We’re seeing increasing evidence that no in-office perks are enough to satisfy employees into returning to the office full-time. If hybrid work is the new reality, do we need to change our security approach?
Check out this post for the discussion that is the basis of our conversation on this week’s episode co-hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), the producer of CISO Series, and Geoff Belknap (@geoffbelknap). Joining us is Joe Lewis, CISO, CDC.
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Huge thanks to our sponsor, SpyCloud
Full Transcript
Intro
0:00.000
[David Spark] We’re seeing increasing evidence that there are no in-office perks that are enough to satisfy employees into returning to the office full time. So, if hybrid work is the new reality, or just work from home, do we need to change our security approach?
[Voiceover] You’re listening to Defense in Depth.
[David Spark] Welcome to Defense in Depth. My name is David Spark. I’m the producer of the CISO Series. And joining me for this very episode, it’s Geoff Belknap as my co-host for this very episode. Geoff, say hello to the audience.
[Geoff Belknap] Hey, everybody. This is going to be great.
[David Spark] He is guaranteeing it. What kind of guarantee do you put behind that, Geoff?
[Geoff Belknap] I don’t believe I used the word guarantee, but I just know.
[David Spark] I’m guaranteeing for you.
[Geoff Belknap] Oh, fantastic. Listen to that.
[David Spark] Yeah, but I want to know what you’re putting behind that.
[Geoff Belknap] I am putting this episode behind it. If you don’t like this episode, don’t listen to it.
[David Spark] That’s your guarantee.
[Laughter]
[Geoff Belknap] That’s what you’re going to have to do. Go back and un-listen to it.
[David Spark] Un-listen to it. All right. Well, just turn back the clock, if you will. Our sponsor for today’s episode is SpyCloud. Act on what criminals know about your business. Oh, yeah. SpyCloud knows what the criminals know, and they let you know. More about that later in the show. Our topic for today, Geoff.
A recent study by Expensify found that it couldn’t create enough incentives to keep people in the office full-time if they were given the choice.
They’d show up for a perk but leave to work remotely. Now, while some companies are forcing return-to-office mandates are into effect, it seems like the work-from-home horse has already left the barn, noted Mark Thompson in a post on LinkedIn.
I’m going to ask you, Geoff, what are we gaining from the work-from-home culture and what are we giving up?
I mean, I think they’re both kind of obvious. Is there any way to get back what we’ve lost, do you think?
[Geoff Belknap] I think this is going to be an amazing set of questions for us to answer, I think, at a very high level. I don’t know that anyone can clearly articulate to me what we’ve lost. And I think as we go through this episode, dear listener, I invite everyone to sort of parallel the conversations we had maybe 10, 15 years ago about moving primarily from data centers to the cloud and how similar this conversation can be sometimes.
It’s like, oh, what are we losing?
And the reality is, anytime there’s a paradigm shift, it always feels like this. And I think this is just yet another thing we need to learn to adapt to.
[David Spark] Excellent. Well, the person who’s going to be joining us in this very discussion has been a guest on the CISO Series before, and he lives and breathes the work-from-home culture with hundreds of employees working from home, maybe even more. He will walk us through how he’s dealing with this very issue, but I’d like to introduce him now.
It is the CISO for the CDC, none other than Joe Lewis.
Joe, thank you for joining us.
[Joe Lewis] Thanks for having me.
Who benefits?
3:05.901
[David Spark] Alex McGlothlin of FloQast said, “It has become incredibly cost prohibitive to live in the cities that are typically tech hubs. Beyond that, my life is immensely better and less stressful living in a place where I can quickly and easily get outdoors, and it significantly improves my performance.
The chances that the best people for your team all live in one geographical area are very low.
You will not get the most talent-dense teams without remote, period.” Robert R. of Certification Technology Associates said, “Remote has always been a competitive advantage for organizations and companies that can utilize it, even if for a portion of the workforce.
What is really important is remote may have not been the final straw.
Other things that need to be looked at are culture, commuting costs, daycare, and cost of living.” So, I mean, this is kind of the obvious thing of what everyone loves about work from home is that they can live primarily their home life rather than it be focused on the physical office life, Geoff, yes?
[Geoff Belknap] Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. It’s sort of bringing this back to my theory at the beginning. The reason we all moved to the cloud, for those of us that could and could do it easily, is because then we could just focus on what we were building, what we wanted to deliver for our customers.
We had flexibility.
We could spin it up. We could spin it down. We could make choices easily and quickly. When you introduce work from home into a workforce, it allows them lots of choices and flexibility.
And there will be people, and I will say like myself, I work for an organization that allows you to be 100% remote. I’m in the office probably four or five days a week because that is what works best for me most days, but I have options. In this case, you want to do a couple of things when you’re a big, focused organization.
You want to attract as much talent as possible and as high quality of talent as possible.
And when you give those people the flexibility to decide when, where, and how they work, you’re really then enabling them to focus on how well they work, how good a product they can put out, and the problems you need them to solve.
You’re taking away the need to sort of solve all these other problems like how to get to work, how do you deal with your family, etc., that they otherwise would need to spend precious brain cycles on.
[David Spark] Good point. So, Joe, how has the work from home culture sort of affected the personal lives of all your employees?
[Joe Lewis] So, it’s really fascinating. My entire workforce is work from home. Okay? In the early days of the pandemic, they moved government personnel out of the offices, and we just never went back, frankly. The IT specialist and cybersecurity specialist in particular is one of those key areas, which as alluded to in your quote, you need to be able to attract good talent.
And the likelihood that you’re going to find that talent only limited to one geographic location is pretty limited.
And I’ll give you a specific example – me. The headquarters for the CDC is in Atlanta, Georgia, and obviously federal hiring is a lengthy process that takes a lot of time. They went through a pretty lengthy hiring process to look for a CISO, spent about 12 months, didn’t find a CISO because they were limiting the geographic region to only Atlanta.
I would not have applied and did not apply the first time that they limited it to Atlanta.
When they opened up to remote opportunities, I was able to take this job. I live in San Antonio, Texas. And so I am walking, talking proof that if you open up your geographic boundaries, then you are able to recruit a probably more diverse group of people than you otherwise would.
And it’s been wildly successful for us as well.
As a hiring manager, managing my cybersecurity program office, we exclusively try to hire remote if we can because then we can select the right person for the job, not necessarily who we have that’s on a list bound by a geographic region.
What’s the best way to grow your staff?
7:14.299
[David Spark] Jacob Ivester of GitLab said, “I think work from home is as much a short-term story about workers valuing and prioritizing their autonomy as it is a long-term story about companies desire and ability to control their culture. Companies that are built to attract and cultivate talent where it is, both geographically and regarding experience, can more broadly pull from the talent pool and will be most effectively positioned to address the market.
As quickly as possible, and where it makes sense, office availability should probably start being seen as immutable characteristic by those in charge of hiring and firing like age, gender, disability status, or race.
If that person can be hired for the role and is the best candidate, they should be.” I mean, this is speaking to what you just said, Joe.
And Stephen Doll of Capital One said, “We’re collectively going through a learning curve to rediscover what teams need to thrive and what firms require to strengthen and perpetuate valued and differentiated aspects of their culture. This is an odd contrast with some of the butts-in-seats impulses that we also read about.” So, Joe, this is what you were talking about, and really this all kind of boils down to it’s a new paradigm.
It’s a new way of building culture in an environment.
And you’re always going to have issues. Why wouldn’t you, right?
[Joe Lewis] Absolutely. I would say that building a culture with a remote workforce is entirely doable, and I think the knee-jerk reaction to say that, “Oh, you have to have people in an office in order to build a culture or imbue a corporate culture,” I think is a false paradigm. I think you have to be more deliberate when you’re working from home and working remotely in order to establish and maintain a culture.
You need to truly take stock and interest in your folks as humans.
When I took over 18 months ago, one of the first things I did was interview…or not interview, but really meet and greet everybody, every single one of my federal staff. It took me months to do so because there’s 93 of them, but it was well worth it because they got to know me as a human.
I got to know them as a human.
And we got to start talking about things that I found important that I wanted to imbue from a corporate culture perspective. And so I think really from a cultural perspective, the place where you’re running into probably the most snags is going to be middle management, entrenched middle management that are having to refactor or relearn how to be successful leaders and managers in a work-from-home culture.
[David Spark] What has been your toughest struggle dealing with work from home, Geoff?
[Geoff Belknap] Well, I think we just covered it here. The hardest struggle is really twofold. One, it’s taking some time to look at how do we keep people connected, especially people earlier in their career. How do we get them onboarded? How do we get them healthy? Well, we’ll say producing healthily and make sure that they’re in a good mental place.
And how do we keep them there?
Because it’s easy when somebody’s in the office, you can look around and go like, “Oh, it looks like you’re struggling with this task or learning this new thing.” Once they become established, it’s much easier to check in on people intermittently.
I think the secondary thing, sort of bringing this back to the topic of the podcast, is how do you look at security risk when you have to throw away that somebody’s working from a secure office or behind a badge reader door? And you sort of accept that people could be working from a bedroom or a living room or a coffee shop or a hotel.
And certainly those are very challenging topics.
And this is where you come back to not everybody can work fully remotely all the time in every situation, but certainly you can give flexibility to everybody. And you can, as a security organization, you can start to decide where are the boundaries, where do you start to go like, “Oh, I need a policy that says when you transition to this kind of work, or if you’re this kind of job family or type of work, there have to be different restrictions that apply in different scenarios”?
And I think that’s when you start to be putting effort into how do I evolve my security program and my workforce program, instead of just how do we force everybody back into this box that I kind of knew how to manage?
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11:27.782
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What are the elements that make a great solution?
13:17.318
[David Spark] Ryan Saul of Streem says, “The smart CEO is one who takes in information and evolves their business to the new environment, not one who tries to make the environment fit their preconceived notions of how a business should be run.” Ooh, that is an on-target quote there. Becca Chambers of ControlUp said, “Glad someone is actually trying to use data to make directions about this rather than ‘we feel like people are more productive in the office.’ No one cares about management’s ‘feelings’ if workers know there’s a better way and can find it elsewhere.” So, this is really interesting and kind of what we were referencing in the previous segment, Joe, of adapting for the market.
And if you don’t adapt, people are just going to go somewhere else.
I mean, I’m sure you know others who are in environments that are forcing people to be in the office. They must struggle with staff. Yes or no?
[Joe Lewis] Absolutely. And I’ll even tell you that the government as a whole is making a very big push to return folks back to the office. And the only reason IT and cyber seems to be not exempt, but kind of an outlier is because our skills are so complementary from a work-from-home type perspective.
But I will tell you that agencies that have been more draconian about their return to work have shed staff.
And in the public sector where we don’t get to compete with private sector with things like pay and some other things, when you lose good talent, it is extremely challenging to replace them with other like-minded good talent.
And so we need all the help we can get up to and including the flexibilities that work from home provides.
[David Spark] Have you had an experience with, let’s just say like your last 10 years of work because work from home was happening a lot before the pandemic, Geoff, were you finding leaders that were being more accepting of it even before the pandemic?
[Geoff Belknap] Sure. Yeah. I think there’s always a subset of leader who – I’m going to try to be delicate with this – or not. Actually, let’s just go the other direction. There are some people that are not great leaders and managers, and the only lever that some of those people have is being able to stand and look at you at your desk and either shout at you or stare you down or micro-manage you.
Those people’s skill sets are limited to the people that are in front of them and how they can micro-manage their work.
Now, before everybody loses their mind, this is not everybody I’m talking about that wants people back in the office, but certainly before…we’ll say before the pandemic as sort of a milestone, a lot of people worked for people like that.
I bet all three of us have worked for somebody that micro-managed and wasn’t great.
So, there’s, I think, a strong correlation between the people that want people back in the office and the people that really never learned how to manage their organization in a high-performing way. And managing your organization in a high-performing way is understanding what do you have to give or get differently from each person in your organization for the entirety of the organization to perform at the highest level, the highest output possible.
And what I have learned is everybody needs something a little different. Everybody needs a little flexibility in a different way. They need to work a little bit differently, or different hours, or use a different laptop, or a different tool, whatever that might be. And when those are reasonable requests, you want to give those because what you want to do as a leader is get the most out of your organization possible, which leads to a bunch of positive things, not least of which is attracting fantastic new talent to the team.
And in the cybersecurity space, attracting great talent is the name of the game.
Buying them is not really the only option. You can just also have a great team to work for and have a great work environment. And I think ultimately when it comes to security, this is a really challenging field to be in, and you want people that are highly motivated, that are excited to be part of a team.
And there are a lot of ways to do that, and they aren’t all just give them the most money, although certainly it helps.
[David Spark] I’m going to throw out something that I think it’s a pretty obvious problem with work from home, and that is the social aspect of it. I think about the fact that if I was in my twenties and I had to work from home nonstop, of which there’s I’m sure many listeners in their twenties, I’d be very upset and depressed because the office was a core part of my social existence in my early twenties.
And I just had this conversation with a young man in his twenties who’s a developer who is working from home, and he says it sucks.
He literally said exactly what I feared had this happened to me. He goes, “I spent the whole day alone all day. It was awful.” How do you deal with that thing? And it’s like, well, it’s technically not your problem.
It’s something they have to deal with, each individual. Because my feeling is that whole social environment of the office is gone.
Heck, I’ve worked in many offices where many of the people got married as a result of being in the office. I don’t think that’s happening anymore. Joe?
[Joe Lewis] I often wonder what my career would look like if I was 21, 22 coming out of college and then sliding into a remote job forever. I think I learned a lot about my social interactions and how to communicate effectively and just a number of things. And so it is a very real challenge. And I think, especially when you start talking about things like internships and workforce development programs, where you’re really bringing in up and comers that are young and that are hungry, how effective can we be at mimicking those types of interactions that we know that they’re looking for?
Right?
And I don’t know. I will agree with you that I am concerned about that as well.
[David Spark] But it’s technically not your problem, and we’ll get into this later, but doing things to improve culture, albeit remotely or maybe a couple times meeting in person would be key. Geoff, do you concern yourself with this? Specifically I’m talking about the 20-somethings here.
[Geoff Belknap] I will say I don’t specifically concern myself with creating opportunities for romance, but I do want to make sure that there are opportunities for people on the team to connect with each other and to build a healthy, trusting relationship. And that is difficult to do if your only interaction is just Slack or Teams or email.
That’s really tough.
So, what I’ve leaned into is making sure, and certainly budgets can be complicated and timing and planning, is to try to have on-sites or to try to have… If everybody is located in the same city, but they have the option and they’re not working from the office very often, you can have like, hey, one day a week or two days a week, everybody needs to work from the office closest to them.
Maybe once a quarter or twice a year, everybody come in and we’ll do some roadmap planning and we’ll have a dinner or some events or whatever.
And you just need to find opportunities on some sort of regular cadence where people can build some relationship, just a basic working relationship, and then you can build on that via Slack or Teams or email or whatever it might be.
But it’s hard to do it initially unless it’s face-to-face.
[Joe Lewis] I’ll offer that we do this, right? Once a year, we provide the opportunity for every single one of our remote workers to come into Atlanta and have an end-of-year kind of in-person. But then every other month, those that are local and are able to come in are able to come in and meet with me.
We do leadership meetings.
Just being very, very deliberate about that use of that tool of an in-person opportunity has been really, really effective.
Sometimes it’s really not that difficult.
21:06.739
[David Spark] Jonathan Harrop of Citi said, “Companies doing return to office and doing flex desks are missing the whole point and ignoring their own arguments about community and familiarity with coworkers. It’s okay to have a few for visiting employees, but everyone? Awful idea. On the whole, flex desks are a garbage plan.” And QT Le of First Citizens Bank said, “Did he really have to do this experiment?
Didn’t the beanbag chairs, gourmet coffee, catered food, massage, etc., from high-tech companies teach him anything?
People see through gimmicks. I think it’s clear what people really value, and that is personal time and space.” And they’re referencing the Expensify study that sort of launched this whole discussion here.
Geoff, this is just sort of coming back to where we started here. The bottom line is this is the new culture, and you have to work with this environment, and you have to come up with creative ideas like you just referenced in the last segment.
Yes? I mean, it’s just sort of like accept it. This is the way we work now.
[Geoff Belknap] Yeah. Look, I like gourmet coffee and catered food, and massages sound great.
[David Spark] How about beanbag chairs?
[Geoff Belknap] But the reality is… Beanbag chairs, those are a deal breaker. Can’t do it. Something about getting old. But the reality is we are no longer in a state as an industry, especially in cybersecurity and tech, but it applies to all industries really, where A, all employees that you would want to hire that are sufficient for your organization to be successful are no longer located near one or two major metropolitan areas.
[David Spark] But the thing is that was never the case even before.
[Geoff Belknap] I think it’s debatable. Absolutely.
[David Spark] Yeah. So, the idea being that actually companies are becoming more competitive because this is now the thing, right, Geoff? Before, you did have to pick the people in your city. You didn’t have a choice.
[Geoff Belknap] Exactly. I think really what I was alluding to before is people convince themselves that they are hiring the best talent possible. And the reality is you’re hiring the best talent possible within a 25-to-45-minute easy commute from wherever your main office was. That was not the best talent possible.
And what we know now with the advent of the internet and the ability to work remotely and so many great tools that can enable that is now you can get the best talent from literally anywhere in the world.
Now, there are many laws and labor laws, and it can be difficult to hire people over the world, but you can do that.
You can find the best person literally in the world and think about what is it going to take to attract them to work at your organization.
And I think if you look at cybersecurity, or certainly AI is an up-and-coming place where you want people that have that skillset, and they are not all in Silicon Valley or New York City or some other major metropolitan area. And if you want to attract them to work on your team, you’ve got to have a better pitch than we have an office with free coffee.
And you have a better pitch than we will just pay you a bajillion dollars.
Now, that will work for a certain amount of time, but if you want somebody to really be excited about working for you, you have to convince them that the team they’re going to be working with is a great team that is empowered, that can do great things together, that will not have obstacles in front of them, and none of those things require there to be free coffee and beanbags and ping pong tables.
But what it requires is the appearance that you have an organization that is committed to bringing the best people together to work on the hardest problems. And this is an easy problem to solve if you as an organization are willing to do the work in HR, do the work in IT, do the work in security, and do the work from a legal perspective to make it happen.
I realize I’m oversimplifying a lot of things, but at the end of the day, if your organization has the will to build a great team, this is an important tool in the toolbox.
[David Spark] Joe, I want to throw to you, and I would like you to close with some advice. Since you have been doing this for so long, and my guess is you haven’t done every step perfectly right, but you figured it out in the end, what would you say is the greatest thing you’ve learned from creating a work-from-home environment with so many employees?
Like what has been the most critical sort of elements for your success?
[Joe Lewis] So, I’ll tell you that new employee onboarding and that experience is so vitally important to get right a hundred percent of the time.
[David Spark] Can we go into the details of that? Give me some elements.
[Joe Lewis] Yeah, absolutely. So, we hired two people, ironically, who used to work for me that both lived outside of Atlanta. They started within two weeks of each other. Their onboarding experiences were night and day. One was extremely good. The other was extremely problematic from a HR perspective.
Paperwork didn’t transfer, things that were beyond our control.
And the difference it made in their attitude when they started the job was palpable. Okay? There’s nothing worse from a new employee experience perspective, not getting your equipment on time. Hey, it’s day one. And now I’m sitting here on an island.
I can’t communicate with my team. I have no work to do.
And I don’t know if I’ve made the biggest mistake of my life by coming to work for this company. Right? So, getting the onboarding is really, really important.
The other thing I think is I think it’s really important to over-communicate with new employees, especially when they’re in that first critical first 30 days. One of the things I do as a CISO is I meet every new employee individually for a meet-and-greet within their first week. Hey, nice to meet you.
It’s a pleasure.
We’re really glad you’re here. Tell me about you. Tell me about the needs that you have. Do you have all your accessibility controls met? Do you have any other reasonable accommodations that we should be aware of? How can we help you to be effective in your first 30 days? Right?
And then the other thing too is working with a good, competent leadership and management team to enable them to be empowered. And I like the way you used that term earlier, Geoff, to empower their employees to be successful. Don’t micro-manage. Give them what success looks like and take off the guardrails around you have to be here by 7 a.m.
You can log off at 4 p.m.
You have to tell me every time you are going to take your break. I don’t care about any of those things. Are you doing the good work that we hired you to do? Do you feel like the work is important? And what can we do to help make you more successful? So, all of that is very, very critical and even more critical in the very first 30 days because if you make a sour impression with that new employee during that work-from-home situation, it stays, and they’ll end up looking for some other opportunities.
[David Spark] Excellent advice.
Closing
27:48.781
[David Spark] And that brings us to our very last portion of the show where I ask which quote was your favorite and why, and I’ll start with you, Joe. Which quote was your favorite and why?
[Joe Lewis] I just love the quote about that flex desks are a garbage plan. And the reason that that’s so funny to me is because you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that we want you in the office and we want you to feel like you’re welcome and that this is a place that you belong, and then also say you can’t bring any personal effects, your desk is going to be different every time you come to the office.
And oh, by the way, the day that you’re in the office may be different from the day everybody else is in the office.
So, you’re coming to sit on Teams meetings anyways.
[David Spark] Good point. All right, Geoff, your favorite quote and why?
[Geoff Belknap] I was going to do the same one. Let me pick a slightly different one. But I’ll just point out someone clearly has some feelings about flex desks.
[Laughter]
[David Spark] I’ve never seen it work continuously. I hear them using it, and then it always peters out. I mean, has anyone seen, “We’re thrilled with flex desks”? Like anybody ever?
[Geoff Belknap] No. It’s fine for people that really are only going to be in the office once a month or something like that.
[David Spark] Right. It makes sense. And usually they have a certain number of desk spaces for the people who are visiting from a remote office, that kind of thing.
[Geoff Belknap] Yeah. My wife used to work for a very large consulting company, and they forced everybody to flex desks even before work from home was a thing. And it was the number one thing we talked about at the dinner table at that time was just you never knew where you’re going to sit, you didn’t know who you’re going to be sitting with, etc.
But I’ll just actually throw a piece of advice here.
If you are a CEO or founder or aspiring CEO or founder, and you want everybody in the office, here’s what you need to do. I’ll give you the secret recipe to having an office everybody wants to go to. Give everyone an office. That’s it. I know. I know it’s really expensive and it’s there’s all kinds of downsides.
But if that’s what you want, everybody in the office, you have to give them an office with a door that closes.
Otherwise, it will not work. And you can subscribe to my podcast to learn more about that.
[David Spark] That would be this podcast.
[Geoff Belknap] That’s right. Look, if this episode goes huge, I’m sure we can have more of this conversation. But I will say QT Le from First Citizens Bank said, “Do we really need to do this experiment in the beanbag chairs, etc.? Did we not learn anything?” I think the thing here is like, look, if you have looked at the data or if you even try to collect the data about what your organization needs and what they want and what is actually in the way of them being successful, being in the office more is not the thing that they are missing.
So, you need to stop kidding yourself.
And I know we all signed long-term leases, and we have real estate strategy that’s got to pivot, but it’s time to pivot and really look at if what your organization is doing is important to the world or important to you and your investors, you need to let go of the idea that it is critical to have an office at all or that it is critical to have people in the office and really lean into what does your organization need to succeed.
And I will guarantee you the number one, two, and three things will not be a really cool office.
[David Spark] Very good point. Well, that brings us to the very end of the show. I want to thank our sponsor. That would be SpyCloud, thrilled to have them back on board again. I adore what they’re doing over there. And you should get that free report of your users’ exposed identity data. It’s totally worth it to see.
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I did it. You should do it. Spycloud.com, go check it out. And I want to thank you, Joe. You’ll have the very last word. Geoff, as always, thank you so much for joining. Joe, are you hiring and are you hiring from anywhere?
[Joe Lewis] We are hiring, and we are hiring from anywhere.
[David Spark] Hold it. Does that mean literally do you hire outside of the country or no?
[Joe Lewis] So, there are rules. Actually, so CDC is in, I think, 62 countries at present. So, we already have staff all over the world. But from my office perspective, we try to keep it within the United States if we can.
[David Spark] So, if you’re in the 50 states, you can talk to Joe about a job at CDC and you can do it remotely. I want to thank you, Joe Lewis, who is the CISO over at the CDC and my co-host, none other than Geoff Belknap. And we also thank our audience greatly for your contributions and listening to Defense in Depth.
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