[00:00:03] Speaker A: In this panel, we'll address the unique challenges and opportunities of remote language work and offer strategies for fostering mental health work, life balance and professional growth. So for the 80 or so people that are watching this live, this is what we're going to be talking about in the next two minutes. And then for those that are watching the recording or you are listening to this on Spotify, this is what we're going to be talking about. We will have the presence of Sophie Solomon from Accenture, Nicole Spy James from Avant Page, Liam Martin from Running Remote, and Eva Claudine Giova from the Monterrey Institute of International Studies. The Middlebury Institute of International Studies, I should say. Eva, Nicole, Sophie and Liam, welcome to this space.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: Hi. Good afternoon, Andy.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Hello, everyone.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Good morning. Good morning. Hello. Hello.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: All right, all right.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Now we can't hear you.
[00:01:35] Speaker C: I can call.
[00:01:37] Speaker D: I think we're hearing as well as well.
Someone has their mic. Their mic open.
[00:01:46] Speaker A: Yeah, it might be. Might be.
[00:01:58] Speaker D: That sounds like we're good.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Hello, Nicole, Hello. Okay, we can hear. Nicole.
[00:02:10] Speaker E: Hello. Good morning.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: Oh, great. EBA.
[00:02:16] Speaker E: Can hear you.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: No, no.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Now, one of the challenges of remote work.
[00:02:36] Speaker C: I'm sorry, still not working.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: We can hear you.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: I think we can hear you now. That is really good.
[00:02:45] Speaker B: The reverbs. The reverbs back.
[00:02:46] Speaker A: Yeah. I think the only recommendation. Eva headphones. I think it's your audio comes in from your microphone, but I'll try to mute myself whenever you're speaking.
And just to make sure that we are all on the same page, we are here in Lang Talent 2024 for those that join us for the first time. The intention of this event is to be an online event designed to connect talented language professionals with leading companies seeking diverse and skilled workforces in the language industry around the world. And for those of us that have been in the industry for a bit, we know there's no secret, this is kind of like a remote first industry where a lot of us work remotely and we know really well how it feels to work remotely. Yet we don't have many of the sophisticated tools that other industries have to facilitate remote work. So the idea of this space is to make sure we talk about that and we talk about well being, which is. Which is something we should be talking more often in the industry. So to do that, we've invited four amazing professionals and I'd love to give each of them the opportunity to introduce themselves. I have some amazing descriptions, but I'd rather have them introduce themselves and get to know them as we have this conversation. So why don't we do Nicole, Liam, Eva and then Sophie.
[00:04:15] Speaker B: Great. Thank you so much, Eddie for allowing us to share the space. I think it's an important topic.
I have worked at Avant Page for eight years and I am the director of People Operations there, which I have the great privilege of having HR Finance and administration under me, which is an interesting intersection. So we really get to put our people first.
I'm really proud of the culture that we've been able to build there. We've grown from 20 when I started to now 104. So we definitely have some interesting remote challenge remote work challenges as we expand globally and very happy to share this stage with all of you.
[00:05:01] Speaker D: My name is Liam. I'm co founder of Running Remote, which is the largest conference on remote work. And then also Time Doctor which is a time tracking tool for remote work. We have team members in 48 different countries all over the world and our mission is we are trying to facilitate the world's transition towards remote work and we've been doing this for almost 20 years. I literally had to Google myself to find out how close I was to that 20 year mark. I'm around 19ish working remotely. So I definitely was doing it before it was cool and then automatically not cool and hopefully cool in the future. We'll see how Elon does.
[00:05:38] Speaker A: Yes, I totally agree with you, Liam. And I think I caught you in the middle of those 20 years and it's been super empowering. So it's great to see you again, Eva.
[00:05:51] Speaker C: Hi everyone. My name is Eva Claudine. I spent 16 years in the industry. I work both on the vendor side and the client side here in Silicon Valley.
I left the industry in 2018 to start teaching as a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. So basically my career went back full circle because my first job was teaching at a university in Slovakia. That's where I'm from. From I'm a program chair of the Translation and Localization management department at Ms. And my situation is very similar to Liam because first time I started working remotely was all the way back in 2001. So I had a lot of experience doing remote work the old way when all we had was just the phone and email and instant messenger. So I also manage remote teams all over the world. Now I'm working hybrid remotely from home three days a week. So I've had a lot of experience doing it every possible way.
[00:07:00] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:07:05] Speaker E: Let me see. Echo. No echo.
Okay, wonderful. So my name is Sophie Solomon and I'm probably the least versed I would say in the language industry, but I hear about the language industry every day because my partner is a dinosaur of the language industry. No, that's true. However, my experience with the language industry, I have been a consumer of translation and localization while I worked at Microsoft and now at Accenture. So.
But the main reason why Eddie invited me to join here is that prior to joining Accenture, that was acquired by the company that I worked with that was acquired by Accenture. I was responsible for creating. It was a small B2B marketing agency. Not small, about 500 people.
And I was responsible for, or I built the whole, whole staff augmentation and strategic resourcing arm of the company. And as such.
And that was. Liam, I could totally relate to you. That was before remote was cool and we talked about remote culture or what at the time was like. Now it's become a cliche. The future of Work, where I hired over 250 consultants to support. Support Fortune 500 companies in their B2B marketing initiatives. So I managed over close to 200 people. I had teams that were up to 59 people, completely remote. To this day, I think I've met five people 10 years later. And as such, I developed a whole program and ecosystem to support not only the individuals, but also to promote the virtues and the advantages that come with remote work. So with that, and then I have a whole day job here at Accenture that is kind of boring. So I'm not going to talk about that because that's not interesting.
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you. And it gives us a lot of texture on where you're at and where everyone is at. So thank you so much and feel free to interject, interrupt if you have any thoughts along this conversation. We have some guiding questions and we know time spread precious and limited, but starting with Nicole. Nicole, you mentioned that as advantage has grown, you've experienced different challenges working remotely. Can you tell us a little bit more about what those challenges have been and then perhaps we can all chip in into how those can be solved and even how you've solved them and whether there are any other ideas on how to go about them and any other challenges that we see in this and other industries. We're saying the remote language professionals, but it's the remote professional overall.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to share our experience. So I think anytime that you're scaling as a company, there is a need to really put the emphasis on fostering connection and building trust.
New people coming in every day. You're losing that sense of community that you once had when you were 20.
And that is increasingly harder. I think in a remote workspace. Just, it's a lot easier. You know, I come from the Silicon Valley back startup background and we used to have like TGIF Fridays where we would all play ping pong and drink beer together and kind of share our weekly goals and progress. And you can't do that as directly in a remote working space. Right. So how do you carry your culture and how do you create a really amazing community, which I think we all want in our workplace. Right. Is to enjoy coming in on a Monday morning. So some of the things that we've tried to do is not overcomplicate it. Keep things really simple, Create spaces within, let's say, Microsoft Teams for people to give each other shout outs. Or having Pizza Fridays where my poor team has to send pizzas to everybody's door all over the world, which is a very hard logistical challenge. But thank you to platforms like Uber Eats that make it possible. And it's those little things that.
And mostly creating the space for people to have real conversations with each other, prioritizing, making sure that people really do sign off at 5. That has to come from leadership. Right? Because I think one of the challenges is especially in the localization industry, we all really, I think we're very passionate individuals. I think most people really care about what they do.
And when your office is in your home, it's hard to leave at 5 or things get blurred. So really honoring the person first and building trust through showing them methods to take care of themselves and to show them that you care about them, taking care of themselves will go a long way as you grow or it has in our approach.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: Thank you. Nicole and Liam, you've seen this for 20 years.
What has stayed as a challenge and of course something that you have to often deal with. Often what new things are appearing there as challenges in remote work?
[00:12:48] Speaker D: Well, one of the things that's remaining is just to Nicole's point is trust and transparency. And I don't know if anyone had read the Wall Street Journal this morning, but there was a piece which was Elon Musk's first task is to destroy remote work inside of his new government agency that he has set up. So he's very focused on getting all government employees back to the office and then also mandating other policies to be able to encourage in office work. And when you look at what they're asking for, fundamentally they're asking for transparency.
So this is really the big issue. And this is, I think the thing that most people don't talk about, which I think we as a community need to start talking about very quickly, or we're going to lose the opportunity of remote work for everyone, because we now have the richest man in the world. And a very.
How could I put this in a politically correct way? A very openly open to new ideas president type of ideas that is going to probably implement some mandates very, very quickly. We have two entrepreneurs, Elon Musk and Trump, that are going to be running the government for the next four years. And as an entrepreneur myself, I'm personally terrified because I know how I'm like, and I probably shouldn't be in charge of any government whatsoever. So it's going to be a very interesting ride. And I think the core piece that we need to address is the transparency angle. That's the part that's been the issue the last 20 years. It's been one of the things that we also don't talk about that often, which is you need trust and transparency on the employee and the employer side. You need that transaction in order for you to be able to make that work long term. And then in the things that have happened just recently, I mean, we're talking about a complete transformation of everything you could possibly think of when it applies to work. Just In February of 2020 4.5% of the U.S. workforce was working remotely. And by March, that was 67% of the U.S. workforce. We're currently at about 32% of the U.S. working remotely. And that has not changed for the last two and a half years. It has remained rock solid. Even when Amazon told all of their employees to go back to the office two months ago, it hasn't even moved the numbers a quarter of a percent.
So we're seeing this huge conflict between these two groups. And I think it's probably going to come to an apocalyptic battle in the next six months, which is very exciting for me, by the way, as like a remote work guy that's been doing this for 20 years.
[00:15:38] Speaker A: Yeah. And I believe those of us that remote work has empowered think about this. And I'm wondering, Eva from the Institute, and you are surrounded by students, surrounded by the next generations. How are they talking about remote work? Are they talking about remote work? Is this something they are expecting? What are you hearing? What do you see from your perspective?
[00:16:05] Speaker C: Just a sound check. Can you hear me with the microphones? Perfect. No echo, no echo. All right, Excellent. So to them, it's a given, it's a reality.
Okay.
To them, it's A reality that is normal. They are not questioning whether it's they should be in the office or whether they should be remotely. To them, it's like one of two options. And many of our graduates actually stay in Monterrey after graduate because they're working remotely for companies all over the US So they're not even questioning it, yes or no. For them, it's like, yeah, these are the two options and we can decide what we want to do.
[00:16:53] Speaker A: And I'm muted. Eva, and you mentioned also that you've been in the industry working remotely for a long time. What were some of the challenges that you first had experienced working remotely? And you've mentioned technology has changed abruptly. Is this something, of course, that has made a difference in how you operate remotely?
[00:17:11] Speaker C: Yes, it's so much easier now compared to when I started in 2001. Like I said, all I had was the phone. We didn't really have WebEx or GoToMeeting yet. It was not so prevalent. It was not so used. So when you needed to talk to your managers or participants in a team meeting, you had to do it over the phone. And it was really hard to be heard when everybody else was. I was the only remote employee at that point. So that was one of the challenges.
So virtual conferencing has made a huge difference. I don't think we would be as successful with switching to remote work if we didn't have Zoom and all the other options.
Another difficulty was being remote, being physically away. And not only like physically away, but literally nine time zones away from the rest of the company, because I was their first employee who was working remotely from Europe. So I was not.
I was separated also by time zones. So I had to adjust my work time. Very good thing is that I'm actually a night owl. So I started working in the afternoon and worked until 10 or 11pm that was not the problem for me. But if somebody is a morning person and is in Europe trying to work with people in California, I think that would be impossible for them. So you really have to look at how your natural rhythm meshes with the regular office hours of your company. If you're dealing with time zones, that was a difficult thing. And I miss the camaraderie of the office because I used to work with them in California. And then because of the scholarship I received, I had to go back to Europe for a couple of years before I was able to come back. So I missed those people that I knew in person where we used to have lunches. I didn't have any of that. So I had to work extra hard on building social connections with people outside of work so that I would have that social interaction multiple times a week. Because I didn't get it through work. It was mostly just emailing with an occasional phone call.
[00:19:24] Speaker A: Thank you, Eva and Sophia. I want to come back a little bit to the idea that we were talking about with Liam about transparency and accountability. And of course you've had a lot of experience around these. What are some of the things that you've done and of course you've done in office work as well as remote work. Can you tell us more about that?
[00:19:45] Speaker E: Yeah, absolutely.
And yeah, I think that what you said, Liam, is right on the mark. And I think that really what it boils down to is it's really accountability and trust.
And when I hear those big concepts about we need to have people back into the office and we need to know where they're sitting, what they're doing, what they're working on, at the root of it all is like it's a complete lack of trust. And so I think that what makes remote work successful, at least in my experience, is not a traditional engagement model. It's more a deliverable and KPI driven engagement that you have with your employees where, you know, who cares if you work from the trunk of your car or from a chair on the beach, right? As long as you deliver, as long as you meet expectations, as long as you make the project or the situation successful, it really doesn't matter where you work. And I think that the mindset, and I experienced this with Microsoft and with Amazon. Right now I'm working on a huge project with them where they demand our people to be in the office 24 7. And when I ask, I mean literally, and when I ask them the why, they said, well, we want to know what people are working on. And I'm like, do you care about their condition? And it's like it's trying to find if you're going to hire somebody, an incredibly talented person that works from Tennessee or work from Oklahoma, works from Medellin, Colombia, that is going to deliver something that is outstanding, you rather compromise the quality because you want somebody that is here in Redmond, in the office. I'm like, where's that? I don't understand the logistics or I don't understand the logic, right? And I think that I really at the root of it all is that is the leadership style that is really, that is suspicious and doesn't necessarily empower the employee or empower the individual to do Their best work with the conditions that they want. And so it's really about accountability and what, what just to close and go back full circle. Eddie, I think that what has worked for me or what the. I think that the recipe for success and Liam, you know, tell me if that works for you as well, is that it really has to. The engagement has to be different. Is how you measure success? Is success the amount of hours you spend in the office, behind a screen, seating at a chair? Or is it the deliverable? Is it the quality of your work? And so for me, it boils down. You have to reframe the definition of success and that it really informs the kind of person you want to hire and the expectations that you put into their relationship.
[00:22:49] Speaker A: And then there seems to be a huge relationship in the success of those remote endeavors with some sort of a structure or alignment around those conversations. How do you do it at a Van page? And I would love to also hear about how Liam and his solutions help with this and how the conference actually gives people tools or at least helps people get some context on it. Nicole?
[00:23:15] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you so much, Sophie. That was, that was a fantastic comment because I think you're absolutely right. When I came into and made the decision to call ourselves a people operation team, it was based off Google Team, which stresses the need for analytics in tandem with people. And, you know, just like any good idea, you can use it in a positive manner or you can abuse it. And I think when we're looking at intentionality of creating a better remote working environment, you need analytics to back up the premise that your people will not work less if they are unsupervised. Right? So having metrics in place like OKR or goal setting systems, KPI's super important, right? Because when you have a manager that says, I don't feel like anything is getting done, we need to bring everybody back in office, you can say, well, let me just show you the numbers here, because what I'm actually seeing is an uptick in productivity. And that's certainly what we saw at Avant Page, right? We have a huge demographic of our employees that live in Mexico City. For those of you that have been to Mexico City, you know that the commute life is a very harsh one, right? It could spend. They could spend an hour and a half, two hours trying to get to work just from the outside outskirts of the city.
Of course, it just makes logical sense that you reduce the time that it takes for them to get into the city to kind of transport themselves around it, that they have more time to focus on their work. Sure. Maybe they do a load of laundry here and there, you know, maybe they go on a walk with a friend. We want them to do that. Right. Like it doesn't matter. Because if you put the emphasis on like Sophie was saying, creating great quality products, allowing people to be passionate and take care of themselves and be well balanced, human beings like that will only serve your company. And I think it is such a false premise to believe that if they are unsupervised that they're going to sort of manipulate the system. No, people really care about what they do if you care about them. So that's been our experience.
[00:25:33] Speaker A: Yes. Liam, I know you've had 20 years of experience and love to hear more about from your expertise. Of course, I presume the way in which teams used to manage themselves 20 years, 10 years ago, it has changed dramatically. And of course even multilingual we use different types of methodologies as well as well as like a daily standup meeting with which allows us just like sometimes just tell jokes and just say hi to everyone. But it also tells us where everyone is at mentally and also what they are working on. And if they've switched tasks, that's fine. Like prioritization. It's part of like what your responsibility is. But Liam would love to hear more from you.
[00:26:21] Speaker D: Yeah, so one of the things that's kind of a caveat to this entire conversation is asynchronous management. So before COVID 95% of remote teams ran asynchronously. So synchronous communication was not a dependency. Right now we're communicating synchronously but if you're listening to this recording, you're consuming that information asynchronously. And so that allowed us to be able to be much more metrics driven and an outcome based organization because we weren't necessarily tied to do I like Nicole, Is it fun chatting with Nicole or what are Nicole's outcomes and outputs as a worker inside of this organization? But to go back to the transparency discussion, I think a bigger part that I've been thinking about basically in the last like three to four days as we've seen this shift politically is we're on the wrong side of remote work for the current administration which and we're located in a whole bunch of different countries. I'm Canadian, currently in Barbados, so it doesn't necessarily affect me, but it does. If you have the US that goes one direction, it's going to impact the rest of those places. And I got a really interesting statistic, which is 67% of remote workers think they're more productive when they work from home and 83% of managers think they aren't.
So like the core issue now they are.
And I could throw essentially about 50 or 60 studies your way to be able to prove that point. But the bigger issue is we can discuss about how we need to trust people and we shouldn't necessarily have any type of transparency or metrics associated with people's outcomes. But the reality is that that's not going to convince the vast majority of the management world that is currently in control of this and also the administration. So how do you measure that? How do you actually come down to the reality? I mean, there's a whole bunch of things in HR that are really bad for workers, but we keep doing it. So large office environments where there are no walls, study after study after study shows it's horrible for productivity. We keep doing it and it seems like when remote work rolled around and deployed at such a large scale, employees loved it and it was better for productivity. And I think what managers thought to themselves is if employees like it, it's got to be bad.
And I think this is the core piece that we need to be able to reverse here, which is it's actually good for employees and it's good for employers. Right now, employers think it's bad for employers and that's the piece. And if we continue to talk about how they're just wrong, they won't even engage in this conversation. And so we need to be able to meet them where they are, to be able to hopefully pragmatically move them in the direction of saying, let's talk about what the actual outcomes that you're focused on. Do you want to make more money as a business? I know I certainly do. And if you do, remote work is the best way to be able to do that.
[00:29:35] Speaker E: So if I may piggyback on what you just said, I couldn't. I think we are exactly on the same page, which is I love hearing what you have to say.
What I go back to when I talk to my clients, it's exactly that. It's a productivity, it's the outcomes. And then I take it one step further. And I said, what kind of talent are you looking for? And this is like you get to that conversation about are you willing to compromise the quality of the talent because you want somebody physically in the office? What if I can find a top notch engineer, UX designer that lives in Argentina, that lives somewhere else, that can actually would meet your deadlines that would make you know, this is like a unique. What would you do? And usually when I have that conversation with them, I'm like, well let me think about it. It's not a flat no because it's really hard to argue with data. But I think the data we need to continue to drive that conversation around data and then outcomes and then quality. And so it's substance basically is that you willing to compromise the and then address the anxiety. What about having somebody in the office is so compelling that you're willing to compromise things like values that are universal, which is content and quality. And so when you have that and it's really. But it really is. I think it really comes from the top down. I don't think that we need to convince the bottom up like the talent that is delivering. I think that what we need to do is to have those really profound, if you want or meaningful conversations with leadership and try to get to the root of the resistance about remote work. Anyway, I just needed to add one.
[00:31:33] Speaker D: Little addition to that. Eddie.
[00:31:37] Speaker C: So in person policy is also discriminatory and we've seen it with our students as well. The moment we allow the opportunity for remote students to join our classes over zoom, suddenly we're seeing students from different financial backgrounds, we're seeing students who already have families, we're seeing students with difficult circumstances, we're seeing neurodiverse students, we're seeing people with disabilities. So if you force people to go to the office, it's discriminating against a huge part of population. And the biggest impact is not only on people with disabilities, but also women because they still carry the majority of the household chores. And what the numbers are showing that many women simply if they're forced to go back to the office, they choose to quit their jobs and spend their time taking care of families full time. So that's a really shift in the wrong direction that needs to be course corrected.
[00:32:42] Speaker B: Can I just make one comment too, which is that there obviously can be challenges with having somebody that's just entering the workforce, let's say working from home for the first time. We have a younger demographic at Avant Page. But going back to Liam's point is if you create a culture of transparency, you're telling those people from the start, like, hey, you know, we understand that you might struggle to get yourself situated. Maybe you don't have like a private office space and you need to meet with clients like come to us, talk to us. Do you need a desk? Like what, what is your situation, because everybody is adaptable and they want to have the best possible work situation. So creating the space allows them to come to you and say, this is exactly what I need. And then you work and you get there. I promise you'll always get there, but you need to have that open dialogue.
[00:33:39] Speaker A: And, Liam, you had some final thoughts on that?
[00:33:42] Speaker D: Yes. So I just did a piece on the. I was in a piece for the Economist last week on overemployment.
And this is why 83% of managers want everyone back into the office. It is employees that are taking on 2, 4, 6, 8 jobs all at the same time. And they say that they're working a full 40 hours for their employer, but they're actually basically job hacking. And there are posts with people saying, I make $1.6 million a year with five jobs or eight jobs or whatever it might be. And as long as there's that rotten apple in the bushel, there will always be that issue. And you cannot overcome it, in my opinion, without some level of transparency. So inside of our organization, as an example, we consider transparency on both sides, meaning you tell us what you're doing, we can look at your data, and you can also look at ours. So we open up our P and L. Every single meeting inside of our organization is recorded. Anyone can watch any meeting inside of our company. We have a policy of radical transparency, where everyone can get access to all information. And then this magical thing happens, which is the employees actually end up making much better decisions, not because they're more or less intelligent. It's because they have the information advantage that the CEO of the company now has. So it empowers them to be able to make these decisions. And this is Asynchronous Management 101. This is the way that remote companies have run for 20 years before the pandemic. And that's the piece that, when we switched to remote, it was emergency remote work. And no one really understood how to manage remote workers during that transition. And we're still, unfortunately, not learning those lessons.
[00:35:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's happening. I see it all around. I think the saddest thing for me is to see someone who's really talented at the local level, meaning the physical world, but they can't transfer those abilities into the digital world, which is a huge missed opportunity. Because one of the ways in which I found to kind of like, compensate for not having, like, a team physically with me is to get involved locally, right? To volunteer to do different things, to be part of different committees, and also be Part of the conferences that happen in the industry. So the language and localization industry have tons of conferences more than the ones that you can attend. Over 20, I would say that you can actually attend that are on my radar. But we partner up from multilingual with over 45 different physical events. So let's say you are a company and you are in this transition. You came from the physical world, let's say, which has happened to so many people in the language industry and as companies. Some companies are actually right now all physical in one single location in Buenos Aires or Cordova or anywhere around the world. They have a physical office and they require everyone to show up or most people to show up. What do you think that they should do? Let's say that there is an interest and leadership wants to move towards like, okay, let's do remote work properly. What are the things that they should consider immediately?
Anyone?
[00:37:10] Speaker E: I'll take it, please.
Well, I think that.
And Nicole, I'm interested to hear your opinion on this already. I think there's a couple things. One is that what happens with people that join the company and there are those that are already in, you know, like acquired Thailand and those that you are the future acquirers, if you want, or the future talent, I think for future talents of the people that are going to join the company. I think that I've spent a lot of time working on onboarding and I think that a successful onboarding, understanding best practices, understanding the rhythm of the business, understanding the governance around the expectations, understanding about, you know, what is the etiquette with video conferencing like we're doing today and treating it like this is your virtual office. And if you think about it as your virtual office, what is the rigor that you need to have around engagement? So I think that that piece is really essential for those that bring in and then for those that exist. It's just basically it's almost like a change management approach. It's like, how do we switch from what, you know, what the physical.
All the benefits and getting really crisp on what are the advantages of being in person and how you artificially recreate or digitally recreate all the benefits of being. So we used to have a virtual water cooler. What is the virtual variable? So we had a little picture of an avatar of water cooler and everybody would come with their coffee and say, oh my God, the water cooler is broken again today.
[00:39:06] Speaker B: Right.
[00:39:06] Speaker E: I mean we would just make jokes, but it was kind of like recreating something. It was almost like before VR, Right. But we Kind of recreated what it would look like. And then somebody really bad joke, who was a really bad joke today, or you know, tell us the most horrible story you've had with a client. Or just like today is a happy day. What is the best thing that happened? So we would just have like those really moments of candid interaction, but it's actually recreating, it's like doing that change management to bring everybody into the virtual space. And the last thing that I would say about this is that.
So you'll see where my pearls. So this is. I've been working remotely all my life. In the morning when I go to work, I put my pearls on. When I have my pearls on, you know that I'm at work, I work from my house. At the end of the day I take my pearls off. That's my way of saying I'm at work. I had a friend who did something amazing. She get up in the morning, she get dressed, she get out of her house, she walk around the block, walk into her office, and at the end of the day she would get out, come walk around the other way and go back and say, mommy's home. And it was like, it was a way. Basically it's just building that rigor, that governance that you basically recreate. Just like if you peel the onion and said, what are the advantages of being in the same, in being physically there and you artificially or digitally recreate the rigor, the governance and the, the habits to create that virtual space. So those are my two cents.
[00:40:51] Speaker B: I love that. And if I can just comment because I think you touched on something really important for people coming into your organization.
The first 90 days is like your most critical moment to build trust with your employees. If you're selling them the Disney experience and they come into your door and it's the Amazon, you know, warehouse experience, you have lost them and you will never build the trust that's necessary to facilitate a great remote working environment. So that like Sophie was saying, the 30, 60, 90 day plans with really clear expectations that include tools and trainings that will support them. Like Sophie was saying, like, how do you show up for a client meeting? What's expected of you? We have a shout out and warm fuzzy channel. Like, what can you say there? Like, how do you interact? Like as an employee we have a very warm, somewhat informal, but we're also really rigorous culture, right? So where, where do I show up with, you know, more formal rigor and where do I get to be my human self, you know, in this space? Because One of the things I think we're all as human as the human race suffering from in this digital technology, especially AI emergent age, is how do we build communities? Because we now have this virtual space, right, which is one degree removed. And our hearts and our souls really need to connect with people on an intimate level. So yeah, you have to work really hard to create that sort of intimacy when you are one degree removed. But it's possible. And we used to have communities by going into the office and seeing people and you know, you could tell if Sally was having a really bad day and you would check in on her. And maybe Sally now is behind a screen, but if you know that she's got something going on with a family member, like message her, you know, it's kind of, I hate when people think that you have to have these complex systems in place. It's really just following your gut and looking at somebody as if they're human and creating a sort of infrastructure around that that builds community and trust and don't over complicate it. Just, just reach out. Just be a friend, you know, and be professional and hold people to expectations. That's the best thing that you can do for your company and for them as well. Be clear about your expectations. People thrive with boundaries. It's like kids, you know, if you tell them this is where you can play, like this is where it's safe for you to play, then they will have an excellent time playing right there, you know.
But you have to be clear.
And I'm not comparing like employees to kids. Sorry if it's an analogy there we're.
[00:43:38] Speaker A: Not going to dig deeper into.
Don't worry.
[00:43:42] Speaker C: If I may add on the boundaries, that's so critical and I'm seeing and hearing so many managers now blur the boundaries and expect employees to be on 24, 7, so. And I'm hearing more and more accounts of that. So it's starting to get really bad. When I was managing a remote team that we were in nine different time zones so it was impossible to coordinate everyone. But I went out of my way to set very clear boundaries.
We had to be a little flexible, but I said, and I really kept the rule with couple of exceptions that were negotiated. I will never bother you anywhere outside of 8 to 8. So 8am to 8pm your local time. Within that time you structure your work, however it works for you. And we'll try to do our one on ones and we'll try to do our team meetings, but I don't want you to bug me. Outside of work hours, I will never bug you. Outside of work hours, I will never expect you to work over the weekend. I will never bother you and expect you to work during your vacations. But I expect the same courtesy from you. And one of my team members from Japan actually called me on my Saturday, her Sunday. I'm like, satomi, son, we're not going to talk today unless there is a big emergency and she just wanted to talk about some project. I'm like, no, we can have a 101 on Monday or Tuesday morning and we can talk about this, but this is not critical and we're not going to be working on the weekends. And unfortunately, I've been seeing that this is being blurred and managers are taking advantage of the kind of guilt that some of the remote employees are feeling. And so they're pushing boundaries. And so it's very important for both the managers and the employees to set very strict boundaries and keep to them.
[00:45:32] Speaker A: Thank you. And I had a question inspired by what Nicole was mentioning, said like, it's critical to build communities. And I was going to ask Liam, Liam, could you tell us the million dollar answer to how do we build communities in remote environments? Is it even possible to build communities in remote environment? And I know the answers.
[00:45:54] Speaker D: My perspective is community is not about pizza Thursdays or whether you get a cake on your birthday. It's about the mission, vision and values of the company and whether or not people align to that. So that is before anything else.
Do your team members believe in what you're doing and are excited about actually making that change in the world? I think the executive team's primary mission is to communicate how that change is occurring. As an example, inside of our companies, our mission is to empower the world's transition towards remote work. Got really exciting in 2020. Lots of changes.
We were responsible for all of them, by the way, and everyone was really excited about all of the changes that we were making. But it's once you tie people into that, then it's not about whether or not you are having these small, particular small issues because you're willing to go through a bunch of crap to be able to focus on being passionate about that mission. And so that's like the core, core tenant that I think no one really addresses. So the way that I test for that when I talk to other companies is I'll come into a company retreat. So most remote companies have in person retreats. So once a year all the employees come to one particular location and I show up and I say, okay, Everyone get a piece of paper out.
What is the mission of the company? Write it down.
What is the vision of the company?
You have four values, right? What are the four values? Write them down. Don't look at your, you know, don't look at your buddy's paper. And then I collect them all, and then I go to the CEO and I'm like, so 16% of your team members knew what the mission of the company was. I can't help you.
You need to address that before we address anything else. And I would highly suggest that if you're running a company right now, do exactly the same thing for us. I measure that every single year. Now, the team kind of knows, unfortunately, that it's coming. I try to sneak it up on them from time to time, but we're at about 87%, so. And we were at about 65% when we started. So I would say anywhere within that range is very, very good. Anything below 50%, your business is in trouble because they just don't care about what you do. They're there for a check.
[00:48:24] Speaker B: Totally.
[00:48:25] Speaker E: I think what you're saying. I'm sorry, go, go, go. No, Well, I think what you're saying is that, and I've experienced exactly the same thing, is that when individuals are not purpose driven or then you, you lose the productivity, you lose the commitment, you lose the passion. When you are financially, when you are transactionally driven, that is where you know, somebody comes in, gives them more money, they're gone. And so that's, it's, it's the purpose thing that I love the way you talk about it, where once you internalize that purpose, then you become part of the furniture, so to speak. Right. You're in the web into the company.
[00:49:07] Speaker D: Yeah. I'll give you one other little trick that we implement, which is we give an opposite question for the talent fit. So we'll ask candidates, we'll say we really like remote work, but we think it's really important that you come into the office from time to time.
And then we find out what they say and if they disagree with us. Exactly the right talent fit.
So everyone, if I say, like, do you like, you know, do you like hot dogs? Everyone will say yes, even though maybe they don't. Right. You need to be able to figure out specifically what the opposite question to that is, because if someone disagrees with you in an interview to align directly with your mission, that's the person that you want. And we are laser focused on trying to figure out people that have drank the Kool aid with us, we really just consider ourselves a cult and we are focused on that core thing and we want to find new cult members to recruit. And if you don't, if you can do that, all these other problems just get solved automatically. It's just not even an issue. Right. There is no issue of, oh, could I make sure that, you know, I deserve a raise? Well, you see the P and L, you see our finances, you see our targets. Do you really think that you need a raise? You have all the information available to you. Could we afford this? Right. It just. If you're open and honest with people and they're focused on the mission, it will work. But so few people don't even pay attention to it, which is really frustrating.
[00:50:42] Speaker B: Yeah, it's so true. Get so good at recruiting, it'll save you so much time and energy and people will be happy.
[00:50:50] Speaker E: Do you know what I ask people when I recruit? The first thing, just to throw them off. I'm like, what's your superpower?
[00:51:00] Speaker B: My favorite question that we always ask is, who's the most important person in your life? And what values of theirs do you either have or wish you had? Because it shows a lot about the core, what's at the core of somebody, you know?
[00:51:15] Speaker A: Very, very interesting. Thank you so much. And I see a few of those that are watching live that like the idea of the cult. Liam. So you might have a few more cult members come on over, apply here and there. They might know some of the tricks of the questions. But great, great questions, great insights. We might have an extra couple of minutes. I know everyone is very, very busy. If you have any questions, please put them in the comments here. But right before we go, are there any final thoughts that you'd like to share? Any of you, in any order?
[00:51:54] Speaker E: The only thing I would say, and I think we touched on this a little bit, it really, it boils down to the human experience. And I think that if each. If individuals that are in this environment, whether you're in leadership or your talent, make sure that you drive it from a place of authenticity and human centricity. Meaning, you know, I'm going to use a silly analogy, which is kind of a cliche, you know, like, put your oxygen mask on first and take care of yourself. Make sure that you're doing, you know, purpose driven work, that you take care of your health, you take care of your family, you have your priorities straight, and if you are in your best place, in your best shape, you're going to give your best work. So I Think that especially in remote work, just make sure that you prioritize things properly and don't compromise. That would be at least for talent. That's. And then for leadership. Also make sure that you're. Whether the cult that you create or the firm that you. Or the environment that you create, it's really human centric because we're so, you know, we rely so much on technology. When we think about remote. We want to make sure that we don't forget the human in. In the mix of it all for the sake of productivity. That's my only. My last parting comment.
[00:53:18] Speaker B: Yeah. And I'll just piggyback off of that. We are a beautiful, multicultural, global industry that is built to enable and foster human connection. So let's not forget that in our places of work, because what a privilege that we get to work in this industry, you know, and that we get to be passionate about what we do. So just take care of your people. It's. It'll pay you back in folds. So.
[00:53:48] Speaker A: Yeah. And we have a. We have a question that perhaps could help us also. Guys, final thoughts. Amir talks about research that show how much workplace learning happens through social interactions.
Of course, we might have to break that down a little bit more. But how does the absence of social interaction, I guess the core question in absence in remote work impact this? What might be some ways in which we could overcome those? I love yearly team retreats. I love that. I love the idea of team retreats. I really, really like it. I'd rather spend three, four or five days with the team once a year than being with them the entire year. Nothing against my team members. I just do a lot of great work by myself as well. But I don't know if anyone wants to take a stab at that question.
[00:54:40] Speaker D: I'd taken that one. In two weeks, we're going to the Bahamas. We're going to Atlantis for seven days. It's going to be awesome. We're all going to go on all those water slides in Atlantis and it costs us a lot of money to be able to do that.
I think the budget there is probably close to half a million dollars, which is a lot of money for us. But we're very happy to continue to spend that money because for us, that's really the positive ROI that we have. It's a conference about the company, really that we get to do every single year. And people love it. They look forward to it. It's a huge company perk. We usually try to fly people to really interesting places. We went to Dubai the previous year, the year before that we went to Bali. The year before that I think we went to Bangkok. So it's just one of those things that people really love and it's fundamental to our culture.
So it is something that I would probably say, yes, social interactions are important for other forms of learning. But we're very mindful of that and we actually try to stack it all. I have a very in depth video where on our YouTube channel where I go through everything that we did, the full P and L of how we do our company retreat and also all the things that we did to prepare for it. Because there's a huge team that also does that lift every single year. One full quarter of a team of three people is just to do that company retreat.
[00:56:07] Speaker A: Wow, that's incredible.
[00:56:09] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:56:09] Speaker B: And I think if you're not in.
Yeah, right. That's what I was going to say too is if you don't have the resources.
Oh, sorry.
I think there's a little bit of a delay.
[00:56:22] Speaker A: You go first, Nicole, and then. And then Eva.
[00:56:25] Speaker B: Oh, okay. I'm so sorry. Yeah, I was just going to say that if you. We've had on the budget to do a big company retreat every year and it's just never. It's been cost prohibitive for us to do that. But what we have done is like micro opportunities for people to meet. So if there's like a little bit of a hub, it's a lot more cost effective if you can just throw up a co working space or get a hotel conference room for a little while and something that we're exploring for next year because we're continuing to onboard a lot of new employees. And like this person had commented, training can be really effective when you're sitting side by side with somebody. So when we're bringing in a huge influx of people, we're going to look to potentially have training events for new employees because it's also a vote of confidence to say you're new, but we want to make sure that we take care of you. So much so that we'll fly you an hour here or we'll pay for a hotel room here and you get to meet your colleagues and really learn them. Right. So yeah, I think it's always good to look for opportunities and I'm so sorry that I cut you off. Eva, go ahead.
[00:57:34] Speaker C: No worries.
It happens with online spaces. So what I wanted to add is you can approach learning system. You have to literally focus on that. We set up different channels of how we constantly communicate with each other. We have a shared team space. I'm forwarding articles and research to my colleagues all the time. We never skip our team meetings. And I extended our team meetings by extra half an hour to make sure everybody has a chance to contribute and ask questions with a shared agenda ahead of time. And I having my new colleagues shadow the more experienced colleagues. And with a three part structure where we have a plan of what we want to learn, what we want to get from the shadowing, then we do the actual shadowing, and then we have something like a postmortem where we analyze what's been learned and all of that is documented. And now I've asked our newer colleagues to create a shared training document. Whenever they find new information about anything, they share it with the rest of the team so that we can learn from each other. Even though we overlap in the office for maybe just a few hours here and there, there are some colleagues of mine that I only see once or twice a semester. And we still make it work because we make it a point to over communicate, to overshare, to focus on this as a very important part of our jobs.
[00:59:03] Speaker A: That's fantastic. Thank you, Eva.
And I know we are past the time. If you have to go any of our panelists, I sincerely apologize. But if you have some time to stay, that'd be great. Nina Kalinina, maybe Sophie, you can help us with this because you already gave us some advice on how to keep home and work separate. Because working from home makes it hard to tell when work ends and when life begins. I've heard of this concept of world life integration, which is just part of what you do. But yeah, it's good to have boundaries, right?
[00:59:34] Speaker E: Absolutely. And that's what Nicole was talking about earlier, is that those boundaries are very important. In the same way that or you, Eva, were, you know, just getting really. Be very transparent about, especially when you work from home.
With my family, with my partner, with my children, I make sure that they know. So in my own ecosystem, you know, when I'm in the office, I'm in the office and I'm. My little office but have my pearls on. I'm working. Right. And so don't barge in.
[01:00:11] Speaker C: Wow.
[01:00:11] Speaker E: You know, we don't have lettuce. Well, you know, not, not now. Right. So. And of course, you know, life happens. So but, but I'm very crisp and very clear about what the boundaries are now with. So you. I think that it's, it's, it's a.
It has to come from you. You have to make your Ecosystem a know and understand what your boundaries are. Same thing with, I mean we all have phones, right? And so the, the Pavlovian response that we have, it beeps we look or just turn it off. Just make sure that you don't get distracted. So you need to have that rigor. And also for the outside world, you inform I have an out of office message that kicks in at 5 o'clock because I start working at 6:30 or 7am in the morning. By 5 I'm fried, right? And if I think that I can be productive past five, forget. I'm going to give you, you know, half baked cake and then I'm going to ask you if it's delicious and you're going to say no, right? Or, or you're too polite to say it's not. And so with work it's exactly the same thing and it's just like being very and don't be afraid, tell your manager and say you know what, I'll get back to you tomorrow at 8am and they said well I need it tonight. And I said well you know, I don't think that's going to work.
And the more boundaries you have, the more authority you have in your own world. And I don't mean that you have to be authoritarian. It's like you need to own your space. And if you start, if it starts to spill, what's going to happen is that you're going to grow resentful. You're also going to train others to expect that you, they say jump and you say hi and pretty soon you're just going to not going to be able to fold the laundry with there with your kids or just do their homework or, or even if you don't have children, walk the dog. The dog is going to sit there looking at you and say excuse me, I need to go potty. I don't know but do you know what I mean? It's like you really need to have, you need to be the driver and don't be afraid to set those boundaries. From the beginning, you know we talked about onboarding from the beginning. Say you know what, I just put it on my email and one of the things you can do I said I know that my sometimes my out of office says I know that I am working.
These are the hours that I prefer to work. I do not expect to get back to me until you is these are in your working hours. I don't want because I manage large teams. I don't want them to feel that they need to Respond to me because I send an email at 1am so you just get those are the. Just put those guardrails in place, but don't be afraid. Even if it's your first job, just set the expectation. Otherwise it's like it's training people to say, oh God, I can't talk to Liam at 6:00. I'll just send him a message or you'll have a delayed message that comes afterwards because liam said after 5:30, I'm not responding.
[01:03:23] Speaker A: So thank you, thank you. And of course we've gotten a lot of insights from you today. I want to thank you for being part of Lang Talent. We will do this next year again. I will give you some time now to say goodbye to everyone and to let them know where they can find you, perhaps how you could be of help. I know that a lot of the content that Liam puts out, for example, is really good for remote work and I use some of that myself with our team. So Nicole, Liam, Eva, Sophie, please say the goodbyes to these amazing people that have been listening to us and anything else you want to.
[01:04:00] Speaker B: I'll start. Thank you so much for conducting this session, Andy. It was a great pleasure to be a part of it with these amazing panelists.
You can find me on LinkedIn with the name that you see here. Avant Page is hiring a lot, so if you're interested in working with us, check out our open roles. And I'm always here to serve the community and our industry, so please feel free to message me at any point in time.
[01:04:24] Speaker A: Thank you, Nicole.
[01:04:26] Speaker D: Mr. Liam, you can find
[email protected] if you're interested in getting tickets there. And also we open source all of our talks. So all the talks are available on YouTube.com running remote. So if you want to learn the newest and coolest strategies on how to build and scale remote teams, go fund everything there. And I am on LinkedIn but I don't look at it. So I saw a couple people joining, I think, or trying to follow me on there. It's probably not the best place. YouTube is a better spot.
[01:05:00] Speaker A: Thank you, Liam. And next year the Running Remote Conference is going to be in Texas, right?
[01:05:05] Speaker D: Austin, Texas, April 28th, 29th and 30th, which we're very excited about.
[01:05:11] Speaker A: I haven't been there for a bunch of years. I might make it this year. I will talk to you and Igor about it. Thank you so much for making it.
[01:05:19] Speaker C: Liam, Eva, thank you, Eddie for inviting me. Thank you to my fellow panelists for great insights I am on LinkedIn and I do check it almost every day. So that's the easiest way how to reach out to me because I have six email addresses and things sometimes get lost. So best way is always LinkedIn and I'm happy to help with any, any questions you might have.
[01:05:46] Speaker A: All right. And last but not least, Ms. Sophie. How are you? Thank you.
[01:05:50] Speaker E: Good. So I do check LinkedIn actually. I train people on optimizing their LinkedIn profile and how to leverage LinkedIn. I stop people on LinkedIn. So yes, reach out to me.
[01:06:05] Speaker D: I'll email you later, Sophie, please.
[01:06:07] Speaker B: Same here.
[01:06:09] Speaker E: I stop and I tell people, you know, I stalk you.
There's a great tool called Crystal Knows also that gives you a lot of information about people and it's totally legit. It's all out there. But anyway, yeah, if you need, if you're interested in reaching out to me or want to have, you know, some further chat, I'm, I'm happy and LinkedIn is good. I'm just going to reach out to Liam on LinkedIn. I'm just teasing you, Liam.
[01:06:40] Speaker A: All right, thank you everyone. Our amazing speakers. Thank you Camila. Also for being back in the pre production post during and post production. Everyone who is attending this event, I want to remind you of a few things as our panelists exited. Thank you so much everyone. Remember that this content will be available on our website website multilingual.com lang talent. You'll also be able to find this content on YouTube and Spotify as Lang Talent. We will send out an email to everyone who has attended this event.
