Remotely Inclined

Hi,

Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about remote work and remote entrepreneurship. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on…

Melissa Kargiannakis was named one of the most powerful women in Canada. Her AI company Skritswap helps people simplify their content and make complicated contracts understandable. She’s also on a mission to leverage remote work as a way to bring great jobs to non-urban centres, a goal she is well on path toward with Skritswap. 

In our conversation, Melissa shared how she plans her day, the two kinds of meetings she uses to run her organization efficiently, her advice for new entrepreneurs, and why she feels remote work is fundamentally a feminist choice. 

Running a remote team efficiently

→ Melissa uses two meeting frameworks to keep her entire business under four hours of meetings per week. 

→ On Tuesdays, the team writes out their blockers, highlights, lowlights, and next steps, and the team discusses blockers and next steps so they can share ideas. On Thursdays, Melissa does ‘compass calibration’ meetings to reiterate overall company strategy and make sure everyone is on the same page with all sub-categories like marketing or sales. 

→ The company created a virtual water cooler using Slack, with a channel called Humans of Skritswap. The channel is explicitly to share non-work, human experience things like cultural celebrations or birthdays, giving everyone a glimpse into their coworkers’ lives.

Advice for remote entrepreneurs

→ If you’re just starting your remote journey, make sure you identify your values, schedule everything, and over-communicate. 

→ If you don’t schedule everything, it’s easy to get lost in the inertia of being at home or working remotely. 

→ Culture, values, and communication have to be even more explicit than in an office.  

Remote work is a feminist choice

→ Melissa believes strongly that remote work is a feminist choice. She defines feminism as the search for equality of all people, which is something that remote work empowers. 

→ Remote work allows people to feel the entire range of human experiences and avoid prejudices that may arise in an office. 

→ The Skritswap team has particularly seen this when it comes to working parents and caregivers, since remote work gives them the flexibility to balance a job and caregiving.

The final word

As Desmond Tutu said: If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. 

“Take action today and donate to each of these organizations in memory of people lost to racist violence”

Remotely Inclined Chats with Melissa Kargiannakis

Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.

Stefan: Welcome, Melissa! Can you share what you’re working on with Skritswap?

Melissa: Absolutely. My company takes complicated information and makes it more clear. We simplify the world’s information because I think you should be able to quickly read and understand mortgage or tax laws, or any complicated agreement or document you’ll sign across your lifetime. 

I’ve grown the company to the top 20 most innovative companies in Canada, and I was ranked as one of the top 100 most powerful women in Canada. I also sit on a few relevant boards and I’m passionate about rebalancing power in society, which is what I believe I can do with this company. 

Can you talk about your mission to build a fully remote company out of a small city?

I wanted to build a globally competitive company out of Sault Saint Marie, my hometown. This was back in 2015 / 2016, but I was thinking about it and saying that there are tools. We can be totally remote and I wanted to diversify the economy in non-urban centres and provide more high paying jobs in rural areas, but also operate remotely and still capture talent from other places. 

I talked about providing good jobs in rural areas in Remote Work Can Heal America. But you didn’t quite get to build in Sault Saint Marie. What happened?

What ended up happening is I have some talent in Sault Saint Marie, and a lot of our technology was developed in Sudbury, Ontario. But I wanted to digitize the whole economy. And when I spoke to the university I realized the courses they were teaching didn’t include Amazon or Google cloud - or any of those services. It’s hard to cultivate talent in a particular way for technology companies in a small town that’s largely focused on a steel mill. 

I’m still hopeful though. I have dreams of building a huge campus there and look forward to that day as the company grows. 

Did you always want to be remote, or was it a pivot?

Always wanted to have some remote. I always knew we would be incorporating local folks, but also recognized that talent is in all sorts of different places. One of our team members is based in Vancouver, for example, and she’s one of the best plain language experts in the world. So we figured out a schedule that works. 

A lot of entrepreneurs understand the benefits of remote, but how do you source remote talent?

Embedding yourself in the communities. For example, plain language. It’s a very specific community - there are roughly 300 worldwide practitioners that make up the best. So I embedded myself in that community by travelling to their conferences and such (since remote works best when you have that mix of in-person). I also joined the board of directors for one of the three governing bodies for plain language - thankfully I was elected by the peer group. We also hire our contractors from the community. 

Can you talk more about the in-person mix that comes with remote work?

We chose to be remote first. I learned about these in Andreas Klinger’s guide on managing remote teams. There is:

* Remote first

* Fully distributed

* Some remote, some in office

* Satellite teams 

Remote first was basically fully distributed, but having a non-critical mass office where people can go one to three times a week. Then we just got diligent about meeting and flying the team together 1-2 times per year (as we grow, we’ll just do quarterly). I’ll bring people together, meet in person, build those relationships, and continue to foster team cohesion. 

How do you foster team and social cohesion remotely?

I’ll share two examples: 

I wrote about the first one in my blog post on how to run a remote team. We have less than four hours a week of meetings as a team. That’s critical because people need time to actually do their work, which is a concept you can read more about in It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by the founders of Basecamp. 

One of the structures we use is on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for 7-10 minutes. 

On Tuesdays, everyone will post on Slack in advance of the meeting:

* Blockers

* Highlights

* Lowlights

* Working on next

We verbally only go through blockers and working on next because that’s key for people to have different ideas and share them. 

On Thursdays, I do what I call compass calibration. I make sure we’re all on the same page with each area of the company. This allows for repetition consistency for every Thursday. I walk through the overall company strategy then each sub-component like marketing, sales, customer success, and product development. 

Then we have a Slack channel: Humans of Skritswap. It’s essentially our water cooler. It’s not in general or random. We post all kinds of things - cultural celebrations, weddings, going snowboarding, home crafts, and cooking. That’s where we see each other as humans. 

How do you plan your day?

I like to start my days early, usually working by 7:30 am. But before that I get up and meditate before I leave my bed. It’s something I picked up from my boyfriend but it has driven a discipline that forces me to calm myself first thing in the morning. Then I’ll grab a tea and have breakfast. I usually try to go to a run as well, whether before my 7:30 am meetings or after 10 am. 

Then I usually do deep work in the mornings. The only meetings I’ll take will be sales because those drive the business. 

My internal meetings start with the team around noon or 1 pm, after a lunch break. Then I do all my meetings in the afternoon as much as possible, even trying to put sales and investor meetings from 1-5 pm. 

You said that remote work is a feminist choice. Can you explain more about that?

Yes. Feminist choices are all about the equality of all people. It’s allowing people to have the full range of what are considered both masculine and feminine traits. So for me, remote work is a feminist choice because it empowers people to be people and have the full range of human experience. 

When I step away in the afternoon and tell my team I’m doing that, it gives them permission to do the same thing. It’s a feminist choice that also empowers families and facilitates a diverse team. It helps women in particular who often carry the caregiving burden at home. It helps them overcome barriers. 

We have two employees on our team with young families. And both the one father and one mother on my team have said having the flexibility with remote work has been critical to their ability to succeed in this job and still be engaged and present for their families and children. They talked about having the flexibility to see a school play or a child’s oral exam and be present and engaged. But then still get work done. 

It starts from a values perspective. Remote work isn’t just a format of having a building or not. Your company’s success is based on results, not butts in seats or hours in the day. So remote work anchors your work around results. 

With results as a core value, it means it doesn’t matter to you as much what time of day your staff is doing certain things as long as there’s some known overlap where everyone’s available. 

I think it takes a lot of pressure off people. You’d think it would add more because it’s all about if the results are in. But I think it takes the pressure off because all you have to check is if you did your job - then go be a human. 

What would be your advice for a remote entrepreneur just starting out?

Three things: 

* Have your values and build culture

* Schedule everything

* Over-communicate 

A lot of people think culture just happens. It doesn’t. You have to concentrate and co-create it with your team. 

If you’re not a planner or scheduler, you will now become one. Your calendar is your best friend. Put in time for everything: meditation, working out, internal meetings, work blocks, etc. 

And then you have to over communicate. If you think it’s excessive to send a voice note on Slack and a bullet list, it’s not - it’s just the right amount. 

Amazing, thank you for your insights!

You can get in touch with Melissa on Twitter.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

Hi,

Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about remote work and remote entrepreneurship. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on…

Joshua Tiernan - he goes by JT - has been working remotely for over a decade. He’s also got a few other monikers to go by:

* No-code founder

* Remote entrepreneur

* Solopreneur

* Twice-acquired entrepreneur

* Family man

Living outside of Edinburgh, Scotland, JT initially got into remote work to get away from the 1.5 hour each way commute he had to his office job downtown. From there, he got into the no-code world, a burgeoning movement of non-technical people building technical businesses without writing code. 

As far as entrepreneurship goes, JT has always worked full-time and focused on side-hustles, eventually selling two of them. 

Now, off the back of selling his remote job board Remote Circle to WeWorkRemotely (part of the Tiny Capital family), JT is focused 100% on his job and building No Code Founders, a community of non-technical entrepreneurs.

Scratch your own itch

JT has built over 10 no-code projects, but not all of them were successful. Each time though, whether it was successful or not, he started the projects to solve a problem for himself. 

As it turns out, that’s also the best way to get success in this game. 

→ Remote Circle was founded because JT wanted to filter remote job opportunities by time zone. That unique feature helped the company stand out in the crowded job board website field — and ultimately helped lead the company to acquisition. 

→ No Code Founders was started so JT could connect with other non-technical entrepreneurs like himself. The community is now over 2,000 people and growing.

Remote work and family life

With a young family, stay-at-home spouse, and working remotely, JT’s entire family is at home all day. Here’s how he avoids the stress and tension that can arise working with your family in tight quarters.

→ He treats his at-home job like an office job. He gets up, showered, dressed, etc. - and he takes regular work breaks as if he was in the office. 

→ The whole family takes a no-screen lunch break to reset and connect.

→ The family gets out of the house at least once a day, usually at lunch. On a nice day they go for a walk. On a nasty weather day they go for an aimless drive to get a change of scenery. 

Building, monetizing, and selling Remote Circle

Built in no-code app platform Bubble, JT started rudimentary and built from there. 

→ The initial unique value proposition was filtering by timezone, making the job board very popular in Europe (as most remote job boards at the time were very US-centric). 

→ By collecting feedback using Superhuman’s Product Market Fit Engine, JT discovered other features his core user base really wanted, which added value. 

→ Instead of charging for job postings, JT opted for a sponsorship model. This allowed him to add more companies and jobs faster than competitors. 

The final word

“Start with whatever’s in your hand at the moment… not everything works, but the important thing is that you learn from your mistakes.”

Remotely Inclined Chats with JT

Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.

Stefan: Welcome, JT! Can you share what you’re working on and what No Code Founders is all about?

JT: Yeah! No Code Founders is primarily a slack community which consists of 2,000 founders and entrepreneurs who are developing businesses without using code. 

Most of the activity happens in Slack, but we also have a newsletter and website where we share resources and interviews from founders who are building businesses without code, which gives us some insight into how they’re doing that. 

How did you get started in the no code world?

I’m an entrepreneur, and thought the online space was the most interesting. But I didn’t have a massive interest in learning to code. I was more interested in the business side. So no code was a natural progression for me finding a way to build things myself without having to find developers. 

When I started my first online projects, there wasn’t the term ‘no code.’ But now there are applications which are way more powerful that allow you to basically build software without code. I’ve just progressively got more powerful tools along the way. 

What were your favorite 3 no-code projects?

No Code Founders itself. That’s my favorite because it’s so simple. 

I also built a project called Earnestly, which was basically a short-form blogging platform. I quite liked that challenge. 

Then I built a site called Remote Circle, a remote jobs board which was just acquired. 

Congratulations! You’ve been working remotely from your home in Scotland - but why didn’t you just get an office job?

I actually used to work in the city centre of Edinburgh for about 10 years. But I wanted to work in the tech space. While it’s a good city for tech, you’re still limited in the companies that you can work for. And as an entrepreneur, my skillset wasn’t focused so it was difficult to get a role in that space. 

Working remotely was also appealing for me because I lived quite far outside the city centre. The commute was an hour and a half each way. And I’ve got a young family so it was appealing to me to be able to work from home and have lunch with them. 

And you’ve now sold two no-code projects?

Yup. The first was called WeddingHacks, which was a wedding blog (just a wordpress site). I wrote all the content myself then sold it to one of the big wedding directories in the UK. And then Remote Circle. 

Focusing on Remote Circle - how did you differentiate the business in the saturated world of online job boards?

I had been trying to get a remote job for a couple of years and found it very difficult. When I was using remote job boards, I was finding that 80% of the jobs were with US companies wanting US staff. But that wasn’t explicitly in the job title. So I’d find myself scrolling through job descriptions. As an example, I went through one site that had 200 jobs, but I was only eligible for two of them. 

So the purpose of Remote Circle was to be able to filter by timezone. So you could see companies that were recruiting for your timezone. For that reason, it was popular in Europe. 

Did you iterate on the project much before it was acquired?

Yeah - the first version was fairly simplistic. It was built really quickly in the first month. Then we used the Superhuman Product Market Fit Framework, which was basically asking people how disappointed they would be if your product didn’t exist anymore. The Superhuman team then iterated based on the people who would be most disappointed. 

Using that framework, we found features people were wanting. One feature was advanced job alerts that people could get via email. Rather than sending a newsletter with all the jobs, they could save their search on the site and get jobs that matched those conditions. There were a few iterations like that. That took probably one year from when we released the product to when we were purchased. 

Did you monetize from day one?

It wasn’t revenue generating right away. It took a while to get to that stage. It was definitely a side project and I was working full-time in tech during that time. 

How do you manage working from home with a family?

We have a fairly small place, so I’ve carved out a small corner for my office. And I’ve recently invested in noise cancelling headphones, and I highly recommend them. 

Other than that, I just try to stick to a schedule as if I had an office job. I keep my lunch the same timing. I take regular breaks, coffee breaks, and whatnot. I try to be quite strict on those things. I don’t work in bed or work in pajamas. I always just get up as if I had an office job. 

What about potential frustrations from everyone being home all day?

We try to take a lunch break. If the weather’s good we’ll go for a walk. If it’s not good, we’ll just go for a drive with no destination in mind, just to change the scene for all of us. We switch off completely from our screens at lunchtime. 

Jumping back to Remote Circle - you said Tiny Capital tried to buy you but you weren’t ready at first?

Yeah, they reached out looking for potential acquisitions. And we were pre-revenue, so it wouldn’t have been a particularly good deal for either of us. A couple years later, when No Code Founders started and was getting a bit of traction, I started putting more focus into that and it was quite difficult balancing growing the two at the same time. So I reached back out and it went from there.

How did you build your monetization strategy?

We had a niche, but because we’re effectively still a global remote job board, monetizing job postings proves quite difficult. So the approach we took was to do site sponsorship. We had SaaS tools that would pay us a quarterly rate to advertise their product directly on the site, effectively as an ad. 

We created the ads ourselves and it was included in our newsletter. It was a nice little model that didn’t require a constant sales process and made it a bit more manageable for me to run those on the site. 

Getting people to pay to post jobs on the site just wasn’t working. We could have niched down to something very specific, but our unique selling proposition was the timezone filter, so we needed to stay global. And we already had an existing audience that was global across all sectors and fields. 

So that forced us to look at alternative revenue models, then we landed on site sponsorship. The big advantage as well of not charging is that you can get more jobs and more companies - we ended up with 500 companies, which we probably would never have gotten if we charged.

Now that you’ve sold Remote Circle, what do you want to accomplish with No Code Founders?

I think at the moment, no code is still quite small and there’s a specific audience for it. But I know that there’s millions of other nontechnical founders who are running Shopify stores that would never have heard the term no code. So I’d love to reach those people. 

I started it to scratch my own itch of meeting people who were like me. I always felt that imposter syndrome of being in the tech scene and not being a developer. For me, it was a way to meet people who were in that same position. 

Wrapping up, what’s your advice for aspiring solopreneurs and entrepreneurs?

It’s dependent on each person’s personality, but I would say start with whatever’s in your hand at the moment. I just start something - and not everything works, but the important thing is that you learn from your mistakes. 

Amazing, thank you for your insights!

You can get in touch with JT by following him on Twitter or signing up for No Code Founders, where he messages every new member to say hi.

Image courtesy Joshua Tiernan and Bubble.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

Hi,

Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about remote work and remote entrepreneurship. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Take this short survey. Or just read on…

Floyd Marinescu has never worked in an office. He started his career remotely working for an American company while in undergrad at the University of Waterloo, and he started his business C4 Media in 2005 completely remotely. 

Looking back on his 15+ years of remote entrepreneurship, Floyd learned a lot about how to structure remote businesses and how to overcome the ongoing challenge of being creative when you aren’t in the same room together. He’s also an advocate for Universal Basic Income (UBI), something he believes will foster much more entrepreneurship in the world and severely reduce poverty. 

Creative ideation process for remote teams

If you’re doing the creative ideation process remotely, Floyd says there are some tradeoffs. 

* Instead of lengthy meetings, have shorter meetings that are more frequent. While people can spend a whole day together in-person, Floyd noticed it’s very difficult to have any video chat lasting more than 2 hours. 

* In between meetings, individuals have ‘homework’ to brainstorm on their own, adding their ideas in writing to a central collaboration document. 

* The tradeoff is that this can slow down the innovation and ideation process, but you can speed it up by having multiple meetings in the same day. In that case, the tradeoff is losing some productivity in the day’s other tasks. 

Building culture

Building culture is critical not just for team connection but also to reduce communication errors and challenges. 

* At Floyd’s company C4 Media, a big part of their culture is communications triage. Employees know that Slack is for project management, email is for non-critical but still essential work items, and Workplace by Facebook is the company’s ‘virtual watercooler’ to share fun stories, ideas, memes, and other social elements of the organization. This process ensures that employees are not greeted with multiple Slack notifications and forced to check every item to see which is important or not. 

* C4 Media also has transparent dashboards for every key company metric and each metric either has its own regular meeting or is brought up in a larger setting. This, said Floyd, makes sure everyone can see exactly what the company is working toward and has the opportunity to clarify and ask questions on a regular basis. 

* Before each meeting, employees do a one-word-emotion check in, where they say how they are feeling in one word (e.g. happy, sad, stressed, etc.) and can choose to tell a story about it if they’d like. This grounds every meeting, said Floyd, and ensures that everyone in the company gets to know a bit more about their coworkers as people. 

The case for UBI

A strong supporter for universal basic income (UBI), Floyd sees it as a necessary next step in world economies. 

* Economic growth is being driven by capital, not labor, meaning more people are being pushed into low-income jobs.

* This is bad for the economy, as it has downstream effects -- when people can’t provide for themselves, they are more likely to be exploited, cost more to the state for healthcare, etc. 

* UBI is a minimum floor that props everyone up (and would be taxed as income, so high earners wouldn’t get it in the end) so that everyone has a basic standard of living -- which empowers them to take risks, start businesses, take part in civic duties, organize against corruption, and generally be a more active member of society.

The final word

“I can see more businesses starting remote from the very beginning… There will be a lot more remote work and that’ll overall be very good for the economy. It can bring us up into a much better world.”

Readers like you make this newsletter possible. Subscribe for regular insights and stories about remote work.

Remotely Inclined Chats with Floyd Marinescu

Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.

Stefan: Welcome, Floyd! Can you kick it off by sharing what you’re working on and a bit about you?

Floyd: Yeah. C4 Media runs events for software engineers and we have a news website called InfoQ.com, which serves the latest news to over a million software engineers. 

I have a computer science degree from the University of Waterloo. I’ve actually worked remote my whole life. I’ve never worked in an office except as a student intern, and I’m 42 years of age now. Working remotely is natural to me. In some ways, one of the silver linings behind the pandemic is that suddenly the whole world learned to use technology properly - and I think it’s going to create a rapid move towards remote work. 

How did you start C4 Media, and can you talk through the decision to found it remote from day one?

It all started when I was in second year of university. I networked my way into a small startup in the US that was doing training. The founder went remote because it was cheap - simple as that. And as an American company, hiring me as a Canadian was also pretty cheap. For me, it was the chance of a lifetime. 

So for the first five years of my career, I was remote from day one. It became natural to me. And when that business got acquired, I left and started my business remote from day one. 

When you’re remote, you could hire anywhere. My co-founder was in California. My other co-founder was in Romania. And the first hire after the co-founders were recent graduates living in Beijing. We were hiring for best fit and best value. This is a new normal people don’t really think about - our transition to remote work is going to hyper-globalize the world economy. Previously, you thought of globalization in terms of industrial machinery. But it’s already been globalized in terms of labor with sites like Upwork. But now it’s even more globalized as companies can be distributed around the world. 

I worked with my co-founder in California in the previous job, we thought we would do this new thing together. And software outsourcing was big and common in the early 2000s. I thought if I’m going to build a dev team, then I’m going to hire in Eastern Europe. Since my background is Romanian, I thought why not hire there. 

Currently, just before the pandemic, C4 Media has 50 staff across 11 countries. Someone on zoom is someone on zoom no matter where they live. 

How do you manage working across timezones?

It’s a good best practice to have an established set of core working hours. I think we did 10:30 am to 2 pm EST, and you had to be available for meetings during that time. Outside of that time, it could be timezone specific. 

People say that execution work is easy to make remote, but collaboration is hard. Have you found this at C4 Media?

You’ve touched upon what I think is the only area where remote work is inferior to in-person work -- creative discovery work. 

Something interesting for me is that we had a lot of repetitive excellence. Getting better at the same thing. Running an online news site with an advertising business is like maintaining a slew of rivers that have to flow consistently and you have to improve the speed bit by bit. The execution work was all done online, so you didn’t need to be in-person. Same with running events - it’s easy to plan remotely because people just fly in for events and then leave. 

But the Achilles heel of remote work is the creative ideation process - that is very painful to do remotely. 

When you’re in an environment of frequent change, it’s difficult to do remotely because it’s just better if you’re in the same room and have the luxury of frequent interruptions to ideate on things. There’s no human barrier to Slacking someone, asking for a call, which for some reason there is when you are remote. 

Despite our best attempts over 20 years of doing this, it’s painful to be on a zoom call for more than two hours. It just doesn’t work very well. Versus the same people in a room could easily make it work and not feel so drained. 

If you’re doing the creative ideation process remotely, there are some tradeoffs. 

* It works best to have shorter meetings that are more frequent and regularly scheduled to occur. 

* In between meetings, people should have creative homework - they have to think through things on their own. 

* Then people have to add their ideas to a core ideas document in writing, and your ideas have the same weight as anyone else’s ideas when they’re written down. It’s an introvert’s paradise, I think.

But in this process you spread the ideation process out over a period of time. You could end up with a better product, but it moves more slowly than if you’re all in a room blurting things out for a day to try to get to an outcome quickly. But in this case you have an environment that favors extroverts. 

What challenges have you overcome in your remote career / what challenges should others pay attention to?

Feelings of isolation

We’ve addressed these in a number of ways. It’s important to have a social network, so we use Workplace by Facebook and Yammer before that. 

It’s important to have it distinct from Slack or tools like that because Slack is for project coordination and Workplace is for the watercooler, sharing ideas, sharing updates, and sharing things that aren’t actionable or task oriented. Things like celebrations, birthday wishes, or news of the day. You don’t want that stuff in Slack because it’s very distracting. 

Team connection 

Another important thing for remote cultures is making time for personal connection on your calls. So any meeting we have, we’ll start with a personal check-in. Everyone can share something personal or work related that’s meaningful to them. 

We follow a method called the Core Protocols for High Performing Teams. We’ll check in with one word emotions, like feeling glad, sad, afraid, mad, or something else. It’s a chance to check your emotions at the door and feel connected to others. Everyone can tell a story if they want, but it’s not required. 

Dashboards and transparency 

And generally having a core value of transparency. The one word emotion check-ins are a kind of emotional transparency, but you should also have dashboards that reflect all the various objectives of the company and try to predict the sort of questions people might have so you can reduce anxiety. But a dashboard is only as useful as your meeting rhythms to review the dashboards. If you do that, people gain situational awareness about what’s going on in the company - and that’s a good thing. 

Communications triage

Another thing I’ve always scared about that no one else has really talked about much is reducing communication stress through the concept of communications triage. So at C4 Media, we insist that Slack is for project coordination - don’t put anything trivial or social in there, use Workplace for that. 

So if you start your day, you know if you’re tagged in a Slack channel, that’s something urgent. Then your next triage is to check any highlighted channels you aren’t tagged in, which are obviously less urgent because nobody tagged you. Then the third is to check your email because it tends to be a mix - train people to not send email if they expect a response within 24 hours. You should be using Slack if you expect a quick response. 

So that way Slack is a triage tool and email is more of an alignment tool - and that should be understood on both sides. Then you check Workplace for the social network and ambience of the company. 

This way it cuts down on stress and people don’t feel stressed when they open Slack and see 50 highlighted channels and you can’t tell what’s important or what’s not. 

Shifting gears a bit, you are an advocate for Universal Basic Income (UBI). Can you explain how you came to support that?

I fell in love with the concept on a personal basis. I grew up in a house of domestic violence. If my mom had money outside of the family unit, she would have more freedom, more power, and more agency to make the right choices for herself. She also probably would have gotten more respect because a lot of power dynamics exist because there are vulnerable people to be exploited. 

But when people can’t be exploited, those power dynamics shift. That’s something I like to remind libertarians -- if people have money for basic needs, they are empowered against the government, not the other way around. They can call the shots. They have time to protest or to get involved in civic actions and civic duties. 

As a technologist, you can see the trend lines. When you see the share of income going to the bottom half of the country continually in decline for decades and the income going to the top 1 percent continually increase, we’re going beyond what you could call capitalism. And soon we’ll be at a point of feudalism that perhaps resembles the income distribution in pre-Revolution France. How is that sustainable? 

Then you put that aside and look at other economic trend lines, where you see the share of income going to labor declining and the share of income going to capital increasing. 

So human work is being devalued, although in an inconsistent manner. It has been common in almost every industrial revolution that we’ve seen a polarization where some segment of society has the right skills and really prospers, while everyone else starts to experience wage decline, wage suppression, and wages that don’t keep up with the standard of living and costs of living. 

At the same time we’re facing a situation where modern computing and robotics for 40 years has been causing a decline in demand for wage labor, which you can see in lack of income growth. So income decoupled from productivity in the early 1970s. 

Some economists who study automation are now concluding that we are not creating new tasks for humans as quickly as we used to. And that’s why we’re seeing a decline in wage labor. We’re creating more low income jobs than high income jobs. 

That’s not a decent life. Every generation should be better off than the previous one. And UBI is frankly how we get there, because it recognizes the changing relationship between capital, work, and technology to benefit everyone. If everyone can get a dividend off our technological progress, everyone can prosper. 

So UBI is like a strong welfare state?

Let me distinguish between the two key concepts of basic income. 

A minimum income guarantee replaces social assistance systems. Then there’s UBI, which is a dividend - the same amount to everyone. 

An income guarantee generally tapers off as your earned income approaches median wages. It fixes poverty by establishing a floor. And it’s what’s in most government proposals.

A UBI doesn’t fix poverty, but it fixes capitalism. UBI is how we share in the gains from technology, implementing dividends from our economic productivity and our growth for the prosperity of everyone. 

But the problem is that no one can really wrap their heads around the radical tax reform you’d need to give everyone in the country $2,000 per month, for instance, as opposed to an income guarantee which you can think of in a more incremental manner. 

With minimum income, or social assistance, you can be caught in the Welfare Trap, as it’s referred to in the United States. You could go back to work, but you effectively lose your benefit. With UBI, it changes the incentives. A lot of people want to go to work - nobody wants to be dependent. That’s why UBI could be superior to a social assistance system that doesn’t pay out enough for those who are able to work. For those who are unable to work, it’s not humane to be paying poverty levels of support and pretending you’re doing something to help people. 

We’re working on a proposal that blends the two that includes both UBI and minimum income. So you have a floor that eliminates poverty and supplements the incomes of the bottom 50% of the country who have suffered most from technological wage stagnation, but you also have a smaller dividend that gives a raise to the middle class and people in the sixth and seventh income deciles, who could certain use a raise as well. 

Thank you. Considering the potential for UBI and remote work technology, what is your prediction for the future of remote work?

I believe we’re going to see a rapid move towards remote work - or at least flexible work environments. 

IBM did this 15 years ago when they built a generic office. Desks were not assigned to anyone and you would go in for meetings, not work. I see more companies doing that. 

I can also see a lot of startups just starting remote from the very beginning. Why wouldn’t they, now that everyone understands how easy it is? 

And I can see a lot of people demanding to only work in remote companies going forward, which is wonderful. It could end up being an economic stimulus if people with mid-range or high incomes could move to small towns and help out economies there, work remotely, and have a better lifestyle. When people are there for lifestyle reasons, there would be better retention. It was great for both sides. I can see those types of arrangements increasing a lot. 

There will be a lot more remote work and that’ll overall be very good for the economy. It can bring us up into a much better world. 

Amazing, thank you for your insights!

You can learn more about UBI Works on Twitter. 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

Hi,

Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about remote work and remote entrepreneurship. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on…

Serge Popovic was a fitness blogger before joining fitness company Crossrope as its Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) in 2015. The company then launched an app to power at-home fitness memberships using Crossrope’s jump rope product. With more people than ever working from home, Crossrope has been growing. 

At the start, Serge worked in a distributed team but got together weekly at a coworking space so his team could brainstorm in-person. Now that the team is fully remote, he’s finding that the right processes help bolster creativity and help people stay on track - even when you can’t operate face to face.  

The process of remote collaboration

* Serge used to believe you needed face to face communication for effective team meetings and building strong team relationships.  

* While in-person is still his preference, he’s found that daily standups and team meetings planned for the same time each week are able to produce great results remotely. 

* He also said a key to fostering relationships is to make sure non-work catch ups are embedded into every meeting, even if only for a couple of minutes. 

Remote growth channels and tools

* Crossrope is looking to grow, and is leveraging a variety of remote growth channels including affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, and podcast advertising. 

* Managing the process with a fully remote team requires a lot of tools. Serge said the company uses all the regular tools - Slack, Asana, and Zoom - but also uses Shift to help them coordinate across multiple Google Drive accounts (such as for support, marketing, and internal team communications). 

The final word

“[It was] difficult to believe that you can operate with such high efficiency in a remote setting. But I’ve found that’s exactly the case as long as you have the right systems, processes, and core values in place.”

Thank you so much for reading this article. Readers like you make this newsletter possible and I'm grateful you're here. If you want to see a specific topic covered, leave a comment. If you're not already a subscriber, why not join? 

Remotely Inclined Chats with Serge Popovic

Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.

Stefan: Welcome, Serge! Can you share what you’re working on?

Serge: Yeah. I’m the CMO at Crossrope. We have a jump rope system where you can clip on different weights of ropes into your handles, so you can change up the resistance depending on what your fitness goals are. 

Over the past few years, we realized there was a need for the content side, so we started developing our own fitness app to go along with the ropes. It’s like a companion app that gives you workouts, challenges, and things you can actually do with the ropes. That’s where the digital piece comes in. 

And you’ve been at Crossrope for 5 years - and were one of their earliest employees?

Yeah - I started working with the CEO back in 2012, but joined full time in early 2015. 

The company was distributed from the start - how did that happen?

It’s a unique situation. I used to have a fitness blog and YouTube channel. I talked a lot about jump ropes when nobody talked about jump ropes. At the same time, my now CEO launched Crossropes’ interchangeable jump rope system. Because the space is small, we connected and started sharing ideas and working together. It became a bit of an affiliate partnership. 

In 2015, we’d been working together for 3 years and he said he needed someone to come in and take over the brand side, since the brand was still young. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity for me since it was all my passions bundled into one opportunity. 

Our CEO is a former navy pilot who settled in North Carolina. And I’ve always been up here in Toronto. So that’s how the dynamic started with a distributed international team. We’ve always had this remote setup and learned to operate digitally from day one. 

Up in Toronto we have a partially remote marketing team - I say partially because we used to work in a coworking space for a couple days a week on things that are better for in-person. 

Can you explain more about the kinds of work you think are more suited to in-person?

This has been largely challenged over the past six weeks, but we use offices for a few things. Face to face interactions and having fun, even in a small coworking space, creates opportunities for ad-hoc conversations and talking more about life. When you’re remote, you’re siloed in your own work, and a lot of communication is work related. I found that bringing people into the office really helped to develop and nurture the relationships between everyone and bringing everyone closer. 

I also try to schedule all of our team meetings during those days. We’ve all seen zoom parody videos as of late and we’ve all had the challenges with zoom and remote meetings. I still think those have their place, but I feel strongly that meetings are a great thing to be done in person where you can talk openly about something without interrupting someone or stepping on someone’s toes in a conversation. 

But now you’re 100% remote. What processes have you put in place to work fully remotely now?

One thing I’ve challenged and encouraged my team to do is over-communicate. We’re in Slack a lot, so we created a few channels for non-work related stuff. It’s often loaded with funny memes, jokes, and videos. 

We’ve always done standup meetings, so now I try to start those meetings with segues - I have a young daughter so I’ll bring her into the meeting, for example. We try to personalize it and use the first few minutes of the meeting to riff off on how the night was and what’s going on. 

So you found a digital equivalent to what you’d regularly do in person?

Exactly. If you’re not doing standup meetings in a remote situation, you’re missing out on a lot - not just from a work standpoint, but from a relationship standpoint as well. It gives you the opportunity to keep in touch with everybody in a structured way, even if it’s just 5-10 minutes. 

You mentioned you’re activating new marketing channels, too. How are you managing the increased complexity?

Yeah, we happened to be on the right side of the coin flip in this crisis. A lot of people are having a hard time so it feels a little odd, but we’re here to remind ourselves that we have a product that is serving people. People are looking for a way to stay fit and active, and there are only a handful of solutions that give you that opportunity at home. 

I feel like we’re doing a disservice if we don’t try to get out there as much as possible. So we will be experimenting with podcast advertising and will be on a few big shows. I’m excited to see how those work out. We’re also trying some influencer marketing opportunities and will be exploring affiliate partnerships. 

Things have been accelerated and this is a great opportunity to test new channels. It’s also great timing from a cost perspective.

What tools are you using to manage all of your new marketing channels?

So we’re big on Slack and email, and obviously we use Zoom. We also use Asana for project management, since Slack can be a mess. 

Then one that you probably won’t hear as often is Shift. If you work with multiple different Google accounts and Google tools, it allows you to check out all of them at once - you can check email if you have multiple inboxes. You can see everything from one vantage point. 

Did you work remotely before joining Crossrope?

No, this was my first entry into remote work. I have an engineering background and spent my first few years working in an office. 

But I’ve always thought about this because when you talk about remote work, the first thing you hear is how people don’t think they could work from home. Almost like you have to be a certain type of person to be able to work remotely. I’ve always tried to think through what characteristics made remote work easy and preferable for me - I love remote work. I hate commuting. 

I think having routines is important. Some people I’ve talked to are struggling, and I’ll ask them about their routine - when they have their meetings. They’ll say it’s whenever. But you have to have a structure in place you can rally around. 

What structure do you use to frame your days working remotely?

I’ve always been a morning person, so I wake up around 6:30 am. I’ll have some coffee and then go see my daughter - often, she’s up before me and waiting for me. 

So I’ll get the day started by getting her ready and hanging out with her. Then I’m usually at my computer working by about 7:15 am - from there it depends what I want to carve out before our daily huddle, which starts at 9 am. It gives me the opportunity to get things organized and take care of some important things.

The challenge with a lot of remote scenarios is that when you encourage people to over-communicate, you can get distracted very easily. It’s important to find the right balance, because it’s difficult to carve out focus time to work on your OKRs. We talk a lot about that and communicate around that - we encourage people to use do not disturb status updates, similar to how you would do in an in-person setup.

Then the team builds their own routine around those daily huddles, which are pretty much carved in stone. 

Awesome. Lightning round time: What’s your favorite movie?

The Count of Monte Cristo. 

Favourite book?

Traction by Gino Wickman. 

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced with remote work?

It’s very easy for remote work to blend into your life. Sometimes having an office so close to your bedroom makes it easy for the two to blend together. Sometimes that’s not the best thing from a family lifestyle, so it’s important to keep top of mind. 

What misconception did you have about remote work, or what part of remote work pleasantly surprised you?

If you told me six years ago, I’d probably find it difficult to believe that you can operate with such high efficiency in a remote setting. But I’ve found that’s exactly the case as long as you have the right systems, processes, and core values in place. 

Amazing, thank you for your insights!

You can get in touch with Serge on LinkedIn.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

Hi,

Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about remote work and remote entrepreneurship. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on…

If you follow tech news, you’ve probably heard of Andrew D’Souza or his company Clearbanc. D’Souza was an angel investor and entrepreneur before Clearbanc, but catapulted to the big leagues when he and partner Michele Romanow (a successful entrepreneur in her own right and star on Dragon’s Den) raised $300 million for their company on the premise that they could give startups better financing than traditional banks. 

So when D’Souza published a video in Fall 2019 that Clearbanc “[doesn’t] have a remote work culture,” it raised a few eyebrows. People questioned whether Clearbanc would be able to attract top talent or build a company in 2019 and beyond if they dismissed remote work out of hand. D’Souza stood his ground, saying it’s not that he hated remote work for everyone… just that he didn’t feel it would ever work for Clearbanc. 

Enter COVID-19, and Clearbanc is fully remote in response to the pandemic. And it seems to be working for them.

So I caught up with D’Souza to hear how things are going - and see if his perspectives on remote work have changed at all (spoiler: they have).

From never-remote to remotely-productive

* A big reason D’Souza felt remote work wouldn’t be good for Clearbanc came from his experience building Clearbanc in the early days, when the five co-founders would spend all day together in the same apartment working, getting a lot done. 

* As an entrepreneur, D’Souza gets his creative energy from bouncing ideas off of people - he felt he would not be able to replicate that in a remote work environment. 

* When the company went fully remote in response to COVID, D’Souza learned that a real challenge was not “building the muscle” of remote communication and not laying down the necessary infrastructure to empower remote collaboration. 

An unfounded concern

* D’Souza mentioned that in the back of his mind he assumed that people in remote work environments would take advantage, being lazy and not delivering work.

* Once Clearbanc went remote, he realized “almost the exact opposite” from the team. He realized that it’s more about hiring the right people (that is to say: people who want to take ownership and be entrepreneurial), providing them with the right tools, and trusting them to put in the work. 

* A big part of the success was shifting up their communication structures to include digital team meetings and all-hands meetings, where D’Souza jumps in and out of different ones on a regular basis. 

All or nothing is easier than hybrid

* Being forced to go remote has made D’Souza realize he can run a successful company with more flexibility - especially now that they have critical ‘remote’ infrastructure in place. 

* However, a hybrid model opens up a new challenge: how to ensure that in-office and remote employees are given the same employee experience. 

* He’s also concerned about intruding in people’s lives who work remotely while still getting the energy of ad-hoc conversations like the ones that happen in office environments. 

The final word

“I certainly have had to eat my words [about remote work] a little bit... but it’s been a fun challenge as a CEO to navigate through.”

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Remotely Inclined Chats with Andrew D’Souza

Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.

Stefan: Welcome, Andrew! To kick it off, let’s talk about that LinkedIn video where you said you would never do remote work. Can you explain more about your perspective on this?

Andrew: It’s ironic and we’ve been put into an interesting situation having to be remote at Clearbanc. We started the company with the idea of creating a new financial instrument for founders. Both Michele and I lived and breathed the ups and downs of raising capital, whether it’s equity or venture capital, and saw the costs associated with raising capital and managing investors. 

So when we started the company, we started it out of our condo. Then we got into YCombinator and moved down to San Francisco where we lived in an Airbnb for eight months. And then when we moved back to Toronto to scale the team, we would work from our home (until we got to about 16 people). 

When we talked about our philosophy around remote work, it wasn’t dogmatic. It wasn’t that no companies should be doing remote work. It was just organically the way our company evolved and our communication systems evolved to be more about hallway conversations, serendipitous interactions, and the sort of entropy that happens in a high-energy environment. 

Are you able to reach the same level of energy now that you’re remote?

So most of what I was referring to happened outside of normal working hours. It was either early in the morning or after everybody finished their last meeting at six o’clock. It’s just people sitting around saying ‘hey, have we ever thought about this - what if we did it this way?’ 

That led to most of our major product innovations. So that was what I was afraid we’d lose. When we went remote, it took a different form. In the first few weeks, people were still online. When you don’t have anything to do, you can ping someone at 8 or 9 pm with an idea. So we ended up recreating those brainstorm conversations. And it got to the point where we realized we were actually taking up too much of people’s time and people weren’t sleeping - we were over-focused on work. But in a normal work environment, people have things to go to in the evenings, so it may feel intrusive to ping people later on. 

Did you not ever digitally ping people when you worked in an office but went home for the evening?

I wouldn’t say never. You certainly will get a ping from somebody with an idea. But I think it comes down to it being more organic and less intrusive. I don’t want to intrude on whatever else they’ve got going on or their other responsibilities. 

There’s just a bit of a barrier with remote. Because when I look across the office and I see someone’s ordering dinner, you can go chat with them over dinner. You feel less bad about including them in the conversation. 

So I’m not saying that this is the right way to run a business. Certainly there’s downsides to the concept of ordering dinner at the office, it may not be for everyone. But it’s the way we’ve evolved as a company. 

So it’s about giving someone permission to be part of the conversation, so you don’t get the sense you’re bothering them?

Yeah, exactly. It’s knowing that everybody is in the same headspace and context to have the freedom of a brainstorming discussion. 

For example, if you book a brainstorming session from 2-3 pm, at 2:55 pm, no one is going to bring up a new thread. 

Couldn’t you just move the brainstorming session to the end of the day?

Yeah - that was one of the plans we had. Before we went remote due to COVID, we were going to schedule a brainstorming session twice a month for a couple of different topics and either have people stay later or dial-in remotely. 

A few questions from social media: How have you shifted your daily communication?

We’ve had to brute-force it a bit. 

We start with a company-wide all-hands meeting on Monday mornings and on Friday afternoons we have demos and recap the week. We now do those remotely. 

Every day, each of the core teams or teams with core initiatives have a standup and I rotate and join each one on a round robin basis. 

And then there’s an optional 5 pm all-hands where it’s basically an AMA in terms of anything that has come up that day or questions and concerns that have come into people’s minds. It’s also an opportunity for Michele and I to share how our perspective is evolving on our situation, the market, and our company. We try to be really transparent with our team and we’ve found that to be pretty energizing. People look forward to it and we’ve started to bring in special guests, such as our board members or clients. 

How has remote work impacted your output?

I think the volume of work has probably increased. I think part of it is the fact that people aren’t commuting and things, but also I think it’s because people don’t have any other plans. I think that’s why we were so productive in the early days of the company - because we didn’t have any plans. We didn’t know anyone, so we lived together, we’d work together, and we’d go eat dinner together. That’s what it takes to create something out of nothing. 

Work output from the team has increased because people pour themselves into the work - maybe as a bit of a distraction. 

Coordination has been more difficult, probably because we never put the foundations and infrastructure in place to coordinate communications across teams remotely. So it has felt like there’s been more crossed wires lately. But part of that is just pace. We’re trying to react really quickly to a very uncertain and ever-changing environment. And we’re changing our plans and priorities according to what the market, data, and our customers say. 

Do you think that remote communication muscle is a good one to flex in general, not just during the pandemic?

Yeah. We’re at about 200 employees. That’s probably the scale where you want to create some more scalable  communication systems and decision making frameworks. To be honest we needed to do it quite a bit earlier than that. We’ve gotten around it through the informal, organic communications that have happened in the company, but I think it’s certainly shining a light on the fact that we would operate much faster and more efficiently if we were better at communicating decisions, priorities, and creating more of a structured information flow. 

I don’t think we’ll ever be best in class at that, given how we operate. But I don’t want that to be what handicaps us. 

Offices are a huge expense for any startup - wouldn’t remote work empower more entrepreneurs?

Thinking about whether having an office is a barrier for people starting companies… it shouldn’t be. For us, what worked was working out of our home. But for other people, I think starting remote could be as good if not better. It’s personal and depends on the type of company you want to build. It also depends on where you are and who you are as an individual. 

I believe that starting a company requires some outsized belief and heavy lifting to be able to get it off the ground. And what drives that energy for me is being shoulder to shoulder with someone. Michele and I live together - that’s probably part of what keeps us going. 

I’m not sure if I can replicate that model remotely. But I’m sure there are some people that can, and I think they can build a much more flexible and scalable operating model. 

Have you been pleasantly surprised by any element of working remotely?

Yeah. I don’t think I ever explicitly stated this, I think I probably subscribed to this idea that if you have people work remotely they’ll slack off or they won’t be as engaged. I have seen almost the exact opposite from our team. Our team is special and very entrepreneurial, but I also think the structure of remote work - giving people autonomy - drives more ownership and accountability to every individual in the company. 

If you hire the right people who are hungry for ownership, then put them into a remote environment and trust them, you will see great work and great ideas. 

Now that you have this infrastructure, will Clearbanc have more work flexibility in the future?

Yeah - I’ve communicated this with our team. I don’t think we should be the first people back in the office, even after the government gives the green light. 

As much as I miss our team and I miss the energy, we’re going to be slow to pull that trigger. But that said I think we’re certainly going to be open to some full-time remote people or people taking a few days to work remotely. 

The hard part, to be honest, will be replicating the experience. When everyone is remote or in-office - everyone is getting the same experience and you’re designing for that experience. What I’d like to do is push our team and myself to build an experience where it is as close to the same experience for people who are remote as it is for in-office. I think that’s the real challenge. 

Some companies have already done a great job of it and I think we start to grow a global footprint and open offices in new countries, it’s something we will have to do. But we’ve kicked that can down the road to date. 

Even though we’ve got a passable way of operating as a fully remote team, I think the challenges of the bar for being a hybrid remote team are even higher. 

Absolutely - it’s a tough balance.

It’s always fun to talk about this stuff. And you know I certainly have had to eat my words a little bit. But it’s been a fun challenge as a CEO to navigate. I’ve been personally challenged more than in the previous four or five years of running the business. I’m always open to new suggestions and ideas. 

Amazing, thank you for your insights!

You can get in touch with Andrew on Twitter. 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

Hi,

Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about remote work and remote entrepreneurship. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on…

Melanie Parish has been working remotely for 20 years, coaching Fortune 500 leaders and startup savants alike on how to grow themselves and their businesses. Her entire career has focused on helping people run more effective experiments, and now she’s written a book about it called The Experimental Leader. As part of her experiment-focused career, she used to think that everyone should work from home, believing in her core that it was better for everyone. That’s no longer her core belief. 

In this edition of Remotely Inclined Chats, I got Melanie’s advice for all different kinds of people struggling with the COVID-19 lockdown and pressed a bit more on why she thinks offices are absolutely necessary when this pandemic is all over. 

Here are the highlights:

Experimenting through COVID-19

* If you’ve lost your job due to COVID-19, Melanie recommends gaining new skills adjacent to your current work if you’re not able to find work that’s relevant for you. 

* If you’re working and are now remote, be as helpful as you’re able to - support local businesses, volunteer, donate, etc. 

* If you’re an entrepreneur with a demand surge, do everything you can to be people-focused. Company brands are made in times of crisis. 

The necessity of an office

* Some people are well-suited to remote work, and they should be allowed to continue that - we shouldn’t ignore remote work entirely. 

* Melanie no longer believes the refrain that everyone should be remote and COVID will make offices redundant in the future, though. Too much still needs to be done face-to-face. 

* As remote work becomes more prominent in the working world, Melanie feels that the experiment is far from conclusive - offices are still absolutely necessary in our working world. 

The final word

“Remote work during COVID-19 is an incomplete experiment. We need more data - and in the meantime we will continue to need offices.”

Remotely Inclined Chats with Melanie Parish

Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.

Stefan: Welcome, Melanie! Can you kick off by sharing a bit about yourself and your work?

Melanie: Thrilled to be here. I’ve been an executive and business coach for the last 20 years, and I recently wrote a book on the thinking I’ve shared with my clients - the tried-and-true methods on how to experiment - called The Experimental Leader. I’m also launching a podcast and academy. So I’m running in all sorts of directions, but it’s all around experimenting and being a thought leader in how we innovate.

So were you a fan of remote work before COVID? Did you plan for remote work with clients?

I’ve been working remotely for my entire career. I’ve coached from home, worked from home, and work with my clients remotely. I used to do it by phone… now I do zoom calls. 

What can people do to mentally prepare if they weren’t expecting to work remotely, potentially ever?

I think there’s two categories (as it pertains to COVID). The first is that they are working - and there are maybe two types of workers working at home. 

There are those who are working, but their work has almost gone away. So for example, my husband is a research scientist. He does research on babies with autism and no longer has access to his subjects - they’ve locked down the university and he can’t get his dataset. So he’s being paid to work to support a student, but his actual work has a barrier. It’s not a bottleneck - it’s a barrier. It’s important to realize the difference between bottlenecks where you have to work really hard to get through and barriers where you have to stop and figure out a new plan.

The other type of people is anyone where demand for their product has increased dramatically during COVID-19. I work with an organic farm. The first week of COVID they doubled in size. The next week they took on more. Now they have a waitlist because they just can’t grow anymore right now.

And then there’s the category of people whose work has gone away and they don’t have work at all. Now they’re trying to figure out what to do in this time. 

How would being an experimental leader apply to these scenarios?

The biggest thing about being an experimental leader is that it’s a new mindset. Being experimental means you’re trying something new. So you try it, but then you need to collect data. It’s a mindset of being curious about what happens, rather than going all in for something. We’re trying it out and pondering what the effect was of what we tried. That’s the heart of being experimental. 

For folks who lost their jobs: 

If you’ve lost your job and are looking - I have a daughter in this situation - the thing I would suggest is to experiment with up-skilling in some way. There may be a job in their field, and if so they should be looking. But if they aren’t finding any traction, experiment with skilling up. My daughter is a chef and no restaurants are hiring, so she’s doing some courses on being a project manager. She’s taking the opportunity to see if she can emerge from this with more skills than she went into it with. 

It’s a good practice, and also gives purpose and meaning. For people who don’t have meaningful work, they need to figure out how they fill their time so they don’t just turn and spin. 

For the employee who is able to work remotely and has a job:

For those people, it’s about making sure they are orienting to a message of helpfulness. For example, I have more disposable income than I ever have because I am not spending it anywhere else, but I want something that’s useful to me - I don’t need tchotchkes. 

For the business leader with more demand for their product or service: 

Another important thing is that people are really busy and doing more emotional labor than they ever have. Their team is looking for answers. They’re looking for guarantees like if they have employment. The people around them are afraid, and customers are needy. 

So experiments should be around how you put down the emotional labor. I’ve been suggesting to my clients that they delegate some emotional labor to someone else so they can take a couple of days where they’re not checking in on all of their employees - they have someone else on the team who picks up the emotional labor piece in the short-term.

Can you share an example of a business doing the right thing in this crisis?

I have a client with a line of products that are good for overall health and immune systems - for example, she has a line of probiotics. 

Many people are jacking up the price on these kinds of products. She put all of her products on sale. She didn’t need to, but she went all-in for helping others with their health, which I believe will be a long-term benefit to her. But in the short term, she was all-in for her clients. 

How has your experience so far changed your perspective on remote work?

I always thought everybody should work at home. That was my core belief. I just don’t believe that anymore. 

The whole world is saying “we’re going to go back, and everybody’s going to work at home, and we won’t need offices anymore.” I think that might be true for some people but I actually am seeing, now more than ever, how offices can also be important. For instance, how important it is to be face-to-face with people. 

Some people are really well situated for working at home. And some people aren’t - some people need to be in a room with other people. And I have definitely seen with some of my clients the toll that being alone has on them from a mental health perspective. I’m most worried about people who live along during this time who are remote 24/7. 

It’s a bit difficult to actually collect the data on if it’s worth working remotely versus living and working remotely. There may be some data, but it’s muddy about working remotely right now. 

Amazing, thank you for your insights!

You can get in touch with Melanie on Twitter.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

Hi,

Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about remote work and remote entrepreneurship. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on…

Emily Lonetto is the head of growth at Voiceflow, acting as both an individual contributor and a people leader. Fond of the freedoms of flexible remote work, she’s now tasked with leading a fully remote team and delivering on her own work remotely. In this conversation, she shared the tools that help her lead remotely, the challenges she faces as a remote leader, and the massive business opportunity she realized from working remotely.

The challenges of leading remotely

* Despite loving travel and flexible work arrangements, Emily realized that being a full-time remote leader came with its own set of challenges. 

* In particular, maintaining human connections was significantly more difficult when you weren’t in the office together, so Emily focused on how to empower her team to have non-work connections and conversations. 

* She also learned through trial and error that you can’t simply build something and expect people to engage - you have to build it with authenticity in mind. 

Creating connection on remote teams

* A big challenge for Emily and Voiceflow was ensuring that communication stayed high quality. The team - distributed across four countries - wanted to make sure check-ins were authentic and the team had opportunities for non-work connections. 

* The team uses Soapbox, Navigator, and Humble Dot for communications.

* They also have individuals pick games for their weekly Friday games night, and have played Scribble and Tabletop Simulator

What remote work can teach every company

* A key learning for Emily was that their processes were dependent on everyone being in the same room. While that was usually the case, it revealed a big weakness where even someone being sick and out of the office for a day could hamper progress. 

* By reorienting their work processes to focus on outputs for clients and value for employees, all companies can produce better products and services - this isn’t unique to remote companies. 

* Remote work created a necessity to find collaboration tools. However, those tools can provide assistance and benefit whether a company is remote or working in an office. 

The opportunity of remote work

“Finding new tools that enable us to do more collaborative work online will provide better ways of doing our work later.”

Remotely Inclined Chats with Emily Lonetto

Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.

Stefan: Welcome, Emily! Can you kick off by sharing a bit about yourself and Voiceflow?

Emily: Absolutely. I head growth at Voiceflow - we make it easy for people to design, develop, and prototype voice apps for Alexa and Google with little to no code. More recently, we’ve focused on trying to make it possible to collaborate remotely. 

What I’m working on predominantly at Voiceflow is how we scale out this design tool not only within the Alexa and Google communities but also globally. 

Were you a fan of remote work before COVID-19 then? 

I’ve always been the type of person who believes in balance between remote work and office work. Even though I love being in an office, I’d jump out and take a bit of a break from that. 

I’ve always been pro-remote work and pro-remote when trying to find the right talent as well. One of the things I’ve found amazing about remote work is opening up your talent pool. Despite the fact that Voiceflow is headquartered in Toronto, we have members who are based in Paris and Belarus. I’m also currently in San Francisco. I think remote work makes it possible for us to tap into some talent that would otherwise be unavailable. 

Did you always have a mixed team in terms of in-office and remote?

Yeah! The vast majority of our team is in Toronto, but we had a small team in Paris and hired someone in Belarus before COVID-19 broke out. I would by no means say we were super remote-ready at that time, but I understood that it was something we were working towards. 

COVID-19 really forced our hand into taking remote work from a side conversation and goal into something we had to act on quickly. 

What’s it like trying to be a people leader remotely?

It was something I’d been preparing for since I just moved out to San Francisco, but now it’s about getting more pointed with the channels we use - having the right type of check-ins and making sure the culture piece is there. 

A big thing I realized once we all went remote is how much of our culture was built on personal conversations - stuff that doesn’t necessarily revolve around work. So I know myself and the rest of the leadership team have been really focused on creating space that isn’t dependent on physical location for us to bond and maintain our culture. 

What successes and failures have you had when it comes to preserving culture in a remote work environment?

Our first gut instinct was to create a Slack channel for people to do side conversations. We assumed if we built it, they would come - which everyone knows is not true. The channel ended up being like a general channel that kind of died out. 

The next effort was to form channels around certain activities. So we had a channel to talk about Call of Duty, which wasn’t the most inclusive activity for folks who don’t play, like myself. 

Now, we’ve pivoted a channel we already had called Remote Committee, which was something we built before COVID-19 blew up to share not just games we could do together but also tools to make it easier for us to work together in different capacities

We’ve since started using: 

* Soapbox

* Navigator

* Humble Dot

All of which have been really great ways of auto-checking in with people on the team. I use it to do ice breakers and get streamlined check ins with my team still in Toronto. We also started to rotate responsibility for who would choose our Friday games night game, and we’ve now played Scribble and Tabletop Simulator. 

Are the challenges of remote work different for you as a people leader versus as an individual contributor?

It’s really challenged the way I dive in as a leader. It’s a lot easier for me to block off time to focus on individual contributions, but I also have more time to think about optimizing how I work with my team. 

Previously, it was the other way around. It was easy to do check-ins with my team or sit next to someone or pair work with someone. Now we have to figure out new ways to do that or find tools to enable us to do that. 

Some of the tools we had chosen or workflows we created were so dependent on us being physically together. That would have made it difficult if we didn’t have every team member in the office. So us being forced into remote work and into this activity of finding new tools that enable us to do more collaborative work online will provide better ways of doing our work later. 

You also used to travel frequently for work - how has it been sheltering in place?

It’s been weird. I think there’s no real way of preparing for this kind of shift. It’s not working remotely. It’s not traveling and experiencing a new city like I’m used to. It’s just lockdown - and trying to control your schedule.

As someone so used to having their calendar dominated with travel, meetings, or keynotes, it’s challenging. It totally changed our companies OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in terms of what we’re focused on for growth, marketing, and really had us focused on accessibility and mental health for our clients and team members. 

It’s also provided a lot of insight on how we can make sure that we’re people-focused and not just placed-focused. It was a subconscious thing, but we started to realize it more as our team is no longer physically in the same space. 

Absolutely. COVID lockdown is not remote work. But has your experience so far changed how you view remote work?

It’s really changed the way I think about creating opportunities for my team members to show off what they’re working on and it’s redefined the way we think about user engagement. 

Previously, we were focused on traditional channels like email and engaging with an app or in-person events. But we weren’t diving in beyond that. With all-hands, we’re trying to shift away from leaders talking and instead getting individual contributors to do live demos - so they can be the thought leaders and we can provide real estate for them to do that. 

It’s changed our workflow as well. We found there was a lot of wasted time in meetings previously - now that time is much better utilized as we’re genuinely checking in. We want to work together and are excited for that moment where we’re actually working on things in tandem. 

Amazing, thank you!

You can connect with Emily on Twitter.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

Hi,

Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about remote work and remote entrepreneurship. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on…

In the first edition of Remotely Inclined Chats, Erin Bury, CEO of legal startup Willful explained how she keeps creative energy flowing in her company remotely, maintains company culture, and how she gives back in a time of crisis.

I captured the highlights here, but listen in or read the edited transcript below for the full story:

Creative juices

Erin keeps creativity flowing by digitally mimicking behavior she would do in the office.

* Instead of walking over to a desk, she’ll send a quick Slack message.

* Instead of in-person meetings, she’ll use Zoom.

* When it’s time to whiteboard, she’ll encourage everyone on the team to take part just as they would in the office.

Company culture

For Erin, a key part of company culture is the conversations and time spent not on work things. It’s the happy hours (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic options available), the team lunches, and the fun anecdotes from everyone’s lives. She’s keeping that alive with:

* Virtual team lunches.

* Encouraging personal chats on Slack.

* Always being there to have a life chat with her team.

Giving back

Willful is in a unique position - it’s actually growing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is pushing people to think about end of life planning. With that privilege, Erin gives back by:

* Promoting local businesses on her social media.

* Giving away free wills and other legal documents to healthcare workers.

* Supporting local businesses by giving her team gift cards to buy local.

And in the end?

“I’ll have a lot more of an open perspective to fully remote people and - potentially even a fully remote company - based on this experience.”

Remotely Inclined Chats with Erin Bury

Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.

Stefan: Can you share a bit about who you are and what you’re up to at Willful?

Erin: For sure! I have a decade of experience in marketing, communications, and business operations. I ran a marketing and branding agency in the past and I was on the founding team of startup publication BetaKit. 

I’m now the co-founder and CEO - alongside my husband - of legal startup Willful, where we help people get estate plans in place. 

Since you’re building a tech company and sell a digital product, were you a fan of remote work before the COVID-19 pandemic?

I’ve always been a fan of flexibility. When you’re building a digital product, there’s no reason that anyone should be forced to be in an office. We’ve always had a really flexible policy around things like working remotely or working from home. 

That said, we’ve never had a fully remote company. I’m an extrovert, so I love the energy of an office. Things like the impromptu happy hours or white boarding sessions -- all of the things that come with being in an office. But I’ve never been the type of person to say you have to be in an office to be productive. 

If you hire smart people and give them quantitative metrics, let them do their thing and trust that you hired them for a reason. 

A lot of people talk about the “energy” in an office - have you found that’s been lost now that you’re working remotely? 

I think there are definitely energy shifts. You can’t necessarily have those impromptu conversations or just chat about personal things. You’re also not interacting as much with people on a daily basis. 

But I haven’t found that it’s affected our ability to be creative other than maybe not having a physical white board. 

Tools like Zoom make it so easy to feel like you’re in the room with someone. We do a lot of impromptu Slack calls and touch bases so you can still have those conversations with people. So instead of walking over to someone’s desk, I ping them on Slack. 

As a leader, are there things you find you can’t do remotely that you could do in an office?

Well, I can’t distract people! As an extrovert who’s constantly sharing memes and talking about things in the office, I know that I’m a source of distraction for our team members who really like uninterrupted periods of deep work. So I think it’s a good thing in some ways. 

But the things I can’t do mostly revolve around culture. We always had a Friday happy hour, for example, where you could get an alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverage and we’d have demo days for people to showcase their projects. That’s a bit more difficult now. 

Instead of the in-office culture stuff like Friday happy hour, we’ve switched gears to Friday Games where we’ll play Jackbox games or trivia virtually. We also still do those demos, now just using video instead of in-person. 

To counteract the lack of impromptu chats, we have virtual lunches for people to pop in - even just for 10 minutes - to get face time with other human beings. 

A ton of headlines talk about businesses going through hard times, but Willful is growing - how do you balance that excitement while also realizing why the growth is happening? 

It’s interesting. We didn’t know if COVID would send our sales plummeting as people stopped spending money or if it would grow. It turned out to be the latter. We’ve seen an incredible increase in traffic and demand, especially from older folks who can’t go into a lawyer’s office right now because they’re in an older segment of the population.

I’m very fortunate and grateful that we are in a position where we have this increase, but I’ve struggled with it because I have friends and peers who are shutting down their businesses or losing their jobs. So success is not something I celebrate publicly because people are buying our products out of fear and anxiety, not a desire to have peace of mind. 

It’s been weird to juxtapose those emotions. I don’t know that I’ve solved for them yet. 

But what I am trying to do is support local businesses where I can. We give gift cards to our team to buy from local restaurants and I give some attention to the small business community with shoutouts on my Instagram. Willful is also giving away 1,000 plans to healthcare workers - we can’t make masks, but a lot of doctors and nurses are being urged to create these legal documents.  

How did you get these different ideas? What resources did you turn to?

A lot of the ideas were from the Upside Foundation, which put out a resource guide for remote workers and entrepreneurs. 

I just felt like I had to do something, even if that’s just using my platform. I’m not Oprah - I wish I was - but every little bit counts. 

On the business side, it was a direct response to the feedback we had from doctors and nurses, who told us their hospital administrators were asking them to get the documents done. It felt like it was only appropriate to help these people out who are risking their lives to help us. 

And on a more personal side - you were forced to move in the middle of everything. How did that go?

Erin: Yeah. These are all first-world problems, but: we had purchased a pre-construction condo in 2014. It was delayed by three years and is now delayed again by COVID. But we had to move out of our rental. Luckily, we could stay at our family home in Prince Edward County. 

But it was weird because we had to that dance with movers. We all had masks on and were moving things around but trying to not get too close to one another. It made me think about all the people who are still working, bagging our groceries and things. They are not paid six figures to do that. I think it’ll be on us as a society to reflect on the value we place on some of these essential jobs. Hopefully, there’s some positive change that can come from that. 

Alright - three rapid fire questions. Number one: favorite book, or a book that changed the way you think about the world? 

* Literature: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.

* Business: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.

Number two: favorite podcast? 

A tech podcast called Reply All.

Number three: favorite movie? 

The fifth instalment of the Fast and Furious franchise - Fast 5.

In closing, what’s something you’ve learned about remote work that you didn’t know before?

I’ve learned you can easily do it - and do it effectively. 

I always had a lot of trepidation about remote work - would the team stay connected? Would we get as much work done? Now, I’ve seen the huge benefits of it. 

I think I’ll have a lot more of an open perspective to fully remote people and potentially even a fully remote company based on this experience. 

Amazing, thank you! 

You can connected with Erin on: 

* Twitter

* Instagram

* LinkedIn

Photo of Erin courtesy Be The Next Her.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com