Latest / Humanity Working / How to Build A Successful Remote-First Organization: Tips and Strategies with Corey Hynes from Skillable
Transcript
- 0:06SPEAKER_02: You want to make sure that you know what the numbers are, you know what the goals are, you know what the metrics are, because now you're not falling back on time and chair, right?
- 0:13SPEAKER_02: And that's that's when you know trust will start to erode.
- 0:19SPEAKER_01: Hey everyone, welcome to the podcast.
- 0:21SPEAKER_01: Today we feature a great interview with Corey Hines, who is the CEO of Skillable.
- 0:26SPEAKER_01: You'll learn more about the company during the episode, but what makes it particularly interesting is that Skillable has never had a physical office in its more than 20-year history.
- 0:34SPEAKER_01: That gives Corey a pretty unique perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of this model.
- 0:40SPEAKER_01: In our discussion, we'll cover some pretty disparate topics, including traits to look for when you hire remote employees, how he keeps remote employees engaged and involved, how and when to gather employees together, and the link between trust and transparency in these types of environments.
- 0:57SPEAKER_01: Now, before we start, a reminder that our podcast is brought to you by Billium Minds, a company that is reskilling humanity for the future of work.
- 1:05SPEAKER_01: If you'd like to learn more about how we use experiential learning to help employees thrive in unstructured, ambiguous work environments, such as hybrid and remote workplaces, then visit our website at www.billiamminds.com.
- 1:18SPEAKER_01: All right, let's get into the conversation with Corey Hines.
- 1:23SPEAKER_01: All right, Corey, tell me a little bit about Skillable.
- 1:28SPEAKER_02: So Skillable is a bit of an interesting company.
- 1:30SPEAKER_02: So Skillable is, as I like to call it, a 20-year-old startup.
- 1:34SPEAKER_02: We um we got started in in our business, which is experiential learning, um, you know, hands-on lab, software demos, that sort of thing.
- 1:42SPEAKER_02: Really back at at, and I love saying this at around the turn of the century.
- 1:47SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, which granted is you know 22 years old.
- 1:49SPEAKER_01: You could say 10 of the millennium, couldn't you?
- 1:52SPEAKER_02: I could do that, but turn of the century sounds better.
- 1:55SPEAKER_02: Um and you know, we for the you know, for probably the first 10, 12 years of the company, we you know, we focused around big trade shows and conferences.
- 2:04SPEAKER_02: Uh and what was interesting about that is you know, you you had a group of people, uh fairly small at the time, that lived in all sorts of parts of the world.
- 2:12SPEAKER_02: I had a Danish guy, I had a German person, I had a couple of Australians, I had Canadians, and we would coalesce in these cities for really intense periods of like two weeks at a time, and then we'd all go home and we'd plan the next thing, and we'd coalesce, we'd go home, we plan.
- 2:25SPEAKER_02: Um, and as the company, you know, kind of got bigger over the last couple of years, we're up to now, I think, about 180, 190 employees spread across about 12 or 15 different countries all over the US, all over the world.
- 2:38SPEAKER_02: We sort of never, never got away from that.
- 2:41SPEAKER_02: You know, it doesn't matter where you are, it matters what you do and how you contribute.
- 2:47SPEAKER_02: Um, and so we've come up through the last 20 years with the last really five or six being really phenomenal, you know, 30, 40, 50% growth years.
- 2:55SPEAKER_02: And at no point have we ever had an office.
- 2:59SPEAKER_02: Um and you know, so it's it's fun, it's it's great.
- 3:02SPEAKER_02: I love it.
- 3:02SPEAKER_01: So that's actually one of the things that fascinates me about this, because you know, for you being, you know, remote only, basically since your formation, that that puts you in an unusual character category, right?
- 3:16SPEAKER_01: So there are, of course, many companies figuring out how to do this right now.
- 3:20SPEAKER_01: It sounds like you evolved naturally into it.
- 3:25SPEAKER_01: Was there ever a point where you were thinking about the idea of having an office?
- 3:29SPEAKER_01: Did that even ever even come into your head?
- 3:33SPEAKER_02: A lot, actually.
- 3:34SPEAKER_02: And and so I'd say uh, you know, for us, we were doing remote before remote was cool.
- 3:39SPEAKER_02: Um, we we had the pleasure of when when COVID hit and all these companies had to shut down and you know, try to figure out remote.
- 3:46SPEAKER_02: We're kind of sitting there going, guys, this is this is actually not that hard.
- 3:49SPEAKER_02: You know, everyone is kind of scared, how are they going to deal with it?
- 3:52SPEAKER_02: It's you know, it's the best thing ever.
- 3:53SPEAKER_02: It's the most productive way you could be, it's the happiest way you can be.
- 3:56SPEAKER_02: It's it's the best work-life balance.
- 3:58SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, and and you know, we had the the privilege of being able to kind of you know help a lot of people.
- 4:04SPEAKER_02: Um, I had you know many other founders of companies and and and you know reach out to me and you know, how do you do this?
- 4:10SPEAKER_02: You know, we're able to help them and help them evolve.
- 4:12SPEAKER_02: But for us, it's just been we've never known anything else.
- 4:16SPEAKER_02: Um, I don't know that we could ever function any other way.
- 4:19SPEAKER_02: Um it's so ingrained in just the life and the culture and the way people operate and the type of people that that succeed here.
- 4:27SPEAKER_02: You know, I think if you were to take our staff and put them in an office, I I I don't think I don't think it'd work.
- 4:32SPEAKER_02: I don't think they'd they'd succeed.
- 4:34SPEAKER_02: Um now to kind of back to your question, which is, you know, yes, this has been intentional, right?
- 4:40SPEAKER_02: Have we ever debated having an office?
- 4:42SPEAKER_02: Many, many times.
- 4:43SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think where we ultimately settled on was, you know, even though we're 100% remote, um, and and as an example, you know, I'm here in in Tampa, Florida, I've got about 30 employees, you know, within a one-hour drive that I've never seen, you know, in probably six months.
- 5:02SPEAKER_02: Um, even though we're remote, it's important that people get together.
- 5:10SPEAKER_02: Right.
- 5:11SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, we, you know, over the course of many times said, hey, you know, should we have an office?
- 5:15SPEAKER_02: Should we have just a you know a meeting space where folks can go to if they want to?
- 5:19SPEAKER_02: Um and what we settled on was, you know, it didn't make a lot of sense to have dedicated space or dedicated office space or anything of the sort.
- 5:26SPEAKER_02: But what was important is giving people the opportunity to come together and just build the social bond.
- 5:32SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, work is great and and we feel hyper connected because of technology.
- 5:37SPEAKER_02: I I feel more connected to the guys that are on the west coast of the country, you know, than I do some of the guys down the street because I work with them every day.
- 5:44SPEAKER_02: We're on video, we're on audio, we're interacting, we have chat, we have this is sort of constant in influx of just you know interactions.
- 5:52SPEAKER_02: Um but it doesn't replace the you know, let's get everyone together, let's let's build the social network, let's build the connections, let's build the bond.
- 6:01SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, what we decided to do, and this was the intentional part, is you know, allocate money, allocate budget for you know what we call them co-working sessions.
- 6:11SPEAKER_02: Um really what they are is we you know uh we'll book a hotel room or a hotel conference space in some city, and we'll take a team, maybe our dev team or a support team, and say, you're gonna work from here this week.
- 6:23SPEAKER_02: Um we don't we don't even necessarily put an agenda on them.
- 6:26SPEAKER_02: We just say, you know, come here, you're gonna do your day job.
- 6:28SPEAKER_02: Whatever you did in in your remote office, you're gonna do in this room, but now you're in a room with your peers.
- 6:34SPEAKER_02: And you know, some of the organic things that happen, you know, when when that happens are just you know absolutely amazing.
- 6:39SPEAKER_02: We do other things too, but you know, I I love those.
- 6:42SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it's really fascinating, Corey.
- 6:44SPEAKER_01: And it's a theme that actually we're starting to see now.
- 6:47SPEAKER_01: Um I think the theme is quite surprising for some uh for some people that are encountering this the first time, but but not um for folks that have lived their remote lifestyle or built up a company that has been remote.
- 7:00SPEAKER_01: And what that theme is, is that that when you uh start from the perspective of um being in office and then that gets disrupted by something like COVID or whatever, right?
- 7:12SPEAKER_01: The natural tendency is to solve whatever you think your problems are by pulling everybody back into the office, because it's what you know, right?
- 7:19SPEAKER_01: If you've uh not started from an in-office environment, then you start you you have the capacity to to make much clearer-headed decisions.
- 7:28SPEAKER_01: Like, what is it that we need to do in order to be able to uh create ad hoc um collaboration sessions that work really well?
- 7:39SPEAKER_01: What is it that we need to do in order to spark um innovation inside the organization?
- 7:44SPEAKER_01: And the answer there can be many answers to that question.
- 7:47SPEAKER_01: And one of those answers might be pull everybody back into the office, but it's only one it's only one of the answers.
- 7:52SPEAKER_01: And I think it's really interesting how organizations that have lived this long enough start to see that there are multiple ways to skin that particular cat.
- 8:01SPEAKER_01: And and you're and in many ways you're speaking to that as you're uh pulling people in in different locations and just having them there for a week and then uh and then having them go their separate ways for the rest of the time.
- 8:11SPEAKER_01: That's that's kind of the sort of stuff that you are able to see that other people cannot necessarily.
- 8:17SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, I I think you know, there's there's a few things to sort of unpack in that that thought.
- 8:22SPEAKER_02: One of them is I do agree that some of the best innovation innovation happens on a whiteboard after the meeting, right?
- 8:30SPEAKER_02: But you don't need to commute every day or two days a week or three days a week to get that, right?
- 8:36SPEAKER_02: How often do you have those meetings where those great innovation sessions happen?
- 8:39SPEAKER_02: You know, it's probably not every week or you know, maybe every couple of weeks.
- 8:43SPEAKER_02: Um, but if you facilitate those opportunities, they become even more powerful and more and even more valuable.
- 8:50SPEAKER_02: Um, for us, for example, um, you know, it's you know, we take you know a group of people, maybe we get them together every you know, six weeks or eight weeks for a couple of days.
- 9:00SPEAKER_02: Um the you know, we get way more out of that condensed period of time.
- 9:04SPEAKER_02: It becomes a very sort of intense session to be, you know, it's all this sort of pent-up creativity, these pent-up ideas, these pent-up conversations.
- 9:11SPEAKER_02: And you know, we walk out of those out of those things going, oh my God, like we covered so much ground in such a short period of time.
- 9:18SPEAKER_02: Now go away and execute.
- 9:20SPEAKER_02: Right.
- 9:20SPEAKER_02: And and at some point, you know, that starts to kind of run out.
- 9:24SPEAKER_02: And okay, it's time to get together again and have one of these really intense sessions.
- 9:28SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, where we're having one next week, for example, around our customer journey.
- 9:32SPEAKER_02: We've got about four people coming, uh, eight people coming in for two days.
- 9:37SPEAKER_02: And it will be two really intense days, but we will cover in those two days, you know, what would have ordinarily taken people a week to cover.
- 9:44SPEAKER_02: And then we'll go away and and you know, go back and execute, right?
- 9:49SPEAKER_02: And and I think what we're finding with with our staff in particular is you know, they love that, right?
- 9:54SPEAKER_02: They love this idea that, you know, I can have this incredible work-life balance, I can execute on what I need to do, but they get and then they get it excited about these collaboration sessions, right?
- 10:05SPEAKER_02: They want to go in, they want to be all in for a couple of days, they want to cover a lot of ground, you know, because they're they're excited to see their peers, they're excited to work with them, but at the same time, they can't wait to get back and do the work.
- 10:16SPEAKER_01: Yeah, really, really, really interesting stuff.
- 10:19SPEAKER_01: You're talking about the employees.
- 10:20SPEAKER_01: Let's let's go into that in a bit more detail.
- 10:24SPEAKER_01: From from your perspective, what makes a good remote employee?
- 10:30SPEAKER_02: Um, so I think there's a couple of things, right?
- 10:33SPEAKER_02: And and I would preface by saying not everybody functions well in this environment.
- 10:41SPEAKER_02: And you have to hire for this environment.
- 10:44SPEAKER_02: Um, we are very intentional in our hiring process to make sure that we're properly evaluating candidates to make sure that we know they're going to be successful in an all-remote world.
- 10:55SPEAKER_02: Um, and there's different ways we do that and different techniques we employ, but we're very, very deliberate about it.
- 11:01SPEAKER_02: Um, it's you know, it it's it's a case of uh, you know, someone who excels in the office, you know, may not excel working from home.
- 11:09SPEAKER_02: Someone who works from excels working may not excel in the office, right?
- 11:13SPEAKER_02: And a lot of it comes down to, you know, the you know, I'm a little bit off topic in terms of you know the traits of the person, but we just you know stop on the hiring process for a second.
- 11:23SPEAKER_02: A lot of it comes down to you know, you get that person for eight hours a day, what does the other 16 hours look like?
- 11:30SPEAKER_02: Right.
- 11:30SPEAKER_02: Um, for some people, the office might be their escape, right?
- 11:35SPEAKER_02: They get out of the house, they can go there, they can focus, they can be productive.
- 11:38SPEAKER_02: You know, another person being in the office might be the biggest stressor they have because they're worried about the cat, the dog, you know, grandma, grandpa, the kids.
- 11:45SPEAKER_02: Right?
- 11:46SPEAKER_02: They've got this incredible schedule to juggle at at home.
- 11:49SPEAKER_02: You know, you reverse that around.
- 11:50SPEAKER_02: A person that works from home that's got you know a schedule to juggle and can juggle it, they become more productive because you've taken the stress away of everything else.
- 12:00SPEAKER_02: Right?
- 12:01SPEAKER_02: So a lot of it is coming down to you know, what else factors into the employee's world or their total 24 hours of the day?
- 12:08SPEAKER_02: What else factors in besides just the job?
- 12:11SPEAKER_02: Because that has a tremendous impact on their ability to be productive.
- 12:15SPEAKER_02: So is that kind of makes it?
- 12:19SPEAKER_01: I think it's a really interesting insight.
- 12:21SPEAKER_01: Um, and I'd love to dive in a little more to how you go about finding that out.
- 12:29SPEAKER_01: So what's the what what do you do in order to be able to to determine that before you even hire somebody?
- 12:37SPEAKER_02: Well, so there's there's a few things.
- 12:40SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, and and number one, you know, you've got to be careful, um, because you know, obviously there's employment law and and and stuff like that, you've got to be cognizant of.
- 12:49SPEAKER_02: But which I I try to focus in on a couple of things.
- 12:51SPEAKER_02: Number one is education, right?
- 12:53SPEAKER_02: Um, anyone that is is coming into a 100% work from home environment, you have to educate them on what that's really like.
- 13:02SPEAKER_02: Right.
- 13:03SPEAKER_02: Um, and you know, and a lot of the education comes down to kind of a couple of things, which is, you know, first of all, what's your support system like at home?
- 13:12SPEAKER_02: A lot of folks that are new, you know, they underestimate that.
- 13:17SPEAKER_02: Right?
- 13:17SPEAKER_02: They underestimate, you know, the importance of having a, you know, obviously if you're alone, that's one thing, but if you have a family um or a partner of underestimating the importance of that network being bought into what you're doing, right?
- 13:32SPEAKER_02: So that's that's kind of one point of education.
- 13:34SPEAKER_02: Um the second area we try to really educate people is you know their social network, right?
- 13:40SPEAKER_02: And so I'll give you a question that I ask almost every employee we hire, which and the question goes something like this.
- 13:45SPEAKER_02: So think about um, you know, the old concept of six degrees of separation, right?
- 13:48SPEAKER_02: Every person's connected, you know, six degrees is everyone else in the world.
- 13:51SPEAKER_02: And I say, I want you to, here's the question.
- 13:53SPEAKER_02: I want to say, I want you to tell me three people that you've had a social interaction with, have you know, had a beer, had a coffee, you know, gone, you know, whatever, in the last 14 days that you cannot connect to your job.
- 14:07SPEAKER_02: Right?
- 14:07SPEAKER_02: The whole six degrees of separation concept.
- 14:09SPEAKER_02: Oh, it's my my co-worker's brother, or it's my you know, um, you know, my daughter's friend is my co-worker's friend.
- 14:15SPEAKER_02: Those sorts of things.
- 14:16SPEAKER_02: Take all those out, tell me three or four social interactions you've had that you cannot connect to your job.
- 14:23SPEAKER_02: And you'd be amazed how many people can't get it.
- 14:27SPEAKER_02: Right.
- 14:27SPEAKER_02: And so that that leads into you know what we we refer to as the uh the three-month rule, which is if someone's going to be successful in this in this world, you're gonna know within three months, right?
- 14:37SPEAKER_02: Three months, they're either going to be a rock star or you know, you're gonna be parting ways.
- 14:42SPEAKER_02: And and what happens to those folks that can't articulate those relationships, you know, they're you know, it kind of goes like this.
- 14:48SPEAKER_02: They get the job, they're working from home, it's great, it's hey, I'm home, I can work life balance, I can you know get a coffee, work in my PJs, you know, flexible hours, it's all great.
- 14:57SPEAKER_02: And you know, they wake up three months later and they realize they're they're lonely.
- 15:02SPEAKER_02: Because those those forced social interactions of being around people, right?
- 15:06SPEAKER_02: Not on video, not on phone calls, but of being actually interacting with people have all faded away because they're all tied to the office.
- 15:14unknown: Right.
- 15:14SPEAKER_02: And for us, it's particularly true because we have in we have states where you have one employee.
- 15:18SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 15:19SPEAKER_02: Right.
- 15:20SPEAKER_02: So we have to know that the support system um beyond the person exists for that person to just be successful job aside, to just be functional and successful in the environment.
- 15:31SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Corey, we've seen we we've seen exactly that.
- 15:35SPEAKER_01: Um and I think what's very interesting is the is the three-month rule that you're talking about here, because working outside an office can feel uh very different from day one, but the full scope of what working outside of the office um is like tends to unfold over a longer period of time than that, right?
- 15:55SPEAKER_01: So you're not gonna feel lonely on day one, for example, right?
- 15:59SPEAKER_01: But over time that that can that can build up.
- 16:03SPEAKER_01: And so what's interesting in the uh interviews that we've done, and this has been borne out by external research by things like McKinsey and so on, is that if you just give people a plane choice and you say to people, would you like to walk into an office uh every day, or uh in most cases drive into an office every day in the US, right?
- 16:24SPEAKER_01: Would you like to do that?
- 16:25SPEAKER_01: Or would you prefer to uh work from home then McKinsey says 87% of people choose um choose the work from home or work from anywhere option.
- 16:36SPEAKER_01: We've seen very similar numbers, right?
- 16:38SPEAKER_01: So in other words, where you give people somebody the choice, they almost almost inevitably pick the choice that gives them more flexibility.
- 16:46SPEAKER_01: Why wouldn't you?
- 16:46SPEAKER_01: People like flexibility, right?
- 16:48SPEAKER_01: But just because 87% of people take that choice doesn't mean number one that they're inherently suited to it.
- 16:57SPEAKER_01: And it doesn't mean number two that they've that there a support structure is in place to um to to help them do that really, really well.
- 17:08SPEAKER_01: And whether they thrive at it or struggle at it will unfold over a period of time and it will not be immediately visible on day one.
- 17:17SPEAKER_01: And that's why I like why you focus on the interview questions so much, because you're trying to basically get predictors.
- 17:24SPEAKER_01: You're trying to to to under to understand ahead of time where those people are likely to uh to struggle.
- 17:31SPEAKER_01: And so um when we've interviewed people about this, we've often gone back, and then it's a much more nuanced picture in terms of what people like and what people don't like about it.
- 17:45SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, 100% I agree.
- 17:47SPEAKER_02: I think you know, the the it's it's the art of, I guess, self-election in a way, that you know, we want people to to understand, if especially those that have not done it before.
- 17:58SPEAKER_02: Um now the good news is, you know, a little bit of a segue, in in recent years, it's much more common.
- 18:03SPEAKER_02: So, you know, one of the you know, hey, have you ever worked for, yeah, I've worked for the last two years?
- 18:06SPEAKER_02: Great, moving on.
- 18:07SPEAKER_02: Right?
- 18:08SPEAKER_02: But for those that haven't, it's let me tell you what this is really like.
- 18:12SPEAKER_02: And and we've had a number of people that have gone, you know, I don't think this is for me.
- 18:16SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, and and they confuse work from home with, you know, in the office a couple of days, out of the office a couple of days.
- 18:24SPEAKER_02: Um, it's they're very different things.
- 18:26SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, and then it kind of get back to your original question around, you know, what sort of of things do we look for?
- 18:32SPEAKER_02: You know, how do we, you know, characteristics of employees that succeed, et cetera.
- 18:36SPEAKER_02: So there's there's a few things that we look for.
- 18:38SPEAKER_02: Um and you know, I I some of these feel pretty obvious, but they may not be.
- 18:42SPEAKER_02: So the first one is is uh we try to ascertain their level of personal accountability.
- 18:47SPEAKER_02: Um you're working in an inherently unsupervised world, um, you know, when you work from home, it's very easy to appear busy and not be busy.
- 18:58SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, so folks that have this sort of entrepreneurial mindset, this sense of ownership, um, where you know maybe they're not working the same hours as you, maybe they're a little bit, you know, they're a little more flexible, but the job gets done, right?
- 19:14SPEAKER_02: Um another one, this comes down to communication.
- 19:18SPEAKER_02: We we we assess written communication.
- 19:20SPEAKER_02: And I think this is something that's not inherently done in a lot of job interviews.
- 19:25SPEAKER_02: Um, in a remote world, proactive communication, and typically proactive written communication, is the number one way that you maintain trust, right?
- 19:33SPEAKER_02: And and trust is the most important thing, right?
- 19:35SPEAKER_02: Let's let's not forget that.
- 19:36SPEAKER_02: Um, but proactive communication, hey, this is what I'm doing, this is what I'm working on, these are my updates, and being able to articulate that articulate that in a clear, concise, well-written way, um, I think is a bit of a lost art.
- 19:50SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, so so making sure that the employees that we bring in as part of the assessment process, and you know, both as part of the interview process and you know, as a just general statement of those that do well, highly proactive, well-written uh communicators, um, tend to do very, very well.
- 20:08SPEAKER_02: Um the the other thing that we you we find is that those employees that truly embrace the whole notion of home office, um, we have some employees where, you know, and and again, it's you know, as an organization, you sort of decide how much of this you want to support.
- 20:24SPEAKER_02: But you know, a lot of our employees, their home offices are pretty elaborate.
- 20:29SPEAKER_02: Um they've taken you know tremendous pride into building this sort of personal space that you know where they go and they can focus, and it's a reflection of who they are and their personality.
- 20:39SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, you look around the room and you know, my home office, I don't know if you can see them here, but I've got you know, a snowboard, a spear gun, and a guitar, like three things I like to do.
- 20:47SPEAKER_02: Um we've got you know some employees where their home office is just you know pitch dark kind of cave with you know video game posters, and it becomes this this this ultimate expression of who they are, and those that you know really invest in having that space, right, versus you know the you know, the the the credenza in the dining room is where they work, um, you know, they tend to do very, very well.
- 21:12SPEAKER_02: Um, and then lastly, that support structure, I can't understate, you know, they're not you know, their work and their home is the same place.
- 21:23SPEAKER_02: You have to make sure the other 16 hours are compatible with the job.
- 21:29unknown: Right.
- 21:29SPEAKER_02: And if they're not, you you get you can get yourself into a bad situation pretty easily.
- 21:33SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think what you're highlighting here, which to me is very interesting, is is that there's a clear understanding in your organization at least, that working in an office and working from home are very different.
- 21:48SPEAKER_01: They're very different experiences.
- 21:51SPEAKER_01: And the people that really thrive at it have understood that and figured out what to do about it.
- 21:57SPEAKER_01: So, for example, what you say about The creating the, you know, the the personalized office space, as it were.
- 22:05SPEAKER_01: That's some people that are getting very thoughtful about what do they need in order to be able to thrive in this space.
- 22:12SPEAKER_01: Right.
- 22:12SPEAKER_01: When you go into an office environment, um, if it's a well-designed office environment, a lot of offices are not, of course, but if you if it's a well-designed office environment, then you at least have a starting point, right?
- 22:23SPEAKER_01: You have a starting point of the um of the the basic things that you need in order to be able to thrive in that environment.
- 22:30SPEAKER_01: And you're able, in most cases, in offices to shift from one setting to another setting, from like your own setting, whatever your desk is or your cube is or your office is to a shared space where you can whiteboard and things like that.
- 22:42SPEAKER_01: And so the office itself is set up to enable that.
- 22:45SPEAKER_01: When you move into an environment where you're working from home, for example, then that becomes your responsibility.
- 22:52SPEAKER_01: And if people take ownership of that responsibility and go, okay, how can I create the most effective, productive space that will help me work, that's an indicator in itself.
- 23:01SPEAKER_01: That's an indicator that the that the employee understands that this isn't there is an opportunity for them to be able to create the best space for uh space for them and a and a really solid indicator.
- 23:12SPEAKER_02: Um I I I would agree.
- 23:14SPEAKER_02: And you know, I think the other thing about the space, not to be understated, is the level of productivity you get.
- 23:19SPEAKER_02: Um that when you can, you know, when you can create the ultimate environment for productivity, productivity inherently goes up.
- 23:27SPEAKER_02: Um I can't imagine some of our folks, you know, if they ever had to live in a you know a cubicle farm.
- 23:32SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 23:33SPEAKER_02: Um I don't think anything could ever get done.
- 23:36SPEAKER_01: So let's assume you got the right employees and your employees have developed those skills either through uh through experience or through programs like we offer.
- 23:47SPEAKER_01: Um let's um let's think now about the resources that you give those employees to help them, uh to help them thrive.
- 23:57SPEAKER_01: And I'm really curious here as to, you know, given what we've just been talking about, right?
- 24:02SPEAKER_01: What do you provide?
- 24:03SPEAKER_01: What do you recommend?
- 24:05SPEAKER_01: And then what do you where do you just like take a step back and just let them do whatever they want?
- 24:10SPEAKER_02: So so a few things.
- 24:12SPEAKER_02: Um I think some of this will be fairly obvious, right?
- 24:14SPEAKER_02: Number one is you have to spend money on their home office.
- 24:17SPEAKER_02: Um it's not a a fair expectation to say, hey, you know, you know, at one point maybe it was, but you know, you're gonna work from home, you provide everything, right?
- 24:27SPEAKER_02: Um if you're gonna ask a person to sit at a desk and sit in a chair for an extended period of time, you darn well better provide a decent decent chair, or at least give them the money to.
- 24:35SPEAKER_02: Um we proactively put money in everyone's paycheck that that is just a stipend for home office, spend it on whatever you want.
- 24:41SPEAKER_02: You want to save it and buy a$3,000 chair, go for it, right?
- 24:45SPEAKER_02: Um if you you know, if you want to put it towards faster internet, go for it.
- 24:48SPEAKER_02: You know, we set certain minimum standards, but the stipend lets the person decide how they want to invest the money in the office.
- 24:54SPEAKER_02: Um some folks like big standing desks, some folks don't.
- 24:58SPEAKER_02: I mean, the list goes on.
- 25:00SPEAKER_02: Um, I think the other thing that we you know that we do to make sure that they work is we prioritize mental and physical well-being.
- 25:07SPEAKER_02: So there's there's two sort of reasons for this, right?
- 25:10SPEAKER_02: One of them is if you're in an office, you know, you're inherently active, right?
- 25:15SPEAKER_02: Even if you kind of sit in a desk, sit at a desk all day, you're going to the cafeteria, to the break room, to the coffee shop, you're going to and from, you're inherently more active.
- 25:22SPEAKER_02: When you work from home, you know, we've we've observed folks that you know the the most they do is walk from the bed to the to the chair, right?
- 25:30SPEAKER_02: And they'll sit there for 14 hours and work.
- 25:32SPEAKER_02: And you know, while you know, as a business owner, hey, that's great, you're doing more.
- 25:35SPEAKER_02: You know, as an employer and as a human, I don't like to see that.
- 25:38SPEAKER_02: Um, so we do prioritize you know mental physical well-being.
- 25:43SPEAKER_02: And we do a lot within the organization to encourage physical activity, um, you know, and and you know, challenges and and team activities and and contests, you know, all sorts of different things.
- 25:53SPEAKER_02: You know, there's there's lots of ways to do this.
- 25:55SPEAKER_02: Um, there are companies that specialize in this that will come in and build these programs for you, and we use some of those from time to time.
- 26:02SPEAKER_02: Um the other uh things that we do is we put a fairly heavy emphasis on creating personal social connections.
- 26:09SPEAKER_02: Um so we've got this concept of what I call an accidental collision.
- 26:14SPEAKER_02: How do you put a group of employees together so that they'll interact in a way that you didn't expect, right?
- 26:20SPEAKER_02: Whether it's through after hours virtual social things, which we've done and had you know uh surprising success with, um, ugly sweater contests at Christmas.
- 26:30SPEAKER_02: I mean silly things.
- 26:32SPEAKER_02: Um we have a group that does um photography um every couple of weeks, every probably three or four weeks.
- 26:37SPEAKER_02: They meet for two hours and they share all the pictures they did.
- 26:39SPEAKER_02: And we've got two fairly apt photographers that give people tips.
- 26:43SPEAKER_02: Um I think we've got a bourbon tasting club, which I need to figure out about because I'm not part of that and that I'd always be able to live.
- 26:50SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, so these these these sort of you know you know different types of of social interactions.
- 26:58SPEAKER_02: And we've you know, and then uh the flip side of that is we have a person dedicated to this, right?
- 27:03SPEAKER_02: So we have a dedicated work from home um leader, right?
- 27:07SPEAKER_02: Where all they do is make sure that this piece of the business, almost like an office manager, is running well and is well oiled and the issues are getting addressed.
- 27:16SPEAKER_01: It's it really is speaking to the same stuff that we've been discussing here, right?
- 27:20SPEAKER_01: The difference of it, and then not an assumption, not an immediate assumption, at any rate, that this is just a means of of saving a ton of cash, right?
- 27:29SPEAKER_01: As in For sure.
- 27:31SPEAKER_01: As in we don't have to pay for anything.
- 27:34SPEAKER_01: They can and should pay for everything.
- 27:36SPEAKER_01: Well, sure, they could, right?
- 27:38SPEAKER_01: But if they do, number one, they're less likely to stay.
- 27:41SPEAKER_01: But number two, uh everything that you're talking about there is something that helps solve a real problem, right?
- 27:47SPEAKER_01: It the problem of disconnectedness, right?
- 27:49SPEAKER_01: There are things that you're doing there and uh that that can help with connectedness, right?
- 27:54SPEAKER_01: Physical activity.
- 27:55SPEAKER_01: Um we've talked about this on the podcast previously, but there is you know, there's external data to back up what you're talking about.
- 28:01SPEAKER_01: There was a Stanford study done not that long ago which looked at the amount of time people spend sitting in a home office setting versus a um work from a traditional office setting.
- 28:12SPEAKER_01: People actually spend nearly two hours a day more sitting in a uh in a home office setting.
- 28:18SPEAKER_01: Right?
- 28:18SPEAKER_01: So that's I mean, if sitting is the new smoking, that's literally killing people, right?
- 28:22SPEAKER_01: So it's a yeah, so it's it's something that you you uh proactively have to focus on.
- 28:28SPEAKER_01: And I think that's one of the most important things for leaders to think about here, which is that um when you think about moving uh uh from an in-office environment to a to a remote environment, don't think of it in terms of how do I create the exact things that I had in the in-office environment and then recreate those externally, but instead think about the challenges that people will face when they're working uh out of the office, and then how do you go about addressing those challenges, which is why things like movement becomes more important, right?
- 29:01SPEAKER_01: It's why things like creating connectedness becomes more important.
- 29:04SPEAKER_01: So it's not a like-for-like replacement, it's a dealing with the uh most important challenges associated with having a distributed workforce where people are working from home.
- 29:16SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I agree.
- 29:17SPEAKER_02: It's it's you know, we found that, you know, I I think at the end of the day, we probably save money because we don't have rent.
- 29:23SPEAKER_02: But it is, you know, the the notion of doing this is not because we want to save money.
- 29:29SPEAKER_02: Um we probably spend you know an above-average amount on travel to get people together, right?
- 29:34SPEAKER_02: Um the it's the notion of how do we get the best people and put them in an environment where they can be the most productive.
- 29:42SPEAKER_02: Um and and it's and it you know, it aligns with our culture, right?
- 29:46SPEAKER_02: Which is one of, you know, so you know, be with your family.
- 29:49SPEAKER_02: I I I have a rule which is you know, don't dare you know miss your kids' kindergarten graduation because you had a meeting at work.
- 29:56SPEAKER_02: We've got the flexibility that that you can do that.
- 29:58SPEAKER_02: And I think generally speaking, it reduces the stress on people.
- 30:02SPEAKER_02: Um, it you know, it reduces the amount of anxiety they've got to deal with.
- 30:06SPEAKER_02: And the result is they end up getting more done, right?
- 30:10SPEAKER_02: And and we see the results of it.
- 30:12SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 30:13SPEAKER_01: All right.
- 30:13SPEAKER_01: So let's uh I think that brings us fairly neatly to things like policy and process and stuff like that.
- 30:19SPEAKER_01: So um I know you've got some some interesting views in terms of of what policies and processes should be in place, but also what burdens you think, well not even burdens necessarily, but what requirements you think are reasonable to place on uh on employees.
- 30:36SPEAKER_01: So why don't you tell me a little bit about that?
- 30:38SPEAKER_01: Where do you where do you think uh it starts in terms of your responsibilities that are instantiated in policy and process, and then what are the requirements you think are reasonable to place on employees?
- 30:50SPEAKER_02: Um so there's a few things in there.
- 30:52SPEAKER_02: So first of all, we'll start with with managers.
- 30:54SPEAKER_02: Um, as 50 people, 50 to 100, 100 to 200, et cetera.
- 30:59SPEAKER_02: Um the you know, the the demands that are placed on on the sort of middle tier of managers, right?
- 31:05SPEAKER_02: Not the executive team, not the not the guys doing the work, but the managers that are you know you know driving the ship every day, um they have to be explicitly taught how to manage people in this world because it's not inherently intuitive.
- 31:20SPEAKER_02: Um and and we've gone through great pains, and I think we've still got a lot of work to do to you know educate managers how to manage people in a work-from-home environment.
- 31:28SPEAKER_02: Um and I think for you know, for managers, there's a you know, uh a few things we kind of impress on them.
- 31:34SPEAKER_02: Number one is as a manager, you have to snap to the style and the calendar of the employee.
- 31:41SPEAKER_02: Um so to give you an example, right?
- 31:43SPEAKER_02: There, um, one of the the ways that we work is we use asynchronous work, right?
- 31:47SPEAKER_02: Which means, you know, we expect you to work roughly eight hours a day, but we don't necessarily care what those eight hours are.
- 31:54SPEAKER_02: Um and you know, we have some employees that you know generally love the you know the nine to five kind of format.
- 32:00SPEAKER_02: But for a lot of a lot of them, they can now snap to things like you know kids' school schedules, right?
- 32:05SPEAKER_02: Or um you know, whatever schedule works in their life.
- 32:08SPEAKER_02: I've got one one guy that works in our accounting department, um, you know, goes to the gym every week, no, he gets up at like 4 a.m.
- 32:15SPEAKER_02: every day, works for about works for about four hours, goes to the gym for about three, I think he takes a nap, and then he works for another four or five hours.
- 32:23SPEAKER_02: And and that schedule like works brilliantly because we deal with a lot of you know international um um clients and customers.
- 32:31SPEAKER_02: And so that that early session, he's on their calendar.
- 32:34unknown: Right?
- 32:34SPEAKER_02: And that late session, he's on our calendar.
- 32:37SPEAKER_02: And so thing, it's it's inherently just more efficient.
- 32:41SPEAKER_02: Um you know, and and and you know, and so you know, if employees work that way, the last thing you want a manager to do is come in and say, My hours are eight to five.
- 32:50SPEAKER_02: And if you want to talk to me, you're snapping to my time.
- 32:53SPEAKER_02: Yeah if you're gonna be a manager in that world, you have to be in ultimately more flexible.
- 32:57SPEAKER_02: You have to kind of snap to the time zone of your directs, otherwise, you've essentially taken that away from them.
- 33:04SPEAKER_02: Right.
- 33:04SPEAKER_02: And and that's it's a learning curve for managers to kind of you know get their head around that and and almost be the example of of what it means to be sort of nonlinear in how you work and how you manage your hours.
- 33:16SPEAKER_02: Um we also encourage managers to meet in person as much as they can, right?
- 33:20SPEAKER_02: If you can find a way to do it, whether you can piggyback on something else, whether it's it's sort of the the regularly scheduled gatherings that we do, um, that that face-to-face in person is absolutely critical.
- 33:32SPEAKER_02: You don't need a lot of it.
- 33:33SPEAKER_02: You only need it once or twice a year.
- 33:35SPEAKER_02: But it builds that relationship.
- 33:37SPEAKER_02: Um we we talked briefly about the notion of you know, you get the employee for eight hours, you got the other 16 that matter, um, the other two-thirds of the time in their lives.
- 33:46SPEAKER_02: And managers have to understand what's going on in the other two-thirds.
- 33:49SPEAKER_02: Again, and that's you know, if you're in an office, you leave the office, you go home.
- 33:53SPEAKER_02: You know, as a manager, I kind of don't care because you're gonna come back into the office, and that transition can be enough to make you know, to go from a bann environment to a great environment.
- 34:02SPEAKER_02: There's one environment when you work from home.
- 34:05SPEAKER_02: Right?
- 34:05SPEAKER_02: So whether you like it or not, there's a blend that occurs.
- 34:10SPEAKER_02: Um, and and you know, negativity in in the other 16 hours bleeds into the workday, negativity in the workday bleeds into the other 16.
- 34:18SPEAKER_02: Um and so you know, for managers, we want them to have an understanding of that, um, be able to manage to that and and and and work to that.
- 34:27SPEAKER_02: Um and then the final thing, and this goes back to um it's it's a you know, if you were to say to me, what's the most important thing, you know, for an employee or an employer or a manager to be successful is trust.
- 34:40SPEAKER_02: Right?
- 34:41SPEAKER_02: If you know, all it takes, and and we've seen this, right?
- 34:44SPEAKER_02: All it takes is for me as a manager to go, hey, I want to talk to Paul, and I can't reach you and it's two o'clock in the afternoon.
- 34:52SPEAKER_02: Right?
- 34:53SPEAKER_02: It's a very, very slippery slope to that place of well, Paul's just taking advantages.
- 34:58SPEAKER_02: He's a slacker.
- 34:59SPEAKER_02: He's underperforming, he's he's not doing his job, he's fired, right?
- 35:05SPEAKER_02: When in reality, you were just zoned out with your headset on working on stuff.
- 35:09SPEAKER_02: And had I walked by your office, I would have, I'm not, you know, I would have said, I'm not interrupting Paul, he's in the zone.
- 35:15SPEAKER_02: Right?
- 35:16SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 35:17SPEAKER_01: It literally goes from clearly working to clearly not working, and the only and the only difference is a lack of visibility.
- 35:25SPEAKER_02: It is, you know, and like you know, yeah, leaders and managers have to understand that, and they have to be able to account for it.
- 35:31SPEAKER_02: And so I go back to trust, right?
- 35:33SPEAKER_02: Trust is the most important thing.
- 35:34SPEAKER_02: I have to trust that you are doing your job as best you can.
- 35:40SPEAKER_02: The only way, the only way that you can have full trust is with clear, measurable goals and expectations.
- 35:49SPEAKER_02: Right?
- 35:49SPEAKER_02: It has to be binary.
- 35:50SPEAKER_02: I expect you to produce X.
- 35:53SPEAKER_02: Did you produce X?
- 35:54SPEAKER_02: Yes, nothing else matters.
- 35:57SPEAKER_02: Right?
- 35:59SPEAKER_02: You cannot build trust based on what you see.
- 36:02SPEAKER_02: You have to build trust based on what you produce.
- 36:04SPEAKER_02: Right?
- 36:05SPEAKER_02: If your job is to write code and I expect you to produce 100,000 lines of code next quarter, did you or didn't you?
- 36:12SPEAKER_02: Like that's my measure of whether or not you are working, not whether or not you are green on a chat window or whether you answered a text in five minutes.
- 36:21SPEAKER_02: Right.
- 36:22SPEAKER_02: Um, and and that the whole infrastructure of you know highly measurable goals, metrics, expectations, whether it's you know, you know, OKRs or similar to that, is an infrastructure the company's got to put in place and that everyone has to buy into and be on the same page with because that's the foundational element of trust.
- 36:42SPEAKER_02: Right?
- 36:42SPEAKER_02: And without trust, this all falls apart.
- 36:44SPEAKER_02: The house of cards comes down.
- 36:49SPEAKER_01: Excellent.
- 36:50SPEAKER_01: Really, really interesting stuff.
- 36:52SPEAKER_01: Let's let's finish up with um a discussion about a culture, which I think we've been actually like touching on as throughout throughout this discussion.
- 37:04SPEAKER_01: But it sounds as though um culture, a remote culture is fundamentally in many ways different.
- 37:12SPEAKER_01: A remote first culture is fundamentally different to a good in-office culture.
- 37:18SPEAKER_01: I think I'll I'll ask you a bit of a left field question on this.
- 37:22SPEAKER_01: So as culture is culture is an evolving thing.
- 37:28SPEAKER_01: Where do you can you think back at times where you felt like the culture in some way inside your organization or other organizations you worked in is sort of if you like slipped a little bit?
- 37:38SPEAKER_01: Or you've seen perhaps trust the road, or you've seen things that are not working in the in the way in which you would want to.
- 37:44SPEAKER_01: And then if you can think of situations like that, what have you done in order to be able to fix that to get to a point where you do have a truly healthy um first culture?
- 37:56SPEAKER_02: Yes, I would say that you know, I've felt the culture slipping away a couple of times.
- 38:02SPEAKER_02: Um, I felt the trust slipping away a couple of times over the years.
- 38:05SPEAKER_02: And I can almost all would always tie it back to periods where we were not transparent.
- 38:13SPEAKER_02: Um we had um, you know, we've had had various investors in the company over the years, and they all come in and they're they're sort of aghast at how transparent we are.
- 38:20SPEAKER_02: How much we tell employees about how the company's doing, how our goals, objectives, where we miss, where we win.
- 38:26SPEAKER_02: The amount of transparency we have is is incredible, right?
- 38:30SPEAKER_02: And what I found is that you know, transparency breeds trust.
- 38:35SPEAKER_02: And anytime that you know, we've kind of felt like you know, people are straying away, or the you know, we measure the sentiment is not there, or things are just sort of starting to go sideways, we look back and go, we stop being transparent.
- 38:49SPEAKER_02: And we get back to the principle of being transparent with people, of being transparent, clear, simple.
- 38:54SPEAKER_02: Here is here are the goals, here's what we're doing, here's what our expectations of you are, here's how we're measuring it, and here's how you're doing.
- 39:01SPEAKER_02: Right?
- 39:01SPEAKER_02: You get back to those principles and the trust comes back very, very quickly.
- 39:07SPEAKER_02: Right?
- 39:07SPEAKER_02: Because now we're all looking at the same dashboard going, yep, we're hitting our goal.
- 39:11SPEAKER_02: And you know, I I've you know I've never once complained about not being able to read a person that's exceeding their goals, able to reach a person, right?
- 39:18SPEAKER_02: Not once ever.
- 39:20SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, you only start asking questions when the numbers are missing.
- 39:25SPEAKER_02: And you should, right?
- 39:27SPEAKER_02: But if you don't have that clear measure of what success means, you're gonna fall back on the only thing you naturally know, which is time and chair.
- 39:37SPEAKER_02: Right.
- 39:38SPEAKER_02: So the worst situation is we're not hitting a number and I can't get a hold of the person.
- 39:44SPEAKER_02: Right?
- 39:45SPEAKER_02: You want to make sure that you know what the numbers are, you know what the goals are, you know what the metrics are, because now you're not falling back on time and chair, right?
- 39:52SPEAKER_02: And that's that's when you know trust will start to erode.
- 39:55SPEAKER_02: So transparency, anytime we you know fell down on transparency, you could see the follow-on of trust begin to erode, you know, things start to go a little bit sideways, you feel like people are maybe taking advantage of the situation, maybe make some bad decisions, you go back to transparency and it all kind of recovers pretty easily.
- 40:13SPEAKER_02: And and I've seen that play out a couple of times over the years.
- 40:16SPEAKER_01: Corey, we'll leave it there.
- 40:18SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for your time today.
- 40:19SPEAKER_01: I really enjoyed it.
- 40:20SPEAKER_01: It was a pleasure.
- 40:21SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
- 40:23SPEAKER_00: Making remote work is brought to you by Billion Minds.
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