February 2021

E-Mentoring Remote Workers Way back in the Pre-COVID Days, Commuting was quite a chore. To get to work, one, sometimes, had to spend hours in cars on clogged freeways spewing greenhouse gases, polluting our environment. If one was conscientious about it and used public transportation, they got to spend their commute time in crowded subways with people who may not have showered. Also, companies were limited to having team members who were close enough to actually make it into the office, lest they pay the moving expenses as long as that potential team member actually wanted to move to the part of the world where the company is located. Work from Home seems like it is a good deal for both the company and employees, so why was everyone so reluctant to implement this until COVID 19 forced their hand?    Along with the advantages to remote work, there are also barriers. There are several barriers to remote work which could limit its effectiveness. Dan Schnabel(2018) found that despite the benefits that telecommuting provides, remote workers feel isolated, lonely, and out of communication with their company and fellow team members. They lament the lack of relationships, and they see themselves not working at the company long term. These problems are causing companies to reverse their telecommuting initiatives and utilizing their budgets on real-estate for their employees to work, despite the advantages of Working from Home (Schnabel, 2018).  There are, however, actions that organizations can take to make remote work arrangements work. One of these actions is E-Mentoring remote workers.   E-mentoring is when a senior employee takes a junior one under his or her wings to “show them the ropes” of the job or provide career advice.  E-mentoring remote workers allow the organization to relay such factors as company culture and values as well as job know-how. So what I did, was interview some remote workers, and I found out for myself the five essentials for e-mentoring remote workers to be effective:  The remote worker must want to work remotely and be the type of person who can start themselves. Some people just love working from Home while others simply cannot stand to do so. The telecommuter must also be someone who follows boundaries and knows how to prioritize tasks. They must know how to use tools like their calendar and the Pomodoro Technique. When their spouse asks him/her to get kitty litter during work hours, they can tell them that they will do it after working hours in a way where they don’t have to call a divorce attorney later that day. Technology must be in good working order. Low speed, public internet connections that are available at coffee shops do not work. Too much time is spent getting the technology to work. High-speed, private internet connections with VPN should be used for optimum results. Ideally, the company can provide the remote workers with training in tools like Google or Zoom to facilitate their work. In the absence of face-to-face, use video conferencing. The visual connection between the mentor and the mentee helps in relationship building. The remote worker feels like he or she is indeed part of the group.  An occasional on-site meeting does wonders for morale. Yes, I know this isn’t easy during COVID. Still, the team should be periodically brought on-site for team-building activities. Occasional on-site meetings also help deal with the isolation.  Relationships were the key to promoting self-efficacy among remote workers. On-line team building, such as Zoom Parties or games to replace that collaboration time at the water cooler, help provide a virtual space for collaboration, much like the fuzzball table provided that space for brainstorming in the physical environment.  The relationship factor is quite possibly the most important part of the e-mentoring remote workers equations. Businesses could benefit by recognizing the competitive and cost advantages of maintaining a remote workforce. E-mentoring Remote Workers is a vital factor in the equation. Employees also benefit from decreased commute times and a better work-life balance. For telecommuting to work, there must be good communication. Candidates for telecommuting positions must be people who can manage distractions. Organizations should do what is possible to ensure that relationship building is occurring in a virtual workplace, including using technological tools such as video conferencing and periodic face-to-face meetings. With these tools in place, telecommuting can be advantageous to the employee, business, and society.  To set up a free strategy session on e-mentoring remote workers, Click Here To find out more about Dr. Work from Home and Dr. Jeffrey Levine, Click Here To read Dr. Jeffrey Levine, Academic Writings, Click Here REFERENCES LEVINE, J. H. (2019). Understanding E-mentoring and self-efficacy with telecommuters. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.proxy- library.ashford.edu/docview /2236393376?accountid=32521 SCHAWBEL, D. (2018, November). Survey: Remote workers are more disengaged and more likely to quit. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 1-4. [Retrieved from EBSCOhost]

Dealing with Disruptions On February 24th, 2021, Fry’s Electronics shut its doors for good, citing “changes in the retail industry and the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.” I used to go to Frys, and it would take me 15 minutes to find a parking space, browse the shelves for hours, and then stand in line for 10 minutes to check out. What happened? Frys was unable to deal with the disruptions and do business in the new reality brought forth.  I had pointed out in my last article several disruptions that have occurred over the past several years, COVID only being the most recent. Well, guys, guess what? That wasn’t the last one! I may not be a clairvoyant, but the one thing about the future I do know is that we will be faced with further disruptions. Take a moment to be with that statement {Jeopardy Theme playing in the background}. The good news is that although the disruptions may be new and unpredictable, you can systemize the solutions to dealing with disruptions. There are seven steps to systemize the solution. The first step is to identify the disruption. Identifying the disruption The first step to dealing with disruptions is identifying the disruption.  Before you can dealing with disruptions, you will need to identify that the disruption occurs: the sooner, the better! One of the reasons that COVID has been so devastating is that our leadership did not recognize it as a disruption. Our political leaders were promoting that it was just another flu. By the time the disruption had been identified, COVID had been spreading for months. By that time, it was already wreaking havoc on people’s lives and the economy. Had it been identified sooner, a solution may have been implemented that did not cause as much damage to people’s lives and the economy.   It is not just with COVID but with every disruption. Does anyone remember Montgomery Wards? Wards had been a force to reckon with in retail for over 100 years. Back in the old west, when frontier families wanted to buy something, they went into the Montgomery Wards catalog and ordered it. Wards had built a business from the disruption of the western expansion. One hundred twenty-nine years later, and it could not successfully pivot to the Dot Com Era. Had Wards realized the disruption that the dot com boom was to retail, it may have been able to pivot to a new business model, thus avoiding bankruptcy, and we all may have been buying our stuff at Monkey Wards rather than Amazon.   Declaring that it is a disruption The second step to dealing with disruptions is to declare that it is a disruption.  If you don’t say that there is a disruption, you could bypass it. Declaring the disruption makes it real inside of your language. Without something being real, there is no urgency to dealing with it and setting things in place to thrive during the disruption.   Grieving the loss of the old reality The third step to dealing with disruption has to do with grieving.  There may have been parts of your old reality that you really enjoyed. I cried when I heard about what happened with Frys. The place was a nerd’s paradise, and I enjoyed wandering through the store to see the gadgets on the shelves. I am sad that I will never be able to do that again, so I must be able to grieve that. I have also lost people in my life due to COVID, and I have to mourn them. Until I do that, I remain stuck in a reality that no longer exists, and I am incomplete with it and thus trapped to a certain extent in that reality.   Reviewing your strategic, tactical, and operational plans So you’ve realized that the reality you had been operating in has moved on. You are well on your way to dealing with disruptions. Your plans may have been great for the old reality, but they may be unworkable in the new reality. For instance, when I was a financial advisor, I used to find prospects by having a luncheon. I would pay for the prospects’ rubber chicken dinner and crack bad jokes while promoting long-term care insurance. Today there are no restaurants with indoor dining, and the target market is a high risk for COVID. That model is no longer workable. Parts of those plans, however, may have been salvageable. Although the rubber chicken circuit may no longer be viable, giving away free stuff to build a funnel might still be. You must ask yourself what is still feasible! Pivoting Of course, without implementation, any plan to deal with disruptions is a waste of time. With any change, you will have resistance, which is why Change Management practitioners make the big bucks. All the stakeholders in your project have their ideas, and you have to get them on board. Dr. Get in Focus has a methodology for dealing with disruptions, so click here if you would like a strategy session (Normally $599.00, but free for a limited time). Change management is essential as without having your team on board, your grand plan will be consciously or subconsciously sabotaged. Realizing that the plans are living documents, They do change. When one is dealing with disruptions, one must realize that plans always change.  We all know the analogy of the moon shot, how the course needs to be corrected quite frequently. No plan is written in stone. When circumstances are not what you thought, or there have been sub disruptions, you may need to change the plans. There is nothing really wrong with that. See what is really going on and then act accordingly. Repeat this procedure at the next disruption. Of course, the main key in dealing with disruptions is realizing that there will always be disruptions, and that is neither good not bad. If you could plan for them in advance, they would not be disruptions,

5 Business Disruptions that have Shaped Our World   Over the past year, we have witnessed some pretty massive business disruptions to our way of life and our way of doing business. These may have come as a complete surprise to us all but have been in plain sight all along. Several disruptions have occurred in the 21st Century that, have come about as a surprise to us although they have been in plain sight. Dot Com / Dot Bomb Subprime Mortgage  Social Media Donald Trump Covid The Dot Com Boom: The first business disruption to discuss is the Dot Com boom and the subsequent Dot Bomb.  Back in 1965, Some Government types invested in this thing called the internet. The internet ended up revolutionizing communications; by the ’80s, you could go on a Bulletin Board and argue politics and play games with friends. Is it any wonder that someone may have figured out how to sell stuff on the internet sooner or later? Does it take a rocket scientist to get that people would instead order things from home rather than fighting traffic to drive over to Monkey Wards? Yet retail was totally caught with their pants down when the shift. We lost several long-time retail establishments like Montgomery Wards, even though Wards created its own disruption in the 19th Century. The Dot Bomb:  Of course, a part of this business disruption is the other side of the coin, what was called, The Dot Bomb if a business is not showing a profit, its value will not rise. After months of stock gains by firms that were not even taking in revenue in the dot-bomb, just because they had “dot com” in their name. You could have a company called, hemroids.com and it would skyrocket in price. Economists were touting how there was a new economy. Finally, people realized that the emperor had no clothes, and the whole tech sector crashed. The NASDAQ peaked at above 5000 in March of 2000. It then crashed, and it took until March of 2014 to again hit 5000. People gained and lost fortune, even though it was well known that it wasn’t worth anything if a business had no revenue. Scotty may have been able to break the laws of physics, but the dot-commers, as much as a disruption as they were, could not violate the laws of economics. The Subprime Mortgage Crisis: One of my favorite lines in Star Trek is when Scotty tells Kirk, “I canna break the laws of physics.,” which is what I think of when I remember this business disruption.   The laws of economics are maybe a little more forgiving, but not by much! When people borrow money, the rule is that it gets paid back. When people loan money to those who don’t have the means to pay it back, there will be problems. It has been that way in the entire history of money. If there is no money to pay back the loans, there will be a negative economic impact – no matter how you might want to structure or restructure the loans, Yet when that’s how it ended up, everyone was surprised. Firms that have been around since day one, like Bear Stearns, went belly up. No one saw the crises coming even though the disruption was right in plain sight! Social Media: Social Media was another business disruption.  Social media permeates our lives. Hard to fathom that a few years ago, people were like, “Face What?” I remember laughing for hours over the name of Twitter, thinking about what a stupid name that was. Well, silly name or not, it has become a part of our lives. It has been used by celebrities, politicians, business leaders, and everyday Joes to spread their message. Remember the days when if you wanted anyone to read your excellent opinion piece you wrote, you had to get it published in a News Paper? Back in the 80s, there were these things called BBS’s where you could use your 300 baud modem to connect up with the BBS and write whatever you wanted to write, where people would read it. Eventually, someone would be bound to expand this. Donald Trump This one will be controversial; although I disagree with Donald Trump and his movement, I do not disagree that Trump was a business disruption.  Arguably, the orange-headed former reality show host has been one of the most transformative trends of my lifetime. When Trump announced his candidacy on Trump Tower’s escalator, Many thought he was merely doing another stunt to promote his business or TV Show. Trump had always been an over-the-top personality who would create notoriety and then capitalize the notoriety. Suddenly, though, he and his Make America Great Again movement caught the imagination of millions of people, and he unexpectedly was elected president. This transformed the entire nation. and the world is a much different place than it was in 2016 when he was elected At first glance, Trump came out of nowhere, but actually, the movement had been in plain sight for years. People had been growing increasingly upset with Governmental structures not responding to their needs. Technology and globalization have long been eliminating jobs and changing the world. Manufacturing jobs were leaving the country, and as far back as 1992 and 1996, H. Ross Perot and his “Huge Sucking Sound” drew over 8% of the voters. COVID: COVID was probably the most significant business disruption of my lifetime. The pandemic and its fallout have transformed everything from healthcare, entertainment, education, employment, dating, and fitness. We have found new ways to do almost anything in a manner that minimizes human contact. This is a massive interruption. People grieve over the lost pre-covid reality with people at various Elisabeth Kübler-Ross grief stages, from denial to acceptance. This new reality COVID has seemingly created has given us stuff that will stick around, such as Zoom Dating, Video Medicine, Streaming, and working from home. These all have