102 | Knitting Remote Into Workplace Culture | Darren Murph

Welcome to the Building Better Cultures podcast, where I talk to leaders about how internal communications, engagement, and leadership all play a key role in creating amazing and successful cultures.

People have realized that their work-life integration or work-life ratio has been off, and they're realizing that we only get one spin around this rock, and work should really be a lever to live a better life.

Hello there and welcome to this episode of Building Better Cultures with me, Scott McInnes. You're very welcome as always. And as I always do before I kick into today's guest— that comes out wrong, I should go with introduce today's guest, which is probably a little nicer— I am going to just say my usual big thank you to our friend, supporter, and sponsor Workvivo. I think a lot of what we're going to be talking about today with our guest is very much about how you get buy-in from people when they aren't all over, when they are in the same place, when they are co-located and they are working from wherever. And I think if that's something that you're looking at doing or something you're struggling with, particularly from a communications perspective, then a look at Workvivo would be well worth your while. And pop along and have a look at their website at workvivo.com, and you'll hear a little bit more about them later on. So today's guest, I think one of the things that we are really struggling with as businesses is trying to get to grips with what now. We had this 2-year forced work from home, that's kind of unraveling very much in most countries. And I'm hearing stories, we're based here in Ireland, things are back to inverted commas normal. In the UK, largely the same. I know in other countries, they're all rolling back to no masks, come to the office, But people aren't necessarily on that bus. People are in a very, very different place. And it's now up to organizations and their people together to think about what next. How do we make this work for you? How do we make this work for the organization? How do we make sure that we still get to do amazing work for us, for our customers, that drives our success and drives your engagement levels and your want to be here? So I'm really, really happy that I'm joined today by Darren Murph, who is the head of remote at GitLab, who has been looking at this and thinking about this for many, many, many years, and is absolutely a subject matter expert in this whole area. So I'm really chuffed that he has agreed to come on the pod today and share maybe some of his wisdom and thoughts and ideas. And actually, as he challenged me when we were chatting before we started recording, let's get down to the nitty-gritty. Let's get down to what are some of the really actionable things that as an organization you can do tomorrow. And I know that's something that you're used to on the podcast. But we really challenged ourselves to try and think about how could we really get into that whole area of what are some of the big actions that you can go away and take and just start doing tomorrow or next week, whenever you get back to your desk. So Darren, hi there. Thanks for joining me.

Of course. Hi, Scott. Thanks for having me.

Pleasure. It's all mine. Listen, why don't we start off with that usual easy question that I've been asking for the past 80 episodes or so, and I do often say I must change the intro section, and I just haven't done yet, but I will, but I haven't today. So why don't you spend maybe 60 seconds giving us the quick pen picture of Darren Murph, where you've come from, what you do today, and maybe a little bit as well about GitLab.

Thank you for that, Scott. So first and foremost, I am an adoptive dad. It changed my life. My wife and I adopted a newborn at birth around 3 years ago. And flexible work played a huge part in enabling that. So there's the personal side of why this matters. On the professional side, I have architected organizational designs and led distributed teams for over 15 years. In other words, I've been doing this long before COVID made it cool or practical, so I've spent—

Or necessary.

Or necessary. So I've spent a lot of time seeing what doesn't work well what not to do, and I've seen works— what works really well. And for context, where I am now at GitLab, we have over 1,600 people in more than 65 countries, and we have no company-owned offices. So the company was built virtual first. The architecture was there to empower people to work from wherever they were in the world, and we're an open-core company, and so we share our learnings on how to do this with every other organization in the world. And it's been fascinating to see others look into how we run things and implement certain elements that have essentially helped them map out their own remote transition blueprint.

Love that. And hopefully we'll get into some detail around that over the next half an hour or so as we work through the pod. Um, I, one thing I really want to talk about in a while is that whole idea of remote-first, that you've come from that place. And I think— and we've had other podcast guests on here that have come from the same place— I think it makes that what's happened over the past 2 years much, much easier to contend with, because actually, it's not been that different for you. It's been almost exactly the same as it was for the years prior to that. So I'm going to come on to that in a wee while. What I want to talk about first is this whole idea. And it was something that you said when we had our little pre-chat. And it was something that really resonated with me, which was forced work from home is very different to intentionally designed remote work. What do you mean by that? Tell me more about that.

So I'll set this up with the co-located analogy. Imagine if you were working in an office building that was intentionally designed by your architect for your company. It was all custom built specifically to work for your business, for your teams, And then it closed. And so you had to go into an ad hoc building. It was not designed for you. It was still a building, but it wasn't set up exactly for you. You weren't sure how fast the broadband was. You weren't sure where the HVAC controls were. You weren't sure if everyone even had a badge to get in and out of the building. You might could work through that, but it would be very difficult. There would be certain challenges and certain frictions. This is very much what we've seen over the past 2+ years. COVID-induced, quarantine-induced work from home is not remote work. Yeah, you save on the commute times, and that's certainly a blessing, but the restrictions in travel, in addition to the weight of the world that was pressing down on everyone socially It made work much more difficult. And what I've seen is that there's been a conflation of remote work and forced work from home. And a lot of people now have somewhat of a negative view of what remote work is because forced work from home has been their only experience with it. And so my advice to people is look to other companies who have been doing this before COVID That is a better a better view of what the future can hold when you intentionally design it and you don't have all of these social and travel restrictions. You can fundamentally shape work so that you can live better and different lives. And that is the real power of intentional design with flexible remote distributed working.

And what should— what are organizations then should they be thinking about? Because we know the organizations that are the very traditional banks that are a couple of hundred years old or other organizations that have been around for 100 years, they're now standing up teams internally to say, well, what does the future look like for our organization and our people? So if you take that perspective of intentional remote working, what are some of the things, the practical things that those people should be thinking about when they're thinking about the planning? Because all I'm hearing often is Oh, it's— we're 60/40, which I'm not necessarily sure. In fact, I'm absolutely sure is not the answer.

So I'll give you two actionable items right away, and we can dig into these. One is shifting the mindset from where people work to how people work. And the second is actively implementing programs that fight against or combat against proximity bias. So let me dig into the first one just a bit. You could audit all of your workflows across your organization and ask yourself a simple question: will this workflow work if people are distributed, or does it require everyone to be in the office? And you can go down the list through every function in the organization, and each time you find one where it's only possible for this workflow to happen in the office, that should go on your priority list of what to change. So you're going to build out a changelog, if you will, of the elements of your business that you need to change if you ever want to build a more distributed, a more flexible, and frankly, a more de-risked future for your organization. So that is how you start. Start asking yourselves what needs to change, what can only happen in the office. You're gonna need to start shifting away from that. This enables people to work remotely from the office if they would like to, but it sets your business up to be more resilient if you change the how and stop focusing on the where. The second part is proximity bias. For organizations that for one reason or another do choose to continue having a company-owned office or multiple offices, you have to be actively concerned with creating a Tier A team and a Tier B team. Those who go into the office will likely have greater access to information, greater access to people, and greater visibility. This by default creates an inferior experience for those who either choose not to or cannot come into the office at the same cadence. The easiest way to solve for this is if you are on the senior leadership team or the executive team, Stay home. If you believe that the office is very important, that's fine, but you need to send the signal that people should not go there to rub shoulders with the right people, to lobby, to politic, to further their careers. And that can only be done by sending the signal that even our senior leaders work from other places in the world. So those are two ways to send— to set a great foundation to galvanize your people into, into gathering their support, into collecting actively building a better future.

And practically, I mean, one of the things that I've said on this podcast many, many times over the past couple of years, and there's now a couple of thousand people throwing their eyes to the heaven, is that we've taken the square peg of how we used to work in the office and we've started just doing those things via Teams or Zoom or Webex. And that doesn't work. And I guess that's that difference from your perspective of forced remote work versus intentionally designed remote work. I wonder, when you're thinking about how people work as teams, one of the things that I've always thought is that that whole idea of hybrid meetings, of having, you know, half a dozen people in a room and then 2 or 3 people dialing in, that's probably a really good example of that proximity bias. So the question is, do you then go down the path, do you think, of we're either all in the office or all remote? And even those 6 people in the office, if we're going down that route, everybody just sits at their desk and we're all on Teams because that presents the level playing field.

Yes. So, here's the longer answer to that. All remote or all co-located are fundamentally the two easiest work environments to administer because you have one playing field for each. Hybrid has been themed as the "best of both worlds," but without extreme intentionality, it quickly devolves into the worst of both worlds. By default, hybrid will have a Tier A and a Tier B team. You will have proximity bias. You cannot implement a hybrid system without proximity bias. I've often recommended that these companies who are insistent on hybrid at the very least hire a head of remote or a dedicated remote leader to attempt to balance the two as best you can. Now, there are some incredible tools that exist today and some that are on the horizon that will infuse more more equitability into these experiences, but it will certainly be a challenge, and it is one that I would advise leaders not to underestimate the significance of. I've seen quite a few leaders assume that moving into a hybrid future is simply allowing people to work from home, but on a bigger scale. It is not that. This is a complete re-architecting of your operational underpinnings. And if you put that much, if you put a serious lens on that, if you put the investment in that, you can address the proximity bias, but it will always be there if you have people distributed around the world.

And I think most organizations, certainly that I'm hearing from, don't have the, maybe the gumption or the bravery to do that, to say, well, we're now going to be 100% remote, we are going to be hybrid. So how do they mitigate against that proximity bias? I guess the first thing, as I always say to leaders in any sessions that I run, is having awareness of it is a great first starting point that it's there. And then thinking about how then do you think about working around it? How do you mitigate against it?

The easiest way is to keep the senior leaders outside of the office by default. Because what happens is, by the way, this is all very much a top-down movement. If you are truly going to move into the future of work, it has to be— you have to have deep conviction and executive sponsorship. This cannot just be a skunkwork project, a bottoms-up type of movement. The executives truly have to believe that you're building a better and different future. So if they aren't at an epicenter of power, then by default they will have to use different tools and different workflows, and they'll have to communicate differently. And if you do that, it becomes more equitable. People will see that your leaders are operating differently. Your leaders are piloting and experimenting with new tools. So that's it. That's a big one. The second one is send a clear signal that it matters by hiring someone or putting someone on your existing, existing team in charge of this transition. Position. If the entire org sees that now it is someone's job to experiment with new tools, to survey people on what they're missing, to create leverage within the learning and development team to design modules on things like expert business communication, writing succinctly— in a remote setting you have to write really well, and not everyone knows how to do that— so creating leverage by using your learning and development team to upskill people into this new world, these are very real things you can do to start sending the signal that you're building a different future. I want to point out here that no one expects a leader who has been in a co-located setting to just flip a switch and be a master at distributed work overnight. It is very much a journey of iteration, and people can get behind that. So lay out a multi-month, maybe multi-quarter, or multi-year plan on how you're going to step by step Remove that, that glue from the office and start building a different type of infrastructure glue that is less reliant on a physical piece of geography. Build the plan, get people involved. I bet most leaders would be amazed at how many people would raise their hands within their own ranks. They want to build a better future. This is an exciting opportunistic time. Hi, I'm Kleena from Workvivo. When working away from the office, it's easy for your people to feel isolated and disconnected from your culture and each other. That's where we come in with our quick-to-deploy employee communications platform. It's all about ensuring that your people feel informed, engaged, and connected to your company culture, values, goals, goals and each other wherever they work from. For more, see workvivo.com.

I think you are absolutely right. However, I do think that there are probably hundreds of thousands of CEOs and CFOs out there going, yeah, that guy's mad. Not on my watch is that going to happen. What do we do? What do organizations need to look at in terms of the benefits to doing this for their businesses? Because at the end of the day, the business construct is there to make money. So how do we bring senior execs, C-suite execs on that journey to show them this is the benefit that this is going to have for your organization and your people?

Moving away from a model where your business results and physical geography are closely coupled will significantly de-risk your business. If your results can be driven without a specific piece of geography, then you are more immune to things like geopolitical crisis. Or pandemics around the world. So it is simply a better way to build a more durable and more resilient organization. So that's one. Two is that you are able to hire the world's best talent, not just the best talent that you can uproot and convince or persuade to relocate their whole family to a place that you deem suitable. It is extraordinary how much diversity of thought and opinion, perspective and intelligence will be at your disposal if you move away from an obsession with physical geography and open your recruiting funnel as wide as you can into the world. So those are the two right off of the bat. And the last thing that I'll mention is that if you look back in history at major inflection points around the world, major milestones in technology, and you look at organizations that scoffed at it, history is not really kind to those organizations. I'll give you a funny example. The fax machine has been around for a very long time, and For many years, recruiting organizations asked candidates to fax their resumes in or their CVs in. And there came a time when systems like Greenhouse, digital email-based systems where candidates had a much more seamless and easy experience on communicating their CVs, that came into play. And there were probably some recruiting teams around the world that said, No, we're pretty happy with our fax machine workflow. It works well. We have it dialed in. We're really happy with it. We actually surveyed our teams and they're happy with it too. So we're just gonna kind of ignore the future and continue using the fax machine. This is the workplace's fax machine moment, and leaders can either choose to embrace and to co-build what that future will be, or dig their heels in and continue using the proverbial fax machine. And my guess is that history will favor those who cut ties with the fax machine now and used this precious time to ask the right questions and start building the future. The, the answer is not obvious. It will be different for every single organization, but there's enough knowledge out there and we're in a shared enough of an experience that we can figure figure this out, and it's not something to be afraid of. It's different, yes, but it can be made better if you put the investment into it.

At the moment, this podcast episode is going to be about 3 hours, because as you're talking, I'm literally scribbling things going, "I must ask him this, and I must ask him this, and I must ask him this." So let's try this. Let's have a little think about it. So I want to talk about iteration and experimentation, and then I want to talk about diversity, because I think that particularly diversity is something that organizations are really focused on at the moment. I think this is a massive, massive opportunity, I think, about the mix here in Ireland. We don't have the same diversity of population that you maybe have in the US or that they have in the UK and elsewhere in the world. This is a huge opportunity to make that change happen. Let's talk about that in a second because I want to talk first about the whole idea of experimentation and iteration. And I think that in organizations that aren't maybe as open to change and people are looking up the proverbial pyramid, and saying, "Okay, boss, tell us what the answer is." And then she or he tells you the answer. And then suddenly, "Oh, hang on a minute. That's not the answer because things have changed." So they're not setting out their stall in the context of, "We're going to try this and it might not work." Because leaders don't like doing that. Leaders like to be certain about things. And if it doesn't work, we're going to try something else. And that makes leaders think, "Oh, they don't maybe trust me or I don't look trustworthy. I don't know what I'm doing." And that's not great either. How important is the whole area of experimentation, of iteration, of agility for leaders going forward as they think about the future of work?

It's absolutely essential. And I would say that there really is no failure. You either succeed or you learn. And if you're struggling with this from an operational standpoint or an org design standpoint, I would say, go have a chat with your, your CMO, go have a chat with your marketing leaders, because marketing minds are wired to test, experiment, learn, and iterate. From quarter to quarter, you never really know what kind of campaigns are going to resonate. You even look at something like Google, the search algorithm changes all the time. So you have SEO and search teams that are constantly evolving and iterating and testing and learning. This mechanism can be similarly applied to people operations. And so my assumption is that this model is actually already happening at some function in your organization. And so if it is, lean on those leaders and ask them what to do, what not to do, and how it could be ported over to people operations and behavioral change.

And I think we're used to doing this. When you look at Lean, that many, many organizations now have as their change and development framework, they're to sprints. Let's try a sprint. Let's get to a minimum viable product. Let's see, does that work? And if it doesn't work, let's go back and sideways a bit and try again. There's no reason that that same model, I presume, can't be taken and applied in the context of organizational change.

It can. And we've never had a better opportunity to do it without judgment. Imagine if you were trying to do this before COVID Shareholders, stakeholders would look at you like you were were absolutely mad.

Just before they fired you.

But now that COVID has happened, the opposite will happen. If you ignore that this has happened and you put no effort into evolving, those same parties will look at you as if you're mad. We now have an expectation to move into the future. The genie is out of the bottle, you'll never put it back in. Something is fundamentally different. Organizations now have, I believe, a responsibility to test and learn and experiment and evolve. Doing nothing, being apathetic, is almost dangerous at this point.

In your experience, is going down the 60/40 hybrid route as a starting point, is that a good thing to do? Or is that somebody going off down a cul-de-sac? That they're going to have to then somehow back the articulated lorry out of to get going again on their proper route, or is that a stepping stone to what an amazing future might look like?

The eternal optimist in me would say, take this opportunity to make a clean break. It will save you a lot of time, will be a much more efficient way to move into the future. However, it is probably more practical, especially for large multinationals to take a stepping stone approach. And I'm a huge advocate of iteration, and so maybe this is just the first iteration of unwinding a reliance on the office. I think what's more critical than focusing on what percentage of your workforce is where is focusing on what percentage of your workflows are being actively audited and reworked so that they are less reliant on the office. Those are the percentages I would pay attention to, and the where will sort itself out in due time.

Okay. Let's go back to leaders for a minute because we touched on them earlier on and the importance of leaders. And I, again, have said a million times on this podcast that I believe that the middle management layer in an organization is a group of probably the most important people in an organization. Yes, your CEO, your ex-co, your leadership team, whatever you call them in your organization, are very important. But those people who make stuff happen with their teams on a day-to-day basis, they're really, really important, the most important. I wonder what skill sets are they going to need or what are they going to be doing differently now? What will they have to do differently looking forward than maybe what they were doing over the past probably 80 years since the Second World War?

So first off, I agree, and I also want to point out that these middle managers have been the most adversely affected by what has happened over the past 2 years. Slack has an organization called Future Forum, and they do amazing research, and they did a study and essentially said that across all levels of the organization, middle managers bore the brunt of this because things were changing, but executives weren't really sure what to advise. And so beneath the middle managers, you have people recognizing in real time that the work-life integration is very different, and they're asking all of these questions about what will the future look like. I'm trying to decide, can I change countries? Can I change states or counties? Can I go move to a place where I can give elder care. What will the future look like? Are we changing tools? They don't have answers. They ask the executives and they say, "We don't know. We're waiting it out. We're trying to figure it out." So, those in the middle management spot have been adversely affected through all of this, squeezed, absolutely. So, to answer the question on what do they need to move forward, the first is embracing the servant leadership model. And I know many people listening to this have, have heard this before, but I really mean it. Most people in this position are more like directors, kind of proactively assign tasks. But in a remote or distributed model, the best middle managers are simply open to input and feedback, and they create a psychologically safe environment where their directs will come to them with context around what is blocking them, and they act as an unblocker. This is a very different model on how to work, and you cannot assume that people will instinctively know how to do this. And so again, I look to learning and development and manager training sessions to upskill teams on, on how to do this. So that's a bit of the softer part of it. On the hard part, the organization is going to have to set them up for success. If they're still using tools of old and workflows of old, they'll never be at their best. If you've ported all of your office meetings to a Teams or Zoom meeting and done fundamentally nothing else differently, no new tools tools, no bias towards asynchronous workflows, no additional documentation or communication guardrails or guides, it's going to make their job really, really difficult, a lot more difficult than it should be because what they're being asked to do doesn't really match the environment. And so it's partly on the organization to set up great infrastructure for them to do great work, and it's partly on them to seek out out learnings, whether it's from their L&D department or online courses. GitLab offers a remote team management course on Coursera that's free to take. There's a lot of amazing resources at Workplaceless. So the information is out there. So I think it's, it's a bit of a combination. The person has to want to learn how to manage differently, and the organization has to set them up so that they can thrive.

And back to something you just said there, Darren, heads of L&D, heads of learning and development, where should they be in your world, in the perfect world, where should they be focusing their efforts? What kind of skills should they be looking to give that cohort of people in their organization?

The first and most important is great business writing, phenomenal writing. Writing and storytelling will be the dark horse skill of the next decade. Writers and storytellers have always been powerful. Stories run the world. Stories run organizations. Stories move markets. And in a distributed setting, when you cannot rely on the charisma of someone in an office, the words that you write carry much more weight. And a lot of people do not know the ins and outs of communicating strategically, being thoughtful with their words and the composition, and being thoughtful about the bigger picture and cascading information and reducing chaos and dysfunction by infusing clarity into a situation. This does not come natural to many people. And so if you're going to pick one to prioritize, it would be make your entire organization a great writing organization. It purifies thought. It adds clarity, reduces fog and confusion. A lot of other things will fall into place if everyone can articulate their thoughts in the written word in a great way.

Brilliant. I love that. And for those of you listening, if you go back maybe 60 episodes-ish, you'll find a podcast that I did with John Simmons, who is the granddad of tone of voice. He invented the concept of tone of voice back in the '80s. He's a good friend of mine. He talks a huge amount of sense. And all the things that Darren just said there are exactly the things that John would say. Actually, well worth picking up a copy of his book that's just been rereleased on its 20th anniversary or 21st anniversary. It's called We, Me, Them, and It. And it's well, well worth a listen. Let's have a little chat about diversity. Because of course this is something that organizations are struggling with, I think, the world over. And of course there have been, there've been massive movements over the past couple of years that have really uncovered really quite dark and thorny issues in organizations. So organizations really are focusing on, well, how do we think about diversity, equity, and inclusion in our organizations? What role does this whole idea of more distributed organizations play in that? What benefit does it bring?

Geographic diversity is an element of diversity that is not often spoken about, especially for co-located organizations. It's not really something they've ever wanted to measure because they're only going to hire in places that they have offices. So first off, it opens up an entirely new layer of diversity. So what happens when you really dive into this? What happens when you have people all across the country or in 60 or more countries, you end up finding even more diversity. Diversity of thought, of culture, of perspective. You have people that are literally on different pieces of land all around the world, and they're seeing and living in markets that could matter to, to your business. This isn't just a secondhand research report that you read on a certain geography that you're thinking about investing in, you literally have people there on the ground that can give you firsthand information. This is huge, and scaled across an organization, this becomes massively impactful to what feeds into your product. It is, it is the heartbeat of innovation. And I would also say that organizations who struggle with infusing diversity into their org It really starts at the recruiting side. If you recruit a diverse set of recruiters, they will have a much easier time finding diverse talent. So how do you get a great diverse recruiting team? You open your recruiting funnel as wide as you possibly legally can, and you get people in who understand certain demographics and certain sectors in a way that you fundamentally do not. And so start there, build a diverse nucleus, and they will find a diverse candidate set as you scale the business.

At Inspiring Change, we help our clients to implement sustainable change and drive business performance by putting their people first. We do that through a focus on strategic internal communications, employee engagement, and leadership consultancy. If you're struggling with change or getting your people aligned behind your purpose, vision, or strategy, then get in touch. Simply visit our website at www.inspiringchange.ie for more. Of course, we know that we're biased towards hiring people that look and sound like us. So I guess to your point, if you have a very, very diverse hiring team, they each hire people who look and sound like them. Bingo.

Exactly.

You know what the big thing for me is always when we talk about D&I is that it's less about the color of skin or the geography or the fact they're differently abled or whatever it might be, but it does come back very much for me back to that diversity of thinking. It's just that diversity of perspective. But one thing that I'm just not sure that organizations are great at is listening, really, really, really actively listening to that diversity of thought, that feedback, those ideas, that innovation from Guatemala or whoever it might be. We're a bank in New Jersey, and what does Guatemala have to do with us? We're not very good at that. How do we get around that?

This goes to an even deeper issue, which is establishing a culture that is ready and willing to accept the diversity that it seeks. So at GitLab, it really all starts with our values, and I would say for any organization, now is an amazing time to look look at your value system, really audit your values, and ask yourself, are our values actionable? For many organizations, they're simply words on a wall, things that you may aspire to. If you take GitLab as an example, we have values that I'm sure you've heard before: collaboration, iteration, transparency. But the truth is, those words means something different to everyone listening to this. And so we don't stop there. We create what we call sub-values or substantiators of the values, and we bundle these underneath the core values so that they are actionable, they are tactical, they are practical, and everyone across the world can look at those and they get an aha moment of what collaboration, iteration, and transparency looks like in our organization. So how do we accept these diverse viewpoints? You build values that allow for it. So one of our sub-values is blameless problem solving. So if we have a problem across the org, we invite everyone, all perspectives, to contribute to solving that without blame. We have another one that says no ego. We explicitly expect everyone to collaborate with no ego. We have another one that says we expect everyone to collaborate with short toes. So this invites a diverse array of perspectives to contribute even across functions. So a designer may have input on how to make our legal function better, and the legal team is expected to collaborate and receive that input with short toes. It really requires a lot of thought, a lot of care and intentionality on building a culture that is meant to receive diverse perspectives. If you just hire a bunch of diverse perspectives, but then don't create the atmosphere for that feedback to be properly considered, I don't know that you've really solved very much.

Yeah, agreed. Agreed. They're just going to be throwing mud at a wall and none of it's going to stick. You touched on culture. This is wonderful because you're just simply segueing into all the things that are in my head, Darren. Let's talk about culture for a minute. One of the things that I often hear is, well, this whole remote thing is having a very, very negative impact on our culture, the hybrid working, the fact we're not getting water cooler moments anymore. It's having a very negative impact on our culture. What do you say to people that say that and how can they address it?

I say that those feelings are real and they're worthy of being appreciated. But I also say that hybrid and remote work have been unfairly targeted when the, the core issue has been the aftermath of a global pandemic. Culture has been negatively impacted by 2+ years of people being unable to appropriately mourn the loss of their loved ones because we can't have funerals in the same way. It's been negatively impacted by having to cancel high school graduations and birthday parties that you'll never get back. It's been negatively impacted by, even for fully remote teams, they aren't able to travel around the world and spend time breaking bread with their colleagues in the same way. So while the shift, the sudden shift to a new way of working impacts culture, COVID and the pandemic are much more to blame. And I know that might sound a bit depressing, but it's actually a great thing because we're almost on the other side of this. And so what you're going to see is that a lot of cultures will begin to reignite and reinvigorate themselves because culture is built by the people within an organization. And as people start to experience more joy and more social connection with their friends, their communities, their families, and people that don't work with you, just other humans, naturally that joy is going to be infused back into the organization. And so I, I'm I want to say hang on just a little bit longer. I think culture is going to have a renaissance, and a lot of it is going to be the sun shining on the world in a different way than we've seen over the past 2 and a half years. But that aside, what can leaders do to take that infusion of joy and make it even better? What they can do is recognize that people have gone through quite an introspective experience over the past 2 years, and many of them have realized that their work-life integration or work-life ratio has been off for quite some time. And they're realizing that we only get one spin around this rock, and work should really be a lever to live a better life. Some organizations could be scared by that, but if you really want to take advantage of building a great culture, you embrace that. And you ask yourself as a leader, what can my organization do to make work more efficient for the people that choose to spend their time working here instead of anywhere else? And what can we do to help them live better lives outside of work? Because if we can accomplish that, they will bring a better version of themselves to work. And this is a very different train of thought. Many organizations are very inward-focused on how do we make culture better, when the real answer is you help people live better lives. Because workplace culture in the future will be largely built outside of the workplace. If we've learned anything during COVID it's that community matters, and we took it for granted for a really long time. So, organizations who are open about that, they encourage people, to put family and friends and community first. They create psychological safety to share what really matters to people back in the workplace. I know this might be a risk, but I've seen it happen when culture is built from the real heartbeat of what makes people people. And the most progressive organizations will lean into that and not be scared of that.

Those of you listening, because this isn't video, I can just tell you that I'm smiling ear to ear and I've been nodding like a mad fool for the past couple of minutes as Darren has been describing that. I love that whole idea of just turning the whole thought of culture on its head. And rather than thinking about how do we create a better culture in work, thinking about what can we do to help people live better lives that will in turn create a better culture in work. I've got one more question. As I said earlier, this could go on for literally 100 hours. I will get you back on again. That wasn't really an invitation, that was a threat. I will get you back on again for a further chat. My last question is this. There are lots and lots and lots of organizations, and I'm not thinking about the ones that have got 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 or 500,000 employees. I'm thinking about those companies that have got 100 people working in them or a couple of hundred people working in them that exist all across this island, all across your landmass and all around the world. And I wonder, what would your advice be? And maybe it's something that we've covered already that we want to recap on. What would your advice be when speaking to the people that are running those much smaller organizations as to the one thing that they should be thinking about and really, really prioritizing as they continue on this journey?

I'll give you two things. One is build the right workplace environment and culture for you. And the second is be empathetic when considering that people are choosing to spend their time working for you and forwarding your mission and business. People first and people focused has been a theme that's been thrown around for a really long time. But have we really embraced that? I think now is an amazing time to get really honest about, are we building an organization that builds people up? Because if you believe the flywheel works as such, the organization creates great infrastructure for people to do great work and then go live great lives, they will propel that joy back into work. That's where innovation comes from. If you believe the flywheel works in that direction, then set up your architecture, your virtual infrastructure to enable and empower that. And back to the first point, you'll see a lot in the news about how some organizations are thrusting people back into the office. And you'll see some that say, we closed all of our offices during COVID and we're making this heroic shift to all remote. Whatever works for you works for you. Ask your leadership team what feels right. Where should you iterate next? This is, this is a journey. It's an opportunity to build, and your organization does not have to look specifically like any other. Take advice from those who have done it. Look to those who have built cultures and organizations that resonate with you, but then build a culture that that you're proud to write down. I think even for organizations that thrust everyone back into the office, they'll have to be a bit more honest about who they are, and maybe they get a workforce that opts into working in that way. I think the net of this is we end up with a lot of organizations that are much more clear about what they are, and maybe more importantly, what they are not. And that should invite people into your recruiting funnel that genuinely, honestly want to be there because you're hiring for values fit and not culture fit. And that is a crucial unlock for productivity in the future.

Brilliant, brilliant. Listen, we're going to leave it there. I have loved, loved, loved our conversation. I'm going out for dinner this evening. I'm going to bounce out the door. I've loved this conversation so much. Before we go, just if people want to find out more about you or get in touch with you or find out more about GitLab, Where could they go?

Thanks for that, Scott. This has been an awesome conversation. Folks can connect with me on Twitter. I'm @DarrenMurph. You can download GitLab's Remote Playbook where we distill down all of our best knowledge and share it with the world at allremote.info. Thanks for having me, Scott.

Thank you for being here, Darren. I've loved every minute. We'll talk to you again soon.

Cheers. Godspeed. Thank you, Scott.

Thanks for listening. To hear from other leaders in our podcasts, to read our blogs, or to find out more about the work that we do at Inspiring Change, please visit inspiringchange.ie.