Welcome! The Problems Businesses Have With Remote Workers plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

Welcome!

Craig discusses some of the issues that businesses are having with Remote workers and why. 

For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Are you like millions of people around the world that's working from home. Maybe your company isn't doing such a great job at it. We'll talk about the reasons why.

Hey, welcome back, Craig, Peterson here. WGAN. Glad to have you along today. It's been a great two hours. I'm on every Saturday from one til 3:00 PM. I really appreciate you guys being with me. I would urge you, if you would, please do me a favor and give me a five-star review, go to Craig peterson.com/itunes.

They still are kind of the 800-pound gorilla, let me know right there. Let other people know what do you enjoy about the show. Craig peterson.com/itunes. And I'd love to hear from you if you have any questions by all means. Just send me an email to me. M E at Craig Peterson.com. I don't know sometimes I think it's cool. Sometimes I think that's maybe a little confusing for people.

[00:01:00] Early on July 31st here this year. The FBI, IRS, US Secret Service, and Florida law enforcement can you can believe all of that. Placed a 17-year-old of Tampa, Florida under arrest named Graham Clark. He's accused of being the mastermind behind the biggest security and privacy breach in Twitter's history.

He took over the accounts of President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Apple, and more. He was trying to perpetrate a huge Bitcoin scam. Now he got away with some money. Got away with probably $120,000 that can never be returned to the people who he bilked it out of because it's basically impossible to send some of this stuff back.

[00:02:00] We'll see what happens. I'm sure the Secret Service can figure it out. They're the ones usually involved, with that sort of thing. So shortly after this Tampa arrest, two more individuals were formally charged by the US Department of Justice. A 22-year-old Nima Fazeli in Orlando, and a 19-year-old, Mason Sheppard in the UK.

They went by some hacker aliases, as they often do Taiwan, according to the DOJ. Let's see two individuals in total are in custody. This is as of a couple of days ago, and an unidentified minor in California also admitted to federal agents that they'd help them access Twitter counts. So there you go. We'll kind of leave it at that. There's a lot of details. If you want to look it up the line, but you're listening here, right? And that's all you need, frankly. They're facing five years in prison, a $250,000 fine. For one count of computer intrusion, that's Fazeli. Shepherd is being charged with computer intrusion, wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering.

[00:03:00] The most serious of which comes with a 20-year sentence and a $250,000 fine here in the US. Apparently some of these guys were just middleman for the scam. It's really fascinating when you dig right into it. Absolutely fascinating.

Okay. Let's get into this because many of us are working from home and it's working for some of us, it's not working for others. The obvious thing is what I talked to Matt about on Wednesday morning, this last week. For the employee, the downside is you're always at work, right? If you're working from home, technically you're always at work and many businesses have been taking advantage of that.

[00:04:00] Having employees handle things after hours, that they normally would not be handling so that's a big downside. Then there are many other downsides too. When a business has just taken the way they do business, all of their processes and tried to put them on top of you working from home. So let's talk about some of the problems people have been having.

This is based on an article out of the New York times that came out here this last week by Claire Kane Miller. In most surveys, people say that even when it's safe for offices to reopen, they want to return, only part of the time, and continue working at home several days a week, right? We've heard that before. I think that's a good thing.

Now, personally, I've been working at home seven days a week for over 20 years. Okay. I'm used to that sort of stuff. But when we're talking about a normal white-collar office, one of the biggest problems they have is you just don't have that physical office space anymore.

[00:05:00] You don't have the water cooler, you don't have the conference rooms. You can't just drop in on a colleague and chat. Sometimes the most productive time is when you're talking about the kids and what they're doing, and then you get that click. Where you say, Oh yeah, you know what? Hold on. I gotta go take care of this right now.

Has that happened to you? It must've right. It's like in the shower, I have some of the best ideas sometimes. So what we found now is that companies that have changed the ways that they work have had much more success with people working at home. In some cases, they've discovered new ways that they want to continue when they return to the office. So all of that I think is really good news, but you have to be paying attention and you have to make sure that you are doing the right things when it comes to meetings. Okay.

[00:06:00] Here are the things that successful businesses have in common, fewer meetings that are long or large, or back to back. Cut back on the meetings. You probably never needed them in the first place. They have meeting-free time for focused work, which I think is hugely important. So that you can sit there and focus and not be having to run into one meeting or another. They offer flexible work hours. In some cases, they kind of take advantage of those flexible work hours.

[00:07:00] As I already mentioned, the best companies are finding ways for colleagues to socialize when they're not seeing one another in person. Now I've seen some businesses that literally have parties. You go out and you buy your beer and you show up on zoom. Hopefully not more than a beer, right? Zoom is very common, but if you have any concerns about security don't ever, ever, ever use Zoom. We'll see what happens if Microsoft takes them over, but we're months away from that.

So stick with either the WebEx, it's teams, which is the one I use. It's the only one that has certifications from the federal government for every security standard you can think of including HIPAA and PCI. Okay.

[00:08:00]So next here, what we're looking at is remote work during a pandemic is not actual remote work. Because we've got also because of the pandemic, the circumstance of crisis. We don't have the childcare we had before. A lot of people are very worried about this COVID. I'm quite sure by the way that I had, as the whole, COVID thing, COVID-19. They came out with a new list of symptoms just this last week.  I never had the cough symptom, but I had a half a dozen of the other symptoms that they just released. I'm pretty sure I had it. But many people are absolutely paranoid about it. You've seen videos or you've heard about people that are, macing other people cause they don't have a mask on. Even though the science on masks is divided, but seems to be leaning towards, they're not going to stop you from getting sick.

Also the inability to work in person, even if it's desirable. So those are part of the problems companies are having to deal with. We'll see what ends up happening. Some of the bigger companies who started remote work said it failed, but one of the reasons it failed is they didn't build the right kind of culture that supported it.

[00:09:00] At Microsoft, these teams realized large meetings of an hour or more with vague agendas worked even less. Online, back to back meetings were problematic too. Office people rely on breaks walking from one meeting to the next, use of the bathroom, eat a snack, or check their phones. Many people, if you're on a call center, like one of my daughters is, she's frustrated because they don't get any breaks.

Now they used to get a much more break time when they're in the office than they're getting now, but their phone lines are also being overloaded. I think that's part of the problem now.

[00:10:00]Here's the good news. They had a look at a 400 person team, and they've seen an 11. Now, this is using a team's application from Microsoft. They've seen a little 11% decrease in hour-plus meetings and a  22% increase in 30-minute meetings. That's interesting. Cause the 30-minute meeting is going to be very long tail. It's going to be to the point. You're not going to be messing around as much, not as much time wasted. One-on-one meetings have increased by 18%. So keep that in mind.

There is a different way that people work when they're remote working, cut back the long meetings, cut back the back to back, eliminate those. And allow these people to have the little 30 minute meetings. They've also found that these little social video meetings, like logging on while people are eating lunch and they can chat.

[00:11:00] Fridays in some of these companies have been designated as no meeting days, so people can focus on a project or recharge. When there's no office to leave the lines between work and life blur, they saw at Microsoft a 52% increase in online chats between 6:00 PM and 10:00 PM. So shifting hours can be helpful, but can also be problematic.

There are smaller companies that are finding kind of the same things. Some of these companies, particularly the smaller ones, tried letting people pick their hours, allowing them to do afternoons or entire days off but became just too much for a problem to collaborate all of that stuff together. So interesting stuff.

I think all of those points are major. If you're having problems with your business work from home. Have a look at the meetings and the meeting schedules and the people. Have a view parties online, have lunch online so people can chat while they're having lunch.

You have been listening to Craig Peterson Here online and on WGAN.

I appreciate you being with me. Make sure you join me and Matt Gagnon on Wednesday at seven 34.

[00:12:00] We'll be talking about next week's articles in the news and of course, join me here or on my podcast. You'll get all of the latest news in a lot more depth. Also, make sure you get my newsletter.

Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Have a great week, everybody.

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