#Remote 5: Personal Conversations Are NOT Optional

WEBVTT 1 00:00:10.429 --> 00:00:15.630 In College, I could walk clear across campus in thirty minutes. I know 2 00:00:16.190 --> 00:00:21.699 because I timed it. This meant that it didn't matter where two classes were 3 00:00:21.780 --> 00:00:25.539 located back to back. As long as I had at least thirty minutes in 4 00:00:25.660 --> 00:00:30.219 between them, I could get where I needed to go. But boy did 5 00:00:30.300 --> 00:00:35.500 my legs burn. It happened a few times where I would end a class 6 00:00:35.579 --> 00:00:38.969 on the far west side of campus and have thirty minutes to make it to 7 00:00:39.009 --> 00:00:43.570 a building on the extreme east end. I made it work by adopting a 8 00:00:43.890 --> 00:00:50.039 singular strategy to walk as fast as I could, with my head down and 9 00:00:50.280 --> 00:00:54.960 headphones in my ears, so no one would recognize me and stop to talk. 10 00:00:55.000 --> 00:00:59.920 Or even if they did recognize me, they would read my body language 11 00:00:59.960 --> 00:01:06.069 and know that I was in no condition to be stopped. In this way, 12 00:01:06.109 --> 00:01:10.670 I was never late. In fact, I was usually early, giving 13 00:01:10.750 --> 00:01:15.069 myself some time to sit down at a desk and rub my calves while everyone 14 00:01:15.069 --> 00:01:22.420 else started to roll in. No, I was never laid, but the 15 00:01:22.500 --> 00:01:27.219 other thing I never was was accompanied. I spoke to no one and was 16 00:01:27.340 --> 00:01:33.090 never spoken to on those walks. I imagine there were many others like me 17 00:01:33.849 --> 00:01:38.489 passing their way to class, gloriously efficient, ready and willing to learn what 18 00:01:38.609 --> 00:01:45.530 they could on time, with note books of the ready and we were, 19 00:01:46.090 --> 00:01:52.680 all of us passing each other like drifting ghosts, full of purpose and entirely 20 00:01:52.840 --> 00:02:12.469 alone. Welcome back to remote, a series on BB growth about where remote 21 00:02:12.469 --> 00:02:17.139 cultures breakdown and how to make them stronger than ever. My name is Ryan 22 00:02:17.219 --> 00:02:22.580 Drotty and I'm the director of culture and people opps, a sweet fish media 23 00:02:23.300 --> 00:02:28.699 which has been a fully remote team for the entirety of its existence. Today 24 00:02:29.060 --> 00:02:34.490 I want to talk to you about the importance of having built in expected personal 25 00:02:34.689 --> 00:02:40.009 conversations with the people you work with at your remote company. First, let 26 00:02:40.050 --> 00:02:45.520 me clear something up. You might argue that carrying about other people on your 27 00:02:45.560 --> 00:02:50.800 team is a broader culture issue, one that every company should pay attention to, 28 00:02:51.080 --> 00:02:55.599 and that's true, but there's a reason it deserves special consideration at remote 29 00:02:55.680 --> 00:03:04.349 companies. In an office setting, personal conversations just happen. You could even 30 00:03:04.550 --> 00:03:07.949 try to force your team not to talk about their personal lives in the office, 31 00:03:08.349 --> 00:03:14.219 and they're going to do it anyway. The reason is because they're stuck 32 00:03:14.259 --> 00:03:19.340 in a building with other humans day after day and they're not going to use 33 00:03:19.500 --> 00:03:24.379 every chance encounter with co workers to talk about how they're performing against their Kpis. 34 00:03:28.569 --> 00:03:34.689 Remote environments have no such forcing function. If you let remote meetings be, 35 00:03:35.409 --> 00:03:42.159 they can easily become ruthlessly efficient. For whatever reason, time tends to 36 00:03:42.240 --> 00:03:47.719 feel less generous, more claustrophobic. On remote meetings. Everyone knows when the 37 00:03:47.840 --> 00:03:53.039 meeting starts and when it ends, and there's no lag time entering a room. 38 00:03:53.879 --> 00:03:57.069 You show up on a conference call and there you are, ready to 39 00:03:57.150 --> 00:04:02.550 dive into the agenda after the obligatory pleasantries. Watching the manner in which someone 40 00:04:02.669 --> 00:04:08.389 walks into a room and sits down is better conversation fodder than you might think. 41 00:04:10.939 --> 00:04:14.699 Then take the example of time left over at the end of a meeting. 42 00:04:15.819 --> 00:04:18.980 If an office meeting ends fifteen minutes early, a few people will likely 43 00:04:19.019 --> 00:04:25.170 linger during the allotted time to catch up on a remote call. However, 44 00:04:25.810 --> 00:04:29.529 if you run out of things to talk about before the end, the facilitator 45 00:04:29.649 --> 00:04:33.529 tells you they're going to give you fifteen minutes back in your day, as 46 00:04:33.569 --> 00:04:38.170 if they're the keeper of time and can distribute it out as they please, 47 00:04:39.360 --> 00:04:44.399 and then they end the video call. You can't linger and talk to other 48 00:04:44.519 --> 00:04:51.000 people even if you want to. What getting fifteen minutes back doesn't give you 49 00:04:51.360 --> 00:04:57.949 is any personal connection. Having an extra fifteen minutes to do work is nice, 50 00:04:58.189 --> 00:05:00.910 but in the long run it hurts more than it helps, because it 51 00:05:00.990 --> 00:05:06.540 keeps people from learning to trust and, yes, even like the people they 52 00:05:06.579 --> 00:05:14.540 work with. There are plenty of implications for managers here too. Not all 53 00:05:14.660 --> 00:05:19.819 performance issues are created equal. Sometimes team members are not working when they say 54 00:05:19.860 --> 00:05:25.250 they are, or they're simply not getting the job done consistently for one reason 55 00:05:25.290 --> 00:05:31.649 or another. These are ongoing issues, but many other times performance dips because 56 00:05:31.649 --> 00:05:39.720 of personal strife or grief, mental health issues or technological malfunctions. These are 57 00:05:39.759 --> 00:05:45.639 temporary issues that are not long term concerns. But you won't know the difference 58 00:05:45.959 --> 00:05:51.430 if you don't know the person in person. You can read body language, 59 00:05:51.470 --> 00:05:58.110 see that they're withdrawn, listen to their tone of voice remotely. When someone 60 00:05:58.149 --> 00:06:02.310 is going through a difficult circumstance that affects their work, it looks drastically different. 61 00:06:03.939 --> 00:06:10.740 It looks like slow email response times, sloppy fact checking, messages at 62 00:06:10.779 --> 00:06:17.610 odd hours and continuous disengagement from channels in which they are normally active. In 63 00:06:17.889 --> 00:06:23.889 short, for managers, context is everything, and you'll never have the full 64 00:06:24.050 --> 00:06:31.009 context without a decently robust personal relationship. There's also this little radical concept known 65 00:06:31.089 --> 00:06:38.959 only to a select group of Tibetan cave monks. It's called enjoying your job. 66 00:06:40.759 --> 00:06:44.079 It's we fish. We like to say ninety thousand hours of your life 67 00:06:44.120 --> 00:06:48.269 shouldn't suck, ninety thousand being a rough estimate of the amount of hours the 68 00:06:48.389 --> 00:06:54.230 average person works in a lifetime. Do you really want to spend that much 69 00:06:54.230 --> 00:06:59.829 of your life living out purely transactional relationships? Do you want to make your 70 00:06:59.870 --> 00:07:03.939 people do that, or do you want to enjoy the people you work with, 71 00:07:04.540 --> 00:07:10.579 have fun together and build something you're all proud of? Okay, so 72 00:07:10.779 --> 00:07:15.220 personal connection is important. We get it, but what am I supposed to 73 00:07:15.300 --> 00:07:19.009 do, might ask. We've got to get work done and I can't exactly 74 00:07:19.089 --> 00:07:27.529 pretend we're not a remote company. The answer is you take the advice of 75 00:07:27.649 --> 00:07:31.120 your nerdy type, a uncle billy who plans out every second of your trip 76 00:07:31.199 --> 00:07:39.240 to the cat skills, and you schedule some fun. Train your managers to 77 00:07:39.319 --> 00:07:44.079 set the expectation that the first ten minutes of meetings will be spent catching up 78 00:07:44.430 --> 00:07:49.029 and sharing what people are excited about in life at the moment, and instead 79 00:07:49.029 --> 00:07:53.990 of cutting a meeting short if it ends early, the owner of the meeting 80 00:07:54.029 --> 00:07:58.350 should give people the option to hang around for the remainder of the scheduled time 81 00:07:58.819 --> 00:08:03.860 to chat and hang out. It does feel awkward at first, if I'm 82 00:08:03.860 --> 00:08:09.339 being honest, and you may need to have a prepared set of questions to 83 00:08:09.420 --> 00:08:13.930 stimulate conversation in those types of settings, but the reward is well worth it. 84 00:08:16.170 --> 00:08:20.850 Set an example for the rest of the company by showing the taking a 85 00:08:20.930 --> 00:08:28.040 few minutes off from head down work can actually produce major benefits, according to 86 00:08:28.120 --> 00:08:33.000 Ron Freedman's book, the best place to work. In the past, taking 87 00:08:33.120 --> 00:08:39.320 breaks at work was seen as lazy or unproductive, and that was true for 88 00:08:39.519 --> 00:08:45.429 line workers and factories, whose productivity did depend directly on the hours they put 89 00:08:45.549 --> 00:08:52.269 in. But in today's knowledge economy, it's the quality of your thinking that 90 00:08:52.509 --> 00:08:58.940 matters most, says Freedman, and the quality of your thinking is directly tied 91 00:08:58.100 --> 00:09:05.899 to energy level and I think we might add employee engagement. In that same 92 00:09:07.019 --> 00:09:11.649 book, Freedman Discusses The human evolutionary need for both what he calls caves and 93 00:09:11.889 --> 00:09:20.049 campfires. Caves Give us the Privacy and distraction free environment to focus and work 94 00:09:20.250 --> 00:09:26.759 unhindered. Remote companies have caves in spades by the very nature of how they 95 00:09:26.759 --> 00:09:31.120 are set up. We don't need to make that happen. The bigger problem 96 00:09:31.240 --> 00:09:37.480 is creating spaces for camp fires or social gatherings where team members can join each 97 00:09:37.480 --> 00:09:41.750 other, share stories, connect, laugh and bounce ideas off one another. 98 00:09:45.190 --> 00:09:48.230 It's sweet fish. We're still learning other ways to personally connect with each other. 99 00:09:50.429 --> 00:09:56.419 We are still figuring out how to build remote campfires. With all the 100 00:09:56.500 --> 00:10:03.620 benefits of working remotely, the difficulty of Facilitating Organic, enjoyable interactions between team 101 00:10:03.620 --> 00:10:09.450 members might just be our biggest challenge. We're trying out video happy hours, 102 00:10:09.690 --> 00:10:15.649 team parties and open offices to stay tuned. But there's one thing I know 103 00:10:15.769 --> 00:10:20.559 for sure. Helping our team personally connect with each other is not a bonus 104 00:10:20.639 --> 00:10:28.440 or nice to have effort. It's central to the health of our remote team 105 00:10:28.480 --> 00:10:31.759 and we won't stop experimenting until we're successful.