How to overcome the challenges of leading a remote tech team

[00:01:17] Welcome and Introduction to the Livestream

Andrew Murphy: Hello everybody. Welcome. Welcome to the Tech Leaders Launchpad Livestream. This is a place where we get together a bunch of people from around the industry to talk about what it means to be a tech leader. Just like you, I'm a leader in the technology industry and I like the fact that I have a community of experts around me that help me and I want to share that community with you. I want to share my mentors, my coaches, the people that help me be a better leader. And that's what we've got today. We've got a couple of people who I spent a lot of time talking to over the past few years and every conversation I have with them gives me something new to go away and think about. The topic today is remote leadership and how do we lead remote teams. So who I have with me today is John Sherwood and Nicola Nye and we'll do a quick introduction. Nicola, do you want to start off by talking about who you are and why remote leadership is something you care about?

[00:05:18] Guest Introductions: Nicola and John

Nicola Nye: Hi, folks. So my career has been a checkered history of working for a number of Melbourne startups in Australia. Most recently I was chief of staff at Fast Mail, an independent email firm. And remote work is interesting to me because of the last few years, but also seeing benefits now that it's kind of become normalized across the country and across the world. But it's not all peace and gravy. So love looking forward to today, to digging into some of the problems and some of the ways that we can work around them.

Andrew Murphy: Awesome. Was that peace and gravy or peas and gravy? Because I don't know.

Nicola Nye: You can, you can read it any way you want.

Andrew Murphy: I've not had my lunch yet, so it's quite possible I heard peas and gravy. John, do you want to give a quick intro?

John Sherwood: Yep. So I've been a developer for like 20 years and about 13 years ago now I started doing a bit of a side hustle. So all of a sudden that went well enough that we started to hire staff and it was all remotely, you know, part time stuff. And then, yeah, like got into remote work back in 2009 I guess when it sort of, you know, couldn't hire Australian developers, they were too expensive and we just sort of went overseas and yeah, so I haven't looked back. So, you know, 13 years now, no office, always remote. So when Covid happened, yeah, it was pretty much business as usual.

Nicola Nye: Early adopter.

John Sherwood: Yeah.

Nicola Nye: There are some who might say that if Australian Developers were too expensive. Maybe this means you were too cheap running on a lean budget. Lean budget, yeah.

John Sherwood: So yeah, maybe we're too cheap. I'm sorry. Certainly we're too cheap. Certainly for when in the early days we had data entry people and certainly data entry in the Philippines and Indonesia, that's a lot cheaper. So yeah, for sure.

[00:07:15] Reasons for Remote Work and Audience Participation

Andrew Murphy: Yep. Yeah. But I think that's a great point that, you know, the reasons why we may have gone remote in the past are potentially different to the reasons why we're remote now and I think that's a great topic for us to discuss. The way this works for those of you who are watching the live stream is I've got a series of questions that I'm going to pose to John and Nicola. We're going to have a bit of a conversation around those questions, hopefully free flowing conversation as much as we can. But please ask questions in LinkedIn or YouTube and we'll use those questions to kind of bounce off of as well. I don't want this to be us talking at you for 60 minutes. I want you to get a lot out of this. So please ask any questions you've got, make any statements you want to have and we'll get to them and we'll discuss them. But first of all let's do something a little bit fun. What was your first IT job? So I'll tell you a little bit about mine. So I started off, I did a degree in software development and as part of my degree there was an industrial placement for a while where basically you stop studying at university and you get a job for a while. And I had a job working with a car insurance agency to go through a UML diagramming mapping exercise to map out all of their business processes so they could migrate from a 1970s VMX system to an Oracle database. So bearing in mind that this was probably almost 20 years ago now, I spoke to somebody from them a couple of years ago and they're still using the VMX system. They didn't do the migration. So it just shows you how tied in these older systems are to these financial institutions. John, do you want to tell me about your first IT job?

[00:09:11] First IT Jobs and Early Industry Impressions

John Sherwood: Yeah. So it was working for the university I was going to as a student. So I was a third year university student and I got a job at the Deakin ITS where I was hired as a programmer. But all I did was write documents about the programs I could theoretically build. And at the time I thought this place is amazing and these people are so Smart and they're doing such cool stuff and now I know better. Turns out looking back like this was a dysfunctional mess where nothing ever got done but at the time.

Nicola Nye: So it really did prepare you for the real world then.

John Sherwood: Yeah, I've had a bunch of jobs. Some were amazing and some were very similar to that. Yeah, but it was interesting just seeing at the time like you know, this doe eyed student, you know, kid like oh wow, this is so amazing. And then sort of, you know, working for some really good projects later on with like really good teams and being like that they had no idea what they were doing.

Nicola Nye: Yeah, goes to show days where you don't feel like you have got your ducks in a row, you can look back on that and go, well you know, there's plenty of people out there who are still, you know, successfully making life work and I've seen how dysfunctional they can be and I'm definitely better than that. Yeah, I did an honours degree and part of that involved they've invited industry to come and see our honours presentations. And so I ended up interning for a few months at a scheduling software company that wrote I think in C and this was in the era well before Google Maps. And so to do their scheduling which at the time they did a lot of scheduling for the New Zealand dairy farmers who had to get their trucks from the dairy farms and over to you know, where the milk would be pasteurized and processed and sent off. But there was a, you know, they had to get to trucks in a certain order based on how much milk was coming through and there was a limited time window that they could get from the farms to the, to the center. So I spent a great chunk of my time with a, with a, with an image of the road map and every time a new dairy farm came online someone had to sit there and work out how long the line would be on the map and, and like manually create a graph and you had to sit there and say, you know, this is a Road Level 1 because it was, you know, a nice good thoroughfare and this is a Road Level 3 because it's a bumpy dirt track. You know, don't schedule down this road. So that was, you know, that was my first job.

[00:11:40] The Manual Reality of Tech Work

Andrew Murphy: Yeah, we've had a couple of comments here. It's amazing how much the, the industry has been and still is is manual. You know John, you talked about how data entry was a very important part of, of what you did. And Nicola, you know, literal paper maps and looking at things. It's. We we, we lie to ourselves. We're in this flash new world. But sometimes there's the jobs of just doing the job. Yeah, cool. All right, let's kick off with our first question then. So this is one of the pre prepared questions to get our conversation going. And we've touched on this a little bit in our intros. But what does remote even mean these days? We in the past went remote for various reasons. Covid obviously caused a lot of us to move remote for other reasons, but it's never really gone back. And you know, the industry in total, very few jobs now are five days a week back in the office. So what, what does remote even mean, Nicola?

[00:12:47] What Does ‘Remote’ Even Mean These Days?

Nicola Nye: You know, in the olden days remote just sort of meant usually that you had members in maybe another state. These days though, you know, we've got everything from people who are working, maybe time shifted hours or casual hours spread across the day, just from home, even if they sometimes come into the office. And then you've got people who are full time remote and then you've got people in other time zones, but they're still in the same country. And then, you know, you've got people totally in another country in a very different time zone which you know, might mean that you have very limited window to crossover and you've also got sort of cultural and cultural barriers as well. So I think remote's pretty broad. I'm waiting for the day that we have remote on the moon.

Andrew Murphy: It's probably not that far off. John, anything you want to add to what Nicholas said?

John Sherwood: Yeah, I feel like, yeah, we're not going back to pre Covid days. That was a huge shift. I feel like even now the things in the state of flux, like what remotes where we're actually going to settle, you're seeing banks and some companies saying, hey, yes, come back in the office. And is it going to be like this sort of two tier system where there's like the. Or three like, you know, we got like full back in the office, hybrid and fully remote and you know, what sort of market share is each of those three tiers going to be like? I'm curious to see where that ends up. And I feel like it's going to, you know, just keep on shifting until maybe, maybe even not in my career. We're going to see the end of it.

Nicola Nye: That's shifting, although I think it depends on the industry. You know, tech is, tech is very accepting and the individual workers, the individual contributors have got, you know, relatively high degrees of power and control and are able to move the needle on the company's, you know, culture. But I know in other industries, you know, even if they're still doing work at a computer, got to come back into the office. So I wonder, you know, you were talking about having sort of a multi tier kind of arrangement, John. I do wonder whether we're going to have, you know, the technology people over here who've got this kind of culture and then, you know, other, other industries and things over here where even if they've got tech workers, they're still going to have an in person culture even if technologically it's possible for them to remote work. Remote?

Andrew Murphy: Is, is that a risk? Because you know, the. If, if as a, as an...

Nicola Nye: Absolutely.

Andrew Murphy: ...We're working under different conditions, different culture to the people we're serving. Because at the end of the day, as an IT industry, we're serving other industries in the software that we create. If we have different cultures and different ways of working, are we going to lose empathy? Are we going to lose understanding? Is there going to be a separation? That's a huge risk. How do we mitigate that?

John Sherwood: I was considering the bit where the company says, hey, we're not going remote anymore. You have to come into the office three days a week. I was wondering if that would be a tool that they could use to basically ramp up headcount, say hey, we're remote. And then when they want to ramp down, you just say we're no longer remote. And basically just cut, cut 20% of staff immediately. Like this is a tool you could use. That's cynical. But I'm like, that'd be an interesting way to play it.

Nicola Nye: John, I don't want to live in your dystopian world. I was more thinking in terms of. So sorry, go ahead.

Andrew Murphy: Sorry. Nicola, we've got a comment from Chania about, you know, tech and banks. It's probably quite different. You're back to my story of the vmx. A lot of banks often still have physical mainframes that are in data centers. And does that mean that there's a difference between the way that we might work? I know Nicola, fastmail had some physical servers, but most of the software you wrote was separate. John, I know that gleam. You use a lot of AWS and those kinds of hosting environments, but for other industries that could be quite different. Does that mean that there might be a separation between them?

[00:16:56] Industry Constraints and Self-Selection in Remote Work

Nicola Nye: Yes, you know, and I think, look, some people are going to want to be hands on, on the servers or they want, you know, that ability to, to, You Know, if you're working in certain industries, you know, bank or defense or that sort of thing, there might be the requirement that you have to be on site and be able to be monitored. You physically cannot take your work home. And I think, you know, there are going to be people who that, but there's also not going to be people who, you know, who are not into that. And I do wonder whether people are going to self categorize and kind of go, well, you know, I thought I wanted to work at the bank and get the big bucks but I'd actually much rather work from home and they will head off into a, into a different job. So I think it's, you know, it's a job risk and it's probably for employers and I think it's more likely to pull people out of face to face industries if they can see that they can get an equivalent kind of job that does have flexibility to it.

John Sherwood: Yeah, I see the banks as like a package. Like you know, back in the pre remote days the package you got from the banks was basically you show up at the office on time, you go to lots of meetings, not a lot of impact. Releases are really slow. You have to wear a suit and tie or you know, slacks and smart shirt. And now that you know, you have to shop to the office as part of that package. So you know, you go to the bank, get paid good bucks, probably the best gig in town money wise. But you know, you're taking a hit on the other stuff.

Andrew Murphy: Yeah, that's a good point. And there's a lot of stuff that goes along with that that isn't just remote work. It's. Yeah, the culture is, the culture is quite different. And are you, what are you trading off? We got a comment from Ben that car sales still allow remote work 100% at the time. But it feels like we're in the shrinking minority. I saw some research that a company did think and grow and it was basically at both ends of the spectrum. Zero days a week in the office and five days a week in the office. That was single digit percentages of companies. So you know, less than 10% at either end of the spectrum. And then the spread was pretty much even in the middle. Two, three, four days a week in the office. It was sort of, you know, 20% for odd percent for each of those. So I think the research is showing that it's unusual to be at both sides and as an industry we're kind of landing somewhere in the middle where there's hybrid work and you know, two, three, four days a week in the office.

[00:19:25] Regulatory Pressures and Shifting Employee Priorities

Nicola Nye: And Chaitan is also sorry. Chaitanya has also noted that certain industries may be getting sort of regulatory pressure as well. But I do, you know, I do wonder if at the moment the tech industry, particularly in Australia and elsewhere around the world, it's a buyer's market. If you want to work, you've got to put up with what the, what the organization's culture is because there's so many people looking for jobs and so many people have been laid off. If that, you know, at some point, if that inverts and you know, people are, you know, there's a real talent shortage and companies are having struggles to hire. Well, you know, then they'll, then they'll bring up, bring back the perks in order to attract the best talent.

Andrew Murphy: Yeah.

Nicola Nye: So it may be one of those things that just shifts over time.

Andrew Murphy: Yeah, I love this where we're potentially heading into the how do you make decisions as an employee type of conversation, which I think is great. But let's maybe move back to focusing on being a leader and leading a remote team and what that means. So first, first question that we've got. What are the top mistakes to avoid when leading a remote team? John, do you want to kick us off?

[00:20:43] Top Mistakes in Leading Remote Teams

John Sherwood: I guess the sort of my go to for that and it's been the same one for a long time, is trying to emulate, you know, in person, remotely. So basically saying, hey, in person we had a stand up where everyone had to stand up and they had to do this. And you're like, yeah, let's just copy that completely as best we can with a zoom call. And I'm like, I've really enjoyed basically being able to invent remote work from first principles. We've never had an office, so we just, rather than saying, how did we do this previously? We just get to start from scratch every time and come up with interesting ideas. Whereas I guess when remote was thrust upon everybody at the start of COVID they basically just tried to copy what they had and then just move it to a zoom call and say, yep, I think we're done remote now.

Andrew Murphy: Yeah. So, yeah, trying to use the same processes and systems. How do you, how do you make decisions about which ones you keep and which processes and systems you keep and which ones you, you kind of change and adjust.

John Sherwood: Well, we've, yeah, we've changed a lot. Even in the time that I've been doing this company, like, you know, in the olden days we had no meetings at all and no FaceTime at all. And it was basically I tried to run it like an open source project because I was so enamored by postgres and how they write amazing software remotely as far as I'm aware. And so over time as I organized and scaled up that wasn't working. Like the feedback loops were just not there. And now we've got monthly calls and one on ones, we've got a few other calls but yeah know, we've moved from a, you know, completely remote, faceless like you know, I had people working for me for several years and I didn't even know what they looked like. And that was cool. But yeah, that if you don't have any rapport with them then getting like meaningful feedback is also difficult. And yeah, like the turnaround time when they're in, you know, Europe and you're doing everything Async, it was just not quick enough. So now I have like, you know, evening calls and things like that. So we've sort of moved more to a traditional kind of shop over time. But yeah, like you basically just just, you know, just basically do retros in one form or another to figure out what's working and what's not and you know, you allow things to stop working. Like you know, if, if people don't want to do a process there's probably that's a bit of a smell that maybe your process isn't adding any value and people aren't, you know, you've hired a bunch of smart people and you've given them a process and not following it. It's not because they're lazy usually, it's because it probably doesn't make any sense and people come lazy.

Andrew Murphy: Yeah, it's a great point. If people don't see the value in a process, they're not going to be incentivized to follow the process. And it's such a valid point. Nicola, I feel like you got a lot to say on this.

Nicola Nye: What I know about you, I think you know, as a leader one of the top mistakes that you can make is trying to measure productivity in the old style way. You know and, and we often, individuals have often spoken about this. You know, why, why are you trying to measure in in such and such a manner or you know, I can, I am concerned that, you know, organizations don't want remote work because they see, you know, if they can't see the work happening then they assume that people are slacking off and being lazy. And that's definitely a really easy to trap to fall into. If you have have gotten by up till now by, you know, sort of that walking past people's desk, watching what conversations are taking place, seeing how people contribute in meetings, which is a really easy thing to do. So I think remote work requires that you need to put in a little bit more thought in terms of what does productivity look like. And I'm not just talking about, you know, have they closed sufficient numbers of stories this week? It is, you know, are they, how do you measure whether they're mentoring other people in your organization particularly, you know, because it's really easy to sort, feel uncomfortable about annoying someone else for a zoom chat. But you know, there, there are always questions that need to be dealt with. You know, in any kind of relationship, people don't go off and work in isolation so they can have those meetings and the manager won't know anything about it. But then how do you make sure that that knowledge transfer is happening? Because it is effectively invisible work. There's no outputs that come from it. And so I think that that kind of requires a big mind shift and if you're not prepared for it, it can absolutely cause real problems in the team. By trying to, trying to manage your experience of what productivity looks like, you can actually degrade your productivity further.

[00:25:25] Remote Leadership: Practical Actions, Measuring and Supporting Productivity

Andrew Murphy: So it's my job in this to make sure that what we talk about is actionable. So you, you said a lot of great stuff there, Nicola, but I'm going to ask you to answer the questions you asked. How do you make sure that somebody is doing these things and how do you get a sense of that?

Nicola Nye: You know, I think great, great start of it has to be consultants answer. It depends. So different individuals have got different kinds of working styles and sometimes this might require that you have a big chat with your team and say, hi, you know, new way of working. What is our, you know, working agreement in terms of how these things should work? And you know, some teams or some individuals are going to sit there and say, you can bother me anytime. I'm going to have my, you know, remote working window up at any time. You can just pop in and effectively. It's like walking through my door in my office. Other people sit there and say, no, no, no, I work really best, you know, deep focus first thing in the morning. But you know, but here's my calendar and you can schedule and let's check in and chat. And so sometimes, you know, as a manager, when you want to figure out is things happening, it requires that you set up calls with, with individuals and say, you know, dear junior person, are you getting what you need out of this? How can I make it work for you? Dear senior person, you know, how are you going mentoring the junior? What did you work on? Or you know, maybe you'd be like, you know, would you mind if I stop by the next time you're doing a pairing session or something like that. But, you know, hopefully having had those conversations with the team and figured out how people like to work, what's going to be successful for them to work, then that's going to give you an idea that the, the staff are brought in and you can also see what kind of agreed artifacts might come out of it. So maybe people, when they're doing some pairing, they might agree to write some notes down so that they don't lose that knowledge and you know, you agree that you're going to email it back to the rest of the team. So they also kind of get a byproduct of that, that knowledge sharing. So you can, you know, monitor for cadence of that kind of stuff coming through.

Andrew Murphy: Yeah, no, that, that makes a lot of sense. How do you balance the, the sense that you might be micromanaging people? Because I can see that there's this desire when you lose visibility in some areas that you want to kind of gain that visibility by over communication and over checking in. How do you kind of balance that in yourself and put checks in to make sure you don't do that?

Nicola Nye: I think at the end of the day you've got to sit there and say, how do, how do, what does that, what does a productive team mean for me? What does a high performing team mean for me? And so some of that is going to be, you know, technically based? You know, are we closing stories at an appropriate cadence? Do I see in the retros that people are surfacing, you know, concerns? Do I think that there is good psychological safety in the teams? You know, so when you do have those team calls, you can monitor for that kind of behavior. If you're concerned that you're micromanaging, then that is, you know, hopefully something that you'll be bringing up in your one on ones or in the retro, you know, the manager's butting in too much. Can't they see that we are getting work done? The nice thing is that the technical artifacts are usually pretty easy to follow. You can use tools to follow that, you know, are commits happening? Do they look like, you know, code reviews or got reasonable stuff happening out? How well is your CI CD pipeline going? You know, our customers actually happy with what's being produced. It's, you know, I do think, as always, you know, some people call them soft skills, I call them core skills. You know, it's all, it's all that people stuff. Are people communicating in a, in a good, safe, productive kind of way. And you will soon figure out which ones you trust are very proactive about that and which ones might need a little bit more nudging. And that's, you know, that's where the micromanaging can slip in. If you think that you've got some, some people on staff whose default mechanism is heads down, bums up, I just want to write code. And then there'll be, you'll have some others whose default mechanism is, I really like talking to people. And you'll, you'll figure out what the balance is. But if you're, if you're concerned that you're getting too much into people's faces where you hopefully you'll be self aware enough to go and say, you know, is this working for you? How can we do this better?

Andrew Murphy: Sure makes sense. John, I'd love to get your thoughts on that spectrum of, I guess, micromanaging to autonomy and where you feel you fit on that and the upsides and downsides of that.

John Sherwood: Yeah, look, my current system is pretty straightforward. Just have a monthly one on one. We go in linear. And I'm a developer, so I can basically estimate roughly how long things will take. And we just sort of estimated like rough days. And I'm like, cool, that's roughly 20 days worth of stuff. I reckon they're like, you might say, does that look like a decent month? And they're like, yay or nay? And we sort of add and subtract stuff and then, yeah, that's their minimum if they want that level of interaction. One phone call a month, that's their choice. So on the other side, where a lot of the pull requests come to me, so there is a little bit of that where the interactions we have via pull requests can be maybe a little bit micromanage where I'm like, hey, change this, change this, change this. But I don't know that that's a remote working thing so much as just the pull request process that most places have. So, yeah, like my system is fairly straightforward at the moment. Just estimate based on what I would think it would take. And then if it takes longer or they don't get stuff done, that's just a conversation we need to have and say, hey, what happened here? I need to do this thing. All right, fine. That took two Extra days.

Andrew Murphy: Sure, yeah, I guess. Hire, Hire smart people, give them the problems to solve and help them do it.

John Sherwood: Yeah, yeah, I, I try very hard, you know, with the exception of like junior developers, like not to be too descriptive or prescriptive in the how I would do it. Like, you know, sometimes I'm quite impressed by the solutions people come up with. And so, you know, I'll often be like, with junior developers picking up, hey, here's the code that I think you'll need to change. But with other developers I'm like, hey, here's how we did this historically. Give them some context and some history, but not be like, hey, please add three lines to this class here. That's not necessary and we'll just give them the shits.

[00:32:07] Challenges of Remote Work: Problems Raised by Teams

Andrew Murphy: Great. We've got a great comment or question from Alex here. What problems did your teams ever raise with you that you might feel are related to remoteness? John, do you want to answer that?

John Sherwood: So, yeah, I guess if you're in the office, the rapport you build and the feedback you get is just this happens because you're in the same room. Whereas in particularly like for pairing or even just sort of seeing how other people work, like that sort of stuff you have to be very deliberate about getting when you're remote. I kind of feel like my junior developers have been getting shortchanged because, like being in the same office next to one developer there and one developer on the other side of you, you just learn a lot more. You sort of look over and like, what the hell is that? And they go, oh, that's emacs. And you're like, that's weird. And then you learn about that. Whereas, you know, to learn how people use their weird ides, you kind of need to be very deliberate about that if they live four time zones away. So, yeah, that's a fairly broad answer about just basically interactions that teach you about the organization and about how people work and even just what they're working on. In some cases it just doesn't happen organically. So you need to be deliberate.

Nicola Nye: You know, this is a quite a nuanced reply because the kind of problems that I see would be staff saying, I can't get my work done, I need more input from someone or other else. And there's a power dynamic at play if you're, you know, people with all the knowledge are like, this is great, I love remote working. I can get so much done, there's so few interruptions, I don't have to answer questions from people asking me what my weird ide is doing. You know, I'm super focused. This is brilliant. And then everybody else around them is like, but you have all the knowledge. And you know, maybe because, you know, we're working quite asynchronously, I can't get the knowledge fast enough. So now I'm stalled on my primary project. And so, you know, I get, you know, I've had people come up to and say, look, I, I with the best will in the world, I'm trying to progress this and I'm sort of slogging it through on my own. But you know, so and so will only talk to me once a week or whatever it might be. You know, it's hard to get access to them because, you know, we don't mandate responses in Slack or you know, they're not checking their email very frequently. And part of that is intentional because they are in fact attempting with the best will in the world to remain focused and their idea of productive. And I see, you know, someone else in the, in the chat has commented around that, you know, that, that those team interactions too, you know, because if you've got a one rock star and, and everybody else, you know, one rock star might be working at 200% but if everybody else is working at 10%, that's not as effective if everybody's working at 80%, for instance. So you know, it's getting those, getting those rock stars to, to focus on team productivity rather than self productivity. And that, you know, that requires some fairly guided performance conversations with your seniors. And it also, you know, it's, it's those team working expectations because it is exhausting if you are, if you are on the wrong side of that power dynamic. Having to always effectively beg for, for attention or information or support. And you can only do that so many times before you sort of sit there and think, well, either they don't think that I'm worthy or it's too much effort and I will carry on and do my thing. And that's, you know, either you end up with people who are burnt out or they're unproductive and you feel like you have to fire them. But you know, really the, the problem at heart is that, you know, this remote barrier is, is getting in the way of fruitful communication. And that's, you know, certainly a really big risk.

[00:36:15] Building Cohesion and Belonging in Remote Teams

Andrew Murphy: Which is a great, a great kind of segue to I think the comment you were suggesting, which is Ben's around, you know, clear expectations around how that communication works and the guidelines around It. One of the things I always encourage my teams to do is to have a team charter in place which talks about how they work and how those interactions work. I think they become even more important in remote teams. What's a reasonable expectation of a time delay between a conversation? How do people want to be reached out to? Is it slack? Is it Zoom? How do they work? What's the. The ways of working of this squad and codifying that into a charter, I think, is how you can solve a lot of those things, because then those conversations become more around sticking to an agreed way of working as opposed to just this constant frustration that things are not really working how people expect them to work. Because we got a definition of how that team works. Got a question from Jethro here. How do you manage cohesion and sense of belonging among team members working remotely? I think this is something that is a perennial challenge, and I think we can all agree that the idea of mandated fun time is not the way that you solve this, but there are ways to do that. Nicola, how did you tackle this type of challenge?

Nicola Nye: You know, this has got so much to it, and I think it requires a strong awareness of your team, team members and. And what kind of floats their boat. The sorts of things that maybe I would do for a full Australian team is different to the sorts of things that I would support if, you know, some of your team is in India, just because culturally there's a. There's a different kind of thing going on. Like, we tried to do team lunches and this was just for people in Australia. It was launch day. We. We completed a whole bunch of things ceremonially, you know, we're like, right, well, we're all remote right now, thanks to Covid. We'll, you know, send everybody menu log kind of voucher thing, and then they can go and. And get their lunch and we'll all eat lunch together. But eating lunch together over Zoom is not as much fun because, you know, the chewing noises are disgusting. And so it was really weird. So that was a total failure. Don't do that. So it comes down a little bit into finding those little ceremonies that bring people with interests together. So I ran for a while. Was called Tranquil Tuesdays. So Every Tuesday at 2:00', clock, designed to fit in around school management times. Because it lasted post Covid, I would log on and people would join the Zoom and it would be cameras off, everybody would be mute, and I would stream in, like a meditation off YouTube or something like that. And we would sit there and it was just 10 minutes. And then at the end of it, you know, if people wanted to stick around and have a little chat, we'd have a little chat. And it was the highlight of some people's weeks. And so we had team members. It was late enough that some team members from India would come and join us. Occasionally team us would come and join us. Sometimes we do a group draw a source, but we always tried to make sure that, you know, when there was a significant release of software or we had a bunch of like a report come through in terms of looking at some of our user data that that would be also celebrated with something. And sometimes that was sending physical gifts out to people and other times it would be an online bunch of shenanigans.

Andrew Murphy: I think a lot of what you're talking about there is non transactional communication remote work can lead us towards this reversion to the lowest common denominator, which is we only talk to people when we want something from them. And that's kind of the opposite of building these senses of belonging and team of cohesion that Jethro is talking about. John, I'd love for you to chime in on this and I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what we were talking about just before the live stream of what you do with your team for this.

John Sherwood: Yeah. Okay, so what do we do? So I'm probably one of the chattiest people in my company and I feel sometimes like I'm screaming into the void and just the odd, like just one little emoji from someone. I'm like, fuck, somebody's listening.

Andrew Murphy: Thank goodness.

John Sherwood: And so yeah, I am. I over index my emojis on people. If I, if they say anything I'm like freaking tadas and all sorts of things. Like I'm letting people know that you know, this isn't just an empty space. So I try very hard to you know, respond to people in like trade comments in slack and emojis and all the rest. So it's the day to day thing. Weekly we run a call. So like 9 o' clock tonight I'll be having a beer. They'll be having you know, Wheaties in Portugal. Maybe the guy from Peru will be like doing like you know, the morning wake up routine before school run. So yeah to we call it tea and T could be whatever you want it to be. So but you know, I'm a little bit on the fence about that one. Like the bit where you're like, hey, we've got Friday afternoon beers like in In Australia if you're at the office you just go for beers on 5 o' clock on Friday. That's a fairly common thing. But trying to emulate that in a remote team that's like across every time zone basically it's a little bit awkward. And like when I go on holidays and they don't do it, I'm like, is this all just for me? Is this like just John's? Yeah, but then they've done it a few times without me. I'm like, okay, it's not all that at least. And then once a year we fly everyone out to. Well, not everyone who wants to come and everyone who's able to come out to like a, like this year we went to Stockholm and got a great big mansion and all of us were there for nine days. That was quite nice. And you know, we basically, basically worked 9:30 in the morning till 4:30 each day and all together at about, around a big table and a few like little coffee table areas and that was super nice. People love that. And you know it's, it's optional and it's like it is truly optional but not many people are going to pass up like an all expensive paid week and a half long trip to whatever country we pick. You know, this year it was Sweden, last year was Australia. We've done Thailand, Spain, Prague and probably do Japan next year. So yeah, nice places. And usually we sort of subsidize there, you know, if you want to go to Japan and hey, you want to swing by Singapore on the way back. We sort of subsidize the to and from travel. You know, if you want to have a little bit of a detour, layover for three days kind of thing and that, that's been huge for people, like people. That's the highlight of people's years in a lot of cases because you know, it's super nice and we, you know, do fun activities like rally driving and we've, we've been trying to do skydiving for years but every time it falls apart. You know, canceled in Melbourne, unable to get it in Sweden. Yeah, I think that's the sort of the main three things we do. But yeah, even now it still feels lonely.

Andrew Murphy: Yeah, it can be, it can be hard. Like I, I realized in my last job when I worked at Linktree that you know, just meeting somebody, we had a, all of the senior leadership team got together for the first time and I just realized that there's people there that I'd never met in person before and it was Just really strange to realize that I'd been working with this person for almost 12 months and never seen them in person. And the dynamics shifted after that, you know, they definitely became a lot closer and a lot more human to me and three dimensional and even being aware of that, there's something deep in the psychology.

John Sherwood: Sorry. So one of the problems we have as in I don't know if you picked up on it before but like I run my monthly one on ones where me and this one person decide on their tasks for the month. This is not like a team estimation session where everyone sort of puts us on the board and picks up things and all works together. It's very sort of like wheel and hub and spoke kind of management which you know, is not everyone's cup of tea. But the interactions between my team are kind of few and far between. You know, if they're not working directly on something together and need each other that you know, those people will just not interact at all. So you know, someone, you know, when they finally get to this retreat and they actually are in the same room together, it kind of. They finally meet each other for realsies rather than like hoping that they cross paths in some, you know, some. The back end person in this time zone and the front end person this time zone. No interactions whatsoever basically beyond like you know, the odd comment in Slack and yeah, it actually became real for them which was quite nice.

Andrew Murphy: I love that those, those moments are some of the best as leaders. It's great.

[00:45:07] Remote Work and Global Hiring Pools

Andrew Murphy: Changing tack a little bit. We've got a comment from Andrew. Apologies Andrew. The way Streamyard works, you can't see your name but it's a comment around hiring pools and the fact that remote work basically means that you can hire people that you wouldn't otherwise have been able to hire. John, I think you can talk about this at length considering that's basically how your entire company works.

John Sherwood: Yeah. So what's been interesting. So we pay basically the same rate globally which is fairly uncommon. So we basically match what would be a good salary in Australia. Not, not great, but good. So we basically just can't hire anyone in the Bay Area. Like they just cost too much. But we can basically just annihilate local salaries in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe and Africa. So in that instance there we basically get the pick of the market, which is awesome. Whereas in Australia we get the people that, you know, Linktree didn't want. So yeah, so yeah, I love this. Like I can get some really, really good people all around the world. Like the Hiring pool is huge. Yeah, we've actually. Yeah, we've got a remote recruiter that's based out of Dubai and she's just amazing. So she finds people all over the globe and you know. Yeah, like I don't think I'd ever go back to just basically putting an ad up on seek and just hitting up local candidates. Like it would just, it would just seem, you know, bizarre and you know, like a terrible system. Just as a quick aside, a recruiter that does time and materials instead of placement percentage. Way better system. Love it.

Nicola Nye: We've had some, I've had some hitches in the past looking to set up remote. Remote folks. If you are concerned about local labor laws, then making sure that people's taxes are being paid and you know, whatever their local equivalent of superannuation or healthcare is being paid can be a huge headache and you can find companies who will manage that for you. But it does add enough on costs that your risk versus reward might be a little bit offset. I know some, some companies chase this, countries chase this more actively than others. Obviously if you are in sort of a more remote country that has a more fluid grasp of laws, you are probably. And you don't, and you don't hire heaps and heaps of people, you are probably not going to come to the attention of the authorities. But you know, other, other countries, you know, if even one, if even one person is, you know, how has this person got this lavish lifestyle when they theoretically have got no income coming in and we've never seen a tax return, you know, tax taxes coming, employee taxes come in, you know, you don't want to put your remote workers at risk of coming to the uncomfortable attention of the law. So, you know, I would suggest, you know, if you're looking to do significant amounts of outsourcing around the world, that you choose the destinations of your remote workers carefully or else, you know, accept that you will need to be paying on costs and then compare what it might take to get someone in a different time zone where maybe those on costs will be smaller or you know, if it actually works out that, you know, a local staff member is. By the time you add in all those extra fees, a local staff member actually might seem not that much more expensive than your remote person.

John Sherwood: Yeah, we were trying to hire somebody in Germany and the, you know, looking at those Companies, you say like remote.com and things like that. And yeah, the costs were going to be quite prohibitive to basically comply with like German workplace laws which are like, I guess probably the strictest in the world. And in the end this person's just like, do you want me to move to Greece? I'm like, yeah, just move to Greece.

Andrew Murphy: Nice that they could do that. I mean the, the EU makes that easier. You know, getting somebody from, you know, Mexico to move to the US it might not be as easy. Yeah. Nicola, you made an interesting point there about how, you know, if you're going into this with the idea that you're going to get cheap people, then maybe you're leading yourself into a false expectation because of all these additional costs. I think that's a really important point. To kind of nail home is often the people don't do this because it's the cheaper option. They, they do it because it gives them exposure to a much larger candidate pool and they can find that they're not limiting themselves in terms of who they can hire based on the country that they happen to have founded their company in.

Nicola Nye: Absolutely. You know, and I think we're seeing a lot more of people saying, look, the time zone is immaterial, but you know, most of our meetings are taking place in, you know, this chunk of time frame. So you know, if you're prepared to get up at 2am every day your time to take those meetings, well that's on you, providing the rest of your performance is great. But equally, you know, a lot of them, particularly for US folks are like, well, you can work anywhere in the US but we do need to be in the US because otherwise we can't pay you. So, you know, I'm really impressed by what John's been able to set up. You know, I think he's clearly 2009. I think you said you started ahead of the curve all over it and have apparently very easily figured out, you know, where you might stand in terms of employment law and how to make it work for you and your company.

Andrew Murphy: How many, John, how many of your employees are like employee and employees and how many of them are like individual contractors that you deal with us in that kind of environment?

John Sherwood: I think we have six employees, like, I think like only a couple of people who are like direct contractors and all the other ones have basically their own consulting company that deals with all the tax internally and you know, all the tax write offs and all that sort of nonsense. So yeah, most people, particularly ones who have like been established remote Workers for a while have set up these sort of tax structures. You know, like one of my. One of my people, we don't have anyone in Estonia, but we pay an Estonian company because that's the way to do it, apparently. And so, yeah, like, people. People, you know, as. As they sort of go like, hey, if I do this, I can earn 10% more money. And then they basically set up the company structure according to that. Like, that's. That's fairly common. So, yeah, six employees, two direct, and then like, what, 10 subcontractors through either their own or some sort of payroll company.

Andrew Murphy: Yeah, I think that's an approach. Approach that works the kind of scale you're at, but it probably doesn't work if you 10x or 100x your employee base. I feel like the admin might get too much. Unless I'm wrong now, when I was.

John Sherwood: Looking at Remote.Com , right, so basically they have two offerings. One is where they basically employ that person directly and comply with local employment laws. And that was really expensive. And the other one is they basically do the contractors and they, you know, the moment I said the word contractor, they basically just put me onto like, the cheapo garbage sales team instead of like this, the Richie expensive one. And they basically just, as far as I could tell, did bugger all beyond, like, time tracking, and I might as well just use Hubstaff for cheaper. So, yeah, like, certainly they had like, you know, the two offerings, and one's kind of meh, as far as I'm concerned. The other one's like the full service, which would be kind of cool if you want that, but expensive. So if I was completely committed to hiring someone in Germany and was like, you know, I'll take the whatever percent hit on this, that would make sense. But yeah, for somebody who just move over to Greece and be like, that's fine. Yeah, it worked out okay.

Andrew Murphy: Awesome. Just got a comment from Ben thanking us for this, for this live stream. You're very welcome, Ben. This. This is the type of stuff that makes me happy, is when I know that we're giving value and helping people. So thank you for your thanks. We're gonna. We're rapidly approaching the top end of the hour, which is crazy considering that I feel like we've just started this conversation. Got a question from Alex. Does it ever worry you that you are hiring? Not necessarily through networks, since it's a global proposition. I think a lot of leaders rely on their network when hiring. John, do you want to start us off with that?

[00:54:01] Hiring Remote: Using and Building Networks

John Sherwood: Yeah, I was a Java developer for a long time. So my network is basically too expensive. So I've not got jobs in banks. So yeah, I'm not going to pay you know, bank dollars and you know, my network, I have a decent enough network but yeah, to try to find like Rails developers these days I kind of need to throw a wider net. Like all the people doing Rails when I started have basically moved on to basically leadership or like you know, high paid consulting gigs. So yeah, like my network is kind of tapped already.

Nicola Nye: So it sounds like you're not particularly worried about it because you've got no choice. I mean John, you've, you've, you're sort of your company's kind of startup scale almost. I have heard of people who are setting up larger scale remote teams and the way I think, you know, referring to Alec question the way that I would do it and I think that it's got a reasonable amount of success is that you need to hire, you'll make your first hire in a, in a country, someone who is like the team lead for that area and then you do all the hard work on one person being hired and then get them to use their networks to hire in the people that they are going to need in that local environment. And you know, maybe, you know this, this is like if a US company wanted to establish in Australia they would hire me and then I would hire the team across Australia. So they don't necessarily have to be directly connected to me. But you know, again then I get to leverage my network, I get to hire the people that I want to work with, which is great and, and you know, so you can do it that way. But you know, every tech leader has ended up hiring people that they don't know or that is, you know, not related through, somewhere through their network. So I don't think going global necessarily makes that any harder or easier other than, you know, all the things that continue to worry you in a, in a day to day environment are going to continue to worry you when they're overseas. But I do think, you know that the first time you hire remote it's really hard because you haven't thought about what it means, what it means, what it might look like, what does your team charter look like. You haven't done any of that stuff. So I think going easy on yourself and on your first remote hire is, is going to be necessary and you'll have to figure it out as you go. And I think transparency is the way to make that successful and acknowledging on both sides that you know you're going to make some mistakes and that that's okay, like it's not fatal and you'll figure it out. And that communication as always continues to be the key to making it work.

Andrew Murphy: Yeah, it's a good point. It's the same. It's very similar challenges to, to hiring just accentuated in, in other areas. John, sorry I cut you off there.

John Sherwood: No, no worries. Yeah, like I think about the hiring pool remotely. So in the olden days remote was basically, you know, a lot of freelancers. Right. And now the, the pool has been kind of muddied with like the freelancers who can't hold down a job, you know, or don't want to hold down a job and then the people that basically like, you know, actual remote full time workers and it can be kind of hard to figure out which one of those a person is. So. Yeah, whereas like, you know, if in the, you know, non remote days we had someone who's going to show up to an office, like if they've committed to show up 9 to 5 to an office, there's a sort of expectation there and that they've kind of got this, this routine down pat. Whereas with remote you don't know if you're hiring someone who's just a total flake or you know, is actually super reliable and actually going to, you know, have good routines because you know, you're not going to be able to enforce those routines easily. So you know, having people that are able to get their shit together, it can be hard to find those people remotely and test for it.

[01:00:00] Livestream Wrap Up and Looking Ahead

Andrew Murphy: I feel like that calibration has probably shifted over the last few years. I think, you know, 10 years ago you're 100% right in that most of the people working remotely were of one of those two categories. We're probably because it's becoming more and more common. We probably are shifting to start to the place where more and more of the people that are working and wanting to work 100% remotely are not the people who can't hold down the job. So that, that calibration is probably shifting over time. Cool. All right, we are, we are coming up to the top end of the hour so we're going to, we're going to start wrapping up now. I really appreciate Nicola and John, you, you joining me and talking about this topic for the last 50 odd minutes. I think it's something which is an issue everybody is facing and is only ever going to become more and more prevalent in, in the industry. I don't think you know where we're going to swing all the way back to the other way. I think there's going to be some swinging around the middle of the pendulum, but we're going to end up pretty close to where we are now, I think. So thank you for sharing your time. Thank you everybody else for joining and asking questions, making comments. It makes our job a lot more easier and a lot more fun when you ask us questions. And we don't just have to talk in isolation. So appreciate everybody who has asked those. Lastly, I just want to mention that this is something we do regularly. We do these live streams on a regular basis, not always with Nicola and John, but my face will be the face that is here on a regular basis. I hope to see Nicola and John again. The next one that we're going to be having is on Friday 10th November, where I'll be joined by Dr. Dan Prager and Lorrene le Gassik and we'll be talking about scaling your impact, how to. How to mentor and develop your team. So as leaders, that's something that's really important. We can't just work incredibly hard ourselves and do the work of our entire team. We have to find ways to scale what we're doing through the people that work with us. So that'll be a really interesting topic with two excellent people. So thank you everybody for joining and I will see you all next time. Goodbye.