By: Jeff Robbins

In 2013, I started Yonder as a conference for leaders of distributed companies to come together and talk about best practices for remote work. In 2016, Yonder stepped out from under the Lullabot umbrella and became a company of its own. I hired a few people and we started publishing articles and a podcast to advocate for remote work by helping company leaders understand the unique needs of remote teams.

We didn’t talk about how to find freelance remote work so you can work from the beach in Bali, dangling a carrot out for those wanting to find employment nirvana. Instead, we talked pragmatically about how to create jobs and expand the job market for all remote workers. Yonder was mission-based right from the beginning – built on the magical experience I’d had building a remote team at Lullabot. Remote work is better work. It requires more communication, trust, respect, empathy, and intentionality than we expect of conventional workplaces. But these are good things to have –  building stronger, more connected company cultures with better employee retention and job satisfaction.

As a company, Yonder started with a mission. I figured that we would come up with a business model as we went along. Advertising? Job boards? Consulting? More conferences? We experimented with all of them. Some were promising. Some were appealing. But in the venn diagram, there was not a lot of overlap between the two. We built a mailing list. I talked to a LOT of great people on the podcast. We ran an in-person conference. We ran an online conference. A lot of it was good. But none of it quite had that spark that it needed to blossom into something great.

The intrinsic motivation (aka the mission) was there. But the extrinsic ones just never came along.

Then COVID hit. All of a sudden, there was a split. On the one hand, the entire world needed information about remote work. On the other, Yonder’s mission and advocacy now seemed a bit naive. Remote work pundits came out of the woodwork. While once I’d struggled to find experts to interview on the podcast, now we were inundated by hundreds of PR people representing thousands of remote work “experts” who wanted to be heard. The world of remote work became a cacophony and I didn’t much see the point in trying to yell over everyone.

So just like that the intrinsic motivation was gone too.

Meanwhile, since my Lullabot exit I have been building my business coaching practice and it is very rewarding. I can tell that I’m helping people. There’s a proper exchange of commerce for services. I’ve got both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators!

So in August, I put Yonder on hold. We stopped posting new content to the website and the mailing list. And I haven’t missed it much. I feel like we did some great things with Yonder. But since putting it on hold, I feel like I’m onto even greater things.

We’re leaving all of our content up for the foreseeable future. We’re getting better traffic than we’ve ever seen. I still love talking about remote work. And who knows, maybe the planets will align for a working venn diagram in the future. But for now, I’m onto other things!

Subscribe to the mailing list at jjeff.com to keep up with my new directions and thoughts.

By: Jessica Thiefels

Empathy in leadership is not only being understanding of your employees—particularly their perspective and feelings—but also trying to put yourself in their shoes to further understand. According to Businesssolver’s 2019 State of Workplace Empathy report, this attribute is essential for leadership as well as overall workplace cohesion. Take a look at their survey findings: 

• 93 percent of employees report they’re likely to stay with an empathetic employer.

• 82 percent would consider leaving their job for a more empathetic organization.

• 92 percent of CEOs say their organization is empathetic, while 72 percent of employees say they work for an empathetic company or leader.

The last stat, in particular, suggests a disconnect between how empathetic leaders believe they are, and how that truly comes across to employees. If this disconnect has been on the backburner in your organization, now is the time to focus on empathy, which is more critical than ever right now as millions of workers are managing the stress of a global pandemic while transitioning to working from home. 

Whether you’re still dealing with stay-at-home orders or making the transition to a partially distributed team, these five strategies can help you bring more empathy to your remote leadership. 

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff 

While your remote team may have had a few weeks of practice already, mistakes will still happen. Just look at the recent Supreme Court remote gaff where one of the Justices forgot to mute themselves while flushing a toilet during a legal argument. Blunders happen to everyone.

Elena Carstoiu, COO of Hubgets, explains how leaders should handle this: "Be understanding of your team’s new normal and the fact that it’s not very normal compared to what they are used to. Set the precedent of accepting that small mistakes will happen. Reinforce that these changes are okay and help everyone learn to navigate their new environment."

Whether a pet walks across the keyboard during a presentation or a staff member is late to a Zoom meeting, don’t sweat it—and remind your employees to do the same.

Role Model Mindfulness

The quarantine and pandemic have turned everyone’s worlds upside down and everyone’s experience has been different. Perhaps one of your team members is stuck in a small apartment trying to juggle their children’s virtual schooling, while you are in a vacation home enjoying space and solitude. Alternatively, certain team members might be lonely and jealous of those who have a house full of family.

Everyone’s circumstances are different, but especially now, workers are dealing with unique (and often difficult) new challenges. Change in itself is hard—the new remote routine might not be what your employees signed up for when applying to their position. 

As a leader, this is an important time to be mindful of the feelings and emotions. One way to do this is to role model mindfulness during this time. As Tay&Val of M Meditation explain in The Power of Mindful Leadership: 

“Mindfulness is more than just a buzzword—it’s also a powerful asset for leaders. Employees will take on the traits you present, so if you lead with empathy, intention, curiosity, and presence, they will too.”

Give your employees permission to be curious about their emotions and feelings and mindful of the feelings and emotions of others by showing them that you’re doing the same. 

Help Employees Help Each Other

Ginger, an on-demand mental health service, found that 69 percent of workers say that this is the most stressful time of their entire professional career—even more so than the 2008 Great Recession or 9/11. Of those working from home, 91 percent report experiencing moderate to extreme stress.  

What’s more, the same report found that 63 percent of workers feel their company could do more to support their emotional and mental wellbeing—but simply being available to talk may not be enough. A Mindshare report found that while 86 percent of people say its important that their workplace supports mental health, they were least comfortable talking to HR and senior leaders about it. 

However, the report found that they are open to helping others. In fact, employees are two times more likely to give support to a colleague than ask for it. 

To create a more empathetic environment, stop the stigma of asking for help in its tracks. Encourage employees to connect with each other and provide support. Ask them to actively listen to one another’s challenges and frustrations. You could even pair coworkers for a weekly chat or check-in. This type of communication will not only decrease loneliness in remote workers but bolster overall mental health. 

Humanize Your Own Experiences as a Leader

Too often, leaders take the mantra of “leading by example” literally and feel they must be a perfect representation of an employee and person. However, when you want to bring empathy to your remote team, it’s far more effective if you’re real‚ which also makes you relatable. 

If you’re vulnerable about your own challenges, roadblocks, and lessons learned, you’ll humanize yourself. This makes it easier for your staff to connect with you, especially when you’re missing out on all the typical human moments of a physical office space (think: water cooler chats, eating lunch together, family pictures on your desk). 

Use this as an opportunity to connect with your team on a new level that also shows them it’s okay to stumble as they figure out the new normal as well.

Lead Your Remote Team With Empathy 

While these times are unprecedented, the global workforce is going through monumental shifts because of it. Bring empathy to your leadership during these challenging times and encourage your employees to do the same by role modeling and being open and honest. When employees see you doing this, they’ll feel they can do the same, making your organization stronger and more connected.

By: Priscila Correia

Remote work is not new, but 2020 definitely marks an important shift. In the past few months, companies and business owners worldwide felt the pressure of moving their teams to work remotely for the first time. And, naturally, this came with several challenges.

From keeping the same levels of productivity to moving everyday operations to online channels, leaders need to ensure remote teams have the necessary resources and tools to be successful while keeping finances organized.

Here are some tips on managing remote teams and finances that can help you set your business for success.

Be transparent about finances

Financial stability is a huge concern for both leaders and employees during these uncertain times. That’s why you need to be transparent about your team’s finances and do the best of your abilities to ensure payments are done in time. Be transparent about reduced hours and check in on how employees are handling financial stress. In addition, providing a space online (be it a Slack channel or knowledge portal) to share insights and links to relevant resources creates a sense of community and support among your teams. 

Electronic payroll systems are also very beneficial for remote employees who have to manage their money on the go. As some employees may take advantage of an online budgeting and banking app or a money management software on a desktop, this makes it simple and convenient for their finances.

Set new budget priorities

Sit down with your team and brainstorm ways to adjust your budget and business model so you can still make sustainable revenue. By budgeting and planning, you can avoid risk as a team and stay afloat through these uncertain times. 

Since your teams are working remotely, this is a huge opportunity to reduce operational costs. Take time to review the costs associated with running a dormant office and reinvest in some other areas that might require attention. For example, your employee’s wellbeing or new digital tools to improve productivity.

Conduct daily or weekly calls

In times of remote work, communication is crucial to keep productivity levels and build relationships. And forget messages or emails. The most effective way to stay in touch with your remote teams is through voice or video calls.

Like other companies in the software industry, my team at Helppier has been required to work remotely full-time. And, as a company following Scrum methodology, our development team always starts the day with a Stand-Up meeting. This meeting consists of a brief explanation of the following questions:

• What did you accomplish since the last meeting?

• What are you working on until the next meeting?

• What is getting in your way or keeping you from doing your job?

We recommend using tools like Slack to stay in touch with your team members as you can easily send messages and files. For large group meetings, we use Zoom as it’s very quick to setup via link. Other popular tools you can use include Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, and Hangouts.

Also, be mindful and flexible when scheduling meetings. Talk to your team members to define the best times to meet and bring an agenda with key subjects so you all can stay focused during calls. 

Set the right digital tools

Staying connected is one of the hardest challenges of remote work. According to Polycom, 62% of remote workers want employers to provide better technology that helps them stay connected with colleagues. With that said, setting up the right tools will help boost collaboration and manage different projects from a distance. 

In addition to communication tools, there are three types of software that you should consider:

• Knowledge Management tools

• Project management tools

• Software training tools

Knowledge Management tools

This is not said enough: sharing information with remote teams is time consuming. Most of the time, information is scattered between Excels and PDFs, becoming difficult to control updates and even share feedback. If you already use file sharing platforms, then you know how long it can take to find the right file when replying to emails and phone calls.

A knowledge management system will allow you to centralize internal information in a more appealing dashboard. This way, employees can find information quickly and update it in real-time. They can also leave notes, comments, and messages directly, boosting overall collaboration.

Project management tools

For business leaders and project managers, it’s imperative to use a software that highlights time-critical data — listing client-specific goals, due dates, and implemented actions for completion. But before you jump into a project management software here are some good practices to consider:

• Outline clear processes for each role and project

• Ensure deadlines are set in advance and agreed upon

• Find a project management approach that empowers your team to get more done

Following Scrum methodology, at Helppier, our development team works with Sprints. The tasks are defined for a 2-week period. On each Sprint, the project manager defines the tasks and discusses with the team so everyone can share feedback. We use Jira and Trello to keep track of everything. Basecamp is another popular option in the market.

Software training tools

Think about this: we use software to send emails, organize tasks, book vacations, plan our business strategy, and the list just goes on. Naturally, some of the tools your company uses require a learning curve. When employees are at the office, it's easier to explain these tools through a quick face-to-face meeting with a mentor. But when you have a remote team, you will need to find more autonomous ways for employees to learn.

Tutorial Videos are an effective way to teach remote employees how to use a specific platform. According to Forrester Research, employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than to read documents, emails, or web articles. You can, for example, record a tutorial video on top of your software and present them inside the platform itself, or export the files to share via email or chat. Every time your employees need help performing a specific task online, they can just watch the video and get things done quickly.

From adjusting your budget to providing the right digital tools, managing remote teams is a challenge that can be overcome. Communicating with your team and being transparent will help you be successful during these chaotic times. 

Remember that remote is the new normal, so don't be afraid to change processes.

Priscila is the Marketing Manager at Helppier, a software company that allows creating beautiful user guides for the web, without coding.

By: Claudia Jeffrey

More than half of the world’s workforce already worked remotely at least once a week before the pandemic. Since the outbreak, almost every non-essential business around the world sent its employees to work from home, and many of us were already accustomed to it.

However, it can be difficult to stay motivated and continue working with the same productivity levels due to a number of other distractions and a disrupted work-life balance. Many employers and business owners are making an effort to motivate their remote workers and helping them set some long-term goals that take into consideration the ever-changing landscape of work in a post-COVID world. For those who are new to working from home, it can be especially difficult if they are used to the corporate environment and associated work rhythms. This can affect the employees’ productivity and result in a severe decline for the organization.

“People today really value workplace flexibility and remote work because it allows them to focus their energies on work and life as opposed to commuting or other complications due to geography.” 

— Ken Matos, Vice President of Research, Life Meets Work

Let’s discuss how you, as the manager, can keep your team motivated!

8 Effective Ways You Can Help Your Remote Employees Set Long-Term Goals

Here are eight effective ways to help your remote workers set long-term goals and stay on track while they work from home.

1. Communication is the key.

Remote teams cease to function without proper communication. Any group dynamic working towards a mutual objective should have open communication channels. It helps to have regularly scheduled meetings to align the daily tasks at the start of the day. This standup session can build up motivation for all your team members as each participates in the discussion and shares what they’re working on. It also eases any communication barriers and sets the tone for a productive workday.

2. Get to know your team.

It is often more challenging to build a cohesive team comprised of individuals who have never met in person. From privacy concerns to not having a dedicated workspace, workstation, or equipment to work at home, there can be many issues that can arise from time to time. As the team lead, you should take the responsibility to be a resource for your team members and get to know them both on a professional and somewhat personal level.

3. Start with small, attainable goals.

Now that you have established a daily team meeting to set the tone of the day and helped the members get to know each other, the question is how are you sustaining the connection? Even though teammates may be patient with each other’s shortcomings, it’s not always as smooth as it seems. To lower resistance to goal setting, start with short, individual, and easily attainable goals. Instead of directly burdening them with longer-term goals, work together on mapping short-term goals that are easily achievable and come together to support a larger business objective.

4. Frame tasks around those goals.

One primary responsibility that team leaders and managers undertake is to keep their team on track to reach business goals. After you have set the short-term goals, it is your responsibility to align the tasks that you have assigned them, so they all tie together to contribute to the overarching goal. When they complete smaller goals, remind them how they are making an impact on their team and the business. This is a great way to keep them motivated and on track.

5. Practice what you preach.

As a team leader, it’s not enough to make motivational speeches and dictate how they should go about achieving goals. A team leader should set a positive example in being forthright about their own goals and objectives. A motivating manager actually practices what (s)he preaches to their team members. Share your own struggles and successes, and also share how you’re working through them.

6. Manage, motivate and empower.

Team management is not easy. Some remote workers are better at self-management than others, and it’s up to team leaders to ensure the right things are getting done. Being able to identify the behaviors of remote workers who may need more help self-managing is critical for your team to be successful. One way to counter a lack of self-discipline is to manage well by motivating and empowering your employees with the resources they need. Help them understand that completion of assigned work and achieving set goals also aligns with their personal achievements. Show them that you, too, do the same and are expected to deliver results.

7. Offer appropriate incentives.

At the end of the day, we all are humans. We all work because of the incentives involved in the process, whether long-term or short-term. As a manager, you might consider offering incentives to your team members to keep them motivated and working towards the long-term goal without giving up. The expectation of a significant incentive by the end of the long, hectic process of working towards an objective might keep them inspired to cross the finish line.

8. Identify resources.

Lastly, it’s important to identify resources to keep you and the team inspired. Ask leaders within the company to make an effort and help the team understand the company vision, mission, and objectives better to align their long-term goals with that of the company. Help them realize that not answering to the team lead, not understanding other team member’s personal space and not fully communicating is not a show of utmost responsibility that a good employee should show. If your team learns to value their everyday tasks as part of a bigger, better goal, you will have a productive team who supports each other and rallies together to achieve their goals.

All in all, nobody in the world, whether they are a celebrity, a businessman are just a regular fellow human, like you and me, would say that they were prepared for what 2020 would bring. Such challenging times are unprecedented. There’s no better time for us all to work together to achieve long-term professional goals and also our personal life goals.

Claudia Jeffrey is a Sr. Business Analyst at Crowd Writer. She has worked as a stay-at-home mom, which is why she understands the struggles of remote work and regularly shares her experiences with readers on her blog.

By: Marija Kojic

A multicultural remote team is a team whose members come from different countries and cultures, but who work and collaborate together remotely. 

These team members may have different culture-based traits, including:

• languages

• values

• beliefs

• traditions

• behavior patterns

All of this can pose a challenge to team managers.

In order to successfully manage a remote multicultural team and maximize its efficiency, the manager will need to help the team understand and ease their cultural differences, all while emphasizing that everyone’s culture is equally respected within the team. 

1. Address challenges related to verbal communication

One of the biggest challenges for multicultural teams is the language barrier. If your team members have different mother tongues, verbal communication may be problematic.

To work around this problem, you need to identify the language you are all sufficiently fluent in. You can then carry out all your online team meetings and communication in the chosen language. 

Yet, no matter the language you choose, bear in mind that not everyone in your team will be equally fluent in it. 

As a result, some people may have difficulties understanding what others are trying to convey, and may sometimes have trouble expressing their own thoughts in the way they want to. 

To help the people you are managing overcome this challenge, don’t be afraid to over-communicate your own thoughts. Encourage others to do the same. Moreover, encourage your team to be patient when listening to others, and discourage them from interrupting or talking over someone.

Also, make it a practice to announce meetings at least one day in advance, to give everyone enough time to prep and think about what they want to say or ask, and how best to do it. This way, you’ll establish a tension-free communication environment where everyone will feel confident enough to express their ideas and thoughts.

2. Address challenges related to non-verbal communication

Non-verbal communication patterns may also vary across your team and make communication even more challenging:

• What is normal in one culture may be offensive in another. 

• What is unusual in one culture may be the norm in another. 

• Gestures, non-verbal cues, and behaviors that mean one thing in one country may mean something else entirely in other countries.

For example, a lot of countries interpret nodding one’s head to mean “Yes”, and shaking one’s head to mean “No”. But, in some countries, such as Bulgaria and Greece, the exact opposite is true.

So, take the time to learn about the common non-verbal patterns and behaviors of your teammates based on their country and culture of origin, and encourage them to do the same. This will prove helpful during online video meetings, as you’ll all decrease the chances of anyone being misunderstood. 

3. Be mindful of the teams’ cultures when assigning work

Being mindful of people’s traditions, customs, and holidays is an important step in ensuring your work schedules are in tune with your team’s availability.

Let’s say your team consists of people from the US and Sweden. 

People from the US celebrate their independence day on the 4th of July. And, people from Sweden celebrate their independence day on the 6th of June. 

Both groups likely hold their respective holidays in high regard, and you should respect that by not burying either group with tasks and deadlines during their days of celebration. Instead, assign these tasks and deadlines to people you know will be free to fully focus on them. In order to further streamline the way you assign tasks, track who is available to work, and when, you can try a team management software.

By tweaking the team’s schedules around their cultures, you’ll show that you respect everyone’s traditions, customs, and holidays. This will, in turn, help everyone in your team understand that they are equally valued. As a result, you’ll further improve the teams’ productivity, their collaboration, and their respect for each other. 

4. Address the issue with the different time zones

Your team members may operate in different time zones. This makes arranging meetings or even sending and responding to messages a challenge due to people’s divergent work schedules.

When it comes to messages, instruct your team to plan with the delay in mind. For example, if Oliver from Sydney needs some project information for tomorrow morning from Carolina from Lisbon, there’s no point in waiting for tomorrow to send a message — because of the time difference that puts Carolina 9 hours behind Oliver. Instead, he can send her the message before going to bed, say at 11 pm. This way, Carolina will receive the message at 2 pm according to her time and have plenty of time to answer it before Oliver wakes up the following morning.  

When it comes to meetings, try to find a time that’s suitable for everyone. For example, if your team consists of people from London and San Francisco, you can set up daily meetings at 9 am PST. This way, the San Francisco group will attend the meeting at 9 am according to their time, and the London group will attend the meeting at 5 pm according to their time.

Unfortunately, sometimes there simply won’t be a suitable time for everyone. For example, if your team also includes people from Tokyo, setting up daily meetings at 9 am PST won’t do, as that is 1 am in Tokyo. In cases when there is no ideal solution, it’s best that you move the meeting times around, so that no group is always the one staying up late or getting up extremely early. 

Managing a multicultural remote team has its share of challenges. But, you can efficiently tackle most of them by researching your team’s cultures and countries, and devising schedules and workflows accordingly.

Marija Kojic is a productivity expert specialized in time management techniques. She works at Clockify, where she enjoys helping people discover meaningful and effective ways to work smarter.

Jeff Robbins interviews Egor Borushko, who is the Co-founder and Producer at the Running Remote Conference about the current state of remote work, the current state of conferences, and the gamut of all the things that have changed around the pandemic.

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. 

If you’re not already subscribed to the newsletter Yonder.io/newsletter is where you can do that, and you should go do that. We will let you know when new podcasts come out, we’ll let you know when new articles get posted on the Yonder website. We’ll find little bits and pieces of interesting stuff around the web and we’ll let you know about those things too. And, of course, if you’re not already subscribed to this podcast, if you’re enjoying this podcast, you just subscribe. It’ll come into your podcast application every couple of weeks. When we put out a new one you’ll be one of the first ones to know and you get it right there. I’ve just described what it’s like to subscribe to a podcast to you, and now you know, [laughing], so there you go. 

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.

By: Ronita Mohan

The HR trends of the future have witnessed a sea of change in 2020—the trends we were likely to encounter have altered drastically because of the current global circumstances.

Let’s examine what HR might look like in the near future as a result of the global pandemic.

Remote Workforces

There is one thing that has been proven by the current environment—a lot of jobs can be completed with employees working remotely. And this is an HR trend we are definitely going to see more of in the near future.

Remote workforces are becoming the future of work—and this will impact how HR functions within businesses.

Over the last few years, remote workers have become more common across the world—and companies are adopting this style because they are a massive cost-saving method.

Remote workers use their own equipment and space—this means organizations save on overheads and supplies. In addition, remote employees give companies access to a wider range of diverse talent—people located in different countries bring their own expertise that may not have been possible with local staff.

For HR, however, there are some complications. For one, remote teams work on their pre-determined schedules that don’t always align with the working hours of the company. HR and remote teams need to figure out the best way for employees to keep in touch—to facilitate better workflow—without being inconvenienced.

For remote employees from other countries, HR will likely have to organize and conduct additional training—not just for onboarding them into the organization’s systems, but also for them to understand the workings of the company’s home country.

In the immediate future, HR teams will likely find themselves transitioning into remote working models. This requires a complete change in thinking and methodology.

There are some remote team templates that can be used for the initial switch to remote work till HR has a handle on the situation and can streamline the process.

Remote Tools

With the steady progression towards remote work that we have been seeing, HR will also need to ensure that companies are equipped with the best remote work tools to optimize workflow.

Some of the necessary tools that companies are having to adopt include team chat tools like Skype, Slack, or other alternatives—so that workers can connect with each other no matter where they are.

Another tool that has become necessary is project management software. 

When you don’t have the luxury of stopping by someone’s desk to chat about an innovation project, getting the right software to simulate that experience becomes the key to project success.

Implementing the right software will help employees stay connected and work productively.

More Flexibility

Flexibility is still one of the major benefits of remote work—a number of companies have started allowing employees to work from home for at least one day a week.

This kind of policy has massive advantages—it saves employees time on commuting and dressing up. Time which is then put into working and being productive.

We should expect flexible working schedules to become the norm for more companies—especially as organizations begin recruiting employees from across the globe.

There is another aspect of flexible working schedules that will impact HR trends—freelancers. The number of gig economy jobs has steadily increased over the last few years.

Gig workers are generally affiliated with a number of companies—they work on a contract basis, which can complicate the work of HR managers.

While employee salaries and monetary benefits follow a standard structure, contractors are often paid according to hours worked or given a flat fee for a project.

HR teams need to prepare to do more calculations and to set up a tracking system to ensure that contract workers are paid on time—cementing the goodwill they feel towards the company.

Modern Benefits

Companies that continue to rely on traditional benefits to keep candidates and employees happy will need to adapt to modern sensibilities.

To create more inclusive environments, companies need to offer more work-from-home opportunities, and flexible hours to accommodate employees who need to care for children and ailing families.

Ensuring that companies focus on virtual team building activities will make it easier for workers with children to engage with their teams without having to organize childcare.

Parental leave should be expanded for workers of all genders—with equal opportunities to return to their job, again with room for childcare.

Affording insurance policies that cover more than the basics will also allow companies to diversify their workforce.

HR will need to be at the forefront of these changes—and will also have to work on ways to market these benefits to make the company more attractive to new recruits. 

HR Automation

Remote work is set to be something that will encompass most areas of the workplace, including HR teams. This means automating a number of processes to make the job easier.

For instance, using expense automation software makes the work of both the HR team and the accounting team more structured and less time-consuming.

A number of businesses have already started implementing HR software like applicant tracking systems, as well as employee onboarding software, and training software—and HR trend that is going to continue well into the future.

Companies can also build a chatbot that will answer simple HR queries—freeing up HR teams to handle more complex queries as well as get a handle on their other duties.

Regular Performance Reviews

Performance reviews have often been held on a face-to-face basis—with the move towards remote working, face-to-face takes on a different meaning.

These review systems will have to be conducted online using team chat tools and online forms. This is more of a change in mindset and work ethic—but needs to be properly planned out.

Businesses can facilitate this form of remote communication by using reporting templates to track progress and goals accomplished.

Changing HR Roles

Because of the global shift towards remote work, HR will now need to collaborate with other teams on various aspects of the recruitment process.

Areas such as the staffing website design and marketing for open vacancies in the workplace will need heavy HR involvement. This will ensure alignment between the content produced and HR’s goals.

Considering the current environment, many businesses are also doubling down on their succession planning, and it’s one of the HR trends that will continue to evolve.

HR is best placed to understand which employees are showing leadership abilities, and who has a cohesive and executable vision for the company. 

They can then advise C-Suite executives on whom to elevate when the time is right.

The HR trends of the future will be pivoting towards making remote work a possibility for all employees.

This will mean getting the right technology to accomplish goals, track progress, and keep communication channels open between workers.

Ronita Mohan is a content marketer at Venngage, the online infographic and design platform. Ronita regularly writes about HR, content marketing, small businesses, pop culture, and representation.

Jeff Robbins interviews Jeremie Kubicek, CEO of GiANT, a leadership consulting and training company. Jeremie is also the author of several books including Five Voices: How to Communicate Effectively with Everyone You Lead, and a popular book called The 100X Leader. Jeremie has a SaaS platform which they’ve launched called Giant TV, which is described as Netflix meets Peloton for adult learning. Jeremie and Jeff dig deep into culture, communication and trust building in this interview.

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.

By: Badri Rajasekar

The trend towards remote work continues to gain steam during the pandemic. Both leaders and employees may still be in an unfamiliar position: facing each other on-screen versus across a conference room table. The new paradigm has businesses trying to figure out their new best practices. How can they assure work is done, clients are serviced, and the team culture stays healthy?

As the leader of a fully remote and distributed team, I found the best way forward involves throwing out the traditional "onsite office rules." This approach gave our team the freedom to create our own guidelines, and what we found sometimes surprised us. In this ever-evolving environment, here is what’s worked for our team in hopes that these tips will help you recalibrate your mindset while adapting to remote work efficiently, whether that’s short- or long-term.

Allow Sporadic Workflows

Many leaders have a hard time giving up the oversight they once had in the office. However, employees often find that they thrive without this same oversight. Executives might feel the need to establish systems that replicate onsite supervision for remote employees, but that could easily turn into micromanagement.

A key benefit to remote work is that it gives employees the ability to work flexible hours. They should have more time to address personal obligations including exercise, family care, hobbies and more, and they may find they are more productive at times that do not always align with the typical 9-5 schedule. While working remotely inherently cuts down on office-centric distractions, like loud talkers or nosey coworkers, other necessities like childcare or grocery shopping replace them. Interruptions must be accommodated, not eliminated.

Remote work lets people focus on getting stuff done rather than “looking like getting stuff done.” Unless employees are missing deadlines, client calls or team meetings, give them the latitude to complete their work on their own time. This builds a culture of trust and transparency.

Encourage Self-Management

Remote workers manage themselves in many ways. Because executives and employees are not in the same physical place anymore, remote work inherently provides employees with a sense of independence, accountability, and ownership over their decisions. However, it’s also important to balance this self-management with keeping leadership in-the-know.

Remote and distributed workflows necessitate that teams build greater trust and mutual dependence. Not only is this advantageous in driving teams to be more productive, but it also increases workplace satisfaction. To achieve this, leaders must define realistic goals and track them with clear metrics. Remote employees should be encouraged to communicate roadblocks early and without the threat of reprisal. While this may sound similar to on-site procedures, remote work timelines are not exactly the same. Maybe it takes longer to navigate the review process, or it’s more difficult to brainstorm new ideas. These differences and time lags must be accounted for when setting goals and shepherding team projects to the finish line.

On the flip side, it’s equally important that your team knows what you’re doing and when. Clearly communicate your availability and status changes immediately. Find ways to establish an effective cadence to relevant updates. Maybe it’s a quick end of day update email or a weekly kickoff video call - whatever works best for both executives and employees. Don’t turn this into busy work!

Rely on Both Live and Asynchronous Communication

Because the Jamm team is distributed across four cities and three countries, we have experience coordinating projects both synchronously and asynchronously. In fact, it’s exactly why we built the app. However, it’s very important to know when and why to use each approach.

Utilizing both techniques can do wonders to streamline workflow. For example, live video is preferred for brainstorming, collaboration, checking in with employees, conducting all-hands meetings, and more. It relays nuance and detail in a way that text simply cannot.

But what if you’re working on something after-hours and don’t want to bother a coworker? This is where asynchronous communication comes in. While sending an email or a Slack message may work for simple requests, we’ve found that recording and sharing a video has advantages beyond the strengths of text. When challenges arise, a quick video recording communicates creative ideas or problems while they are still fresh in employees’ minds. In the tech world, a recorded video can clearly show a bug reproduction step, commentary on visual assets, or user feedback more effectively than sending bulky emails or a couple of Slack messages. Overall, recorded videos are an efficient method for teams to relay information while simultaneously building alignment and shared vision.

Throwing out the rules you used in the office to manage teams can be challenging. However, we’ve found time and again that remote employees are up to the challenge. By giving them the tools and latitude to work in their own personal way, you create a culture of respect and productivity within your organization.

Badri is co-founder and CEO of Jamm, a lightweight spontaneous voice and video collaboration tool for remote and distributed teams.

Jeff Robbins interviews repeat guest Daron Robertson, CEO and Co-Founder of Bhive and CEO of BroadPath Healthcare Solutions, about the shifts that are going on currently around remote work during this Coronavirus pandemic from the perspective of running a large distributed company.

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 [email protected] 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.

By: Katarzyna Tatomir-Rebeś

Earlier this year, Monterail introduced the remote-first approach to our organization as one of our Key Initiatives for 2020. Why such a radical shift? 

That’s simple, we want to continue attracting and staffing the best talent here at Monterail, regardless of their preferred location or modus operandi—the approach prioritized choice, meaning everyone could work from home, the beach, or the office (or even from the Moon!).

Back then, however, we couldn’t have anticipated that circumstances would soon force companies worldwide to embrace similar work-from-home approaches, not as a privilege, but as a must in the face of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Thanks to our prior experience, the right software, and an established company mindset that appreciated remote work, the switch to a fully remote setup went relatively painlessly and fairly quickly.

Read on to see what remote-first means to us and what has changed (or hasn’t) in terms of cooperation with clients, meetings, and other organizational issues after we went full remote. And see the end of the post for a brief FAQ section.

What does “remote-first” entail?

Embracing a “remote-first” approach means that we’ve opened our company even more and decided to use the situation as an opportunity to grow beyond Wrocław and Poland. Even though our head office is here and will stay here, we can now expand our already great team by seeking talent from outside the city or even the country.

From now on, every one of our team members will have the opportunity to choose a work style that suits them best—remote, on site, or a mix of both, depending on the need (that, obviously, doesn’t apply to our current quarantine conditions). If somebody’s living situation requires them to move cities, their status at Monterail will remain unchanged.

It also means having a more open approach to remote work in general. This includes identifying areas for improvement and implementing solutions that will make our cross-team cooperation better, easier, and more effective. Try to see remote-first as a method of working, collaborating and sharing knowledge together, that encourages getting everyone on the team (rather than only office-based team members) involved.

Necessary adjustments

Given the circumstances, any remote-first approach implemented right now would necessarily be a little more sweeping than usual. On March 11, the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. The epidemiological situation is evolving rapidly, and governments around the world have been introducing broad measures to curtail the spread of the infection.

For the time being, the entire Monterail team has moved to a fully remote work arrangement, to stay safe and reduce the risk of spreading the infection. We also introduced a number of other safety precautions as well.

The entire company had to shift to a remote-only mode in only a few days, so it should come as no surprise that the whole situation has brought up lots of questions and concerns—we’re going to address most of them in the FAQ section below.

Frequently Asked Questions

So what will change for our clients or team members? Very little, actually. This situation won’t affect either ongoing or new projects in any way. Monterail works remotely with its clients >98% of the time, so the shift will hardly force any major changes. Let’s dive into the details.

1. How ready is Monterail to work 100% remotely?

We are more than ready. We have tools, processes, software, and hardware all in place. Before going fully remote, we drafted a set of guidelines and best practices to facilitate the shift to a remote-first mindset (which we’re going to share soon!) We did the research and spoke at length with some of our team members about their remote work experience. Every suggestion was taken seriously and contributed to making the whole experience, for both employees and clients, as pleasant and effective as it is when we’re working together in the office.

2. How will the change affect my project?

We can confidently say that this situation won’t affect either ongoing or new projects in any way. We’ll continue to have regular meetings and calls, and continue to work on development stages as previously scheduled.

3. What if any of the developers will be forced to stay in quarantine or take sick leave?

We will handle sick leaves as usual, meaning that the Project Manager will inform the client about the situation and, if required, we will try to replace the absentee. Each client has already received the following information, along with additional details about Monterail's strategy for the upcoming months:

"In case an unplanned absence puts any business-critical priority in danger, Monterail will be searching for substitutions, recommending changes in scope or strategy or taking any other actions to support your business."

4. How will you conduct the workshops?

We decided that in this case Zoom.us would suit our needs best, mostly due to its “dual monitor mode” and simultaneous screen sharing. Using these capabilities, a designer could be showing an artboard straight from their design software and a PM or BA could be presenting the list of tasks with relevant descriptions to a client sharing their business ideas and concepts that they wanted to discuss—all at the same time. Additional details will be provided to the clients before every workshop.

5. What about meetings with clients?

All client meetings, whether held in our office or in the client’s office, will be moved online. Our project managers and the Customer Success team have already informed our clients about the current situation and the steps we’re taking to reduce the risk of coronavirus transmission.

6. Did you restrict travel/events/company gatherings?

Yes, yes, and yes. Business travel—domestic and international—has been suspended. We are rescheduling or canceling any events that were to be held in the office, e.g our monthly Friday chill out, International Women’s Day. Monterail’s tenth birthday party, planned for May, has also been postponed.

7. How do you keep communication flowing?

Communication is the ultimate foundation of remote work. Without effective communication, little gets actually done, so we make every effort to ensure that the exchange of information remains unimpeded and conducted properly. All of the tools specified below have been in use at Monterail for quite some time now.

• For project meetings and calls that require the presence of the entire Monterail staff or one of the company’s specialist teams (Growth, Development, Project Management, Business Support etc), we use Zoom.us.

• For the development team, Github remains the daily driver used for hosting source code projects in a variety of different programming languages and keeping track of the various changes made to every iteration.

• For matters not requiring instant reaction, communicating strategic decisions, and discussing important issues, etc., we use Basecamp—a knowledge-sharing platform created to be the calm, organized way to manage projects.

• For real-time communication, quick and urgent questions, and project discussions, we use Slack. It’s also the main touchpoint between marketing and sales teams because our Slack is integrated with Pipedrive and Hubspot, which allows everyone on the Growth team to see new contact form submissions, lead updates, and project details as real-time notifications.

8. What will recruitment and onboarding look like now?

Onboarding, recruitment, and peer reviews will continue but in a remote capacity. We’re still figuring out how to handle signing contracts and necessary paperwork, how to deal remotely with HSE workshops, distribute the necessary hardware to new hires, etc.

Let’s do this!

Not everyone has the opportunity to switch to a fully remote work arrangement, and we really appreciate ours. We’re also really lucky that the organization we’ve built is robust enough to contribute—at least to some extent—to curtailing the further spread of the new coronavirus without significant losses in productivity. Although the situation somewhat forced us to introduce these extraordinary solutions, we see it as an opportunity rather than a risk. We’re more than ready to try out a remote-first approach, and put the necessary tools and processes into practice.

At Monterail, we’re usually led by realism with a touch of optimism. Instead of succumbing to paranoia and using it as a default mode in an emergency, we decided instead to harness it to forecast all possible scenarios. And so we’re keeping our fingers crossed to the wave to crest in the following weeks.

The situation we found ourselves in is far business as usual, but we’ll all make it through. Stay calm, stay safe, wash your hands, and keep delivering meaningful software.

This article was originally published on the Monterail blog here.