How To Make Remote Work Actually Work- Smart Ways To Remotely Run Your Team and Business with Nick Sonnenberg - I Love Marketing Episode #424

We do on demand growth projects and tasks, anything with marketing, sales and operations. We've been a remote company since the beginning and we scaled very quickly without having any office. We scaled to seven figures and 150 people in the first year. Fully remote by leveraging systems and tools in smart ways.

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Remote work actually work. Some of us have already been running remotely for a number of years. Some of us, this is a new experience. And running remotely has massive benefits if you do it right. And even if you think that you are running a company remotely in a very efficient way, there's always smarter ways of doing things. There's massive benefits to running a company remotely if you do it right. And if you don't do it right, it could be a huge pain in the ass for you. My company is leverage. We do on demand growth projects and tasks, anything with marketing, sales and operations. We've been a remote company since the beginning and we scaled very quickly without having any office. We scaled to seven figures and 150 people in the first year. Fully remote by leveraging systems and tools and smart ways. I wrote my first book Idea to Execution about how we used tools to do that. There are tricks that you guys and tools that you guys can be using right now to get your company quickly operating more efficiently in a remote capacity. Now is a great time to clean up what I call your operational debt and those things that you never worked on in the past, and I call it your operational debt. And it's just time to pay that back. How do you stay connected with a team remotely? How do you make sure that your team is aligned? How do you make sure that you can hold people accountable? And then finally, how do you minimize the impact that the coronavirus is going to have in the near future on your business? The first thing to be thinking about is you need to have a clear line of communication with your team. You know, in war, it's a strategy that you cut off your enemy's lines of communication. Communication is like the oxygen of your company. So it's important that you continue to have efficient, streamlined ways of communicating with your team. There's various forms of communication. If you are used to physically being in the office with someone, you're used to just being able to go up and tap someone on the shoulder, which isn't the most efficient way to communicate. Someone could be working on something in Deep thought and you've just taken them out of their flow state. Something could have waited until next week's meeting and it wasn't that urgent, so. Or maybe you tell someone something and they want to refer back to it in a week from now. So there's a lot of benefits to using certain tools and not relying on just face to face communication. And the tools that I recommend for communication while you're remote, obviously you're going to keep using email. I recommend email for external communication with clients. I think that you'll utilize Zoom or Google Hangouts or Skype a lot. Face to face communication over one of those platforms is going to be critical. But then I suggest a tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams for internal communication. Some of the quick benefits. So email is external and it's really like a to do list that other people can add to Slack or Microsoft Teams. There are a handful of massive benefits that you'll get using this tool to communicate with your team. One of the primary ones is you have the ability to create channels which are topics of conversations. So as opposed to most companies have what I call a scavenger hunt where you're texting, you're face to face, you're sometimes emailing, sometimes it's different combination of group messages and group emails and it becomes a scavenger hunt. If you have to go back and find information, it takes you 10 times longer than it needs to to find that information. So a channel is a great way to find information more quickly because you could have topics and one of the tricks is with channels you want to have naming conventions. So you could have marketing channels that start with marketing and then you could have a certain channel just for your Facebook ads. So you could have marketing Facebook ads. You could have another channel for podcasts, so you can have marketing podcasts. And those are places where you can contain the conversations as it relates to those topics in one place so that it's easy to find. Because I believe that a company can only scale as fast as knowledge can be transferred. And there's so much wasted time on an operational level having to look in multiple places because you don't have a framework with where information should live. Lastly, on Slack again, this is the quick version, you have third party integrations and I'll just share a couple that I think are useful for the move to remote. Now this might sound silly, but there's an integration with giphy, so this helps you. Maintaining culture in a remote environment is going to be critical for everyone. So things like giphys are going to start becoming really, really critical or it's going to help promote a positive culture. So if someone does a good job, instead of saying over text, good job, you could go in Slack and do Giphy, good job. And you have these funny little Giphy videos that pop up in the channel and it's just a good way to keep the culture positive. There's other bots or third party apps. Another one's called Donut, which randomly connects two people in the company together. Again, these are just culture builders. But it's important to be thinking about your culture now that you're moving to a distributed work environment. Zoom is probably already a critical tool in your toolbox, but that's going to continue to be critical. And I think that it's really important that you use as much facetime as possible. Even though you're not going to be physically with people, it's important that people still see your face, hear your voice. So some of the best practices are if you're doing a zoom, keep video on obviously right now for bandwidth where it's off breakout rooms. I use zoom a lot to just record myself. So if I have a message to send to the team or I want to show how a process is done, I'll spin up a zoom by myself, hit record and start screen sharing and talking through how to do something or what the error is. And then I'll send that zoom recording to the team via Slack. So that's a really quick communication overview for remote communication. The next thing you need to be thinking about right now is how, what, how do you do meetings now that you're remote? So the three, the three things to think about are what's your cadence of meetings? Meetings should have an agenda and meetings should have a structure. These are just a handful of different types of meetings. But I think it's important right now, especially if you're. If this is your first time operating remotely, it's better to be over communicating than under communicating with your team. Making sure that you're aligned on the same page that people are feeling okay. I really believe people over process as a general principle. And even though I'm all about process and technology, your people should be first and making sure that they're good should be your priority. So you might want to consider daily standups right now. And if you don't have a structure or you've never done this before, a very simple structure you could adopt is asking people three questions. What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? And what are you blocked on that's a really simple, simple structure. And then you might also want to have some longer form meetings as well. You know, weekly all hands meetings, monthly strategy meetings. Meetings should also have agendas. So we have a policy, no agenda, no meeting. Agendas are very useful for multiple reasons. An agenda keeps you on target so you don't go and spend way too much time on a tangent. Also, it's a good productivity hack. Instead of Slack now becoming the source of noise as opposed to text and email, we have a policy that something's non urgent and it can wait till next week's meeting, add it to the agenda and then we'll cover it in batch on the, on the meeting. So that way you're limiting the number of non urgent distractions that are coming up. You have a place where you can capture all that stuff. We loosely follow EOS level 10 meetings. We've adapted it for our own purposes, but come up with a structure. So for us, the level 10 meeting structure that we loosely follow is have a quick check in with each other. We then have this concept of a scorecard. So we go over the metric. We have client and team member headlines. So the first 20 minutes of that meeting is already following a certain structure. You can create your own. But I think it's important that you have a place where people can capture ideas or decisions that need to be made that are non urgent. But still they need a place to put it so that they're not having to distract you. So pro tips with meetings. One thing that I found that we were doing incorrectly at leverage, which we changed, was and we've all been there, right? You've done a meeting and you've talked about a million things and then you forget what the hell are we supposed to do now? Or what were all the decisions that were made. And then two weeks later you're realizing, hey, I know we talked about this, but I forget what the decision was that we made. So I think it's best practice to have a moderator who can moderate the meeting, but also is responsible for documenting the decisions that were made as well as making sure that you're loading up all the next steps and action items into a project management software that was decided in that meeting. Another productivity or efficiency gain that we got at Levereg was we were wasting a lot of time on report outs in meetings. And the way that we solved that problem was it's needed to update me. I asked them to record on their phone or on their computer a video giving me the update so that I could Then watch it over the weekend at my own leisure. And that saved a lot of time in these meetings. An hour on A Monday at 9am is worth way more than an hour when I'm in the back of an Uber and I can watch the video. So as much as you can go asynchronous and pull out the report outs of those meetings and do that asynchronously, that was a huge gain for us at Leverage. And there's a bot called Standuply that is another benefit of using Slack. They have these bots that this is just one of many that you can program to ask certain people certain questions and it will aggregate responses and put it into one channel for you. Another tool that if you're not using or you might be using but it's just not optimal, is you should have a form of project management software. You need to be aware of who's working on what. And at a very high level what you, what your team needs to know is what is the most important thing I need to be working on right now. And there's a million tools we use Asana at Leverage, but really any of these can work. It's really just a matter of understanding when to use it and making sure that you set it up for success. In just a few clicks you can know everything that you need to know. That's the most important thing for you need to know right now in terms of what you need to be doing or what someone else is working on. It really also minimizes all the micromanagement or stress as a manager of not being aware of what the status of something is. And then I'll leave you with this final thought because I think that the most overlooked thing that's the biggest risk for companies right now is that they've lacked digitizing knowledge. Company the biggest risk that I see people sitting on is that they're a key team member is sick for two weeks and can't work. So what I suggest that you guys do now and if you had more time, you know there's tools for this, there's process Street. At Leverage, we do something called role rotation. So we, we've documented our core processes and we role rotate to stress test those processes, but you don't have time for that right now. So the most important thing that you need to do right now and then you could remember this and come back to it later, but you should have a conversation with your team member as soon as possible. Identify the core processes in the company that are critical to keeping the lights on. So you know running a podcast is not a core process. But for example, payroll is a core process. So if only one person knows how to do payroll in the company and that person gets sick, you're going to be in trouble. So as much as possible right now, what I suggest is be proactive rather than reactive. Identify risks that you might not even be thinking about as risks, but just assume worst case scenarios can happen in this environment and what can you do right now to get ahead of that? So I'll leave you with one example of a risk that we identified last week that we handled. This is specific to leverage, but I think the thinking process is still valuable. So we use Salesforce as our CRM and we do a lot of custom automation with Salesforce, and every three or four months the Salesforce token expires and you have to reset it. Only our developer knew how to do that. So we identified that there was a risk. So what we did was we rotated the token keys. That's what I would suggest is the type of conversations you should be having right now with your team.

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Sam.