Jeff Robbins interviews Greg Hanover, CEO of LiveOps, about what it’s like to work in a virtual call center, the value of physical get togethers, education and virtual learning, and how managers can measure results for remote workers.

Here’s the transcript:

JEFF: Hi Greg. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

GREG: Good Morning Jeff., Great to be here.

JEFF: Yeah, it’s great to have you here. (3:11) The first question I ask our guests on every podcast, when I remember to ask is, where are you talking to us from today?

GREG: Today I’m actually in Dayton, Ohio. We have an office here in Dayton and I’m spending some time with our team in Ohio this week.

JEFF: (3:29) Where are you from?

GREG: The company LiveOps is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona and we have some remote offices in Ohio and California, and we have a lot of folks who work remotely around the country which I know is going to be a big topic of conversation today, but I’m originally from Toronto, Ontario. I’m Canadian and been living in the U.S. now for about 20 years.

JEFF: Wow. (3:54) Do you live in Scottsdale now?

GREG: I do. I’ve been in Arizona for about 17 years and been with LiveOps about 11 years and we’re headquartered out in the Sunshine State.

JEFF: (4:06) The size that LiveOps is I’m assuming you work out of the office on a daily basis?

GREG: Correct. I travel quite a bit, but we have our headquarters in Arizona. We have about 70 people in our headquarters. We have about 240 employees across the business, and those are the employees, that’s not our remote workforce that we refer to as LiveOps Nation. Of those 240 more than half actually work remotely around the country  and then the remaining employees work from one of our office locations in Arizona, Ohio or California.

JEFF: Right. So, let’s introduce you [laughing] to the audience. (4:41) Tell us about yourself and about LiveOps and we can also get into how that overlaps with the remote work stuff that we’re talking about today.

GREG: LiveOps is a virtual call center company, and we have been pioneering work at home for the last 20 years.  We have been in existence since close to 2000. We were founded in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and really there was a need to service what’s called the Direct Response Industry, the infomercial business, and as you could imagine those types of infomercials and commercials generate spikey call volume when people see an ad on TV and want to call in and order a product. Back around 2000 the traditional call center model, which we refer to as a brick and mortar call center model, they were struggling to handle this influx of call volume that would come in in bursts. So, our Founder decided to create a distributed workforce, or work at home model, to be able to staff up and staff down using independent contractors to service that business. We have been iterating on more pioneering and the work at home space for about the last 20 years and we’ve evolved over time and we do a lot more than just the infomercial business today. We service a lot of different verticals in retail, healthcare and insurance, doing a lot of customer care work using 1099s, independent contractors who work from home around the country and work around their life and sign up for shifts when they’re available to work. I’ve been the company for about 11 years. I’ve been a lot of different roles with the company over time. I started in client services and moved into operations and took over as CEO in 2017. We’re excited about where things are going. We talk a lot about market conditions, have never been better.  When you look at the changing mindset of the workforce today, more people wanting flexible work, more people wanting to work around their life, around their terms, we feel we’re positioned well just with our business model in general, and being able to help a lot of companies approach their customer experience a lot differently using a distributed work force.

JEFF: I agree. [laughing] (7:02)  For listeners who maybe don’t know exactly what this means, what is a virtual call center? You covered it a little bit but paint a picture for me.

GREG: All of our agents work from home around the country, and we handle a lot of customer care calls for a lot of large companies in the retail space, in the healthcare space, in the insurance space, and do the customer service work. So, if you shop at a large retail company, or whether you go online to their website and you purchase something or you have a question and you call that 1-800 number, there’s a good chance that you could be talking to a member of what we call LiveOps Nation. So, you could be talking to one of our agents who are taking those phone calls, or handling those emails, or chat sessions, from their home, around the country. A lot of times people are familiar with or used to the traditional contact center  model which are folks going into a physical location and working from there. As we all know there’s a lot of challenges in that model in trying to get people to go into a physical call center these days, whether it’s because the markets are saturated and there’s a lack of talent, or it’s back to that changing mindset of the workforce where people want to work around their life and work on their terms and work remotely. So, a virtual call center are folks who are working from home around the country handling those customer care interactions or experiences.

JEFF:  This whole infomercial thing has me really curious. (8:33) With something like that, you’re saying there’s a lot of calls that happen, obviously when the infomercial airs [laughing] or if it’s the Home Shopping Network situation, that there’s going to be these ebbs and flows. Are those predictable? Are you ramping up a lot of workers around that time, knowing there’s this late night thing that’s going to happen, or is it more using something like Home Shopping Network as an example, some product might be a lot more popular than another product and you’re going to then need to ramp up a workforce within 10 minutes rather than 10 hours?

GREG:  Great questions. I would say all of the above. The one thing to note is that industry has gone through a lot of change and consolidation over the years. So, when you think about consumer behavior and how people purchase today, instead of picking up the phone and calling a 1-800 number, a lot of folks now go on their tablets or their phones and go to the website, or they do text to order. That industry has changed in a big way, but to your point some of that is scheduled. So, the 30-minute infomercials are mostly all scheduled and then we have what’s called short form commercials where it’s the 30 or 60 second or two-minute spots which tend to run at different times throughout the day with little notice. Our ability to respond quickly and staff up and staff down in a very quick manner, just provides an advantage for us, because we bring that agility and that nimbleness to the staffing model that a lot of these companies require to be able to handle these calls. 

JEFF: Right. (10:11) Which you couldn’t do if you had a physical call center, because it would be a matter of reaching out to people and seeing who could get to the officer quickly enough whereas theoretically now you can just send a text to everyone saying “hey, there’s a rush. Who’s available?” 

GREG: Exactly. We do that in a lot of industries, not just the infomercial space. We do a lot of work in the insurance space, healthcare, we can staff up and staff down in a moment’s notice.

JEFF:  (10:42) And some of that is seasonal, ramping up and ramping down, but ramping up and ramping down nonetheless, right?

GREG: Yeah. Great example, this time of year is one of our busiest times heading into the retail push in Q4, so we work with a lot of large retail brands, and they’re counting on us to take our staffing to 3, 4, 5X of where it typically is in a very short amount of time.

JEFF: (11:10) I’m imaging there’s probably people out there who run a business who think about their customer service people and want to make sure there’s a fair amount of quality control, that there’s not babies crying in the background [laughing], or internet problems, maybe VOIP connection problems, things like that.  We can talk about controlling the [laughing] quality of the people, but how do you control the quality of the work?

GREG:  Great question. If you would’ve asked me this question 10-15 years ago my answer might’ve been a little bit different, just given working home was still somewhat nascent, and we were still learning on how to build a work at home model, and the crying babies and the barking dogs used to be a big issue 10-15 years ago. You think about the growth and work at home today and you think about how mainstream work at home has become where people are now making sure they’re building out the right environments to successfully work from home. Those issues that were [laughing] very prevalent 10 years ago are not really there anymore and on top of that we have requirements built within our model to where individuals sign an agreement with us and they agree to all those terms, making sure they have proper internet speed, making sure they have a quiet work environment, all the things that would be required to be successful in working from home. So, a lot of those issues to be honest don’t really pop up that much anymore. 

JEFF: Right. It’s one thing if you’re doing more B to B work, client services work where we get to know each other and maybe there’s a dog barking or baby crying, it’s okay, this is Bob who works at home and we know Bob. But, when it’s B to C stuff [laughing] it’s get to be a whole kind of different thing when you’ve got consumers or there’s someone that’s calling in that needs some peace of mind of professionality. Maybe people are getting more understanding over time. It’s funny, you talk about the architecture; in New England here where I live, we have a lot of old houses that were built in 1900, the 1920s, that don’t have a good place to put a 65” television. 

GREG: Sure. [laughing]

JEFF: [laughing] I think about houses being built now and how you need a clear back wall for your videoconferencing [laughing] you know? You could pull down a picture of Hawaii or something, so it looks like you’re in an exotic location. It’s interesting how architecture mirrors communications technologies. A lot of those 1920s houses had this really nice phone booth [laughing] in the entryway.

GREG: That’s right. Yeah.

JEFF: The latest technology. (14:15) So, let’s talk about the other side of that which is people control. What skills do you look for when hiring people in these kinds of roles?

GREG: We’re looking for a lot of different skills. The biggest thing in our model, we treat our 1099’s or independent contractors as home-based business owners. So, we’re looking for people who are self-motivated, who understand they control their own success in that this is very different than an employee type position where you go in and you’re typically guided in many ways. We try to make it clear upfront that you have this opportunity to come in here and build your business and determine your own success. So, people who have that profile of being able to come in and really take things into their own hands and take ownership of their role and really control their success, that is probably first and foremost what we’re looking for in individuals. Then from there we’re looking at profiles. We’re looking at backgrounds, experience, skillsets that would work well depending on the type of opportunity that they are applying for. But, really, it comes down to if you were to say what’s the number one ingredient or main key to success in a role like this is being able to come in and essentially run your own business.

JEFF: So, independence, that entrepreneurship, proactive, good communicators, that’s what I’m hearing there; all those kinds of things. One of the things about hiring a remote workforce is that you break yourself out of the local job market, and you can hire anyone anywhere which allows you to raise the threshold of what you’re looking for in terms of experience and all that stuff. (16:08) I noticed as I was doing a little research about you that you’re tending to hire people who are very experienced at this kind of stuff. Is that true? Are you finding that more? 

GREG: Absolutely, and if you look at the difference in the profile of a flexible workforce participant versus what I’ll call a traditional call center  BPO employee, our agents are on average, 81% brings some level of college education. They have a lot more work experience they’re bringing to the table, so what you’re seeing is you have this workforce out there who’ve decided that working an 8 to 5 office job, that daily grind, they want something different. They want flexibility. They want to work around their life. So, the people that are coming into a model like ours bring great experience, typically a lot come from corporate America, and they want flexibility in their life, and they want flexible work and so, we’re benefitting from these individuals who have grown throughout their career, some in corporate America, who are now taking to take those skills and that experience and apply it in a different way that brings balance to both their professional and their personal life. 

JEFF: This is a story I’ve heard a lot on this podcast and it’s really great for employers that want to happen into this really great workforce. [laughing] (17:41) However, I have a question that seems to come up and maybe you’ve had some experience with this. It seems like with the remote workforce it’s harder to hire entry level people. Do you feel that too? Are you able to hire entry level people and what does that look like? Is there some sort of on ramp or maybe just the workflow, and by work I mean [laughing] employment flow, is that entry level people get in office jobs and learn the skills and interpersonal communication skills, all those kinds of things, so they can then transfer those things to a more home based remote job in the future. But, tell me if I’m wrong here.

GREG: I think our model may be a little bit different. We do attract folks at the entry level and I think the reason is, if you look at the different opportunities that our marketplace provides; we look at it as a marketplace, we have all these different customers we serve, some being very basic customer care type work to more complex stuff that we might be doing in the healthcare space or the insurance space. Some of that more basic stuff does attract more of that entry type employee or profile into our model. I will say the folks who have the most success in our model are the ones who bring that experience to the table already, so they have more experience that comes into our model that allows them to really adapt to the type of model that we run and running your  home-based business. So, if you are coming into our model and you have little work experience it might be more challenging for you to have success early on, but we do provide opportunities that lend well to that entry level individual. 

JEFF: Right. There’s not really parity. You’re not adapting exactly when it’s the first thing that you’ve done. [laughing]

GREG: Yes. [laughing]

JEFF: You’re not saying, “oh, this is analogous to this thing that I did in the office, or this thing that I did at this other company.” You’re still trying to triangulate and figure things out, full cloth.

GREG: I will say though, just on that point, just the growth and work from home and virtual work that again, a good example if you asked me this question 10 years ago I’d probably answer it a lot differently, but with the growth and work at home becoming mainstream, even though we might be attracting people at the entry level into our company, more people are coming to us with virtual experience, that is helping them be successful regardless of the level of experience they have. That’s a big shift in change that’s happened, that just given the growth in virtual work, more people have experience in understanding how to navigate and be successful in virtual work.

JEFF: Yeah. (20:41) What is that? Why is that? What are those skills that they’re gaining by having already done some work remotely?

GREG: A big part is the discipline of virtual work. 

JEFF: Self-management? Yep.

Self-management, having the discipline to come in and know you’re your own boss and that you have to come in and set your schedule and you have to build a schedule that’s going to allow you to be successful.

Greg Hanover

GREG: So, understanding how to communicate virtually, how to use technology to be successful. Again, if you’re working in this virtual environment, we talk a lot about this at LiveOps, enabling these folks to be successful through virtual practices. Do we have the tools and technology in place to set these individuals up to be successful? That’s a big part of it; building a virtual community because people still crave that interaction with other individuals, but you have to figure out how to put the infrastructure in place to allow individuals to be able to do that in a virtual way versus what we’re all used to in the physical office environment.  

JEFF: Right. Now, LiveOps has certainly built a reputation in the business community particularly, yet there’s still oftentimes this perception out there in the workforce a little bit that work from home schemes [laughing], scams. At least  in the U.S. we grew up with these flyers taped to telephone poles saying, “work from home” and it was usually some kind of a pyramid scheme things. (22:25) Do you just ignore that and rise above it, or is there anything particularly that you feel like you need to do to battle that? Either on the hiring side or also helping the employees [laughing] explain to their neighbors what they’re actually doing?

GREG: I would say again, it’s another one where we probably receive this question or this type of feedback a lot more years ago. One of the things today, you’ve got to be very present upfront and have high touch experience of when somebody’s first investigating or researching your company and they reach out to you or they go to your website, making sure that there’s some level of high touch experience there so they can actually talk to somebody or reach out to somebody via email, or chat, or just being able to get in touch in some capacity with your company to make sure it is legitimate, and that it is a real opportunity. We get that a lot when people come to us and we have an agency that’s been with us a long time and they say, “yeah, at first I wasn’t sure if LiveOps was real or this was a work from home scam, but I was excited to see that it is real, and you guys are legit and it is a real opportunity,” but you’ve got to be present upfront so that you overcome those potential issues from the outside.

JEFF: I oftentimes hear stories of new employees who go out and open up a separate bank account so they can give out that bank information for direct deposit in case there’s still a chance that these people might be actually a scheme for some wire fraud [laughing] kind of thing. 

GREG: Sure. There’s a lot of it out there.

JEFF: Yeah, there is. I think this high touch, high communication, constantly proving that you exist and that you’re there is to some extent the battle of remote work. It is creating presence through the wires which ultimately comes to a certain amount of transparency and culture; how you communicate, what you communicate, how people feel connected to the company. (24:44) Talk to me about that. How that happens at LiveOps both for your 240 employees, but then also for the 1099 people?

GREG: I would say this for both our employees and then our independent contractors at LiveOps Nation, but just never underestimating the power of communication and making sure we’re staying in touch and we’re doing things both from a virtual standpoint, leveraging technology to communicate out things that are going on within the business, but then also taking the opportunity to bring people together. We have a lot of folks who travel a lot to our offices, so we do company events on an annual basis where we bring our entire company  together, the employees, out to Arizona. So, just making sure you continue to place importance on the physical interaction with your employees, and yes, there’s a lot you can do using technology to bring your folks together, but nothing replaces that in-person interaction, so making sure that you place a high importance on that. I look at it the same way within LiveOps Nation or independent contractor agent group where we have over 20,000 individuals who work remotely around the country, and we do a lot with technology today to bring folks together. We also go out and visit with agents in different states every month, different cities we go out to, and we bring agents together in those areas to create that personal connection, and also to allow the independent contractors to get to know one another in person. That’s just a couple different ways that we make sure we keep that connection top of the line. 

JEFF: Yeah. At that scale you’ve got a social network. We think of social networks as online things but they’re not [laughing] necessarily. It’s just a social network, a network of people interconnecting with each other. They have a lot in common all these people having the same jobs or doing similar kind of work. (26:49) It must be exciting and fulfilling to facilitate them connecting and getting together?

GREG: And you’ll hear it from the agents. They’ll meet other agents in person who they’ve been virtually working with for years and you’ll hear the feedback on it, “so great to finally meet  you in person.” So again, nothing can replace that human interaction and you’ve got to make sure that it stays part of the plan, especially with people working on their own, remotely.

JEFF: (27:20) How often do you get together your 240 employees?

GREG: We have folks who travel out regularly to our office throughout the year, but we bring everybody together for an annual event. Once a year we have all of our employees come out to Arizona and we do some sort of celebration or kick-off for the following fiscal year. But, again, we try to do that at least once a year.

JEFF: (27:43) What happens at these events? Is it more on the social side or more on the alignment side, I guess is the language we use a lot of times? [laughing]

GREG: [laughing] It’s a little bit of everything. Part of it is getting alignment on where we’re going and part of it is celebrating our successes and we also bring some of our independent contractors out to these events and we celebrate all the great work being done by LiveOps Nation. We bring in guest speakers. Obviously, there’s a lot of social interaction. So, it’s a combination of things to really celebrate our company and where we’re going and what we’re doing.

JEFF: Celebrate is a good word around this. It’s such a different thing when you have a collocated company that maybe is doing a company retreat or something like that. It’s difficult sometimes to build that momentum towards something special, but when you’ve got all these people that don’t get a chance to be in the same room together, and they do get a chance to be in the same room together, there’s some inherent elation that happens and celebration to support that and that type of connection I think is a really important thing that happens. 

GREG: We get great feedback from our employee base every year about doing these annual events and they’re asking if we’re going to do it again next year because they place so much importance on it and just love the interaction with the rest of their fellow employees.

JEFF: Right. It’s like  “I want to make sure we don’t schedule anything during that time,” to really reserve that. Here again, I assume we get a fair amount of people listening to this podcast who don’t yet have a remote team. They’re curious about that whole side of things. Some of it just maps differently to try to get your employees to go on a trip and convince them to do that actually is much easier than you think, because it becomes this really nice experience and a great opportunity to steepen company culture in a way that I think it doesn’t sometimes map to collocated environments so much.

GREG:  I couldn’t agree more. I think companies need to also just pay attention. All the benefits we’re talking about with work at home and virtual work and being able to tap talent regardless of geography, you also have to make sure though when you think about, not that there’s really any downsides, but just that isolation of your employees, or in our case our 1099s working on their own from home. You just have to be aware of and really think about your strategy of how are you keeping people connected to other people in the company and how are you placing importance on the human interaction component on your business. 

JEFF: (30:42) So, how are you battling isolation and keeping people connected?

GREG: We just talked about a couple of ways, doing a lot of these virtual meetings where you’re connecting people virtually. We have folks within our human resources department who do reach out, talk to our remote folks on a regular basis to make sure they’re doing okay and seeing how things are going. So, just making sure you have those communication strategies in place and you’re doing regular reach outs to your remote folks to check in on them and see how they are doing, because you can’t do the management by walking around obviously, with a virtual workforce, so how are you connecting with and how are you reaching out and checking in on people, is a critical element.

JEFF: (31:30) I assume when most of your agents are talking to most of your customers, or most of the end customers, it’s over the phone or, as you’re saying these more text, chat-based things. Do you use video calling a lot for these meetings or do you stick with the voice calls? 

GREG: Some of our programs do have video components. We have some customers who we work with and partner with where our agents are doing video chats. A lot is voice and then, like I said, we do email and chat, but primarily it’s a lot of just voice work.  

JEFF: (32:08) So, your internal meetings tend to be more voice based, conference call, thing, as opposed to a video meeting? 

GREG: We do a lot of video with our internal, so for our employee based meetings we use different tools like Zoom and Go To Meeting and Blue Jeans, and all those different tools out there that enable both video and voice, so we use a lot of those tools also, in trying to create that connection in using video too.  

JEFF: (32:38) Let’s talk a little bit more about communication. Particularly in a distributed work environment, I find that you need to be more proactive, more thoughtful about  coming up with more of a communication strategy, philosophies around all this; you mentioned it’s important to communicate a lot. Are there guiding principles that you’ve developed over time around all of this?

GREG: I think the biggest one is, and this probably goes for whether you have office based or remote folks, is never assuming that people are getting the information, especially in a virtual environment. So, how are you sharing updates on a regular basis to your entire staff, and obviously the importance around your remote workers and then sharing that in different ways. Is it video updates? Is it sharing messages within some of your communication tools whether it’s a Slack? Just sending a company email these days probably isn’t always the most effective way to do that, just given we’re all inundated with hundreds or thousands [laughing] of emails on a regular basis, so what are you doing to effectively get your message across to all of your employees and obviously the importance around the remote folks to make sure they are getting the information and they are up to date and up to speed on what’s happening within the company.  We do a lot of quarterly company all hands. I’ll send out video updates on a regular basis. We’ll share updates and like I said, our different tools. But using a lot of different forms of communication to share information is a key component.

JEFF: Right. It’s not enough to just send an email. It’s probably a good idea to also, if you can, put the email into Slack or mention in Slack, everybody check your email. Hit as many communication mediums as possible.  Some of it is personality type, as to where people gravitate to communication wise, but even department to department, team to team, they can be different tools, different methods that people are falling into, so don’t assume that everyone’s communicating the same way that you are.

Reach out to your employees and your staff and ask them what’s an effective form of communication for them. Solicit employee feedback on how best to share information and communicate.

Greg Hanover

GREG: I would also say reach out to your employees and your staff and ask them what’s an effective form of communication for them. So, soliciting employee feedback on how best to share information and communicate is where we typically start.

JEFF: Absolutely.

GREG: Versus assuming we know what is the best way.

JEFF: Yeah, totally. (35:31) What about training? We talked about the ability to hire entry level people or not, but professional development stuff and ultimately building the team that you have, building the skills of the team that you have. How does that tend to work in an environment like this?

GREG: This is a great one too. This is another paradigm shift happening. We talk a lot about virtual work, another big topic which ties in nicely to this is just how do you train a remote workforce? There’s the belief that if somebody’s not sitting in a classroom and you can’t see them that they’re not learning.  When you think about the changes that are happening in training and how you can train people virtually, and actually see more benefit, it’s pretty interesting, it’s pretty powerful. It’s one of the biggest parts of our success as a company.  We have what we call LiveOps University. It’s a 24/7 learning center where we use a blended learning methodology to train individuals. We have a learning management system. There’s a lot of self-paced learning where they go in and learn on their own and take tests and quizzes to ensure that they’re capturing and retaining the information and we also do virtual classroom so people can log in and be part of a virtual classroom session. We do one on ones, but we really use a blended learning methodology, and everybody learns differently, we know that, so to think about sitting in a classroom and training with the lowest common denominator which isn’t always the most effective way and you’re at the mercy of how good is that trainer at the front of the room, when you think about the benefits of a virtual learning methodology here and how you’re allowing people to learn in a way that is good for them, it’s a lot more beneficial. We actually have a lot of companies now who come to us just for our learning curriculum, so they see the benefits, they see how we’re able to successfully train individuals in a remote environment, whether it be for a basic customer interaction or a very complex customer interaction, and they see that we’re able to do it in a cost-effective, consistent way, they’re actually now leveraging and tapping us for our learning curriculum to use within their companies, because they see the benefits and the advantages of this blended learning methodology in a virtual environment, and it’s so much more powerful than what a classroom setting provides. And, we’re not the only company,  obviously, out there doing this. There are a lot of companies who are really figuring out and are very forward thinking when it comes to the virtual learning curriculum, but dislike virtual work in general, you’re going to continue to see this massive shift to the virtual learning environment.

JEFF:  Yeah. We’re seeing that more and more as universities are starting to embrace that style of learning and I think we’re going to hit the tipping point with that eventually where it’s a perfectly reasonable way to go. (38:35) How are you incentivizing it for the employees? Is it something that’s part of their, like, “hey, next month we’re going to send you to training,” or is it sort of optional? Maybe all of these things. How is that used in terms of the people management side of it, the operational resource management.  

GREG:  That’s one of the things we’ve been spending more time on recently. We’ve really iterated and figured out, or if it had a lot of success in using this learning style within LiveOps Nation or 1099s, and we’ve been spending a lot of time on how do we now take this methodology we have and use it internally with our employees. That’s something that we’ve been continuing to invest more into and will continue to leverage with our employees going forward now that we’ve really had a lot of success and figured out how to do this within our remote 1099 environment. It’s just as important to our employees as our 1099s, so that’s where there’s a big investment being made right now to leverage this with our employee base also.

JEFF: (39:46) I guess this also overlaps a little bit with management techniques in general. What have you found about managing remote workers?  Obviously, you can’t micromanage. In your environment maybe there’s monitoring software you can listen in, quality control stuff that way, but how are you measuring results and ultimately, more on the management side, that feedback loop of talking to employees. I guess there’s different answers on the employee versus the 1099 side but address all that a little bit.

GREG: This is a great topic that I think is [laughing] debated quite a bit in terms of how do you measure success in a virtual work environment? I think there’s a couple of things that come to mind that we’ve learned quite a bit over the years, is, one, your profile upfront. When you’re hiring people into your company are you really hiring people who fit the profile of a successful virtual worker? No everybody can work from home and be successful. We know that. We talked earlier about the level of discipline that’s required to be successful working on your own and working virtually. Then the second piece is, how are you measuring success of that employee or worker in general? It’s all about being productivity based. Are you measuring their results? Are you measuring their productivity? If you can’t accurately measure their productivity, it’s going to be difficult  to determine whether that individual is being successful or not. You have to get away from this whole, “if I can’t see them, they’re not working.”  You still hear that quite a bit. [laughing] It’s kind of scary because with where we’re going with our workforce, you really need to focus on productivity and being results based versus “if I can’t see them, them I’m not sure if they’re getting their job done.”

JEFF: It’s such a dangerous philosophy, because all you need to do is be that 180 degrees behind the computer monitor and they can be on Facebook all day and you wouldn’t really know, but it looks like they’re working. [laughing] 

GREG: Exactly.  It’s actually scary because if people continue to stay tied to that methodology of, “I need to see them and they need to be in the office 8-5,” my fear is those are the companies that are going to get left behind, because the workforce is changing and if you’re not changing with the workforce you’re going to have challenges succeeding in the future. 

JEFF: I don’t mean to say that being on Facebook is even necessarily a bad thing. Ultimately you need to trust the employee, leave it to them to be productive, to get their act together, and if they need to check Facebook that’s probably fine unless there are security issues on your network, or you need to micromanage. My new saying is, “monitoring is not management.” 

GREG: Exactly.

JEFF: It’s not. It’s just not the same thing.

GREG: Well, it goes back to the beginning there when we were talking about profile. Are you bringing the right kind of people into your business that can be successful in a remote environment?

JEFF: Yeah. (43:11) So, talking about these standard business practice, or at least what we think of as conventional management techniques, let’s talk about standard enterprise businesses, when we think stereotypically, we’re starting to see some embracing of remote work in Fortune 500 type companies, enterprise level businesses and stuff like that, it’s happening more and more. Each time I say, “oh, we’re not there yet,” I think, “oh, it’s been another week, maybe [laughing] we’re that much closer.” I still haven’t quite seen it yet, but there’s certainly inklings of this out there and we’re even starting to see money types venture, capital types who are much more friendly to this kind of thing than they were certainly 10 years ago.  (44:05) Talk to me about how you see enterprise businesses starting to embrace this. 

GREG: We get a lot of companies who reach out to us and want to chat about how we run our virtual workforce given it’s what we’ve been doing for 20 years. The recommendation we always share is step into it lightly. You don’t need to go from a full office environment one day to a complete virtual workforce the next day. Take the opportunity to step in and test things out. That might be one day a week you allow folks to work remotely, or you change hours and have more flexible hours. Whatever that might be, test and measure. Try it out and slowly step into it versus going full speed because again, there’s going to be a lot of learns along the way and you’ve got to slowly adjust. Especially if you have a culture that’s been built around having office culture. It’s a big change and it’s a big shift to a virtual. So, take your time and step into it and think about the infrastructure and the tools you are using to allow people to work remotely, successfully. There’s a lot that goes into it that I would caution people to move fast into a virtual workforce. 

JEFF: Certainly. I would also advise, keep a careful eye out for, I call them crutches. People saying, “well, let’s not meet today because I’m working from home. Let’s meet tomorrow because I’ll be in the office.”  People need to fully work, if you’re giving them a day to work from home they need to be fully working from home, [laughing] that you’re not really learning anything, there aren’t really measurable results if you’re just shifting around the work, particularly the interactive, collaborative part of the work to the days that they’re in closer, physical proximity. Find ways and tools to start to do that kind of thing.

GREG: Agreed. It just reinforces the need to move with caution, because you’re going to learn a lot when you start making that shift. A lot is going to change and there’s going to be a lot of feedback, so even more reason just to step into it lightly. 

JEFF: LiveOps has been doing this kind of thing for 20 years now. (46:24) Are you starting to see any industry trends around this? Are the sales calls easier when you [laughing] talk to people and say our agents are working from home? I’m guessing that 20 years ago that a harder sell than it is these days.

GREG:  Very much so. We talk about this a lot internally. If you were to ask me how calls went 10 or 15 years ago with enterprise companies, it was more around security and can people really work from home, and does this work, and what about the barking dogs and the crying babies. Today the conversation has shifted significantly, and companies are not asking those types of questions anymore, because work at home is becoming more mainstream. The problems are so great in our space for companies to provide excellent customer experience using traditional call center models, so we hear it all the time, where they can’t find the people, they can’t access the talent, whether it’s because of low unemployment or whether it’s because people don’t want to go into a physical call center anymore. Those are where the conversations are today. So, we’re just approaching it differently in terms of how we’re solving our problems.

JEFF:  Absolutely. As we wind down here, I’m curious to get your thoughts about [laughing] the buzz word, the gig economy. This oftentimes comes up around remote work. Oh, Uber drivers are remote workers, are they workers at all? This a femoral kind of thing is compared to your 240 employees and your 1099 people who at least know what’s expected of them [laughing] and can get some guidelines and some communication around that. (48:09) Give me your thoughts around the gig economy as it relates to this. It oftentimes comes up as this is the future. Do you feel like gig economy is the future? 

GREG:  I do. I think a lot of the trends we’re seeing are going to continue and depending on which reports you read from which research company, the consistencies are there in terms of the growth and the gig economy for the foreseeable future. I don’t get caught up on the whole gig economy concept. I look at it more as just flexible workforces and the changing mindset of the workforce and what people want in their life. It’s interesting because when we go to all these events and we host people at what we call LiveOps Road Shows and I meet with our 1099 community, and I ask them, “why do you come to LiveOps, and why are you part of LiveOps?” The first thing, 99% of the time they’ll say, “because of the flexibility you bring to my life. The fact you allow me to work around my life.” To me, it’s more about the changing mindset of the workforce and what people want in their life when it comes to work today, versus maybe 5, 10, 15 years ago. I believe flexible workforces are here to stay and you’re going to continue to see it grow and it’s going to continue to pressure organizations to figure out on how to provide flexibility because if you can’t figure it out, you’re going to start seeing attrition for folks that are going to go into companies who want that flexible work environment.

JEFF: I guess when we think about the gig economy it is this fungible workforce, with such a high turnover and almost this anonymous relationship, but it doesn’t need to be. These could be supported people who have a relationship and actually care about what they’re doing with the company the work for and the relationship to that company, as opposed to something like Uber where it feels more individualistic. It’s the relationship between the driver and the people that they’re driving, and that the actual Uber company is just an operating system to make all of this happen, which doesn’t map to all work environments.  

GREG:  Hopefully one of the things that’s come through in our conversation today is the importance we place on building community in our business model. We place high importance on the human interaction and on the members of LiveOps Nation, the 1099s in just in how we allow them to interact with LiveOps Corporate but also interact with other 1099s. We place a high importance of building that virtual community because we believe it’s a big part of allowing us to be successful with our enterprise customers in providing that excellent customer experience.