The Work From Anywhere Debate: Remote vs. Office vs. Hybrid

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
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** (0:17)
Hello and welcome to the show. I'm Stephen Sakach. We have Tullio Siragusa and Ash Maher with us.
So in the advertising and marketing space, which we're in, the annual turnover rate is somewhere in the range of 18 to 30 percent, depending on the source. It's very high. The US average annual turnover rate is in that 11 to 13 percent. We, as a company, are only at 3 percent over the past five years. And this was even during the pandemic, and after that, when you have people changing jobs like crazy.
And in some roles in our company, it's really hard to get a job with. We just don't have a lot of openings because of that low turnover rate. There's a lot we get right. And one of the more challenging areas, though, is we have a hybrid workplace. Some jobs are fully remote, but at our headquarters, we are hybrid. There's certainly a huge benefit for our employees, but it does pose some challenges and is very much a work in progress for us. So in this episode, we're going to talk about coffee, cats, and conference calls, or rather, the challenge of connecting in the remote and hybrid workplace.
But before we dive in, Tullio, have the Orange Cheetahs recovered from their last-minute devastating loss to the pink cupcakes? How did they do this weekend?

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:40)
Oh, don't get me started. What happened this weekend?
The City of Fish and Laguna Niguel double-booked the field because we weren't playing on grass field because it was very wet. So the turf field got double-booked. And so 12 teams got booted over two teams that were that was their home turf. It was absolutely a nightmare.
Then we try to find a field that was dry enough where we could actually have a little game between the two teams that were competing and there were two inches of water on the ground. So we did not play this past weekend. We had a great practice yesterday and we look forward to this coming weekend where it's going to be sunny and hopefully we'll win again. That was not fun.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:36)
Thinking of soccer team names, when I was young, we got these green jerseys and we had to come up with our name. I don't know if you had to go through that process too, but being a bunch of young boys, we came up with, I can't believe they let us have this team name. It was two words, and we called it gang green.
After the bacterial infection, kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum as the pink cupcakes.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:10)
I'd be able to play your team for sure. Just for the name, I might get the cooties as a kid.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:18)
The humorous part for us as kids was having the parents on the side lines, cheering on gang green. We all just like be snickering while we're playing the game and stuff.
But anyway, I brought up this question because I think a lot of companies took a hit in their culture when going remote because they lost these random conversations. It's like the water cooler stuff, you're just hanging around and someone mentions something.
In the remote hybrid situation, you're a lot more isolated and so you don't have those opportunities. One of the tools we used during the pandemic that really help us was Slack. We have a channel or two where people are doing stuff outside of work and they share photos, Tullio shared photos of the soccer team, the Orange Cheetahs. That was followed up later by an employee who shared one of her videos, of hitting her weight lifting goal, and then another employee with his son at the martial arts class. We love this. In fact, Slack should probably lean into that emotional connection as a marketing point.
But the point is even though our company and employees are all over the US and in multiple countries, this is one of the ways we could connect is through technology. I think a lot of companies probably doing similar things. Maybe not. Slack themselves, they have hundreds of channels for social and interest channels that they have internally just to bring out some of that culture. But if you're going remote or staying remote or hybrid, you really have to think about these little areas of connection that you miss now by not being in the office to participate in something as simple as those water cooler type of conversations. Ash, so there are challenges. Is the jury still out on the effectiveness of remote and hybrid work culture? What's the data say?