Luis:
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen to another episode of the DistantJob podcast. I am Luis, your host, and this podcast that’s all about building and leading awesome remote teams. Today, my guest is Susan Basterfield. Susan is a member and foundation director at Enspiral. Susan, thank you for being on the show.
Susan Basterfield:
Luis, it’s an absolute pleasure. So thrilled to be here. And this is what remote work is all about in these times. I’m in Wellington, New Zealand in the middle of winter, and I’ve got my fire going. You’re on the west coast of Europe, in Portugal in the summer enjoying the surf. But the power of technology allows us to be together.
Luis:
Yeah. So first of all, did I get your last name right? Because I’m usually precious about these things, but I completely forgot to ask you before we started recording.
Susan Basterfield:
No, absolutely fine.
Luis:
Okay, thank you. So tell our listeners a bit more about yourself and what you do.
Susan Basterfield:
Sure. So, I’m probably older than most of your listeners, and probably most of the people that you’ve spoken to. I’m definitely in the second season of my career, having spent the first season of my career in very traditional organizations, big multinationals, like IBM and Hewlett Packard and Vodafone, in traditional senior leadership positions with co-located teams.
Susan Basterfield:
In the ’90s, during the first dot-com boom, I was living in the UK. And remote work was literally getting on a plane and doing the route between all of the European countries. The idea that we could actually create teams that were truly decentralized had kind of … I’m not sure if it hadn’t occurred yet. But it certainly wasn’t practical yet.
Susan Basterfield:
In 2003, I immigrated to New Zealand, and sort of initially and for the first probably five years here, it felt very isolated, right? We’re a couple of islands in the South Pacific very far away from anything. But even in that very early period, I’d had my first sort of move away from the tech sector. So most of my career I started in tech when I was 17, at the very, very beginning of the personal computer boom.
Susan Basterfield:
But when we arrived in New Zealand, I did something different for the first time. I was the International General Manager for an organization called AJ Hackett Bungy. AJ Hackett is a Kiwi who commercialized bungee jumping here in New Zealand, and I was responsible for his locations in Australia, and Bali, and Macau, and Malaysia, and Mexico, and Las Vegas. So again, I was replicating the idea of trying to manage a remote team, or yeah, hold a remote team together by jumping on lots of planes.
Susan Basterfield:
But really, in the early 2000s, this is when sort of the ubiquity of the first iteration of SaaS software became a reality. So we were actually able finally, for the first time to actually notice trends across locations, and to be able to sort of build some, both tactical and strategic plans, even before the advent of video calls or really, truly sophisticated messaging apps that are so ubiquitous now.
Luis:
Wow, that’s something. That really is being in a pioneering position.
Susan Basterfield:
Yeah. And it’s interesting to notice that because I think that maybe because that’s been my story that I have appreciated all of the advances and what’s possible now. When I think about finally having left corporate life, so after my bungee jumping adventure, I did go back to like the easy life of corporate, and I finally left in 2015. And since then, for the last five years, it’s been a real exploration and a sort of, I think, coming of age for myself, for me and my business around what’s possible in this age of technology and the amazing work that can be done remotely.
Luis:
Yeah. So I want to talk a bit more about that point of working with the early communication tools. The reason I want to is because I have a somewhat similar story. Remote work is all the rage these days, and it has been an important thing for the last five years and certainly somewhat of a thing for the last 10 years, right? But before that, it was ’99. It was ’99 when I actually started working remotely, and I started working remotely specifically because I was called to manage an editorial team at a gaming magazine, at a video game magazine.
Luis:
And also, at the time, I was obviously into video games. So I was playing online games, specifically World of Warcraft with my friends, and meeting a lot of people in World of Warcraft that were from other countries. I distinctly remember that sometimes we had to coordinate playing with 40 people at once, and that text chat was obviously not good enough for that. That was the time where …
Luis:
I think that this was a video game thing that this came up through video games, that we started seeing the first Voice over IP services. In the gaming case, it was Ventrilo and Teamspeak. So I do think that a long time before remote work was the thing, there were already people connecting over the internet, probably more in obvious pursuits, in large scale and again, coordinating over the internet over those rudimentary chat tools.
Luis:
Now, I want to ask you, what I’m trying to get with this, because I want to ask more about your experience with those teams with those tools. I feel that even though the tools were much rougher, and we were definitely still trying to learn it, I do feel that there was a community spirit. There was a culture of team interconnection, that at the time, it felt very real, and very, very consistent. And today, it feels more like if we want people to create an online persona and an online culture, that businesses actually have to put a lot of effort into that. Whereas back in ’99, it did seem to happen organically. What is it with the pioneering technology that seems to make that sort of environment easier?
Susan Basterfield:
Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. I think that partly just because it was novel and new, and it was like that first step into living The Jetsons, right? The idea that you’d have a phone with a face on it, or, as you said, something like Voice over IP, or I can remember the very early days of Skype and like, what a miracle it seemed that you could actually have a phone call, but with bypassing a traditional carrier.
Susan Basterfield:
I think that yeah, that spirit of everything is new, and everything is possible that that comes at the vanguard of a transition is electric and very motivating. My sense is that that’s probably why some of our early experiences just felt so alive and unforced. It’s an interesting point that you make that I think that even back in those days, I can’t remember ever conversations about okay, now, we’re doing more book communication and being a little bit more interdependent remotely, we need to talk about the culture that we need to be working on to enable this to work well.
Susan Basterfield:
I think that that didn’t really even come into the vernacular until about probably five years ago or so, and I’m curious about that. And I’m curious if maybe it isn’t because there were the digital natives starting to enter the workforce, and they didn’t have the prior experience of what it felt like to work co-located in an office and be able to build a culture over time. I think that when you’re trying to do something for the first time with people that you don’t know, that’s a developmental hurdle that maybe is a little bit difficult if you don’t have that experience already.
Luis:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. For sure. It also seems to me that, as you said, it was somewhat magical, just the idea that we could coordinate with people all across Europe or across the pond or something like that. I guess that people that are younger take that for granted more like. I mean, they have lived in the internet for their whole lives. I remember dialing in to a number and asking if they were the ones that sold the internet. I have had that experience.
Susan Basterfield:
That’s hilarious.
Luis:
I have had that experience of phoning in to buy my first phone modem and-
Susan Basterfield:
Yeah.
Luis:
Exactly. I was living with my parents, and in a month I got into trouble with the phone bill. So that was …
Susan Basterfield:
Yeah, me too. Don’t talk to me about phone bills, seriously, yes. It’s crazy to think about that. Yeah. I mean, I can even remember the buzz of being able to send an Excel spreadsheet over email to work on it, and then send it back. It seems like a miracle, right?
Luis:
Oh, yeah. That’s something. That was something. So, I actually want to talk … You said that you were probably older than most of my podcast guests. I would say that less than you would think. If you go through my podcasts, to my podcast guests history, you will definitely find that more people are in their 50s and 60s, than in many podcasts. That’s actually by design. Because I am a believer in the power of experience and seniority.
Luis:
But I do see that, especially when it comes to remote work, there does seem to be a certain kind of huge bias. So I want to dive into that a bit. Because just as I’ve had podcast guests in their 50s and 60s, talking about agile, talking about leadership, talking about managing teams over the internet, and I am constantly learning from these people, I’ve also interacted in my daily life with people in their 40s that they tell me that no, this doesn’t work for me. I’m not going to learn this remote thing. This little tech is not something that I can manage. Even in places like sales departments, I’ve met incredibly prolific salespeople that could probably sell me some sand if they met me in the middle of the Sahara Desert, and they just couldn’t adapt to working in remote companies, in remote-first companies.
Luis:
So I guess I want to ask first, why do you think there’s this huge bias? And what can businesses that, again, tend to be remote-first, so they tend to skew younger, how can they start building the bridges to tap into all that knowledge that the people that have been doing these kinds of things albeit offline have? I do think that that is an untapped source of knowledge and proficiency right now that we’re losing because we’re skewing younger?
Susan Basterfield:
Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. There were many questions in there. The one where I heard you the clearest was in your example with the salespeople, right?
Luis:
Yeah.
Susan Basterfield:
So, sales is an intimate relational vocation, right? To be able to look somebody in the eye, to be breathing the same air, to be really sensing how you’re going to solve the person’s problem, or what your product or service is going to change the way they work or make what they do easier, is something that is, in my experience, much easier to transmit face to face. And even in the world of Zoom and video calls, it’s hard, right? You get some of it, but you don’t get all of it. So I can totally empathize with professional experienced salespeople that are struggling to figure out how to do digital marketing or focus on a more tactically oriented mode of sales.
Susan Basterfield:
I think that curiosity then that builds into your next question which is around skewing for youth and digital natives that have grown up knowing a certain protocol around relationship building in the virtual space, that is no replacement for building like actual relationships in person. So I think that there’s something there. I also think it was interesting the comment that you made. I’ve worked with, I can remember, three or four years ago, a very good friend of mine, in his late 20s, was running an agile development team. And he had been working mainly in co-located teams.
Susan Basterfield:
And then he was managing his first remote team, and he had a conversation and he was in tears, because he was so frustrated that the language and the practices that had worked so well for him in person, were not working remotely, simply because when he’d not met and eyeballed each individual to actually understand that there was some coherence around words like commitment, and accountability, and definition of done or whatever it might be, that there was that constant disappointment of not really knowing and not having that coherence.
Susan Basterfield:
And that was then kind of amplified by the fact that many of these people that chose remote-first working were maybe doing so, so that they could hide and not have to have those human relationships, and just sit in their box and code, and not have to do or participate in the relational dynamics that is the definition of a team.
Luis:
Okay. But at some point, that’s something that I could see how that would impact teamwork negatively. But I also like to see it as a way to tap into untapped potential. And by that I mean that some people are really good at the production part of the day, right? Some people are incredible developers, and the more they’re pulled into a team the less they produce, because that’s what they like. They like to be in front of their computer for hours on end, without human interaction, and that’s when they produce their best code, right?
Luis:
I have met people who said, “Please give me a pay cut. I don’t mind, but let me work from home. Let me work alone.” So this is a podcast about building and leading teams. So it feels a bit strange to say that, but there is a place for those people. They can be high quality contributors, just not necessarily inside the team.
Susan Basterfield:
I absolutely agree, as long as it’s explicit, right? So my work is about working with organizations and teams that are curious to question and challenge the Tayloristic vision of what organization should be, i.e., few people at the top making decisions on behalf of everybody, and the people that are doing the work being benevolently extracted to provide shareholders with a value, right?
Luis:
Yeah.
Susan Basterfield:
I’m sure that you’ve heard this before, it’s very interesting for me that we’ve made progress in so many other areas of human endeavor. And the way that we’re organized is one kind of structure that we’ve chosen to just ignore. We inherited it, and that’s just the way it is. And very, very few organizations or humans even question that structure. So that’s the work that I do. I’m not trying to sell it on anybody, but there are enough people out there in the world that are interested in exploring, and really at least taking the posture of recognizing what those structures are so that they can name them and then have some options and make some decisions.
Susan Basterfield:
So one of the principal elements of that for me is, just as you say, there’s absolutely a place for somebody that just wants to produce. But the thing that is non-negotiable in my book is that that human needs to actually opt into that position and say, “Look, I’m Luis, I just want to code. I don’t want to go to any meetings. My commitment is that I will produce on time and to spec. And this is how I want you to hold me accountable.”
Luis:
Yeah.
Susan Basterfield:
If that’s okay, and if that works, then more power to them. And if everybody on the team can be that clear on this, “I’m Susan, this is what I’m accountable for. This is how I’d like you to hold me to account,” then I think that there’s room for all manner of different contributions and needs and gifts to be expressed in the team.
Luis:
Yeah, I think that part of it also has to do with career pathways, with career evolution. Because the mistake that I often see is that people that are very production focused and that are great of production, they feel and often they are right that their only chance at a bigger paycheck is to drop the production and go more into management. This doesn’t happen so often with developers. Again, developers tend to be paid very well, even if they just produce. But in many other occupations, for example, in marketing, it does feel that you do have a certain salary threshold where you actually need to stop producing and need to start managing.
Susan Basterfield:
That’s an example of a meme or practice that we’ve not questioned for 100 years.
Luis:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So because we already started down that pathway, I think that it’s the time for you to tell me a bit more about how remote work has made your business, the business you work at possible or made it better?
Susan Basterfield:
Yeah, it’s interesting, and it’s a bit challenging and confusing in these times of COVID.
Luis:
Yeah, well, definitely made a lot of businesses possible that didn’t think it would be.
Susan Basterfield:
Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, I think I’d just like to say a few words about Enspiral.
Luis:
Please do.
Susan Basterfield:
You introduced me as a member and a director of the foundation. Enspiral came together in New Zealand in 2012, or 2013, by a developer. It was founded by a developer by the name of Joshua Vial, who he has and had a passion for his own version of activism and his own vision of how to contribute impactful work to the world. He had a theory that if people could move from spending 20% of their time on the issues that were meaningful to them, to actually come together so that we could all spend all of our time and earn a good livelihood working towards the things that matter to us, then each of our various ways of expressing that would be amplified.
Susan Basterfield:
And so it started off in a co-working space with some coders, and then very soon, he was attracting designers, and lawyers, and accountants, and architects, and other professionals to this idea that an entrepreneur’s life is not an easy one. In some ways, it is a solo path. But if you can do it alongside others who are also working on expressing their purpose in the world, then this could be very interesting.
Susan Basterfield:
And so over the last sort of eight, nine, 10 years, there have been about probably between 30 and 40 companies that have emerged from the Enspiral soil. So it’s important to know that Enspiral isn’t a company. It’s an intentional collective, where people opt in to support each other and get support. So out of Enspiral, I’ve co-founded two companies. The first one was a company called the Golden Pandas, which was a livelihood pod, which is an expression that helped the four of us entrepreneurs, bootstrap our way into our businesses being sustainable. So what we did is we collectivized our income for about two years. Each month, we had a conversation about how we were going to split that money. And at the end of two years, we disbanded because each of our companies had become sustainable on their own.
Susan Basterfield:
So the company that I then joined that came out of the Enspiral soil is a consulting and training company called Greaterthan. So Greaterthan is a global organization. I’m in New Zealand, the other three co-owners, one is in Italy, one is in Spain, and one is in Australia. We’ve all come from the Enspiral DNA, but we have been functioning as a truly international core team. And we’ve got about 10 or 15 associates, again, all around the world, that are contributing to a business internationally.
Susan Basterfield:
If I think about my clients, 90% of my client work is outside of New Zealand. So I work with clients. I work with a Buddhist trading organization in Nepal. I work with a self-organized paper manufacturing plant in India. I teach a course in collective entrepreneurship at Bennington College in Vermont. Our trading arm is, we’re kicking off a course in liberating structures tomorrow, and I think we’ve got attendees from 15 different countries.
Susan Basterfield:
So I think that because we always knew that we were going to be remote-first, we’ve optimized our business to be able to do that well. And I think that both the pedagogical approach we use for our training, and the fact that we are not in the business of selling a system, but we are in service of founders and organizations who want to really push the boat out and be the vanguard in this next way of working, that having a global footprint, and an international host of very well respected associates has just been a blessing, and something that has allowed me to, I guess, express my purpose outside of this little island called New Zealand that I never would have been able to do if it hadn’t been for remote work.
Luis:
Nice. Nice. That sounds awesome. So I have a question regarding how does the specifically … I guess specifically, it would be the Enspiral model, how it works online, because I’ve joined many online groups and communities focused on entrepreneurship and on marketing over the years to try to educate myself. And in most cases, I’ve come away disappointed because what happens is that people are actually more interested in finding referrals and clients than necessarily support and in exchange of knowledge. When you do have exchange of knowledge, it tends to be less powerful than if you just go and Google for an article or God forbid, buy a book. So how did you manage to make Enspiral different?
Susan Basterfield:
It was always about the relationships first. It was never about being a professional referral network. That was just a happy outcome of people choosing to be together to support one another. It does seem a little bit magical if I think about it or talk about it in retrospect, and especially thinking like how has it gone from … Because this is another great example, like it was founded, and it had its core for the first probably five years in Wellington.
Susan Basterfield:
But now, we’re literally global international. I think we have as many members outside of New Zealand as we do inside of New Zealand. If I think about the last seven members that have joined the organization, they’ve all been from outside New Zealand. So I think that by focusing and having that filter on relationships first, so you can’t just rock up and join Enspiral, you need to use your agency to form a relationship. So you need to find somebody who’s in Enspiral and initiate a conversation. From that conversation, the person that you speak to will probably have some ideas of who else to connect you to, then you have that other conversation and over the course of a couple of conversations, you might learn a little bit and think, I’d like to see what this feels like.
Susan Basterfield:
You come in for three months and try it out. And if after three months, you feel like it’s a place that you’re both learning from and able to contribute to, then super simple. You decide whether Enspiral is worth a coffee or beer or a pizza a month to you. And if it’s a coffee, it’s five bucks a month. If it’s a beer, it’s 10 bucks a month. If it’s a pizza, it’s 25 bucks a month. That contribution just goes to running the administrative systems.
Susan Basterfield:
I think that one of the things that has made us sustainable and made us different and has ensured that we keep on iterating and growing and changing is the sense of cadence and rhythms. So two retreats a year, assembly sprints, we’re in the middle of an assembly sprint now, which is a great way of actually doing the work of the network remotely. So twice a year for two weeks, people focus all their energy on the work that needs to get done in the network.
Susan Basterfield:
I was on a call earlier, and sort of 30 people, half of which have been around forever, the other half maybe are less than a year old. But the ability to actually work on and continue to evolve the container, I think is what makes it different than just this expectation of transaction.
Luis:
Okay, so can you go a bit deeper into what an assembly sprint is and the details?
Susan Basterfield:
Yeah. So for example, because there are no roles in Enspiral, you’re a member or you’re a contributor, there is no hierarchy, there is no boss, there is a minimum viable board, which I’m part of, which is literally just there for compliance reasons and to make sure that we don’t go broke. But we don’t do strategy or anything like that. So an assembly sprint is a time to get together to work on the really hairy strategic issues of the organization.
Susan Basterfield:
In the assembly sprint that we’re at right now, there are three principal things that we’re working on, or that have been raised, and are being worked on through this assembly sprint. One is onboarding. So we’ve tried various, like over the years, like all kinds of different onboarding practices from having a buddy, to having a steward, to joining an onboarding crew, to just finding your own way. And, yeah, it’s time now to try something else. So that’s one of the things that’s going to be worked on and be proposed.
Susan Basterfield:
I think it’s important to say that this work is going on to form a proposal, which then will go to the entire organization to be green thumbed. We don’t work on consensus, we work on consent. So anybody in the organization can raise a proposal, and we use a tool that we actually created called Loomio, which is an online decision making … Well, it’s an online … Yeah. So it’s an online decision making tool that allows everybody in the organization to participate, ask questions, contribute ideas, when the proposal is right for a decision, then somebody can raise the decision.
Susan Basterfield:
And again, our practice is consent. So as long as it’s safe enough to try and it’s not going to harm anything, the practices that it will get a green thumb or a an ambivalent thumb. Sometimes it even gets a negative thumb. But even a disagree still means it goes forward as long as it’s not blocked. So, that’s how the governance stays alive, how the governance is participatory, how there’s not one little cabal of people deciding what’s right and what the network needs right now. It’s all kind of organically surfaced through what 130 people are sensing is needed. Again, it sounds crazy, but it works.
Luis:
Yeah. Well, I’ll have to explore that more, because it definitely seems interesting. I have many questions, but it’s getting late for you, and I do want to be respectful of your time. So I think we should wind down into some rapid fire questions.
Susan Basterfield:
Yeah.
Luis:
Better Work Together.
Susan Basterfield:
Yeah. So this is the Enspiral book. Yeah. So this is the book of stories in Enspiral for the first eight years. So maybe in your show notes, you could just put it in.
Luis:
Oh, yeah. I will add it. I would add it. Better Work Together. Better Work Together.
Susan Basterfield:
Betterworktogether.co.
Luis:
You can use Enspiral or is there …
Susan Basterfield:
Yeah, either enspiral.com and you can get access to our handbook. We open source everything. So we’ve got an open source handbook, and …
Luis:
We’ll link it in the show notes.
Susan Basterfield:
Yeah.
Luis:
Okay, so a couple of rapid fire questions to wind down before we end. So, let’s talk about your remote work toolbox. What are the apps that boot as soon as you boot your computer? What browser tabs do you have open right now? What browser tabs do you have always open?
Susan Basterfield:
Well, my biggest tool for my browser is OneTab, because I have a practice of having too many tabs open. So once I get up to about 20 tabs, I just click on my OneTab, and then it creates a list of the tabs that I’ve had open so that I can go back and see them. So that would be my number one tip for somebody that uses a lot of tabs. So I guess my principal toolbox, the things that I check, that’s the first thing that when I log in is Slack, Telegram, Zoom, I probably average, I don’t know, at least 30 Zoom hours a week.
Luis:
Wow.
Susan Basterfield:
So Zoom is a platform that is absolutely essential to me. MURAL, so our team loves to use MURAL to have kind of persistent note boards to be able to iterate on frequently. We use Airtable quite extensively, everything from our CRM to tracking work. Trello, of course. Yeah, so those would probably be the ones that I look at within my first hour of starting work every day.
Luis:
Awesome. Awesome. So if you had $100, and you can make them U.S. dollar, I don’t know how much the New Zealand money gets you these days. But if you have 100 U.S. dollars, let’s say, to spend with each person working for you, what would you give them? And number one, you can’t give them the money or an Amazon gift card, that’s cheating. And you can’t ask them. You need to buy in bulk for everyone.
Susan Basterfield:
Some beautiful food or beautiful wine.
Luis:
Okay, that’s one of my favorite choices as well. What about you, what purchase has made your work life easier or more productive in the past year?
Susan Basterfield:
The one that comes to mind that I’ve really been enjoying is FunRetro.
Luis:
FunRetro.
Susan Basterfield:
FunRetro, it’s a really neat tool that yeah, just allows the shyer people on the team to actually express their thoughts without fear of judgment. It allows dot voting, and it can really create an atmosphere of crowdsourcing the best ideas for the next topic to work on in a way that allows everybody’s voice to be heard without what happens sometimes when there’s that HiPPO in the room. Have you heard the phrase HiPPO?
Luis:
No, I’ve heard the phrase elephant. I guess the HiPPO is …
Susan Basterfield:
Yeah. So HiPPO is being influenced by the HiPPO, the highest paid person’s opinion. Any tool that can mitigate that as long as-
Luis:
The loudest.
Susan Basterfield:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Or the oldest or the youngest, or yeah, whatever.
Susan Basterfield:
Exactly.
Luis:
Something else, like every business has their biases. I mean, you just said Shire, and you’re in New Zealand. So I automatically thought hobbits, so I guess that makes me a racist.
Susan Basterfield:
No.
Luis:
Anyway, okay, so that’s software FunRetro.
Susan Basterfield:
Yeah.
Luis:
Okay, I’m going to find it and include it in the show notes. What book or books have you gifted the most and obviously, not the Enspiral book?
Susan Basterfield:
So probably well, definitely Reinventing Organizations. That’s like the seminal text for humanistic future of work. So that’s the one I’ve gifted the most. And probably the second one would be An Everyone Culture. It’s a guidebook to becoming a deliberately developmental organization. So the idea that the workplace can be a place for us to do our ongoing psychosocial, personal development as well as our professional development. So those two definitely at the top of the list.
Luis:
Awesome. Awesome. Okay, so it’s late there in New Zealand, so I’m going to ask my final question and leave you to have a pleasurable evening. So final question requires a bit of setup. Let’s say that you are hosting a dinner where there’s going to be a roundtable about the future of work/remote work. And attending this dinner are the top executives from major tech companies from all around the world. We’re talking about CEOs, CTOs, hiring managers, policymakers, decision makers. The twist is that the dinner takes place in a Chinese restaurant. So you, as the host, get to pick the message that goes inside the fortune cookie. What is the fortune cookie message?
Susan Basterfield:
Your only job is to create the conditions for potential to emerge.
Luis:
All right, your only job is to create the conditions for potential to emerge. That’s a good fortune cookie message. Okay.
Susan Basterfield:
Thank you.
Luis:
Susan, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much for being a guest. Now, please tell my listeners where they can go to learn more about you, to learn more about your projects, and how can they reach you to continue the conversation?
Susan Basterfield:
Right, so you can see me on twitter @opentogrow. You can find out more about Enspiral @enspiral, that’s with an E, E-N-S-P-I-R-A-L.com. You can find out about my livelihood work at greaterthan.works, that’s Greaterthan all one word .works. You can find the Enspiral book at betterworktogether.co. And you can reach me on LinkedIn or good old fashioned email [email protected] will find me anywhere in the world.
Luis:
All right. So, thank you so much for doing this. I know it’s late for you. I appreciate it. It was a pleasure having you, Susan.
Susan Basterfield:
Thanks, Luis. I loved it.
Luis:
Loved it too.
Susan Basterfield:
Hope to see you soon.
Luis:
Hope to see you soon as well. Ladies and gentlemen, this was the DistantJob podcast, a podcast about building and leading awesome teams. See you next week.
Luis:
And so we close another episode of the DistantJob 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.
Luis:
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, any episode really and subscribe. By subscribing, you will get a notification whenever a new episode is up, and whenever we get the transcripts of the episodes up, so you can actually peruse the conversations in text form.
Luis:
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 DistantJob podcast.
