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. 

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

JEFF: Egor, welcome to the Yonder podcast.

EGOR BORUSHKO: Hi Jeff. Thank you.

JEFF: It’s great to have you on. 

EGOR: Yeah, it’s good to be here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EGOR: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EGOR: That’s correct.

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Interesting.

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

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

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

JEFF:  (44:52) What have you seen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

EGOR: That has been forced and imposed on them. 

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

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

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

EGOR: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

EGOR: Oh, tell me about it.

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Yeah, absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF:  (1:02:20) How’d that work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Take care.

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.

Jeff Robbins interviews repeat guest Daron Robertson, CEO and Co-Founder of Bhive and CEO of path.com/">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 path.com">daron@broad-path.com or they can go to the website go.inbhive.com and fill out the information request page. 

JEFF: Yeah, great. Well thanks Daron.

DARON: Thanks Jeff. Pleasure, as always.

JEFF: Always an interesting conversation. Take care.

Jeff Robbins interviews Mark Faggiano, CEO of TaxJar, a sales tax calculation SaaS business, with over 160 employees all of whom are working remotely. The company tripled in size last year, and Mark has a lot of great insight into culture, growth, and transparency.

Here’s the transcript:

JEFF: Hi Mark. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

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

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

MARK: Sure, it is. [laughing].

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

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

JEFF: And you’re at home?

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

JEFF: Okay.

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

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

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

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

MARK: We’re at a little over 160.

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

MARK: Yes. 

JEFF: (5:51) Completely distributed company?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MARK: [laughing] Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: [laughing] Been there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Patterns. We can call them patterns.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MARK:  Totally.

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

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

JEFF: Right, yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MARK: Exactly.

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

MARK: A new role?

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

MARK: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

MARK: Agreed.

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

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

JEFF: Well, thanks again. Great conversation.

Jeff Robbins has been setting up remote and distributed companies for 15 years. Ivan Stegic runs TEN7, a fully-distributed digital agency and also hosts a podcast. Now that the coronavirus is forcing the concept of remote work into the forefront, Ivan and Jeff decided to do a podcast with some high-quality information about transitioning to remote work, from folks who’ve been through it, and now believe it’s a better way to work.

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

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

Highlights

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

• Let’s talk remote work vocabulary

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

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

• Check-ins are key

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

• “We’re all in this together”

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

• Working from home is living at work

• Overcommunicate overcommunicate overcommunicate

• Everyone should cc liberally

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

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

• Context-shifting is a thing

• Time is relative

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

• Remote workers will likely work too much

• Purpose is context

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

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

• Remote work is ankle weights for management

• Don’t confuse foosball with culture

Links

• TEN7 Podcast

• Lullabot

• Bureau of Digital

• Seven Tips for Productively Working from Home

• jjeff.com

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

Alright, let’s talk to Ivan.

IVAN: Thanks for joining me today Jeff.

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

IVAN: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

IVAN: Right.

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

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

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

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

IVAN: Yeah.

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

IVAN: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IVAN: A little more planful, intentional.

JEFF: Intentional.

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

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

IVAN: [laughing] Right.

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

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

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

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

IVAN: They might not have direction.

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

IVAN: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

IVAN: Right. Their options.

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

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

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

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

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

IVAN: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IVAN: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

IVAN: Right.

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

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

IVAN: Specific.

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

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

JEFF: Yeah, half a dozen’s a lot.

IVAN: Five or six back and forth? Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Is it?

IVAN: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IVAN: Or a high-five elbow. Right?

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Give me a call. [laughing]

IVAN: Absolutely. Number one, absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

IVAN: Yes, I do.

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

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

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

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

Jeff Robbins interviews Ali Greene, who for the past four years has been working as the Director of People Ops at DuckDuckGo, and she’s got a new company called Cohana, which offers consulting services and general remote work advocacy. They talk topics related to culture, vulnerability, and intentionality. They also discuss what it’s like building diversity on a remote team and battling isolation through community support.

Here’s the transcript:

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Ali Greene. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Yeah.

ALI: Just a testament for the remote world.

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

ALI: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALI: It’s a little cold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Yeah, burn you out, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeff Robbins interviews Jerad Bitner, who is the Development Manager and a Developer at Lullabot, the company Jeff co-founded back in 2006. They discuss the potential of virtual reality in remote work environments and other virtual communication topics.

Here’s the transcript:

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

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

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

JEFF: Hi Jerad. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

JERAD:  Hey Jeff. How you doing?

JEFF: I’m good. (5:31) How are you?

JERAD: Doing very, very well, thank you.

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

JERAD: It will be 10 years in March.

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

JERAD: Yup. Providence.

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

JERAD: [laughing] 

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

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

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

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

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

JERAD: [laughing]  Yeah, it really is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JERAD: That is a thing. 

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

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

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

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

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

JERAD: Yeah or interacting.

JEFF: Spreadsheets.

JERAD: Touching buttons to do things.

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

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

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

JERAD: On a screen maybe.

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Fully immersive.

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

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

JERAD: Oh, yes.

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

JERAD: It is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Mozilla, the people behind the Firefox browser.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Windows PC.

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

JEFF: Yeah. Right. 

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

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

JERAD: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JERAD: Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Some people want to express their inner banana.

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

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

JERAD: The oasis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JERAD: It does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JERAD: PTSD.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JERAD: Are we the only ones?

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

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

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

JERAD: Yes, he really is. 

JEFF: 700 episodes. That’s amazing.

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

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

JERAD: My pleasure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Yeah. Take care.

JERAD: You too. 

Jeff Robbins interviews Aaron Weiche, CEO of GatherUp, about working how you work best, expressing passion in a virtual environment, and amplifying productivity through remote work.

Here’s the transcript:

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

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

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

JEFF: Hi Aaron. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

AARON:  Thanks Jeff. Thanks for having me.

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

AARON: I am just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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

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

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

AARON: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF:  Yup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

AARON: Yes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AARON: Yes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Congratulations.

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

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

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

JEFF: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeff Robbins interviews Greg Hanover, CEO of LiveOps, about what it’s like to work in a virtual call center, the value of physical get togethers, education and virtual learning, and how managers can measure results for remote workers.

Here’s the transcript:

JEFF: Hi Greg. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

GREG: Good Morning Jeff., Great to be here.

JEFF: Yeah, it’s great to have you here. (3:11) The first question I ask our guests on every podcast, when I remember to ask is, where are you talking to us from today?

GREG: Today I’m actually in Dayton, Ohio. We have an office here in Dayton and I’m spending some time with our team in Ohio this week.

JEFF: (3:29) Where are you from?

GREG: The company LiveOps is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona and we have some remote offices in Ohio and California, and we have a lot of folks who work remotely around the country which I know is going to be a big topic of conversation today, but I’m originally from Toronto, Ontario. I’m Canadian and been living in the U.S. now for about 20 years.

JEFF: Wow. (3:54) Do you live in Scottsdale now?

GREG: I do. I’ve been in Arizona for about 17 years and been with LiveOps about 11 years and we’re headquartered out in the Sunshine State.

JEFF: (4:06) The size that LiveOps is I’m assuming you work out of the office on a daily basis?

GREG: Correct. I travel quite a bit, but we have our headquarters in Arizona. We have about 70 people in our headquarters. We have about 240 employees across the business, and those are the employees, that’s not our remote workforce that we refer to as LiveOps Nation. Of those 240 more than half actually work remotely around the country  and then the remaining employees work from one of our office locations in Arizona, Ohio or California.

JEFF: Right. So, let’s introduce you [laughing] to the audience. (4:41) Tell us about yourself and about LiveOps and we can also get into how that overlaps with the remote work stuff that we’re talking about today.

GREG: LiveOps is a virtual call center company, and we have been pioneering work at home for the last 20 years.  We have been in existence since close to 2000. We were founded in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and really there was a need to service what’s called the Direct Response Industry, the infomercial business, and as you could imagine those types of infomercials and commercials generate spikey call volume when people see an ad on TV and want to call in and order a product. Back around 2000 the traditional call center model, which we refer to as a brick and mortar call center model, they were struggling to handle this influx of call volume that would come in in bursts. So, our Founder decided to create a distributed workforce, or work at home model, to be able to staff up and staff down using independent contractors to service that business. We have been iterating on more pioneering and the work at home space for about the last 20 years and we’ve evolved over time and we do a lot more than just the infomercial business today. We service a lot of different verticals in retail, healthcare and insurance, doing a lot of customer care work using 1099s, independent contractors who work from home around the country and work around their life and sign up for shifts when they’re available to work. I’ve been the company for about 11 years. I’ve been a lot of different roles with the company over time. I started in client services and moved into operations and took over as CEO in 2017. We’re excited about where things are going. We talk a lot about market conditions, have never been better.  When you look at the changing mindset of the workforce today, more people wanting flexible work, more people wanting to work around their life, around their terms, we feel we’re positioned well just with our business model in general, and being able to help a lot of companies approach their customer experience a lot differently using a distributed work force.

JEFF: I agree. [laughing] (7:02)  For listeners who maybe don’t know exactly what this means, what is a virtual call center? You covered it a little bit but paint a picture for me.

GREG: All of our agents work from home around the country, and we handle a lot of customer care calls for a lot of large companies in the retail space, in the healthcare space, in the insurance space, and do the customer service work. So, if you shop at a large retail company, or whether you go online to their website and you purchase something or you have a question and you call that 1-800 number, there’s a good chance that you could be talking to a member of what we call LiveOps Nation. So, you could be talking to one of our agents who are taking those phone calls, or handling those emails, or chat sessions, from their home, around the country. A lot of times people are familiar with or used to the traditional contact center  model which are folks going into a physical location and working from there. As we all know there’s a lot of challenges in that model in trying to get people to go into a physical call center these days, whether it’s because the markets are saturated and there’s a lack of talent, or it’s back to that changing mindset of the workforce where people want to work around their life and work on their terms and work remotely. So, a virtual call center are folks who are working from home around the country handling those customer care interactions or experiences.

JEFF:  This whole infomercial thing has me really curious. (8:33) With something like that, you’re saying there’s a lot of calls that happen, obviously when the infomercial airs [laughing] or if it’s the Home Shopping Network situation, that there’s going to be these ebbs and flows. Are those predictable? Are you ramping up a lot of workers around that time, knowing there’s this late night thing that’s going to happen, or is it more using something like Home Shopping Network as an example, some product might be a lot more popular than another product and you’re going to then need to ramp up a workforce within 10 minutes rather than 10 hours?

GREG:  Great questions. I would say all of the above. The one thing to note is that industry has gone through a lot of change and consolidation over the years. So, when you think about consumer behavior and how people purchase today, instead of picking up the phone and calling a 1-800 number, a lot of folks now go on their tablets or their phones and go to the website, or they do text to order. That industry has changed in a big way, but to your point some of that is scheduled. So, the 30-minute infomercials are mostly all scheduled and then we have what’s called short form commercials where it’s the 30 or 60 second or two-minute spots which tend to run at different times throughout the day with little notice. Our ability to respond quickly and staff up and staff down in a very quick manner, just provides an advantage for us, because we bring that agility and that nimbleness to the staffing model that a lot of these companies require to be able to handle these calls. 

JEFF: Right. (10:11) Which you couldn’t do if you had a physical call center, because it would be a matter of reaching out to people and seeing who could get to the officer quickly enough whereas theoretically now you can just send a text to everyone saying “hey, there’s a rush. Who’s available?” 

GREG: Exactly. We do that in a lot of industries, not just the infomercial space. We do a lot of work in the insurance space, healthcare, we can staff up and staff down in a moment’s notice.

JEFF:  (10:42) And some of that is seasonal, ramping up and ramping down, but ramping up and ramping down nonetheless, right?

GREG: Yeah. Great example, this time of year is one of our busiest times heading into the retail push in Q4, so we work with a lot of large retail brands, and they’re counting on us to take our staffing to 3, 4, 5X of where it typically is in a very short amount of time.

JEFF: (11:10) I’m imaging there’s probably people out there who run a business who think about their customer service people and want to make sure there’s a fair amount of quality control, that there’s not babies crying in the background [laughing], or internet problems, maybe VOIP connection problems, things like that.  We can talk about controlling the [laughing] quality of the people, but how do you control the quality of the work?

GREG:  Great question. If you would’ve asked me this question 10-15 years ago my answer might’ve been a little bit different, just given working home was still somewhat nascent, and we were still learning on how to build a work at home model, and the crying babies and the barking dogs used to be a big issue 10-15 years ago. You think about the growth and work at home today and you think about how mainstream work at home has become where people are now making sure they’re building out the right environments to successfully work from home. Those issues that were [laughing] very prevalent 10 years ago are not really there anymore and on top of that we have requirements built within our model to where individuals sign an agreement with us and they agree to all those terms, making sure they have proper internet speed, making sure they have a quiet work environment, all the things that would be required to be successful in working from home. So, a lot of those issues to be honest don’t really pop up that much anymore. 

JEFF: Right. It’s one thing if you’re doing more B to B work, client services work where we get to know each other and maybe there’s a dog barking or baby crying, it’s okay, this is Bob who works at home and we know Bob. But, when it’s B to C stuff [laughing] it’s get to be a whole kind of different thing when you’ve got consumers or there’s someone that’s calling in that needs some peace of mind of professionality. Maybe people are getting more understanding over time. It’s funny, you talk about the architecture; in New England here where I live, we have a lot of old houses that were built in 1900, the 1920s, that don’t have a good place to put a 65” television. 

GREG: Sure. [laughing]

JEFF: [laughing] I think about houses being built now and how you need a clear back wall for your videoconferencing [laughing] you know? You could pull down a picture of Hawaii or something, so it looks like you’re in an exotic location. It’s interesting how architecture mirrors communications technologies. A lot of those 1920s houses had this really nice phone booth [laughing] in the entryway.

GREG: That’s right. Yeah.

JEFF: The latest technology. (14:15) So, let’s talk about the other side of that which is people control. What skills do you look for when hiring people in these kinds of roles?

GREG: We’re looking for a lot of different skills. The biggest thing in our model, we treat our 1099’s or independent contractors as home-based business owners. So, we’re looking for people who are self-motivated, who understand they control their own success in that this is very different than an employee type position where you go in and you’re typically guided in many ways. We try to make it clear upfront that you have this opportunity to come in here and build your business and determine your own success. So, people who have that profile of being able to come in and really take things into their own hands and take ownership of their role and really control their success, that is probably first and foremost what we’re looking for in individuals. Then from there we’re looking at profiles. We’re looking at backgrounds, experience, skillsets that would work well depending on the type of opportunity that they are applying for. But, really, it comes down to if you were to say what’s the number one ingredient or main key to success in a role like this is being able to come in and essentially run your own business.

JEFF: So, independence, that entrepreneurship, proactive, good communicators, that’s what I’m hearing there; all those kinds of things. One of the things about hiring a remote workforce is that you break yourself out of the local job market, and you can hire anyone anywhere which allows you to raise the threshold of what you’re looking for in terms of experience and all that stuff. (16:08) I noticed as I was doing a little research about you that you’re tending to hire people who are very experienced at this kind of stuff. Is that true? Are you finding that more? 

GREG: Absolutely, and if you look at the difference in the profile of a flexible workforce participant versus what I’ll call a traditional call center  BPO employee, our agents are on average, 81% brings some level of college education. They have a lot more work experience they’re bringing to the table, so what you’re seeing is you have this workforce out there who’ve decided that working an 8 to 5 office job, that daily grind, they want something different. They want flexibility. They want to work around their life. So, the people that are coming into a model like ours bring great experience, typically a lot come from corporate America, and they want flexibility in their life, and they want flexible work and so, we’re benefitting from these individuals who have grown throughout their career, some in corporate America, who are now taking to take those skills and that experience and apply it in a different way that brings balance to both their professional and their personal life. 

JEFF: This is a story I’ve heard a lot on this podcast and it’s really great for employers that want to happen into this really great workforce. [laughing] (17:41) However, I have a question that seems to come up and maybe you’ve had some experience with this. It seems like with the remote workforce it’s harder to hire entry level people. Do you feel that too? Are you able to hire entry level people and what does that look like? Is there some sort of on ramp or maybe just the workflow, and by work I mean [laughing] employment flow, is that entry level people get in office jobs and learn the skills and interpersonal communication skills, all those kinds of things, so they can then transfer those things to a more home based remote job in the future. But, tell me if I’m wrong here.

GREG: I think our model may be a little bit different. We do attract folks at the entry level and I think the reason is, if you look at the different opportunities that our marketplace provides; we look at it as a marketplace, we have all these different customers we serve, some being very basic customer care type work to more complex stuff that we might be doing in the healthcare space or the insurance space. Some of that more basic stuff does attract more of that entry type employee or profile into our model. I will say the folks who have the most success in our model are the ones who bring that experience to the table already, so they have more experience that comes into our model that allows them to really adapt to the type of model that we run and running your  home-based business. So, if you are coming into our model and you have little work experience it might be more challenging for you to have success early on, but we do provide opportunities that lend well to that entry level individual. 

JEFF: Right. There’s not really parity. You’re not adapting exactly when it’s the first thing that you’ve done. [laughing]

GREG: Yes. [laughing]

JEFF: You’re not saying, “oh, this is analogous to this thing that I did in the office, or this thing that I did at this other company.” You’re still trying to triangulate and figure things out, full cloth.

GREG: I will say though, just on that point, just the growth and work from home and virtual work that again, a good example if you asked me this question 10 years ago I’d probably answer it a lot differently, but with the growth and work at home becoming mainstream, even though we might be attracting people at the entry level into our company, more people are coming to us with virtual experience, that is helping them be successful regardless of the level of experience they have. That’s a big shift in change that’s happened, that just given the growth in virtual work, more people have experience in understanding how to navigate and be successful in virtual work.

JEFF: Yeah. (20:41) What is that? Why is that? What are those skills that they’re gaining by having already done some work remotely?

GREG: A big part is the discipline of virtual work. 

JEFF: Self-management? Yep.

Self-management, having the discipline to come in and know you’re your own boss and that you have to come in and set your schedule and you have to build a schedule that’s going to allow you to be successful.

Greg Hanover

GREG: So, understanding how to communicate virtually, how to use technology to be successful. Again, if you’re working in this virtual environment, we talk a lot about this at LiveOps, enabling these folks to be successful through virtual practices. Do we have the tools and technology in place to set these individuals up to be successful? That’s a big part of it; building a virtual community because people still crave that interaction with other individuals, but you have to figure out how to put the infrastructure in place to allow individuals to be able to do that in a virtual way versus what we’re all used to in the physical office environment.  

JEFF: Right. Now, LiveOps has certainly built a reputation in the business community particularly, yet there’s still oftentimes this perception out there in the workforce a little bit that work from home schemes [laughing], scams. At least  in the U.S. we grew up with these flyers taped to telephone poles saying, “work from home” and it was usually some kind of a pyramid scheme things. (22:25) Do you just ignore that and rise above it, or is there anything particularly that you feel like you need to do to battle that? Either on the hiring side or also helping the employees [laughing] explain to their neighbors what they’re actually doing?

GREG: I would say again, it’s another one where we probably receive this question or this type of feedback a lot more years ago. One of the things today, you’ve got to be very present upfront and have high touch experience of when somebody’s first investigating or researching your company and they reach out to you or they go to your website, making sure that there’s some level of high touch experience there so they can actually talk to somebody or reach out to somebody via email, or chat, or just being able to get in touch in some capacity with your company to make sure it is legitimate, and that it is a real opportunity. We get that a lot when people come to us and we have an agency that’s been with us a long time and they say, “yeah, at first I wasn’t sure if LiveOps was real or this was a work from home scam, but I was excited to see that it is real, and you guys are legit and it is a real opportunity,” but you’ve got to be present upfront so that you overcome those potential issues from the outside.

JEFF: I oftentimes hear stories of new employees who go out and open up a separate bank account so they can give out that bank information for direct deposit in case there’s still a chance that these people might be actually a scheme for some wire fraud [laughing] kind of thing. 

GREG: Sure. There’s a lot of it out there.

JEFF: Yeah, there is. I think this high touch, high communication, constantly proving that you exist and that you’re there is to some extent the battle of remote work. It is creating presence through the wires which ultimately comes to a certain amount of transparency and culture; how you communicate, what you communicate, how people feel connected to the company. (24:44) Talk to me about that. How that happens at LiveOps both for your 240 employees, but then also for the 1099 people?

GREG: I would say this for both our employees and then our independent contractors at LiveOps Nation, but just never underestimating the power of communication and making sure we’re staying in touch and we’re doing things both from a virtual standpoint, leveraging technology to communicate out things that are going on within the business, but then also taking the opportunity to bring people together. We have a lot of folks who travel a lot to our offices, so we do company events on an annual basis where we bring our entire company  together, the employees, out to Arizona. So, just making sure you continue to place importance on the physical interaction with your employees, and yes, there’s a lot you can do using technology to bring your folks together, but nothing replaces that in-person interaction, so making sure that you place a high importance on that. I look at it the same way within LiveOps Nation or independent contractor agent group where we have over 20,000 individuals who work remotely around the country, and we do a lot with technology today to bring folks together. We also go out and visit with agents in different states every month, different cities we go out to, and we bring agents together in those areas to create that personal connection, and also to allow the independent contractors to get to know one another in person. That’s just a couple different ways that we make sure we keep that connection top of the line. 

JEFF: Yeah. At that scale you’ve got a social network. We think of social networks as online things but they’re not [laughing] necessarily. It’s just a social network, a network of people interconnecting with each other. They have a lot in common all these people having the same jobs or doing similar kind of work. (26:49) It must be exciting and fulfilling to facilitate them connecting and getting together?

GREG: And you’ll hear it from the agents. They’ll meet other agents in person who they’ve been virtually working with for years and you’ll hear the feedback on it, “so great to finally meet  you in person.” So again, nothing can replace that human interaction and you’ve got to make sure that it stays part of the plan, especially with people working on their own, remotely.

JEFF: (27:20) How often do you get together your 240 employees?

GREG: We have folks who travel out regularly to our office throughout the year, but we bring everybody together for an annual event. Once a year we have all of our employees come out to Arizona and we do some sort of celebration or kick-off for the following fiscal year. But, again, we try to do that at least once a year.

JEFF: (27:43) What happens at these events? Is it more on the social side or more on the alignment side, I guess is the language we use a lot of times? [laughing]

GREG: [laughing] It’s a little bit of everything. Part of it is getting alignment on where we’re going and part of it is celebrating our successes and we also bring some of our independent contractors out to these events and we celebrate all the great work being done by LiveOps Nation. We bring in guest speakers. Obviously, there’s a lot of social interaction. So, it’s a combination of things to really celebrate our company and where we’re going and what we’re doing.

JEFF: Celebrate is a good word around this. It’s such a different thing when you have a collocated company that maybe is doing a company retreat or something like that. It’s difficult sometimes to build that momentum towards something special, but when you’ve got all these people that don’t get a chance to be in the same room together, and they do get a chance to be in the same room together, there’s some inherent elation that happens and celebration to support that and that type of connection I think is a really important thing that happens. 

GREG: We get great feedback from our employee base every year about doing these annual events and they’re asking if we’re going to do it again next year because they place so much importance on it and just love the interaction with the rest of their fellow employees.

JEFF: Right. It’s like  “I want to make sure we don’t schedule anything during that time,” to really reserve that. Here again, I assume we get a fair amount of people listening to this podcast who don’t yet have a remote team. They’re curious about that whole side of things. Some of it just maps differently to try to get your employees to go on a trip and convince them to do that actually is much easier than you think, because it becomes this really nice experience and a great opportunity to steepen company culture in a way that I think it doesn’t sometimes map to collocated environments so much.

GREG:  I couldn’t agree more. I think companies need to also just pay attention. All the benefits we’re talking about with work at home and virtual work and being able to tap talent regardless of geography, you also have to make sure though when you think about, not that there’s really any downsides, but just that isolation of your employees, or in our case our 1099s working on their own from home. You just have to be aware of and really think about your strategy of how are you keeping people connected to other people in the company and how are you placing importance on the human interaction component on your business. 

JEFF: (30:42) So, how are you battling isolation and keeping people connected?

GREG: We just talked about a couple of ways, doing a lot of these virtual meetings where you’re connecting people virtually. We have folks within our human resources department who do reach out, talk to our remote folks on a regular basis to make sure they’re doing okay and seeing how things are going. So, just making sure you have those communication strategies in place and you’re doing regular reach outs to your remote folks to check in on them and see how they are doing, because you can’t do the management by walking around obviously, with a virtual workforce, so how are you connecting with and how are you reaching out and checking in on people, is a critical element.

JEFF: (31:30) I assume when most of your agents are talking to most of your customers, or most of the end customers, it’s over the phone or, as you’re saying these more text, chat-based things. Do you use video calling a lot for these meetings or do you stick with the voice calls? 

GREG: Some of our programs do have video components. We have some customers who we work with and partner with where our agents are doing video chats. A lot is voice and then, like I said, we do email and chat, but primarily it’s a lot of just voice work.  

JEFF: (32:08) So, your internal meetings tend to be more voice based, conference call, thing, as opposed to a video meeting? 

GREG: We do a lot of video with our internal, so for our employee based meetings we use different tools like Zoom and Go To Meeting and Blue Jeans, and all those different tools out there that enable both video and voice, so we use a lot of those tools also, in trying to create that connection in using video too.  

JEFF: (32:38) Let’s talk a little bit more about communication. Particularly in a distributed work environment, I find that you need to be more proactive, more thoughtful about  coming up with more of a communication strategy, philosophies around all this; you mentioned it’s important to communicate a lot. Are there guiding principles that you’ve developed over time around all of this?

GREG: I think the biggest one is, and this probably goes for whether you have office based or remote folks, is never assuming that people are getting the information, especially in a virtual environment. So, how are you sharing updates on a regular basis to your entire staff, and obviously the importance around your remote workers and then sharing that in different ways. Is it video updates? Is it sharing messages within some of your communication tools whether it’s a Slack? Just sending a company email these days probably isn’t always the most effective way to do that, just given we’re all inundated with hundreds or thousands [laughing] of emails on a regular basis, so what are you doing to effectively get your message across to all of your employees and obviously the importance around the remote folks to make sure they are getting the information and they are up to date and up to speed on what’s happening within the company.  We do a lot of quarterly company all hands. I’ll send out video updates on a regular basis. We’ll share updates and like I said, our different tools. But using a lot of different forms of communication to share information is a key component.

JEFF: Right. It’s not enough to just send an email. It’s probably a good idea to also, if you can, put the email into Slack or mention in Slack, everybody check your email. Hit as many communication mediums as possible.  Some of it is personality type, as to where people gravitate to communication wise, but even department to department, team to team, they can be different tools, different methods that people are falling into, so don’t assume that everyone’s communicating the same way that you are.

Reach out to your employees and your staff and ask them what’s an effective form of communication for them. Solicit employee feedback on how best to share information and communicate.

Greg Hanover

GREG: I would also say reach out to your employees and your staff and ask them what’s an effective form of communication for them. So, soliciting employee feedback on how best to share information and communicate is where we typically start.

JEFF: Absolutely.

GREG: Versus assuming we know what is the best way.

JEFF: Yeah, totally. (35:31) What about training? We talked about the ability to hire entry level people or not, but professional development stuff and ultimately building the team that you have, building the skills of the team that you have. How does that tend to work in an environment like this?

GREG: This is a great one too. This is another paradigm shift happening. We talk a lot about virtual work, another big topic which ties in nicely to this is just how do you train a remote workforce? There’s the belief that if somebody’s not sitting in a classroom and you can’t see them that they’re not learning.  When you think about the changes that are happening in training and how you can train people virtually, and actually see more benefit, it’s pretty interesting, it’s pretty powerful. It’s one of the biggest parts of our success as a company.  We have what we call LiveOps University. It’s a 24/7 learning center where we use a blended learning methodology to train individuals. We have a learning management system. There’s a lot of self-paced learning where they go in and learn on their own and take tests and quizzes to ensure that they’re capturing and retaining the information and we also do virtual classroom so people can log in and be part of a virtual classroom session. We do one on ones, but we really use a blended learning methodology, and everybody learns differently, we know that, so to think about sitting in a classroom and training with the lowest common denominator which isn’t always the most effective way and you’re at the mercy of how good is that trainer at the front of the room, when you think about the benefits of a virtual learning methodology here and how you’re allowing people to learn in a way that is good for them, it’s a lot more beneficial. We actually have a lot of companies now who come to us just for our learning curriculum, so they see the benefits, they see how we’re able to successfully train individuals in a remote environment, whether it be for a basic customer interaction or a very complex customer interaction, and they see that we’re able to do it in a cost-effective, consistent way, they’re actually now leveraging and tapping us for our learning curriculum to use within their companies, because they see the benefits and the advantages of this blended learning methodology in a virtual environment, and it’s so much more powerful than what a classroom setting provides. And, we’re not the only company,  obviously, out there doing this. There are a lot of companies who are really figuring out and are very forward thinking when it comes to the virtual learning curriculum, but dislike virtual work in general, you’re going to continue to see this massive shift to the virtual learning environment.

JEFF:  Yeah. We’re seeing that more and more as universities are starting to embrace that style of learning and I think we’re going to hit the tipping point with that eventually where it’s a perfectly reasonable way to go. (38:35) How are you incentivizing it for the employees? Is it something that’s part of their, like, “hey, next month we’re going to send you to training,” or is it sort of optional? Maybe all of these things. How is that used in terms of the people management side of it, the operational resource management.  

GREG:  That’s one of the things we’ve been spending more time on recently. We’ve really iterated and figured out, or if it had a lot of success in using this learning style within LiveOps Nation or 1099s, and we’ve been spending a lot of time on how do we now take this methodology we have and use it internally with our employees. That’s something that we’ve been continuing to invest more into and will continue to leverage with our employees going forward now that we’ve really had a lot of success and figured out how to do this within our remote 1099 environment. It’s just as important to our employees as our 1099s, so that’s where there’s a big investment being made right now to leverage this with our employee base also.

JEFF: (39:46) I guess this also overlaps a little bit with management techniques in general. What have you found about managing remote workers?  Obviously, you can’t micromanage. In your environment maybe there’s monitoring software you can listen in, quality control stuff that way, but how are you measuring results and ultimately, more on the management side, that feedback loop of talking to employees. I guess there’s different answers on the employee versus the 1099 side but address all that a little bit.

GREG: This is a great topic that I think is [laughing] debated quite a bit in terms of how do you measure success in a virtual work environment? I think there’s a couple of things that come to mind that we’ve learned quite a bit over the years, is, one, your profile upfront. When you’re hiring people into your company are you really hiring people who fit the profile of a successful virtual worker? No everybody can work from home and be successful. We know that. We talked earlier about the level of discipline that’s required to be successful working on your own and working virtually. Then the second piece is, how are you measuring success of that employee or worker in general? It’s all about being productivity based. Are you measuring their results? Are you measuring their productivity? If you can’t accurately measure their productivity, it’s going to be difficult  to determine whether that individual is being successful or not. You have to get away from this whole, “if I can’t see them, they’re not working.”  You still hear that quite a bit. [laughing] It’s kind of scary because with where we’re going with our workforce, you really need to focus on productivity and being results based versus “if I can’t see them, them I’m not sure if they’re getting their job done.”

JEFF: It’s such a dangerous philosophy, because all you need to do is be that 180 degrees behind the computer monitor and they can be on Facebook all day and you wouldn’t really know, but it looks like they’re working. [laughing] 

GREG: Exactly.  It’s actually scary because if people continue to stay tied to that methodology of, “I need to see them and they need to be in the office 8-5,” my fear is those are the companies that are going to get left behind, because the workforce is changing and if you’re not changing with the workforce you’re going to have challenges succeeding in the future. 

JEFF: I don’t mean to say that being on Facebook is even necessarily a bad thing. Ultimately you need to trust the employee, leave it to them to be productive, to get their act together, and if they need to check Facebook that’s probably fine unless there are security issues on your network, or you need to micromanage. My new saying is, “monitoring is not management.” 

GREG: Exactly.

JEFF: It’s not. It’s just not the same thing.

GREG: Well, it goes back to the beginning there when we were talking about profile. Are you bringing the right kind of people into your business that can be successful in a remote environment?

JEFF: Yeah. (43:11) So, talking about these standard business practice, or at least what we think of as conventional management techniques, let’s talk about standard enterprise businesses, when we think stereotypically, we’re starting to see some embracing of remote work in Fortune 500 type companies, enterprise level businesses and stuff like that, it’s happening more and more. Each time I say, “oh, we’re not there yet,” I think, “oh, it’s been another week, maybe [laughing] we’re that much closer.” I still haven’t quite seen it yet, but there’s certainly inklings of this out there and we’re even starting to see money types venture, capital types who are much more friendly to this kind of thing than they were certainly 10 years ago.  (44:05) Talk to me about how you see enterprise businesses starting to embrace this. 

GREG: We get a lot of companies who reach out to us and want to chat about how we run our virtual workforce given it’s what we’ve been doing for 20 years. The recommendation we always share is step into it lightly. You don’t need to go from a full office environment one day to a complete virtual workforce the next day. Take the opportunity to step in and test things out. That might be one day a week you allow folks to work remotely, or you change hours and have more flexible hours. Whatever that might be, test and measure. Try it out and slowly step into it versus going full speed because again, there’s going to be a lot of learns along the way and you’ve got to slowly adjust. Especially if you have a culture that’s been built around having office culture. It’s a big change and it’s a big shift to a virtual. So, take your time and step into it and think about the infrastructure and the tools you are using to allow people to work remotely, successfully. There’s a lot that goes into it that I would caution people to move fast into a virtual workforce. 

JEFF: Certainly. I would also advise, keep a careful eye out for, I call them crutches. People saying, “well, let’s not meet today because I’m working from home. Let’s meet tomorrow because I’ll be in the office.”  People need to fully work, if you’re giving them a day to work from home they need to be fully working from home, [laughing] that you’re not really learning anything, there aren’t really measurable results if you’re just shifting around the work, particularly the interactive, collaborative part of the work to the days that they’re in closer, physical proximity. Find ways and tools to start to do that kind of thing.

GREG: Agreed. It just reinforces the need to move with caution, because you’re going to learn a lot when you start making that shift. A lot is going to change and there’s going to be a lot of feedback, so even more reason just to step into it lightly. 

JEFF: LiveOps has been doing this kind of thing for 20 years now. (46:24) Are you starting to see any industry trends around this? Are the sales calls easier when you [laughing] talk to people and say our agents are working from home? I’m guessing that 20 years ago that a harder sell than it is these days.

GREG:  Very much so. We talk about this a lot internally. If you were to ask me how calls went 10 or 15 years ago with enterprise companies, it was more around security and can people really work from home, and does this work, and what about the barking dogs and the crying babies. Today the conversation has shifted significantly, and companies are not asking those types of questions anymore, because work at home is becoming more mainstream. The problems are so great in our space for companies to provide excellent customer experience using traditional call center models, so we hear it all the time, where they can’t find the people, they can’t access the talent, whether it’s because of low unemployment or whether it’s because people don’t want to go into a physical call center anymore. Those are where the conversations are today. So, we’re just approaching it differently in terms of how we’re solving our problems.

JEFF:  Absolutely. As we wind down here, I’m curious to get your thoughts about [laughing] the buzz word, the gig economy. This oftentimes comes up around remote work. Oh, Uber drivers are remote workers, are they workers at all? This a femoral kind of thing is compared to your 240 employees and your 1099 people who at least know what’s expected of them [laughing] and can get some guidelines and some communication around that. (48:09) Give me your thoughts around the gig economy as it relates to this. It oftentimes comes up as this is the future. Do you feel like gig economy is the future? 

GREG:  I do. I think a lot of the trends we’re seeing are going to continue and depending on which reports you read from which research company, the consistencies are there in terms of the growth and the gig economy for the foreseeable future. I don’t get caught up on the whole gig economy concept. I look at it more as just flexible workforces and the changing mindset of the workforce and what people want in their life. It’s interesting because when we go to all these events and we host people at what we call LiveOps Road Shows and I meet with our 1099 community, and I ask them, “why do you come to LiveOps, and why are you part of LiveOps?” The first thing, 99% of the time they’ll say, “because of the flexibility you bring to my life. The fact you allow me to work around my life.” To me, it’s more about the changing mindset of the workforce and what people want in their life when it comes to work today, versus maybe 5, 10, 15 years ago. I believe flexible workforces are here to stay and you’re going to continue to see it grow and it’s going to continue to pressure organizations to figure out on how to provide flexibility because if you can’t figure it out, you’re going to start seeing attrition for folks that are going to go into companies who want that flexible work environment.

JEFF: I guess when we think about the gig economy it is this fungible workforce, with such a high turnover and almost this anonymous relationship, but it doesn’t need to be. These could be supported people who have a relationship and actually care about what they’re doing with the company the work for and the relationship to that company, as opposed to something like Uber where it feels more individualistic. It’s the relationship between the driver and the people that they’re driving, and that the actual Uber company is just an operating system to make all of this happen, which doesn’t map to all work environments.  

GREG:  Hopefully one of the things that’s come through in our conversation today is the importance we place on building community in our business model. We place high importance on the human interaction and on the members of LiveOps Nation, the 1099s in just in how we allow them to interact with LiveOps Corporate but also interact with other 1099s. We place a high importance of building that virtual community because we believe it’s a big part of allowing us to be successful with our enterprise customers in providing that excellent customer experience.

Jeff Robbins interviews Andy Tryba of Crossover.com about the future of work, this idea of a cloud wage, building company culture, and radical candor.

Here’s the transcript:

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

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

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

JEFF: Hi Andy. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: [laughing] Thanks for clarifying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Yeah, I’m familiar with it.

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

JEFF: Right.

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

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

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

JEFF: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: [laughing] Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: [laughing] Right. Buy a castle.

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

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

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

JEFF: They need to ring a bell.

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

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

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

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

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

JEFF: That Toyota methodology as well, when we think about the stereotypical, particularly American kind of starting of the industrial revolution, management style, its adversarial. It’s, we need to impose work on people. They’re not hired to think. Starting to change that paradigm to realize that we’re all in this together. The idea is to be productive and being productive is a pretty good feeling as a human being [laughing], to feel like you’ve got job security and we’re all caring. There’s a certain amount of compassion that goes into it, but that we’re on the same team is really valuable.

ANDY: Dead on. This isn’t Taylorism. This isn’t like, “how do I get these dumb people to go do the very specific things that we need,” and go hit a hammer. When people are high skilled you have to adapt that and be like, “no the best people in the world want to learn to get better.” They have this growth mentality where they’re like, “give me the feedback. I want to know how I get better, because I think I’m pretty good today, but I can get better.” I do very much use analogies of the professional sports. It’s coaching. It’s giving them data so they can get better and better and it’s not just once a  quarter or looking at your MBOs or it’s not once a year looking at your review. Give them all the sensors. Think of the Fitbit. People look at their Fitbit and they’re like, “Oh, I didn’t walk my 10,000 steps today so I’m going to take the stairs.” That leading indicator matters because the lagging indicator of that is just stepping on a scale two  weeks later and be like, “Oh, I didn’t lose any weight.” That’s too late. You want to get it to where the work is done. You want to do it exactly where they can take action and it’s by  getting that data in their hands right there on the spot that actually makes a difference. So, that’s the big thing about setting these metrics. It’s got to be leading indicators, not lagging indicators.

JEFF: And we see that relationship and those feedback mechanisms and ultimately the respect thing happening a lot in those more skilled white-collar jobs, but I think we’re going to start seeing it more on the factory floors; blue collar jobs. Obviously, Toyota’s had that figured out back then. It’s all going towards the same end. (1:06) A question I want to ask you before we end all of this, and I can go on and on [laughing] talking to you, but as a person that runs a private equity fund and in that venture capital realm, where are we at with remote work? I know VC tends to be conservative, rightly so, it’s a very cutting edge technologically forward, but wanting to be safe, this is money we’re talking about, and historically remote work was not tried and true proven thing when you were talking to Venture Capitalists, they wanted to make sure that everyone was in the office and was aligned. Is that changing for you? Is that changing for the finance industry as a whole? What’s your perspective?

ANDY: It’s interesting when you look at remote work trends over time. It’s a big sign wave where there’s a big boom in the late nineties when telework came out, per se, and it rose up and then in the early 2000s, particularly around Bristol Myers and others and Yahoo, it went the other way; everyone’s got to be in the office. Now it feels like  in general it’s on it’s way back, but I’d say that VC and PE are actually two different spots right now. On the PE side of the world I find that it is further behind, particularly there’s PE shops that are looking to buy companies and sell them. They feel everyone has to be there in an intact unit because it looks better for someone else that’s going to buy it. They got an office here in Austin and they’ve got 150 people here and that’s where everyone is at. So, there’s this packaging effect that I think that they start feeling uncomfortable about. We’re like, “they got three people here in Austin, but they got 150 people spread around the U.S.”

JEFF: There is this, again, sort of innate human value in being able to walk into a room or building and say, “this is the thing.” This is what we’re buying. We’re buying this building with the people in it and if you don’t have the building, if you don’t have the people all assembled into one place, it’s a much more abstract thing, but arguably so is any SaaS. 

ANDY: Exactly right. 

JEFF: Or a Cloud service by definition is fluffy. 

ANDY: Dead on. I feel like PE is pretty far behind there. I feel like VC is also far behind but not quite as far because VC, particularly in the bay areas, is starting to run into the talent availability problem. You see more and more now where they’re like, “I still want you to have your core team in San Francisco here, but feel free to have some other people remote, because I care more about you actually growing your business.”

JEFF: We can’t afford to pay everyone $600,000 a year.

ANDY: Exactly right. They’re like, “you need to get your product up and going so go hire those people and maybe someday you’ll move them here.” But it’s still not to the point where I believe that the VC and the funded companies of the future will be one gal and an idea and an end number of Cloud teams, and they’ll just assemble it like Lego blocks and be like, “there’s your company,” and you’ll be done in a week and you can try it out and get your MVP and you’re rocking and rolling. I believe very much like the server world, where again you’re like, “right now just go fire up another AWS.” And obviously the AWS’s are still different. The N4 is different than the R4 and what have you. You still specialize but it is an amazing research you have available. I believe eventually that will be the only way things get funded. You have to have your core team there in Silicon Valley and whatever else and be like, “what are you doing? Why are you paying $600,000 a month, or whatever, for this office space and the four people that you have inside of it?” Get rid of that and just be in the Cloud. It will be a Cloud centric startup world where that will be the mentality and I think it will be looked at as idiotic to not have that, and that all revolves around these Cloud teams and just the speed in the talent level and the lower cost to be able to go do that, will be the competitive advantages and those will be the companies that will end up being funded. I haven’t seen any VC go there yet. There’s still all these other concerns about trust and IP and culture building, that they haven’t quite got there yet. I think it’s a ways away yet, but it does feel like it’s back on the upswing which is good. 

JEFF: Wow. That’s really interesting. Great perspectives on all of these things and I think our listeners are going to really enjoy hearing all this. (1:10) If anybody wants to follow-up with you, get in touch [laughing], there’s so many possible things, they can start by vising your LinkedIn page just to see all the things you’re involved in, but where should they get in touch with you.

ANDY: Twitter is always a great spot. My handle is @andytryba and I’d be happy to chat. I’m working on a book that is along this line on how to actually do remote management and some of the tips in trying to get rid of the fairytales that are out there and things like that. Hopefully you’ll see that come out soon too.

JEFF: That’s great. Well, thank you Andy, so much. This has been a great conversation.