Leading a Remote Team | Managing a Remote Workforce

Karen, how are you today?

I'm good, how are you?

Doing awesome. And I've, I read that that is literally the worst question you can open any podcast with is how are you doing today, because it brings just no value to the audience what Whatsoever. So I figured I'd kick it off with that, but today we are going to be talking about managing and leading a remote team. Obviously a hot topic for a lot of people right now. Some people are, have chosen to manage and lead remote teams. Others have been forced into this as a result of everything going on and kind of the same going forward. We're seeing a lot of employers where they're looking at this is going to be the, as much as we all hate the term, the new normal. Is to be managing and leading a remote team going forward. And we have others who are saying, hey, this is a temporary thing, but we want to make sure we're doing it really well while we are doing it. So my thought was that we just kind of walk through the process from the point of hire until termination. Ideally not termination, but it obviously happens. Most employment relationships end at some point. They all end, I believe, would be a more accurate term. So let's, let's start with the hiring process. We're not going to get into interviewing. We're not going to get into the selection. We're not going to get into all that. That's a whole topic inside of itself, but let's talk about hiring just in general. What do you think are some best practices and things to consider as you look at hiring people in a remote environment?

So hiring, I would say one of the most important is still making their first day, their first week, their first month as memorable as possible. That's the day, the timeframe they're going to remember. And we've talked about this a lot on previous webinars and, you know, things that we've talked about, but it's still just as important when they work remotely, if not more important, because they're not in the office with the team, they're at home, they're by themselves. They need to have that feeling that they are a part of the team, that they are, you know, they're not just sitting alone. They, You know, you're timid when you start working. Most of the time, you're not very open to asking a lot of questions. You kind of wait for instruction. So as a leader, it's, you know, taking that time, carving time out of your day to get them in, have them, you know, give them some trainings, courses they can take, have their documents, you know, have stuff ready about the company so they can be fully— they can get involved in that and then introduce them to the team virtually. So, you know, Do a quick Zoom meeting. Don't just send an email that says welcome, you know, get everyone on so they can put faces to the name and that they feel welcomed already. Um, you do a great, you know, email at the beginning about asking about favorite restaurants and all this, and that's a great, you know, icebreaker. But I think going on a little bit more is let's meet in person over Zoom or over, you know, to meet, to meet them. And I think that that will make their first day easier and make them a little bit you know, more eased into the new position.

Yeah, that's a great point. And that's actually something we're adding in right now is, hey, everybody schedule 15 minutes with this new person, just get to know them, get to learn a little bit about them. One of the things that I had in my notes as preparing for this is that the natural collision that happens in a normal office environment goes out the window when you've got a remote team. So people aren't going to bump into each other, have conversations. You've got to force some of those conversations. And Oftentimes people aren't going to seek them out on their own. So as a leader, it's your job to make sure to facilitate those conversations. One of the things that I've had to adjust on is that I've actually got right over here in the corner of the office, I've just got the box of stuff for the next person ready. So I don't know who the next hire is, but I know that I've got their laptop, their second monitor, their— all their, you know, keyboards. And then we've actually created a nice checklist for equipment of what somebody needs to work from home.

And we send it to them and say, hey, what are these things do you need, want, et cetera?

And then I've got all those things here ready for the next person so that we're not ordering them all as things pop up. And I know everybody's got different ways of handling their IT needs, et cetera. But I think that was a big thing for us is just being ready to— We had one of our first remote hires after this all started happening. She was like, "Oh, wow. Geez, the whole box just came with everything right in it all in one fell swoop, and I'm up and ready to go in a matter of an hour instead of things coming in bits and pieces." And to even add on to that is, and you do this as well, is you send the box but also ask them what else they may need.

So some people might already have a, you know, a mouse that they can use. Some may not, you know, any little item that they may need to make their work more efficient from home. It's also just asking that question. You know, I sent you this, this, and this. If you need anything else, you know, I'll be happy to get it for you. Just accommodating them just like you would in an office space. I think that makes their workday a lot easier.

And the fun thing about this conversation is, as we're preparing for it, I'm realizing some of the things we do poorly as well, right? So, so one of the things that we do really good here in the office is that we've got a whiteboard where whatever you need, just write it on the whiteboard, and it's— that's the list where we order supplies from. You need something, boom, it's on the whiteboard, we place the order, it comes in. We don't necessarily have that for the remote people. I'm kind of proactively checking in from time to time, just going, oh hey, do you need anything for the office? Whereas, you know, maybe a Trello board, which is a little a little bit of a tease into— we're going to be talking about some of the tools we use to manage the remote team. But, but Trello is a big one for us, and maybe just a nice way for us to put a board out there for people to add and go, oh hey, I need more paper, I need more ink, I need more of this, that, whatever the thing is for their home office.

Make it virtual. And that's also a good point because at ERG, I know that some employees work from home some days and some are in the office and they go back and forth. So they technically have two office spaces. Say one of them's in the office and they're like, oh, I need this here. But then at home they may forget, you know, I still need this for my home office. And then they just— so having it virtually in that way, that could also be helpful for those who are kind of a hybrid of remote and in office.

Yeah. Just a little bit of— sorry, Karen. Oh, sorry. And a little bit of context for people listening in. So we do have a blended team. At ERG, so we have about 50% of our staff is remote and will be full-time remote pre- and post-COVID, and then the other half are in the office, but now even the folks that are in the office are only in the office about half the time just to handle the things that we need to get done or to get out of their home for a little while and get into the office since there aren't so many of us here. It's not a very crowded place. So, you know, for us, these things— you bring up a really good point, Karen. I know for me, I'm kind of packing up all this stuff whenever I'm going to work from the house and packing up even the microphone because we're doing, you know, so many Zoom meetings and all these different things that it's kind of a pain. I've basically got to bring like a whole new— I've got a whole new backpack that I'm lugging around with me everywhere that I never used to carry before. So redundancy would probably be another big thing.

Right. And there's a lot of people, you know, just me personally, I know there's a lot of people that's like that now. You know, they have alternating days they go in to lessen the amount of people that are in the office. So they're dealing with that as well. So good thing to consider there.

Yeah. So one last thing on the hiring piece, as far as I think about it, I like to think about it of let's keep it as much the same as humanly possible, but doing it remotely. So thinking about, okay, if I would spend normally 2 hours with this individual on their first day going through the mission, vision, values, and really capturing, like Karen alluded to, the emotion of that first day, well, I need to do that in a virtual environment as well. And if I would normally then pass that person off to somebody else, sit down and hear and talk from them, well, I need to do that same thing in a remote environment as well. We can't lose sight of people just because they're out of sight. And so maintaining our normal processes in a remote world, we already know that we can do this with all the tools. We're doing it every day over webinars and all these things. So, uh, certainly possible. Uh, one last thing there, because it kind of comes up, is don't lose track of the vision of where you are going. So I say that to say, If you're going to now open the door for remote work as a full-time possibility, e-post-corona, then make that known. If you're not sure yet, make that known. If this is changing your business model, or if your business model is staying 100% the same, either way, just communicating how the vision is staying the same or changing is really important to your team and helping them to picture where they're going to be and how, where they fit into the vision long-term.

Yeah, I have to say, I think this communication part of it fits a bigger point that we'll probably talk about is how important that communication is. You know, when you're in an office and you can talk to everybody, you're more prone to have that office talk and, you know, talk more about what's going on where you're not just going to send a random email that just talks about little things, you know? So keeping that conversation as open as possible, especially with what's going on with the company, but also with just everything else. You know, communication with these remote workers to make them keep the culture going, keep the, you know, their love for where they work going is that, that small talk. You know, most people really like going to an office. They get to see people, they get to get out of the house. So keeping, you know, them in the loop and still having those side conversations, you know, we do a great job at that for everyone. I work 100% remotely and I feel like I know this team, you know, I've met them in person a handful of times, but I feel like I know this team very well, and I can have small conversations with them, not just work conversations. And that's a big part of, you know, them feeling comfortable and being part of the company. So I think that that plays a big role in, you know, leaders making sure that that stays consistent.

Yeah, it's a really good point. And that's— communication is everything in a small business, and especially critical as people start to go remote, because you can feel like you're on an island out there, which is one of the things you want to really prevent, right? Is the old— the proverbial They walk in the door, we give them the orientation, and then we give them their bag and throw them to the wolves. That is just terrible for them in a normal environment, and it is just amplified to the nth degree in a remote environment because people left to their own devices will feast or famine out there. So yeah, let's move on from hiring and talk about it. For me, the next thing is thinking about training. So somebody comes in to that point, we want to get them up to speed as quickly as possible. We want to give them the tools to do their job. We want to have— set them up for success. And this has got to be one of the harder parts because there is— there's value in eavesdropping, as much as people don't want to say that, right? Just being sort of inundated with the information of the people around you. But once again, we want to model how do we normally train when we're in person. And so how can we replicate that in a remote environment? What are some of the things that you had in your notes as far as keeping up with training in a remote environment?

I think the first set of training that any new hire is going to get, and this is more of that new hire focus right now, is just all the platforms that you use. And that is where I think all the questions align. So there's, you know, there's continuous training that employees will do over time, and that's a little bit easier to do on their own. But, you know, your training initially to really get in the multiple systems that most companies use, that's where those small questions are constantly coming up. So a great way to do it is, you know, take an hour out of your day as a leader and go through and record it just like a Zoom meeting, record it, go through everything and take the most common questions that you usually get and make sure you have that in the recording. So it's better than a written step-by-step instructions. Those are just hard to follow. You know, you're trying to look at the program, you're trying to focus on a document, video record it, you know, send it to them, then open up the forum to ask questions. What questions do you have? You know, this training is the most important for them because this is how your company processes everything. And if they aren't comfortable with the systems that you use and they, you know, they have small questions that they're not answering, um, answer— asking, they're going to be, you know, not effective from the beginning because it's going to set them back. You know, tasks that should not be all that hard might be a lot harder for them because they're still learning the system as they go. And that quick pop over the head on the cube and ask someone else isn't as available. So if they can go back to a recording and constantly see that, then I think that's very helpful. So just recording your trainings and having those in a place where they can easily access it, that would be a big tip. Um, The other would be is have different people train them. So if you're the leader and you're the only one training them, you may have a style that it may not work as well. And they might learn something from someone else. And, you know, you take the strong suits of your different employees. So if one's really good in this aspect of the business, you have them train them on that over a Zoom call, or, you know, just to make it a little bit easier for them. So, and that also gets the team involved and lets them meet them one-on-one as well. So those would be kind of my two suggestions for training in that initial, you know, new hire environment.

You hit on something that I'm a big advocate for regardless of the scenario, and that's recording what you're doing, making it accessible. One of the notes I had was centralizing resources. So saying, hey, this is where you can find all the stuff. Because to your point, if, if I come in my first day and Susie is the person who shows me how to use the CRM every time a new hire comes on board, well, why are we having Susie spend an hour every time a new hire comes on board going through the same stuff when she could just record it one time, give it to the new hire, and then set a meeting with them to go through all their questions and basically just cement the learning instead of actually spending time training them on the system. And so Putting those things centralized, we'll talk about some of the ways that we centralize our stuff later, but record everything. It's shocking how many people don't even connect the dots to say, well, just open up the Zoom and hit the record button and you're going to record your screen and that's how you can record it and you'll save it right to your machine. And, you know, we also use a great tool called Snagit. It's wonderful for screen recording, wonderful for screencasts, and a great tool for this. But training is definitely one of those things that you want to Maintain your balance of, you know, balance, I think is just the key word there, right? Some roleplays, some videos, some conversations, some over-the-shoulder learning, all of the above. It takes a little bit of everything, external resources, internal resources, but just don't let it get lost in the fold. I mean, I know we've been guilty of this on occasion where it's just, yep, Andrew just started on Monday and we're already, you know, kind of losing track of, hey, here, he's working on this thing. Oh, we got to get back on, make sure we're training him on where to find everything and where to get it and not just kind of leaving him to his own devices.

And it kind of goes to the point of the next level of, you just kind of hit on it. Don't stop the training. Always be conscious of the training. You know, we do it where we have 1 hour training a week and make sure that that still goes into play. And then we're held accountable on our Monday meetings. You know, did you get your training in last week? And that's just something you're going to, your employees are going to better themselves by their personal training. And then they can teach their trainings to other employees, which helps better the company as a whole. So don't, Stop emphasizing on the training and hold them accountable just because they're working from home. Doesn't mean they don't have to do training. I mean, training's available everywhere. We use Lynda. You can use, you know, for the marketing, we use HubSpot. It's very simple to find different training courses that are free and very easy for someone to pop on for an hour a week, get their training and take some notes and save them in that centralized location. And it's right there for anyone to ever see it. And then talk about it during your team meetings. You know, I did my training on this. And if someone else was like, oh, I want it, you know, to learn a bit about that, they can go to the notes and skim through it. So just always train no matter in office, out of office, just make sure it's always happening.

Yeah. So it brings up a couple of good points on that. And you touched on something that I'm just a huge advocate for, and that's allowing employees to own their training program. So obviously we've got training related to, okay, how do I use this system? How do I do the thing the way the ERG way or the grow way? What is that process? But then there's just, hey, I want you to get better as an individual. We talk about this all the time. Our commitment to you when you start here is that you are going to be better than when you started. So when you leave here, you'll be better than when you started. And how we make sure that happens is an hour a week of training that the employee owns the program. Nobody sits down and assigns a bunch of training to anybody. But as we go into the next step here that I want to talk through, performance management, That's when we identify, oh, hey, here are some opportunities where you can get better. Let's find some training resources to help you, to Karen's point, to get better at that and to grow yourself personally and professionally and to, you know, really become an asset to yourself, which is what's most important. We want to reap the rewards of you continuing to get better, but ultimately that promise is to you and yourself. So let's talk about that performance management process. I saw your mouth open there. Do you have anything to add on to the training program?

No, I just wanted to say that it's such— most companies put off training, I think, because they think that— and most employees don't do the training because they think they need to spend their time doing quote unquote the real work. You know, they, you know, I've got too much on my to-do list, my training, I'm not worrying about that this week. No, like you're not going to get better. You put, you know, that is a big part of your weekly task. You don't— you scratch that off your to-do list every week, you know, don't put it off. So I think that You know, busy schedules happen, but making that a priority is just something that we're engraved with. And I think if you as a leader engrave it, it's going to happen.

Yeah, absolutely. I can't tell you how many times people have— when we talk about their training, they brought up something where I'm like, well, what does that really have to do with executing your role? Okay, I don't really care. So you want to learn how to code? You want to spend an hour a week learning how to code and you're a designer? That's fine with me. That's great. You're getting better. And somewhere down the road that could pay off for the organization, but it definitely will pay off for you as an individual as you continue to learn and grow, which is what it's all about. So, um, let's talk about the performance process. So for us, we have a little bit of a unique approach to this, and I think it's, it's become more critical as we look at this particular remote environment. So we do monthly plan and reviews, as we call them, which is when we sit down and we review what's happened in the previous 30 days, what's coming up. This is an opportunity to take a step back, talk about yourself, talk about your career, any higher-level issues you have, goals, aspirations, all that kind of stuff. It's not about talking about projects, even though we always slide into some projects. Uh, and we're smiling because Karen and I just did ours this morning and it goes sideways quickly. But, and then on every third or fourth one, we'll do a quarterly review. We try to do them every quarter. We do at least 3 a year where it's more of a self-assessment. And a manager assessment. Because let's face it, if you're doing annual reviews, it's terrible practice in the first place. If that's all you're doing and you don't have a supplementary process that's happening in more real time throughout the course of a year, you might as well throw it in the trash because recency bias takes over. It's, it's really just kind of a waste of time. And so, but if you're doing these every month and then you're leading into an annual review, then it'll make more sense. You can look at your notes from throughout the year. But this frequency, velocity, and just kind of the tone of the conversations has been tremendous over the last 10, 11 months, whatever it's been now since we've gone into COVID season. And it's been really helpful for us as a team, and I highly suggest it, kind of increasing the velocity of those more formal sit-down conversations, but also the more informal conversations as well that should be happening on a daily basis.

So I actually just thought about this as you were talking about it. And it, we had our, you know, plan and review today. It would be a very cool thing if we would have recorded it and a year from now, we went back and watched parts of it to see how much that can show someone exactly how much they've grown over a year. Like it can take them back. We were talking about this a year ago and look at where we are now. That would be, that's, you know, such a cool thing that this remote work has the possibility to do something you might not have thought about before, but, you know, recording each one, having them on file and going back and, you know, a year later and be like, oh, you know, look how much has changed since then. Um, but I do think to your point, having them continuously, the best thing to do on a person's first day, schedule them out for the year in advance. You know, have it, we have ours every third Wednesday of the month. It's scheduled out. It's no, we don't miss it. We don't forget to schedule it. So as a leader, put them right in the books, you know, get those quarterlys out because if you just put on your list, you know, schedule so-and-so's quarterly assessment, you're going to forget it and it's not going to happen. So go ahead and don't put that off and schedule it out for the year ahead.

Well, that goes back to, to the hiring process. One of the things that everybody probably already has is some sort of a checklist for a new hire. If you don't, we've got a ton of templates on our website, ergpayroll.com. You can grab one off there. But that is one of the things, and to your point, Karen, if I don't do it from the checklist and I don't— and I don't check it off on the new hire onboarding checklist, then I skip that step. Then it'll be 3 months and I'll go, oh, have we done any plan reviews yet? Oh, no. Oh, great. Well, we never— we never scheduled them. So to get those on a checklist, make sure they get done and also make sure that they happen. One of the easiest things to do is to look at that as sort of a soft piece of your calendar. And kick it down the road, you know, and be like, oh, today is not a good day, Karen. We're just so busy with year-end. Perfect excuse today. It's January 20th, 2021. We own a payroll company. So that means that we are doing all of our year-end stuff. This is the busiest time of year for us, and it is hard to crowbar in new things into the calendar. But there was no way I'm going to miss that opportunity. And I've got great news for you, Karen. I take all the notes from those conversations. So in a year from now, when we look back, you know, what I don't want to do is sometimes you look back and you'll go, hey, for the last 6 months we've been talking about the same thing. Are you going to make any progress on this? Is it really important to you? Because I continue to see it come up in conversation after conversation. Or conversely, oh hey, think about, to your point, like we were talking about this a year ago. What a joke that even is. We don't even care about that anymore. You've gone way past that and blown past it. So a lot to consider there when it comes to those. But Definitely sort of a sidebar to that performance conversation. If you're picking up these plan reviews, make sure you take notes, make sure you've got them in a centralized place. We use our human resources information system Guru, which does paperless employee onboarding as well. I don't want to turn this into some big shill for our, our products and services, but you know, it's been critical to us. We've seen a huge influx in users for Guru because of the paperless onboarding and because of the fact that we can create all this checklist and all the things that you need to follow and keep up with in there. So performance, no different than that, making sure you've got a mechanism for tracking and keeping up with it.

And one other small, quick one is during performance reviews now for remote employees. So I had two last week with two employees, and I made sure to ask, how can we better our communication? How can we communicate better? And this goes back to all the communication we've already talked about, but it's such an important factor Since I work remotely personally, one of the employees also works full-time remotely and the other one is, you know, that hybrid of in and out of the office. Communication's all different. So what do they need to better be effective is number one through communication. You know, how can I as a leader communicate with you better? And that is so important right now for remote employees and, you know, adjusting to that because we, I can't stress enough, if you're not communicating clearly with your employees, since you're not seeing them, it can downfall the entire company because of just the impacts it can have through employees. So just asking that every single month and seeing how it, you know, hopefully over time you'll see that there it's improving and it's improving and it's improving. So that's just something to consider as one of the questions to ask.

So what did they say?

Um, well, to quote unquote, they both said it's great. And I think, you know, a big part is that, you know, opening the communication lines of just not doing email. You know, they call me, they text me, we use Hangouts all the time. You know, there's such a delay in response on email sometimes, and just having— they love the Hangouts, actually, you know, any kind of chat features, Slack or whatever it may be that companies use. But that's instant communication. It's kind of like you're right there with the person. And both of them quoted on that, is that that's their easiest way to get a quick question asked, and they don't have to do the formal Hi, Karen, I have a question for you. What's this? Over email, you know, it's, hey, did it, and then just going back and forth, like you're in a conversation. So that's a big part of, you know, how I communicate with, you know, our team members a lot is just through those chat, you know, platforms.

So one of the next things that I didn't know what to put this bullet as in my notes, I put it as monitoring, because there's so many— the biggest concern of the business owner when you go to a remote environment is, are my people going to be productive? Are are they going to work when I send them home? Are they going to be, you know, sitting on their couch drinking coffee while they're on the clock and playing with their kids and doing this, that, or the other? Obviously, for exempt employees, not as big of a deal. But when you look at non-exempt staff, you're always concerned, like, hey, am I getting what I'm paying for? Or, and how do I keep up with that in a way that's not intrusive and invasive? And I definitely have seen folks coming around with, hey, we've got tracking software on the machines, we can access anytime, we can see what they're doing, da da da. And oh no, they're fine with it. I'm like, oh geez, like, going back to culture, that's not the kind of culture we want to create. It's not something I would ever suggest unless you had a reason for it. But a couple of things that we've inserted into our day, not necessarily to monitor, but to kind of keep everybody engaged on a daily basis. But we went to a morning, uh, standing call every single morning. So we never used to have daily standups until this, and we're about to break them off into multiple teams. Just for many of you, if you've got more than 15 people, you don't want to do this. You want to have multiple different different conversations amongst the team so you don't have 15, 20 people on each call. Usually we got a couple of people no-showing or different people coming and going, so it doesn't get too out of control. But what we do, two things during this call: what are your two critical things for the day that if you get these two things done, you will consider your day a success? So if you had to leave at noon today at lunchtime, but you got these two things done before you left, you'd feel like the day was a success. And then secondarily, we do an icebreaker question which has ranged everything from do you have a nickname to— oh my goodness, we're 4 days a week on these icebreakers and we're 10, 11 months into it. So we've got to know our team pretty darn well over the last 10 months. And, and every person to a man has mentioned how good they are and how much they enjoy the icebreakers. And I just love it. What was this morning's?

Every leader should be doing this. This morning's— we've had so many. This morning was— I'm trying to think of what my answer was to think of the question.

Oh, the best thing you bought for under $100.

Yes, best product you bought under $100 recently. Yeah. Yep.

And I went with the air fryer, and also I threw in an asterisk for some new Brooks running shoes I got that I got on special, which actually brought them in under $100.

Yeah. And coming, you know, doing this every day, I have to admit, it is my favorite part of the day. You know, it's just that 15 minutes in the morning, we all get to just talk, we laugh, but we still— and then we hold ourselves accountable because these are the two things we have to get done. We've said it, you know, everyone heard us, so we got to get them done. And then you will at the end of the week be like, who— how does everyone feel about, you know, their two criticals this week? Did you guys get it done? How did it go? So it's a, you know, it's an easy way, it's a light and fun way of keeping everyone accountable for the work.

Well, and it becomes part of also the sort of cascading goals, which I think isn't really something I had here for as it comes to managing a remote team, but I think it's really important. So we've got our 10-year, 3-year, 1-year vision. We've got it broken down into quarterly goals, which we're about to walk through here next week as well. And then so then I've got my quarterly goals. I break them down week by week and then day by day when I sit there and I go in the morning, what are the 2 criticals that I have to do today? They're feeding into my weekly goals, which feed into my quarterly goals. Feeding my annual goals, et cetera, et cetera. So if you don't have that true north for the organization and you haven't communicated it clearly, then people's goals will tend to stray from the organizational goals. And everybody should have their own individual goals in addition to the organizational goals. But how much better is it? How much clearer is it for everybody if we go, okay, cool, we're all marching in the same direction, we're all rowing the same way, and now we're going to achieve much bigger things because we're all on the same Absolutely.

And we hit on it. And like you said, on our quarterly Rocks, you go over the mission every single time. It is ingrained in our head. I think so many leaders forget to talk about it and forget to keep, you know, mentioning it. You can say on their first day and they're going to forget it. Just keep it going. You know, we hear it every 3 months. We hear it a lot more than that, but you make it a point that every Rocks meeting, we talk about the big picture. We talk about, you know, what our mission is and how we are hitting that. So don't stop talking about your mission. Mission. Always make it front and center. Yeah.

Karen's continuing to progress into a leadership position here in the company. And one of the things we just talked about this morning was, as redundant as it feels to continue to say the same thing over and over again, you never know how that message is going to hit somebody today versus how it hit them last time you said it. You never know who's here today that wasn't here last time we said it. You never— like, and the core values of your organization are meaningless if you just talk about them once a quarter, once a year, once every 6 months. They're not your core values. Yeah, that's it, right? If you're not living them, you're not talking about them, you're not being about them, then they're not your core values.

Yep. And that's— once you lose sight of that, you know, it's hard to really bring everyone in and keep it all going.

So last thing on that, like, monitoring thing, and I know this is hard for people even though most of the data points to the fact that people are more productive working in a remote capacity. And, and it's interesting, I was actually just listening to The 4-Hour Workweek again by Tim Ferriss and there's a huge section in there about how to convince your boss to allow you to work remote. And I was just like, it's so interesting now reading this about like, you know, trying to beg to be able to work remote, which is not the problem for most people nowadays. But, but the last thing on that monitoring thing is to stay outcome-focused. Don't necessarily worry about how everybody's spending every minute of their time and how many hours they're working and what they're doing, but are they achieving the desired outcomes? And if not, are there roadblocks? One of the things that I view my biggest job as a leader is to remove roadblocks, right? If I can't get roadblocks out of somebody's way and make their job easier, then I'm making it harder. So that's, that's poor leadership. And that's my job is to get roadblocks out of the way and focus on outcomes, not necessarily the process of how we got there.

Right. And that's also, you know, we heavily talked about process and you, you know, A per— every person works different. So they may have a different process than you have in your head of getting a task completed. But at the end of the day, if they're getting it done and they're sending it through, you know, it doesn't matter how they got there almost in a way if they're getting it done. So if you're tracking every move that they're trying to do and you're trying to focus in on the nitty-gritty, so to say, and not the outcomes, like you said, it's going to take up more of your time as a leader where your time can be spent on other items. And, you know, then it comes in, yes, if there are issues, you know, the outcomes aren't getting hit. Well, what, like you said, what blocked them? Let me figure out a solution. Don't just assume it's because they're not working. You know, they're out partying and not behind their computer. You know, make sure that you've cleared the air on everything that's going on and talk through it. You know, I think there's a lot of assumption from leaders of, you know, what's going on. You know, they didn't get this done because they probably weren't working. I need to check in more. Well, just make sure you ask the right questions first before you go to that part. You know, that's, you know, it's getting that out of your head.

Karen, what's 4 4? 8. What's 6 2? 8. There's more than one way to get to the right answer.

That's going to be a trick question.

And so that's one of the things we have to remember as leaders, right? If we're going to beat people up because they didn't add 4 4, and they added 6 2, but the answer was still 8, then what kind of leadership is that? Now, to back that up, if it took them 72 hours to get to 8 and it should have taken them 10, then, you know, maybe we ought to show them how to use 4 4. But, uh, but as long as the outcomes are getting there in a relatively timely fashion, then, then that's all good. And you hit on something too, and this is, this has probably been one of the bigger, uh, challenges for me is just leading the whole person and understanding that everybody's consuming everything that's going on in our world right now differently. And so some people have, whether it be all the way up to death close to them, and they're being impacted to that level by coronavirus, and other people are just finding their way into some paranoia and different things through the news and feeding into the beast, if you will, of the Twitter doom scroll. And others are just totally totally fine and they're, you know, handling it, another thing in stride, and others are being careless and there's just everything in between, right? But understanding how people process, meeting them where they are, leading them how they need to be led to help them to grow is a really hard thing to do. But situational leadership is a, a fit. It's sort of a technique as old as time. And that just says, hey, I don't lead everybody the same. Everybody needs to be met where they are, and it's my job to help to move them forward. So just keep that in mind that it's not a one-size-fits-all with your team, especially when you look at in a remote environment because everybody handles it differently.

In addition to what's going on in the world, it's what's going on under their household. You know, a lot of parents have children at home. You know, they— I know kids in South Carolina just started going back. They were, you know, virtually from school. That's a lot on a working parent. You know, you have to be understanding of, you know, asking what's going on at home and know that that they might have an elderly parent who's, you know, staying with them that they have to care for, you know, trying to stay safe from COVID There's just so many different aspects that are going on with different people, and it affects the way that they work. So understanding that and, you know, tailoring your leadership to them, you know, with that understanding. Absolutely.

I would like to start firing through some of the technology tools we use. Do you have anything else you want to throw in there before we get to that? I have maybe one or two more bullets after the tech pieces. So, so I know everybody's got their own blend, their own mix. To me, I'm trying my best to say less is more. We are the type of organization where the mindset is if somebody were to pick up your laptop on the side of the road, they couldn't— it would be useless to them unless they could log into all of your online logins because there's nothing on the machines. We want everything in the cloud. Cloud. And so this has always been critical to us, but we, we use Zoom, obviously, but we also use Google Meet's video version for our internal meetings, which I don't think any of us like. And so we're probably about to go back to Zoom full-time, but we do use Google Suite for just about everything though. So we use Hangouts, which is their chat feature. We use that Meet, which is their meeting feature. We use Docs, we use Sheets, we use There's a lot to be said for if you're using Word and it's not online version where people can't operate on the same document in real time. I think there's a lot to be said for that ability to be able to, to work on the same, uh, document or sheet. We use Zoho Connect, which is one of my favorite tools for manuals. So anywhere we have a lot of manuals, training manuals, how-tos, all that, Zoho Connect is where we house all that. We use Dropbox for secure file sharing, which they've loaded up a ton of new features to be able to allow you to do interesting things in there, like write big descriptions, add additional things. So when you're sharing these folders, they're almost like little wikis. Use Trello for project management. I know there's a ton of great project management tools out there which don't get caught up in the same thing that we do from time to time, and that's getting caught up in the FOMO or the one more button. Like, Trello does everything we need it to. There might be some things we would wish for it to do a little bit differently, but changing all of our platform off of Trello would be a monumental effort at this point. We use Zoho Desk for our customer support, which allows us to all be completely remote and still make sure that all of our client issues are being handled in a, in a quick and easy fashion. We use Snagit for screen recording and for being able to take screenshots and be able to mark them up, add graphics to them, all kinds of cool stuff. Snagit's wonderful. And we use Zoho CRM for sales and marketing, and we use ActiveCampaign for email marketing and for site tracking and for form building and all sorts of fun stuff. So we— so many other tools, but those are some of the ones that have been really helpful. What'd I miss?

You missed a big one. Number one, I want to hit on ActiveCampaign. For all leaders, I guarantee you're using MailChimp or, you know, Constant Contact. ActiveCampaign, you may not have heard of. It's great. Definitely check it out. It's got a lot more features than MailChimp. So, you know, I'm not I'm not going against Mailchimp, we love it, but ActiveCampaign could be a good one for you. The big one you missed is Canva. Canva is a great asset for any company. It lets you create any kind of graphic and a 5-year-old could basically do it in there. They have templates ready for you. You can put your logo and your brand colors right in there. And it's right in there for you. You can do anything from a flyer to a Facebook post, to a presentation. So if you don't have Canva, the free version, is incredible. It basically does not hold back on a lot. I think the only big thing is you can't get as much and as many stock images, but Canva is a great asset. And that's not just for marketers, that's any business. I mean, they can find it useful in any way.

And then anybody from the dev team that's listening, I did not forget about Bitbucket. The— I just, as you know, I'm never in there. All right. So I would say just one thing is do your best to consolidate. So one of the reasons you heard Zoho so many times throughout is we use their Zoho One platform, which has like 35 or 40 different apps that we get for one low monthly fee. And it just makes it easier to train people on, you know, to train somebody on 4 or 5 different Zoho apps versus 20 different, you know, the 4 or 5 different— every one of them has another competitive offering out there that we could get, and then we'd be training them all. But they had all the different Zoho apps use the same user interface, same sort of methodology. It makes it a little bit easier to learn. So, and once again, we use probably too much stuff. People come to me all the time like, and I'm in a bunch of Slack communities, hey, why don't you guys use Slack? But it's, it's like, it's one more thing. We've got Hangouts, we've got file sharing, we've got like, we just, there's probably some huge advantages using Slack, but for the love of Pete, we cannot add one more in here. I think everybody'd strangle me. So, um, we love Hangouts. Hangouts, man, chatteronies. And, and this is a way off topic but on topic life hack for everybody is turn off the dang notifications on your phone. Turn off your email notifications, turn off your, uh, little Twitter and LinkedIn notifications. It's just, it's not doing your mental health any good to constantly shift from thing to thing to thing because of little badge icons popping up on your phone. I think you'll, you'll find that that will, uh, especially the mail one. Good grief, it changed my life when I turned off the mail badge notifications on my phone. Because I just always felt like I had to answer whatever somebody reached out about, which meant all hours of the day.

So, so I actually read real quick this article the other day and it said that I think it was 68% of people. So we work on double screens. That's another big one is, ah, yes, double screens. It's so much more effective. It's like 68% of workers who have double screens keep their social media platforms up on their other screen. As well as have the notifications on their phone. So you're just nonstop looking, take it off your computer, like maybe check it once an hour. That's okay. I mean, if you're, if you want to do it, but don't keep it up there. So I read that the other day and I'm definitely not one that keeps it up. I, it would drive me insane. So that just kind of, you know, I would never think about keeping up there all day, but if you do that, don't.

That's a very good point. And I know some people are going to be like, well, Matt, you're on LinkedIn nonstop. How do How do you go about doing that? Well, I pick up my phone when I walk away from my desk and when I'm walking down the hall, I scroll, I check it real quick, see if I've got anything I need to respond to or want to smash that like button. And I handle it from there. So I think the last and final point I want to kind of put in here and one of the things that we've still got room to work on when you just talk about more collision over the course of a day. So have fun So how do we add more social conversations into the daily, weekly, monthly routine for our teammates? How do we make sure we're creating more collision for people when they aren't going to do it themselves? Once again, going back to knowing that some people are just introverts by nature and they're not going to go seeking out a conversation with somebody other than to get work done. And sometimes you have to— and that's fine. And we don't want to force a bunch of unwanted conversations on them. But at the same time, these bonds are what build us as a team. People don't just get to— in a great team environment, people have to contribute and people have to get to know each other and trust each other and work together. And that doesn't happen just based on, you know, passing glances. So one way that you can go about doing that is creating projects that require people to meet that normally would not, right? So if that means your marketing team and your customer support team are getting together to try to do some customer retention campaign or, you know, making sure that the development team is getting together with the customer support team to make sure that they understand What the number one concerns are from the users, all those things, just creating more collision over the, over the course of a day, week, month, year to help your team to get to know each other better.

I actually heard about this, it's called the 3-in-1 rule for leaders, and basically it says do not give, do not delegate or give an employee more than 3 tasks in 1 hour because it can overbear them and it can get them, you know, very very high in anxiety and stress and then just cause their whole day to be in that mindset. So if you wait another hour to send, you know, 3 more items that may be sent, it gives them time to digest the items that they already have. And you're not, you know, I have a big tendency in the morning when I get on, I know that this, this, this, this needs to be done. So I'm constantly in Trello. Didn't know, well, take a break because they're getting notified and they're just like, you know, they see it and they see it and they see, and that's what they start their day with. So it starts off a little bit more stressful. So that's just a, you know, a little thought process, you know, 3-in-1, don't do more than 3 tasks in 1 hour and then go back and send more, you know, unless it's the tiniest tasks that are like nothing. But if they're pretty decent tasks, follow that 3-in-1.

Well, communication in general, one of the things I remember, I probably talked about this on the podcast before, is I used to have a boss that he would travel a lot and he would get back to his hotel room late at night and whatever time zone he was in, it could have been anywhere in the world. And then he would just start to answer and respond to all of his emails. Once again, I had that little badge on my phone and I'd start to see all those emails come through. Literally while I was laying in bed, I would have the phone next to the bed, I'd pick it up and look, and then I would all of a sudden become stressed out because now I'm seeing his responses or his action items for me and all these things. And he was not trying to stress me out. It was just the only time he had access to sit down and answer emails for the day. And that's when he did it. But there's a handy little feature in almost every email system that will allow you to snooze sending. It for a later time or pick and choose the time you can send it. So do your team a favor and send it at a time that is more convenient for them to receive the email. And I do it all the time. A lot of folks will get emails from me at 8 AM exactly because I've snoozed it from the night before when I'm actually sitting down and going through email. So I think it's a, it's a common courtesy thing.

I mean, if you're just sending one or two emails, just make it very clear that do not respond back to this tonight. I'm just trying to catch up on emails. Didn't it? And then that puts it out there. I don't need to respond. I don't need to worry about this. I know what they're doing.

Awesome. What else would you like to add for our managing and leading a remote team session today, Karen?

I think we covered a lot of good things. Communication, always number one. Like you said, keep it fun, keep it light, you know, and make it open, make it feel like you're at work with your team. You know, don't stop communicating because you're behind a screen now. Technology in 2021 lets us all do face-to-face. Use it. I think that's one of the biggest takeaways that you can do.

Absolutely. And if you're looking for more tips on how to manage and lead your remote team, you can check them out on the download that will be somewhere. Where will we be placing said download, Karen?

We, you will see it when you get this. We will be on YouTube, but it will be on ergpayroll.com/remote-work-guide. Tons of information. It's got a great guide. It's free. Take it, and it goes into a little bit more of the logistical items like your remote work policy, a little bit more of the technical items that we didn't talk about today, but it has a lot of good information in it.

Sounds dope. Well, thank you for your time, Ms. Karen. I appreciate you. Thank you.

Appreciate it. Bye.