This episode of the Stan State EduCast features Stephanie Eubank (Lecturer for the Management Operations and Marketing Department of the College of Business Administration).
This Warrior expert join host Frankie Tovar to discuss the increasingly relevant topic of Remote Work and Leadership - a field she began studying long before the COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown.
Produced by the Office of Strategic Communications and Marketing, edited and recorded in the KCSS studios on the campus of Stanislaus State.
This episode of the Stan State EduCast features Stephanie Eubank (Lecturer for the Management Operations and Marketing Department of the College of Business Administration).
This Warrior expert join host Frankie Tovar to discuss the increasingly relevant topic of Remote Work and Leadership - a field she began studying long before the COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown.
Produced by the Office of Strategic Communications and Marketing, edited and recorded in the KCSS studios on the campus of Stanislaus State.
Remote work has been a hot topic over the past few years since the COVID 19 pandemic forced much of the workforce to work from home. At the peak of the pandemic. 80% of the global workforce worked remotely. A far cry from the 24% that worked from home prior to the shutdown. Boasting a bachelor's in English lit and a master's of science in operations management, Professor Stephanie Eubank is currently working on her Doctorate of Business Administration with a focus on remote work and leadership. She also teaches several courses here at Stan State and is currently trying to organize a TED Talk on campus slated for October that focuses on how COVID has reshaped the Central Valley. She's the perfect guest for this episode of the Stan State EduCast. So without further ado, let's get into the discussion. You're listening to the Stan State EduCast - produced on the campus of Stanislaus State. Professor Stephanie Eubank. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. I feel welcome. What classes or class do you teach here on campus? This term I actually teach four different classes. I have two operations management courses, which are the beginning of the kind of the beginning of the end of a student's degree program for operations management. And I teach one Lean operations management course and a supply chain management course. And are you from the area? I'm actually from Santa Clara. My mom's mother's people have lived there for longer than recorded because they were the native people there. But my mom's father's people were all the native people over it, just south of us over in Visalia, Fresno area. Okay, so a native Californian, at least. Yeah. Whenever anyone asks how I identify ethnically, I say that I'm a Californian because we are one of the great melting pots of this country. I agree. I think I'm going to steal that and use that myself. Now the topic at hand remote work and remote leadership. You are pursuing a doctorate degree, studying this, correct? Yes. I'm just finishing up my dissertation now with the expected graduation date of Cinco de Mayo. Oh, wow. Okay. Now, this is a very pertinent topic given the COVID 19 pandemic and the shutdown and everything that's happened. But you've been studying this for much longer. Can you kind of take me through when you started to study remote work in remote leadership? So I've actually been I've been actually studying it since my master's program. It was one of the Keystone research projects that I did for my master's in operations management. And I've worked in remote strategical leadership and operational management. Got over 15 years. Now I feel old. But when I started this towards my doctorate program, it it had occurred to me because my focus is on a particular side of remote work that and of leadership in general that we don't really research all that much, which is followership. There's a lot of focus on the leadership lens or the leadership perspective, but not on the people who are being led with or followership. So the kind of that employee viewpoint versus just the manager viewpoint. And I had worked remotely for so long that it had occurred to me all of the aspects of diversity and the differences that seemed to get carried over in remote work, and especially during COVID, which COVID actually made it so that I got so much new research, because a lot of the research for remote work has been done since the eighties and not a lot has been updated since the early 2000s. And most dissertations require that there has to be some sort of research, academic research, not just practical research. Academic research within the last 7 to 10 years. And 2000 was almost what was over 20 years now. So COVID made it. So I finally had some research to use to finally catapult my dissertation research and finally make it so I could finish. But remote work adds a really interest putting benefit to business as a whole to allow for more diversity and communication. The problem becomes when we have leaders that have only led in a in-person workplace and have never really been taught how to lead and instead kind of utilize what is called theory leadership theory leadership are the managers who honestly believe that people hate work. People don't want to work. They have to be motivated. Carrot and stick method or need to be motivated in kind of that militaristic methodology. And unfortunately, that creates a hostile work environment. And in a remote workplace where it's transparent, it makes it so that these toxic behaviors are highlighted and can land a company in major issues. So for remote work, particularly, we need more leadership with y theory, which is leading with our empathetic and authentic selves, bothering to care about our workers and help support them, which means we need more leaders who are. If you're familiar with the Myers-Briggs test, even though it has been disproven due to their background when developing it, it still holds true that those with what is called the teacher personality are the type of leaders we actually need. And traditionally in business, we push them aside and make them assistants or make them subject matter experts. So it's really quite fascinating how this differs. And due to quiet quitting, we're seeing a screaming from the workforce. A That's the type of leader that they want and need. It's very interesting that you studied this well before the COVID pandemic hit. Did you have a crystal ball? Did you know this was coming? Why did you delve into this topic before? It was a topic that was on most people's minds. Honestly, I was a mom when I had my first son. I was working hybrid and having to travel a lot for work, and towards the end of my pregnancy I was having complications and had to switch to remote work. And after my pregnancy, having to go back into work, I found myself constantly having to give myself breaks, hiding in the bathroom and crying because I just wanted to be near my baby. It didn't matter if I had the daycare center next door on the other side of the state. I felt too far away from my baby, and one of my mentors was starting a new program at the company she was at and wanted me to help her do strategy and organizational development for that program and that it would be remote. And I just jumped at it and said, I'm in even having help with my children in the home while I was able to focus on my work. It not only helped me, but my son be able to bond better and having my two kids, most of my coworkers didn't know I had kids unless they looked at my social media or I told them it really helped me be able to be a better mother and a better leader because it helped give me a level of empathy that, especially in the beginning part of my career, where I'm trying to make my bones that I didn't naturally have and allowed me to be able to be there for my kids and, you know, go take my lunch break and go to their their school performances, be able to get off work on time and go down the street to go pick them up from school, things like that. And a lot of other parents don't have those luxuries. And it honestly, I'm trying not to cry. It made me think of my mom having five kids, how much easier her life would have been if she had gotten to do that or her mother. Because again, in the eighties, this has been researched and proven that remote work is doable and the technology's been there to do it since. But kids. Too. That's surprising as well because you think about remote work, you think about teams or zoom. A lot of modern technology involved. How did remote work look in the eighties or even when you started compared to what remote work is now? Well, remote work in the eighties was more like a hybrid sort of methodology where you would be calling people on the phone and working on your computers, saving it and coming in and bringing your work into the office. And you know, printouts and so forth. So it was more of a hybrid model. And when I got to be more in the remote work place, it was entirely different. We had Internet, we had Skype for business, we had software systems to utilize for this. There were even proprietary softwares internally within organizations to communicate effectively, remotely. So not a lot has changed. It's just become mass market and they're adapting to what their market is and making their product better. I mean, if you think of how Skype for business was as far as what capabilities it had, it had the ability to be used as a in place of a telephone, but didn't always connect and didn't always work. Now we have teams which you upload the app and you can replace having to have telephones, Zoom anything else within your office. Teams is able for you to be able to do most of your work and share it with very little additional issues. Same with utilizing Google and other Google programs, although they have their as you know, their their usage agreements, which can be cumbersome. So you have that unique perspective of studying this topic before the pandemic hit. And then, like you said, your dissertation kind of got a boost from the pandemic. What did you see or observe that was notable during the transition? Well, prior to COVID, the the research had shown that remote workers were suffering from three specific pitfalls, and all three of them were forms of isolation, professional, social and geographic isolation. So professional isolation was the concept of your manager and your managers manager weren't physically there in your face to be able to look at you and see what your exact contributions were. Although with appropriate communication and proper communication tools and knowing to be able to step up for yourself and be able to connect in that way, this isn't an issue as much in remote work. Now social isolation, because let's face it, business is a social construct. I actually had one of my students recently tell me about his mom, who's in person working and part time because she doesn't want to retire because she expressed that she she was bored and missed all the gossip in the workplace. And even his grandmother had the same thing when she retired and ended up going back to work a year later. And that's a common thing. My own grandfather used to say the number one killer of senior citizens was retirement because he felt it made him lose his sharpness. So it's really fascinating as far as that perspective, which brings us into geographical isolation. So a lot of companies, when they hire you in person, let's use the tech industry as an example. So they hire you say as a programmer, but they're in Minnesota, so you go and relocate to that company in Minnesota and you decide or they decide that it's not quite working. You don't have an option to go to a competitor. That's their local. You would have to relocate or go back to the Mecca of Silicon Valley to be able to really make it In your career field. With remote work, you're able to have an inverse effect. The Mecca can be here in Silicon Valley, but you can be located in Minnesota or anywhere else in the country. Be able to live within your means and be able to thrive and bring more of that talent and that income into areas that have been experiencing in the past are economic downfalls, and it really helps build up the economy now. But prior to that, if you lost your job or it wasn't working in your job, you were up in interesting named creek without a paddle. Now what we're seeing is, Oh, and there's one more thing that was traditionally happening in remote work. Prior to COVID, companies were foregoing team design, which is basically where you were designing your team based on personalities and so forth. In remote work, they were just putting a bunch of subject matter experts together. And what happens when that when you do that works great in the short term for like projects. But when you do that long term subject matter, experts tend to develop what is called the Apollo effect. The Apollo effect is a concept where they all become in for themselves and not for the team and basically start acting like they're son guys. And this can create a lot of issues within your team design and within your organizational design. So now since COVID, we find teams that have been thrown together or planned out normally because they were in person, switched to a remote environment and the leadership methodologies that a lot of these, especially in middle management, have been utilizing because they haven't been trained to lead generally for middle management, we promote them up because they were good at their job, maybe teach them a couple of little things or software systems they need to be able to manage, but that's about it. And unfortunately they run the risk of developing the habit of mixing up fear with respect. And unfortunately, this doesn't work in a remote paradigm, especially for those who've been traumatized by COVID. And even before COVID, we were running the issue in-person, where people were developing from having these type of leaders workplace, PTSD. So by continuing to have these leaders now in a remote workplace, we are expanding the workplace, PTSD, creating more burnout and honestly making the whole workforce burnt out all at the same time, which contributes to what we're seeing about quite quitting, which again, is just employees trying to set the boundaries that they found unhealthy. Right. Some of these terms have been proposed by certain groups and there's probably intention behind the words they choose to use for the terms, right? Yes. They're often observed and coined within a leadership lens only and not taking a step back and looking from the global perspective of both sides, because basically during COVID, a lot of us took a good hard look and learned about ourselves and learned the hard lesson about particular business behaviors that are toxic and create literally manifest a hostile workplace. Tell me if you've ever heard this phrase, where are your work family? Most of us have heard something similar to that. Or you can tell me I'm in H.R. These kind of concepts aren't not healthy and they're not true and are often utilized as bad behavior to guilt employees into working without extra pay or without pay at all, and working harder and longer. And unfortunately, it shows a lack of understanding of productivity. The Bureau of Labor Statistics actually did a study since 2016, and they've been updating it since they found in-person work. The max amount of productivity a person can put out in an eight hour workday, 2 hours and 53 minutes is the average in person. In a remote workplace, it's 4 to 5 hours of productivity. And we're finding there's a lot of remote workers who are, as the issue has been working multiple full time jobs, is because they're so productive, because they have this agency given by being able to control their environment, that they're being more productive, getting more done and faster, that they're able to balance an additional job on top of it. I can relate to that. I count myself among the lucky few who has found myself in that situation since COVID hit when I was introduced to you and your work prior to this podcast, I was very interested in speaking with you and you also have a blog and a YouTube channel. So a lot of what you're saying is familiar because I did some research, as I should have, right? It seems like you're more interested in the leadership aspect. Is that correct? I could understand why you would think that, but really what it is is I'm taking a global look because you can't be a leader if you don't learn about your those you're leading. It's kind of that old military concept. My grandfather used to say, You can't lead until you learn how to follow. If you don't look at your followership or your employees and what their needs and wants and what they need to be more supportive so they can be more productive, you run the risk of becoming a bad leader and thus hurting your employee base, which kind of cultivates that whole leadership lens of nobody wants to work anymore. I really hate when people say that. And Kim Kardashian, unfortunately, has been the one to be made a meme all over the Internet for this specific phrase. And then unfortunately again, shows those who haven't studied leadership specifically or studied business to where they can look at the followership and the leadership, because in reality, leaders are also followers. Most managers have to answer to another manager, to another manager, to another manager. It's all still followership. There was a quote that you like to use from a movie, right? Can you maybe drop in on me? It honestly is one of my favorites. Remember the Titan, Disney's Remember the Titans with Denzel Washington? It is the quote is attitude reflects leadership. And I do repeat that a lot. I even repeat it to my students a lot, too. I think they're kind of secrete promoting Disney Plus then for them to go and go watch. It's a great movie. But at the same token, it's not wrong when leaders start complaining that no one wants to work anymore, people are lazy. Again, that theory, leadership mentality. When that happens, we find that the truth of the matter is it's not that people don't want to work anymore. It's they don't want to work any more for you because attitudes reflect leadership. Right? You mentioned one already. What are some other arguments against remote work that is coming from leadership? Oh, how much time do you have? We have as much time as you need. Oh, well, there's one that the CEO of Yahoo! Back in 2013 did that honestly is really insidious to me. But we're seeing it coming back now. In 2023. She called all of her remote workers back to work, saying it's for increased collaboration and synergy. I really hate that word. And I know I say a lot of times how much I really hate that word synergy, but nonetheless, that was literally the quote in multitude of her articles that she did when she was interviewed for this purpose. And by bringing all these people back or forcing that you either come into the office or you resign, those are your choices. It made it so that those people had to resign and go get other jobs instead of if they couldn't physically afford to come back into work or physically able to go back into work, which made it so that the company could avoid paying unemployment. So basically they got to do a little spin of a layoff without having a layoff, without having the publicity of a layoff and without making it look bad in the media. And it worked at that time. But now, as remote work has gained popularity and we see the return to work or auto start to become the new trend that a lot of companies are saying because they're trying to argue productivity or training, etc., because they're not utilizing universal training methodologies, which again is a concept of lean corporations. And any rate, by doing this, they're trying to have a layoff without having a layoff. And technically that's kind of illegal. And yeah, they should probably see counseling. But at the same token, that's become really insidious and made it so that these companies are able to again have a sole layoff. The other issue as we just finished discussing about middle managers, particularly having that theory leadership that they're using because they were never trained how to lead even internally by their organization, part of the reason they're pushing return to work is because they're covering for those managers and their bad behavior, even though they're being hit after hit after hit of lawsuits. And that's part of it. They're now having transparency and have to be accountable for their leadership and trying to silence everyone to stop all the lawsuits. So companies don't want to deal with it because they don't want to be transparent and get caught. There's also the issue of leaders that don't want to adapt. And business, like anything, is evolution. It's Darwinian in nature. And if you don't learn to adapt to these concepts and learn how to do the proper type of leadership that remote work requires, you end up really making your whole team and yourself suffer. Those are the main points of why people are pushing return to office. And based on your research, does your research support these claims or does it refute these claims? Oh, it it supports these claims that these are the reasons they're saying we don't want work from home because it's unproductive, People aren't creative. It doesn't help with diversity. It doesn't it you can go down the list, but that's a smokescreen. Does your research refute that? And is you more productive? It's more conducive to research. Those things have all been disproven since the eighties. Okay. And that's just it. COVID basically took all of that research since 1988 to 2020 and basically gave a dry run If the whole world was going remote and prove that all that academic research was right. Right. The world didn't crash. And burn. I mean. In ways. Relatively. Okay, It had little fires. It didn't all implode. We didn't it didn't become Mad Max or any other dystopian. It didn't turn into Dune. It didn't I can go through all the post-apocalyptic movies. We didn't have that remote work actually made it so that we thrive and actually helped a lot of employees, especially when we think about workplace PTSD. We gave those people and those with disabilities room to be able to heal and room to be able to come into their own and have some confidence and have some lowering of stress. And this is an interesting thing that I found recently in my research. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been studying this as well from that psychological perspective and statistically analyzing it. During recessions, we have an uptick in workplace violence. This has been studied since the nineties and we even saw bits and pieces of that research from the recessions we had in the eighties and nineties and in the early 2000s in oh eight and we even saw some of this happen recently last month during the Lunar New Year, Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, there were mass shootings. Both of them were conducted by people who went to their workplace and shot it up on the one in Monterey Park allegedly used to work at those dance studios. The one in Half Moon Bay, the farm that we went and shot up was where he used to work. We've also seen before that over in San Jose, the VTA worker who went and killed a bunch of people. I can keep going down the list. Since you said yes. In said there was a family and I live in Racette as well. And this really hit home. There was a family who ran a trucking company, a allegedly this person who was one of their past employees was upset. Turk, the owner, his brother, his wife, three month old baby hostage, murdered them and left them in a field. I can only imagine. And these things escalate as we go into a recession, which depending on which economic expert you talk to, we're in one. We're not in one we're in. That doesn't matter. What matters is that this keeps happening. And what's worse is most companies just put it to h.r. To figure out what to do if something like that happens and teachers at trained how to deal with that because they're used to real training on what to do with that other than, oh, learn how to hide and how to get out of the building. We even tell like with the mass shootings at schools and being a teacher here at Stanislaus, we have to be aware of this as well, where they tell us, Oh, go get the the backpack, buddy, and put dye packs in your backpack for you. That is a scary thought that that is our answer to dealing with this. Well, that's response that's not mitigating the. Exactly. Issue. Exactly. We're not looking at the root cause analysis on that front. So worker safety is a benefit. And that also extends to having to travel and commute. Right. You mentioned, oh, you live in Moore said it was flooded. My neighborhood kept getting evacuated home evacuated, sent home, evacuated, sent home because I'm right there near Bear Creek Road. And a lot of that area was evacuated and is still doing the cleanup. And right now, as we're speaking, we've had the warning that that's potentially could happen again in the next couple of days because of the atmospheric river heading for us. And traditionally, if that happened, you'd be so well used to work. But now but it could also make you destitute prior to being able to do remote work. But now, yeah, like I have a friend who I was just texting. She's over up in Boulder Creek and was able to take her work home and work from home because they're all prepping and battening down the hatches for this storm coming in, which is great. In the past, you there's no way you would be able to do that. You'd lose money on your work, you'd lose customers. Your entire business could be in jeopardy because of major disasters like this. This allows for us to better plan for emergency disasters. And especially and I hate to use this example, while working at B of A post-9-11, they used to make sure that they had everything duplicated in multiple regions as a way to address in case there's another terrorist attack. And they trained all of us what to do in the event of a natural disaster, terrorist attack, etc. what to do as far as our software and other proprietary information, which is great. That is a wonderful example of emergency preparedness with remote work where even more or better able to address this, we're able when it's flooding here in California, in New York and other areas that are fine, are able to pick up the slack and the rest of the world and the business feels no impact. And those people are able to recover. Those people are still able to work and those people, their lives don't get disrupted. I'm also reading that not just lives avoiding disruption, but actually being more fulfilled, couples are more likely to have babies or, you know, existing parents are more likely to have another baby of working from home. Does your research kind of delve into that area as well? Yes, actually, my husband and I are a great example of that. Both of us being from home and working from home has been wonderful because we're actually able to spend more time with each other. And I do understand there is this just the statistical issue of during the lockdowns, there was an uptick in divorce. My husband, I got married during COVID and honestly, we were great together and we like being with each other. And I mean, we're both home. Usually when the kids come home, we're able to better balance our children and expand our family because we can afford to be in a place like here in the Central Valley and work being able to be anywhere else. So that we're not having to pay the high cost to the Bay Area or any of the other major metropolitan areas, but still be close enough to go there when we need and still be able to balance our family. It allows a new work life balance and honestly, I love that I can go to lunch with my husband or go get many pedis for my lunch break and with him or by myself, or we can go and travel to go see family and still be able to balance work all from our laptops and this technology has been there for decades now. It's just now to the masses. It's it's now being able to support more people. I know personally, one of the benefits I've seen is that I'm able to cook at home and eat from home more. So I'm eating better, I'm saving money. And that's been a real benefit I've seen. That's actually a really funny thing. So I am not Martha Stewart. I as far as a business. Schiro, I understand her and I appreciate all of the advancements she has made, but I know I am a menace to society. In the kitchen I have a glass stovetop, and my husband, when he got out of the Marines, one of the first jobs he got out of the Marines is becoming a shorter to cook. And he learned to cook. And he is amazing in the kitchen and even more so with a grill. We have the rule that I'm not allowed to cook unsupervised. And there is a reason and I have I had this on camera, actually, because we have cameras throughout our house, mostly because when we're away, it's fun to watch the cats do stupid. But any rate, I was cooking pretty soon eggs and I guess a little bit of the oil got onto the stove underneath the pan. So when I was done cooking it and slid the pan into the burner ahead so that it wouldn't sit on the hot one, apparently it created friction and sparked a fire that went off and went away. Honestly, I'm lucky my eyebrows and these are still intact, but it was on carpets. I guess you could file that as a danger for working from home then. Yes, but you're right. It does allow for more of that healthy cooking, but it also allows for an aspect that people one of the other leadership and economical concerns about remote work is that small businesses like coffee shops, restaurants, mom and pop shops will go out of business because nobody's in the big cities with remote work and with DoorDash and Uber Eats and all of these other Postmates and other services. It was nice because especially during COVID, Starbucks delivered, oh, with my ADHD, it was like all my caffeine fix came to my house. It's awesome. What else could you ask for? Oh, yeah, Especially because that was like since working from home. One of my favorite things to point out is a thing that used to annoy the daylights out of me, of in-person working. There's always that one person that fiddles with the coffee maker and breaks it for everybody, and it's broken for a day or two. So you have to go out and go find coffee elsewhere or they play with the coffee maker. And there's always that one person who either puts too much or too little of the grounds and everyone has to deal with it. I love working from home because I can just use my coffee maker that makes just one cup and nobody's played with it. No steady place settings. Nobody, nobody else but me has used all my creamer or anything else of that nature. But remote work allows for us if we if we prefer eating out, it gets delivered to us, which also help stimulate the economy and helps promote small businesses. And it doesn't take away from those companies that don't have yet an ability to convert everyone to remote. And it also there's another interesting aspect on that front that that I've been seeing both in my research and in talking with my students. I love teaching because they teach me as much as I teach them. A lot of my students and even my husband, who works in similar fields of the R&D side of ops management, we're seeing a divide where managers are remote and the people who are fixing the robots are there in person, or those who are actually physically doing the work are in person. And especially when we look at like Tesla and Amazon, we're moving towards this automation, not just when we think of robotics, but when we think of like H.R. and marketing, where they're utilizing A.I. to go ahead and send out those invites to different things that are going on in your company, sending out, Oh, it's time for you to sign up for this, for your insurance, your work or your happy work birthday, things like that, or here's your W-2. All of that stuff is now being automated. And so now we're getting to a point where, yes, it's doing away with certain jobs, but it's making room for others. And what's really beautiful is it's making room for things like robotics and engineering to become not just a STEM or having that negative opinion. People have about higher education in STEM, but becoming that blue collar necessary work. That is a trade. And we're going to need more people going into those fields to be able to monitor that. And even with that comes with a lot of remote ability. These conversations are often framed labor versus management. A lot of the benefits we've been talking about aren't just exclusive to the workers. It seems that they're beneficial for the companies and for the communities and society as a whole. So it is kind of surprising that there's pushback from the management side. And I know you address this in your work. You have six reasons why companies should embrace work from home. Oh, I have more than six, but just six are the popular ones. But all the reasons you just gave her a big reason why they need to promote it. And honestly, all of this pushback hurts companies you lower. How much you have to have is overhead. You make it so that there's more room in the economy for rival companies to evolve and develop so that you have more room in the marketplace and a room for better improvement and better products in the marketplace. I mean, the benefits are endless, but it also helps cultivate a workforce that isn't stressed and is better performing. So the reasoning that a lot of leaders are the leadership lens is that people don't want to work anymore is interesting because it shows a disconnect between the workforce and leadership. And in the past when leaders would or when employees would exhibit things like quiet, quitting or acting your wage where you're just what your job description says from your start time to your end time and that's it. You're not willing to work overtime. You're not willing to put in that extra mile. In the past, that was interpreted as disengagement, which means that you're having a morale problem in your workplace. In this case, this isn't a morale problem, and I understand why leadership would think that, because this has been the case for over 100 years of business leadership study. And most of the research is only from the viewpoint of leaders. There is research from the employee standpoint, but not a lot of it. It's just not as popular. But if we look at what our teams need and remember the basic business principle of your greatest resources, your people, we really learn how to be better leaders. We talked a lot about refuting some of the claims from leadership, but do any of these claims have merit? I see a lot of means of, Oh, I'm working from home with quotation marks and you see people at concerts or people slacking off. Is that reality? Is that is that a misconception? Have you found anything that would give credence to some of these claims? I think in some ways those memes are meant to be funny, and in other ways management is misconstruing it because. I have led team meetings well on my elliptical and doing it all from my tablet and having a PowerPoint up and leading a whole meeting and basically by me multitasking, that has helped me be able to make sure I get my workout in and get my meetings done and keep everything on schedule. I have had to travel for work or for school and whatnot and been able to get so much work done from my phone or from my tablet or from my laptop that I wouldn't be able to get if I was just stuck in an office. And I understand to management, especially those who have been in management in-person for so many years, it looks like, oh, they're slacking off. I want to do that. And that's what's really interesting also is as we're seeing this pushback about not wanting employees to work from home, we're seeing a push of management not wanting to work in the office either. It's really fascinating why we're doing that and a lot of that is just a resistance to change because there are growing pains when you change and business is going to evolve. But remote is here to stay and we need to embrace it. So I know several people who once the pandemic hit and they had to work from home, they were working in the Bay Area, they moved back to Modesto. They're still getting that Bay area wage. That's a benefit. I'm pro that all day. Is there a danger, though, that as remote work becomes more common that wages can drop? You're not going to get that Bay Area wage. You're going to get more of a federal minimum wage. Is there a danger of of backsliding? There is. If you don't know how to properly negotiate. So I myself from from Santa Clara, my family's lived there forever and moved out here to Mirsad for my family. So we primarily because of the real estate market to get a two bedroom shack out there is like 1.2 mil where my house is less than half of that and it's a four bedroom with three baths. The Central Valley offers so much more bang for our buck. But using your example of living here in the Central Valley and work and my work to our work being technically in the Bay Area, the benefit is for one, if your needs you to come in, you're not that far away. You're saving money. You're better able to afford to have just one job. And a lot of companies are taking umbrage with the idea of people working multiple jobs because they're getting more done and have more productivity if we start having companies try to renegotiate, Oh, well, you're in the central Valley now. We want to pay you Central Valley wages. The argument there is, well, if you do that, other companies aren't going to care. They can easily go to another company and they will pay them Bay Area wages so it can drive away talent from wanting to work with you. And let's face it right now, it is a buyer's market for employees because they know that they can negotiate that business. Leadership is kind of like the real estate market right now. Prior to the pandemic and even during the early parts of the pandemic, it was a seller's market and you could charge whatever you want for wherever you wanted and prices would just go up and people would pay for it. Well, now businesses find themselves the same place that a lot of people who are trying to sell their home right now, while the rates are up, are in where they're trying to get people to buy for these exorbitant prices and people are like, no, no, thank you. I'm going to wait it out. I can get a better offer over here or I can go and relocate out of state and get more bang for my buck. I can do this. I can do that. They have options. So it's no longer that people are trying to have a Hunger Games battle over whatever position you're offering. Businesses are in a weird predicament where they actually have to sell themselves to people who want to work with them. And if they keep hurting their goodwill or reputation that way, they're going to make it to where people just go to another company that's willing to pay them. That is really quite interesting when you think about it. It also, in a way, drives up inflation as well. But again, if you're making Bay Area money and you're able to live here in the Central Valley where prices are more affordable and life is a little different as far as like we have homes that have real square footage and real yards and I keep saying real. And that's because when you think of the Bay Area, the average age 2 to 3 bedroom is between 1017 hundred square feet. Where over here the average has been tween, what, 1720 500 square feet for that same house. So and that's not counting the the yard and whatnot. What's your projection for the future? We have politicians focusing on this now. Bernie Sanders is talking about a four day workweek with no loss of pay. We have other people talking about changing up the 40 hour workweek. And then you also brought up automation. I as as factors that kind of all meld and mix when we're talking about working from home or remote leadership as well. So with all that, what is your outlook for the future? What would your forecast or prediction be? Let me get my crystal ball and do my best Nostradamus impersonation. Well, I first of all, I love Bernie's idea about pushing the four day a week workweek because quite frankly, when you look at the actual ways that productivity is measured, because there's one thing we didn't discuss about remote work is the use of what is called boss where boss, where it was initially designed to let leadership be able to watch their employees for two weeks to a month at the max, to look at just, you know, this short time period and look at where they can better their process improvements or help those employees and do better load balancing and see if they need to hire more, etc., basic management constructs. But since COVID, a lot of these software systems have been adapted to, basically make it so that bosses are using it to spy on their employees. There are software systems that will lock you out of your system if you've been away from your desk to where the conversation you have to call your manager to unlock it and have the conversation of Why were you away from your desk for 5 minutes? I had to go to the to the loo. I mean, by your employer asking about that is technically an h.r. Issue because bathroom breaks are federally protected and some people need them more than others, especially if they have physical disabilities. And legally they don't have to disclose that. I mean, this creates all kinds of issues and all kinds of privacy issues which actually bernie and elizabeth warren are both taking to the to the mat on those issues on whether or not that's happening. So we're going to soon see a lot of legislation put out about what leadership can be doing as far as boss aware. But that's a whole nother TEDTalk by what we're going to see in the future. However, in the short term, we're going to see a disconnect where especially in the blue collar sectors, where we're going to see this pushback about leadership being able to work remote where they can't. And that's because some of those positions are going to get phased out for people who have more technical experience to be able to manage robots and AI and so we're going to see a shift in the type of skill set we're going to need from the workforce. We're also going to hopefully see in our educational systems more of a push for that and more of a push to make those kind of skill sets into trade school programs, which I personally find fascinating when people say we need more trade schools, we need more programs like that, stop pushing college. Most reputable trade schools are in our colleges and in our junior colleges. So that's a misnomer. And more education isn't a bad thing that helps us be able to. How do I put it? My favorite uncle used to tell me the one investment he ever made was in his education, because it's the one thing in this world no one can take from you. So in investing in ourselves, because in the past companies used to pay to retrain you to do something else within the company. That's not a thing anymore. We have to invest in ourselves and get ourselves the education to be able to manage this new dynamic of the business world. In the past, people put a lot of faith in the companies that they worked in to make sure they were taken care of. And we don't have that anymore. My prediction for the future, especially as we go remote, we're going to see the labor force push for more remote because it allows them to set healthier boundaries and it's going to allow them to lower their stress levels. We're going to see a shift where you're seeing employees be able to have time to themselves and time to be with their families and people in general enjoying life, which is a good thing. The stimulates the economy. This also lowers stress and lowers some of the mental health issues we've been seeing throughout our workforce. I mean, I can't emphasize the benefits enough. We're going to see a shift. There's always going to be pushback because change is hard. But once we get past it, we're going to see a new type of workplace where hopefully we're working four or four days a week instead of five or three days a week instead of five, like a ten hour business week that a lot of those in R&D currently utilize, or less hours in general, just because when we better understand productivity and better understand that breaks and rest and taking your vacation, we where they're part of your pay. They also contribute to your ability to be productive and that is good for business. And what's good for business helps keep everything flowing for everyone. So my hope for remote work, remote work is going to make it so that people are able to get rid of a lot of the classist and divisions we have about diversity in the workplace because it will make it so that it doesn't matter if you're low income, you're able to work and not have anyone judge anything about you because they don't see it. You're able to work and be able to work up. It will give more upward mobility to especially the working moms of the world, the single moms of the world. There is a concept that women raise economies, women help build it, and it's because we have so many additional responsibilities, but it will also better our overall family unit that this country was founded on. We're going to be able to see moms be able to provide for their children. We're going to be able to see families be better, able to not only be there to support their kids, but afford to do it. Remote work is going to bring so many benefits to our culture that I just I can't manage to overemphasize it enough. While I share your hopes, this has been an interesting discussion. I feel like I've learned a lot, not just during this discussion, but in the research prior. And if anybody has arguments remote work, I'm going to direct them to your blog and to your website or your I guess your YouTube channel. Which is the website and the YouTube channel, all of that's linked in the YouTube channel if they need. Well, for anybody out there listening who is interested, can you maybe tell them how to how to navigate to those pages? Yes. So I run a business consulting firm called Wicked B of the West. Ironically, I named it for that because when I first started out in working in operations in the compliance sector of finance, I had a salesperson who ironically was based in Florida, and he kept giving me a lot of files. That's like, no, these are textbook fraud files. Why are you sending this? And he, he, he called me that phrase that I was the wicked B of the West, and. He ran with it. No, I told him I told my supervisor about it, and she gave me the best piece of advice. She said, when people look to insult and try to get rid of you, that's when you know you've arrived because you've been making the good kind of waves and you're making them actually have to work where it sounds like an insult. It is actually something I have learned to brand and be able to better own of myself. And again, you can find me on YouTube at Wicked B of the West. You can find me on Instagram and Facebook also under that and with links to my website as well. And if you're a Stan State student, you can enroll in one of your classes, right? Or if you’re a Stan State student, you can also email me too. You can easily look on the stand state website I have. It's under my name of Stephanie Eubank. Well, Professor Stephanie Eubank, thank you for joining us on the Stan State EduCast. Thank you so much for having me. It was a lot of fun. I agree. Once again, a big thank you to Professor Stephanie Eubank for joining us on the Stan State EduCast. And thank you to all the listeners for tuning in, downloading and following us. If you like this episode and you want to listen to past episodes of the Stan State EduCast, you can find us online at CSUSTAN.EDU/PODCAST. You can also find us on your favorite podcasting platform, so be sure to follow those who are notified of new episodes. Expect a new episode of the Stan State EduCast next month on a topic that is yet to be determined. So until that episode, I'm your host, Frankie Tovar. Have a great day.