WFH Problems Are B and C Player Problems

My job is to help CEOs and leadership teams scale their companies and there are still a lot of people talking about a work from home problem and when you're talking about a work from home problem, what you're really talking about is a talent problem. So I've coached 30 plus companies over the last eight years. I've helped them grow and scale their organizations. I've coached companies that are in the same facility, they're fully remote, they're in hybrid settings and here's the truth.

The characteristics among our A players. Meaning people that live the core values consistently hit KPI driven gold 90 plus percent of the time. They are consistent regardless of the setting. They can be in a remote setting, they can be in a hybrid setting, they can be in office and they are the same.

They live the core values consistently. They're similarly productive, regardless of what setting they're in. And so when I hear organizations say, hey, we need to bring the workforce back into the office if they were distributed for a time or they had a work from home setting. What I really hear them say is we're tolerating a lot of B and C players in the company and those B and C players are people that don't live the core values and are not productive, right?

And particularly the C players who aren't good at living the core values and who are not productive much at all and really detract from the rest of the organization. That is what we need to solve for rather than punishing all of your A players by saying, hey, forcing them to come back to work with all the poorly talented people anyway, which is really not a reflection on them, their behavior, or their output. So what I would say instead is take a good hard look at your workforce. Ask yourself, how many people are we tolerating on a day-to-day basis that are consistently violating the organization's core values and are not giving us the output we need?

Those are our C players. And honestly, those are the people we need to move on from immediately. Move on from that group. And you know what's going to happen?

You're going to see the productivity of your team go up dramatically by at least 30%. This is fascinating, by the way. I have year over year, several years, I have tracked the effect of what happens when we release an A player into the water, excuse me, a C player into the wild. And it's, almost without fail, whatever KPI, key performance indicator metric that that team owns, it will go up by at least 30% when we release one of those people that's just dragging down the whole organization.

And that's why I've never heard in eight years one CEO ever say, I wish I would have held on to that C player longer. So instead of, like I said, punishing everybody else by saying the entire workforce is bad, let's bring them all back into the office, instead look very selectively and intelligently at who you're holding on to that you shouldn't be. Remove those C players quickly and expediently, and then really try to coach those B players, right, and the A players. They both need coaching.

A players respond extremely well to the right coaching. Coaching, and you can watch my other videos for how to coach, but look, you're going to see much more effective workforce, much more effective workforce, by doing what really needs to be done. Because what you're ultimately doing by pulling the workforce back into the office that really didn't need to come back to the office is you're really punishing your A players and putting them in greater risk of leaving instead of dealing with the root of the issue, which is grappling with the C players in the organization. Take that for what it's worth.