Luis:
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of the Distant Job Podcast, your podcast about building and leading awesome remote teams. I am your host, as usual, Luis, but in this episode we have a very special treat for us. It is a special episode. I usually interview remote managers and leaders in the remote work world, but today, exceptionally, we have a community question and answer session. So with me, I have the brains and the heart, but mostly the heart behind our social media Distant Jobs and Think Remote social media channels, Lucia Flores. Lucia, welcome to the show.
Lucia Flores:
Hi everyone. It’s lovely to be here. We have some questions from our audience and Louis is experienced enough and smart enough and a great manager so he can get on.
Luis:
Yeah, I appreciate. But yeah, maybe you’re overselling me a little bit. Let’s see how this works. Now you’ve set the bar too high. I thought that people would just assume that I’m just winging it. But yeah, let’s see. Anyway, these are the questions coming from you, dear listeners, our audience, and if for some reason you did not see the call for questions in social media, well just add to our social media channels. Lucia will provide them in the show notes and ping us. Just post at us or on our timeline or whatever, and she’ll collect your questions for the next show like this. And as soon as we have more, we’ll do another one. How does that sound? Okay.
Lucia Flores:
It’s sounds amazing. So let’s get started. We had a lot of questions from our audience so I try to keep to the most relevant ones and the ones that I think you’ll be great answering as a remote manager. So let’s start with the managing part. As a remote manager, what is the best way to do check-ins on your team, and how often should you do them? So a lot of people are asking if it’s better to do a one-on-one, if it’s better to do group meetings. What is the best way to feel your presence known and your team to feel like you’re there?
Luis:
Okay, so the answer for this question is the most annoying answer ever, which is, it depends. It depends on what you are after. So what does check-ins mean? If we’re talking about progress on a project, it makes sense to do a group chat or video. I personally prefer chat. If a project exists, if it’s people in a project and we need check-ins, I think that a great way to go about it is on your tool of choice, communication tool of choice, in our case it’s Slack, but in the past I did it in Basecamp, just have a daily standup. A simple, in the channel, everyone commits every day at a certain time to put their status on the channel. We used to follow the standup formula, which is, “Here’s what I plan to do. Here is what I got done. Here’s what I plan to do today. Here is any blockers, any things getting in my way, any things that got in my way last time.”
Again, you mix it up, you select the elements that make sense for you and your team and for your way of work. But I’m usually a fan of not dragging people into calls unless it is needed. And you mentioned one-on-ones.
Lucia Flores:
Yeah.
Luis:
Check-ins. Usually if it’s something about the person and not the project, about their career, about their performance in the company, et cetera, I’d say that warrants more getting the person on a video and on a one-on-one. I would do that, while I had a small team, I used to do that weekly as opposed to the project check-in, which I did daily and it was a sync. But when it’s a call, it’s harder to do daily so you’d spend all your day doing that. So just do it weekly or biweekly if you have a larger team. So that’s a bit more involved. That’s a bit more involved solution. Again, if it’s about the person, the career, giving them some feedback, et cetera, knowing how they’re doing. If it’s something like, let’s say you have one salesperson in your team, you want to know how their day is going, how yesterday went, what today is happening.
If it’s just project based, if it’s really related to work, to the tasks they have to accomplish, I don’t see the need for a call. I would just do it. And that’s how I did it with our salesperson. For the longest time, we only had one salesperson instead of a sales team. And that’s how we would do it, just normal check in on Slack, “Hey, how many follow-ups did you do yesterday? What worked? What didn’t? How is the status of these emails? What’s the people responses, et cetera?” Just basically a daily report, just directly on Slack. So does this answer your question? Do you feel that there’s something that I missed?
Lucia Flores:
No, I feel like communication is key. I feel like a synchronized communication is really important and can really help a team and the manager in general. You would be on calls all day if you had weekly one-on-ones with all of your team. But yeah, I feel like the most important thing is maybe when someone starts on your team, when someone gets that job, to make everything clear like, “This is how we’re going to communicate on this team. I like synchronous, I like a weekly group meeting. You can reach out to X, Y, and C.” And I feel like if things are clear in that sense, it should all go smoothly. You should not be scared of remote work communication if it’s clear with your manager.
Luis:
Yeah. Again, just to recap, I like the agile framework for check-ins and I prefer a sync. When it gets more personal, when you’re talking about someone’s life and someone’s work life, that feels like it warrants a call.
Lucia Flores:
Yeah, totally.
Luis:
Let’s say that you want to discuss, “Hey, I want to know. I want some feedback on my work. I want to know how well I’m performing, et cetera.” That’s easy for people to misinterpret feedback. So I guess that’s a better way to put it. When it’s about checking tasks and finding challenges, just go with sync, do it daily or weekly depending on the project, depending on the task. I prefer daily, but weekly works too, and just do it in sync. When it’s about feedback, when feedback is involved, it’s probably best to do it on a call.
Lucia Flores:
Totally agreed. So let’s go with the next one, which I think is great for you. We had a lot of parents asking us questions and Luis became a parent recently.
Luis:
Yeah, it’s almost six months now. Time flies.
Lucia Flores:
Let’s have your feedback on this one. They say, “I’m having trouble working remotely with kids at home. Any advice would do?”
Luis:
Okay. Wow. So I actually do not understand how people are able to be parents without remote work. I think back to the time where I didn’t have a remote job and I imagined myself having the kid at that time, and I don’t know how that would work. I just don’t know. I think I’m incredibly blessed to be a remote working parent. Now that said, my situation might not be the other person’s situation, and I am also very blessed to be able to have a room, my little man cave. I basically have a dedicated space for work, and that helps a lot. That is very important. And of course, children need attention, it’s not reasonable to think that you can just drop a child on the floor with a toy or in their little playpen with the toy and think they’ll be entertained for two or three hours at once while you focus on work.
The reality is that kids need attention, kids need people to take care of them. So what I do with my wife is we take turns. So working remotely, taking turns, it makes having kids at home without impacting productivity as much. Because I usually like to say that a four-hour remote workday equals, if it’s focused time, if it’s focused four hours, it equals a normal eight-hour day where it’s full of distractions and lack of focus. So the reality is that if I can get two uninterrupted work hours while my wife takes care of the kids and then she gets two uninterrupted work hours while I take care of the kids, the day is won.
We’ve done 70% of what we need to achieve on that day, and then we can put that. Now ideally, I would have a babysitter. Ideally. Personally, I don’t like putting young kids. My kid is very young. Personally, I would not like to put it in a kindergarten, though I know that some people opt for that and that’s fine. Ideally, I would have a babysitter, but we are in the middle of a financial crisis, so it’s not that easy to find the funds for a babysitter every day while we work. But yeah, we find that … And look, I work with my kids all the time, but just lower brain power tasks. For example, those two hours that my wife is focusing on her work and I’m with the kids, the kid is playing with a toy or some such and I interact with them, say hi, et cetera, but I’m going through my email, I’m clearing my inbox, I’m checking task completions, et cetera.
There are certain tasks that don’t require your entire focus, organizing your schedule, et cetera, et cetera. And you can do it. That’s phone tasks. If I can do it with my phone with one hand, then I can stay with the kid. I can do those tasks with the kid. Now another challenge when you do that, when you adopt a static is that, especially if you’re a workaholic like me, it can be that you start distracting yourself after work on time that should be dedicated to you and your kid and you start grabbing the phone and checking your Slack, checking your messages, checking your email, et cetera. And that I think you should avoid, you should try not to do that. You should try to have your set work hours, do work during those work hours, and then when you’re not in those work hours, just spend the time with your kid.
Try not to use the fact that you can work while holding the kid in one arm and working with the other hand. Don’t use that fact to be working all the time. That’s not healthy. But yeah, I think that’s it. Look, the reality is that it’s very tough to be a single parent with a kid at home and have to work. I don’t have a good solution for that scenario. Kids, especially very young kids like mine, at six months old, almost six months old, they need a human in the room at all times unless they’re sleeping. It’s a lot easier if you work in a kid-friendly environment. If you can, look for a job in a company that has specifically kid-friendly, flexible time. That makes it easier.
Lucia Flores:
It all starts there.
Luis:
So I guess to recap, best possible case scenario, you find a job that caters to parents. You find a job where companies are kid-friendly, parent friendly. Not everyone is in the position to do that. Some of us fought very hard for our jobs, and we are rightfully afraid that it’s not the best job market to find a new job. So if that’s your case, look for the next better alternative. Can you minimize your meetings? Do you have the power to minimize your meetings? Minimize them, and try to sync your meetings into times when someone can handle the kids for you. You don’t have that power, well, you need to find some way for there to be a human in the room with those kids while you are working. Maybe you need to pay someone. Again, some companies have sponsorship programs for new parents where they can pay the totality or part of a babysitter salary. Ideal case scenario, you have your kids with a partner, and your partner is available to take care of them half the time and you take care of them half the time.
Again, this does not mean that your eight hour a day work becomes a four hour a day part time. That means that your eight hour a day work becomes four focused hours and for unfocused hours where you can handle tasks that don’t require your full attention. I think that’s it. Did I miss something, Lucia?
Lucia Flores:
No, I really like that advice of dividing your tasks into the more focused one and the unfocused ones. I think we all do that when we’re having a rough day, things we have to take care of. You just divide your tasks. There are a lot of things that take up your time that you can do with a kid by your side, I feel. So yeah, that’s great advice for parents, Luis. I’ll take it into account someday. So let’s go to the next one. Meetings are a big thing, apparently. No one likes them. And they say, “I feel like my company wants to watch over us all the time because we work remotely.”
I think that may be the case because maybe they switched companies. A lot of companies that weren’t remote from the start had a hard time switching, and then you feel like they’re watching over you and that kind of stuff. So they say they have a lot of unnecessary meetings and they want to know how to bring it up to their manager. So if one of your team members had to say this to you, how would you like them to say it? Like, “Luis killing me here with this meeting.”
Luis:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So first of all, it’s important to create empathy and to understand where management is coming from. We are an incredible remote friendly company. We are a remote only company, but even then, in the past, and this comes from me not being so experienced in hiring, doesn’t happen so much these days, but when I was inexperienced, I felt like I would like to be always watching over people because I hired some people that weren’t so transparent, that weren’t so practiced at networking remotely. And every now and then I felt like, “Okay, are these people taking advantage of our company full remote policy?” Because I don’t feel like … They say they’re working, but I just feel like their productivity for the tasks that have been assigned should be much more than this. So it’s very easy, especially when managers are not so experienced and everyone needs to start from a place of inexperience to feel like you’re being somehow scammed or conned.
So I totally understand that. And by the way, even when the employee has the best of intentions, it could happen that the employee just doesn’t understand how to communicate properly. I had this problem when I started working remote. I just thought that, “Okay, I’m doing my job and that should be apparent,” but it’s not. As an employee, the onus is on you to communicate very, very often to your management. What are you getting done? So they don’t feel the need to check out on you. And I know this doesn’t respond to the question directly. I’m going to give a more direct response, but first you need to understand what is in your power to create the conditions that you want. And I bet that if you have three check-ins a day, if you send a Slack message to your manager in the morning saying, “Hey, here’s my plan for the day. Here’s why I plan to get done and here’s when I’m going to do it.”
If you send a check-in the middle of the day saying, “Hey, here’s how the day is going, here’s what I got done and here’s what I still have to do.” And then at the end of the day, “Hey, you know what? I got these things done, these things were a bit more challenging. I’m going to have to pun them over to tomorrow, et cetera.” If you do these three check-ins, and if you start doing this with some regularity, then you will have a much better case when you have to have that conversation because you can literally say, “Hey, you’re getting three reports a day from me on Slack. What do these meetings accomplish? What exactly?” And then obviously, maybe you don’t do it. So let me give you the straight answer to the question. Maybe you don’t do it like that.
Maybe you do it a little bit more diplomatically. You say something like, “Hey boss, I understand that these meetings are important because of this, this, this and that, but I feel that I could be more productive if I had a little less meetings. I can have more focus time and work a bit more productively if I don’t have these meetings here and there. Can we maybe start skipping one? Let’s see how that works.” You start by skipping one meeting and then again, you double down on being very transparent with your work so that your manager is actually sick of knowing what you’re doing. If your manager starts getting a message and saying, “I really don’t need so much messages, you’re okay,” then you’re halfway to having less meetings. And again, you should always approach it in what’s in it for them, because your managers don’t really enjoy those meetings.
Maybe they do in a certain extent, that they like to feel in control, but they would certainly prefer not to be sitting on Zoom all day if they could avoid it. So just sell it as, “Hey, I’m going to do a better job if I don’t have this meeting. And by the way, I’m already telling you in Slack what I’m doing three times a day, so you know that I’m good for it.” Yeah, I think that would be my approach. Just explain that you’re going to be more productive with less distractions if you can work straight, focus straight, focus on a problem for X straight hours without interruptions, that is scientifically proven to improve performance and show them before you even have the conversation that they can actually have a pretty good idea of what you’re doing because you’re going to be telling them all the time. Does this seem reasonable? Would this work for you, Lucia?
Lucia Flores:
In most of the cases, they will probably understand. There are obviously bad managers out there, but you already have no for an answer. So I would say, just go for it. So the next one, they ask, “What do people mean when they talk about remote work culture? My manager keeps talking about it and I don’t get it.” I think it’s a term that came up a lot. A lot of people, when the remote work boom happened, were like, “The remote work culture, this new thing.” It’s the office culture that happened earlier on. So yeah, I don’t know how you would say it.
Luis:
So it’s very vague, right?
Lucia Flores:
Yeah. It’s vague.
Luis:
It’s very vague. So there are two things that I can assume, it’s just a broader remote work culture, just saying, “Hey, remote workers act like this.” And I feel that that’s a bit unfair because there are some people who think that remote workers are digital nomads. There’s that confusion. People assume that remote workers are digital nomads. People assume that if I’m a remote worker, that means that my ambitions is to be working from the beach or from an internet café in Bali, or something like that. Whereas that’s actually not what Distant Job deals with. When Distant Job is hiring people, we actually … Not that we have anything against digital nomads, but that’s not our profile actually when we’re looking for candidate for our clients. We are looking for people who have, like I have, an office in their home and they actually want to work from their home office. That’s it.
Not want to work while traveling, not want to be a digital nomad, not want to go work from a different café every day, people who like working from home. So I think that there is not a single remote work culture. There are very several types of remote work. Now in the past couple of years, there’s been a push to associate remote work with wellbeing and mindfulness and work-life balance and all of that.
There’s an agenda there because there are a lot of people who thrive on being consultants and selling courses and products and et cetera about these things. And these are generally nice things. I appreciate work-life balance, I appreciate people having a healthy relationship with their job. I appreciate all of that. But the reality is that there are some remote workers that love being workaholics. There are some remote workers that hustle a lot. There are remote workers that use the ability to work remotely to hold two jobs. Again, being honest, I’m not advocating for people who commit for two eight-hour jobs and then work four each, but some people work an eight-hour job and then because they save on commute, they save on stress, they save on all of that, they use that possibility to spend some non-work hours building their own business, something like that. So again, speaking on a general culture that applies to all remote workers, feels like a very weak argument to me. Now maybe what the person is talking about, what this person’s manager is talking about, is building a remote culture in the company.
What is our culture, our specific company culture when working remotely? And that depends on what the culture was before the company worked remotely. How can we transition the in-office culture to a remote work culture? So let’s say that when you were in the office … Distant Job has gaming Fridays, we are mostly at Distant Job, a lot of us are nerds. The nerd is very strong in this company. A lot of us like board games and video games. We have a Friday game channel that’s optional. Not everyone is in there. I’m in there, but I mostly ignore it because I’m not a big fan of multiplayer games. But there’s a lot of people that every Friday, they gather in the channel and they set up a game and they play a game. It’s not something that’s set in stone, but company culture, remote company culture, is built off a lot of little things like that.
In his book Surviving Remote Work, our founder Sheron defined culture as building connection, having connection. And what he means by company culture is ensuring that you have a set number of rituals, obviously mostly optional, opinions vary on that. I personally think that you don’t need to have optional stuff during work hours. If you are being paid to work at X hours of time and we’re asking to take one of those hours to do something, I think it’s reasonable to expect the team to go do it, unless it’s something super personal like drinking. Some people can’t drink, they’ll get sick or worse addicted. So obviously I’m not telling you to force people to drink if it’s on work hours, but if you have a town hall and the town hall is during work hours, I would expect everyone in the company to go there.
Lucia Flores:
I think that’s-
Luis:
That makes sense to me. That makes sense to me. But yeah, so where was I going? So you need to have a set amount of activities to build connection. It can include work or not include work. For example, when we used to have a scheduled meeting every week in the marketing department, that was part of the remote company culture. We are the kind of people that at the beginning of the week, gather in a call to do our round table about our marketing initiatives. Then the team structure changed, the leadership changed and that didn’t make sense anymore. We found a different way to do it. We adapted our culture. But yeah, I guess that if the person is looking for a definition, I would say that the best definition really is this, what your managers are talking when they talk about remote work culture is the set of activities either tightly related to how you do work or parallel satellites to working in your company, that give the people working remotely an idea of this is who we are. This is what working in this company means, this is what we do.
Seth Golden as a really nice quote about this that I’m probably about to butcher, that is something along the lines of people like us do things like this. That’s what you want to achieve with a remote work company culture. You want to feel that, “I’m working remotely at this company and people who work remotely at this company do things like this.” And when you know what this is, then you can say that you have a culture.”
Lucia Flores:
Amazing. I think that was actually a pretty hard term and you summed it up great. But yeah, at the end of the day, there are many different types of remote workers and many different types of remote companies that enable different things. You can’t just be a digital nomad in all of them. A lot of places expect you to have an office, to sit eight hours and you’re just skipping the commute and then you’re living life as you would in an office. So I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about that. But yeah, I think that’s a great way to sum up remote work culture and it’s all about those little rituals and the connection that you build with your team.
So you touched on a topic when you talked about that, that is related to our next question, which is, “My team has been asking to go fully remote and I’m nervous. I’m scared that it will affect productivity.” So they ask what is the best way to start doing it? So if you had, at Distant Job, this didn’t happen because we’re actually a fully remote company, but if you had a office based company and you had to switch to remote, what things would you do to help the productivity, help the team adapt?
Luis:
Okay, so look, first of all, it’s easier to dive in at once, than to dip pure toe, meaning don’t try to mess with having some people at the office some of the time and some remote, et cetera. Just rip the bandage, rip the bandaid and go all in and go full remote. And expect that your productivity will drop because even if you were staying in the office but you change the tools and the way you do things overnight, it would drop because there is a learning curve. So you need to expect a learning curve. There is no magic button or advice that I can do that will keep your productivity intact when making change in your company. It could be just changing all your Windows machines with Mac machines in the office. That would be a big change. Different software, different operative system.
You would lose productivity without anything about remote work. So whenever you do a big change, you’re going to lose productivity. There’s a learning curve. There is nothing that I can do or anyone can do to remove the cost of changing, because it’s always there. That said, there are ways to do things that could potentially minimize that cost of changing and the reality, you need to know why you’re doing that. Are you doing it just because other people are doing it, just because that’s the popular trendy thing? That’s a terrible way, that’s a terrible reason to adopt remote work. The reason for adopting remote work, there are basically two reasons, but only really one business justifiable reason. There’s what I call the saint reason, which is you expect people to get the same level of productivity, but just have a better life. You are just caring for your employees health and wellbeing and you want to be a nice boss and give everyone the remote work experience and not pay a big price for that. If that’s you, that’s definitely possible.
That’s not me. I don’t care about people, I care about profits and I care about productivity and I think that remote work makes people work better. So yeah, you don’t actually need to be a saint, you can just be a greedy little bastard like I am and still want people to go remotely. And you can totally do that. If you make people happier, less stressed, have more free time and if they enjoy their work more, they will be more productive, they’ll work the extra time, they’ll be more focused, et cetera. Focused is a big thing and despite what we talked about earlier in this program about the trouble of dealing with kids in the house, that’s the exception. If people are sending their kids to a daycare or if they don’t have kids, working from home is going to let them be hyper focused.
So I guess this is just a big preamble to say that you need to know what your objective is. How are you going to measure success in going remote? Is it people happiness, same productivity? So first of all, you should have a plan. You shouldn’t just go, “Okay, tomorrow everyone goes home and we’ll figure it out.” You should pick a management software. We have plenty of articles advising you about that on Distant Job and Think Remote, so I’m not going to go too much in the weeds there, but by planning software, I mean somewhere where you can assign and track tasks across several different teams and projects. So it could be Asana, could be Trello, could be Basecamp. All of those have their pros and cons, or could be something entirely else. Some people really like Monday. You need to evaluate what’s out there and see what fits your style of leadership and your company better.
But you should definitely decide on these things, let’s say one month … It should be set in stone one month before people go full remote. Then if not the same and it probably wouldn’t be, you need to set to decide on a communication platform. Again, the industry standard is Slack. I actually work with a lot of partners on Discord. Discord is great as well. Some people like Microsoft Teams, those people are very weird. But hey, if that works for you, sure, go ahead. Go ahead, go Microsoft Teams. But you need to have everyone on board with the same communication method. So you basically need to standardize tools, make sure that everyone has them, and then you need to start using them well in office. Before your last month in the office, have people try to work as much on their computers and communicating through their computers as if they were already at home, just so that they get a feel for the [inaudible 00:35:47].
And what’s going to happen is that someone is going to get frustrated and they’re going to rise from their computer and they’re going to go talk directly, sit three people with them at the table and have the conversation that wasn’t going that well via digital means, and that’s fine. It’s absolutely. But it’s important that they just start getting the hang of it, getting the hang of handling as much things as possible in the digital office, so to say. Now, part of having a plan is also having the structure. Before you send everyone home, you need to explain, and again this goes to starting to work with the tools while they’re still in the office. How are we going to set up? How are we going to communicate every morning? Are we going to do an agile like standup? Is everyone going to poster their status on the Slack? How are we going to decide on hours? Now that everyone is working from home, are we going to set up some different hours? What is our message [inaudible 00:36:51] going to be like?
Are we going to demand that everyone is, for their full amount of time that they were working on Slack and available, what is an acceptable response time?
Is it 10 minutes, is it 15 minutes? Is it 24 hours until people should be expected to reply that message on Slack? The answer depends on you. There’s no right or wrong way to do it,. Personally, I feel that asking for people to be online on Slack for the full duration of their workday can be a big distraction. And again, you lose that productivity that you get with increased remote work focus, but you might have good reasons for wanting them there. If you work with support, if you’re working in customer support, there is no doubt that you should be available and as responsive as possible for the duration of your work hours. Of course, I don’t want my customers to have to wait two hours or three hours for their queries to go answered. That comes with a job. So for different jobs, you have different expectations, but it’s important that you set them.
A big recommendation that I’ll do is that you sit in front of a document and you create what I call a team agreement. And if you have a big company, have each department manager or department leader do it. And a team agreement is basically a document that’s X pages long, the Distant Job marketing team agreement, which by the way is open source, it’s available on GitHub and it’s also available on our website. How the Distant Job marketing team works is I think it’s a seven-page document that’s basically a manifesto of what’s expected when you work at a distant Job marketing team, and it’s very thorough. It says, “Here’s what you need to know, here are the things that you need to read. Here is how you communicate your progress. Here is what we expect from you every day. Here’s how we expect you to reply to emails, here’s how we expect you to reply to Slack. Here is how we expect you to structure your tasks, to report on your tasks, et cetera.”
And it might sound like a lot of work, but actually, it’s not. If you sit in front of your computer for an afternoon and you type away, you’ll have a good first draft. And then what happens if you feel like you’re that kind of leader, you can pass it around in your team, “Hey, do you think this is reasonable? Do you think you would like working on this? Would you enjoy working with this? What would you suggest to make this more foolproof? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” And you can gather feedback that way and adjust it to what you feel is reasonable.
So if you do these three things, if you decide on your tools and processes in advance, and there’s plenty of successful companies that you can copy, you don’t need to come up with all of this by yourself, if you start one month before you go full remote and then when you go full remote, you actually have a target, but you also expect that there’s going to be some challenges along the way, but everyone has access to this team agreement, et cetera. If you have these three things you’ll probably have a good shot at it. You will have a good shot at it. And then after you start, after your first month, you need to do a town hall with everyone in your team, get everyone together and have an honest conversation about what’s working, and what’s not. And people will generally be very motivated to change if that means that they get to keep working remotely.
Lucia Flores:
Yeah. I totally agree and I feel like it’s a big misconception that productivity goes down. As you said, there’s a learning curve to everything. But yeah, I think the pros … Once you do it, it can feel scarier first, but the pros definitely outdo the cons, and you will usually find yourself surrounded with happier employees. Once they sleep a few extra minutes because they ought to skip the commute time, you’ll find yourself surrounded by a very happy team.
Luis:
Yeah,
Lucia Flores:
So let’s go to the-
Luis:
The great thing about happiness is that is happy people work better.
Lucia Flores:
They work better.
Luis:
It’s amazing. It’s amazing. You don’t actually need to be a good person to be interested in other people’s happiness. You can be completely selfish and still want people to be happy.
Lucia Flores:
Of course. Your productivity will go up, your wallet will be full. Just let people sleep a couple more minutes.
Luis:
Yeah. Let p.eople sleep more and stick with your … Look, it’s so great to be able to spend some extra time with my kid. Just that is amazing. Just that is enough to make remote work be worth it for me. It is really fantastic. People will be a lot happier and again, as I said before, I don’t tire of repeating, happier people work better.
Lucia Flores:
And it’s about the little things that you just get from the overall experience. Having lunch with your family, sleeping a couple more minutes, I don’t know, just being home, I can just shut down the computer and I have my couch beside me with a TV show watching. I don’t have two hours of traffic ahead of me.
Luis:
That’s actually a good-
Lucia Flores:
It impacts you on the daily.
Luis:
Yeah. So I should actually add a little bit to the answer there because that’s also important. You should make sure that the people in your team, in your company, just as you are making a plan for your company to go full remote, you need to make sure that your employees also have a plan to work full remote because there’s definitely possibility, thank you for reminding me of this, Lucia, that they are just thinking about how it’s good for them, but they don’t actually have a plan how to do it. And that will severely affect productivity. You need to make sure that your employees have a plan for this, that they have a place to work, that they have stable internet connection in their place, that they have either the company provides or they have their own hardware solution, that works and that works well. And preferably, though we know it’s a bit harder to demand this on people because it’s usually expensive, but they should have, especially if they have kids, if they have kids, it’s very important that they have a place where they can go work.
I mean close themselves in the kitchen, whatever. Have a specific room of the house where they can close themselves to work because it really doesn’t do to work in the living room while other people are using it. You need to have an office even if it’s an improvised office. And it doesn’t have to be fancy. I always joke that one of my idols as a writer, Stephen King, he wrote his first masterpiece, Carrie, in a broom closet under the stairs, but he had to have that space. He had to have that broom closet because the house was full of kids. So that is definitely important. You need to ensure that your team has the proper setup. I don’t hire people who don’t have a good internet connection. I’m sorry, that is somewhat discriminatory. I know.
But at some point, you need to have tools for the job. You can’t rely on the company to provide everything for you. Now obviously if I hire someone, they have a good internet connection and then something happens and they stop having a good internet connection, I’m not going to fire them. I am probably going to find out if I can pay for them to have a better internet connection again. But your employees need to understand that they share the responsibility of making this work. They need to make sure, or they need to work with you to make sure, that they have the conditions to perform.
Lucia Flores:
Of course, I totally agree and I think we can actually do two for one on this one because there’s a really similar question, and I think you touched onto that. They’re asking that they’re going to start a remote job and how they should prepare. So I feel like it’s that physical stuff that you talked about. You need to have an actual space, you need to have yourself, you need to have the tools that is part of working remotely. But then you also have to prepare mentally because maybe we always talk about great things, the way you skip commute, the way you get to have lunch with your family and be with your kids. But it’s also, I found, it’s really important to have a schedule, have a rhythm, take a shower, get rest in the morning, even if it’s not what you usually where to work.
Some people, we love it. I feel like we’re both more introverted people, but some people love the water cooler talk in the office and missing that from one day to another can be hard. If you’re used to moving physically to the office, find a way to incorporate that into your day as well. You can go out with friends, you can take a walk. If you’re an extrovert and you’re accustomed to a lot of contact and collaboration with other people, make sure that still happens for you. You need to prepare mentally for the change because it is a big change, not having that daily contact with other people.
Luis:
Of course, find the others. If a decent amount of your company, of the people … If you’re going to be working, ideally you’re going to be working in a company that has at least a certain amount of people close enough to you that you can arrange a meeting during the week, can go out for lunch or for coffee or something, and even talk about work, make it a work date if you’re missing that kind of thing. Ideally that’s what would happen. If you are not that lucky, let’s say that you are in Antarctica and the rest of the team is in South America, well you can try a co-working space. Even though I prefer people to work from an office, co-working spaces, if they’re good, they have the conditions for you to be focused and productive while still having people around.
And people usually want to stop for a coffee break to discuss things and something. So you can actually create an office day for yourself in a co-working space, and then you go there once a week to get that necessity out of your system. But I want to double down on what you said about the schedule. It really is important. Now, I’m not going to say that there haven’t been days where I went straight from my bed in my pajamas and put myself in front of my computer and started working. No one is perfect. You shouldn’t probably do that.
Lucia Flores:
Oh, we’ve all done it.
Luis:
But don’t feel too bad if you do. But in general, try to have a schedule, try to dress for work. You don’t actually need to dress super businesslike. I’m not advocating for that. Personally, sometimes it feels good to me. Sometimes I just feel nice wearing a blazer, even if I’m working from home. But in general, I try just not to be a slob, just not to dress as in my pajamas or as if I’m going out for a run or to the gym. I try to put a shirt on, even if it’s not a fancy shirt. I put a fancy shirt on for this, but I wasn’t too bad before. So that’s the situation. Try to dress for the job. Obviously if you’re meeting with clients, that’s different, then you should dress to client expectations, obviously. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about when you’re not on camera with anyone, when it’s just you and your thoughts and your work.
Still try to dress as if you needed to go out, I guess that’s the main thing. As you already mentioned, schedule, make sure to take breaks, regular breaks. I personally really like the [inaudible 00:50:11] technique where depending on your version, you set the timer for 45 minutes or for 30 minutes and then you take a five-minute break after the timer is done. And during that five-minute break, usually if you have a balcony or a garden, it’s nice to get some fresh air, do a couple of pull-ups, get up, move, et cetera. Just don’t sit for two hours straight or three hours straight. Even putting aside long-term health issues, it’s going to reduce your level of focus. It’s going to drive you slowly a bit crazy while working remotely. So don’t do that. So I guess that’s it.
Dress for the job. Make sure that you have the physical conditions. Not everyone can have a dedicated space at home. At the very least, try to create some barriers. I use not to have a dedicated space at home. You do the best you can to create your own little work bubble for when you’re working if you can’t have a proper room. Now, like I said, to me, if I’m interviewing someone for a position, if they have a bad camera, bad microphone or a bad internet connection, that’s a no-go, for me personally. Some people are super hardcore about the sync, they don’t care about video meetings at all. For those people, these things are not so crucial. Though I would argue that just for a file transfer and stuff, you’ll always need a good internet connection. But definitely I think for me, you need to have the tools of the trade. You have to have the minimal tools. You have to have … It can’t be an excuse when your boss says, “Are you late on this?” It can’t be an excuse that, “Oh, my laptop is so slow and frustrating to use.”
You came to this job, you knew that it was remote. You need to have the tools to do it properly. That’s just the name of the game. Just as I am not going, if I am working physically in a place and the place is in our town and I know that there is no reliable transportation and I can’t drive a car, I’m not going to apply for a job in another town. Exactly. So you need to have the means to do your work. Some companies provide you with some of the means. Some companies provide laptops to their employees. Great. That works. Not all companies do it. Some companies expect you to have the means for yourself. My company is not in a place where I can provide a laptop to all my employees, but if I feel that they’re really good value, if they’re really impressed me and if they can secure good internet connection on their side, I’ll send them a microphone and a webcam.
Sure, fine enough, I can afford that if I really want to work with that person. But it really is a better impression if you provide these things on your own. So I guess that’s it. Physical location, little work bubble, the best you can, the proper hardware, scheduling and mindset. And by mindset, I mean get up every now and then, dress properly, eat properly also. Just don’t survive the rest of your life on Uber Eats. You’re working from home. You can take half an hour to cook a proper meal. And if you don’t know how to cook a proper meal, remote work is a great way to learn how to cook. It’s actually quite fun.
Lucia Flores:
Yeah, completely agreed. So let’s go with the last one because you mentioned a sync work a while ago and there were a lot of questions about that, actually. Some people don’t fully get the concept. So one of them ask, “I’m new to a sync world. What is the best advice for organize myself?” I know some people have a hard time not having, I don’t know, set working hours, not matching up maybe with your boss. So yeah, I would just love to start by saying that you should work on your writing skills and that documentation really matters. I think you can take it on from there.
Luis:
Okay, so yeah. Writing in particular, I feel it’s very important, but I’m biased because I’m a writer. But yeah, you should try to keep things as simple … Minimalistic, not simple, minimalistic. You should try to write as little as you can while still getting your point across, and pay special attention to punctuation because that can make some … And spelling and spelling mistakes. Now some people are neuro-divergent. I’ve worked with some of them in the past. Some people are dyslexic, some people have a bit more trouble with reading comprehension, and you should cater for these people. At Distant Job, we try to cater for these people. But again, these people need more camera time. That’s just it. If I have a teammate that’s dyslexic, I need to have more camera time with them for both of our benefits so that communication flows better. But in general, try to work as much as possible in your writing. Now, if you’ve listened this far, there are a lot of little things that you can grab that we’ve been speaking about along the way.
Just the transparency about your work. There are like 99.9% of the managers will love it if you update them three times a day. You will not be annoying them. It will be a very, very, very minute percentage of managers that will be annoyed by that. And guess what? If you are doing that, then you’re also keeping yourself on track. You’re also keeping yourself responsible. When you tell your manager in the morning, “Hey, my goals for today are this. Yesterday I did this and my goals for today are this, and this is what I had trouble with.” You are giving your manager all the tools they need to be a good manager, all the information they need to be a good manager. But you’re also giving you everything that you need to succeed because now guess what? You are already committed for something for that day.
Work on that. That’s it. It really sounds so simple and so dumb, but just committing for something at the start of your day is really good. Talked about working hours. We already talked about the importance of keeping a schedule. Even if that schedule is full of holes, maybe your schedule is okay, work one hour, not work another hour, work one hour, not work the next hour, fine, whatever. It’s a weird schedule, but if it works for you, it works for you. Just make sure you stick to it as much as possible. What doesn’t work is thinking, “Okay. So today I have to do work and the laundry and do this with the kids and also pick up the groceries for my mom and I’m going to wing it.” What happens then is that obviously unless you’re feeling that you’re this close to getting fired, the priority will always go to your family and that’s understandable.
But at the end of the day, you won’t have anything done and that means that you’re going to rush whatever you need to do and you’re going to do a poor job at that. So recognizing that all plans fail. It’s very probable that by the end of the day you have not completed your plan to perfection, but it’s still much better to have a plan than not have one. So have a schedule, have a plan, over communicate with your manager. I love it when people ping me saying, “Hey, here’s what I’m going to do today.” It’s just another thing I don’t need to worry about. And I love it when people communicate their challenges to me because, well, that’s my job. Now, I don’t have to figure out what are your challenges? You just told me so you’ve just made my job easier.
Now I just need to figure out how to help you solve them. And that really is it. Also ask for expectations if you’re not given. Some things, again, if it’s in a same situation, ask your manager, “Hey, when someone messages me, when is it reasonable to expect a response?” Maybe it’s 15 minutes. Some people work like that. I don’t think that qualifies as a sink because if you have to check every 15 minutes, that’s almost real time. But some people work like that. Personally for most, unless I specify that, “Hey, I’d like to know this by this time,” I’m usually okay with 24 hours. I mean, we run a recruitment agency, marketing department. What emergencies are there?
Now, if I was on the support department, if I was … Our colleague, Mercedes, that works with the accounts, works with the clients, you can be sure that she expects a much faster response from the people on their team. Of course, they’re dealing directly with clients. You can’t have a client wait for 24 hours. So it really depends on what your work is. You probably are not in a position where you get to define those expectations. You should ask what they are.
Lucia Flores:
Of course, being in the same pages.
Luis:
I think that’s it.
Lucia Flores:
Yeah. [inaudible 01:00:35] Communication in general. What I said with documentation matters and your writing skills, I meant you can’t just send a message being like, “Hey, are you there? Hey, can I ask you something later?” You can’t leave someone in the dark for 24 hours if you’re working a sync. So it’s very important.
Luis:
That’s a really good point.
Lucia Flores:
[inaudible 01:00:56] Minimalistic, as you said, and being concise like, “Hey, I’m having these roadblocks. I’m having trouble with these things and I need your help by doing this. That’s it.
Luis:
Yeah, that’s a really good point. That’s more for managers, but I think it’s worth, whenever we have to interact with something, this is something that used to happen in the early days of Distant Job, and we actually almost entirely scrubbed it out, but it was a hard bug to kill, is just starting a conversation by, “Hey, how are you? Or hey, good morning.” Because it’s nice to be polite and social and everything but-
Lucia Flores:
It’s better to be efficient.
Luis:
Because then if the person is working on a four-hour lag and I say, “Hey, good morning,” and then the person takes four hours to reply to that and says, “Hey, good morning, how are you?” Then it’ll be eight hours before I tell them what I need to tell them. And if you get a “Hey, thanks,” from your boss, then that can be very stressful for some employees. So that’s definitely not … So when you communicate remotely and synchronously, make sure you get to the point.
You can be polite and social. I’m not telling you not to write, “Hey, good morning.” I’m telling you not to write just that. Go to the point. Start the conversation with a clear action. Just say, “Hey, I would like to talk about this and I’d like to do it on a call. When do you have a moment? Or I’d like to talk about this, leave your reply here whenever you can. Give me this specific data. Give me this specific report.” Something like this. Be actionable and specific in all your communications. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be social and polite, but you need to be actionable and clear.
Lucia Flores:
Of course. I completely agree. I feel like that’s it for now. We do have more questions, but we can touch on them in the next Q and A. We love hearing them.
Luis:
That would be great.
Lucia Flores:
And when you leave them on social media, we always read them and we are happy to reply and to help. Remote can be scary sometimes, but I feel like a lot of people will find the pros are more than the cons.
Luis:
Of course. And this is usually the time where the guest gets to plug their business. But since-
Lucia Flores:
If you want to plug some … If you want to do it.
Luis:
Look, if you’re one of these people that are feeling like they need to do the transition to remote work and want to build a more remote company, Distant Job can actually help you expand the team. Because the kind of questions that we’ve been building with, the people that Distant Job finds, the candidates that Distant Job finds to place on your company, they usually don’t have these issues. They are experienced remote workers. They have their remote work setup at home. They know what the expectations are. They are experts remote communications, synchronously and asynchronously, and they’re just used to remote working. So you can skip a lot of the learning phase, and get someone that is already very experienced at remote work.
And guess what? Distant Job, you only pay once you hire. So there really is no big upfront commitment. If you’re considering hiring and hiring remote, check out distantjob.com and let us know your needs. We’re very fast. We get you your first stack of candidates and we really vet them for your company. So you actually need to have a call with us. I know that’s a big buy-in for someone, but we actually vet them and you get a stack of two three of the top candidates for the placement that you’re looking for in under a week. So that’s it. That’s what I have to say.
Lucia Flores:
Well, it was lovely doing this. I loved interviewing you for once. I hope it went great. So yeah, we’ll love to hear more of your questions. You can follow us on @thinkremote on every single social media except TikTok where we’re thinkremoteofficial, and on Distant Job on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
Luis:
Okay. Thank you so much, Lucia. It was a pleasure.
Lucia Flores:
It was a pleasure. Goodbye everyone.
Luis:
Bye-bye. And so we close another episode of the Distant Job Podcast. And if you enjoyed the episode, please, you can help us out by sharing it on social media. That will be great. It’s how we reach more listeners and the more listeners we have, the more awesome guests I can get in touch and convince to participate in these conversations that are a joy to have for me, and I hope they’re a joy for you to listen to as well. You can also help a lot leaving reviews on iTunes or your podcast syndication service of choice. Reviews are surprisingly helpful in helping the podcast get to more listeners. Now, another thing that you might want to do is go to distantjob.com/blog/podcast. Click on your favorite episode and any episode really, and subscribe. By subscribing, you will get notification whenever a new episode is up and whenever we get the transcripts of the episode up so you can actually peruse the conversations in text form.
And of course, if you need to find a great employee for your team, a great remote employee, you should take the whole world into consideration and not just look to hire locally, not just look to hire in your country. Look around the whole world because that’s the talent pool that contains the best talent. And to help you with that, again, distantjob.com is the perfect place to start. You will tell us who you need and we will make sure that you get the best possible candidate, 40% faster than the industry standard. And with that, I bid you adieu. See you next week on the next episode of Distant Job Podcast.
