[MUSIC] 0:01 My name is Allison Porter and I'm going to be talking to you today about how to 0:15 successfully wrangle remote teams, how to hire support, and 0:18 how to keep your remote team running like a well-oiled machine. 0:21 So before we get started, let me tell you a little bit about myself. 0:25 I am the co-owner of Copter Labs. 0:28 We are a web design and development agency. 0:30 We also do consulting for start ups and smaller agencies. 0:33 And I have been with the company since 2012, although Copter Labs has been, 0:35 in various variations, been around since 2003-2004. 0:40 I am based out of Portland, Oregon. 0:44 My co-owner is actually based out of Philadelphia. 0:45 We have a part time employee also in Philadelphia and 0:48 we have a contractor that works in Scotland. 0:51 So we are a completely remote team. 0:53 We don't have a main office anywhere. 0:55 We don't come in and meet. 0:56 We all work from where ever. 0:58 And so when it comes to remote work, it's not a new concept. 1:01 Especially in the tech industry, this has kinda been around for years. 1:04 But we're noticing that not just in tech but in other industries there's been 1:07 a huge upswing in companies allowing their employees to either work flexible hours, 1:10 work at home once or twice a week, or work completely remote. 1:15 And this is a graphic from the Wall Street Journal here, where you can see across all 1:19 industries there, from 2000 to 2010, there is a huge increase in remote work. 1:22 And it really got me curious, like what's happening here, 1:28 what is causing this upswing for remote work? 1:30 And so my first thought was to go to, okay, 1:34 the people who are interested and wanting to work remote. 1:36 What's drawing them to it? 1:38 Why do they want to do this? 1:39 So the first thing on my head was they wanna work on the beach, 1:41 literally on the beach in the shore, cuz that makes perfect sense. 1:44 Or maybe sitting on a chair in the beach, somewhere. 1:47 Or on a cliff instead, or out with some hay in a field somewhere. 1:51 I'm not kidding, I could do an entire talk on remote work stalk photography, 1:56 this is like if you want a good giggle after this, Google it, 2:00 it's like at least minutes of entertainment, it's fantastic. 2:03 But aside from the idea of working from wherever, 2:06 what are some of the things that are causing this upswing? 2:09 And one of them is a generational shift. 2:12 So the youngin's nowadays. 2:14 They're realizing, 2:16 they are more attracted to these flexible positions that are available out there. 2:16 They're starting to see that it's not that uncommon anymore, 2:20 it is actually something that's attainable. 2:22 And they're starting to be more picky when it comes to getting these jobs. 2:25 Adam Kegel from the London Business School told Fast Company that 2:29 remote work is a criterion that people are expressly looking for 2:32 before they'll sign on the dotted line. 2:35 So basically what's happening right now is we're finding that if you put specifically 2:37 in front of a monomial two identical positions except 2:41 one they're going to be required to come into an office and work everyday. 2:44 But the other position's going to offering more flexible options and, or 2:47 the choice to work from wherever, they're gonna go with the flexible option one. 2:50 They know they don't have to be tied down anymore to one job. 2:54 And if they are, 2:57 if they get offered that position they're probably gonna look elsewhere. 2:58 But it's not just millenials either. 3:02 So flexjobs.com actually held a survey to see who in general was, 3:03 what they were looking for when looking for a flexible job, and 3:08 what would they be willing to sacrifice? 3:10 And this is kind of interesting here. 3:12 So people who were willing to work a flexible job, 3:14 they were willing, 23% were about to take a 10% cut in pay. 3:16 Another almost 23% said they would be willing to work less hours. 3:20 They would be willing to go from a full-time position to maybe a part-time 3:23 position in order work a more flexible schedule. 3:26 About 22 and a half said that they'd be willing to give up health benefits, 3:30 no insurance. 3:32 About 22% said they'd be giving up some vacation time. 3:34 About 18% would be willing to work longer hours and about 16% said 3:37 employer match retirement contributions they'd be willing to give that up as well. 3:41 But I was kinda curious, I'll get on to it in a minute, but 3:45 how 18% said they'd be willing to work longer hours. 3:49 So you see they're willing to take a reduction in hours, 3:51 they're willing to work less but they're willing to work more. 3:54 They're willing to put more hours in the day to get the job done. 3:57 So again, I'll touch on that in just a second. 4:00 But what about the other end of it? 4:02 So why are employers looking more towards flexible options or remote work for 4:04 their businesses? 4:07 And the first, kinda more obvious, one is they have more candidate options. 4:09 They're no longer relying on a small pool of people to find anybody. 4:13 When you're looking in just you small town, 4:16 you're kind of like working in a kiddy pool. 4:18 You have just a small choice of people to work from. 4:20 But if you start to look in the next county or the next state or as we've 4:23 done even in the next country over, all of the sudden you have these huge options. 4:26 And you're no longer just trying to find the best out of your tiny pool, 4:30 you're able to find literally the best person for that position. 4:34 They have the skill set required, they're gonna need minimal training and they 4:37 probably have some skills that you didn't realize you needed to fill that position. 4:40 Another reason that they're going towards that is they're seeing an increase in job 4:45 satisfaction. 4:48 Allowing your employees to have more flexible time to work, 4:49 either leaving a little bit early one day and making up hours up elsewhere, or 4:52 maybe working from home one day a week, or working completely remotely. 4:55 It makes them happier. 4:58 So my aunt in particular, she worked in IT for the county, for 5:00 a county in my state for a long time. 5:03 And near the end of her retirement she finally negotiated into her contract that 5:05 she wanted to work from home one day a week. 5:09 Just one, usually a Friday. 5:10 And she was fairly happy with her position there but you know you're in 5:12 the job all time, and office politics can kind of start to bug you. 5:15 And even getting a break from that about one day a week she was so 5:19 much happier in her position. 5:22 And she did feel like she was getting more done. 5:23 Which leads to employee productivity. 5:25 Happier employees are gonna produce better products. 5:27 And I'd kinda like to relate it to free-range chickens. 5:31 So they always say that chickens that are allowed to escape the coop and 5:34 run around in fields, they're gonna be happier and 5:37 they're gonna produce better quality eggs and better quality meat. 5:39 It's the same thing for your employees. 5:42 Let them go spread their wings. 5:44 Let them out. 5:45 They're gonna be able to do it. 5:46 They're gonna be happier and 5:47 therefore they're gonna give you better quality work on top of it. 5:48 So with all this with remote work, how do go ahead and hire them? 5:51 It's not really the same anymore. 5:56 When you're hiring for a position that gonna be in an office. 5:57 You're gonna be sitting in front of them all day. 6:00 You're gonna have more personal interaction. 6:02 You're going to sit down with them and you're gonna be able to get a lot of 6:04 ques off of them by physically interacting with them. 6:07 But if you're hiring people who are not gonna be in the office all the time, or 6:10 at all if they're in a completely different area. 6:13 How do you hire for this? 6:14 What are some steps to take to kinda narrow down your candidates field to get 6:16 the best quality candidates? 6:19 And the first thing is pretty obvious, but maybe not, is to draft up a solid listing. 6:21 We're not in a place anymore where you can just put a generic listing out there. 6:25 If you just say you want a graphic designer just to do generic, 6:28 you're gonna get generic candidates and that's gonna be more pain for 6:30 you to try and dig through there and weed out the one's that you actually want. 6:33 When we were hiring a developer a few years age, 6:36 we drafted up our listing to say specifically what we needed them to do. 6:39 And then at the bottom of the field, we ask them to perform a certain task for us. 6:42 So we had them write out the code exactly how they would perform the function. 6:47 And the great thing about this in two ways, this is great in two ways. 6:50 First, it weeded out all the lazy candidates, all the people that are just 6:54 gonna start throwing their resume at you and hoping for the best. 6:58 We made them put their money where their mouth is. 7:00 We made them show us exactly what they were gonna be doing. 7:02 And the second thing that was great for 7:04 that was we kinda got a sneak peek of how they did their work. 7:05 So they say that they do things a certain way, and it was a pretty simple task, 7:08 I can't remember off the top of my head what it was. 7:12 But it was a fairly simple task, and so 7:14 we got to see if they made it more difficult than it needed to be. 7:16 We got to see if they did it exactly by the book. 7:19 We got to see if they actually were really innovative, that they're using, 7:21 did something that we hadn't seen before. 7:24 So it was a great way to kind of have a preview over candidate field and 7:26 really narrow down and 7:30 get a smaller field as opposed to reading through all the big ones. 7:31 Also, when you're looking to hire, 7:35 it's always great to look inside your network first. 7:37 This is one of the reasons why we do networking in general. 7:39 It's not just to meet like-minded individuals and 7:42 see about potential collaborations. 7:45 But it's also great for, because I'm gonna wanna hire from people that I trust. 7:49 So when I'm networking with people and I know somebody, I've met them here and 7:57 I like the way they do their work, I know. 8:00 A, if I know they're interested in some sort of freelance work, 8:02 if I have a position open, I'm gonna reach out to them first. 8:05 Even if they're not available in a freelance position, but I trust them and 8:08 I trust the work they do, 8:11 I'm gonna trust their opinion of people that they work with. 8:12 So I'll reach out to them and 8:15 say hey, I know you're busy right now and I know you're not interested in this, 8:16 but do you know anybody else who would be interested in this position? 8:19 Also when we were looking for our developers previously, 8:22 we would actually post on Facebook or free posted anything on job searches or 8:24 Craigslist or anywhere else. 8:27 The people would follow us, the people who know us and know what we do. 8:29 It's a lot easier when you're hiring within your network because it's going to 8:32 mean minimal training on your end and 8:34 they're gonna be familiar with how you do your business and how everything works. 8:36 If you kind of exhaust all those options and doesn't really work, 8:41 that's when you can look forward to the Craigslist or the JobFinder postings. 8:44 So let's say you narrow down your candidates and you have at least two or 8:48 three, or maybe just one, that you're really interested in. 8:51 Schedule a video call. 8:53 This is huge. 8:54 Either a video call or a phone call or a Skype call, or 8:55 if they happen to be not that far away, go ahead and grab some coffee with them. 8:57 As I mentioned before, when you're hiring for 9:01 an office there's a lot of personal interaction. 9:03 You're sitting down and you're talking to them. 9:05 If you're hiring them and they don't live anywhere near you, 9:07 it can be really difficult to have that personal interaction. 9:09 So scheduling a video call or 9:12 even a phone call kinda gives you a way to get a better feel for them. 9:14 Anybody can come off a certain way via email or text or chat. 9:17 But to actually talk to somebody, get to know them a little bit more. 9:20 Also, the other benefit to this is, 9:24 let's say you're scheduling a video call, when you're talking to this candidate, 9:26 are they giving you various options to get a hold of them? 9:30 Like Talkee or Google Hangout or Skype? 9:33 Are they also offering up various times to get in touch with them? 9:35 When it's getting closer to the call, do they actually follow up with you? 9:38 These may seem like small things, but these are cues to pay attention to. 9:42 These are people that are showing that they are proactive, 9:45 that they're go-getters, that they're doers. 9:47 These are qualities that you want in a candidate wen you are hiring for 9:48 someone that's gonna be working from home, or out of the office. 9:53 So, you hire your person. 9:57 Now what? 9:59 Introduce them to the team. 10:00 Don't just throw them into the fire. 10:02 That's the worst thing you could do. 10:04 Let the team know what's happening, keep them in the loop as well. 10:06 Even though you kind of have your camaraderie and 10:08 rapport built with your team, they need to feel like they're part of it as well. 10:11 When we have people join our team, we have a little virtual office. 10:14 We used to use HipChat, now we use Slack, but I'll get to that. 10:18 But when they come into our HipChat, or to our chat, 10:21 we would throw them a little gif party and we quoted Hot Rod for 10:24 at least a couple minutes and kind of freaked them out there. 10:27 But it's good for 10:30 them to kind of see the atmosphere of what they're getting themselves into. 10:30 To meet the team, and to really get involved with everything. 10:34 But on the flip side of that, you don't want to just give them the biggest 10:38 project that you have for them to get started on. 10:40 You kinda wanna give them a test run. 10:43 So, if you have a giant project and you bring someone brand new onto the team, 10:45 that's a whole lot of eggs in one basket. 10:48 That could go either really well if you're lucky, or it could just fall on your face. 10:50 So what we have found, what works best for us, 10:53 is to give them a smaller project that we know that should be pretty easy to do. 10:56 But smaller projects can be more challenging. 11:00 If they make it more difficult than it's worth, 11:02 that's not really a relationship that you want to continue. 11:04 So, after you've hired them and you introduce them to the team, 11:07 it's still good to make sure that there's still gonna be a good fit work wise and 11:10 workflow wise when it comes to everything. 11:13 And so this comes to my first key to managing your remote team. 11:16 We're gonna have three of them and this is my first one, which is pretty basic, but 11:19 it's trust. 11:22 You need to trust the people that you're working with. 11:22 If you don't trust them, everything's gonna fall apart. 11:25 And the biggest thing is, you need to trust the people you hire. 11:28 It's a big step, I understand, but we're taking all of these steps. 11:31 And if you don't trust them, they're gonna know it. 11:34 They're gonna feel it, and 11:36 they're not gonna give you the quality work that you need or you deserve. 11:37 Wade Foster from Zapier, in one of his articles, wrote that remote work 11:41 stops working when you can't trust the person on the other end of the line. 11:43 So while it definitely goes one way, that you need to be able to trust this person 11:47 that you're hiring that's working from elsewhere, 11:50 that's gonna be getting the job done, they also need to trust you. 11:52 They need to trust that you're gonna be there for them at any time. 11:55 That you're gonna provide them with the resources that they need. 11:58 That you are going to be there if they have any questions. 12:00 That you're not just secluded and closed off. 12:03 As Kate said during her keynote speech on Tuesday, 12:05 that you need to build trust by being trustworthy. 12:08 You need to be reliable, and you need to be there for them. 12:10 So you have your team, how do you manage them? 12:15 This can especially be tricky, again, when you're not working in one place, 12:17 when you're scattered all over the world or the country. 12:20 How do you try and provide feedback? 12:23 How do you try and help them and keep everybody running the same way? 12:25 So speaking of feedback, 12:29 the first thing you need to do is actually give proper feedback. 12:30 You can't just say, yeah, that was good, this is great. 12:32 You need to be very specifically. 12:35 With our projects, generally what we do, is we'll do a little review. 12:38 And since we're a pretty lean team, there's only four of us, 12:41 all of our hands are on the project at some point in time. 12:45 So while we could do a group review, 12:48 we found it works really well if we just do an individual review. 12:49 So I'll talk to me developer and my designer, and I'll say, 12:52 how did this go for you? 12:55 Let's take a look at everything. 12:56 And we'll kind of analyze and see what worked and what didn't work. 12:57 If everything worked great we'll say, awesome, fantastic. 13:00 Keep doing this again. 13:03 If you think of something that might work better in the meantime, do that too. 13:04 If something didn't work well, let's start to have some constructive criticism, 13:07 we'll talk about it. 13:10 But it can't be just me providing feedback to them. 13:11 They need to provide feedback to me, they need to help, 13:13 I need to hold myself accountable and they need to hold me accountable. 13:16 So when I give deadlines, usually after a projects over, 13:20 I like to make sure that the deadline was okay, I'll discuss it with them. 13:23 Was it too aggressive, was it to far, what worked for you? 13:26 And sometimes they'll come to me and they'll say, you know what, 13:29 that was a pretty aggressive deadline. 13:31 I don't know why you told the client it'd be done that time, it took a lot longer. 13:33 I need to know this information. 13:37 Because if they don't say anything, and I continue to set these deadlines that 13:39 are unattainable, if my team can't meet it then that's gonna make for 13:43 an unhappy client cuz we're gonna have to keep pushing deadlines back. 13:47 So it's really important that even though you need to provide feedback to your team, 13:50 you need to allow them to give feedback to you as well. 13:54 It's also important with managing for time tracking. 13:59 So, whoops, we're gonna go back here. 14:02 So, when you're not working all in the same office, it can be really difficult to 14:07 know if they're actually working when they need to be. 14:10 When you're in an office, you can just kinda peek over the cubicle wall and 14:12 you can kinda see if they're actually doing what they said they were doing, 14:15 or if they're just on Reddit, surfing. 14:17 So, how do you keep track of your employees when you're out of the office? 14:19 We actually use time-tracking apps. 14:23 And so I'll get to those later in my tools. 14:25 But it's really easy for us. 14:27 It just runs ambivalently in the background and at the end of the day 14:30 we have a list of projects and they're all individual for our team. 14:33 We have a list of projects on the side, and throughout the day, or even at 14:37 the very end of it, we will itemize each of the things that we worked on. 14:40 So we can see exactly how long we spent on each project. 14:43 On one hand it's great because, let's say, with a deadline, they say that wasn't 14:46 aggressive deadline, that was too fast, you should've changed that. 14:50 Okay, cool. 14:53 Let's look at your time tracking and let's see how many hours and 14:54 how long over the time period you spent on that. 14:57 So if you'll look at the time, and we see that throughout the project 15:00 they're putting in solid hours all through it and they still have a hard time. 15:04 It's still getting to crunch time and 15:08 they're still not done with it, that's on me. 15:10 I set the deadline wrong. 15:12 We'll adjust it from there. 15:13 But, maybe with the time tracking you see that they worked a couple hours here or 15:14 there, or they really didn't work here or there, and 15:18 then the very last day they put in six or eight hours. 15:20 Okay, let's talk about it. 15:22 Let's talk about some prioritization. 15:23 Let's figure out what went wrong here. 15:24 And it's also great for 15:26 me because I get to see exactly how long it takes me to do projects. 15:27 For a while there I was just like, oh yeah, 15:31 it should take me a couple of hours or it should take me one hour to do this. 15:33 And I started time tracking and I started to realize exactly how long it would 15:36 take me to manage a project from beginning to end. 15:40 And this is great because when it comes to clients asking us how long it's 15:42 going to take to do something, I'm able to refer back to similar projects, and 15:46 I can give them an exact estimate of what it should be. 15:49 The other side of that is, I can also price accordingly. 15:52 If I know exactly an updated time how long it takes us to do certain things, 15:55 we can adjust our prices to reflect that. 16:00 So when you have your team and 16:03 you are managing everybody, what do you do when they're in a whole other time zone? 16:04 Again we have our developer in Scotland. 16:09 This can be really tricky. 16:11 He's nine hours ahead of me from the Pacific time. 16:12 So it can be very difficult trying to run the team together when you're not 16:15 all in the same room. 16:18 So how do you manage that? 16:19 The first thing that you need to do is, schedule times to connect. 16:21 And I'm not just talking like a group meeting. 16:23 Every week, Mondays at 9 AM my time, we have a weekly staff meeting. 16:26 So we all get on the video chat. 16:31 We all get on Talky. 16:32 We talk about our weekend. 16:33 We talk about what's coming up during the week. 16:34 We just kind of get everything ironed out. 16:36 But you can't just leave it at that, especially when they're not in the same 16:38 room as you are and they're completely away from you. 16:41 So, I know that my developer, 16:43 he's unavailable from around 10 AM to noon my time. 16:45 That's family time for him. 16:48 He's getting the kids ready for bed, he's making dinner, 16:49 he's getting stuff ready around the house. 16:51 So if I need to get in touch with him I know that I have until about ten in 16:53 the morning and 16:56 then I have about from one to whenever he decides to go to bed that night. 16:57 So you need to be aware of their hours and 17:01 you need to make sure that you reach out to them during those hours. 17:02 You can't hold it against them if you reach out to them when they've told you 17:05 that they're going to be unavailable during their time and they and 17:08 nothing gets done. 17:11 That you need to reach out to them when's available for them. 17:12 You also need to be aware, especially this kind of comes with different cultures, but 17:16 also in different countries of different holidays. 17:19 And so, in the UK they have a ton of bank holidays. 17:21 I was just looking up the other day, and almost every other month there's 17:25 some sort of holiday happening, or there's Boxing Day, or something else. 17:27 Maybe they don't celebrate Christmas, they celebrate anything else. 17:30 You need to be aware of these things. 17:33 Clients don't expect us to work on certain days, like Memorial Day or Labor Day. 17:35 Why should we expect them to be working those holidays, as well, 17:39 when everybody else is off. 17:41 Keep that in mind. 17:43 We've also found that you kinda need to set separate deliverables, and 17:45 that's not to say that you need to completely adjust a deadline for them. 17:48 It's just good to keep in mind, like I mentioned before that, so Rob, 17:51 our developer, he's unavailable during those three hours. 17:55 If I get him resources after that time and 17:58 expect him to have something done the next day, that's not really okay. 18:01 You need to make sure that you set certain times and certain deliverables that they 18:05 can meet and it's up to you to provide them the resources for that. 18:09 And again, that just comes with connecting with them and communicating with them, 18:12 which comes to my second key to managing your remote team, which is talk. 18:17 Just like with any relationship, communication is huge. 18:22 And you need to make sure that you make time to talk to them. 18:25 And to remember, that even though they're not in the room with you, 18:28 these are people, they're not robots. 18:30 These are real people, living things. 18:32 They're not just having code flying through their fingertips 18:33 at at all times [LAUGH]. 18:36 And so, again, you need to make sure that you make time to talk to them. 18:37 They have a life outside of this work, and you need to ask them about it. 18:40 How did your son do at soccer? 18:44 How did you kid do in the play? 18:45 Did you guys have great weekend? 18:47 Anything to let them know that they feel appreciated. 18:49 And they also need to know that they can come to you about anything. 18:52 You need to keep an open line. 18:55 So, if you seclude yourself and just kinda lock yourself away, and 18:57 don't allow them to talk to you about anything personal, pretty soon, 18:59 they're not gonna want to talk to you about anything. 19:01 And that line of communication is gonna get broken and so is the trust and 19:03 that starts to happen. 19:07 With the trust fall gift, just everything's gonna fall apart, 19:09 nothing is gonna work proper anymore. 19:12 So with your team, when you're scattered all over the world, 19:14 how do you keep everybody motivated? 19:17 How do you keep everything running smoothly? 19:19 And again, when you can't gather everybody around a pow wow in the lunch room with 19:21 some cake, it's kinda difficult. 19:24 So what are some steps you can take to kinda keep morale high and 19:27 keep motivation going? 19:30 First thing, is to keep everybody in the loop. 19:31 No one likes to be left in the dark. 19:33 If there's information you need to be sure that you're sharing it with them in 19:35 the timely manner at that. 19:38 If you heard something a week ago and you're take your time to tell it to them, 19:39 they're gonna feel like you don't real like their time doesn't matter to you. 19:43 You need to be sure that you're telling them things when they need to be told. 19:46 And you also need to make sure that you tell them one on one that you 19:50 appreciate them. 19:53 I know I try with my team at least some point in time, either weekly, or 19:54 throughout the day most of the time. 19:57 If we're in a Slack-Chat and they ask me a work problem, I'll answer it and then say, 19:58 you know what? 20:02 Thanks so much, I really appreciate what you're doing right now. 20:02 And honestly, I mean it. 20:05 I literally cannot do my job without them. 20:07 I'm a project manager, I don't design. 20:09 I don't develop, I don't do any of it. 20:11 So without them, I literally have no job. 20:13 I can't do it, and I need to make sure that they know that I appreciate 20:15 every hard hour that they are putting in here. 20:18 I also need to make sure that they can come to me again about anything. 20:21 And this isn't even just personal problems. 20:24 And this isn't even just business problems. 20:27 This is personal problems too. 20:28 I know, before, one of my old developers had an issue at home. 20:30 And I could kind of tell things weren't going so well for them. 20:32 They were a little bit sparse in their Slack-Chat. 20:35 Their work was kind of coming in a little bit late. 20:38 So instead of just berating him, I find, 20:40 there is one day where I finally just reached out. 20:41 And I said, I do have some questions about work, but 20:43 I'm not gonna ask you about those today. 20:45 Today I just wanna know, are you okay? 20:47 Is there anything I can do for you? 20:48 And then he just said, thank you. 20:50 The fact that you've been able to listen to me, that's really all I needed. 20:52 And sometimes that's all it takes for them to kinda get back on their feet. 20:56 Yeah, some personal stuff may still be going on. 20:58 But the fact that you acknowledged that you see what's happening and 21:00 you know what's going on will make them feel better about everything. 21:02 You can also shower them with gifts, and I don't mean throw things at them constantly 21:06 but just little things that make them happy. 21:10 I know at my old job I worked at credit union for 21:11 five years before I joined the Copter team. 21:14 And we'd had a pretty rough patch that we'd had. 21:16 We were opening a new branch, and things were kind of hectic and crazy. 21:19 And so my manager came up. 21:21 It was a particularly nice day. 21:23 And he was like, so are you going to lunch today? 21:26 Where are you going? 21:27 And I said, oh yeah, I was thinking of going out somewhere. 21:28 And he was like, all right, great. 21:30 Take a two hour lunch, but you're only gonna get charged for a one hour lunch. 21:31 Don't even worry about it. 21:34 So I got to go spend two hours running around, but 21:35 even though I would put it down that I was out for an hour. 21:38 And that made me feel so good. 21:41 He was showing his way of appreciating me. 21:42 Another friend of mine, who also works from home, she works for a health and 21:45 fitness company. 21:48 They had a new launch come out. 21:49 Everybody was working really late hours trying to get everything done. 21:52 And to show them that they appreciated them, they sent them a voucher so 21:54 everybody could go get free massages. 21:57 So they could really de-stress after all that. 21:59 Another employee, another friend of mine, they were sick. 22:02 They wrote in sick via their chat that they weren't gonna 22:05 be able to work that day. 22:08 The very next day, their company sent them cough drops, tea, a little mug, 22:09 a little get better card, just little ways to show that you care. 22:14 We were lucky enough, earlier this year, so, the gentleman in the middle there, 22:17 that's Rob, our developer in Scotland. 22:20 We were finally able to fly him down to Future of Web Design in London 22:22 earlier this year, and me, Alex, who is on the left there, and Jason, 22:26 who is our former boss of Copter Labs. 22:29 He finally got to physically meet them. 22:31 Rob has been with the company for, he's one of our longest term employees and 22:33 had never physically met anybody on the team. 22:38 And we finally got him to come and meet everybody, and 22:41 it was a small way to show that we appreciate him. 22:44 Finally we're in your area. 22:46 We want you to come down so we can see you and thank you for 22:47 being with us for so long. 22:49 We were lucky enough to be able to do that. 22:50 Some companies might not, but just little things to show them, 22:53 little Amazon gift cards or little bonuses here and there to show them that you 22:55 appreciate them is gonna keep morale and motivation going. 22:59 So with that, how do you run your virtual office when you don't have 23:03 a localized hub? 23:07 How do you keep things going? 23:09 You don't have the little office room with the cake parties, and 23:10 you can't get everybody together. 23:13 What do you do to kind of set up an office of some sort? 23:14 And the first thing that you need to do is find the best setup for your business. 23:17 One size does not fit all. 23:21 As I mentioned previously, we use Slack. 23:23 So we have our various channels for our projects. 23:25 We have the direct messages for our team members, and we have our accounting and 23:27 some private chats down there. 23:31 And then we have our water cooler chat. 23:32 And our water cooler is essentially our lunchroom. 23:34 It's where we can talk about anything. 23:36 Rob, this was during one of our video chats one morning, 23:38 Rob's face got superimposed over mine, so I became a Roallison hybrid. 23:41 And then Risa was wondering why she looks so upset. 23:45 But it's just somewhere we can just kind of hang out and talk, and 23:47 it kind of keeps the community feel there. 23:51 And that's why I feel it's really important to have at least one non-work 23:53 avenue open for your team. 23:56 And I feel like if you don't, you're going to just kind of drive everybody down. 23:58 Everyone's going to feel tired, and 24:02 they're going to get sick of talking about work constantly. 24:03 You need to be able to allow them an avenue where they can vent and 24:05 talk about their weekend and say like hey, my daughter made the soccer team. 24:09 I'm super excited. 24:14 Or, hey, I saw this movie. 24:14 Or, hey, I'm having kind of a rough day, can I talk to you guys? 24:16 Something to let them feel that it's kind of like a home environment. 24:18 Which comes to my third and final managing your remote team key, which is tools. 24:22 You need to find tools that will work for your company. 24:27 And RealtimeBoard had a little stat. 24:30 And they said that 90% of remote workers thought that collaboration tools 24:33 are important or even mission critical for virtual teams. 24:36 You need to have the proper tools to keep your team running, 24:40 to keep your company running. 24:43 And what's important, though, is you need to use tools that will help, not hinder. 24:44 Again, just because it's working for somebody else, 24:48 doesn't mean it's going to work for you. 24:50 So, we have Slack. 24:52 Slack works great for us. 24:53 I tried it with some people earlier this week that were like, you know what? 24:54 Actually, my company prefers IIRC. 24:57 We hate Slack. 24:59 Or, we hate Slack, we want HipChat. 24:59 It doesn't matter. 25:02 But you need to also realize that it's kind of a moving target. 25:03 We used HipChat for a long time and thought it worked great. 25:05 Then one of our employees showed us Slack, and 25:08 we saw that it actually integrated better with some of the tools that we work. 25:10 So we switched over to it. 25:13 So, when you do find your toolset, don't be afraid to change it. 25:15 Don't dig your heels in. 25:17 There might be something out there coming along that's gonna be even better for you. 25:18 Some of the tools that we use for our, these are collaboration tools really. 25:23 So we use Dropbox for all of our files for resources and mock ups. 25:26 We use Trello for collaboration project management. 25:31 So we have base camp for all of our projects, but 25:34 we kind of use Trello a little differently than it's supposed to be. 25:36 Each project has its own card, and then we're able to update that card with 25:38 timelines and deadlines and notes on there. 25:42 The timing app that we use, most of us, is Timing for Mac. 25:44 Rob is actually a PC user. 25:48 So he uses a completely different timing app, but I don't know what that one is. 25:50 We use Talki for our video chats, our Monday morning video chats, and 25:53 then again we use Slack for our virtual office. 25:57 So these are just some of the tools that work well for us, and who knows, 25:59 in a year this might change again. 26:02 This list might be completely different. 26:03 But for right now, for what we need these all do really well for us. 26:05 So, in the grand scheme of remote work, where can it go from here? 26:10 We know how to hire them. 26:15 We know how to support them. 26:15 We know kinda how to keep morale going. 26:16 But where is it gonna go from here? 26:18 Again, there's this huge upswing happening right now. 26:20 And how do we kind of steer into the skid and go with it? 26:23 My one hope is a, that companies are gonna stop treating remote work as, 26:26 they're gonna stop holding it hostage. 26:30 They're not gonna make you earn remote work. 26:32 They're gonna allow it to come out more. 26:34 Basically because they're gonna see that they're gonna lose candidates if 26:35 they don't make that an option for people. 26:38 And then at that point with how technology is going and work space is going, 26:40 maybe we'll be able to work on the moon one of these days. 26:44 And maybe you'll be able to outsource to Mars. 26:46 It's gonna change your deliverables. 26:49 It's gonna change your contact time a little bit. 26:50 But, you don't really know, it could actually still work. 26:52 So, in the grand scheme of things, talk to your employees, 26:56 make sure you're using proper tools and please, please, please trust them. 26:59 Those are the biggest things I can ask of you. 27:03 I ran a little bit short, but I want to thank Future Insights for everything. 27:06 I wanna thank you guys for showing up. 27:10 I greatly appreciate it. 27:11 Let's be friends. 27:13 Follow me, follow us on Facebook and all that fun stuff. 27:14 Backstreet Boys for life. 27:16 [LAUGH] 27:18 [MUSIC] 27:20