Reignite: From WFH Zombies to High-Performance Humans

The “return to office” problem isn’t logistical. It’s psychological.
In this episode, I coach a business owner through rebuilding connection after remote work shattered the unconscious social systems that made work feel human. You’ll learn:

• Why people don’t know how to come back
• The real motivators that drive re-engagement
• How to rebuild team rhythm through environment and leadership

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you actually want to get people back into the office.
This is an honest assessment of how to do it.
It's probably not hr compliant, but it's true. This is
a coaching session with the owner of an extremely large
business about how to mitigate the absolute disaster that has
happened with everyone working remotely when COVID happened. We learned

(00:22):
some fascinating things. I would say. One of the things
that we learned that is the most fascinating to me
is that most community behaviors are unconscious. And so when
we did this you know, isolation thing, and then said, oh, okay,

(00:46):
we don't have to do that anymore, nobody knew what
to do. Nobody knew how to go back because they
weren't consciously doing the thing that they were doing. They
were just in those environments. People went to church every
week and then there was a snack table, and so

(01:10):
everybody went to the snack table and slowly met each other,
and because of that they had friends. It almost brings
me to tears actually just talking about it. Like one
of the real tragedies of this thing that happened is
like there's so many people who are alone, who have
no idea why they were alone or what to do

(01:31):
about it. They're just alone. It's like, it's heartbreaking when
you really think about it, it's so sad. But I
think this little tidbit is core to bringing people back
in is to know that the behaviors they were engaging

(01:51):
in before were unconscious and they have no idea how
to come back to work. It's not you need to
just come come back to work and everything will be fine.
I think it's we need to assume none of the
behaviors are in place, none of them, and they have
no idea what to do. Home is safer and home

(02:13):
is more comfortable, and so nobody wants to leave home.
And so this is just a semantics thing, but I
think it's really important. So nobody wants to come hang
out with you at work because that those words are
an implied comfort, and they have something more comfortable than

(02:36):
hang out at work, and so that frame just I
don't think that works at all. Nobody wants to hang
out there. A couple people who know that they're truly
missing something, Like my best friend is a very strong extrovert,
and like he knew that he was lacking something, and

(02:59):
he under understood that he needed to get out. But
that was higher level behavior. Most people don't know. We
know the emotional requirements to make a sale are the
same at twenty dollars as at twenty thousand dollars, Like
all the sales copy required to convince somebody is all
the same, which is mind boggling when you really look

(03:21):
into it. So you have to convince somebody that like,
this item is going to save their life. And then
the difference between what you speak and what you deliver
it also must be different. You sell what people want
and you deliver what people need. Right, otherwise the business
is fucked because you give them what they want and
then they're like, I don't want that, and you're like,

(03:42):
but that's what you said you wanted. Right. The frame
of how you get people into office, I think is
different from what you make the office. And so I
think you get people in the office with we need
to save our company. This is an emergency. They're like, oh,

(04:02):
this is so good for me. I can't not keep
doing I have to not because they want to, but
they just see that this is good. You keep using
the words save the company or whatever. You keep battering
them with healthy, positive environment and then you keep reselling
that this is necessary, it's needed, and if you think

(04:24):
about it, this is actually what men in particularly respond
to very very well. Is like, I have never in
my work with you ever told you that you deserve
to go to the sauna, because that would make you
feel gross and you would hate it. I tell you
need to go to the sauna. It's your job, right,

(04:48):
it's your responsibility. And so you need to be in
the office. And then here's all the positive things you're
getting in the office. And people mess this combo up
all the time, where they either do you need to
be in the office and then everything's as hardcore nectivity,

(05:08):
or people are like, let's be in the office, it'll
be wonderful, and then they try to stack positivity on
top of that because it's pain and pleasure, right, and
so we need pain motivators behind us and pleasure motivators
ahead of us. And so the pain motivator is, this
has gotta happen, We gotta get in here. And then
the pleasure motivator is, look at all of the good

(05:30):
things you're getting as you're here here, you're just getting
battered with goodness and things are getting better and better
and oh no, no, no, you've got to be in here.
I believe this is the frame. So then I think
the next thing is, I think we need an sop
for what in the office looks like. I really think
it's kind of necessary. It's like we have to go
like how much downtime do they need? How many times

(05:53):
do they need to hit the water cooler? I mean,
we can figure out how granular to get here, but
like how many times do they need to move their body?
How many times do they need to be around other people?
How many times do they need to be in alone
time doing deep work? How many times do they need
to be working with other people? Right? Like social, team, solo, Like,

(06:16):
all of those are different. Nobody can manage any of this.
And this doesn't necessarily need to be all on you. You
could assign this to somebody, but I think it needs
to be managed. I got the opportunity to visit one
of the Google offices recently, the Google office in Austin.

(06:38):
Friend of mine worked there and gave me a tour,
and honestly, it was I mean, I kind of knew
it was coming, but it was a bit shocking to me.
I'd never been in one of those types of HQs,
and I was like, holy shit, they're all children because
everything has been managed. The length of the stairs is

(07:03):
altered specifically to get their brains to fire a little bit.
More like they mix up the length of the stairs
so that they're invigorated by walking up the stairs. There's
certain subjects matter to be talked about at certain restaurants.
Inside of the building, there's like all of the culture

(07:26):
is defined, and there's good and bad things to the
way that they do it, Like they're actually paying for
some of this is there. They got high performance children,
but they didn't get any adults out of their environments
that they set up, and so now they're having trouble
at higher level management. But they did get just some

(07:46):
of the top performance that could possibly exist, and it's
because they just managed every single piece of the environment.
And it was so fascinating because I was like, oh
my god, like these people don't even realize what's happening
to them. They're just kids that are like engineered to
be happy in this box. And it was so apparent

(08:07):
what needs to be pulled from that is the good bit,
which is like that there needs to be some engineering
done we've got to figure out what metrics you can control, Like,
like some of the some of the straightforward ones that
I'm quite certain you can control is you can control
a degree of their interactions with other people, and you
can control a degree of their activities. You can probably

(08:33):
influence their diet if you wanted to. You could make
yourself the main source of food, and you know, if
you did that, like potentially you could get you know,
increased performance that way offset the cost of food. Part
of this depends on how nuanced do you want to
get right. But the things that I think are the

(08:56):
most accessible. I think, for example, something that's really accessible
is to create an sop for brainstorming various forms of interaction.
Food fairly straightforward if you've got a solid sized company

(09:17):
and a budget to get catering in. And then physical
activity I think is fairly straightforward because you can have
you can do a couple of things here. You can one,
you can just plan people's day a little bit so
that they have to, for example, just move across the
room a couple of times throughout the day and that's useful.

(09:39):
And then you can bring personal trainers in to actually
like make that a natural part of it be like,
you know, okay, this person teaches a yoga class once
every Thursday, and then you yourself go to the yoga class,
and if you have enough free time, if things are
going right, this is a where you like you walk

(10:02):
around yourself going like, hey, come into the yoga class today.
And that's a great thing because it's like one thing
we need to do is we need to redirect their
fears into something that empowers them. And so if if
you the CEO, the person that they're afraid of right now,
walks up to them and says something like hey, you're

(10:23):
going to come to the yoga class, they're gonna go,
oh fuck, I guess I better do it. And then
they're gonna do something that's really good for themselves and
they're gonna feel better, and then they're gonna like you more.
And then once you've kind of got that going, then
you can get a really hot girl to do it.
So this is a thing and the high tech companies
have figured this out. My best friend, who's a developer,

(10:47):
he recently told me like he thought about it. He
was like, wait a second, I've never not reported to
a woman. And this works because I work all all
day long, because developers just have to grind, right. They're
basically construction workers. They're the constructions of workers of the
digital age. And He's like, I work alone, and then

(11:12):
when I'm done, I need to tell a woman what
I've done so that I'm proud of myself. I need
to show off for her. And so almost all the
male developers report to women in the in the like
high end tech companies, I think there's very deep utility

(11:33):
in hiring for attractiveness for certain roles. If you would
like to join a program that encourages open and honest
conversation about how to actually move forward in life, then
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