WLP342 Location and Schedule: Defining Remote Work in Your Organisation
In this episode, Valentina Thörner talks about the importance of defining what “remote” means in an organisation, particularly around the dimensions of time and location.
Today’s guest is Valentina Thorner, known as the “Empress of Remote”.
She has “one leg in the future of work/distributed team management area - and there she calls herself the “Empress of Remote”, and she has another leg in product management and product leadership - so there she is the “Empress of Product”.”
Valentina wears a tiara in public appearances (she wore one for the recording, even though it’s audio only!). When asked about why, she said:
“Actually, the tiara was first. The nickname was second. In the “before times”, la ong time ago, I did a lot of public speaking, and as I was speaking a lot in places like Amsterdam I wasn't the only blonde lady there. So because I'm not really good at recognizing or remembering faces, I would always wear the tiara on stage and then tell the audience: “if you have any additional questions, find the lady with the tiara”, because that's easy to remember.
And then at one conference, a colleague told me, “I bet you would never go to a conference with a tiara if you are not a speaker”. And I said, “Hold my gin tonic”.
I went to the next conference with my tiara without being a speaker. I made so many amazing connections - because what happens is that the tiara, it takes a little bit of this intimidation away, because I'm clearly a person who doesn't take herself too seriously. So lots of people came up and were like, oh, is this a real tiara? Or oh, I love the sparkle.
And this started a lot of interesting conversations. Because I'm actually kind of introverted, it takes a lot of energy for me to walk up to someone else, but if they walk up to me and I just have to react, that's perfect. So I kind of figured out, oh, this is my little networking hack. And that's how it all started.”
(Pilar wishes she’d thought of this herself, she also finds it difficult to approach people and prefers it when people introduce themselves to her.)
Valentina Thörner
06.45 MINS
Some of the work that Valentina does is help organisations to put in the processes that can help them to create the products they want to create. The works sits at the intersection between product leadership, operations, people operations. She’s realised that many organisations say, “oh yeah, we are remote”, but when you look into it, you realise that they have a very specific policy where people can work from home, and they can work from outside the home for up to one week a month, but it can only be outside the national territory for three weeks, a year or whatever. We are putting lots of concepts under the umbrella of “remote” and we are not doing ourselves a service with that from a company point of view.
So, the question is, what do you actually mean with “remote”?
“Location is only one of the dimensions. Where can your people work? And do you have any rules about where they work? Like maybe you have simply the rule that the salespeople should not have their negotiations in a coffee shop. Yeah, not because you don't want them to work in a coffee shop, but because there is information that's being transmitted that might be sensitive. And you wouldn't want to have your HR people having salary negotiations in a coffee shop either. And then the other aspect is actually when does the work happen? It's kind of the time of the timing when it happens. And it's very different when you say, okay, we do nine to five or we do flex time, come in between nine and eleven, but then you can leave between three and five or whatever. Or you can say do whatever you want.
And the thing is, one is not better than the other. For example, for myself, I have twins. They are seven. They go to school. I very much love when my clients want to work between 09:00 A.m. And 05:00 p.m.. Because then the kids are in school while for somebody who maybe, I don't know, loves to go surfing and wherever they live, the best waves are between (I’ve no idea about surfing) between 02:00 p.m. And 06:00 P.m.. So maybe they want to work really early in the morning or only late at night. And so they would not be a fit for the same type of work or the same role that I am a fit for, even if we had the same abilities or the same skills. Because we have very different needs in terms of what we expect from a workplace. So from a company point of view, if you can really define what is the location for you, what do you mean by the location and what do you mean by the time frame that can help you with hiring, that can help you with attracting the right talent, that actually aligns with what you're trying to do.
And it also really helps the people, ops people, because suddenly you have clear guidelines and when somebody asks, hey, can I work from Bali? Then you can tell them you can, but you need to stay within our time zone because we have the clear mandate that everything needs to happen with an overlap of these types of hours, et cetera. And so you stop only solving for edge cases. You have a very clear policy that's easily understandable and people can opt into that and if they don't, well, maybe you're just not a fit as a company.
For a lot of companies this is really hard. Like when I tell them, you can decide. You can say “We only hire people within, eg Germany because we really believe in the pension system and the health system and in the twelve months of maternity leave. And that's why we only do Germany because we want to make sure that all of our employees have the same benefits that are being paid for by the state and we can't fund those privately” and that is fine. Of course people are going to complain, but there's always somebody who complains and I think it's really important that companies actually see this also as a value proposition. Like these are our values, these are not some arbitrary rules that we picked out of the air, but we actually thought about this and this is why we're doing what we're doing.”
That’s what Valentina means by “the workplace narrative”, how an organisation talks about how work happens.
18.50 MINS
Talking about asynchronous work, what kind of work and which kind of teams are more suited to it?
“Customer support and sales cannot be async (unless you have a very specific customer), but your typical customer support needs to be there when your customer is there. And as soon as you're going into scheduling, like if you have 24/7 chat support, you need to make sure that 24/7 somebody is sitting at the other side of the computer and can answer the customers, which means you very likely will have shifts. So traditionally there would be three eight hour shifts in a day and then maybe you have people who do the graveyard shift which is the one that goes through the middle of the night. Or maybe you have like a follow the sun system where you have one center in Europe, one in Asia and one in the US. Or like the Latin America US time zones and that you rotate around the globe but you still need people to be at their computer at a specific time.
And then there are other people who are like everybody signs themselves up for when they are available and we shuffle them and tell them when they need to be at their computer. But there's still kind of implementation from above that tells you you need to work at this time because in customer support and also in sales, anything that is really customer facing the input kind of correlates with the output in terms of time. You cannot offer 4 hours of customer support in 3 hours. Yeah, like there's no optimization that can make that happen. You can use Chat bots, you can use AI to kind of do more in those 4 hours but those 4 hours somebody needs to be there.
And then on the other extreme development work, if you have really good practice in terms of writing down the scope, writing down what's exactly needed so everything where the communication can happen in writing lends itself for async creative work as well. If these creative people are fine not having those little group huddles where they can just put ideas in front of other people and discuss them.
And that brings us to another kind of complication of the entire matter. Some people think in writing. I'm one of those people. I write things down and that helps me to structure my brain and I get new insights by writing down what I already know because it kind of helps me to connect the dots. Now there are other people who actually think through like verbally. They have to explain what's in their brain to somebody and then they make very similar connections to those I do in writing but they do it verbally. For these verbal thinkers, for lack of a better word, the office is better because there are lots of people available whom you can just kind of use as your canvas to think through the problems that you have. While for me, obviously it's much better to be in a kind of async company or a company that puts value into discussing things in a Google Doc. Yes, because that's the way I think and as a company you probably need both. I think there are very few companies who are 100% async, especially nowadays where it's so easy to actually have a video call.
Like some companies, for example, Automattic, the WordPress people. They used to be completely async when they were created because at the very beginning there wasn't even Skype. So basically they were happy that they didn't have to send carrier pigeons with letters. But nowadays everybody has at least a little bit of social contact. But it's like, how can you put these? Whom are you optimising for in your company? Whom are you optimising based on different functions? And how can you make sure that you don't accidentally forget a part of the population? Some people don't want to be async. Some people actually think better when they do it in person or like in person, as in so by telling them, oh, you just have to learn how to write better documents. That's like when we told back in the day, people need to be more extroverted to be successful in business. How can we actually incorporate these people and not alienate them? Because we need their brains as well, even though they may structure things differently than ourselves or specifically because they are structuring them differently than ourselves.
What I'm mostly seeing is there are organisations who take this very seriously, who get somebody like me in to review everything or who appoint ahead of remote internally and really look at everything and see how we can work better together. And those are far and few in between. And then most companies are kind of muddling through, they're kind of okay, we would actually like to get everybody back to nine to five working from the office because at least we kind of thought we knew what we were doing, but we can't because we told them to come back and they basically ignored us. And there's nothing we can do to enforce this, especially in the tech industry. They just go to another company that allows work from home. and there's that and getting rid of 70% of your company from one day to the other.
24.00 MINS
Valentina has noticed that whereas a few companies are defining how they work remotely and finding out the ways to support their employees best, there is very little improvement.
So what I've seen actually happening in a lot of those companies is that there are certain pockets within the company where somebody is really passionate about making this work because they are listening to your podcast, because they've stumbled over the Remote How Institute or whatever. There are different points where they're like oh, there is a different way, let me learn more about this.
If you're an individual contributor, you don't have that much impact on company policies than if you're for example, a team lead or if you're the head of HR. But you can start to experiment. It can start with little things like I like starting meetings at five minutes past the hour, because everybody has meetings from top of the hour to top of the hour. And in too many companies these meetings actually start at nine and then they finish when you collapse.
So by giving these five minutes, I know that I'm giving the other person a bio break opportunity and to refill their coffee. And it's these little experiments that then sometimes spread through the company.”
These kind of experiments show that you can start playing with time. It’s brining back the conversation about scheduling work and communication. “We've always done it like this, but look, now we're just going to do it this little bit differently and that can send out a very strong signal that we can start to shift.”
Because remote work is not just about location, but also about playing with time.
Pilar adds: “Learning and development departments could have a much better time and have a much more impact if they facilitated the spread of the learning of these experiments. So instead of bringing in a programme on how to lead your remote team, actually just facilitate this learning by doing, pick a couple of people, get some working out loud practices out there and support those people.”
39.40MINS
Valentina writes regularly about remote work in her newsletter. She says, “It’s a very personal newsletter, usually about remote processes and about product. Currently I'm very deep in a project on product excellence, which is close to product operations, like setting up how a product can be better, and collaborating in a big organisation. A lot of the things that I'm thinking through actually end up in the newsletter because obviously, I think in writing.”
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