as a leader there. That's hard to come by a lot of times in business. And do you think it was related just because of that shock of the recession? Or was it just like you said, things were going along smooth and then they're not. And you're like, what's wrong?