Supporting Article:
“The Right Way to Build a Remote Culture” by Nick Francis, Inc.com
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Brandon: Welcome to the It’s About People podcast! My name’s Brandon Laws and I’m with Molly and Suzi. We’re here to talk about an article we ran across. It’s called, “The Right Way to Build a Remote Culture” and it’s found on Inc.com.
This is an essay written by Nick Francis, he’s the co-founder and CEO of a company called Help Scout. They have a 100% remote workforce and he wrote an essay basically saying what he’s gone through in the process. He breaks the essay into four sections: Going All In, Whom to Hire, How to Hire, and How to Manage. Each of these sections have really good tips and advice and I wanted to talk about those with you guys to see which parts of the article you thought were the most relevant. Let’s just kick it off from there.
I’ll just start with the “Going All In” part. I thought it was pretty interesting, because he said there’s no in-between with a remote workforce. He says you either have to commit to it fully or not at all. And he basically said by having split workforces, let’s say a certain percentage is remote and some are in the office collaborating, that people get left behind all the time and there could be some jealousy between different employees, so I thought it was a pretty good point.
Molly: Yeah, I think the communication impact is the big one. And we talked about this recently in another podcast that we did about I think it was Yahoo’s decision to bring everybody back in, and it got a lot of response, and quite a few prominent workplaces came out and said Wait a minute, we’re finding that it works quite well! So I think it puts a lot of additional pressure on the management team to have open and consistent feedback, to your point Brandon, about wanting to have thorough conversations with people.
Brandon: On the commitment side, it was actually interesting on the “Going All In” section—he wrote that in the organization now that they have, employees are in an office, but they treat all the employees the same. Meaning, you have employees who sit literally right next to each other but they all use the same tools and access the same information, that way nobody on the remote side is left behind. So, if they’re going to go to a conference call, they’re going to get on Slack or some sort of tool like Appear.In where you can have a quick conference call and see each other.
Suzi: Even though they’re sitting right next to each other. Oh interesting! It’s the discipline, right? So they don’t leave anybody out.
Molly: Everyone’s treated the same.
Brandon: The point was that, let’s say we want to have a quick stand-up meeting next to the water cooler and talk about something that’s going on in the business. You’re going to forget to call in Joe who’s at home walking his dog, who needs to be part of the conversation. So I thought it was a good point.
Molly: It’s interesting. I was just talking to a manager the other day who has just changed jobs and is going from a culture of walking around, basically. If you have a question, you get up, you peer over the cubicle, you go find so-and-so rather than IM-ing or emailing or calling them. And it was really funny, in the new culture he’s in, everything is done via meetings or email. He was saying, My inbox is just full! I’m going to these meetings and then half an hour later I have 60, 70 emails and a lot of them I’m just CC-ed on. WhyImage may be NSFW.
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aren’t people just getting up and walking over and asking questions? It’s a really hard adjustment. And that’s, again, from someone who’s fairly technologically savvy, it’s more about the relationship building of the in-person conversation. So someone from that perspective would really struggle in an environment like this.
Suzi: Yes, and I was actually talking to a client not that long ago who said that that’s how their culture’s evolved, to where people are so busy, they’re a fast-growing organization and so they’re communicating pretty much exclusively by email.
Molly: Oh wow.
Suzi: And now they’re seeing it show up in problems. There are misunderstandings, there are issues with collaboration because of that relationship or lack of trust, so they’re trying to get back to Hey, we need to start getting up and walking over to someone just to talk to them.
Molly: Yeah. Or a phone call would save a lot. I find that Xenium is a very chatty culture.
Brandon: Email-heavy?
Molly: Yeah, and I think we care so much about relationships that you get a lot of the “thank you” emails coming from five different people on topic—Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Which is great, and we have a lot of folks who are remote, so it’s important to have that kind of bond. I know, as somebody who works outside the office quite a bit, I appreciate that. But a phone call would have probably accomplished that tone, you know—the question, the answer, and the thank you.
Brandon: But a phone call is one-to-one versus reply-all emails. And in this article, and I’ve heard other CEOs mention it who have remote workforces and have to manage a lot of people and communication, is that there are a lot of tools out there that are a really good replacement for email. Because email, to your point, I think you said it Suzi, I think the CC line, if you’re on the CC line, Do I respond? Is it really pertinent to me? You just get bogged down on email so much that tools like Slack is one that’s coming out, I’ve never used it but my understanding is that it really keeps communication in line with whatever project is going on and it’s just a really good stream of communication. I think it runs on keywords and tags so you can easily search for things. For a remote workforce, that would be really important.
Molly: That’d be huge.
Brandon: The next section was “Whom to Hire.” I thought this section was pretty interesting, because they’re looking for people who are self-managers; really, they’re looking for people who are disciplined to get the work done on their own because they’re not going to have a manager with them when they’re working from home and people who can use the tools. The big one I saw was writing style, because if they’re communicating by text, through email, through tools like Slack, they need to be able to communicate because, I think they mention, a two-minute conversation can turn into a ten-minute one if someone’s a really bad communicator in the written form. I thought that was pretty interesting. Any other thoughts on that?
Suzi: Did they mention how they were vetting people for that?
Brandon: For who to hire? Yes.
Suzi: What was their process for screening for those people?
Brandon: That’s the next process. They were talking about how most companies will hire a recruiter to really find the right talent for what they’re looking for, but they said that when you’re thinking remote workforces, you’ve got to think globally in terms of where the talent’s at. So they said recruiters didn’t really work for them, because they’re very localized in some cases. They don’t use big job boards either, they use specific job boards for their industry and I think they were probably some software company, something specific, so they used job boards specific to what they need. I think that was the recommendation, that if you’re looking for a certain type of worker on the remote side, use job boards instead of all these other tools.
The other thing they said in the article was that they used their employees for recommendations, and I think they said that 75% of the new employees they hire are referral-based.
Molly: Wow, that makes a big difference.
Suzi: Yeah, and they know what it’s like to work there and what it takes to be successful and happy and to thrive there. So that’s a good source for sure.
Brandon: The last section they talked about was how to manage these people. A little tougher, but one-on-ones. I think this is something we talked about on a recent podcast was the one-on-ones with remote, so you can refer back to that podcast we did on how to coach remote employees. But it’s a lot of the same stuff, it’s one-on-ones, it’s having a constant stream of communication that everybody has access to, I think the words they used were transparency and level playing field for everybody. So having access to the same stuff, using Dropbox or some sort of intranet, and just making sure that the communication is pretty standard throughout the company.
Molly: We struggle with that, I know, with our on-sites. We have quite a few HR folks who are on-site, embedded with clients and don’t have access to our Xenium server. They really, that’s one feedback we’ve heard before, that they miss the access to the tools that we have. The trainings, things like that. And again, it’s a security, it’s a network security issue, given the level of information that we have on our server with, you know, payroll information and medical information. We have it locked down pretty airtight, but it’s a challenge with giving those folks equal access to even simple trainings and things like that. So that’s something that, to me, is very relevant as well.
Brandon: So this article touched on, really, how to build a remote culture. Overall, do you both think that it’s possible to do it? Which side of the aisle are you on in terms of whether it could work or not?
Molly: I’ve seen it work really, really well. I have one client in particular that has several of its senior leaders—vice presidents and directors—that are remote in California or Chicago and their communication is constant. It’s very precise, they know when and what to communicate, they’re good at keeping each other in the loop. They might feel like it Image may be NSFW.
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lacks at times but from an outsider’s perspective I’m really amazed at how well they do. And the reporting relationship goes back to our president here in Oregon, I think a lot of the credit goes to him and that he really works hard at keeping them in the loop and they do the same with him. So I’ve seen it work well when it works.
Suzi: I almost think about it similar to the job share that I did in that there has to be a high level of commitment to communication.
Molly: On both sides.
Suzi: Over communicating, in a way. Not over communicating verbosely, but making sure that you’re not leaving out important information. So I think you’ve got to be really aligned on the vision and objectives for your organization and ensure that and have some regular ribbons of communication between people. I mean, you should do that anyway. But being remote, there’s got to be that common language, and people have to be communicating even better and more frequently, in my opinion, to make that effective. And also maybe what’s going on in that organization that you work with.
Brandon: In that organization, were they fully remote or is it just some people?
Molly: Fully remote. Well actually, sorry, not fully remote in terms of the whole company, but the reporting relationships at that director level were primarily. So we’ve got folks, four folks actually, who are remote and are here once a quarter for a meeting, but beyond that they’re pretty remote. And it seems to be working for all parties.
Brandon: It’s an interesting topic as technology keeps improving I think this is going to come up more and more as people want flexibility and we’re able to communicate a lot easier remotely. So, again, this article was, “The Right Way to Build a Remote Culture,” and it’s found on Inc.com, so we’ll put a link up to it. I appreciate everyone for joining us today and we’ll see you next time!
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