MBA1851 Why We Built a Virtual Office (& How You Can Too)

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Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA show your Better Business Boot Camp every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar is at home. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and in today's episode you will learn why we built a virtual office and how you can too. I run a totally remote team with team members all across the world, literally five different continents, and we've used several tools to collaborate, Basecamp, Slack, Jira, Trello, you name it. And all these tools are great and they're fantastic for working asynchronously. But we also wanted to create a space where we all can actually see each other face to face, ask impromptu questions, check up on each other, maybe even have a virtual lunch together. In today's episode, I'm going to share with you why we decided to do this, how we pulled it off, and some of the benefits that we have discovered in the process. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Running a remote team is a lot of fun. You get to hire people from all around the world, and it really works for a lot of businesses. But it's not without its challenges. One of those challenges is that it's not always simple and easy to communicate freely with your colleagues. If we were all together in a room or in a shared office, it's easy for me to walk up to somebody at their desk and ask them a quick question. This is something that comes natural to us as human beings, but working remotely, it doesn't naturally come to us to be like, hey, I'm going to jump on chat and ask this question. It's a learned behavior. And we've been doing this for over 7 years running this remote team. And we wanted to make it easier on our team to communicate with each other, to help each other out. It actually started with our customer support team at Webinar Ninja. We noticed that sometimes our support agents would struggle with maybe new questions they were getting from customers, new scenarios or situations that they never came across. And we would put the customer service agent, or ninjas, as we call them, customer service ninjas, in a strange situation because it wasn't super convenient or instinctual to just jump on, chat and chat with their colleagues, ask them a question, wait for a reply while the customer's waiting. You know, this could be a live chat with a customer. So we decided to pilot a program called the Virtual Office. What this basically means is that we're all together on camera and Mike in a virtual room. There's a lot of complicated tools to do this, but we literally just used Google Hangouts. We're like, hey, what's the simplest, easiest way to validate this idea without having to sign up for anything? Let's just use Google Hangouts. But before he rolled it out to the customer service team, we wanted to test it out as the managerial team. So myself, my co founder, Nicole, our head of customer service, our customer service manager cj as well as our senior lead agent, Anna, joined this virtual office and we worked together. We co worked together on this virtual call that basically went on for as long as we're working for about a week. We wanted to see how it would feel. What are some of the hiccups Some of the things that we would have to work around. One of the things we discovered is, hey, it could be noisy sometimes in people's houses or offices. So by default we would mute our mics, but we would keep our volume on or our speakers on. So that way we have our headphones on, we're listening to music, but then I can hear if somebody unmutes their mic and asks a question. This prompts me to go to the tab where Google Hangouts is and I just unmute to answer the question. What we found is that we were able to hash out problems and solve things very quickly. After the management team actually just piloted it, we then invited the rest of the customer support team to join the virtual office and be a part of this. We explained the benefits, we explained why this would be helpful to them and make their life easier. And we explained that this is an experiment and if it doesn't work, we'll stop doing it. But if it does help us, we'll continue to do it. So we rolled out the virtual office, again, very simple. Just a Google Hangouts room where everybody joins and we're co working virtually as if we're in the same room together, being able to talk to each other, ask each other questions. And some fun surprises that we discovered is that in this process of running a virtual office, we really got to know each other more and more every day. We talked about our weekend plans and what we're having for lunch or notice somebody's new haircut. You know, the things you normally would talk about in a real physical office. Eventually, after two weeks of running the virtual office with our customer support team, everybody was bought in. Everybody found the benefits outweigh the negatives of any kind. And it was just a nice place to go when you start your shift of work. We then opened it up to the rest of the team, engineers, marketing, for them to pop in and join us and cowork so it's not lonely, so they can sit there and work alongside their colleagues. So how can you do the same in your business? Well, first of all, don't overcomplicate it. Use a simple piece of software like Google Hangouts. You don't need anything else really to pull this off, at least just to pilot it. Next, pilot it with a small group of people that are in leadership, the managers in your company. Because you gotta lead by example. You gotta first find out if this is gonna work. And you should take the brunt of that. You should take the risk of maybe the week that you try. It doesn't work out, that's okay, but it's easier for you to present it to your team when you say, hey, us managers, we've been doing this for a week and here are the results. And lastly, make the changes and the tweaks to the virtual office that work for you. We actually looked at a different tool to use for the virtual office, but that tool didn't have virtual backgrounds or blurred backgrounds, and many team members felt more comfortable with that given the fact that many of them are working from home and it's not always super tidy at home. Right. And that's a pretty valid concern. So we chose something that works for our team, and that was Google Hangouts. Be flexible about it. At the end of the day, you just remember what the goal here is, is to just increase communication and make it easier for your team.

ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people to wrap.

Up today's lesson, we absolutely love our virtual office. Now we do a meeting with all team members called All Hands every single month. Once a month. Now when we do the All Hands, it's not like we miss everybody because we just saw them every day in the virtual office. With some exception, of course. Some people share different shifts, but it really builds a lot of camaraderie and a good bond between your teammates. And that always helps with teamwork, with team morale, with team culture. Thanks so much for listening. I hope that you give it a try. Give it a try. It's actually quite fun to have a virtual office if you have a remote team or even a partially remote team that can join the rest of your physical office. If you love what you hear on the show, subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Also, when you hit subscribe, those podcast apps you use, they recognize, hey, this is a cool show. Give it some exposure and you'll be supporting the show by just pressing a button. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Anytime you are doing things to help your team, make their job easier, make it more fulfilling, make it actually a bit more fun, your team will appreciate it. They'll see that you're actually trying. Even if you fail, they'll be like, hey, at least this person's trying to make my job better. So whether it's a virtual office or something else, keep trying to improve the experience for your team. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Free ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll. ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.