Here’s the transcript:

JEFF ROBBINS: Hi Folks. It’s Jeff Robbins, back with Episode 88 of the Yonder podcast where we talk to company leaders and big thinkers about how to make remote work. We’re focused on expanding the remote work job market and helping listeners to create happy, productive, distributed teams. This time we talk with Egor Borushko who is the Co-founder and Producer at the Running Remote Conference. Egor lives in Bali, and we got to talk long-distance, have a nice conversation about all the current state of remote work, the current state of conferences, the whole gamut of all the things that have changed around the pandemic, but also the trajectories that remote work had been in and maybe continues to go into [laughing]. Anyway, interesting conversation with Egor. 

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Alright, let’s get to our interview with Egor Borushko.

JEFF: Egor, welcome to the Yonder podcast.

EGOR BORUSHKO: Hi Jeff. Thank you.

JEFF: It’s great to have you on. 

EGOR: Yeah, it’s good to be here.

JEFF: [laughing] (2:37) The question I ask people first off is where are you talking to us from today?

EGOR: I’m located in Bali, Indonesia, tropical island.

JEFF: Yes, perhaps the most exotic location I had a guest from. [laughing] I always use Bali as the example that you can live anywhere in the world, for instance, Bali, and you do live there. That’s amazing.

EGOR: Yep. I’ve been here for 10 years and it’s almost turning into a cliché now.

JEFF: [laughing] Well, yeah.  Before we get into other things, I’ll let you introduce yourself to people. You are the co-founder and producer of the Running Remote conference but expand on that. 

EGOR:  My name is Egor. I was born in Russia. My childhood was in Malta. I’m been in the U.K. and for 10 years in Bali. I’m a truly global citizen as someone referred to me as, and as my day job I am a producer and co-founder of Running Remote, which is a conference and also community for founders and leaders of remote teams. 

JEFF: (4:04) The conference has run physically in the past how many times and where in Bali was it? Or, you’ve done it other places?

EGOR: I have been in Bali for 10 years and I’ve seen the remote work landscape and the coworking landscape really change the face of Bali. I’ve been really inspired by the movement. Being disconnected from the world located in the southern hemisphere, I had to find a way to sustain myself being here. Originally I’m from London and it’s quite an expensive city to be in. So, I went to discover remote work through online marketing which was my expertise. Long story short, my last employment was with a company called mystuff.com which produces software, and engineers of software that track productivity of remote teams, and there in that team I had an experience of working in a truly remote fashion with a large team of 100 people in 46 different countries. And I was even more inspired by the remote work movement, and so with the founder of those companies we had an idea of spotting a conference and what better location may be in Bali, because obviously I’m based here, it’s very easy for me, I don’t have to travel anywhere, and also it’s a place that attracts a lot of companies that run remote teams and whole teams are based here and a ton of coworking spaces as well. That was our first launchpad and we’ve had two conferences here in Bali.

JEFF: I didn’t make it there for the last one. I was thinking maybe I would come, it’s a long trip to Bali, but I’ve heard really good things about your conference, and you were planning on doing one here in Austin in March or April and then we had this pandemic that many people have heard about, [laughing] and that one has been postponed at least, but you guys have been doing online conferences. (6:26) There are all sorts of different aspects of this that I want to get into, but over the few years that you’ve been running this conference,  and there’s the physical logistics of running a conference, but you are also curating and figuring out what the messages are around this topic of the conference that you are running. I’m curious just in the past few years, what changes you’ve seen or epiphanies you’ve come to around remote work through curating a conference like this?

EGOR: I think right off the bat our tagline is to enable people to work wherever they want, whenever they want, and that’s essentially our driving force of running remote and we try to relay that in our content, that it’s not only for the hirers, the people that are the employers, the people who are looking to expand their talent pool and hire from elsewhere, but it’s also the employees themselves that are sometimes based in very rural locations and so with the conference we realize that a lot of remote work conversations happen around the western countries, the first world, who are actually the proponents of remote work and actually hiring all those employees all over the world.  I’ve realized there has been quite a big neglect of the impact that remote work has had around the world, specifically in third world countries, with amazing platforms like Upwork and Fiber. Those platforms have literally provided livelihoods for families and we try to portray that in our conference as much as possible, to  actually expand the notion of remote work that, of course, we know about the cost cutting and things like that, but what long term implications does it have for the future of work and essentially how the future work will pan out for that developing countries.  That’s one interesting area I’ve been thinking a lot about.

JEFF: To some extent you’re syndicating work, right? When you  disconnect it from a location you need to come up with the rules for how work works, [laughing] and systems and processes around communication and stuff like that, but once you’ve put that together people can work anywhere, and oftentimes anytime, and you disconnect it, which for companies starts to create a wider talent pool that you can pull from but potentially an infinitely wider talent pool, you can pull from people all over the world. So, there is inherently some globalization I guess I would call it, that can come pretty quickly with remote work.  

EGOR: Yes. Remote work connects people. It connects the world in unprecedented levels, and I was also quite surprised by how the proponents of remote work founders of successful tech companies are actually calling themselves remote because they are distributed within one country. So, they are actually non-collocated which is the official dictionary definition of remote work. 

JEFF: (10:27) The official definition is what, non-collocated? Is that what you’re calling it?

EGOR: Exactly. We’re not under one roof. So right now, at the time of COVID you have coworkers literally working behind the wall from each other, maybe in the same apartment block. That makes the culture in that remote company quite different to the culture of a remote company that has employees in more than one country. So, I’m specifically interested in how the founders and people ops managers in companies that are fully distributed are dealing with multicultural complications, multi-time zones. And there are certain advantages to that.  

JEFF: There’s a lot more potential when you decouple from location. There’s a lot more potential for all sorts of diversity; cultural diversity, economic diversity, language diversity [laughing], time zone diversity. A lot of these things that can become potentially a competitive advantage for companies but also can be inhibitors of productivity sometimes where you’ve got people spread out all over the world, and it’s difficult to meet. I think some people have found that. Some companies have chosen to embrace it, and just go  with it and figure it out, mold their company culture and communications, strategy around that, whereas other companies, I’ve talked to people on the podcast here who only will hire people who are at most one flight leg away. [laughing] If you have to do a layover to get to where these people live, where they consider to be the center of the company, that’s too much, whereas we’ve got companies that are just spread out completely, globally. (13:02) It’s interesting all the different ways that it works. The part I find most interesting about it is how you need to rethink everything. You have to start from the ground up. What is communication? What is work? And start to build it back up again. 

EGOR: That’s right. I  also think that labor laws in certain countries had made it quite difficult to hire  contractors remotely from a different country. There are now companies that are helping solve that issue for distributed companies. I  believe we will see much more cultural diverse teams, but nevertheless distributed work fashion still requires the same rules applied to the way you communicate, the way you document processes, the way you hire. Those are all the same. One of the main differences is if you’re working in multi-time zones you have work happening non-stop and that’s the amazing thing. You wake up and somebody in India had already just finished the day and handed over their task results onto your table when you start your day.

JEFF:  It has potential for great productivity assuming you can figure out the communications issues and make sure that the handoffs are happening elegantly. (14:35) What other trends have you seen? I guess to some extent where do you think things are going?

EGOR: Connected to dealing with companies with multi-time zones and multi-cultures, the notion of asynchronous communication has been more and more pronounced, and tested by more and more companies. Asynchronous communication is different than synchronous communication in the simple way that when you receive a message or an email from an employee, if you’re communication culture states that it’s asynchronous than that email doesn’t require you to reply right there and then. So, if it’s 2:00 AM on your end and you know that the other person doesn’t require a reply right now because that’s what your asynchronous communication states, then you can wait until you’re comfortable with your times to reply to that message.  So, that takes away a lot of stress from managers who are dealing with multi-time zones such as myself. I have messages coming in all the time, but because everyone knows that I work in async manner, I will reply when it’s good for me. So, that builds up a certain expectation and I’ve seen a lot more companies now adopting that methodology.  

JEFF: I feel like we were following certain trajectories and you could see these trends emerging and then the pandemic hit, and it’s changed everything. [laughing] So, there’s sort of like, what trends were you seeing and then there’s like, where are we now, which is a whole different conversation. The thing I’ve been saying is, with Yonder I had built this soapbox I was standing on and saying, “hey everyone, remote work is great. You should try remote work. Let me do some interviews with some people who are having success with remote work, and you can see what remote work is like,” and then all of a  sudden everyone started working remotely, they started working from home, and now it seems silly to be on a soapbox about it, like, “hey everybody try it. It’s great.” People are doing it and they have opinions about it. I don’t know that they’re necessarily doing it right. [laughing] I  think there’s still a lot they can learn from those of us that have been thinking about it and doing it for all these years, but it seems a little bit silly to be evangelizing remote work these days. 

EGOR: Yes, to the point that everything has changed, the landscape of remote work has changed in a very unexpected manner. Basically, we no longer have to promote it as a perk, it’s a necessity, it’s just a simple survival mechanism. I think this also shows some companies that should there be any kind of infrastructure lock down in the future, and there can be a million reasons or causes for this right, these companies are not going to be more prepared to not disable their daily business operations, having now embraced this model. But, of course, it will leave a sour taste in a lot of companies who have now been thrown at it without the correct toolkit, and  I speak on a daily basis to acquaintances that work for large organizations that can’t wait to go back to the office because they miss the water cooler conversations, because basically from what I’m hearing, is because they don’t have a culture manager who specializes in remote work. So, they haven’t adopted the correct methodology and that’s where Running Remote comes in, and educational tools and podcasts and eBooks. It’s basically to go back to the ABC, and a lot of companies haven’t had the ability because they are simply trying to get through the nitty gritty of their day to day massive pivot that has happened right now. But now that we’ve had a couple of months of COVID, and a few  organizations have now proclaimed that they’re going to be permanently remote like Shopify, CoinBase, AWeber, Nationwide, Facebook, I think now these two months have given an opportunity for a pilot program. That has also been one of the trends that I’ve been seeing in the last couple years where a large organization would want to continue doing remote work, however, they shouldn’t think about going all remote and sending the whole department remote, they should pick a pilot group of maybe 10 or 20 individuals. COVID has just magnified that so all these companies that have gone through their pilot programs and those that have seen advantages and done it successfully are  going to continue.

JEFF: I’ve definitely been discouraging companies from taking a trend that a lot of companies do where they say, “we’re going to let people work from home one day a week and then maybe we’ll go to two days a week and then three days a week and then four days a week, and eventually we’ll be completely remote.” I think that’s not a great way to progress because what you do is you move your meetings to those four days a week, then three days a week, then two days a week, [laughing] and then you put all of your meetings on one day a week and when you give up that last day you’re not really down to 20%, you’ve just crammed 100% of your interactions into that one day and you haven’t really learned to work remotely. So, instead what I advocate is more of a remote first thing where you take this on as a philosophy for the company and/or send everybody home [laughing] all at once and learn it altogether, which is basically what we’re doing right now. It’s sink or swim. There’s some companies that are finding that it’s good and working for them and then there’s others that are [laughing] resenting it and saying things like, “we’ll never do this again, it’s awful.” But that’s inevitable.

EGOR: I think that a lot of companies that have got it right and they’re committed to making it work, will actually see their productivity increase exponentially, simply due to the fact that remote work enables you to reveal all the caveats that you have maybe in your communication or process recommendation, so if things don’t work remotely and you need somebody to go and plug in the gaps with their presence, then you’ve got a flaw, and I think it’s a great x-ray exercise to see maybe the organizational chart does no longer apply.

JEFF: You definitely need to rethink things a little bit, realize that there is a difference, but it is a one to one relationship. One of things that I say is that “good remote management is simply good management.” These are tactics that work in a collocated environment as well. However, you can kind of get away with more things. I think there’s a lot of things that happen when we’re physically located together that feel like management, feel like communication, feel like productivity, that oftentimes aren’t, and it can feel like stopping by someone’s office and having a conversation about sports for a little bit is connected and we know what’s going on with each other now and we’re synced up and aligned in our goals, but it’s [laughing] not really that.

EGOR: Exactly.

JEFF:  There’s value to it but it’s not that. 

EGOR: I think also, I have met founders here in Bali, who have flown from across their world and left their team behind, and they’re basically waiting to see what happens with their company. They’re a remote CEO, everyone else is collocated and they’re waiting to see, and if the business doesn’t work without them, then there are major issues that they need to fix. 

JEFF:  That’s always a good one. I think a lot of CEO’s founders, in particular, find that in order to sustain the company, in order to come up with culture process systems that are sustainable, they need to figure out how to extract themselves, and oftentimes [laughing] it doesn’t happen very elegantly. They just leave for a month or two months or six months or something, and hope that things will right themselves, that the company will heal itself and the people will start to fill in the gaps and figure things out, but sometimes it doesn’t.  

EGOR: Definitely. I think the culture of a mini CEO where everyone is responsible as the CEO of their own area of the company, that works really well, which means that you have far more autonomy to the extent that I’d rather you make a bad decision than no decision at all. Or if you give me three options of performing this task, give me the one that you think is the best at the same time. So, all of these things make you think like an entrepreneur but also make you much more responsible for your area of the company as opposed to my experience being in offices where you basically walk in and there I would have formed the plan for my day based on what my managers would want.

JEFF: And it follows the theme that comes up so often in remote work of autonomy. That remote work is autonomy. There’s a certain amount of self-management that comes in, it’s just part of the thing that you need. You need to embrace trust and allow people a certain amount of autonomy, self-management and that leads pretty quickly to people having their own agency in the company, at least in their own work.

EGOR:  I was having interesting conversations regarding this actually recently with a company who were actually afraid of this mini CEO format because our employees will become entrepreneurs, start their business and leave, and [laughing] I said on the contrary I gave that company an example where I know a CEO who hires only a person who he knows will be likely to quit in the next two years. So, somebody that’s at the verge and they’re hungry and they’re full force, they want to hire that guy. So, I think it really is not for everyone, and therefore we do have these various models within remote work as well, but remote work by itself is just not for everyone, and it really depends on the entirety of the CEOs and founders themselves.

JEFF: [laughing] Yeah. (27:25) How do you think all of this is going to play out. What do you think that remote work will look like as the world starts collocating again? That companies start back up again. 

EGOR: The funny thing is that even being in 2020 before COVID, there have still been very large number of companies who think that remote work is just a bunch of fun for people that want to be irresponsible and go sip a coconut under a palm tree, and that’s what remote work is. 

JEFF: [laughing] Well if they didn’t have all of those coconut trees in Bali, they wouldn’t be saying that. 

EGOR: [laughing] Yeah, and I’m like, “really, wait a minute. We’re in 2020. We’ve had remote work for a good 4-5 years present here and you still think it’s not serious?” That is going to be gone, completely evaporated with some of the big names that I mentioned previously and that these serious companies, like Shopify have actually been components of remote work for quite a while and have made large scale operations very successfully in  a remote fashion.  I think that  there’s going to definitely be more trust in remote work. I think that for every coin base or Facebook going remote there’s going to be another thousand companies that are going to follow suit. They’re simply going to follow that same case study, so I think that it’s generally fantastic for the world. I think it will enable more people to be more mobile and actually implement their dreams that they had for awhile to go visit certain places to maybe work at the time that they want to work, rather than the time when everyone walks in, to work during the hours when you’re most productive. For a lot of people 7 PM is when their brain switches on. Not for me, I’m a morning guy [laughing], but for a lot of people that’s like, when everyone is gone from the office and, of course, Jason and JJ from Basecamp talk about this in their book, that 6 PM everyone leaves, that’s when I start to go into my deep work. So, it will enable people to actually live fuller lives to spend more time with their families. I think a lot of goodness is to come, however I’m always focused on the problematic areas. That’s just how my brain works, on how everything is amazing, but how do we make things better? I think the only way to make it better is find the companies who have had sour experience with remote work, who have had these in the past as well, Bank of America, Mellon Bank, a couple others. They didn’t have a good experience, so I’d like to focus on what made this experience bad and why didn’t it work out. Most of the time it’s the same issues, it’s just lack of processes and the a, b, c understanding, maybe bringing somebody into the HR department who understands this and has experience. I think healing those companies that have a sour taste of remote work following COVID, that’s going to be the focus for Running Remote. Bali coworking spaces are completely empty, and I think together with the hotel industry and travel industry it has a really big fear of its survival, however I think the coworking industry is going to massively scale up after COVID is over. All those people who have their employment contracts changed by the organizations they work for. I think Twitter has 20,000 employees or something. They’re  all gonna wanna travel, so I think coworking is actually going to become the norm as well, and that’s thanks to COVID. But, we try not to talk about the good things as much because all of this has been caused by a massive tragedy, which has had a lot of people not be here with us anymore, so, always trying to remain mindful as to why this all started.

JEFF: I feel there’s going to be a rebalancing. A pendulum swing. Obviously all these people are working from home now and for some it’s working well and some it’s not working so well. I think that the pendulum will swing back the other way for a bit, but there’s also going to be this momentum back for a lot of companies that maybe were resistant to try it, now they’ve tried it, and there may be aspects that will work for them in the long run. 

EGOR: It’s definitely huge, huge news, something that we didn’t expect, and, of course, most products that are now built, and tech products and services that have been built to sustain the remote work management practices, they’re all booming right now. What I’m seeing is also a lot of products are being shipped much faster because companies are having to pivot and readjust, and restaurants are now having to do online deliveries and such.  Another externality that I see from this is that the procurement of products being shipped is going to be much faster, meaning that developers have super-compressed experience right now, and I think that’s really exciting. We’re going to see some really awesome products come out.

JEFF:  I feel like there’s almost this, it’s tough to sum up this concept, it’s so wide, but a redefinition of professionalism that in the past with an office job you needed to get dressed up and put on a suit and a tie, and you would go in and pretend to be a professional person [laughing]. That you would ignore the things that made you a non-professional person, your family, your kids, the difficulties of your life, the chaos, and now that we’re  working from home and using Zoom, people have animals that are hopping on their lap while they’re on a Zoom call, or children that are, and initially there’s this gut feeling, these hundred years of work evolution that make us think, I need to be a professional person because here I am on Zoom, but the truth is that we are just human beings, and it’s okay. (34:43) While it can inhibit communication, it can inhibit productivity, the truth is that these things are oftentimes doing that anyway just in the background. I feel like we’re starting to accept each other’s humanity a little bit more, and in the same way we’ve got  these lean start-up style product development cycles where products are developed in a more human centric way where you’re shipping them a little bit earlier, saying, “this is a beta version. Give us your feedback. Let’s talk. We’re all humans.” And these faster cycles are causing that. I think in this chaos we’re showing a little bit more of our nooks and crannies, the humanness of things, and that’s okay. I like that trend.

EGOR: Beautifully said Jeff. I do think it’s not the most intuitive point of view where actually remote work and digitalization of the world brings people closer to each other. As opposed to separating people more and more, it actually brings people closer where now in standup meetings or Zoom calls, you can actually say more things than you could’ve said in Board meetings and stuff like that.

JEFF: Well, you kind of have to because there’s not the water cooler, there’s not those non-verbal ways of communicating, there’s not the casual sports conversations. Those need to be brought in. “How’s everybody doing?” “How about that sports?” Well, there’s not really any sports happening right now, but “how about the weather?” [laughing] “How are your kids?”  Incorporating a lot of this stuff that was seen as unprofessional in the past, inefficient, realizing the morale value of that, the human trust building value of it, and how that stuff does allow us to align more and feel like we have each other’s backs, and that’s something you have to incorporate into remote work because it doesn’t happen otherwise. But to think that it does happen, accidentally in an office space, is probably a mistake.

EGOR: Yeah, trust plays a very central role here. By the time all these companies have closed their offices, they didn’t really have the time to write down a process for some of their employees, so they just really had to trust them that they will wake up tomorrow, pull out their laptop and start working the same ways they did, and I bet lots didn’t, but at the same time many did. So, managers are like, “wow, I can actually trust these guys. They’re getting work done.”

JEFF:  (38:04) And then it becomes clear, right? The ones that you can’t trust. The one’s that aren’t getting the work done. That’s a problem. And either it needs to get better or those people need to go. 

EGOR:  Coming back to that x-ray washing machine or however you want to call it. It gets rid of all the stuff that was bottlenecking and building up and hindering your company growth.

JEFF: Yeah. [laughing] (38:34) So, I’m curious. Living in Bali, am I correct, your business partners in Running Remote are in Toronto, Canada right?

EGOR: That’s correct.

JEFF: (38:45) So, same time zone as I’m in I think which is almost exactly 12 hours from you. Basically, when it’s daytime here, it’s nighttime there, and vice versa. [laughing] How does that work? You said you’re the asynchronous guy. You have to be in Bali, or I guess you can just work overnight?

EGOR:  It’s definitely that I’m in that position of no choice. So, before I end my day I have to already have a list of things that I want to discuss with Liam who wakes up in Toronto and I’m going to send him those points and in the morning when they wake up they will answer it. If there is something important, and there always is, and that’s why we have a couple meetings during the week, those are either inconvenient for me or inconvenient for Liam. If you love your work you really don’t see that as an inconvenience. But, of course, we have a time when we are synched as well. 

JEFF: You start to find your rhythms, your cadences for these kinds of things, so it’s like, “I have a 9 PM meeting once a week, and that becomes okay.” To some extent the 9 to 5 workday is arbitrary. [laughing] It could be 7 to 3 or 6 to 2. Or we could work over nights if we were nocturnal beings. You kind of find your rhythms around these things and I think those happen company to company relationship to relationship within companies, but it is certainly a redefinition of what we think of as the conventional workday sometimes.

EGOR: I think it really depends on your job role, being a customer support rep, or customer success. You got to be there at certain hours to be there for customers to ask you questions, but for a lot of other roles I actually believe that it’s much better for the employee to choose their own time so that they don’t feel that work is pushing on them. Also, I’m a strong believer in a 20 hour work week. 

JEFF: Interesting.

EGOR: Don’t just sit there and try to figure out I’ve got three more hours to kill. What do I do? Free up that space for your mind and actually have everyone work at their fullest capacity, and of course, it’s very difficult to be 100% productive for five hours. Two hours is great. So maybe an hour for clearing up your inbox and then another hour for setting strategy and actually two hours of being super productive. For me, personally, it’s definitely sprints. Developers work in sprints. They work very hard and take a pause. I do exactly the same thing, but with my daily routine at work. So, I work a maximum in batches of two hours. Say if I’ve been sitting in front of the computer for more than two hours I know I have to stop even if I’m feeling really inspired, I just have to stop because it’s physiologically straining and also to kind of break my day up. So, typically I do two hours in the morning, starting at 7, then I take a break, have my breakfast, and then after that I do another 2 hours. So, by 12 I’m done with half a day. So,  that’s the best way of doing it. I think the worst pattern would be to work on and off for 18 hours, early morning to night. That’s very challenging.

JEFF: Yeah. And people burn out and ultimately there’s a productivity loss. I think micromanagement is not compatible with remote work.  You need to move to a more results oriented way of looking at things, both as the worker and as the [laughing] manager, right? It’s like “did you get things done today?” “Were you productive today?” “Why weren’t you productive today?”  Rather than, “did you work 8 hours straight today?” Because my analysis of myself when I had a collocated job was that in an 8 hour workday I was usually lucky to have 2 hours of productive work. It’s just hard to measure, but the results are easier to measure. Ultimately are things getting done. Are we getting our objective accomplished?

EGOR:  Absolutely. Sometimes just doing four hours a week may produce better results than working a lot. We all know that working many hours doesn’t make you successful. Working hard doesn’t mean working a lot of hours. I have seen a lot of interesting exercises within remote team cultures that I haven’t seen anywhere else in the corporate world, but they can be applied.  There’s a lot of interesting tests that can be done in the remote work fashion. 

JEFF:  (44:52) What have you seen?

EGOR: For example, I mentioned we would hire somebody who would be on the brink of resigning in the next year or two. That’s something unusual. Also, if I would be, “Jeff I have a message for you.” That message is actually empty in itself so I have to express my message in full because I know in the remote work setting maybe you’ll see that message and be like, “okay, what is the message Jeff?” and by the time you see that you’ll be like, “oh, well, now I’ll mention that.” So, I think that effectiveness of communication and efficiency can be learned from the way it’s done in remote teams.  I’ve seen much more flexibility in job  titles, so being able to take on the role or being essentially an octopus and keeping your fingers at the same time in many areas, isn’t a bad thing. For example, when a server crashes in a company that has a tech product, your inbox is going to be flooded and the support team is going to be unable to answer all those. If you have somebody that’s closely related to them, for example, customer success or maybe sales that also are full with facing customer people and have them trained and being able to put on a different suit in the area of the company.  

JEFF: This syndication idea I think is easy to refine and rework people. It’s not like they need to go to a different office where the phones are, they’re in their same space. It’s easy for people to be malleable and jump in and help. Collaboration. I think remote work is really just great for collaboration. Initially, it’s difficult. It feels more difficult to collaborate. It feels like I think for a lot of companies they assume that collaboration is going to be more difficult in a remote working environment, and I’m not sure that I exactly disagree with them. It is difficult. [laughing] but once you can figure out how to squeeze that collaboration and communication through the pipes you’ve got a magical thing, because you could do it anywhere with anyone, at any time to some extent, and it becomes a really amazing tool for a company to have.

EGOR: With some skill I think you just become a better communicator full stop. You learn how to write sentences that make sense, which verbally something may sound great b the water cooler but once you actually try to put that down in writing you really have to give it some thought. Of course, it’s a prerequisite that remote workers should have but it’s something that you can develop while being a remote worker as well.

JEFF: It’s interesting to see companies transitioning to remote and I’m sure that we’re going to have all sorts of stories over the next couple of years of all these companies that were pushed into working remotely, that people are discovering the sarcasm that they used to use verbally with people doesn’t really work over Slack. [laughing]

EGOR: Oh yeah. I mean look, again, there are companies who are saying emojis are actually going to be a company policy. There’s no way for me to see your mood so please indicate using an emoji. Use video by default. Don’t come into work if you’ve got a bad hair day. That’s another thing actually I haven’t experienced in the corporate world and I spent quite a few years in London working companies there where, nobody cares about how you feel you just go in, unless you’re like blue color then there’s something wrong with you, you’re going to go back home. But mentally it can be very challenging and when you know that your culture and your managers allow you to not coming to work if you’re not feeling like you’re going to be at your best and just don’t come in, that really releases a lot of stress.  

JEFF: (49:36) Do you feel like there’s any of this stuff that’s happening now. I get this feeling that there’s a lot of things that people think is happening right now with the pandemic that is remote work that is not really remote work. [laughing] I don’t know how to explain it. 

EGOR: That has been forced and imposed on them. 

JEFF: Exactly. That people feel like they’re actually evaluating remote work, but it’s not really what remote work is really like, because  people are forced into it. People are not thinking it out ahead of times, it’s not intentional.  Peoples’ kids are home. They think that it’s a microcosm of what working remotely would be like, but it’s not.

EGOR: I think it’s really important to be real and accept the fact that the future of work is not 100% remote, it’s going to be hybrid and it may be my point of view, but it may actually pan out to be that way from the majority of companies. So, to have as an employee, an option to opt out from office work, if my environment at home is providing that, is amazing. Equally it’s amazing to be told that “if you want to come into our beautiful office and use the vending machine there, you’re totally welcome to do that.” So, given the option, because definitely not everyone first of all is in that environment but also just there may be an extreme extrovert [laughing] and they need to be around people.

JEFF: [laughing] Yeah. It’d be interesting to see how this all plays out. I’m really curious. But it really has changed the game around talking about remote work. 

EGOR: Absolutely.

JEFF: It used to be this thing that was at the edge, and was cutting edge, and idealistic, and now it’s pragmatic, practical and messy, [laughing] which is okay. 

EGOR: I can’t help but feel that the world is catching up and unfortunately it had to do that due to this massive tragedy that happened globally. But I still feel a lot of companies have embraced it and now have changed their policies, they could’ve actually done that earlier. It was just at the moment an excuse to figure out what their policies are like. So, I do think the world was meant to catch up at one point but didn’t think it was going to be everyone at once, at the same time. 

JEFF: So, let’s talk about your conference and conferences in general. (52:46) What does  the future of conferences look like? What do remote conferences look like now and in the future?

EGOR: So, we had to postpone our events because it was scheduled for the end of April in Texas, and Texas was one of the states that declared a state of emergency, so we pulled a force majeure and postponed it along with many other conferences. We postponed ours until September thinking that due to all the optimistic projections, things are going to normalize much quicker and they actually did. So, at the moment we’re here two or more months ahead already and the situation hasn’t really gotten any better so there are many more events that have been postponed to next year now, as opposed to end of year. Many events that were scheduled for autumn, and these are large events. I’m talking Miss World Beauty Pageant, the UN Climate Change conference. There are approximately one massive event every three hours that comes out in the news as being postponed to 2021. So, I think the approximate future for live events is very, very bleak, so 2020 is going to be a very bad, bad couple of quarters for the event industry. At the same time many conference organizers have tried virtual conferencing. Some of them are still on the fence and not sure what that’s like and don’t understand how that works, but those that have tried it have certainly seen the potential and we were one of those. So, funny enough, our topic prior to the COVID live conferences, build and scale your remote teams,  it kind of relates to not being together under one roof.

JEFF: [laughing] Right. And there’s always this irony to holding a physical conference about remote work.

EGOR: Oh, tell me about it.

JEFF: Yeah, but on the other hand, even with remote work there’s a lot of value to getting together in person at times.

EGOR: That’s what we always say. We say that face to face conversations, in person contact, are just not irreplaceable in any shape or form and for the same reason I think the world in the future is going to be hybrid, it’s impossible to fully replace that. There’s a very famous product that a lot of big conferences use called Bizzabo and they are an amazing team that runs a lot of survey data on the state of the event industry, and they actually just ran a big survey last week with a very large pool of conference organizers from all over the world, and 98% of them said that virtual conferences don’t replace live events. So live events still have a very, very big place to play, not only in companies marketing budgets but also just in connecting the world and educating the world across all industries. So, they will spring back. It looks like what’s happening, and I think that’s actually going to be a long-term strategy is that in 2021 when live events come back, they’re going to be mostly hybrid. So, a lot of people are still going to be afraid of traveling and getting into planes and big airports, so they’ll try to opt in for livestream process, whereas previously those livestream processes would’ve been very simple where you just have access to a private link and you can see the cameraman, walk around the conference and have a close up of what’s happening on the stage, etc. But with the opportunity that virtual conference platforms offer, it’s actually going to be possible to run simultaneously your conference offline and online, and that makes it a hybrid conference, and that’s something that we’re thinking about. 

JEFF: When we think about an online conference we think about a webinar and it tends to be a one way, it could be a YouTube video and you sit on your couch [laughing] with your computer on your lap and watch the “conference”. But there are a lot of pieces of a conference that that’s missing, right?  There are in-person conferences that work a lot that way too. You come in and it’s corporate(y) and people aren’t socializing and talking to each other and there are people that lecture, and then maybe it’s a one day thing and then people leave, and there’s not a whole lot of social aspect to it. But I don’t feel like that’s a very good [laughing] in-person conference and it’s not exactly what I want to replicate online. (57:59) What are you thinking about in terms of trying to bring the conferences online? What does an online conference experience look like?

EGOR: I thought that it’s just going to be a bunch of webinars and people are gonna be mostly quiet and just absorbing the content. We were very surprised as to how our event ran. I think a lot of it depended on the platform, that where you run the event.

JEFF: Yeah, absolutely.

EGOR: We had an opportunity for people to talk to each other and network and have these one on one video conversations as well as keep an eye on the stage and so there was actually an atmosphere of a real event that was created there. Yes, you don’t really have this feeling of being in the room, but because you are so absorbed into the screen at what’s happening there, you really are teleported along with the rest of the people into this bubble where you’re all sharing a similar experience, and actually there are many advantages of virtual events that virtual events possess and live events don’t. You can be in two places at once for example. That’s the most basic one. 

JEFF: Even a back chat, back channel kind of thing is a thing that doesn’t happen at a lot of conferences where you can be commenting and posting links to things that people are talking about as they’re talking about them and stuff like that. 

EGOR: Yeah. There are lower barriers to participate. There are a lot of advantages but with the technology developing so rapidly to accommodate for this need of virtual conferences, because of the live events being cancelled due to COVID, they are coming out with amazing features, and you are able to run three, four track conferences with AI tools to tell you who they think you should meet out of all the registrants for these. One of the cool observations that I had is if you are at a conference and you want to find somebody from a specific company like AWeber, you’re going to have to walk around and look into peoples badges, or maybe if they have an event you can find them that way, but here you literally just search for the person you need and you find them, so it’s easier to connect with people I think. The issue is maintaining those relationships for more than five minutes. 

JEFF: Even the connect, just a dynamic precedence, a culture. I’ve certainly found myself both walking around conferences looking at peoples badges to see who I would want to connect with? Who is interesting? And also just talking to people randomly and then realizing, Oh, we’ve talked online, and that on the one hand there’s some serendipity to it which feels magical, but also I just as often left conferences feeling like I didn’t connect with anyone and feel frustrated because I went to the conference with several questions and hoping to meet some people and I didn’t get my questions answered and I didn’t meet some people. 

EGOR: I think it can definitely also help introverts who are a little bit slow into getting their pocket full of business cards just because they’re thinking of an entry line that would open up the conversation. Online it just makes things easier for them. We had an event, Remote 8, and we didn’t want to monetize on the COVID and so we did a free event and we collected money for the Red Cross. So, anyone who signed up could just donate. We sent $5,000 to the Red Cross. At that event we had random video networking. It was basically like speed dating but video.

JEFF:  (1:02:20) How’d that work?

EGOR: It was mixed opinions. Some people didn’t like the random part. Other people loved it because they didn’t think they needed to speak to that person at that one point or they didn’t realize that the company the person represents actually can be beneficial in a certain angle to them. I think we probably want to do half random but mostly targeted, nevertheless. But it was amazing for the fact that a record number of conversations was 45 video calls, and those were all video calls that are going to be emailed with contact details to that attendee who had those 45 video calls with the contact details of those people. Now, imagine a live conference during a day. If you have 45 meaningful conversations and you walk away with the contacts, that’s worth a value of three conferences maybe.

JEFF: Yeah. At any given conference if you have five meaningful contacts; contacts implies business card networking, and I don’t mean it like that. It’s more of a human connection thing. If you just sit next to someone and it’s like, “oh, you’re an interesting person. This is interesting,” you would never get 45 at any conference.

EGOR: No. That was very surprising. The person was very happy because those connections were valuable, but honestly I never believed in virtual events. The truth is that I never wanted to sell any livestream process, you know, you gotta be there, especially being in a remote workspace. We were saying, “just disconnect from your computer, fly in and meet people in person.”

JEFF: And especially when you’re meeting in Bali [laughing] it’s tough to create a virtual version of Bali.

EGOR: Yeah. The environment has a direct impact on the value of networking. If you’re sitting at a sunset just outside the auditorium, that conversation can go into other levels, but maybe Bali will be a place where we’ll come back to one day, but for now we’ve cancelled all our live events, including the one we have postponed for September. We’re just not going to risk it. Even if we are going to be able to pull off a live event at the end of this year, the likelihood of it being attended by half the attendees we want is going to be very high, so we’re going all into the virtual conferencing space. And I’ve completely changed my mind of how I view virtual events.

JEFF: Well, to some extent being forced into it allows a level playing field. We know we’re all doing this, we’re all committed to it, and we can really explore the virtual version of all of this.  It’s funny, maybe not to you, but running remote, I was slated to speak at the event when it was happening in April, and as it got postponed and now cancelled, it got cancelled due to this pandemic, however the pandemic is causing us all to think about remote work and rethink remote work, and I think that there’s probably no better time to be having a conference about how to do [laughing] remote work than now when it’s really difficult  to do a conference about remote work. I think it’s great that you’re doing this online and I have a feeling that when you pick it up again in person it’s going to be even more popular an event than it has been.

EGOR: We’re definitely not trying to recreate the atmosphere that we have running remote live, we’re simply doing a whole new event. So, running remote online is a different animal, and running remote live is going to have a much bigger place to be now for all those online attendees to have an opportunity to finally meet in person. It also enables us to build an online community which is something amazing.

JEFF: And that’s the thing with all of this stuff. You have to break it down to it’s component parts. What is a conference? What do we want to get out of a conference? How can we try to replicate that online? That’s the best way to do it, rather than just saying, “well, there’s aspects of it where people are never going to get any networking online so let’s just forget that and we’ll just make a YouTube video”, and I don’t think that really takes advantage of the potential of what can be done online, so I think it’s great that you’re a little bit dubious about online conferences in general. I think it’s great that you’re rethinking it. I think it’s great that you’re embracing it.

EGOR: It’s like with remote work. The only way to fully test it is to go all in for a short while, so we’re doing that for the next two quarters, and we’ll see what comes out of it. I’m pretty hopeful and I think a lot of it relies on the quality of technology that’s now available to host these events which weren’t available six months ago. So, very excited.

JEFF: And, runningremote.com, if you haven’t found the link already, is where you can find all this stuff. (1:08:08) Egor, if people wanted to follow-up with you about any of this stuff where should they get in touch with you?

EGOR: Runningremote.com, also my LinkedIn, I’m always there so you can just search Egorrunningremote on LinkedIn and you’ll hit my profile right there.

JEFF: Cool. Well, thanks so much for coming on and talking to us. I’m glad we managed to coordinate this across our time zones. [laughing]

EGOR: Thank you Jeff. It was an interesting conversation on a topic that I really love.

JEFF: Me too. Great. Alright. Well thanks again.

EGOR: Thank you too. See you at one of our next events hopefully.

JEFF: Take care.

Here’s the transcript:

JEFF: Hi Jeremie. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

JEREMIE KUBICEK: Jeff, so good to be with you. I love that name by the way.

JEFF: Yonder?

JEREMIE: Yeah. Yonder. [laughing]

JEFF: You know, the problem with these things is when you get too literal at something you get boxed in, right? We call it remote work podcast and then three years later everybody decides, “no, no, no, we’re not calling it remote work anymore.” You’re kind of stuck in that. So, it’s always good to kind of go a little oblique with things. It’s a lesson I’ve learned in naming all sorts of things [laughing] over time.

JEREMIE: Makes complete sense. Absolutely.

JEFF: Well, thanks for coming on. (3:27) First of all the question I ask  everyone, where are you talking to us from today?

JEREMIE: I’m in Oklahoma City. We have our giant studios here in Oklahoma City but that’s about the only thing. Everything else that we do is remote and virtual.

JEFF: I like Oklahoma City. It’s one of those undergo cities you don’t think too much about and then you go there and it’s just really nice. Great place.

JEREMIE: It’s a feisty city and I like it because I lived in London and I lived in Atlanta for a number of years, almost a decade, and I lived in Russia, Moscow. So, I’ve lived in lots of places. I’m from Oklahoma City and so we moved back here, and the only reason I moved back here is because of the number of pioneers that are here, and the entrepreneurial Ferber that’s here, it’s completely different than I found in Atlanta or London. So, I’m like, “you know what, yeah.” It’s an entrepreneurial city. It’s not the most beautiful city, it’s not like Rhode Island or London or other places for sure, but it definitely has its perks in other areas. 

JEFF: (4:37) So you are the CEO of a company called Giant. Tell us about Giant and you and your background.

JEREMIE: Our business is basically focused on people intelligence. We help people maximize their team performance by making people more intelligent around personality, around emotional intelligence, around skills that give them a competitive advantage. And we find that most of that leader development historically  has not been scalable, has not been agile, it’s not been really nimble enough. So, we figured out a way to package it and help people learn how to multiple it without having to go to conferences and read millions of books, and so on and so forth. So, my  background was, in this business, I’ve been doing this about 20 years. I used to run one of the largest leadership brands. I used to own, with John Maxwell’s assets, we had partnerships with lots of different thought leaders, I built a brand  called Leader Cast, which is one of the largest leadership events, simulcasted events, and then we had another brand called Catalyst that was an under 40 leader events, two day, three day conferences with 10, 12, 15,000 people. Those types of 20th century learnings, if you will. It was about 2008 or 2009 I started after the 2008/2009 crisis, I basically started reevaluating how people learn and how adults learn, and I think from the crisis it really spun a new vigor for what is the 21st century of leadership development and learning look like, and that’s what we’ve been focused on. 

JEFF: Yeah, and your team is distributed. So, the Giant team.

JEREMIE: That’s right our team is Slackville. That’s where we all live. So, we live in Slackville. We are in London, in Naples, Florida, in Lexington, Kentucky and Albuquerque, New Mexico, Oklahoma City and Atlanta, as our main people.

JEFF: Well I love having people on to talk about culture for a couple of reasons. The saying that I’ve had is that, in a remote work environment culture is your office. There is no physical office to go in and give you that warm feeling of connecting [laughing] with other people and so you need to be much more proactive. You need to be much more intentional about connecting which ultimately creates the culture for a company. (7:39) Talk to me about your experience with culture in your own distributed team, but sort of where that goes.

JEREMIE: I like to think of culture as culture is atmosphere. The problem with culture is sometimes it’s like leadership, it’s too vague, and it just has all of these different meanings. So, for me, I think of the greenhouse to go, look culture’s atmosphere so if you’re present in a greenhouse then you can control that culture, if you will. Now to your point of being distributed, like we are, therefore culture is atmosphere, how then does leaders define the culture. So, I define the culture of our team dynamics, and I have people to help me so I’m an executive team. I actually have a COO named Rich, and he is a different style, and so we use what we call The Five Voices, which is  young anthropology that we systematized and made it way more simple. So, Myers Briggs comes from this and so forth, but it’s too complicated so no one ever remembers it, or it doesn’t scale because you have to have these professionals to come in and  help you. So, we created the five voices, so I know I’m a connector creative and my COO he’s a pioneer guardian. So that language doesn’t mean anything to anyone listening right now, but it makes a massive difference when you understand the dynamics of your key players inside your culture and what are the expectations, what are the goals, what are we trying to accomplish. So, we’ve just been playing with this for a long time and really, really been working on culture, and the rhythm of culture and when do we meet face to face and how much do we need. Those types of things. We’ve been systemizing good culture in a distributed fashion.

JEFF: Wow. I have so many questions. (9:48) So, by defining how people are, their personality type, you also start to define their communication style, ultimately things like their loves languages. How they connect. What they need to connect. Talk to me about what that means, again, particularly in an environment. Because there’s a lot of people who need to connect by sitting in the same room together. By looking in peoples eyes, sort of a more kinesthetic type way of connecting and learning that doesn’t quite work so well when your company is online or there’s [laughing] a pandemic going on and your companies online, whether you like it or not.

JEREMIE: So, the beauty is if you know someone and really know their wiring, and the way I describe wiring, it’s this nature/nurture choice. So, the nature is what were you born. I’m an extroverted feeler. My nurture though is I was brought up by an introverted thinker. So, my Dad and I worked on a farm in a tractor cab with no radio. So, I had an upbringing of extraversion in an introverted world. So, I learned how to adapt. Most of us have learned how to adapt really, really well. The problem is, we’re confused if we never studied ourselves. We end up playing someone on TV that we’re really not. So, the one thing that’s really important is helping people find out who they really, really were at 16 years old, and then what layers got covered on top of that personality over time, and who you’ve adapted to become, and are you comfortable with that or not. So, in our world, with our own team members, we do a lot of deep dives and we know each other really well, and because we use the  Five Voices, we understand predicted leadership behavior. So, we can predict the behavior based on stress. So, on  moderate stress and extreme stress, we know the tendencies of each other, and we give each other space and time to talk about it. So, we have these sessions that we do. We use agile as our system for two week sprints and getting work done, so we’re highly productive. But we also have these moments and these check-ins and these one to  ones and other things that go into highly present. So, the idea is how do you stay present and productive. If you’re overly productive and under present then you’re not going to form communication and relational trust. If you don’t have relational trust it’s almost impossible to be a distributed team. That’s fully engaged. You can get people who are compliant but not engaged. So, we have an engaged team, so we have this  language that says, “look, we’re going to fight for the highest possible good of each other,” and that’s the mentality of anyone who works on our team. We have a metaphor because I write books, so we have these books. The 100X Leader is the latest one and we use the metaphor, the Sherpa on Mt. Everest. The Sherpa is the best leader because they have to climb, and they have to help climbers. They have to perform and help performers. So, therefore, as the leaders to find the culture then Rich and myself and our Exec team, we are the Sherpa to the rest of our people. Meaning that it’s not about us getting to the top so we can take our picture at the peak, it’s literally going, “how can I help you get to the next level?” “What level do we need you to be on and how do I help you?” “What support do you need and what challenge do you need to get there?” Does that make sense?

JEFF: Yeah, absolutely. There are a number of tools that have been created over time for people to identify themselves and their styles, their communication styles, their thinking styles over time and I like them. There’s been some criticism of them over time. Things like Myer Briggs, as a hiring tool and how that can sort of limit diversity in a company or start to define people in [laughing] ways that they don’t want to be defined. I like this idea of, not empowering people, but I oftentimes feel like people have shame about what they might see as their shortcomings without recognizing their strengths, and ultimately one of the things I say as a leader is like, “you need to repeat yourself often and in different ways.” If you send something out as an email, you probably also need to get on a phone call and say it again, and if you could get on video, if you could tell it to people in person, people learn in different ways, people communicate in different ways and you need to be empathetic to that. But I like this idea of getting even more granular about it and people saying, “hey, I need to get on the phone with you, because that’s how I communicate best.” 

JEREMIE: And if you know someone and they know that you know them, then they know that you’re for them. And I think that’s the key. I think about every one of us wants to work with a team or people that you like, and how do you like someone? Well, a lot of leaders think, Well I can’t get close to people or Because I need them to stay productive. Well that maybe will get us compliance. So, what does productivity mean? It means when they become fully alive. So, helping people find out who they really, really are. And that’s just what we do as a business. We always say, “you can’t get what you don’t possess.” So, at the core  of our business we have to live it, we have to live what we sell, and we sell people intelligence, so we spend a lot of time working on our own people intelligence. How do we eliminate gossip. We try not to have gossip, so we really focus on that. How do we deal with stress behavior? For instance, we have something we call weapons and we can share with people what the weapon of every personality is, and so a pioneer is someone who is, when and all stakes, they’ve got to win, they’re like a general, military strategist.  They’re 7% of the population. That would be in the Myers Brigg land at ENTJ and INTJ, those  types of things. But the weapon of a pioneer is a grenade launcher and we can share and show when people use that. When do pioneers tend, what’s the trigger that causes them to pull the trigger, and it’s really, really fun because people now start getting in you, oh my goodness. But the reality is we say, “look, I’m all the voices. I’m all the personalities. I’m adaptable. I’ve played a pioneer most of my life but I’m really not one, I’m really a connector and creative pioneer.” So when you understand those dynamics like that, inside a team culture, it gives you a lot more latitude to be able to have influence because if I don’t know people and I’m trying to lead them, then I might expect the worst in them, or I might create a narrative over somebody because they’re not doing a certain this or that, well, when I’m not around you I don’t see you. So, therefore, these narratives pop in my mind as the leader. But if I know, for instance, Oh, no, no, no, they’re a guardian, they understand guardian work, love it, a guardians detailed, very formulaic, let him go. 

JEFF:  (18:19) Another thing about these definitions is there’s a certain vulnerability to it, right? I’ve got my own quirks too. Here’s my stuff, let me lay it out on the table. Let’s figure out your stuff, let’s lay it all out on the table, and that builds a certain amount of trust right?

JEREMIE: Absolutely, and that trust is, again, vulnerability is, we have a little tool called, know yourself, lead yourself, and it’s an infinity loop and at the bottom it has tendencies and tendencies slide over to patterns, and then actions, and at the very top there’s consequences that shape your reality. So, what we’ve done is we built self-awareness into a visual tool and we encourage our employees and our clients to create tendency logs. Well I’ve got 28 tendencies that I’ve logged in myself. So, I’m just going to be vulnerable and I’ll share one of them as an example. And by doing this what I’m doing is trying to go, “look, leaders define a culture, I’m going to screw up, you’re going to screw up, it’s okay, but let’s at least be aware of our tendencies, and if we can know ourselves and lead ourselves that’s the game.” Because when you lead yourself you don’t need to be lead by other people.  I think that’s the real secret to distributive work, is, you need unbelievably self-aware people for it to be very, very successful, because if you have people who are needy, who are constantly flailing in the water, or they’re on a mountain and they need the Sherpa to always come down and get them, it’s not going to work very well long-term. So, for me, the “know yourself to lead yourself,” one of my examples is I have a tendency to exaggerate, and I’ll always have that tendency to exaggerate, that’s in me. Well, is that a weakness, or is that just a tendency? It’s a tendency, but when do I do it? That’s the secret. And I do it when I’m trying to win an argument. I’ve learned that about myself in the last two years and I’m always 50. And I’m just now learning it, and I showed my wife and she’s like, “yeah, I’ve know that. I’ve known that for a very long time.” So, I’m just now becoming aware of my tendency to exaggerate. So, my wife and I built, as a hobby, this modern farmhouse development in Oklahoma. It’s called the Prairie at Post, and it’s really, really, really neat. Well, we had this builder who wasn’t following the rules, so there’s only five builders out of 20 houses. So, I went to Larry, and I was mad at Larry, I said, “come on Larry, you know,” and I almost said, “Larry we’ve had eight builders who have all followed the rules”, that was my  exaggeration, and I caught myself, I lead myself going, He knows there’s not eight builders. He knows there’s only five. Historically I would’ve said there’s eight builders and then Larry would’ve thought, There’s not eight builders, and then we would be on a side argument about how many builders there actually was and he would not have complied with the actual issue that I had. And so, I caught myself and go, “there’s five other builders who have had this very issue and they’ve all complied. You need to get onboard.” And he did, and I didn’t have to have the side conversation. But sometimes I try to prove myself. 

My point, if you’re a listener in this, all of us have tendencies. We all have tendencies to fly off the handle, be impatient. We have positive tendencies, we have negative tendencies, but most people aren’t aware of their tendencies, and so, the definition of insanity, they do the same things over and  over expecting different results, when they’ve never figured out, Oh, my goodness. I’m limiting my influence. So, as a team we just said, “hey guys, we’re going to work on our tendency logs. We’re going to be aware of them ourselves to try and self-lead,” and if you, for instance, Jeff were my team and you saw me being willing to realize, yeah I do that, yep that’s a tendency, and here’s when I tend to do it, and I share that with you, then you might be more open to work on yourself as well.

JEFF: And it’s all about learning, right, advancing and opening yourself up to learning. You talk about needy people but it’s okay to be needy, it’s okay to need, it’s just you need to learn [laughing]. I think it’s important for a company to have a culture of teaching and learning. For my company Lullabot we actually started as a training company and that culture got engrained in us without quite realizing it, [laughing] that even as we advanced into being more of a consulting company and a development company, we still had this culture of what do you need to know, how do you need to know it. And people speaking up when they didn’t know things, because they knew that other people around them would help them to advance. (23:50) But it’s that point where people aren’t [laughing] taking in that information, they’re not opening up for that information, that things that really frustrating.

JEREMIE: Exactly, and that is the consistent intentional leadership that needs to be there. So, what we’ve done is we’ve created a system of our calls and our calls, when we get together in our meetings, we do looking back, looking up and looking forward. We go backwards over the last two weeks, “Hey, let’s look back. What’s happened? What’s good? Let’s celebrate.” And we have a system called a “communication code” and the communication code that we use has been really helpful and myself and another business partner, Steve Cochran, we created this, and we could actually create most of our content based on pain and issues that we’ve incurred.  We’re like, “oh my gosh we keep doing that. How do we solve that?” And what happened is Steve is a pioneer, he has a tendency to critique, and I’m a connector, I want to celebrate. So therefore, I bring this big, such and such I’m working on, and I bring this little fire of excitement and Steve takes water and throws it on the fire. [laughing] So, that’s historically how we actually create all of our content. It’s been brilliant. We’ve had a great partnership in that. But the idea of the communication code is there’s five words, there’s care, celebrate, clarify, collaborate, and critique. And it’s really, really important in a team dynamic especially if you’re distributed, if you’re working remote, all those things. To learn how, what does care look like to a person and how much care, based on a personality. You have some personalities that are like cactus, they don’t need a lot of care. Just put them out there, don’t water them, they’re good. You have Ficus trees over here who need a lot of care, and so care is an important element, and people need to know that you’re for them.   But then there’s some personalities that need more celebration than others, that’s why it’s important, it’s mainly between the thinkers and the feelers on the team, and if you understand what celebration looks like, that doesn’t mean a ticker tape parade for a full day, it could just mean, “hey Jeff, let’s just pause for a second guys, just celebrate. Did you see what Jeff just did. That’s awesome.” And everyone piles on, ok, great, two minutes, five minutes.

JEFF: Yeah, it’s easy for a company, especially start uppy, where you are really focused on goals, to miss the milestones along the way.

JEREMIE: That’s right. So, you use this language as a code and so when we start the conversation we go, “okay guys, do a communication code,” and sometimes it’s lead by the person, “guys I’m gonna share some things, I really need you to clarify before critique. Then let’s collaborate a little bit and then we’ll see if there’s critiques even needed, because I’m not in there yet.  Or there’s times when I’ll go, “hey, I want your full critique.” On the flipside, you don’t have to say it long-term if you have intuition and you start learning, he’s a connector, celebrate a little bit. Or they’re a nurturer, make sure that they feel the care. Or if they’re a pioneer, don’t celebrate too much, go right to critique. [laughing] So, it depends on who you’re talking with, but that language has been so helpful to build really strong trust. So, after we do our meetings, we do looking back, then we go through our sprint review, and we use Trello and we use Airtable, Miro and all these great tools, but as we go through them and share them then Rich, our CO will go, “alright guys, let’s do a communication code. What do we have?” And then people will pile on and they’ll be like, “hey, Bronson I just want to celebrate you man. Dude, without you, we would never have gotten this far this fast.” That’s it. Or, “can I have the clarifying question, when you do this are you saying this?” And having those rules for everyone, it eliminates the chance for drama to come into the team. So, that’s been a really key part for us as we’ve been working remotely and virtually for so long. 

JEFF: (28:18) I’m curious to talk about  drama. You also talked about gossip and stress. There tends to be less, at least I’ve observed, and it seems to be a side effect of the things that need to happen around remote work, but there’s not office politics in the same way. But there still can be gossipy, those things that bubble up a little bit. Talk to me about those dysfunctions and how to avoid them. 

JEREMIE: A couple of personalities are more prone to gossip than others. We have just found that. A guardian doesn’t really gossip, they just say it. [laughing] So, my wife doesn’t gossip about people, she just comes straight out, she’s a guardian, and she’ll say, “this isn’t right. Here’s what I see.” And so, you know exactly where you’re at with certain personalities. Certain personalities will have a tendency, we call it cyber warfare. They’ll use a little cyber warfare. So, we have a tool. We have about 60 tools by the way, that we use as part of our product for clients,  Google, US Air Force, Biagen, those kinds of companies, we’ll use our language, big and small companies, but we also use it for our team, and one of them is called “Go to the Source”, really simple. Go to the Source is, “you know what? I’ve got an issue with Dan,” and I come to you, you’re the third-party, Dan is the second party, I’m the first party, and I come to you, “Jeff, you know, I don’t know, does Dan, I don’t know he just frustrates me. Have you ever experienced that?” And I’m fishing in the gossip  world and I want you to partner with me to advocate, to make me feel better that Dan’s a jerk and I’m amazing. And so, I then go to you for this and what that does is that begins to erode, it becomes a cancer or a toxin in the cultural system of a team. So, your job, if that happens, your job is to be a firewall. This is a simple language, the fire is starting to spread, you go, “um, you know, um, it sounds like you got a personal thing with Dan. Have you gone to the source?” And it reminds me, Oh yeah, I’ve got to go to the source. 

JEFF: (30:56) Source, meaning Dan?

JEREMIE: Being Dan. Yup. “No, um, okay, yeah, okay, I got it.” And all of a sudden it becomes pure accountability just because you can even say, “hey you remember I’m the firewall, go to Dan.” So, then that language shuts it down immediately, and what we found is objective, common language is a key for success of teams, because healthy  communication is, if we all know the same language, we all have a tool. So, you say I’m a firewall go to the source, I remember the tool, “yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. I got it.” I go and have a conversation with Dan, “you know what, Dans actually not a jerk. I forgot he’s a guardian and I’m a connector, and he’s my nemesis voice. Got it. Okay.” And it gives a chance for that relationship. But if you go, “yeah, he kind of does that to me sometimes too,” you just opened the door for the fire to spread and then I’ll come to you again and again and again, because you’re not advocate with me against Dan. 

JEFF: In short-term great feeling, “oh, I’ve got someone who understands me,” because gossip is just fear, right? It’s paranoia tinged fear. I think that I don’t know if I trust this person and their rubbing me the wrong way, and to have someone say, “I totally understand you,” feels great, but not as great as ameliorating the fear altogether, right? And reminding yourself that Dan’s actually not so bad. His intentions aren’t bad, and if you dig in deeper with some dee question, what did you actually mean, it’s not so malevolent as you’ve made it up in your mind. 

JEREMIE: That’s right. And that narrative, the narrative that we put over people, happens usually because of missed expectations, and we just find that expectations are this key. So, if I have an expectation of Dan to do a certain thing or to appreciate something that I’ve done, So, it’s really been important. So, all of these dynamics are in place, and an example, I’m a connector, everything is personal. So, historically, that’s a tendency. So, if I have an idea I put that idea right over my heart. I go to Dan, “what do you think about my idea” he might critique it or shoot holes to my idea thinking he’s helping and then all of a sudden blood starts running down, because I put that right over my body right? And he’s like, “why didn’t you put it there? Why didn’t you put it out to the side?” And what happens then is that narrative I go, “I can’t trust Dan. He’s not for me.” He doesn’t like my idea. He doesn’t like me. Okay, so while that’s not true but that’s how I played it.  Well, if I’m a feeler, I’m going to do that. If he’s a thinker he’s not even clued into that. So, he’s going “what? That’s silly. He just asked my opinion and I gave him my opinion.” So, those are these dynamics that are at play inside relationships, inside teams. And over time we found that the pressure of the client, the pressure of the work, and usually the leaders were wanting to be overly productive, they sweep that kind of stuff under the rug, and over time it will implode a team. When it didn’t need to be that way. In fact, you create the common language, you create the visual tools that all the team starts utilizing, and by doing that, that makes people more intelligent and when they’re more intelligent themselves, around emotional intelligence or their own personality, or they’re gaining skills to deal with gossip and narratives and communication, all of a sudden that’s a competitive advantage, because your team isn’t suffering the fooled  errands of most other teams.

JEFF: And you become invisible in a sense because a lot of those tools that your customers, clients, whoever, outside your company  you’re working with, might use to divide you, to manipulate you. That stuff sounds intentional. This is sort of unintentional. This is the way that humans behave with each other, doesn’t happen. Just something as simple as if someone wants to hire someone away from your company, it’s hard to compete with that culture that you’ve created and also maybe a culture of openness where this person would come to you and say, “hey, I just got a job offer from one of our clients. Let’s talk about this,” rather than the more stereotypical kind of thing where these things happen in secret, and in the background, and with a certain amount of shame and often come out in sometimes angry ways, but oftentimes sort of shame based kind of ways.

JEREMIE: That’s right. So, if you’re this leader who is leading a team, a team is like a flight well, and to get this team to perform at the highest level, you have to start with communication and relationship. That’s where relationship trust is built. Then you get alignment. Let’s get everyone on the same page, then execution, now let’s make it happen, then you’ll find that you have capacity. Your capacity of your team will handle more because you have more trust with each other. If you skip communication and relationship and don’t value those things, if you don’t value personality, if you don’t value the nuances of understanding your team  and they don’t think that you really, really know them, but you then force them, “let’s get on the same page. Come on. Let’s just get it done. Dag gone it.” All of a sudden that will create compliance.

JEFF: “I don’t want to hear about the difficulties. I don’t wanna hear about the problems you’re having. Let’s just all get together and make this thing happen.”

JEREMIE: Just get it done. I lived in Russia for two years in the early nineties, and I watched 70 years of domination and you know what it lead to? It lead to abdication. It lead to compliance, just do enough to not get killed. Just do enough to not get sent to the gulag, but I’m not fully engaged at all. 

JEFF: (37:25) So, that’s how you keep your sense of self, right, is to not quite go all in? Don’t be vulnerable. Just do what’s needed. Don’t show too much emotion, kind of get through, get by. 

JEREMIE: That’s right. And that’s what leaders who are so fixated on productivity, and by the way I love to be productive. We are very, very productive. But we’re so productive out of relationship that people give way more than they would’ve ever given, because they’re vested, they’re excited, they’re bought in. I have to literally work with our team on the weekends. Like, “guys, why don’t you just not work. Take some time off. You’re good.” “No, I love it, this is  awesome. No, I’m fired up too. Relax.” It’s the opposite of what other teams have experienced. So, there is a secret to it, but as you know Jeff, it takes a lot of work to set this up for your teams to be able to thrive, and it takes consistency of you as a leader. We have one type of leader called a protector. They’re like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They bring lots of rah rah and then they can come in and micromanage, and that ying and yang coming back and forth can create a lot of drama with people. So, it’s just knowing yourself, to be able to lead yourself and becoming a consistent leader. I’m not a perfect leader at all, but we have tools that allow me to be way better because I’m following these tools.

JEFF: Well, I think perfect is dangerous. There’s no room for culpability, vulnerability, change, error. All of this stuff. Going back to Dan, right? When you go to Dan, Dan needs to be open to say, “oh, I’m really sorry you didn’t understand what I was saying. I made mistakes. I must’ve not explained myself well enough to you.” Like, there needs to be a certain amount of empathy there if Dan doesn’t take any, “well, it’s your problem for now,” well that doesn’t go very far.  (39:46) You talk about relational trust. We talk about trust a lot on this podcast but define relational trust for me. 

JEREMIE: Well, I trust an uncle of mine. Do I like him? He’s different, you know what I mean. So, trust, relational trust is likeability and it’s a different level. We’ve been working as a team on SaaS business model for the last two years and we’re growing a ton and our product works, the content works, but our team really, really likes each other. Well that is so fun because we can’t wait to hang, we can’t wait to talk. It’s almost like a joke, because our spouses are going, “really, you’re talking to Bronson again or Mike again or Rich or Tracy?” And I’m like, “yeah, we’re just jamming right now,” and so, the point though is that relational trust means that you’d want to go hang out for a barbecue or you’d want to go places. That’s a deeper level. That doesn’t mean you have to be best friends with everyone, don’t hear that if you’re listening, or you’re inviting people all the time to come hang with you, but the point would be, do you like them enough that you want to devote that amount of time? And, is your mission strong enough? So relational trust means you know the communication styles, you can predict leadership behavior in other people, and you can give grace to them and you can also challenge them. We found in relational trust, if Mike knows that I’m for him, he does, he’ll let me challenge him and push him to the highest levels. Well, the verb we use is “liberate”. So, if you think of Mt. Everest, if I’m a Sherpa to Mike, “Mike you should be at Camp 4 for sure. That’s the level we need you at.” So, I’m giving him enough support, “what do you need to do your job”, he’s our Chief Revenue Officer, and then I’m going to challenge him, “now Mike you told me you’re going to do this. Where you at? What’s going on? What do you need? Are you afraid? Are you excited? What’s happening?” And we talk about those things openly. So that relational trust though means that he so knows that I’m for him that we can have really hard conversations without there being retribution and that’s a key component of relational trust. 

JEFF: Yeah, it’s more of a two-way street when we think about it compared to trust which tends to be, I can trust a newscaster, but it’s not really a relationship. 

JEREMIE: Well Jeff, it’s really influence. It’s not positional power, and I think that’s a 21st century, especially in this remote setting that everyone has been experiencing lately, it’s “yeah, I can force you to do something because I have a higher salary than yours,” but that goes back to compliance. But relational trust is like influence. I can maximize my influence or I can minimize it, and my reputation is built on a thousand small things that I do, and so, if I want to grow my influence with people, then I’m getting to know them, I’m understanding them, I’m calling them up, not calling them out, and that’s something that we talk about a lot. Like, “hey Mike, I’m calling you up dude. This is who you are, come on man, I believe in you. Let’s do this.” Well that’s a calling up. I don’t have to do that very often. But when I do, people know that I mean it and I’m for them and I want to support and help them there. But I try not to call people out, “dog gone it, seriously, again,” that demeaning domination leads to fear and manipulation. It can motivate people for like a week maybe, but over the long-term if that’s my strategy, than that’s the Soviet Union strategy.

JEFF: We’re stereotyping of course. (44:01) Talk to me about stress. So, we’re recording this at the end of April, beginning of May, and we are locked down here in the United States, it is not only a stressful time in general, but a lot of people are working remotely. Talk to me about stress and should we just suck it up, [laughing] or do we just blow off at our clients? What’s the best way to deal with it because it sounds like those things are not great? 

JEREMIE: Well I think you have two parts of stress; you have moderate stress and you have an extreme stress.  So, what is moderate stress? Most of us we’re in this storm, okay.  So, when the storm came in general, we’re sent home, we’re locked down, we’re having to adjust. So, say in March everyone was having to adjust and adapt to the whole idea. So, it’s not just your own stress, but it’s managing the stress of your kids. I had two college students who came home, my high schooler and my college students, I have three kids, I have two graduates who aren’t graduating. That’s stressful.  I’m having to manage their stress and then I have my wife’s stress and my stress. So, that’s the combination of this storm. It’s a storm. While all of us are in it, but then if you have a company or a business that you’re running, it’s a storm within the storm. So, if you have a restaurant and all of a sudden not only are you in the storm of the Coronavirus, COVID, but you’re now the storm on your hands with your team  because you have to manage and you only have 30 days cashflow, maybe. So , therefore, what does that look like? So that becomes extreme stress. So, what we’ve done on Giant, it’s giant.tv and what we’ve done is, once you understand yourself and know yourself, we show you in video form and in all types of illustrations, we show you what extreme stress will do, and what your tendencies are. So, if you know for instance, for me, I have a tendency to get hyper focused and start creating ideas in moderate stress. In extreme stress I will pull away and watch movies and just completely crash. Well, that’s only happened maybe once or twice in my life, extreme, extreme stress. Most of the moderate stress, I get a lot done and I’m overly focused on ideas of how to get out of certain things. Well that happened. I experienced that. So, it’s important to understand how extreme stress will take you out. Some personality, and it’s based on personality types and we see it over and over again, the pioneer versus the guardian versus the nurturer or connector or a creative, they will do things differently. So, if you know your kids. If you know your spouse. If you know your team, you can help them because you can predict their leadership behavior. So, then you can help them respond to certain things. You can help cut things off. You can help distract. You can help them, “I know where you’re at.” I know what my son will do, he’s a guardian pioneer. I know what my daughter whose a creative will do. I know what my other daughter whose a nurturer will do. So those are the combinations, so it’s really important to just understand the dynamics of it. And then when you track your tendencies know when it happens, and change your actions, that’s when you begin to lead yourself. Most people just accidently run into this and they throw all kinds of fits, and cause all types of drama, and there’s ramifications of that in relationships, in families and in teams.

JEFF: Absolutely. That stuff you brush it  under the rug for awhile and eventually it explodes and giant rug bits all over the place. (48:23) I want to zoom out a little bit. I think a lot of the stuff that we’ve been talking about here, pretty much all the stuff, falls under the emotional intelligence umbrella. You talk about people intelligence with emotional intelligence being part of that. (48:45 What else do we need to know as leaders under this heading?

JEREMIE:  We would say it’s personality and emotional intelligence, it’s skills. So, if you could put it altogether which is where a lot of leadership IQ comes together. Like actual know how of how to do it. So, one of the keys would be for instance, right now in this season, assessing the damage that has happened. I call this the tsunami. The season that we’re in, if you ever studied tsunami’s and I have been, tsunamis are not just one wave, it’s not a tidal wave, they call it the tsunami wave train, and it’s actually 3, 5, 7, 10 waves that come in. Some of them hit five minutes after one another. Some of them hit an hour after one another. So, we’ve already experienced  a three wave tsunami. COVID, the shelter in place ramifications, and layoffs. I’m predicting another wave of layoffs, probably in May. If there’s no vaccine there could be another wave, that would be a five wave tsunami, then there could be another resurgence followed by probably adapted shelter in place financial ramifications followed by another. So, there could be an eight wave tsunami over an eight or nine month period. So, if you understand that dynamic, how then do you adapt to that as a leader, as a team? What needs to happen? So right now, here in bed, I’m doing a whole series and show on assessing the damage and preparing your team to restart. So, what has to take place in the midst of that? And so, those are skills. This is a skills intelligence, if you will. “Okay, I see the  damage. I see where my team is. I understand the psyche of my customer. What’s the battle plan that we have right now?” So, we created a battle plan for Giant, it was a survive and thrive. Survive was contingency planning and stabilization, and then thriving was response and building. What can be build during this time? What do we respond during this time? So, that’s an example of a skill that a leader will think versus if you’ve ever seen Saving Private Ryan or some of those war shows where you get a leader and then all of a sudden, there’s the good leader and there’s the bad leaders, and the bad leader kind of cowers under pressure and they just kind of check out, and the idea would be, the skill of a leader is to assess the damage, to start getting the team, gathering them back, “okay, guys,” establishing short-term goals. What needs to happen between now and September? What needs to happen between now and the end of the year? Let’s now worry about their five year, 10 year vision, let’s just assess where we’re at and what can we do? What can we control in the midst of the uncontrollable?

JEFF: From my business coaching clients, I remind them that it’s okay just to get by. [laughing] That’s step one. Let’s worry about keeping the company alive through this whole thing because that’s the main thing. There are opportunities but if we’re still worrying about survival, don’t worry about the opportunities yet. But there are opportunities and kind of once you can acknowledge and ultimately, sort of as you’re saying, come up with a plan [laughing] for survival, because it may not just happen on its own these days. I’ll give you a hint as existing remote working companies we have a bit of competitive advantage at this point.

JEREMIE: Absolutely. Oh, my goodness. We are getting so many people. We created a remote “boot camp” if you will, how to do team developments, one of these things that I’m telling you about, and we put it out there, and we’ve offered it, but we have so many people who are looking for advice on these things. And if you’re listening you go, “yeah, we’ve been doing this for years. Oh, my goodness why is it just now vogue or it’s okay,” but the new norm will change the dynamic of work. You probably talked all through that in other episodes, but the new working world will be different because of this. 

JEFF: Certainly. I think that there will be a little bit of a backlash. I think that there will be and there are companies that have just done this whole remote  work thing without any plan, without any adjustment of their culture, they may have an alpha culture that doesn’t translate very well to remote working, and people may feel disconnected and it may not be working, so in a few months when they go back to the office they say, “let’s never do that again.” But I think that there will also be a lot of people who are saying, “oh wow, I’m way more productive. We’re being much more vulnerable with each other. I feel more connected. I feel like I actually understand my team better now that the communication is more of a level playing field, it’s not based on where your desk is within the office.”

JEREMIE: Here’s my percentage, this is just a hunch. Fifteen percent (15%) of companies will work differently. Now if you extrapolate that out with how many millions, that may be way too high, but the only rationale I have is the number of clients that have told us that. So, if you’re in the commercial real estate world, that’s going to be a different dynamic, because you may, depending on the property have a harder time. We have two clients who are pulling out of cities and going into a hub and spoke model working out of their home, and they’re giving up the fixed overhead, because of this experience. And it’s been extremely positive. And I think that’s the other thing, we have this thing called a “peace index” Jeff, and we kind of do an index form of where’s your piece at right now? And we found the overwhelming majority, it’s been about 70% of the people. have been more peaceful in the midst of this.  Now, those are some people who haven’t lost jobs and their spouse hasn’t lost a job, and so forth. But, they’ve enjoyed this. So, there’s been some positive obviously. But I think to your point, a lot of people are experimenting with remote. This is one big experiment. And a lot of them are coming out of it going, “that’s what I want to do forever.” So, I think it will change how many change agents are out there and how many freelancers start things, and so on and so forth.  

JEFF: (56:14) Talk to me about the Giant SaaS. For people, I try to define all of the terms when they come up. SaaS software as a service. So, you have some software around all of this. 

JEREMIE: We found that most of the traditional learning for adults was get them to a seminar, sell them a book. It was like go to these long events, read this book and that was where most learning of the 21st century. We just found because of 4G, because of streaming services, because of our phones, most adults are cynical know-it-alls, who don’t read anymore. So, therefore, what content looks like, so on and so forth. So, we were like, “you know what? Lets make adult learning. Let’s make it very, very focused.” So, we created visual tools, we created common language, we  created these  almost Netflix meets Peloton meets Play Station platform called Giant. So, it’s giant.tv. If you want to just try it out and experiment with it, you can go to giant.tv/jk. That gives you 30 days, not just kidding but that’s Jeremie Kubicek. So, giant.tv/jk and you can try it and do a little demo. But what we’ve done is we basically created this system. We use the term “progress is a process.” So, we say, what if you added one tool to you repertoire every week. So, we’ve got 65 or so tools. We’ve got these different pathways. We have things from how do I actually deal with transitions with people? How do I lead remotely? How do I lead my teenagers remotely when I’m working from  home or my kids to that’s more the softer side, to the really needy practical, how do I deal with extreme stress in someone. How do I lead my team with…. So we have about 800 or 900 episodes and then we have pathways and surveys and data and it’s a really unique system and you unlock cards and we share with people what it’s like to be on the other side of themselves. So, it’s almost like a self-awareness journey meets a team performance system. And it’s all designed to get you to work more intelligently and to know yourself, know your team, to get real hard skills on how do I eliminate this? How do I increase influence? How do I get someone to the next level, so on and so forth. So that’s what we built. 

JEFF: (59:11) Is this focused more at leaders and managers or everybody on the team?

JEREMIE: No, this is the cool part. We started off with having everyone in leaders, but we’re morphing it to everyone. What we found is we have a lot of aspirational leaders who wanted to go further, like, why are we limiting them. So, we are just literally in the next week going to open it to everything. Right now, we have three different groups. If you’re a consultant guide, you can actually learn our system, and you can go and we become a wholesaler if you will, so you can use the system. If you’re an individual or a leader, we have those separated, we’re about to let it be for everyone. So, everyone can see everything. And you can then decide how you want to use it with your team. But we do have team tracks that teams can use. Then we also have a system we’re about to employ that allows teammates like almost forced relational trust with each other. It’s like, “Jeff you’re going to meet with Dan this week and you’re going to do these questions.” We’re just creating some innovation around people, adult learning, that hasn’t existed, and we’re getting a lot of looks and a lot of people who are appreciating it. We’ve also made the cost so low. So, it’s very inexpensive. I think that’s another thing people appreciated, which is like a SaaS model, when you have $8.99 a month for an individual I can do that. 

JEFF: It’s cheaper than Netflix.

JEREMIE: That’s right. 

JEFF: And you get more out of it arguably. 

JEREMIE: That’s right. You could only watch so much. Literally, we’re done binge watching in our house. We’re just tired of it. 

JEFF: Eventually you get through the stuff you want to watch and then you’re watching stuff you don’t want to watch. [laughing]. (1:01:33) Well, Jeremy, if people wanted to follow-up with you, get in touch, ask more questions, what’s the best way for them to do that?

JEREMIE: So, giant.tv/ obviously. Or you can go to jeremiekubicek.com. So, if you want more information on anything that we’re doing then you can go to either of those places. Jeff, thanks so much man. It’s so good to talk to someone who is so competent, and I appreciate your questions and your rhythm.

JEFF: Like I said at the top of the podcast, I love this stuff. This is the stuff I really enjoy. Helping people to connect. Helping people to understand each other. And ultimately using that as a method for productivity as a feeling. [laughing] Like, not so much productivity as an output. I think productivity is a measurable thing. We think of this back to the turn of the century, the Industrial Revolution measuring productivity and how many widgets do we have put per hour. But there’s a personal feeling you get from really feeling like you’re personally firing on all cylinders. It’s something that’s kind of , you can connect with that much more when you’re working remotely because it’s you. You’re managing your own time. You’re managing your own productivity, and it can be a great feeling. But I really think that all of this stuff that we’re talking about, culminates in that. There’s obviously business value to having a productive team, but ultimately I think it could be really rewarding for everyone involved.

JEREMIE: Love it. Well, thanks again Jeff.

JEFF: Thank you Jeremy. Keep in touch.

JEREMIE: Appreciate it. Take care.

Here’s the transcript:

JEFF ROBBINS: This is Yonder. Hi everyone, it’s Jeff Robbins back with Episode 86 of the Yonder podcast where we talk to company leaders and big thinkers about how to make remote work. We’re focused on expanding the remote work job market and helping listeners to create happy, productive, distributed teams.

This time we talk with Daron Robertson who is the CEO of BroadPath Healthcare Solutions, a company with employees, the majority of which Daron said 99% of which work remotely and currently with the pandemic going on as it is 100% of which are working remotely. BroadPath provides HIPAA compliant customer support and other services for healthcare and health insurance companies and BroadPath has spun off one of their tools into a separate product called Bhive which provides an open office workplace like environment where employees can see each other on camera while they’re working, also providing some level of trust and meeting compliance needs for remote work environments where security is so important as it is in the healthcare and insurance industries, and Daron is CEO of Bhive as well. 

Daron’s been with us before, but with the shifts that are going on currently around remote work during this Coronavirus pandemic I thought it’d be a great thing to get him back on and to hear from someone who’s running such a large team with security compliance needs and all that stuff that goes beyond. I think it’s easy to talk to small and medium size businesses about what remote work is like but it’s often, as you get into the thousands of employees realm, how does it work? What works? What’d good and what’s not? A lot of it’s very similar but especially when it comes to all this compliance stuff, things get a little bit different. So, anyways, great conversation with Daron coming up.

JEFF: Hi Daron. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

DARON ROBERTSON:  Hey Jeff, great to be here again.

JEFF: Yeah, man you’re a long-time Yonder alumni [laughing] I guess is what I might call you. You came to the Yonder conference in San Diego when we ran that a few years ago, you’ve been part of the Yonder circle, and  we’ve had you on the podcast before.  So, I’ve gotten to  know you some, but we’ve got you to come back to have a deeper conversation as this pandemic has kind of taken hold here in the United States, taken hold worldwide. But, let’s get you introduced. If anybody hasn’t listened to the previous podcast that you were on, why don’t you introduce yourself to people. 

DARON: Good. Daron Robertson, CEO of two companies, BroadPath and Bhive. BroadPath is a services company, aka BPO in the healthcare sector and Bhive is a SaaS Software company with work at home, remote worker focus.

JEFF: And, (5:03) BroadPath is, by remote work company standard, huge. [laughing]  You’ve got a huge team. 

DARON: And growing pretty rapidly. Unfortunately, in some cases because of this situation we find ourselves in.

JEFF: Because of the healthcare issues, not necessarily because of the remote work options, but because of the healthcare immediacy.

DARON: Yeah, and it turned out that within the healthcare sector most of our clients are health plans, like BlueCross plans, things like that, and when this thing hit in early March there was lot of uncertainty around what was going to happen, and call volume was going on the upswing significantly, and some of them were tracking COVID related calls specifically and those were on the rise, and so, there was a lot of scrambling to get extra capacity lined up so that they wouldn’t leave their customers hanging. That did occur for five or six weeks and now things have settled back to normal levels because a lot of folks aren’t going to see the doctor or go to the hospital for more minor things right now. And, fewer cars on the street so there are fewer car accidents, things like that. So, within the healthcare industry it’s been an interesting thing to witness where in the health plan side, initial uptick and now a down tick in the provider side, with the  hospitals and things like that, it’s been a bifurcated impact where direct COVID related care, of course, close to overwhelmed if not overwhelmed, and then in the non-COVID care there’s been furloughs within these providers, where people just don’t have anything to do and they’re trying to cut costs. 

JEFF: Yeah, if you do heart transplants as a surgeon, like, not doing that right now. [laughing] I don’t know that the heart transplant doctors  are getting laid off but maybe the nurses are. 

DARON: Given the cardiac issues that are coming out of COVID, but certainly other practices are. 

JEFF: So, (7:34) just to paint the picture, BroadPath provides the call support.  They call support people for healthcare companies, particularly healthcare insurance companies. So, if you call up your insurance company  you might talk to a BroadPath employee who would help you through the phone tree of whatever your being helped with. Correct?

DARON: [laughing] Exactly. Yes. And us and many, many others.

JEFF:  I’m sure I’ve oversimplified it. [laughing]

DARON: No, that’s fine. That’s essentially what we do. There’s a lot of other stuff we do on the backend helping with administration of claims and things like that. But, yes, in the call center space that’s what we do.

JEFF: (8:30) And partly it’s seasonal because things like open enrollment is seasonal. 

DARON: Yeah.

JEFF: (8:41) And so that happens for a few months when people are calling up to rearrange their healthcare, and then open enrollment closes, and those people aren’t really needed, which is part of the reason that the healthcare companies hire you, rather than just doing that in-house is because they need specialists to handle that ramp up and ramp down stuff? Is that right? 

DARON: Exactly. Yeah, most of the workload in the health payers, it’s called, the health insurance sector, occurs between October and March, and it’s relatively painful to ramp up by thousands of heads and then ramp right back down. Certainly, some of our clients do that themselves, but they in large part offload much of that work to partners like BroadPath.

JEFF:  (9:38) And your people all work at home? In fact, that’s pretty safe to say, work at home, because sometimes when we talk about this, they’re like, oh, people work from Starbucks and stuff, but you can’t really do call support from a Starbucks. 

DARON: [laughing] No, you couldn’t.  But pre-COVID we were about 99% work from home and now we’re 100%. So, didn’t have a lot of transition pain there.

JEFF: (10:10) So, now that we’ve painted that picture and people understand your background here, let’s zoom way back out again and let’s talk some about this COVID situation, and particularly remote work. All these companies including a lot of your competitors, all of your competitors I would argue, in order to stay in business have just sent their people home, and for companies like yours and mine, where we’ve been working remotely for years and feel like this is a competitive advantage, all of a sudden we’re now competing [laughing] with all these other people who are kind of doing the same thing, but I guess in a larger sense, I have this existential question, is this really remote work? Are these companies that have just sent their people home and now they’re “remote working” are they? They are, but what are the missing pieces here? Should those of us that have felt like we’ve had remote work as a competitive advantage be afraid or delighted? I’m trying to get my head around this from somebody who has been talking about remote work for the past 15 years and feeling like, Oh, this is a great thing. Everybody should adopt it, and now everyone has, and I have a mixed [laughing] feeling and I’m trying to unwind that. (11:57) What are your thoughts about all this?

DARON: I have mixed feelings as well. [laughing] It’s sort of like you feel both. You feel fear and delight at the same time. [laughing] I’m personally very excited on that everyone has now ripped the band-aid off, right?

JEFF:  Right.

DARON: I think remote work, at least in my industry, fell into the category, there were two things going on. One is, it fell into that quadrant of important but not urgent and so, maybe it was a good idea to do and we’ll dabble in it, but it doesn’t have to be a strategic initiative for us today because it’s not urgent. Then the other thing, I think holding it back was this largely perception that it is not as secure. That, particularly in the healthcare space, you’ve got people working from home dealing with highly sensitive data, medical records, the usual stuff like credit card information, social security numbers, but also medical information, and they’re having very sensitive conversations with people about their health, and there’s nothing really more sensitive than that conversation. That or maybe money. And so, I think that combination of those two is why you just didn’t see remote work take off despite huge advantages to the model.  We did this back of the napkin little study internally at BroadPath years ago where we just wanted to see if you put real estate and commercial office, spend as it’s own industry, expenditure and held it next to healthcare expenditures and defense and education and social security, and all the major programs that the government is involved in, it’s up there, number two or three on the list, and so, that alone, the massive potential for organizations to save money on real estate should’ve pushed people firmly into the remote work model.  Tons of other reasons, carbon footprint, people on average commute six weeks a year, employees love it, employers can save a lot of money and get access to talent nationwide. All these are really, really powerful things in the pro category, and you have to ask yourself what’s in the con category that’s always been holding it back, and I think it’s trust and that lack of urgency, and so the urgency just got ripped off [laughing], everyone did it. 

JEFF: Right.

DARON: They moved out of the important but urgent category into the important and urgent category and it happened. But, the trust hasn’t been addressed, the accountability hasn’t been addressed, nor has the softer stuff like culture, connection, engagement, and so, we have to figure out how to solve those to make the model work long-term, and our concern is that we all declare victory prematurely and then we look back three months from now and we go, Oh man, this isn’t working very well. Let’s all run back to the office as soon as we possibly can. 

JEFF:  Right.  That it can have this hangover effect, that everyone is delighted, Oh, this is so great. Remote work is so great, I feel so free, this is so great, and then the next morning people realize they’ve lost connection, they’ve lost culture, they don’t quite trust people, they’re not being as productive, they’re not being as connected. And they blame remote work rather than the systems and processes that they haven’t really [laughing] thought about, and go back into the office saying, Blah, I thought it was great but apparently not, and that’s that. It seems like an unfortunate conclusion.

DARON:  And avoidable. What we’re trying to frame the discussion as is think about it, pick your framework, but our framework is, we view it as a three-stage evolution. So, stage one is the basics and we’re there now. We got into stage one. We got bodies, we got people at home. In our industry we got calls successfully routed to the home agent. Whatever industry you pick people are at home, they’re doing the work, they’re getting the work done, and we all deserve a huge pat on the back for making that happen in a more painless way than we thought it was going to happen. Stage two we think the focus of people that are trying to make work at homework and stick, we think that the next focus will be stage two is sort of, how do we get good productivity and performance and accountability within that remote work model now. So, everyone would admit they probably sent people to work from home that might not be set up for success there, and so, putting the processes and other programs in place, not just the technology but the processes layered around that technology, to make sure that they get good performance, productivity out of their work at home employees. And then Stage three is more of a shift into culture and connection and engagement and social isolation, and the more soft stuff around making work at home successful.  

JEFF: Maslow’s hierarchy of remote work. You got the basics, just get people working at home, next on top of that is productivity, maybe you want people to be productive, and then  the higher level stuff is, which is important I think because people expect that in an office environment is, those more squishy things like connection, culture, morale.

DARON: Yeah, exactly. So, we all love working from home now, but for some people in particular it’s got to be a pretty isolating experience and they’re feeling out there on their own, maybe they don’t even have the communication patterns established yet. Initially, four weeks ago when we would have that framework discussion people were like, whatever. Yeah fine. We’ll talk about culture later, we’re just trying to keep the lights on right now, thank you very much. But now we’re getting a lot of traction with that model, and we’re just trying to frame the discussion there and get people to buy into. One of the larger organizations that we work with, a senior leader said something to the effect of, Hey, what’s so hard about this? We’re all working from home now. Heck, our partners are at home, and this is the more interesting thing then to is, We’re at home offshore. So, this is something that is brand new to my industry. When you think about in the healthcare sector there always has been a lot of offshore support to that model, right? Folks in the Philippines, in the Caribbean, in India. Thousands and thousands of workers, right, in those countries, and work from home was completely unheard of.

JEFF: Huge call centers in particularly the Philippines but also India, other places, but these were call centers. People went into work often at odd hours in order to work the American workday, but yeah. 

DARON: And not only that, but the benefits of work from home are even greater there. It’s not uncommon in the Philippines for instance, for people to commute two hours, three hours, each way to get to work.  Every call center there, for the most part of any size, has sleeping quarters where people can take naps during the day. In some cases, spend the night there. Maybe you have workers come in at four a.m. for a seven a.m. shift, they come in early just to avoid traffic and then they need a place to nap. So, there’s all this friction in the  model that work at home addresses but due to concerns about infrastructure and the basic trust, accountability question, security, it’s been completely unheard of, and now everyone’s doing it, and many organizations are considering keeping 20-30% of their headcount at home, even offshore. Again, it’s hard to overstate how big of a change this is virtually overnight.

JEFF:  (21:50) Yeah, are there security concerns? This has been a main focus of BroadPath. Do you need to be HIPAA compliant or is that outside the purview of the work that BroadPath is doing?

DARON:  No, very much HIPAA compliant is part of it. There’s another certification called HITRUST which we’re a HITRUST certified organization. 

JEFF: Right. (22:20) So, you’ve got people working at home, they’re dealing with sensitive data, certainly sensitive conversations, any conversations around peoples’ health is sensitive and probably people don’t [laughing] want that getting out.  How do you handle that? How is that being handled by people working at remote villages in the Philippines?

DARON: We’re handling it in two ways. The first way is the same way that everyone else is handling it which is a significant lever that you pull. Number one is technology, and not our technology but just straight up stuff everyone uses; VDI infrastructure, virtual desktop infrastructure, lock down PCs, all the frontend table stakes technology controls that everyone has in place which are arguably 80% of the security posture that you get is from these things that everyone does, right? The second is, of course, training, making sure people understand things like fishing. All the table stake stuff that everyone does is still really important and arguably responsible for the majority of protection that you get. Then the remaining stuff, the things that made people uncomfortable with the work at home model, that’s what we’re trying to solve for in addition to the connection, engagement, and social isolation piece. And so, we do that through technology we developed called Bhive as well as the programs that we’ve developed around Bhive. So, when you think about the remaining security gaps, and with any at home worker, it’s what’s going on in their office. Is an unauthorized third party looking at their screens? Are they perhaps working on their computer? Does the person say, I’m going to split my shift with my wife or son, I’ll take the morning shift, they’ll take the afternoon shift, and it’s like a different human being sharing the work.

JEFF: Right.  These are interesting things that you could never do in a collocated office, but, ways that people might take advantage of a remote working situation. Similar to, you hear about people sharing; your Uber shows up and the driver who’s driving, it’s the car you ordered, but it’s a different person at the wheel, because they’re sharing, or somebody’s filling in and stuff that’s not supposed to happen, right? This is not the vetted person. This is not the person who was hired for this job.

DARON: That’s right, and then other areas are, okay are you writing down protected health information? Are you taking pictures of screens? Things like that, and you could never control for those at 100%. But with Bhive and some of the other programs we have in place, you can begin to get closer, and that helps a lot, to take it as far as you can take it in the at home environment, and it’s enough that it’s made our clients comfortable using BroadPath agents working from home, and it’s got a huge potential benefit in the offshore model because it’s largely perception again that home office work in the Philippines is less secure than home office work in the U.S. It’s not fair, but that perception just exists. 

JEFF: Right. (26:28) So, Bhive. You’re solving these difficult problems; jobs where security was an issue paramount. People had to be in the office and they’d oftentimes get padded down before and after they leave [laughing], and there would be someone closely looking over their shoulder. Bhive  has a camera that people have on them while they work. And, I mentioned this the last time you were on the podcast, and I’ll probably say a pretty similar thing like, part of the thing with remote work for a lot of companies has been that it’s just about trust, and that there’s no such thing as micromanagement in remote work and stuff. This isn’t for the purpose of micromanagement. This is more about security, accountability and building the trust from end to end between the people who are answering the phone and doing the work, and not only you, but your security conscious clients as well, right? 

DARON: Yeah. The starting point for Bhive is really the premise that you feel closer to, and you trust more people that you can see, than those you can’t. 

JEFF: That’s why in the general [laughing] population people didn’t really know what Zoom was until the pandemic, and now everyone’s talking about it everywhere because it’s how people are connecting.

DARON: Yeah. It is funny this awakening that people have to Zoom. For us and a lot of other people it’s been just one of many tools.

JEFF: Right. It happened to be the one that happened to be at the top of the pile when all of this hit. There have been others over time. I remember Skype. Everyone was excited about Google, what was it called, Google Meeting? 

DARON: Hangouts.

JEFF: Hangouts, that’s right. And then Zoom floated to the top and then all of a sudden everybody needed something, and Zoom was the most popular one. Certainly not the only game in town. 

DARON: Yeah, and it’s free and it’s super easy to use and it works, so everyone’s using it.

JEFF: (29:00) But what you’ve got is a different technology. It probably does similar kinds of things, but this is more about ongoing monitoring, I guess is what I’d call it. Yes?

DARON: It’s not monitoring. There’s certainly part of it that is monitoring. But in our view it’s no more monitoring or scary than you would have working in an office with people where you could see each other working, like an open floor. Bhive is basically creating an open office environment virtually, where your CEO is sitting next to you at a desk, all your coworkers are sitting next to you at a desk, and you all work together and see each other. And it’s simply no more scary than that is.

JEFF: Than an open office.

DARON: Than an open office.

JEFF: Any San Francisco startup will tell you exactly what this is like. [laughing] That’s how all the startups start. 

DARON: That’s right and it has similar benefits and drawbacks to an open office, right. In an open office you don’t have a lot privacy to take a call from your wife unless you step out into the little phonebooth. In Bhive we’ve got a mechanism to do that as well; it’s called shutting off your camera, and we don’t have audio. It’s just recreating that visual open office space. And so, it’s interesting to see peoples reactions. The people that have worked from home forever and are kind of digital nomads look at me and they’re like, Well, we don’t need that, that’s Big Brother, and okay fine, but people who haven’t worked from home before and maybe aren’t built for it, or more social and want to feel more connected, they like being able to see their coworkers working just at a glance like left and right. Now, there’s a key distinction I have to make with Bhive, and that is, we don’t do a front facing, high definition camera always on kind of thing. That is uncomfortable, and you don’t get that in an open office where you have three peoples faces six inches from yours just staring at you [laughing] continuously. We’ve deliberately tried to recreate the experience of looking to your left or looking to your right, people positioned 10 feet away, what would that look like on camera, and that’s what we’ve done. So, we take a wide-angled webcam, we put it to the side of the person. The view you see is a fairly low resolution view of them working kind of far  away in their home office. So, you see their desk, you see the side of their monitors,  you see the cool stuff they have on the wall, in my case it’s a bunch of guitars, that prides some talking opportunity, but it’s not like you’re sitting there altogether, all day long, like in a Zoom meeting. That’s not the experience that we go for. It’s more like sitting in a coffee shop next to your coworkers, virtual.

JEFF:  So, this fills in a piece, right? One of the things I worry about with this podcast is that it can become a bit of an echo chamber, that there’s a certain amount of pattern matching that I only end up talking to web development companies because web development companies work really well in remote work, and we talk about the world of remote work, but really what we’re just talking about is a subset of web development companies [laughing], but the question I’ve asked and the reason that I started Yonder was, how can I harness what I learned in my web development company and seem to be this magical thing around remote work. Is this something that translates? How can it translate? Who can I talk to, to start to understand and ultimately create a modellable behavior for other companies around what are the lessons that we can bring out there into the world and what works? And, a missing piece historically has been this security, monitorable work. The kind of work where that security is a concern and we need to translate that trust. (33:47) I’m sure that there are probably also other pieces that this starts to bring in. talk to me a little about that. What am I missing about what are the cultural advantages? Are there other pieces that start to fill in when you’re doing this? Or maybe there are other things that you’re doing that start to bring culture in, especially at scale where you’ve got 2500, 3000 people all working like this.

DARON: That brings us to where we’re taking the Bhive platform. Really we’re envisioning Bhive as a platform purpose built for the remote work experience. It has functionality in really three boxes. It has functionality that enhances connection and engagement, one. Two, it has functionality that enhances performance and accountability. And then, three, it has functionality that enhances security. And so, we’re building functionality along all three swim lanes, and again, it’s nothing more than replicating things that exist in the office experience today.

We’ve launched a program called Hive Life, played on the Bhive term, and it’s focused on directly addressing some of the gaps that exist with remote work relative to social isolation and wellness.

when you think about wellness offerings that employers provide for employees, that’s a b to b product, there’s a lot of interesting things being done. By and large historically if you’re a remote worker in some cases you could access to a coach, you could do virtual telehealth, things like that which is great. But if you want to learn more about restful sleep or nutrition or whatever, you’re typically going to be watching some prerecorded content, consuming it On Demand by yourself. And so, that fills its space. It’s incredibly convenient because you can do it on your own schedule, but it misses two things. One is, it doesn’t really connect you with coworkers, per se, so it doesn’t really solve the social isolation issue. There’s a lot of research being done on social isolation and directly tying it to health impact, and that is very real. The second thing is that it’s not a live experience. There’s something about live that makes people feel more engaged. So, what you see with those programs traditionally, wellness programs, are relatively low participation, especially from remote workers. And they’ve got a ton of other options available, just online. You can just go online.  Now that’s changed a lot in the recent three or four weeks where everyone’s on Zoom and the live thing is not an issue anymore; everyone’s live. My wife dances with 5,000 people everyday for an hour, which is awesome, and I love to see the creativity that’s coming out now in society. It’s a whole new world going forward. But, still, in my mind, one of the  missing components there is, there’s not an avenue directly for connecting while you’re doing that live 5,000 person thing. If you could combine that large massive online format with a small group intimacy, that to me has a lot of potential, and that’s what we’re trying to do with Hive Life. So, what we’re doing there is saying, Okay, let’s say we’ll offer a six week stress management and mindfulness workshop. It’s an hour a week for six weeks and you meet with eight to 10 of your coworkers who share that common interest and throughout the process you support each other on that journey dealing with stress which is through the roof for our employees now. Cause not only are they taking calls all day long but now they’re taking calls from more stressed out customers and they have their kids on their lap.  Our employees don’t have a lot of available time or the tools to deal with some of these issues. So, because we’re a service provider we can’t change a lot, but we can offer the tools to deal with stress. So, you’re in that six week class, you meet for an hour a week, you are both learning practical tools to manage stress but you’re also making friends in the process. And so, when you exit that six week class, hopefully two things have occurred; you’re better at meditating, one, but two, you’ve made two or three friends that you wouldn’t have had opportunity to otherwise. So that dual purpose of wellness and connection is where our focus is with this Hive Life program, and it’s been incredibly successful so far in our pilot stage, in our bootup stage with employees just raving. They’re like, Please don’t stop because I want to keep going to these classes. Now our challenge is how do we scale it.

JEFF: Interesting. Yeah, I mean there’s a whole lot of value. Well these layers of value, right. You can watch anything on YouTube, it’s just a matter of actually getting around to doing it, so when something is live and especially when you’re doing it with other people, there’s some urgency isn’t quite exactly the right word, I mean it’s urgent at the moment, right? You need to be there Monday at 10:00 when the thing is happening and you know it’s going to happen, right? I’ve realized during these past six [laughing] weeks or whatever it’s been, I can do workouts on YouTube. I wasn’t going to my trainer because she would walk me through the workout, or because she knew what the workout was, I was going there because it was an appointment, so I would actually do it and I was beholden to her and all that kind of stuff. So, there’s value to that. And then another layer on top of that is this social aspect, which is a really interesting thing, and provides some interesting clues, especially as we’re potentially looking at the next year without things like conferences, and places that people oftentimes go for that social aspect of things. And a piece that gets missed on online interactions, either it’s a one to many like a webinar kind of thing where you don’t have any idea who you’re attending with, or it tends to be more of work based, purpose built groups that meet online in a small group.  (42:00) But I’m curious how we can start to replicate these more serendipitous relationships that happen through meeting with things, and it seems like this has some of that right? That it’s the people that are taking the mindfulness class together out of the 3,000 people that work at your company [laughing] get to know each other, which is an interesting aspect. 

DARON: Yeah, and it does have potential benefit in the consumer space, we’re just trying to solve for the employee sector first.

JEFF: Absolutely.

DARON: Another thing that we’re going to be doing is monthly, and this is not particularly unique, but it is a little unique, we’re doing monthly livestream events. We hired a local  band here in Tucson called Ryanhood to do a private BroadPath performance for us for 40 minutes, and that was special because employees, it was for them. It wasn’t like, Hey, let’s all watch a livestream together.

JEFF: This isn’t Lady Gaga that’s putting this together.

DARON:  Exactly. And so that right there helps because the 200 or so people that chose to attend, we offered it after hours so not everyone could fit it into their schedule, but the couple hundred people that attended, that was already a safer group to share with. We did a little happy hour before the event where it was even smaller groups of eight to 10 people on Skype or Zoom, tool  of their choice [laughing], just drinking cocktails and hanging out; everyone’s doing happy hours, but then when you piggyback that happy hour with this company private livestream, it was really cool. What we’re trying to either build or buy is, can we  seamlessly shift people to the large group event, but preserve the small group interactions that you had in that happy hour, so that you’re watching that livestream event both with your small group that you just got drunk with, and with the larger group.  What happened during the livestream concert was that a smaller group of people that I was part of, we were on WhatsApp posting pictures of us and our families sitting in front of the livestream screen, and so it was like a bunch of people just snapshotting themselves while they were watching and that added a whole new level of we’re in this together. So, what we’re building is a mockup or a prototype where you’re in a small eight to 10 person group, then you all jump into a large, could be thousands of people watching, livestream event, but that eight to 10 people are still visible, right there in video and posting pictures of each other and chatting and that to me is like, that’s the special sauce there, because then you get both. You can scale it, but you still get that small group experience. It’s kind of like some things that they’re doing with Twitch, the Netflix watch together kind of thing. A lot of those are just like chat based. We want to be able to see the people that we’re watching with, while we’re watching, in a not distracting way [laughing].  

JEFF: Right. Yeah. It’s a fascinating user experience issue. To some extent it’s a technology problem, but I feel like the technology’s mostly there it’s just a matter of figuring out how to arrange the technology [laughing] so that it kind of replicates real life, but maybe even better than real life, because if you’re going to a concert together oftentimes if it’s a quiet concert you can hear each other talking, but then it’s rude to talk [laughing] or it’s a loud concert and you can’t talk because it’s so loud, you know, to try and find that balance. (46:28) So, again, I want to zoom back out again. What advice can we give for companies that have gone remote? I feel there’s this potential for them to do it wrong, not knowing what doing it well looks like, and that we end this whole this with remote work in a worse place than it was when it started. I don’t think that’s a likely scenario, I’m being a little bit hyperbolic, but what advice do you have for these companies maybe as they’re going through these stages as you put them, the one, two, three? Because at any point, they get the basics down, but they never quite get productivity. They assume that productivity is just not a thing that happens with remote work, they go back into the office and say, Well, we would never do remote work again because it’s so much less productive. Or they never get culture and they go back into the office and say, Well, you can’t replicate culture in remote work. What advice do you have? What’s missing?

DARON:  Kind of just plan for the breakage and commit to the long haul. It’s all of these gaps that are going to show up, or these weaknesses that are going to occur.  The other shoes going to drop, plan for it. So, we know there are people that have been sent home to work remotely now that have no business working remotely, right? Maybe it’s the simple stuff like their home office isn’t set up for it, or their bandwidth isn’t quite where it needs to be. But it also could be they don’t work well in that kind of environment where there’s low accountability or there’s no connection and they’re just off on their own as a single producer. So, if we understand those issues are going to come up and commit to solving them, they are all solvable. It’s not just one answer. Our technology and the way we approach it, there’s no one size fits all anymore than there is in the brick and mortar environment. There’s a million different ways to skin a cat and arrive at the same finish line, so to speak. But we’ve all ripped the band-aid off now, so look at this as an opportunity to permanently optimize yourself, to set yourself up as a forward thinking company versus  a maybe, in some cases, middle of the pack or even a follower. Take advantage of it.   The other thing is why it’s an opportunity is that, it’s new. You can do anything. There’s no burn in that’s occurred for the most part, especially if you’re new to this where your employees are used to working in environment A and you’re trying to change manage them into environment B. 

JEFF: Right. Sending them home for seemingly no reason, and there’s a reason now, above, and beyond “company optimism” or we’re going to try a new thing, or I’ve got a brainwave. 

DARON: Yeah and even with a technology like Bhive which requires some change management along with it, if your workforce has not been used to something else, then it’s not as challenging because the change isn’t as large. So, it’s just an opportunity to really take a step back once we’ve ripped the band-aid off and get more strategic and see what do we want the longer term to look like, even if COVID were to evaporate tomorrow by some miracle cure, there is an opportunity there to permanently transition your model in a more future forward way, like future is today. [laughing] However, if you don’t take a look more toward the long-term and how we can optimize and make the remote model more sticky, then we know in a lot of cases it’s going to be more painful and you might end up just out of sheer frustration, like, Whatever, everyone just go back to the office. We’ve got the real estate. We’ve got the cafeterias. We know how that works. Everyone just come back in.

JEFF:  (51:38) So when you say plan for the breakage, you mean it’s not going to work perfectly the first time and maybe not the second time. There’s going to be a little bit of stuff that falls apart, but it’s worth sticking in.

DARON:  Let’s say you’re a Fortune 500 company and you’ve had a remote work program but number one, it’s been hub and spoke, so you’ve kept everyone within a 50 mile radius of an office so they can come in for training and corporate events and things like that, if that’s been your approach, one. Two, if you’ve also, which a lot of enterprises have done, use remote work as a reward system where only your top performing employees get to work from home, then you got a whole different paradigm right now that you have to get in front of, where maybe it’s not hub and spoke anymore, or maybe it is but you just don’t have the office to go to so you don’t have that benefit. Number two, you’ve got people working from home that aren’t your top performers and aren’t self-driven, high performing [laughing]. How do you make work at homework for the masses, just like you made brick and mortar work for the masses? Again, they’re solvable problems but if you’re approaching it in exactly the same way you did before, or worse, approaching work at home exactly like brick and mortar, then there’s going to be some significant breakage, I think. And what we don’t want to have is any organization just go, Oh, that sucked. That didn’t work. Let’s all go back to the office.

JEFF: (53:30) Do you think that there are certain people who won’t work well remotely or is this more a problem of management and company and culture. Are there tricks that you found for helping people to work remotely that might not be so self-directed?

DARON: Well, yeah.

Bhive helps a lot. If you can see your team members, just forget your boss, but if you can just see one another working throughout the day, you right away feel more accountable to your team members. It’s interesting.

We’ve also seen patterns of communication change when you’re in Bhive versus out. We had some far flung developers, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Philippines, where we weren’t as deliberate about getting everyone in the same room together in Bhive, and everyone needs a nudge Jeff. Everyone needs a nudge to get on video in Zoom, everyone needs a nudge to get on video in Bhive. It’s the same thing. But once you’re there you go, Oh, that’s kind of cool now.  

JEFF: Well, and it’s an even playing field too. That’s been one of my sayings around remote work. It’s important that whatever you do it’s an even playing field, right? It feels uncomfortable when most people in the room are on video in Zoom and a few people aren’t. Why? What’s going on? And likewise, maybe nobody’s on video and that also feels okay.  And likewise, hybrid teams are really difficult where some people are in the office and some people are not. But whatever it is, once you’ve got an even playing field everybody’s on video. Okay, this is just what we’re doing. We’re all in this together.

DARON: And there’s this, lack of a better term, I call it Zoom prairie dogging, that we’ve seen with some companies. It’s really interesting to watch where you’ll be in a Zoom meeting and people only go on video when they have something to say, and they’ll say their two or three sentences and then they’ll go black again. So, it’s like pop in the video, go black, pop in the video, go black, and it’s weird because you’ll be one of two or three people whose on video the whole time and it’s like Whoa, what’s going on and why are we doing that? [laughing] It’s got no brick and mortar precedent really.

JEFF: Yeah, it’s funny. As the leader of a company, or even a manager, I think we don’t even ask for as much empathy as we might. But oftentimes that means that you, or me, are the people who are on video [laughing] talking to a blank room of nobody and then somebody pops up and has a question, and it’s weird [laughing], it’s really frustrating.

DARON:  [laughing] It’s really weird. It is really weird. What you said is right, if everyone’s doing it everyone should do it. If no one’s doing it, no one does it. Either one is fine. It’s the hybrid ground that’s uncomfortable for both parties. The other thing that we really try to do is give people a hall pass, number one. Some people just have Zoom fatigue these days, like, I can’t stare at myself on Zoom anymore. I just need a mental break from that like looking at you, looking at me, talking to one another and part of it is self-conscious and part of it is trying to focus on you, it’s just a weird experience to have for eight hours a day.  When we were showing Bhive to an organization a couple of years ago, one of the developers, he was leading a development team, he said, “You know, it’s interesting because when you think about it, Bhive is really the ultimate opportunity to show vulnerability and promote connection because you’re making yourself vulnerable by allowing people to see you all day long working from home”, and that’s a powerful way to promote connection. And we’re trying to do that here at BroadPath too, where it’s okay if your four year old jumps on your lap in the middle of a meeting. It’s okay to show up with a baseball cap because your hairs a mess, or whatever, you haven’t shaved for two weeks. It’s okay, let’s have fun with it. I think it’s a beautiful opportunity to show the more human side. The prairie dogging effect is really people that are really afraid to show that other side, and it’s such an opportunity. So, you’re eating a carrot right now, who cares. 

JEFF: Right. That’s what I was going to say. They’re prairie dogging because they’re eating their lunch. It’s like, just eat your lunch, it’s fine. [laughing] And to have that kind of built into your culture I think is important. My saying around it is we are being invited into peoples homes. If people are working at home they’re inviting our company into their home. Let’s be respectful and treat them like a human and allow them to be human and not require them to do the Kabuki theater that is professionalism. I joke like, most people are able to pull off professionalism about eight hours a day, and then, it’s just [laughing] okay, I gotta go home because I just need to put on some sweatpants or I can’t wear a necktie anymore, or whatever those things. I don’t know any company that requires people to wear suits and ties when they work from home. Where does that go. Likewise, you can’t really control what your pet is doing. Likewise, you can’t really control what your kids are doing. Let that be okay. 

DARON: Yeah, it’s a great equalizer and humanizer to be able to have that window. [laughing] I think some people when they think about a Bhive environment they think, Oh man, will I be micromanaged, and this could be such a powerful tool and so misused and that’s right. We don’t  think it’s appropriate for some cultures [laughing] where it wouldn’t be used  appropriately and respectfully like you said. There’s no predefined outcome. It could be a connecting tool and it could be a micromanaging tool.  

JEFF: You could use a hammer for all sorts of different things as well.  

DARON: [laughing] That’s right. Exactly.

JEFF: It’s just the tool, you know. You could build a house or go on a killing spree. [laughing] One is ill-advised. 

DARON: We’re doing our first BroadPath’s Got Talent Show in two weeks where it’s going to be interesting. People are auditioning for a two to three minute chance to be famous [laughing] amongst their coworkers.  

JEFF: (1:01:23) Are there other  cultural things? I’m curious just that the scale that you have, what it looks like to connect people, because I think for people that have had remote work experience maybe they’ve got a team within their larger company and teams are usually in that range of five to 15 people that need to connect or you’ve got a larger company that’s 50 to 75 people and there are ways you can kind of connect. You know everybody’s names at the company and stuff like that.  I guess there’s probably a lot of stuff [laughing] that translates from having a 3,000 person collocated company because they’re the same problems, but what does it look like to handle such a large remote team like that?

DARON: Some things are done at the team level organically and other things are done more enterprise wide. 

JEFF: (1:02:25) So you are split up into teams? How large are your teams?

DARON: 10 to 15 typically, sometimes 20. So, the people that have a lot of fun with Bhive, and you could do everything you could do in a brick and mortar center now, because you can see each other. So, you can wear purple hair for a day, or you can put your favorite stuffed animal in front of the camera, or you can do where’s waldo. The limit is human creativity there and teams just do that organically and we take pictures [laughing] of it when they do it.

JEFF: Yeah, there’s some of that on the Bhive homepage which we should mention the URL here. It’s go.inbhive.com, and as I’m watching these photos cycle through there’s people wearing crazy hats in one picture and everyone wearing orange in another picture [laughing]. These are interesting and people start using these things in interesting and kind of fun ways that ultimately start to express culture.

DARON: There’s one person, John, in our accounting department that everyday usually he does something subtle and interesting in front of his Bhive cam, and so people go, What is John doing today? And we got a little bit of a photo montage going. [laughing] And then you could do corporate wide things that are more structured like the livestream that we’re going to be doing monthly. The Hive Life classes, things like that. So, it’s kind of a combination of both. Like you said, it’s just a tool, and it can be either neutral, game changing positively or game changing negatively, depending on the programs that you wrap around it. So, we’re focusing obviously on the connection and engagement piece and taking that to the next level of what does Bhive enable you to do that you couldn’t do before and lets run with that. 

JEFF: Yeah. Cool. Well Daron this is a fascinating conversation as usual. (1:04:59) Is there anything you wanted to touch on that we zoomed by that you want to revisit?

DARON: The last thing I was going to say is what we’ve noticed is that patterns of communication change. For example, in our software development team, when they all got deliberate about being on Bhive for more hours of the day, you know you can’t do it eight hours a day if you’re in all different time zones, we saw the patterns of communication change a lot where, people were much less hesitant to ask a question. They would always assume if you couldn’t see the person they would be more leery about am I going to interrupt that person by asking them a question? And so, you would see less collaboration and people wouldn’t be as aligned, and just strictly patterns of communication change when you’re in Bhive you see a higher frequency of email and chat on the other tools that we have. There’s more Slack chatter, more Slack communication, there’s more phone calling going on when they’re in Bhive than when they’re not. And that’s really cool to see, because it means that it’s working to help bring people together and make them feel like they can collaborate.  One of the main complaints is that presence is not always real, [laughing], so you might see the green dot but that doesn’t mean they’re going to get back to you anytime soon. 

JEFF: Right. Yeah. This line of keeping an open line of communication is one of those phrases that goes around in the corporate environment, but, what we’re really talking about is just knowing that we can reach out and being able to see people, see your coworkers is a reminder that they are there, and they’re in fact not talking to anybody else on the phone right now. Just that reminder. I do think the presence and this peripheral information, one of the things that I advise around remote work is that people need to understand their context. They need to understand their purpose, but ultimately they need to understand where they sit. Who are they working with? Everything from what does this company do to how this company does it. I find that in remote working environments companies tend to be much more transparent. They need to be in order to provide that context to people so when they sit down at their laptop, they sit down at their computer at home, that they know what they’re doing. And it seems like Bhive is just another way of giving that context. 

DARON: It is. Some visual context. We started developing a prototype that we still want to move forward with where, and this skirts interesting territory but, where Bhive would pick up audio of the user, not to hear the conversation or transcribe it or record it or anything, but strictly to do pattern analysis on the wave form, and indicate with a greater confidence level whether the user was available to talk to or not. Were they in a conversation on their cell phone? Were they in a conversation in person? Because you can get some of that stuff from your integrations. So, if you’ve had a Skype integration you know if they’re on a Skype call, great. But that doesn’t help you with an in person conversation nor a  cell phone conversation. And so, could you do reliable audio analysis to say, Okay, when you have these kind of patterns it indicates a person is not available because they’re in a conversation of some sort, and then how much silence do you listen for before you say, hey, they’re available now. So, if you combine something like that with integrating with coms applications, with also having the ability to put yourself in a do not disturb or a focus time, you got a really kickass way to really hone in on those times when a person might be with a high confidence, I can reach out to them now and I’m going to be able to go synchronous with them. When you do that in an office, if a person is working two doors down, you typically would say, okay do I have a green dot? Yes. Okay, now I’m going to walk over to their office, I’m going to glance in, and I’m going to see are they on a call, are they talking to someone, and then do they look like their heads down, and if the answer to all three of those is no, you might knock on their door. So, can we replicate that virtually to get the same effect.

JEFF: Well, a better effect ultimately. How many times in an office environment have you walked all the way down to the bosses door only to look through it and realize, Oh, they look like they’re busy, and then later on, two hours later you’re like, Oh, I came down and you looked busy. Oh no, no I wasn’t busy.  [laughing] Like that conversation, it didn’t even need to not happen  you know.

DARON: And the hard thing is you want to automate it for people  cause the focus time capability is cool but then the user has to remember to put themselves in and out of focus time, and they’ll forget going in or they’ll forget going out. [laughing] So, if you could do that sort of automagically that would be really cool.

JEFF: Well, great. So, Daron if anybody wanted to follow-up with you about Bhive or any of your stuff, BroadPath, where should they get in touch with you?

DARON: They can email me directly at daron@broad-path.com or they can go to the website go.inbhive.com and fill out the information request page. 

JEFF: Yeah, great. Well thanks Daron.

DARON: Thanks Jeff. Pleasure, as always.

JEFF: Always an interesting conversation. Take care.

Here’s the transcript:

JEFF: Hi Mark. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

MARK FAGGIANO:  Hey Jeff, thanks for inviting me. Great to be here.

JEFF: Yeah, well we’re [laughing] recording this. I should give people a little reference. We’re recording this right at the end of March. Tomorrow will be April 1st in 2020, and we are right in the middle of the pandemic. So, this whole remote thing is a hot topic. [laughing]

MARK: Sure, it is. [laughing].

JEFF: So, where are you talking to us from today?

MARK: I’m located just outside of Boston, so a little bit north of Boston.

JEFF: And you’re at home?

MARK: Sure am, yep. I’m at home every day. That hasn’t changed at all. 

JEFF: Okay.

MARK: There’s more people here at home than there normally are, but, otherwise same desk, everything’s the same for me right now.

JEFF: Yeah, right. Because all the kids are at home too, and I think for a lot of us who have figured out our remote productivity thing, it [laughing] sometimes depends on kids being in school more than we realize. So, okay, you are the CEO of TaxJar. (3:54) Why don’t you give a better introduction [laughing] than that to people.

MARK: So, I’m a career entrepreneur. I started my first company about 16-17 years ago. Really fell in love with finding ways to help small and medium size businesses be more successful. About 10-12 years ago I first got exposed to SaaS businesses, really fell in love with that whole concept. So those two things came together for me, and I’m trying to figure out how to solve problems through technology, and in 2013 founded TaxJar, and our main goal is to make ecommerce easier for everyone. So, the way that we move the needle there and the way that we can help entrepreneurs and businesses be more successful is to solve a really [laughing] painful and nasty problem, which is sales tax compliance. We have automated software that does a few different things but basically everything from calculating how much sales tax should be collected at the point of sale to filing the returns that you owe to numerous states and making sure that the money that you owe gets to the states on time.  We automate all that so that the business owner can focus on being more successful and focus on the more fun stuff of being a business owner rather than the really painful compliance side. We’re almost seven years in now, and we’re having a great time. We’ve experienced a lot of growth. We did it purely as an all remote company, so excited to talk about that more today.

JEFF:  Seven years in. (5:41) How many employees at the company now?

MARK: We’re at a little over 160.

JEFF: Wow. (5:48) And, fully remote?

MARK: Yes. 

JEFF: (5:51) Completely distributed company?

MARK: Never paid a dollar of rent. Proud of it.

JEFF:  I don’t like to define companies by whether they’re boot strapped or VC backed exactly, but it is always really interesting to me to see venture capital investing in remote companies. (6:19) You are VC backed, is that correct?

MARK: Yes. We, at the very end of 2018 partnered with Insight Partners for our Series A.

JEFF: Okay. (6:33) So this is after you’d been established for a bit, so they weren’t exactly coming in to found a startup as fully remote, although we’re seeing more and more of that.

MARK: Yeah. So, I should say we have raised money a couple of times over our history. We raised a very small angel round, almost right after we started the business, and that was because we had some promising signs early, and we found a couple of developers that we already knew from previous businesses, and we wanted to bring them on board, and we didn’t have any money to pay them. So, the rest of us were working for free, [laughing] and we needed money for salaries, so we raised just a little bit of money from angels and then the following year we raised a very small seed round which was from venture capital, and at that point we made up our mind that we weren’t going to raise money again unless there was some very obvious strategic value that it would bring to the business. So, we challenged ourselves at that point; we had to become a profitable business. It took us about a year and a half after we raised the seed rounds, and we did it, and we operated that way for the next, whatever that was, three and a half, four and a half years. My math’s terrible [laughing] to the point where we raised the Series A. So, you bring up an interesting point. There’s a lot of folks that are in the pure boot strapped camp and then there’s other folks that are venture backed. I always find that pole of conversation pretty interesting.

JEFF:  Well, for people that aren’t familiar with the world of venture capital, what we’re talking about is people who professionally invest in businesses and help them grow. The world of money [laughing] tends to be pretty conservative, and particularly conservative around what is defined as business, and there’s something very comforting about walking into a big office and seeing people hustling and bustling around, and historically at least, venture capitalists have been a little hesitant; they’ve been a lot hesitant actually, to invest in businesses. Especially when you talk about it being a virtual business [laughing] or anything virtual, they want to see something real and physical with real returns on investments and stuff like that. And, so, although those of us in the remote work realm have seen more productivity, more profit, less overhead, all that stuff, it feels like it’s taken VC awhile to come around to realizing that. We’re starting to see that more and more. I’ve been keeping an eye out for that kind of stuff, and it seems like there’s some of that happening here.

MARK: There’s a huge contrast between the conversations that we had in 2018 versus the ones that we had with investors in 2013. So, in 2013 there was nothing but pushback really. I understand it’s working now with five, six employees, but there will come a day when you’re going to have to get everybody in the same room.  

JEFF: Right.

MARK: We always said, “well, we understand, but we don’t think so. Maybe you’re right because you’ve invested in all these other companies, but we’re pretty sure this is scalable and we can do this in the long-term,” and that has totally flipped. Now, if I was going to talk to a VC or private equity firm or professional investor, I would say eight out of 10 of them would say, “Oh, no, no, we’re totally bought in. We understand that you can do this remotely. We’re actually big believers in this,” and the conversation ends there. We don’t spend half an hour trying to explain how we jump on Zoom calls, how we communicate remotely, how we collaborate. They already get that. They’ve already seen that other companies have been successful, and they understand the benefits to the business model as well. 

JEFF:  That’s interesting. Again, we’re looking for tipping points around remote work, and certainly we will be interested to see how this quarantine, Coronavirus stuff and everyone working at home, will obviously have some major changes around how people view remote work. But, [laughing] it’s nice to know that maybe we were hitting a tipping point pre-pandemic here, which is nice.

MARK:  Yeah, what’s going on now is so fascinating to me. We’re being thrust into this giant experiment, right, and we’re all obviously looking forward to this being over, but I’m really looking forward to what happens when, at that moment, when we can assume normal lives, I’ve been saying this for the last couple weeks, I think a lot of businesses are going to have tough decisions because employees are going to say, “You know what, I actually kind of like this, and I don’t want to come back.”

JEFF: I see little inklings of people tweeting like, “You know, I kind of like this better.” I mean certainly there’s a fair amount of people like, “this sucks,” “I can’t really connect,” and that’s fine. I think we’re looking at at least six weeks of this and that’s enough time. I figure it takes a new employee about three weeks to find their rhythm as a remote worker, and we’re going to see people starting to find their stride.

MARK: I would consider myself a remote purist, someone who wants this to work, and someone who doesn’t understand any other way of working at this point in my career. And, the way that we’ve gone about this, in this experiment, is not the way that we would have drawn it up, had we wanted to convert more people to working remotely. Right? People are just being thrown into this and it’s a really tough situation and it may sour a lot of people who otherwise would’ve had a great experience. So, that part is disappointing. But I think it will resonate with a significant amount of people,

I do think a lot of business owners are going to have to listen to a significant amount of employees who are going to say, “I don’t want to get in my car tomorrow and come into that building. I’m doing great work here in my office at home.”

JEFF: Well, you know, I talk to a lot of companies about this kind of stuff, and I also end up at a lot of events where people run physical companies, and I hear their concerns. I think there’s this feeling a lot of times that transitioning to remote work is, you start by letting people work one day a week at home, and then two days a week at home, and then three days a week at home, and then four days, and I think that that’s a horrible way to [laughing] transition a company, because what ends up happening is it’s not very deliberate. I think that what ends up happening is,  you end up, when you’ve got two days a week in the office, all of the meetings get squeezed in there, and it just becomes this imbalance between my home days these things happen, and my work days, and really we need to figure out how to do everything and keep it even. By being tossed into this, in this situation, certainly I think the ill effects of remote work will rear their ugly heads. Isolation, mismanagement, disconnection. I think that there’s a lot of misconceptions around even what remote work is. Okay, I’m working remotely so just email me everything and I will email you everything. 

MARK: [laughing] Right.

JEFF:  We know that remote work is not the same thing as email.  

MARK:  What is email, I don’t know what that is?

JEFF: Well, so there you go. (15:37) Talk to me about that. How has remote work evolved for you? You’re joking here about what is email because I’m guessing you don’t do a whole lot of email. What does remote work look like at TaxJar?

MARK: So, just using email as an example, we don’t allow it for internal usage. It’s only for external. So, a lot of people at our company don’t have really any reason to use it. Our partnership team, our sales team, they’re obviously going to use it, but otherwise there shouldn’t be a great amount of people using it. 

JEFF: (16:19) What are people using instead?

MARK: So, we live in Basecamp, that’s our home. There’s a whole discussion on how we ended up there and what other tools that we tried, but that’s where we’ve lived for probably the last two, two and a half years. So, pretty much 80% of our time is there and then the other 20% is on Zoom. We’re constantly on Zoom and that’s evolved. We tried every tool imaginable and Zoom, we’ve been using that for the last couple of years and have been thrilled to use it. It’s just been phenomenal, and I’m happy [laughing] to see it take off so much in this environment. But those are the two primary tools. There are other tools that we use that are very specific. We use something called Fellow for managing meetings and one on ones, that’s been tremendously helpful for us. We look for places that maybe Basecamp can’t support as well as we’d like and supplement it, but we try to rely on Basecamp as much as we can. We like to be using the fewest amount of tools possible. That’s always been the goal. 

JEFF: Yeah, so in the same way that people log into email to keep up with what’s going on at the company. At a lot of companies people log into Basecamp and use that for that. (17:54) So, the company started out completely office less?

MARK: We did.  I can’t claim on day one I’ve had this vision that we were going to have hundreds of employees and we’re going to be totally remote. The reason why we started that way, well there’s a couple of reasons. One is, at that point I was probably already 10 years into working remotely. I didn’t know how to work any other way. One of the things I despised about the short career that I had in the corporate world was, I just couldn’t take commutes, and I didn’t understand how a building was supposed to dictate my own productivity. The fact that I walked in and took an elevator up to the 35th floor or whatever it was, that that was all of a sudden supposed to turn my brain on and make me feel like I can do really good work. The other big reason was, the couple of folks that started the company with me, we didn’t live near each other. Both guys I knew very, very well and for a decade plus at that point. Our CTO lived in Lake of the Ozarks and our CRO, we didn’t have titles at the time obviously, our CRO lived about an hour from me and we both lived in Southern California at the time. So, we had the benefit of we knew each other and had worked with each other, so there was no reason for us to be in the same room and look each other in the eye. It was more like we knew what we had to do, and we went our own ways and did our thing. Plus, we didn’t have any money to pay rent, [laughing] so why would we take out a loan or something just to have an office space? We wanted to build software that was very much a touchless experience. It was self-service so we didn’t need a conference room to talk to people, to try to win deals. If we built the software the right way, that was going to happen through search engine marketing and optimization. So, that’s why we started that way, and again, the first couple of hires were people that we knew really well or were referrals and they lived in different areas. One guy was in northern California, actually they both were, and it was like, okay, just hop on the train and let’s get to work. The thing that we had to figure out pretty quickly was how were we supposed to meet, how were we supposed to talk. In the earliest days we were using free conference call. 

JEFF: [laughing] Been there.

MARK: Yeah, to have a daily standup, and we were talking on Skype chat at that point, so that was the earliest thing, that was how you got in touch with someone, or how we had a group discussion without having to jump on the phone. So, that’s how we got started.

Then things happened over time where we had an epiphany to say, oh, wow, this is actually our thing. This is the way that we want to run the business, and we think this could actually be really good for us.

JEFF: Yeah. (21:05) I sometimes wonder if there’s a competitive advantage not just in the talent acquisition possibilities for being a remote company where you can hire anyone anywhere in the world, the best talent, but also one of the things I used to say about Lullabot when we first started was, we were a web development agency, the company still is a web development [laughing] agency, I’d say, our work lives online and so do we. That you need to learn how to communicate really well through the internet, writing good content and making things clear enough that your coworkers, as you’re creating this product, that you can all understand each other, which translates really well when you need to create a website and in your case, create an API so that people can incorporate your functionality into their websites, right?

MARK: Right. We’re both lucky in the sense that the businesses that we started just lend itself perfectly to this way of working, right? So, if I wanted to start a furniture store, [laughing] obviously this is a non-starter, but I mean it’s software at the end of the day. We don’t need that conference room, like I said. We don’t need to be in the same room. Everything is on the Cloud, and fortunately for us, the tools have evolved over the years that we can communicate effectively and store files and have discussions and do all the things, collaborate, and do all the things that a business needs to do to function at a high level. So, we’re lucky in that way, and I’m extremely thankful that that opportunity existed in 2013 for us.

JEFF: (22:59) I want to take a little tangent here and talk about the product itself, because there’s a multi-geographical aspect to the product you’ve created as well because for anybody who’s listening who has not run an ecommerce website, calculating taxes and keeping track of taxes, each state as a different tax rate, but oftentimes it goes down to the city level as well, and if you’re doing international stuff it gets even more complicated. Just trying to stay compliant, right? [laughing] We talk about that a fair amount around remote work is like, how do you stay legal with all of these different regulations as you start to disconnect from your local geographical location and get out there? Have you found that there’s some parity like I’m talking about?

MARK: The whole topic of sales tax compliance, most people’s heads spin within the first 10 seconds. There is no IRS of sales tax. There’s no Federal governing body that dictates the rules for the entire country, instead it’s left up to the States. So, 45 states participate in sales tax and essentially have their own sets of laws, and those laws cover everything from when and where to collect and how much to collect and what to collect on, and how often you need to pay. I can go on and on about how complicated it is.  Fortunately for us, unfortunately for the small business, and any size business out there, the ecommerce business, as soon as you get to any sort of scale, and you don’t have to be a million dollar business even, you’re probably going to have compliance requirements in multiple states. Again, it could already be painful. If you’re just in California, filing that sales tax return only in California is painful. It takes 45 minutes to do manually, I’ve done hundreds of them myself. But, once you start adding new states and more filing requirements and more collection requirements and what’s taxable and what’s not, it’s pretty easy to understand that any ecommerce seller would say, I don’t want to do this. I don’t even wanna learn this. I don’t even want to take the time to understand this it’s so painful, and I’ve got  a hundred other things to do that are more valuable to my business. I just wanna make sure that I don’t get into any sort of trouble because I’m onto something here. I’m doing something that I’m really excited about and it’s working, and I don’t want there to be any risk. So, I would gladly pay someone whom I trust to take this off of my hands and keep me educated about what changes I need to make, or what states I need to add to my portfolio of states that I’m already compliant in. But otherwise, just please, take this off of my hands so I can go do other things. Just make it go away.

JEFF: Yeah, which is kind of the same thing as remote work a lot of times. It’s like, I wanna be able to hire people in different states and it’s worth a little bit of overhead money, however you’re handling that, to just stay compliant.

MARK: Yep. I think in hindsight we were blissfully ignorant on multi-state compliance when it came to hiring. I’m glad we didn’t know about that or maybe we would’ve actually had the discussion around like, because we were in California at the time, do we just hire people in California? And I’m so glad we didn’t have that conversation or even think about it. It is very challenging. We’ve got folks in most states now and just like sales tax [laughing] there are all sorts of requirements unique to every state, especially even now, the amount of notices that I’m getting from the states and our compliance team is getting from the states just in this COVID world, right. What’s defining sick time and leave time and you have to be up to date on all of that stuff to make sure that you’re being compliant. Because same with us, right? We’re onto something. We don’t wanna screw it up by making a mistake on the compliance side that costs us a lot of money. And more important than that, we wanna make sure that we take care of our teammates.  But it is a huge, huge job, and it’s hard to believe now that we actually have multiple people, that their full-time job is to keep track of this stuff. I never would’ve dreamed that at the beginning.

JEFF: (28:12) So, all of your people are in the United States?

MARK: Yes, all of our full-time employees are in the United States. 

JEFF: Wow. (28:22) So, talk to me about building the team over time. Starting from just a few of you back in 2013 and growing to a pretty significantly large remote team, as remote teams go. [laughing] What did you say 100 and?

MARK: Yes, it’s 160 something right now.

JEFF:  160 something, yeah. That’s gotta have been interesting. [laughing]

MARK: Yeah, what’s even more interesting is that at the end of 2018 when we signed and did our Series A, I think we had about 60 people. So, last year we tripled the size of the team, which was, interesting is a good way to describe it. That brought a whole host of challenges with it that we’re still working through in some cases, but, I’m happy to talk about any of the scaling the team stuff, otherwise I can just talk for hours on that. [laughing] 

JEFF: Yeah, so one of the things that I say about remote companies is that you can get away as a collocated office based company. There’s a certain, nice, warm feeling that you get. It’s this animal thing, like we’re just a herd of animals all working together, but when you get to maybe 100 people, if you’re starting to grow beyond that as an office based company, it starts to feel like, whoa, wait a minute, I don’t know everyone’s names anymore and I don’t know who we are and we never really came up with core values or a vision statement, or a mission statement, and that’s about the point when collocated companies start trying to figure that stuff out. It’s actually a little bit difficult because now they’ve got 100 people [laughing] to vote on this kind of thing. I find that for distributed companies like yours and mine, you get to about 20-25 people and it starts to feel like, whoa, we need to kind of figure out who we are in order to be able to allow our people to know who they are working at home by themselves. To be able to do some self-managing. And certainly, when you’re looking at the growth trajectory that you have either that happens at the beginning or about half-way [laughing] through when you realize, whoa, we’re just hiring people and they don’t know who we are. They don’t’ know who they’re supposed to be. (31:17) I’m making a guess here that some of this is relevant to your growth. 

MARK: Yep, that’s really well said, and applies to our story to a high degree. So, at about 25 employees we brought in our first, what I call a hire related to culture, and it was because we made her the head of employee experience and it was because at 25 employees I realized I could no longer onboard every single employee; that was one of my jobs. Thankfully before 25 employees we realized all the points that you are saying so well was that we wanted to teach every single new employee what it meant to be a TaxJar teammate, what we expected from them, what it took to be successful at the company, kind of historical anecdotes and context that helped them understand why we were doing the things that we were doing and how we had got here. We really grasped at an early stage that first one to two weeks were absolutely the whole ballgame, right. If we made sure that folks had a really good experience early on, then all the more reason that we could trust them right away and then they could get to work, and they weren’t starting and stopping and pausing and asking a lot of questions like, why do we do this? Or who is that person? Or, what is that all about that I’m seeing on Basecamp? I don’t understand this. Let’s get all of that out and front load that so that they can just do their work. That employee experience team has grown significantly, and they have a couple of people now who are constantly refining that onboarding experience. That is their thing and they have a very well detailed, well thought out process that takes a full week now, where before you start your job you have to go through that orientation and it teaches folks, and that includes an hour with me by the way. I still meet with every new hire for an hour, going through the things I talked about. What we expect from you. Here’s how to be successful at the company. And, here’s how we do things. I think one of the things that we’ve really learned over the last 15 months is, folks bring with them, for better or for worse, I hate to use the term baggage, but they bring things from prior experiences. 

JEFF: Patterns. We can call them patterns.

MARK: Okay, patterns. I’m going to use that from now on. 

JEFF: [laughing] That’s not good or bad, it tends to be bad but let’s redefine that pattern.

MARK:  That’s the smarter way of saying it. [laughing] I’m just used to doing something a certain way. This is the way I’ve always worked in the past.

JEFF: It’s what has worked, or it’s how I was taught. Just how you communicate in some companies; it’s maybe not the best way to do it in a distributed company.

MARK:  Right, and when you only hire one or two people a month, it’s really easy to teach that. There’s just a lot of osmosis that happens and you could lead by example and say just simple things. We don’t call a meeting in this situation. We want to work through Basecamp and do this asynchronously, this is how we do it.  Don’t get 10 people on a call, time is too important. But when you hire 10 people in a month, you realize you have to be much more thoughtful and much more detailed and much more purposeful around teaching people those things, because if you don’t they’re just going to do things the way that they were taught, and they were trained, and now you have clashes, and I’m just picking on this meeting thing, not to say that that’s the biggest thing but, why are those 10 people having a meeting, and actually more importantly, why do they think that’s okay. This is not the way that we solve problems at TaxJar and that’s on us. We didn’t coach them and train them and teach them how to do things the way that we’ve been really successful doing them in the past.  There’s a whole constant set of learning that goes on there and we’re trying to get better and better and better at it. I think we do a really good job now, but, there’s always room for improvement there. To me, that is so pivotal to the all remote experiences. You have to get that part right and invest a lot of time and effort into making sure that every new hire is exposed to that.

JEFF: Yeah, you want to get people situated and ultimately you’re talking about autonomy. Remote work is autonomy and allowing people to self-manage; I don’t want to overstate that. We’re not talking about isolating people and saying, “figure it out yourself,” but when it comes to finding your points of productivity, ultimately you’re guiding yourself because no one’s going to micromanage. In the long term that’s a good thing; in the short term it could be a little overwhelming as a new employee sits down at their brand new Ikea desk in the corner of their guest room, [laughing] and then says, “am I working.” (37:16) Talk to me about culture and connectiveness and how you keep your team a team. I’m guessing you’ve had some realizations over the years.

MARK: So, this is a really important one obviously. It’s particularly  important to me because I believe especially in times like these as we’re talking right now,  investments and culture really pay off. All the work that we’ve done to make sure that folks do know each other and know how to communicate with each other, and have passion around the customer and what we’re trying to do, that is something that you could cling to in a time of just an incredible amount of uncertainty, right, right now? So, there’s lots of things that we do that are very purposeful around communication, for example. We have a daily update that goes out, I publish it every morning. It has probably about a dozen or so metrics covering the day before. How many new customers did we get? How much came through the door in terms of how much we billed customers? How are we doing this month compared to our goal for the month, our forecast? People can ask questions on that if they see a number, like, “wait, what is that? What happened yesterday that was different than I’ve ever seen before?” Then our team leads shares what’s called a weekly recap, and that’s once a week on Thursdays, Friday mornings. “Here’s what you need to know from this week,” boiled down into a few paragraphs. “If you are not on this team, here’s what you should know about what we did this week. The challenges that we’re going through, the things that we accomplished, victories, celebrations”, all that stuff.   Then we have an all hands meeting every Friday afternoon, eastern time, and that’s the entire company on Zoom which is interesting when you have 160 people on Zoom every week. [laughing]

JEFF:  (39:30) Could everyone show up on video when it’s that many people?

MARK:  I would prefer that. We don’t get 100% participation there, but we do pretty well.  We try to keep that light and fun. There’s an agenda that we follow, and we rely heavily on demos, we encourage show and tell basically. One of the things I always say to new employees, new teammates is, “Don’t ever underestimate how interested other teams are in what you do every single day, because we’re all in this together and we all want to succeed. What you think might be not moving the needle, other people I promise you are going to find fascinating. They want to see what you’re doing that is going to help us be a great company for the long-term.”   

Then I do a monthly recap, so in this case, early April I’ll post about 80 metrics on what happened the month before as well as my take on how we did. Like, “here are the things that are really great. Here are the things that we need to work on. Here are the things that I’m watching for the long-term. Keep going and here’s what I expect in the next month coming up.” We see all those things together as kind of the way that we all stay up to date on what’s going on with the business and what we also encourage is because there’s a lot of things going on in Basecamp if you make sure you just follow those things, and what’s going on with your team, then you’ll know what you need to know and then it’s up to you to make decisions on if you wanna follow any of the social things that are going on. 

So, we’ve learned a lot. Within Basecamp there’s a channel for just parents which has just taken off in the whole quarantine situation. Parents are, all day, sharing notes on, I found this virtual tour of this museum, or, how are you dealing with teenagers that are not wanting to do the work that they’re being assigned. How are you filling your time? There’s one on pets. There’s one on sports. There’s one on working out. All those different channels. We have, once a month, if somebody wants to teach the company how to do something, like last month, one of our developers showed people how to make a keyboard for their laptop, a fun, unique, keyboard. Somebody taught people how to bake bread one time. All these cool things. So, we’re not afraid to have a timeout in the middle of the day. It doesn’t have to be after work. We’re going to spend an hour, put your work aside and let’s do something fun where we get to know each other. I can go on and on. There’s lots of other stuff. But we’ve learned to embrace those types of moments because we don’t have the opportunity to go out for a beer after work, or take somebody to lunch, and you have to make up for that in some way, because that intangible time is really  important.  

The last thing I’ll say is we do have a twice a year retreat that we call Jar Fests and that’s where we get the entire company together and meet for a week, celebrate the wins, talk about strategy going forward and just really focus on being together and working collaboratively across functionally, while we can be in the same room.

JEFF: That’s great. (43:12) Where do you tend to do those?

MARK: So far we pick a new location for each one. We’ve been everywhere; Boston, Chicago, Nashville, we’ve been to San Diego, all over the place; Austin. It gets a little bit harder with 160 people versus 20. We have to find larger locations that can accommodate that many people for five or six meetings at the same time and have a big room where you could hook up a microphone and talk [laughing] about all sorts of things. But, that week has been very magical for us every single time, and it’s so important to who we are as a company. 

JEFF: Yeah. I’ve talked to a lot [laughing] of people on this podcast, and we’ve talked about retreats a lot, and I still feel like I haven’t quite captured that magical aspect of it. There’s something about it when everyone’s working separately you kind of know each other, but you get together and it’s just very high fidelity [laughing]. It’s very charged to meet people, or even people who you know who you’ve been working with for a while, and you’ve gotten together with in person. It’s a different thing that’s very fulfilling and creates just this magical feeling that seems to last for about six months. [laughing]

MARK: Magic is the word that we use. Fortunately for us it’s been in every one of those Jar Fests that we’ve had, and I’d be worried if it wasn’t there. It’s such a great point. I can’t put my finger on it 100% either. I think if you hire really great people who like to work with each other, and they only get to see each other twice a year,  I think that has a lot to do with it. I am actually getting to sit down with you and have  a meal versus talk to you on Zoom all day and this is exciting, and we can talk about our kids and other things going on in our lives,  and that’s really meaningful.

JEFF: It feels like a privilege, like when you think of the stereotypical company retreat it feels there’s this sort of dread [laughing], like I don’t wanna hang out with people from work over the weekend. 

MARK:  Totally.

JEFF: But, in a distributed company like this, it feels like a privilege. Again, you’re hiring the best people from all over and there’s just this respect. I think you get a better sense of people’s lives working with them remotely that in an office, I sort of joke that people kind of get dressed up and put on their professional selves and leave their personal selves at home, but when you’re working with people who are working at home, there’s not a whole lot of differentiation, and you kind of get to know the interesting part of people too.

MARK: That’s really well said. The other thing I think about is, because geographically we’re so diverse, people are being exposed to folks in areas of the country maybe they’ve never been to. So, they’re just curious about, what is it like living in Montana? Tell me about that. Whereas I think if you’re all collocated maybe you even have mutual friends already on the first day, you already know people in common.

JEFF: Right, yeah. 

MARK: And, everything that’s going on in your world is also going on in everybody else’s worlds in the company. So, there’s that lack of diversity there that’s just another benefit of being an all remote team, and it’s fascinating, and again, just trying to get people together is so critical and rewarding and I wouldn’t have guessed it at the time, but it’s become a big part of our culture. The amount of build up for these events now [laughing[ is like six weeks, eight weeks out whereas before it was like, oh, we’re supposed to get together next week. What’re we doing, you know, like get excited. 

JEFF: [laughing] Yeah, it becomes a thing that people look forward to. (47:45 When you’re hiring people what are you looking for? Is one of the things their ability to get on a plane and come to a retreat like this? Is that important? Are there a significant number of people that don’t come? And then, I guess, to transition also into what other things are you looking for when you hire people?

MARK: Sure. Well, we definitely tell them you’re expected to be at an event twice a year, which means you have to be okay with travel. We get a really strong participation number. I think the last time there  were a handful of folks that couldn’t come and most of that was because they had a spouse that was expecting, or they were expecting, or they had some illness in the family. And, of course, we totally understand that and we’re not going to force people to come to an event and miss those things.  We also are, I would hope, that we’re very upfront. There is a cost to missing this event if you don’t have that situation and you’re thinking you just don’t wanna come. You will miss out on stuff, from the fact that you’re not there. You’ll miss out on those conversations walking to the next meal, or in the elevator, or that magic that happens when your team and another team comes up with a great idea and figures it out in three hours, that otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to spend the time on, doing their daily job. So, we try to be totally transparent on that, that’s a big part of who we are. In terms of other things that we look for, curiosity is a really big one. To dedicate your career or some chunk of your career to sales tax, you better be curious. This is not a domain that most sane people would want to dig into and learn a lot about, but you do have to eat, sleep and drink this stuff, and we find that folks that are just like, I wanna learn anything. I just love learning and I’m dedicated to learning. It’s a big part of who I am. Most people do really well here. They have to be a team player. There’s enough work for us to do where we really would love to minimize drama and relationship issues or anything like that. So, you have to check your ego at the door. We’re very, very upfront about that. That type of behavior, lack of accountability will not be tolerated. It doesn’t do well here. 

The remote thing is also a consideration right. To me it’s important that you either have experience working remotely or you’re open to working remotely. Not that this is some sort of test for you, that this might be cool. I would rather have somebody say, actually my next job needs to be remote for x,y,z reasons. It’s either I don’t know how to work any other way, I’m totally committed to it, or this is going to work better for my work life integration because, for whatever personal reason is going on home, and I know I can be productive working this way. One thing I should mention is that every single employee  hire goes through what’s called a mutual assessment, which is some time period, it could be two weeks, it could be 10 weeks, where we work together. The potential hire gets paid for that time, they get paid an hourly rate, and  we call it a mutual assessment because the potential hire, the candidate, gets to assess TaxJar. Is this the place I want to work? Do I like these people? Is what I read online, is it actually true? Do I believe in what they’re doing? And from our side it’s, okay, this person has done really well in an interview. We think they could be a great teammate, now we just want them to prove it in a short amount of time working together. And that to us has been critical to be successful in our hiring process.

JEFF: It’s a nice way to get to know each other a little bit. (52:10) Do you have problems where if someone is transitioning from another job that they’ve already got to ask them to step into this, sort of an employee kind of thing? Does that block you much or do people tend to go for it?

MARK: There’s definitely folks who can’t give us any time and we say that this is a requirement for us to be able to hire you. So, in those cases it doesn’t work out. In cases where people have a full-time position, maybe we wanted to hire somebody next week, that’s an exaggeration but, because we really like a candidate and they can only give us five hours a week, okay, we got to extend that out until they can give us some time period where we feel good on our side and more importantly, they feel good that this would be a good career move for them.

JEFF: Right. So, people could do evenings or, something to get that relationship going, but still maintaining their  existing job. The truth is, [laughing] you’re honestly just being more honest and upfront about it because a lot of companies put people into a probationary period when they’ve been hired anyways, and if it’s not working out after a month or two, they’ll just let them go, and so, it’s just kind of being a little bit more honest about it. (53:37) Quick question, I wanted to ask you about having such a large team and being a product company as you are, how do you handle retreats from a customer service, kind of keeping the product running perspective? Lots of companies get very skittish about, stopping company, either it’s a services company and they need to keep the income coming in, or it’s a product company and they need to keep their 24 hour service or whatever they’re providing for their customers going. How do you handle that? 

MARK: Really great question. So, this has evolved over time. One thing we do is we’re upfront with customers and say, look, if they email us we are in our company retreat at the moment and that may result in a response time that’s a little bit longer than you’re expecting so we’re just trying to set the stage there. In the early days when we didn’t have that many folks on the team, at that point anybody in the company at any time could be called onto answer support tickets. That was just a way that we did it. We made sure that every new employee got trained in our software to support customers and knew how to answer questions. So, when we got to a retreat we would have support hours and the entire company would take time to hammer down the queue. If the queue was 20 or whatever it was, it was probably a lot more than that, everybody would take a couple of tickets and we’d get it down to zero and we’d move onto the next session. We can’t do that now just because the product knowledge is so specific now and not everybody knows the product inside and out, backwards, like they used to in those days. So, we set aside time for our customer support organization to, basically they  have shifts throughout the week where they can take care of the most urgent tickets and make sure that our customers know that they are our highest priority and they feel appreciated. And sales uses that time as well. You’ll see the sales team jump out when those hours come up and they’ll go outside in the courtyard, or whatever, of the hotel and they’re taking calls and making sure that they’re trying to close deals at the same time. So, we’ve had to figure that out over time, and it’s such a great question because our team doesn’t want to let the customer down. At the same time, they know that that week is so important for the company and they don’t want to take away from that either.

JEFF: It’s a difficult thing to juggle. I like that you just expose the customers to it, like, hey, this is the thing we’re doing, it’s what makes us us, it’s what makes our product good, it makes our team so great and to allow the customers to just [laughing] participate in that a little bit, as opposed to hiding it away as this dark bad thing that the company needs to do, this retreat, and try to hide it from the customers. (56:53) Have there been any other epiphanies that come to mind around growing the company like you have over the years? Inflection points? Realizations that you’ve had that might be helpful for others listening to the podcast.

MARK: A lot of them are things that I’d always heard as someone who is trying to learn how to be an entrepreneur and thought that sounds so basic. It can’t be that important. It sounds too simple. The one other thing about it is it’s always about the people and how well you hire, and I never really gave that enough credit, and now to me, honestly that is the whole ballgame. The better we hire the more successful we’re going to be. We take every single hire very seriously. The cost for getting any hire wrong is so expensive and takes so much time away from people who are trying to do really good work for us and are doing really good work for us, there’s just so much work that we can’t afford that. 

JEFF: Especially when a company’s growing so quickly, right?

MARK: Exactly.

JEFF: You hire a new type of person [laughing]. I don’t know what that means exactly.

MARK: A new role?

JEFF: Yeah, and the people that work with that person. You know what, I’m just going to be honest and share my experience. At Lullabot we were growing. We hired a salesperson which was a new type of  person for us.

MARK: Sure.

JEFF: A new role, and we wanted to hire someone who was just a real bulldog.  Got their teeth into things. And we didn’t really have those kind of people at the company. It tended to be more collaborative. People who were just very collaborative and less aggressive [laughing] shall we say. And we hired this one person, and the people who had been working for us for awhile started to think, oh, okay, I see where the companies going now, and it wasn’t really where we had intended the company to go, it was just this role, it was just this person, and it wasn’t till we said, wait, that’s not who we wanna be. Let that person go. And all of those people came back and said, oh, okay, oh, oh, now I need to redefine back to us being a good  company. [laughing]

MARK: So, I had the  exact same experience. We got to 10,000 customers with one salesperson, believe it or not, and when we decided to bring in a more senior salesperson who is terrific, I had a long discussion with him before we hired him, about look, you have to be okay with the fact that this is not going to become a sales driven culture. We’re going to stay product driven and that has to be okay. If not, let’s not do this. And to your point we also had to talk to the company about it. Say, look, we’re going to increase our sales team. It’s not because we’re going to make changes here and let them dictate how to run the business. We’re still going to listen to the customer and let them be in the drivers seat. To your question about what things have you learned? Being deliberate and open and transparent in times like that always pays off. It always does. I’ve learned a lot about transparency. Fortunate for us we’ve set the tone on being basically 100% transparent with our employees, and that is so the right way to go, it just eliminates so many other problems that I just don’t have to deal with. It causes some difficult conversations, let there be no doubt, but it’s just a better way to go and I always thing about how would I want to be treated as an employee. A lot of us are entrepreneurs because we’ve had horrible experiences and we don’t  want to work in those horrible environments. We want to build something the way that we believe it should be built, and transparency for me is, our employees know how much there is in the bank account. They know every single month. And they know whether it goes up or goes down and why, and they don’t have to spend their time worrying about how are we doing? Is this a good month or a bad month? They can just focus on doing their best work, and that’s been a huge lesson for me, and we try to remind ourselves of that constantly. 

JEFF: When you list off all the meetings that you do and all that you share, I definitely get that feeling that there’s a lot of transparency, and to segway a little bit, we’re in a time right now with this pandemic happening that a lot of companies are freaking out, [laughing] and a lot of the employees are freaking out too. I mean, everyone’s freaking out. And, I think for companies that don’t communicate well, that aren’t transparent, there’s a certain vulnerability to being that transparent, I think it also forces you into a certain level of eloquence. You’re just figuring out your ideas.  Like you talk about being a sales driven company or a product driven company, I think a lot of companies don’t know what they are, they haven’t defined that because they haven’t needed to communicate that, they haven’t thought it out to define it to help figure out what don’t I want to be? What do I want to be? This is my advice to pretty much all companies these days it just try to communicate. Communicate to your team, especially as they’re working at home, what’s going on. Even your fears, what’s difficult, because people want to keep their jobs. They want to [laughing] have a job.

MARK: Yeah, so, we went through this. I think everybody points to March 12th being that day when the NBA cancelled and everything cancelled, and it was pretty clear that the world was going to be a lot different, and right away we went into kind of what if mode. What if it plays out this way? What needs to be different? How do we adapt? We have to change our financial forecast and all those things. And, we got to Monday morning, the following Monday, and typically if we’re going to make any sort of changes, we’re going to talk about them as a team, as a company, on that Friday call. And, five days from that Monday morning felt like five years, and we said, we have got to get everybody together sooner than that to share things like we’re not laying people off. To share things like, hey, here’s how we look at the year now. We’re throwing out the playbook of the thing that we just talked about at our retreat two weeks ago, [laughing], this is how the year was going to be, we’re throwing that out and here’s what we’re going to do to adjust to that.  So, we had that meeting two days later when we had thought through enough things and that went over really well. People were really glad that we didn’t wait. Because every moment that we waited and didn’t say anything, folks are left alone to their own imaginations thinking, Are we okay. What’s going to happen to my job? How’s leadership thinking about this? Are they even paying attention? Maybe they don’t know this is going on? Or the exact opposite of what’s happening was like, we cleared out our calendars and that’s all we were talking about is, how do we adjust from here and how do we talk to the team about it. That’s an easier exercise when you’ve set the table that you’re going to be totally transparent, because now you feel the obligation to ramp that up and trim two days from the original schedule to get out in front of people. So, just another piece of learning that we’ve had along the way. 

JEFF: Yeah. (1:05:49) So, how are you doing with the whole pandemic thing? There seems to be this, I don’t know, we’re in an obviously very serious situation and stuff, and yet, as I talk to a lot of people running distributed companies, it’s like, not a whole lot has changed. Obviously things change around your clients [laughing] and customers and maybe how comfortable they are spending money, but in terms of productivity and getting the work done, has much changed for you?

Mark: No, not much has changed there, with the exception that Monday when everybody went through that weekend, it was business as usual for us; no roles changing, how we communicate, we’re still in Basecamp, huge advantage for us. We’re going to get to work. I will say even though we’ve been distributed for almost seven years, there’s still an adjustment period here. So, the most obvious example, folks who now have kids at home and are being mandated to teach kids certain curriculum and maybe their spouses home too. So, a lot of folks that have the spouse and the kids home for the first time and they’re trying to navigate like, okay, how on earth do we do this? I’m not an educator, I’m a professional doing a job. How do I find time? So, we figured out pretty early that we wanted to send  a message like, we understand productivity is probably going to decrease in those situations that’s okay, by the way I’m at home as the CEO; I’m trying to figure this out too. My kids are home, and I’ve got two kids under 10, and for whatever reason they know that I work remotely but they come barging in the door. I’m surprised they haven’t done it on this interview yet; 50 times more than they did on a normal day. There’s just something different about this feeling. So, we said, look, we understand it’s going to be different. We trust you. Maybe you’re going to work at night now, because you’re figuring out kids’ stuff during the day and maybe you can only work six hours instead of seven, that’s okay. I don’t know how to do it any other way than to be understanding and we have to be flexible. 

Then you have folks who are already homeschooling kids and there’s a zero difference to them, other than they go to the grocery store less times. So, we’re very much dealing with it in real-time. I think the hardest part of this whole thing is, as we’re recording this in this day, tomorrow may be different.  There are way more unknowns than there are knowns, and that factors into what’s a persons own personal situation is going to be, what does the business look like. Is this a short stent where the economy snaps back, or the longer this goes, the more impact it has on the economy? As a CEO of a company how do I adjust our expectations and make sure that we can take care of our teammates the best we can? Every day is a little bit different now and we’re trying to adjust and make good decisions and realize that the decision that we’re making today may not be applicable to next week, for reasons beyond our control. So, strange times. We’re just trying to do the best we can. 

JEFF: There’s very few people I’ve talked to on this  podcast who started the remote thing as a real competitive advantage. It feels like maybe a productivity advantage. It feels like I said, a hiring advantage. But in terms of competing in the market, it feels like it evens out. We can hire better people and we can do better work but maybe people will be less quick to find us because we’re not local, whatever that is. But all of a sudden [laughing] it’s starting to feel like whoa, I’m comfortable with what an advantage this is right now because I know so many people are struggling. 

MARK: Our sales team, if we had them on our call, would tell you that comes up a lot now. How are you as a company prepared for however long this period is and obviously we have a good story to tell here. We’ve been doing this. We’re not trying to figure out how to use Zoom. We’re not trying to figure out how does customer success talk to products. That’s all business as usual for us, and that’s very reassuring in those sales conversations.

JEFF: Yeah.

MARK: You mentioned something else around, is it kind of a neutral.

I tend to believe that if we tell our story the right way, in a non-COVID world, in the normal world, our story resonates with the customers that we want. Our goal is to not get every single deal that’s out there, it’s to work with customers who want to work with us.

So, if we’re proud of the fact that we’re remote and we do things a little bit differently, or in our case a lot differently than our competitors, that’s either going to resonate with the customer or it’s not. And the ones that really love that story, let’s do everything we can to work with them. If being remote and all the advantages that come with that, if that doesn’t mean anything to the customer and they prefer a competitor that spends all kinds of money in a tall skyscraper, than so be it; philosophically we’re not aligned there. I always think there is an advantage to tell the right story, especially when it could resonate with a lot of potential customers.

JEFF: Yeah, and it just comes back to that transparency again. It’s nice to be respected for who you are and being open and honest about who you are rather than feeling like you need to hide away. A lot of this remote stuff started hidden away. People were quiet about that aspect of the company, and it’s still not necessarily the main selling  point, but it’s becoming more and more of an advantage. 

MARK: Agreed.

JEFF: Mark, thank you so much. This is a really interesting conversation. (1:12:41) If anybody wants to follow-up with you what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

MARK: I’m on LinkedIn. That’s probably the best way. I do have a Twitter handle, but I don’t spend much time there.  Happy to talk with folks. Look me up on LinkedIn and we’ll go from there.

JEFF: Well, thanks again. Great conversation.

This podcast is an introduction to remote work for managers and workers forced into it by the pandemic.

The conversation is loosely based around the article that Jeff recently posted, entitled 7 Tips For Productively Working From Home For The First Time.

Highlights

• The coronavirus pandemic has brought the concept of remote work to the forefront

• Let’s talk remote work vocabulary

• Companies need communication policies to define expectations, set clear direction and give feedback

• Managers have to learn to trust employees, even when they can’t see them

• Check-ins are key

• Company culture must support honesty about what’s not working

• “We’re all in this together”

• Have a physical space for your work at home, and it affects your mental space for work

• Working from home is living at work

• Overcommunicate overcommunicate overcommunicate

• Everyone should cc liberally

• Switch communication modalities if you stall (Slack to Zoom, email to phone)

• Respect people’s home space. When you call, you’re barging into their home!

• Context-shifting is a thing

• Time is relative

• Be respectful of remote workers, allow them to define and self-manage how they work best

• Remote workers will likely work too much

• Purpose is context

• Part of a leader’s job is to trust their workers (it’s not a pipe dream to have a caring manager!)

• It’s even more important to be vulnerable. Being remote can be isolating.

• Remote work is ankle weights for management

• Don’t confuse foosball with culture

Links

• TEN7 Podcast

• Lullabot

• Bureau of Digital

• Seven Tips for Productively Working from Home

• jjeff.com

Transcript

JEFF ROBBINS: This is Yonder. Hi everyone, Jeff Robbins here with episode 84 of the Yonder podcast where we talk to company leaders and big thinkers about how to make remote work. We’re focused on expanding the remote work job market and helping listeners to create happy, productive, distributed teams. This episode is a special one. We’re recording this on Friday, March 13, and hoping to publish it within the next 48 hours if all goes well, maybe sooner. We’ve been talking about remote work on this podcast for nearly four years. This is episode 84, we’ve talked to 80 or more people [laughing] on the podcast about remote work, however, things are starting to shift around, around remote work here in the United States, especially as the coronavirus starts to attack the western hemisphere and people are being warned to stay home.

Many, perhaps most companies in the U.S., and all over the world are starting to look at remote work as a way of mitigating their financial losses. We need to keep the companies in business despite the fact that people may be not going into the office for weeks? Months? We don’t know yet. We’re right at the beginning of this. So, everything is emerging, and remote work is on the tip of everyone’s tongues.

After doing this podcast for years, and people being sort of marginally interested, all of a sudden, all this stuff seems to be coming into focus, which is exciting, a little scary, but exciting overall. As of today, thousands, if not millions of office workers are finding themselves trying to settle in at home and get work done. They’re trying to stay connected and be productive despite the fact that they’ve got children, dogs and probably piles of laundry, all vying for their attention.

[laughing] We usually stay a little bit more strategic on this podcast and talk to company leaders about how they hire and manage remote workers. However we want to get more tactical on this episode and really talk to the needs of the staff as well as management and executives.

TEN7’s Ivan Stegic joins me today to delve into this topic. Ivan’s digital agency started as a co-located company 13 years ago, but three years ago they transitioned to running as a fully distributed company. Between us we have over 20 years of experience leading remote teams and leading companies in general, and I think I can speak for both of us in saying that it’s simply a better way to work. But I wanted to hesitate from getting too preachy, hyping remote work on this episode. I want to really talk to people who are new to this. People who are still adjusting, probably still a little wary of the whole idea and give some practical advice about how to be productive and stay connected while still working at home.

Alright, let’s talk to Ivan.

IVAN: Thanks for joining me today Jeff.

JEFF: Thanks for joining me today, Ivan. So, this is a little confusing right? So, we’re doing a cross-posting episode. So, this podcast will appear on the TEN7 website, your website, where you are up to, coincidentally, your 84th episode.

IVAN: Yes.

JEFF: And on the Yonder website where we are also posting our 84th episode. So, it is episode 84 for both of us, although of a different podcast [laughing] so, we’re unclear on who should exactly start.

IVAN: But that’s okay. We can figure it out. And, it was amusing to me to see the text message from you yesterday after I reached out about recording a podcast episode that you were thinking exactly the same thing. I mean, that was good.

JEFF: Yeah. To some extent the impetus of this idea came from—so, there’s a company called The Bureau of Digital that runs conferences and a Slack channel amongst other things, for people that run, in particular, digital agencies, they have some variance of that, but, and I was in Slack offering advice to all of these company leaders who were looking at possibly sending their people home, and people had a lot of questions and thoughts, and I started think, I’m good at disseminating [laughing] information through a podcast, maybe I should do a podcast. I don’t want to do a podcast alone, where I’m just talk, talk, talking. Ivan’s a great person who I enjoy [laughing] talking to quite a bit, maybe the two of us can do it, and then I looked at my messages and there was a message from you saying, “Hey, you want to be on a podcast to talk about all this?” [laughing] And here we are.

IVAN: I just love the way that it’s worked out. The Bureau of Digital community is just such a wonderful resource for us all, and it kind of feels like this wave of concern, and wave of worry, and then action happened in the span of a few days, after it seems to have been building up for the last few months. What are we going to do? How are we going to react? Is this really gonna happen? And then all of a sudden, in the space of about three days, people are sending all of their employees home and now leaders are wondering what’s going to happen next.

JEFF: Yeah, which still remains a question. It’s not like everyone’s just going to magically, rainbows and unicorns around remote work.

IVAN: Right.

JEFF: [laughing] Right. We both have struggled with remote work in various ways. I’d like to think that I had failed so others could learn [laughing] and I’m happy to share all of my thoughts and insights from years of thinking about this, but it doesn’t just happen.

IVAN: Should we start with vocab? Definitions and words that we’re going to be using throughout the podcast, that people will be using in their remote work? Things that maybe haven’t come up in the co-located office in the past. Maybe a good place to start is, are we all working from home? Are we remote? Are we distributed? Are you hybrid? Are we telecommuting? Are we telework? What do we call it?

JEFF: Yeah, what do we call it? To some extent this has evolved over the years, and if you listen to early episodes of the Yonder podcast, the first thing that I ask people, I ask them where they live, where I’m talking to them, where they are in the world, because we’re spread out all over. But then, I was asking them, “What terms do you use? What’s the vocabulary that you use?” And everyone had different answers, although over time I feel like people have gathered around this term “remote work,” which is a little bit difficult because I have a whole philosophy around it.

So, “remote” has the same Latin roots as the word “removed.” This is the “rem” in “remote.” It means separated from. We are remote from something. I feel like for all of these workers who have been sent home because of the pandemic that’s happening, they are remote right? The company is there, and they are home. However, there are a lot of companies that we talk to on the Yonder podcast—and TEN7 is that kind of company—that does not have a central office. Those companies I tend to refer to as “distributed” and I think that’s a better word because there’s no mothership that people are not at.

IVAN: Yeah.

JEFF: They’re not, not somewhere, they’re exactly where they need to be, they are “distributed.” Another word that gets used a lot is “virtual.” I’m hesitant using the word “virtual” around companies or people. Virtual workers or virtual companies, these are real workers, they are real companies. [laughing] “Virtual” I think tends to come with this thought of ephemeral and maybe like gig economy kinds of things where it’s like, Oh, I work for Uber when I do, but then I don’t.

IVAN: Yeah.

JEFF: Like here and gone. But in order to establish the sense of realness around this, which is important, we want to legitimize this type of working, I’m hesitant to use the word “virtual.” That being said, I think some of the communication is more virtual. These are kind of virtual connections that we’re making. We’re virtually meeting in person. We’re not actually meeting in person; we’re meeting over video. So, the word “virtual” does come up.

Then there are these other words that get thrown around a lot that I feel are antiquated. “Telework” is one that’s coming up a lot. It just means working over the telephone. Right?

IVAN: I always thought, I didn’t like that either, because I always imagined a telephone. One of those big honkin’ beige ones which you have to hold to your face.

JEFF: Yeah, and one that’s luckily fading out is “e-work,” which is just very loose and weird. It’s like any work on a computer is electronic work, I guess. And then, work from home. Now, in the U.S., “work from home” is starting to lose the stigma it had. Growing up in the seventies and eighties, there used to be these signs posted on electrical poles [laughing] and places as you drive around your town. “Work from home!” and it was a pyramid scheme, it was like, Stuff dollars in envelopes and send them to your friends. You can work from home. You could make $50,000 a year.

It was a sort of scam kind of thing. But what we’re actually talking about, literally these days, is people working from home. They’re working from home. I tend to be hesitant using that word interchangeably with remote work, because lots of times when people are working from coworking spaces or Starbucks or [laughing] other places. They have an office, it’s just not shared with other people. However, if we’re quarantining at home [laughing] we’re working from home. So that one’s not inappropriate.

IVAN: Maybe it should be called “quarantined work” from now on. [laughing]

JEFF: [laughing] Yeah, that’s nice. Yeah, just associate it with sickness and the virus.

IVAN: What other words do we use in the community, in this distributed workforce?

JEFF: There’s terms that are kind of big words that come up a fair amount, but I just wanted to define them at the top because they’re likely to come up as we talk about this stuff further. The idea of “synchronous” and “asynchronous” which sound very technical programmer-y, kind of computer words, but they’re not. And we talk about “synchronous communication” and “asynchronous communication.” Synchronous communication sometimes is referred to as real time, happening all at once, and asynchronous communication happening not in real time. So, good examples of synchronous communication are recording a podcast over a VOIP kind of system or telephone call or meeting in person.

This is stuff where it needs to happen at the same time. It’s funny because this language has actually made its way into our work vernacular. We talk about “syncing up.” This is the “sync” in “synchronous.” Hey, let’s sync up, let’s talk on the phone, let’s do a videoconference. You can sync up over Slack or text messaging, but those are kind of hybrid technologies because it’s up to your company culture as to whether people need to respond immediately to a text or Slack message or not. And those things tend to live longer.

Asynchronous communication’s like email, message boards, issue queues for you programmers out there. Even things like voicemail, stuff that’s more archival that you can go back and refer to.

IVAN: You can use Slack asynchronously as well. If you’re going to spend time focusing on some work and switching Slack off, you can put it into “do not disturb” and it effectively turns into asynchronous.

JEFF: Right. And that stuff will oftentimes vary company by company and it comes down to ultimately this idea of a communications policy, which I advise most companies to implement, certainly remote work companies, to know what’s expected. When do you email, when do you text message someone, when do you message them in Slack, when do you call them? Do you just call them on the phone without any warning, or do you send them a message and say, “Hey, can we talk on the phone?” All those kinds of things come down to ultimately company culture, but I think there should be more policy around that.

Maybe expectations. Maybe, it can be loose, but I think people need some guidance around that, just to know what’s expected of them, because these can come in conflict. If you say to people, for instance, “Oh, we’ve got flex time at our company. You need to be at meetings, but other than that whenever you get your work done is fine,” And you have a policy that if you get a Slack message you need to respond to it within five minutes, those things are clashing with one another. You can’t go pick the kids up at school and try to be text messaging, Slack messaging. [laughing] I mean, I’ve done it. I remember distinctly sitting in line to pick up my son at school and responding to Slack messages on my phone. But, it’s better to be a bit more thoughtful.

IVAN: A little more planful, intentional.

JEFF: Intentional.

IVAN: There are some misconceptions about “working from home.” I remember in a previous job when people said they were “working from home” on Fridays or on Monday mornings, usually that meant they were either planning a long weekend or had experienced a long weekend.

JEFF: Right. They say, “I’m going to be working from home on Friday,” and they're miming a golf club swing.

IVAN: [laughing] Right.

JEFF: [laughing] Yeah, you’re not doing anybody favors here.

IVAN: I think that’s changed. At least the connotations have for me. I definitely trust all the people that I work with. When people say they’re working they’re generally working from what I can tell. There are other misconceptions around distributed work and working from home. Do you want to speak to some of those?

JEFF: Yes. [laughing] I think that to try to not get too into the weeds on this, I think that it’s an issue of trust. On the Yonder podcast the word “trust” comes up a lot. I think that managers who are used to managing people by looking at them, you know, when we think of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century-style factory space, the managers have this elevated office, that’s elevated above the factory floor, so that they can look down and see that people are working. That doesn’t really work in the electronic age, because, just because someone’s sitting behind a computer doesn’t mean they’re not on Facebook [laughing] or not really working.

But it still has that primal trust-building thing, like I can see them, so therefore I can trust them. And I think for a lot of those managers there’s this feeling that if you can’t see people that they won’t be trustworthy, that they won’t act in a trustworthy way. It has been my experience that if you start to trust people and allow them a certain amount of autonomy, most of them will rise to the occasion. I think another very important part of managing is to provide really clear expectations so that people know what a good job looks like and they’re clear on what they need to do, because it can be really difficult being an employee. I mean, we try to find some empathy for these workers who might be slacking off. They might just not know what to do. They might be unclear—

IVAN: They might not have direction.

JEFF: Yeah and provide some direction, and then, feedback and not...monitoring exactly. One of the things I say is that it’s basically impossible to micromanage as a manager of remote workers, which is really great if you’re a remote worker. We need to allow people to, like I said, rise to the occasion. There needs to be feedback mechanisms: we need to check in daily, weekly, whatever to check to see how people are doing. Both of us have run digital agencies that do development, computer programming, web development in particular, but around those tools, you can see when someone has checked in their work and what they’ve done, there are these feedback mechanisms. I don’t know quite how those mechanisms work at all companies, in different environments. There are all sorts of metrics tools that have been built from everything from telecommunications companies, customer support companies. There are tools out there to help us manage more based on results, rather than whether butts are in seats.

IVAN: Yeah.

JEFF: And it’s a better way to go. Let people work, give them autonomy. You won’t know for four days, three days, a week maybe, whether anyone’s working. But when you get to that cycle where you can check in on those metrics, you’ll have some idea. Then you also need to create a culture where you can have frank conversations with people. Maybe you do daily—especially for companies that are new to this—do daily phone calls. They don’t need to be that long, but it’s just like, “How’s it going?” “How are you adjusting to this remote work thing?” “What’s going well for you, what’s difficult?” “Is there anything I can help with?” To talk holistically about what’s working but also what doesn’t work, and some companies don’t have a company culture that supports that.

IVAN: I think that Gary Cole’s character in Office Space, what was his name? Bill? Bill Lumbergh? I think his mind would explode not being able to micromanage people, and I think the thoughts of trusting other adults to do the work that they should be doing would just blow his mind. I don’t think he could exist.

JEFF: And the keyword there is “adult.” Running my company, Lullabot, I had multiple people come in and say, “Oh wow, this is the first job that I’ve ever had where I felt like I was treated like an adult, where I was trusted, where I was given autonomy, where I could do some self-managing, and where I was allowed to be vulnerable to talk about what’s not working.”

This sort of alpha culture thing, sort of a stereotypical start-up culture—but this exists at lots of companies—where people are expected to only share their triumphs, their wins, and it’s kind of a “winning” culture, and tends to be a gender-male [laughing]-vibe kind of thing which can be difficult in its own way.

But what happens managing at any company, especially a co-located company, is that managers become really well-attuned to looking for those micro-expressions, those [laughing] When are people not really saying what’s really going on? When are they having difficulty? In order to not attack them, to help them, maybe, “Do you need some help with this?” “Oh, I guess I do, yeah, actually now that you mention it.” But in a remote work environment, that stuff can get hidden quickly. I do think that managers should still ask, but we also need to create a culture, and precedence.

You can talk about it, but people at the company see other people doing it and it’s actually working out, where they say, “You know, I was just completely unproductive yesterday. I had all these tasks that I wanted to get done, but my kid is sick, and my other kids are home, and I’m just having a really hard time with this remote work thing,” and to have the manager not go like, “Well, you’re fired.” To have it be like, “Well what can we do? Do you want to try and work evenings? We’re all in this together.”

IVAN: Right. Their options.

JEFF: Remember that, “We’re all in this together.” And it’s about collaboration and support,but it’s also about learning and employee development. This is about people—not to get the help that they need, because they’re always going to need help. There may be some of those people, but for the most part, people will get the help they need, they learn, and then they don’t need that help anymore, [laughing] and they can help other people. I think that this idea of vulnerability has come up a lot on the Yonder podcast as a key to remote work.

IVAN: Now there are going to be millions of people who are at home trying to do the remote work thing, and I thought it might be a good idea to go through some high-level tips of what these new workers from home should consider doing, should consider putting into their regular course of actions that they’re going through. I know that you have an article out, Six Tips for Productively Working from Home.

JEFF: [laughing] Yes, it might be seven tips by the time it gets posted. But it will be on the Yonder website and we’ll link to it in the show notes.

IVAN: Absolutely. But let’s give these new workers some high-level tips here.

JEFF: Yeah, I think the first one that comes up a lot is very tactical, it’s to work like a worker. Get dressed. Have a space for your work. Make physical space but also some mental space. And that could just be as simple as, “When I’ve got my headphones on, I’m working and don’t anybody in the house [laughing] bother me.” Or, “When I’m sitting at this desk,” or “When I’ve got the door closed.” And it goes both ways; there’s a message you’re sending to the people that you live with, but it’s also a message that you’re sending to yourself. This is my work chair. If I want to not work, I’m going to get out of this chair and go somewhere and then I’m not working. And you could think to yourself, I haven’t sat in my chair enough today. [laughing]

IVAN: Yeah.

JEFF: You know, it feels like I’m not working [laughing] because I’m not in my chair. Whatever those things are, the devices you use to know when you’re working and when you’re not working, because, here’s one of my sayings: working from home is living at work. We all think, Oh, working from home is so great, but it’s also living at work. So, you need to create some definition between working and not.

IVAN: That was one of the things we very quickly learned in the first few weeks of being distributed. As you mentioned, we were co-located for the longest time, 10 years, and then three years ago we became distributed, and we had to test it out and try it out. We all started working from home for one day a week and it is so important to have an actual space you could work in. And it’s not just about everything you just described, which is very important, but it’s also being able to leave that place of work to enjoy the rest of the house and enjoy the rest of the life outside of work. And that active standing up and walking away from that office chair you just described, and the table that you usually work at, is also liberating; it gives you the ability to process the fact that you are now spending time with your family, taking a break.

JEFF: Take a break. Catch your breath. Another word for work is effort. [laughing] We are endeavoring at work. It’s not easy. They wouldn’t call it work if it was easy. And so, you need to take a break every now and then and there are different ways to do that. But, if you’re kind of confusing what a break is—you know, I sit on my couch to work and I sit on my couch to take a break—it could be difficult to feel like you could step away. You might have multiple places that you work. I get up in the morning and before I even take a shower or anything I’ll go sit on the couch and work for two hours, just catch up on all my communication, and then I take a shower, and then I go in to my office and I work there for another couple hours and then I go to the gym, and then I work at Starbucks in the afternoon... Lots of times people are changing it up some.

I think it’s important for people to experiment some, and ultimately this is finding productivity. Find your points of productivity. What works for you? What are your internal productivity rhythms and to work with those, especially if your company is amenable to working relatively flexibly. It’s hard not to work flexibly when you’re working from home, just because if you go sit in the lunchroom at the office, you still are at the office, right? Where if you go sit in your kitchen for lunch at home, you’re at home, and so, it feels like, I can’t bill, I’m not working now. Whereas, if you’re in the lunchroom in the office, it’s like, This is part of my workday. And then, I joked in the intro for the Yonder podcast, [laughing] you get things from kids and dogs.

IVAN: Pile the laundry, I hear you. [laughing]

JEFF: Yeah, exactly, that’s just sitting there and it’s like, Ah I’m not being productive right now, I’m going to do laundry. That’s okay. Maybe that’s your break. But you also need to find that harmonic rhythm of work so that you know that you can be productive.

The other thing is, I just need to say this—this is not particularly helpful to those managers who are listening, so maybe those managers can go have a little snack right now and I’ll just speak to the workers. You’re not usually very productive during the day [laughing] at your office anyways, let's be honest. Between the lunch break and stopping by peoples’ offices and connecting, all these things, they kind of amount to connecting and culture and talking about how things are, all this kinds of stuff.

Like my experience working at an office was that if I got four hours of productivity a day, that was a really good day. So, I just want to encourage everyone. Okay, managers, you can come back. I want to encourage everyone to cut themselves some slack here. It’s more about getting the work done and less about exactly the number of hours that it took. We want to try and get more results-oriented if we can and not quite get so caught up. But for everyone to acknowledge a certain amount of humanity and all that that comes with that vulnerability.

IVAN: There’s some other tips that are in your article and one of them is a word you made up, I think. Overcommunicate. [laughing]

JEFF: [laughing] I think it’s a word, but my spellchecker just doesn’t know it. The title of that section is “Overcommunicate, overcommunicate, overcommunicate,” which, I figure, three times is enough overcommunication. All of them have little squiggly lines underneath them because Google Docs is saying, “What is this?”

Communicate too much. There is no such thing as overcommunication in a remote environment. There are entire books that have been written to limit communication in a typical office space. Don’t cc people that don’t need to respond; only people we’re going to expect a response from this email should get this, because we want to limit peoples’ inboxes and we want to minimize meeting time. But, in a remote environment, this is how you know that people are around you. This is how you know that people are working, both as a manager and as staff, that you know that your managers see what you're doing. This is how we connect. A lot of these books talk about, You need to send out an agenda for the meeting, before the meeting, and then when everyone gets to the meeting exactly on the minute that the meeting starts—in fact, maybe you should not start the meeting at 2:00, you should start the meeting at 2:07, so that people will know how serious you are about the exact time that the meeting is starting and then exactly at 2:07, you start that agenda and hopefully you’re done by 2:12. Like, get it over with. That doesn’t really work in a remote environment. First of all, people will be there on time because they don’t get distracted getting to the videoconference. There may be technical problems that you’ll need to overcome in your first few weeks, but as people get the headphones working and figure out which buttons to press to get Zoom up and running or get into the conference line or whatever it is.

But talking about the weather, talking about the virus, all this stuff that is the human stuff, is actually really good, because we need some non-purposeful communication in our lives just as humans. In order to connect and trust each other and feel like we’re being heard, we need to be able to do that. And pretty much all communication in a remote work environment is purposeful, which is kind of a good thing, right? There’s not a lot of peripheral stuff that’s unintentional that’s coming in to confuse you and distract you, but if we’re not also intentional about non-purposeful [laughing] kinds of things, just checking in, “How’s everybody doing?” “Is everybody okay?” “Good?” Then we start to lose that connection. So, build that in, start the meeting at 2:00, and then maybe at 2:07 you can start to get around to the agenda.

But there are a whole lot of communication methods these days. Slack is one that is very, very popular with remote companies, and oftentimes has been tried in co-located companies. If you work at a co-located company, perhaps somebody tried to set up Slack at some point because they heard how great it was, but it just didn’t catch on, it’s because that type of communication, the sort of transparent public/private thing where two people can have a conversation in a room and other people can see what’s happening, but aren’t obligated to jump in, so it’s private in that it’s a private room, only to be seen by the people who are in that room, but public, because everyone in that room can see it, but it’s still a conversation that’s just happening between two or maybe three people and you could pull somebody else in, you know, @sign them @Ivan, “Hey what do you think about this? Can I get your comment?”

It’s not needed in a lot of office environments, particularly if you’ve got that typical open office space [laughing] where that stuff is sort of happening anyways, sometimes to the annoyance of other people in the office. It’s not needed, but it’s a good thing for remote work because you can get a lot of that peripheral communication, that’s the overcommunication.

One of my sayings around remote work, at least from my perspective, is that people should cc liberally, which I know is exactly the opposite of how a lot of companies encourage their people to use email. But, my philosophy is that if you are in the cc line, you are not expected to reply to this email. It’s just peripheral information; we’re keeping you in the loop.

IVAN: It’s interesting that you talk about email because I found since being a distributed company, we’ve relied internally much less on email. All of our communications happens either in Slack in real time, over Zoom for video or in an issue queue or in a wiki, or somewhere where we’re actually documenting things. I think I’m the only person who uses email in the whole company and it’s usually to talk to clients and to talk to new business prospects; it’s external. Even our clients are using Slack and the tools we use. I’m sure there are different modalities and different companies, but it’s interesting, it didn’t even occur to me that email was something that you would use internally.

JEFF: Well, email is a very low common denominator. Like the telephone, everybody who is in business is expected to have an email address, right?

IVAN: Right.

JEFF: And, especially for people who are new to this whole remote working thing, you don’t need to bite off too much stuff at once, you can just use the same tools— the telephone and email—that you’ve been using, and you could use with virtually anybody on the planet, the phone probably more so than email. And you can do all the work with just those things: conference calls, telephone. I’m a big believer in telephone conference calls.

I think a lot of people think these days that remote work is going to be all about video. I like the phone. I worry less about the expression I’m making. I could be more thoughtful, and pick my nose or whatever [laughing]. I don’t need to worry about where I’m sitting and how people can see me. I can really focus on the conversation itself and also, I can do it from wherever. If I need to hop in the car, I can put on my Bluetooth headset and do that.

IVAN: That’s one of your tips too, right? Pick up the phone?

JEFF: Well, yeah. I think another misconception around remote work is that it will be all email, that it will be all asynchronous communication. That we won’t have conversations with each other, we will just send each other these paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of email and then we’ll be all obligated to absorb, Oh, what am I being asked to do? Oh my gosh I don’t think I understand it. Now I’ve got to write paragraphs. Did you mean this? Particularly for things like that, requests, what I call strategic communication, where we’re doing the planning work as opposed to tactical communication, which is the work, work, right? [laughing]

For the strategic stuff, synchronous communication works way better. Brainstorming. Again, that word syncing up. Like, Hey, let’s just sync up on this, I want to let you know what I’m thinking around it, and what’s kind of expected and what the client’s looking for, so that you can go heads down and do your tactical work. So, when things get confusing like that, if you’re finding that an email is longer than three paragraphs, and you’re really just sending that email to one person, pick up the phone.

I do recommend scheduling phone calls, even if it’s just to say in Slack or just a text message, “Hey, could you talk at the top of the hour? It’s only 10 minutes from now, but could you talk at the top of the hour?” To give people a chance, you’re kind of respecting their space, their privacy. When a company has people working at home, we’re in their home [laughing] and you don’t know if people are eating lunch or whatever, and if you do a FaceTime call with them [laughing] and they’re on the toilet, it’s like, What do I do? My boss is FaceTiming me! I feel like I need to answer! Don’t put people through that.

IVAN: Right.

JEFF: And the other thing is the issue of context shifting, which managers will know but staff may not. Workers may not be as familiar with that concept. If you’re working heads down and someone calls you to shift you from thinking in a very tactical, problem-solving kind of way, to more of a zoomed-out wide, Do you think that this is the right way to go? It’s actually really hard to switch your mind from one of those to the other. And the phone call will always take precedence.

You can switch into that mode pretty quickly, but when you hang up the phone, to switch back to writing that thing or coding that thing, or whatever that is that you’re doing is difficult. So, it’s nice to oftentimes, if I’m in the middle of composing an email or something and somebody texts and says, “Hey, can we talk at the top of the hour?” and I say, “I think this thing I’m working on is going to take me a little longer, let’s talk at quarter past the hour.” And of course I’m talking about “the hour” here because I’m used to remote companies working across time zones, and that’s a way of talking about time that’s more relative.

IVAN: Specific.

JEFF: That won’t be so much of an issue for people who are in the same city, just all working from home, but it’s a way that we remote people talk about these kinds of things. Or we add the time zone onto everything we do. “Hey, can you talk at noon eastern today?” Because in a remote company, where people are spread out across time zones, noon means nothing. There are twenty-four noons a day!

IVAN: I love the idea of picking up the phone. We actually do that at TEN7. We have a little rule. If there is a back and forth of more than half a dozen interactions in Slack, then maybe it’s time to go to the Zoom. If you are trying to hash out a problem in Slack and you were just not getting your idea across or it’s just not working out, maybe that means there’s a time for a modality change and so, like the rule is, half a dozen, go to Zoom.

JEFF: Yeah, half a dozen’s a lot.

IVAN: Five or six back and forth? Yeah.

Flex time, we mentioned that earlier. There’s something about working remotely where if you embrace flex time, that’s another tip I think that we should talk about, because it really lets you time shift your day. It makes your life a whole lot easier with your family, you can pick kids up if you need to. What other thoughts do you have around that?

JEFF: This is going to be difficult for a lot of managers who are new to this, who are managing a remote team for the first time. This idea that people might not be working at 2:00 in the afternoon is really freaky, and maybe you need to ease into this. I write this up in my article, I feel like no one is really professional.

We pretend to be professional, and we can pull it off for about eight hours a day [laughing] but part of it is knowing that when those eight hours are over, we can go home, we can put on sweatpants that’s probably just an American thing, but it’s a thing we do, so I’m just going to say, we can put on sweatpants—and we can collapse on the couch in a wholly un-ergonomic manner, and we know that we’ve got that, so you can pull off eight hours.

When you’re working at home, there’s a lot of distractions, there’s a lot of things that are happening, and I think it comes down to this respect thing. I mentioned this earlier, but as companies, we are invading peoples’ homes. We’re being invited into their home, so let’s be respectful and let’s allow them to define, self-manage and define when and how they’re the most productive and allow them to be a little bit more human. I think we can be both human and professional.

Like I said, if people need to flex their time, if you’ve got meetings people need to be at, they need to be at those meetings. If they’ve got deadlines, they need to meet those deadlines, certainly. But beyond that, if people are going to be more productive working after the kids have gone to bed, or early in the morning or whatever, that’s okay.

That being said, I do want to alert people who are new to this that there is a problem. I’m a little hesitant to call this a problem. People who are working from home remotely, remote workers, usually will err on the side of overworking rather than underworking, just to show that they’re working. To prove that they’re working, they will work too much, oftentimes way too much. And so, the irony is of course, that managers that are new to remote work are afraid that people aren’t going to work enough. It’s been my experience and nearly universal on doing over 80 episodes of the Yonder podcast, that remote workers tend to work too much. As a manager then the problem becomes worrying about burnout and resentment [laughing] and all these other things.

So, by offering time to be a little bit more flexible, we can allow for that. Because people will work. If you require them to work the 9 to 5, they will work the 9 to 5, but they’ll also check their email at 6:00 before dinner, and then they’ll check their email at 8:00 and probably work from 8:00 to 9:30 because this email came in. It’s not really work, work, it’s just communicating. And these eight-hour days quickly become 10-, 11-, 12-hour days.

IVAN: That kind of segues nicely into one of the other tips you have which is seek purpose. You basically have to self-manage when you’re at home, right? And maybe that’s not something you’re used to when you’re in the office. You’re not going to see your team members. You’re not going to see all the people that you work with all the time, so trying to figure out where you fit in into that company might be a little harder.

JEFF: Yeah, purpose is context, right? This is about understanding where we fit in. When we’re sitting at home, we don’t feel like we’re fitting in anywhere. So, to be able to visualize, How does this work that I’m doing, what is the purpose of this work? What is my purpose in my role at the company? What is my purpose? What is my team’s purpose? The department that I’m working in, what is our purpose? What is the company’s purpose? Lots of companies have core values and mission statements and ongoing vision kinds of things. That can provide some guidance, but that also needs to filter down. So, as a worker, I think taking the initiative to ask, [laughing] “What is my purpose?” Now here is the forewarning: some managers may take offense at this, but I think there are ways of doing it if we remember we are all a team, we are all headed in the same direction.

But to ask, “Listen, I’ve got this thing. You’ve asked me to do this task. When’s it due? When do you need it? How soon do you need it? Here’s how long I think it’s going to take me,” and giving that kind of feedback. “Who else is working on this?” If you’re a services company, “What does the client need here?” Or if you’re a product company, “How does this fit into the product development?” And to just understand all that peripheral stuff around what you’re doing, I think, starts to create this warm embrace and purpose. People need purpose. They need to feel important and they need to know that the work that they’re doing matters. And so, in a company, some of that comes through this primal kind of stuff, just because you’re surrounded by people, it feels a sense of purpose. I’m working with these people and they seem nice, so that’s good. But in lieu of that, trying to seek out your purpose. Hopefully managers will do a good job of helping people to understand what their expectations are and what the purpose is and sort of how things fit in. But if your manager’s not doing that, ask, at least as best you can.

IVAN: Part of, I think, a leader’s job is to trust their workers, their team members.

JEFF: Is it?

IVAN: Absolutely.

JEFF: Is it though? I would say stereotypically, the idea of the untrustful manager is going to be the way the sitcom is set up, and not this loving, caring, empathetic trusting manager. [laughing].

IVAN: I think if you’re a leader and don’t have trust in your employees you’re going to be doomed, especially in a remote work environment.

JEFF: I agree with you. It is the kiss of death in a remote environment.

IVAN: So, I think what I was trying to say was, that’s, I think, a big part of being a leader. And I think on the other side of the equation, where you have team members, they also have to trust your leader, but I think a bigger part of it might be being vulnerable as well. If you’re a team member and you’re at home and you’re going to experience some sort of isolation—because that’s one of the things you deal with in a remote environment, you’re isolated—I think you have to be vulnerable enough to say, Holy crap, I feel isolated. Who can I talk to about this? Can I talk to my team member? Can I talk to my manager? I think that’s another tip that’s on your list is, be vulnerable.

JEFF: Yeah. Ultimately you would like that either your company culture or your department culture, your team culture, will allow for that vulnerability. I think a lot of companies have this more alpha culture where we only share our wins and don’t share any of the difficulties that we have. But it’s really important that we holistically are able to share with our managers and our coworkers what we’re doing. This is the overcommunicate part, right? It’s a little bit of overshare as well [laughing] l ”My kid’s sick.” “My dog is barking.” “I need to go walk my dog.” Whatever those things are. But also, like, “I’m struggling here,” or “I’m confused,” “I’m lonely.” And, hopefully your manager will be empathetic enough to say, “Yeah, I can see why you would be lonely. You’ve never worked remotely before. You know what, tomorrow let’s just set up a lunch call for everybody on the team. Everybody who wants to join, we’re just going to all get on video and we’re all going to eat our lunch together, and I don’t know, talk about whatever the latest HBO show is.”

IVAN: Or the coronavirus. [laughing] Talk about the virus. How many people do you know that have it?

JEFF: [laughing] That seems to be the topic of conversation, I know. Yeah, well, that’s not very settling, but okay, sure. We’ll talk about whatever we talk about to connect, because we want to connect. That is really important. And the truth is, that remote work, by default, is disconnecting. The advantage is that we have the opportunity to purposefully reconnect and define how that connecting is going to happen. Autonomy is part of remote work, right? Remote workers are going to be autonomous. They’re working on their own. They’re working separated from everybody else, so as managers we need to embrace that. As workers we need to embrace that. There’s just a certain amount of autonomy. However, I think a lot of time the trade-off feeling is, since I have this autonomy, I can’t expect to also remain connected. I’m going to be isolated because I’m autonomous. And that doesn’t need to happen. I think we should connect, but we need to be intentional about connecting as I’m saying. Like, let’s start the meeting a little early so we can talk about the weather. Whatever those things are, because we lose some of that nonverbal communication that happens in an office space. The manager can’t walk by your cubicle and give you a high-five, or “Hey Bob, great work.”

IVAN: Or a high-five elbow. Right?

JEFF: Well, there’s many reasons that we should not be high-fiving right now. But what it means is, we need to be intentional. Instead of the high-five, I need to send an email and I need to say, “Hey, Bob, I need you to know I really appreciate how you got this thing done on time, under budget. It’s great. I‘m really proud of you. It’s great to have you as a coworker, you’re a really nice person to work with.” That’s a much better message than a high-five! It’s more work. It’s certainly more intentional, but it’s all over, like, more meaningful.

I get to use all of my [laughing] sayings on this podcast. Another thing that I say is that, “Remote work is ankle weights for management.” It’s ankle weights for communication. It’s more difficult, but you are building better muscles, and ultimately in the long run, it’s going to be better. It’s more difficult at first, but once you get used to it, it’s a better practice. It’s a better workout. I’m trying to figure out how to make the ankle weights metaphor go further than it actually is. It’s difficult at first. You need to be very intentional about it and it’s going to feel like a lot of work, but once you get the rhythm of it...

I mean, part of the side effect of all this email and Slack and all this stuff is, you’re documenting all this stuff. And if you need to bring new people into the loop, you just cc them on the email or forward the email to them or invite them into the Slack channel. It’s all there, whereas lots of time in an office it’s like, “You haven’t been to the meetings that we’ve been having for the past three weeks in the conference room. Sorry. Maybe I can have someone send you the notes.” It’s just not quite the same thing as being able to syndicate all that information so quickly because it’s already stored electronically.

IVAN: We’ve talked a great deal about what new workers can expect. We’ve gone through the vernacular. I would love to hear if you have any high-level advice for company leaders, either owners of agencies that have always been co-located somewhere, or leaders of groups in larger companies that now have to manage 10, 20, 50 people. What are the nuggets of wisdom for them?

JEFF: Give me a call. [laughing]

IVAN: Absolutely. Number one, absolutely.

JEFF: I can share small doses of it for free and large doses of it, I’m happy to do some consulting.

IVAN: Everyone’s not the same right? We can’t give the same advice.

JEFF: It’s difficult because it really has to do with what kind of a company culture you’re starting with, how your company communicates, what your company values. How value happens at the company and then I guess also the company values, like the core values as well. What are those things? A thing I say is, “Don’t confuse foosball with culture.” Just because you’ve got a beer fridge at your company does not mean that that’s your company culture. Your company culture may be, “We drink. We value drinking.” Or it could be that, “We value creating things together,” but the beer fridge is not culture. And so to some extent by not having those artifacts it doesn’t mean that you don’t have culture, but you just need to rethink, “What is culture?” How you communicate what you value, what you care about, and then start mirroring that. If foosball means, Hey, we take things lightly and we have fun and if anyone wants to take a break at any time, there are lots of ways of doing that in a remote environment as well. It may be scary to jump right into that, if you also need to establish the fact that you can get work done, but eventually, if you were to take this on as a more long-term kind of thing, there are ways of doing that as well.

And I can talk, and have talked, for hours and hours [laughing] and hours about this subject. So, like I said, if anybody’s got questions, just send me an email or give me a call. Jeff@yonder.io is where you can track me down in the Yonder sense. I also do business coaching. Most of that happens at jjeff.com.

IVAN: It’s been so great doing this with you today Jeff. I feel like I’m going to close it for TEN7 and close it for Yonder. Very confusing how I’m going to end this right now. [laughing] I feel like you have to say something as well.

JEFF: So, your podcast has an outro, that little thing that you say at the end.

IVAN: Yes, I do.

JEFF: Whereas on mine, I just say goodbye to the guests and then we play a little music and off we go. So, goodbye Ivan, it was lovely talking with you.

IVAN: Well thank you Jeff. It was lovely talking to you as well. [laughing]

You’ve been listening to a special episode of The TEN7 Podcast and of the Yonder Podcast. You can find us both online. We’re at ten7.com/podcast, and Yonder is at Yonder.io. If you have a second, send us a message. We love hearing from you.

Our email address is podcast@ten7.com. And, if you need Jeff, just go to Yonder.io and fill out the contact form. Until next time, stay healthy, don’t touch anything and sing a song while you wash your hands. This is Ivan Stegic and Jeff Robbins. Thank you for listening.

Here’s the transcript:

JEFF: Hello everyone. It’s Jeff Robbins back with Episode 83 of the Yonder Podcast, where we talk to company leaders and big thinkers, about how to make remote work. We’re focused on expanding the remote work job market, and helping listeners to create happy, productive, distributed teams. On this episode, we’re talking with Ali Greene, who for the past four years has been working as the Director of People Ops at DuckDuckGo, a privacy focused search engine that hopefully you’ve heard of. DuckDuckGo the company is fully distributed and in fact Ali lives her life as a digital nomad traveling from city to city and country to country every few months. In the past four years Ali has helped DuckDuckGo to grow nearly threefold and she’s got a new company called Cohana, which offers consulting services and general remote work advocacy. Great conversation with Ali. She’s so charming, and we talk about culture and vulnerability. The word intentionality comes up a lot. We talk about building a diversity on a remote team  and battling isolation through community support that remote friendly companies can provide. Stay tuned for the podcast and we’ll [laughing] get into all those things. 

If you’re not already subscribed to the Yonder newsletter, Yonder.io/newsletter is where you can do that. We send out little bits and pieces to let you know about new podcasts, let you know about new articles going up on the Yonder website, and little bits and pieces we find around the internet to keep you updated on the latest remote work thinking. Also, if you’re not subscribed to the podcast that you’re listening to right now, you can do that through Apple podcasts, Google, Stitcher, Spotify, we’re on all the places that you might get podcasts and you should go and subscribe. Maybe while you’re there you can leave a little review. If you’re enjoying the podcast tell other people, recommend it, we always appreciate when that happens.

I also want to tell you about my business coaching and mentorship services practice for the past three years since exiting Lullabot, the company I started back in 2006. I’ve been working with owners and leaders of various types of businesses, both remote and collocated, to act as a virtual business partner. Someone to check in with weekly and to work out the issues that you need to keep your company and yourself, [laughing] healthy, happy, sustainable, and to help you move toward your goals, whether to grow your company or to simply make sure that your company is fitting into your needs and not going to burn you out. You can’t keep running a company if you burn out, and it’s good to have somebody to check in with, and I do a lot of that, and I love it. It’s really great. Super rewarding for everyone involved.

So, jjeff.com is where you can find out more about that. That’s jjeff.com. Alright, let’s get to our conversation with Ali Greene. 

JEFF: Ali Greene. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

ALI Greene:  Thank you, I’m so excited to be here. 

JEFF: Yeah, I feel like we’ve known each other for years because I feel like the first time that we talked was probably four years, maybe more than that, through email and stuff. I don’t know that we’ve ever actually been [laughing] in the same room together.

ALI: Not yet, but I’m looking forward to seeing you in April.

JEFF: [laughing] You’ve been a part of the Yonder circle group that we’ve been running and so we video chat each month and so, yeah, it’s a testament to virtual connections I suppose.

ALI: Yeah, it’s funny, I think some of my closest new connections in my life have started out very similar to you and I, where we have this email friendship for about a year and talk about really interesting things, and then finally get on video chat. So, you must’ve been in contact with me for pretty much my whole digital nomadic experience so far, and it’ll be really cool to finally be able to see you and the Yonder circle video chats, just really took it to the next level. 

JEFF: Yeah.

ALI: Just a testament for the remote world.

JEFF: So, I oftentimes ask people at the top of the podcast where are you talking to us from today, but I should give a little background to people that this whole digital nomad thing is your thing. It seems like every time I talk to you I want to ask you where you are because your somewhere else in the world.

ALI: Yes.

JEFF: [5:31] And you said, so you’ve been doing this digital nomad for how long now?

ALI: For  a little over four years though I really do think it’s in my blood. When I graduated from university there was a six year stint where every year I would not only change apartments but change cities and move around and was really just trying to find my groove until I realized my groove is constantly changing my environment, and luckily it was at a time where remote work was really taking off, so I was able to bridge my personal needs and my professional needs and now I travel the world, and I’m in a different country anywhere from every two weeks to every two months. So, sometimes it’s really fast paced for me, which is why every time we talk, I’m usually in a different country. [laughing]

JEFF:  [laughing] There’s something different in the background and all that stuff. So, the question today, [6:29] Where are you today?

ALI: Yeah, so I’m calling in from very exciting Detroit, Michigan, where we have had nonstop snow since I’ve arrived about 48 hours ago, and in a few days I’ll be headed to Miami and then a ski trip in the French Alps. So, a little bit of everything.

JEFF: [laughing] I guess so. You know, you want to add a little Detroit into the soup, just to keep things interesting, when you could go to Miami and the Swiss Alps. [laughing]

ALI: [laughing]  Keep things fresh. I visited my family. I have an adorable six year old nephew who doesn’t really understand that when he talks to me it’s daytime for him and nighttime for me, and so I really have to come home and start influencing the world of travel and remote working to him at an early age.

JEFF: [laughing] Don’t get me wrong Detroit is fine, but Detroit in February.

ALI: It’s a little cold.

JEFF:  Probably not the choice of when I would go there. Okay, so let’s get you introduced. I know you probably best as the Ops Director at DuckDuckGo, a wonderful and fascinating company that provides a counterbalance to pretty much that everything Google does [laughing] but you’ve recently left there. [7:56] Why don’t you give a better introduction to yourself?

ALI: Yeah, definitely. So, I was the previous director of People Operations at DuckDuckGo. I was lucky enough to be with them full-time for four years, so as I was starting my location independent life and remote work really building up the DuckDuckGo team as well, and so during my time there I was able to help them almost triple the size of employees we’ve had throughout the world, 16 different companies represented, increasing gender diversity 130% was something I was really proud of working during my time there, and really just seeing how a company could grow from 30 to 90 people without putting limitations on where people live or coming into an office, and things like that. It was just an incredible learning experience for me. I have so much respect for DuckDuckGo’s mission but also how they approach culture and the types of projects I was able to work on. Throughout my time working there another big passion in my life has been forming communities of people that also see this digital nomad life as a more sustainable way of living and what the benefits are for society in terms of learning through travel, and that’s learning about yourself, but also learning about the world and learning about the business. And so, thinking just about what I wanted the next stage of my life to be and how I could future impact the world of remote working, I decided to launch my own remote work consultancy.

Cohana.io is the website and what I will be focused on is really educating and inspiring teams to become more effective and engaged, not just in their professional projects, but also with each other, and supporting the remote work community  as a true community.

JEFF: Yeah. So, let’s talk about DuckDuckGo and your time at DuckDuckGo. Boy, I have all of these stock questions I’ve asked on this podcast over time, but I guess maybe [10:28] I’m just curious, what was it like. So, DuckDuckGo was already a company that had been around for a little while when you started there four years ago. What struck  you about starting work at a remote company like DuckDuckGo is and was?

ALI: So, I think my first introduction to DuckDuckGo is really a good story about what my whole experience was like there. So, I had been living in New York City, commuting from Brooklyn to Madison Avenue for this really “glamorous”, I’m making those air quotes, but you guys can’t see it listening to me, job.

JEFF: [laughing] Everything in New York is glamorous.

ALI:  [laughing] What’s not glamorous is the hour commute on a subway where you’re packed in like a sardine, and people wondering why you’re not…

JEFF: The picture’s glamorous, the smell is not glamorous.

ALI: The smell, the rats, yeah. New York I love to visit. It was not for me. There was a rat race there that really just got me down and so I was really lucky that that is where I started my remote work journey. I was able to negotiate at the job I was there to leave and I backpacked South America and continued on with them as a consultant, and during that time really started to see what consultancy looked like, and what South America looked like, which is amazing, and I still like remote work in digital nomad, it wasn’t a common term. So, I had this amazing experience, I climbed Machu Picchu, went to the Patagonia, and then I was like, “okay, where do I settle down. I need to learn how to put down roots.” But I wanted to do it in a way that’s genuine to Ali. I don’t want to have to be forced to do this hour commute, get into an office at eight a.m. and try to spit out really productive or things before I’d even had a chance to have coffee. Those who know me know that I’m obsessed with coffee, and kind of plan my trips around going to coffee shops, so it’s a really important way for me to start my day. And, I had met Gabriel, the CEO of DuckDuckGo at a Philly startup barbecue and I think I was in Philly only a couple weeks at that point. It was where I decided like, this is going to be my forever place if I have to choose one. So, I moved to Philly, I jumped right into the scene. I went to this barbecue and I met Gabe and we just started to have a conversation around company culture and everything he said made me so excited, and not only was DuckDuckGo trying to really hit the mainstream audience which they’ve now done, I would say, in terms of why privacy is important online, but also why is it important to treat your employees like adults, and if you put trust in them they will do good work, and you don’t necessarily really need to be watching over someone’s shoulder to know that they are really mission driven and want to help you company succeed, and it was one of those experiences where at this barbecue I think I was nodding my head so much, that like my neck was starting to hurt, because we were just agreeing about all of these things. And, he was really, I think, thinking ahead quite well because the company was only about 30 people in that stage. They didn’t yet have a formal People’s Operation team, but he was trying to hire someone to come in and really launch what that team looks like, and focus full-time on how the company could scale, while also scaling culture, and so, I started to work with DuckDuckGo. Back then they had a really long interview process, but what’s still true about the interview process that I had helped refine over the four years was people at that time came in and got to do some test projects and really see what it would be like to work there, and so I did a few test projects, was really excited about them. They were really excited about me, and then it just became a full-time commitment and so that’s how I found out about the job opportunity at DuckDuckGo and then over those four years those conversations that I had, not only with Gabriel, but with the rest of the leadership team, and my peers at DuckDuckGo, were constantly about -- we’re a successful company. How do we make sure that the success isn’t lost because people start to get disengaged or the success isn’t lost because people don’t have the right information because they’re working in all these different time zones? So, really, so much of my time there for the past four years was thinking about how do we make sure that we have the network in place that people don’t feel like there is a loss of communication, collaboration, or make sure that people are not feeling isolated, that they’re feeling fulfilled by this remote work opportunity.  

JEFF: Yeah. Take note dear listeners, [laughing] especially in a remote work environment, these things, culture, trust and mission driven company, or at least one with solid core values are what really attract quality employees to your company and then as you scale, you need to scale those things too, and it’s good to bring in people to help you do that and keep focused on that. [16:00] Talk to me about that end of things. Growing the company. You also talk about building diversity. What was that like. Something that we know how to control, I’m hesitant to use the word control, but when you’re talking about building something that’s hand built, built with loving care,  you want to control it, and we know how to do that in an environment where we can look at each other, collocated company, but how does that work when growing a company like DuckDuckGo, that x number of multiple what? Three times as big you left it as when you came in. How does that work in a remote environment, especially for you?

ALI: Yeah, I think the biggest things there are to start early with creating a framework and knowing that framework can change, and what I mean by framework is having almost like an inventory on what are the core values of the company and what are the rules of engagement, what are the behavioral norms that we want to celebrate, and what are the behaviors that work that will help someone be the most successful here. And, as  a leadership team, thinking about that early, and then not assuming that people will remember that as you grow is incredibly important. So, in an office you might have them plastered on the walls. You might have little tokens with your core values. It’s built into the system because it’s visually there.

For remote work it’s about intentionality, like, how do you take those values and really live by them.

And, then, if you know how to live by them, how do you document that, so that the expectations are really clear. And I think that might sound like a really boring answer to people, like, oh write it down, but it’s true. Write it down and make sure that people know where to find it on the tools that you use across the web. For us, at DuckDuckGo, very tactically speaking what it meant for me is I was spending a lot of my time engaging with various people at the company, figuring out what the best practices were, figuring out what the gaps and understanding were, and then creating a lot of templates that people could take, and then the repetition came, not because values were posted on the walls, but because there was a cadence of communication that looked the same and felt the same regardless of what team you were on. So, the design team would be working on a project and post weekly updates, and those weekly updates felt very similar to what the People Ops team was posting, so anyone in the company could jump in, and the mental overhead to figure out what they’re talking about disappeared, because it felt familiar, and then they could really focus on the content and learn what was going on in the company.  

JEFF:  Yeah, because this whole remote work thing is still new, and while it may be something that many of us had had deep long experience with, still it’s such a small percentage of companies that are doing it, for, I would venture to say the majority of new employees working in a remote work environment, are new to it, at least within a few years, and so, and this is in a great way, there aren’t these tried and true business patterns around what memos look like, or how business meetings happen, and so, it’s nice to be able to rethink those things [laughing] but on the other hand you can’t expect everyone at the company to know unless you start disseminating that, repeating that, creating those cadences. [19:59] When you say you’re creating templates, what does a template look like? Are these literal templates or are they more figurative?

ALI:  So, in this case, they’re literal templates. One of my favorite online tools for collaboration, I’m going to surprise all your listeners because I’m not going to say Slack, is Asana. So, I love Asana and DuckDuckGo, the office was our Asana projects, and so, it became not only a place to get the work done, but a place to communicate with each other and a place to learn, and part of that learning was to have legitimate tactical templates where there were certain, either pieces of information that were always going to be true or clear cut questions that people would take and copy for themselves and then write out the answers to that, to make it really customized to the problems they were working on. And these templates were things anywhere from how to kick off a project and think about what stakeholders you want involved and what the milestones of this project look like, to our hiring process. How do we know what we’re looking for? Who is going to be that A++ candidate? And based off of those answers, how do we go about finding those candidates, and so it really stemmed from, and I think everything in life stems from this, it’s asking the right questions and defining your expectations early. 

JEFF: So, okay, one of the things that people use Slack for a lot is what people often call culture. I’m always hesitant to call anything culture, but these peripheral, kind of like, hey, here’s a picture of my dog. Here’s funny things and you know,  [22:00] does that stuff happen in Asana at DuckDuckGo? Are you using it a little bit more lightly like that or does that stuff happen somewhere else, or does that stuff not happen at all?

ALI: Yes and no. It’s a very like, I think, answer that people give and then you’re like what is this person talking about? [laughing] So, yes, in the sense that the implemented threads in Asana that became part of a behavioral norm each week, to ask people about things going on in their world, so a sort of like an ask me anything, where sometimes it was what’s something that you want to know about a different team and what they’re working on to what movies are you watching lately? But, I do think having a Slack or Slack alternative is great for  more of the answer. I also lately try to stay away from using company culture as a descriptor, I must prefer a company community, and thinking about what culture is and then as you grow remotely people have their own cultures and then the company culture and it kind of gets confusing, but a company community is being on the same page about what are the rules of engagement? What are the norms? What behavior is celebrated? How do we interact with each other? And I think creating that community through fun, through friendly conversations, through banter, is incredibly important, but it doesn’t need to live in the same place that the work is getting done, because they serve two different purposes. So, I love Slack. I actually use Slack more often with my personal communities than with my professional communities. But I love it for talking through what are productivity tips that you need when you’re working remotely. What are great recipes that people are sharing? And this is something I’ve seen happen at DuckDuckGo and other communities that I’m part of, is just, using it as a way for people to get to know each other on a personal level, and using it to substitute passing in the hallway to substitute grabbing that cup of coffee in the kitchen at work, whereas tools like Asana become the desk space. And so, I like to sometimes think about what are the tools I’m using remotely and what would this tool be in the physical world?  

JEFF: I have in my head this giant matrix of communications tools and, things like their a femoral nature versus their archival nature, and how deep and engaging they are, there’s probably three dimensional or four dimensional chart [laughing] but Slack is kind of a femoral. It goes away and there could be important and useful information. Sometimes that important and useful information can be what somebody’s dog looks like [laughing], but one of the nice things about doing things in something more like Asana or, I realize this isn’t exactly a parallel, but like a Wiki or there’s companies that do more internetty kind of internal or Wiki blog kinds of things where it really is archiving things, especially early on in a company could be really good to create a lot of artifacts of, it’s funny because a lot of these companies evolve out of programmer culture and particularly  internet development and development standards there’s a thing called an RFC, which is a Request for Comments, and it doesn’t actually quite work that way, but basically it’s a way of saying, here’s a proposal. Here’s how I think http protocol should work. Hey anybody take a look and comment, and theoretically it’s a way people can collaborate and stuff like that. But, it’s also a way for people to put a stick in the sand and say, this is it. This is our flag. And someone else would come along and go, “Well, what if it looked more like this?” But when  you’re establishing a company, when you’re evolving, I think it’s a nice way to collaborate. 

ALI: Yeah, and there’s a few interesting things there too. So, one, just in terms of this archival nature, I think it is really important for building community or building culture, because these artifacts become the stories that you tell, and pass down from generation to generation of people that work at the company. We see it in consumer driven industries, the nostalgia factor is real, and building that own nostalgia into your company I think is a really interesting way to create deeper connections for not only employees that have lived through that, but new employees as well, because they have the opportunity to go back into these archives and see how far the company has come in terms of innovation, in terms of decision making, understanding why certain decisions were made and what the company felt like back then. It’s really helping new employees time travel to see the whole history and legacy of the company, which inherently makes them feel like they were part of it and connected even if they are new. So, I think that’s really interesting just in terms of how do you create culture? How do you create community? Having icons, having archives, having stories to tell in various formats is incredibly important. And then, jumping back to the tools, it’s just so interesting because whenever conversations happen, people always want to know what tool should I use? I have the tools I love and use, but I always hate recommending a tool or talking about specific tools, because it’s not about the tool, it’s about how you use the tool, and that’s a very human decision. 

JEFF: Well, to focus on the medium and not the message. The tool and not what you’re creating with the tool. And this is, again, going back even further to culture stuff. I think people confuse the foosball table with culture.  Right? It may be an evidence of your culture [laughing]. It may say something about how lighthearted you are, and you allow people to play games during the day in your office, but a beer fridge is not culture, and likewise Slack is not culture. It’s the way that we think. It’s the set of values. The philosophy, the communication style, the way that we treat each other. It’s the air that we breathe at the company and how that works. 

ALI: And that stems from leadership and from how you celebrate people and how the company actually achieves their goals and then all of the other stuff just represents that.

JEFF: Yeah. [29:24] So, here’s a Segway. One of the things that happens around culture a lot is that companies start searching for other employees that match the culture of the company which can oftentimes lead to a lack of diversity. It could just create these inherent biases of like, “well, we’re all white guys and we talk about white guy stuff, so if we hire other people they should enjoy cigars and going to football  games too,” and it can box in a company in a way that is ultimately dangerous in the long run. As a person that’s thought about diversity, as a person that’s thought about diversity particularly around remote work, which can actually be a little bit even more difficult to find diverse candidates when people are finding you through the web, the evidence of things that you do on the web,  going to your website and looking at the pictures of the people on your site, and pattern matching against that and saying, “Oh, well, I guess I wouldn’t fit in here because I don’t look like the people on this web page.” What have your thoughts been around all that?

ALI: I think it’s a beginning to be really intentional about why you value diversity. It’s 2020 so hopefully I don’t need to go on a soapbox about why diversity is important, but it is important, and the world is full of so many different people and that can be defined in so many different ways, so it’s not just about gender, or what you look like or where you’re from. It’s all of those things, and all of those things means that you have a different life  experience that you’re bringing into the company which will at the end of the day make the product better because you’re going to get lots of people challenging the status quo, and that’s where I think innovation comes from. But you do have to be intentional about it. Diversity wont’ find you, you have to be open about having the conversations, questioning what’s working and not working, and to be honest if you’re just getting started thinking about this as an entrepreneur, as a People Ops leader, the one thing that I think is the most important is, just be honest about your forthcomings so far. Be honest about where the companies at and be clear in your intentions of where you want the company to go and how you plan on getting there. Because nobody wants to feel that they were a token hire, but I do think if you don’t see someone that looks like you on a company hiring page, it is intimidating to be, “Am I going to be the trailblazer that is going to have to always be focused on what women in leadership look like,” for example, which has been my case in my professional journey so far. But then having a conversation about that with a company…

We’re really trying to get better here. We’re open to having conversations about where we’re at right now and what that looks like, however these are the very clear objective standards of how we’re going to make the hire, and so, while we want you because of the skills you’re going to bring to the table but also the new perspective through this aspect of diversity, we’re making the decision based off of the work itself.

So, in terms of just how you communicate that I think really being authentic and genuine with candidates, with people, is really important when it comes to how you make that work in your hiring process, I am a huge component of letting peoples work speak for themselves and if possible whether you’re technology or whether other People Ops team allows you to do those things as blindly as possible and so really looking through, how do people respond to certain case studies? I was always so proud of DuckDuckGo for paying people to do external projects and hiring people based off of the skills shown through those paid work. I think it removes as much as possible because people are human and there is some sort of unconscious bias to fight, but if you have a piece of work and you’re able to evaluate it clearly across the board, it makes a lot of strides there. 

JEFF: [33:50] Are you a proponent of anonymizing, adding layers of buffered anonymity between  hiring people and the people who are being hired? I’ve seen a fair amount of that, and it seems difficult, and ultimately doesn’t help you if you want to be more proactive [laughing] in hiring a more diverse group of people, it doesn’t quite help you. Maybe it does, I don’t know. But you’re kind of rolling the dice with that. I’m curious;  your thoughts. 

ALI: There’s pros and cons to that, like there’s pros and cons to everything. I think that looking at each stage of the interview process differently, because each stage of the process has different goals and therefore you can reach different diversity goals throughout that interview process is really important. So, if you’re a company that’s large enough to have talent acquisition people or recruiters and then hiring managers that are going to be evaluating work, some tips that I would have is, one, make sure, yes, everybody is on the same page about the importance of diversity and inclusion at the company, what the company has done so far to make improvements there and what are the gaps that still exist, but then the talent acquisition it would be their goal to really make sure the top of the funnel is as equal and fair as possible and so making sure that if they’re getting applications that are all from one group of people, how do they round out the diversity of the top of the funnel, and proactively engage with potential candidates that fit the bill, and that’s totally different than what the hiring manager’s going to see. 

JEFF: And, I think that there’s a certain amount of vulnerability and vision -- I’m a big fan of the alliteration, [laughing]. There’s a difficult hurdle if you have a company, let’s just say for the sake of argument, say it’s all white guys. As the leader of the company you need to admit, we’re all white guys, and I don’t want it to be that way. So, vulnerability is what is inherently potentially if you want to make a change, an embarrassing admission, right, that we haven’t been as diverse as we ought to be up until now.  That’s a vulnerable statement, and then the vision to say, but I want to change, and as you’re able to get out there and talk about it more, you can as you say, change who’s coming into the funnel, right, if you’re out there, speaking at conferences and saying, we need more women, we need more people from different economic backgrounds and go out there and talk about it.

ALI: And the reason why too. So, it’s not enough to just say, “hey, we have this problem right now, we’re very homogenous in terms of who is working for our company,” but to hear in someone’s own words why that’s important and not to fall back on the assumptions that the business world has communicated, I think is really important because that’s when you get an idea of the leaderships vision, to make sure that is going to ultimately, at the end of the day, gel with the behaviors and values that you’re going to see on a day to day basis. Because a company could all look the same, and they could admit that that’s a problem, but not really know why they want different people in the door, and then how is that going to look if you are that different person stepping in? Are they going to be flexible with changing some behaviors that you might feel uncomfortable around? Does the company want feedback and want to make proactive changes to make it feel like more of everybody’s safe space? So, what do those things look like?

JEFF: Absolutely. [38:04] From my perspective running a company, as the CEO, especially as the company started to grow, you start to look at things differently, you start to see the trees as a forest, and it’s like, okay, what kind of forest do I want to build? [laughing] Right? In the past it was sort of thinking about tree, tree, tree, tree, tree, but now it’s like what do I want this to look like as we put it altogether and I want a more diverse team with a wider perspective of views and a wider background in experience that people bring in.   And I think when you start looking at it that way it starts to change things and it becomes a little bit less, as you’re saying, sort of this by rote because we’re supposed to [laughing] kind of thing. 

ALI: And then it’s like, “oh, we have this forest, how do we make sure we have mountains and streams as well? How do we create a whole world of people and their perspectives” and with remote work it’s so much easier in some ways because you really do have the whole world as your team? I think some of the most interesting conversations I have had with colleagues has been people that come from different countries and cultures that’s in those countries that you assume are very similar to yours, especially the English speaking world at times, it’s hard to be like, oh, yeah, we’re kind of the same, we speak the same language, and then you go and spend time in different countries, and as a full-time traveler I’ve experienced this, but even talking to my coworkers that are from different places, it takes a lot of work to recognize the subtle differences and then it takes a lot of work to recognize the ways that you’re all the same, and be able to talk about those two things. One of the most surprising things for me was mental health, and what countries is it okay to be really vulnerable about mental health and where is it not. That was a shocker for me. So, there’s lots of interesting things about getting to know people from around the world. 

JEFF: But I think with all that stuff it’s just a matter of putting it on the table and acknowledging, “hey, we’re going to make mistakes, we’re going to say the things that may be wrong, or you may not fit into your culture, speak up, let us know.” [laughing] I always fall back on being an ignorant American, [laughing] that works for me. See I’m from America, I don’t know these things, please educate me. But it rises up to be able to just speak to people across the world with a variety of different accents and experiences and it’s summer there while it’s winter here and it’s day there while it’s night here, and there’s all these different festivals. It’s the opposite of closed in. I don’t know if I can work at a company down the street these days because it feels so close minded, means not quite the thing I mean it to mean here, but it’s such an expansion of the way that you think and I think it’s really good for a company to think that way, and it leans a company more towards being an international presence anyways when you’ve got people across the world. 

ALI: Yeah, it’s like a fishbowl versus an ocean. You can stay in your fishbowl and be happy but only know so much and then you can go to an ocean and realize there are sharks and whales and jellyfish and that’s really cool. I’ve loved that through working with so many people from different countries. I’ve learned so much about things like how do people in Japan use the internet, was a discussion we did one year at a DuckDuckGo meetup. I actually work on a laptop I bought in Spain and so I have a Spanish keyboard and my Spanish is not good [laughing]. I’m constantly trying to learn. I spend most of my time in Spain and I’m getting there slowly, Buenos Dias, like I can order my coffee, but to type and work on a Spanish laptop, even starts that trigger of problem solving and putting yourself in foreign experiences, hearing about how different employees choose to live their life if you give them the same basic guidelines, is so fascinating to me at a personal, but also professional way. So, thinking about remote work, you can work remotely, you can choose to live anywhere, or in my case, not live anywhere, seeing why people choose rural Scotland, or Saskatchewan or New York City, and what those choices mean for their life, but also what their choices mean for how they structure their workday and when they are productive and when they feel inspired, it’s like you get so much information about the people you’re working with, and I feel more connected to people that I’ve worked with remotely because of those types of conversations with people that I’ve sat across from in an office but never really had a deep conversation with. 

JEFF: [43:39] Yeah, we get so used to protecting ourselves in a physical environment with people that you’re kind of, respecting their space, respecting their privacy. But, when you’re talking on Skype or even on Slack, you choose how much of yourself to share and I think it creates new and different boundaries and barriers around how people are communicating. Also, the other thing is that you try to hire people who are good communicators to work at a remote company anyways.

ALI: Yeah, communication in not remote companies is key too. They have easier ways to not be as intentional about it but it’s always an important skill. What’s most interesting to me, and this is the word of the day I feel is, vulnerability, because there is a sense remote work is blurring the lines between your personal life and your professional life and it’s all just becoming your life. You’re working a lot of times in the same space that you’re living, but your hobbies exist and so that vulnerability shows as a video chat is a window into someone else’s life experience. I know when we talk on video and I see some of your music and audio things in the background, and I got to learn a little bit more about your hobbies, whenever I’m on video and  you see a different background all of the time it’s interesting on why and how I choose different places to live and those are questions that are triggers because of the scenery that we’re getting behind the computer screen. 

JEFF:  [45:34] Talk to me about isolation, but also about community. I don’t know if they’re necessarily different ends of the same thing. Feeling connected to people versus not feeling  connected. As we’ve got people spread out all over the world, especially in different time zones, communication can happen a little bit less synchronously, a little bit less connected, a little bit less real-time if somebody’s sleeping while your awake. What are thoughts about this? I know you’ve got a lot of thoughts [laughing] because you got a new company that’s thinking about this. But let’s maybe start with isolation particularly, and what you learned at DuckDuckGo about that, and then we can expand into the stuff you’re thinking about now. 

ALI: Definitely. So, there’s a really interesting study that recently was posted on, I think it was Buffer and Angelis collaborating, and I was surprised the number was as low as it was, it was 20% said loneliness was a struggle for them in remote companies, 20% is a really decent amount. I definitely felt isolated and lonely in my work experiences in the past and what I think that I’ve learned about isolation is that it is a area of remote work that really will impact all of the aspects of your life, and in order to combat it, again, the word of the day, vulnerability, is huge, and so I think a companies responsibility to make sure that their employees are not feeling isolated, it is about building a safe space for them to be able to be vulnerable with their struggles they have around it, and really think through what is the most respectful way to include the right stakeholders at the right time.

That answer for every company will be differently. I’ve had plenty of experiences working in Asia when the majority of my teammates were in California or Philadelphia or Poland, and not really sleeping that well, feeling isolated in some ways because I would see friends that were there that were out hanging on the beach and then going out to dinner, when I was just starting my workday. Yes, it was my personal choice to be there but that doesn’t mean it was any less difficult, and so just having that understanding through a company to say, “Well, while you’re here maybe some of these meetings since you’re a key stakeholder won’t be at four a.m.” It’s not only going to make the person tired, but it’s going to make the meeting less successful. Do you really want someone who’s half asleep showing up to your meeting and making really important decisions, or brainstorming and talking nonsense cause they’re sleep deprived? Probably  it’s bad for business and it’s bad for the person. Instead, what is the most respectful meeting time, not what is a meeting time that’s optimal based off of business hours in any time zone.

If you think about that, the window opens up for times you can communicate because for someone in North America talking to someone in Asia, it gives you six hours a day if you’re thinking like 7:30 and 9:30 a.m. and p.m. are not that terrible hours to work if you get the rest of your day to own and control. So, I think, shifting the perspective of not what’s normal, but what’s most respectful, is it most respectful to wait for this asynchronous conversation to happen and make a decision over the span of two days. Like, what’s going to be the business impact of waiting and what’s going to be the cultural impact of waiting, versus making a decision without someone that you know is really passionate about this project.

So, I think having leaders ask those questions at work is really important in terms of what the community looks like. I also think that progressive companies will start to realize that this feeling of fellowship you can have with other people does not have to be with your coworkers. It’s amazing if it is. There’s an awesome gallop article talking about how friends at work really do matter, but friends in life, in your professional area of expertise, don’t have to be part of your company to still be productive allies for you inside and outside of work, and so, one thing that I think is a really great benefit that companies are offering, DuckDuckGo did this, is coworking benefits, and it’s not just being productive and having fast Wi-Fi, that’s really great, but it’s about if you’re in a community and there’s other remote workers in that community, how does going to a coworking space and those kinds of spontaneous conversations around different design tools or if you’re really frustrated by a bug and you can’t figure out what to do and you go and blow off steam and have a conversation about whatever cool TV show people are watching these days in the kitchen at the coworking space, that can reduce stress enough for you to go back to you problem and work on it on your own. So, I think really progressive companies moving forward will think about:

How do I shape internal company community, but how do I provide the benefits or support to employees to create a network outside of work where they can learn from, be more happy and engaged in their life, and bring that engagement back to work.

JEFF: Yeah, it’s a thing that doesn’t get talked a lot about in business in general but certainly around remote work. There’s a high percentage of people that get a job at a company or a place, a restaurant, because they want to meet those people [laughing] and hang out with them, right? It’s a whole social aspect and oftentimes people have met their spouses through work and all this stuff, and how do you handle that if there is no workplace for people to meet? I wouldn’t advise that you create a dating event at your company retreat, that’s probably not where you want to go, but I like this idea of supporting people having social connections outside of work, that a workplace might otherwise offer if it weren’t distributed. 

ALI: Yeah, and I think I can most eloquently speak about that in a digital nomad community because that community is just growing and as interconnected as anywhere. I was recently in Buenos Aires for three weeks working, and even before my flight landed I realized I knew 15 other people there that were my friends,  but also remote workers, which meant from the day that I landed I had 15 people to help me be motivated if it was a really sunny day and I didn’t want to work, but we all went to a café together and helped each other get excited about the projects we were working on, because we got to brag about the cool stuff our companies were doing. I had 15 people socially to go out to dinner with, so I was taking the necessary time away from my laptop and away from work, to recharge and not get burnt out and have a little bit of fun so that the next day I could get right back into the grind of work. Because I do think that sometimes [laughing] and I’ve been really guilty of this as a digital nomad if I choose the wrong location and there’s nothing to do, my fallback is work, but then I’m not having inspiring ideas because I’m not fulfilling myself socially.

JEFF: Yeah, burn you out, yeah.

ALI: And so, I think it’s really cool. Yeah, like burnout as a nomad is real, and I’m so guilty of this. My Instagram you see me hanging out at a café working with an ice cream Sunday or you see the fact I was able to go on a lunchtime hike to a private beach in Brazil. Yes, I’ve done all of those things, but I’m not showing you the days where I haven’t changed out of my sweatpants and I’m in Poland alone and it’s getting dark at two p.m. and so, I just work all day and all night because I’m bored, [laughing] and don’t know what to do.

JEFF: Well, it goes back to that vulnerability thing. That needs to be acknowledged that that happens to people, that that’s okay, and that there’s a means to be able to talk about that in some work channels of some kind. Because it really holistically we’re talking about morale. That’s a word that gets thrown around. I almost feel like it’s a cynical word because you don’t use morale to refer to happiness otherwise, right? [laughing] You know, “how’s employee morale? Are they gonna stick around? Can we keep exploiting them or are they going to leave?” But, yeah, happiness, but if people can’t express what’s going on with them, they start to feel shame about it, they start to hide it away, and they start to feel isolated. So, this relationship between isolation and company culture that allows a certain amount of vulnerability, allows an acknowledgement of the difficulties of work and life and allows communication around that, is really important. 

ALI:  Yeah, and I think there’s certain triggers and tools and clues that leaders in remote companies can look for. I think that the problem with isolation is that it’s in some ways a self-fulfilling prophecy or it’s this terminal circle that keeps going around and around and around because if you’re going through something difficult and you work in an office, you show up to that office, you’re probably not looking at your healthiest state emotionally, and whether people ask you about it or not, it’s more telling that you’re going through something. In a remote company, and I’ve been there and done that, I have gone on to a Zoom video call, like fake it till I make it, kicked butt on a really cool training session, closed my laptop and cried because I was going through some personal shit that I didn’t know how to bring it up with my coworkers. It took me a long time and I work in People Operations and I know how deep this goes. It took me a long time to be like, it is not only okay to ask for help but it is celebrated, and in the long run it’ll make you closer to these people that do care about you and want to help you, and then it’s better for everybody to, in a healthy way that’s respecting people’s boundaries bring this up because it is better for you as an individual to have support to be able to maybe not do a certain piece of work that can give you more time to focus on the stuff that you need to mentally process things. It gives somebody else an opportunity to get to know the stuff that you’re working on, to feel connected to you as a person, and help you, and it helps the business because nothing is being slowed down. So, as a leader, I would recommend that people really pay attention to what do people look like normally in conference calls and not just in terms of what they physically look like, but are they really engaged, do they have their video camera on? Are they looking into the camera or not? Or do they have their videos turned off more often than not? Are they coming to the meetings and not engaging with people, not speaking when they normally speak? Those are the clues that you get in an office space that you can take time to look at in a remote company, and paying attention to those things, and building the trust and asking from the get go even though it’s uncomfortable to get to know this, but it goes back to our conversation around paying attention to the physical cues of what’s behind someone’s computer screen and starting to have those ice breakers early so you get to know their hobbies because that’s a way for you to then start asking them, “Oh, you know, Jeff when’s the last time you played that guitar that’s hanging behind you?” If you say, “Oh, I haven’t played in weeks because I’m so overwhelmed and busy,” like hey, you might be at risk of burnout and as a leader in an organization let’s have a conversation about it.  

JEFF: [58:48] Obviously you can’t force people to talk and you don’t want to even coax them necessarily if they’re not wiling to talk about something, and the fact that you can fake it through a Zoom call and then close your computer, there’s some beauty in that. If you’re not ready to share something you don’t have to. And there are ways even that you don’t need to necessarily, you know, you see people using the phrase ”make it through the workday,” right. You don’t need to make it through the workday, you just need to make it through the Zoom call, or whatever. And so that’s kind of nice, but again it goes back to that word intentionality, like, creating an environment where you can say, and there’s also, it’s a whole other topic to get into, [laughing] but the book Nonviolent Communication, that whole realm of thinking is really interesting, and in that way of communicating to say, ”Hey, here’s what I’m seeing. It looks like you’re disconnected,” and be honest about that, and, “if you ever want to talk I’m here to talk and it’s okay”, but not demanding, “AND YOU HAVE TO TELL ME WHAT’S GOING ON OR YOU’RE GOING TO BE FIRED.” That’s obviously outside the realm of even probably what’s legal. 

ALI:  Yeah. I think it goes to creating that safe space, creating the opportunities for vulnerability and it’s up to the individual to take it, and then also when we talked about this earlier, if they choose not to take it with the company or if they choose not to take that safe space and vulnerability with the people they’re directly working with in terms of the projects they’re working on, who are they physically around that they’re working with and how can you create a safe space for them to get  support in those environments, and so for me, in my example of there are times when I was feeling isolated or lonely, and I would have those experiences of faking it through the Zoom call and then being lonely and alone in a random Airbnb somewhere, then thinking about “oh, but I actually have this coworking benefit so I can go to a city with people that I know I’m friends with and reconnect with my friends and that’ll solve my problems of loneliness which will help me solve my problems of being able to focus at work,” and so it’s like companies can offer support by creating the environment for people to get support whether it’s directly through the company or through other means, and I think that’s really cool. It’s like it doesn’t just have to be what you talk about at work, but it’s making sure that as an individual you know how to have ownership over your day and over the resources available to you, whereas in an office you might have to be there 9 to 5 and remote work if you’re feeling really crappy one day and you need three hours to do something that will make you happy or lay low and you’ll get your inspiration later that night, that’s okay too. I think that’s really good if people just know more about themselves and they know, here is signs when I’m hitting a wall. Here are signs, now I know how to deal with that effectively, and it’s not going to impact my work because it’s really stressful to be feeling burn out, to be feeling isolated, and trying to figure out how to deal with those things, and not have it ruin the quality of what you’re offering a company, and your reputation and your professionalism, and so reducing that anxiety is really beneficial.

JEFF: Well, and you feel like you don’t have options to know that you’re working at a company where you could talk about the problem you’re having. You could go to coworking. There are any number of these things that you could do, just keeps you from feeling so trapped and this existential stuckness. And I know there are companies out there, “we offer a coworking benefit but nobody seems to take us up on it so we may discontinue it.” Don’t discontinue [laughing] it, right? It’s working perfectly, if people know that they can if they need to, and I think there are a lot of things that fall under that heading. Like, not necessarily that people need to be communicating every thought in their head and their deepest existential angst, [laughing] but to know that they’re not trapped and don’t need to necessarily feel too much shame around that, at least from the work culture.

ALI: Exactly. It’s like having the toolkit and you don’t always have to touch the toolkit but when you open it up knowing that the tools will help you, that’s perfect for a company to offer, I would say.

JEFF: [1:03:49) Okay, let’s talk about Cohana. You’re doing your own stuff now. Talk to me about the mission of Cohana and now that you’re out on your own, what are the horns that you want to trumpet? [laughing] Ah, that metaphor didn’t work. [laughing]

ALI:  Yeah, so for me, [laughing] the bells I want to ring, I don’t know what the metaphor is, the drums I want to beat [laughing], so for me it was really about thinking through what are the aspects of my life that I’m most passionate about and also feel that there is a gap between what currently exists and what the future could hold, and that is what the inspiration behind Cohana was. It was, I’m a remote worker and a very specific type of remote worker, and I think there’s so many amazing conversations going on between why remote work is good for companies. Why remote work is good for individuals. There is less conversations around two things. The first one is, okay we know it’s good for companies, but we don’t know how to successfully implement it. What do we actually do next once we’ve decided that we want remote work? How do we make sure people don’t feel isolated? How do we make sure we’re talking about boundaries and definitions and expectations that work? And so, one of Cohana’s goals is to help companies get to the point where they can successfully offer these toolkits to their employees so that more people have an opportunity to explore remote work and how they can make remote work for them. So that brings it to the second goal and mission, is really around, okay, now we’ve made it easier for people to work remotely, the companies are more successful at offering remote work, what is the bigger societal impact of that and what’s the next phase of remote work, what are the projects there. So, some of the things I’m really passionate about exploring through this new venture are things like, rural areas and there’s a psychological benefit to being out in nature. It’s proven to reduce stress. People  don’t have to live in cities anymore because they have remote work. How do you take those two things and revitalize a rural community with new energy, new money, new young people, and what does that impact on the towns community as well? So, if you’re bringing all these remote workers and attracting them, well non-remote jobs could potentially be increased as well, and so this idea of forming communities online and in real life to challenge the status quo of remote work and open up the conversation to be around things like urban planning, rural development, the gap between remote work and physical and mental disabilities and what could be solved there, families that want to travel and how can the educational system be changed with remote work. That’s like, all of the things that consume my brain at any given time that I’m excited to explore and play around with in the future. So, that’s like probably Cohana like 5.0 in the meantime I’m doing consulting and helping companies really get off their feet with the tactical endeavors of creating internal processes. I’m hoping to release soon some worksheets and interactive guidelines so companies can do for themselves some of the things that they should be thinking about or having the right conversations internally. But then hopefully in the future I’ll be playing around with planning some of these interesting retreats and challenging societal norms through remote work.

JEFF: I love it. You’re speaking my language. It’s great stuff. Cohana.io, that’s where you can find out more about that. Ali, if anybody wanted to follow-up and maybe their brains were stimulated by some of the exciting things we were saying today, and they wanted to follow-up to tell you how great you are or ask questions [laughing] where should they get in touch with you?

ALI: [laughing] Well definitely visiting my website Cohana.io is a great place to get in touch with me. I’m also huge on Instagram and love sharing more about my digital nomad life there. The beautiful scenery in my pictures and the flubs and challenges in my stories. [laughing] So, if people want the inside look at Ali as a nomad they can go to seeinGreene on Instagram (that’s one ‘g’), and I’m always doing weird things on there. [laughing]

Here’s the transcript:

JEFF: Hi everyone. It’s Jeff Robbins back with Episode 82 of the Yonder Podcast, where we talk to company leaders and big thinkers, about how to make remote work. We’re focused on expanding the remote work job market, and helping listeners to create happy, productive, distributed teams. This time, we’re talking with Jerad Bitner, who is the Development Manager and a Develop at Lullabot, disclaimer, the company I co-founded back in 2006. I’ve since stepped away from the company, but Jerad still works there and wears a lot of different hats, but he’s also particularly interested in virtual reality, which is what we’re talking about on the podcast today. This topic has come up a fair amount in talking with people about the ways that we communicate, or the ways that we can communicate, and this idea that virtual reality might be a future technology, maybe we aren’t talking in Slack so much, we’re putting on headsets and stepping into the ready player one, movie style, immersive world and meeting our virtual teams in virtual space, or maybe it’s just all weird. I don’t know. It’s up to you. [laughing] But, here’s the podcast. We’re going to give you a bunch of information. It turns out for basically just $400.00 you can buy a headset that will do pretty much all of this that you need to do without even needing an external computer with it. But I’ll leave it to you as to whether this is a direction you want to pursue or not, but it’s a really fascinating conversation with Jerad and a chance to immerse you in this new potential direction for remote work, virtual communication stuff.

I also want to tell you about my business coaching and mentorship practice. This isn’t something that I’ve mentioned too much on this podcast, but for the past two or three years since exiting Lullabot, the company I started back in 2006, I’ve been working with owners and leaders of various types of businesses, both remote and collocated, to act as a virtual business partner, someone to check in with weekly and work out the issues that you need to keep your company and yourself happy, sustainable and help you move toward your goals, whether those are to grow your  company or simply to make sure that your company fits into your personal needs, make sure that you work for your company, and your company works for you. There you go. We think a lot about brand and marketing and sales pipelines and also stuff like culture, group dynamics and company growth. I’ve done a lot of brainstorming with my clients helping to develop products and new initiatives for their companies and if those are the kinds of things that you’d like to have someone to talk with about those kinds of things with, we should talk. 

If you’d like to set up a call and talk about working with me to help make your company better, visit jjeff.com, and that’s my business coaching and mentorship site, and you can find out more there and fill out the form and we can set up a call and I can tell you more about what it’s like to work me with in that capacity. But if you’d just like to work with me in the capacity of listening to a podcast, we’ll let you do that, and get to our interview with Jerad Bitner.

JEFF: Hi Jerad. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

JERAD:  Hey Jeff. How you doing?

JEFF: I’m good. (5:31) How are you?

JERAD: Doing very, very well, thank you.

JEFF: [laughing] I should mention for everyone listening that Jerad and I are old friends and work acquaintances.  (5:44) Jerad, how long ago did you start working at Lullabot?

JERAD: It will be 10 years in March.

JEFF: Wow. And we met probably two years before that when you came to a workshop that we were teaching that I was part of.

JERAD: Yup. Providence.

JEFF: Yeah. And now you’re a superstar.

JERAD: [laughing] 

JEFF: [laughing] (6:15) Well, first of all the question I ask everyone, where are you talking to us from today?

JERAD: I am in Gig Harbor, Washington, which is just a little bit north of Tacoma.

JEFF: Wow. (6:24) And do you work from home?

JERAD: Yeah, I’ve worked from home for a long time now. [laughing] I had a room upstairs, my daughter got older, wanted her own room, so we built a small room in the garage, now I have a garage office, or I like to call it a studio, I guess. [laughing]

JEFF: [laughing] It’s all about how you sell it to yourself you know.

JERAD: [laughing]  Yeah, it really is.

JEFF: (laughing) You could have a basement, boutique studio, with no windows. (7:04) And so, why don’t you introduce yourself to people. 

JERAD: Sure. My name is Jerad Bitner. I am currently by day, a Development Manager and Project Manager at Lullabot. We work on large-scale websites. Current clients is IBM. I’ve been working for them for actually almost two years now, it’s been a pretty long gig, but it’s really good. I think by night I would say I am a creative technologist working mainly in the field of virtual reality.

JEFF:  Yeah, and that’s why we got you on the podcast. We’ve had several guests now that have talked about virtual reality as kind of a future of remote work. It’s certainly a future technology, future communications technology, a new way of interacting and I thought, oh, I know a VR guy who’s really interested in that, and you and I talked a few months ago and thought it would be a good idea to have you on the podcast and we can have a conversation about, to some extent, the state of VR, [laughing] and what it is, what works,  even potentially what doesn’t work, and what people might look for and think about. Are we at that tipping point yet? Are we ready for everyone to start wearing goggles at home doing all their virtual remote work, [laughing] or where we at with that? (8:57) So, let’s start with the history of things a little bit. Talk to me about when you got into VR and what the state of things were then, and then maybe we can walk it forward.

JERAD: I started into VR as most things hobbyist and it was October of 2014 when I said, I’m buying myself a birthday present and it’s going to be the Oculus DK2, and the DK2 was the second development kit that Oculus was coming out with after their acquisition by Facebook for an ungodly amount of money. 

JEFF: (9:48) DK? Does it mean it was pre-consumer release developer stuff? Sort of like the google goggles which have not actually technically been released publicly yet, as far as I know, right?

JERAD: Yeah, the development kit is geared towards developers. It’s usually somewhat subsidized so it’s a little bit cheaper that developers can get into it and just start experimenting with the technology to see what they can do with it and hopefully learn how to create content with that stuff, because by the time you get to a consumer release you want to have a pretty flourishing ecosystem of content to give to the consumer.

JEFF:  (10:39) So, what could you do with it back then?

JERAD: Well, back then basically, it was only a headset. You just had a headset that you could put on. It had no stereoscopic view and there were a couple different demos. One of the famous demos was one called Tuscany, where you  basically had this place in Tuscany that you could go to and walk around this house. There wasn’t a whole lot of interaction or anything, but it showcased the ability to look around a three dimensional space while sitting at your desk using your keyboard and mouse as navigation and you could look around and it could track your head, but that was basically it.

JEFF: (11:31) Right. So, no positional stuff. When you say you could walk around in the house you had to mouse around or arrow key around to move forward and back?

JERAD: Yes. Like a videogame. You press forward with your arrow key and you go forward and you’re actually still sitting there but it feels like you’re going forward and that’s when they started realizing things like simulation sickness was a thing [laughing].

JEFF: [laughing] So, let’s make sure we’re explaining this, kind of beginner for everybody who  is listening. So, simulation sickness is a form of motion sickness, it’s kind of the opposite of motion sickness, right? Motion sickness oftentimes is caused because your eyes are not seeing the motion. You’re in a vehicle but your body’s feeling emotion and because of this disconnect your brain thinks oh, I must be sick, or someone must’ve drugged me, so I need to get this drug out of my system. I should throw up. (12:36) And this is sort of the opposite right, in that you’re seeing motion but your bodies not feeling the motion.

JERAD: Right. Your brain is perceiving motion and your body is not, and so there’s where the disconnect happens and it still is like, yeah, I ate some bad berries, I need to throw up. [laughing]

JEFF: Right. It’s evolution folks. It’s working for you. 

JERAD: That is a thing. 

JEFF: [laughing] Yeah, we’re eating fewer bad berries these days than we are using VR. (13:08) So, how have things evolved over time? Walk me forward maybe a year or two from there. Things starting to come out into the consumer world. What problems have been fixed?

JERAD: Well specifically with locomotion, I think and try to make sure that people aren’t sick. There’s a lot of design considerations that are in play. So, things like limit the users field of view when you’re moving them, or doing some sort of teleportation is typically a little bit easier to handle than the actual motion of moving from point A to point B. So, just teleporting, and being there instantly, or being able to do things like, some people really prefer snap turning, so that you can hit a button on your controller and it just snaps your view 45 degrees to the right or left. Things like providing a visual cage when you’re moving. So, sort of like when you’re in a car, you’re moving, but you see the car around you. Your body perceives that you’re in the car and the car is moving and not so much making music, although car sickness is still a thing. Right? [laughing] There’s a lot of things you can design into your VR application that can mitigate a lot of those symptoms. So, I think that’s probably the biggest one. The other one is just the advances in hardware have gotten us to higher refresh rates, higher resolution, and when you can give your brain more input it tends to put that motion sickness, or simulation sickness, down. 

JEFF: Right. I think when people think of VR these days, they’re thinking of putting on a headset and shooting at things or riding a motorcycle, some kind of high intensity videogame type thing. So, to some extent it probably, is sort of, there’s kind of a disconnect, like, “why are they talking about that on this podcast. This is a podcast where they seem to talk about business culture and communications and keeping people connected.” (15:44) Talk to me about what has evolved in VR in the realms outside of gaming. 

JERAD: Gaming is a big use case for virtual reality, but there are literally a ton of other use cases. I think videogames is pretty typical because it makes money, right. [laughing] The game development industry is also the ones who are the most knowledgeable about graphics, and graphical user  interfaces and things like that, so you see a lot of game companies getting into VR because it’s a natural extension of what they already do, whereas, typical application development is a little harder, it’s not as natural, and there’s been a very huge transition for me in thinking of creating two dimensional user interfaces into three dimensional user interfaces. Man, that was a whole area of study, and still is, we don’t have it all figured out, but I read a lot of those books. 

JEFF: (16:55) Meaning what? Like watching a movie in virtual space would probably be a simple use case.

JERAD: Yeah or interacting.

JEFF: Spreadsheets.

JERAD: Touching buttons to do things.

JEFF: Right. Because this is what user interface has been for the past 40 years, 50 years [laughing], on a two dimensional screen this is what we’re used to.

JERAD: Yeah, and when you add that third dimension it really changes how you have to think about your whole application. [laughing]

JEFF: When you think about it, even airplanes, cars, it’s still a two dimensional user interface even though it’s switches and buttons and stuff like that.

JERAD: On a screen maybe.

JEFF: Yeah, well it’s certainly on a screen, but on an airplane, there are just all these switches mounted on the wall of the airplane [laughing]. There are things like a stick shift kind of device, or a steering wheel is much more of a three dimensional interface thing, but for the most part, most of the switch kinds of things tend to be two dimensional.

JERAD: And that’s what’s fascinating, is, how can you take a user interface that is traditionally two dimensional and find things that are, in the real world, that people understand, like levers and switches, and make them three dimensional so that people can use them in those manners. Or, what happens when I flip something over as a user interface. Or, what happens if I grab this and pull it up to my ear, things like that are fascinating to me.  [laughing]

JEFF: (18:43) So, communications, again, when we think of gaming it’s usually a relatively solitary experience, maybe you can hear the people who you’re playing the game with or maybe they’re in the game with you, but it’s not call grandma  kind of thing. What has been the state of the art with that historically and also moving up to where we are now?

JERAD: This is sort of the number one superpower I think of virtual reality. It can bring people together. A lot of time people talk about, “oh, virtual reality is going to ostracize us and nobody’s going to talk to each other because they’re in a headset”, but in reality, the largest benefit of virtual reality is the fact that I can meet with somebody in a totally different country, a totally different time zone, and feel like I’m exactly in the same room with them. I can see their body language. I can talk to them. I can get their voice inflection just like it would on a videocall, but it’s every more because I feel like I’m actually in the space with them. 

JEFF: Fully immersive.

JERAD: Yeah, and what’s more, I remember it as an experience that I had. There’s a fundamental difference between seeing something on a screen and being in it. 

 JEFF: It’s interesting, the psychology of it, right?

JERAD: Oh, yes.

JEFF: Because one is that you’re watching something on a screen or on a phone, it’s sort of a surprise that you can interact with it.

JERAD: It is.

JEFF: Right [laughing]. Like that first time you did a videocall, like, “wait, you can see me? This is a TV where you can see me”, you know. But this is more immersive, this is an experience and you remember it…

JERAD: Not only can you meet with that person and talk with them, but you can interact with them and you can interact with the things that are in that virtual space together in real time, and so you could imagine that opens up a  whole world of collaboration in real time with three dimensional objects [laughing] remotely.

JEFF: Right. So, you could do 3D modeling, 3D sculpting together if you were working on some sort of device or developing a car. You can also work together on a whiteboard device.

JERAD: Yeah. I’m coming up with an article right now, Six Ways to Use VR for Remote Work, and you just hit on two major ones. One is the meetings that we just talked about; another is whiteboarding. You can have a virtual whiteboard with built out sample applications around this where I can meet with somebody and we can express our ideas in 3D space. What’s nice about it too is, it’s not even limited to just the board, I can just draw in the air, and then grab it and move it around. It doesn’t have to be on a flat surface that I’m drawing. The whole space becomes the whiteboard basically.

JEFF: (22:35) So, what’s happening technologically here? Are there specific apps? I know the buzz words that I heard you using years ago, and maybe this is not the current state of the art but, was web VR sort of this idea of creating, mirroring web technologies, so web activity in a VR environment. I should also mention there was this first wave of VR that happened in the nineties and I was doing a lot of web stuff back then, and so there was this idea of VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language), and things like that that probably evolved a lot. But, how does all that play into this? 

JERAD: VRML was very formational; it was a foundation. Tony Parisi was the author  around in the early nineties, he’s now working for Unity, which is a game engine company. So, what I want to point out there is, there’s a sort of paradigm. There’s basically these two main options of, you have, sort of videogame engines, 3D engines and then you have web engines, and to a certain extent there’s a crossover. So 3JS is a JavaScript Library that can access web GL within the browser, which basically accesses your GPU directly to do the processing. So, you can get better graphics, better processing there, and, so there are projects like, I think the most prolific one right now is Mozilla has a Hubs project, Mozilla Hubs, which is probably one of the better VR pieces.

JEFF: Mozilla, the people behind the Firefox browser.

JERAD:  Yup. Their foundation has a project around that which is geared toward creating 3 dimensional spaces using web VR and has multiplayer built-in. So, you could actually go to a web address and hit a button in your headset, feel like you’re in a 3 dimensional space and have other people join you so you could have a meeting and talk with them and do various things within that space. That’s web VR. There’s also a lot of different projects with game engines. And the difference between these two things is, I would say, quality. Web VR is a little bit like shoe horning and advanced technology to an existing product, the browser. That comes with a lot of overhead. The browser is not meant to do this, so, you even have Mozilla coming up with new browsers. For instance, the Oculus Quest has a brand new browser called Mozilla Reality, or is it Firefox Reality? One of those, [laughing] and it’s geared towards simply only being able to browse websites in 3 dimensional spaces, and it takes out a lot of the overhead that traditional browsers have, and allows you to have multiple browser windows open at once in a 3 dimensional space, allows you to go to a web VR website and click a button and just be immersed in it, instead of a space where your screens are now. So, they’re trying to make that transition very seamless, but the difference between doing that and browsers and doing that with game engines is still, I think, a matter of quality. You can get a lot better quality in game engines, because they’ve been built for a 3D. They’ve been built for optimizing the assets and presenting those assets. They have had this pipeline figured out for years through building videogames and browsers are kind of catching up to that. So, I think that’s the biggest difference really, is just the quality. You can do more easier in game engines and still have high quality things that respond in real time a little bit better than you can in web browsers, but it is catching up. 

JEFF: It’s a little bit of a “tortoise in the hair” situation. This was the state of things, historically, that even Microsoft Excel was not something you could do in a web browser because it was too complex. But, over time, web browsers got better and you have things like Google Spreadsheets now, and a lot of this stuff is caught up in a way that it is potentially more interactive, more low common denominator, as it’s moved to the web, but the faster, the hair version [laughing] of the tortoise and the hair race is still native apps, which oftentimes cost more money. Or how much of this stuff is free? Or are VR interactive communication apps like this. I know games cost money, but what are we talking about in terms of investment. Let’s talk about the equipment, but first let’s talk about software.

JERAD: Sure. Game engines are typically free as well, until you actually compile that application and what to sell that application and then you’re looking at having a license for that game engine. So, developers end up having some sort of license that they need to purchase in order to actually sell their applications. 

JEFF: Interesting. (29:12) So, there’s actually a cost to the developers to distribute their app so it makes it difficult for them.

JERAD: It’s not exorbitant. It’s based on how many licenses you plan to distribute basically. So, the more money the developer makes, the more they have to spend on those engines.  I’m not a super expert in that area, like what those pieces are. I dabbled with Unreal and I’ve dabbled with Unity and I’ve dabbled with Web VR a lot. But honestly my main platform these days is something that combines a lot of the stuff into one package, and also allows me to build VR applications without taking my headset off. I can be in VR and build the full application and publish and distribute it with multiplayer built into it, or you can restrict it without that. [laughing]

JEFF: Dude, you blowing my mind. [laughing] (30:23) So, it’s meta right that you use a VR application, or, a VR application to create VR applications. 

JERAD: I had a friend describe it a little bit like GitHub. The application itself is not Open Source, but you can build Open Source applications within it and distribute them, so you can publish these things as if you were publishing it on an app store for instance. You don’t really make money off of that, it’s more like if you want to give it out that’s fine, you can charge people for your time to build that thing, so there’s still a client services model there to be had, which is an area I’m pushing for [laughing]. It gives you a lot of freedom. You can even, with the tools that are built into it build these applications much faster than you could with traditional game engines such as Unity or Unreal, in which you still have to take your headset off and do all of the things on your desktop and then compile it and then put the headset back on and test it out, take it off and make your changes. This I can just do everything in VR, without ever taking my headset off, and it’s really powerful.

JEFF: (31:54) How much does a rig cost? If somebody, when they get to the end of this podcast, they think “I need to figure this out,” what are they in for? What are the options?

JERAD: Sure. It depends on what you want to do with it. If you want the high-end gaming system that is going to give you the most power and highest refresh rates and everything like that, you’re probably looking at something like the index.

JEFF: (32:37) That’s for the headset, right?

JERAD: I think right now it’s $700.00. That’s just for the headset, the controls and the tracking devices. But you also have to have a videogame system like Caliber system with a really good graphics card.

JEFF: Windows PC.

JERAD: And a hard drive space system and power consumption. Yeah Windows PC too. Mac is still catching up [laughing] to this stuff, as it always has with gaming, visual stuff.  You could probably get one for $600.00 that would be sufficient. I would probably recommend spending somewhere around $1200.00 for a system and then the additional $700.00 for a headset, if I were to recommend it for someone who is going to use this as much as they typically would use a typical workstation for doing professional work. But there are also headsets that are much cheaper, wireless, totally standalone, don’t need a PC for, that are really getting good. The Oculus Quest is probably the most prolific one right now that has the best support and it’s $400.00. So, $400.00 gets you really good graphics, it’s got a great ecosystem of applications, you can do things like web VR development on it, and it comes with the headset and two trackers, no computer. But you have the option to just add a cable and hook it up to a good computer to do even more powerful processing with it. So, it’s extremely flexible, and $400 bucks is not a huge investment anymore.

JEFF: Yeah. Right. 

JERAD: I mean how much do you spend on your cellphone? [laughing]

JEFF: (34:58) So, with something like Oculus Quest, would you be able to do interactive VR communication calls with it, or is it more game oriented? 

JERAD: Yes.

JEFF: (35:09) It has a microphone and all that stuff? Wow.

JERAD: Yes, you could. It’s got full tracking. It has what they call inside out tracking which is a series of cameras on the front that detect what your room looks like and you can set up a boundary so that if you go past that boundary it basically does a pass through of the camera so that you don’t run into a wall. 

JEFF: Okay. I’ve been keeping a loose peripheral watching this over time. So, the state of the art a few years ago was that you had to mount some sensors on the opposite upper corners of a room that would then monitor the room for the VR headset and gloves, or controllers, or whatever, and then send wirelessly back to the unit to kind of, “ok, here’s where they are in the 3D space”, and stuff like that. (36:10) So, what you’re saying now is that you don’t need that anymore, at least with this version of the technology. That the headset is keeping track of where it is within the room by having sensors that go out of it. That’s interesting.  

JERAD: Yes. And they also just released this week, hand tracking, so you don’t even need the controllers now, it detects your hands and there are certain gestures that you use in place of buttons; things like pinching will get you a cursor that you could use to click and things like that. 

JEFF: Well, we’re starting to see these gestural interfaces. There was something that came out recently, was it the pixel phone or something like that, that you could change pages by just waving your hand over the device? But it seems a little bit silly with a 2D interface [laughing], like a phone or a tablet, but in a 3D space there might actually be some use for that. That’s interesting. (37:20) So, $400, I’ve got an Oculus Quest, paint me a picture. What does it look like when I’m in a meeting? I’m a remote worker, we bought these for everyone on our team so that we could meet more immersively and interact. What’s it look like? It is ready player 1?

JERAD:  [laughing] I guess you could say some of that would be accurate. When you put the headset on you have a home, and you’re by yourself. You have this nice looking home that is rendered and you could change it around to put applications where you want them to be, and you can then execute those applications or you could hit a button to pull up a heads up display, a dashboard that will give you a menu system to go further into the system to launch various applications or whatnot. So, for meeting somebody you would want to launch a particular application and then invite them in and you’re basically meeting. The area can look like whatever you want it to look like. There’s standard templates that you could use and then customize.

JEFF: But this idea of whatever you want it to look like is a very developer centric way of looking at it. Those of us who are more on the consumer side, it’s like, “what does it look like?” [laughing] “What are my choices?” (39:07) What is a typical situation? What does it look like?

JERAD: A typical situation is this house that is overlooking the ocean and you hear the sound of seagulls flying and maybe some ocean waves down below, and there’s extremely nice desks sitting around the area that you could go over to, and maybe there’s a fireplace in the side. That’s a very typical, sort of home environment.

JEFF: (39:44) So, it’s a very posh business retreat that we’re having. Is that what it is? Okay, nice. 

JERAD: Yeah. 

JEFF: Okay. Nice.  Everyone can have their business retreat by the ocean every day. (39:55) And then what do we look like to each other? Do I look like me?

JERAD: [laughing] It’s so hard because it’s like, yeah, whatever you want it to look like.

JEFF: This is an indicator of the state of things. We haven’t quite hit that tipping point where there even is a typical, you know, when we launch Zoom, we kind of know what a video conference is going to be, but 20 years ago when you launched a video conference it was much more DIY and interpretive and stuff like that, (40:33) and we’re still a little bit in that point with the VR stuff right?  

JERAD: A little bit. So, Facebook in particular with the Oculus Quest, has a typical look for their Avatars, because you have to standardize on a typical look in order to have some boundaries for customization. So that I can’t walk into a meeting looking like a banana, for instance. So, they have humanoid standard Avatars, and this is one of the things that can turn people off a little bit. It’s a little cartoony.

JEFF: Some people want to express their inner banana.

JERAD: Well, there is that too. There’s a very large contingent of furries than VR, people who want to look like animals, and that is a form of self-expression. It’s a form of reflecting how they feel, which is also a whole nother psychological avenue to go down that is extremely fascinating. The whole idea of how I look in VR actually changing the way that I look at the world is a thing.

JEFF: So, the movie Ready Player 1 for people that haven’t seen it. Stephen Spielberg, Action E movie. But particularly the whole idea is it depicts this virtual world that a lot of this action is happening in. [laughing] 

JERAD: The oasis.

JEFF: (42:11) And as we talk about this stuff, I think that there is some similarity, right? That some people look like a person. Some people look a little bit more anime and some people might look like a monster, and ultimately, I think probably it’s going to be yet another thing that if you’re a business leader and allowing these virtual environments, you’re going to want to provide some guidelines that people should be clothed, not make each other uncomfortable. There’s some stuff like, “oh, it’s the wild west man, it’s cool.” But there are some lines that are easy to step over.  And, even to the point where if someone could just feel like a non-expressive character or if someone is a lump, or as you’re saying a non-human character [laughing]. Like Bob comes to these meetings as rock, he’s literally a rock. Like, you can’t get any feedback from Bob. It takes some of these metaphoric things to literal levels that are just weird.

JERAD: I’ll tell you. I have a meeting quite regularly with a guy who looks like a jeep and another guy who looks like a piece of toast with jam spread on him and his hands are a spoon and a knife. But we know each other, and we have these meaningful interactions in these places, and the Avatars become a secondary thing. It’s not that important. What’s important is the conversation and the ideas that we’re sharing. The things that come out of that is what’s important. Sure, it’s a distraction maybe at first, but after you get to know the piece of toast, [laughing] it doesn’t matter anymore. Especially since you can change those so quickly, it’s like changing your clothes. A lot of people put so much emphasis on how they look in the material world, and it sort of strips away some of that. 

JEFF: Yeah, I mean we see that in remote work stuff anyways, that it becomes more about the actual interactions, the actual communication, the actual work and output rather than so much focus on the dancing around and the rituals that we’ve kind of developed around these things. You can forget that they’re not as important.

JERAD: But there is that transition period, right? To get people to adopt something you have to give them something that they can relate to, and what they can relate to right now is reality. So, you have to create things that are realistic, whether it’s your Avatars or whether it’s the space that you’re meeting in, in order to get people to even understand the value of what you’re doing. Like, we’re just hung up on those visual things, and you have to replicate that in order to have adoption, I think.

JEFF: Well, in the early web, and I did a lot of work on the web, in the early web, in the early nineties, every meeting the client would say, “okay, so on the home page we’re going to have a picture of a library, and that’s going to be our resources area, and then we’ll have a picture of a bank.” It was like, “we’ll have a picture of a store and that’ll be where people go to buy things.” It was like you had to have this picture of a thing. AOL was like that for a while. Maybe it was a crutch, and there was a point later in the nineties where we had to sit down with people and remind them it’s a web page, it’s not a village. So maybe we need to do the village thing for a while. I have to admit the idea of sitting down to have a meeting with Godzilla is a little bit much for me to get my head around [laughing] right now, but maybe this is the ultimate and sort of acceptance and [laughing] diversity that we can abstract ourselves. It’s hard to know where that line is.  

JERAD: It’s a moving target. As I got into VR, I really like anime, I love watching anime, lots of different types of anime, there’s lots of different types of the actual style and animations and stories, but I couldn’t see myself as an anime character, and all these people were coming into VR with anime characters and I was just like, “I don’t get it,” but there’s a certain ease of use with an anime character. It’s a sort of middle ground between realistic and efficient rendering that you could get.  It also allows you to be expressive in a humanoid form, so it’s still very relatable. It’s easy to render. And yet it doesn’t give you that uncanny valley feeling.

JEFF: (48:04) Does that happen? If I try to make a Jeff Avatar and it’s got pictures of me from different angles and it looks just like me except dead [laughing], except that it doesn’t actually react in the same way that I do, does that get weird?

JERAD: It does.

JEFF: (48:27) Is it almost better for people to go for something that’s a little bit more low res at this point?

JERAD: I think so, because the effort of rendering a realistic Avatar that looks exactly like you and the skin looks like your skin, the light semi-permeates it with subsurface scattering and the eyes; eye moving is a thing. Our brains are very attuned to pointing out things that are not real, to pointing out the things that are fake in our perception. We’re very attune to that. You try to replicate it and your brain just says, “no, that’s not real,” and that feels uncanny, and that describes the uncanny valley term, or that term describes that concept, and so anytime I’d seen anybody come into VR with a model that has been constructed out of imagery around them, it’s even weirder than just saying lean into the awkward. [laughing] It’s just an awkward thing. You’re not going to look like a human. Although that technology is also advancing. I’ve seen so much better looking scans, like body scans, and textures and all of that stuff, but it comes at a processing cost, and we’re just not quite at that reality stage.

JEFF: Interesting. (50:03) So, where is all this headed? I’m sure that this realization that people can get into this for $400.00 is a surprise for some listeners. It’s sort of a surprise for me, to realize that oh, wow you can just experiment with this for $400.00 and potentially start to have meetings. What should they google to have a VR meeting? Let’s say, two people who work at a company together both get the Oculus Quest, we’ve got the holidays coming up, [laughing] although they might be behind us by the time this podcast comes out, but you know, they keep coming around, there’s always something on the horizon. For Valentine’s Day, get an Oculus for someone you love. How are people meeting? You don’t download Zoom.

JERAD: I think the highest thing that I see is social VR in general. That term is a thing, social VR. And there are many applications of social VR. Just basically things that allow you to jump into a world and socialize with other people. Maybe they’re random people, maybe it’s an invite only type of scenario. Oculus Quest has it built in.

JEFF: I was going to say, Oculus is owned by Facebook, who is a communications company and has Messenger, and of course they want to monitor everything you’re doing and saying, but they’re going to provide a lot of avenues for you to be able to communicate.

JERAD: I think right now what they use is something called Oculus spaces, which is a way that you could invite somebody into your home space, and you see their Avatar, or you can go to their home space, but they’re also working on a larger social VR network called Horizons. But, yeah, there is that whole concern of the privacy concerns and the tracking concerns

JEFF: I was going to say, it’s like the chat roulette of VR. Like randomly meet people or go into their home, or like [scream] what is happening? [laughing]

JERAD: Like chat roulette VR, go to VR chat. VR chat is another very popular social VR network that allows you to do a lot of Avatar customization and space and world creation and then meet there with your friends and do things like that.  The application I was talking about earlier is, some people consider it a bit of a social network because you can build that within it. You can create a space and just invite somebody in there and hang out with your friends. You wanna create a chill place to hang out or a meeting space. But it’s also to the point where you can create applications, and that’s called Neos VR, which I’d love to talk even more about. I just built an application within there for voters in Scheibbs, Austria, who are voting on a new bridge for their town, and we built an application that allows them to switch the bridges, stand on the bridge, switch out the various options and then actually vote on those options. 

JEFF: Oh, interesting. Okay. Wow. Okay. Right. So, another side of this is AR which is Augmented Reality, and we’re starting to see things like Ikea, if you download the Ikea app you can move your camera around and see what the Hagen Schengen unit will look like in the corner of your bedroom. But there are other reasons, it’s not an augmented reality where people have to walk down to the river to see what the [laughing] bridge would look like. They want to be able to stand on the bridge and be able to decide democratically voting and so to give them an opportunity to virtually visit the different bridge options. It’s fascinating.

JERAD: Yeah and these folks are already going to City Hall to vote, and so we have a booth set up in City Hall where as the voters come in they’re given a QR code for their coding, we can scan that, allow them to put the headset on, experience what it looks like to walk on these different bridge options, and do a 5 star rating. I basically built 5 star module in VR, [laughing] which is pretty awesome. Yes, it actually communicates with an API.

JEFF: (55:16) Are they voting like rating Amazon or it’s actual legal voting in VR?

JERAD: It’s actual legal voting.  They are able to do a 5 star rating which communicates with an API that records their vote in a block chain. It’s in a partnership with another company who does this voting API for local governments.

JEFF: It’s really interesting stuff we’re getting here.

JERAD: And that’s what I really want to point out here. It’s not just the social things. It’s not just the meetings. It’s not just the games. You build actual, useful special applications for virtual reality, and I think that’s really where the market is.

JEFF: So, you’ve got VR, you’ve got block chain voting, which is fascinating, and everyone should look into, and also non-binary voting. This idea of choosing preferences on a scale, ratings voting, which is a thing that we’re just completely not familiar with in the United States, at least. Well, I mean, you choose one, but it’s not like who would be your second choice, usually is not the thing. I would like to vote for this person but only a little bit [laughing] which is probably reflective of a lot of peoples voting.  Wow, fascinating. (57:07) Tell me about any other stuff that’s happening in VR that you’re working on or you’ve seen people working on, that might give people a little glimpse into the future for all of this. 

JERAD: My other topic I like to talk about in VR and participate in is just art. There is a lot of artists who, as you know, artists really push the boundaries of society in general and tend to cling to newer technologies for their work and ways to express themselves. Art in virtual reality is a huge community. There’s a huge conglomerate of people that are just doing art. So, things like tilt brush. Tilt brush is a very common one. Google bought the applications, it’s now a google application, and it allows you to just paint with different brushes and textures in virtual space. That right there tends to be a big clicker for people because they’re drawing but then they can walk around inside of their drawing. So, that’s a very big avenue. Three dimensional art in general has always been a thing, but now it’s giving people like architects and professional car designers and shoe designers the ability to work with their creations in a 3 dimensional space which gives them a greater understanding of what they’re actually making. It gives them, spatial awareness of what it actually is. So, instead of having their brain translate their ideas, which are 3 dimensional to a 2D screen, they can work with it in 3 dimensional spaces as if they were modeling it from wood or clay, and actually take that and then give it to somebody to 3D print.  My calling card in some circles is mandalas. I like to create 3 dimensional mandalas and animate them and share them with people, a lot of people like this. So, it’s a great way of just having self-expression. So, art in general, and crypto art even. Oh my gosh. So, marrying VR [laughing] and crypto currency in a 3 dimensional space to create art and sell your art. It’s amazing. 

JEFF: [laughing] Too many buzz words. I got to go take a shower. 

JERAD: Wait until we throw AI in there buddy. [laughing] I  haven’t even started on that one. [laughing] Art is a really big area as well. 

JEFF: There’s also a lot of stuff that’s been happening with immersive VR stuff around therapy, mental health stuff.

JERAD: PTSD.

JEFF: Post traumatic stress, and stuff like that, or people with chronic pain who might be immobilized or something like that to be able to go sit in a field for a while.

JERAD: It is. It’s a sort of therapy by distraction I would say, but that is a very real thing to somebody who is feeling so much pain that they want to escape reality. If you give them that tool it actually relieves the symptoms there, and we’re even seeing it with children, being able to distract them from some sort of procedure reduces their anxiety, which ends up increasing the rate of healing afterwards as well.

JEFF: (1:01:29) So, dentists with virtual reality goggles is what you’re talking about?

JERAD: Well they already cover kids eyes and put the headphones on and everything. My daughter just had a tooth pulled, and I wish I would’ve taken a picture because the amount of things they put on her, I was just like, “oh, I should’ve just brought my VR headset,” she would’ve been totally fine. [laughing]

JEFF: Get to get some Minecraft done while she’s in the chair.

JERAD: Minecraft in VR is a thing as well, yes.

JEFF: (1:01:54) So, what’s the future here. The $400.00 headset feels like a bit of a tipping point. We’re starting to get there. A lot of the barriers are moving out of the way. There’s still sociological barriers. There’s probably people listening to this podcast going like, “these guys are crazy. I would never do this,” and they might be right, but they also might be just not relating that 5 or 10 years from now everybody will be doing this. The first time I saw someone walking down the street talking on a cellphone I felt like they were just breaking all sorts of societal norms. It was a horrible thing. It was totally rude. And now it’s just the way of the world. (1:02:57) Paint me a picture. What are we looking at? What are going to be the advances in the coming years and what should people be keeping an eye out for, particularly around communication in VR?

JERAD: Allow me to proselytize a little bit. [laughing] 

JEFF: Stand up on the soapbox. There you go. 

JERAD: [laughing] I honestly see the future of VR and spatial computing related to what we do today with computers. Twenty years ago, you didn’t have a computer in your home; most people. They didn’t know what a website was. Today our whole economy is completely dependent upon it. If computers went away, if websites went away, our economy would literally crash, and that was only 20 years ago. This technology is advancing at a pace that is faster than the computers advanced as well. It’s advancing even computing technology. So, the future is going to, I honestly believe people will want 3 dimensional spaces to interact with their customers more than they’re going to want a webpage. I don’t think webpages will go away. I think there’s always going to be a use for pulling up a flat piece of information and not have the investment of going somewhere, but we already go places. We go to the mall. We go to the store.

JEFF: Particularly when we’re buying things that we want to be able to see and experience. A refrigerator, right, that you want to go to the appliance store to be able to talk to the person and be able to look at the different refrigerators, but that stuff could happen in virtual space.

JERAD: Yes. And it does. I’ve built some spaces like that that are concept things. It’s going to become more and more of a thing, and I do think that our economy and society will be dependent on it at some point. It’ll just be a part of everyday life. I don’t know that we’ll replace things. Actually, let me say that differently. I don’t think it’s going to take away from existing things. I think it will replace some of the things that we already do, because it will do them better. That’s something I want to be a part of, and I want to invest my time in building that future technology. It’s sort of a choice at this point. I think it’s going to be a thing. I think VR headsets, I think they’ll probably end up merging with AR, so VR and AR merging, and having a device that can do either/or.

JEFF: These days it tends to be separate. Augmented reality, phones are capable of augmented reality and they’re ubiquitous and so, we’re doing more like 2 dimensional augmented reality stuff. Using your phone as this little viewer of the augmented reality while it uses your camera to do spatial awareness and place your “Ikea unit in the corner of your bedroom” was the example I used. However, if you’re talking about VR, virtual reality devices, that have these cameras that are facing outward to help figure out where they are in the room, those cameras could also, you just turn them on in the screens in front of your eyeballs, right, and now you’re seeing the room  and you could potentially augment that too. (1:07:11) So, these things are merging together. Am I correct?

JERAD: They are. You are. They already are. To an extent I’m seeing augmented reality glasses. They look like sunshades that you could just put on and have augmented reality.

JEFF: So that’s another one, right. So, non-goggle kind of interaction and stuff.

JERAD: Yeah. Well you got to make it like glasses because that’s what people understand and it’s the convenience factor. I put my glasses on every morning. So, if augmented reality is built into them, I just have it at my disposal. And then it’s just a flip of a switch, eventually, that actually immerses me into a virtual world and replaces my reality as well. 

JEFF: (1:07:56) So virtual reality glasses that feel and look more like glasses than the current goggle thing. [laughing]

JERAD: Yeah, and if it’s as simple as flipping a switch to move from reality to virtual reality, it becomes very convenient and people like convenience and will use that.

JEFF: Yeah, it’s weird. I don’t know. (1:08:22) Is it the decline of western civilization or an evolution of humanity, or just another weird thing to be like, “oh, yeah, he’s got a 3D TV” or whatever. It’s hard to know [laughing] what all this means, but it’s really interesting to keep an eye on it and particularly from this podcast, we talk about virtual communication, we talk about communicating online and this is increasingly becoming an avenue in that realm. I don’t know, I’m still not quite sold on it myself, but we’re close. I know that it’s just a matter of maybe in a year that I’ll have some company on that just does this, they do all their meetings in virtual reality and it’s the best thing ever, and we’ll hit, not necessarily that tipping point, but we’ll at least have those clear and obvious role models. When I first started talking about remote work, we were kind of looking for that, and to some extent had that in Lullabot [laughing] right. This like, “hey, we’ve got this really cool thing that we’re doing. Is anybody else doing this? Are we doing it in a way that works for other people?” 

JERAD: Are we the only ones?

JEFF: Yeah [laughing] which is how Yonder got started and all this kind of stuff, and now this being the 82nd podcast I feel like, yeah, we’ve talked to a lot of people that it’s worked for and this idea that, oh that’s not a thing that works or that seems crazy, is not really so much of an argument anymore. I think we’re going to start to see that with virtual reality.

JERAD: If I may, since you’re talking about podcasts and the number of podcasts that you’ve done, that sort of proves out the fact that remote work is a thing. There’s also a really good podcast that I would recommend by someone you know, Kent Bye, who does the Voices of VR podcast. He has over 700 episodes.

JEFF: Kent worked for Lullabot years ago, and I can say that Kent is nothing, if not prolific.

JERAD: Yes, he really is. 

JEFF: 700 episodes. That’s amazing.

JERAD: Yeah, he’s done a lot of work with that. And his big thing now is trying to extract the amount of knowledge that he’s uncovered in a more digestible format. To sit through 700 podcasts, that’s a huge time investment right. [laughing] Good talking with him about that.

JEFF: 82 podcasts is quite an investment as well. [laughing] Well, great. Jerad, thank you so much for coming on and shining a light into the goggles here.

JERAD: My pleasure.

JEFF: Was there anything that you wanted to touch on that we didn’t get to?

JERAD: I think that’s pretty good. I will mention I have an article that I’m writing right now that I’ll probably end up adding this podcast to the end of that is about the future of work, about ways that you could use virtual reality for remote work specifically, different use cases there. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I talk a lot about VR things there and my name is circuitry, spelled phonetically sirkitree.

JEFF: (1:12:03) Yeah, and that’s your username on various things, but if people want to follow up with you is that a good place to ask you questions and stuff like that?

JERAD: Yes, it is. I communicate a lot with a lot of different people on Twitter.

JEFF: Great. Well, Jerad thank you so much for coming on and talking to us here.

JERAD: Thanks for giving me the opportunity. Appreciate it.

JEFF: Yeah. Take care.

JERAD: You too. 

Here’s the transcript:

JEFF: Hi everyone. It’s Jeff Robbins back with Episode 81 of the Yonder Podcast, where we talk to company leaders and big thinkers, about how to make remote work. We’re focused on expanding the remote work job market, and helping listeners to create happy, productive, distributed teams. This time, we talk to Aaron Weiche who is the CEO of GatherUp. GatherUp is a SaaS platform for reviews stuff that companies use, sort of b to b kind of thing. He’s got a 23 person team that he’s built over the past few years, spread out all over, and great conversation with him. Aaron, like myself, is a philosopher about these things. So, we always get into deep conversations (laughing) when I have people like that on the podcast. We talk about this idea of working how you work best. I like that one. That’s another T-shirt. Work how you work best. Also, the idea of how to express passion in a virtual environment where you can’t quite always express your zeal (laughing) through the virtual communications, and a lot  about productivity which we talk about on this podcast. But Aaron has an interesting perspective on that, having moved from a historically collocated environment to GatherUp which is a fully distributed company. 

If you’re not already subscribed to the yonder newsletter, you can go to Yonder.io/newsletter to get that, and, of course, if you’re not already subscribed to the podcast, if you’re not getting the podcast immediately (laughing) as soon as it comes out, you can subscribe at Apple podcast, Google Play, Stitcher, we’re on Spotify now, and stuff like that. 

I also wanted to mention my business coaching and mentorship practice that I have for basically the past two or three years since exiting my company, Lullabot, the company I started back in 2006. I’ve been working with owners and leaders of various types of businesses, both remote and collocated to act as a virtual business partner. Someone to check in with weekly, and we usually meet one on one and work out the issues that are top of mind for my clients, and help them stay on track towards their goals, both the goals of their company, but oftentimes there’s a lot of checking in to make sure that your company is working for you. I think if you started a company you want to make sure that it’s also something that’s fulfilling your life, that it’s not sucking you dry, and oftentimes I think that there’s idea that your company can’t be successful and being happy and having a successful company, are mutually exclusive. But it’s certainly been my experience that one feeds the other. The happier that you are the easier it is to have a more successful company. And so, that’s the kind of work I do with my business coaching clients, and this podcast about remote work, I have a lot of experience with remote work, if you have a remote company, or you’re thinking about harnessing that, certainly we can talk. Some of my clients are also collocated businesses. A lot of the issues that come up are not particularly unique to remote work. A lot of the stuff we talk about on this podcast is not particularly unique to remote work, and I love helping people with all of this. You can find out more about my business coaching at jjeff.com, which was my personal website, and now it’s my coaching website. So, yeah, you can contact me through there  and we can set up a call and I can explain the whole thing to you. (laughing). Alright, let’s get to our interview with Aaron Weiche.

JEFF: Hi Aaron. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

AARON:  Thanks Jeff. Thanks for having me.

JEFF: Yeah, it’s great to have you on. (5:07) So, the first question I ask our guests usually when I remember is, where are you talking to us from today?

AARON: I am just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

JEFF: (5:19) Right on, and do you work from home or do you have an office?

AARON: So, I have an office. It is a whole 5 minute drive from my home, and I need that dedicated space as a father of four, ranging from 15 to three. Working from home is not a very consistent productive thing. 

JEFF: Yeah, I mean the thing we talk about on this podcast a lot is productivity right and how  ultimately when people are working “from home”, it’s a matter of doing a little self-managing and finding your own point of productivity which is not always at home. (laughing)

AARON: Exactly.

JEFF: Yeah. (6:07) So, why don’t you introduce yourself to people here.

AARON: Yeah. Well, an easy way to surmise me is I’m 20 years in now to a digital marketing career. I spent a majority of that time in the space of web design, web development, search engine marketing, SEO, and a lot of that came through starting and building agencies. So, doing client work, starting out with a lot of small business and then moving upstream from there. The last agency that I was partner at we built to roughly about 50 employees. We were doing work with a nice roster of Fortune 100 companies building websites, mobile apps, all those things. Then after well over 15 years in that I got the bug to do something a little different. I moved into the software as a service, into the SaaS world, came onboard at GatherUp where I have been now for the last four years. Roughly about two years ago I took over as CEO, and GatherUp serves a little over 20,000 businesses globally helping them capture customer feedback, online reviews and really understanding what their customer thinks about their business and then helping them respond and use that to their advantage in marketing.

JEFF: (7:38) And how big is GatherUp as a company itself?

AARON: We’re right around 23 employees as a head count now.

JEFF: (7:50) Describe to me the companies relationship with remote work these days.

AARON: We have been always fully remote. So, we have a few spots; my office is one where I actually recruited someone from the community I live in, so he works out of the same office space as I do. After that, you’re pretty hard pressed to find anyone else in the same location. We have team members in Michigan, Oregon, North Carolina, New York, Georgia, Poland, the Island of Cypress, Toronto. Definitely a distributed, fully remote company. We do have a few little aspects here and there. I’ve always been in the Minneapolis area, that’s where my agencies have always been officed out of. We can dive into that. Very interesting moving from at an agency where everybody’s there, everyone’s in the office, camaraderie, culture, those things all the time, and then going to a fully remote company was definitely an interesting process (laughing) to say the least 

JEFF: Yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure. Wow, you’ve  got people spread out all over. (9:08) Are you sure to make sure that your company retreats happen in Cypress?

AARON: (laughing)  We have yet to pull that off.

JEFF: (laughing) We’re all coming to your house. Congratulations on your new job. (laughing)

AARON: Yup, it’s tops on everyone’s list. You know, not surprisingly our engineering team is all over in Europe, split between Cypress and Poland, so those guys actually have, and they just had one this past week, they have their own summit and face to face get together with the five of them, and then we do an annual summit in North America. What we’ve done the last few years with that is, we bring everyone into Minnesota because that’s where we have our highest head count.

JEFF:  Yup.

AARON: And we rent a resort, a couple of really big, nice cabins, about three hours north of Minneapolis and hang out for the week and just have a really great time. It’s probably everybody’s favorite week of the year when we get to sit down face to face and have meals together and hang out and do business and fun.

JEFF: Yeah. (laughing) It’s a lot to do this podcast that’s about remote work in companies that are distributed and stuff like that, but I almost want to do a podcast just about company retreats, particularly for distributed companies because it’s such an interesting thing and such a fascinating phenomenon the way it works, and the dynamic of all of it and where things happen and stuff like that, and having run company retreats all over, the idea of setting something up within a stone’s throw of someone, rather than completely remote right? You know, we’re all going to go to Hawaii, where no one is, as opposed to setting something up not too far from Minneapolis, where someone (laughing) could go out, scope things out, make sure there’s enough beds and food to eat and all that kind of stuff.

AARON: Yeah, absolutely.  And having boots on the ground to help pick people up at the airport and all of those details to help with is definitely helpful, but what we’ve done, over time as a company’s growing, once upon a time it was basically a 4 or 5 person company when I joined and we would get together sometimes in just random towns and all show up and do an Airbnb for the week, we’d have meetings and stuff planned out and then we’d just start looking into like, alright what are other experiences that we can have since we’re in Austin, Texas or Boston or Orlando or San Jose, and things like that.

JEFF: Yeah. (11:52) So, talk to me about joining the company. Your history previous to GatherUp had all been collocated, conventional, digital agencies you said, but more what we picture as a conventional company up until then, or had you had some remote work experience prior? 

AARON: No. Basically I had had none personally. I even laugh now. So much was put into everyone being there at any given time. You can grab two developers and a designer and a strategist and jump in a room and bang out an idea on a whiteboard and all of those kinds of things, and it was interesting. We hit a point in the company as we were growing, and we had a Project Manager who, she was highly liked by the client, it was a very large client for us, but her husband was in the military and they were being relocated out of Minneapolis out to the coast, and it was really stressful for us as the executives in the company; do we allow her to remain in her role and work remotely, and what do we do with this one person that operates so different from everybody else we see on a daily basis. Through whatever hemming and hawing we arrived at like, ok, the client likes her, she’s a top performer, why are we letting location get in the way of this, and we moved forward and it worked out fantastic, and other than that we still never sought out remote employees, but that was quite a change going from being around nearly 50 people all day every day to then all of a sudden all by myself, with four or five coworkers that were spread across the country.

JEFF: (13:48) How did it feel? I really want to focus on this a lot because I’m sure we’ve got a lot of listeners who are, as I call them, remote curious, (laughing) and have a lot of experience as most people do of working in a collocated office together, and certainly managing and running a business. Oftentimes that transition is really scary. It seems like you had, sort of an advantage that the company was still relatively small, so you weren’t stepping into something where you had to connect with a whole lot of people in this intermediated (laughing) kind of way, with the cyber (laughing) between you. But, talk to me about what that was like. 

AARON: I think the easiest way to put it is, it was confusing.

JEFF: Yeah.

AARON: When you go from being in a situation especially when you’re a leader in a company, I’d be in my office with the glass door and whatever and people were lined up outside of it like a deli with their number and they were going to walk in with their problem of day, what they needed help with, whatever that might be, and then all of a sudden I was sitting at home in the office at my home without all these people around me, all these demands on my time, and in complete isolation where I just couldn’t walk over to someone and be like, “alright, well tell me more about this, and help me get to know this, and understand this,” and so many of those things. So it definitely was really confusing and, you’re right, the good news is that I wasn’t trying to acclimate and trying to build relationships with another 20, 30, 50 people, it was just a handful, but that isolation was definitely weird and I’m an extrovert, I’m a people person, and it was a lot to traverse in the first couple of months. I definitely got my feet under me fast with work that needed to be done and tasks  and things like that, but the isolation part was much more difficult. 

JEFF: (16:01) What lessons did you learn? I’m guessing that there were a lot of epiphanies that happened, or at least sort of ideas and methods (laughing), like, “hey, let’s talk on the phone everyday” or “let’s do some video calls.” What worked for you in that transition? Having run a distributed company for 10 years myself, the idea of sitting in an office with 10 people outside the door with deli numbers is really, from a productivity standpoint, is horrible (laughing). It’s just not very efficient. On the other hand, I would feel important, I would feel connected, all that kind of stuff that I could see missing if we started reorganizing, scheduling everyone and doing video or phone calls with everyone. It wouldn’t feel quite as immediate. 

AARON: Absolutely. A couple of things as I mentioned what I probably found the easiest was bearing myself in the work and finding the strategical and task driven things that I could push forward and then I quickly realized that in that environment, like surfacing those, it’s like when you work in an office with people it’s really easy to discover what others are working on or their progress, because you can be over their shoulder, you can stop by, you can ask for an update, you can go grab lunch together. There’s all these ways to surface that progress and I quickly realized being heads down when you’re remote and when you have a small team, it can definitely lead to just about everyone wondering, “what’s that person doing” and “what are they up to” and especially when you’re the new guy. So, I quickly realized, alright, I need to find ways to surface progress, or here’s where I’m at, small little sit raps and things like that, and when we were that small we didn’t have these, like, “here’s our set meeting time”, “here’s are all hands meeting,” or “here’s when we’re going to discuss this.” So, those are the kinds of things that we started building in that I think helped started to foster that communication and focus time to see what was happening.

JEFF: It’s funny the idea of discovery. Correct me here, because I haven’t had maybe as much experience in managing a collocated team as you, so this is a really interesting perspective that you’re bringing to the podcast, that (18:47) discovery can be more of a pull situation as a manager; I can walk around and pull out of people what they’re working on whereas in a distributed work environment, it tends to need to be more of a push that we need the people to share and be transparent about what they’re working on and what their concerns are, and it’s just a different dynamic. There can still be opportunities that you can make as the manager to meet with people one on one, or create those environments for them to speak up, but if people don’t speak up you won’t really know what’s going on. 

AARON: I think you’re very spot on with that where collocated it just kind of happens organically by being a human and how you exist and move and make conversation.

JEFF: Someone sitting at their desk and sighing from a management perspective is very telling. (laughing)

AARON: Yes. 

JEFF: And you’re not going to get that in a virtual team.

AARON: Yeah, and virtually right, especially if somebody’s working on something that’s bigger or longer cycles. I remember one of the first things that I took on is, we badly needed at that time to get to version two of the marketing website. So that was when things were like, “this is something that needs to be done, I’m just going to take this on”, do whatever else. Well, what I was working on was kind of large so it was a much longer cycle and I can remember one of the other partners at some point just being like, I felt like the call was like, “what are you doing,” right? Like, “we haven’t really heard from you.” There’s no time where the periscopes gone up to take a look around and whatever else, and I was like, “Well, here’s what I’ve been doing. Here’s this whole website” right. And he was like, “Oh, Holy cow, okay, there’s a lot being done here, and whatever else,” and that was kind of  a teaching moment to me and like, “okay, we need to create more of daily interaction, communication, things like that. And some of that time too was the movement off of email communication to utilizing Slack. You start to realize some of those things that help fill the gaps and help be ignitors or provide a place for things to surface more easily.

JEFF: Yeah, you need to find different fidelities and different expenses of communication. Slack is cheap communication, you can send a two word message, whereas email is a little bit more expensive, you’re kind of expected to use full sentences, maybe proper grammar (laughing), a little thank you at the end, a sincerely perhaps. I think for some of the communication that we need to happen in companies that expensive communication, that more formal communication can be a detriment as people might not have the complete ideas to share (laughing) to write an entire email to summarize their day, but maybe they can hit some checkboxes somewhere or they could, who knows what? Slack, like I said, can be cheap. Then, also having multiple modes of communication as well on calls and video and stuff like that.

AARON: Absolutely. And, then, some of those you come across, some of the stuff I wish I would’ve documented to a certain part, when you get years down the journey and it’s like, “oh, I wish I can go back,” and, “what was the tipping point that made this happen or that happen?” But you just saw things that were needed, especially when we went from four or five people to nine or 10 people, just how do you create more of that, and what are some of the challenges in getting them to feel culture or personal relationships. What are the questions you asked? How do you start off meetings with that type of interaction? We definitely started to have conversations as the three or four of us that were shareholders on the executive team, how do we create happy hour digitally and so Slack channels or leading the way in what was shared, using webcams during meetings. Our team is probably divided in half. Mondays is our all team call, so all 23 people are on and 12 or 13 will have their webcam on and be engaged in whatever else, and then another 11 or 12, you probably couldn’t pay them to turn on their webcam for one reason or another. It’s dealing with all those differences in personalities and how people like to work and what’s beneficial just for them personally, also balancing with what’s beneficial for the entire team. Those things just get really, really interesting with how you address those over time as you grow.

JEFF: Absolutely. This idea also of moving from a more collocated style management, that pull style of management to a push style of management where you’re depending on the staff to push out their communication, ultimately that kind of stuff, the styles and ways of working come down to culture right? It becomes the culture of the company, the way the people interact with each other. (24:23) So, I’m guessing building a company, and so quickly over the past few years as you have, you had to do a lot of thinking about that, (laughing) about, you know, “hey, you’re going to become an employee at GatherUp, here’s what you need to know.”  Are you tending to hire people that already have remote work experience or if they don’t what are you looking for? What are you sharing with them as they come on as an employee?

AARON: I would say that’s something that we have definitely integrated into the interview process. We look for people that have had experience working autonomously that are self-starters and have the right set of communication skills. That said, we’ve taken on a couple that haven’t before, but we’re able through the interview process to be able to determine that they have that. I would also say we probably, whether purposely or just how it shakes out, we’ve probably hired more on the side of experience with someone who’s a little bit more developed in their career, where they know what they like, they’ve already done the, grass is greener over there so I went over there, and then I realized that I liked where I was. So, some of those things are really helpful to get someone who kind of understands how they work best and how they’re most productive. One of the really big, high level things that I tried to really champion and view this way is this idea of, work how you work best, and for some people that’s at home in their pajamas, moving 10 feet from their bed over to a desk in  their one bedroom apartment. For someone else, it’s having a hot desk at a co-working space or getting to be around other people or being able to get together with a few people that are within their area. Or, might be like me, where, yeah, I have an office just so I have quiet focus space away from my home and where I’m at. But that’s a lot of what I’ve tried to build is, finding out what is your best scenario where you’re happy, where you’re productive, you have all the things that you need to be excited about work, and then what are the best things that we can do in order to make that happen for you, so that you feel like you have the right environment and you’re not stuck in a specific environment on how you have to work.  

JEFF: I hear this a lot on this podcast that people are tending to hire people that are a little further along in their career, maybe a little bit more self-assured, not so entry level, partly because you can because you have a bigger pool of potential employees being all over the world and not just in your local area, but also partly because as you’re saying, in order for people to work how you work best, people need to know how they work best (laughing) and it’s hard to discover that when the first job you have is working at home, and without any sort of point of reference or experience maybe. 

AARON: A really hard skill to develop professionally is self-awareness. So, through experience and when you’ve done things a couple different ways, you gain that self-awareness, where you really understand it. I can say now, I would absolutely prefer to work remote because productivity is super important to me, especially at this stage in the game and the things that I’m trying to accomplish and everything else, and that was something I didn’t always understand. That was probably my biggest challenge as a leader. When you’re in a collocated place, you can see someone’s work ethic, it might come out in the time they spent, it comes out in their passion and how they talk about things and how they engage, if they see something happening that’s challenging or a problem and they’re willing to take part, well when you go to remote all those situations are much harder. You don’t’ have this way to be able to see how someone is working. You can’t see how passionate someone is on Slack, because if they’re typing in all caps or a lot of emojis or exclamation points, who knows what that means, it could be yelling mad, whatever else, so that was really hard for me to learn how to be who I was where I felt like I was a good, but still always learning  leader in person in building good relationships, to going to where you had to work a lot harder in different ways to do those exact same things. You had to earn it in a much longer time period than you could in person.

JEFF: (29:41) You mean you personally had to earn it or the people who you were managing had to earn it? I mean, I guess it’s both, meaning that you felt you were working really hard, but you were afraid that it wasn’t coming across.

AARON: Yeah. I think the latter more than anything. But, I do think it applies to everyone somewhat, because we’re all wired that seeing is believing and I guess it gets back to my, how do you work especially to begin within shorter cycles where you’re able to bubble things up that people can see and have tangible conversations about it, and everything else. That was really, definitely hard on me personally, on things that just were easy. It was like I was just being who I was in an office environment and other people saw, alright, he’s super passionate, he’s always upbeat, he has all these things. Well, that translates over Slack very poorly, right? If anything, you might look like an a—hole sometimes, when you’re actually like, “I’m just really excited about this and I want us to do the best job.” It just comes across completely different.

JEFF: (30:52) So, how do you express that? We talk a lot about moving to a more results oriented focus which I think is a good thing, but passion in itself, and part of being a manager certainly a CEO, there aren’t as tangible outputs (laughing).  Certainly, maybe you’ve investors and they want tangible outputs, but for the employees it’s not oftentimes so easy to show your results if you’re talking about this results oriented way of being, but how did you find to express your passion?

AARON: I don’t know if this is a great answer (laughing), but from us having executive summits, or some of us getting together, others whom I’d never bet before, they saw that in person, so then they were able to communicate to others. Maybe if someone else raised like, oh, how dedicated is he? Or, who knows however it came up, but it allowed that person to be like, “listen, when you’re around him, he is so all in on this,” whatever else, it’s not coming across as it might be, so that definitely was one part. So maybe it’s looking at, how do you find a few people to build those relationships that maybe easily get you or you can spend some time with, or those types of things, so that they’re able to basically vouch for you that that’s the angle that’s being taken. But on the other side I think you have to understand it’s a little bit longer game, and you have to understand that it’s consistency, probably much more so than like, “here’s one thing I can do that will get the stamp of approval.” It’s like, over and over and over until they’re like, “yes, this is the consistent energy,” how they look at it, the questions they ask, the things that they do. I think that’s so much more important in a remote environment.  

JEFF: I guess without the fidelity (laughing) of an in-person relationship all the time it is more of a long game, right? You’ve got to be consistent. And, ultimately, it’s about trust, right? You’re building trust over time. Trust that Aaron cares. Trust that Aaron is passionate. Trust that this employee is productive and knows their stuff. It goes both ways.

AARON: I think finding the way to have more personal conversations is really needed when you work remote too, because your interactions tend to be so confined to work, to business, where again, when you’re in an office environment there’s all kinds of watercooler talk, happy hours, all these things, and you walk in everyday with part of your life as always part of you. But, when you communicate remotely, you’re just in these small fragments where it’s like, while you’re writing that quick Slack message, they don’t know that two of your kids are home sick with the flu. They don’t know that your dog needs to have surgery on a leg. They don’t know the things that might be troubling you or stressing you, and I think those are harder to talk about in a remote environment too, because instead of talking about work, you’re just going to directly state, “hey, here’s something weighing on me, or hard in my personal life,” when you just don’t have that personal life overlap because you’re not physically interacting. I don’t know if that makes sense.

 JEFF: (34:40) Well, here again,  in a collocated environment the employee’s sighing at their desk. It might not be about work, it could be about their dog, but it would give you idea that something was weighing on them even if they didn’t speak up about it so much, but I think in that more intentional, more proactive culture of remote work transparency, we need to allow people to speak up about their dog too, right, and allow that into the wholeness of things. I worry about collocated companies that get a little too formal, a little too logistical with making sure that every meeting that they have is super-efficient and we never talk about our personal lives at all, and certainly in a remote work environment we don’t want that to happen. That can become dominant.  There are all these books about essentially how to make sure that your not injecting any personal information into the company meetings (laughing), that they’re super-efficient. But in a remote work environment it doesn’t work, right, because these are oftentimes your only interactions with people, you’re not having coffee room, watercooler interactions where you do get to find out that peoples dogs are sick or whatever’s happening.

AARON: Well, it doesn’t end up with a seat at the table, right? That I think is definitely something I struggle with,  because let’s take a look at the context of all this. One, you’re in a startup so you’re working your tail off to get traction and to grow and to have all these things happen. Two, you have a list of to dos far more long than you have people, time, resources to be able to get done. Then you’re trying to have all that efficiency and you’re still trying to have this interaction and communication, and it’s something you have to create space for, you have to make it happen instead of just organically happening. So, within all those things it’s really easy to be like, “hey, we need to focus on what needs to get done, and getting it done,” and all those other things, and fail to realize we need the human side, we need the personal connections, we need a platform for people to be able to talk about what is their why behind working. What, who, why are they trying to make money to take care of? What are the experiences they want to have? All of those types of things. It’s really easy to fall into that trap. That’s definitely something I’ve had to remind myself from time to time, is, okay, the business side is great, all those other things, but you have to stop and get people connected with each other. 

JEFF: (37:38) Do you feel like people end up the same amount of connected, less connected, more connected, with a distributed team as compared to a collocated team?

AARON: There’s definitely pros and cons in both. Anytime you’re part of somebody’s almost daily life, you’re going to be a little bit more connected, but that connected brings some of the cons too, where you notice the idiosyncrasies or the little things that might bug you, or that person’s always late and you’re always on time, where you have some really gracious passes on those in a remote environment. But when you don’t get to experience it all, that’s where it becomes harder, and that’s where I do think it’s so important to have those meetups, to have a summit, to get people those facetime. I even see it. We don’t get to meet face to face with our development team, and so I see even though we have great interaction, we’ve made videos for each other, we share photos when each side is getting together, doing a summit, we do so much of that, there’s still, if we had just one time of getting together and hanging out for three or four days and eating meals together, that bond would be strengthened so much further than even four or five years of work together has built up in it.  So, you can have all of the right ingredients, but the mixture of them is when you actually do get just even the smallest amount of facetime. I don’t know if it’s validity or trust, or what it brings to it, but it does put it at a whole different level.  

JEFF: You’re totally right. And, it’s the secret of this podcast (laughing) right? We talk all about remote work and we talk about how to be productive working over virtual communication tools and stuff like that, but there’s still a piece missing and that piece seems to be filled in with about, I don’t know, three days of  hanging out in person (laughing), maybe once a year, twice a year, maybe even more often, but whatever you can work out, it seems to just fill in that piece, and there’s this vacuum for that piece, which is why these get togethers are so valuable that people are looking for them.

AARON: And they really look for it.  We just recently did a survey from all of our employees and that was one of the things that was pretty high was like more facetime, in person facetime with the team, because the good news is if you’ve done it right, and we’ve built a really great culture, they love their coworkers, they enjoy them professionally and personally, and so, of course, give me just a little bit more of it, this is something I look forward to. Can I do it more than once a year to have everyone together, because I like the energy, I like the laughs, I like the things that happen, of course I want a little bit more of that. 

JEFF: (40:41) I want to dig a little bit more deeper into something that you said earlier which is, that having done both you really prefer the remote work thing. Can you expand on that some, particularly, again, knowing that there are probably people listening who just can’t quite imagine getting over that hurdle? What’s on the other side? What do you prefer? What makes the grass greener in the remote work realm?

AARON: For me it really comes down to productivity. Based on who you are and why you’re doing it and what you enjoy, I mean, I really love my work, and so within that, having focus time to do that and to be heads down and not get pulled into certain meetings and things like that that can happen on a face to face basis, I love that. I feel like I’m twice as productive in a remote environment, even running a company and having demands on my time and travel schedule, and all these other things. When I get a solid week in my office, I feel I can be unstoppable with the amount of things that I can get done. I would feel that. I would feel a sense of accomplishment in working in collocated offices, but just nowhere near the level of just focused time.  Like, getting back to the deli, there is always someone at the door. And here, now, if someone knocks on my office, I’m in the second story of an old building in the smaller community I live, I someone knocks on the door here, they’re really lost. It happens about once every six months. It’s a great feeling to have that focus time and that space to do it. It makes it easier for you to have boundaries around how you like to work.

JEFF: (42:36) Asynchronous and synchronous mean a bunch of different things in this context, but certainly having a line of people at your door means that you’re constantly in “putting out fires mode”, and you’re not getting any chance to go heads down and get anything done on your own. That can happen in a remote work environment. You can just have a phone and people could call you whenever they want, and you’ve constantly got a virtual line of people on hold on your phone. I’m guessing from what you’re saying that you’ve also reworked how that works as well?

AARON: I think it’s just easier for you to create space and create the interaction when you’re going to take it. When somebody’s at your door and you wave them off (laughing) or whatever else, there’s so many other things that go along with it. You’re sending a message, you’re not important, where in remote work there is some amount of implication where everybody realizes, “oh, they could be on a call, their heads down.” 

JEFF: He could be picking his kids up from school, right? It could be anything.

AARON:  Yeah. And they offer you so much more grace in what that might look like. No one’s ever Slacking me, like, “are you there?” “are you on?” “what’s happening?”, like any of that; where in person that’s totally the feeling that someone could give you if they need to talk to you right then and there in that moment and they can physically see you or approach you. 

JEFF: Yeah, and there’s a little bit of panic as well, right, because you’re here now, if I come back to your office you might not be here, so I’m going to stand in this line of people and take a number from the deli counter.

AARON: Yes. 

JEFF: (laughing) I love that metaphor by the way, that’s good.

AARON: (laughing) I’m like, “oh, if I can just slip out the back door,” right, on Friday afternoon before I get eight more questions.

JEFF: Yeah. It’s not great for anybody. Another thing, this idea of productivity when we talk about the productivity of things, it often comes along with the word optimization and then it quickly becomes a euphemism for sucking the soul and life blood (laughing), kind of optimizing the efficiency out of everyone at the company. I’m guessing that’s certainly not what you mean, by, you’re talking about it mostly for yourself, but as I’ve seen, it’s more helping people to find their flow and, what was the line you used earlier, work how you work best; that people can figure out how they can work best, and how they’re productive and then find some enjoyment, and ultimately become a morale booster to be productive rather than how we oftentimes think of it in more of an optimization thing where it can start to bring down the morale of people.  

AARON: Absolutely. We all have things that we need, and we all get it in different ways, right? For some people, as I was alluding to, in having seven, eight people around the Twin Cities, we actually have  a three desk coworking office that all eight of our people have an access and a keycard and can go there at any time. Now, most days I would say there’s maybe one person there, or maybe even two, but there’s definitely times where we just say, “hey, let’s everybody get together for a lunch,” or “here’s something important going on, let’s all work together that day if possible,” and it allows people who want to be in an environment where, “alright, I can go work in this office. I’m all by myself, but there’s at least 30, 40, 50 other people in those coworking space. I see them, I have my productive space, but I don’t feel isolated, I don’t feel like I’m only in my home and I didn’t get out for the day and the sun goes up and the sun goes down, and I didn’t go anywhere, or leave the front door.” Everybody’s definitely wired differently with what productive feels like for them, and really at the end of the day I think  it’s options, right? Do I have the option to work alone if I want to? Yes. Do I have the option to work around others if I want to? Yes. Do I have the option to communicate a lot or a little? Yes. I’ve always found for people who are the most responsible, accountable, driven, all those things, that’s one of the biggest drivers, is like, do I have options instead of am I forced to only do it this way.

JEFF: Yeah. (47:31) What advice might you have for someone who’s thinking about taking their team remote or as you did, moving to a job that heads in that remote direction from a leadership and management standpoint at least?

AARON: Some of my first advice would be just having clear communication. If everybody’s together and you’re disbursing, that would be a very interesting situation where you’d probably want to have -- here’s ground rules, here I’ll be different. You’d have a lot of people adjusting all at once, so you need to be mindful of what that might look like. What will be confusing is how do we set up easy check-ins for people to ease into this move through it and maybe how do you slowly change that environment, where you still may be, “alright, let’s get together and at least meet up for a lunch,” or do these things in some timeframe where it can get further and further apart until people find the way that works best for them, instead of just a complete like, alright, we’re all together one day and then the next day everybody’s going to be disbursed, and yeah we’ll figure out a time to meet up sometime (laughing) and whatever else. That definitely might be difficult. But, when you have people that are excited about the work they do, they look forward to it, they want to be productive, they want to get as many things done as possible, which is much different than if you have someone that’s like, “I want to do the bare minimum.” “I just want to get by.” “I just want to get my paycheck, fill my seat.” I think you get into a whole bunch of different things there. That’s another reason why when we hire that’s what we look for. We look for people that really want to make a difference, they enjoy what they’re doing, they want to get ahead and be part of a team that’s trying to get ahead as well. And, when you have that culture with it, I think it’s a lot easier for these things to happen, because people are really interested in, “what is going to make me more productive?” “What’s going to further the mission that we’re on?” And, they’re really open to what those ideas, or what they might look like.

JEFF: Absolutely. (49:43) Another thing that people oftentimes worry about when they’re looking at this whole remote work thing is legitimacy, and that happens on a number of different levels. There’s the individual, “what will my neighbors think when I’m not leaving for work (laughing) each day,” and then as you’re building a company you’re trying to find customers and clients, which with a SaaS isn’t so much of an issue, right, cause people are used to (laughing) buying things online these days, but, if you get, especially into the world of investors, venture capital and stuff like that I’m curious, I see a note here that your company was recently acquired and I’m curious, (50:33) the whole remote thing, I’ve always seen it as an asset. Do you think that investors (laughing) are starting to realize that, or is it still something that we need to fight for legitimacy with, or is it something, I’m guessing, it’s probably somewhere in between?

AARON: Yeah, probably somewhere in between. You gave me a few different things to breakdown in there (laughing). 

JEFF: Yeah, take that anywhere you want (laughing).

AARON: (laughing) Yeah. As far as the first thing, legitimacy, absolutely. I live I’m a community of about 20,000 people, about 40 miles to the West of downtown Minneapolis, and how I work best, a lot of times I start my day about six a.m. and I’m going to respond to email, do a bunch of things to get things going, then my kids get up and  start going to school and whatever else, and then I’ll often, around eight o’clock, bring one or two of my kids to school, and then I go to the gym to workout for an hour. So, I already have things in motion, whatever else, and then what’s best for me is then getting that sanity, taking care of my physical health, going to the gym. Well, when you show up to the gym at nine o’clock and people kind of know that you run a company in town, and whatever else, they’re like, “what company do you run where at nine o’clock you’re in the gym for an hour?”  So, you automatically get that kind of look. So, that legitimacy thing is totally a real thing, but you also have to understand on the other side, they don’t see you when you’re working, when my kids go to bed and I might be working from eight till 11 at night, so you definitely need to be okay with yourself. How people view me isn’t going to validate me, especially with remote. When I was in an agency, I was wearing a suit and tie three days a week, and now the suits in my closet are so dusty and I love it. There’s so many things, where I’m going to wear what is unbelievably comfortable to me. Yes, if I’m on video calls I will look as professional as possible from the waist up, but I might have shorts on with my button up dress shirt, right. That’s the perks of being able to do those things. The legitimacy side I would just tell people, “you have to feel alright.” Not everyone’s going to understand it. Especially for me, I live in a community where plenty of the community are more blue collared jobs and trades and things like that, where, how I work and how my schedule can be so varied, can be a very confusing thing to them.  Then, to your last part, one, when the company was started close to six years ago, we were completely bootstrapped, self-funded and yeah, as of November first, we were acquired, which, great success for us.

JEFF: Congratulations.

AARON: Thank you. A number of really great things have happened over that time and a really great team, and those are really big decisions to make with who you’re selling to and why and all those things. The company that we sold to, they definitely liked the metrics of what we were doing, financials and our growth, and all of those things. What they found out is, when we went through the purchase process is the team that we had built was like a massive bonus. They are actually headquartered in Seattle. They’re in a very competitive market, hiring people alongside of Amazon and Microsoft, so many other tech companies. They are primarily, for the most part I would say, they are three quarters collocated; everybody there is on site. So, it definitely is already a little bit interesting in one month of starting to work together. But, one really great thing that they did is, they flew all of our North American team out to Seattle, and we basically had what they called an integration day, and it was getting to know the other team, and getting to know how people work best. We went through an exercise called how to work with me. What are your values. What are your pet peeves? What are your strengths? What do you expect out of others? It was a really great way in a short period of time to get a bunch of people who were complete strangers acclimated to each other, start to build trust, start to do those things, and they did it upfront rather than, “alright we acquired you guys and we’re working together and we’re building relationships over Zoom calls and all these other things, and now eight months later, now we’ll meet in person.” Within the very first couple of weeks they said, “let’s get everybody out here. Let’s hang out. Let’s build relationships. Meet your peers in person. Have a stage where you can be recognized individually and collectively as a team, and then we can get to work with each other.”  It had a really strong impact on our team, and I think on their side it took away a little bit of the stigma of, “okay, three quarters of our team is here in person, where 100% of you guys are pretty much remote,” so I think it did a great job from both sides in a situation filled with a lot of change.

JEFF: Nice. I feel like we’re starting to hip a tipping point. There was certainly a point where, when investors would come in and they found out that you didn’t have a central office and they couldn’t walk into an office and see everyone clicking away on their computers, that they would slowly back away (laughing) feeling like, “ooh, this must be a scam. It’s not really a company.”  But we’re getting to the point where people are realizing there’s value in that, and a lot of value.

AARON: Well, it’s so hard to go against the grain, I even know for myself, like seeing is believing. So, when you see somebody, again, in person, working hard or doing the things that they’re doing or how they speak to others, it’s just such an instant comfort level when you can see those things, and it’s a lot harder as a human to believe that those things are there when you can’t see them.

JEFF: Absolutely.

AARON: There’s some leaps of faith in it, that when I was younger, I probably would’ve failed at. I can say some of it is from having a 20 year work history, being around a lot of types of people, in a lot of situations,  some who were successful and some who were not. That made that easier for me, that transition to happen for me at 40 years old compared to if that transition happened for me at 25 years old. I have no idea how that would’ve gone. It probably would’ve gone badly (laughing). I could probably say that I wouldn’t have understood either side of it. I wouldn’t have been a great performer and I also wouldn’t have been open-minded enough to give trust first in that situation and then look for the right signs and communication and help support it being successful.

JEFF: (57:52) Is that one of your concepts? I like this idea of trust first. Sometimes this leap of faith, I think from a management perspective, but just to default to trusting people, allow them to rise to the occasion and if they don’t there’s conversations to be had. (laughing)

AARON: I’m working on it. I realized it’s very important and with that it’s just continually trying to work on that and the benefit of doubt first and putting that trust in them that they’re going to do great things in figuring out “how do I best support that?” “How do I help unlock it or get it out of them, or champion it for what’s there?” The other side is pretty much fear based. It’s like, I’m fearful that they’re not going to be doing the work. I’m fearful that they’re not going to try hard enough. I’m fearful that they’re going to baseball games during the day instead of working. There’s all these other things that are all fear based with it instead of just saying, “well, I hired you because I believed in what this person is going to do and the things they’re going to accomplish,” but it’s weird, it’s like then when they start day one, you almost have this tendency to want to cut that off and be like, “alright, well now you have to actually prove yourself. We hired you, everything sounded great, your past is great, you answer questions great,” all these things, but now you’re like at ground zero and that’s not right.

JEFF: Well, even more than being fear based, it’s adversarial. You’re kind of setting up a you versus me situation, which is really difficult when you already have this intermediating technology (laughing) right? It’s already difficult to get to each other to add to that difficulty by not trusting each other.

AARON:  What I’ve realized and what I’ve tried to help foster with our company is, when people have something else to do that is part of the flexibility of working remote, or a reason why, like, allow them space to be honest that that’s what they’re doing. If I’m going to leave early, my kid has a basketball game or I need to go to this doctor appointment, instead of creating an environment where they might fib about it or tell a lie or make something up, or just not even let anyone know and they just go do it, and they’re like, “well, no one knows so what’s the difference,” creating environment where people communicate that, that just builds trust with everyone. It builds trust that they’re respected, they can make their own decisions. It’s about getting the work done, and yes, you have to be available for your teammates, but if you’re not going to be, to take care of something at convenience or part of a remote culture, that you have the freedom to do that and you can openly state it instead of trying to avoid it, hide, or lie. 

JEFF: As a leader you have to model that. You have to lead by example because you can preach that all you want, but until people start seeing you saying, “hey, I’ve got a doctors appointment.” “Hey, I’ve got to go pick the kids up.” “Hey, I’m leaving early for a basketball game,” or whatever those things are, they’re not going to quite trust that they can actually do it themselves, because it is different. 

AARON: Yeah, that’s what you see in a collocated right? It’s like when the boss leaves at 2 p.m. on a Friday, you start to see people ducking out left and right, because you’ve created this culture of, oh, if there’s a supervisor, if there’s someone on premise watching over, then you’re not going to do those things, but the minute the watchful eye is gone, then everybody’s going to break out. Being that as a leader, a lot of times when that person does leave, they’re not saying anything about it. They’re also just trying to duck out the door or not be noticed, but, guess what, everybody notices. It’s much better to send something out and just be like, “Hey, I’m logging off early today to go and do this,” and again, those are the things that humanize you too, right? “Hey, I’m logging off early to go to my daughter’s basketball game.” “I’m logging off early to head out of town with the family.” Things like that. I just think that helps support more of a trust network and make people comfortable with being themselves more so than avoiding it. 

JEFF: Absolutely. Well, Aaron, this is a great conversation. (1:02:29) If people wanted to follow up with you and find out more about anything we talked about or follow up with you about GatherUp, where should they get in touch with you?

AARON: I can easily admit I’m a Twitterholic, so, following or connecting with me on Twitter is a great way to do that. My handle is @aaronweiche. Otherwise, LinkedIn is always a great place. I call LinkedIn, slow Twitter, so I might post something once a month to LinkedIn where it’s probably daily on Twitter with that, but happy to engage with people there as well. Then I also cohost a podcast about running a SaaS company and that’s called the SaaS Venture, so people can look at up on iTunes or check out the www.saasventure.com.

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.

Here’s the transcript:

JEFF: Hello friends. It’s Jeff Robbins, and this is Episode 79 of the Yonder Podcast, where we talk to company leaders and big thinkers, about how to make remote work. We’re focused on expanding the remote work job market, and helping listeners to create happy, productive, distributed teams. This time, we talk to Andy Tryba, who is the CEO of Crossover, which you could find at crossover.com. They’re an interesting company that helps other companies to build their remote work forces which comes in super handy for Andy because he also runs a private equity firm and he’s the CEO of Sacoco and a whole bunch of other companies. We’ll list off some of them on the podcast. He also worked as the Director of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness at the Whitehouse, as part of the Obama Administration. So, Andy’s been thinking about work and the future of work and how remote work fits into all of that stuff for 12 years now. Great conversation. We talk about the future of work, we talk about this idea of a cloud wage, building culture and radical candor which is a book that comes up sometimes on this podcast. 

If you’re not already subscribed to the yonder newsletter, Yonder.io/newsletter [laughing] is where you can get that. We’ll let you know when new podcasts come out, when new articles come out on the Yonder website, we’ll find little bits and pieces of news and tips and ideas from around the web and we’ll slap them all in the newsletter and send it right to your inbox.  Yonder.io/newsletter is where you can do that. And, if you’re not subscribed to the podcast, you can do that through I-Tunes, the Apple podcasts interface, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify now as well, and you can listen to the podcast right when it comes out. It’ll be right on your phone there and ready for your morning drive or your afternoon drive, picking the kids up from school you can listen to me talking to you in your car, that’s what I’m saying. You want to just maximize me rambling on. Fit it into your day. 

Alright. Let’s get to our interview with Andy Tryba.

JEFF: Hi Andy. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

ANDY: Great to be here Jeff, thanks for having me.

JEFF: Yeah, it’s great to have you on. (3:13) So, the first question I traditionally ask our guests is, where are you talking to us from today?

ANDY: I am talking from Austin, Texas, where it’s finally turned into Fall a little bit.

JEFF: Yes, well here in New England I can you foreshadowing of Fall. The leaves are falling. [laughing] But it’s nice to know that it’s not this cold everywhere quite yet. Austin is a great city. (3:42) Have you been there for long?

ANDY: I moved here about 5 years ago from the Northern California area.

JEFF: There must just be truck lines; one-way trucks from northern California to Austin. [laughing]

ANDY: I think that the last stat that I saw, that there were 150 people a day moving to Austin, and I tell you what, when I look out my window here, with the number of cranes and buildings going up, it really looks like Beijing. So, it’s definitely not a secret anymore.

JEFF: No, it’s really something. I’ve been visiting Austin for probably  25 years now, and it’s a whole new city, and it’s good, but it’s also starting to suffer from some of those [laughing] same difficulties that some of those northern California cities have had.

ANDY: Yeah. Indeed. But the people here in Austin continue to be great. The texting is great. You got the university here. You’ve got a music scene. A great foody scene. Those are the reasons why it always ranks in the number one or number two of great places to be in the United States and I love it. Truly, it is about the people here.

JEFF: Yeah. It’s a great town. (5:03) Let’s get you introduced to the people. I have you listed here as the CEO of about a dozen companies, [laughing] and you’re an entrepreneur, and I’ll let you introduce yourself, you do it better than me.

ANDY: I’m the CEO founder of Crossover, which is one of the largest remote talent marketplaces; we’re in about 130 countries, but I think from that I also have a private equity firm called Think3, where we buy a bunch of B2B SaaS companies and we put a bunch of that remote talent into these companies and that’s a big part of what we do there. Then I have a bunch of different nonprofits including a nonprofit version of Uber and Lyft here in town called Ride Austin where we also use local talent and remote talent.  So, definitely got my hands in a few different things, but it makes it more and more interesting every day I come to work.

JEFF: (6:04) You were telling me, as we were warming up here, that you also just bought Sococo, which is a product that’s been mentioned on this podcast a bunch of times, sort of a virtual workplace software. Cool stuff.

ANDY: I love Sococo. That’s probably one of my favorite acquisitions that we’ve had to date, and I’ll certainly be happy to talk about it later, but it’s really all about building culture in remote teams and I can tell you from managing remote teams over the last 15 to 20 years, that building culture is always the hard part. You can obviously use lots of different communication tools, and audio videos gotten great but building culture is so much harder and it does that phenomenally.

JEFF: (6:54)  Maybe we can start in a zoomed-out way. Talk to me about your experience with remote work, your perspective on remote work, several of the companies that you’re involved in, probably most prominently Crossover, are built on the foundation of remote work. What’s your current philosophy around remote work and how has that evolved over time? 

ANDY: I was at Intel for 14 years and I was in the U.S. Whitehouse for about a year, in the previous administration. [laughing] I have to clarify that  nowadays.  

JEFF: [laughing] Thanks for clarifying.

ANDY: [laughing] My role at Intel was very much on the future of work, and we’re obviously looking at it from a hard work perspective, but Intel’s an interesting company. It’s the only company I know that you have to basically dig a big hole in the ground, throw about $15 billion into it and in five years, hopefully you’re right. So, therefore we spent a lot of time studying different devices and what have you for the evolution of silicon, but you really understand it’s all about teams, and how those teams interact. The first conclusion, of course, we saw that everyone sees now, which is, everything goes in the Cloud. Hardware goes in the Cloud, but then software goes in the Cloud, which of course are trivial, but I think the piece that is still emerging is that if software is in the Cloud all of your jobs are nowadays interacting with that software, in one way, form or fashion, so your job is actually in the Cloud also. So, the whole notion of remote, it goes hand in hand with the Cloud movement, and all of a sudden you can start thinking about jobs and teams in the same Cloud dynamics; infinite scalability, finding the best in the world, etc., etc. So that was the realization within my Intel world and then I left for the Whitehouse and we were actually studying the future of engineering in the United States. We graduated about 130,000 engineers a year, total, and you overlay that with China and India, who produce a million each and the typical American says, “oh, but our guys are better.” 

JEFF: [laughing] Even just that law of averages, it’s a going to be more competitive when you have more people.

ANDY: Exactly right. Even if you’re like, great, our guys twice as good, or we’ll just say even five times as good, so what we were looking at in the Whitehouse was, why would the next Silicon Valley be in the U.S. when we have this overabundance of engineers remotely. So, I kind of put those two pieces together and my brain was like, okay guys, everyone’s job is in the Cloud, even what we’re doing here is so different than what we would’ve done 20 years ago, so therefore the jobs are in the Cloud and they’re going high skill and, oh by the way, there are great people everywhere so you got to put those two pieces together so over the next 20 years you’re like, Guys, my kids (and I’ve got two little girls, a 10 year old and an eight year old), their notion of going to work in an office, they’re like “Why would I ever do that?” I just click a button and that’s my job and I could do that from anywhere and I believe that has tremendous impact, not only on the individuals but then as entrepreneurs your ability to fire up teams and get up and going really fast or enterprises and be able to harness the best people in the world completely changes.

JEFF: Yeah. It’s a different dynamic. (10:50) I really like this idea, it’s one that’s not brought up around the kind of conversations that we’ve been having on this podcast for some reason, but, this parity with Cloud data. If your data lives in the Cloud the output of your work is living in the Cloud and we’re all in the Cloud ourselves. We’re working in the Cloud to create the work in the cloud. I think a lot of that is oftentimes thought of as when we’re breaking it down to data, we’re dehumanizing it. But this is the really interesting thing about this work so often is, we’re actually bringing humanity into the Cloud, the culture and connection, because it’s really hard to do the work without that human factor. Otherwise, we just hand it all over the artificial intelligence or less [laughing] artificial intelligence and there we’d be. 

ANDY: You’re exactly right Jeff.  The interesting part is when you start thinking about Cloud teams you start then completely changing the way that you even think about how wages are set, for example, or where people have to go to go get jobs. You can start using the Cloud to now deliver jobs anywhere around the world, where people are great. As long as you have a great connection and you can communicate and what have you, then all of a sudden, I can deliver you a job as opposed to making you up and move and come to my city or zip code for the job, I can deliver you the job. So that completely changes, and location becomes less and less important. The other thing that actually becomes pretty interesting over time, and we haven’t seen a lot of this, but we do this across all of our firms is, you get what you call a Cloud wage. In that, if you look at wages nowadays, they’re set hyperlocal; what that job developer makes in Silicon Valley is different than what somewhat makes here in Austin, Texas, is different than what someone makes in Rio De Janeiro, when in reality if you start saying, location is irrelevant, all those guys are  doing the same job, and why are they all getting paid differently? So, I believe that the world actually normalizes to this market clearing Cloud wage where no matter where in the world you are, you actually get paid the same amount, and that is a paradigm shift that I think will dramatically change HR practices  and all the ways you think about work, and it will have amazing impact to a lot of places around the world that have these amazing people but just for whatever reason they’ve been largely exploited over the years.

JEFF: It is the ultimate globalism, and it [laughing] comes with all of the pros and cons therein. It’s really exciting in that it’s ultimately fair based on the skills that people can offer and not necessarily where they live or the politics therein. But at the same time, it’s a little scary and we’re still getting around at the Yonder conference that I’ve run and now Yonder Circle where we get together leaders of remote teams and fully distributed companies, so often the conversation comes down to what’s legal? [laughing] To some extent what’s legal, theoretically at least, the laws are based on ethics, so it’s to some extent what’s ethical but there’s oftentimes the laws and governments  certainly aren’t keeping up with the technology, even the philosophy around all of this.

ANDY: Exactly right. I love your view on the ethical side of it. If you think about it today, even the way the laws are set up, people largely think about going remote or going international as a cost reduction. “How do I get that person in India to do this job for $2.00 an hour and whatever else it might be?” In a Cloud world, again, that completely changes.  Why shouldn’t people get paid what they’re worth versus where they happen to live? In reality you think of your AWS servers in the same way, whether you’re getting EC2 here or there, your expectation is that you’re getting a great product and it’s infinite scalable and you’re paying a fair price for it, no matter where in the world you are. So, that notion of ethics and worker protection and things like that, all of that comes into play from an  exploitation perspective, but if you’re able to deliver folks around the world that are willing to work hard and objectively measured, then you can get around a lot of those ethical dilemmas, because I think you end up raising the wage rate of people around the world.

JEFF: But, historically, the problem around finding skilled people around the world was an issue of trust. We establish trust oftentimes, historically, evolutionarily we assess trust by sizing people up. You stand with them and look them up and down and think, can I trust this person? And there’s inherent, all sort of negative human behavior there, racism and prejudice and thing like that, that might come in. So, it’s really interesting and neat to think  about judging people more based on the results, the actual output of their work and not being so focused on the who of the work, but even sometimes the methodology and the what. We’re not defining hours and making people sit at a desk and a lot of that stuff. (17:12) Talk to me a little bit more about the trust aspect of that because so much of this India outsourcing, what used to be a shorthand for low quality, cut corner work, where price was more of a concern than quality, and stuff like that, I’m not sure that’s a true assumption anymore. It certainly comes with a certain amount of prejudice. We’re deciding ahead of time that the work is not going to be good, and becomes, to some extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy of companies just saying, “We’re only going to pay five dollars an hour and we expect maybe eight dollars an hour worth of quality.” (18:04) Are you finding other ways that we can start to build the trust for hiring people far away and ultimately building that trust? 

ANDY: Trust is one of those things that is misunderstood. There are a lot of less than trustworthy people out there around the world, particularly when you say there’s seven billion people in the world. You can’t trust all them. Therefore, how you hire matters and then also how you manage has to completely change. The good news is the Cloud helps in both of those. On the first one on how you hire, the good news is now, particularly in the Cloud world, you can actually objectively measure how good people are at their specific  skills. You can now give them various tests on their competencies on that role and measure it and then be able to look for all the things like cultural fit and things like that. Crossover, for example, we have anywhere from 20,000 and 25,000 people a week apply to our various jobs and we give them barrages of tests from cognitive tests, emotional tests to skills tests, to work sample tests, and what have you. We then interview them and then we give them the higher mangers interview and things like that. Therefore, we actually believe that we remove a lot of the biases by going objective with these tests, because we rarely even look at resumes. We certainly don’t look at peoples skin color or where they’re from in that particular case. 

JEFF: Right.

ANDY: We can measure them more objectively versus if you look at your resume your resume format is 500 years. Leonardo DaVinci is actually the guy who invented the resume and though it was more decorated than ours, it was largely the same, it’s just a list of bullets, and you meet people and you get biased and maybe you like the school they went to  or what company that they worked for, or didn’t work for, you get all these human biases in there and it’s terrible versus in the Cloud based jobs you can get more objective than that. But I think on the trust side it really comes on the manage side and this is where working in the Cloud matters, is that, Cloud by definition you produce tons and tons of data while you’re working. The typical cloud worker produces about two terabytes of data a year and believe it or not most of that data is thrown away.  What application is in the foreground, what’s in the background, who are you collaborating with, what type of asynchronous work that you’re doing, etc. etc. Two terabytes is roughly the size of a college library. You think about most performance reviews, even the non-remote performance reviews, you’re getting together once a year, once every six months and here are three things that you did well, things you didn’t do well, it’s super data liked, versus in a Cloud job, now you can have tons of data and actually bring that forward into how they’re actually working.

I believe that the manager of the future is actually a bot. The bot is actually going to give you suggestions on “here’s how the best people work and here’s how you’re working and maybe these are different things that you can do to go tweak that.”

Then, through that you can also look at all the fraud.  If anyone’s trying to cheat the system or steal certain things, or whatever else it may be, you can get those sensors in there. I believe that these folks that are around the world, they will have a different sense of trust and the measurement element of it because of the fact that, again, you’re taking advantage of the fact that you can do it from anywhere. I believe that entire paradigm changes but I think that the Cloud has advantages on both of those to go and create trust, and we’re in that tweener time period right now, where we’re trying to take the mentality of non-remote and apply it to a remote world versus starting fresh and saying, “Well, what are the attributes of the remote world that are there that I can use to my advantage, and how would I design that scratch versus take my legacy with me.”

JEFF: Yeah. That’s really interesting. (22:32) This idea of starting to clamp down on the fraud. Part of the reason people are hesitant about their trust is because fraud has been prevalent, particularly around these work from home schemes. [laughing] Growing up in the United States there were  these things stapled to bulletin boards and hammered to trees, “Work from home. Ask me how.” It was usually some sort of pyramid scheme but then even these outsourcing things where the team was kept anonymous and behind a wall. It was this acknowledged mechanical Turk situation.  (23:20) I wonder when we think about fraud, I think of the medicine show, snake oil salesman in the Wild West. There was a need. People needed medicine. [laughing] People were dying. They were getting sick. They wanted help and so they were willing to fall for this false medicine or whatever you’d call it.  People want workers to help them. [laughing] They want help in this way and so historically there’s been some fraud about this, however, you don’t find snake oil salesmen these days because there’s a prevalence of actual real medicine. I think maybe it’s just a maturing of the industry instead of needing to do this smoke and mirrors kind of work overseas that we can actually start to mature the market and get real people doing real work. We’re already starting to see that. I think it just hasn’t been fully recognized.

ANDY: I agree with all that Jeff. And I believe the transparency is a big thing. The snake oil guy, he was pulling out vials of random things, there was no transparency or what have you. 

JEFF: Right. Exactly. Don’t ask. Don’t ask.

ANDY: Here’s all the ingredients and what have you.  The marketplace dynamics will weed out the bad players and the faster you can weed out the bad players obviously the better off you are, but the fraud will always continue to be there. I think if you are managing remote teams without massive transparency, you’re setting yourself up for massive fraud, and you have to be okay with that level of transparency and your people have to be okay with that level of transparency. If they’re not, you don’t hire them. It’s as easy as that. There’s so many tools nowadays that can actually measure a lot of this. Trust is one element of the transparency, but again, that real time coaching is the part that matters the most. At the end of the day the fraud players are still going to be a small percentage. What you want is, how do you make your teams better. How do you get all this information that is absolutely reducing the fraud, but giving that to people so they can get better and better and better? The example I give often is actually athletes. I feel like all the best and professional athletes out there, there’s all these data sensor networks that are measuring the angle that they’re releasing the ball or their swing plane or whatever else it may be, and they are using that data to get better and better and better.  It’s one of those, that we, for whatever reason in the business world, we don’t do that. Despite the fact we have longstanding there, why are we not using that sensor network to get people better and better? I think we will, and I think we’re just on the cusp of that also where the best people will want to measure themselves. Like, “How do I get better? Give me coaching.”  How do we do that? It just also happens that you can get rid of the fraud element of it also along the way if you do that.

JEFF: Yeah. To some extent historically there’s been diminishing returns around what we think of as productivity optimization. That the more optimized the team becomes the morale starts to go down, and people leave. You end up with turnover and then that cost money. I think what we’re learning over time is, zooming out a bit and including morale, it’s really difficult for people to be productive if it’s sucking the soul out of them, that maybe we can find an optimization of both soul and productivity. 

ANDY: [laughing] I find that you want to automate away the low value tasks that people do, and we all have it. If you look at any typical person that’s is making 200 grand a year or whatever, there’s some percentage of their job that’s like ten dollar an hour work, that that person is not getting enjoyment on and it’s a waste of not only corporate time and what have you, but that persons time spending that. Finding those and eliminating those is actually where a lot of the automated issue comes in. I’ll give you one example. I’ve got account managers within Crossover that work with hiring managers, understand their needs and give them the candidates and what have you. I wanted them to be spending fifty percent of their time or more talking to customers, talk to the accountants. That’s how you know their needs. But when we measured it, they’re only spending about ten percent of their time with customers.  I’m like, “Guys that’s not enough.” I’m like, “What is this other eighty, ninety percent of your time?” They’re like, “Well, Andy, we look at it and it’s in Google Sheets and I’ve got to pull together this information and be able to share the sheet with the hiring manager” and yada, yada, yada. I’m like, “Okay, that’s a low value task,” and as a result of that they couldn’t talk to their customers as much. I’m like, “Well, why don’t we just automate a bunch of that?” So, we’ve made it an aside where they just had to click a couple buttons that automatically shares with the hiring manager, then they’ve got the list of people and what have you, and that dramatically reduced that eighty, ninety percent of the time that they were in Google Sheets. It didn’t go to zero, it’s still thirty percent of the time, which then enabled them to spend more time with customers, which ended up being better for my business, end up being better for them too,  because they wanted to spend more time with customers. So, it was better for everyone. It’s that type of automation, it’s hopefully not soul sucking but it just adds to where I want them to be spending their time and where their skillset is, versus banging away on Google Sheets. 

JEFF: Right. (29:27) It’s been my experience, and I’m curious to hear your take on this, that that transparency ultimately needs to go both ways. As the employees are being transparent in their processes to management, that management in the company also needs to be transparent to the employees, primarily to provide some context. We don’t have those visual, non-verbal cues that we get from walking into an office, “ooh, the company’s doing really well, we’ve got fresh cut flowers today,” or those kinds of things you need to be more explicit about if you’re managing a remote team. Also, ultimately, remote workers, there’s a certain amount of managing yourself, even if it’s just reminding yourself to sit down and start typing at the keyboard. It’s difficult for people to manage themselves when they don’t understand their context within the company. 

ANDY: Dead on. I agree. That transparency goes both ways. There’s a great book that came out by Kim Scott called, Radical Candor.  I don’t know if you read it or not.

JEFF: Yeah, I’m familiar with it.

ANDY: I love it, because she had this x,y axis and though x axis was challenged directly, and the y axis was cares personally.   So, at the top right is where you want to get to which is where you actually care about het person and then you challenge them using this data to challenge them but everyone is super clear on where it’s coming, but you care, you want that person to grow, you want the organization to grow versus if you’re at the bottom right [laughing] which is where you challenge directly but you don’t care. She calls it obnoxious aggression. Then the upper left is when you care but you don’t challenge, it’s called ruinous empathy, and then the bottom left is when you don’t care and don’t challenge, and it’s called manipulative insecurity.  But that level of transparency matters both ways. It’s through that data that you can actually apply that. I grew up underneath Andy Grove, at Intel, and he had what was called constructive confrontation, which is two words that typically don’t go in the same sentence together, but it was great, because we at Intel knew that we could challenge the idea aggressively. Literally, we’d stand on chairs and scream at each other about the idea, but we always knew the rules of engagement where you could challenge the idea, but you never attacked the person. Then we’d all go out to lunch afterwards and what have you. I believe that the remote world has that opportunity to go do that with data, but you have to pull that in.  In our companies we have this notion of Mother Theresa and Spock, where if you think of most companies while people are working, they are super Mother Theresa where they are soft with the people and it’s really touchy feely and not really being radical candor. “Oh, you’re doing good, but I like that you do whatever,” and then eventually the manager gets frustrated and like, “Okay, here’s your two weeks, you’re fired, get out of here.” Right?

JEFF: Right.

ANDY: And it’s very much Spock at the end. We try to invert that, where we are actually Spock while you’re working. “Here’s a bunch of data, we’re going to challenge aggressively, we’re going to talk about it, and you could challenge us.” We go back and forth and what have you, and for whatever reason if someone is in my role or whatever, then you do Mother Theresa on the way out. People are people. If they don’t fit, try to help them with another role. If they need four weeks to transition out instead of two, give it to them. They’ve got families and lives. We believe that it should be inverted, it should manage under this super data centric model where it’s very direct and we think that is actually how you lead the companies through success. I believe in the remote world where you have this data sensor network you can do that both ways. 

JEFF: I’ve been finding myself referring back a lot to the book, The One Minute Manager, recently which is from the seventies or eighties. It’s classic management book.  The picture of the book is the manager sitting at his desk with his feet up on his desk, twiddling his thumbs, and waiting for the need to manage because he has done such a great job of helping his team to manage themselves, then ultimately realizing that your job as a manager is managing expectations, or at least letting people know what’s expected of them. That’s a Spock process. That’s saying, “Hey, here’s the data. Here’s how you are matching up against what we need the data to be,” and I think it allows you to be Mother Theresa at the end and say, “I care about you, but let’s be honest, [laughing] you weren’t matching up. It’s documented. I’m really sorry you weren’t able to meet it, or match it, or whatever.” I think the bad management is when employees feel like it’s personal. 

ANDY: Exactly right. Or, when the employees feel like they’re surprised. 

JEFF: Right.

ANDY: You’ve given out this soft message this whole time and they’re interpreting it as, oh I’m doing great. Then all of a sudden, you’re like, “you got two weeks left.” They’re like, what the heck just happened?

JEFF: Right, and they immediately go to, “I guess you just don’t like me, then,” or “You keep moving the goal post.” It’s like, no, no, no, we got to be very clear where the goal posts are [laughing] and what it takes to get there. 

ANDY: And unfortunately, management style and communication between cultures change dramatically too. Obviously if you look at the U.S., it was built as this melting pot, so we have to be very direct at what we say versus Asian cultures, like Japan. It’s been the same language, homogenous, for thousands of years so it’s all about what you don’t say. Unfortunately, as managers we tend to forget that in that U.S. managers do positive, negative, positive, when it comes to feedback. 

JEFF: [laughing] We call that a criticism sandwich.

ANDY: Exactly right. “You do good over here; over here you need to work on that; but you’re doing good.” But some cultures are the exact opposite where it’s negative, positive, negative. “Hey, I need you to really work on this over here; over here you’re doing okay; really need you to work on this over here.”  So, you could imagine the U.S. manager that is doing that sandwich and you get another culture that does it the exact opposite when and literally they’re trying to talk to each other, that they may as well be speaking a different language. [laughing] 

JEFF: Yeah.

ANDY: That’s where data matters. If you have data and everyone is transparent about it and everyone can see where they’re at, then there’s no surprises. Just like give people the data. There’s no reason not to, then everyone knows exactly where they stand and then some people can get coaching at that point. Even better, if you as a manager, can help provide the coaching and the road maps and the playbooks on how to get better.

JEFF: (37:06) Let’s be honest, managing is not a science; it’s more of an art. It’s unclear how to be a manager sometimes and even how to measure how your people are doing. Obviously, there’s all of these OKRs, KPIs, kind of things we’ve developed over time, but they’re just built around data. “Hey, let’s agree on the data so that as a manager it can be clear to me whether my people are doing well or not,” and to know that it’s not personal.  

ANDY: Exactly right. I find that most managers, and particularly important in the remote world, they’re not clear on what the job really is and how it’s measured.  For any given role, what is the one metric of success that job is either succeeding or not succeeding, and unfortunately managers don’t define that. As you mentioned, if you are remote and you’re not quite getting the little nudges along the way to help you find that path of what is successful, then all of a sudden one day occurs and you’re like, you just realized you’re not meeting the job and all of a sudden, you’re fired. That’s dead wrong. I find that in the remote world, you have to be even more diligent in defining the role, being very clear on what that metric is, and ideally automatically measuring that and then providing that feedback on, ideally even a daily basis, on how that is going, but at minimum doing it on a weekly basis so people can see where they stand, and again that’s very different than the traditional old school management, of just walking around the hall. 

JEFF: Yeah. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, remote work is ankle weights for management. These are all great practices and the stuff that we’ve been talking about for the past five minutes you could apply to any company. It’s just that much more important and ultimately mission critical in remote work, to get it right. But it’s right for all management. [laughing]

ANDY: It is, because at the end of the day it’s about finding great people. Being able to spin up those teams quickly. That’s going to be critically important to all startups in the future and certainly all companies where, the analogy I often given is actually a football analogy, where if I were to assemble a football team here in Austin, Texas, there’s two million people here, so it’d be a good football team. But if I were to expand the denominator to thirty million people in Texas, my Texas team is probably going to beat my Austin team, and if I expand the denominator again to 350 million people in the United States, no controversial here in Texas, my U.S. team is probably going to beat my Texas team, and then certainly my U.S. team is going to beat my Austin team. But we as managers don’t think of our own squads the same way. This is your team. Who do you want on it? You want the U.S. team on it? Or even going beyond that, rest assured if I assembled a worldwide team of the best football players, my Austin team’s going to get crushed. It’s not even going to be close. So, you’re like, guys why wouldn’t you want that on your team? Why would you not think about that being the talent that you want to draw from, and by the way if you can do that in 24 hours and assemble that team with the best people around the world, then holy shit, that’s like another whole ballpark versus you having to choose from the best people in your zip code and it takes you six months to do. So, this is going to happen. This is happening. I believe, similar to where it used to be in the nineties, where you’d go raise a bunch of money to have a big server closet and now, of course, there’s no one  that ever does that. You just go to AWS and call it a day. 

JEFF: [laughing] Right.

ANDY: People will do the same thing with teams and they just haven’t quite got there yet. Trust and culture building are the two elements that have to go hand in hand. We talked a lot about trust, but then on the culture side of it, you have to be able to bring these people in. These have to be part of your team. You have to have that same equivalent of you walking around the hall and being able to bond with people, because it’s really building that team and having that culture is what then makes those individuals a team.

JEFF: Absolutely. You need to be intentional, proactive about that process because it doesn’t happen by default when people are all working from home. However, when you are so intentional and so proactive, you’re really on the right track to nail it.  (41:41) I don’t know how well this scales so I’m curious to check in with you. You’ve seen larger, larger companies, the people that we talk to on this podcast, we’ve certainly had people with teams of five, six thousand people but they tend to be in the hundred-person median point, but they tend to have this amazing culture where people feel really connected. They really have a sense of this peripheral view of what’s expected of them, what the goals of the company are, what the mission and vision and all those things are of the company, how management works, what it takes to advance in the company, all that stuff, and it tends to be great all around. I feel like that’s a result of both the transparency stuff that needs to happen but certainly the intentionality. (42:41) Talk to me about your perspective on all of that. I think it’s perfectly reasonable if it doesn’t [laughing] scale as well to larger companies. We certainly don’t expect that when we go work at Wal-Mart or something. I’m curious to hear your perspective on culture at scale.

ANDY: I actually believe that the large companies spend more time on culture. If you go walk around any of the Fortune 500 halls, you’ll see their mission statements on the wall, people walk around with badges with core principals or whatever else it may be because at a certain size you realize, unless people fundamentally understand the values and understand the culture, they’ve got to make decisions on their own that are aligned to that, and therefore,  you can’t be on every single decision, and therefore you have to put the right framework in place. I find it’s actually more intentional the larger you get than small. I find that in the remote world though, you have to do that again in a different way. It’s one thing to put a bunch of bullets together on here’s what we believe, and I’m not downplaying that, because that’s obviously important, but culture is actually what you do on a day to day basis. It’s the cognitively hard problems being solved by these people that are super dedicated and can really go out there and work together, and they know that they’ve got each other’s back and they’re going in and being challenged. This is where remote work you have to think in a different way in that because a lot of it is done asynchronously and because you don’t have the in-person affect, the question is how do you recreate that in-person type of feel? I think this is actually where I love Sococo, believe it not. At the end of the day all these communication tools are great. Zoom is great. Slack is great. But they’re communication at the end of the day, they’re not building culture.  

For those that don’t know what Sococo is, basically think of it as a virtual office where you can look at your office and see people virtually sitting at their desk, and you see people that are huddled together in the conference room, or you can knock on peoples doors and go in and say hello, there’s a water cooler or you can chat there. And, it creates this really interesting mental framework in your mind where it feels like even though you know that those people huddle around that table, my engineering team all huddle around that table, these folks are three, four, five, six thousand miles away from each other but they feel like they’re next to each other. I can actually just walk in and chat with them. It’s so much of a different perspective then, “oh, they’ve got a little green dot next to their name, let me go chat with them,” or “let me jump into that channel.” Those aren’t natural culture building things. The natural culture building thing is like, “oh, this person just showed up to work. How was the weekend?” You’re able to have those types of conversations using video and what have you, but seeing them virtually in a space, I find is the missing key for a lot of these remote teams, to be able to pull those people that are remote into an environment that feels like an office, but better because it’s infinitely scalable and it has those same affects. Your brain does this really interesting thing when you’re in those types of spaces. So, I literally couldn’t be more excited about Sococo. I’d give up Slack before I gave up Sococo. It is that important to building culture and making people feel like they’re together, than just really having that sense. I believe it can be done, and I believe it can be done remotely, and I believe we have to collectively figure it out, because that is literally the single most important thing that we got to go do to be able to pull all these teams together. 

JEFF: It’s interesting because that Avatar based stuff is historically, at least, or dominantly has been videogame fodder. So, it’s easy to look at that from a buttoned-up business perspective and roll your eyes and go like, “that’s not productivity” but it’s really interesting to see the patterns that you fall into around this Avatar based communication. You wouldn’t think, “oh, I’m not really going to be able to.” But maybe it’s that tapping into the same stuff that the gaming stuff is tapping into? You kind of fall into this “Well, what would I say to a person in real life?” Here we are with this substitute for real life, let’s have a conversation as we would have in real life.  It pretty quickly breaks down some of those psychological barriers that you might have if you were to fall into a more traditional business looking communication method; maybe even Slack or certainly a phone conference or something like that, that we’re so conditioned to know how to run a meeting that sometimes we forget to make those more human cultural connections. 

ANDY: Dead on. I believe that overlaying that with actual high def audio and high def video matters. I’m not a big fan of just two Avatars talking to each other in this second life type of world. I’m actually a fan of two people, literally, like it happened this morning. Someone knocked on my door and I let them in. They came in and we fired up a Zoom meeting through Sococo and we had a conversation. It was a quick, two-minute conversation about what occurred yesterday as well as what we’re going to do later to go watch the Astros hopefully win the World Series. That type of thing doesn’t really occur in Slack. 

JEFF: It doesn’t occur in Zoom. Who has a two-minute Zoom call? After you’ve gone through all of the formality of setting up a Zoom call, most people will feel obligated to do a half hour or fifteen minutes. Well, let’s put together an agenda for our call, but that’s not how real-life works, right? It’s the popping your head in and just checking in. “Hey, I’m just checking in about this thing.”  

ANDY: It is exactly right. It’s the equivalent of someone coming and knocking on my door. It’s like, “Hey, let’s go to the game tonight.” “Okay, great. Let’s go do that.” That’s what helps build the culture. In this particular case it was going to an Astros game, but those type of informal, quick, little conversations and what have you, and really helping each other out and feeling like you have some place to go, because sometimes you literally can be on an island [laughing] when you’re doing your remote work, therefore your ability to be able to navigate and who’s available and things like that, you want to make it feel like you’re actually in an office. Maybe in the future you are in an office. Maybe you got a VR headset on or something like that and you’re virtually walking around or whatever else it might be, but that is so key in making this remote world feel like your office. I believe that’s actually what’s going to bring a lot of managers around where they’re like, “You know what, that’s cool. Great. They’re not in my office but they’re right here in their office right there, and I can knock on the door and I can see them. It builds trust. I know that they’re there.” All that starts bridging the gap and it’s so important to managing teams.

JEFF: I think a lot of people are comfortable with that one to one translation. Maybe it’s even that Sococo to one extent becomes a transitional technology to help people. I think about the early web. I started doing web development back in ’92 or ’93 before anybody knew the web, and it was all AOL and CompuServe and stuff like that, but it seemed like every single website they were like, “We need a picture of a library on it, and we also need a picture of the store.” It was like let’s make this so people can relate. Let’s take real life, a little village, and put it online, and eventually later as we got through the nineties, we’re like, it’s a website. We can get our heads around that now. When I looked at Sococo I was like, we’re not in an office together, but there is so much of this. It takes a while for humans to evolve. How do we do it? I know a lot of managers who are interested in making that transition for their company, themselves, to remote or just their team to remote or starting to hire some remote people, they get stuck. How does it work? This is a great model for how it works. 

ANDY: Exactly right. Again, it goes back towards that culture building and it goes back towards that trust too, where particularly managers that are maybe just starting out in the remote world and hiring remote teams and what have you, there’s a certain comfort level where you see your team and they are around the table together. Even though you know they’re not actually physically around the table, but they are, and they can virtually reach across the desk and tack chat people and ask questions and things like that. The way I have mine setup, I’ve got my marketing huddled together, I’ve got my engineering team, I’ve got my customer success team, I’ve got my sales team. I’ve got these desks that they all huddle around and then when I need to go and  chat with all of them, I go in there and open up a channel and we chat. I got to tell you, having managed remote teams as long as I have, even with me, there’s a feeling that you get. You’re like, “Wow, here’s my team. It’s awesome. I can see you.” They’re not just green and yellow and red dots. They’re people, they’re sitting there. I’ve got it set up where it ties in with their LinkedIn profile, so it’s got their faces sitting around that desk and I can see them. From there I can go and do all the typical communication tools, but there is that trust that they’re there and they’re working and that feeling of togetherness. I don’t know if that ever goes away. I don’t know if that’s, “Hey, Andy just because you’re on the beginners side,” I think there’s a human connection that you need to create that way and I think this is a simple and easy way to go do that.

JEFF: Absolutely. (54:12) We’re digging into some really great stuff here. I want to be sure to talk about Crossover a little bit more. Talk to me about Crossover. How did it evolve? What’s the philosophy behind it? Particularly what can listeners of this podcast learn about and from Crossover?

ANDY: Crossover is the notion of, “Hey let’s assemble these Cloud teams of great people no matter where in the world that they are.” What we do is we literally scour the world with just all these different ads to have people apply. We’ve got anywhere between twenty and twenty-five thousand people apply and we test everyone. We have a super high bar on your recognitive perspective, how intelligent you are from an English competency perspective, because today it’s still business is lodged on English, and then we go into a variety of different skills testing, whether that be if you’re an accountant, we’ll give you a bunch of different accountant tests. Of if you’re a developer we’ll have you code, and then we’ll have you interview. What we do is then assemble those folks into teams and then we basically place them with various customers or largely we use it across the companies that we’ve been buying. We realize that the whole remote work Cloud team is still emerging so we’re like “You know what? This is an amazing set of people.” As everyone knows if you put amazing people in companies, amazing things happen. Go figure.   We’ve been leveraging those guys to go in and buy as many companies as humanly possible and put them into a common set of engineering team, support team, professional services, inside sales, accounting, finance, you name it. We put them all into these teams and make these companies better. We’re buying companies like crazy right now. We’re still hiring people from anywhere around the world, and all the things I mentioned previously on Cloud wage where we pay people the same amount no matter where in the world they are. We’ve got an EVP of product role for example that’s $800,000 dollars and it doesn’t matter if you’re in Silicon Valley or you’re in Bucharest, Romania, you can get the same $800,000 dollars a year because that’s what we value that position to be. As a result, we get the best of the best.  You pay someone $800,000 dollars in Romania you could imagine what type of people you get.

JEFF: [laughing] Right. Buy a castle.

ANDY: Exactly right. You get the best of the best, therefore that’s what we do across the board and we assemble them into teams. Then we have all the data sensor stuff we also talked about to make sure we give them coaching on a real time basis and make sure that we’re eliminating fraud. But our belief is that you can assemble these unbelievable teams around the world in whatever skillset that you need and then you buy whatever companies [laughing] you want and  fuse them into these companies and make these companies great. I’m like, “wow, why don’t we just keep doing that?” In parallel we got a bunch of external customers that’ll realize that too and are jumping on the bandwagon too. We got 4,000 people within our companies and we got another x thousand across other external companies and now we’re just trying to find more and more right people.

JEFF: (57:48) Wow. This is the epiphany for me. This, “you can hire anybody anywhere. You can hire all these great people. We could put together the best company that we could think of,” right? And that’s what I felt like I did with my company Lullabot, just be super visionary and idealistic about the kind of company we wanted to put together and then just put it together with people wherever they live, and it’s interesting to see you basically doing this at scale. It truly is a competitive advantage, and also having a private equity fund you have an obligation [laughing] to the equity and it’s just really interesting to see this happening at scale, but also in a pragmatic acknowledgment because for me running a private company it feels really good, I feel like we have an advantage to be able to sell and be a place with basically zero turnover. It’s really interesting to see that happening where companies are realizing even to the point of you putting together a company that does just that [laughing] sort of help connect people with these talent pools. That’s amazing.

ANDY: It’s been fascinating. We’ve had to learn a ton along the way. How do you run an inside sales team remotely for example? You go talk to the experts, right? They’re like, “No, no. Everyone’s got to be there because you got to make sure they’ll pick up the phone if they call.” 

JEFF: They need to ring a bell.

ANDY: Right. Exactly. You got to go boiler room on you, and you have this leader board, whatever, and you’re like, “no, actually you don’t, right?” Yes, you need to use the right tools like Outreach and others to record the calls and grade the calls and make a script on all that other good jazz, what have you, and you’ve got to have a great manager that can hire remotely. So, we had to figure it out across all of the various elements to run a company. That’s the other thing people think about. “Oh, remote equals engineering.” We’re like, “okay, sure.” But then what about your accounts receivable and accounts payable? What about your treasury? What about your sales and marketing? And what about all the support. All these other positions that you’re like, “guys, if we’re going to run a whole company like this, we got to do it across all, for every single one of them.” You’ve got to write a playback and how is it measured and what’s the rule, and how’s the work actually done? I’m a big fan of going to where the work is to understand. Most managers stay so high level. They’re like, “Oh, I want this thing, blah, blah, blah.”  I go, “Okay, well how about you go to the actual job itself and go do it for a bit?” Like, this is actually the skillset that’s needed. This is actually the calendar that’s needed on x, y, z, and these are the actual tools we needed. I find that if you can’t go do that as a manager and you can’t dive down into where the work is done, then you’re a terrible manager and you shouldn’t manage remotely because you’re going off a gut feel versus actually looking at the data and doing the job. 

JEFF: There’s a certain amount of vulnerability, empathy and agility and flexibility that needs to be there. You can sit down and academically think of what the bet process is going to be and then try to impose that on people, but it could be wrong. It probably is wrong.  

ANDY: It is wrong. Until you get in there and see the work. This is actually what Toyota Manufacturing did so well back in the eighties. They had what’s called the Gemba walk, where unlike the U.S. managers they would just do PowerPoint and Excel and dictate things down to the manufacturing line. The Japanese managers would go down to the line and would have a checklist and go and interview the people on the line and go, “Hey, how do we make your job better?” It’s not micromanagement, it’s looking at the job, and you talk to the guy and he’s like, “you know what? The problem is that the wrenches are over here three feet away, therefore I got to get up every time, grab one and bring it back,” when “oh, by the way we share all the wenches so therefore if that guys using it, I got to sit there and wait until he’s done.” You’re like, “Okay, why don’t we just give everyone the tools and why don’t we put it closer, so you don’t have to get up and then you just got to reach over and grab it?” You’re like, “oh great.” And that increases productivity. So, that level of going to where the work is you have to do remote and  you have to be like, great, let me look at this inside sales role.” Okay great, let’s listen to the sales call. You know what these are the objections that come up. Let’s make sure those are clear. Okay, great let’s record the outreach. Let’s go put that into a sentiment analysis tool in Amazon and understand whether or not the customer and what their sentiment is throughout the call and whether or not they turned from skeptical to positive. All  this amazing data you can do for every single role, but you got to go where the work is. That’s one of our big issues is, ensuring that managers are willing to go do that. Managers they have a tendency to be lofty and high level.

JEFF: “I got all the experience. I came in with you. I was hired for my experience.” Yeah.

ANDY: Exactly right. You’re like, “no, go to where the work is. Go do the job for a little bit and then you have the right perspective.” Then all of a sudden you discover things and you apply that knowledge. You’re like, “Great, this is how we’re going to make it  better for everyone.” Then the low value casts away and etc., etc. So that’s how we’ve been able to build it. We’ve got tons of work to do. By no means have we got it all figured out yet, but I feel confident that if the managers continue to go down and do the work and we can either measure it and then we can even give people coaching that the sky is the limit. I think 10 years from now we’re going to build so many competencies on how to actually do these roles great. Now, you’re leveraging all the best people in the world and you have this coaching and sensor network and manager bots. In what world does that not win. So, I’m like, “great. That’ what we’re building.” 

JEFF: That Toyota methodology as well, when we think about the stereotypical, particularly American kind of starting of the industrial revolution, management style, its adversarial. It’s, we need to impose work on people. They’re not hired to think. Starting to change that paradigm to realize that we’re all in this together. The idea is to be productive and being productive is a pretty good feeling as a human being [laughing], to feel like you’ve got job security and we’re all caring. There’s a certain amount of compassion that goes into it, but that we’re on the same team is really valuable.

ANDY: Dead on. This isn’t Taylorism. This isn’t like, “how do I get these dumb people to go do the very specific things that we need,” and go hit a hammer. When people are high skilled you have to adapt that and be like, “no the best people in the world want to learn to get better.” They have this growth mentality where they’re like, “give me the feedback. I want to know how I get better, because I think I’m pretty good today, but I can get better.” I do very much use analogies of the professional sports. It’s coaching. It’s giving them data so they can get better and better and it’s not just once a  quarter or looking at your MBOs or it’s not once a year looking at your review. Give them all the sensors. Think of the Fitbit. People look at their Fitbit and they’re like, “Oh, I didn’t walk my 10,000 steps today so I’m going to take the stairs.” That leading indicator matters because the lagging indicator of that is just stepping on a scale two  weeks later and be like, “Oh, I didn’t lose any weight.” That’s too late. You want to get it to where the work is done. You want to do it exactly where they can take action and it’s by  getting that data in their hands right there on the spot that actually makes a difference. So, that’s the big thing about setting these metrics. It’s got to be leading indicators, not lagging indicators.

JEFF: And we see that relationship and those feedback mechanisms and ultimately the respect thing happening a lot in those more skilled white-collar jobs, but I think we’re going to start seeing it more on the factory floors; blue collar jobs. Obviously, Toyota’s had that figured out back then. It’s all going towards the same end. (1:06) A question I want to ask you before we end all of this, and I can go on and on [laughing] talking to you, but as a person that runs a private equity fund and in that venture capital realm, where are we at with remote work? I know VC tends to be conservative, rightly so, it’s a very cutting edge technologically forward, but wanting to be safe, this is money we’re talking about, and historically remote work was not tried and true proven thing when you were talking to Venture Capitalists, they wanted to make sure that everyone was in the office and was aligned. Is that changing for you? Is that changing for the finance industry as a whole? What’s your perspective?

ANDY: It’s interesting when you look at remote work trends over time. It’s a big sign wave where there’s a big boom in the late nineties when telework came out, per se, and it rose up and then in the early 2000s, particularly around Bristol Myers and others and Yahoo, it went the other way; everyone’s got to be in the office. Now it feels like  in general it’s on it’s way back, but I’d say that VC and PE are actually two different spots right now. On the PE side of the world I find that it is further behind, particularly there’s PE shops that are looking to buy companies and sell them. They feel everyone has to be there in an intact unit because it looks better for someone else that’s going to buy it. They got an office here in Austin and they’ve got 150 people here and that’s where everyone is at. So, there’s this packaging effect that I think that they start feeling uncomfortable about. We’re like, “they got three people here in Austin, but they got 150 people spread around the U.S.”

JEFF: There is this, again, sort of innate human value in being able to walk into a room or building and say, “this is the thing.” This is what we’re buying. We’re buying this building with the people in it and if you don’t have the building, if you don’t have the people all assembled into one place, it’s a much more abstract thing, but arguably so is any SaaS. 

ANDY: Exactly right. 

JEFF: Or a Cloud service by definition is fluffy. 

ANDY: Dead on. I feel like PE is pretty far behind there. I feel like VC is also far behind but not quite as far because VC, particularly in the bay areas, is starting to run into the talent availability problem. You see more and more now where they’re like, “I still want you to have your core team in San Francisco here, but feel free to have some other people remote, because I care more about you actually growing your business.”

JEFF: We can’t afford to pay everyone $600,000 a year.

ANDY: Exactly right. They’re like, “you need to get your product up and going so go hire those people and maybe someday you’ll move them here.” But it’s still not to the point where I believe that the VC and the funded companies of the future will be one gal and an idea and an end number of Cloud teams, and they’ll just assemble it like Lego blocks and be like, “there’s your company,” and you’ll be done in a week and you can try it out and get your MVP and you’re rocking and rolling. I believe very much like the server world, where again you’re like, “right now just go fire up another AWS.” And obviously the AWS’s are still different. The N4 is different than the R4 and what have you. You still specialize but it is an amazing research you have available. I believe eventually that will be the only way things get funded. You have to have your core team there in Silicon Valley and whatever else and be like, “what are you doing? Why are you paying $600,000 a month, or whatever, for this office space and the four people that you have inside of it?” Get rid of that and just be in the Cloud. It will be a Cloud centric startup world where that will be the mentality and I think it will be looked at as idiotic to not have that, and that all revolves around these Cloud teams and just the speed in the talent level and the lower cost to be able to go do that, will be the competitive advantages and those will be the companies that will end up being funded. I haven’t seen any VC go there yet. There’s still all these other concerns about trust and IP and culture building, that they haven’t quite got there yet. I think it’s a ways away yet, but it does feel like it’s back on the upswing which is good. 

JEFF: Wow. That’s really interesting. Great perspectives on all of these things and I think our listeners are going to really enjoy hearing all this. (1:10) If anybody wants to follow-up with you, get in touch [laughing], there’s so many possible things, they can start by vising your LinkedIn page just to see all the things you’re involved in, but where should they get in touch with you.

ANDY: Twitter is always a great spot. My handle is @andytryba and I’d be happy to chat. I’m working on a book that is along this line on how to actually do remote management and some of the tips in trying to get rid of the fairytales that are out there and things like that. Hopefully you’ll see that come out soon too.

JEFF: That’s great. Well, thank you Andy, so much. This has been a great conversation. 

Here’s the transcript:

JEFF: Hi everyone. It’s Jeff Robbins, back with Episode 78 of the Yonder Podcast, where we talk to company leaders and big thinkers, about how to make remote work. We’re focused on expanding the remote work job market, and helping listeners to create happy, productive, distributed teams. On this episode, we are talking to Joshua Gross, who is the Founder and Partner at Planetary, which is a small digital products agency that does work with large clients like Google, Amazon and Univision. They’ve got a small team of really talented people. Really great conversation with Josh. We talk about a new place to hire specialized remote workers. I’ll leave that a mystery. Just listen to the podcast and find out where you should be posting your jobs or maybe if it’s the appropriate place for you. The value of over communication and tricks for competing with conventional companies, particularly during the sales process.

JEFF: Hi Josh. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

JOSH: Hey, thanks for having me.

JEFF: Yeah, thanks for coming on. Let me start with the question I ask everyone. (3:28) Where are you talking to us from today?

JOSH: I’m actually talking to you from South Carolina. I actually live in New York, but my partner and I came down to South Carolina to visit some of her family. So, we’re down here for a few days and actually heading back up to New York later today.

JEFF: Nice. See, you can work from wherever, and do podcasts from wherever, too. (3:56) So, tell us about Planetary and particularly your relationship to remote work around that.

JOSH: Sure. I’m the Managing Partner and Founder of Planetary. Planetary is basically a digital studio. We work with a lot of clients, large companies, startups, to help them do digital product development. That can be anything from building an internal analytics app to building out a complete new website and E-commerce platform for food brand which we’ve done at least once, if not twice. [laughing] But, the type of work we do varies really widely, but we mostly focus on working with web technologies and on mobile to using web technologies to build mobile apps. We’ve been around for about six years and we’re a small team. We are based all across the world.

JEFF: Your website is really cool. It’s not often that I say that about websites, but having run a web development company, I appreciate that. [laughing]

JOSH: [laughing] I wish I could say it’s easy, but that was a process.

JEFF: I can imagine it was. I’m just looking at it, horizontal scrolling and it’s got these images that flip back and forth, at least on the desktop version it’s doing all sorts of cool stuff. Congrats on that. [laughing]

JOSH: [laughing] Thank you. It was a painful process. You should’ve seen some of the earlier versions of that. I’m happy where we are, let me put it that way.

JEFF: (5:52) Simply just making your own website for your own company that does digital work, there’s some voodoo in there somewhere that it just prevents it from happening. There’s that old saying about the Cobblers children have no shoes, but I feel like the universe is stacked against the Cobbler in that case. You would think he’s busy doing work for other people, but, you know, he wants to make shoes for his kids, it’s just not happening.

JOSH: You’re your own worst client. You want to make the shoes for your kids, but you want to make them perfectly out of the best material, you want to put them together with the perfect stitching. Who has time for that?

JEFF: No, it’s impossible. And you also have a product have you’ve built (6:46) It helps distributed teams.

JOSH: Yes. Spacetime.

JEFF: (6:54) Tell me about Spacetime.

JOSH: It was actually born out of a need that we had as a distributed team. We’ve been distributed since we began, day zero. As we grew and we started hiring folks, some of our earlier folks were in Eastern Europe, South America, we had folks across the world, and keeping track of when they were available was difficult to say the least. We kept forgetting when they were in, we kept bothering people late at night. So, we had at some point discussed, we had an internal team hackathon and we were like ooh, what would be fun to build? One of the things that came out of that was a tool that lets us see when folks are in, when folks are out and what time zone, they’re in. So, we built it for ourselves to solve a problem. As I showed it to folks a couple months later there was more interest than I expected, so we kept rolling with it as we had time between client projects to build it into something that other folks could use.

JEFF: (8:13) This is the surprising, biggest challenge of starting a distributed company, I think, for lots of people. You think, oh, we’ll just start a distributed company. We’ll hire people all over the world, but I feel like understanding the concept of time zones and even just the basic idea that the sun is in different places on the planet at different times [laughing] is something that our animal brains just don’t get.

JOSH: No, not at all.

JEFF: So, it’s like everyone I know that’s started a distributed company, it’s a surprise or maybe it’s not a surprise, but it’s something that they instead try to really avoid. We’re just going to hire people in the greater Minneapolis area. I had a podcast recently with someone, kind of in a good way, hired people who were one flight away, which is a nice strategy, but you’re not totally benefitting from the unlimited talent pool that you could get with a fully distributed team.

JOSH: Right. The tighter the radius you’re looking in, obviously the fewer folks there are that will fit the needs that you have. Basically, making it an unlimited radius, you can select from anybody, but you do have that challenge of dealing with time zones and for whatever reason, humans are just really bad at doing time math. It’s not inherent to anybody.

JEFF: Yeah. It’s a difficult thing to get over. Whenever I get a team, we run the Yonder conference, and this Yonder circle now, where we get together people who are thinking about remote work, and I always want to talk about time zones and everybody kind of rolls their eyes. But, I’m like, “No, you don’t understand. Time zones are a big challenge. We all need to figure this out.” Ultimately it comes down to the scheduling and the different rhythms of people in differing time zones. (10:39) Do you have people all over the world?

JOSH: We do. Right now, we have folks in South America, East and West Coast of the US and Canada and in Western Europe as well. So, not as distributed as we have been in the past, but still enough so that time zones can be an issue.

JEFF: (11:01) So in the past have you had people in Asia or Australia?

JOSH: We actually have not gone that far, but the furthest person we’ve had is Romania, which is far enough in and of itself that fortunately that particular person enjoyed working later hours, but had they worked a normal day, we would’ve only had a couple hours of overlap.

JEFF: When the hours that people are sleeping is the hours that we think of as the workday at least in the U.S.

JOSH: Right.

JEFF: Having as many tools as possible [laughing] around that, it’s really difficult. You got this vernacular for talking about time. “Hey, are you free for lunch tomorrow?” “Hey, maybe we can talk at 9:00 tomorrow morning.” That just don’t have meaning when you send an email to people and you’re not quite sure where they are.

JOSH: That becomes such a problem. I’ve even gone so far as to look up folks when I send them an email. If I’m suddenly talking to a client, I’ll look up where they are by searching their name and hopefully, they pop up on LinkedIn and have their location, so I don’t feel like a complete jerk when I suggest a time and they’re in California, and I suggested basically something that’s like six a.m. for them.

JEFF: Yeah. It’s funny. I think people that work remote, particularly on LinkedIn and places where you might find their location, are a little less likely to post their location because it doesn’t matter, I’m wherever, except when you want to schedule a call with them and they’re in the middle of sleeping.

JOSH: It’s funny. You mentioned people roll their eyes when you talk about how important time zones are. I had a conversation with someone the other day, they were trying to introduce Spacetime to their team, and it’s one of those problems that it seems like folks don’t know they have until they experience not having it.

JEFF: Right.

JOSH: He’s telling me their team loves complaining about how difficult it is to schedule meetings, but was also hesitant to start using Spacetime because, oh, we don’t need another tool to manage this. He’s like, “Well, I guess they’d rather just complain than not have this problem at all.”

JEFF: Yeah. It’s this funny thing. Again, it seems to be outside of how our brains want to think. So even the idea of talking about it [laughing] is sometimes the thing that people don’t want to do. They don’t think it’s a problem until it is a problem and then when it is a problem it feels like it shouldn’t be a problem.

JOSH: But it’s like how do you solve it? How do you make it go away in a way that doesn’t require thinking about the time zones and putting that mental effort in.

JEFF: Right. We can all use the UTC time but that seems to be a challenge. [laughing]

JOSH: I don’t know if you remember this, but this was from years and years ago, Swatch had Swatch time.

JEFF: [laughing] Yes.

JOSH: And that was like, they were trying to physically invent the UTC as a timestamp.

JEFF: But then it was something funny. It was like an hour was not 60 minutes, it was 100 minutes [laughing] or there were 10 hours a day. It was something weird like that. It was Swatch beats, the number of beats per day.

JOSH: It did not stick. I remember they actually released watches that exclusively told the time in beats, which I thought was very funny.

JEFF: Yeah. (15:12) I think I had a watch that you could put it in that mode, so I put it in that mode for maybe about an hour one time and looked at my watch. I was like, this means nothing to me. [laughing]

JOSH: It’s funny, because it’s like that idea has clearly been around. People hate time zones enough that this watch company tried to invent an entire different unit of time to eliminate it. Poorly, but even within a company that makes watches for a living, I was like time zones are awful.

JEFF: Honestly it was probably well thought out.

JOSH: [laughing] The idea was good. Right?

JEFF: It was well reasoned. [laughing]

JOSH: Everything’s a unit of 10, sort of like metric, but then you try to sell it in the U.S. market and everybody’s like, I got my 12 inches. I got my 144 pounds of gross. Like, what’s the problem here?

JEFF: The problem as usual is the Americans. [laughing] We’ve got enough people. We’ve got enough commerce. We’ve got a big enough country where it’s like ahh, it’s fine the way it is.

JOSH: Sixty minutes in an hour. Sixty seconds in a minute. Who needs anything more simpler than that?

JEFF: (laughing) Right. (12:27) You say the companies been distributed since day zero, and you’ve got a very prestigious company. Your website is beautiful. You’ve done some work for some amazing clients. I’m imaging that you have a very talented team. Talk to me about the decision to be distributed or the non-decision [laughing] and how it’s been to build a team and find talent.

JOSH: It’s definitely been interesting. It was not really a decision that was made intentionally at first, honestly.

JEFF: That’s often the case, especially with small businesses, whether they’re distributed or not, you sort of do what you do.

JOSH: It was like a matter of convenience, honestly. When we got started, Planetary is born out of, what I was doing at the time, six years ago, which is freelancing. So, when I started getting to the point where I needed additional help, rather than trying to find folks in New York or Brooklyn, I knew that was going to be expensive, and I didn’t have an office at the time, I was mostly working from home, I just went online and found some folks I could work with. I got introduced to a friend of mine who lived in St. Louis at the time, a designer, he was helping me out, also living in St. Louis, it was just easier than trying to find and pay someone in New York. When I realized it was not that big of a deal to have folks in different places, it was like, alright, what’s the difference if I have a team of people in New York or I have a bunch of people in different places?

JEFF: (18:25) You said six years ago is when you started all of this?

JOSH: Yeah. We got started, in earnest, in 2013, so it was six and a half years ago at this point. It was March or April 2013; I want to say. I was doing freelancing for several years before that, so it was like this slow curve upwards into doing bigger projects.

JEFF: That’s great. How many people do you have these days?

JOSH: We’re seven.

JEFF: Smaller businesses tend to grow a little bit more organically. It’s people you know, people you meet, stuff like that, as opposed to as we think about larger companies, kind of recruiting people and needing to have more of a proactive hiring. (19:52) Which mode are you more in? Is it that earlier one? Are you hiring people as you meet them around on the internet? Or, are you actively out recruiting people? [laughing] Whichever of those it is, I’m curious to know how that works for you.

JOSH: When we got started, initially the first couple of folks I was working with were folks that I got introduced to through some acquaintances. But, once we started hiring, honestly, we just put up some job postings for the role we were looking for and started to interview folks, and these weren’t people we knew, before they sent us an email with their resume. We just kept rolling with that. The first person we hired was based out of the UK somewhere. We were rolling with the punches at that point, so we put together an interview process for an engineer. We had never really done that before, but we rolled with it. I talked to some friends that had done hiring in the past, got a sense of what’s the right way to interview a person for this role, and we went through a bunch of interviews with different folks, and brought somebody on. They worked with us for two, two and a half years, and that was a good start for us.

JEFF: (21:40) So, where are you posting jobs? What does it look like to hire for you?

JOSH: That’s always been hard for us. When we first started posting jobs, we tried all the typical job boards. Mind you, six years ago we didn’t have all the remote working job boards that you do now, so we were posting in the places you would post any sort of job. The number of applicants we got in and the quality of the applicants was a struggle initially.

JEFF: Struggle because it was so many applicants, right?

JOSH: It was just overwhelming. There were hundreds of people sending us emails and being just a couple of folks routing through all these resumes, it was exhausting to say the least. The process was a lot more difficult than I was hoping it would be. I was really hoping for a smaller set of more qualified candidates that fit the role better. But we ended up finding actually AngelList job board and posted there, and for whatever reason we got fewer applicants, but they were all much more qualified for the role we were looking for; the type of person we were looking for.

JEFF: That’s really interesting.

JOSH: Ever since then, honestly, I’ve posted any openings to AngelList job board and the folks we get from there have been great. That’s basically where we found everybody, we’ve hired that hasn’t been a referral.

JEFF: (23:21) Do you feel like posting on AngelList was better because the candidates were looking for something specific or that there were just fewer of them? What about that?

JOSH: I want to say it was a combination of both. There were definitely fewer candidates looking at that job board. It has always been, at least as far as I can tell, a smaller job board. It doesn’t attract as wide an array of candidates, but the folks that are looking on there, are looking for something very specific.

JEFF: They’re kind of expecting jobs with more specific qualifications which honestly is probably what you’re looking for.

JOSH: Exactly. And you can narrow down by those qualifications. AngelLists filtering platform is designed and tailored specifically towards tech rolls and it makes it a lot easier to narrow down candidates that you want with specific experience or in a specific role. It’s just a lot easier than some of these more generic job boards that cover every possible role in lots of different fields.

JEFF: (24:39) Are there specific traits that you’re looking for? Are there specific skills that come around this being a remote job?

JOSH: It really depends on the role. We don’t play the game, necessarily that they need to be a culture fit, and everybody needs to have the same personality. Our team right now is composed of folks that, one of our folks makes himself golf clubs as a side business, and one of our other folks just bought a farm and has horses. These are very different types of people and I think that’s really healthy. It really depends on the role. I think the biggest thing is just the ability to communicate. That’s the most difficult part of being a remote team, so that’s really the only aspect that is the most important. You need to be able to communicate well and clearly, since we’re all not sitting in the same room together.

JEFF: I think that’s a thing we inherently look for in a job interview. Especially when you’re interviewing someone remotely. I think oftentimes with our tendency to want to be fair. Maybe that’s what we think we’re being. We want to judge people more on their resume and the jobs they’ve had in the past and maybe they didn’t interview very well. But, look at what they can do or what they’ve done. The truth is with a remote job, especially in a fully distributed company, that interview, that communication [laughing] is a test of their communication skills that they’re going to need in conducting this job. Right? So, if you’re not connecting with them in the interview it kind of doesn’t matter what their resume says they can do, it’s going to be a little cordoned off by their inability to communicate.

JOSH: Yeah, that’s the most crucial part. Any of these other skills can be learned or you can get better at them. If you’re a Project Manager, you can get better at project managing. If you’re an Engineer, you can learn to be a better engineer. But, learning to communicate better I’ve noticed is more difficult and as a remote team if you don’t have it from the get-go, at least some level of ability to communicate well, it’s a struggle, because then that person really doesn’t feel like a part of the team simply because they just don’t participate in everything the rest of the team does in the same way. It also just hinders other folks. You need to be able to communicate as an engineer, especially on a remote team, what you’re doing or what problems you’re having. You need to be able to have little hesitance to reach out to somebody else on the team and ask for help and talk to them about the problem you’re having, or what you need, both over a text or over a call or jumping on a video chat. You need to communicate what you need clearly and easily as opposed to sequestering yourself off in a corner and trying to solve a problem because you don’t want to or can’t communicate the thing that you need.

JEFF: Yeah. And there’s a certain courage and vulnerability willing to allow for vulnerability which to some extent has to do with company culture, but it also has to do with how comfortable people are being able to ask for help, being able to admit when they’re having a difficult time. I’ve seen that be a problem too, where, you can hire people who are good at communicating their wins, their successes, but tend to get a little bit shy when things aren’t going so well, so they tend to do a thing I call submarining, where they’ll disappear [laughing] for a week or two at a time because they were having a challenge with a project. But that has this sort of compounding effect, particularly for anyone who’s managing them, of like, I think that they’re having trouble and they’ve disappeared. [laughing]

JOSH: And you don’t know what trouble they’re having because they never told you.

JEFF: Exactly. “I don’t know how to help. I don’t know what to do.” And they disappear which is bad. This is bad.

JOSH: I’ve only had that happen once or twice in the past few years and it’s tough. Especially as a remote team, because you’re not there standing in front of them. You can’t get the to talk to you in the same way.

JEFF: Yeah. When people need your help, the most is when they’re the least likely [laughing] to ask for it in those cases. So, you have to build this in as part of the way that your business does business.

JOSH: Yes, exactly. Everything I’ve told my team over the past few years, like, one of the core tendons of how we work as a team is just over-communicate. Say more than you think you need to, because that’s probably the right amount.

JEFF: I like that. Just over-communicate. It’s a mantra. [laughing] You need to over-communicate that your company needs to over-communicate. I know I keep saying this, but we need to over-communicate. [laughing]

JOSH: Exactly. It’s funny because my team I say some of the same things over and over, either in one on ones or to the rest of the team and they’ll start repeating these things back to me, with an eye roll, but at the same time in my head I’m like, “good, you get it.”

JEFF: You got it. [laughing]

JOSH: I’m going to keep saying it, but you know it. [laughing] It’s just that that’s so crucial to say more than you think you need to, because worst case, you’ve given too much information but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but if you don’t give enough information then people have to start filling in the blanks.

JEFF: (31:17) And that’s, I guess I call it dangerous. Just people are filling in the blanks and they don’t know, so it tends to be this multiple reality. In worst case scenario, this is what’s going on with this person. We’re not hearing from them because horrible things, they’re in rehab and they’re hesitant to tell us. [laughing] Or, best case scenario they’re just really heads down and really kicking ass and are just going to have this big reveal a week from now. But usually the worst case is not true either.

JOSH: You don’t know unless they tell you. You just don’t know. It’s so much more helpful. When you fill in the blanks you also end up with a situation where folks are either guessing what they need to do to help you, or guessing what work they need to do along side you and then what ends up happening is a lot of times you end up doing the same thing that they were already working on because you didn’t know you’re duplicating their work.

JEFF: Yeah, which I think is almost the stereotype model for how I think collocated managers, when they think about how remote work is bad, [laughing] or could be bad, it’s this, it’s that, how am I going to know what work people are doing? How am I going to trust that they’re doing the work? How and I going to keep things optimized, productive and efficient when I’m trying to coordinate all these people that are spread out and not communicating. [laughing] Because maybe we don’t need that level of communication in a collocated office, so we don’t expect people to offer that.

JOSH: Right.

JEFF: But it’s really necessary to making a distributed teamwork.

JOSH: Oh yeah. We have this issue with our clients sometimes. I’ll be talking to a potential client about a project and I tell them we’re a distributed or remote team, and then they start making faces and getting worried, like, “Oh, well how will you manage the project?” “Where is everybody based?” “What if we have a question?” I’m like, “nothing changes here. We work the same way any company that is all based in New York would work,” but I have to explain to them, “no, no, no, everything will be fine. We’ve done this for years.”

JEFF: And even if you’re a New York agency working with a Fortune 500 business in New York, they’re never going to come to your office. You always go to their office anyways, and it almost looks exactly the same except that you get a couple hotel rooms every now and then. [laughing]

JOSH: Right, and I’m gonna say it just doesn’t cost anymore at the end of the day for them, but, like, “I’m happy to show up at your office and talk to you if you want to see a live human being in person,” but by and large the majority of this work is going to be over phone calls anyway, whether we were based in New York or not.

JEFF: Right, and as we were talking about earlier, they’re working with better communicators.

JOSH: Oh, yeah, exactly.

JEFF: Or at least people who have a requirement to be better communicators. [laughing]

JOSH: Yes.

JEFF: [laughing] I’m not saying people in collocated offices can’t be good communicators but there’s a threshold for doing remote work.

JOSH: The only thing I think about that is we built processes around how we communicate and how we communicate with clients and how we document things. So, when clients are working with us, not only do they get folks that can communicate well, or require to communicate well to do the jobs, but we will document much more than I imagine other agencies do, or from what I’ve seen, other agencies will document, simply because in order to communicate between teammates we need to have a lot of information written down. But to the benefit of the client, that means we have a lot more to share on a regular basis.

JEFF: (35:38) This idea, it comes up less and less, and I’m curious, because when I started Lullabot, my company, back in 2006, we certainly weren’t to a tipping point. I still feel like we’re not quite to a tipping point yet, but, talk to me about the legitimacy of being a remote team. You’re saying that sometimes you’re able to get the project [laughing] but once you start to get in to get the project they go, ”Oh, your teams all over? How’s that going to work?” How often do you hit that attitude? Are there tricks that you found to avoid that? I mean, having a great website is probably [laughing] a good trick. They can just see. But, do you have any insights for people who are afraid that they might hit that attitude, that challenge?

JOSH: It’s tough. Honestly, it’s tough. We’ve run into it less and less I would say. We definitely run into this problem much less frequently then we did five years ago pitching clients. It’s less important but you still do run into it. The best thing I found to (37:08) those fears is offer to have someone show up on site for these folks. The people that have the most hesitance about working with a remote team, I’ll often say, “I’m happy to fly out there,” if they’re based in California or whatever. “I’m happy to fly out there and drop in and say hi for a couple of days and work with you on site. We’ll do a couple of workshops, or I’ll send one of my engineers out to you and they could sit with you in the office for a day and get the project kicked off.” I’ve noticed that kind of comforts them, having seen the person, or at least one of the people on the team, and met them and getting a sense that there’s a body behind the camera; there’s legs below the fold. It helps a lot. Once you get that, you get past that fear of the team being remote, that’s the best solution I’ve found. But, everything else, it’s hard. It’s hard to sell your way past it otherwise.

JEFF: Yeah, I think you have to have your marketing really buttoned up. You have to have your brand, have a really good website. But then, as you say, sort of having empathy for what people in a collocated environment might value. For instance, getting together in person, that’s something that you certainly do, and maybe even working it into the sales process where it’s like, “Hey, let me show up and shake your hand,” [laughing] and help you to realize that I have legs.

JOSH: Exactly. [laughing] That’s my favorite thing to tell folks.

JEFF: The value of legs.

JOSH: Yes. There are legs below the camera. I’ve made this joke, even within our team. Everybody has met each other except for I think one of the folks we hired last year, since we haven’t had a meet up since, but, it’s like, “I don’t know if you have legs below the camera and if you do, you do, if you don’t, you don’t,” but for me it’s not that important. For clients it somehow has value; that has value.

JEFF: The thing I always, sort of notice having seen this happen in a number of environments, but particularly with my own company, people, when you have a company retreat are oftentimes particularly surprised by how tall or short people are.

JOSH: Yes. Oh, yeah. That’s been an interesting thing the couple times we’ve had a team retreat. I’m particularly [laughing] short. I’m only 5’5” and then meeting some of my teammates I was like, “Oh, cool. You’re all taller than me. I am the shortest person here. “Everybody just look down when you’re speaking to me for the rest of the time we’re here. Don’t worry about it.”

JEFF: Using that as part of your hiring process or something like that.

JOSH: Yeah, exactly.

JEFF: You’re inadvertently trying to hire people who are taller than you are.

JOSH: [laughing] Yes, we have a hire requirement. Everybody needs to be under 5’5”. I can’t be the shortest person of the company. It is definitely one of the funnier things that you experience when you do a team retreat, it’s just like, “Oh, you’re all much taller than I would’ve expected because I’ve ever only seen you sitting.”

JEFF: Yeah. (41:05) So, do you have people get together? Do you do team retreats once a year or more often? Do you have any philosophies or thoughts about when people need to get together in person, what role that plays in a distributed company?

JOSH: We haven’t done one this year, we’ll likely do one next year, but the first few years I wouldn’t say we were too small, it was we were just financially constrained, so we didn’t hold one for the first three years of the company. But once we got into a place where I felt comfortable doing it, we did a couple of them two years in a row, and it’s really helpful. Doing one once a year is really valuable to get folks together. There’s a level of team building comradery, whatever you’d like to call it. There’s things, I’d hate to admit there’s things you can’t get as a remote team while being remote, but there’s something about being able to see everybody in person and chat in person that really does help bring everybody closer, and you get to know people in a way that’s sort of an outside of work, happy hour type of situation for a couple of days. It definitely helps bring everyone together. Everyone gets more comfortable with each other. Then you go back to work, but it helps improve the dynamic. Everybody learns things about the other teammates that you wouldn’t normally have discussed over just your day to day Slack chat.

JEFF: Yeah. I always feel like working in a distributed team, it doesn’t feel that way necessarily, but is very cerebral. There’s a lot that you need to be proactive in your communication. You need to be good at communicating. They’re all good practices. It’s better ways of communicating. Better ways of managing. But getting together in person is not cerebral, and after all this cerebral time connecting with people, it’s really nice to have more of a, physical connection. Physical connection means a lot of things and some of them are not what I mean, [laughing] but it’s this primal, just to be able to sit with people and oftentimes you’re at places, so you’re sitting around a fire. Like, we were like connecting with the caveman connection. We’ll just grunt to each other for a bit. It’s wonderful in building trust and more emotional non-cerebral connections, which really enhance the other side of things once you start back to work.

JOSH: I think you get a sense of the persons other personality, that you don’t get in a day to day context of working remotely. Even over video chat, there’s a way you square yourself up with the camera and the way you talk on camera is different, than you would talk just sitting on a lawn chair around a fire. There’s a different body language that you have, and you get a sense of someone’s personality just sitting there with them in person, than chatting with them with a screen in between you. That’s really, I think, the biggest benefit of having these team retreats, is, being able to get a sense of what someone’s personality is like and getting a clear sense of what this person just likes and doesn’t like, and how they are in person, because when you speak to them, when you go back and put the screen back between you two, it helps, I think, give you a better sense of how you talk to this person and how you interact with them.

JEFF: Yeah, it really gives you context, a much more high-fidelity experience of understanding people. (45:23) Have there been any epiphanies, insights, or little tricks you’ve picked up along the way that anyone who’s listening might be starting a company and thinking that distributed might be a good way for them to go? Any advice that you might have for them?

JOSH: I could think of two things. One being, document as much as you can in a shared location. For example, we use Notion to document everything from how we run the team to when we do certain things to our notes for our standups. Everything goes into one place and it’s a great way to be able to just have a record and collection of all these little tidbits, important facts, information you want to reference later, and especially as a remote team, especially if folks aren’t working all the same hours or there is some overlap, but you might say something or have a task that needs to get done for somebody coming in the next morning, having all that documented in one common space is wildly helpful. It makes everybody’s life a lot easier because you know where to look for the information that you need. The other thing I’ve noticed, which is less serious, is just come up with something fun to do with the team once a week. We recently started doing this, but on our Monday, we do a standup every Monday, and I’ve added a question of the week to it and the question of the week is like, if you were a hotdog would you eat yourself? Something ridiculous, but it’s fun to get people’s answers because it just sort of loosens everybody up after coming back from the weekend and you’re shaking off the weekend head space. It brings everybody back together and you get some really goofy answers as everybody’s having their first sips of coffee.

JEFF: (47:27) [laughing] Yeah, well, I think if we look at this remote working as more cerebral, it’s nice to find ways to loosen that up and make sure that there’s less purposeful communication that’s happening, and conversation that’s happening in ways that we can just talk about the weather, or our kids, or whether we would eat ourselves if we were a hotdog. [laughing] But things that get us outside of that purposeful work communication. The thing I say all the time is, there are all of these books out there that talk about how to have efficient meetings and how you should ahead of time have a bullet point list of the meeting agenda that you send out to everyone who is going to be there and then everyone shows up exactly at the right minute and within 30 seconds of the top of the hour your into the first topic and hopefully you’re done within 10 minutes, and I feel like if, on a remote team, if that were all you were doing, you would never have any human connection with the people that you work with. So, finding opportunities, and it might be that first five minutes of each meeting, is just, how’s everybody doing? What’s going on? What’s on your mind? Including the, “oh, I got a flat tire on my car,” or “it’s raining here.”

JOSH: I feel like that’s been such a crucial part of building some of the team dynamic, is that, we do Monday morning and Wednesday morning standups and having those first few minutes just be a loser conversation, like, “Let’s go around and everybody talk about what you did this weekend,” or “How are you feeling? Are you present,” is a really nice one that just shakes people up and get’s people to be like, “I’m here, but my kids not feeling well so I’m a little distracted by that?” There’s a human element that you add to those conversations. It helps.

JEFF: Being able to admit that. Can you imagine in a lot of stereotypical corporate culture is there anyone to admit that they weren’t fully there? [laughing] You’re all sitting around a conference table and it’s like, “Hey, how’s everybody doing? Are you here?” And someone would go “I’m really not here, I’m just totally distracted.” [laughing] It seems like it would not fly in certain environments, and yet I feel like you really need to embrace that. The whole human. And acknowledge that people are going to ebb and flow knowing that they will flow eventually, they just may be ebbing now. That’s okay.

JOSH: Yeah, and it’s like it’s fine, people are human. Not everybody is going to come into work at 100% everyday being totally present and totally ready to do everything they need to do. It’s just not practical. People have lives outside of work and as much as people try to avoid letting it affect their work, sometimes it does. One of the folks on our team, she has a farm and she has horses, and she threw her back out doing work and came in the next morning and was like, “Yeah, I’m here, but my back hurts so I may or may not be as focused as I normally would be.” I was like, “that’s fine.” It’s better to know that and be like, “Okay, cool, we won’t ask as much from you today as we otherwise would.” But that’s not a big deal. That happens.

JEFF: And it does happen. Again, I’m trying to listen to the podcast [laughing] as we’re recording it. Through the years of a more conventional manager who is hearing this and saying, “What? You’ve got somebody who is basically not going to work today? How is that possible?” I think again in this distributed work environment you need to judge people more on their output rather than input. You judge them on the results. Are they getting the work done and then trust them to get it done? It allows us to have these conversations about the difficulty of getting work done, and the ebbing and flowing of productivity, and all that kind of stuff that we might not otherwise talk about.

JOSH: It’s exactly that. As long as they get their work done, it doesn’t matter if they need to take a couple of hours off in the middle of the day to lie down. It’s not a big deal. One of our engineers takes off for an hour in the middle of the afternoon to get outside, because he lives out in California, and wants to get some fresh air before the sun goes down. But he comes back and he gets his work done. He works an extra hour in the evenings. It’s not a big deal as long as the work gets done. Honestly, as a manager, if you think that every single person on your team comes in at 100% everyday and is just pumped to get all of their work done, you’re lying to yourself.

JEFF: Or they’re lying to you.

JOSH: It’s not a thing.

JEFF: It’s like, “Yeah, I’m going to totally get all that work done,” and then you walk by and Facebook is open on their screen [laughing], and, you know, “oh, I’m sorry, this has only been up here for a second.” I came up with this phrase on a recent podcast, and I’m going to just keep revisiting it because I think it’s good. Eventually we’ll get it printed on a T-shirt. But monitoring is not managing.

JOSH: Yes, I like that.

JEFF: (53:51) I think when we think of this, ultimately it goes back to the industrial revolution of monitoring employees is the same thing as managing employees. Are they there? Are they sitting? Are their hands moving? But, it’s really not the same, especially these days. Going to a much more supportive coaching role where we’re helping people ultimately manage themselves.

JOSH: It’s more about giving folks the direction they need to go in. Setting the goals then keeping an eye on exactly what they’re working on at any given moment. If you’re doing that, as a manager, I don’t know how you manage to get anything else done that’s more important. It’s like that element of micromanagement, where you’re just constantly keeping an eye on every single thing that’s being done by every single person you manage, and it’s like, “Don’t you have other things that are more important for you to be doing? Shouldn’t you be thinking about what’s next?” As opposed to what is presently being done.

JEFF: Yeah. And what you’re being judged on as a worker is not whether you’re doing the work, but whether you look like you’re doing the work [laughing], you’re going to put more work into looking like you’re working than actually working.

JOSH: There’s something nice about the remote team that I can’t see what anybody’s doing at any given moment. I don’t care.

JEFF: There’s no way of looking like you’re working. [laughing]

JOSH: I can’t care. No, for all I know all these people are sleeping for seven out of eight hours and then get all their work done in an hour, but honestly if they’re that good, great. More power to you. It’s great. All I have to worry about is, is the work getting done? What’s the output we’re getting out of the projects? Are things being done on time? Everything else is irrelevant; I can’t see it.

JEFF: [laughing] I agree. Well, this is a great conversation Josh. (55:53) Is there anything you wanted to touch on that we haven’t touched on? Or anything you thought of in all of our conversation here?

JOSH: Not really. I’m excited to see, as more teams go remote, that folks get less fearful of working with a remote team. I think that’s a matter of time, as more teams are going remote, and it’s now become a thing. Four or five years ago, it was really not a thing folks were excited about. I think some of that fear is fading and it’s nice to see. I think that we’ve still got a ways to go and I’m excited to see it become more of the norm as opposed to an outliner.

JEFF: Yeah, I get both excited and a little bit afraid of it. [laughing] When Fortune 500 companies are teaching six Sigma practices around remote work, ultimately that’s good stuff and I do feel like a lot of the stuff we talk about, the allowing autonomy, sort of accepting the whole person, allowing people to work more flexibly, is par for the course. That’s the way that remote work works. So, maybe it’ll be a matter of seeing companies start to accept that stuff rather than taking remote work and making it less fun. [laughing]

JOSH: Yes. You don’t need all of these consulting methods on top of remote working. It’s just about trusting the people that work for you and letting them do the work they need to do.

JEFF: Yeah. Absolutely. (57:46) Well, Josh, if anybody wanted to follow-up with more questions for you or find out more about Planetary, where should they get in touch with you?

JOSH: You could find us at planetary.co and if you want to get in touch with me directly, I’m on Twitter @endtwist.

Here’s the transcript:

JEFF: Hi everyone. It’s Jeff Robbins, back with Episode 77 of the Yonder Podcast, where we talk to company leaders and big thinkers, about how to make remote work. We’re focused on expanding the remote work job market, and helping listeners to create happy, productive, distributed teams. This time we are talking to Michael Ly, who is the CEO at Reconciled, a serial entrepreneur, who started several businesses. Reconciled is a virtual CFO firm, bookkeeping, accounting services that you could find at getreconciled.co.  

(01:10) Really fascinating conversation with Michael. We talk a lot about things that I’m sure listeners will love to hear about, tax and employment law, that’s always a really popular thing on this podcast, something that people want to make sure that they get right. We also talk about company get-togethers and we talk some about transitioning legacy professions like, accounting, the more traditional, conservative kind of professions to remote, and some of the advantages of that and some of the difficulties, sociologically, as people in those professions get their head wrapped around the idea that they could work remotely.

JEFF: Hi Michael. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

MICHAEL: Thanks Jeff. Thanks for having me.

JEFF: Yeah, it’s great to have you on. (3:20) Where are you talking to us from today?

MICHAEL: I am in Burlington, Vermont, where I call home, and it’s a beautiful fall day. 

JEFF: Yeah, we’ve had several New Englanders on the podcast. Myself, I live in Rhode Island, so I (3:33) don’t get up to Burlington as much as I’d like. Summer is sort of the time to go. I guess unless you’re a skier. [laughing] It gets really cold up there. I mean, you’re practically in Canada really.

MICHAEL: Yes.

JEFF: Throw a baseball from Canada to there.

MICHAEL: Yeah, it gets surprisingly cold, even for Bostonian’s that relocate up there, they are surprised by how that short of a distance the weather can change quite a bit during the winter.

JEFF: Yeah. Maybe it’s in Boston you have the ocean there, and it kind of keeps things more temperate than you realize, because it does get, what feels like cold in Boston, until you get to Burlington. [laughing]

MICHAEL: [laughing] Yeah, it’s definitely a different group of people up here, that’s for sure.

JEFF: [laughing] (4:21) Did you, yourself, relocate to Burlington? Or are you from up there?

MICHAEL: Like many people, especially Asian/American’s, I’m Asian-American, there’s not a large population of native Asian Americans here or generations of Asian-Americans, so I married into Vermont. I think my wife’s a 4th generation or 5th generation Vermonter. So, she grew up on the border of Vermont and Canada and introduced me to Vermont. I’m from Arizona which is in the Southwest, and most people in the Southwest don’t believe there’s a state other than New England, [laughing] and Boston’s the capital. So, when I first met my wife Shannon, I literally looked at her and said, “what’s Vermont? Is that a city in New England?” [laughing] That’s how ignorant people in the West Coast can be about the rest of the country.

JEFF: Well, that’s sad. I mean, the reason I bring all this up and particularly relocating is because these remote cities there’s a lot of interest in remote work because there oftentimes isn’t that magnetic pull that a lot of the tech hub cities are that we think about. But, before we get into that, let’s introduce you to the listeners. You’ve done a whole bunch of things.(5:48)  You’re the CEO of Reconciled, and an entrepreneur who has done a whole bunch of things over time. Tell us about that,  and particularly, as that relates to your experience around remote work. 

MICHAEL: I got started in my career in accounting and finance during and after college, but I always knew inherently I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I had an entrepreneurial drive. My parents are both entrepreneurs, they were both refugees from Cambodia, and kind of modeled, or me and my siblings starting out with nothing, starting something with nothing looks like, and so, me and my siblings inherited that in our DNA and so me and my siblings are all entrepreneurs to this day, which is great. So, I knew that I would want to start something. When I moved out to Burlington, Vermont, my wife and I came here to basically raise our kids. We had one child at the time, and we have had two more since then. I knew being here in Burlington that it wasn’t going to be the same kind of economic environment, or the same population that creates the mass you need for a fast-growing ecosystem, so I set out to figure out what I wanted to do next. So, I started doing CFO consulting for different companies and a few years into being here, when I reached the summer of 2015, I realized that this whole bookkeeping side of a business was a big challenge for most entrepreneurs and startups. So, it’s usually the last thing that entrepreneurs think about, is bookkeeping and accounting. It’s not sexy, it’s not fun, it’s very tedious for most entrepreneurs, so I went out to solve that issue and try to come up with a systemized way as well as a way to provide accounting and bookkeeping services to startups across the country and entrepreneurs, that was affordable, accessible and allowed them to focus on their core strength which is what’s growing their product or service that they went into business in the first place with. That’s the idea that began. I wanted to do it from here in Burlington, Vermont, which is where I live, and not have to move to a major city like Boston or New York to do it. So, spent the summer of 2015 coming up with framework of Reconciled, hired my first bookkeeper and chose a platform, QuickBooks, to do it from and additional accounting apps to do it from, and began growing the business and acquiring customers. And before I realized that I’m four years in, I’ve got 20 employees, five additional team members that are contractors and adding about one or two employees a month to the team. All those team members are distributed. Basically, from the beginning I didn’t want location, like being in Burlington, to be an inhibitor to the growth of our business, so we’ve intentionally looked at cities and states to hire from, so now we have employees in eight different states, and I think additional team members, contractors in maybe five additional states on top of that. So, we’re disbursed in about a dozen states and we have clients in about half the states in the country. It’s been really a great experience to jump into this and really see distributed workforce and remote teams as a strength not a weakness to what we do. 

JEFF: Certainly. Having run a distributed company you start looking for resources that are sort of compatible with that, and it’s relatively easy to hire developers who want to work remotely, it’s easy to hire management sometimes, marketing people, sales people certainly, but especially when you get to [laughing] more traditional, more linear professions like bookkeepers and accountants and stuff like that, for some reason I’ve found it’s really difficult to find those kind of people who want to work remotely, who are looking at remote jobs as a possibility. I’m not exactly even sure why, so, it’s nice to talk to companies like yours that already speak that language. So, there’s sort of this skill of, is accounting different for a remote work company than it is for a physical company? Maybe there’s some little bit of different ways of thinking, but it’s not particularly. In having tried to hire a bookkeeper and an accountant, a CFO type people internally, it’s been difficult in a remote environment. I’m guessing you have a whole list. (11:08) What are the advantages of hiring a company like yours where people have that experience?

MICHAEL: Obviously, our primary employees, our bookkeepers/accounting professionals, CFOs, are teams, and they’re all remote workers and so, to address some of the challenges you’re talking about, where companies have had a hard time finding remote workers that are in the field, if you think about the accounting profession in general, much like other industries that move very slow, and slow adopters to technology, the accounting profession is very conservative.

JEFF:  Well, and you want your accountant to be methodical. You don’t want them to make mistakes. [laughing]

MICHAEL: Yes, exactly. You them methodical. And the people that are drawn to accounting, tend to be, I think in that vein. I mean, I could be stereotyping, and some in the accounting profession don’t like me  saying [laughing] these kind of things, but when we go out and look for accounting professionals, what also confirms, what validates what you’re talking about is, we often get accounting professionals to see our job ad and we’re literally the first remote accounting job they’ve ever seen in their whole career. So, one, they think it’s a scam at first, but they explore it, and it’s not until they get to the second or third interview that they realize, “oh, wait, this is a real company. They legitimately are providing a real career, they’re not an MLN scam or some other kind of scam, or a Nigerian prince wanting us to send some money.” 

JEFF: We are talking about both methodical people, but also this is finances where you want to be careful and conservative and secure and all that kind of stuff, and that realm is rife with scams. In fact, even when we start talking about banking and anything in the cyber/virtual realm, everyone’s hair goes up on the bac) of their neck.

MICHAEL: Right. And so, because of that, we realize, okay, we need to both not only close the trust gap with our customers, but also with our potential employees, to say that, even though remote work for accounting professionals is still in the minority for the industry, it is a fast-growing minority. You see platforms coming out and also competitors to Reconciled that are coming out, that are providing, kind of the uberization of remote work for accounting professionals, but also are completely remote companies themselves. So, we knew that and acknowledged that, and so what we did was, we were very intentional in our journey as a remote and distributed company. We began hiring and making intentional hires in cities that were either driving distance or one flight away from Burlington. That’s how we started.

We said, “okay, if we want to begin introducing this remote work concept to our potential employees and our customers, let’s start off with hiring people in the Greater Burlington area, in the whole state of Vermont, so that they can get to Burlington, across the lake in New York, in Manchester, New Hampshire and then let’s start looking at cities where, literally, me or the team member can get on one flight and come to Burlington or I can reach out to them physically.”

We begin just doing those easy, low hanging fruit ways of doing that and that’s what kind of began our journey with remote work.

JEFF: (14:42) So, what does that look like when hiring? You’re not posting on a remote work job board; you’re targeting those specific locations with your job posts?

MICHAEL: We are actually posting on remote work job boards but we’re saying specifically you need to be located in these cities or states, or in the greater areas of these states, and, yeah, exactly, we’re also posting  in the cities of those locations to say this is a remote job, work from home job with flexibility. We usually provide also a coworking space in that city for people who want to get out of their house on occasion as well. But, we’re very intentional about that. The other thing that is the accounting hat that I put on is, and one thing that a lot of distributed teams don’t think through is, when you hire, for every additional city or state you hire in, you create what you call “tax nexus” for your company. So, if you have a closely held organization like an LLC or partnership, S corp., or even a C corp., for every place you hire an employee, you now have to register in the state for employment tax; you have to register for unemployment tax; you have to register for Workmen’s Compensation. There might be a municipal tax or a local family or medical leave law that you have to abide by as a remote company, and then as a partner you have to then begin filing an IRS tax filing for that state, or an S corp. filing. And those are the things that I think a lot of CEO’s and entrepreneurs that are doing distributed work, they don’t think about. They don’t go, “Oh, I unintentionally created tax nexus and now I have this tax filing in Delaware that I didn’t expect to happen.”

JEFF: I think one year I signed tax forms for probably many different states. 

MICHAEL: [laughing] Right. And those are the things where I put my tax hat on and went, “okay, I don’t want to have to deal with five states out of the gate, I want to deal with two or three, and then as I grow, I’ll add an additional, additional,” unless I’m hiring for a really obscure skillset where, okay, I’m willing to deal with somebody in Rhode Island or somebody in a state I don’t operate in right now, then I want to be intentional about the tax nexus I create. That’s really important for both our customers but also for us as we’re building a distributed team.

JEFF: It keeps it cleaner. (17:21) To hire people willy-nilly around the United States, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the biggest problem is that, particularly at the Federal level, the revenue services don’t understand [laughing] remote work, and oftentimes as I say, there’s not a checkbox for that. So, in addition to these twenty different tax forms I filled out for all the different states then on top of that, you get another four or five angry letters from some random state saying, “hey, you owe us $20,000 because we misunderstood something,” and thankfully I had a really good team to help with that stuff and [laughing] I was able to send it off to them, and the response was always, “oh, don’t worry about this.” But it is scary to have that happen, but I like the strategy, by also keeping it so that people are one flight away, especially if you’re growing a company, to just know that you can get people together physically when you need to.

MICHAEL: Right. We’re very intentional, we try to get our whole company together, physically in person at least once a year if not twice a year. So, we do that for a variety of reasons, but also as a distribute company you’re trying to augment the natural, cultural creation that happens in an office. Right. The natural cultural. You’re trying to augment that with technology, and technology can go so far, but also, we understand that  physical human interaction, especially in a larger group, is sometimes hard to replace.

JEFF: It’s tough to beat a million years of evolution.

MICHAEL: Totally. [laughing] Exactly. We don’t have long enough a timeframe as a society to doing distributed work together in large groups, and until we get those options and that history created, the fact is, we’re going to have virtual reality created to make that even better pretty soon here. Facebook and all these other companies are working on it. but until then, we’re going to have to augment with technology that we have, with videocalls, group chats, and then we got the occasional in person, which frankly is fun. If you could remember growing up, those camping trips or youth retreats or high school or  college trips that you did, or road trips, and just the experiences that you had from those, that’s what we’re trying to recreate when we finally get together. The team members just go, “Wow. That person I’ve been talking to on video for three, four, six months a year, almost, I get to see them in person. I feel like I know them, but now I really know them.” So, we really think it creates that camaraderie and that team knittedness that we need by doing that once a year gathering.

JEFF: (20:47) What do your gatherings look like? Is it a multi-day thing or do you get together for a meeting? What does it look like?

MICHAEL: We geek out on tax law [laughing]. No.

JEFF: [laughing] I wouldn’t want to be there, but I have a lot of respect for that. 

MICHAEL: [laughing] Really. Usually it’s about two days at least of time together, with travel on the backend and the frontend, it’s usually three days total, but two days of actually being together. We have about a days’ worth of training and that training could be related to updates on QuickBooks online and the accounting software that we’re using to serve our clients, updates on how the company is growing and what our plans are and the team members that we’re adding. Then we try to have a lot of fun. This month actually in a couple weeks, we’re having our staff gathering for this year, and we’re going to do some fall stuff in Vermont. We’re going to do some fun things that a lot of the team members that don’t  live here have never been exposed to. We try to do something fun and teamwork related to get the team getting to know each other and really getting physical touch points involved that aren’t going to happen because we’re a distributed team. It’s a lot of training and then a lot of fun. 

JEFF: It’s really tough to explain these distributed company retreats or get togethers to people that only have experience in a physical, collocated company because when you picture a retreat there, there’s parodies on The Office about this, [laughing], like, “we’re going to do trust falls and things like that,” but when people have been deprived of this connection of literally being in the same room together, it’s really intense and powerful and also has this amazing ability to sustain. You can feel it in the culture of the company for weeks and months after a get together, and really you only need to get your team together a year to get that.

MICHAEL: Oh yeah. I would describe it as, ‘if you think about the best of what office interaction or being in an office has the best, and you take out all the worst things.

JEFF: The best. This is the best folks. [laughing]

MICHAEL: Yeah, because if you take out all the politics that happens in an office, it doesn’t happen. All the politics, the things you take for granted, all the annoying things, and you only put all the highlights of being in an office; the occasional times where you’re just having an amazing time, where the best  jokes are being told, where you’re having outings and dinners, all that happens in a matter of a few days, and you condense all that, that’s why it’s memorable. Then all the things that you don’t like about being in an office, those things just don’t happen because you’re not in an office, your not taking each other for granted. You’re actually like, “Wow, I (24:14) really enjoy being in your presence.”

JEFF: You’re not stumbling over each other. Everything needs to happen proactively and why would you proactively do the negative stuff. 

MICHAEL: Yes.

JEFF: Why would you go out of your way to passively, aggressively do some office politic elbowing move? 

MICHAEL: Right, and what’s great too is, and a lot of companies do this, is we make everybody stay in Airbnb’s together, so it’s not like a corporate retreat where you’re each  in your own hotel room, and you’re in the Airbnb’s together, you’re getting to see each other at night and seeing each other in your pajamas, [laughing] and you’re waking up and having breakfast and coffee together, so you’re getting a sense of, “I’m really getting to know this person in this condensed time,” and they’re not distracted by family life or by office politics or by office distractions, because we’re in these Airbnb’s hanging out, spending time together, and then we’re doing these team things together, whether it’s training or fun. I find it to be really, really great.

JEFF: Yeah. And here, again, (25:27) I would imagine if someone’s listening who is a manager at a collocated company, maybe they’re listening because they’re thinking about doing this remote work thing, some of this stuff is going to sound pretty foreign, but as soon as you start putting together a remote team, it just seems kind of logical to seeing people in their homes anyways, there’s more of an acceptance of a casual event, and even this craving to get together in a way that I feel like in office environments there’s more of a craving? part. [laughing] At least stereotypically. 

(26:18) Talk to me about, in starting this accounting firm you also need to find customers, we talked some about finding employees, people to do the work but this is a services business [laughing] and oftentimes again, as with these traditional businesses, this is an old profession of accounting, people just look for the accountant around the corner or down the street,  or the business next door asking “who is your accountant?” How do you find customers?

MICHAEL: One thing I talk about with this is accounting is in this service area that I call the “handful of services that most people buy locally,” and it’s a service that has high trust and high fiduciary responsibility. So, if you think about who are the services? You usually purchase your attorney or legal services, your banker or where you bank, your accountant, your doctor and maybe your psychologist. Those are the five. For every major small business or entrepreneur, these five, I buy local, even though I could buy virtual. I could see virtually now. The technology exists to do it. Even Teladoc is a possibility. My health insurance Aetna has this Teladoc service where I can literally just talk to a doctor and a nurse by my phone and get diagnosed. I can see a psychologist on video now, a counselor on video. I can talk to an attorney and a banker.

So, everything is available to do, but the majority of us, 80% to 90% of us still do this locally. I knew that and sensed that and realized that as a CFO and somebody with an accounting background, and said I need to leap or build a bridge over that trust gap by creating a very transparent culture and company and values for Reconciled on the face of what we do. Our website, our branding, and all our videos, I did video very early and accounting firms don’t do videos [laughing], we’re very boring, so I did video very early to let people know, in the beginning you’re basically trusting that Michael Ly and what we’ve built is trustworthy. So, explaining to them very clearly how we work, what we do, the software we use, how we plan to communicate with clients, where your data is going to be stored, how it’s going to be housed, we talk about all of that and we explain that to our early customers.

And, of course, any service business I let my CFO clients that I was consulting know in the beginning, “hey, I’m starting this online bookkeeping firm. I’ve got a bookkeeper hired. I’m going to hire more. They’re all going to be U.S. based. They’re all going to be certified and efficient in QuickBooks and other accounting apps, you can trust us, and if you’ve worked with me in the past and now, you can work with my team.”

That was early on. But then using the videos and leveraging our website and leveraging LinkedIn, I began acquiring customers that were not in Vermont or in my local vicinity but were clear across the country. So, they would find our website, see our videos, resonate with me as an entrepreneur, and from the beginning sharing my entrepreneurial journey, talking about how Reconciled itself is a startup, I’m an entrepreneur, how I can relate to what they’re going through.

So, really being transparent about myself and about my values and what I was trying to do, helped us acquire customers. That was really, really helpful. Then, probably our biggest growth has been from something that many people in other industries have done, but accountants have never done, which is email marketing. At Reconciled, we’ve been doing email marketing since fairly early starting out and that put us in a really different position than a lot of accounting and bookkeeping firms, because most of the emails I get that are called emails, are from software developers overseas or marketing agencies or software as a service company, but I never, ever, ever got one from a bookkeeper and accountant. We began doing that early on.

The company has only been around for four years, so probably about a year in, I began playing around with the email marketing, and realized how fast we could grow from it. It’s been one of our biggest customer acquisition strategies over the past three years.

JEFF: (31:13) Who do your customers tend to be? Are they just your standard (31:22) collocated company? Are they looking for something more virtual to start with? Is there any sort of vertical that you’re tending to find yourself in, or patterns? Or is it just all over the board?

MICHAEL: We do have a heavy concentration of customers in probably a handful of industries, and they tend to be faster growing industries right now, and also forward thinking. We have a lot of clients that are e-commerce companies or what I call “multichannel sellers.” These are people that have created a product and they are selling them on a website like Shopify and also on Amazon and E-Bay and other marketplace platforms, and they might be also wholesaling it to retail stores. So, multichannel sellers, professional services firm, so other service providers that are either doing marketing or HR or sales online and they also are distributed companies, professional services, digital marketing agencies, most digital marketing agencies we work with are distributed teams so they’re really easy to work with, because they themselves are selling a distributed service. Then breweries and alcohol, that happens to be the fact that we are in Vermont and because Vermont’s well-known as a brewery place, and because we would pickup early brewery clients, we’ve been able to get others across the country, so anybody in brewery or alcohol, but that industries growing very fast. People making alcohol, whether in recession or in a bull market, people are drinking, [laughing] and breweries like to be savvy with resources that they have, so they’re using a service like ours.   Then “sass” companies, “software as a service company,” they tend to be distributed as well. Those are the industries we have heavy concentration in, but we also have quite a number of nonprofits, retail stores, a few restaurants,  people in construction, construction workers, manufacturers, other industries that aren’t necessarily distributed but they are lead by forward thinking entrepreneurs, who want to leverage technology and want to use a service like ours, and resonate with who we are as a brand and who we are as a service. So, that’s been really, really wonderful to serve those types of customers.

JEFF: Cool. I have any number of different directions to take the questions here. (34:12) This one keeps coming to mind. It sort of echoes back to some of the stuff we were talking about earlier, but, as an accounting firm with your own remote workers, with clients with remote workers, do you feel like there are “gotchas” out there? This idea of nexus is sometimes a surprise to people and sometimes as the laws are changing there can be little “gotchas” out there. If you were talking to someone who was starting a fully distributed company or building a remote team onto their existing collocated company, what “back of the napkin” advice would you give them?

MICHAEL: As people are in this journey of hiring people to their teams, and because unemployment is so low right now, there are companies that are obviously trying this remote idea, or remote team idea, mainly out of necessity to find team members across the country, to find team members in states that have maybe a higher unemployment rate. But also, if you’re trying to just start a company and you want to go into this, there’s a few things we’ve seen, a few “common mistakes” or “gotchas”. One is, as people build distributed teams, they want to take advantage of the convenience of having the team members as contractors, which is totally fine. A lot of people starting up start that way, they have a team member as a contractor, but the mistake they make is trying to treat that team member as an employee when they’re not. So, one of the rules you have to know is that the IRS and the state’s that these contractors work in, they will not look at you kindly if you try to treat a contractor like an employee. For example, you can’t really expect a contractor to be loyal to only your business if they’re not an employee, because a contractor, by definition, is a business owner. A contractor by definition can and frankly for their safety, should have, more than you as a worker, otherwise the IRS or the state they’re working from may force you to treat them as an employee later. A lot of companies get into this problem when the contractor, let’s say a contractor is full-time with you, you are their only client, you’ve got 32-40 hours of work for them to do, and let’s even say they’re doing a job for you, that only they can do, they’re doing a marketing role, they’re doing a sales role, they’re doing HR or recruiting for you, but you’re the only company they’re working with, if they’re let go, it’s an official let go or firing that happens, the problem we see clients run into is that contractor then goes in and declares unemployment in the state they’re in.

All of a sudden, you as an employer, like, “wait, unemployment? You’re not an employee.” Then the contractor goes, “yeah, you’ve treated me as an employee this whole time. You’re the only client I work with anyways. You were my livelihood. You’re technically my employer.” The Federal government will most likely side with that employee; almost 9 times out of 10 they side. So, that’s one mistake.

JEFF: At which point they’ll come after you as an employer for all the taxes.

MICHAEL: Taxes. Which you didn’t submit for years. So, that’s the mistake a lot of new companies to this make is, to try to treat somebody as an employee that’s really a contractor or try to treat a person who should be an employee as a contractor.  You want to really clearly define that. Do you really need a contractor or employee when you go about this route and to build your teams? Secondly, if you’re trying to build a real organization, a real business, then my encouragement to everybody is, get employees. Hire employees. Whether they are part-time or full-time, hire people that will be employees, because you want them to be a part of your culture – your team, your brand – you want them helping you build your actual business and to be loyal to you versus leveraging contractors, where a contractor may or may not be loyal to you, but the reality is, they have to be loyal to themselves and to your brand. That’s one of the things I tell people.

JEFF: (38:46) I think this sometimes falls into some misconceptions around remote work as well, that part of the psychological feeling of people not being connected because they’re not working in the same office together, people assume, well then, “I guess they’re probably just contractors.” But I think that’s the wrong direction to go. People that are already prone to isolation, just due to the physical separation, and I’m talking about the evolutionary process on this podcast, but we are used to wanting to be in the room together and when we’re not, it’s something that we need to overcome, and I think making people employees is a step towards…

MICHAEL: Right. And also, you want to attract people that have bought into your vision and bought into what you’re trying to build and grow. Employees are the one loyal to that vision. A contractor theoretically can be, it’s just from a reality standpoint, they legally aren’t going to be loyal, because you’re a customer to them, and you should treat them as such. You should treat them as a vendor and they should treat you as a customer, they should be invoicing you for their time or however they’re billing you, and you need to treat the relationship as such. That’s fortunately or unfortunately, the way that the State and the Federal government has set it up.

Now, there is also a strategic route in which you build a remote team and you want to think through how you’re going to, as we talked about, compensate for that isolation. The way we do that is, by intentional check-ins, and an intentional structure, where every employee has an ability to check in, either with a team or with the person they’re being supervised by.

Just because you’re doing remote work, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a supervisor, or you don’t have team members that you’re a part of, or a team you’re a part of, and that you should have intentional check-ins leveraging technology to do so, just like you would in an office, where you might have a pop-up check-in or a scheduled check-in, in a conference room that’s in your office, you want to have the same thing happening in a virtual room, for virtual team meetings.

So, we leverage the technology Slack to do that, as well as Zoom or Google Hangouts to do that. Slack let’s our team stay up to date and have what I call the office banter virtually, and then we can do the spontaneous or the scheduled video conference that mimics the conference room. That would be in your office. So, that’s really important to be intentional about the strategy you are going to use to connect people, because it is isolating, if you’re not intentional about it, you could end up working your 40+ hour week only connecting with a co-worker for one or two hours of that whole week. That can be fairly isolating if you’re not in an office.  You want to be intentional about that.

JEFF: Absolutely. (41:59) And all of this stuff is good management. I’ve said it before on the podcast, and I will continue to say it, “remote work is ankle weights for management.” [laughing] It’s a little bit more difficult, but we’re building stronger muscles and ultimately you become a stronger manager, and all of these check-ins, all of these ways of communicating that are more direct and more open and more honest, and less high-fiving, and more emails saying exactly what you would’ve meant by a high-five if you were able to give one, are good management. Right?

MICHAEL: Right. I’d say the other, last mistake or assumption is, if you’re an established company and you’re going to go the remote or distributed route for cost saving measures, let’s say you’ve got a 4,000 square foot office and you’re paying a large amount of rent, and you’re in the middle of New York City or LA, or whatever, and you’re like, “okay, if I go distributed and people work from home, and I can get half the space for maybe the executives, or a quarter the space for core management team I’m going to save some money.” Well, the mistake to think through is that it’s a like for like cost savings, because the reality is, you’re going to have to make some investments. You’re going to have to think through, okay, you’re going to require employees to have a solid internet connection at home that never goes down, that’s fast enough, especially fi they’re programmers or people downloading large amounts of data to interact with your company or do the work. Well, you might have to upgrade their internet at home and that’s an extra expense now for the employee that you’re going to have to think about in reimbursing. You’re going to have to make sure everybody’s got the same kind of setup at home. Do they have a separate home office at home, or an office that’s quiet, or do they have dogs barking, and cats meowing and kids running around? Well, okay, they’re going to have to think about that as for the employees that don’t have that you might have to pay for coworking space that’s nearby their house.

JEFF: Especially when you have a client services business where they may be on the phone or even on video conference with clients.

MICHAEL: Yeah. You might have to invest in some technology – better microphones, better headsets for employees, you might have to get an office chair that’s comfortable because they are going to be sitting at their home office. Those are all things I think people forget that are going to be investments they’re going to have to make that won’t necessarily have a like for like cost savings, maybe you need to be more realistic about what you’re going to save and like you just mentioned, the intentionality of management. Now you’ve got to train your people on how to manage remote teams. You’ve got to train your people about how to communicate and what is expected in communication online versus offline now, now that you’re not in an office to get those offline cues. So, those are all things I think somebody looking at this is going to have to look through.

JEFF: It always seems like bad news that it’s not a cost saving thing for companies. Maybe there are ways that companies could save costs, but it really comes at the expense of connection and ultimately an all-around better experience for productivity, morale, employee retention and just general connectedness of a company. There’s so many opportunities to do that, that I think if you really were to try  to impose those cost savings? you’d be missing out on stuff in a way that ultimately, I think would be detrimental for most companies. 

MICHAEL: I agree. That makes a lot of sense.

JEFF: (45:53) Are there any other “gotchas”, the states that people should avoid doing business in or hiring from? Are there things like that that you’ve seen?

MICHAEL: I definitely encourage companies to do their research before they hire an employee in a particular state, to do their research on the state and the state requirements. We’ve made an intentional decision to never hire a remote worker in California. There’s a variety of reasons, one of which California makes the tax reporting requirements from a revenue perspective very stringent, and also the types of registrations you have to go through as a company as an employer and what you have to provide to the employee, makes it very, very difficult to make the cost justified to hire somebody in California. There’s also states that have much more stringent family and medical leave acts and so you need to be aware of that, and also, there are states that have much hard overtime rules than the state that you’re probably operating from.

So, for example, the State of Vermont, the  way it defines a contractor versus employee is actually more stringent than the Federal government. So, we have overtime rules that you wouldn’t necessarily have in most states, so I make all of our bookkeepers that start out here, they all have to track time, because there’s overtime rules, versus other states where you could probably tell an employee, “oh, don’t worry about tracking time, you could work whenever.” Well, that’s actually not something that you’re allowed to do here in Vermont.

So, you want to make sure you do your homework on that and see how  stringent the state is. But, then also the advantages, there might be states where unemployment is really high, so there’s going to be a lot of talent at a good rate or a better than market rate, and you’ll be able to get a really great talent who can work from home, and then the cost of living might be significantly lower in some of these states you hire from, so therefore, you’re going to get a great experienced remote worker that might be at a half or seventy-five percent of what it might cost you for the same remote worker in Boston or New York City or San Francisco.

So, that’s another advantage to think through also is, being intentional about what’s the cost of living in the city? What’s unemployment like? What kind of talent are the colleges around there producing and what kind of companies are around there, that’s going to give you a sign of, if that state or city is going to have the kind of talent you’re looking for?

JEFF: I have a business coaching client that had a problem in California hiring a part-time remote employee because they weren’t working enough hours to be overtime exempt. Is that what it’s called?

MICHAEL: Yeah.

JEFF: And so, as a non-exempt employee all of their hours had to be defined and they had to have a half-hour lunch break and a break in the afternoon, a break in the morning, and it all had to be documented. It was just so very incompatible with the flexible, remote work stuff. We’re seeing that. You’ve got things out there like Uber that are redefining work, and I think, kind of in a good way, that the governments are stepping in and going like, “Wait, wait, wait, let’s make sure that employees are covered.”  But in some cases, they’re not considering all of the cases and they’re rewriting the laws. But still there’s no checkbox for remote work. 

MICHAEL: [laughing] Right.

JEFF: So, you get into problems like that. I’ve also heard difficulty with New Jersey and remote work, and as a professional services business, having clients in Texas the law at least last I knew was sort of viral, they would tax the entire business on the entire businesses income as if it was all made in Texas, or something along those lines. I need to keep track of all this. We should  put a webpage together that lists all of these things, mostly to reflect them back so that these governments can see how this reflects on us as employers with remote employees.

MICHAEL:It is a new territory. If you think about if you have American employees or non-American employees who decide to work remotely overseas and permanently relocate to Portugal, Spain or Brazil, or to Australia, then you have this other challenge of, “okay, can I treat them as a contractor now?” “Are there payroll companies that will do international payroll?” “What’s the tax implications for my company if I have an employer overseas.” There’s all that.

There’s also NAFTA rules if you have contractors in Canada. If you have employees in Canada, there’s these NAFTA rules you have to abide by. Do you have to now abide by GST and HST tax depending on the province they work in? There’s all these complications that jumping into this, you need to make sure you do your homework. I know a lot of companies leverage platforms, like Upwork or Fiver, and there’s another company called Safeguard International, that helps you set up remote workers in international countries, so that you’re protected and you’re abiding by all the compliance rules. But you want to make sure you’re doing your homework and not creating unintended compliance or scrutiny for yourself, that you’ll have to deal with later.

And oftentimes it hits when you think you’re doing really well, then it hits you, a notice, a notification, and all of a sudden, you’ve got a tax bill for three years and in your fourth year is super successful and you get this tax bill that just wipes it all out. You want to be intentional about those things, and having good advisors, having a good team around you, that knows and does that research for you, your legal outsourcing HR or accounting so that you don’t have to build that expertise in-house, that’s going to be really important for you with a distributed team.

JEFF: (52:17) Right. I realize that this is adjunct to your focus as a CFO organization, but I guess when it comes to taxes and salaries and stuff like that, what are your feelings about “PEOs?” which I should explain for listeners, is “Professional Employment Organizations.” A company who acts as a buffer between the company and its employees, and intercepts [laughing] and kind of handles all of this stuff?

MICHAEL: We totally believe in PEOs.  Reconciled, itself, uses a PEO.  We use Just Works as our PEO. It’s one of the fastest growing PEOs in the country and the great thing about PEOs, the advantage for a distributed remote team for PEOs is, if you’re trying to build an employee base that’s remote, they’ve taken care of all the necessary requirements, and they inform you of the requirements that you’re going to have to take care of, state by state. They are really great at customer service, really great at communicating about it. They’re growing very fast, so they’re obviously onboarding new customers every day and every week, but they had to deal with the complexity of employment/employer reporting in every single state. 

JEFF: This is the same reason you use an accountant. We could all conceivably do our own taxes, it’s just really complicated and difficult and you want to make sure that it’s done right. I think it’s the same thing when it comes to employment. These days especially, if it is as complicated as hiring people across state lines, or certainly across international borders. 

MICHAEL: And you want to make sure you get to know the PEO. You abide by their specific rules. So, there is a way that PEOs do things that you can’t do if you were not with a PEO. For example, there are very specific ways in which if you accidentally pay an  employee more than they should on their payroll, and you’re using a PEO to do that, or you accidentally pay the wrong employee, payroll for somebody else, there’s specific steps you have to take that are way more stringent than if you just did payroll on your own through a payroll provider, and you have a lot more flexibility. You also have to abide by your state rules. Some employers don’t know that if you accidentally pay an employee more than they should be paid, every state has rules about whether or not you  can collect that back, so it’s very, very interesting and whether or not you’re even allowed to hold an employee responsible for that. So, it’s very interesting in regards to that.

Also, I tell this about both when evaluating a payroll provider and a PEO who’s handling your payroll, but also your HR, is that you want to make sure that PEO or payroll provider is legitimate and is going to be around. So, we’ve run into more recent situations where there was a big story about a payroll company that was in New York and they basically had a huge scandal and diverted $35 million of their clients 4,000 employers payrolls. That happens with a payroll company that has 4,000 customers, you think, who has been around for 12 years, you think, “okay, their good.” No, you got to do your homework. You really got to make sure what are their practices and policies. Some of those customers went out of business that were impacted and some of them were able to recover, but it’s something that you want to really make sure you do your homework on and have the right advisors around you to vet these service providers and these PEOs. But I definitely encourage it and think it’s a great option for fast growing distributed teams.

JEFF: (56:34) Absolutely. Anything that can help with the complexity of things and ensure that the “i’s” are dotted and the “t’s” are crossed and stuff.  Interesting conversation Michael, thank you so much. Is there anything else that you want to touch on? Anything that we talked about today that was brought up that you want to bring up before we wrap up?

MICHAEL: I would say that in regards to building your company, especially distributed teams, is, whatever product or service you are providing, I would encourage companies to stay in their core focus. A lot of the times the areas of your business, like HR, IT, sales, legal, marketing, accounting, those are all areas which considering a best in practice, or best in class service provider out there, can really help you accelerate your growth and allow you to stay focused on your core area. So, as the example that you gave earlier, having to find a remote accountant to work with that would be part of your team, oftentimes you can find that kind of person but they might be with a service provider, or they might be with a company as a trusted brand, so, whether it’s HR, marketing, sales, the areas in which you know you’re not strong in, finding the service out there that can be best in class, that can be your partner, can really be a great way for you to learn quickly to get to market quickly, but also to avoid mistakes of having to build the expertise that helps.

JEFF: And it’s just fatiguing to build that much [laughing]. You think, “oh, we could learn that, that’s not a problem,” but it’s a lot of work to put it together. Another advantage of hiring a company like yours as opposed to doing it in-house is, the sort of aggregate knowledge that you’re able to bring as laws change, as techs issues change, as there’s new best practices, as other companies are starting to do new things, working with  a company like yours, that knowledge becomes a benefit whereas if you’re depending on that in-house person to keep up and stay up with the latest things or (58:59) mistakes will happen. 

Well, Michael. (59:00) If anyone wanted to follow-up with you, get in touch, ask further questions or find out more about Reconciled and the other things that you do, how should they get in touch with you?

MICHAEL: You can shoot an email to info@getreconciled.co or you can follow my Twitter, @burlingtoncfo is my Twitter handle. You can also follow getreconciled which is a Twitter handle for our company. People think I’m the Burlington Coat Factory CFO or the City of Burlington CFO, but otherwise follow me on @burlingtoncfo. I’d love to connect with you.

JEFF: Nice. Well thank you, Michael. Thanks so much for all the information.

MICHAEL: Definitely. Thank you, Jeff.

Here’s the transcript:

JEFF: Hi Everyone. It’s Jeff Robbins, back with Episode 76 of the Yonder Podcast, where we talk to company leaders and big thinkers, about how to make remote work. We’re focused on expanding the remote work job market, and helping listeners to create happy, productive distributed teams. This time we’re  talking with Wences Garcia, who is the head of Culture and co-founder at Marketgoo. Marketgoo.com is where you can find Marketgoo, and we have an interesting conversation today about Culture. Wences is the head of Culture at MarketGoo and talks about Culture and the role that plays for company leaders and CEO’s. We talk about employment regulations, particularly in the EU and Spain, and we talk about language and language barriers which is a thing we don’t talk about nearly enough on this podcast. Interesting conversation coming up with Wences Garcia. 

If you’re not already getting the yonder newsletter, go, do it now. Yonder.io/newsletter is where you can sign up for that, and we will let you know when the new podcast episodes come out, we’ll let you know when new articles get posted on the Yonder website, and we’ll find little bits and pieces around the web, little clips, ideas and we’ll send them to you right in your inbox and you can stay updated.  Yonder.io/newsletter is where you can do that. And, if you’re not subscribed to the podcast, you can do that too through Apple podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, and we’re up on Spotify now, too. 

Alright. Let’s get to out interview with Wences Garcia.

JEFF: Hi Wences. Welcome to the Yonder Podcast.

WENCES GARCIA: Happy to be here, Jeff.

JEFF:  It’s great to have you on. As I often ask our guests, the first question on the podcast is, (2:43) where in the world are you? 

WENCES: At this moment I am in Madrid, Spain at my house, no office.

JEFF:  (2:53) Do you have no office? Or you just happen to be at home now?

WENCES:  It’s funny, I say that we have no office, and I’m still getting used to it, because we are a remote company. We used to have a small office in Madrid, downtown, but we closed it back in June. So, I moved into another house just two weeks ago, so for me it’s strange, being in a new house without an office. [laughing] That’s why I got rid of it. Like, shock, no?

JEFF: [laughing] There’s always this, is it shame we have? Or difficulty of feeling am I still legitimate if I don’t have an office, office.

WENCES:  My wife is complaining because she doesn’t find  anything in the kitchen either [laughing], but my problem is worst, I don’t find anything in my office. It’s full of boxes in the new place and everything is different from my office. But, I’m very happy I have to say.

JEFF:  [laughing] Good. So, you are the head of Culture and co-founder at MarketGoo. (4:07) Why don’t you tell us about what MarketGoo is and what your background is and all that?

WENCES:  We make SEO tools that are easy to use to help mostly SMBs to have more success online, to attract more visits. We’re not a very well-known brand, but we’re reaching almost one quarter million users using our solution. The trick is that we distribute our own solution through different companies, most of them hosting companies. I’d say Bluehost in the U.S. for example, a well-known brand. So that’s what we do. This is a company I started and co-founded seven years ago and the solution we co-founded is based on our past experience in the hosting industry.

JEFF:  (5:19) So, how many people are at the company?

WENCES: At this moment we have 15 core members plus we work with another 10- external permanent co-workers.  I prefer to explain because sometimes when I talk to some of our partners they say, “how many are you?” So, working mostly full-time on the team are roughly 20 people, but core members who have been working with us for most of this time is about 15 core members.

JEFF: (5:57) And is everyone is Spain?

WENCES: No. We have people in 3 or 4 different time zones, but most of the people are in Spain. 

JEFF: (6:23) Is Spanish the core language of the company?

WENCES:  Yes, it is. That is an interesting topic. Although our main which is English, Spanish tends to invade most of the conversations. [laughing]

JEFF:  [laughing] Yeah, that’s an interesting topic. When you’re spanning countries, what’s the language that you’re going to speak. It sort of defines, ultimately, who you hire based on what languages they speak. 

WENCES:  I found the most challenging thing about the language, when it comes to motivation or trying to transmit or express things that are not in your native language, like English is not a native language for me, so when it comes to our retreats or when we have to speak and motivate or do some kind of a speech, that’s where I found the most limitations. Also, in the joking side [laughing] as always, but despite that most of our partners are in English, most of our customers work using English. 

JEFF:  (7:51) It’s funny this idea that English is the language of the business world, is probably an idea that people who spoke English made up [laughing]. It doesn’t necessarily need to be the rule, but oftentimes on this podcast, we’re just assuming that everyone is speaking English, but this issue around language is probably one that we should talk about a lot more.

WENCES:  When I go to some trade shows and I start speaking with some founders of companies and maybe prospects for us, and, as I said the tricky part comes when it’s late at night and you’re having drinks or having some good fun with somebody, [laughing] they’ll start with this slang and jokes and then you start putting those faces like, “oh, yeah, that’s a funny thing, [laughing] and you got no clue what they’re  talking about.

JEFF:  Well, and a lot of cultural references to children’s television shows and things like that that aren’t always a common point of reference.

WENCES:  Kind of. So, I tend to go to the known places like cars or stuff like that. [laughing] I try to eliminate the jokes. 

JEFF:  [laughing] Yeah. This is something that probably all of us should be conscious of. If  we manage or even just work with coworkers from different countries, they probably have different cultural reference points. 

WENCES:  Exactly. For example, we have one Latvian guy and he’s always [laughing] out of place because nobody gets what he’s trying to say to us. He’s always, “no, but this Latvian food is amazing,” and we look at each and are like, “What? What is that?” 

JEFF: So, your whole team is remote. (10:19) You have no office fully distributed team at this point?

WENCES: Yes. Completely remote, fully distributed team at this point.

JEFF:  (10:27) Has it always been that way, or have you transitioned to that?

WENCES: My co-founder is the type of guy that is like this technical guru on the business side, and when we started together, he told me, “you know, I like to work overnight. I go to sleep at five or four, that’s my big zone, so I’m going to be at home.” I said, “that’s okay for me, I don’t find that trouble.” So, from the beginning we were a remote company; that was seven years ago, but as soon as we were starting to grow, I found that some people wanted to go to the office, or myself even, I wanted to have a small office, but as I said it was like two months ago that we decided to close it definitely and move into a completely remote distributed team. So, yeah, it’s been nice so far.

JEFF:  Yeah. (11:27) How does that go over in the Madrid business community? Are there a lot of remote work companies there or [laughing] is it something that people are confused by?

WENCES: Yeah. It’s funny. I’ve been working on the internet since the late nineties, which makes me a little bit old guy, but maybe I’m feeling that I’ve been living always or working in a bubble, because at the time that we decided or we announced that we were going to become a complete remote company and I just tweeted and some of the guys in the company tweet about that, the guys that were friends and colleagues in Madrid, in Spain, that know about us, they were like, “what? Really? You’re going to become remote, remote first?” So, there was a splash of surprise and we’ve been invited to different events to tell about our experience and what is so strange about being remote. The truth is it’s obviously a global trend.

JEFF: (12:48) Do you come across legal issues around this? Sometimes what businesses have done, is where the law sits, [laughing] and when  you try to do something outside of that, you can oftentimes come in contact with ways that the government is less supportive of things like flexible time, kind of undefined exactly when people are working or aren’t working. (13:30) Are there any issues that you found around that?

WENCES:  I think that working and playing a global company that is looking into providing service globally and make business globally, have some dissonance with the country that your company is incorporated in, and in our case it’s Spain. So, there was this recent government change in Spain and these new people decided they have to regulate an obligation to all the workers to say how many hours they were working on a daily basis. So, that’s an example that we’re facing. When this government is making these local laws, they’re affecting companies aiming to work in a global playing field. In our case, it’s a ridiculous thing, like asking our co-workers to just say, “okay, I’m starting now and I’m going to lunch.” It doesn’t make sense. Those are the kind of things that are affecting us. 

JEFF:  Lots of times these laws are made for, as you’re saying, factory workers [laughing] right. For people that are running mill machines and they want to make sure they’re not overworked, it’s not people who are sitting at home on their couch, on their laptop, and sometimes it doesn’t quite line up.

WENCES: I’m not going to rant that much about that, but the strong dissonances they say, “we want to be the next Silicon Valley in Europe” or “we want to be this and that, we want to support technology companies, we want to support very flexible type of organizations,” but at the same time they’re execution is their laws and no, they are not supporting the way that we work. But that’s it, we get over it.

JEFF:  (16:03) So, you’ve chosen the title of Head of Culture. The truth is that you are the co-founder of the company and essentially act as the CEO of the company. But, why head of culture?  

WENCES:  I’m glad that you make that question, because that is a way for me to showcase our team and our culture. Maybe four years ago there was a way to showcase our teams that for us the culture is way more important than even the company. My co-founder and me have past experience in organizations that we didn’t like. It’s in this type of organization where somebody’s looking at you saying, “when they are going to fire me.” Or you just kind of see the fear in their faces. So, my co-founder and me, we had a bad experience in that company, and we were like, “okay, let’s do something. What is making us happy? So, what makes us happy is creating products and having freedom. So, as soon as we started with the project, the project was more important, working on the product, working on distribution, but soon we saw  it was kind of a struggle. The company was not growing the way that we wanted because we decided to be a bootstrap company. We decided not to get any start-up money in the search for freedom, so as the company was not growing, we faced that the only way to motivate the team and to motivate ourselves was looking into a bigger goal. A higher goal than just becoming or having breakeven or this amount of monthly recorded revenue. So, that and the amazing team that we initially gathered was like the perfect ingredients to create a kind of culture that wants to become a part of what we’re doing today. But, our bigger goal, our vision, is to become a high-performance team that is going to work here for years and that we’re going to do what we want, and we want to have freedom and do all this stuff around culture. Why are you laughing?

JEFF:  [laughing] That you had to take control of the culture. 

WENCES:  Yeah. It was getting out of hand, so I said, “okay, I have to become the example of this,” so I decided to start working, and there were so many things to work on the culture side. I started a team and enrolled some people in the company, one programmer and marketing manager and so on. So that’s when I said, “okay, what is exciting me more about running this business,” is it the culture? Obviously, I have a lot of work to do in managing the product on the business side and sales and so on, but I think if I look back in 20 years what I think is going to be creating more impact in what we are today is shaping the culture, so that’s why I choose that one.

JEFF: (20:07) I like this idea a lot. I think that every CEO of a company should realize that they are head of culture as well. Many don’t, but that’s where it comes from. The head of division, head of culture, head of keeping the company together, and ultimately being in charge of the reason why people would want to work there, at your company. It’s great. I really like this idea of putting together a team that sort of has a higher purpose than simply the product that you’re building, and that you could do anything with this team. That’s got to feel great for the people that are working there and feel great for you.

WENCES: It’s, how we say, more foundational than I was expecting. When you say we have a higher goal doing stuff together, but when you put this down, it’s like, “okay, what’re we going to do in the next quarter? Where we going to be in the next year or three years? What is our goals and mission vision and values and so on? For example, one of the biggest challenges is how do we mix it all together? 

So, the question that comes is, when your mission is to become a really high performing team and do this stuff, what you are going to put forward is to have experiments, not to validate, to master to your team, to know you can do freemium or you can do nice acquisition studies, but it’s not that important that you reach the goals. The important thing is that you increase the wisdom. So, it’s harder than you expect. At some time, you say, “we’re not reaching the goals, but we know that this stuff is not working,” so it’s like, “oh, yeah, it’s well done guys. We have our new skill but that is not paying off in the short-term. “Can you spot the challenge there?”

JEFF:  (22:53) Yeah. Absolutely. This is a thing that happens a lot at companies; when your company is very purposeful, focused on a specific goal, and oftentimes you see start-up style companies where they’re bringing in people with incentives that are focused around the goal, “we’re going to have an IPO and you’re going to make a lot of money and that’s why you’re working here.” Then something happens and the company needs to pivot, and they need to change, and they need to adapt, they need to be agile. And all of those people who were focused on that one goal that’s now changed, question whether they should be there anymore. So, if you could focus more on the people and focus more on the journey than the destination, create a great culture, create a great place to work, a place where people really take pride in their work, then it’s pretty easy to adapt and be agile like that. Right? 

WENCES: I’m still running a very controversial idea that is, that we, as a group, and I’m talking about us, we aim to provide every team member self-interest fulfillment. When you say we have to look after the people, so I think that the ultimate way to look after the people is like looking at them and “what is your self-interest?” If your self-interest is aligned to what we want to do like a group, at least there is additional enlightenment, so we are going to go together. Let’s take my co-founder example again, he’s like the typical research guy. He’s not used to working on mythology, organization, screen time, deadlines and stuff like that, so my ultimate goal with him, which is not the present time is, that he will be able to understand what are our challenge is, going back into his cave, working there for weeks and come up with new technology or new approach that we can leverage on that. So, as I said it’s a very crazy idea, but I think that’s like the guiding principle that is taking me into the following years. My vision is how do we accommodate all this stuff? 

JEFF:  (25:45) It’s An interesting idea to think that the collective self-interests of the employees of the company would benefit the company.  I think that oftentimes there’s this view that the business has the businesses needs and the employees individual needs don’t matter. [laughing] They’re not part of that. They would not further the goals of the company as a whole.  It’s been my experience that having a discussion around that, trying to accommodate the individual needs, sort of self-interests as you’re saying, of the employees ultimately can really help accelerate the needs of the companies goals and growths. It doesn’t always line up exactly, but I think there’s a conversation to be had there. Certainly, ultimately the idea is these people want to have jobs, they want the company to be successful so that they’ll have job security and hopefully continue to have the job that they enjoy doing.

WENCES: We are profitable now, but our main metric is profit  brand product because we understand that is a way, we can secure our freedom in a way we are chasing our own self-interest. It’s going to be a nice challenge. Let’s see what happens in five years from now, or something like that.

JEFF: (28:26) And oftentimes, again, in that discussion that we have with employees, maybe they come and say, “I want to build a videogame,” and there’s a conversation to be had. There’s things that they’re not thinking about. Okay, well, who’s going to buy this videogame? Why would people care about this videogame? Can you build an audience? It could be possible that your company could build a spinoff that builds videogames, if there’s actually a business to be built in it. But, oftentimes, this stuff comes from a more developer mindset, more focused mindset is a way of thinking about it, it’s focused on the product and not necessarily the market, and oftentimes there are people, like I’m guessing yourself, who better understand the market and might help to have a more productive conversation around that kind of stuff.

(29:37) This idea of self-interest fulfillment and some companies have talked about this idea of taking your whole self to work or employing the [laughing]complete person rather than this idea of, we have a business self and a personal self, that’s not true. We have our whole self and as a company being able to employ and work with the whole self, I think can be a really good think. But this comes up on this podcast a lot, and a lot of the stuff that you’re talking about, these out there, cutting edge ideas in the business world seem to come up on this podcast a lot. Do you think there’s a relationship between remote work and a lot of these ideas? Do you think it’s because we are the kind of people that have these ideas, we have a company that allows remote work? Or do you think that there’s  a way that it works in the reverse as well, where because we’re doing remote work, we need to think about things differently, and it starts to bring in some of these wider ideas that we don’t see so much in the outside business world?

WENCES: We found that remote type of workers, when we were making the hires, they were more willing to have a mindset closer to value, the organization they were working with and not so strict on what they were going to be compensated for, but the way the company was working. Remote workers want to have their freedom and their freedom starts by where they’re working, how they work, what hours do they work, do we have to face anybody, so we understand people are more sensitive to follow these kind of ideas.

JEFF: (31:44) You have an article that I came across on Medium, that talks about improving your companies culture but quickly starts to talk about managing millennials. Talk to me some about that idea and those ideas in a particular what you see as we hire new generations of workers.

WENCES: I think obviously the people are changing. The experience that we have with millennials is sometimes very different to my colleagues. Obviously, there are different types; the younger people are much more willing to have these challenges and fulfillment. They are more willing to make that on their own, but at the same time I found very hard workers. Everything becomes into self-interest. There are some people in our company that are millennials, and they have a very family-wise type of personality. 

JEFF: And oftentimes I think millennial is sort of a shorthand for a lot of ideas and stigmatized concepts that are labeling beyond just a [laughing] generational label. We’re talking about these kids can’t pay attention, and they don’t work, and they don’t take responsibility, and stuff like that. I totally agree with you. Those labels are dangerous and prejudiced, honestly. But what we’re finding is that there are just simply new people who are entering the workforce without a lot of those legacy old ideas of what work is, so it’s interesting to see how these new ideas are being formed.

(35:28) You talk about your company being a remote first company. What does that mean to you?

WENCES: What it means is that when we used to have this office, in the office was the sales director and head of product and myself and other team members and we reached a moment where we were having two-sided communications, like people in the office and people remote, so we just stopped ourselves.  It was two years ago we started saying we are remote first. Everything should be remote. Everything should be like we have a remote first company, so let’s focus on that. So, I think that remote first means that we are willing to hire people that are willing to work and that we value the freedom and the benefits of remote, but we also understand the constraints. We don’t force people to be on duty every moment. 

JEFF: I like that idea because it seems to be more philosophical and a little bit looser than…

WENCES: than location based.

JEFF: Exactly. That you could be a remote first company and look exactly like a conventional office-based company. Everyone comes into the office, however the way that you meet, the way that you interact, the way that you frame the communications of the company can be different. Ultimately remote first is all about communications than locations.

(37:41) I also noticed that Marketgoo has been growing awfully quickly. How has it been growing a company? Have you come up with any thoughts and philosophies around that? You mentioned that you didn’t want to grow at the expense of freedom. I like that idea too. Talk to me a little more about that. 

WENCES: Yeah. There are ways to do software technology stuff in companies like the ones that we are running. We have a very similar company that started when we started, with the same idea, same market, same stuff, and they raised $15 million Euros and it’s been very nice. We’ve seen the development and they’ve been doing pretty well, but they are not the owners anymore. They are not the ones running the company, they have a lot of constraints, they have a lot of liaisons, they have to grow and grow and grow. So, I understand the opposite side of the lifestyle business which is always not very well-known and not very well appreciated. So, our thing was, we want to retain our freedom, but we are also a business, so let’s make it, let’s be brave, understanding our constraints. We are not going to put one million bucks into advertising, but we have to see there’s another way around. So that was it. It was like, okay, let’s let us decide for ourselves. Let’s make our decisions.  The founders and all the team members, they have more involvement in the decision-making in what we are going to become than others. So, when we have this kind of vision, that I said that the culture is more important than the product that we’re running right now, so we don’t want to be forced to do things that are not aligned to our vision. The vision is to grow in our wisdom and have fun and make nice things together. 

Sometimes when you see companies formulating their vision and mission, everything is very purpose driven, it’s like everybody wants to improve the world. At the end of the day for us, our main purpose is to be the best ones. The purpose is based on the team, it’s not based on some investors waiting to have an exit. 

JEFF: (41:42) I think ultimately a company’s value is its value to the owners of the company and the people that work at the company. Oftentimes that extends beyond monetary value which isn’t to say that it can’t or shouldn’t be financially successful, but there’s this holistic value of how much are you working? How much do you enjoy it? If you can have a job that you hate and have to work 100 hours a week and it makes pretty good money [laughing] or you can have a job that you love and you only have to work 30 hours a week, and  make slightly less money, but ultimately has better value overall. As you’re saying, this idea that oftentimes this phrase ‘lifestyle business’ is used as also a way of stigmatized thing that venture capitalists say, like “oh, you’re a lifestyle business, I’m not going to invest in you,” [laughing] because you can’t be happy and financially successful, and I don’t think that’s true. I like this idea of building a high performing team and just really kicking ass at the things that you set your mind to, and to be able to be successful and happy.

WENCES: Yeah, business related, you have to play with different cards, like when you have all this busy money and you can pour that money into making those experiments, it’s easier to do it. We don’t want to be franchised so we will have to have all these months of burnout of cash in the bank, so that’s one tool that we have. Another tool that we have is that in every decision that we make, we are looking into high leverage; for us it’s leverage, leverage, leverage, always. We have mostly one quarter million users using our tool, we didn’t meet any of these guys. We saw a way to reach these people was through the different channels and hosting companies who have the big amount of SMB, so instead of thinking first against the SMBs we start thinking about our distribution channels and decided to create this sign to be a tool that is a very easy way to resell through that solution types.  What I mean is that you change the way that you are doing the things and you look for leverage or you look for some cash that you can invest. You make your wise investments. You keep your focus very strong. As I said, it’s a different game. You rule your own world.

JEFF:  (45:36 [laughing] Yeah, exactly. Well Wences this is a great conversation. As we’re wrapping up is there anything else that you wanted to touch on?

WENCES: Jeff, I feel like I would be able to speak for hours. It changed my life. I want to change our members’ lives and our teams. We have a lot of competence about culture. We write a lot about them, you know, our plugs, so if it’s helpful for inspiration we always like to be inspired by other companies as well. I think it’s a very exciting moment to be living in remote work, other than this label, “where do you work?” “I work from home”, or “I work in a remote company”, like I will invite people or companies to think beyond maybe their economic benefits or hiding talent and stuff like that and think that creating a remote company is much more of a mindset and there is a lot of that we can do with that mindset. We haven’t spoken any about the challenges. Like for example one of the things that I found is to run a remote worker company is isolation. No, isolation of people including myself, no. 

JEFF: (47:14) How do you battle the isolation? Part of it is identifying it [laughing] which is the first step of helping the problem, but have there been ways that you found to help with that problem?

WENCES: I am not quite sure that it’s easy to identify them. What we do is we gather once a quarter and twice a year all of the team goes together for a week. Actually, the next retreat is going to happen in a couple of weeks. We’re going to go to the South of Spain. We always go to nice places. We spend time together, we mix together, and we have all these conversations, and personal bonding. That’s where we feel if somebody’s mood is isolated then we have our retools, like one on ones and conversations and people coming into some specific place or doing some meetings. I like to host people at my house and do some barbecues and stuff. So, those are opportunities to see them and to see how they are feeling. Mental health I think is one of the most hardest things to spot and one of the most biggest questions to follow and help our teams. I think that’s a challenge, but at least from now I think we have a pretty healthy team. 

JEFF:  (49:18) Yeah, it’s always interesting, the role of getting together in person makes. I go through phases of digging deep [laughing] with podcast guests, and then sometimes going past it and not really talking about that enough, but certainly for anyone who is listening who is thinking about starting a distributed company or starting a remote team, that will never get together in person, it feels dangerous somehow. It seems like, at least we need to give people the option to get together in person every so often. Once a year, maybe twice a year, something like that. It’s just part of our human nature to build that.

WENCES: The one thing we did with the office that we used to have was instead of thinking there was going to be savings from now, we tell the team, “okay, we have this pocket of money where we’re willing to spend on the office, as we rid of the stuff around the office in Madrid, so this is an additional buy it for us together, so if you have any ideas or you want to meet some guy, you want to spend some days in the sun, in the Canary Islands; like we have one guy living over there, and you want to, just do it.  I think we are encouraging people to use that value thing in order to see their faces. That’s what we call rituals within our company. 

JEFF:  [laughing] That’s great. I’m sure people can come up with reasons to go visit the Canary Islands. [laughing] Go do a little surfing. Yeah.

WENCES: The biggest struggle also beside the issue of isolation, is families and couples. “You’re living the greatest life. Where are you going now?” “To the Canary Islands”. “Where are you going now?” “To the retreat.” It’s like, “do you work or is it all fun?”

JEFF:  (51:57) That’s a funny thing that comes up sometimes; this sort of guilt sometimes that remote workers can have around how good things are. [laughing] Oftentimes with their spouse or neighbors they become a little bit ashamed of their lifestyle and stuff like that. It’s a good problem to have I suppose. [laughing] 

WENCES: It is. [laughing]

JEFF:  Wences, thank you so much. (52:32) If people wanted to follow up and get in touch with you, where should they do that?

WENCES: On our blog, marketgoo.com/blog or on my Twitter account which is @wencesg. It would be very nice to follow up on the conversation.

JEFF: Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us today.

WENCES: It’s been a pleasure, Jeff.

Here’s the transcript:

JEFF: Hi Everyone. Jeff Robbins, back with Episode 75 of the Yonder Podcast, where we talk to company leaders and big thinkers, about how to make remote work. We’re focused on expanding the remote work job market, and helping listeners to create happy, productive, distributed teams. Did you know that remote workers are 29% happier with their jobs than office-based workers? On this episode I’m talking with Rebecca Corliss, who is the VP of Marketing at Owl Labs. They have a really interesting product called “Meeting Owl” which is a 360-video camera, webcam kind of thing, for meetings. It also has microphones. It’s a really great tool for particularly hybrid teams where you’ve got some people in the office who are maybe sitting around a conference table, and then you’ve got remote people that need to be able to see all of those people around the table, and be able to speak and be heard, and more importantly, hear [laughing] the people who are in the office. It’s a really interesting product. We talk a little bit about that, but in particular we delve deep into their annual state of remote work report, which they just published the 2019 version, that has some interesting stats in it such as, one in four workers would take a 10% pay cut in order to work remotely, or that 29% of remote workers are happier with their jobs than office-based workers. Just a really interesting conversation around all of this. We use the report as kind of a “jumping off point” for several different philosophical discussions, including one about proximity bias, which I think is a really interesting idea, and if you listen, I make up a new management slogan that Rebecca and I are going to get printed onto T-shirts. It’s still a good management slogan, nonetheless.

If you’re not already subscribing to the yonder newsletter, Yonder.io/newsletter is where you can do that, and we will let you know when new podcasts come out and articles on the Yonder website, and little bits and pieces we find around the web to keep you updated, in the know, as it were. And, of course, if you’re not subscribed to the Yonder podcast, you can do that through Apple podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, and we’re now on Spotify podcast as well. So, you can subscribe in all those places and get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out.

Alright. Let’s get to our interview with Rebecca.

JEFF: Hi Rebecca. Welcome to the Yonder Podcast.

REBECCA CORLISS:  Thanks, so much Jeff. I’m really excited to be here.

JEFF:  Yeah. I feel like we’ve already gotten to know each other. We had some technical issues [laughing] getting set up here today, the recording software wasn’t quite working right and so, we had all these non-verbal interactions and then finally managed to actually hear each other, and it just feels great. [laughing]

REBECCA: And here we are. We were successful, nonetheless. [laughing]

JEFF:  (laughing) Yes. (4:05) So, Rebecca, first of all, where are you talking to us from?

REBECCA:  I am from, and talking to you from Boston, Massachusetts today. It’s a beautiful fall day [laughing], and I’m actually joining you from my home, which is a little bit unique, but felt in very good strides with the alignment of this podcast today. [laughing]

JEFF:  [laughing] (4:26) Nice. And, so, you are VP of Marketing at Owl Labs. Tell us about Owl Labs and what you do there.

REBECCA:  Sure. I had the pleasure of joining Owl Labs back in 2017 when we were really in stealth mode, and we’ll talk a little bit more about Owl Labs, but we’re a technology company looking to make meetings more productive for hybrid teams and remote workers. But I had the fun opportunity to both launch the company out of stealth, launch our product, and today we’re growing quite rapidly, and I have the pleasure of running a really amazing marketing organization that’s all focused on spreading the gospel of remote work and hybrid teams and helping managers and leaders be successful with that. So, it’s a very, very fun role for me. Love our group. Love our company.

JEFF: As is often the case, when we’re talking to people who are providing products, sasses oftentimes, but you have an actual, physical product, “the Meeting Owl,” but when we talk to people who are doing support around remote work, they oftentimes are working in a remote company themselves, so there are sort of two different aspects. (5:44) My understanding is you have a hybrid team. Is that right?

REBECCA:  That’s exactly right. So, our group particularly, it’s a perfect third, third, third. Third that are fully remote. Third that are half and half based off of the weather, their job, their focus of the day, and a third who are mostly office workers. So that’s actually the place that we look to support as well, for hybrid teams, whether you have a few remote people or only a few office people. It’s usually meetings that are the most difficult to overcome because that’s when there’s a lot of inequality, so the Meeting Owl is a 360 camera/mic speaker device, and it actually looks to give those remote participants in a meeting, an experience that feels nearly like being in the room of whoever is sitting together. That’s our mission, to equalize that conversation because everyone should have a seat at the table as we like to say, [laughing] which is especially important in today’s modern workforce for all the obvious reasons.

JEFF:  (6:47) Yeah, meetings in particular is a real pain point, particularly for hybrid teams. When you’ve got people that  are sitting around a conference room table, oftentimes on a speakerphone that has really bad duplexie things when one person is talking and you can’t hear the other people, and then oftentimes there’s no video component, the person who is on the speakerphone is not being seen, and they can’t see the people in the room, it’s oftentimes a pain point. To the point that I oftentimes discourage people away from being hybrid teams, not because I think it’s easy to overcome, the truth is it’s actually probably way more common than a fully distributed team, but because I feel it requires a level of advancement. It’s like the easiest thing, or at least the most conventional thing is, having an in-person team. This is what we think of when we think of work. Right? Then in my mind the next most difficult thing is having a fully remote team, at least that’s an even playing field. The more difficult thing beyond that in my mind, is having a hybrid team and really it has to do with the communication and communication tools and the difficulty, particularly for those remote people connecting when there’s an in-person team with all of those advantages of a bazillion years of evolution. [laughing]  We communicate by getting together in person and when you’ve got a person who oftentimes isn’t even seen in the room it can be really difficult. 

REBECCA: You’re on the money, that the hybrid team is the most difficult by far. I love to be a little controversial. I wrote a medium article, I’ll be PG here, and I won’t curse. One of my lines I had is that, “if remote work is the future, I’m in deep trouble.”  (I’ll say deep trouble here). [laughing] The reason I speak to that and I can understand how it might be obvious or a good technique to think, “should we just all be remote then, because that’s a great way to equal the playing field?” I actually like to speak to my own style in that case and just be frank and say, “if that is the answer, I’m not sure where I personally will be able to work.” 

JEFF: It’s not for everyone. Like I’m saying, I think hybrid is much more where the ball wants to roll. It seems to be the next evolution or it’s how we are. We can’t define, “no, no, we can’t be together in person.” Especially if you’re speaking holistically about all companies and not just web development companies, you’ve got companies where they’re shipping things. There’s people that need to be together in the company in order to do physical work, and so, it’s not practical to be fully distributed. 

REBECCA: I think in that exact same vein, I like to think of a “higher power” if you will, [laughing] and basically where I hope the future goes is one where we’re not necessarily categorizing ourselves. “Oh, I’m an office worker.” “I’m a remote worker.” “I’m a whatever worker.” But more that we start creating a working society that’s just based on choice. We’ve been thinking of this as the “work from anywhere movement”, where at any given time people are choosing to work wherever it makes sense for them, and we’re actually helping form of society where location is fully irrelevant, whether it be you’re sitting right in front of me, or you’re sitting a thousand miles away; whatever it may be. So, that’s what I hope for. That is quite the utopia and will take some time [laughing] and some really great technological advancements, but I’m optimistic that that is the world that we’ll get to, because I think when people have choice, that’s when we’re able to do our best work, be our most successful and be our happiest.

JEFF: (11:14) I think it has a lot to do with an empathetic accommodation of people who aren’t in the office; and a lot of that has to do with embracing the technology that accommodates those people. Generationally, to some extent, I think there are people now who have grown up with mobile technologies and are used to incorporating those tools into their productivity. I advise oftentimes if companies are thinking of moving to a more remote way of thinking to adopt a remote first approach, or at least a remote first mantra, and bringing in technology, like the Meeting Owl, into meetings, and getting over that hurdle to figure out how to set it up and the tools are getting easier to set up.

Let’s talk a little bit about the Meeting Owl. I want people to  understand what it is and then also just to tease this one to people who are listening, Owl Labs has sponsored this really great state of remote work report that I want to really dig into as well. So, the Meeting Owl, describe it to people.

REBECCA:  Sure. Well, first, if you’re wondering, and I bet you are, if it looks like an owl to those listening, it does [laughing]. You should just google it and look at it [laughing]. It’s adorable. I love that our cofounders and our original team took the leap to really make a business product that has the same sort of coolness factor that a consumer product might have. So, I love that. In terms of its value and what it’s for, basically, the picture I like to paint first is, imagine the last video call you might have joined when you were a remote participant, and you were joining a team that was sitting altogether, and if you could think of what your experience was, you mentioned maybe it was really hard to hear and maybe it was really hard to see what was going on, and this is really a problem because so much of effective communication comes from  nonverbal communication; your body language, your facial expressions. And, if you’re not seeing that, that’s how you get that awkward, “when the heck do, I interject?” paranoia. [laughing] 

JEFF:  Yeah, exactly.

REBECCA:  It’s a real problem, and I mean the other miscommunication that can come with it, long of the short of it, the Meeting Owl solves this by being a smart 360 mic camera and speaker device that goes in the center of the conference room table. That’s really the biggest difference, and then it actually intelligently uses audio and visual cues to focus on different people as they talk and even split the screen. So, it’s kind of like a live talk show happening, if you will. Always seeing who just spoke and the person who responded and getting all those important points. We found the best compliment we can possibly get is when a remote participant says, “I just joined the meeting with the Meeting Owl, and I felt nearly like I was sitting in the room with the team.” That’s the experience we really want to create, because we want to level up the experience of the remote participant to those in the room. So that way everyone has the same context information, visual information, that can make those types of conversations go from really frustrating to really successful. So, that’s our world.

JEFF:  (14:47) Let those remote participants know that they’re important and that they’re being accommodated.  Fun technology, as well, just that immersive sense of it. GoPro makes a 360 camera as well that does not work for videoconferencing, [laughing] it’s a totally different purpose. But this idea of capturing everything in the room is really powerful. I’m sure there are all sorts of wonderful directions that you could take this in the future, and I’m sure that you’re having meetings [laughing] and Owl Labs planning all that out. But, even just where it’s at right now is really amazing. 

REBECCA:  Thank you.

JEFF:  (15:39) That’s cool. So, owllabs.com is where people can find the Meeting Owl, and it’s also where people can find your state of remote work report. Let’s talk about that. 

REBECCA:  Sure. So, we’re really proud of it. This is actually our third annual state of remote work report, and really the mission of this report, there’s a lot of amazing data out there and we wanted to take a slice and really find opportunities where we can both help those that might be looking to accept remote work more in their organization, give them data that really helps them advocate for that shift, to data that really helps people think through the types of circumstances that makes remote working really, really successful, and what is required to make it work. So, we were really proud to partner with Kate Lister, who is the President of Global Workplace Analytics on this report. This was a U.S. based report, so we surveyed a little over 1,200 folks in the U.S. of working age and really dug into understanding frequency, impact on work life balance, retention, [laughing] hiring, all those things that are really crucial, because we found there are some organizations that are starting to see the shift within their employee base of an increasing need and interest for remote work and flexible work options, that would bring them to become a hybrid team, and some folks are embracing it with open arms and some folks are fearful. So, we see our obligation as showing the benefits, so companies then can be thoughtful and considerate for themselves and have those really thoughtful conversations into what makes the most sense for their organization.

JEFF:  (17:30) That describes a lot of the listeners of this podcast. Oftentimes people who have started a remote team or distributed company, or are thinking about it and trying to gather the information [laughing] of, “what do I need to know?” “How can I make this feel good?” I think part of that is understanding what other people have done. So, research like you’re doing here is hugely powerful and I think really important. Let’s go through it a little bit. Should we go through this in a more linear way or maybe start with some of the things that were most exciting and surprising to you about this.

REBECCA: I’m happy to do that. I’ll start with my favorite stuff that I thought was really fun. One of the things we wanted to know, and we said, okay, when talking to businesses about really evaluating the impact of remote work and the desire to work remotely, how can we dive into this? What we wanted to learn was, if given the option, would people take a pay cut in order to then get the opportunity to work remotely and how would people perceive that.

We actually found that one in four U.S. employees would take a pay cut up to 10% in order to work remotely.

So, if that doesn’t really paint the story of how much people are valuing remote work, I don’t know what does. Just to be clear, I am not saying then now go use this, “hey businesses across the world, use this as an opportunity to slice your salaries,” no, by all means, but use it as a tool to understand how valued remote work is to so many people, that people would even consider such a thing.  

JEFF: (19:34) I think that that’s particularly interesting when you combine it in with the fact that by hiring remote workers, you’re decoupling yourself from the local job market oftentimes. So, because these jobs are super enticing for people and you have a larger market of people who you could hire because of it means that you could hire better people, maybe for the same money. I’m always a little bit hesitant about the assumption that our company will save money by hiring remote workers because I haven’t really seen that aspect of things. Even oftentimes when you include the cost of having an office and stuff like that, those costs oftentimes go to travel and things like that. But people love it, and they are certainly enticed by it.

REBECCA: I do think, however, there are a few ways in which organizations can save money on their bottom line by leaning into remote work. Not quite a literal cost savings saying, “okay, I can reduce everyone’s salaries by 10%, blah, blah, blah.” Not in that way. But actually, in terms of the hiring retention engine within an organization. So, you spoke to hiring. Absolutely the case. I’ll give an example in Owl Labs. We had the opportunity to hire a new Director of Design and we are a hybrid company, we don’t care if you live in Boston like me, or if you live wherever, and so, when thinking about who might be the right person for the role, I had the opportunity to talk to a woman who was from a Great Harbor company previously in Southern California, and it happened to be a slam dunk for her too, so that was an example that I was able to hire faster, because I was able to broaden my scope of where I was looking and, I believe, find the absolute best person for the job because her location was completely irrelevant in that search, and we were able to find it. So, that’s an example of saving money, because it didn’t take me half a year to find the best person in Boston; I could look everywhere.

JEFF:  (21:46) Right. And, also people don’t leave because their spouse got a job in another state. They don’t leave because the commute is difficult. They don’t leave because the person that works in the next office is annoying.  There are, I think, efficiency improvements around remote work. 

REBECCA: To keep on the thread of hiring, we found that 71% of our respondents would actually agree that the ability to work remotely would make them choose one employer over another. So, in terms of companies that are considering making their workplace more interesting, or a bigger attractor to applicants, that can help. And, we found that actually 81% of U.S. workers agree that the ability to work remotely would make them more likely to recommend their workplace. So, that’s really cool too. So, not only is it going to make them pick your company over another, it might make them recommend it to a friend, which is also going to help your hiring pool. So, that was very, very cool to learn and see those benefits of hiring, just considering that. It’s wonderful that unemployment is lower than 4% right now, but it does mean that it’s a workers market, and companies have to be really thoughtful about how they flex their recruiting pool.

JEFF:  (23:13) Absolutely. So, the people that you surveyed kind of ran the gamut. Some were remote workers, but this wasn’t just a survey of remote workers. It wasn’t all remote workers saying that remote work is great; it was a wider cross-section than that?

REBECCA:  Correct. It was very important to us that we surveyed a population that represented the population of the U.S. workers, so we could get a really, great strong mix of all perspectives, whether it be you do work remotely all the time, you work part of the time, you don’t work at all, and that was really, really important to us. We found of the group that we surveyed, two of three employees actually did work remotely at least some of the time, and that was really great, and we thought represented to a lot of the other data that we’ve seen in regards to how frequently remote work is happening across the U.S.

JEFF: (24:12) One of the things that happens and certainly happened to me and I’m guessing to a lot of listeners of this podcast is, when you run a fully distributed company, you’re not interacting with other companies so much. [laughing] You’re not like, “oh I run into those guys at the deli all the time; they have the office downstairs,” or whatever. So, you kind of lose track of how things are happening. You also get very focused on your own team, which I think happens for everyone. But who works remotely? [laughing] I think for people that work at tech companies they think that only tech companies work remotely, for people that work at customer service businesses, they think that only customer service businesses work remotely. What did you find? Where is remote work happening?

REBECCA:  That’s a great question. One, we found across the board, we were very curious of how likely people across different levels will work remotely. We found that sea level folks are actually working remotely 55% of the time. That was fascinating. That was actually quite higher than I was expecting [laughing], which I think is great. Why not? I think that’s wonderful. We also looked at different specific industries. Kind of going down the ranks in terms of where it was most prominent. We found healthcare actually at the top of our list.

JEFF:  That’s interesting.

REBECCA: Technology being second. Financial, education, manufacturing, in that order. So that was really interesting to see a great spread of those types of organizations represented. I’m playing in my own bubble, one might think, “oh, of course it’s those really innovative the companies [laughing] that are flexing this muscle,” and they are, however they are second to healthcare which I thought was very, very cool and interesting for us.

JEFF:  (26:22) So, when we stereotypically think of healthcare, we think of doctors and nurses and how would they possibly work remotely? But I’m guessing there’s some stuff we’re missing here. Is this like insurance companies? Who are these people working in healthcare and how are they working remotely?

REBECCA:  Great question. I’ll hypothesize. We didn’t ask so far as to the particular roles in this case, but to hypothesize, I would say these might be a lot of the individuals who either come to one’s home and, thus might not be office-based. 

JEFF:  Right.

REBECCA:  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

JEFF:  (27:03) In fact my brother is a nurse and does exactly that. In-home calls.

REBECCA: Oh perfect. 

JEFF:  (27:12) It’s funny because when we think about remote work oftentimes, and a lot of the tools we’re talking about, like Meeting Owl or Slack or Google Docs, nurses who are doing house call things like that, maybe need different tools than those [laughing] things exactly. But it’s a really interesting thought to start incorporating those people into all this thinking that we’re doing around this stuff.

REBECCA: Of course. And I would say essential. To the point if you’re hoping to retain these folks, and they’re absolutely quite qualified, look at the service they are offering, very important and with the same love and care that great organizations are thinking about how they offer the best possible experience for those in the office, we have a great distance to go to really give that same love and care to the experience that we’re giving those out of the office. They are not of lesser importance. They should receive this similar type of report but in the way that makes the most sense for them. So, I think that’s important.

JEFF:  (28:23) I think, we’re hypothesizing and philosophizing here, but that’s okay, [laughing], we can have whatever conversation we want. But I think in the past there’s always been these concessions around remote workers - well, these people work from home and I guess it’s okay that we don’t communicate as well with them. Or even these assumptions about how work should work stereotypically; that remote workers are people that live at home, maybe in their parents basement, and just work from their inbox and send the work out and they don’t really want to interact with other people. And that’s not true.  We’re seeing this transition happen around those people that we had in the past said, “oh well, he’s a technical person so he probably doesn’t want to interact with real people, anyways.” We’re finding that’s not true. And, I’m guessing that we could probably support all of these salespeople and healthcare workers better as well.

REBECCA: Very true.  We found there’s a lot of fun biases that were slowly [laughing] watching away -- that being a great one. I think the other one that probably a lot of people can relate to is the idea that, “if she’s going to work from home today, it’s because she’s going to (I like this pun) phone it in.” [laughing] “She’s going to do her laundry and probably take plenty of naps and watch daytime TV.” So that’s what she’s doing. And, actually with that in mind, and knowing obviously that’s an extreme, that bias might exist especially among managers and leaders who are fearful of allowing and supporting remote work. The data that we like to showcase is, we found that 79% of remote workers actually work from home to increase their productivity, to be more effective. I don’t know about you, but if I am prepping for a new quarter, I have a ton of analysis to do or there’s this really intense focus time that I need, or really big challenge at hand, I will likely choose to do that from my home in order to get the focus and productivity time I need to be more effective. I think it’s really important to showcase that fact. 

JEFF: (30:57) Yeah, and there’s probably even aspects of remote working or working from home that fit into our more, sort of Dick Vandyke [laughing] conventional style, of thinking about work, taking the work home, “oh, I’ve got this report that’s due. I’m going to work on it tonight after the kids go to bed.” You’re working from home. That’s remote work, right? [laughing] You’re taking it home to be productive on it in a place where you’re not going to get interrupted and you can flex your own hours and stuff like that.

REBECCA: We also need to be careful that we’re not taking advantage of that. [laughing] We found in the same study that actually remote employees are working more than the standard 40 hours per week, 43% more often than on-site workers. [laughing] Which on one hand maybe you can say maybe it’s because of the benefit of the lesser commute or they’re actually getting time back, but I think also the other side of that coin is, we need to make sure that while it’s a little bit harder to have the really clear division between when I’m on and when I’m off, we need to be mindful of that as leaders and those supporting our teams, because people are working more and that’s wonderful, but we need to make sure it’s a choice in the moment versus an obligation or something that’s harder to shake because we do deserve that work life balance. 

JEFF: (32:24) And those stigmas, that idea that she’s phoning it in today is the thing that we work against, and the truth is, “well, I did turn on Oprah (or whatever the equivalent of that is), [laughing] while I was eating lunch, but on the other hand, I worked until 10:00 at night because I felt guilty about that.” I think it’s just that matter of finding the balance, and ultimately starting to lose some of these preconceived notions about what it means to work from home, and ultimately moving to a little bit more, looking at the proof in the pudding rather than thinking about these preconceived notions about it.

The truth is people are productive and we’re starting to see that and we’re starting to see reports saying that people feel more productive, and they are more productive.

REBECCA: I think that’s true. I’m curious if you’ve seen this Jeff.  An idea I’ve been thinking a lot about, kind of at the core of this biasses that either leaders have or workers have themselves, I’ve been calling it “proximity bias” with the idea that people have the bias that, intentional or not, subconscious or not, that if someone is physically present they’re going to do better work or they are working harder, and I find that so interesting especially when it is self-imposed. I actually like to tell a story in a previous role because Owl Labs, I can recall a particular day in which there was a big brainstorm or something we’re planning, like the Q4 priorities, or something like that. Very, very important brainstorming. And maybe this is a story that a lot of people have experience. Anyway, I had a terrible cold, a really bad cold, and I exerted poor judgment and said, “well, instead of staying home, I’m going to go in because I believe I will not be as productive and impactful in this brainstorm if I am calling in,” an din that case we even had video conferencing technology, and so, I went in and probably made all my coworkers terribly sick, which was terrible, because we were entering Q4 and the holidays. But anyway, that I thought was interesting because it was a self-imposed bias. No one was going to judge me.  Everyone on my team was incredibly supportive, would’ve completely understood, and yet I still made that choice. So, I bring this reflection up because I think one of the things that managers and leaders can do, is not only give obviously the resources and tools to remote workers and work from home people partially or full-time that they need to be successful, but also really showcase that remote working is accepted, whether it be by having the CEO work from home once in awhile to show that is a OK, but encouraging it, whatever it may be, because a lot of the shift not only needs to come from the leadership but also the employees and allowing themselves to have that freedom and have it work together at the same time.

JEFF: (35:46) Yeah, absolutely. Yes, I’ve seen this proximity bias and I think that it is the definition of management for the past 100 years. This is industrial revolution management. The managers had offices way above the factory floor so they could look down on the factory workers to know that they were working. Right? And that just doesn’t really work these days. I do think that it’s to some extent, an evolutionary bias. I think that this is just how we learn to trust each other, is getting together in person, looking each other in the eye, and kind of, “do I trust you?” I do think it ultimately works against management, particularly in an environment where it’s not just about the widgets the people are cranking out, it’s more thoughtful and people are on computers and you can’t quite tell if they’re on Facebook [laughing]. They’ve got Facebook on their phone. There are any number of ways that people could be at their desks and not being productive. Even just simply the water cooler hanging out and talking and getting to know people, rather than work getting done. I’m not against the water cooler. I think in  distributed teams we need to find ways to emulate the water cooler, but it’s not the default. It also has a lot to do with culture and especially when you talk about managers leading by example, there’s what you say and what you do, and lots of companies have this culture of proving by [laughing] overworking. It’s sort of like, “I’m here before everyone gets here,” and “I’m here after everyone gets  here, and therefore I’m more important,” but when we start to decouple being the presence, the proximity from value and trying to find value in other ways, we can actually move that value metric to something that’s actually closer [laughing] to what the business needs. The business doesn’t need  people to be there. The business needs people to create those widgets, and when the widgets are digital or abstract, or services business in some way, you want to have an actual interaction with those workers and talk about what they’re creating.

REBECCA: You’re exactly right. I would say one of the tips that I’ve been giving managers who are trying their very best to walk away from this idea that I monitor productivity of the “buts” and move away from this, as I bring it back to really encouraging a performance based management system, as their way of working with their team, which for what it’s worth really is the way to go if you have a team that’s onsite or not. 

JEFF: Absolutely. All of this stuff is good practice for collocated companies as well. It’s just better.

REBECCA: I think it’s really helpful, and you used a great word a little bit earlier. You mentioned the word “trust.” So, so crucial. I go ahead and say it, “if you don’t trust your employees, remote work in any level is not going to work,” because that is so much at the core of it and we’re seeing that in fruition. 82% of those who work remotely say that the ability to work remotely and getting that privilege actually does make them feel more trusted, and when you feel trusted, you feel more effective, you have a better relationship with your manager, you are proud to work harder, better, faster, you name it. So, we thought that was really wonderful to see that fact echo in the data.

JEFF: (39:58) Having done so many of these podcasts now, [laughing] I’m starting to wonder if that trust and that culture of trust, that openness is a cause or an effect. Are we able to build a remote team because I’m a trusting person or oftentimes I almost feel like I took a leap of faith? I didn’t really trust people to work from home, but I figured I would try it. Remote work is autonomy. In order to grant people autonomy, you need to allow the, to give them at least enough trust to start and try. Then the effect is, “wow, actually people are being productive. They are getting the work done. They are showing up and I mean that proverbially. They’re showing up to meetings or even in person. They are showing up [laughing] when they need to be there; and now I can trust them. It ends up being an effect, or at least a perpetuating factor in ultimately a more respectful environment, more respectful culture and I think in my mind, if I can get super highfalutin and super philosophical about it, I think that we’re starting to see a new paradigm in work in the relationship between the employer and the worker is, where we can start to include the workers in a lot of the things that had been shielded off to them in the past. The fact that the company needs to [laughing] sustain itself was often a thing that was hidden away from workers.  There was this adversarial relationship, and this assumption that workers were untrusting and were going to try and get away with things. But, when we can all get on board, this is what we need in order to keep our jobs, in order to keep the company in business, I think workers want to be present. They want to  be trustworthy. 

REBECCA: I think especially in the coming workforce, right now millennials are the most present and Gen Z is right on their heels, and these are a group of workers that are really looking for sense of purpose and people are being really selective in the companies that they choose because they want to feel some sort of connection to the mission, or some sort of connection to the value they’re offering customers. These are employees that care quite a bit, and I would say the best way to build that trust, even if maybe you’re nervous about it from the leaders perspective, to really echo what you said is, take that leap of faith, and then give your worker the opportunity to rise to the occasion, because it’s going to be those moments in which someone meets and then exceeds your expectations, is when that trust is really going to be fortified. So, I would say, you won’t even have the opportunity to have that experience if you don’t take that leap of faith first. So, I think you’re exactly right. Some people are trustworthy and are trustful from the get-go and that can help, but it’s really having that experience of saying, “hey, you know what, John [laughing] I wasn’t sure John would be a successful remote worker, or how this dynamic would work,” and now I know for sure.

I had an experience (semi) like this myself. So, prior to coming to Owl Labs, I had never managed a remote worker before. I had never done that. I had been in support of remote work, worked from home frequently, but I wouldn’t go so far to call myself a leader of remote workers. A woman I hired, her name is Erin, she lives in the St. Louis area, and remarkable person, and was very interested in joining our company and I had a previous experience with her and knew she’d be exceptional, [laughing] and it was crystal clear if she were to join Owl Labs, she would be remote. Then you’d say, “well, good. Makes sense given our mission as an organization,” but it was actually a really interesting moment for me as a leader to say, “okay, here we go. Now I get to learn my own style and how this is going to work.” I will say, I’m thankful I embraced it very openly, with a very open mind, but even with that open mind, it wasn’t until the experience of working with her and saying, “this is incredible,” and “she is incredible” that really sealed the deal to showcase that this could work. And that is what helped me fortify my own trust.

JEFF: (44:41) And there’s a certain humanity that comes with it. We need to accept the whole person. They’re allowing us, as an employer, into their home usually, and into their lives as they’re working flexibly. So, as an employer, it’s like, “oh, yeah, go pick your kids up from school. That’s okay.” Whereas in the past it felt like, “wait, this is the workday, 9-5, I own you during this time.” I think by starting to create that new relationship people are oftentimes more open, more vulnerable, and ultimately can share that deeper stuff, which oftentimes is a compassion for the company and the work that would otherwise be hidden away.

(45:38) In light of this report, I don’t know which direction to go here, but I’m guessing that there’s probably an interesting dovetail. What were the things that you found as a manager building a hybrid team that were echoed in this report, or felt like epiphanies for you?

REBECCA: Epiphanies. I would say I’m really thankful to see things echo my instincts [laughing], if you will. That was very affirming. For us at Owl Labs, it’s all about the opportunity to choose, that’s what is most important, and give people the ability to work at their best. Things that weren’t going to be a big surprise. Better work life balance was the number one reason people to choose to work remotely. Is that an epiphany? No. But it makes complete sense that that would be echoed. So, that was really interesting. I was really hopeful that just using instincts, that the flexibility and remote work abilities would influence how people perceive their employer and the longevity they might have at one.

We actually found that from a retention standpoint 74% of workers agree that the ability to work remotely actually makes them less likely to leave.

So, that’s wonderful; nearly 75%. It all comes together if you feel trusted [laughing] and have a strong relationship with your manager. If you are able to be productive in your work. If you are able to get the work life balance so you can be really, really successful in your job, as well as have the other parts of your life, you’re going to stick around. Again, I think there’s two ways to look at it; there’s the capitalistic view which is ‘great’ ‘good’, we want to get the biggest impact [laughing], more people as possible, we want people to stick around, hiring is expensive, let’s improve our retention, but then there’s also the human aspect which is, isn’t it wonderful that there’s an opportunity to engaged in this workplace shift and then truly create a workplace that’s worth staying and being a part of for a long time.  I like that version better. It makes me proud to think that hopefully in terms of the environment that I’m creating across my team and across Owl Labs, that people feel that flexibility to choose and be at their best, because I don’t know about you, but for the other managers listening, I imagine you get a sense of pride knowing that you’ve done something right and you contributed positively to someone’s life. That personally means a lot to me.

JEFF: (48:20) Absolutely. I think we all want to make the world a better place and the world of work [laughing] represents a significant part of that. For anyone who is listening who maybe has a collocated company and they’re  thinking of hiring a remote person, or are thinking of giving up their office altogether, especially pivoting off this report, what data or straight up advice can you give to them? What are the things that are like, “well you need to know this?” This is the thing that is going to push them over the edge [laughing] and help them get it.

REBECCA: That’s a great question. I think there’s a few ways to dig into that. One, I’ll go off an idea that I really care about, especially if you’re going to be hybrid, which as we mentioned in the beginning is the most difficult [laughing] type of workplace set up to manage and make successful. I would say a rule of thumb you could use is, “is the way I’m either working with my team, communicating with my team, supporting my team, managing my team, is it something that crosses boundaries that works while you are in person and works while you are not in person?” Because if you have a style that only functions in one particular way, you’re going to create a disadvantage. So, I would almost start with taking an audit. The real stereotypical one is, “if your way of engaging and socializing with your team is to wander through cubes, [laughing] that’s what you do and that’s the only thing you do.” That’s quite obviously not going to translate. 

JEFF:  (50:08) The example I always used to use was the ‘high five’. High five a manager. Walk through and high fiving everybody. 

REBECCA: Oh yea. It’s great. By all means you can still do that [laughing] but hopefully that’s not the only thing you’re doing, and you’re having that  human connection with everyone else. The high five emoji on Slack or whatever Chat you’re using is great. Go for it. [laughing] So, I think that’s important. 

I would say another, I’ll call it a ‘mistake’ that some folks might make that I think is a bit of a shortcut is, trying to directly translate management techniques that are normally done in person to the virtual remote world. The example I would say is, if you still are in the habit of monitoring productivity based off of how long you’re working or when you’re working, I know that some folks have said, “oh, your light on Slack,” or, “your chat light wasn’t on at 4:00. What are you doing?” [laughing]  Those are fun ones.  

JEFF:  Monitoring is not managing. 

REBECCA: Oh, you could put that on a T-shirt. [laughing] You should put that on a T-shirt. That’s a great line – monitoring is not managing. If you’re a Twitter person, tweet that. That was great. [laughing]

JEFF:  Every so often I come up with one. 

REBECCA: [laughing] I love it. That’s perfect. That’s very on point. There’s so many things I could say, but the one I really believe, we mentioned performance-based management, I believe in this so thoroughly for any team, any make-up and it’s that, in today’s modern age especially, make sure you’re evaluating your employees based off of the impact that they’re having, nothing else. Because that really is what they’re hired to do – have an impact, drive results, really make your company successful.  So, make sure you have really key goals that you’re going after. Make sure you have really key milestones that you need to hit and you’re on the same page, because that also is going to help you get and give autonomy to anyone wherever they are working, and it just removes that barrier completely. That is a technique where location is absolutely irrelevant because there’s a world, I don’t know about you, but I’m a night owl (pun intended) [laughing] and I personally love to write and I love when I have the opportunity to write blog content, things like that, “I’m going to do my best work after dinner, after a glass of wine on my kitchen table at 11:00 p.m.” That is just when it is going to be. That is just my brain. So, again, I’m lucky to have a very, very supportive team. My boss, in this case, would understand that. “Oh, it’s okay that she slept in the next day.” [laughing] The impact she has had. 

JEFF:  (53:14) Again, that holistic view, “we got the report from Rebecca that she wrote up, the whole new thing and the email went out at two o’clock in the morning. I don’t expect to see Rebecca until ten or eleven o’clock today.”  That’s sort of the holistic thing, whereas that traditional punch the clock style thing, from a management perspective, is something we need to start moving away from.

REBECCA:  Actually, can I tell you what I would do in that case just because I think it’s fun? I actually would likely schedule my email. [laughing]

JEFF:  [laughing] Because that is another issue. If you’re leading a team do you want to set the precedent of sending email at two o’clock in the morning? There are downsides to that as well. Certainly, I’m going to repeat it again, monitoring is not managing. What is managing especially in this environment, and I think you’re right. I think it’s a matter of starting to look more at the results and the output and ultimately, I think oftentimes for managers there’s this question of, “I don’t know how much output I should be expecting,” and it’s like “well, compare it to the other people at the company?” [laughing] Right? I suppose you could have a low performing team overall and it would make the bell curve a little difficult to figure out. We want to support the process as well and ultimately support people so they can find their point of flow and peak productivity in a way that obviously feels good for everybody involved. 

(55:25) Another one of my sayings around this is, ‘making the formal informal’. Things that we have historically thought of as formal, particularly in an office environment; “hey John, are you free at four o’clock to meet with me?” Historically it had been just stopping by John’s office cube and going “hey, here’s the thing I need.” But when you schedule it, John thinks, “I’m getting fired.” [laughing] This thing that’s so formal, but if you do it every week or this is just how Jeff communicates, then John starts to calm down around it, and these things like a videoconference that we’ve historically thought of as this ‘formal’ thing, become informal and it just becomes better communication. It becomes  a time when John can be focused on the conversation. I can be focused on the conversation. It’s not this haphazard half communication that oftentimes happens in collocated environments as we said. Based on that evolutionary thing we feel like, “I was in person and I talked to you, so we must’ve’ communicated.” “I gave you a high five, how did you not know that what I actually meant was you’re doing a great job. I really value everything you do at the company. I really feel like over the past six months you really improved.” That stuff seems too formal, but in a remote work environment, we can’t high five so maybe we need to get a little more informal about that formal communication. Ultimately, it’s better communication; John actually knows.

REBECCA: I love that. I have two ideas. I love that. I never thought about it in those terms and I agree. I have two things to contribute. One, I’ll tell a little story that I think fits this philosophy. A woman on my team, her name is Sophia, she’s a 50/50 gal [laughing] which is how I like to describe, and probably pretty early after she started at Owl Labs, she was very open saying, “I love writing with my cat at home,” and [laughing] “I love doing this type of work in the office.” I said, “great. Now we know how you will chose.” And she said, “So, Rebecca, should I make sure that I let you know or ask to work from home before I do?” I said, “oh, that’s interesting.” No one had asked me that before. And I said, “you know what? No. No, I don’t think so, because you would never be asking me to work from the office. [laughing]  That would never be your instinct.” And so, the system we have instead is I mentioned Slack a few times, we love using Slack as our internal chat, and we actually put the little home emoji icon next to our names, just for informational purposes, just to be clear, but it’s not a formal request because to do that would just change the perception around remote work, which is the problem. So, that’s one thing.

JEFF: Right. That it should be an even playing field. I think that that culturally in a company, what you’re talking about right there, encourages or even defines a remote first work environment. That it’s not like, “I’m going to be in the office on Tuesday so let’s have the meeting on Tuesday because I  obviously can’t meet with you on Monday because I’m working from home.” If being from home inhibits some aspect [laughing] then it’s not really quite being treated the same way. It’s like, “hey, let’s meet at 4:00.” That’s a little bit more formal than just stopping by, but I don’t know if you’re going to be there when I stop by.  I like it.

REBECCA: I think that’s so true, and actually to that, my other one actually relates to that idea. I would say I hope that it will be very, very soon where videoconferencing is not a novelty at all. It shouldn’t be. The ability to see someone should not be a novelty. [laughing] it’s not a novelty in person. You’d never go to a meeting with a paper bag on your head, [laughing] so why should it be a novelty? I would say, I believe in a world in which it is by default the same way how you would think to use your phone to call someone. You would use your camera to call someone in that case or get the group together. It is always by default. By default, everyone always assumes that there is likely going to be someone remote, and that is just so engrained in our habits, that meetings are much more seamless, and this is available across an entire organization. So, if you’re a big organization every room is enabled for this, because every room is a meeting space or someone might be remote, and that’s the default at all times.

JEFF: Anything else that we should touch on here? 

REBECCA:  We talked about so many. I’ll just talk about a nice one. A feel good, punctuation if you will [laughing]. 

JEFF: [laughing] I’m always a fan of the feel-good punctuation.

REBECCA: And that’s the fact that remote workers are happier in their jobs, 29% more often than onsite workers, and I just think that’s lovely, and something to lean into and I’m not surprised, and it just reinforces what I hoped to be the case. It’s wonderful when data paints a story that helps us work better together. I love that one. It’s a good feel good.

JEFF: 29% more. It’s not that they are 29% happy or happy 29% of the time. Most people like their jobs, but remote workers like it nearly 30% more. That’s amazing.

REBECCA: Yeah, isn’t that great? I love that. That made me happy. [laughing] 

JEFF: Yeah. Well, Rebecca, this has been a great conversation. (1:01) If anybody has questions about this or wants to follow-up with you about anything, where should they track you down?

REBECCA: I love Twitter. I love connecting with folks on Twitter. If you want to connect with me there, my name is @repcor, so I love talking to folks there. And, then if anything we said about Owl Labs or our meeting, we’re owllabs.com so feel free to check us out in the report. We’re really happy to contribute to this incredibly important world with technology, with our leadership with data, so we’d be happy to keep giving you more.

JEFF:   Well great. Thank you, Rebecca. This was a great conversation. I feel really energized [laughing] about remote work, and I hope our listeners do as well. Take care.

REBECCA: Thank you so much.

Here’s the transcript:

JEFF: Hi Wayne. Thank you so much for coming on the Yonder Podcast.

WAYNE TURMEL: Well, thank you for having me. I’ll go pretty much anywhere I’m invited.

JEFF:  [laughing] Well, thanks for being here. As I often ask people, the first question on the podcast is, where are you? (2:39)

WAYNE: I am in Las Vegas. We just relocated here from Chicago a few months ago. I am getting used to looking out the window at bright blue sky.

JEFF:  [laughing] And warmth, and the lack of humidity.

WAYNE:  All those things, yes. Of course, it is 112 degrees, so, the lack of humidity is basic chemistry since water evaporates at that temperature.

JEFF:  It’s true. Like, sweat works.

WAYNE:  Exactly.

JEFF:  [laughing] It actually cools you down when it’s so dry like that. Great. So, introduce yourself to people. Tell us what you do. (3:27)

WAYNE:  I am one of the co-founders of the Remote Leadership Institute. As  part of the Kevin Eikenberry group, Kevin is infinitely better known than I am [laughing] in the leadership circles, but for 20 years or so, I have been involved in teaching communication skills and leadership skills, particularly at the middle management type level. About 10 years ago, the world started moving in this new direction and people were saying things like, “gosh, communication skills and presentations skills are great, but I only talk to real people once a quarter, because I’m on WebEx, or whatever,” and so I spent 10 years as my own company, teaching those kinds of skills. Then a few years ago, Kevin and I merged to create this new entity “The Remote Leadership Institute,” and that’s how we came to write The Long-Distance Leader together, and all of that good stuff.

JEFF:  Yeah. That’s right in light with all the stuff we talk about on this podcast. It’s really great to have you here.

WAYNE: [laughing] Better to be lucky than good.

JEFF: Yeah. So, where should we start. Have you had a lot of experience as a long-distance leader yourself, or has this information come from talking to a lot of people who’ve done this kind of work? What have you gleaned through all of this? (5:08)

WAYNE: Wow. A lot of gleaning over the years. Truthfully, from my very first management job, I have had team members that did not share a workspace with me. I started in the training business and had independent trainers all over the place and have always kind of worked that way ever since, as well since joining Remote Leadership Institute I am a remote worker. Our headquarters is in Indianapolis, and I, of course, am not. So, both the managers side and the employee side, which I think is important for leaders of remote teams. There are a couple of key things, I think. One is remember what it’s like, because most managers have at one time or another, been a part of a remote team.  Either they have been the one whose remote, in which case their empathy level goes off the charts, or they haven’t, and they understand the frustrations on some level. (6:22)

JEFF: Empathy is usually a good skill for management [laughing]. I hadn’t thought about this too much, but there are all sorts of different ways that remote work can happen, and lots of times it will be a company that starts hiring remote workers, and in that event, oftentimes you have a manager who works in the office, whose never really had much experience working remotely, who’s management a remote team, and they kind of need to jump over some hurdles in order to really start to build that empathy.

WAYNE:  I think a lot of us have gotten into the remote part of this by what I call, stealth telework, which is the company doesn’t officially have a policy, theoretically everybody’s supposed to work here, but it starts with, “hey, can I work from home a couple days  a week so I can get this project done?” Or, “my spouse is being transferred to Denver and I really like working with you guys. Can I keep my job?” And, they go, “yeah, fine, no problem.” So, it starts with one or two people or an instance, nothing formal, and then they wake up one morning and as most people in big city offices will attest, on any given day 50% of the assigned desks are empty. I remember walking through a big international companies bullpen with the manager and she was going on about how, “no, we think everybody should come into the office and we don’t really have a remote work policy, blah, blah, blah,” and I went, “so where is everybody?” 50% of the desks are empty. They’re assigned. There are cat pictures and deflated birthday balloons and obviously somebody works there. “Oh, so and so is in Boston today.” “So, and so has a sick kid.” Well then how could you tell me you don’t have people working remotely. I think that’s the challenge for a lot of us. It’s kind of the frog in the boiling water analogy, which is a horrible analogy and makes terrible soup. (8:42)

A lot of organizations that we work with, the conversation now is, “holy cow, this thing is happening, and we never planned for it, and we never really saw it coming, and now how do we fix the boat when it’s in the water?”

JEFF:  Right. Our communications have moved on from printed memos being passed around the office to email, and now everyone’s got their email on their phone.

WAYNE:  It’s not just that. This is a really interesting thing, and for somebody who is of a certain age, certain age being my first corporate job. My first big project was to roll out email to the company. That’s how long I’ve been on this earth, and there’s been a huge change that most of us have never taken into account, which is in the, let’s call it 25 years, that email has been a thing; 70-75% of all business communication now happens in writing.

JEFF:  Right.

WAYNE:  That has never happened in the history of the human race.

JEFF:  Yeah. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

WAYNE:  (9:54) It’s just a thing, and if we’re not aware of it, if we’re aware of how  we write emails, how we use emails, when it’s appropriate, when it’s inappropriate. If we don’t give it some conscious thought, which 99% of us don’t, we find ourselves getting into problems. We find ourselves overwhelmed by the share volume of incoming email. We find ourselves stuck in email threads that aren’t solving problems and just seem to go on forever. Who’s insane idea was it to let every salesperson in America write their own correspondence and not have it checked first?

JEFF:  [laughing] Yeah. When we think about the stereotypical remote worker, I think oftentimes there’s this sort of unspoken belief that management or leadership has that remote workers will just work asynchronously, we will send them email and they will do the work in the email and email it back to us, and they work for us, and that’s how it goes, and that’s oftentimes, most of the time I would venture to say, not the most efficient way, certainly not the most mentally healthy way of working and keeping your employees connected to you and to each other.

WAYNE:  (11:22) What it does is it falls into a trap which is all too common. Since everybody on this call is a manager and concerned and cares, I’m going to talk a little treason. A lot of this trickles down from the C-suite where the number one concern is ‘are they working?’  How do we know that they are working? We’re paying them darn it, how do we know they’re not on Facebook or whatever? That concern about tasks and measurable behavior results in remote work often becoming extremely transactional. It becomes a series of tasks and as long as you are doing the tasks you are assigned; I’m going to assume that everything is fine. What that does, and there’s been lots of studies about this, the most famous one is The Harvard Review Study. The headline was Remote Workers Get More Done, which hallelujah everybody that supports telework and all the rest of it said, “see, we get more work done than people in the office.” The problem is if you go into the data, that it’s what they’re working on and how they’re working that is both good news and bad news.  The good news is, yes, they are getting more done. The bad news is, they are getting their tasks done, they are extremely focused on what’s directly in their control, and so their task list is getting completed, but the tasks that involve other people contributing to the group, brainstorming, collaborating, all that stuff, very often suffers.

The second thing is the reason they get more done, is that they work longer days. Your day starts when you stumble out of the bed in the morning and you pick up your phone and the kids are in bed at night and you’re still answering email, you better be getting more done because you’re working more hours. And, that’s not necessarily a good thing. So, as the leader of the team, there’s a bunch of stuff that we need to do besides just get the work done. It’s our we working with them on their priorities and making sure that they’re working on the right things? Are they engaging with the rest of the team and how could we help make that happen? Am I getting emails from them at all hours of the day or night and what am I going to do about it if I am? That could be a coaching conversation. So, we need to think differently about how we’re working. As leaders we need to have all that in our mind, not just is stuff getting done. Because if we keep it on a strictly transactional basis, some people work fine like that.

JEFF: Yeah. But there could be a certain amount of isolation and, kind of loneliness. When you’re simply working on your tasks and don’t have an idea of the context of those tasks within the project or within the company (14:36) you also don’t have an idea of your context [laughing] within the company. It can be isolating. Ultimately, sometimes feel productive, but it can lead to burnout.

WAYNE: It can, and here’s something that most managers don’t think about. The turnover rate for remote workers is actually higher. I have a friend who was a headhunter and she licked her chops when she found out that people work from home, because if I work for you and I have to schlep into the office every day and I know everybody and there’s a whole social component, and my day is built around my commute and setting up childcare and all that stuff, to change jobs is a really big deal. (15:30) If I work at home the only barrier to changing jobs is, I need to remember a new password. So, if work is purely transactional, as long as everything is fine, I’m getting paid fairly, my boss doesn’t aggravate me, the work is okay, I’m doing a good job, that’s fine. But it doesn’t take much [laughing] to make me start seeking greener pastures. Whereas, if I care about the company I work for and I have a good relationship with my manager and I like the people on my team, etc. etc., I’m not going to be interested in going anywhere else. So, when we talk about employee engagement and all that good stuff, it’s easy to say well nothing’s on fire, there are no problems, so everything is fine.

JEFF:  Right. [laughing] There’s so much to unravel here. It’s really interesting. All of those things that people usually take into consideration when switching jobs – what’s the commute going to be like? Where do I park? How much will that cost me? Where will I eat lunch? All those kinds of things are just out the window. I know exactly how all of those things are from remote job to another remote job. It just becomes the job itself. (17:02)

I’d like to think that these, sort of inherent frictions of remote work, isolation, loneliness, giving people a context within the company, helping them to feel managed and what’s expected of them, and all that kind of stuff, the default setting on all of those things is not. [laughing] Is for people to just feel isolated and not connected to the company at all. But because we’ve got these sort of ankle weights as managers of remote teams, we need to make an extra effort. It’s sort of clear that there’s some friction around this, and we need to put some proactive focus on making these things better. I’d like to think that for companies that make an effort in that direction, you can solve these things so that you can have big wins. My company, for example, has had nominally zero percent attrition rate [laughing] over the past 13 years, and I think it’s because we put a lot of focus into those kinds of things.

WAYNE: Here’s the thing, and we talk about this in Long-Distance Leaders, kind of a first principle. We talk about all the rules. Rule number one is, think leadership first, location second, because there have always been remote teams since time in memorial. Julius Caesar did perfectly well thousands of miles from Rome. It’s actually when he went back to home office that things got ugly. So, we’ve always been able to do it if you’re thinking about the things that make teams work. (18:58)

People are passionate about their work, they’re engaged, they feel supported. All the stuff that makes teams work. The challenge is that we are working on a smaller data set. So, if Wayne is struggling, how do you know that? Or, if Wayne is getting ticked off, the only clue  might be that he’s not talking on meetings as much as he used to.

JEFF:  You’re not getting those visual cues that you would get in an office. Wayne’s walking around with his shoulders slumped down. He’s showing up late.

WAYNE:  Yeah. If I walk past the cube farm and I see Jeff banging his desk on his monitor, it’s very natural for me to say, “is something wrong?” [laughing] We can address that. If Wayne has always been a good worker and I don’t really have to micromanage him and I haven’t heard from him for a while, I don’t worry about that.

JEFF: I find a lot of that comes down to culture, and sort of creating a company culture where it’s accepted and expected, for people to speak up about those dark places, the sort of difficulties that a lot of work culture is oriented towards, sort of, success oriented, a little bit more type A oriented.

WAYNE:  Yes, you actually hit it right on. The end of that is, your workstyle, your work type is going to impact this a great deal and it’s not like only one workstyle can be successful working remotely. There’s this notion that working remotely is an introverts paradise.

JEFF:  Right. But the truth is, if you’re truly an introvert it’ll actually be really difficult because you won’t be communicating well enough to squeeze that communication through the pipes.

WAYNE: (20:53) The problem is the communication technology allows us to do great things if we’re mindful and we use it well. It also allows us to play to our weakness. I’ll give you an example. Manager needs to have a difficult conversation with Jeff. Jeff has been not doing a particularly great job with something, and I know that I should, if we were in the office, I’d pull him into my office and have a Chat, I know I should have this conversation with him, but Jeff’s kind of a pain in my neck, and I’ve had a long day, so I’ll just send an email. Or, I’ll leave him a voicemail after hours. Because it allows me to not have to do the really hard things, and still say I handled it.

And that’s the thing. If I’m having a coaching conversation, and this is really hard for managers, if I’m coaching my people in the office, there’s a certain set of behaviors. I take them somewhere quiet we have a little Chat before we get started, “how’s your coffee? Okay, good. Here we go.” When we work remotely, first of all there’s very little of that phatic conversation. The first words out of the managers mouth is always “I don’t want to waste your time.” Let’s make the best use of our time, let’s get right down to business. So, there isn’t that “how are the kids?” “How did the Raiders do last week?” None of that stuff. It’s more transactional and less personal.

It very often happens that, since I’m going to be on the phone, because I don’t like webcams and we don’t use webcams at our company, so I’m going to be on the phone, let me do this while I’m sitting in the airport waiting for a flight or while I’m driving between somewhere else. So, what’s actually happening is, yes, you’re having a one-hour coaching conversation with both of those employees, but the quality of that conversation is very different. This is actually a big thing where a lot of managers that have been thrown in the deep end, their thing is, “well I have to treat everybody the same whether they’re in the office or not.” The fact is you don’t. What you have to do is treat everybody equally. You may need to work differently. I’ll give you a really silly example. I don’t like people particularly, but I do really well with small doses of frequent communication.

JEFF:  [laughing] Fair enough. Okay.

WAYNE:  Right. So, when Kevin Eikenberry, who’s my boss, I live on the other side of the country in a different time zone, I have found what works really well is, every morning I get up and the first thing I do is, I send him a Slack message, say, “Good morning. How’s it going? Anything I need to know? Four mornings out of five, he says, “nope, carry on,” or “what are you working on today? Okay. Fine. Good.” It takes 30 seconds and we’re done. I’ve had the communication I need to keep me on track. If there’s something I need to know there’s an opportunity to get it, I can check my assumptions about what I should be working on, and I need that.

            There are people on Kevin’s team that he talks, and by talk, I mean communicate within some form, once a week, and they’re fine with that. If I go two or three days without checking in and making sure that I’m working on the right things, I get really neurotic and crazy.

JEFF:  (24:37.3) You’re also saying that four out of five days he says, “nope, everything’s fine,” but that means one day a week there’s, “oh, thank you for reminding me. I do have something I need to let you know.” We oftentimes assume that all communication is proactive. If someone has something to communicate then they will do it. But oftentimes it’s reactive.  It needs to be drawn out of them, and so it’s good to check in.

WAYNE:  You know what it’s like. There’s a 9:30 meeting in the conference room, so people start walking into the conference room, and you see Alice come in and go, “oh, Alice, I owe you that thing, let me send it to you as soon as I get back to my desk.” There’s all that stuff that goes on. The word that you use is really important, and we’re using it more and more around here, which is that idea of proactivity, which is buried in a whole bunch of stuff. Proactivity sounds like if something needs doing you do it, which is, kind of an assumed behavior with grownups. What proactivity also means is my teammate I see is struggling something. Am I stepping up to answer that question? Or, this email thread is going on forever and it’s not going anywhere, am I comfortable saying, “hey, this is nonsense. Let’s call a meeting and talk about this.” Or, “I think I’m doing the right thing, but I’m not scheduled to talk to my boss till next Tuesday, so I’m just going to keep working on this and hope I’m doing it right.”

JEFF: That’s where I think a lot of this comes down to culture. Because that fear really depends on how your company handles, what communication looks like within the company. Do people get trounced on when they show some vulnerability? Or is it the kind of place where you can say, “hey, I’m a perfectly experienced person who’s qualified for my job, and yet I am very confused about what I’m supposed to be doing right now.”

WAYNE: I’m imaging people listening to this, and I know because I used to do this. Whenever the word culture comes up, people roll their eyes and say, “here comes the HR thing.” But the fact of the matter is that for most of us on a day to day level, culture is simply the word for ‘this is how we do it here’. The thing is you either mindfully, intentionally create the culture that you want to have, or one will form organically.

JEFF:  [laughing] Or it will  happen to you.  Like a tumor.

WAYNE: (27:36) Right. You make decisions about this is how we do things here. One of the hardest things to do for a manager, people think that creating a culture from whole cloth is hard. No, the real challenge is you’ve now been put in charge of this team, or you were put in charge and things were going fine and now it isn’t, and now we need to course correct.

JEFF:  Lots of times managers come into a company and they’re trying to pattern match on the larger company culture, oftentimes [laughing] misunderstanding what’s happening. We sort of veer towards this more protected default, particularly in corporate environments. But I do think if you’re running a team, you can create a culture for that team, even within the larger company that might have a different culture.

WAYNE: Absolutely. That’s where it starts. You can’t say, “boy this company is really shame and blame, and we ought to do something about that.” [laughing]

JEFF: [laughing] No.

WAYNE: [laughing] Right. That’s not going to happen. But what you can say is, “I know what’s going on out there and with this team for this group of people, let’s work on that.”

JEFF: And maybe lead by example. If you believe, and I believe, you can be more productive by getting rid of that shame and blame culture, show it. [laughing] Wayne’s got this great team. Look how productive and happy they seem to be. He’s got zero turnover and how can we replicate that within the larger company, is a better message than knocking on the CEO’s door and saying, “hey, I’m Wayne. I just got hired here. [laughing] I want to tell you some things I have on my mind”.

WAYNE: It’s really interesting when you’re talking about trying to change team culture, because one of the things we were talking about, stealth telework, one of the things that happens is the team is working really well. Now we are either hiring you remote people or we’re letting people be remote, and so now we have this charming thing called a hybrid team, where some  people are in the office a majority of time and some people are working remotely. And for the first six months or year, it works great because everybody was part of the original team. “I know Bob, and so I know Bob is a really good worker, so I don’t worry about the fact that he’s remote because it’s Bob.”

JEFF:  Right. “Cause we had lunch together for the first three months that he was here.”

WAYNE: “We have history and so I don’t worry about it.”  But, as you bring new people in as Bob is no longer there every day for a year or so, and we don’t really know what’s happening in Bob’s life, in his head, in his world, in his work, you start to see fractures. And, that hybrid team is really kind of a hot bed, and it’s first often the first sign, that you’ve got a culture problem.

JEFF: Right.

WAYNE: (30:59.2) Because you start getting a lot of us and them. The remote people feel like second class citizens. They dial into meetings and can’t get a word in edgewise, and the people  in the room are dominating the meeting.

JEFF: And there’s joke’s like, “are you even wearing pants, Bob?”  Things like that.

JAMES; Yeah. Like I’m sitting here all day in my AC/DC T-shirt and my bunny slippers and not doing anything.  And by the way, the people in the home office are getting all the delegation assignments. They are getting promoted.

JEFF: Yeah, but they have the commute, so they deserve more, because they have to sit in traffic.

WAYNE: And we have to wear big boy clothes every day.

JEFF:  It’s just not an even playing field anymore. It’s not fair.

WAYNE: What happens is that you get these resentments, and sometimes managers exacerbate that unintentionally. (32:01.2) Here’s a really simple thing that managers do all the time. I’ve got employee A who’s part of the in-house team and I’ve got employee B, and employee B does a great job on something. And, like a good manager, I reward that, I recognize it, I make sure the person who works remotely knows that I appreciate the great job they did. And, you know who else on the team heard that? Nobody.

JEFF:  Right.

WAYNE: So, even though person A and person B both did a great job, person A got told that in front of God and everybody, and everybody knows what a good job person A did, but person B is out in the provinces somewhere and we don’t really know what they’re doing. The manager knows what a good job they’re doing, but the rest of the team doesn’t get that information.

JEFF: I think remote work is a really interesting experimental study. We’ve kind of got it under glass here, and you’re starting to kind of pull apart, what is communication? How does communication work? There is synchronous communication and asynchronous communication, but there’s public communication and private communication, and with all of these things, there’s sort of these, shades of gray in between. We are so used to this happening in this innate, primal primate kind of way that you don’t think about it, you’re just like, “well, Bob works at home. I talk to Bob on Skype, so I’m going to tell Bob on Skype how great a job he did.” And it seems like extra formal, or some sort of contortion to try and find a format for that communication that can give Bob the recognition of his peers. But, it’s really, really important.

WAYNE:  (33:58.9) Communication has two levels, and the challenge with technology is that technology handles one level really well. Part of communication is data transfer. Thee is a message that I am sending from me to you.  You can do that in an email, IM, carrier pigeon, whatever you want to use. Technology allows you to do that data transfer, extremely efficiently. The other part of communication is the context, the understanding, the inference, and that will never be anywhere other than in the heads of the people communicating with each other.  So, if I don’t take into account the emotional, empathetic context of the message, just engaging in data transfer creates all kinds of problems. If you have ever sent an email and then spent three days apologizing for it, you’ve seen this in action.

JEFF: [laughing] Yeah.

WAYNE:  Right. “All I was doing was telling you….” “I wasn’t judging you…”

JEFF: “I want to get all of my arguments in one email and I’m sorry that I inadvertently took your head off.”

WAYNE:  Or, “I’m sorry I freaked you out,” or “that you didn’t get the tone of the email,” because you can’t see that I kind of chuckled when I wrote that. So, if we’re going to use technology, and we have no choice is we work remotely, it’s literally our lifeline, we still need to have the mindset of a great communicator, a true leadership mindset when we’re thinking about that. You can’t separate one from the other.  How’s that for a lecture?

JEFF: I love it. You’ve got a captive and responsive audience here. This is great. (36:03.7) I’m curious to revisit our manager in the waiting lounge at the airport. One of the things you said about that was this idea of starting meetings with “let’s get down to business,” and then also just the whole concept of the distracted manager over the phone. We’re outlining that as what’s not good. Those are probably not great behaviors. What do you recommend as the good behavior for those kinds of things?

WAYNE: Again, it goes back to first principles. As a leader, what should you be doing? I use this argument with meetings all the time. People say, “well, you know Skype meetings aren’t as good as being in person.” I go, “okay.” So, what would happen in person?

JEFF: Right. And here again you need to dissect it. You need to take it all apart. The things that you hardly notice in person, of sitting down and making eye contact, and maybe somebody making light of something, or a joke, or talking about the weather and how are the kids. You hardly notice that. That’s not the meeting. The meeting doesn’t start until we say the meeting starts. But it is the meeting. Right?

WAYNE: Right. So, what you just did is, you can break that out. My argument, and this is true of phone calls of meetings, of whatever, is, what does a good one look like? And given the constraints that you’re working under, how do we make that as close to that optimum experience as we can? So, when people say, “oh, well, I like to use a show of hands,” you know on WebEx there’s a button that says, “raise hand”. “Well, I like to use a lot of flipcharts and stuff,” there’s a whiteboard in every meeting tool that there is. We make jokes. Are you encouraging people to use Chat or are you telling them not to use it because it’s a distraction? Because there’s great stuff happens in Chat. People ask questions. We bust each other’s chops. We make little jokes. It’s so funny because people go, “oh, that’s unprofessional.” It’s what we do in meetings. It’s how we get to know each other.

 When Skype for Business came out, I was outraged because I’m old and I’m a dinosaur, and I was outraged that there were like 50 emoticons in the Chat section of Skype for Business. I was like, what is this nonsense, darn kids with their rock and roll.  What I realized very quickly because I do it, is, people were using those emoticons to make jokes, tease each other, react to something that was said, because they’re desperate for that kind of connection and for the same humor and social bonding that they get in the live meeting. I encourage that silliness now. If somebody gets way out of control in Chat you send them a note and say knock it off. It never happens. I would rather people are using emoticons and teasing each other in the Chat and doing all that good stuff because I know they’re engaged. They’re engaging with each other. It’s the same thing with that call. One of the things we teach at Remote Leadership institute (he says, name dropping).

JEFF: Was that the Remote Leadership Institute?

WAYNE: I believe I said Remote Leadership Institute. Yes, I did. Anyway, one of the things that we teach is this concept of using the right tool for the right job. We use the concept of richness versus scope.  Are you familiar with this?

JEFF: I may be under, sort of a different terminology.

WAYNE: (40:03) It’s one of those blinding flashes of the obvious that a consultant came up with and I went, “holy cow, that’s what I’ve been trying to say”. What it basically means, is, all communication is a balance of richness. Richness is you and I having a cup of coffee, one on one. I could read your body language, your tone of voice, your facial expressions. It’s informal so if you have a question you can just ask it, it’s not a big deal. It’s wonderful and it’s completely impractical.

JEFF: Right.

WAYNE:  [laughing] Right. If you get more than one or two people involved in the conversation the richness drops, the dynamic changes, and of course it doesn’t account for things like this does. Email has great scope. A thousand people can get the same message at the same time, in the same way.  But we know that there are messages you send my email and there are messages you send in person. All the other tools at our disposal, synchronous, asynchronous, web meetings, webcams, all that good stuff, fits somewhere on that spectrum of richness versus scope. So, we need to think about, given the communication task at hand, what is the right tool to use. And we’ll go back to coaching conversations. Yeah, I can schedule a coaching conversation on my cellphone in between sales calls. I can do that. Is that the right way to handle that particular thing?

JEFF: Right. Because those should be the rich calls. Those should be the deep calls where you’re digging in and you shouldn’t be distracted.

WAYNE: (41:45) And, you’re looking for feedback and you want to look the other person in the eye. Well, if you can’t get person to person, what’s the next best thing. Well are we using our webcams on those coaching calls? “Oh no, we don’t use webcams in our culture.” Well, congratulations. You’ve now tied one hand behind your back, so the people in the office are inherently getting a richer, better coaching experience than the people who are remote.

JEFF: Yeah.

WAYNE: So, one of the things that I really encourage people strongly to do is, look at how your team communicates and make some conscious agreed upon decisions about, for certain communication tasks, how are we going to do it?  The one thing that I would say to everybody is, if you’re not using your webcam at least 50% of the time internally, you’re probably missing an opportunity.

JEFF: (42.54) Certainly if you’ve got a hybrid team or a hybrid work environment, yeah. You want to give the remote people as much fidelity as possible. The environments I’ve seen where more audio only kind of stuff can work is when everyone is audio only.

WAYNE: Where there’s a level playing field. It’s funny, I was teaching a class on virtual meetings the other day. Very high-level IT people. We were talking about hybrid meetings and the challenges of having the people in the room dominating, and he went, “why would we take people who are in the office and make them all use Skype instead of meeting in the office?” 

JEFF:  [laughing] I could talk for about a day about that.

WAYNE:  I did the good facilitator thing and said, “what do you think the advantage is?” There’s a bunch of them. First of all, we don’t have to fight for conference space. Second of all, everybody’s at their desk. Third of all, everybody in the meeting is communicating in the same way. Everybody can see everybody because they have access to webcams, and they encourage them to use their webcams.

JEFF: Everyone could see the emojis. [laughing]

WAYNE: Everybody could see the emojis and engage equally in the conversation. There’s a bunch of reasons, and it’s not like every meeting has to go that way, because let’s face it, donuts in the meeting is a thing.

JEFF: Donuts.

WAYNE:  Right.

JEFF:  Ruining remote work. [laughing]

WAYNE: You might want to think about certain meetings if you’re really brainstorming and collaborating and you want equal input from everybody, how about everybody’s using the same tool as richly as possible? We’re not talking about a conference call; we’re talking about a web meeting where we’re using a whiteboard and we’re sharing our cameras with each other and engaging in both synchronous and asynchronous communication. It’s not as good as having every member of the team in a meeting together, but it’s pretty darn close.

JEFF:  Yeah. Again, I want to visit another thing you mentioned earlier which was, that remote employees oftentimes work too much. Talk to me about that. I’ve certainly seen that, but what are your thoughts about why that happens? (45:33) How that happens? If that’s a good thing or a bad thing, and sort of the parts that oftentimes managers aren’t thinking about around that?

WAYNE: I think some of it happens for the right reasons and some of it happens for the wrong reasons. The right reasons are that people are conscientious and they actually do care about their work. If they get an email on their phone at a non-work hour and somebody has a question, their Pavlovian response is to be a good teammate and respond.  It’s just kind of a thing. I want to help. I want to be responsive. I want to be seen as a proactive worker. So, some of it is that.  If you’re working across time zones that tends to happen. So that’s a good thing. The other thing is because we have flexibility as remote workers, if I decide I want to go to the gym in the middle of the day for an hour, I’ll just log out and I’ll do an extra hour later on. We’ve got some flexible time. So, as long as that’s what’s happening, if you look at the cumulative time people are working and it’s a reasonable amount of time, I don’t care if somebody’s an email at 11:00, as long as their job description doesn’t require them to be there eight consecutive hours, 9 to 5. That’s the good stuff.

The bad stuff is my boss isn’t here, so I need to show them that I’m working. (47:20) I need to show how hard I’m working. I need to be responsive. I’m maybe not getting as much done during the day as I should and so I’m burning the midnight oil, and so there might be productivity barriers that I’m encountering, but I don’t want my boss to know that.

JEFF: Right. They make jokes that I’m not wearing any pants, so I’m going to show them that I’m super productive.

WAYNE: I’ll show them. Yeah. Exactly right. So, there are good reasons and bad reasons, but if the only evidence you get is somebody’s answering emails at seven in the morning and ten o’clock at night, you don’t know if that’s good or bad. That’s just a thig. That’s behavior. Why are they answering email at seven in the morning and ten at night?

I remember when I was living in California, my boss in California moved to New York, and for awhile we were having this kind of strange contest about who could send the email at the weirdest time of day. [laughing] I’d send an email at two in the morning because I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and do whatever, and he goes, “ha ha-ha, you sent it at two,” and then I’d get one at four, whatever. It took the two of us saying, you know this is nonsense right. This is not healthy. It’s not productive. It’s not good for us. [laughing] It’s like a lot of stuff, and we actually had to do a mutual intervention with each other and say, “this behavior is not okay. We need to get better about compartmentalizing our work.”

JEFF: Yeah, absolutely.  

WAYNE:  (49:10) Did I leave any other breadcrumbs in this conversation?  [laughing]

JEFF:  They are all very interesting threads and I keep writing that I want to talk more about that. [laughing]  Are there things that managers can do, obviously keep an eye out for emails sent at two o’clock in the morning and it’s not a matter of jumping on and saying, “hey, don’t send emails at two o’clock in the morning.” It’s just, “hey, I want you to know that you do not need to [laughing] send emails at two o’clock in the morning. We don’t expect that of you. You don’t need to feel like we have that culture where you have to do that.”

WAYNE: And, I’m willing to say that that’s probably not an email that you should send. That is the kind of thing, where instead of saying quit sending emails at 10 p.m., the question is, “so you’re sending a lot of emails at night. What’s going on?”  Let them tell you. “Well, you know, I had to go to my kids play this afternoon and so I put in a couple extra hours after she went to bed.” Okay. That’s cool. If you got the type of job where you have that flexibility, that’s one of the great joys of working from home. Knock yourself out. If, on the other hand its, “well, you know, I’m trying to be responsive.” Now, it’s time to talk about boundaries.

JEFF:  (50:40) I would think some  managers would have some nervousness and hesitation about asking some of those kinds of questions, because you start to get into some personal, potentially invasive kind of things, where the answer could be, “I’m going through a divorce.” Even just, “my kids had a play and I was going to make up the time later.” It’s like what’s the line between what’s work. Are managers managing peoples work lives or do they need to pay attention to people’s personal lives, the whole thing. It’s been my experience that it is more of a whole thing kind of thing and you need to allow people to be people and acknowledge that.

WAYNE: Let’s plug in where you just said that. If they were coming into the office every day and they looked like hell and they were dragging and there were a lot of personal, angry phone calls, wouldn’t you ask what was going on?

JEFF:  Right.

WAYNE: You might not even have to ask because they would be going crazy and you’d hear about it and it’s relevant information. If there’s something going on that’s impacting somebody’s performance, or there’s something about their performance that’s impacting their personal life. If sending emails at ten at night or one in the morning is creating problems with the spouse, that’s relevant information. I think  if you ignore personal stuff, you’re in trouble.

You know when you teach or you coach people you often learn as much as you teach, right? I remember working with a company in Silicon Valley and they had a rather unique problem. They all these brilliant world class coders and whatever and they couldn’t get anybody to take management positions. Everybody just loved being a coder, and I said to them, “why? You took the job and then you left and went back to the bench.” I said, “why would you not want the prestige and the money and the status,” and all that good stuff, and he said, “because code does what you tell it to do the first time and you don’t have to ask how the kids are.”

JEFF: So, maybe it’s something you look for in a manager. Someone who is empathetic, kind of holistically interested in that way. The Peter principle is this idea that people get promoted because they’re good at the thing that they were hired for, into a management position they weren’t necessarily hired for and aren’t necessarily good at, and as you’re saying, might not even be interested in doing.

WAYNE: Well, here’s the thing, and this goes back to management 101, which is again, if you think about leadership, the remote part kind of falls into place, which is the people who are really, really good at a job are not necessarily the ones who can teach it, coach it and be good leaders. If my job consists of writing code for hours and hours at a time with somebody sliding food to me under the door, and not paying attention to any other human being, and that’s what makes me great, and now you’re going to make me the boss of the coders, where I never get to touch a keyboard and my entire job is dealing with other people, that is probably not going to be a good fit.

JEFF:  Yeah. (54:51) Just because you’re good at the thing that you would be managing the people doing, [laughing].

WAYNE: And it doesn’t mean that they can’t be good at it. it doesn’t mean that those skills can’t be taught and improved and built upon, but what you can’t do is take that subject matter expert and say, “congratulations, you’re the boss, and by the way you’ve got five people here and four out in the world and go ahead make it work. Let me know how that works for you.”  Which is what’s happening to a lot of people, which is why organizations like yours, and mine frankly, exist. Right? [laughing] Our job is to help organizations recognize what the dynamics are so that they can help their people be successful. And, if they need a little extra help, there are resources out there to do it. But the fact that they need help doing that is a fairly recent realization. The move to telework, again, it’s always existed, but really started with the invention of email and really took off 10 years ago with the invention of the smart phone. It’s picking up pace and working ever since. The problem is, we all know, and especially the bigger companies, is, they have policies, and they have procedures, and they have things, and so, HR policy for example, hasn’t caught up with the way that we work. A lot of organizations are struggling. One of the reasons they’re losing their remote workers is that the remote workers are being excluded from the promotion career path. If you choose to work from home, you have chosen lifestyle over your career.

JEFF:  Right. And just to make sure that we’re clearly saying this that should not be the assumption.

WAYNE: Unless you’ve given it careful consideration. There are, for example, consulting groups that do a lot of in person brainstorming and that in person, in the room tension and dynamic is an important part of who they are. Okay. If that’s your decision that that is how you want your company to be, and you want to build that, cool.

JEFF:  Yeah, I guess so. I mean we see people who sort of semi-retire and move up into the hills in Vermont and telework a little bit, and they are not as connected and not as achieving, perhaps. That’s okay. And I don’t mean to exclude that from what I call remote work. (57:51)

WAYNE:  You know when Boeing allowed telework at a high level? When they hired a CEO, who didn’t live in Seattle and said, “I’m not leaving Chicago.”

JEFF: [laughing] Yeah. They said something like 85% of decisions about where corporate headquarters are going to be built have to do with where the CEO lives. It’s usually within five miles of the CEO. [laughing]

WAYNE: “I’m not moving to Seattle we have to make this telework thing work”. Then all of a sudden, the skies opened, and the angels sang and there was telework. IBM had a real problem with one of their consulting groups, and this made all the papers, it was a big deal. The headline was IBM Stopping Telework and Making Everybody Go Back into the Office. It was partly true.  They did have this small consulting group performance drop.  Their answer was, “that’s it. We all need to be back together.” Okay. Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe the answer also was “we could’ve prepared these people for the challenges.” We could’ve offered them the tools to do the job right and we could’ve held them accountable for their participation and their contributions. Yeah, could’ve done that too.

JEFF:  Yeah, right. Just restructure management practices and culture to some extent.

WAYNE: But that requires thinking about, what is this thing that we’re doing. If there’s a company that spends more time gazing at it’s own navel than IBM, I don’t know what it is, and I say that with love. This is what they do for other people. But, when we’re so busy running and every  morning we’re just trying to g et the work done, the notion of let’s stop, let’s examine the way we’re working, let’s offer new skill building for these new skills that people are going to have to have, that’s where we are now in leadership development.

Remote work is no longer something that we need to start planning for. It is here. We need to build the skills into our leadership development seamlessly so that we’re thinking about leadership first and location second. But when location becomes an issue, we know how to make that adjustment.

JEFF:   So, this is a very subjective question, but (1:00:39) do you feel like we’ve hit the tipping point for remote work? It’s hard to know what that tipping point is exactly. But I know there are a lot of managers out there who are feeling like, “I don’t know if we’re there yet,” or  particularly large enterprise companies where there’s these from on high statements of “that’s not what we do.” Talk to me about the trends you’re seeing and what your thoughts are around that.

WAYNE: It’s here. It may never be the majority. It’s funny, Barber the other day was asking me what I did for a living, and I told him, and he said, “well, that’s nice, doesn’t work for me. People can’t send me their heads that I can send back.” There’s always whatever that percentage is, and it’s going to vary company by company and industry by industry. But there is now the 100th monkey has set up their home office and I think we have, in fact, reached a tipping point where a considerable percentage of the thought leadership in your company will be working from home. What are you going to do about it?

JEFF: My prediction [laughing] is, it’s sort of this fits and starts of change anytime. So, we’ve got a lot of people who  are talking about this, a lot of people like you and me, who basically figured it out. It’s like, here’s what you need to do. However, I think that there’s a lot of legacy systems and processes and people who are kind of [laughing] afraid of change, that will as we’re saying setup hybrid teams, head into these tragic waters and crash. It will fail. Like IBM, they will pull back and then, we’re still moving forward, this is progress, it’s still [laughing] happening. We still have the tools. This is what people still want, those companies who frankly screwed it up will need to step back and rethink and talk to people like you and me to understand it better and not just step into it thinking, “we can do this, because we do everything.”

WAYNE: I’m a big history geek. I believe this is nothing new. (1:03:19) Things are constantly changing and there’s a spectrum -- some people are ahead of the curve, some people are right on the curve, some people will never get with the program. What we’re experiencing with this has always happened. I’ll never forget there’s a quote from a guy named Claudia Sextus, something. He was the last Roman general in England. He was the guy in charge of the Roman settlement in England. He famously wrote back to Rome saying, “I am no longer entertaining ideas for new weapons. Everything that needs to be invented has been invented, and we just need to keep those darn Scots out of our territory.” 

Nothing has changed. Stuff changes and sometimes it feels overwhelming and it’s like, “that’s it. We’re not going to do this.” Well, you know what? It’s going to happen. Email came whether people were ready for it or not. I could’ve given you 10 reasons why email should’ve been kept contained and in it’s cage. But it wasn’t and it wasn’t going to be. Suddenly we have email. It fundamentally changed the way we work. Okay, now we’ve got to deal with it. So, to say, “that’s it. We’re not going to use email anymore because,” no, don’t be an idiot, of course you’re going to use email. You just got to get smarter about how you’re going to do it. And that’s always been the case. There’s always been people who worked remotely, and we had to find a way to make it work.

 What we have to do is when it all gets too crazy, we need to stop  and say, “what is the right thing to do in terms of the outcome we’re looking for?” “What do I already know” is the right way to handle this, and then given the circumstances we’re under how do we get as close to that ideal situation as we can? People that can do that is making it work.

JEFF: (1:05:34) Yeah. I think the best that we can do is to continue to lead by example and show as I hope to do on this podcast,  in each episode, to show what works, and not keep that a mystery from the people that might want to change what they do.

Wayne, thank you so much for joining me on this podcast. It’s so much stuff, I feel like we could just keep talking and talking. If people want to follow-up with you to find out more about you or ask you questions and follow-up with anything on this podcast, where should they get in touch with you?

WAYNE: (1:06:18.5) I am not hard to find. The obvious thing, obviously is, our website is www.remoteleadershipinstitute.com. Shockingly my email is, wayne@remoteleadershipinstitute.com. There’s LinkedIn. There’s all kinds of good stuff. I am not hard to find, and I am delighted to talk to anybody who wants to dig down into any of this further. And, of course, “The Long-Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership” is out in the world and anybody with an Amazon account or whatever can find it easily enough.

JEFF: Yeah, you could find it on Amazon. The book is called, “The Long-Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership.”  It’s available on Amazon Kindle Audiobook. If you’ve got an Audiobook, that’s great.

WAYNE: It’s everywhere.

JEFF:  You got an audio CD of the book. That’s great. [laughing]

WAYNE: Barnes and Noble chapters, Waterstones, whatever country you’re in, it’s coming out in three languages this year. Get the book.

JEFF:  There you go. Well, thanks Wayne. I really appreciate it.  Take care.

Here’s the Transcript:

JEFF: Hi James. Welcome to the Yonder Podcast.

JEFF:  Yeah, it’s great to have you here. I find that our guests are usually able to introduce themselves better than I can. So, why don’t you introduce yourself to our audience.

JAMES: Yeah, sure. I’d love to Jeff. As you said, my names James Carrier. I currently co-lead a small business called “The World of Work Project”, with my business partner, Jane Stewart.  Fundamentally, what we do is, we help individuals and organizations develop. So, we do it in a couple different ways. We do some consultation work around the people side of change. We do some coaching for individuals to help them with their organizations and careers. But mainly our focus is on delivery and, sort of, personal management leadership development programs. So, that’s kind of what I do from a work perspective. From an individual perspective, I guess if I start by saying I’m a dual national. So, I actually grew up out in the states, but you’d never be able to tell by my accent.

JEFF:  Oh.

JAMES:  Yeah. That’s right. I grew up, of all places in Virginia, in Charlottesville, which has shot to fame over the past few years. 

JEFF:  [laughing]

JAMES:  Yeah, lucky us, right? So, I grew up there. I finished my school in the UK, done my education here in the UK. For University I did an economics degree and then on the back of the economics degree, I went and became a very exciting accountant. [laughing] Yeah, that’s great right?

JEFF:  [laughing] I have a lot of respect for accountants, because my mind does just not work that way. I mean, I can usually get the numbers to add up, it’s just sitting down to wait for the numbers to add up. That’s the problem. [laughing]

JAMES:  Oh, it takes a whole lot of skills. In the end I didn’t necessarily think I really had. So, I did a graduate program. I went and joined Ernst & Young and worked for them doing all that sort of auditing stuff in the finance world, which was what it was. I left as soon as I could, and almost as contrast to that, I moved out to Switzerland with some dreams of setting up a bar/restaurant and living in a ski resort for a while. So, I moved up there, I met some people, got some money, set up a business out there. I ran a bar/restaurant for two years until I ran out of money, and life got a bit tough, and then I moved back to the UK. So, that was a good lesson. Then, once I got back, I spent 10 years doing the core bulk of my career, which is working in financial services for a large banking organization with multiple divisional businesses. I went in initially in a finance capacity, so I was involved in delivering and leading finance change programs, mainly, looking at combining businesses, and improving their performance of finance functions and then other operational areas of corporate banking division.

I realized along the way that what I really liked was working with people and trying to get people to have a better working experience, a better quality of life, and better ways of working, and with that, increased performance and engagement. 

So, I jumped over about five years into my time in, sort of industry, into roughly an organizational development role, and then I spent the subsequent five years until I left, working in that organizational development space, fundamentally helping teams and individuals improve their performance in their engagement. That was through a mixture of leadership coaching, team coaching, changes to ways of working, things like culture change, things like working on inclusion and diversity programs, and trying to improve both the diversity, but also the inclusive nature of the organization. I got to work on internal calms and sort, of, culture change as well, that fits loosely within that space. So, it’s within that, sort of five-year period of my life, that I got closer to the remote working side of things. So, that’s my background. And, then, I left to set up the project that I mentioned earlier, “The World of Work Project”, a little over a year ago. So, I guess that’s my background.

JEFF:  Where are you talking to us from today? Just so people can kind of picture you on the globe?

JAMES: Yeah. Okay. So, I’m quite far north. I’m in Edinburgh, in Scotland. I believe we are 56 degrees north. So, to give you some sort of vertical context, we are north of Moscow, how about that. 

JEFF: [laughing] Wow. I did not realize.

JAMES: Yeah, we are way north up here. It’s August, but the sun is still out late.

JEFF: You think of Moscow, it’s so cold.  I suppose you have more ocean around you? Maybe it keeps things a little bit more temperate?

JAMES: Yeah, we’ve got that gulf stream, which basically keeps this a green country. If we didn’t have that it would be snowy and icy out there all the time. It would be horrible.

JEFF:  [laughing]

JAMES:  As it is, it’s lovely. But we’re blessed.

JEFF:  So, tell me more about “The World of Work Project”. What was the impetus for starting this?

JAMES:  Yeah. I’ll tell you what it was. Obviously, I’m really interested in the type of work that I’ve done for large financial services organizations that I’ve been involved in, and it’s something that I wanted to carry on. It was time for me to leave. It took me about a year to leave that organization. I left with an intention of carrying on in the same line of work that I’d been doing previously, but doing it not in that scale of organization, so that hopefully I  could make more of a direct impact, and also so that I could get more community engagement, and work with more charitable sectors and try to contribute a little bit more.

So, having left to do that, I actually met my business partner, Jane, who had relocated to Edinburgh, partly because she wanted to have more control over her life, to have a bit more remote working, a bit more, sort of, self-determination. She moved up from London for that with her partner. I met her through a friend of a friend, and we started talking and realized that we were both heading in roughly the same direction, aspiring to do the same types of things and make the same types of changes for the people that we work with. 

The core of that is really this belief that, the quality of an existence for an individual is hugely shaped by their experiences at work. We think that if we can help people have a better existence in work, it’ll just help improve their lives a little bit, and through that it’ll help improve the lives of those around them. They’ll be more positive, more socially involved, have a greater sense of value and inclusion at a societal level. We think that’s fundamentally a good thing and something we both aspire contributing towards. So, we had conversations that talked about things like that and sort of branched out. We explored different ideas. 

Then we realized we kept meeting up to have these conversations, so we thought, “you know what? Why don’t we just start to record some?” So, we actually just started out doing podcasting ourselves. We did “The World of Work” podcast. We recorded a whole bunch of those, and we released them, and we thought, “well, you know, this is kind of fun.” Then about three months after that we thought, “we’re still doing this podcast, we’re talking about all these other projects, we’ve got basically the same types of things that we want to do, why don’t we, sort of, bring our ambitions together and set up a company to do it?” So, that’s where it’s come from. My business partner, Jane, has her own business at the minute that’s up and running doing this consulting piece in the background, and I’ve got some of my stuff. So, we’re pulling it altogether at the minute.

JEFF:  (10:35) That’s interesting, that you’ve started a company out of a podcast. I like that idea, for a lot of reasons. [laughing]

JAMES:  [laughing] Well. Where you gonna go next, Jeff?

JEFF:  Well, partly because I could relate. A podcast is sort of getting together to talk and think things out, and kind of put together ideas and ultimately, sort of find your philosophy and your mission.

JAMES:  Absolutely.

JEFF:  And I think that you end up with a more mission-based company than sitting down with a more, business school, kind of, business plan, focusing more on the financial side of things. You talked a little bit about this integration of home life and work life. I think there’s also this integration of the mission side of a business and the financial side of a business, and it works much the same, right? We’re all one person and if you don’t [laughing] believe in the company that you’re running, despite the fact that it can be financially successful, it just could be kind of soul sucking.

JAMES:  (11:55) Well, absolutely. It just undermines the quality of your existence. It’s, as you say, soul sucking.

JEFF: Yeah. 

JAMES: And what happened with us is we talked through, it really was that exploration piece that you talked about, about kind of trying to define your philosophy, and I think between Jane and I, we kept influencing each other a little bit, and we’d go one way a little bit, back a little bit, and over time we just refined our way of working and aspirations for what we want to do in business, and ultimately realized they’re basically the same, so we kind of talked ourselves into that.

JEFF: Yeah. This topic of, sort of, to even call it integration, it’s actually more bifurcation or disintegration [laughing]. When we talk about this separation between work and personal. People are a person. I think in the past businesses have tried to distance themselves from peoples personal lives. Partly because people want their own privacy, and they want to be able to not have that hinder their work. But the truth is that, people bring themselves to work. All of us will be better served by acknowledging that. This comes up exponentially more when we’re asking people to work at home. Right?

JAMES: Yeah. (13:35) I think that’s absolutely right. I think that point around trying to bring your whole self to work and what that means now versus what it meant a long time ago is a really valid point. Certainly, in the organizations that I’ve been in, when we’ve looked at the inclusion agenda, if you will, and how do you create spaces that let people be their best, a lot of language we use in that space is around bringing your whole self to work. With that ability to bring your whole self to work and to be your whole self to work comes an ability to be at your best which is captured by things like increased creativity, increased freedom of thought. And, fundamentally, in my experience and in my opinion, a lot of that comes about because you get to drop all the underlying anxieties and emotional energy spent on things like trying to perform, and trying to please, and all that kind of stuff. 

JEFF:  Absolutely. Yeah. The word vulnerability comes up on this podcast a lot, which seems odd on a podcast that’s talking about business and work. Here again, I find that with remote work, I’ve said this on the podcast before so I apologize to listeners who have heard it, but I’m going to just keep hammering it that, you need to create an environment where people can communicate fully, and without the non-verbal cues of people walking around with their shoulders down or not making eye contact that you can pick up in an office you need to create a culture. You need to create an environment where people can speak up about what’s not working for them, which is a very, very vulnerable act, but you have to have that with remote work, because otherwise you won’t know what’s really happening. But the flip side of that is, it creates this wonderful culture of acceptance and allowing of diversity, a little bit of discord because obviously you want people to be working well, you want people to be productive, but you need to acknowledge that sometimes people aren’t going to be able to do that, which is a little bit of a leap of faith for leaders, sometimes. [laughing]

JAMES: Yeah, absolutely. You know when you’re talking about trying to get over the fact that you can’t see people’s shoulders slump, and you can’t see somebody’s smile on their face when they’ve come out of a meeting that’s gone well, you lose all those tertiary social cues around how people are feeling and what they’re thinking. And, trying to recreate that is difficult in a remote environment. We talked when we’ve tried to roll out what we referred to as agile working. That was a phrase we used which incorporated remote working. We talked about trying to create basically digital water cooler moments as part of this. So, how do you get that sense of conviviality that you can generate in a built environment where people are co-locating? How can you try and create that remotely? That was a challenge. That’s around the team cohesion aspect that we focused on. We also focused on trying to get some of that perception of current state of being from the people that you’re working with. Those were both really big challenges. But, like you say, if you get it right it can work really well. If you get it wrong, it think it can be a really difficult thing for both organizations and individuals when people are working remotely.

JEFF:  Yeah. Absolutely. (17:23) Another one of the things that I say a lot is that, the best practices for remote work are best practices for work full stop. Good remote management is good management. You’re working with ankle weights, oftentimes, [laughing] it’s sort of more difficult, but once you get it right, and you kind of have to get it right, then I think a lot of this can translate…

JAMES:  I probably, now that you’ve said that, I probably believe that good remote management is better than good face to face management, because I think you need to bring a different set of skills to it, so you need to demonstrate different levels of trust, you need to not place value on somebody’s effort at work. You’re not watching how long they’re at their desk. You need to really understand the value of the output that they create, you need to understand what metrics and measures are important for your business. So, you really need to know what you’re doing to manage remotely, I’d say.

JEFF: Absolutely. And, I feel like there’s some sort of nature, animal instinct, [laughing] kinds of things that come into play when we’re together.  

JAMES:  Absolutely.

JEFF:  We sort of judge each other on non-verbal, visual cues, almost more than if you ask someone how they’re doing and they slump their shoulders and they look down at the ground, “I’m doing great.” Right? Then you know that they are not doing great.  

JAMES: Yeah. 

JEFF:  Not having those cues, we need to kind of find other ways of doing things, other ways of communicating. Almost more honest ways of communicating. We need to actually say what’s actually happening, and I think that’s good.

JAMES:  I agree. I think it’s a challenge to our social skills both as individuals who are working remotely, but also as leaders who are trying to work in a way where we’re managing teams. You’re point there about how much weight we place on the non-verbal cues. (19:50) Do you know that guy Moravian, who did a communication model? I don’t know if you know this. He had a communication model that is attributed to him, Moravian, I can’t remember his first name. But it’s called, like, “The 7 38 55,” and it says that based on analysis, when you’re communicating to people about, “send me emotive content, or personal content,” that actually only 7% of a  communication that is relevant, takes place through the words for your ears; 38% takes place through tone and voice and pace and nuance, stuff like that; and the remaining 55% he actually reckons is body language. So that gives a huge context in terms of the benefits that you get from face to face communication.  There’s something else that you mentioned that I think is important. When we think about the way people work together, we tend to think about people in teams and things like that. In that you get the fundamental tribalism of human beings in groups, and you get your group dynamics. So, within the workplace you get people who are building their teams, jostling for a position, they’re defining their pecking order, but while that is disruptive in some stages, it also, once you go through that process, creates a clear sense of where different people are within that group, and you get your defined roles, and you get your roles, and you get your dynamics and you can gel and work effectively, and that, sort of, creates that sense of in group. So, even though the person that I’m working with might really annoy me or be slightly above me or below me in the pecking order, they are my person and they are part of my intimate working group. And that brings a lot of power to it in terms of team cohesion, which I don’t think you always get remotely.

JEFF:  Yeah. There’s also sort of, this idea I have of the physicality of office politics. That it’s the way that people carry themselves, the sort of status symbols, the sort of outgoingness, and when we can kind of move to a more results-oriented focus and actually, kind of, creating a more even communication method. I don’t mean to overstate the evenness or the filtered-ness of remote work, but if you use, for example, Slack, as an example, of everyone’s just got text and emojis. It’s an even playing field. Everyone can communicate, everyone can communicate to anyone at the company, and it’s a very different dynamic  than when you think about this sort of stereotypical office space.

JAMES:  Yeah, you know, with a lot of us, sort of team coaching and different activities like that, when we work with teams, one of the things that we do is we want to occasionally elicit ideas from people around the room. So, for example you’ve got a problem you’re trying to solve, or you’re trying to develop something, you’ll try and get ideas from people, and what we find is that, and I’m sure you’ve seen stuff like this before, say you’ve got 10-15 people it the room, if you ask an open question of a room in that type of forum, the dominant voices will jump in right away, and they’ll control that narrative and they’ll drive our agenda. And the future conversations anchored on that initial positioning that they’ve introduced. And so, when we do that kind of stuff in a team environment, in a physical environment, when coaching we’ll always basically try to do silent brainstorming which basically just says, “here you guys go. Here’s some post-it notes. We want all of you to independently come up with your ideas,” and then we’ll share those collectively and that’s the way to sort of even out those voices, to dampen down the exuberant, strong, dominant voices, and give voice to people who are often quiet, but often have really great to say, they just never get a chance to say it. So, to some extent that democratization fits with what you were talking about.

JEFF: Yeah, and I would argue that it’s the manager’s job to democratize, to give voice to the quieter people in the room. But, on the other hand,  if the company culture, or just the evolution of the company has been such that those managers were the louder people who were promoted, [laughing] oftentimes it will just perpetuate, right? And then that’s where you are.

JAMES: Yeah, we see a lot of that. It’s a real challenge.

JEFF:  Man, I’ve got so many questions, but let’s kind of zoom out, because your focus is on “The World of Work”, the wider world of work, and even when you talk about remote work, it’s kind of as a subset of this agile work methodologies. Talk to me about that, kind of, where you see remote work sit in this larger view. We’re kind of down in the weeds here, on this podcast, talking just about remote work, but help us understand sort of where all of this sits in your view.

JAMES: (25:31) Sure. So, when I speak about agile working, I’m not speaking about, sort of, IT methodology and agile work in that way. So, it’s the way that agile working’s referred to in the organizational context, in the UK, kind of led by an organization called the “Agile Future Forum”, that’s about trying to change the way the UK works fundamentally.  And the “Agile Future Forum” looks at four different pillars of agility, fundamentally, and those four different pillars cover what they think are the core ways for people in organizations and react to those organizations from a work perspective.

So, the first piece that’s really in there is around where people. So, are they remote, are they in the office, are they in a local Starbucks? From a banking perspective, in my background, do they work in a head office building? Do the pop into their local branch and is there a spare office there? Do they work out of a call center? Where do they work? So, physically where do they work and with that, to some extent, what’s their built environment like and what’s their technology to support that. So, pillar one is around where people work.

Pillar two is around when they work. So, this firm looks into agility of hours effectively. So, do people work traditional 9-5? I guess that’s traditional in the UK, I guess it might be a little bit different in other parts of the world. Or, do they work compressed hours instead of contracted arrangements. Do they work, maybe 8-6 four days a week and have a day off on Friday? Do they work entirely flexibly? Is there any control over their hours? Do they work as long as it takes to get the job done? Do they work part-time? And increasingly, when we’re looking at these large organizations and the agility of a workforce within there, we start to question things like, do they work slightly different patterns? Do they work two weeks on, two weeks off? Do they work, maybe in for example, a tax organization, maybe they work three months high intensity around tax year-end and work reduced hours for the rest of the year. So, that’s for what people work. 

The third pillar’s around what work they do. So, who defines the work that individuals do within an organization? Is it purely hierarchical? Are they told what to do? Do they have some autonomy around it? Do they get to create and shape their own work? Does it work on, maybe a ticketing system? So, do people pick up tickets of work, and deliver those independently? Is there some sort of internal market? Do people auction pieces of work and bid on it internally? How does that definition of who does work and what work people do, get created?

And then the last pillar that we look at in this context is around the contractual obligations between the person delivering the work and the organization, I guess, benefiting from that work. So, are people in full-time contracts? Are they in part-time contracts? Are they on fixed term contracts? Are they agency workers? Are they supplied through another organization? Are they gig workers doing piecemeal pieces of work? How does that work? And, so, certainly in our context, when we think about agile working, what we’re really saying is that, through these four different pillars, you can help redefine the agility of an organization. So, as you get more flexibility and variability around these different factors, what you create is an organization that benefits as  well as benefits for the individual. So, an organization if it gets these things right, can benefit by being able to flow it’s work in new directions more quickly. So, if there’s a change, and it’s say regulatory environment and it needs to increase work on a certain aspect of compliance, it’s got flexibility in it’s labor force that lets it move people to focus on that different area to change capabilities, to bring in resource quickly, to reduce resource quickly. So, all that, sort of flexibility, creates benefits to an organization as well as obviously some aspects of cost saving, around where people work, and things like that.  

And then from the individual perspective, it gives people choice, it gives people variety, it gives people opportunity, to fit jobs around their lifestyles and to fit within the requirements of what they do. So, we think of agility as being a really key aspect of inclusion. So, if you want to bring in people, you know, maybe you want to increase availability of your roles to people who are, maybe less physical able than others. They might find it a real challenge, for example, in London get to a tube station, get across London on the underground, get out and get out into an office, and that’s a barrier to their engagement. [laughing]

JEFF:  [laughing] That’s difficult for an able-bodied person. 

JAMES: [laughing] I realized when I said might it was a little bit optimistic. But you know what I mean. So, all the agility that we talk about here is part of the inclusion strategy, and in turn that means that all of this really becomes a strategic imperative to organizations looking to exist into the future. You know, you want to have a competitive advantage through the people that you have in your organization, and to do that, you need to attract and retain the best people, and with that, means that you’ve got huge numbers of really excellent people who need to work part-time who are not able bodied. You have other commitments that mean that they’re committed to being geographically in certain places. They might be careers. There are all these types of people that you want to make sure that you have access to in your recruitment and retention. So, agility fits within all of that. So, remote working in my perspective, is a really core part of that overall strategic imperative around the agility of an organization, and through that its ability to, I guess, to deliver its strategy and to survive in the future to use, particularly, corporate sounding words there for a bit.

JEFF: Yeah. And all of these things expand the talent pool that you have available for hiring great people. [laughing]

JAMES: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we call our project “The World of Work”, and I guess we’ve ended up with that title because we’re interested in all aspects of work. We think that works important, as we said, for individuals, but I think both Jane and I ended up settling on this, sort of consensus, but we believe that work is more important than just something that we do, right? We think work defines to some extent or contributes to a definition of our identity, so at an individual level it’s really important. But we also believe that, at a sort of cultural or societal level, the way that we shape work and the way that we define what work is within our cultures and societies, really helps shape who we are at a societal level. Then that means that we progress in certain directions, or we regress in other directions, depending on what our relationship with work is. 

So, for example, if we think about the remote working side of things, if we work in a world where we maybe do a bit more supporting of remote working, we’re a little bit more granting of autonomy and empowering to the people, then we give people scope to do this kind of stuff and reap benefits of that, or not just to the individuals themselves, but we believe that those seep through into society. So, if I am working from home because I’ve got care and responsibilities for an elderly parent with dementia and I’ve got a young child, right, that means that I can have that good job, I can be there. I can do it in the windows of opportunity that I have within my day, I’m better able to care for the people that I need to care for, I’ve got better relationships with them, and through that I’m a healthier, happier person, and I’m having better touch points with those that I interact with around the world. So, you know, fundamentally at our core we think all of this stuff is really about trying to improve, you never lift experience with people at all levels of society. Does that make sense? I kind of went off on one there.

JEFF: It makes wonderful sense. (33:35)and really brings a sort of wonderful, higher purpose to all of this. Certainly, the stuff that we’ve been talking about with remote work, but even when you look at it in this larger context of flexible work or agile work, yeah, it’s great. [laughing]

JAMES: Well, I guess I aim big, right?

JEFF: Yeah. And I think there’s this subtext, it’s an effect of gratitude, that seems to come up around this as well. It’s kind of difficult to talk to because you don’t want to expect it or demand it, but if you talk about it, it’s sort of a wonderful side effect. People are usually really appreciative of ultimately the respect that is underlying of all of these things, and it goes both ways, right? I am appreciative that people would be willing to work for me and kind of open their homes to my company, and do work for us, and they’re appreciative to be able to work there and in that way. So, there’s that side of things, that isn’t constrained to remote work specifically, but sort of comes with this sort of wider flexibility and ultimately sort of trust and respect.

JAMES: I think trust and respect are really key words in this. Both parties need to trust the other party.  From both sides you need to trust. If you’re managing remotely then you lose your eyes. You see the outputs, but you’re not able to peer over your desk, you’re not able to see what time somebody walks in, you’re not able to see how long they’re there. So, you’ve got to develop that bit of trust. But, likewise, if you’re working remotely some of the challenges are that you need to trust your leadership to really understand what you do, to value it, to speak up for you in events where they need to. For example, if it comes to what we’d call a calibration session, you do your annual performance management cycle or quarterly, or however you do your assessment of employees. If you’re a remote worker in an organization that’s not entirely remote you need to trust that people will remember you. You will have the same visibility and share that conversation about your performance. So, you really need to build that trust for it to work, I’d say.

JEFF: Yeah. (36:37) So, again, coming from this sort of wider context, talk to me some about culture change. This comes up a lot around companies that are “thinking about going remote” or “thinking about harnessing this remote thing”, but aren’t quite sure how to get from point A to point B. Because usually in my experience, this is more of a cultural change, and trying to insert this trust and respect, or managers to kind of loosen up. I’m curious what other cultural blockages you might see.

JAMES: Sure. I can tell you. So, what I’d say is that it’s just a kind of difficult and messy process, right? And I think you’re right that at the heart of this is change of a culture of an organization, and as you are moving away from a fixed location to a remote working process, you come up against a fair number of obstacles, and a lot of those obstacles we touched on in relation to trust and things like that. But the ones who move first in this process are the ones who are probably going to find it the most difficult. Once you get over that tipping point, and if you get to a stage where maybe 20-25% of people are remote then, then it kind of changes and the dynamics change. 

If you’re looking at changing culture, then I’d actually look to follow some of those sort of traditional organizational change models, something like John Kotter, but really like my preferred overall change process goes back to Kurt Levin and he’s got a three-stage model of change which I think is beautifully simplistic which says, unfreeze, so, shake up the stuff that you’re doing, change it, and then refreeze. So really what he’s saying there is:

Allow stuff to unfreeze so that it can change, then introduce some changes, and then embed those changes so it sustains.

So, as a high-level framework for any change process that’s broadly what I’d look to have in the back of my mind. 

When it comes to culture change specifically, I think you’ve got some particular challenges in that culture change is really fundamentally about people and social relations and interactions and interpersonal relations. All that type of stuff, right? So, culture change is not about the process of your organization really. I mean processes can contribute to it, but they’re not really what it’s about. It’s about the people, and it’s about the emotions and it’s about how people rub along together. It’s about how people feel that their actions are fair, it’s how people think things are equitable. It’s all those types of things. So, if you’re looking to introduce a change program like this, I guess you need to first make sure you think it’s the right thing for you. So, you need to understand the costs and benefits associated with it, and the risks associated with it, and make sure it’s the right thing to do. Then if you’re going to go ahead to deliver it, I would say that almost, and I hate to say it, unfortunately one of the really key things to do is to get real buy-in and sponsorship from your leadership team, right? Because you’re going to need to get people to help you. [laughing]

JEFF: [laughing] We could say this, right, that they’re paid to fall in line except that you’re asking for plate tectonic shift sometimes here. I think sometimes managers can see this as, especially micromanagers right, could see this as, “what am I supposed to do if I’m not micromanaging?” 

JAMES; Exactly. And that’s a big change. 

JEFF: It’s scary. Yeah.

JAMES: (40:41) And so like, you’re saying it later, I need to understand what it is. I need to do things like create a common language around what remote working is. So , you need to get all those shortcuts to communication, so people really understand what  you mean and by having the shortcuts in language, so if everyone has a shared understanding of what you mean by remote working, then let that be a shortcut. You can introduce other language around that, that could help people communicate more effectively around it. And, you need to get to a stage where your leaders are role modeling. So, your leaders need to behave in the right way.

(41:17) When you speak about organizational culture, people speak about roughly three levels of organizational culture. At the top you got roughly your values and behaviors. Those are the things that you espouse about your culture. Then if you go down a little bit further  what you get is things like your artifact of culture, So, if we look at this, you’ve got your value “we support remote working in a great organization” would be your  organizational value. 

The next level down, this may be the artifact level, on each of the front doors to your building you have a sign that says, “we value remote working,” “are you working remotely enough?” “Have you taken a nice walk at lunch today?” Whatever happens today is a sign there. So those are the two layers.  

Then the third layer down is really the lift experience. Values and behaviors and actions and things like that. If you’ve got an espoused value that would value remote working, if you’ve then got artifacts around the building, you’ve got posters and stuff like that [laughing], at the third level what happens is your boss is in there everyday saying, “why aren’t you in the office?” 

JEFF:  [laughing]  Right. The whole management team is in there saying, “no, you can work from home, but the action is happening here at the office. But, if you want to work from home, that’s fine.” 

JAMES: Exactly.

JEFF:  You probably just won’t ever get a promotion, but it’s fine. Do what you want.

JAMES: Yeah. It’s the right thing to do, work from home. 

JEFF: We’ve got the signs on the doors.

JAMES: Exactly. (42:43) So, breaking that down requires real leadership by an engagement, and that’s a challenge. And like you said, you’re micromanagers are scared by this,  because at least some of them that I worked with suddenly realize that they don’t really know where the connect is between effort and output within particularly some of the more complex pieces of work that their teams do. They see the output and they see the input, but they kind of lose track of what people are doing and the control that they have for it.  So, it’s rather difficult.

When we go ahead and do this we talk about all this stuff, we think it’s important to have effective communication and to have your leadership role modeling. But what we’ve done, which I think has been the most successful is, when we’re trying to introduce this into the team that’s changing, we do tend to introduce what we call “remote huddles” or “daily standouts” and get those touch points for people. So, when we’ve rolled stuff like this out to teams, we’ll normally work with teams of between six and 15, so that level within an organization that works under a single leader, and we roll out a series of management practices, for lack of a better word, that would support remote working. With that would be both the technology to enable them to all communicate effectively, but also with process. 

So, we work with them to build out what we’d call a “team information center”, which basically you could think of it as a kanban board, but it’s not really that. It’s a visual representation of the performance of the team with everybody in it. We’d help them design that; it would be a co-created piece with them. We would then get them used to using that. Depending on the platforms that people use, we’ve probably have that in something like Excel or Enterprise Social Network, or somewhere that lets them all access and see the same thing, and we’d create that information center. Then we’d introduce daily check-ins for that team or maybe three times a week depending on how they work, and we’d then try and have those touch points at the start of the day where the remote team gets together and everybody has a chance to check-in what the whole team is doing to air their grievances, to raise concerns, to ask for help, and within that we’d always try and build in some focus on the individual. So, we recommend that teams always basically ask, “how is everybody doing today?” “How are you feeling today?” “How are you feeling about your workload?” “What’s going on in your personal life?” “Have you got any personal successes you want to share?” And we try and allow for some of those more personal conversations to take place in that forum. We find to achieve and embed some of that,  it takes 10-12 weeks really, from starting a creation process to having it effective.

But having those remote checkpoints for remote teams is a really helpful thing.

So, that’s a series of things that I think about from trying to introduce about change.

JEFF: I find that lots of times companies who are thinking about transitioning to remote think of it a little bit too much around the physicality, geolocation of things and there’s sort of this idea of, “well, we’ll allow people to work from home one day a week and then six months later we’ll allow people to work from home two days a week, and then three days a week, and then four days a week, and then we’ll be a fully distributed company.” It’s been my observation that that does not work.  Because as you’re saying, there’s cultural change and process change and organizational change that needs to happen, that has nothing to do with where people are working. And, without those changes, what will inevitably happen is we’ll schedule meetings around people, “oh, we won’t have meetings on Friday because everyone works from home on Friday.” “We won’t have meetings on Thursday because now people work from home Thursday and Friday.” Eventually we just get to this one day that there’s meetings and all the stuff is happening and then we try to remove that. Everyone is standing on this teeny little island of meetings and all of a sudden, we try to remove the island, that it’s not possible.

JAMES:   A snorkel sticking out of the water, or something like that.

JEFF: Yeah. So, one of the ideas that I’ve had, and I think this fits into what you are saying, but I’m curious to get your thoughts about it, is, (47:37) this idea I have of what I’m calling “go remote first, first”. So, remote first is sort of the philosophy of a company, particularly a hybrid company, and let’s be honest, hybrid companies are much more common than fully distributed companies, right? In the same way that flexible work and agile work is more common. And, it is ultimately a superset of remote work, but remote first is basically this idea that we need to all work as if we are remote workers.  So, if we have a meeting and some of us are in the office and some of us are remote, we don’t go into the conference room and add the people on the conference phone who are remote because that’s not even, that’s not first. They are secondary in that equation. So, instead we all call in. We all connect through Zoom or whatever, from our desks, and all work as if we are remote, remote first.  And the interesting thing about that style is that anyone can do it. You can do it if no one works remote.

JAMES:  Absolutely.

JEFF: And, you start to adopt some of these cultural changes, certainly the sort of technological changes. It seems a little weird and awkward at first, especially to kind of go through this extra effort when people are in the office together, but I think it’s a really nice way to get started down that path.

JAMES: I’d 100% agree with you. In teams where we’d work with them, we would say as you said, “everybody should be dialing in, onto a video conference platform. You should not be in a room with one person dialed in, and it’s for the equity piece. It’s about having that equal experience, that’s really important. So, I think that’s  absolutely right. And as you said, I think you can embed the practices of remote working without ever leaving your office, if you want to. And that’s kind of a good test bed in which to work on some of this stuff. So, I’d absolutely support that as a direction progression.

JEFF: Yeah, and obviously you should be thinking about all of these other things, but I think that they’ll almost come out of necessity from a remote first approach. I think it’s a good introduction. Much better than working at home one day a week.

JAMES: Well, you know, if you just tell people to work from home, they’ll just not really know what to do. “So, I’m at home today, what’s that?” And it’s all that stuff about “what’s the purpose? Why am I doing it? What do I get out of it? How does the organization benefit? How will people see me? What do I do if something doesn’t work?” All that kind of stuff. It’s a big change and it’s got to be a gradual thing.

ffJEFF: Yeah. (50:55) Another thing that you’ve thought about a bunch and  I wand to get into is diversity. We sort of touched on this a little bit when talking about agile, flexible work and being able to hire a more diverse set of people who are available to work. But talk to me about that. Oftentimes there’s the Venn diagram between remote work and computer technical, developer, community of workers which oftentimes is not as diverse as it should be. That Venn diagram overlaps more than I would prefer [laughing] in general.

JAMES: Yes, I’m with you.

JEFF: So, how can we help all of this?

JAMES: Trying to create diverse teams, again like all these things, it’s a bit difficult. In the organization that I was in, we actually ended up inverting the traditional diversity and inclusion and referring to inclusion and diversity. We really ended up believing that creating the inclusive space was the first thing that you needed to do and everybody, as you said, should be able to bring themselves to work. That’s an equal statement. That’s not about any protected characteristics or anything like that. It’s about giving everybody the equal opportunity to be themselves at work. So, we really think of that as the starting point. With that comes, at least in the types of organizations I’ve worked in, almost a softening of what was historically, fairly macho dominant type environment to some extent. So, with that you get aspects around emotional intelligence, you get things around communication, you get things around psychological safety, self-awareness, values. All that kind of stuff within the creation of that inclusive culture within an organization. Then you also get the, sort of built inclusion, access, workplace adjustment for people with different needs in the workplace, and things like that. So, that inclusive piece is a really important key bit. 

Then when you get to diversity of your population, you’ve got your traditional protective characteristics. Things like age, gender, ability, sexual orientation, increasingly you bring in things like mental health, potentially as part of health, some big things here are around social mobility and social diversity. So, how do you bring people in who haven’t had an opportunity to go to university? How do you get the best outcomes for people who have maybe been in the social care system in their young lives? How do you bring all of these people in? And it’s difficult.

A lot of what you need to do, or at least in the scale of organizations I’ve been working in, you work by creating to some extent communities of interest around the different diversity strands that help you raise awareness, create allies of people with productive characteristics, raise awareness of what’s going on in there, but also let you reach out to and influence the leaders in relation to these different topics and different strands. 

So, by getting your leaders in your organization to understand and empathize with the experiences of different people from diversity strands, you develop a real sense of empathy. We ended up doing things like, tell me anything sessions as opposed to asking, and we’d get ?, senior leadership and we basically had to sit there and we’d get young people from a specific diversity strength come in and say, “this is what it’s like being me.” And these senior people had to listen to it. These are really senior people and it’s hugely powerful. Stuff like that could be really hugely powerful.  Again, unfortunately, a lot of that is about trying to almost change the mindset around some of the leadership of these areas. 

We’ve also, although I’m not convinced entirely it’s a good thing, done things like tried to bring in, to some extent, quotas around applicants. So, for roles we’ve said that x proportion of people need to be female, x proportion should be from an ethnic minority, whatever it happens to be, which can be beneficial but there’s some real challenges around that. We’ve also done things like making sure you always have exit interviews with people who are leaving your organization, so you understand the challenges and trying to remove bias from your recruitment process by maybe stripping out applicant names and things like that. So, a lot of that goes on. One of the things that we’ve had as a real challenge was getting, for example, in the financial services industry, women into senior positions.

We’d work really hard on that and we’d create accelerated development programs for young women, and we’d have bits of target, female networks, role models coming to speak to them, mentor them so we’d have senior to junior mentoring, the tell me anything sessions. We’d invest a fair amount in this. What we found happening was we got a lot better at supporting women into stepping into more senior roles, but we couldn’t retain them. Which I thought was interesting.

We managed to overcome that one hurdle of helping them progress up in an organization, but fundamentally they got there and didn’t like the culture and what it was like to be there, so they left. So, again, for me, a lot of that comes back to your inclusive culture and how you get that right and how you manage your expectations. I know that’s a bit of a round about conversation about inclusion, but hopefully there’s some interesting stuff in there for you.

JEFF: Yeah. It’s all logical kind of stuff. But it’s another red flag to put next to those dominating personality people kind of moving into management roles, and ultimately pattern matching that thing that comes around, the role of having an inclusive culture and pathetic culture, vulnerable culture and allowing for a wider variety of people. There was some company that came across my radar a while back that really prided themselves, they had a thing, every Friday afternoon it was cigars and whiskey. [laughing]

JAMES:  [laughing] Well that sounds just like my kind of place. Sign me up.

JEFF: And they couldn’t understand, those things are not necessarily inherently gender specific. They’re not inherently ethnically specific, but boy, it paints a picture. [laughing] It’s really hard to move into that when you’ve got that kind of thing going on. You can obviously go so far in the other direction that we’re really hesitant about having any fun because there is some sort of tribal stuff where, I don’t know, playing rock, paper, scissors at the company retreat, arguably, there’s a culture that comes with that. [laughing] 

JAMES: Yeah. It’s all about a balance. I think when you look at celebrating different things and say you’ve got your team lunches out or whatever you do, you have an end of month and everybody goes out for lunch, and it’s okay to go places that serve alcohol. That’s fine sometimes. But sometimes you might want to do something else as well. So, if you have people that don’t drink for whatever reason, well they’re welcome to. It’s just that awareness.

JEFF: (59:16) I like this idea that inclusivity comes first. That’s it. Once you create a more inclusive environment where you’re thinking about including people, in a very literal and direct way.  Like, what if we have someone at the company that doesn’t drink, then do we keep that company culture? We have this blow out beer pong every Friday night. [laughing] Is that inclusive? And once you have a more inclusive environment, then at least it opens up the possibility for more diversity in the company.

JAMES: Yeah. Absolutely. We also did a fair amount of work around culture sharing (1:00:05) Again, the scale of organization I was in was very, very large so there was more opportunity for that. There were regular communications, artifacts around the building, things posted up by places like the printers, sometimes people need to print stuff out because as much as we’d like to be paperless, we’re not. [laughing] There are things up there and it would talk through all the different religious festivals. So, basically a calendar that exists and talks about different cultural events all the time. So anytime anyone’s at a waiting place, outside a lift, or at a printer, wherever it is, there’s something up saying this is for the nearest upcoming religious festivity. This is what it means for these people and here’s an example of somebody from our organization who finds this an important event. So, that’s a powerful thing. And, drawing those real connections between people helps bring to life that sense of inclusion and helps break people out of boxes and helps people think of each other as real people and explore by lift experiences and that leads to inclusion.  

JEFF: Yeah, right. Rather than trying to homogenize the environment to allow for this mix and openness. I find that this is a wonderful thing about remote work as well, when you have a distributed team or distributed company, oftentimes they’re spread out across the world, and so it’s not that someone is out of their culture, and they want to celebrate a holiday that we’d never heard of, it’s that that they are in their culture. [laughing] Now we’re like, “please tell us about this Indian holiday that I don’t know about. I want a wonderful chance to learn about it.” 

JAMES:  Yeah, and to celebrate it and share. It’s exciting. Interesting stuff. 

JEFF:  [laughing] Well, James this is a great conversation. Your website is worldofwork.io. I’m a big fan of the .io domain.

JAMES:  Good. [laughing]

JEFF: [laughing] Other than visiting the website, if people want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way?

JAMES: Yeah, so, obviously there’s contact stuff on the website, but we’re on Twitter. You can get me @jgcarrier, get in touch with me that way, I’m quite responsive on Twitter. We’ve got Twitter for our podcast which is @thewowpodcast, and then we’ve got one for the website which is @worldofwork_io. So, all those things work. You can find us that way. I’m on LinkedIn. All the usual places. We’re out there and we like engaging with people and chatting and all that kind of stuff. Feel free to reach out.

JEFF: Yeah. Super. Well, thanks for coming on, James. This was really fascinating, and it’s nice to step out of the remote work scope a little bit and understand where it sits, and I think we sit well. [laughing]. 

Here’s the Transcript:

JEFF: Hi Emma. Welcome to the Yonder Podcast.

EMMA HEUSTON: Hi, Jeff. How are you?

JEFF: I’m great. It’s great to have you on.  We keep having Australians on, which is a really nice little look into the future for me. I get to see what tomorrow’s going to be like, as I talk across the international dateline. [laughing]

EMMA:  [laughing] It’s eight a.m. here. Nice and early.

JEFF:  Yeah, and I also get to do an evening podcast for me, which is a nice little change of pace. But, yeah, well let’s see. I find that guests usually do a better job of introducing themselves than I do. So, tell people who you are and what you do.

EMMA: So, I’m Emma Heuston, and I run a law firm which specializes in remote and flexible work solutions. So, being a lawyer for 19 years, and during that time I’ve helped many people overcome difficulty times, and in my own experience, the four years previous to this year I actually worked remotely at partner level for a law firm based in Sydney, Australia, and I live near Baron Bay which is about 1,000 kilometers away, or 500 miles away. And I worked completely remotely. I managed a team, one of whom was in Germany for a while, a team of five, and that was such a change of  paradigm in the very traditional legal industry. And through that, and through the book I released last year called, “The Tracksuit Economy”, about working  productively and effectively from home, it was clear that there was a real gap in the market between people doing this and then being able to have the policies and the procedures in place, and the law, because there are some real quirks that aren’t covered in our traditional kind of workplace policies, or employment contracts.

JEFF:  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I’m sure that listeners are going to be excited  about those kinds of things, because this isn’t a thing that often comes up around remote work. It’s sometimes, sort of, a simple blanket question, “is it legal?”

EMMA:  Yeah.

JEFF:  And the answer is, well, yeah, it just hasn’t all been quite figured out, and the existing laws don’t exactly apply. What are the areas that you’re finding as a lawyer, both working at a law firm remotely as a remote worker, but also as a lawyer? You have an interesting angle on both of these things.

EMMA:  And so, this year, I actually started my own law firm which looks at legal issues for companies to do that. So, it might be that they wholly remote or it could be that they have one or two people who work from home, some or all of the time. So, there’s a few legal issues, and there is actually a Forbes article by Laurel Farrer published in April, I think, called, ‘Is Remote Work Illegal?’ which sort of looks really globally at those issues with a Canadian lawyer, Tara Vasdani and myself.

JEFF:  We know Laurel well. She’s a Yonder person.

EMMA:  I think that’s how I found you in the first place too. [laughing] Yeah, so, that’s sort of on a global spectrum, but sort of day to day, the things I see, the people, you know, say you got a hybrid remote workplace and people start a remote work arrangement, so they say, “I’m not going to work in the office anymore. I’m going to work from home now.” They don’t put things in writing, so you’d need to vary that, because an employer has all these obligations once someone goes to their house, to make sure that there’s work, health and safety arrangements, and a work from home policy. So, there’s all these things that are all of a sudden up in the air, like the hours that they are going to be working at home. If they’re flexible that might be alright, but they might have to be available for certain hours, for client calls, or things like that.

Or, is data security going to be an issue. Are they going to be using their own equipment, their own laptop? Or is the company going to give them a laptop? And with that, have they got virus and data protection, and then if someone goes to a café and works and uses free Wi-Fi, they’re leaving themselves open to a cyber-attack. And also, confidentiality, because you’re at a café, you leave your laptop open, you might have sensitive data on the screen, and someone could see that. So, there’s all these, sort of, privacy issues as well as workplace, health and safety. Then certainly in Australia, just because someone works at home, it doesn’t mean they’re not an employee under our local Labor Laws for Workers’ Compensation Insurance, which I believe is different in America and different across different countries, but certainly in Australia the employee is still liable as if they were in the office.

JEFF:  Yeah.

EMMA: So, it’s very important. It’s not insurmountable, but it is very important they look at where they’re going to be working, if it’s safe and secure and make sure it is. I mean,  they can’t be there watching them, but to have these checks in place and things on record to say that we’ve looked into that and that’s all working. And the other thing is policies. What to do with these unchartered territories and to make sure workers at home are being treated the same as workers in a head office, and that’s there’s sort of health and wellness policies for these people because remote work does have a tendency to overwork, so you need to have those health and lifestyle policies as well.

JEFF: Yeah. I mean a lot of it, the labor laws, and I’m guessing this is around the world, the labor laws that we have developed over hundreds of thousands of years [laughing] are based on what we conventionally think of as labor, as work, and workplace, and so, for instance, health and safety laws about working conditions and more recently it starts to get into things as specific as ergonomics, right? With people getting repetitive stress injury kind of work, [laughing] which is the kind of work often times that remote workers are doing. Having a good chair and all that kind of stuff comes up and becomes a legal issue. These are working conditions, which is one thing to enforce when you can walk around an office and say, “well, look it, you’re not providing good quality chairs, or whatever that is.” But when people are working from home and laying on their beds or sitting on their couches, it’s sort of more difficult to control those things.

EMMA: Yeah, exactly.

JEFF: But, I think, as you’re alluding to with all of this, it’s really thinking about these things and about writing down policies.

EMMA: Exactly.

JEFF:  Like, is it okay for people to go and work from a café? And I’m guessing. Is it okay to leave their laptop open and running with the screen still with the confidentiality information on it, as they go up to get a coffee? With all these things, I think most workers, particularly remote workers who are kind of trying to do their best, will adhere to guidance policies, but [laughing] you need to actually have those in place, when you tell people what you want.  

EMMA:  Oh, absolutely. That’s right. I think trust is such a big thing about remote work, and as that trust is there it builds on both sides, and it can create a really beautiful, loyal relationship, but I guess on the odd occasion someone doesn’t do that, then the business, sort of needs to be able to step in and fix that. And a policy just gives that certainty on either side, and I sort of describe a policy, an employment policy, as any type of sort of guide rails, so within there’s some flexibility about behavior by either side, this is your hard boundary to the left, and this is your hard boundary to the right, can’t do these things, there are expectations, but within there’s quite a lot of flexibility provided. You communicate and tell us what you’re doing and you’re meeting all KPI’s and anything like that, to make sure that you’re fulfilling all those job requirements. 

JEFF:  This comes up a lot on the podcast, but for remote workers who don’t have the, sort of, visual peripheral cues of an office space, as much guidance as you can give them, as to what is expected, certainly, but also kind of, what’s right and wrong. What’s the behavior that we’re looking for, and in any environment, even collocated work, there’s people who are going to go against the policy. They’re going to do something wrong. They’re going to put information on  a thumb drive and bring it home. Perhaps, malevolently, perhaps not, but it needs to be clear whether they’re doing something wrong.

EMMA:  Exactly. At least then they might do something and not know it’s wrong without the policy, and then, it’s really hard to fix that, whereas if they know it’s wrong at the start, it’s an easier conversation.

JEFF:  Yeah. And from a legal standpoint, if you get into litigation, if you have a client, to at least say, “hey, we have an employee that did something wrong. It’s clear that they did something wrong because we have a policy that they went against.” 

EMMA:  Exactly.

JEFF:  And at least there’s recourse there. It’s sort of the entirety of the legal profession comes to write it down. [laughing] This is what the law is, let’s figure it out. Write it down.

EMMA:  I wrote a blog right when I started my business earlier this year, and one of my very first blogs was ‘Five Important Legal Issues’, and legal issue number one was to make sure everything is in writing, so exactly. Whether that be for new employees, like a letter of offer, getting the contract ready, and I think the next one is what people miss of it, for existing employees if they change their arrangement, even if they already work remotely but move cities, and they’re in a different time zone, with a different remote work location, then it’s really important to actually vary that change in document, that change to their remote work arrangements, as well.

JEFF:  Have there been any surprises or, as you’re talking to people about legal issues around remote work, what seems to be the thing that comes up the most as something that maybe people are not thinking about when they should be, or, just the things that sneak up?

EMMA:  Probably workplace health and safety. People just don’t think about it. It’s interesting, I spoke at a remote and flexible work conference in Sydney a few months back, and there were a lot of companies who had hybrid remote teams, and some were Australian government departments there, and they sort of just didn’t have policies. They don’t really do checks or self checks. So, in response to that, I’ve actually developed a, sort of, interactive audit, which is sort of a quick online, check, watch a video, take some photos to upload and that generates a report, which is a nice, sort of, middle ground between a company actually sending someone out to look at a remote workspace, and there are companies in Australia and government departments which do that, but, it’s so expensive, especially if they live across the country, or the world, and not really practical.

And then there are other companies that, if they do do something, it’s sort of a checklist, make sure these things are right and there’ll be a few ticks and you’re done. So, this is a nice middle ground. Upload some photos, do some checks, get that report generated, and sort of do that quite regularly to annually. So, that’s something we just haven’t thought about yet, and they also haven’t thought about equipment. One of the questions I got in the Q&A session of this conference I did was, “well, do we have to buy them furniture?” For someone working at home quite infrequently, they kind of are, but maybe not, but then you sort of think about hiring a remote person, and the alternative would be if they were in an office being hired, then they would come into that office and they would have a chair and a desk and a computer, and all these other things that are set up, the way that the workplace had been set up ergonomically, but then if people would hire someone from home, they’re probably saving realistic costs by having less people in the bricks and mortar office. But they sort of then, take that step and give them an allowance for furniture and set them up properly. It’s a really interesting sort of thing to think about.

Well, do you give that allowance? Do you, sort of, help them set their workplace up? And if you do that,  you can be more confident that they will be a) be using the right technology and data security; but also, b) they’ll be comfortable, and they’ll feel valued and part of that company.

JEFF: Yeah. There’s a lot to be said for intent. Like, making it clear to employees what your intent is, or that it is our intent for you to have a comfortable workplace. It is isn’t our intent for you to have an ergonomic workspace and if that requires us to buy you a standing desk, or an ergonomic keyboard, I mean, a lot of the stuff that I’m talking about is computer related. Oftentimes the Venn diagram overlap between computer information, data work and remote work, is pretty close. It’s nice that there are other types of work that are emerging, but I’ll just talk about the [laughing] experience that I’ve had. 

EMMA: And I think that’s right. Yeah, mostly professional or designer. Some kind of computer-based work. 

JEFF: Yeah, but as the company to let the employee know like, “hey if you need an ergonomic chair, we’ll buy one for you, or we’ll go half with you, or we’ve got a budget.” Oftentimes a thing that I recommend at companies is that they basically give employees a stipend, a budget of maybe $2,000 a year for them to buy the equipment that they need, ongoing stuff, new computer, maybe every other year, a new chair, a new desk, a new computer monitor, of that kind of stuff. There are ways of making it work and some of this is, perhaps, a kind of United States centric way of thinking about this, but companies tax wise in the United States get a write-off if they own the equipment, so you’re kind of giving employees a budget for them to buy the equipment that they need that’s continued to be owned by the computer, until such time as they leave the company, at which point the company sells the equipment to the employee for one dollar, and so basically this is how a company can kind of own the equipment and depreciate the value of the equipment without having this kind of situation where people have stuff in their home that isn’t really theirs. 

EMMA: Yeah, exactly. I work with a lot of start-ups; they don’t have buckets of money to throw around. But even some really, kind of strategic gestures may not cost the earth, but they can make a big difference to people. I know one of the companies I met, another Australian company at Running Remote in Bali a few weeks ago, one of their things, all their remote workers use, sort of a lamp, to help illuminate because they have different time zones, and when they’re on video conferences some people would look like they were kind of in the dark [laughing]. And they said it’s made such a difference to their communication with each other. 

JEFF: They just bought a lamp for people to put on their desk that would light them up so they would show up on camera. [laughing]

EMMA: Yes. Yeah, that’s right. And then they could all see each other, and when they do have those team meetings, they’re just all there in a better way, sort of lit up and visible, which it sounds really simple, but they said it’s just made such a difference with people in different time zones and countries.

JEFF:  It’s interesting how these little things like that can kind of affect the way that you communicate, affect the culture, affect sort of how people interrelated with each other, all that kind of stuff. Tell me more about your book, about ‘The Tracksuit Economy’, and kind of how that came to be and what your mission is with that.

EMMA:  So, last year, probably three years into working as a remote worker, my team started to get even bigger, and I was really interested in going into the management side, and working out, well how do you work from home productively and how does that work? I’d been doing it for a few years and had been really enjoying it, but I still hadn’t looked into the mechanics of it so much. And I went looking for some books on remote work, and I found, I think ‘Remote’ by the Basecamp guys, Jason Fried, which was a good read, and it sort of showed what they did there. Then the only other one I really found was called ‘The Year Without Pants’.

JEFF: [laughing] which isn’t really, yeah.

EMMA:  I was like yeah okay. [laughing] I’m sort of a parent in Australia, a woman, you know, completely different.

JEFF:  In the United States pants means trousers. Pants in other English-speaking companies means what you wear underneath your trousers.  [laughing] And that’s the thing with that book. I hoped that it was going to be more insightful and it ended up being kind of an immersive journalism style thing as Scott Bergman, who worked at Automattic, the company behind WordPress for a year, at least, [laughing] in order to write the book, and explained how it was. And the funny thing about it is that, my understanding at least, the feeling that I get is that Matt Mullenweg and other people who lead Automattic read the book and immediately decided to change some of their policies [laughing], based on “well, it is kind of a party culture, maybe let’s tone that down a little bit.” And so, a lot of even the stuff in that book isn’t really how it is anymore.

EMMA: Yeah. Cause they were talking about retreats and working in hotel lobbies together.

JEFF:  Getting drunk. Yeah. 

EMMA:  I’m kind of like, “oh, well, I’m a parent, I actually try and work around school hours”, with my son, and, it’s a complete lifestyle change. We’ve had a city change; we’ve moved from the city to a regional area. It’s about work/life balance for me, and flexible work, and there are so many other parents, but people who care for elderly relatives or parents themselves, people with disabilities. So, I also have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, so working from home just helps me manage all those symptoms a lot better too. And, it’s sort of this inclusivity and work/life balance aspect that just wasn’t in, probably in either book, really. And, there was no kind of like, what are the time hacks? How do you actually save time, be more efficient? There was sort of none of that in those either, so I thought, “I’m going to write my own book.” So, in May 2018 I released an E-book, in an E-book version, ‘The Tracksuit Economy. How to Work Productively and Effectively from Home,” and it was more a blueprint, so it’s a little bit about my own journey, and then what I was doing day to day, and then I spoke to 15 other people who work remotely, some of who own their own companies or they were employees, and what they like about it, what they find challenging, and what they do to make it work. What people have told me, the feedback about the book is, 31 tips to make it work effectively, and they’ve been really helpful. And then there’s now a print version which I have sitting in my office, [laughing]  in boxes. It’s on Amazon and iTunes if you search ‘The Tracksuit Economy’ you should find that.

JEFF:  Highlight some of those tips for me. What have been, sort of, the most impactful of those?

EMMA:  I think it’s things like time blocking and blocking out emails. So, instead of being really responsive or held captive to your inbox, you’ve got some time blocking, “I’m going to spend this time doing this.” Scheduling, things like that too, just scheduling in everything, your personal aspects as well, so you’re not sitting there, sort of, doing work, cause there was sort of a time when I was working remotely and I’d get really busy, I’d find myself creeping down to my office, because my office is downstairs, and it’s quite separate, I can shut the door off, but it’s really a boundary, and that is, I think, the number one remote work tip, is have your own remote workspace and be able to shut it off, even if it’s in the living room, just have that differentiation between work and home.

JEFF: Yeah, to just know whether you’re working or not, because sometimes it could be hard to tell. If you’ve got the television on and you’re responding to email, are you working or are you watching TV? Or are you kind of doing both? And you’re not doing either very well, really.

EMMA: No, it’s just being present there, but also having that boundary. There are times when I was sort of working some weekends and evenings, and then you’d sort of creep up a bit, you feel awful, you know, I sort of committed to, early last year, actually before the book was released, five o’clock my  work emails are going off on my phone, you know, turning that mail account off on my phone at five every evening and not turning it back on until nine when I’m sitting at my desk. And that was so good, just not to have that constant kind of availability, which I think in modern society we all have now, but when you work from home, you’re actually living in your workplace, so it becomes even more of an issue. And that sort of helps employers and employees. If their employee is sort of healthy, they’re more engaged when they are at their desk in work mode. 

JEFF: Yeah. Have there been other tips in the book that people come to you and say, “oh, this has changed my life?” [laughing]

EMMA: Yeah. 

JEFF: I guess I’m just asking you to quickly change the listeners lives. [laughing]

EMMA:  [laughing] So, definitely. Other tips people were looking at was making sure people make time each time for exercise or to get out of the house. So, don’t stay in the house for a week without going out. [laughing] Try and get out each day and try and get up and stretch. There are so many yoga apps or things like that to do. Get your dog out for a walk. A lot of the case studies in my book have dogs, and they said that was amazing, just getting that dog out and going for a walk, was really amazing, getting that fresh air.

And the big thing too, is having that human contact, and it doesn’t have to be in-person contact, although it is one of the tips is to get out once a week and arrange a coffee date with someone. Not necessarily a work colleague, but just somebody to see face to face, and to make sure every single day you communicate with your colleagues or co-workers, or people you work with, whether that be through chat or phone calls or video. It’s just great to have that human contact.

And, communication is probably the biggest I think, I mean apart from your separate workspace, and that’s to be talking to the people you work with and make sure you’re all on the same page, because it’s really hard when you’re a remote employee to know, first of all, should I be doing this?  Then you want to find out where the information is when we’re talking about policies or ask someone. So, it’s really good to takeaway that doubt so to give clear instructions, communicate, talk to each other, open that dialogue up. I run my own virtual business now and it’s sort of flipped, I’m not so much talking to coworkers, but I’m certainly talking to other business owners, and clients, and that kind of thing, but when I ran a team, I made sure I spoke to them all every morning.

And when I gave a task, I gave detailed instructions, so they knew what I expected and I’d often check in on drafts and give some feedback, so someone wasn’t stuck doing these big tasks to get it to me and for me to say, “no, that’s not right.” So, that communication is really important, because those remote workers, they miss out on the water cooler talk and other talk. So, you just got to make sure it’s available for them.

JEFF:  The thing I say is that there’s no such thing as over-communication in remote work.   Always over communicate. And, lots of times, if you think about what over-communication is, in a co-located work environment it’s meetings that are too long and people are sort of antsy because they want to get some place else to get something done, but, not all remote work companies work this way, but generally speaking, maybe typically speaking, it’s not difficult for remote workers to find time to be productive, to kind of put their nose to the grindstone and really get things done, but that is quiet and maybe a little bit lonely and oftentimes they would welcome some communication, someone to get on and check in, and let them know what’s going on. So, yeah.

EMMA: Absolutely. And I think, one of the case studies in my book, she was working remotely, and then, sort of, it was lonely for her, she missed that camaraderie and she has actually gone back now to working in an in-office position at another law firm. I used to work with her and she’s happy doing that, but she does spend Thursdays working from home, so she’s sort of now going back to a hybrid mix of working from home and working in an office, because that suits her personality.

JEFF: Getting back to, sort of the legal, lawyer side of things, running a law firm that’s focused around remote work, do you find that there are laws that are changing, or need to be changed, or aspects of laws that need to start to be rethought as we’re kind of redefining  what work is?

EMMA: Yeah, I think there’s a big gap, with increasing technology there will be gaps, so our labor laws pretty much globally work as a result of the industrial revolution, which is a long time ago, and that was based on sort of factory work.

JEFF:  How we got the weekend. Right? [laughing]

EMMA: Yeah, exactly. [laughing] So, eight-hour shifts, so as now we’re available all the  time with this technology. So, I think the laws in general, and certainly France has released that digital policy where you’re not obliged to check work emails after hours and certain things like that.

JEFF: If I remember correctly, it was funnier than that, that companies couldn’t send employees emails after hours, which made it very awkward from a remote work standpoint, because when are work hours? [laughing] It’s like, how do you know, if I’m hiring a French employee and I live in California, whose work hours? My work hours? Their work hours? Like, if they’re working flexibly, yeah.

EMMA: Exactly. And that’s a whole can of worms, so you sort of got to look at, you know, instead of an international kind of jurisdictional issue as in well, where’s this person, what’s their country of employment, where do they pay tax? Looking back at where are they employed? Put that aside, a lot of countries don’t have laws around information technology and cyber security, the laws aren’t great there, and also if you look at the workplace health and safety laws we were talking about before, it seems crazy that a company can be liable for what happens in someone’s home. Certainly, in Australia there’s been some cases around this in court about an employee who fell down the stairs during her work hours and another one who slipped coming out of the shower running for the phone. And there’s been this whole broad discussion around what constitutes work? When are they working during those times?

JEFF:  [laughing] They’re not working when they were naked running across the floor, but as soon as they get to the phone and pick up the phone, then they’re working. [laughing]

EMMA: Well, interestingly, that guy succeeded, because he was on overtime. He got in trouble in the past and his boss said, “you’ve got to make sure you answer the after-hours phone because if it’s an emergency, we need you to respond.” And, he had been really remonstrated to do that, so he actually won, because he had been told that was part of his job. He was doing that overtime and he was running to do his job. 

JEFF:  I feel like the moral of that story that I take is a little bit different than people might think. It kind of comes down to this idea that, this philosophy that I have, that when we ask people to work for us from home, we are kind of, guests in their home, and we need to be respectful of that, and not be too demanding of time or responsibility. Obviously the work needs to get done, but we need to depend on people to be productive and trustworthy, and ultimately, sort of do some self-management on their own, and that some demands like that, if you need someone to pick up the phone within five seconds and absolutely never have screaming children in the background, might not be the best solution [laughing] to have people working remotely in that context. You might need to have someone who is working in the office, and not taking a shower. 

EMMA: That’s right. And I think this was a trucking company, but that’s right may be they need an after-hours call center or a virtual assistant who can do that and they relay messages to the drivers that they need to disperse. So, it sort of begs the question, well companies maybe need to look at their procedures as well, and we need to look at laws. And I don’t think it’s a matter of the current laws don’t cover it, because when we draft employment contracts, a remote work contract will have some really different provisions in there about, looking into the remote workspace, what are the core hours, what are the expectations. So, we can get around that in contracts, but certainly if it was law, and that sort of thing was given [laughing] rather than us having to specify it really clearly, then that certainly would be helpful.

JEFF:  Well, really interesting stuff here, and like I said, I think you have an interesting perspective because I’ve said before on the podcast, and I always cringe a little bit even to hear the words coming out of my mouth, but there’s a lot that just hasn’t been quite figured out around remote work. There are not clear paths, there are not clear laws, there are not clear rules exactly, and we’re still kind of figuring things out. And sometimes you need to kind of do the best you can to adhere to not the letter of the law, but sort of, the intent of the laws around the thing [laughing] you’re doing, because there is no letter of this law yet, and so it’s really interesting to talk to someone who is more inclined to figure those things out more specifically than me.

EMMA:  Yeah, and that’s the thing, I think we’re all early adopters. I think in the next 10 years it’s inevitable, it will become more mainstream, but at this stage, we had all the IT people doing it now, now there’s sort of this early adoptive phase where I think we’re all in, where is the rest of everyone else’s catching up to what IT have been doing in their industry for years? It’s interesting. I think the bridge between early adopters and when it becomes more mainstream will be probably where the laws are written. So, it’s really exciting for me, because I’m the first law firm in Australia to be doing it. I can hopefully have a say in writing those laws. 

JEFF:  Yeah,  figure it all out, and then we’ll just sort of do a bad photocopy of it and call it the American policy. [laughing] which is oftentimes how the American policies are. It’s a misunderstanding of something that smarter people did. [laughing] Alright, I won’t get political. Well, Emma, this was great. Great conversation. If people want to follow up and ask you more about this or anything related, what’s the best way for them to get in touch with you?

EMMA: They can connect with me on LinkedIn or go along to my website which is www.theremoteexpert.com.

JEFF: Great. Well, thank you Emma. 

EMMA: Oh, thank you. It’s been a great chat.

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion Topics…

• How does location affect getting remote work done at The Superfan Company?

• Why the company motto is “meet the clients where they’re at”

• Productivity when working from home vs while traveling or at an office

• Improving communication skills as a result of working remotely

• Finding a healthy work-life balance when transitioning to a remote workstyle

• Choosing the hours that work best for you to “get work done”

• Efficient ways to communicate internally and externally

• What does your creative process look like?

• Business Plan: “Make money. Have fun.”

• The importance of trusting your team members to get things done without micromanagement

• Scheduling calls with clients and remote workers

• How to hire great remote workers and which qualities to look for

• Working together towards common goals as a remote company

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion Topics…

• What is Shield GEO? How do they make international employment simple?

• Where do Shield GEO’s employees work?

• How are typical U.S. companies expanding overseas? Which aspects should they consider?

• Differences between hiring international freelancers versus international employees

• Employing international employees in the way their country employs people

• Minimizing risk for employers hiring internationally

• What are the regulations around taking time off for international employees?

• How are salaries affected by hiring remote workers globally?

• Determining competitive salaries based on geography and what’s fair in teaching remote employees

• What happens to salary when remote employees decide to relocate?

• How is salary affected by having employees who are digital nomads?

• Staying compliant with various country regulations

• How to terminate distributed employees outside the country

• Why is the future of work “flexibility,” and what does this mean?

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion Topics

• How does Cro Metrics run as a distributed company?

• Determining pay scales based on value to the company, not by typical salaries in a geographical area.

• What are the biggest lessons you’ve learned in the early stages of growing your company?

• Importance of shared experiences and company retreats for remote teams

• Communicating and collaborating effectively as remote workers

• Leading with transparency and trust

• Setting and achieving OKRs to improve the productivity of distributed teams

• Advantages of a distributed company vs a co-located company

• Why remote management is good management

• Helping remote employees to self-manage, as opposed to micromanagement

• What is “the client shirt” all about?

• Fostering a high performance company culture and prioritizing the customer

• What about hierarchy?

• How to attract top talent and hire remote workers

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion Topics…

• How did Lullabot get started, and why did you decide on the distributed model?

• Overcoming early challenges of running a remote company

• Growing into a leadership role from being a developer

• Assessing productivity levels as a remote company leader

• The philosophy behind, “It’s not what you can do, but what you can get done”

• Helping remote workers figure out work-life balance

• Openness and when to share vulnerability as a leader

• Autonomy, management, and micromanagement

• Bringing humanity into the remote workplace

• Proactively addressing isolation for remote team members

• Why physical companies are still struggling to hire remote workers

• Client services and time zone compatibility

• Cultural differences in distributed companies

• What’s a PEO (Professional Employment Organization) and how does it work?

• Importance of collaboration in remote companies

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion Topics…

• What was it like to grow to 600+ employees over 11 years?

• Having a remote-first mentality around work, even when employees are in the office

• Accessing a global talent pool as a remote-first company

• “If you’re not able to trust your team, maybe you should not have hired them in the first place.”

• Does trust scale to larger distributed teams?

• Managing the security risks of scaling from a nimble team to a larger company

• Using the right tools to optimize productivity and enhance communication for remote companies

• What’s the Culture Book at Netguru?

• Living by company values in everyday interactions

• Giving employees trust is not a new phenomenon, but it’s still not a mainstream concept for companies

• Remote is not the reason for trust, but it’s more the effect

• Importance of face-to-face communication in regular intervals

• All-hands meetings, company conferences, and unstructured client meetings

• What are company conferences with 600+ employees like?

• Having a remote-first philosophy at the company without being fully distributed

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion topics…

• Transitioning a co-located 300-person company to a more distributed model

• Educating the company around the benefits of remote work

• Working remotely within the office as a starting point for working remotely outside the office

• Challenges around transitioning managers to working without their own offices

• How middle management adapts to a results-oriented management style

• Why the leaders of today are more similar to coaches

• Going remote to refresh employees’ connection to the organization, not because it’s trendy

• Creating company workspaces around collaboration

• Shortening (or avoiding) commuting time to enhance company productivity

• Why Yann is not a fan of home offices for his employees, rather asking employees to work from customer or supplier offices and in coworking spaces

• Taking a pragmatic approach to remote work

• What does it mean to work together in “clusters”?

• Connecting remote work to a higher purpose

• Finding your remote ambassadors who are willing to test out your distributed team model

• Benefits of having remote workers in different time zones

• Hiring the best remote workers from a global talent pool

• Offering your remote workers a better quality of life

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion topics…

• Why are employees feeling unsupported within co-located companies?

• What kicked off the remote work research project?

• The process of sitting down and talking to remote workers to conduct the research

• How remote workers collaborate with others outside their organizations and geographical locations

• Which competencies set co-located employees apart from remote workers?

• How do personalities affect where people prefer to work?

• Overcoming difficulties around communication, connection, and work environment

• Which competencies matter most for remote workers?

• Can you develop the skills to become a remote worker, or are they inherent traits?

• How to better interview remote job applicants for required competencies

• Why competent remote workers exhibit quiet strength and confidence

• Using StrengthsFinder when hiring remote workers

• Feeling under-supported as remote workers and what managers can do about it

• What type of feedback do remote managers need to give to remote workers?

• Giving remote workers a purpose, sharing how they are contributing to the overall goals

• Soft skills that managers need when they have remote employees on their team

• Building better support systems that can easily accommodate distributed team members

• Creating an assessment tool to help hiring managers determine if a remote candidate might be a good fit

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion topics…

• Rethinking commutes in busy cities

• What is BELAY?

• Hiring employees in the Atlanta area to incorporate more face time into the company culture

• What type of “physical space” do you actually need for your company?

• Embracing a virtual communication style to get work done

• What do company get-togethers include? What’s the value in getting together for remote workers?

• Budgeting for company culture, being intentional about connection

• Determining core values that actually fit your company, where values reflect who we already are as a company - not who we aspire to become

• Importance of transparency and vulnerability on distributed teams

• How we encourage virtual employees to “show up” to work

• Helping new remote workers find their ideal level of productivity (Full Focus Planner)

• What it’s like to start a new business

• How we hire new team members at BELAY and which qualities matter most in remote workers

• Cultural match between company and customers

• …and more!

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion Topics…

• What was it like to work remotely in the 1960s up till now?

• The difference between “presence” and “productivity” in the workplace

• How can remote work and flexibility affect business profitability?

• Workplaces are “wherever you have an internet connection”

• Location independence for remote workers and using technology to localize work

• The future of office-ing and how that could affect commercial real estate

• Why almost every company needs to think of themselves as a global company

• How to know when people are working if they work remotely

• Using data to drive the metrics around employee productivity, helping them to improve and thrive in a distributed team environment

• What could virtual reality office-ing look like?

• Increasing trends in open collaboration

• Not only changing the way people work, but the world they work within

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion Topics…

• Putting together, growing and managing a fully distributed team around the world - starting with virtual assistants

• Minimizing the challenges of migrating a company from a co-located model to a fully distributed model

• When to use asynchronous versus synchronous communication - focusing on highly collaborative environments across time zones

• Benefits of using Loom during team meetings to improve transparency

• Encouraging remote employees to find work-life balance

• How do remote managers check in with remote workers without disrupting the flow of meetings or micromanaging?

• Remote work enables you to be ultra-transparent, communicate at a high fidelity, and skyrocket productivity

• Mimicking co-located interactions within a distributed work environment to make interactions feel more human

• Should we keep work lives and personal lives completely separate on remote teams?

• Going beyond the interview when hiring distributed team members

• Determining which medium to use for communication (bonus: which Snapchat filter to use for days you don’t want to put on makeup!)

• Why culture is even more important in a remote setting

• Overcoming geographical cultural barriers to encourage transparency in communication

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion Topics…

• Transforming a 200+ co-located contact center into a smaller, home-based organization for Virgin Atlantic

• Working with Apple in the early 2000s to set up home-based customer support

• John’s epiphany, “You could actually trust people without standing over them.”

• Managing well remotely without micromanaging remote workers

• Why remote workers on well-designed teams are both effective and trustworthy

• Learning how to make remote work ‘work’

• Helping remote workers avoid burnout from working too much

• Why the future of remote work is going to be a gradual transition for large companies, not an overnight change

• Why remote workers choose a location they are happy to live in, rather than a location they are happy to work in

• How having remote workers affects the local economies in rural areas

• Why startups are adapting to remote work faster than more established companies

• Understanding that some workers go to work for the social experience, making space for them on hybrid teams

• Why 15% of co-located employees transitioning to a remote work model is a good success rate

• How remote workflows differ from co-located workflows and navigating the transition period

• The key to integrating new-to-remote-work employees on a distributed team

• The importance of being flexible when it comes to figuring out what the best approach is to connectivity and touch points for remote workers

• The benefits of a popup office for distributed teams in the same geographical areas

• What get-togethers are like for Shopify and why they matter

• Characteristics of successful remote workers

• …and more!

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion Topics…

• What is StudySoup? How does this distributed company operate?

• How has the evolution of remote work impacted students and could affect the future of work

• Why today’s students are more prepared for entry-level positions in distributed companies

• What’s the company culture like at StudySoup?

• Understanding exactly what makes a company “results-driven” and how that builds trust

• Using the ROWE work model - Numbers chats. Monday slides. Quarterly briefs.

• Giving people the independence to live how they want, but expecting accountability to the work

• Encouraging employees to turn off Slack and identify their most productive times to get work done

• How co-located companies can transition to a remote work model: trust, truth, transparency

• Leadership and management set the example in distributed environments

• Will the future of work become more trust-centric and accountability-driven?

• How can we rethink people operations for both co-located and distributed teams?

• Can we create a more human relationship between workers and workplaces?

• Are remote workers technically freelancers or part of the gig economy?

• Fostering camaraderie and supporting other remote team members in getting the work done.

• Effectively managing a distributed team from across the globe.

• What is timezone empathy?

• Importance of general scheduling flexibility for remote workers.

• Which management style works best? Tugboat management vs. helicopter management

• What is TaskMates.co? Building outsourced, dedicated support teams and achieving a 93% retention rate.

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion Topics…

Working at Celerative

• Looking at the day-to-day look for a Celerative developer

• Becoming a Celerative developer

• Using algorithmic project management

• Encouraging professional development for freelance software developers

• Empowering project managers with the tools they need to become more effective

• Connecting great customers with the right talent to help them accomplish projects

Management & Leadership

• Minimizing micromanagement by focusing on output

• Hiring talent based around the world

• Overcoming challenges when transitioning into a management role

Skills & Communication

• Keeping strong communication between clients and freelancers

• Fostering a sense of transparency and honesty while working remotely

• Coordinating work across times zones using asynchronous and synchronous communication

• Improving communication techniques in distributed environments

• Handling relocation and adjusting to differences in work environments

• Educating remote workers on communication best practices

• Developing empathy, both with coworkers and customers

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion Topics…

• Creating adaptable curricula for remote workers

• Teaching new remote workers about how to get started successfully in a distributed environment

• Why developing skills around autonomy matters to remote workers

• Challenges distributed teams face in building or repairing trust

• Dangers of trusting too much when hiring new distributed employees

• Career development issues workers often encounter at distributed companies

• Difficulties around hiring entry-level employees to work remotely

• Communicating enough while working remotely

• Importance of developing a good structure for onboarding remote employees

• Learning how to ask for help on distributed teams

Courses Mentioned

• For Remote Workers: Workplaceless helps remote workers develop core competencies

• For Remote Leaders: Leadplaceless helps remote leaders gain the skills necessary to lead a remote team

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion Topics…

• Behind the scenes with Zapier

  • Handling communication when a team is fully distributed around the globe

  • Zapier’s favorite asynchronous communication tools (Slack, Async, Quip)

  • Having 24/7 coverage for customer support because of distribution

  • Grouping teams and managers into similar time zones improves collaboration

  • What actually happens at Zapier’s company and team retreats?

  • Defining the company’s values and how that plays out in your company culture

• Career Development

  • Figuring out career trajectories in a non-traditional work environment?

  • Building out career tracks for remote workers to grow their own careers

• Salary & Compensation

  • Handling compensation ethically in a fully distributed team environment

  • Adjusting for different currencies and pay scales using market data

  • Fairly compensating for the talent and skills remote workers have

  • How salary banding can be applied to remote companies

  • Being intelligent about how to reward and incentivize talent

• Management Strategies

  • Overly communicating to manage effectively

  • Giving and receiving timely feedback

  • Helping remote workers deal with impostor syndrome

  • Focusing on the work itself, not internal politics

  • What it means to formalize the informal

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion topics…

• What’s the challenge in going from a co-located company to a distributed company?

• What is time zone empathy?

• Video vs audio for company calls

• Basing asynchronous communication around using Slack

• How many get-togethers does Toggl have each year?

• Getting (and staying) connected as a remote workforce

• Is it possible to avoid the common mistakes remote teams make?

• Which tools do you use for internal communication?

• What’s the difference between remote working and remote management?

• The importance of intentionality in all remote work communication

• Why management is done better in distributed companies than co-located companies

• How does culture play into remote work at Toggl?

• Which values matter most to distributed teams?

• How do you know if remote workers are actually working?

• Mastering the art of written communication

• Crowdsourcing as a way to identify what makes your company unique

• What’s in store for the future of distributed companies?

• Time zones, languages, and other assumptions we make around communication

• What to think about before you post a job description

• …and more!

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io! You can follow Evelin’s blog here on Medium.

Discussion topics…

• How well are people supported when working remotely?

• Are we preparing young people for the remote-friendly workplace?

• How do we link remote work competencies to feedback?

• Which qualities do remote workers need to demonstrate before they are hired?

• Why is there often a feeling of shame around working remotely?

• How hiring entry-level people is a big challenge for distributed companies

• Why each of these competencies matter to remote workers and the distributed companies hiring them

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion Topics…

• How has the hybrid company model worked for Lemonly?

• What are the perks to building flexibility into your company’s work culture?

• What are the differences in communication for hybrid teams versus 100% remote companies?

• Which elements are most important to Lemonly’s company culture?

• If you started Lemonly in today’s environment, what would you do differently?

• How could companies use the radical candor approach to communication, collaboration, and leadership?

• What are the advantages to having a remote-first or remote-friendly company?

• The importance of when activities and meetings happen

• How do designers collaborate and work remotely?

• How can the “stop, start, continue” framework be used to manage effectively?

• Why companies should always be run as an experiment

• …and more!

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion Topics…

• What skills and work habits do you need when you start working remotely?

• What Buffer’s company culture is REALLY like

• How does the onboarding process work at Buffer (i.e. role buddies and culture buddies)?

• Are distributed companies at an advantage or disadvantage when it comes to building company culture?

• The importance of foundational team values for distributed companies

• When should remote companies create their team’s core values?

• How can distributed teams help remote workers cope with loneliness?

• How does Buffer encourage relationship building across the company?

• Which types of communication styles does Buffer use? When to use synchronous or asynchronous channels?

• Should time zones affect how distributed companies choose where to hire remote employees?

• “A community is a network of people connected to each other.” - Arielle Tannenbaum

• What types of get-togethers does Buffer have? What happens at these events?

• …and more!

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion Topics...

• How do you find people to hire without a central office?

• How can we encourage more companies to go remote and sustain engagement?”

• “Remote companies exist with trust as a basis. This trust can only be sustained with high levels of transparency.” - Ankur Gupta

• What can co-located companies learn from established remote companies about how to go distributed?

• How do remote team leaders address isolation for distributed employees? (hint: life coaches)

• Why Axelerant is implementing a playbook to improve team chemistry

• Empowering remote employees to become more productive at work

• Experimenting with diversity and changing the dynamics on a distributed team

• Pros and cons to hiring inexperienced employees at a remote company

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion Topics...

• Digital nomadism and connecting with other remote workers

• Crossover between remote work and coworking spaces

• What exactly is a co-living space?

• How coworking and co-living spaces integrate with one another

• Addressing productivity issues while being a digital nomad

• What takeaways, insights, and connections remote workers make at Nomad City (we'll be there this year!)

• How to travel to far-flung locations as a remote worker

• Does location affect remote worker productivity?

• What's your long-term and short-term vision as a distributed team manager?

• Challenges of running a hybrid team (i.e. some employees in office, some employees remote)

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Discussion topics...

• How to know whether or not your team is virtual or co-located
• Why virtual teams are the future of work
• Remote working environments contributing to workplace productivity
• Cisco is big on telecommuting - sells solutions to other companies to encourage remote work
• Stat: Cisco reported $277 million dollars in productivity savings as a direct result of remote work
• The average Cisco employee telecommutes two days per week.
• How do you convince co-located managers that going remote is a good idea?
• Piloting a remote work program, slowly rolling it out to co-located teams to build trust
• Ineffective communication is why virtual teams fail to stay engaged or get projects done
• Managing distributed teams by achieving objectives, not by the time they spend at their desks
• What exactly is "the curse of knowledge"?
• Good reasons to over-communicate or over-explain tasks to ensure clarity and understanding of tasks and remote team responsibilities
• Stop using a secret language
• How does "the bystander effect" influence remote work? 
• Using direct language to get things done on distributed teams, assigning to individuals and not to groups
• Setting deadlines strategically, not optimistically
• What do virtual managers need to know about keeping their distributed or hybrid teams productive?
• Inserting humanity into remote management to build trust with remote workers

Books mentioned for further reading:

• Remote by Jason Fried
• Influencing Virtual Teams by Hassan Osman

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

We talk about:

• How is work changing as we move into the future?
• Pros and cons of telecommuting 
• Flexibility of productivity
• The future of work 
• What's the big deal with trust?

Topics we discuss...

• Challenges that remote workers and leaders face at distributed companies
• Getting "thrown into the deep end" of communication at distributed companies
• Becoming more intentional with written communication at work
• Informal coffee chats for distributed teams
• Why company retreats are Lullabot's best culture building activity
• What's it like to be part of a "hugging company culture"?
• Life in the day-to-day of managing a remote team at Lullabot
• Adapting to a remote work environment after working at a co-located company
• Building trust during the remote interview process
• How working from a home office makes remote workers more willing to be vulnerable
• Hiring people who self-manage and giving them the support they need to kick ass at their job
• Productivity tools, charts, and graphs don't tell the whole story about remote workers
• Having difficult conversations with distributed team members
• Giving feedback to and receiving regular feedback from remote workers
• Working in different time zone ranges
• Narrowing down job applicants based on predetermined criteria
• Importance of pre-screening calls during the job application process
• Creating an effective onboarding process
• Using your gut feeling to make decisions - pros and cons
• Finding remote workers who are aligned with your company mission and values (Lullabot's values)

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

Topics we discuss...

• Hiring and training seasonal remote workers
• Scaling up and scaling down a remote workforce
• Remote work, as it applies to healthcare clients
• Dealing with high attrition rates
• Attracting better talent because role requirements are not geographically limited
• Overcoming hurdles to remote work in the healthcare industry
• Managing and connecting remote employees using Bhive™
• Recreating an office culture in a remote environment
• Feeling more accountable when 'working remotely'
• Using an always-on video camera to keep team members accountable and connected
• How do you know remote workers are actually working?
• Book Recommendation for Remote Companies: Who Can You Trust? by Rachel Botsman
• Effectively training remote workers
• A day-in-the-life of a BroadPath remote worker
• How does "flexibility" work for a call center remote worker?
• Avoiding remote work scams online
• Want to land a job with BroadPath? Check out their job openings.
• Any questions for Daron? You can email him directly: daron@broad-path.com

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

(Images from Left to Right) 

Siobhan McKeown, Director of People Operations at Human Made;

Kayla Boyer, Recruitment Lead at Shopify;

Meghan Gezo, HR/People Operations Specialist at Zapier.

Jeff Robbins facilitates a remote work roundtable discussion where we discuss how each company hires their distributed employees, overcoming communication challenges, and creating a productive (and happy) remote work environment.

Topics we discuss...

Hiring

• How do you hire remote workers?
• What qualities do you look for in remote workers?
• Where should remote workers look for work?
• How remote workers can get their application to the top
• Using videos in the remote job application process
• Building a good job applications pipeline
• Fielding incoming remote job applications
• Getting the whole company involved in the hiring process
• Gamified referral system for recruiting top talent

Communication

• How do you communicate across different time zones?
• What's the interviewing process like for remote job candidates?
• Ideas for remote work meetings
• Using trust batteries to measure trust on a remote team

Onboarding

• Helping employees who are new to remote work
• Coaching remote workers about work-life balance when your home is your office
• Creating a productive work environment and designing your own schedule
• Challenges of transitioning from a co-located position to working at a hybrid company

Company Culture

• How do you keep your remote workers connected?
• How do you make remote work 'work' at your companies?
• Bringing your whole self to work 
• Encouraging diversity in the workplace
• What do companywide retreats look like for distributed companies?
• Hackathons, remote work sprints, and team productivity
• Performance reviews and giving feedback at distributed companies
• Embracing and 'celebrating' failures at work
• ...and more!

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

We talk about:

• Turning failure in academia into running a successful distributed company
• Helping hybrid and distributed companies trust their remote workers using Time Doctor
• Empowering remote workers to improve productivity through actionable data
• Using data to create an ideal workday model for each remote employee role
• Average on-computer daily work time in North America is just over 3 hours
• Helping remote workers improve productivity with positive reinforcement and additional support—not by being "big brother"
• Why blocking websites from the company wifi actually increases workplace distractions
• Solving the problem of mistrust on a team before implementing remote work agreements
• How "working whenever you want" enhances productivity for writers and developers
• Creating flexible schedules around days and times that are better for workers
• Individual and team cultures with 80+ remote workers in 27 countries
• Struggling to find and hire the best talent as a fully distributed company
• Looking for remote workers on the introverted side of the spectrum
• What to look for (and what not to look for) when hiring salespeople
• Rewarding salespeople for collaborating, rather than competing, on deals
• Using the Coworker Coffee app to strike up non-work-related conversations
• "Culture is something that would appear weird to other people."
• Picking up non-verbal cues through video calls
• Experimenting with virtual reality team meetings
• Previewing the Running Remote Conference 2018 lineup and topics [Use the discount code for 30% off registration: Yonder]

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

We talk about:

• How to establish a remote work routine that works for you
• Why living at home means living at work
• Working less to improve workplace effectiveness
• Team communication for distributed teams
• Importance of one-on-one regular meetings with managers
• Communication tools to stay in contact with team members
• Figuring out the right number of meetings for a distributed company
• Meeting-free Mondays and Fridays 
• Using videoconferencing for meetings
• Creating conferences for company retreats (Hang Time)
• Day to day operations of Dribbble 
• Dribbble’s hiring process
• Dribbble's "no jerks allowed" hiring policy
• Developing a vibrant team culture
• Creative remote work perks at Dribbble
• Benefits of a global talent pool for hiring remotely
• Dealing with growing pains while growing a distributed company
• Clarifying Dribbble's core values as a foundation for the company culture
• ...and more!

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

We talk about:

• How did Work EvOHlution start?
• The distributed work profiler
• 11 traits of a successful remote worker
• 12 attributes which leaders of remote teams must possess
• 6 buildable skills that remote leaders need to learn 
• Remote management and remote meetings
• What it means to "be plan-ful" in distributed and hybrid companies
• Giving remote workers the attention, appreciation, and the space they need to thrive
• Being a good time zone manager
• Managing by objectives and goals versus absenteeism
• What excites co-located managers?

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode with us? We'd love to share ideas on Twitter @yonder_io!

We talk about:

• Importance of trust on remote and hybrid teams
• Creating a connected, flexible workforce as a large corporation
• Good remote work is good communication
• Trust is not inherently present when you work in a cubicle next to someone
• Why remote workers often communicate better than co-located workers
• How remote work happens at Dell
• Redesigning the workplace for employees who work in the Dell offices
• Developing remote work team culture 
• Finding and hiring talent for hybrid and remote teams

Want to discuss this episode with us? Tweet us @yonder_io and be sure to tag @JenNewbill to answer any questions you may have!

We talk about:

• What is Virtual Distance?
• How to stay connected as remote workers within hybrid companies
• Overcoming hurdles to communication in the workplace
• Understanding the different types of virtual distance (physical, operational, affinity) 
• Doing business remotely after the industrial revolution
• Why geographical distance is not the problem in the workplace (and what is!)
• Treating employees as humans, not nodes on a network
• Explicitly bringing context to every aspect of workplace communication
• Making remote and co-located workers feel that you trust them
• Fear of losing control when transitioning a traditional company away from a co-located model
• Why technology will never be a substitute for human to human communication
• Power of humanity to positively impact the future of the workplace, society, and communities

Want to discuss your takeaways from this episode? Let's discuss on Twitter @yonder_io!

We talk about:

• The motivation behind starting Rimon Law
• Remote team meetings
• The challenges and advantages of scaling
• Finding talent in a remote environment
• Roadblocks to going remote in the industry
• Getting together for retreats 3x/year 
• Finding role models of well-run distributed companies

Takeaway Quote:

"When everyone works remotely, nobody works remotely." - Michael Moradzadeh

We talk about:

• Evan’s transition from employee to entrepreneur 
• The deciding factor in building a remote company 
• How to capture culture within a remotely based company
• How do you manage your team? 
• Remote work tips on hiring
• How empathy plays a big role within a remote company 
• How daily habits build productivity 

We talk about:

• What is Hotjar?
• What is it like to work at Hotjar?
• The process of hiring remote employees
• The Hotjar team culture 
• Remote meetings
• The nomadic lifestyle 
• Legal issues/taxes while working remotely
• Travel hack
• Staying productive

We talk about:

• Benefits of working in the office with a hybrid team
• Shopify meet-ups
• Managing remote teams
• Overcommunication as a best practice
• Conducting effective remote meetings
• Distributed team scheduling
• Traveling as a remote worker
• Ideal workweek for productive remote workers
• Helping employees set healthy work-life boundaries

We talk about:

• Mike’s journey into the life of remote work 
• Why create a company based on open source?
• The cost of living difference while working remotely
• Corporate companies transitioning to remote
• Hiring remote workers 

In this episode, Jeff Robbins interviews Claire Lew, CEO of Know Your Company. We discuss the challenges and benefits of remote leadership.

We talk about:

• How is remote leadership different? 
• How does communication change as a remote leader?
• Respecting the bounds of quiet uninterrupted time
• Should we micromanage our employees? 
• Introversion vs extroversion
• Fully remote company vs partially remote 

We talk about: 

• The pros and cons of remote sales teams 
• The motivation and mission behind starting Remote.com 
• How does the Remote.com job matchmaking service work?
• The hiring process for remote employers
• The benefits of diversity within a remote company

We talk about:

• How is work changing as we move into the future?
• Pros and cons of telecommuting 
• Flexibility of productivity
• The future of work 
• What's the big deal with trust?

We talk about:

• How did the idea for Tortuga come about?
• What is the process of designing a backpack?
• Working in the home office vs working outdoors
• Collaborative working
• Team retreats
• Travel hacks

We talk about:

• Work collaboration 
• Design thinking
• PPP:  Plans, Progress & Problems 
• Eliminating email
• Best tools for team collaboration
• Advantages of remote work
• Humanizing team collaboration

We talk about:

• Remote meetings vs in-person team meetings
• Partial interaction in meetings
• How to prevent meetings from being time-wasters
• Scheduling across time zones
• The need for peripheral communication within remote teams

• How Alley Interactive runs a 61 employee distributed company
• Is running a remote company an anomaly or will it become the norm?
• How the team uses Slack to build culture within the company
• Buying lunch for the entire remote team
• Incorporating coaches (and not managers) into the workplace
• Creating transparent communication within the team

Robin Zander, Founder and Director of the Responsive Conference

Rodolphe Dutel, Founder and CEO of Remotive 

Darren Buckner, Founder and CEO of Workfrom 

In this episode, Jeff Robbins facilitates a roundtable discussion with Rodolphe Dutel of Remotive,  Darren Buckner of Workfrom,  and Robin Zander of Responsive to discuss the future of remote work. 

We talk about:

• The future of remote work
• Location independent Millennials
• Whether the traditional employee-employer relationship will go away
• Working as an employee vs working as a freelancer

We talk about:

• Cultural difference in remote team-building
• Team productivity working remotely vs working in an office

We talk about:

• Using Spark Hire to conduct video interviews
• Finding qualified applicants to hire
• Sourcing through LinkedIn and Indeed
• Using LinkedIn Groups to find qualified candidates
• What medical jobs will move remotely
• How to overcome client objections to hire remote workers
• The process behind setting up team meetings
• Becoming a great remote interviewer
• How to know if remote workers are working
• Establishing high levels of communication
• Screening an applicant by asking behavioral questions

We talk about:

• The purpose of a company retreat
• Why a company retreat is important
• Benefits of meeting remote workers in-person
• Justifying the cost of company retreats

We talk about:

• The future of eduction 
• Quitting doesn't mean failure
• Pros and cons of remote working
• Flat management structures while trying to scale
• Management best practices within a distributed company (Manager Tools podcast)
• Encouraging anonymous questions from employees
• Hiring the right people helps leaders avoid micromanagement
• How The 4 Disciplines of Execution moves the needle

We talk about:

• How a simple mental shift helped start Upbuild
• How Mike built his reputation to gain clients
• Using "jumpstart sessions" to onboard new employees remotely 
• Having pair calls to build team culture
• Running a business remotely vs brick & mortar

Christopher Koch, Deputy CFO of Freelancer

Jessica Tiwari, Senior Director of Product Management at Upwork

Mario Gabriele, Chief of Staff at AND CO

In this episode we dive deep into the freelance world as we interview three prominent leaders to discuss the freelance economy. 

Topics We Cover:

What exactly is the gig economy?

The difference between “gig work” vs “freelancer.”

How domestic freelancers can join in the action.

Jeff Robbins talks to Johnny about building the company and managing his distributed team.