How We Make Working Remotely Work at MarketBeat

Hey, guys. Matt Paulfsen Here in this video, I want to talk about MarketBeat's unique approach to remote work and how we get some of the benefits of spending time together in person as a team without the drawbacks of being in an office. This video is kind of a response to a recent episode of Dan Andrews and ian Schoen's Tropical MBA podcast. You can check that out@tropicalmba.com they're also building a remote work job site called tropicalworkforce.com and on a recent episode they talked about some of the productivity benefits for being in the same room as your team. But there are also some diminishing returns after a certain point because you get sick of each other and there can be office drama and that kind of stuff. With a remote team, you have the benefit of being able to hire the best person regardless of where they're located. But you can also have some communication and productivity issues if you don't monitor your remote employees work and manage them as you would an in person employee. You know, with an office, your hiring pool is a bit more limited and you also have to deal with some of the drama that comes with having different personalities in an office all day. But there are real collaboration benefits of being in an office with your team. You don't have to send them an email when you want to ask them a question. You can just go grab them and say, hey, let's talk about this quick. You know, at MarketBeat, we've developed somewhat of a hybrid approach that's worked pretty well for us. You know, I would say it's the perfect setup, but we've been able to capture some of the benefits of working together in an office without the cost and then the other issues associated with coming together and being an office together all day long. We don't have an office that is our default work location all day, but we do have a home base and that is a specific coffee shop that we like, which is Queen City Bakery, that we like to go to. We have a great relationship with the owners there, Mitch and Christine Jackson. We spend a lot of money there and we tip pretty well. So we typically have an organized in person staff meeting about once a week at Queen City Bakery, and then some of our team will meet there one or two other times per week informally. Just kind of hang out, work together, and ask questions of each other if we need to. So typically like every Thursday morning at least, Ryan and Will and sometimes a couple other people will when we hang out at Queen City Bakery, because that's what they do. And this works pretty well for us. And six of our seven team members are located in Sioux Falls. And then our Florida employee joins us since we need some zoom when it makes sense for him to do so. And I'd estimate that most of our team spends about five hours a week in the same place as each other. And that's kind of about the right amount for us. You know, the rest of the time we are free to work in the place that we enjoy the most or the place that we are the most productive. For most of my employees, you know, that's our workspace in their home. You know, Will also likes to work at Zeel, which is our local co working space. And then, you know, my kids are at home during the day, so it doesn't make a lot. I can't get a lot of work done when I'm at home. So I have an office that I'm in right now in downtown Sioux Falls. And then I'm not working at Queen City Bakery. You know, I'm usually kind of here in my office during the day. Since our team isn't together for 35 out of 40 hours each week, we also have to have really good communication and really good task management. Our business, we kind of use Slack as our primary communication channel, but we don't use it to assign or to delegate work. You know, I just don't think Slack is a good tool for to do list and work assignment. You know, we use kind of Slack to discuss what we're working on. Every one of our employees are kind of required to post a short message each morning about what they got done yesterday and what they plan on working today. So there's a channel called what we're Working On. So every morning 8:00am, first thing, you just make a list of all the stuff you did yesterday, what got done, what didn't get done, and then the stuff that you hope to do today. And that way everyone kind of knows what everyone else is working on on any given time. Then we also can use Slack for our water cooler talk and to discuss issues that just kind of come up in the business throughout the day. And then if an issue we chat about in Slack does become an actionable action item that can't just be taken care of then and there. And then we kind of add that to our to do list in our project management system. At that point we also have a separate project management tool that we built under the name, we just call it the Markerby Web Admin. But we each have kind of A prioritized task list so that we always know what we should be working on next. It's a pretty simple system. Every task has a high or medium or low priority. And then after that we sort by dates so the oldest items get done first. And then for each action item, there's a detail section where you can write additional information if you need to for the task. You could do this thing with pretty much any other task management system like Trello, but we use an internally built system because it ties into our database. That way we can dynamically generate task assignments when specific metrics occur in our database. So if our email open rate falls below a specific percentage, that will dynamically generate a notification for Will so that he can check in and see if we got put on a blacklist or having some other deliverability issues that we need to address. The other kind of thing that's unique about our hybrid work setup is our employee onboarding. Whenever we hire a new employee, we have a day that we call MarketBeat University, where we go through the entire history of the business, the company's business model, its key partnerships, team roles, and kind of stuff like that. Everyone that attends, everybody in the business attends, no matter how many times they've attended Market University. It's always a good reminder to go over the basics. And then we make sure our new employees have somebody to work next to for kind of the first week in their business. So we had Maureen start with us a few weeks ago, and we had Market University on Thursday. That was her first day. And then we kind of took turns working with Maureen and checking in on her until kind of the next Wednesday. So she had a chance to meet everyone, work with everyone, and kind of learn her job next to somebody else in the company. And that worked really well to onboard her kind of. Our hybrid remote system for work is pretty simple, but it does work well for us. We think we get the vast majority of the benefits of having a remote team by working independently for most of the week. But we also get a lot of benefits of working together by touching base in person once or twice a week. And we can also kind of avoid all the costs that come with having an office and as well as the interpersonal issues that just happen when you put people in an office together all day. And I don't know if we'll keep working this way forever, but for the size of team that we have today, this works pretty well for us. I'm going to be speaking more on this topic. I was invited to speak at the YPN Crossroads Summit in downtown Sioux Falls on August 15th. I'm going to be talking about the future of remote work and what that looks like. So if you want to deep dive on this subject, you can certainly attend the YPN Crossroads Summit and you can get tickets@sfcrossroads.com so if you run a remote team or quasi remote team, I'd love to hear about how you make work work for your team. How do you do communication? How do you do project and task management? Feel free to comment. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how this works for you and your business. Thanks for watching.