Remote Accountability with Jonathan Raymond

Today's guest is really special guest, whose body of work I found really helpful as a practitioner in the context of delegation and remote accountability. Usually the topic is full of platitudes and hot air when you read stuff online, but Jonathan has thought very deeply on the topic and come up with frameworks that empower you to go and solve real-world issues you face, as you'll hear on these episodes.

In this episode you will discover:

• how to hold people accountable in a respectful way, without feeling like you've been taken for a ride
• what accountability really is, and what it means for you as a leader
• how lockdown has changed how leaders hold their remote teams accountable

About Jonathan Raymond

Jonathan Raymond is the CEO of Refound, a leadership training company that helps organizations unlock high-performance through transparent conversations about growth and accountability. Jonathan spent 20 years building careers in business development and personal growth before realizing he could have the best of both worlds by starting his own company. Now, he uses those skills to advise CEOs and organizational leaders on how to create a people-first culture that drives results. His goal is to provide Refound’s clients with a partner they can trust and a program that gives managers an experience of how they can make work a better place, one conversation at a time. Jonathan is an experienced CEO, Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker (Inc. 2018) and the author of Good Authority, How to Become the Leader Your Team is Waiting For. He lives in Encinitas, California. He is madly in love with his wife, tries not to spoil his daughters, and will never give up on the New York Knicks.

• Refound.com
• Jonathan Raymond on LinkedIn
• Download the goodies Jonathan promises here

Transcript

Luke: Jonathan, Raymond, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks. And

so can you say a few words about how you got into the topic of accountability and delegation?

Jonathan Raymond: Fairly simply realizing that I was a lousy CEO when it came to delegation and remote accountability and feedback and coaching, and I was pretty good at the vision and strategy and okay, where do we want to be?

And what does it look like and thinking about products and things like that. And I thought I was okay at the delegation and feedback and remote accountability and I wasn't. And so I realized back in this was probably 2013, 2014, seven, eight years ago that I needed to change something. Something substantial about my approach to leading and managing teams.

I also saw my managers who were mostly around my age, a little bit younger at the time, like mostly in their thirties. They were really struggling and people, this was, pre way, pre pandemic, pre all the crazy things that are happening in our world right now. And people were really struggling with how creating a space for their teams to perform at a high level based on the company goals or the team goals.

And. Be really human and give people the development that they were looking for, the autonomy they were looking for. That's where I started. We'll get into where I ended up, I just became really passionate about. This topic of conversations and where every organization that I was a part of, whether it was part of organizations that I was in a leadership role in, or that I was consulting or coaching to that everybody seemed to be struggling with this.

And I was like, okay there's gotta be a better way. So that's where I started.

Challenges with remote accountability

Yeah. That's how I discovered the book too. I was looking for , anything around this because it just felt like I wasn't doing very well. With this particular thing so in terms of the the process of getting into it, what were the first. Challenges. That you overcame as you started getting into this area?

Luke: The first was really a mindset that I had talked about a lot in good authority, which was like, like most people, I grew up in a education system, family system, cultural system that rewarded and incentivized me based on my individual contributions.

So I became really good at my individual contributions. Knocking off the things in my inbox and, moving things forward that were, that seemed important to me. And I started to shift that perspective and I started to see that was not my highest value anymore as a team leader, while it was my highest value as an individual contributor, that, that mindset of solving problems and fixing things had become a liability.

And all of a sudden I had a team of people, whether it was eight people, 20 people, a hundred people surrounding me in some sort of way. The more that I used that muscle that I re that I really knew the worst things got. So the more I was the one who was the fixer of problems and the solver of things, the less the team performed.

And the less that I did that, the more that I said I don't know. I've got an idea for how to do that, but how would you do that? Or, Hey, I've got some ideas for how we might do this. And of course I've got some ideas, but I don't want to put my ideas out there first because the tendency will be to go with my ideas and they may not be the best ones.

If we want to go deep, pretty soon in our conversation here, it's really about identity. It's really about who do I think I am. And what, and how do I think I add value in the world? And as an individual contributor, we think rightly that we add value through our individual contribution and when we're called into a position of leadership, at least in my view.

And I think this is a widely shared view these days more so is that we have to change that self value. We have to say, Hey, wait a second. My self value is about empowering others. It's about lifting up others and creating the conditions for other people to go to places that they've yet to go. I'm good at taking myself to places that I, you have to go, but my job is to get other people to go to places where they you've got to go.

And I had a CEO of a fortune 500 company recently say to me, something that you never would have said to me a year ago, where he said. Jonathan, what I realized is that it's my job to create the emotional conditions for high performance. And I was like, wow, okay. My job is done here. That's the kind of stuff you don't hear.

It takes a while. So that's the mindset shift from individual contributor to team leader. 80% of it is mindset. There's tactics. We'll get into the accountability dial and we'll talk about delegation there's but it's about a mindset shift and that's the hardest part.

What is accountability, really?

In terms of accountability. Let's start there. What is it really when it's working well?

Jonathan Raymond: Here's what it's not, or it's not only a lot of people say accountability is like doing what I said I was going to do. Okay. Fine. That's fine. But that's the table stakes, right? And most people don't even do that. And especially in big companies, they suffer from a lot of people, not doing the things that they were going to do.

But to me, accountability is about the way we go about things, it's not just about the tasks in your inbox, but it's the way you go about it. Did you communicate in an effective way? Did you collaborate across the team? Did you give people fair warning around changes? Did you acknowledge when you messed something up and you didn't just say oops, You said, oops, that was on me.

And because it was on me, here's how I'm going to fix it to make it easier for you. Nobody does that in our world. That's accountability. Accountability is I screwed up. I made things harder for you. I made your project go slower. I messed something up for you saying I'm sorry is worthless. It's better than nothing.

But accountability is going to saying Hey, of course say, Hey, sorry about that. And I'm going to take it upon me because I'm the one who took the action that resulted in harm in some way, I'm going to take the next action, which is I'm going to fix it. I'm going to undo. I'm going to, I'm using the word damage, even though it's a bit extreme, but I'm going to proactively undo the damage or the harm that I did.

That's accountability. That's where that's the top of the mountain, what we're going for and what we coach leaders and executives on. And the more and the higher you are up in the org chart, the more meaningful it is when you do accountability like that. And the more obvious it is when you don't and the more harmful it is when you don't, because everybody goes this culture talks about accountability.

We talk about ownership. We talk about living our values, but they don't do it. The work that I do is oftentimes with, senior leaders, but, or, but we're working organizationally and that's so to me, accountability is about how we show up in our roles.

How to avoid beating people over the head with accountability

Luke: How do you move from accountability being this code word for beating people over the head with a bat, the type of accountability that you described?

Jonathan Raymond: Organizationally, what we do is we ask a lot of questions. We're a pain in the ass that way. So when we'd go into an organization, we're typically not working with one person we're working with a team or a division, oftentimes it's a whole company. And we ask a lot of questions that people like, Hey, so if I use the word accountability, what does that mean to you?

What does that mean in this organization? And people have a wide variety of answers. And then we asked them, we said what should it mean. It should mean X, Y, and Z. It should mean if somebody is going to delay a project that they should come across the hall real or virtual. We let the organization define what accountability should be.

And then oftentimes we'll ask questions like, okay. So let's assume the level of accountability in the organization like, Oh, let me say it this way. I had a CEO come to me and say accountability is one of our core values. So that's great. That's wonderful. What happens if somebody isn't accountable and he said, what do you mean? And I said what are the consequences? If you said accountability is a core value, what are the consequences? If people don't behave in an accountable way? I guess there really aren't any. Okay you don't have accountability as a core value. If there are no consequences and it doesn't mean firing people, although sometimes that happens, like if there are no consequences to accountability, then you don't have accountability.

So we ask a lot of questions around what does accountability mean? And different people have different assumptions. And, it's if we use the word excellence, if we asked 10 people, they're gonna have 10 different definitions. So we ask a lot of people in the organization. What does it mean?

What should it mean? Now, what would it look like if accountability was operating at a really high level in this organization? Okay. We would be doing this, and this. Okay. Does everybody agree that those are good things? Yeah, that would be awesome. Okay. So now we move it out of the realm of of a negative and something. People don't want to, something that people do want because it's attached to an outcome that they care about.

Remote accountability and delegation

Luke: Let's move on to delegation, because I think that's actually the thing that probably helped me the most. Why do people struggle with delegation so much?

Jonathan Raymond: Especially in larger companies and where there's know layers of leaders and managers we're afraid of the poor work coming back on us. Or it's not happening fast. Like we oftentimes have a manager or a leader who's in some form or another, under a lot of pressure breathing down our neck about a results.

We talked about the conditions for a second, though. A few minutes ago, the conditions are ripe for me to not delegate or to not delegate fully. I'll give the easy stuff. I'll give the stuff that has like a list of one to 10. Go do these things, but it's, but at the conditions are ripe for me to hold back.

The parts that are, that involve a little more creativity that involve more context that involve a bit more risk. The inertia is in favor of me holding back. Versus letting go. So you have to proactively work against that. That's the reason why it's so hard is because we believe even if it kills us, if you look at the inner world of most managers and leaders, you'll see a lot of burnout and a lot of overwhelm, we believe that the only way that we're going to survive.

And get promoted is by doing it ourselves, getting it done, making sure like we're a constant, this constant state of making sure polishing, finishing all of that kind of stuff, because we were afraid. And as a parallel to that, we don't know how to do it any other way. So what would be the alternative? I don't do that.

If I let go. I know it's going to happen. It's going to be a disaster. This person's going to be sloppy. This person's going to be late. This person's going to be blah, blah, blah. This person's going to do an okay job, but I'm going to have to redo it. Anyway, we have this whole sort of in the legal world, we'd say they say the parade of horribles, right? This parade of horribles that goes through our mind of all the things that are going to happen if we genuinely truly delegate. So we don't do it because we don't have an alternative for how would I do that in a way that doesn't necessarily guarantee me that doesn't happen, but reduces the risk. Substantially. And without that, I'm not going to delegate.

And that's what the accountability dial in. A lot of the other tools in the book are for how do we mitigate the risks? How do we create moments where we can delegate and give the people feedback in real time of what happens when we do, what did they get, right?

What did they get wrong? How do they improve so that we can improve our own abilities to delegate and the flexibility in our system.

Delegating under uncertainty with remote accountability

Luke: So the difficult thing to delegate is the thing that's big and hairy and uncertain and unknown, which especially nowadays there's a lot of that. Yes.

There's a lot of that.

How do you start? Do you need to break it down into specific tasks? Do you need people to do it for you suggest how they would do it?

Jonathan Raymond: I'll give you one example. One example. A lot of managers would benefit from thinking a little bit more like a mentor apprentice type of relationship.

I think people do this in engineering to some degree. If I want someone on my team to be able to do something well, me telling them to do it well, isn't going to work most of the time, me explaining to them what looks like it might have a little bit of effect, but nothing is going to have the same effect as me showing them how I do it. Step-by-step. What are the micro moments? What are the questions that I'm asking of myself as I'm going through a piece of work? Because they don't know what those questions are.

So as a leader, who's who grows through the ranks, who gets promoted, what people don't understand is the reason why you're promoted.

Nobody ever talks about this. The reason why you're promoted is because you've demonstrated to somebody that you understand, context, it's that simple. You understand the context of the work. And so they're willing to give you more of it because you understand the little bit of the why and you show up to it the right way.

But then we bring it up. People will keep a team of people around us and we don't delegate. We delegate the work, but we forget to delegate the context. And so the way to delegate the context is to go.

So let's use sales for example. So if I, rather than me telling a sales person a hundred times how to do a good sales call, I want to go through one minute. Of a sales call that I did and stop the tape a hundred times and say, okay, right there. Why do you think I asked that question? Oh shit. I don't know. And then I want to get them thinking about why do I do the things that I do relative to this really important task they're going to learn way faster and what managers think that is.

So they say, Oh, I don't have time to do that. And it's nuts because you spent so much time now managing around the absence of that. So if you would just say, Hey, look, I'm going to spend five minutes a day this week in a spirit of learning where I'm going to sit down with one person on my team on Monday, and for five minutes, I'm going to really teach them how to do something that I know how to do that.

I suspect they don't know how to do, or they don't know how to do it the way I know how to do it. That's how you start to break it down there. There are other things we could talk about as well. But what I've seen over and over again,

I'll give you another related example where a manager and she's a very senior leader, but in a very large company and she's struggling with delegation. And she said I keep going to these meetings. I keep going to these regional meetings because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The why I'm afraid something bad will happen, but whatever. And I said, okay, great. So I said, Catherine, what are the questions that you ask yourself? As you're sitting in on those meetings and she thought, I don't know, I just do. I just do it. Okay. I bet if you take, let's take five minutes right now and I want you to write down. What are the five most important questions that you're asking yourself, as you're listening to this other team share this information. She did it in 30 seconds. once I asked her the question, she knew exactly what the things were and I said, okay, great. Now write that in an email and send that to your direct reports and say, Hey, here are the questions that I ask myself. When I go to these meetings, these are the questions that I want you to ask with whatever other questions you think are important. I'm not going to those meetings anymore. And that's what she did.

And she hasn't been, since it's been six months, she doesn't go to those meetings anymore because she'd got it out of her head, she got the context out of her head onto a piece of paper, into ball, an email, and sent it to the people, explained why those things were important. And then let them be smart.

Let them go too. And then they made it better. Because there's a bunch of questions she wasn't thinking of. Cause she's operating at a different level. Hope that's helpful.

Why context matters when holding remote teams accountable

Luke: Let's go into context a little more because this is something that I've been thinking about lately. It's this thing that obviously is there but what is it exactly? And then an organization, for example.

Jonathan Raymond: Think about it this way. One of the things that leaders often struggle with myself included all leaders struggle with this in different ways is that we say a thing. And we don't understand why our team, even though we said the thing, and maybe we even said the thing three times, we don't understand why our team doesn't understand the thing that we said in the way that we set it. We don't understand it. It's reasonable. Why we don't understand it. And the reason why is they lack context. So what does that mean? They weren't in. The 50 meetings prior to that moment where people hashed out all the nuances and debated the ideas . They didn't marinate with that content. They didn't work on them in all of these passive ways, over a period of time. Leading up to that moment when we said the thing, we've all of this context for what's behind it and why it matters and how it's different than this other thing that we could have said, but we didn't say how, why it's white has to happen on this timescale. And, but we spent a bunch of time arriving at that statement and then we make that statement and we think someone else, another human being is going to understand it in the way we understand it. It's crazy.

So it doesn't work. So that's one form of all of the nuance, all the debate, all the critical thinking or lack of critical thinking, all the pressure, all the stress, all the emotion.

Maybe there was a heated conversation about why that was so important. And then somebody shows up on a team, a couple layers in the organization and says, Hey everybody, we're doing this now. And everybody's what are you talking about? I thought, why is that important? Like yesterday you said this was important and all the context got lost in that conversation, right? All the, why all the, why does it matter? Who does it matter to? Why does it matter more than this other thing? All of that stuff gets lost and then we wonder why doesn't the team perform at a really high level?

How to delegate with context to new employees

Luke: In the context of people, especially junior people who are very good, who joined and then I want them to be more involved for example. And then if you give them too much context there. Practically doing my job. Which obviously isn't good for them or good for me either in terms of it's a waste of their time. And yeah. On the other hand, I want them to have enough context so that they bring their full selves to the work. So it isn't this kind of thing where I just go and tell them what to do and give them to do this. How do you give enough context without overwhelming people to, to basically go and do their job?

Jonathan Raymond: for me, it's a line item that should be in your one-on-ones that's sometimes spoken about, and sometimes is it depending upon the week or the month? click on that a little bit? Exactly. As you said too much context, not helpful. It can be debilitating, not useful to little context. So it should be a conversation. It should be, from the moment somebody is like, starting with me, so I have a new guy on my team, but I'm going through this right now. And we're trying to figure out that balance of like how much context is enough, how much is debilitating, where he's swimming and how much of it is not enough.

And so we talk about that, right? So rather than me. Trying to figure out exactly how much context he needs. It's a regular conversation or a one-on-one. It was like, Hey, do you feel like you have enough context for this? Some things he surprised me. He was like, Oh yeah, I totally get it. I talked with Sarah and blah, blah, blah. I totally get it. And other things he's I don't really know. Can you say a little bit more? And so that's a feature. A line item in our one-on-ones is context maintenance, so to speak where we're in conversation about that. And I'm going to give him feedback, which you with accountability dial, which maybe we'll talk about in a couple of minutes, I'm going to get some feedback.

When I see him operating either without enough context or being debilitated by too much context. And that's the purpose of the accountability dial. And the feedback methodology is to be able to say, this thing right now. I feel like we're spinning our wheels on the strategy piece of it.

And I want us to live in a tighter box there. So can you think of about that and how would we move that forward? If we just said Hey, we're going to, we're going to lock in. This is what we know. We know that it's imperfect, but this is what we know. How do we move it forward over the next. 30 days, 60 days.

So I'm going to give my feedback at that level as well, so that he can understand, from my perspective, is he operating at the right level of context? Some people use like the right altitude. Is he doing the work with the right level of altitude? So I think it's an ongoing conversation.

And people will tell you, right? They will, if you do a survey and they say I don't like, if you do a survey and whatever tool you use and people say, I don't understand my job. I don't understand what I do here. It's the most frustrating thing for like HR leaders and CEOs. How do people not understand?

Like we tell them we, what we do, all these things right. Because they're lacking context, right? And so they need managers to help them understand why their role matters. And what's important about it. And also to remove things that are not important. That's the fatal flaw of most managers and leaders. They don't declutter the inboxes of their teams in an effective way. And so people are like you never took those other things away. So I guess I have 27 priorities. Yeah. I'll try to work on all of them, yeah. Yeah.

What is the accountability dial?

Luke: So accountability, dials. What is it?

Jonathan Raymond: I realized painfully not only as a CEO, but as a manager, when I was giving feedback that I thought was reasonable and was reasonably toned and was reasonably challenging. I thought that the way that I was doing that was okay. And I realized this is, back in that same period, seven, eight years ago, that what I thought was reasonable and properly toned and reasonably challenging was way too heavy handed was way too intense, was bringing way too much authority for people to be able to hear.

And so as a result, what I was getting was defensiveness, victimhood, people blaming other people blaming other systems, people shutting down and I didn't understand. I cried. I was like how is this happening? Like, all I said was blank. And what I didn't realize was that the binary nature of my position in the organization and I can be an intense guy, but it wasn't just that the combination of my position and my own personal intensity was causing people to shut down.

So I decided to create a better way for myself. Refounded and exist. The book didn't exist. I was just working as a leader in the team, senior manager, but it was working in it on a bigger team. And I started to slow down and I said, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna bite-size this.

Instead of giving my feedback, I'm gonna break it down into five components and see what that does. And what ended up being the accountability dollars. These five stages mentioned invitation conversation, boundaries, and limit, which we talk about extensively. And we'll share some links for some people to check out some things about this is I said, okay, I'm just going to start with a mention and see what happens.

I'm just going to say to the effect of, Hey, I noticed in this morning, stand-up I noticed this, I don't know what to make of it, but I noticed it. And then I'm just gonna shut up. And I wasn't going to make a theory or maybe I had a theory, but it wasn't going to out my theory or a conclusion or make a judgment or dictate an action.

I wasn't gonna do any of those things. And what I found was by just starting with dimension, I started to spark self-reflection. I started to spark curiosity in people. I started to spark people's taking on the thing that I saw as their own. And taking it from me, which is what I wanted because I saw something, I didn't know what to make of it.

I just knew it wasn't good, but I don't have the context that they have about the customer ticket or the product sprint. I didn't have that context. I just knew something was off. And so what evolved from that was these five stages where the mention is just the simple Hey, I noticed this.

I'm not making grand conclusion, tell me what you think of this. And that was the key that unlocked it. And then we went to the invitation, which was, Hey, I noticed a couple of things. I noticed the pattern. I don't, I have a theory about why that's the case, but I'm not sure that it's being addressed in a compelling enough way.

And then we went to the conversation to talk about the impact that it was having. And then we went to the boundary to talk about what happens if this doesn't get fixed? And then we went to the limit when we said, okay we're, we've done all the coaching that we can do. And what I found was when I started to do this for myself, and then I started to teach people this, 70 years ago that it unlocked something really magical on a team where people felt like they had space to work on themselves without feeling undue pressure.

Are feeling under the gun to make the dramatic behavioral change because people are not capable of making dramatic behavioral change in short periods of time. It doesn't work that way. Behavioral change takes time.

So the feedback cycle, the accountant ability to doll is honoring the true nature of behavioral change is we need information. We need information that comes from a place of curiosity. We need pressure. We need someone who keeps their attention on the thing that they want us to change. Doesn't just go away. It doesn't say it once and then forget about it forever. Every teenager knows how to work with their parents, right? If you say the thing once, and then you forget about it, they learn. Okay. All I have to do is duck. For a minute, the storm will pass. I don't have to change. So there's a bunch of ingredients for how to facilitate behavioral change that we've honored with the accountability doll. And that's the primary tool that we teach, not just for managers with their direct reports, but a lot of the times with peer-to-peer co managers, co-leaders, co executives in an organization.

And we also teach it for people how to give feedback up. So it's a framework for how to start and maintain. A conversation in a way that doesn't create defensiveness and people shutting down and people feeling like you don't understand, why is that coming out of left field? Because it's has consistency.

It has care.

Luke: Yeah, I think that it helped me the most was that it allowed me to say things that I was noticing how without feeling like I'm going to be cutting someone cutting out under the legs or something.

Yes, exactly.

In my particular case, I had, certain situations that I wanted to do something about it, but at the same time, I didn't really have a good structure. This way of looking at it from the point of view of a coaching conversation helped a lot, I think in terms of being able to actually raise issues, but in a way that was exploratory and collaborative.

How to delegate with undermining people

Jonathan Raymond: There's something you said just before, which, which is I can't impress upon enough. It's so important is that we, what we don't realize is how easy it is to undermine people. It's so easy to undermine and disempower and cut the legs out from somebody. And it's so difficult to recover. You've done that. And that's it. There's one thing that people get from the book is how exactly what you described.

How do I say what I see? How do I talk about what I see in a way that doesn't do that? Or at least minimizes the likelihood.

If you've got somebody on your team who's just gets triggered at anything and you'd be like, there's nothing you can do. You're gonna have to deal with that in another way.

But how do we operate as leaders and managers, especially because people have so much going on outside of work, our world is so screwed up. And so many ways there's some, depending upon where you live, the version of the screwed up is different. But people have a lot going on. And it's so easy even before all of that to undermine and disempower people.

So we need a way to talk about what's real, to be honest, to be truthful, but in a way that doesn't undermine people and take the legs out from them before they've had an opportunity to get better.

Remote accountability when letting someone go

Luke: We talked about the beginning of the noticing and the deepening what about when you're getting towards the end, when you do realize someone just isn't interested or capable to do what you want or what the organization needs? How does this mindset help them? And you?

Jonathan Raymond: So a couple of things with her, which I found really interesting what the what the data has shown over time is that when you use the accountability dial, and again, the mindset that we talked about at the beginning, not the accountability dollar as a weapon, but as a coaching tool, When you do that, you will find that you have far less of a need to have those difficult boundary termination conversations.

Because one of two things will happen. People will receive the feedback earlier and make the changes that you want, or they will opt out. And this has organizations that are using the accountability, though. What happens is that people, when they're getting feedback, Where they can't hide. Where, how they're behaving, how they're showing up.

They're not being collaborative. They're not doing the things that they said they were going to do when they start to get feedback about that. People go, you know what? I don't want to be here anymore. I don't like, that's not a good feeling right now. Some people will keep going, right? Because some people will push through for one reason or another.

But so those two things that knocks a lot of people off, some people will change. That's the hide, the ideal outcome. And some people will leave. And then you have this third group, of people who won't change or won't change fast enough or can't right. And maybe that's just, it's just not, they don't, there's a capability issue.

There's just not, there's a talent gap. That's fine. It happens. Is there, it starts with framing that up to be able to, and this is a question that I will often ask, I'll say, okay, give me a behavior. I'll ask you. So Luke. Give me a behavior. It doesn't have to be a current person on your team, but someone in the past that was behaving in a way or showing up in a way that wasn't what you needed from them at the time.

What were they doing that wasn't good or effective or good enough? What was the behavior?

Sure. So it was a developer who would finish a piece of work and give it directly to the quality assurance team without checking that what you just did actually works.

Okay, great. So I'm going to give this person the ability to stay on your team, doing exactly that thing.

Not following the process that you need handing it directly over instead of that intermediary step. And they're going to do it exactly that way for the next 10 years and stay on your team. How do you feel about that? Not great. How about five years and and more importantly, not just me. I think other people that we're both working with also so five years you want to keep me for five years.

There was a pattern. I was escalating it and yeah. At a certain point I realized that this, yeah this isn't working.

So what, where we get to without exercises, we should note in larger organizations, especially, but even in smaller ones, sometimes what I'm about to describe isn't as clean a process.

Like you, you have HR, there's a lot of messiness to this, but to frame up that conversation, and what I've found is that we, the behavior like the one that you were describing, there's a timeline that you have in your head, by which that behavior needs to change. And it is almost never longer than 90 days.

It's not a day. There's some willingness. Hey, if I saw some progress, if I saw some willingness, if I saw a little bit of movement, I would be willing to let this play out for a little bit longer. So it's not a day, but it's not 90 days. And somewhere in there is your boundary in your head of how much longer you're willing to deal with this.

Remote accountability and the invisible 90 day boundary

In its current state, the only problem is we haven't told the person that. So the boundary, which is stage four in the accountability dial is to have that conversation. Hey, so we've been, and this is the key we've I've made some mentions about it. We've been in this conversation. We've been talking about the impact, you've been, doing your part to try to work on this a little bit, but for whatever reason where I think we are is it's not changing or it's not changing enough or fast enough, That's how I'm seeing it.

And I want to talk about what are we going to do about that right now that might happen in 90 days for a certain type of behavior? Probably not. Most of the time it should happen pretty soon, right? Like within a couple of weeks or 30 days, or we can't let a lot of time go by before we have that, what the conversation is and then the boundary.

And once, once you've used the first steps of the accountability dial and you're coming from from a coaching mindset, that's why I'm being a bit of a broken record. What you'll find is that conversation's a lot easier to have. And then you're in this, you're in a room, maybe it's a zoom room, but you're in a room with a person and you say, Hey, here's how I'm seeing it.

How are you seeing it? Oh, and then what you will get is people feel like, yeah, I know what you mean. I'm really struggling because of these, in these things. And I've really tried and, whatever it's okay. So let's put a frame around this. What would a boundary look like? What would a consequence look like for you to, that would help you.

Inverting responsibility on the employee

Make this change. I get that. It's hard. I get that you've been operating a certain way for your whole career or one year or whatever. I get that the last manager didn't make a big issue of this. And I get all of those things. What's an agreement that you and I can make so that you can change this behavior in a way that's positive.

That feels like a meaningful change for you. And that I also get what I need from your performance. What would that look like? Can you take, can you, my direct report, I'd love for you to sleep on that. Let's stop her one-on-one or let's finish our one-on-one today. We'll talk about some other stuff and let's revisit that next week.

And I'd love for you to do some thinking. I don't want to be the one to say this and this doesn't happen then blah, blah, blah. That's not how I want to lead this team. I would rather you come and say, Hey, I get it, Luke, I get it, Jonathan. I understand why you're frustrated. I understand what the problem is.

Here's my plan for how I'm going to change it. What do you think? That's the outcome that we want, right? We want them to author like people, you hear people say smart people say the employee should offer the one-on-one. Great. How often does that actually happen? Very rarely, except in the supremely motivated person.

So this is one of the ways that you get the, you have to get your, the people on your team to be offering their own destiny by asking them questions. Hey, rather than me come up with a plan how about you come up with a plan. I'll do this. I'll give you feedback. I'll we'll talk about it. It's not, it doesn't have to be perfect, but you come back with the first draft.

That's what the boundary conversation should be like.

Remote accountability under lockdown

Luke: Yeah, this tool was super useful in the context of remote teams. I'm wondering how. You, your clients, people around you, how they fared now that everything has moved to remote only with the benefit of these tools or as or if they're learning them, let's say during the lockdown period, what they're getting out of it.

Jonathan Raymond: I've noticed two primary themes that have emerged. So when we used to do everything in person I'm almost everything in person. And then when COVID hit and, whatever it was, the last February. March. And we sent him, I was like, okay what's the, what are we going to do now?

We shifted the entire business to online as we had to. What I've found was two things happened at the same time was managers and leaders who were already under enormous pressure already under enormous strain that went like TEDx. Where the level of burden, emotional and mental space that managers and leaders were being asked to hold TEDx off the charts.

And now we don't have the social benefits of physical space from that. A lot of teams were remote already, but for teams that were in person that had gone through remote, it was really difficult. The first theme was things got way harder.

And the other thing that I found was. People almost defaulted into becoming more of a coach out of necessity was they ended up in so many more conversations that were the types of conversations that I was trying to get them to have in 2018 and 2019. But in 2020, they started doing it out of necessity and they started, ended up doing a little bit of therapy, right? A little bit of life coaching, a little bit of. Ministry in some is they ended up doing a lot of the things that people like me have been telling people that they needed to do for a long time. People started doing this and they started using the accountability dial to frame and create boundaries and structure around that conversation.

Because once you open that door, it's really easy to go too far. It's really easy to find yourself making excuses for people being too understanding, being too empathic. And then it comes back on you because you're not delivering the results that you need to deliver as an editor. So that was so things got way harder.

The team one and the accountability dial really helped people create boundaries around those conversations. I'm a coach to my that's my job. My job is to facilitate the growth of my team. But it's not my job to be their therapist. It's not my job to be their marriage counselor. It's not my job to be their relocation specialist. Those are not my jobs, but I need a way to talk about that. That doesn't undermine the good relationships stuff that I'm building.

Luke: Where can people find out more?

Jonathan Raymond: We've got some links. I'm assuming it'll be refound.com/launch tomorrow. If it's not, we'll fix it in the show notes. I'm sure.

More like refound.com/managingremoteteams.

Jonathan Raymond: That has a video course on the accountability dial that people can check out. A link to good authority, which you can get everywhere. Of course, Amazon, but other places too. And a one-on-one meeting guide, we've got up there on the page, a ways to get in touch with us. So there's a bunch of free stuff. There's some other stuff in there too for people to check it out and learn more about this approach.

Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you very much.

How to setup your remote team for success

My name is Lukasz Szyrmer. If you are new here, I am the author of the book Align Remotely. I help teams thrive and achieve more together when working remotely. In this episode of the Managing Remote Teams podcast, we speak with Joe Houghton. Joe has seen the long and the short of it with respect to remote work, and now teaches and consults on the topic of how to setup your remote team.

Upon listening, You will learn:

• Why it's easy to assume everyone has the same setup, even that's rarely true
• Useful kit and tips on optimizing your WFH setup as a manager-somewhat back to basics but still practical as I picked up a thing or two
• how to be more intentional about casual interactions
• how to relax your brain in 2 minutes, if you are constantly in front of a screen
• how to combat team member loneliness, a big challenge nowadays especially for extroverts who like being in the office
• how to communicate standards of performance when everyone is remote

About Joe Houghton

Joe is a professor at University College Dublin Smurfit Graduate School of Business and a management consultant and coach with a 20-year career in international business with multi-national companies running IT and Business teams developing

• remote salesforce automation software,
• then telemetry systems and
• later managing teams all across the globe.

By the early 2000's he was a global manager with General Electric, before moving into his current academic career following an Executive MBA at Ireland's top business school. In 2005 he co-created and now directs the Master's in Project Management at University College Dublin Smurfit Graduate School of Business, Joe teaches and advises on remote team setup and learning to businesses, and charities via Houghton Consulting.

• Joe Houghton on LinkedIn
• Houghton consulting website

Transcript

Joe Houhgton, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks very much. Thanks for me. Yeah.

So can you say a few words about how you got into the topic of remote and helping people adapt to remote work?

Yeah. I've been using remote for 15, 20 years now, I do management consulting. I'm a professor at the business school in Dublin where I teach business. And one of the courses that I teach is remote working and managing virtual and distributed teams. I've done many. Contracts and stuff where I'm running teams remotely and I had 20 years in big business up until about 2000 where I ran multinational teams for large corporations in to include GE.

So I've got a lot of experience of working out of a laptop and out of a suitcase and also managing and interacting with teams. Yeah, all over the world.

So how have things changed relative to the nineties? It would seem a lot of technology would have shifted since then and how have people's attitudes towards it change?

The technology has become more accessible. If you cast your mind back to the nineties, that's 30 years now, isn't it? It's scary. We didn't have laptops like we do now. They were big luggable if you had one at all, we didn't have tablets. We didn't have mobile phones and stuff like that. Whereas these days we just don't even think about this stuff. We have a screen in our hand or to our hands, almost all the time. We had very early. Connections very slow connections. All that stuff has improved for a lot of people, but not for everybody.

I'm in Dublin, in Ireland. In, in main Dublin, you've probably got pretty good internet. You go outside of Dublin and head West, even in Ireland. And you've got people living 30 miles away from me who have a calling. Connections. And I finding it very difficult to work from home. So even though perhaps the accessibility to the technology has improved over the last 20, 30 years, it's by no means for everyone. And it's by no means ubiquitous even today. Perhaps styling we'll sort it out.

Setup for remote team performance

From what I remember when working in the nineties, I think most of it was email-based in terms of communication, out of necessity between offices. So it still was in the office, with much higher bandwidth, I think certain things become possible, which weren't before.

Indeed. I remember being in charge of teams, writing kind of Salesforce, automation, software, early distributed databases working with things like Lotus notes. Early, early kind of systems to, to share sales information or marketing information across large sales forces, for instance.

But we were hugely constrained by bandwidth and very often, People would have to leave their computer plugged in overnight for that big presentation to download at 56 K or whatever it was that we were using at the time. So yeah, it's gotten a lot easier with the speed increases.

Setup for remote team communication

So let's go here. You help a lot of people. Adapts to remote working individually. What's the most common thing that you see that they believe that's true about remote working, but actually isn't, especially when they're first getting started.

Communication fundamentally is the thing that drives the way we do business together.

Whether you're in person or whether you're working on the end of a zoom call or a WebEx or teams call or whatever the fundamentals around communication don't change, but they just get more difficult. And I think people who are forced into or find themselves having to work remotely, underestimate the challenges around communication that not being in-person.

Boring. And particularly for managers. If you're responsible for managing teams or coordinating projects, that kind of stuff, it can be very easy to overlook the added managerial load and current in terms of time, in terms of being proactive, in terms of ensuring things that you've got.

One big problem that I see a lot of people do is that they assume that because they've got a good connection and they've got the right care to, and they've got a fast laptop and everything that everybody else in the team has to. And almost always, that's not the case, particularly you've got a global team and you've got people in different parts of the world. So access to bandwidth will be different. People will have different types of kit. People will be running different versions of the software and they're not all upon same space.

So what you have to do is you have to be much more intentional. You have to do things like an equipment audit. You have to do a skills audit. You have to find the lowest common denominator between all your people, wherever they are, and play to that because you can't play to the highest common denominator.

You can't assume everybody can download stuff on 5g within 10 seconds. If somebody is on a really slow dial-up connection and some people still are.

Can you unpack communication a little bit more? Because that's a previous guest has pointed out that within communication skills, you've got everything to what, a nurse might mean when dealing with a patient to, making a presentation in front of 75 people online while sitting at McDonald's like I did in the past. What do you mean by communication?

The most important part of communication is actually seeing each other as people and not as cogs in a machine. It's very easy in business, particularly when you're remote to go to task based interactions immediately. .

What that loses is the five minutes before the meeting that you would normally have had in the office where you meet around the coffee machine. Yeah, all the water cooler and you're just having that catch-up chat and you're asking about the kids and how your weekend went and all that kind of stuff. But when we get onto zoom, we don't tend to do that. We don't tend to do that chit chat. It's two o'clock. Let's start the meeting first agenda point bang.

We don't know whether you're having a bad day. We don't know whether something's happened at home or whatever, and because we're all remote because we're not physically connected. I've not had time to see your body language before the meeting. I've not had time to see that you're down the line and you've put your game face on and you've jumped in and we missed that perhaps.

That's the first bit of communication is just be aware of each other as people and know that everybody's going through a hard time, because I don't think anybody isn't going through a hard time at the moment. And I don't care whether that's the president of the company. Or whether that's, some mid-level manager or whether that's somebody further down the food chain, everybody's going through problems. So we've got to treat each other kind of like human beings.

Then there's the stuff that you, you mentioned, that they're doing the presentation from the middle of McDonald's. You've got to adjust your delivery. To the small screen, talking to camera is really difficult if you're not used to doing it, just getting used to talking, into a screen and into a camera is very difficult for people.

Physical setup for remote team work

For instance, just the physical setup of your office. The best thing I bought last year was a $15 laptop stand. This laptop stand allows you to put a laptop up instead of sitting flat on the desk. It allows you to put it up at an angle which eases the top, where the webcam is to Island.

Just that completely transform how you come across on screen. Yeah, so because my camera's at eye level, if you look behind me, all the verticals are vertical. And the horizontals are horizontal and it doesn't look like the camera's looking at my nose or whatever, we're at the right angle. And there's no kind of cognitive dissonance in terms of what's in the background.

So you got to think about how you're coming across. I've got you on a second screen behind my laptop. Okay. And I'm talking to you to, to your image on the screen and I've got you right next to the webcam. So it looks like. I'm looking straight at you because you were right next to the webcam. So little things like this can actually cause quite a lot of difference on how you come across in how you're perceived by the other people in the meeting, by the people that you're trying to communicate with.

And that you're also trying to listen to them and you're trying to communicate to them. But if they, let me move my eyes down to the bottom of my screen. Now, if I carry on talking now, It's a completely different beast. Isn't it? In terms of the communication. Cause I'm not looking at you. I'm my eyes are down.

Whereas when I come back up and I'm looking at you again, we've got that connection. So there's a bit of training for people I think required for a lot of people. Who've moved online to just be aware of this stuff, get some decent lights, have some lighting from the front because so many people will sit themselves with a window behind them.

No lighting, it looks like that old queen video, the fishermen video where, you know, all the lighting in the wrong place and everybody's eyes look dark and horrible and all the rest of it. So coming across well on screen is something that doesn't just happen. You need to actually work at that.

And I think you need to help your people. Do that. I spend a lot of time with my university students coaching them on this kind of stuff, because at the end of that course, they're going through a job. And at the moment, all those interviews are going to be over zoom or they're going to be able to teams.

So they better be able to come over well within that first five minutes, because you only get that one chance to make that impression.

Kit suggestions for remote team setups

Yeah, absolutely. I guess the good news is that these are mostly things that you do once and then take advantage of it.

Yeah. Yeah. You only have to buy what and you only have, but you probably do need to buy a little bit of kit.

If you're going to be working remotely, don't just assume that the laptop webcams going to be good enough because they're, most of them are not. Most of them pretty awful. You need to maybe invest 5,000 books in a decent webcam. You need to buy a couple of lights. Yeah. And these ring lights that you see advertised now, they're great.

One or two of those, either side of you just giving you a bit of lighting, stuff like that can make a huge difference. And as I say, a laptop stand. As well, because that makes a huge difference. So an external keyboard so that you can be a little bit further back and a decent microphone. Yeah.

The most important thing about video is the audio. You know that you run a podcast, but most people don't get that. they don't even think about it. So buy yourself a little USB mic. It will. So below triple the quality of your audio. And again, that means that you come over more clearly, that what you've got to say is heard better and people will, take you on more credibly if they can hear you well.

And if you come over well,

Yeah. And one of the, one of the things that came across sorry the that I found super helpful as a one of these docking station things too. Cause then you could hook up multiple screens and see more at once, that's another piece of gear.

And some research done on the fact that, you tend to be more productive as a remote work. If you have a second screen that you can use, you've got more real estate, you can have more windows open at the same time. You've not got that switching cost of switching between applications on one small screen. So that's pretty, pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, cheap these days. So you don't have to to splurge out a lot. A little trick there , black Friday last year I went online and enriched Mr. Bezos a little bit more. But I spent, I think 250 $300 on a 42 inch 4k TV. Which is now mounted on the kitchen wall I'm very often down on the kitchen table, but I have that second screen.

Now I have a two inch 4k TV on the world. Now the children still don't know that's a TV. We will monitor HDMI cable into the laptop. Good to go. Yeah. And that was $250-$300. So yeah, I'm not paying through the nose for a super-duper computer monitor. The high-def TVs are great now.

So going back to communication, so one is “Treat people like people when you're connecting remotely”. Two is get decent gears so that you aren't facing kind of difficulties getting the message across. Is there anything else in particular in terms of communication that on a kind of day to day operational basis, particularly when you're with a team of people that comes to mind?

You've got to be more intentional if you're running a team or even if you're part of a team because you don't have the casual interactions.

Now there's this technology that can help these days, with Slack, we've got things like, all this presence technology that lets you know, that the other guys in the team are wrong. If you like, they've got the little green dot next to that thing, and you can ping it quick texts, or you can mention them and exchange information.

So set up something that works. And it might be WhatsApp. It might be Slack. It can be, any of these different tools, but set something up that allows multiple channels of communication. Because for most people sending a zoom link and everybody connecting at a particular time. And so it's easy now.

It's very easy to do, but it's a hoop to jump through. And what you need to do is you need to break down as many barriers to. They the general chit chat, interactive type communication as you can. So the more ways you can set people up to, to be able to interact easily the better.

I've heard of some teams now. Where, they all agree. They're all working from home between certain hours or whatever. And they'd just say we'll just open up a Google meet or we'll open up a zoom call or whatever, and we'll all just be on. And if you no in the room, you're not in the room, doesn't work.

Don't worry about it. But it just means we can all have seen each other in the screen and we can chat to each other if we need to unmute ourselves. If we can't. And that kind of stuff works quite well. Now, not everybody likes that. And you've got to respect people's home spaces and , it doesn't always work, but that kind of stuff can be quite useful.

Meeting setup and how to plan them beforehand

Do you have any tips on organizing meetings?

Another little tip that I've used is. Are you finding at the moment that some days your kind of schedule is blocked out hour by hour and you get to the end of one meeting and it's 10 o'clock and you're straight onto another meeting at 11 o'clock and then another one at 12.

O'clock another estimate. A little trick that I've started to use with some of my teams is we always stop meetings at tend to. Yeah, we start meetings on the hour and we stop meetings at tend to the hour. So we never run up to the hour that just gives everybody 10 minutes of downtime because most people don't do that.

Maybe the next meeting that they're going to be, it probably starts on the hour because most meetings tend to stuff on the hour or the half hour don't they know. And when I have a staff meeting at 17 minutes past Just think about building in those little chunks of downtime in the day.

When I schedule a meeting, we never run a meeting more than 50 minutes without a break. So if we're running, say a two hour meeting, the tend to is a break time now, so tend to up to the hour, right? Go outside, walk around.

There's a little exercise that, that I saw out of Stanford university a few months ago. And it's really simple. You just hold your finger up in front of your face. Like this. Look at something 30 yards away and look at your finger and do that five or 10 times quickly. It forces your eye muscles to move in and out. And it gets you away from that. What, one meter away from the webcam that you've, your eyes have been fixed to for the last 20 minutes, half an hour, 45 minutes or whatever.

And it's incredible how that actually just relaxes your head. During a break. So I put that in, when the coffee cup comes up from break or whatever, I just go and do the, I exercise as well, walk outside for a minute little things, but these things make a difference.

And then if you can schedule a few minutes at the beginning of the meeting before you start the meeting, just to do catch up. Just to say to her, Hey, how is everything, how are you doing? Yeah. And tell everybody we're going to spend the first 10 minutes of each meeting, just doing catch up, just bring you a cup of tea or your cup of coffee or whatever it is. And we'll just tell each other how things are going. No, no work discussion. That's for a little while longer you got to build this stuff in now. Cause it does happen and you have to be much more intentional. With your remote teams and your remote people for this stuff.

So speaking of promote teams, you were saying that you teach about management and virtual team management. From a teamwork perspective, what are the differences between in-person versus remote? Let's say in the literature and the academic literature.

It's funny. The academic literature doesn't specifically differentiate a lot of the team bonding stuff and a lot of the tin communication stuff is the same.

It's just more difficult. Okay. The only kind of classic definitions of a virtual team are that you are separated by distance and you're communicating electronically. And that's it, so that's most of us, most of the time, these days, isn't it. But. It's the fact that there's more hoops to jump through and the communication isn't quite as effective.

On a zoom call, as it is in-person because you do lose the body language. You do lose the verbal cues that you just pick up better. Somehow when that person's in the room and you're listening to them, even though our cameras are pretty good these days, the microphones and the speakers are pretty good.

You don't actually get quite the same amount of information back. So you've got to be more intentional. You've got to listen harder. Don't always feel you've got to come back with an answer when people are talking sometimes just. You don't have to come back with an answer. You don't have to give them anything, but you just have to let them share. And really think about what they're saying and then reflect back. What you've just heard. This is a really effective technique in remote working.

Okay. So you said something and I say okay. Can I just tell you what I think you just said and then you tell them back in your own words. And that's called reflection, but what it does is it .Confirms understanding. Cause they're hearing back. What you thought you'd heard. There's now a confirmation that what they just told you was heard and understood.

Now that's really important because remote workers very often feel isolated. They very often feel unheard. They very often feel unseen. Feeling positively heard is a really important skill for everybody who is working remotely to develop.

It keeps people motivated and it keeps people feeling that they're part of the team rather than just this person, out wherever they are in the world that we're just using to get a job done.

Is there anything that you see that related to working from home that people should start doing that they aren't, or that they aren't doing enough.

Okay. As I say, I'm in Dublin, in Ireland, yesterday the Irish government released the new legislation about disconnecting. So now in Ireland it's enshrined in law now that you're allowed to disconnect that you were allowed not to be on all the time.

And I think this is important. And I think increasingly we're seeing it in, in, in different countries around the world. Because it's a problem. I'm just as bad as everybody else. Yeah. I live in my laptop but it's what I've started to do now. Sundays, for instance, Okay. Unless there's just some crazy fire going on that, has to be dealt with.

I don't open the laptop on a Sunday because the drawer is too much. Isn't it? It's almost like a drug, isn't it? We're almost addicted to our devices now. I don't open my laptop. I don't do emails. I don't. Anything, I don't process any videos. I try not to do zoom calls. Nothing, a laptop free day.

Now, not everybody can do that, but getting to a point in the evening, seven o'clock, eight o'clock, whatever it is, close the laptop. Have dinner without a screen setup for remote work. Yeah. Talk to the wife, children, and or the husband or whoever you've got it around or whatever. So the disconnection thing is important.

I think that's really important.

Another thing that a lot of people perhaps haven't done on, and again, it depends on your home situation, but if you can find a space at home to make the work space. And it could just be a desk under the stairs. Okay. But if you can find a place that you can make the work space, try and just work in that one place.

And then when you step away from that, your home is your down space, because what we're doing is we're losing that disconnect. When you go to the office is work and home is home. But we've lost that to a large extent, recently. And it's very easy to lose that when you become a remote worker, if you sit on your bed or you sit on the sofa with your laptop.

Then your bedroom shouldn't be. A space where you've got work in your head, your bedroom should be a safe space to relax and to sleep. And the same with you, sofa.

I never take the laptop in the lounge. So when I walk into the lounge, I'm not working, I'm going to be playing with the kids over, maybe watch a bit of TV or whatever. So try and create some kind of separation within your home environment between a workspace and a non-work space.

Is there anything that you see that you think people should stop doing that it's really unproductive or not good for them or something else?

Give yourself breaks. I find at home, I can sit down at eight o'clock in the morning and the next time I get up, it's one o'clock and I've done four or five straight hours staring at a screen, working solid all the rest of it. You're less productive than you think when you do think. I'm working really hard.

I'm working. I'm really busy. Yeah. This is fantastic. I've just done five solid hours. Yeah. Who are you fooling? You've done five solid hours and you wrecked and your hands are act. And probably those last two hours were pretty unproductive.

So set an alarm every hour. Yeah. And just give yourself five minutes. Walk away, walk outside. Breathe. Yeah. Do your eye exercises , twice a day, take half an hour and walk around the park or walk around the block. Okay. Get a little bit of exercise. People are not doing this. Not everybody is doing this. And this is so simple. And there's loads of research to back all this stuff up about, the need for regular short EXOS and you only need 10 or 15 minutes.

If you've got one of these watches on it, it beeps at you doesn't it. And it says, get up and walk around, get your next standout or in, and stuff like that. You need eight more minutes to get your move goal and all the rest of it. Listen to these things. Cause they're actually those algorithms are quite clever.

And it's nice, they've gamified it. So do get exercise and do, give yourself breaks. That's why, the 10 to the hour thing works really well. Encourage your people to just give themselves as little bits of downtime and set the working expectations for your teams. We have to allow people to set these schedules because they're now sitting at home. And the schedules don't set themselves automatically by having to commute to work and then come home. So that there's still has to be more proactively managed. I think. Bye. Bye everybody.

I was talking with a friend about the standards that you set as a team lead of when you send emails to the team for example or how you communicate. There is a certain element of showing an example that. At least implicitly people are going to expect to follow. What are other specific things, that leaders can do themselves to help model the right approach to their team?

I think that's a great question. And the question is almost the answer, isn't it?

So you have to model the behaviors that you're looking for your people to, to take. So if you don't want people bugging you as a manager at 12 at night or whatever, don't be sending emails to them at 12 at night saying, is that presentation ready? I'll need to do it in the morning.

Okay. Once you people know what's expected of them, and they know that you've got these kinds of breaks, Allowed, if you like then you stick to those as well, because if you're sending emails outside those times, that's no good.

A very simple little thing is adding something to the bottom of your email. So it says, you may have received this email outside of normal working hours, however, Yeah. I don't expect you to answer it outside of normal working hours. Feel free to leave it until the morning or after the weekend or whatever. Because again, when we're working in different times zones, I might be sending it in my working hours and it comes into your email in the middle of the night.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's very common when we're working across multiple times and instances. Having something like that in your email and getting all the team to, to use that type of thing again, it's just a little visual signal, isn't it? That that things are okay.

How do you think things will look a few years out in terms of the worlds of work and teamwork and we're, where are we going in your opinion?

Anybody who doesn't have to have hands-on in a physical location. I think we'll be in a hybrid mode going forward, but that's going to need all kinds of changes. That's gonna need legislative changes. That's going to impinge on things like insurance. We've got a tsunami of insurance claims coming

because to be honest, the last year has been this honeymoon period. I think where everybody has said, you've got to work from home and don't come into the office. So many companies haven't done anything about. Sending proper chairs home to people or getting them the right equipment.

And I think there's going to be, there's going to be some interesting times ahead around all that stuff. Interesting. Yeah, I never thought about that.

So where's the best place for people to reach out and find out a bit more about the consulting they do?

Consulting: https://www.houghton.consulting is the website.

I do a blog as well at substack.com. And I quite regularly put articles on there about, working from home and optimizing , remote working and stuff like that.

And yeah I enjoy doing, mentoring and training both in-person where that's appropriate, but increasingly remotely via zoom now. So yeah, anybody's interested and I can help feel free to reach out and give me a shout.

Great. Thanks a lot.

How to start large scale change initiatives

This is part 2 of the interview with Mike Burrows of Agendashift fame. In this episode we go into two of Mike’s tools which he uses to kick off larger scale change in organizations. You will discover two really practical change management tools that bypass employee's natural resistance to change:

• how to organize and prioritize organizational learning when implementing big changes
• how to discover a lot of potential outcomes your company can pursue together with everyone in the company

About Mike Burrows

Agendashift founder Mike Burrows is the author of Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition March 2021), Right to Left: The digital leader's guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020), and the Lean-Agile classic Kanban from the Inside (2104). Mike is recognised for his pioneering work in Lean, Agile, and Kanban and for his advocacy for participatory and outcome-oriented approaches to change, transformation, and strategy. Past leadership roles include global development manager and Executive Director at a top tier investment bank, CTO for an energy risk management startup, and interim delivery manager on two of the UK Government Digital Services ‘exemplar’ projects.

• agendashift.com/book redirects to the main page for the 2nd edition.
• Most other things would be under agendashift.com/resources.
• Mike Burrows on LinkedIn

Transcript

Two things I wanted to ask about. In terms of easy ways for people to get started. So one thing that you've come up with that you've already mentioned change band. So what is it and how would you do it?

Change ban? It's a, at one level, it's a Kanban simulation game. No way to, to teach people how Kanban works and it's based on feature band and which is. I forget when I came up with feature and feature band was the first thing I opened sourced, and never regretted open sourcing it. And I went and sourced a lot of my stuff ever since.

And feature ban. It's very clear that you're modeling a development process, a for Columbo design four or five column for design, and, the stages typically end up looking design build, whatever. And it's fine. And actually as a teaching tool in the technology space, it's been very popular.

It's used all over the world and you can teach metrics and things like that with it as well. The one of the later stages of playing the game and the beauty of it is it starts simple. Although it's clear that it doesn't work very well. And then we make, an intervention or two, and suddenly things start to work a lot with certainly work flows a lot more smoothly.

And more importantly, in fact the players of the game find that they collaborate a lot more, and the big takeaway feature that both feature ban and change ban is the relationship between work and progress and collaboration. And it's very, it's a very pleasant surprise. Is it instead of when you do something lean based, the temptation is to think that, the only learning point is that when we control our work in progress, then the system is going to perform more productively and faster, and the worst of it.

But actually the relationships in work in progress and collaboration is a wonderful learning now. I wanted to get away from it being modeling, a development process, and I followed Jeff Anderson's lead and I, and this was years ago now you're reading around in the lean startup literature.

And in various lean startup books, you'll find Kanban bowls that are built on valuable, feasible, usable, and the feature band board design the the column names aren't valuable, feasible, usable, but their tuned map, they do map to those. And that there's some prescription descriptions and the on the board and in the deck that explains the the relationship and the great thing about that, is it valuable? Is it feasible? Can we agree, an acceptable way forward? Is it sticking music? Is it working for people? Is it delivering the benefit that we expected? That sounds a bit less like a drug development process, and we found that people from outside development respond to it a lot better than they do to a, to feature that.

And we've simplified a bit, made it a bit more fun. We've abandoned the metrics module and that we let the Kanban trainers teach that in, with feature panels or whatever. And we're focused very much in States on what a learning system looks like. We actually get points.

Experiments can everything in the changement system as an experiment and it can succeed or it can be rejected or use rejected rather than failed. We treat rejection as an active and positive step. It's very artificial it's, but it's just a game, every time we complete my item, we get the chance to choose an item to reject.

So complete an item or a rejection item. And you get points, you get as many points for rejected items as you do for accepted items and the the scoring system actually Rewards, an even spread of acceptances and rejections a reward for maximum learning and making sure that every stage of the process is contributing to learning as well. And we don't want to get into too much technical detail though.

So it's a set at one level it's simple and fun way of learning Kanban and get in that space main takeaway of, when your limit your work in progress, then there will be more collaboration. And it's just less than you need to come down in scrum teams know this as well. Scrum team should know this as well.

And at another level, it's teaching you about experimentation hypotheses lean startup, thinking about how we reflect on our learning and realizing that you've probably learned a lot more from the items that you rejected than the ones that succeeded.

And we, you start to introduce, what our hypothesis looks like, how do you frame your hypothesis so that your guaranteed, however, it ends up to generate some learning. And what's interesting about where in the process that it failed and so on, what on earth were we thinking when we prioritize this piece in the first place and it got this far, and then we rejected them. And those are, that's a question we don't ask ourselves often enough. And we don't typically have a forum for asking that question as directly as that and where the insight from answering that question is likely to go anywhere useful. So that's an interesting question to walk an organization design as well.

So these are all topics that are very much about the agenda. Ships is very interested in. So all that sort of conversational stuff, outcomes, organized, generating outcomes organizing. Then that's the first three chapters. The last three chapters is much more about how do we organize ourselves so that we are continuously learning, so that we're adaptive. How do we frame our work? How can we, find solutions in a creative, innovative way? And, finishing with the, the, the serious organizational stuff, the viable system, stuff that to do deliberately adaptive organization, wholehearted organization, and so on.

And tying that to, well-tested models, viable system models. I said been around for decades tying it to what's been happening at the organization development space in the time that agile has been around has undergone a revolution of its own.

Change management in the nineties was, choose a solution, sell it, roll it out, leave a comment, and then choose new solution deliberately noxious about it. But whole system consulting process or core process consulting. It doesn't mean, process management, the process of the change process and the conversations that need to happen. And then more recently dialogic organization development, generative organization development. And in fact, there's a model called the generative change model and by Marshack and Bush. So it's coming from the academic organization development space and the model maps almost one-to-one with a gender shift. It's amazing. Almost fell off my chair when I read the dialogic ID book. And and again, when I read the generative change. Book it's a real paradigm shift. This has happened in the ODI space, that has quite a lot of parallels with the paradigm shift that happened in the technology space with that joint. And there's a lot that they can learn from each other.

And I just love connecting to these different models and integrating them and seeing what we can reconcile them and seeing what we can learn in the process. And and so on.

Another tool that you mentioned is the 15 minute photo since it's 15 minutes, that sounds like a good place to start for people. What is it and would people go about doing that?

The name is from obstacles to outcomes. That's the photo bits in 15 minutes. So it's quick. Our description of it is our clean language inspired coaching game. So we are teaching people how to have some coaching conversations using the clean language questions, and the really cool thing about it is not me standing at the front, asking the questions, it's me organizing people in table groups or breakout rooms. And then either having informal conversations as a whole group. And anyone can also ask a question that anyone can answer type conversation.

And then the second time round, a more intense version where we're rotating the one-to-one conversations around, around the table. So everyone gets a turn as being the coach. Everyone gets a turn that being the clients, everyone gets a turn at being described, Whiting, all the outcomes down. Everyone gets a term turn at being the observer, the safety officer or the timekeeper, and so on all the things that observers to. And it's based on a quite small subset of the overall set of clean language questions.

So clean language, I should say. It comes from the therapy world as a number of coaching tools. And there are different ways that you can use it. And use it in a way that's appropriate to the contract that you have with the people that you're working with. I'm very clear, I'm not the therapist.

I want to design 15 minute votes, so it's not therapy, it's, how do we get, how would we take our list of obstacles and turn that, in a way that has clear business value, turn that into a list of outcomes that we can then organize. And by construction, those outcomes are related to each other. Interestingly, so basically in a, given an obstacle, what would you like to have happen? And that turns it into a, into an outcome. Nine times out of 10, you can always ask it twice. If you don't get an outcome, you can clarify obstacles or you can clarify outcomes with what kind of, if you say, if your obstacle was you said rubbish stand-ups so like what kind of rubbish or what kind of stand-ups what could terrify that's a bit more and probably unnecessary in that case.

And then what would you like to have happen? You say something about that you would want what kind of to clarify just those three questions actually. Oh, and once to have what have mentioned that, then what happens? So you go within what happens, takes you from outcome to outcome and with what would you want to have happen? What kind of, and then what happens? Just three questions. They do 90% of the work in 15 minute folks.

So I, but there are some others now what's happening when. What happens before? Where does that come from? And so on. And that's some rules you use the question was on the card verbatim. Most of the questions have an X in them, which are for the client's own words.

And when better stand ups, then what happens, that's just a silly example. What kind of better standards, where do those better stand-ups come from? What happens before better? Stand-ups is there anything else about better stand ups? And what's forcing the coach to do is to actively listen.

And the more subtle thing about clean language is that you're actually helping the client to build a model. No, you're not saying when you said X, did you mean Y and sort of them losing their train of thought, or have you thought of Zed again then losing their train of thought, instead of you are going words, they're going with them or going with their words and helping them build up a picture that perhaps they've never built up before.

It's really funny then what happens? It's such an easy question to ask. It's only three words and the longer version and when whatever it was, you said, then what happens is a few more words. We're still not many words, and what's more, the client knows it's coming and even so it can take them as a surprising amount of time to answer.

And that's very revealing when, so often we're heads down doing our work, and forgetting why we're doing it. And forgetting about, what it'll do for our customers when we've delivered it and what they will then be able to do. And so on. And "then what happens?" Questions. It's all about, consequences. And so much of it, isn't about what makes the work meaningful.

every time I see people think hard about the, "then what happens" question. We give ourselves so little time for thinking about why we do what we do. And that's part of the power of the game. Yeah it's a great thing.

Yeah. So agenda shift the new version that's coming out next month?

hopefully. So by the time this goes out, I hope hopefully it will be out in the UK. It's actually ordered all the already available for pre-order. The print version the Kindle version suffered a minor delay, but I'm hoping that by a launch date of the 29th or thereabouts, certainly by the end of March, I'm hoping that it's gonna be available. In print and Kindle versions, and it'd be going outside on other ebook platforms as well. And so whether it will be out to more platforms by the end of March, I am not 100% sure, but certainly be available in some forms. And in that timeframe,

Okay, great. We'll definitely leave a link in the notes. And and also I guess the main place for all the resources is the gender shift.com

or I'm going to agendashift.com/resources specifically for the, that comment. It's pretty easy to find the resources page. So you can find some of the things that we talked about, the 15 minute FOTO, all of the resources around that our feature ban and change ban the outside the strategy review and so on.

You'll find that so very easily. There's a cheat sheet as well, actually just published another couple of weeks ago that helps bring together all that sort of 15 minute FOTO stuff and the strategy review stuff. And it will it's a new way of listening guide to the first couple of chapters, at least to the book as well.

Yeah, that sounds great. Thank you very much.

How to set effective boundaries when managing remotely

My name is Lukasz Szyrmer. If you are new here, I am the author of the book Align Remotely. I help teams thrive and achieve more together when working remotely. In this episode of the Managing Remote Teams podcast, we speak with Remote work influencer and PeopleOps expert Ali Greene. Ali is keen on equity in labor markets as well as making everyone’s life at work better through self-awareness. Setting effective boundaries is a critical skillg. She’s also the coauthor of an upcoming book on the subject.

Upon listening, you will discover:

• why you have to help people unlearn behaviors that were quite common in an office
• where effective boundaries come from and how to set them
• practical tips and tools to work more effectively with remote teams

About Ali Greene

After four years of full-time travel as a digital nomad, and almost 40 countries visited, Ali decided to retire from full-time traveling (for now) and from DuckDuckGo where she was the Director of People Operations right before the pandemic and the "remote work" shift took the world by storm. Ali is now currently based in Spain. She is the Founder of cohana.io. She also works with Oyster, an HR platform for globally-distributed companies, as the Head of Culture and Community. Ali is a frequent speaker and podcast guest, chatting about topics near and dear to her heart: remote work, community building and organizational psychology. Ali has also recently been featured as a "Remote Expert and Influencer to Watch". She is the co-author of the upcoming book Remote Works.

• cohana.io
• remoteworksbook.com
• oysterhr.com
• duckduckgo.com

Takeaways

The insight that healthy and effective boundaries start from your own self-awareness, as it helps each team member to do the same. Effective boundaries actually start from your own self-awareness as a leader. Because you doing so helps each team member to do the same. It opens up the discussion. To set up a healthy arrangement for everyone.

Modeling the right behavior, I think is quite powerful.

Transcript

Allie Green, welcome to the podcast. Could you say, could you say a few words about yourself and how you got into remote as a topic?

Yeah, so I have been working remotely. This is funny. I just looked at the. Exact date a few days ago, cause I saw a post on LinkedIn.

That was a poll of how many years have you worked remotely? And it was six years ago. During the summertime I was living in New York city doing an hour commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan to sit on my computer all day and. I am not a city person. And I was really quite unhappy living in the city. And I had questioned for a long time.

Why companies, especially companies that dealt with the internet and technology and knowledge workers, weren't making things more flexible and fun and innovative with how you're working when they're making such fun and innovative products. So I ended up. Super cliche. I ended up leaving that job.

Ali’s delve into the remote work world

I backpacked around South America. I went to Machu Picchu. I had. A lot of hiking and reflecting and thinking about what I wanted to be doing with my life. And I was lucky and fortunate at that time to be able to stay close with the company I was working with and ended up consulting with them on human resources.

And through that consulting experience, I really learned about this world of remote work because their office was still very much in Manhattan and I was responding to emails and South America. I then went and visited my family and. Michigan and did virtual learning and development sessions and workshops with them.

I moved to Philadelphia and I was able to do most of my work completely online and every so often would pop in. To the office because it was fun. And I wanted to build the relationships with people.

And so thinking about that experience six years ago and where it's taken me so far has been really interesting because through these six years I've had experience managing remote teams.

I helped grow. The people ops team from scratch at my former company, duck deco while traveling the world full time. And so not only working remotely, but what does it feel like to work remotely in a country where you don't speak the language and don't know how to properly cross the street, which was scary when I first moved to Vietnam and people just would fly at you and their motorcycles.

And so it was really a wild experience. The four years I was at DuckDuckGo, I became. Just so passionate about how remote work can change lives. And it definitely changed my life in terms of the fact that I'm now living in Spain, but there's so much social impact there as well.

And so when I made the decision to leave duck duck go a few weeks before the pandemic strike last year, I had no idea what things were going to turn into and how many people were going to have to be thrown into this world of remote work. Coming from a place of so much fear because of everything that's going on in the world, instead of the excitement that I faced when I started working remotely.

And so now I really split my time in two ways. One is I'm the head of culture and community at a company called oyster. And their mission is to really help make companies be able to hire, pay, provide benefits to people all over the world and make it really. Easy and do it in a matter of days instead of weeks or months. And so I think it's really incredible just to be able to really close the talent gap worldwide and make sure it really. Awesome. Intelligent people are getting very challenging, exciting jobs.

And then it also had a company called Cohana. And my mission there is to just educate and advocate for remote work and what that can look like. So having opportunities like this is really exciting for that. And through that company, I am currently writing a book with a coauthor who lives in Boston and it's meant to be for. The everyday team that's working remotely and be a fun, fresh kind of honest look at what you can do to make that remote experience work better for everybody.

Ali’s remote experience

Lots to dig into there. Just to quickly check. So duck taco is, are they fully remote or no?

So Dr. Goh has been fully remote from the very beginning and they do have a small office. It's quite funny. It's in this little town outside of Philadelphia. And at any given time, it's more like a coworking space. And so people that are local that might want to just get a change of scenery would pop in and out.

Anytime that I visited the office during my time being there, there'd be like equal number of humans and dogs. So there's always go to the office. But when I was Working at duct deco, I lived and traveled to Asia, South America, Europe, Canada, where we had employees living, but also I traveled as a digital nomad and worked from all of those places.

And so it was remote in terms of the culture, how things got done, how people looked at the work there just happened to also be. An office with a very cute duck. And it looked like a castle. Yeah, no, I actually grew up in Philly, so yeah, I never actually met a Gabriel or that kind of thing, but I kinda know that no, the area Philly has a special place in my heart.

I lived there for a year. It was a great year and I love going back. My family's from the area. Whenever I get home sick for the U S I think of Philadelphia.

What is PeopleOps

Just to clarify terms, so what exactly do you mean by people ops?

Yeah. So this is a fun question. I think that the people ops terminology has. Had a little bit of a facelift and it's evolved throughout the years. And so I very much look at people operations from a wider perspective than maybe some people were, I think, through not just traditional human resources.

So things like, entrance checklist, onboarding, hiring benefits, but also any strategic decision, a company's making anything that they're going to start to then operationalize. How are they? Going to roll out that process, those frameworks and teach employees at accompany, how to work effectively with each other and how to manage that change and how to understand what the standard operating behaviors of a company are.

Which is a term I like to use to describe just what are the formal and informal norms. How do people work really well together and things of that nature.

I guess that lens is quite useful, particularly in the context of a pandemic starting. So what have you seen in terms of, the companies that you've spoken with, or, how they've dealt with the changes that were happening quite rapidly.

I think the biggest. Area that was struggling for people, leaders of teams, people, operations was not knowing how long this would last and the sheer impact it would have on everybody's day-to-day life. And so if you think back to last year, I know for myself, I was in France when they announced the lockdown and it was supposed to be two weeks.

And I think any company that. Is looking at a situation where it might just be a two week situation can say okay, how do I approach my employees working from home for two days? What do they need to take from the office to be productive and successful? What happens if just some people take that time off and use their holidays, or if they don't have access to everything they need, can they still get most of their job done?

And. Finish up certain projects when they returned to office. And I think this was really unique and industries like the legal field, where a lot of stuff is still being printed out and facts and not everyone was going to take like a fax machine home with them. And so like most immediately I think just that initial shock of okay, we can prepare for two weeks, but I don't think anybody knew to prepare for a year.

And so from that perspective, Looking through the lens of tech and security, I think was surprising to most people because long-term, how do you make sure that you're teaching your team how to be secure and use VPNs and have policies around that? And then I think from a behavioral standpoint, it was, Oh, we can just recreate what we do in the office, because this is a very temporary thing.

And it hasn't been temporary because we're now a year into it. And so somewhere. In this past year, I think that smart leaders realized it's not temporary and they were treating it like a temporary situation and they want to just start to learn and educate themselves around how to evolve, to make remote working, be more sustainable for their company.

Return to the office, effective boundaries, and culture

And so I think that's what we're seeing today. Is a lot of leaders there. They're talking about what does a return to an office look like? What is the goal of the office? If we go back there and if we don't go back, what do we want the remote lived experience for our team to be? Because it likely shouldn't be what it was in March, April, may of 2020.

So in terms of the cultural changes in the way things work in teams. How have these managers have caught on that? It's more of a longer term thing. what changes they introduced that you've heard of, or that you've come across.

Yeah. So one interesting project that I worked on last year for a client of mine was looking at their harassment and code of conduct policy. And that might not be interesting for most people. I am, a little bit of an HR geek after all, but what was interesting about this policy is so much of it was written to be about what happens at after work events and in person, and so questioning the what is the scope of this going to be if employees choose to get together? Outside of what is working hours? Are you going to be the type of remote company that has standard working hours or core working hours or a work whenever, wherever policy and depending on your answer to that, what if people get on a zoom call and are just, hanging out and they work together and somebody says something that offends someone else, how does a manager step in and know how to handle that situation?

So I think that's a really A really interesting thing to think about in terms of. Before you even get there, like that's the worst case scenario is that something's happening. That's going to go against the code of conduct, but in writing a code of conduct, you learn, this is what we want to promote as healthy, good behavior for our company.

And now how do managers lead by example, maybe they need to learn a little bit more about, using Slack and talking about talking in Slack in a way that's both professional and fun. So people can feel like vulnerable to just be authentic and be themselves and have conversations and carry on getting to know their coworkers, which is a huge benefit for a lot of people at work. And so that was quite an interesting project that I worked on, where I had the lens of a company that felt very confident in the office. And then didn't know what scope to consider when moving remotely.

it sounds analogous to my whole rabbit hole of searching, what productivity means. In an office it's somehow. Was more obvious, but as soon as you get everyone remote and only remote, then it's suddenly, there's all of these things, which you assume were true, which actually aren't.

Yeah, I think about it in the way that remote is a magnifying glass and anything that the company has been doing becomes more obvious in a remote setting.

So if they're very good at developing KPIs and goals, It's obvious when someone's reaching those goals, even if they're not in an office and I've been advocating for remote work while before the pandemic hit. And I remember two or three years ago, having conversations about remote work and how amazing remote work is, and people would always push back to me.

Then the first question I would always get asked by people is if you're a manager managing a remote team, how do you know if they're working? It just made me laugh and also get frustrated at the same time. Cause I was like if I was a manager and an office, how do you truly know if your employees are working?

They might be sitting at their desk behind a computer, but they could be online shopping, like taking a. A news article and like catching up on information, trying to buy a plane ticket for their vacation. Cause they're so frustrated at work. Like you see them typing and you see their face, but those things don't equal productivity.

Self awareness and effective boundaries

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. One of, one of your insights that you've had being in this space for awhile, while is the importance of leader self-awareness in a remote context. Why is that so important in your opinion?

Yeah. So this is a big focal point of the book that I'm working on and we're starting with self-awareness because everything stems from that.

And it's this idea of know thyself and. Once you learn more about yourself as a leader, you'll be able to do a few things. One you'll be able to better communicate that. And in doing so, you're leading by example for your employees to have self-awareness and share things that they might need in order to work more efficiently or effectively.

An example of that is, do you know when you're most productive during the day? And if you don't know that about yourself, how can you help your team? Especially if they're transitioning to remote work for the first time, understand what activities, give them energy, what activities drain energy and how they should structure their day since they don't physically need to be in an office from nine to five anymore.

And so having self-awareness can help lead by example, it can help build trust and grow relationships. And I think it also identifies. Leaders gaps. And so it can help even with things like hiring, like what type of person do you need on your team in order to. Support or fill in any holes that you might have in terms of behaviors that, that the leader has to be successful.

So something like that might look like if you're a leader and you're quite introverted, and now you're working remotely with your team, are you going to feel confident and comfortable? Bringing them together to have a space that's a shared virtual space for people to get to know each other as a means to build trust and build a relationship.

If you're not, is there somebody that you can hire on your team that loves that stuff and really wants to champion bringing people together and be more of the cultural leader within the team. And so when I think of manager self-awareness, I really also break down managers by types so they can start to understand like what their persona is.

Defining effective boundaries

What about the role of self-awareness and defining effective boundaries for yourself and with the team? How does that play out?

I love that question. I love boundaries also. This is something I talk about quite often. I think some of the core components of working successfully remotely are clear expectations and boundary setting.

And so I think boundary setting comes after words. You really need in order to create clear expectations? This was a mistake I made when I was a manager for the first time I remember having. In intern on my team. And I would give that intern in assignments and, I said, okay, this needs to be back to me by Friday it's Tuesday today.

And this is what information it should have. And then I would get upset because on Wednesday, I didn't know how far along this person was in the process. I assumed that. That person would get the project back earlier than the deadline, not on the deadline. And then I realized that's not fair. And that's an expectation that I subconsciously had and never shared with somebody else.

And so in that experience, I learned my own self-awareness and was able to put down effective boundaries with myself that if I give someone a deadline, I respect that deadline. And if I mean something different than I need to set new expectations and respect that. And so I think what. That means for self-awareness self-awareness will help you create expectations.

Once expectations are created, then you can draw a line in terms of boundaries and understand what that looks like where's the limit. And then you can have a clear idea of when that's being broken or not broken. And also self-awareness helps with understanding what to do if a boundary is being tested and how you want to handle that conflict.

Okay. And where you're flexible and where you're not flexible.

Effective boundaries and remote flexibility

So do you have an example of that?

Time zones? I think time zones is going to be huge for companies that choose to not just be remote friendly, but also fully distributed and really respecting and understanding. If people have things going on in their life where they cannot work in the evenings even if it's daytime for the majority of their team and like, how do you handle that situation?

And as a manager, what norms are you going to create on your team to respect someone's boundary of. I can't physically work at this hour or attend a meeting. Nothing's going to stick in my brain. I'm going to be tired. It's going to ruin my next day in terms of my mental health and my physical health and understanding what that means for work and drawing healthy, clear and effective boundaries on when people can turn off for the day and pick up the next day.

Yeah. Yeah. What I found that was interesting was that when when I was running a pretty distributed team, I think in the people who are more in Asia, they were used to in those offices or in their locations, they were used to working in the evening because everyone there works in the evening almost.

I don't know, to what extent it was just the office or literally pretty much the whole the whole industry. Just because people are used to it. Does that mean that it's right?

Yeah, exactly. That's true. That's absolutely true. Yeah. Then conversely, like with people working in Latin America I feel bad asking them to get up, and I know before the sun is up in this particular case, if it's close to the equator it's always 6:00 AM anyway. Maybe I'm just justifying myself into it. What do you think this, but

I think this is where awareness comes into play. So I learned And I was lucky enough to travel around the world for four and a half years. And so I learned this because I was thrown into different times zones that I am solidly an afternoon person. I don't function well and want to get up and do work right away.

Effective boundaries that increase productivity

I feel my best if I can get up and do some sort of physical activity to get my blood pumping, to get it out of the way, whatever. That's my strong suit. I also am a daytime social person. So during the day I like to meet with friends for coffee. I get my energy from being out and about in the daytime.

And I don't mind working later into the evening because after I feel that personal sense of reward, I'm super excited to jump into my work. So today, for example I woke up, I did yoga. I went for a very long walk. I think I hit my 10,000 steps. I had a picnic lunch with a friend and then I came home and I started to do a little bit of work.

And now we're chatting. And that was true of my routine anywhere in the world that I personally was. So even when I went back to the U S even though, then all of the stakeholders and my teammates might be there, I still wanted to start working around two or 3:00 PM and work later into the evening.

Because I knew that was what was going to produce the highest quality work. So where I'm going with the story. And besides that, being a daytime person can be fun is that this is where self-awareness comes in. And so if that's true about yourself and you can share that with your team and then ask your team questions.

Like when do you feel like you have the most energy to sit and not do uninterrupted work? When do you like. To be the most engaged in conversations. How many conversations can you have back to back before you feel like you're drained or getting zoom fatigue? And if you can start asking yourself and asking others, these questions, you can start to understand what works best for some people, and you don't have to make assumptions that certain people prefer working in the day, or don't mind getting up early or find staying late because it's.

Culturally like more acceptable in the country they're working from. And from there, there's this idea that I love instead of like business hours for meetings and people at ham at home, can't see me doing that. Like air quote thing. You change it from business hour meetings or the majority not inconvenienced is another method that I see a lot of remote companies go to an idea that I like to call like the most respectful meeting time.

And if you think about that, it's like, when is everybody most productive? Who are the key decision makers on this meeting? Let's prioritize a time that works for them. And maybe it means someone in the U S is waking up for a 7:30 AM call and that's 7:30 PM in Asia. Those aren't really normal. Business working hours or meeting hours for either person, but maybe both of them are happy to talk at that time.

And so it works.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the most complicated was being in Europe, trying to organize a call with both the U S and Asia at the same time. Yeah, personal preferences start to become the question. You have to get really good at asynchronous communication.

Effective work-life boundaries

Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Going back to the topic of boundaries, what about work-life boundaries from a, from an individual and a team perspective? How have you seen people navigate that? Or now during the pandemic, what's what seems to be working or not working in that area?

I feel for people that have kids home during this pandemic, I think that's been something that even the most seasoned leader in people, ops person is still struggling with to figure out.

And I think. Even though it's been a year still understanding that is an ongoing challenge and we're working in the midst of circumstances that are not normal and haven't been normal for a long time. And to maybe change the expectations accordingly first and foremost, I think is hugely important when it comes to work-life boundaries.

You can't control if you're on. A zoom call and your child fell down the steps and you have to go take care of them. And so what I do love about this is this idea of having empathy again in the workplace and really thinking about introducing like your whole life into your work and through that vulnerability, having your team understand that sometimes things are going to have to take priority.

That is not work-related. And. Having that team camaraderie to have people pick up the Slack maybe one day, because the next day they're going to need some time away from work as well. This might sound idealistic, but I really do love seeing that in teams. I've seen companies that have Slack channels for like parents to chat and to like share resources and things like that.

Other ways in terms of work, life boundaries And that I think are great, especially during the pandemic is using your voice and Slack to carve out intentionally your boundaries. And so something that people do at oyster is when they start their day, they'll say, Hey and Slack, and share a gift or a picture or something that's been like, on their mind to start off their day, their cup of coffee, whatnot.

And at the end of the day Sign off. So people know Hey, I'm not here today. That might work for some companies that might not work for other ways that I've seen happen is setting expectations every Monday of what. Your week looks like, and when you're available to do heads down work, and then on Friday, revisit those points and every week just say Hey, today, Monday, Tuesday, I'm available from this time to this time, Wednesday, Thursday, this and this.

And people can just pin that note wherever they're communicating and go back and see when people are available. Blocking calendars as well as a way to set boundaries. I. Was it for it's so weird. Sometimes as someone who's so deeply involved in tech, the tech that I've only started using during the pandemic.

And one of them is like Calendly. I love Calendly. And I very much block off times. Not because I'm not available, but because I know I'm not going to want calls. And I also, you can limit by type how many calls you have a day. So you can say Oh, virtual coffee, Versus internal calls versus external calls and limit it to two or three a day.

And I think that's a perfect example of using a tool to not only make something easier, like scheduling a meeting, but also to protect your boundaries.

Yeah. Yeah. I think one thing that works we use something called Microsoft planner to indicate, so it and I think some people, some teams also use outlooks at a separate shared calendar to, to do that.

And that kind of seemed to help a lot, but yeah, it's tough. It's not easy.

Ali’s Remote Works book project

Tell me a little bit more about the book.

Yeah. So the book I'm really excited for working title is remote works and I'm writing it with a good friend of mine who I met while we were both working remotely from Cape town. And we actually like. It's so funny because we wouldn't have even been friends or co-authors if it wasn't for remote work.

And so remote work is such a cornerstone of our relationship, but we actually met because our. Where are our coworkers at two different remote companies were married to each other. And through the great vine realized that we were both going to be in Cape town, working remotely at the same time. And so they introduced us and we had coffee and we walked on the beach and we chatted about remote work and all the places we've traveled to.

And I was like, one of those feelings of Oh, this person I'm going to collaborate with on a cool project at some point. We planned a coworking retreat. And now we're writing a book and the book for us is really like we have been working remotely for many years before the pandemic happen.

And both of us happen to do it while traveling full-time, which adds a whole layer of complexity. When you're working a full-time job for a company that's fully distributed and has serious growth goals and productivity goals. And through that experience, we really just wanted to share. A more down to earth, relatable and fun business book around.

What are things that managers should know about working remotely and bringing remote work to their teams specifically. And so I think managers like everyday managers, the ones that are helping push forward projects, the ones that are coaching individuals that are struggling, especially right now.

They're the heartbeat of the organization through the pandemic, I haven't noticed a ton of resources available specifically for that group of people. I think there's a lot for individual contributors around how to be more productive, how to set up your remote work routine, how to turn off at the end of the night.

I think there's a good amount of conversations happening for leaders. How do you create a remote work strategy? What are some of your remote policies that you should put in place? But. It's the people that you work with and communicate every day, that's going to make your experience positive or negative.

And so giving people one, a wide variety of perspectives, because we're bringing in case studies and other people to share their experiences, to share our own stories and what we wish we knew when we started working remotely and three providing interactive. Written workshops that they can then bring back to their team and make decisions together is going to be the power behind the book that we're working on.

Hiring during the pandemic

Yeah. That's that sounds great. Yeah, I totally agree. I just made the connection. Since you were at a high growth startup, you said, serious work. So in terms of the The actual hiring processes of people when they're remote. You've done it before the pandemic. I guess you have some insight into how it, how things are going on now. How have things changed if at all?

And yeah. Yeah. So I think the biggest changes with hiring remotely now is that. Everybody has some sort of remote work experience.

And so that's interesting in a hiring process for a couple of reasons, one is, I think candidates are starting to really question remote work culture at certain companies. Either the candidate loves it or hates it, who knows, but they probably have a point of comparison where before they didn't. And I think that is putting a lot more good responsibility on hiring teams to be able to articulate.

What the expectations are at a certain company in terms of working remotely. I think things like, do they have standard core hours or can people just get worked on whenever they want? How many meetings should they expect to be in a week? What tools they use and do people have certain tool preferences?

Is that enough to walk away from a really cool job that remains to be unseen. But I do think you're starting to get like the Assan and camp, the Monday camp, the, like the notion camp. And when it comes to onboarding, that's going to be huge too. So you have to help people unlearn behaviors that were quite common in an office.

If you're not getting a response from someone like casually going past their desk and like stopping to say hi, and then throwing in your ask about work, that they were meant to get back to you. Which is something I did when I worked in an office and people weren't getting back to me fast enough, like what is fast enough mean?

So it's about, teaching people it's not about. Sending multiple pings to someone it's about setting proper expectations. The first time of when do you need this by, in what time zone, how is it going to impact the success of a project if they don't get it and help everyone learn things like prioritization skills, which I think are going to be huge skills that we'll be hired for.

So that's like candidate looking into to accompany company, looking outwards. Awesome. Like people are starting to really realize they don't have to rely on local talent to build out their team. They can hire from all over the world underserved communities and countries where people might have had to move in order to get successful jobs.

Now, can I have access to really challenging jobs and the money that they're making can then go back into their local community. And it has this huge social impact mission, which is a huge focus of oyster. And I think that's incredible because people. Once interesting, exciting jobs. And it doesn't matter where you are in the world.

If you have the skills to do a job, you deserve a chance to do it in a way that's going to bring you joy. And so I love that aspect of remote hiring. The whole world is your candidate pool.

The whole world is your candidate pool

Yeah. Let's dig in on that a little bit. In terms of job markets converging, is that happening or in terms of things like salary ranges across countries for let's say similar roles or not really now that everyone's remote.

I think this is something that we're going to see play out in the next couple of years. I think right now there's a lot of healthy debate coming up around what this means. Ultimately, I think that eventually it'll be a global market rate that people are looking at in order to justify salaries, but I don't think we're there yet.

And so the common ways that companies will choose their salary strategies as one, a market rate for everyone in the company, this is the one, this is one of the things at DuckDuckGo that I was just so proud of to be part of their team because they pay. Everybody the same salary for the same level of the company, regardless of, not only like where they were located in the world, but what their functional area was.

So someone in marketing or people ops that was junior level, we get the same as the junior level engineer, senior level people would get the same. Across the board. And I thought that was just like extremely unique. I'd never had seen that anywhere else, but what that did was send signals that it was about how they were driving forward the business in terms of impact and in terms of how much oversight that person needed to be successful.

And that was what the company valued. And so that's what they paid against. So that's one strategy that I just love. I think there's. Other people that are very articulate about explaining other types of strategies, such as paying on local market rates. That make sense for them. For me, this has been a year of exploration on the topic.

And I'm still learning a lot about how, what the trickle down effect is on. Local economies. What does it mean? And depending on the day, I have a different opinion. So am I the best person to like, very adamantly take a side where I feel like a few years ago I would have adamantly taken aside, but what I do hope from all of these conversations, these debates, these sharing of facts and perceptions is that companies will start to ask themselves.

Salary strategy in a global labor market

And I think this is the most important question when it comes to salary. How do we want our salary strategy to back up our culture, our values, and what we as a company think is going to help make the company the most successful and what is the impact of this person going to be? And I think that's going to be an interesting.

Series of questions that leaders are going to ask to have to ask themselves is if we choose this strategy, what does it say about our values? If we choose the strategy, what does it say in terms of like how we value our people? And if they can answer those questions in a way that feels. Good and honest and true and does gel with their culture and their values.

Then I think that's a sign that it's the right thing to do. And if there's out of her point where they have a salary strategy and they ask themselves those questions and people feel uncomfortable, or can't confidently say that publicly, then maybe they need to reevaluate their salary strategy.

It is somewhat, industry dependent. I was listening to a podcast actually talking about Amazon where it's it's very different on the AWS side where everyone's basically a technical type person versus people working in the warehouses where, the whole business model on the e-commerce side is just, it's about thin margins and trying to get as much as they can out of everything, including the people. So it's not a thing against the people. That's how that whole industry works. It's just something that's constantly top of mind also, being here being here in Poland. Historically it was more of a low-cost country and now things are changing a little and

What I would hope for the future is as more people have opportunities to work remotely and have more choice on what type of team they want to join that. Those market rates will fluctuate and hopefully like maybe money will be distributed more equally across the world.

And that might mean that in certain areas, the cost of living goes up, but the salary and earnings potential goes up. And in other places it goes down. But if we start to give people more free movement, because they're not attached to a city because of a job, how will that reset an equilibrium for the whole economy?

I don't think I did well enough in economics and university to like, know the answer from a super like rational or mathematical point of view. But I imagine that places like San Francisco and New York housing is out of control expensive there, but how many people had to move there in order to get these really interesting high paying jobs.

And if those people choose to leave. How many people are going to leave. What's the impact of that going to be on rent? What's the trickle down effect. If all, if those people choose to move to new places and more people are moving into those places and you have to build amenities there, I can imagine that those places rents would increase.

So I do think we're at a beginning where lots of people can make predictions, but nobody knows for sure how this is all going to shake out.

What oyster offers managers looking to hire in remote markets

absolutely. Absolutely. With oyster, how so you're saying that you're trying to create something where people can be hired regardless of where they are. What's at a high level, what's the approach? Is it like a service, is it a piece of software? What is it that you're doing?

Yeah. So is there as software as a service company and. What's really great about what they're doing is one of my biggest challenges when I was working in people ops is this idea of okay, we want to hire somebody and they live in this country.

One are they an employee? Are they a contractor? Is there employee? How do we set up a business there? What does that look like? If they're a contractor, how do we give them benefits? What is the compliance of this country? It's confusing. It's challenging. It takes a long time to figure out. And so what oyster does is remove a lot of those headaches from the people ops person.

Bye. Then themselves being an expert in different countries and collaborating in ways that help people, ops people be able to make that decision. And so one of the things they offer is like contractor risk assessment. Should, what is the risk of hiring this person? As a contractor also goes back to.

Like, why should someone just because they live in another country, have the burden of figuring out things like benefits for themselves. Why can't we offer benefits for these people and treat them as if they were, full-time workers in our country. And so thinking through things like, what does benefits look like in Greece versus Lebanon versus the U S and how can we make sure that people are being treated fairly and then finding ways to systemize that and offer that for people asked to hire people more effectively around the world.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, no I do remember this thing, things similar to this coming up. Yeah, I think was, it was, I think it was vacation times have a strange way of a cruise. Clearly, it was very specific to that. Regulatory environment within that country. And even though it's nice to think in terms of, in terms of global and lots of countries, he does have a slightly different reality that you need to somehow adjust to.

until there's internet country or all countries decide to agree on certain things, which I don't think is going to happen in my lifetime. Just having the resources and the expertise and the knowledge to be able to navigate the rules everywhere and then treat people better than fair, I think is going to be really important in terms of cultivating a great remote work experience in the future.

Yeah, absolutely. Great. This has been a blast. Thank you very much for hopping on and yeah, all the best with the book. Thanks so much. There are some interesting questions in there that got me thinking as well. So it's fun. Yeah. That's great.