[00:00:06] Debbie Goodman: Welcome to On Work and Revolution, where we talk about the world work and Edtech. I’m your host, Debbie Goodman. I’m CEO of Jack Hammer Global, a global group of executive search and leadership coaching companies. I’m also an advisor to venture backed Edtech founders. And for those of you in Edtech who are hiring, we have launched a fractional leaders offering in addition to our full time executive search.

I’ll put a link in the show notes. My main mission with all of my work is to help companies and leaders to create amazing workplaces where people and ideas flourish. So today I am really thrilled to have Beth Hollenberg as my guest. Beth has more than actually many, more than 20 years experience building and scaling Edtech companies on the ground and online in both K 12 and higher ed markets.

She is currently CEO and co-founder of Everspring, which is a pioneering education technology and services company recently listed again as one of Chicago’s best places to work. So, Everspring partners with top ranked universities to help them build and market high quality online and hybrid programs. Prior to this, Beth was President and Chief Operating Officer of Kaplan Higher Ed, serving 40, 000 students nationwide, and which grew to more than a billion dollars in annual revenue She has many other years’ experience, but we have to pause there. She also holds a Juris Doctor from Stanford Law School. She was an editor of the Stanford Law Review and another law graduate who did not pursue a career as a full-time lawyer, just like me. Um, and today we’re going to be talking to Beth about the thorny topic of remote work and remote college experience and where we find ourselves when two years post pandemic.

Welcome Beth.

[00:02:06] Beth Hollenberg: Thank you. Really glad to be here.

[00:02:08] Debbie Goodman: All right. So Everspring has just received a best places to work award, which means that it’s at least a really good, if not great place for people to work, what work model have you selected for Everspring and why?

[00:02:25] Beth Hollenberg: Well, so prior to the pandemic, we were basically entirely face to face. So, we were one of the few employers that had very limited remote work. And when the pandemic hit, being a company that delivers online, it was very easy for us to move to be entirely remote. So clearly we, along with the rest of the world, uh, moved ourselves online and stayed there for a really long time. And when we came back, we said we were going to have several priorities. Okay. Great. Basically, the first was going to be health and safety, but the second was going to be our community and the preservation and nurturing of our community. And then third was our commitment to each other and to our stakeholders. And so we came back, we actually took a vote, uh, at one point and said, do you want to completely dissolve? We would have absolutely no sort of central place or core, um, all the way to all the way back. And our team at that point voted for somewhere in between. So, where we’ve struck the balance is two days a week, which is hybrid work, with a requirement that folks come in, everybody from every market, three to four times a year and that they come in for important meetings as needed.

So I would say that we’ve struck the middle ground. We struck it early and we haven’t deviated from it. We’ve held on to it when we were more in the office than most and we’ve held to it now that I think we’re actually less in the office than a lot of employers have moved to.

[00:03:52] Debbie Goodman: Right. Okay. So, you are sitting in that, um, structured hybrid segment. I actually just recently, like, a few days ago, read a report, the Flex report, which is very up to date. It’s a report as a Q2, 2024. It covers just under 6, 000 companies in the US and it looks at where we are now with remote work hybrid return to office. Can you guess how many companies are, what percentage of that is, is five days a week in office? Any thoughts on that? 

[00:04:25] Beth Hollenberg: So, and that’s all employers, not just the traditional finance

[00:04:29] Debbie Goodman: Yeah. Yeah. Just it’s, it’s a broad spectrum. I mean, just as a, as a general gauge, um, uh, what would you say like, what would your gut feel say to you?

[00:04:38] Beth Hollenberg: I would say 26%.

[00:04:41] Debbie Goodman: Okay. Well, that’s pretty close. I, it’s approximately a third. I was gobsmacked that a third of employers are back to five days a week, fully in office. A third are structured hybrid like you with an average of about two and a half days, in office. And then a third are fully remote, but that I had thought that we were done forever with five, five days a week. I thought industrial style, in the office eight to five was a thing completely of the past, but apparently not. So that was a fascinating piece of data that I just, read. Which I think was relevant for this conversation, because structured hybrid has got its own challenges. And what are some of the biggest ones that you’ve encountered at Everspring, because you work with large institutions, many departments trying to provide some kind of turnkey service. So how does that all work?

[00:05:38] Beth Hollenberg: Well, and we also interface with universities in almost every time zone. So we have this sort of duality of being multifunctional in house, and then also basically docking with partners who themselves have such varied approaches department by department within the university structure. So for us, the, the challenge has been that folks feel like their work is actually different. So one of the challenges we heard is, well, I’m in finance and so, you know, I’m heads down. I don’t actually need that interaction. Or our technologists who are actually coders who are largely head down. And one of the ways that we actually went about solving that, is really to focus on what people mean to each other. So individual work may be heads down, but our community is not. And to the extent that we’re coordinating services within our company, and then yet again, between our company and universities, the element of physical presence, not all of the time, but as an activator, right, what we found was that two days in, leads to many of the benefits of full time physical presence. And once we said that’s an absolute, not everybody liked it, and we did lose a few people over it. But I felt like that enabled us then to use that as a jumping off point saying we’re not all out, we’re not all in five days a week, but we are fully committed to this subset of time that we’re committed to. And in that, the only thing that we’re going to be absolute about is all of you matter. We also sort of have talked to a lot of people about the mental health angle. So your work may be heads down, but humans are important to humans. You’re an important part of the community.

You may not know who you’re important to. And so I think that that’s where we focused in order to sort of try to level set what is very different work demands, very different, you know, needs in terms of function to function.

[00:07:43] Debbie Goodman: Let’s discuss, I mean, that all makes sense. Nevertheless, there are some real challenges. Certainly I’ve encountered with my team and so many of the companies that I consult to and advise – that sort of loss of the incidental intangible information, the knowledge, the insights, the stuff that happens by, we call it osmosis, but really it’s the proximity that we have to people where we can just walk past another person’s desk or office or hear things as we’re having, taking a break, there is so much of that micro nano information gathering that happens incidentally, that we cannot possibly replicate in any kind of remote setting. And so how have you seen that impact your work environment or more importantly, the service that you offer?

[00:08:32] Beth Hollenberg: So there’s so much environmental learning. And it’s been such an interesting discussion to be in the college business while bringing people back into the office. Because part of our discussion was, well, would you have had the college experience you had if it was entirely remote as a four year traditional college student? And as we started to dig in with our team about what matters and what doesn’t, it really became very, very clear that there is a certain osmosis about not only our culture, but our team works on basically university dedicated teams. So not only is physical presence important for our own culture, but it’s really important for our team in terms of sharing aspects of the university accounts to which they’re dedicated. And so I do think it’s all those intermittent moments. It’s overhearing somebody talking, if you’re going to use our community as the example, somebody talking about what they did on the weekend or something that they read or an idea that they had that would never be worth scheduling a 30 minute Zoom call and we should talk about those artificial time blocks, right?

It’s the five-minute idea that somebody else hears and picks up on and says, wow, that’s really interesting. Uh, and there’s this, there’s a story, I don’t know if this story is true, uh, but there’s a story about Netflix and the lore is that streaming British based, uh, basically shows and in particular British mysteries had been killed multiple times at Netflix as being a bad idea. And then somebody in charge started hearing people talk about what they were watching on the weekends and the team themselves was watching British based mysteries. And so, you know, there’s, there’s sort of something about that informality that really speaks to how we operate as humans. And we’re very communal. We’re very tribal and we’re very environmental. And I think that you can’t completely disconnect that from the work experience and get the same results. There’s absolutely something that gets lost. Our question was, how much time together do you need in order to preserve that? And what we ended up finding out was, um, just being in the office two days a week does not do it.

That alone is not enough to sort of recreate basically the value of physical presence. And so we had to go a step further. And if you sort of look at it as an evolution, first it was, well, two days and any two days are going to be good enough. And then it was, well, we need to really organize how we’re spending our time together over those two days, what meetings we have, how do you use in person presence as a tool, as a communication and a work tool?

And then we evolved beyond that to, well, you can’t have it all be structured, because if you’re in two days a week and you’re back to back to back to back to back to back in structured meetings, you still haven’t preserved the spontaneity, the creativity and the brainstorming. So I’d say we sort of went through this evolutionary arc where now, if you look at how we spend our two days and occasionally it’s three days and sometimes it’s high, high value meetings, it’s really a mixture of social time and meeting time because those end up being important to how humans interact with each other, how humans build bonds with each other, and honestly how humans work most effectively together. If you and I have a personal bond were instantly gonna be more effective when we’re working together, more relaxed, more creative, more spontaneous, all those things that we know leads to not just a good workplace, but true collaboration, meaningful bonds and friendship. And when you’re working in any workplace, but especially one that’s dedicated to education and to university life, those things end up being as important to the overall sort of community as, as what you’re meeting on and what you’re, what you’re doing in terms of an agenda while you’re meeting.

[00:12:46] Debbie Goodman: I mean, I think the, the, the piece that you allude to, which is the social space or kind of like the white space, the space for that spontaneous creativity, which we never even needed to think about what didn’t need to be intentional. It just happened because of proximity, uh, to one another. I think that has absolutely been the most challenging thing to try to replicate because by virtue of needing to fit it into something, it automatically has this artificiality to it. And, I had to just accept, I mean, I work remotely from my entire team they’re working in very different time zones. I have a whole team that is Africa based. I have one meeting with them a week, but I’m on daily, you know, WhatsApp interaction with that whole team. But I’m a person who used to walk into the love being in the office every single day.

I used to love the walk around the floor, the chat to everybody, the picking up. I have had to accept that there is no way for me to ever replicate that because they’re, um, other than calling everybody for a five-minute conversation and interrupting their flow of, that’s just not going to work. So, um, I, and we don’t necessarily know what we are losing out on because we cannot replicate that, that intimacy, that spontaneity.

And perhaps we’ve, in the intentionality piece of it, perhaps there has been a, you know, uh, balancing, so to speak, who knows? I know that’s certainly that creative lateral thinking that’s, the idea generation, there are many companies that feel like they have just missed out on that and have found other ways to compensate.

 So let’s just talk about the one thing that most people hate, right? Because you and I have agreed on this

[00:14:33] Beth Hollenberg: Being told what to do

[00:14:35] Beth Hollenberg: Everybody hates being told what to do. I mean, the irony of it is, even as the CEO, when I have told people what to do, and then I need to live by that myself, I’ve occasionally bristled, and I have more control than most. So I, there is, there’s like a, a reflexive pushback. You’re not the boss of me, um, that, that I think is part of everybody’s psychology.

[00:14:58] Debbie Goodman: Um, and I think it’s that, um, that flexibility that people had because of the pandemic and then feeling like, okay, now we’ve been told what to do again. That has been a level of rebellion together with the harsh realities of the one thing that absolutely is unequivocally the worst thing, the commute.

Nobody ever said I would love to do a commute. Said no one ever. I recently read a post by Adam Grant where he stated that the best way to retain people is to let them work from home two days a week. Okay. So tick the box on that. He was saying that there’s an experiment, 1, 600 people over two years.

It showed that, um, it reduced quitting by 33%, especially for women and long commuters. The thing is that by having any kind of structured, structured hybrid, or in office sort of, let’s say even four days a week, never mind five days a week, commute is inevitable. It also requires people to live in relative proximity to an office somewhere. There’s just no getting away from it. Are there any creative solutions to this? Are we all just going to spin around in circles? Just going, accept it or find another job. I mean, what’s the deal?

[00:16:09] Beth Hollenberg: It’s such a great question. And I think, you know, the struggle to try to make things perfect for people and to make it everything for everyone, is something that I think we’re all going to fail at and, and I see it most clearly when I actually look at the broad variety of needs in my own workforce.

So I’m a fan of hiring people who are just out of actually, we have we have folks that don’t have college credentials. We have folks that are just out of school, but we also have people that are in their fifties and well into their fifties and that and everybody across the spectrum, people with new babies, with young children, with teenagers.

And so one of the things that I’ve heard if we look at work preference among our own workforce stratified by age group. It looks radically different because people are balancing different things in their lives. And so while everybody hates the commute, the question of what work conditions become fatal to somebody’s employment. At what point does somebody say, I don’t want to work somewhere that I otherwise would want to work. I’m going to give that up because I don’t like the work conditions in totality, you know, and I think that tipping point is really very different for everyone and we’ve seen it be different for people at different stages of their lives.

I had one person say, please, get me out of my house. I cannot stand trying to balance the fact that I have young children with Zoom calls. Like I’m done with it. And so I think that we’ve heard that sentiment too. There is nothing that makes the commute better. The only thing that I think we can hope for on the other side of it is meaningful work where people feel recognized, feel like they make a difference, understand why they are being asked to come in two days a week or required to come in two days or three days and strong bonds between them because I think that commute is always going to be a hassle, even for people that actually kind of love the separation between work and home. So I don’t think we’ve solved that yet. One thing I did hear that was very interesting that I think

 that can spread if you want the surface area of community, right? So if you think about one day a week, two days a week, four days a week, um, what takes whatever that kernel is and spreads it. I think we have yet to see an organization that truly can create a Zoom room that’s really always on. If you just walk into that room, other people are in that room and I’m sort of we, we’ve talked jokingly here about experimenting with it.

The room that if you’re here is always on or the live room that no matter where you are, is always on. So if you want to grab lunch in the room, you would just turn on the room. We’ve not done that experiment. And I think that while there’s a lot we could experiment with, that would increase the surface area of togetherness, I think that commute is just always going to kind of be part of what it’s going to take us to get to work because nobody wants to live at work, said by a former lawyer, where I used to work somewhere where there were in fact cots outside of the bathrooms and that was what convinced me to quit my law job.

I was like, you know, I don’t want to really work somewhere that has cots. So, uh, so yeah, I think the commute is here to stay. Unfortunately.

[00:19:28] Debbie Goodman: Yeah. Or one can always listen to a great podcasts. I have, uh, learned so many new things, in long, on long drives. So On Work and Revolution, listen to that on your commute. 

[00:19:41] Beth Hollenberg: I think that’s a great suggestion.

[00:19:43] Debbie Goodman: There you go. Um, the inevitability, but I think that that sort of statement that you, that you said, what makes it fatal?

And, I think there is that balancing act. Ultimately, if the work is meaningful enough, if the, when you’re in the office, it feels like there’s a reason to be there. It’s not just sitting with your headphones because somebody told you to come in, where there is something more than that, that glue, that adhesive that, that feels like, yeah, that actually was a great time today. I always hope that people will feel like that once they’ve, you know, on their, on their drive back home and they were like, that was worth it.

[00:20:14] Beth Hollenberg: I also think it’s really important that we know things about each other as humans, right? So if you’re coming into an office and it is completely separated from who you are, you know, what your life is like, what you like to do on the weekends, it’s just going to get less meaningful versus we’re going to be there, but people know each other and they can ask and sort of knit the fabric of togetherness that crosses those boundaries.

And we’ve seen really deep, enduring friendships be developed in that way, which I think sort of helps offset some of the, some of the more negative aspects like commutes.

[00:20:51] Debbie Goodman: Yeah. Um, I love your term retro intimate. Uh, you used it in the context of phone calls and just share a little bit more with listeners. I just, I always love new phrases that I hear.

[00:21:06] Beth Hollenberg: I have long thought everything old is new again and I am old enough that I have seen that play out in fashion, in fads, and in work trends. And so, I think, I mean, when you start looking at what Gen Z, what millennials are doing, I do think that there ends up being this rebound effect of the things that are, uh, enduring. And I’ve heard a number of people talk about really valuing phone calls, that they’re burned out on video, the video’s not doing it for them anymore, but they can really focus if they’re on a phone call. And I think of that as being retro intimacy that, you know, what do you do when it’s really special?

Well, I’m going to pull up a cup of coffee and I’m going to call somebody and I’m just going to call them and I’m going to be in that quiet corner. I think that there’s a lot to the idea that the things that sometimes burn us out in the moment when they are less frequent become very valuable. You look at flip phones making a return. So I think that sort of anti-technology movement, face to face, phone call. Um, it is. It’s going to be retro intimate, you really matter to me, I’m going to go back and see you face to face and I’m going to call you.

[00:22:22] Debbie Goodman: Right. Okay. You’re the trendsetter here, Beth. okay, let’s switch briefly to talking about remote learning in the context of college learning, because, I mean, you’ve been engaging with online and hybrid university learning way before the pandemic, way before it was a necessity. So I, expect you’re an authority on what works and what doesn’t. And then pre pandemic, there must have been a huge number of naysayers who believed it was impossible or unfavourable to teach online. And then they were all online for a bit and, uh, faculty were compelled to teach digitally and now there’s just a mashup. So in your opinion, when is person face to face significantly more valuable or like really essential in the college learning experience.

[00:23:09] Beth Hollenberg: I think that college does not mean the same thing to everyone. And so when we look at what, what many people consider a traditional 18 to 22 year old who goes to a residential college and has a residential experience. And when you look at that, that is what most people think when you say college. And yet, the majority of college goers in America in the United States have very varied experiences of college.

So I’ll start with, you know, I think that there is no substitute for the student that wants that residential experience as, as having that residential experience. They don’t need to have every course be in a classroom, but the dorm experience is real. And if you’re wealthy enough and you come from that, that background and you can afford to do that, It’s an amazing experience because you do make so many friends.

 I think for once you exit that and you look at alternative four year experiences, which are partially online or mostly online, you look at Southern New Hampshire, you look at Arizona, you know, ASU or some of the universities where people are attending while they’re working or while they’re in the military, there are still certain disciplines for whom and for which in person physical training is going to be essential and I’ll use healthcare and the allied health as the ultimate example, you can get really far with didactic or book learning, but at the end of the day, if you’re going to learn how to draw someone’s blood, you’re going to end up needing lab.

You’re going to end up needing a practicum. You’re going to end up needing that applied face to face. But a lot of the book learning, there’s just been a lot of tremendously innovative things that have been done with the supplementing of face-to-face learning with digital education. And so I think that it’s really, it really is a spectrum in which a tremendous amount can be done digitally, whether that meets the needs of the learner as an individual learner, different question and whether that meets the needs of the instructor as an individual instructor, there still is choice. But I think there’s a lot as technology is advanced, and now you even look at virtual reality and people that are practicing surgery in a VR applied setting before they actually do it on a human. They won’t get all the way there without ever doing it on a human. But I think that where we’ve come to is that digital capability is so powerful, that it really can get us very, very far up the learning curve.

[00:25:42] Debbie Goodman: I mean, I think that is just the magnificent situation we find ourselves in is that with the pandemic, which propelled people who were a little stuck in their approach to actually go digital, to go online, to learn new skills in instruction, to figure out new ways of communicating, we do have such a vast range of options.

 I actually did my post grad, my law post grad through distance learning, which at the time there was only one university that did distance learning and it was not online because there was no online, cause we’re in the same age bracket, Beth and, and I used to get these booklets that used to get sent to me and I used to learn from these booklets and then write an essay that would get dropped in an envelope.

It was completely manual and, and the learning, the experience was just really thin and poor. I mean, managed to, you know, get the degree at the end of the day, but comparatively now you can still have such a rich and, fully, engaged learning experience, albeit, you know, not necessarily full online on campus residential, but get your degree or whatever certification you’re going for, in such a robust way. So yay, pandemic.

[00:26:57] Beth Hollenberg: Exactly. I do think though, that a lot of people think that Zoom is online. And I think what we would say is that a tremendous amount is known about cognitive science and Zoom is one of hundreds of tools. And so I think for the online learner, um, the fact that it’s enabled by Zoom does not make it online learning. It makes it remote learning. And I think, you know, there was this great moment in the midst of the pandemic where it was like the emperor had no clothes and you, you know, you have faculty and universities that have existed with sage on the stage, you know, since, since there was chalk and rock and, uh, and everybody was like, we can’t change, this is essential.

And then overnight, everybody moved online. Everybody moved to Zoom. And I think that was the great wake up call that faculty, in fact, can pivot on a dime that humans are adaptable, that people love experimenting and that they can do well with it. That, however, is not a full learning experience. And so what we know as professionalized online educators is it’s not enough to just video yourself and put it up there.

People get bored. It’s not engaging. They drop out. There’s a really rich digital toolkit that that really can promote online learning with depth, with variety, with exceptional engagement, and it can be measured. What you can’t measure in a classroom, although you feel like you can measure it, is look, I know who’s engaged, I know who’s in the back, I can see it.

We can actually measure online is the interactivity between the student that’s learning and whatever’s being delivered. And when you start looking at the range of tools, short video, animated graphics, small modules of learning that can be reinforced, examples that can be delivered in through timelines and through branching case scenarios.

And the toolkit is so vast that as professional online educators, I would say a lot of what’s out there is still version one Oh, and Zoom barely, barely makes it into what we would consider effective digital engagement.

[00:29:13] Debbie Goodman: Well, it sounds like I mean, obviously, this is the work that Everspring does, and it sounds like there’s still a really exciting road ahead, which leads me to my last question for you, because we’re unfortunately at almost at the end of our session. But okay, so what are you most excited for with Everspring for 2024, we’re halfway through the year, but, what’s coming up on the runway?

[00:29:34] Beth Hollenberg: Oh, I am so excited by the level of thoughtfulness that I think is, is going on. I mean, we are in an incredibly disrupted period. This may be one of the most challenging periods for American higher education, certainly in my lifetime. And I think the, the, Productive byproduct of that is a rethinking of the value of higher education, of the role of higher education, of the modality of higher education, and I think anytime you get that level of both criticism, critique, inventiveness, you get a really good result.

Good set of innovative outcomes. And I think everything from alternative credentials to the rethinking of how we deliver traditional education to the rethinking of what is the value of traditional four year education and of graduate work. I think it ends up increasing the scope in which education can be used and made valuable.

So I think the array of choices that prospective students have and the array of modalities, is going to lead to really exciting innovation in this next chapter of American higher education coming out of a period of hardship, but I think it’s going to be an amazing period for innovation and growth.

[00:30:52] Debbie Goodman: Well, I absolutely love that optimism and enthusiasm, and, I’m going to continue to, watch Everspring’s, work. I, no doubt you’ll be on Chicago’s best list of places to work in the next year ahead. Beth, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me.

[00:31:10] Beth Hollenberg: Likewise. Thank you so much. It was great to be here.