Dashboard: Are Your WFH-ers Really Working?

[Music] welcome to another 21 hats dashboard brought to you by our sponsor the great game of business I'm Lauren feldin and I'm here with genan marks to talk about the things we think business owners should be following this week welcome Jean Hey Lawrence with the great game of business still sponsoring you huh that's got to mean something you've been away for a while Jean I've missed you but it hasn't been that long yes they're still sponsoring me that says that says a lot these people like you and they're they're enjoying the experience and I think if any other potential sponsors are listening to this Lauren right if it's good enough for the great game a je good enough for anybody you're a good guy there we go thank you I appreciate that I know the great game folks appreciate that too good Jean you're always writing and talking about stuff that matters to business owners I want to start today with a piece you wrote uh about what you call the next phase of remote work let me let me quote you yes a great many employers have recognized that allowing their employees to work from home one or two days a week can be an enticing perk to offer in these times of tight labor they understand that their workers have personal commitments families and dependents and they want to help accommodate them by adopting a more flexible work schedule and what do they get in return more loyalty praise from their employees gratitude nope instead they get the yes parentheses shorthand for workers who are in the office only on Tuesdays Wednesdays and Thursdays tell me what you're uh referring to there Jean so first of all the uh the if if you're in England you're calling them and if you're in the US you're calling them and I know because I know you've got a dirty mind what you you think of this is a family friendly podcast I was just quoting you so I looked it up I looked it up on both Miriam Webster and the Encyclopedia Britannica and although the profane definition is is among the top three really it's um the first you know definition of a or a is usually you could look at it an an idiot basically is what it is um and I I think that that is where a lot of employees um you know that that that think they're they're getting away with something aren't really getting away with anything it's it's a process this whole work from home thing you know we you know the the let's face it the workplace is not going to change you know people are lamenting that like Office Buildings are half empty um and they are in Philly where I live but you know Lauren I mean like that the world has changed the workplace is such that most good employers most people who know what they're doing um are are offering some type of work from home remote working arrangement um and usually it's like a hybrid type of arrangement I get that and it makes sense what doesn't make sense to employers because and again not talking about it yet but this is what's coming is that when we offer those uh you know hybrid Arrangements yeah you can work from home two days a week and be in the office three days a week which two days does everybody body choose Lauren they choose Monday and Friday oh what a coincidence well we're not going to come and we're just G to take Monday and Friday off those are our two days right and come on if you're an employee you don't think that employers don't know why you choose to work on a Monday and a Friday the real reason is is that you are probably not working as hard as you would be if you were working on a Tuesday Wednesday or Thursday because you're either recovering from a hang over or you are kicking off your weekend a little bit early or you decide to sleep in a little bit after a long weekend away whatever the case is it ain't the same kind of a work day if you're working from home on a Monday or a Friday now there some people say they no I work very hard on Mondays and Fridays that's not me all right there's always exceptions to the rule but what I'm seeing among my clients and what I can tell from the readers and the people that I talk to in the business world is they're wise to you if you're an employee and you're only working home Monday and Friday and that's going to change it's going to change Lauren the the work from home thing is not going to go away I think employers will still continue to offer uh you know you know work from home because it's in their best interest to do it but just watch this whole Monday and Friday that's going to go away it is going to be a requirement that you're in the office on days other than those two days that's what the piece was all about you know G hearing you say that I don't think anyone would ever guess that you yourself run a fully remote company fully remote yeah are you experiencing this problem yourself no I mean I don't because you you you never have anybody in the office so your people are all are definitely uh working at home on Mondays and Fridays do you see uh a productivity problem with that no because I don't really measure it and I leave it up to my employees to you know to to determine whether or not they're getting their jobs done I really don't care if my people work at 3: in the morning or 3 in the afternoon whether they're working on a Monday or they're not working at all as long as our clients happy and our client and the work is getting done and the jobs are finished that's all I really care about that's the nature of my business um but many other businesses that's not necessarily the nature they have employees that are doing very routine overhead type of work every day customer service work marketing work maybe even work in sales Administration Finance accounting uh you know these are the kinds of things that are just this repetitive you know you know work where you need to be at work during the day to be as productive as possible so you know and a lot of these employees they didn't they haven't been working remotely like my employees have been for the past 10 to 20 years in some cases um this is a new thing for those employees so now they're oh wow we get to work from home now this is great um so I'm going to choose Monday and Friday to work from home because why not do you have any suggestions for employers who uh share your concern about this yeah I mean don't have your employees work from home on Monday and Fridays I mean if you're GNA offer you're going to offer uh uh three days in the office uh make sure that one of those days in the office is a Monday or Friday that's my suggestion and do you see your clients trying that is it working um so what clients my clients are dealing with right now is Backlash from employees who want to work from home all the time because they were loving it so much because of covid and anybody that runs a business knows um and I can be the first person to attest to this that companies are more Innovative and and better and have a better culture when employees are actually coming into the office because my my company doesn't have that and we suffer greatly from that so you know because employers know this they've got us tread lightly we're still in an era of tight labor so I think a lot of employers are uh you know they don't want to rock the boat too much um which is why I think it's going to be the next phase of remote working you know Lauren I think it's just the next battle um isn't going to be over remote working it's going to be you know a battle over when that remote work has taking place Jean you said that your company has suffered greatly from working full-time uh remote yes what what keeps you from opening an office is it the expense of the office I had an office with my dad up until 2005 and nobody came to the office you know it was because everybody's a clients you know because that's that's a a function of the type of business you run uh people are out dealing with clients correct it's just aun fun of the type of business that I run and looking back on it if I could have done if I could have done it differently I could have required people to come in the office at the very least but this was back in the early 2000s when there really wasn't things were like on dialup in ISDN lines you know what I mean it it wasn't as easy to work you know remotely for clients and back at that time clients really wanted to see people there face to face you know so it was just that was just the the the the culture at the time now our clients don't even want to see us anymore they would rather that we work remotely but you know the die is cast I can't just say like hey guys I know you've been working remotely all these years now I'm going to you know to come I mean that would not fly very well so it's just I'm just a product of the situation I can understand that H have you found any strategies to help you get people connected so that you do have a little bit of that tried it all I have tried it all we've tried Zoom happy hours we've tried face-to-face events I was doing for a number of years um Christmas parties Lauren we would have a Christmas party where I would have you know my 10 employees maybe another 10 of our frequent contractors show up nobody even knew who everybody was you know what I mean they talk on the phone but they didn't even like regn it which is very awkward because they don't spend any FaceTime with each other you know right um and I just it's just kind of the culture I mean I sell the company on its remote work culture the fully virtual culture and that's what attracted those PE you know the type of people I've attracted um so that you know if I were to say like Hey we're going to have a night where we're going to get together and throw axes you know somewhere um I I would get push back people when show up because they're like hey man I didn't sign up for this you know having said that though I do have to say you know I have one guy that I hired about a year and a half ago he's a young guy he's like 30 years old as a project manager and he's great and he's he's lamented to me that he wish we had more FaceTime with other people in the company and um and I'm concerned I'm going to lose him because of that interesting all right next topic um you recently wrote that artificial intelligence has an Achilles heel that no one's talking about what were you referring to so I I'm SC you know you know I do a lot of like speaking and so I'm going to be speaking a lot this fall and there's been a demand for people to talk about Ai and because I write about it a lot for Forbes now um I've been you know I'm excited to talk to a lot of groups about AI but I got to be clear about AI we I know we hear about AI this and AI that and if you're a tech company you got to have ai in your name and you know it's like the buzz word it's a crack for anybody that's in the technology industry got to be ai ai ai even if people don't even know what it is but here's the thing about AI Lauren right this artificial intelligence artificial intelligence is is basically software algorithms that are making decisions and taking actions okay this is different than workflow before where something gets trigger like a field changes you know you know from A to B and then you know an email gets sent AI is where it's actually looking at information or listening to information and then based on that information able to parse it understand it and then do something with it that's what AI is which is great but it's all dependent on the information you know like if your data is your AI is not going to work garbage in garbage out yeah so and just about every client that I go to across the board small and big clients and I mean big clients that you ask their people they will tell you their data is you know there is different levels of accuracy and completeness in your database but nobody says like oh my database is fantastic it's completely you know complete and accurate and completely reliable you know most people realize that their data is is not up to Snuff and I think that's a huge Achilles heel for AI because you're not going to have automation running off of bad data I mean for God's sake you don't want it make decisions and contacting customers um you know or prospects based on Dat the de Gene I think we should clarify uh they they different uh types of data that people are referring to with AI so you know like with chat GPT it's scraping the entire internet for data when you wrote about this you were referring to ai's use I think I think specifically in the use of right uh and specifically CRM Services uh where the AI is using your own data what you know about your clients but that's but Lauren that's what's that is what is happening right now I mean Microsoft which pretty much owns you know open Ai and chat GPT is is rolling out new features and functionalities with with office and teams that's going to be leveraging an organization's data to provide Automation and Google is doing the same thing with Bard and every other large technology service provider uh from from sage and sap and Oracle and epicore all these people Salesforce that that's where this the business use is I mean like right now chat GPT is what you can ask it to you do a recipe for something or to write an email I mean to write a marketing plan or to to write a blog post um people are doing that yeah I mean but look at right now look at the accuracy of even chat GPT right now in the dayed scraping I mean wasn't there a lawyer last last month yes right fic fictional cases that did not actually exist relying on it for whatever that's a perfect example I think some people are using it as a first draft but you you still need human eyes to review and in all of these cases like you said Hey to put together a marketing plan or to write a blog or an email okay so it's going to do that and then you're going to look at it and somebody's got to review it and you know what okay fine but the real power of AI will be not GPT but something called autog GPT which means that it will look at something based on instructions it will then create some type of communication and then it will send that communication without humans being involved until humans need to be involved and there's no way my clients are gonna are going to really Leverage The Power of AI until their data is in good enough shape to do that because there well let's talk about that wh why is the data in the CRM services so bad well it's not just CRM I mean it's CR you data and accounting systems data in HR platforms I mean people don't update information people leave some Fields filled in and some Fields don't get filled in is is that why I still get a a birthday email from a dental practice that I haven't seen in 10 years exactly right or you know why my mom is getting emails from you know or my grandmother is getting emails from you know her accountant um you know you five years after she died you know what I mean like these are I mean like it's nice to be remembered yeah I mean these things you know and and you know people are very sensitive to even like uh you know if their name is is misspelled or if it's not the right name let alone actual facts about their situation so you know unless you're really you know keeping it but isn't that a problem even irrespective of AI it is that you have yeah you just mentioned it you just said you're getting emails from your dentist 10 years after you know you stopped using them so yeah it's a problem so you know but you know if we're going to be relying on all of this automation it's it's going to be using this problematic data that continues to be problematic so there's a lot of you know people say like okay so if you again like I said if you ask anybody they're like yeah we admit our data is not 100% it's not even near it what do we do what do we do well there there's two things one you can do internally and one hopefully the AI providers will be doing the what you're doing internally is you need to have internal controls to make sure that your database is updated in other words you have fields that are required for data entry on every screen before somebody can move on and you have uh drop- down lists where people can they can't free form they have to choose from a specific list of of options that goes in there and you have alerts that that tell your database administrator when maybe a field is empty or a field hasn't been updated in a period of time those are just a few examples and I've got more of like sort of internal controls you can do to tighten up your database that's that's one then the AI providers they've got a responsibility and and hopefully they'll be doing this is that they'll be double-checking your your own data so if you're going to send an email out to Lauren at 21 hats um and you've got an email address in your database AI will hopefully you know the software providers will hopefully become intelligent enough to say ah it's trying to send an email to Lauren at 21 hats this is the email address let's look at this external source of data some web whatever uh to verify before we send out that email so that it's not going to the wrong person do you know what I mean and we got a ways to go before we get to that point as you can tell which is why I think a lot of companies are going to be very hesitant to really go all in on AI until some of these issues are addressed I I just wonder about it even again W without getting to AI how big a problem do you think it is for companies that they have bad data whatever the uh the platform is that they're using it it seem you know they're probably investing a lot of money in it it seems like uh an issue today let alone before you know when they comes along there is no it is it's a big problem um and again if this is not a small business problem there a big business problem I deal with some larger clients you ask them about their database and who they have and it is you know it's a mess it's a mess and it's a resource issue because people are getting data submitted from from online all the time I mean look at Twitter as a perfect example or threads even I'll have the same issue with the problem with dots but Bots excuse me and fake users um you know even people that are posting things that they shouldn't be post this is all data issues that even the largest companies that it's their business model have a really hard time grappling with um other companies you know marketing is in a silo and you collect your data in one way and you only have so many resources to be able to deal with that data and you know I don't think it gets the attention that it deserves all right last topic you wrote another piece about the recent Supreme Court decision finding that a web designer doesn't have to create a website for a same-sex wedding the ruling seems to open the door to businesses feeling free to discriminate against any group of people they choose to discriminate against but you suggest they think twice about that explain yes listener if you're listening to Lauren he said safe sex wedding and I think he meant to say same I said same I think I thought it sounded like safe but you know what regardless both are important Jean yes I appreciate you taking caution either way Lauren so you know um I to me if a business is operating within the law fine right so if you choose to discriminate uh against somebody because you can't discriminate because the color of their skin the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Sol that but if you discriminate based on religious preferences based on uh sexual orientation you know based on political parties you know you don't want to serve a a a trump supporter you know the Supreme Court with this rolling has now allowed you to do this so hey man have at it go for it you know I think it's you're you're insane for doing that um I think when you know people say like oh I I don't know many small businesses you know Lauren that are doing so fabulous that they can afford to turn away business you know so you know you're going to turn away like you you're you're so you're not doing you know a same-sex wedding website because it's against your religious principles okay well I hope you have a lot of money in the bank um and I hope you can withstand the we should probably point out in this case the person person who filed that lawsuit doesn't even have a business doing these websites yet yeah and and they're there wasn't an actual client uh that was turned away but fair enough fair but there are plenty of businesses that do this and we we've read the stories of the Bakers and the you know and the other they won't do the wedding cake for the same- seex you know the the same- seex couple I mean I mean these people are not only are they getting bad PR because it's you and I are talking about it you know like people cover this stuff all the and your business gets drawn into this and you get obliterated for doing this on you know on social media then you turn off their Community I mean you know my my daughter's gay I mean you know she gets she if she was going to get married to her girlfriend and gets turned down for a uh you know for for a wedding cake or whatever guarantee that none of her friends are ever going to go to that place ever again she'd be pretty pissed off you know so if you want to piss people off and you want to you know alienate a portion of your customers you know hey like I said have at it I just I hope you understand all of this and the other thing that I I also have to make sure that I'm clear is that you know when you run a business it's not about you I mean if you're running a bakery I'm assuming you've got employees you've got other customers you've got Partners you've got suppliers and vendors you've got people that rely on you to be in business because they're making their livelihoods off of you so when you just make a decision to like exclude a significant for any portion of your customer community and that hurts your business financially it hurts others that are relying on your business it's just not about you and that's the reason why you know you don't see Microsoft not selling office to somebody who's gay you know or or or you know Staples not selling you know printers to people you know of some religion or political party I mean even Chick-fil-A I mean is we know you know the owner of that company or the CEO is you know is a right of Center person and has their religious beliefs but they'll sell their spicy chicken sandwich anybody who's got the five bucks to pay for it you know they're not going to discriminate they get it they got shareholders you know so I'm just saying the point of the column is like all right go ahead and discriminate if you want to do that it's as long as you're within the law the Supreme Court is allowing it but do so at your own Peril man because you know you're you're really you're you're going to make life a lot harder for yourself as a business owner that's my feeling all right Jean what are you working on anything we should be watching for this week well just this past week the SBA is giving loans to uh some Philadelphia businesses because of that I95 collapse yes um which how awesome was our governor of Pennsylvania Shapiro just jumping on that and getting it it was just awesome but anyway it was supposed to take months and they they fixed it in weeks crushed it and he he made one big mistake he set up a webcam so you could watch the uh watch it in real time and he didn't sell ads on the webcam that would have been would have paid for to tune in somehow Jean was it exciting watching it was super popular it was really popular but anyway so um so some some people are getting um um SBA Loans disaster loans and um it spurred me to write for the inquire this week I'm working on a column now about other SBA Loans you know because you know there are plenty of SBA has a lot of capital available particularly these tight times and I just think people need to be reminded about that so I have that and I'm going to write on uh on entrepreneur I'm going to revisit Health reimbursement accounts as well so all of that's common we will watch for that sounds great Gene marks is a CPA who writes weekly on small business for the guardian the hill the Philadelphia inquire the Washington Times the Chicago Daily Herald Forbes an entrepreneur you can also hear them on ABC radio's eye on the world with John Bachelor Jean hosts two small business podcasts with paychecks Corporation and the Hartford this episode was brought to you by the great game of business which helps bus business a great game of business helps businesses use an open book management system to help build healthier companies you can learn more atre game.com thank you Jean thanks Lauren see you soon have a great week everyone