Bruce Edlund discusses managing distributed teams across multiple locations and how hybrid work has changed treasury functions. He covers remote work dynamics, team communication strategies, and the role of technology adoption in making flexible work models actually work.
It's not easy when you're not around, you know, your people physically all the time. You don't have those informal conversations, you know, in the hallway or in the kitchen. Those times are super valuable. I don't remember. At some point after I started at Citrix again, I set up basically a weekly touch base for our whole team. And I've got four people reporting to me underneath me, two people in Fort Lauderdale, one person in Switzerland, and one person in Germany. So we're already spread out. I mean, even though those people work in an office, I mean, our whole team is knocked together. So we had these weekly touch bases on Monday mornings, and we started out the meetings very informally, where we really. I mean, it was everyone's choice. I mean, they could share what they wanted however much they wanted or however little. But we really passed things like, oh, you know, how was your weekend? What did you do? And the kinds of conversations that you would probably have, you know, in the kitchen when you're getting coffee on Monday morning. And that really helped us, I think, you know, come together as a team. I've always had an interest in, I guess, the technology side. Treasury, you know, doing a little bit of coding here and there. And I see there's definitely been an evolution in Treasury. A lot of times you have someone on your team that's sort of tech focused, you know, the. In the past, maybe with the Excel guru, right, that. That built all these big models. And I know for myself, I spent a lot of time automating Excel with VBA coding 10 years ago, and then someone introduced me to databases and I realized, well, these databases are doing a lot of the things that I was coding in Excel, so this is a much better solution. And so then building out databases and then you start to see, you know, some of the limitations there in terms of, like, being able to pull in lots of different data sources and, you know, automate that in a way that's really reliable for somebody who maybe doesn't understand databases. And then that's kind of evolved into newer technology that help to do this on an automated way are things like, I mean, we're using Power BI a lot today, and now I've got somebody on my team who has really taken Power BI and built a lot of automated pulling of data sources together and reporting together. So I think there's just been this evolution of technology within treasury where there's a bit of a diy, do it yourself mixed with external software providers.
We're sort of in the hybrid camp. If we do have events in the office, People are going into the office. If it's maybe like a big meeting or I've been traveling to the office about once a month. And so then usually if I'm in town, then, you know, my team will show up in the office once or twice, and other teams are there. So that's kind of how we've been working. And I've heard from some other companies at some conferences that I've been at that have somewhat similar approaches, or actually even more sort of definitive, where they say, oh, we're fully remote, but we're getting together, like once a quarter somewhere. So, personally, I think it's great to give people the flexibility to live where they want, whether it's locally, commuting in or not.
