Hello, friends and listeners. Today's episode is a deep dive, something we're trying out where we go deep into certain topics that that people have written about asking about. And today's is with an expert on the subject of remote work heating. Shaw is been building companies for 15 years solely with distributed workforces, meaning people work all around the country or the world and don't really have a single office that they go to. And he has built some pretty big business is this way. So much so that he's become the expert that people ask about how to go about building a remote team, remote business, a remote culture. And they have just published today perhaps the most comprehensive report on data driven report research on remote work. So I'm really excited to have him on the podcast, to almost act as a kind of audio complement to the research that they just posted and dive into the topic of remote work. So, without further delay, let's get into it with heat and show.

Keaton, welcome back. Thanks for having me chairs, of course. Cheers. Today this evening's drink is Yogi Chammah Me les t getting everyone knows it's pronounced Chammah meal Can a meal champ Chammah meal.

That's the first thing we did disagree on.

And that's I want to invite dissension. Um, so won't you. I'm not saying I'm right. I'm just saying everyone knows it's jam a meal, You know? What is your What is your tags? Say so. Yogi tease. Have these a little quick, please. Phrases on each team talk, and they're always unique. Probably some dude in Boulder just writes these down.

Mine's really good for

today. What does it

say? So to speak the truth. I do my best to do that. I try to, but I'd rather do it, so I'm gonna speak truth.

Amen. Amen. That's perfect for today. Mine is. Couldn't be better for today. Mine is socialized with compassion, kindness and grace. Sounds like you standard. Yeah, that's great for today as well. I love it. Neither of those. Well, actually, yours has a lot to do with this topic that we're gonna do a deep dive on. This is an experiment that I have I've been wanting to do where I just go deep into a topic. And today's topic is remote work which so many people have questions about. You have been not only doing remote work. For how long? 15 years. 16 16 years.

Only light, so to speak.

Wave of way before. Since you're three way before, Uh, it was in vogue. And it is. And what was that? Out of logic necessity? When did you? 16 years ago. What made you accident? Awesome. Okay, well, get in at, but also not just doing it for well over a decade, but also compiling all of this research on remote work, which is this remote work data that you're about to drop. Yeah. You are dropping

that report and it'll be out now. It is out now. Amazing. Ah, and it's that bit lisa bit dot l'll I slash remote report and you'll be able to find it. And we did it at one of my companies left by I. We researched it by We ended up having about 400 plus respondents to it. And then we did a bunch of other sort of, uh, solicitation on Twitter to go fine, cute pet pics tad to it and tips tad too. It tons of tips. We have 150 plus tips and then also remote works setups. So those all got incorporated into the report. We also originally did it with a partner called Mira, who has, ah,

sort of, ah, white boarding. And so they helped us promoted early on, and that's kind of a story. And we've got a few other partners that ah, we have in there as well. And so, yeah, I think the reason I'm excited to talk to you about this is one I like experiments. So I'm the guinea pig. I would say on this one about a deep dive that you want to do, and that's awesome. And then number two, it's really great to talk about something that so many people are thinking about right now, for,

I think, many different reasons. And then it's also interesting to talk about something that has been around for a long time. It's kind of a weird thing. It's hyped right now. I would say, cause so many people are talking about it. I think there's a number of reasons why it's hyped and start a planned and a lot of founders air thinking about it, and at the same time it's been something that some of us have done for over a decade. Her decade and 1/2 I will give props to the folks at 37 signals Base Camp. Who wrote the book on the topic many years ago. I don't remember how many years ago that rework, I think, was no, they haven't know. They wrote this a few years ago now. Ah, and it's I think the book is called remote. So they wrote the book on the whole thing about how they

do it. Yeah, and then word presses well and get hub and and and even at Airbnb, out of the 5000 placement, obviously very distributed. Yeah, and many that that, uh, that work from home, and it's it's growing there. But there isn't a great comprehensive look at remote work, and the companies that have, well, how to remote workers are not really incentivized to do the research on what is absolutely best for everyone. It's it's very hard to do. The research companies that are completely remote aren't necessarily incentivized to do the research. Is this the right?

You kind of commit to it early on, and if you have 500 employees, even 100 employees. You're pretty looked even, maybe 15. It's It's very difficult to, Ah, a shift, and that's one of the most. And that's probably one of most fascinating things about this. Not necessarily organizationally, but lifestyle for individuals. Once they do it, it's very hard for them to go back. But I want to start super high level. When did you when did you all start?

This and this is so great. But so not only is this very topical people are talking about remote work employees in the same way that they three years ago, were saying, Hey, let's use slack there now, with pretty high volume saying and we should be distributed or we should be remote from a very high level. Do you mind giving just, Ah, your 16 year view on the history of remote work on maybe goes back way beyond that. But just hi little view of what you've seen over the last 16 years and the differences between remote and and distributed. It's a touch of

funny and I never really thought much of it, and I just accidentally landed on it because we had a consultant company and we had consultants and we hired people who are remote already by nature of hiring writers and folks who understood social media and things like that, and they happen to be all over the world and especially back then all over the U. S. Ah, and so that's my history where it was accidental. And it was out of starting a consulting company as first kind of bonding company, I started her online focused company. Prior to that, I I believe that the Fortune 500 companies of yesterday, which are still Fortune 500 companies like IBM and he'll, a Packard and a bunch of companies like that at some point in their history enabled people to work from home. So if you start even looking at the terminology online, then you start looking at search history and search trends. Remote work is very low volume in comparison to work from home. So to me, a lot of this trend also has to do with work from home,

which is a little bit different, cause work from home could be. I work from home, I make money. I don't necessarily work for a company right, and that's like the historical sort of perspective on it. And so I believe that when I when I did a little bit of research on this Ah, a while ago, the those companies were enabling people to work from home, and they got a bunch of learnings about people working from home. And some of those learnings were oriented around. Oh, we shouldn't let people were so because they're less efficient, less productive, productive or we just don't know what they're doing. We can't see what they're doing. I mean, back then, though, you didn't have the same accountability systems or the same

tools and win with this eighties, nineties,

eighties, nineties. I mean, this is not like it was. I would say that it wasn't even distributed work. So I think the evolution has been more like people. For whatever reason, we wanted to push for people working from home. And the whatever reason actually back then was to cut costs, commuting costs, costs of office, space, office based chair seats and, like, you know, there is a cost cutting period, you know,

in the world for a while, and so work from home and work from home days. Or think back then. If you start looking into it. After that, I would say that once we started outsourcing toe other countries because that was another trend that started happening. You were essentially having a distributor workforce. So you and even kind of prior to that you have multiple locations in different countries, different parts of the U. S, East Coast, West Coast, things like that. So it's another thing that kind of split up works that it wasn't all in one office. So this idea of distributed work has been happening for a long time. Starting with,

I think, roughly work from home cost cutting, outsourcing all the way to today where there are companies that are 100% distributed and we call them remote or we call it remote work, now 100% remote companies. So one

thing I find fast and interest for listeners that will give the distinction we probably land on his distributors. You have employees around world remote is people are working not from offices distributed could be five offices in five countries and remote would be five people. Five different cities work in five different environments

or anybody or even could be. You have half the team that's distribute it everywhere, and then you have a central office. That's kind of another way to think about it. One way I think about it is that when you hire contractors, those contractors aren't always working out of your office and you hire an agency. They're not always working out of your office. That's distributor work as well. So

in just on that, on that topic, I wonder what the graph would look like. Did you get insight into just how fast the 100% co located Cos. Is declining? I mean, it cannot be. There's no more than more than 50% of companies.

Uh, there is no good data on this because distributed work is not quantified. So if you go to a company, asked them, like how many people are distributed or how much distributor work happens. I would say that now, in every company there is distributed work happening. If you can't agencies consultant as distributed as well and and so to me, I think the the bigger opportunity and way to think about it is what because of the way that we can communicate with each other, using the various online tools and growing okay, Slack zoom are kind of two classic examples. But when you go further back, one of the things that really think push this forward would be G sweet Google Docks and Google APS When it was called that in that whole suite because they were the first to move to the cloud and hit scale with millions of users.

When you think about about time, it's about time for them to change the name again to spend like you don't like. Jeez, we know. I just think it's, you know they have kind of. It's two years now. They need to change the name again. Rebrand Snoop Dog That was like the name. Now it's just annoying how they change it Every now 23 every one of their products. It's so annoying hangouts and then Google meats. And then it's There's just way too much name changing happening out. You have inbox in the knee at Gmail, okay of that soap box. Okay, so these tools you're making it is it is the more that these tools empower the individual and are built for a 21st century world, the more they by definition,

are going to really empower remote work. I mean, it's it's that's so obvious, but it's worth calling out that it's email. You've received your messages in your pocket or in whatever device you want to use anywhere you go 25 years ago, the memos that you need to read that morning 30 years ago would still be delivered Thio a quote unquote in box on your desk.

Yeah, your your admin or your assistant would deliver him you and they'd be sitting in a box, right, little box looking thing. That's an inbox. You're totally right. You know, when you mention it like that, I'd say that, you know, BlackBerry probably started this kind of trend or helped start this trend with the keyboard and your ability to respond to emails much, much more easily than, like, just with numbers, um, or the number keep hat. And then the iPhone probably made the whole situation just so much better.

Because now you could type into the phone in a very like fast and efficient way. And you had all these APs and had all these opportunities open up. So when you look at even like these technol technological trends, it's not just software. It's also the hardware that got us to this place where we can work remotely. I I work for my phone a lot. I type up whole emails like like emails to like my email. It's not just like 121 e mails or whole block post or tweets or anything I'm doing, Ah, even internal into the coming whole documents about things on my phone. I don't need a computer to do it, which means that I don't need to be tethered thio desk or sit somewhere. In fact, one. I mean, there's two pieces of this that I find really interesting when it comes to remote work.

We're still talking about one of them, which we price should continue on, which is the idea that there are business implication when you think about remote work and distributed work. And then there's the other part of it, which is there are implications for the individuals and the people that actually work on the team, and so the both areas are fascinating to me. One of the things about thinking when I think about remote work and destroyed to work today, I really think about what's the difference in terms of how you operate a business and how you think about operating visits. Because one of the reasons we did this is we were having tea and you started asking me about remote work because you're interested in it and you're thinking about it. And you were asking very much from a business and a process standpoint. So I feel like there's a lot to say about that and a lot of things that folks are saying about remote work and distributed work and what that means for how an organization set up and how they operate. And when I when you were asking about the distributed work in the data, the most fascinating thing and I can't prove it fully. But there are just facts that are out there is that there are still very few companies that 100% room up.

That's I think that was one of the things that when looking over the notes on the report it is and then diving into it, it was really It was actually fascinating to think about how there isn't a single company that I know of any more through your your definition that is remote And I think that in my head two weeks ago I thought, Oh, it's probably, like 18% of companies a remote. No. And then maybe it's maybe it was like, 0 32% when you think distributed officer, maybe 50% distributed offices. And then when I started to think about in terms of that offering you bring to the customer is sliced up from people all over the globe, whether it issue the packaging product, the design, the, uh, whatever the customer support, I was like, Oh,

my God, it's There might be 10% of companies that are, if that if that, but you just generously 10% of companies air just today. Seven. Yeah,

let's just say single

digits. Yeah, single digit, 100% remote, 100%. Um

uh, Cole. Okay. Oh,

yeah. Yeah. Street. Um, there's Oh, So you're saying there's very few that are 100% remote? Yeah, as well. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Okay. So what

would you think? Both sides are true. I think we're in the single digits on both pure place, basically. And

so everything's a hybrid.

I think everything has to be a hybrid. Everything will continue to be a hybrid, and the one that will increase is the amount of companies that do more distributed work. What that's not gonna decrease that's gonna increase. The amount of companies that are 100% remote is also gonna increase. But I don't think it's gonna increase at an incredibly crazy pace because there's there's land, there's there's office space, there's types. There's companies that need office space until we get to the point where so many things could be contract it out. So then some agency has office space, but you don't need it because you don't need to do what they do. So you know, this is all like the I mean, there's so many aspects of this that are really fascinating because against it dives really into the weeds like there's now this new trend of these kitchen's opening up right that that that companies can rent basically, and these kitchens have everything a company needs in order to make their food and deliver it through all the delivery APS or getting delivered. The kitchen. Yeah,

the cloud kitchen type stuff. I think there's a help me with that name when you think about it like that. You're like, Wait, you can have a fully rebel company. Use cloud kitchen. Are you remote, or do you have an office because you're renting from Cloud Kitchen or using their outfits part time? What are you right? So I think the definitions of all Vince, there's two ends of it. Pure right, Like you said, Pure co located in one place or multiple place is fine for purely 100% remote. But then everything. There's a murky middle, and I think the murky middle is what is really the

reality. And I think where is relevant to two people right now is just the murky middle. That means that you need to understand these aspects, these dynamics or girl. This if it is, if you're running a company with 20 people, if you're running a team with eight people in to our remote, that means that you you obviously are really interested in this topic because it's now become, ah, a problem to solve. It's a problem you need to solve for

for the entire team. I was talking to some friends yesterday, and they said that they travel a lot for their business, and they said that they have one person that's remote now, and that person used to work at a fully remote company, and they're still trying to figure it out on howto work with not even deal with, essentially work with that person who's fully remote. And I find that really just a fascinating thing. That means that we don't know how to do this if you bring someone on and their struggle to make them successful just because of the fact they're remote. That essentially means that as organizations and I'm extrapolating. But it's about generally true. We don't know howto actually work with folks who aren't in the same room for the same office at scale. So like not every company can be like, Oh, we're just gonna bring one person on this remote for one person on. It's like somewhere else, not where we are.

Well, it's a so would it be helpful to frame this and we're gonna go into the parts of we've already touched on. This isn't new. We're just starting to pay attention to it, and we're gonna touch on a few other buckets. Should we have the dichotomy of for the company and for the individual.

The reason I feel that is because when we did when we when we did the report, there are aspects that because these were individuals filling it out, there are lots and lots of aspects about the way someone works. So I call it way of working when your remote, our working on distributed team that are much than the way of working in the ways of working when you're co located. And those things do have business implications. But then there are a ton of like, more holistic if you're a distributed. If you have a distributor, workforce, have a remote team or you're 100% remote. What are the business considerations that you have to think through or you should be thinking through. So there's some fundamental one. So, you know, let's go through. I think I think it is where it's separating it out and talking maybe about the company perspective.

One of the main reasons also is because that's right, folks listening that, um, or probably call located right, and I'm thinking about when do I go distributed and what I'm noticing. When I talked to some friends of mine who have like ah perspective by looking at multiple companies, so usually use their investors. They're telling me that every single one of their portfolio companies is thinking about how do we get folks who are distributed, like, How do we get folks who are not in the office and how do we work with them

and one of your one of your tweets? I remember Ryan Hoover was the top comment where it said for the for him personally, he loved being remote because he could work from anywhere and see the world. And the second comment, a cz ah was from the company. Perspective was better recruiting, better hiring, which is to pretty damn you know, compelling reasons to do it. But from the from that that from the report just real quick do you have What was that? What was the lay of the land of the people that responded of the 400 plus people that responded? Was it, um, and I think, for ease of conversation for this podcast, and you know, it's a new topic when the terminology isn't set in stone for the ease of conversation,

I think we'll use the terms Distributor Remote pretty. Um Yeah, fluidly interchangeably. But it's essentially there two ways of of building the on office geographically or company geographically today, one under, everyone under one roof go located and everyone distributed around the world so or remote. But ah, but yeah, What was the what was the kind of lay of the land of those 400 plus participants?

Yeah, So the exact date a 60% of the people said they work remotely 100% of the time. 70% of them said that they've been doing it for three or more years, so that's the sort of demographic that we got. So we did get folks who are undistributed teams that don't work 100% of the time remotely and haven't also been doing it for a long time or for more than three years. The one interesting thing that is worth getting into is that recruiting and hiring point that you may, which we didn't go for in the report. But a lot of our tips. Some of our tips are around recruiting and hiring. I think it's basic. You have a not even exponential. You have like, I don't know, a 1,000,000 ex. Her not 1,000,000 maybe like 110,000 x 100,000 times larger pool of people, potential people. When you are thinking remotely instead of thinking,

co located, that's amazing. And that has lots of cost, advantages or potential cost advantages and has lots of advantages around reach and your ability to find the best person for the job, not just the best person for the job. That's either in the area or the best person for the job that's willing to move to the area.

And this isn't just relegated to technology companies. No, I think it's it can seem like Oh, that's easy if you're a software developer. But whether it's customer support, whether my dad runs a recruiting from Dallas, Texas, everyone is under one roof. But do they need to be, And probably not for what they're. Ah, for at least 60% of what they're doing, they probably wouldn't need to be. So you could run a food truck and have a social media manager and ah, and prepare that are in the restaurant, right? Yeah, Okay, that's so the All right, So that's the lay of the land and on the participants. Let's let's dive into some of the insights that

you learn. Yeah, so this was the most surprising one. And it's the one that, like, you know, kind of visit title of the remote work report. But it's basically that people love working remotely. And the stats we have on that, or 91% of people said working remotely is a good fit for them,

and this was 70% had been doing it for three years or more. So this isn't I think it's actually one of the. So you mentioned is if it's kind of obvious, but that's obvious to you had 16 years. I think for many people they would think, Oh, that would feel great for like, two weeks and then I'd get distracted all the time would be as productive. I think they're kind of self defeating, a deceiving themselves of why they should be in an office. But that is really, really interesting that you said 92%

91% said that they that it's a good fit for them. It gets more interesting, though, because 95% said they'd recommend it to a friend. So your points are valid and we'll get into that in a second. You know, it kind of blows my mind because of what I'm gonna say that. So despite the fact that 91% said it's a good fit for them, 95% said that they'd recommend it to a friend. The top challenges our communications, socializing, loneliness and boundaries. And when you think about all those things, you're just like, Wow, Are we win with remote work? Are we creating more depression?

Are re creating more social problems for individuals? And that I kind of like it kind of tells you that, like as humans, we might not be used to this. We aren't used to This has humans. We have toe learn how to work in isolation because it is isolation

in great part. Well, and I don't have a dog in this fight, but does.

I don't either, even after doing

it 16 and that I think it's I wish for office up. That's right. That's right, it is. But it would seem that those air those seem to be the challenges. And I think, by the way it's worth mentioning. There is no perfect scenario of of, of doing hard work that that is, that is, I think it given. But those might be those or the top challenges. Do my naming them again.

Yeah, absolutely. So communication has a top one. So how do you communicate with each other when you can't just walk up? Someone ask them somebody, right? Yeah, there slack and things like that. But there's still a different level of comfort that people have or discomfort. And then there's socializing. So this is like the you, you know, have lunch with your co workers or you take a coffee break with one of them and you go for a walk. Someone mentioned on Twitter recently about how they miss the walking meetings, and I'm like, Yeah, get on the phone,

you know, or get on flack chat or whatever voice and I walk around and it's like to me, it's equivalent somewhat s. That's kind of interesting. And then you have loneliness well, and then finally like boundaries.

Uh, and the want to dive into those. But it's still 95% of the participants are of the surveyors were saying that they would recommended to a friend, so it those do sound costly Yeah,

there's some dichotomy going on here. There's some There's something going on in people's minds around how much what the way I would umbrella. This is, say, that remote work provides people with so much freedom that they love it. And we as humans want freedom in life when we were seeking Pria because freedom equals happiness, and with that freedom at work, I think there is a cost. I think there's a huge cost, and that cost is that we get the freedom. But that means that we might find it hard to actually get motivated and work because we're not forced to were not forced to go somewhere at nine o'clock and clock out it. Whatever. 5 p.m. But if you're the big arena, 10 PM right or whatever Ah, nobody. There's no construct that you have like that you are choosing when you start work. Usually obviously there's meetings and things like that,

but they're not always like, Hey, we have a meeting every day at 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. or something, and then you're choosing when you stop and I think that level of freedom is is amazing in life. I mean, generally, I'm really a proponent of freedom. I don't see anyone that wouldn't be, um, and if that's the case, then there's a level of discipline and understanding of yourself that needs to increase in order to be productive at work makes stuff happen.

He's there. Then I want to get into the benefits, and maybe that's actually back. Ah, great. Next area. What are the company? Just the high level company costs and benefits for this. And then we can start in that bucket and then moved to the individuals.

I think you have a cars. Ah, it's almost like everything's a double edged sword. So the fact that people get toe work when they want to work and have freedom to go do things in the middle of the day, they might not feel like they have freedom to do when they're in office, because the offices is some kind of commute. So they're further away from their chores or, you know, family, family pets will not be at all those things. You end up, you end up with the freedom of time. But then what happens from an organizational standpoint that I think is the cost is you have less for lack of a better word control over the time that people put in how much time they put in when they put in time.

Were you able to get any data on so hard to get data on this? But on productivity? No. What would your after looking at this? And you've been tweeting about that? Well, you've been doing it for six years, but tweeting about a gathering insights for this for over a year. What is? What is your sense before we turn on the mikes? You were telling me a little bit of your sense on productivity in trying to read between the lines. Because it is, it is hard to get a sense of measurement on productivity. What would you say is the productivity, benefit or cost to the company side of things?

I think that costs of remote work is you lose without a lot more effort. You lose accountability and accountability super important for any organization. In order to achieve their goals, every team member should feel accountable to their work. So what we do and what I'm a huge, huge fan of, uh is we have a channel in slacks called daily updates, and every single person on the team is required unless her out on vacation or sick. But even then, they would say they're sick to blissed out what they did yesterday and what they're doing today. Just his bullet, sometimes a link toe like a get hub issue. Or they linked to a document if they want to. Um, but they're just listing out literally and bullets what they're doing, what they did, what they did yesterday.

What they're doing today is that simple, and there's nobody checking over it. Nobody, um, forcing you to do anything about it except do it, and that gives everybody visibility in tow. What's going on in the company? Who's doing what? And that's just one select channel, and I've seen his team scale. They have their own slack channels for the team, like marketing team, the product team, et cetera. And they'll just do it in there right or they'll have a daily updates, things just for them,

which is great, too. So and we even have like a pin document that's, ah, the best practices for these updates, such as like if you're gonna be on vacation or you're gonna be out. Tell people feeling me out a certain time, like just tell them if you can write it. It's like a abnormal thing for you. Um, so there's these systems and these processes that's like a very simple

Oh, and it's everybody's doing this piecemeal. Figuring out the Simpson it Zach get help is figuring out piecemeal WordPress piecemeal before I piecemeal it. Every company that's doing this, for the most part is doing this piecemeal. And and I think one of the trends that I have seen is they try to use a monopoly of eight tools and then condense it down Thio two or three or as few as possible. And they actually simplify over time rather than like we need this for this part of business. This for this part of business. That's why that simplicity of daily beyond okay are we're kind of snippets, type of type of methodology that day. Those daily updates simp simplicity is sochi for these systems.

Yeah, and something like snippets from Google, right is valuable human. If your co located. So what I find fascinating is these processes work. Even if you're not remote and you should do that. And in on remote teams, you have to do you have to do them. Otherwise, the accountability is not there. So now think about what happens if you're not doing that today. You're not doing the daily updates and you scale toe like 300 people. How does the how does how? How do people know what other people are working, even on a high level, even if it's not on a daily basis, How did they know?

Where do they look? How did they know who's working on what and who to bother about something or who to ask, like, Hey, what's going on with this? Or you need help with this thing that's related to what you're working on. The visibility gets reduced, and so my thesis about productivity is if visibility is lower, then people are gonna be less product.

So extrapolate that out towards that cost benefit analysis

for the company, so I think it comes at a huge cost. Remote teams come in a huge cost of productivity unless you're spending a lot of effort in process and even documentation to go even deeper into it. So

what do you mean by that specifically,

I think a good classic example is on boarding. So you onboard a new team member? Ah, it's really easy for them on a cooking, a co located office. Thio. Ask people questions and figure out where things are on a remote team. You don't get that you have. It's like you have the same tools you did in office. You have, like, all these document tools, and you have like Vera, and you have, like, ticketing systems, and you have,

um, code to look at. If you're an engineer, you have all these things, but what you don't have is you don't have as easy access to the people because you can't just walk up to them. Talk to them, are talking about lunch talkto during coffee. There's no like, casual way to bring up things that you might have some anxiety bringing up because you're new and you don't know how the norms of the organization. So if a remote team has not documented things that they've done in the past, their processes aren't solid. People met like five people or 10 people. What happens is when new people come on well, it just takes a lot longer to ramp up takes a lot longer for the new person, understand the norms and how things work, and it can be very challenging.

It could take six months, nine months, man, just in a new task. It can take you a year to feel like you're in a group, but especially you had distributed team where it's just like now they're seven dark corners that I have no idea what these other people do. Okay? And so what do you do to solve against that? So for that

full on, there's companies that will record every meeting and make sure it's shared with the team like every meeting. That's, I think, more than two people more than the one on ones, right? It's usually how they think about it. Um, what we do in our company's is we look to write as much as possible and create a lot more documents. We help people find their talk us. It's wonderful things. All right

thing, but check out F Y I for that. Thank you. Search

everything. You that my eye doctor. Um, but like Esso, it's not. That's not why we do it. We do it because We're a remote team. We really value efficiency, productivity and, realistically, people's happiness. If people confined the information they're looking for when they're looking for it, they're happier. Especially they don't have to ask somebody because there's a lot of feelings emotions, anxiety and nervousness around asking people on your team for things you don't want to look stupid. That's basically what, like a lot of people go what goes through most people's heads when they're thinking about CO.

I need this information and they try to go hunt for themselves, right? So if you have organized the way you do marketing every time you launch a marketing campaign, there's a document. There's a process, and there's deliberate work and effort you put into that in terms of creating those processes. One. You should do that anyway, because the only way you can improve something is if you document it and then do a postmortem on it when you're done with it. But the funny thing is like when you're like 20 people 30 people and you're all in the same office, you're probably not doing all that stuff. And don't get me started on the fact that people think slack helps, but it doesn't. It is not to rag on sock or anything like that, but like it doesn't help because all the information that you might have shared about this campaign or something for the most part gets lost in slack.

I also think that the idea of of serendipity that comes from lunch or the co location of bumping into people in the hallways I think there is that is greatly exaggerated. In my opinion, it is so valuable. And for much of my career, I thought, that is it is as valuable as it is talked about. But the reason I say it's exaggerated because in that example of someone coming onto the team, you lean on that crutch of Oh, you'll get to know everyone just by being here for over the next 90 days, you'll bump into everyone, and that does not end up being the case. You don't get to know everyone and false promise. Yeah, it is to do it right on in running remote teams in my career or building till we had five offices around around the world and in people working remotely outside of those offices. The thing that I really focused on really own dental on and kind of, Ah, catchphrase was one central repositories.

Information that people can look up when everyone else in the company's sleeping. I mean, they don't need to bother anyone. Quite literally. They could be the only one awake, but they don't need to bother anyone else for any information is very hard. We didn't achieve that. But that was the vision for our our documentation or as simple as and running a team with 8 10 15 people around the world having a master doc, a Google master doc that has every resource that we that we use just don't link to it. I mean, it's you don't He's not a code. You don't need to build out a system. You don't need to look at what app to use for us. It literally can just be, Ah, Google doc with links to all the other Google docks or links to whatever you want to link to.

But there's one repositories for everyone toe to find this information, and that ended up being completely on. It was unintended. But then Anna being one of the most amazing non boarding tools you could create Yet where it's like, Oh, just spend the 1st 34 days outside of some of the on boarding tasks that we would also design just going through that master looking at everything. Looking at the presentation of the 2017 strategy in January from 13 months ago, you can see that presentation. And like I said, unintended Lee became probably the best way better than this idea of Let's have, um, hello, hand tunnels and and rockets on their first day, and the on boarding is about making them feel like they belong. That stuff's important. But man,

once you once were forced to think about it in terms of distributed workforce, the processes I I would venture to guess. People would say that was that information provided the way better than the co location provided. That is essentially a proxy When you say that, like in the hallways are lunch a proxy for information.

You just unknowingly pitched what we're working on next F y I, which has left my eye for teams.

Thanks, dude. Oh, I That was not a softball. I did not know, You know, that's so awesome. But what? Well, obviously tell tell me more. Ah ah,

In proper fashion, if you're building product the right way, you're learning from customers. What you just said about one Master Doc is what customers kept telling us over and over again. And these were people who were very good at managing information inside the company. There's all kinds of challenges with it like, Well, who's maintaining that document? How do you make sure it's up today? But you just demonstrated that if someone's willing to maintain it or the companies willing to maintain

it so I wouldn't

find of value, would you? Yeah. You gave a shit, right? Not everyone does.

And it's not what it actually is really illuminating when you are adding your 37 link to another document on that to page. You know, Master Doc, you like we have too much shit going on. We should probably simplify this down, and we would get it down to seven. Yeah, any more insurance. And it was

it was a bit of someone had to care, right? And then most companies we heard way heard that people would create these documents and then they wouldn't get maintained. And but there's always a master. And then there was all these nuanced issues, which, you know is one of the reasons I'm excited about this. It does relate to remote work because I think remote teams need to do things like this is like, What if someone clicks on the document and don't have permission for it? Then they're still looking. Somebody helps. There's all kinds of funny issues like that that come into play that are really fascinating that I don't know. I geek out, kick out on, but I will not. So it's really, I think,

even though you folks we're co located, you figure it out. What many remote teams that I've seen have barely figured this out, which is that central repositories of information, documentation of processes. Those are the types of things that will make it so that not just with on boarding, but as you operate as you do things in the business, they are able to be repeated. They're able to be understood. Even if someone came today, they could look through it and figure out what's been going on and what's happening. And that amount of regular doesn't exist in most organizations, even if they are co located, especially if they're co located, because you get away with, like, knowledge

and people's head. No. And that's why I'm saying it was, Yeah, it was such a That's why I think it's so greatly over exaggerated of the serendipity. And I'm a human that's wired to love serendipity. But you can. You can manufacture scenarios where that can come back. You can have literally an hour and 1/2 agenda list meeting on video that people can jump into. Serendipity can happen that way in a distributor room. I'm just not sure, but that was such a crutch. Now I look back and just said about it, and it it's It became such a crutch to say no, you'll you'll get this tribal and we would use these terms that, like sounded so

tribal knowledge,

tribal knowledge. You'll get that trouble knowledge by being in the office and and and where you try to convince him to come to the office, You know, no way we would know that, uh, you miss out on some of this trouble knowledge and that that's true. This isn't their shades of gray to this, so I don't want it to be seen black and white. But I now look at how over rotated towards a crutch. It was to get this trouble knowledge rather than realizing Hey, this, like, kitschy term, you've added to a tribal knowledge for basically what you just said. Information in people's heads in a disconnected way that will take you six months toe actually pieced together, if you remember it all is so much more onerous. And,

yes, there's some serendipity that comes with it, but you're paying a dollar for 15 cents in return. You're getting some serendipity. You're getting some, um, some just chance interactions that are great. One you can you can really put effort behind creating those and distribute away but to, um, and we'll talk about that here in a little bit, too, of how you all do that still create that serendipity, but it's you're paying way more than I think you're getting returned by just saying, Oh, but the lunch interactions, the bumping near the bath,

bumping into each other near the bathroom. And it's and yeah, I just look back to actually know the Master Doc that we created was so wildly more information only hopeful, impactful made people feel like. All right, I'm on the same page now. I actually can riff with someone on slack at 7 p.m. Just saying, Hey, what if we did this? Because now I have this contextual information that I got in. I'm not exaggerating, like within three days of joining the company or the team rather than hey, this thing that that you mentioned that meeting, I'd love to know more information about it that takes, you know, three months to build up the courage

and also lots of waste of time. Even if you have to ask someone when you can go read a document and write or read something that was done, I think that the I like, I like your your method here of talking about costs and benefits because a lot of times like the things that we think are a cost of remote work or even a cost of cold located are actually the benefit, too. But then when you dig into it, you can find ways to switch that around just like you did with serendipity. You're like, OK, that's a benefit. But when you really dig into it and think about it. There are alternative ways that actually are more valuable. That would work on a remote team. And, in fact, co located organizations should do them, too.

So in 2019 the standard company, uh, that is trying to do remote. So what aren't from the company perspective? What are those cost benefits, costs and benefits again. So the costs being and there's a major one productivity, one cost being. It's ah, it seems like the challenges are appropriate here. Communication between team members. Yeah, the loneliness. And that's part of the individual side of things. So we'll get to that.

But we will get to that.

But it's the fun part. But that's Ah, that is Ah, an aspect toe. Think through if you're have to look carrying thoughtful leader, the water, some of the other costs and productivity being a major one. I don't know if we tied that it off. What is what is the How do you reconcile that? How big of a productivity drop is it?

So I think one of the most useful ways to measure productivity that many folks aren't willing to. Is it based on the number of people we have? Could we do everything we're doing and want to do with less people. And I think on a remote team that conversation, that math already on a collective team is difficult on a remote team. It's even more difficult tohave because oftentimes you don't know how much or how little and individuals actually contributing. It's much harder to measure because you don't see them coming in and working out their deaths. You can't literally walk over the desk, and you know, some managers air like this, but make sure someone's not on Facebook, right? That's just how people think. Right? Um, you're dealing with this sort of information asymmetry. And so what ends up happening is from a productivity standpoint,

you end up having to trust people, and I'm not saying people are untrustworthy, but they're gonna They're gonna basically behave just like the average person in the company, whatever that is. So the behavior you're as a leader a lot of times, if you're like the CEO or a founder, and you're like a multi 100 person company, regardless, whether you have an office or not, even in an office, people don't know what you do because you're usually not in the office. You're out there in the world, somehow, usually right. In most CEOs cases, especially once you get to hundreds of people you're not actually in the office.

And then this mimicking of your behavior that the team tends to do, kind of in at least on office, in office environment, you're making your managers or you know you have that. But in a remote work environment, you you don't know the contributions other people are making without blame or effort on average. Okay, that's the productivity issue,

and it for F wise at how many employees where it doesn't right now. And how big did kiss metrics get about

70 and it was actually started fully remote, then got sort of distributed with one office.

And what would you say is for F. Y example at 12 employees? How much? How much quicker would you achieve your goals if you were located? One office? If that is measurement of productivity

at this point because of the way we do things, I don't think we would have done anything quicker. In fact, we might be quicker right now because they're just less non productive conversation and time that people have.

And so when you make the observation or the into intuition, I guess that cos air less productive when they go remote, you're almost saying that they are going remote because maybe they're following peers or it's it's in both our costs, the cost cutting. But they're not adopting the process, is there not that actually take advantage of it exactly

right for you? I don't I don't see enough enough conscious thought put into, and I don't see that inculcated companies either. But about how can you make what we're doing more efficient? How can we do a better, faster, cheaper and all three? The others, like the triangle, is the only pig to know better, faster, cheaper? How do you How do you think about what you're doing in that way and in remote team? That's harder because you're not able to see the lack of efficiency that an individual might have in the organization because you don't have systems in place to understand their efficiency from additional perspective. You're not sitting there saying, Hey, you know,

and again this gets very tactical, but this is how many tickets and the quality of the tickets this is that someone's, like, you know, has an engineer. They're like dealing with our or whatever you're not able to like. There's so many parts of a business that could be quantified that don't get quantified already. And so you had remote to it and you're like, Well, that person's over there and they do marketing and they help the marketing team and they write a bunch of content and create a bunch of campaigns, things like that. But if you're not really quantifying the effort they're putting in and the work output, you end up in a spot where you might need a higher two of those people instead of one feel, hire someone else because things aren't getting done all right, we have more to do.

Well, then, I know the survey wasn't totally on the company's side of things, but I love that that bifurcation of company and the individual. It's hard to ask individuals on the company exact trends, but on the company side of things it is. I think, of the distinction that that you're making that seems really important, is it is saying, you know, all in one office or remote is is that's like Marketing channel. You can't. It doesn't mean it's effective just because, Hey, we have commercials on TV, but we're selling a piece of shit product that that isn't I know that.

But I'm not just there's not all these benefits you instantly get

because you're using a channel of All right. Still got to work the channel, Gonna

work the channel right with the marketing channel. It's like, Yeah, you start, but like, it's never gonna be as it's never gonna be as efficient as you need it to be at scale unless you put

work into right.

So it's just totally good

way to think about it. Maybe two different channels of teamwork. Yeah, and and it is a bad team where you got a bad strategy. Doesn't matter what channel of teamwork you're exercising,

what you need done.

But on the remote side of things and that channel of teamwork it is, and leveraging human capital, it sounds like there is an entire spectrum of companies doing it, one to cost cut. It's like, All right, let's move all of these people Ah, to working from home and then really kind of maybe, ah, you know, shit the bed on actually leveraging it. And then there's There are companies that maybe in your case of 16 years of figuring it out, what would you say? Is my my view on it? I know one of voice. This potential bias just cause it's there, is that I think if you do it right,

you do pay a dollar, but you get $3.50 in return like there is a cost. There are those challenges, and you listen off those individual challenges. But I also saw in a report that the individual benefits were more time with family, more time with pets, more time to do things like exercise. So it's like, Yes, there is a cost. It's not black and white. One is not clearly better and the other is no perfect scenario. But it being all in one office in 2019 does seem like there is so much kind of pretend work, extra work, so much distraction, especially as companies have moved to open offices that you pay a dollar there and you get a dollar 15 and return dollar 25.

I'm just making these up, but it's directionally what I think you get a dollar 25 there costs and there are benefits. But it seems to be if you do it right with and I would love for you to go through you the tools that you guys use because, you know, you've probably tried everything. And I remember over over t um, 23 weeks ago, it was a really simple tool set tool set. And I had you been just talking me through how you all pay a dollar. There is some calls, but you get I don't know, 23 Sounds like you're getting a lot

in return. Yeah, absolutely. Ah, it's slack. It's email. So we used Gmail Ah, and the whole Google sweet And those air The primary methods that we use and that includes hangouts. And there's always a backup. So there's now there's always many options. So there's slot calls. We don't we don't use them were distributed. We don't use you amuse hangouts or slack calls. Our worst case scenario, we get on a phone call if we have to, or you can even use ah ah. What is it? Um

facetime audio phone phone call from Polly.

What is that one of my calls every week is like a three way call.

There's a phone call. Grandma and I I love taking phone calls on a walk. You're saying, Ah, walking, meeting. I really love the phone calls on walks.

I feel like people get very tool centric. And I'd rather get purpose centric. What is the purpose? What are we looking accomplish and then figure out what the right tools are. Otherwise, you could get excited about every new tool that comes out. Yeah, I play with the tools that I'm really like. Interested. But I rarely will pick a tool and get a new tool. Adopted our company, in fact, like culturally, if you came in our company and you try to get us to add tools, you're not gonna last too long. There's a period, any kind of tools to be frank and honest cause, like, we don't want need more tools. We want to get more work done.

Right. And I remember you. Ah, I liked that you mentioned this principle of it was it was something that you correct me, Howie, if I miss a word, it But it was basically no new tools. If a current tool can D'oh! Yeah,

I think you're saying it better than I did. So yeah, you really sum that up. Yeah, I would say that, like, you know, And then there's exceptions, right? Like there's there's things that we have an air table, but we still use Google sheets. There's storage. We haven't dropbox still, but we also use Google Drive, so there is a bifurcation of those kind of tools, But those air very commoditized tools at this point, and some of them have some specialized features that you really want.

Like, if we want to power a website, we're not gonna power website necessarily with Google sheets because their tables easier to power website if we don't wanna bug engineers about it, Right. Um, but when you when it comes to like, remote work, the biggest tools are information oriented tools and communication or into tools, and the ones we use are the ones that are the easiest, most ubiquitous ones that we can use because sometimes we're sharing them with people outside the company to

and you're saying the tools again?

Yeah, again, it's literally all of g sweet or whatever. They're gonna call it in two years. Ah, and Flack and that I'm like, racking my brain. And I'm, like, Wait like this, right? And obviously we use our own two left. Why? I but like that's it.

And then email.

Yeah, so Joey's includes email and phones and like, sure, there's backups. It's like I'll go get someone Skype username because everyone has one. If, like the hangouts is freaking out or slack calling is awful, right? And we do have a zoom account. We don't use the zoom account, but we have one. It sits there. Backup plan. So a lot of the communication tools we have have backup plans, but we rarely use them. And I'm okay with 3 to 5 minutes of pain on the voice tools because that just

happened right? And that is Yeah, you got like, you're paying a dollar. You got to know that you're paying a cost, but it is so much cheaper then would you rather have the alternative 25 minute commute?

Both you guys you got there, You

You total it up. It's like, Oh, this is actually way less daily with, like, traffic. Yeah.

I mean, sometimes the internet goes out of my house. Believe it or not, that's kind of annoying. But then I have a cell phone and I tether it. We have unlimited data on this up alone because of that school. So I would say that we use the tools we use are simple. The process is we use are thorough, wants a complex or complicated cause that size, and and my whole theory is when things get complicated, find a way to get back to basics, and sometimes people would call that first principles. But it's really the building blocks of whatever you're doing. So the building blocks of marketing, for example, is you create assets for marketing. So that's copy and images,

and then you basically scheduled them or post them wherever you're going to, whether it's at paid out ad campaigns or Twitter or social. And then you measure the result and you figure out how to do better next time. And there's just the workflow there. And yeah, there's a lot more complicated things in those work flows, but we get to the basics. Basics. Are these three steps that you have to do with marketing with all marketing? Let's create a document that outlines the process for each of our channels and what we have to do it with those three step. So there's a document. And then there's lots of templates for some of these things over time. And I think the one if I were to say the one thing that I think every company, remote or not should do is something that my co founders really my cofounder Marie's really big on. And I am, too, is postmortem. And we talked about this the last time.

And just to underscore this point that you're making, I think it's a it's ah really powerful one, which is don't get caught up in thinking about the tools to enable remote work. No, think about spend the time. Thing about the process is to enable remote work. There are there's too many tools and it's one. There's just fatigue. If you try things out and they don't work, then it's just it's exhausting.

For 10 years you have 2020

you can use right, even though you are using exactly, but it's ah, it's It's a great point that you're saying just be thorough in the thoughtfulness of the process is like a Master Doc. Do you actually could use so many different so many different tools for that? That's not the That's not the hard part. Nor the important thing is whatever you want, but doing it and maintaining it. Okay, so, um okay. Keep

going. Yeah. I was just, uh, extolling the benefits. Ah, postmortems and retrospective on engineering and reviewing what you did in order to be honest with yourselves about it, be self aware about what? What went right? What went wrong? What you did what went right, what went wrong and what you want to take away for next time. And if you're listening and you're like on a growth team and you're running experiment, you're documenting your experiment. You're writing up what they are your hypotheses around them And what happened so you can take those learnings with you Now, imagine being able to do that for everything you do. Product initiatives,

even like we've done it with, Like, a single tweet sent out a tweet. See what happened with it. Review it. What went right? What went wrong, right. And then when you start getting amassing like 100 of these or 20 of these because you ran that many campaigns are sent that many tweets or built that many features. Then you start seeing the patterns and you start seeing you start actually getting a better idea. What are what are the patterns of success? What are the conditions of success for those initiatives? And to me, that's all process. And that's all, you know,

boring stuff like process improvement. These are things that are old school, like they talked about processing, proven back in the day. They talked about things like change management, which is about improving things an ideal world, right? Once things get messy back in the day and retrospective there from engineering there from back in the day, there's a lot of things from lean manufacturing, like five wise, like Toyota's lean manufacturing theories. And like those were the things that I gravitate towards. Those were the things that matter to me, which is like, How can you be thinking about the processes that we use when we're working remotely or working, period.

And how can we improve those for us in the way that we need to do it as an organization and to me, the best practices for remote work are not on a company level, are not best practices for remote work. Their best practices for getting work done in an organization to their organizational best practices. There still old school with basically kind of new school flavor, which does include tools. When they didn't have slacked back in the day, they still did stuff. They still got stuff done

right? And I know that you even just the the idea. And I think I subscribe to this years ago. Where's where the idea of open offices so great Intel talks about this? Ah, and and it is something that we borrowed is Americans borrowed from? I believe this Japanese workforce, where they would have people in a pit basically all in one big desk, working around together. And it is a convention, I think, while it is one cost saving and that's not has talked about as like, it's productive to have all of this report that stuff is really is really key. But it goes back to that cost and benefit. The cost is it's It's very distracting, very draining. You can't spend time just looking.

You know what I think about this all the time in an office where everyone can see what everyone's doing. You do feel this big weight of making it seem like you were working all the time. That makes sense on an assembly line that does not make sense for deep creative work. When you really need to just look into the middle distance for an hour about a problem and you cannot do that. You know I like. I think it's physically impossible to do that and office, where you know you're gonna be looked at by five people. It's It's extremely You're costly.

Reminded me of a story from other day. I'm meeting with the, uh, marketing friend of mine. She works at a company that's co located one office, and she's like, We're just talking like, Oh, this office is kind of like, really high energy. Yeah, I don't right here. I need to write. I don't do it here I go down the street to a coffee shop. I do it at home like all interesting. So

do what What was her? What was her profession?

The marketer. Now she's a marketer. She has content to write things like that to do, and she she she finds it, or she finds herself being more productive When she's not in the office and she does it,

You could almost toss that into the quasi remote. Yeah, right you're doing. You're a lot of your work, which is so that is so. That is the norm for so many. So many start up companies and employees is that they do their best work. And it's this is in this again goes to, if we really think deeply about those costs have been a cost benefits. And what do we conventionally say? And why is it really wise, or is it really wisdom? Or is it really just path dependence on? Oh, but everyone says the serendipity at the the water fountains, so it's believed powerful. I think that,

yes, there is benefit any but one. You can engineer that through a Google hangout room that anyone could jump into for an hour. That's a generalist if you want, or you don't do any of that right or we're just not talking about the things that are left out of. You know what is even maybe more productive than the serendipity of two employees bumping into each other? Is you being able to sit and think for an hour and 1/2 on a really long problem and not feel like I need to leave the office for this.

Yeah. I mean, you said your status, the way to set set your status still away, and people know your way. You can even put an icon of what you're doing. If you want people to know, you put like a nature icon, your nature and you're thinking right like you can you can communicate what's happening very easily and at the same time, like you don't need to feel this pressure of like, I have to be in the seat. I have to be in this office all day, and I think that that that that is that might be a good segue way for good on the company stuff to, like, get to like individuals.

Okay, yeah, let's do it. I think on the benefits, at least on the company's side, it seems like it's worth touching on some of the responses where were seemed like from the survey and from Twitter, and it is all gonna be linked into the show notes and everything that you own. The company side. The benefits would be recruiting would obviously be costs. Of course, of no

office space could hire from anywhere, and the costs are theoretically

lower, right? The I think you do benefit quite a bit from the lack of commute, even though that is an individual benefit as well. The lack of commute people just kind of want to start working around nine actively adds up. They want to start working longer. Why not exactly. It really does add up on. But I think thematically, something to really take away on that maximization, or the The harmony of costs and benefits is to really be thoughtful in the process is. But even those could be pretty simple.

I think you're forced to, though, so when you when you have that benefit of being forced to, is a good benefit for your

organization, right? I think I think it's nailed on the head. I think it forces you to just to what you said adopted better practices for running an organization, not for running a remote organization from daily updates, just a kind of recounting daily updates, too. Uh, morning post mortems to using master docks with all resource is linked, using with typical tools that everyone's used to and not spending too much time thinking about the tools but really spending the time thinking about the actual processes that's and walk me through the actual tactical time that you'll spend re capping a meeting with notes.

Sure, yeah, we take notes and meetings so every meeting, like if it's a running meeting, it has a running document and the document and who keeps notes on whoever whoever feels like it right, like whoever is in front of a computer or whoever. We have a very organic process. And if we had, we usually have, ah, meetings that our discussions and the discussions lead to some action items and those kind of meetings. There's just whoever feels like it is in there doing it. Sometimes multiple people are in there typing. You know what's going on. Someone's just there. It's not even like a hey, you're assigned to do it. It's more like it's a collective responsibility,

and how's it shared or disseminated afterwards?

Usually the people who are in the meeting ah are in the document and they already have access to it. If there are meetings where other people should have access to it, the documents already accessible by them. And so that's That's the way we think about it. And sometimes the action items are to summarize the meeting so that it can be shared. Ah, in a way where, like, it's a little more polished,

it's sounds pretty simple. Any other processes that that you'd say air God sends for you've discovered whether running kiss metrics was 70 or five

of 15? I think there's there's really interesting remote practices of like, Ah, I might have mentioned this before, but like one where you are, if you have a company and you do have an office. But then you have, you know, enough people remote even if it's just a few are handful you. When you have all hands, meetings make everyone lugging to zoom and stay at the desk. That's such a powerful statement to make sure that there aren't second class citizens in the company. What do you mean? Well, if you're not in the room, you lose context if your remote and you have and the all hands and the CEO and the executives, whoever are speaking.

But they're speaking with a microphone in front of a group, But then you're watching. It's not the same experience. So how do you give everyone the same experience? So I think a lot about that, those kind of things, especially as either company's transition or they're distributed. We don't have that problem right if we do on all hands, all remote anyway. And people are presenting and things like that, so that that's a practice. I've seen people really mess up really quickly, and it's when we learn that kiss metrics when we went from fully remote distribute

and the solution was you,

everyone's logging in from their desk and zoom,

I see. So there is no 15 people, no people and no so Everyone is digital way invested heavily at Chilton and Airy and be even more so on the video side of things. Video conferencing video for for all hands and multiple angles be able Thio. Everyone could get a microphone, and it really was just trying to make it as, And it wasn't it wasn't far from perfect, but it was trying to gather out means 6% of of I think sex for center communication is as verbal and so you got body language. You have all types of different, you know, communication you're trying to capture with with great video, and it's worth investing

in. And realistically, that's that's Those are companies that ended up being co located in multiple offices. And maybe you had some distributed folks. But it wasn't something where you know the terminology of people say is remote first today, right where you're thinking remote first, I think companies can think remote for so imagine and Airbnb or until when you're working on it. If everyone was digital and they were just in front of computers, what kind of experience? What kind of experience with that? No. E think it would be different. Not sure if you could get her bad, but she only they're going

to be. That is interesting.

That's more not flat. But that's more. Everyone has to see me first, right? I promote first, so there's practices like that that are important. The daily updates air really critical. Um, I like to keep things simple. There are a lot of companies that do things like Happy hour. There are a lot of companies that do things like retreats. Um and we were talking about crutches before, and these were Then we were talking about crutches in the form of co located crutches. There are remote crutches, remote crutches to me are really fascinating. And then they they this could be controversial. But to me,

it isn't. The best reason to have a retreat is not because for those for that week or those three days or five days, and this is a retreat, retreat would be like your remote team. But you'll meet in one

place and don't go toe Tahoe or something.

And a lot of lot of remote teams will do that to have a strategy meeting. Uh, I don't think that's a good reason front.

You know, that is a your music music to my ears. We would do retreats, but he was literally nothing. Work related. It was just for that serendipity edible. Hey, let's get three days of water cooler. Talk about anything political and not Ah, I mean, if you really love the serendipity of what happens when the moment is someone in it at the bathroom, you can even engineer that better for co located much less, much less when your remote the but Yeah, using that for strategy meetings.

This is strategy meetings, Hackathons. I mean, these

companies, we would do We would do hackathons, but But it's time. I

don't know if that's good or bad. What I mean is like, why can't you do it remotely? That's my only point, right? It's like

and it does force you two to improve the process.

There's like a norm. The norm in your company is at your remote. If your remote well, if your remote, then why would you want to invent something that causes you all to have to be in the same place to get something done that's critical to the organization?

Well, I want to touch on the individual side, and and I think it's It sounds like the And, by the way, how often do you do audience?

We have rarely been in all hands. At 12. We should be doing them more starting soon, and we'd probably do them at some cadence of every 4 to 8 weeks. And the reason for that is the way we think about all hands might be different than how other folks do. It's not about time. It's about shipping cadence. We've been building for a while because we just now no, what to build. We prototype a lot of things. So we've just been building for a while and there isn't a shipping cadence that's strong enough yet, and we're setting ourselves up for that. So what I like and what I mean by that is you doing all hands cause you ship something and now you want the team to basically rally around what you're gonna ship next. So it's like part most Morton Review After people have done the work to do that, to share what happened

and try as

a result, what we're gonna do that to me is how I like to run. Companies do not have an arbitrary we do in all hands every month where we do all hands at this specific can. It would be nice if we had a month e cadence of doing all hands because we were shipping whether it's that often or however you want to think about it. Ah, and thinking like

that. Out of your 120 companies are so over 15 years, even advised invested in what is there any company that stands out that does this really well that does this remote first. Really Well, that you learn from,

I think that the practices are a mix of companies. Then that's what that's what you're gonna find over and over again. And just like I was saying, like there's these crutches that these companies is most of the companies use the crutch. Then crotch is meeting in person for some reason because we just don't know any better, and there's not like as much. And again I am dogmatic about this and I don't like to be, But I think it makes sense, which is, if your remote, your remote operate like that because then when you scale the retreat cost goes up, right. All these costs, all these things start adding up as you scale. So I would say that the companies that are your sort of common companies that have done this and have talked about it are automatic. So the folks that run WordPress and commerce in a bunch of other things buffer, which has been known to be super transparent and so um,

an advisor to both. And then we have companies like envision and you have the folks at get lab who I think have are the newcomer, so to speak, and they're speaking up a lot more about remote. The 1/2 they have. Is there an open source? First company Open source is remote. Always has been, so that gives him a little more wiggle room and, in my opinion, on like processes on dhe set up compared to other companies, same with automatic to great extent to they are open source, you know, originally like that's the inception and company. Um, so those were the few countries that come to mind.

But I wish I had better context on other companies that are fully remote that are have shared more about their processes. And I'm like, Oh, these are great. So this is one of the reasons again, this was like a softball for me again it We created the tips area for the remote work report. It's tips from remote folks, and it's categorized in lighting 13 different categories, and so you can go read the bunch tips and figure out what resonates with you. The funniest, most interesting thing, not funniest, is that there are a lot of tips. I contradict themselves, especially on the personal and individual side of the

world. Well, let's jump into personal assignment. The last thing that I'll say on the company side, it sounds like it also requires a bedrock of trust. Yeah, some to the point where from everyone working on it and as they say with trust you 20 years to earn 10 seconds to lose its it's critical that everybody's investing in that in that trust of of this type of channel. So working, moving towards the personal side, what were what were the costs and benefits that people noted in and the report on the personal side?

Yeah. So I think you mentioned a lot of the benefits which were very focused on, um, the ability to basically spend personal time when you want to. That's the way I would summarize that one. And that's really critical, right? Like you get thio basically, go walk your dog. You get to go hang out with your kids, you get to pick them up from school if you want to. You get to hang out with your family so you have all these benefits that are very personal, and I think that the costs have everything to do with what people said are the challenges. This is what we talked about earlier, around communications, socializing, loneliness,

um, and boundaries and isolation is also mentioned. A bunch in terms of people feeling isolated because they are remote. And that feeling, I think, is especially, Ah, from what I've seen impactful to folks who are new to remote work because they're just used to going in office and having those conversations and being able to talk to their coworkers about the weather, the weather. But you know, all the also, all the things around their personal lives and stuff and, like you could do that on a remote team. You get on these calls and, like, you know,

you're catching up, right? So to speak and talk about what happened on the weekends and stuff like that, you still do it. It's just different. It's not the same as, you know. The funny thing that I find is like one of the benefits is there's less gossip. That's one benefit, but then the contrast and cost of that hiss. If there is any gossip, it's a lot more. Hit it so you can create a culture. You create a very, very, Ah, weird culture on a remote team if there's politics and if people perceive politics or if you have, you know, in a weird way, I think there's a new odd amplification when you have someone that's not a good culture fit in a remote team because you might not be able to understand the one on one conversations they're having with people that are much easier to see your understanding office or not happen.

Do you mind walking me

through? An example of an example would be someone joins a team, and there's the type of person that likes to talk about other people. So they just start talking about other people, everybody, and typically that's a that has a tendency to create, ah, political environment in the inside a company. So on a remote team, it might take you a lot longer to figure that out. People are just talking to each other, generally blessed, especially with serendipity and that sighting. There's a cost of culture that can come that has to do with individuals that has to do with individual people's opinion. Other things I've seen are the in a way, there's a higher potential or misunderstanding because someone could say something and it could be a by a text, and you can take it the wrong way much easier than if they said it in person.

So the jokes and the mannerisms and smiles after you say something just don't happen. And people still try to communicate in that way or they try to communicate. They had the way that they would communicate to a friend on text message, which is a lot different than how you should communicate on slack to a coworker. Typically right? Not always, but typically. And so I think there's just some of these communication, isolation, social issue that end up happening, and one of the one of the ones that I find so much more amplify it on a remote team is the idea of boundaries. And that's like when like it, there's almost like it is a double edged sword, which is like, When? When can you text someone?

When can you not text someone? It's weird because even on ah co located team, if your boss is texting you at 11 p.m. Is that okay? Is there a boundary? There isn't more cultural.

My faster actions? No, that doesn't seem okay.

Exactly. So it's like when your remote, it's like everyone's communicating. And this way you don't have any other way to communicate most of your communications through tax

and carried set of 11 p.m. It's It's 6:49 p.m. On a Thursday, and but for you, it's 3

49 There you go, and people might not know time zones well enough. And there's no there's not as much clarity slacks helped without a bunch with some of their ah indicators. But that doesn't mean everyone uses like and that doesn't mean that people feel comfortable. And also there's the counter effect, which is this is one of my favorite ones. You're gonna like this one the at all or at channel paradigm in slack eso. I've seen this happen where there's an at all or at channel that the executives are using, and people will remove slack from their phone because executives are using that. That's kind of sex you want people have cycle from you actually did, and it and the awesome thing about slack is they have functionality that lets you turn that off and not let people do it. But if the executives of the company are you doing it, they are in some ways, invading boundaries. They're abusing the boundaries.

What is the fix for that or what is tthe e mutual agreement that everyone joins into? I think the reason I worded that weighs is their fix. And two, Is this something? It's like, Okay, this is gonna suck. Like commute sucks. And this is a new new new new suck ege

E. I mean, the social norms of remote where are not established. The social norms with office work is a very established. We even have posters that were required to put up on the

so, Well, I I would I would actually slightly disagree and that the boundaries are pretty gray in office area when it comes to a lot of important things as well. Like, Hey, I was thinking I didn't want to be distracted. They want to be tapped on the shoulder, had my headphones in or hey, I actually I actually don't just want something added to my calendar at, you know, uh, 8 45 in the morning.

So then you have the same problem. They're just different, different way that they manifest. Same problems in

I'd say you can come up with a good process and it's I hate process. You'd

be worried, too. Yeah,

yeah, like I hate I hate them, But you could come up with a process that helps work around that one, but and and it's actually like it's very it was. It is so easy in a busy office to being come distracted and have that boundary.

I mean, a lot of times it has to do with empathetic leadership in both those scenarios that leaders have to be conscious of people, people's times, time being wasted. Another example I've seen that affects individuals is, um, I've seen remote teams have a ridiculously high meeting, cadence and culture because some folks on a meeting in the company, I feel like they want to be part of every decision. And if it's an executive that wants to be part of every decision, then you're gonna have more meetings and people's productivity tanks. Supercop.

Yeah, it's well, it's just like so much of the things that are in vogue today that just seemed like they're all upside collaboration like that seems like it's all upside and then actually, you try to do anything creative where you have something that one person could do. But you add for people to it. It's always a compromised version. It always when one birds It's like the worst design trope in the world is having multiple people D'oh design something that one person could D'oh! Now is a waste of time. But you gotta. But it and that's just that's obviously just one example of five seconds to think about. There's there these words that we toss around that it's like it's only upside to have this and and then kind of zoom out. You say, Actually, no. Sounds nice, but when rubber meets the road actually is not. That is not key.

I think it's the well I don't I don't want to go to two deep into just that. But I think even that I would I would see that I've been in places where it is so many meanings in it again is it doesn't matter, remote or not, doesn't matter. It's not even much for across information disseminate for terrible process.

Look, we're just we're just going back to the same thing. What do we keep going back to. We keep going back to the fact that these are organizational problems. They're not specific to remote or co located cos they're just organizational problems which ultimately our people problems which can be solved by implementing proper process.

What can't be solved on the individual side.

The fact that I am remote and there's no one around me I can relate to and I'm depressed

won't even fall into depression and walk me through how a co located office would solve that. But also just walk me through that. Give me a little bit more color

in a ah, we're social animals. So if we're working from home, we're generally around the same people all the time, and there's not a variety. So it's, you know, our partners or spouses or kids, her dogs or cats or snakes. And we're also from a pure perspective. If you're working from home, you are typically working from the same place, maybe different corners of your of your apartment or house or whatever, but you're working in the same place and what I've seen as a pattern and I'll pick on my co founder, Marie on it. Is she has learned over time that she needs to get out of her house at a and I've She's just told me that today, actually,

that she actually wants Thio find ways to get out of her house, even the middle of the day. Like to go grab lunch out of the house. And weeks ago she was saying, and the remote work stuff has really helped. Ah, I think both of us think through this more. She was saying that I can't stay in the house for two days straight and work from home. I need to get out. So she has a membership, um, at the wing, which is down the street in San Francisco, and she goes there. And so I think she's a classic example of something I've heard over and over again that people, people say,

which is if I'm at home working from home continuously for days straight, I kinda get stir crazy and my productivity decreases. And I feel like I need to go do something. So my equivalent of that is, um, for me, I like driving my car. Any car, not even my car, any of the cars, any car. And if I go two days without driving a car, I kind of go stir crazy, even if for like, five minutes go to grocery store or something. It just it's not even a walk.

A walk is great and all that, but it's actually driving a car for some reason for me, and that's my habit. And so there are these things that are very individualistic because the way she is is much different the way I am in terms of what gives me continuous energy or what re fields me. If you want to call it that. And I feel like with remote work, you have no choice but to figure it out for yourself. It's very personal, right? Even things like what time you drink tea or coffee. Or like all these little things that are high, you make it yourself or whatever you're you're a lot more self sufficient to, which means your self directed, which means that you have to be self disappoint, so that all self there. So in some ways you get to know yourself better by doing remote work,

but you have to and because you have to, I think that many folks are very confused and don't realize that they have to increase the amount of I'm going to say this, but basically increase them on a self care. They have to apply to themselves in order to be very successful. And that might mean their own process in ways of working. Need to be iterated to need to be thought

through. You know, I've only been working from home for as a full time angel investor. I work from home that have been for the last seven months and I love self care. Love it. Yeah, and I didn't know that was the term to call it until my wife, my wife in conversation with with another couple. She said James is great itself. Care what? That and I was like That sounds naughty and then thought about it for a second was like, Oh, yeah, Oh, self. You build it. Yeah,

sounds that sounds about right. From the perspective of it is, I think you can lean on a company for a lot of these things, especially if someone is more introverted. You were all different in their ways that there are benefits that are not felt by as their benefits that are felt more disproportionately from others from that kind of co location. But it's, I think, on that self care. I went and got a massage today, right? I'm no wonder you're so relaxing like a camera meal, either. Chamber Mile and I went Thio, get lunch with a friend and was able to make it an hour and 1/2 lunch because I just didn't have a 30 minute commute in the morning. And 30 minutes of meeting dated today is I also block out Wednesday's no meetings, so I'm able to just make it a little bit more of okay,

I was telling you, before we turn on the microphone, just I'm able to knock out my to do list like crazy, and I also just prioritize Wednesdays. That's the day that I get out of the house. I've got to get out of the house. So I planned things that to get out of the house, but it it I think it goes back to that trust side of things where trust is a double edged sword. Like all of these things, trust, collaboration, self care. They're like just words there as words and concepts that just sharp swords without handles. It really requires the person on that team member to develop their handle of that. Whether it is OK, this is how I'm going to be selfish to say.

I'm gonna go get I don't know. I'm going to get a gym membership and use it just for the social aspect of it. I'm going of getting out of the house for the routine I'm going to get, which is also just it. The research showed people are able to exercise more the I know that I am exercising way more than I ever ever did. The hack there is Pel Itan I I use the bike, but honestly, the app on the phone I'm like snacking on like, Oh Aiken. D'oh! 10 minutes of a core workout now in between calls or in between video calls because no one's looking at me. I can do total two feet from my desk. Just do 10 minutes of a core workout. 10 minutes of a yoga session, 20 minutes of just It's really so it's double its double edge or it's a sharp sword that you need to put your own handle on because that that the freedom being one of those

him. I mean, I try

to do, you've got to leverage it and think, be thoughtful of your own personal processes.

I work on a beanbag $200 Muji beanbag, and I worked on a being back every day, and I'd rather work on the beanbag, then sit in a chair on a desk and my back is great

dude 100%. I use this bed. This is an air bed. There's our guest room and I can crush their four hours of email. Paga Neck doesn't hurt back, doesn't issue. And

it's just shut up for

you. Yes, and so And it is so funny that were mentioned this because this is part of that adjustment. Like in my head. I was thinking about a week ago I was like No one ever talks about. No one ever talks about working from beds. Everyone's doing standing desks, but in my silly and thinking beds are way, way better not your own bed. Pizzonia. I think there's

There are that

could be a really, really ah, there's some implications. Yes, implication. Just cognitive issues with us as have your bed with with productivity But ah, guess bed or a comfortable couch that you prop up with with pillows that is the most or a beanbag or being back the most. I want to give a shout out to my friend's friend John. His company's called Moon Pot. Amazing. Amazing. Haven't tried those yet being backs, but ah, these a founder of Gravity Blanket. Have you seen that it? Yes, I have bread heavier.

Yeah. So he but it being backs are amazing for comfort. And it's what you're saying is just back to basics. What are you trying to do with all of this? Can be comfortable. Airbnb spend so much on ergonomic work places. What do you what? Back to basics. For you. It's being back interesting

all day, every day. Okay. And I'd be the weird person if I had a bean bag at the office, Right? Probably couldn't even do it. Where'd you put the bean bag? When you have a desk?

No, I've never said out Now that I work from a bet, you see? But I'm proud of my being back and I'm super. I'm proud of the the results of Yeah, they're working from others from a bed. The this is the bloodline version of working remotely there. Yeah, the on the self care, though I think it's and on the topic of of the P word process. I think building on that personal process is also key. And and I don't think all of these things are crutches of working off saying there's there's great creativity and collaboration. There is costs of not doing that. But I think that the the the process that you add to the company, it feels like to me is just is important that thoughtfulness to the process for your own weak, your own work style, like a day where you have no meetings a day, that you have time to go out and about structuring your life to where you are getting a membership. Like you, said your co founder, getting a membership at a workplace space

she wants. Get that, get out of the house and be around people.

How often did together?

I believe once or twice a week beat up tasker,

okay? And on the tip side of things, what were some of the other tips that stood out on that personal side for overcoming the costs

A lot of people had very strong opinions around getting out of the house, getting a co working space, working with other people that are remote workers. Um, and basically there is no one size fits all. There are no best practices around this. The biggest one is like just what we've been talking about, like figure out what matters to you. And, you know, it's like something that, as human beings, I don't think we're used to. We're actually not used to being forced to figure out what's best for us. You go to work, they're likely feeding you in a lot of cases multiple times a day early, start snacks there, right

and release their social conventions to go to the lunch spot around the corner with your co workers. Choose healthy options

because there's a habit right, and there's Ah, there's a norm and there's a structure, and you're given that when you do remote work, you have no structure. It is your your job to figure out structure. Sure, you might have meetings and scheduled things, but they're like you could do them from anywhere as long as you have Internet. Um, and you're not actually force toe have structure, and it's not normal in a work environment to not have structure that the company is dictating on. And so what I see is that people are coming up with what they believe is the best way, and then they're telling other people that that's the best way and that that happens typically when nobody knows anything and we're in this like, phase and again, I don't think the best practices are oriented around. You have to leave the house or you have to go get a co working space.

I think what's more right is every individual figuring out what is right for them, measuring their productivity for themselves, not even for the company but for themselves. Like am I being productive? Did I just smash through e mails and four hours because of where I was sitting and then you do it again? You're like, Oh, I did it again and this is repetitive. I can do this so when I want to do this, I have ah, structure that's mine. It's not a structure that someone else is imposing on me, and that goes back to what I said about freedom. We're all looking for that freedom one way or another. When we have it, though we tend to not know what to do with it.

And that's what that's what remote work, kind of the sort of crossing the T dotting the I on all this remote work information is basically like we have. There's an increasing level of freedom and a level of freedom that's unparalleled to any other way of working. I think that's factual, and we don't know how to deal with that freedom yet. It's like you didn't have it and now you have it, even if, like you've never done work in the office, you were at school, most likely even if it was like even if you didn't get past high school, you were still at school and all the sudden you're remote work environment and that different really big because you had structure and now you're unstructured, but you're not really. You have to create the structure for yourself so that you could be productive. And let's not even get into like the fact that most freelance work his remote on those freelancers also have the same kind of

struggles. Were you able to see one of the things that I did notice in the data that I really wanted ask was on the down sides. Could you segment out freelancers because I feel like freelancers. Freelances even is even tougher on many of these personal front because it it doesn't have this team structure or this social convention for us to look out for each other. That you do, in a

way, did see a bunch of freelancers. Ah, and there are the number of freelancers that kind of We didn't do the segmentation cause we didn't ask them. But there are a bunch of freelancer there, and it could be that they work for a company that's like 10 people are like dessert a line or whatever on beacon, segment it out like that on a high level. What I find interesting about the research on freelancers is so much of the research has been so focused on the benefits a company gets from freelancing or having freelancers

or what do

you mean? Like like there's a lot of research like from let's say, up work about freelancers. But the orientation is around the audiences, companies that want freelancers. So what? I'm curious about is more alike, and I'm sure it exists and people have done it. Haven't seen it yet. More research on freelancers themselves in the struggles they have. And some of the struggles are still the focus on the business side, not the personal side. So it's like, Oh, freelancers. Number one struggle is getting more client, for example.

I'm sure there's reports that say that. What about like you're saying? Like to me? I think the remote category one of the biggest remote categories is freelancers. So that's like an interesting demographic inside of it.

Did you notice it? Were you able to segment the demographics by age at all? Meeting? Ask Paige the thing that they interesting. But there's data on millennials, right? Yeah, well, I thoughts that come to mind and just citing some of the other data that you've tweeted about before you know what, The biggest benefits working remotely. The 1st 1 is flexible schedule. 43% was the was the biggest benefit that people listed then spend time with family ability to travel, work environment, working from home. Avoid office politics, exercise regularly. Those were all the top

Tommy I did. I did a whole Tweetstorm and found all the research I could find.

Yeah, it's great research. It's great. You know,

people really like that. I like

to thio. We'll put these fun to find these links in the show notes. And then the biggest struggles that that at least part of the research that you had found said loneliness at 21% collaborating, communicating at 21% and then distractions at home, 16% staying motivated of 14% listed these as as the top as some of the top reasons. But it was this one was 1900 freelancers and employees, and and I wonder if they're really does need to be a tip. Sexual segmentation, strong segmentation, freelancers vs versus employees of remote companies because it is just the social convention of looking after each other isn't isn't there on the freelancer side? I imagine that's I think it's their points in my day where it will be lonely no matter what, but but it is a I think it would be much harder for younger freelancers, and the reason I say that is I think it's and I want to ask, is one of my final questions for us, but I feel like it is a If you have two kids, one kid married, you have a more or less stable home situation.

You are older. You know what you're good at? You know what you're not good at? You've already had this exploration phase of what is everyone doing now you're in the drill deep into my specialization or the area that I really want to focus on face where you want a lot of focus and you want a lot of time for deep work. But if you're 23 24 you never had that experience. That's the end. You live with two roommates. Seems very it feels very hard, much harder, especially when you add in thes soft areas of life social calendars of going on, partying a lot, erratic sleeping schedules like it feels like for me. I love remote. Waking up at 6 45 a year and 1/2 old daughter, a wife and daughter at home that I get to see versus if I was 24 that would have been really tough.

Absolutely. Yeah, I think I think the younger you are, the more likely it is that remote, remote work will feel really, um, traumatic because of what you've just been used to in some way. And that's probably more the personal ways. That being said, the younger folks are actually used to a digital lifestyle. Uh, and a lot of remote work involves a lot of digital tools, and they're getting good next, Lex. Good. It's actually funny

is I have younger people here in San Francisco that that just say, Hey, can we just facetime call a coffee on facetime? No parking? No, no commute. I'm like, actually, that is

really smart fun. So I think there is that aspect of it, too. So if we don't have a, it's going to go back to the P word process. If remote companies don't have great process, they're not gonna be able to train these millennials two actually work remotely because their process stinks. And so their ramp up time might mean it. It might happen, but the the folks are basically left to their own devices to, like, figure out like, how do I work here? How do I find what I need to et cetera? That being said, like they're what many people would call that digital natives. They'll go dig around the tools and figure it out a lot faster than folks.

They're old on. The last thing I'll say on that, that on the challenges front, it also feels like if you're using the company for that cos I think it could be a nice byproduct to have the social aspect of life through your company co workers. But it goes back to that crutch of If that's this, just me speaking on the cuff, too. If I was speaking to a friend, if you're using your company for your social calendar, that could be a crutch, for these. People are paid to be in a office or room with you. And how can you really flex the muscles of going on building relationships on your own? Very good point that that is not one where there's aah! Financial component for you all to be in the room together. That seems, I don't mean that is pretty overly harsh,

but I think we have a chat about this, a number of times of just taking when when I do get a sense that someone isn't taking responsibility, wars innocent, a scenario where they could take responsibility. It is. It's just like 1/3 rail for me to where I'm like, This is a situation where you could take 100% responsibility and pretty much every situation is a situation where you'd benefit from taking 100% responsibility on that loneliest front. I think what you're getting at Is this a blow like this with my real thoughts. This is not necessary. PPC you're coddling point of view of Let the organization solve this for it is just sit on the edge of the bed and think hard of how you're contributing to this loneliness and how you could add to this p word process thoughtfulness to improve it. And yeah, that sounds. Actually, I don't even know if that sounds harsh. That's just March, that reality, that is

reality. All adults, it's reality, right? Figure your shit out

and on. And this is you on the topic of mental health. I think that is the healthiest thing you can do for your mental health is to take the responsibility. Think through it. If you were dealing with something on the biological or cute side of of clinical anxiety of clinical depression. That is a very different, different level, uh, of of work and examination, but that, as we know, with the stats of about one and five suffering from mental illness in the course of any calendar year, that actually has nothing to do with very it can't have very little to do with whether you're in office or not. I know plenty of people that work in offices that are dealing with acute mental illness, so I think it is a fascinating become a company and personal breakdown. Is there anything else you want to add to that personal side of things of the costs and benefits? You know? I mean, the overarching Davis seems to suggest, as he pointed out, 70% working more than three years and 95% of the surveyors recommending it to a friend.

Yeah, people love remote work with all its challenges. All the things we just talked about people love remote work and my theory an opinion. Is it because of the freedom that comes with

Do you feel like there's a curve in how much they love it? Three weeks in versus a year and 1/2

in yeah, I think, I think, probably three months in, maybe even six months in. They love it less because they're still figuring it out. And after that point, they figured a lot more out.

I said, It's probably right on point. You have a dip. There's

a dinner. Yeah, at first you're excited. You're like our remote work, eh? I'm real productive. And then you probably hit Cem some mode where you feel the social aspects or lack of social aspects of it. You don't feel as productive, but you just haven't figured out what your structure is, which our own personal way of working is. And if you haven't figured that out, then basically what ends up happening is that you figure it out or you quit. You go back to an office, but there's less quitting and going back to an office now because it's becoming more and more of a Ah, there's more and more of an understanding that this is a great way

to work. Well, last last question. If you were to fast forward five years, and in this being this feeling like an an inevitable trend that is starting with smart, the nimble small startups But usually that's where a lot of these trends start and they don't stop there. Where What do you think the world looks like five years from now for remote work?

I think all of organizations have to adapt to the way that their team members, the way the employees wanna work. And if they want to work from home, they wanna work from a coffee shop or they wanna work from a national forest they're able to. So it's more of adaptability, um, by an organization to what the needs are of the people that are helping build the business. And so we're just going to see an increase in organizations becoming more adaptable. We're also going to see one that we haven't talked about. But it's interesting considering, you know, start ups and founders and things like that. Larger organizations heart, not buyers of remote teams yet, and the reason for that is that they're not used to it. They have co located offices. They're not able to absorb 1000 personal remote team and know what to do with them.

So that's one aspect of it. Another aspect of it that has to change in five years is that investors don't always feel comfortable funding a remote team, especially when the remote team isn't like, uh, basically a rocket ship, because there's no physical place to go and see what they're doing on. And that's what investors they're used to as well, so big. Large companies are used to co located work. Investors are used to co located teams, and in the next five years, both parties you're gonna have to learn how to deal with it both from a mergers and acquisitions, you know, partnerships, that kind of standpoint as well as personally inside of an organizational personally. But as a as a big corporate,

her Fortune 500 company. You do have distributor work happening. You might just not be comfortable having teams fully remote. And you will have to like, start adapting to that. Because people are it's almost like you're gonna have to give people what they want and leave along remote work.

Yeah, it is interesting. Just do you have Microsoft acquiring get up and two years prior you have which is fully remote or not fully, but which is remote, um, vast majority remote. And then you have Yahoo two years ago, three years ago, saying You can't be remote anymore. Yep, it's Ah, it will be interesting. Tow watch Fiber Day. Guess where things go five years from now. I think the next I think it's going to become like I agree that it's it's gonna become a wave that is just makes too much rational sense to not figure out these challenges that's standing in the way of it being, ah, better on 90% of the fast.

I think there will always be the costs costs involved, but I think it will make too much sense on the company. And on the personal side of things here is you have great talent that refuses to go back to where you got office like you. Really? Oh, and now these people have developed into leadership roles. So now we can't fact how are we gonna have a multiple managers of teams to three managers of teams that refused to be an office and then not take on a stance of remote friendly, then potentially remote First, which I do think it's it. Is those air inevitable if you go remote friendly than you're forced to then become remote first in your mentality because of because of just that Prioritization ends up going in that direction. But I think, yeah, I think then you you end up with these something really fasting for another day's modular I This idea that I've been thinking about for the last few weeks of modular company designed that the world's moving towards modular Cos yes, where it's like this team is better at online marketing than our own internal team could ever be. Let's use them. This team is better for four customer support and will ever be.

Let's use them. This team is better for design. Let's use them. It's it is and you look around. You're like, Oh, well, we have a very small team and we have this thing helping write these modular aspects that were all coming together because and I think this is the reason it's related because I think it is so through network tied thio, these tools enabling remote

worked. Our ability to do it is higher than ever,

exactly sharing that Google doc instantaneously with with the brain ing agency. Yes, now, 25 years ago, you didn't have access to their desk toe leave

the things. They're they're prototypes of their draft within a week.

Well, he and was there anything else we we didn't touch on that? We should. It sounds like the big takeaways being remote isn't new. We're just starting to pay attention to it. People love working remotely. Tobu prefer remote in spite of the challenges. But there are real challenges. And I think the the knee jerk reactions that think of tools to solve those challenges rather than thinking through it's just good old fashioned work around process to solve this challenge is, and and even in the midst of that, remote workers are using these new generation of tools that do make it really possible and preferable

for many. Yeah, that's it.

You nailed it. All right. Do you have any ass or requests from listeners?

Check out the remote report. Awesome. Bentley bit dot l'll I slash remote report. Check it out, man. What you think and make sure you check out the tips to

bend d l add in that as well as all of the links to your your tweets over this over the years. And it's great information that people confined in the in the description of podcasts. You can see it over there. People. Right on. Thank you. Thanks again. Thank you, sir, for coming in for this experiment. I hope people find it useful later. A friend's and listeners, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you want to hear more of these types of conversations, go over to your favorite podcast app and hit, Subscribe or leave us a review. Fitter Bad love hearing from people that that appreciate this type of conversation and want more of it.

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