- Collaboration Superpowers
- Work Together Anywhere
- Butter
- Remote working success kit
- Running Remote
- Lisette Sutherland on LinkedIn
Transcript:
Jeanna: Hey everyone. Welcome to Remotely Cultured. I'm your host, Jeanna calling in from Roatan, Honduras, where I run FPS and host this podcast. This episode is brought to you by First Page Strategy. At FPS, we use data and big ideas to produce exponential growth for PLG SaaS brands who want to work with a non-traditional agency to quickly scale their marketing team and revenue. For example, in one year, we've grown a client's total revenue 197%. Their organic revenue from SEO by 300% and their paid revenue by over 1,000%. We also do it by working remote first and async with your brand, unlike most other agencies. If you're a PLG SaaS company and need to hit your 2024 high growth goals or launch a new SEO strategy, check us out at firstpagestrategy.com. All right, today with us, we have Lisette Sutherland on the podcast. Lisette is the Director of Collaboration Superpowers, a company that helps people work together from anywhere through online workshops. She is the author of the Work Together Anywhere Handbook, the host of a podcast featuring interviews with remote working experts and a facilitator of workshops on a variety of remote work topics. Welcome, Lisette. Thanks for calling into Remotely Cultured today. Where are you from and where are you sitting?
Lisette: Oh yeah, that's always an interesting question with the global world. I would say, I was born and sort of half raised in Germany and then moved to the United States to Colorado and finished being raised there. And then as soon as I could, I went back to the Netherlands. So I now live in the Netherlands. I feel like a home agent. I kind of came back close to where I started.
Jeanna: Yeah. I believe we all have a place that our hearts want to nest. And some people just have to figure out where that place is sometimes. I had to figure that out.
Lisette: For sure.
Jeanna: Cool. Well, tell us a little bit about the Netherlands. You're our first guest calling in from the Netherlands. There's got to be listeners who have never been there before. I have had the pleasure of going there once when I was 20. But can you tell us a little bit about the culture, what it's like to work remote in the Netherlands?
Lisette: So a couple of interesting things about the Netherlands, of course, you know, in not regard to remote work, I would say the interesting things here is very much a bicycle culture. So that is unique to other places in the world. Every person here, like the statistics say, everybody has two and a half bicycles. And even for me and my family, that is true. I also have two and a half. And I say half because there's like a loaner bike for when friends come over and things like that. So there's like, you know, but in any case, it's really true. So that is lovely. The other thing that is distinct about two other cultural things that are distinct about the Netherlands is that people are very direct. And so what you see is what you get. And as an American, that was difficult to get used to, because I'm used to being a little bit more passive and positive and going around the issue. So I had to really learn that, you know, the punch in the face directness, you had to learn how to take it, you know, that it wasn't rude, that it was just direct. And so that's an interesting one to learn. And then the other one is that they have here, the way that they make decisions here, they call it the polder model. So that means that everybody gets the say and they try to come up with consensus in the group. So whereas in other cultures, it might be the director or the leader that makes the decisions here, things are done more by consensus. And that's just a cultural thing. So if you're working with Dutch people, those are culturally, those are good things to know about.
Jeanna: Yeah. Amazing. I like that. I like the group decision-making. It should be, I like to follow that sort of process it at my company myself. I don't feel like it should be a dictatorship, but just because I own the company, I'm the one making all the decisions, right? When you hire good people who are smart, who know things you don't know, they're sitting in the room for a reason. So it makes sense that there should be a group decisions on these types of things. That's really cool. I love that.
Lisette: Indeed, indeed. You bring up one thing though, that in remote teams, decision-making can be really difficult because sometimes the hierarchy is not obvious or it's not wanted. Like in your situation, you want people to sort of step up to the plate and not treat you as the ultimate CEO. Maybe I'm just, but yeah, right. You want people to have all the input. One of the techniques that we use in the remote world is by actually there's a practice called delegation poker where you can assign levels of delegation depending on what the task is. So for instance, like hiring, who is, does the director or the leader hire or is it the team members that also have a say in who gets hired? Like there's all these decision-making areas of a company where it's unclear. So for my first remote example, finally, I'll just say that in remote teams making those decision-making areas very clear. It's so useful. When I worked for Management 3 .0, one of the rules that they had there was if the cost of something that you wanted to buy was less than 500 euros, you didn't have to ask permission. You could just buy it, but you had to submit the receipt until it was transparent. You couldn't just buy things for yourself. So those kinds of things, you don't have to go back to anybody ask or create unnecessary meetings or emails. You have the prime directive there of this is what's allowed. It made it so much easier. And then all the years I worked there, nobody violated that. Nobody took advantage of it, not once. You know.
Jeanna: Right. Following the rules. Well, let's jump right in it. Since we're here to talk about remote and working the culture of remote inside of tech and SaaS companies. Like when you're saying that sometimes it's hard to understand hierarchy or delegation in a remote team, what's the way to solve that?
Lisette: To me, many of the problems that we have when we go remote can be solved through various methods of transparency. So whereas in the office, we're able to see what people are doing and you sort of get a sense of the vibe. When we go remote, we have to create transparency in new ways. Some ways may include like the tools, like there's all kinds of virtual offices where we can literally work together in the same room in a browser, right? Where it simulates the office feeling. There's other concepts like working out loud and making our work visible to each other. There's other things like creating an agreement for how to work together. There's all these different ways of making things visible. And it's really good to just recognize that these are two mediums of work. We keep thinking about it as like, it's all work. And I'm like, no, it's two mediums, like in-person. It's like television versus radio. Right. You've got these broadcasting meetings, but you design content for each one differently. You would never do a radio show on television. Like it just doesn't, it just doesn't land. So the same is true with remote and in-person.
Jeanna: Yeah, I strongly agree with that. It is something I often talk about probably a little bit like a broken record on this podcast is that all of these companies that are trying to, you know, maybe they went remote, quote unquote, went remote during the pandemic. And then they say, oh, it didn't work for us. People feel disconnected. They're unhappy. They want to be back in the office, whatever it is. They're trying to make everybody go back. I think it's because what they did was just take the way that they work in the office and stick everybody at home and then expect things to go the same way without having prescribed ways of working, prescribed ways of communicating the right tech stack to support that all of that, right? So.
Lisette: Absolutely. Training. And not to mention that working at home, locked in your home during a pandemic is not the same thing as having the freedom to work where you are most productive. And I am for sure not anti-office by any means. I think that if people want to work in the office, if they, if companies want people in the office, it's all good. What I don't like is the mandate.
Jeanna: Yeah.
Lisette: The mandates of you must be here now. I don't understand that. They don't make sense to me. And honestly, I don't think they're gonna last.
Jeanna: No, for sure.
Lisette: Mark my words, like in 10 years we'll look back and maybe it'll be like, oh, that was so wrong.
Jeanna: No, I don't think so. All I see and hear, you know, from someone that's running an agency and where we hired upwards to 15 to 20 people last year, knew lots of interviewing, lots of recruiting. We're seeing people come from big companies that in one back in the day, a small boutique agency like mine would not have been able to touch or recruit that kind of talent from big companies. But it was because people talent, very talented people are running away from companies that are mandating back in the office. So I think that they're gonna lose a lot of talent in terms of who you're able to recruit into your company. And we're kind of seeing that right with like some of these like fake, we work remote job postings that I keep seeing talked about on LinkedIn where people say we work remote and it's like one month a year and you have to be in the office Monday through Thursday and maybe Friday half days once a month you can work remote kind of thing but they're like claiming they work remote. But what do you think is behind the mandating of employees back in the office?
Lisette: Well, you know, uh, I mean, my first reaction is real estate agents who don't want to lose their buildings. I think, you know, so I think, I mean, you know, all joking aside there, that is a big thing there. There is a lot of money in real estate and a lot of money in office buildings. So I can imagine that there's some panic there, you know, downtown areas are also suffering because people are not coming down into a place anymore. But, um, what was the question again? I just, yeah, I have too many thoughts at once.
Jeanna: What do you think is driving leaders to mandate employees to go back to the office?
Lisette: Right, so when I talk to leaders, the three biggest things that they're saying is, one, people are disappearing. Two, the culture is suffering. And three, productivity is down. Those are the three things. And I think that that's what they're actually seeing. I think in a lot of cases, companies are seeing productivity go down and people are disappearing and it's a bit chaos. Then the natural tendency is like, okay, bring everybody back because it was working so good before. And I think it wasn't actually working that well before. If we really look back, we still had all of these problems. So it's a knee jerk reaction. The problem is, is that people have tasted freedom and have had the chance to design their lives around the things that they love the most. I mean, you know, we were doing this for three years. So it's really hard to put that toothpaste back in the tube.
Jeanna: Right. Yeah. Did you think there's a way to go back to the office or have this kind of hybrid model without going back to what office culture was like pre-pandemic?
Lisette: 100%. In fact, one of my talks, my most popular talk is called, If You Go Back to the Office, Don't Go Backwards in Time. Because, yeah, we can't, first of all, work has fundamentally changed from pre -pandemic to where we are now. I mean, it's just fundamentally changed. So we can't, simply can't go back to the way it was before. And also many of us don't want to. So it's gonna be interesting to see what shakes out. There's a real tension playing out. And again, I'm not anti-office, but I am pro flexibility. So the key to that is really, you know, training, getting people to create more transparency, having the intentional processes in place, yeah, learning the new medium.
Jeanna: I think it's really, you know, what do you think about the resolution? I think these companies, if they hired a, is there a chief remote officer? Is there a director of remote work that is there to understand how to improve these things? How to write the processes? How to develop the software, the documentation, the Slack groups, like the ways of working that kind of make people productive and make them connected, working on the culture, right? Like, do you think that they would be able to move away from wanting everybody back in the office if that was the way they approached it?
Lisette: That would be a very open-minded approach. I have recommended that numerous times because the head of remote is this new position that sort of manifested itself since the pandemic. And so it's been an interesting one. But, you know, at the office, we had office managers. So it makes perfect sense to have some kind of a remote office manager when we go online. I think it's a, I've in fact, I give a lot of workshops, but I've in fact, thought about going back into a team just to experience, you know, well, just to just to experience like what would the head of remote do. And how could I, maybe I could help develop that role. I've actually been curious about it myself going back in. I would love something like that.
Jeanna: Right. Yeah. I think it's needed. It's just, like you said, it's maybe progressive and a little ahead of the leaders that are just thinking the solution is putting everybody back in office. Let's switch a little bit and think about some of these leaders. Let's think you're a founder, you're maybe a CMO, VP of marketing, you have a team that's all working remote and there's some things that you want to solve for, right? Like maybe one of them is too many meetings and you're not necessarily nailing the async part of your team management. How can leaders think about reducing number of meetings or making meetings more productive and meaningful?
Lisette: I love this question. Matt Mullenweg has, I think, the perfect quote for this. He says, meetings should be rare and excellent. So indeed, you want to reduce the number of meetings you need and improve the ones you're having. And I would say there's a number of techniques for reducing the meetings that you need. The obvious one that everybody's doing is the meeting free days. But I kind of feel like that's a bandaid to a, it's not really solving the problem of having too many meetings. And what we see is that managers will schedule stuff on top of that because they know that everybody's got a meeting free day. So it's like the convenient day to schedule extra stuff. So one of the more creative, one of the more creative solutions that I've heard is somebody created an energy calendar where they color coded all of the meetings that drained their energy. They've made them red on their calendar. The ones that gave them energy, they turned them green and they're like yellow ones were like, well, I could have gone either way. And then at the end of the week, they did something to try to improve those red meetings. Like maybe it was more interaction or just not going or summarizing or recording or whatever it is. And so I thought that was an interesting technique for assessing it. And then the other two that I haven't really, that don't come up a lot are one, virtual co-working. So instead of actually meeting, having sessions where you're both just working or your team. You know, like me and I, you know, you can do it with the video on and the sound off or the video off and the sound on, you know, there's all kinds of different ways and tools and things to configure around that, but that's a nice way of kind of just having time together and letting things bubble up naturally without having this forced agenda. And then the last technique for reducing meetings that I love is office hours. So instead of, you know, recurring meeting, just like, hey, I'm available every Friday. I'm here anyway. You know, if you need to come. If you need to come by, I'm always in the Zoom link or whatever. You know kind of office hours we have. So I think that those are good techniques for reducing the meetings that we have.
Jeanna: I love it. I'll add one more. We do something at FPS. We actually quarterly evaluate our meetings. So we look at everything that's reoccurring, that's popped on the calendar. We talk about, is this needed? Can we actually do this async? Can this be shorter? Why is this sitting? And so we're constantly looking at scheduled meetings that are reoccurring and how we might reduce them. So, cause they, I feel like recurring meetings are always popping on the calendar within a year's timeframe. So making sure that you're going back in those are looking at those being useful. I think it's a good tip also.
Lisette: I love that. You know, why my team, we used to meet on Monday mornings and then we were doing a retrospective and it just came up like randomly that, yeah, it's rough on Mondays to start with a team meeting. Like we're just kind of not all there yet. You know, and so we're like, well, let's experiment. Let's move them to Tuesdays. It changed everything. It was like, everybody was so much happier. It amazing how, how good that small tweak was.
Jeanna: Yeah. I, I am so, I am one of those people. I am a hardcore against Monday morning.
Lisette: Amen. Me too now. I'm just not ready yet.
Jeanna: Yeah, most people, they want to like filter through, like I want to filter through my inbox. I want to create my plan for the week. I want to look at all my tasks. I want to like orient myself in what I want to do. I don't want to get on 9 a.m. and talk about that yet.
Lisette: I'm not ready yet. Yeah. I can't get up early enough to be ready for that 9 a.m. call. It's true.
Jeanna: Yeah. So, you know, you touched on the co-working together virtually or remotely. I saw that you had shared recently on LinkedIn these this idea of productivity power sessions using Pomodoro and Butter. Can you explain that what you've created or what you're doing and what the how that works?
Lisette: Yeah, it was actually I got to give credit to one of my facilitators, Dayo Woodard, brilliant woman. She came up with, I mean, I've been doing virtual co-working for ages, but she started running these sessions and I took them over and all my facilitators give these sessions. So we do them a lot, but they're basically two-hour virtual co-working sessions and people sign up from all over the world. I don't know who they are and they arrive and we spend the first 10 minutes just saying hello and like, what are you here to get done today? What do you need to get done? And then we do three 30 minute focused sessions. So it's 30 minutes, we all turn off the sound and we keep the video on and we just work as much as we can for 30 minutes. Then we take a five minute break, another 30 minute session, five minute break, another 30 minute session. And then we do a 10 minute checkout at the end to see, did you get done what you came, what you needed to get done in that session? And what's amazing is people, you would think that you would be less productive because there's people around, you know, there's like stuff happening and like it's only, you know, it's two hours, but you spend 30 minutes of that two hours and breaks and also talking to other people about what you're doing. Wouldn't it just be better if you just worked for two hours? The thing is, is that the co-working, it forms a kind of focus when other people are watching you work, just like at the office, right? Like you're kind of more, or like if you go to a yoga class, at least for me, or any kind of exercise class, like I work way harder in the class than I would if I just did it to YouTube at home. You know, like just that social pressure around you. So in the same way these virtual co-working sessions really push the productivity. And I am amazed myself every session, how well it works. So I offer these sessions just for free and have people come because I want people to understand and experience what it's like to have something like this so that they can take it back to their teams. So it's just something we started playing with and it got really popular.
Jeanna: Cool. I love that. I was thinking as you're explaining it, you know, I'm a talker. So I would have this inclination to want to like kind of make funny jokes or like talk the whole time. It would be a little bit hard for me, but I guess if everybody's on mute, you know, and people can't hear you anyway, that would go away.
Lisette: We've had a couple of things come up and with the nice thing about the tool that we use, which is Butter, is that people can create breakout rooms and just go have a chat if they need to. If something comes up and you're like, I just got to say something like it's no problem. Just go and have your chat come back at the very. It's a very flexible sort of environment. It is not discouraged to do that. So you'd be welcome to come and chat.
Jeanna: Thank you. And let's touch on Butter a little bit. It's a tool that I've used through running remote mastermind groups. It's a competitor of Zoom or Google Meet. And why are some companies or remote workers gravitating to Butter over the Google Meets and Zooms of the world?
Lisette: One, I think it's easier to use in many ways. It's very simple, simplified, and also because of the agenda building functionality in there. For instance, these co-working sessions, I can set up an agenda once, and then I just reuse that agenda for every single session. Or I also run icebreaker playground sessions where people come and play with different icebreaker styles to see how it affects the group. And with Butter, you can build in these exercises and all these activities within the tool. So you don't have to share your whiteboard and go outside of Butter. Everything's contained within. So as a facilitation tool, it's just brilliant. Zoom, I have nothing against them. I'm a big fan and Google Meet less of a fan, but still a fan. You know, they all have great functionality, but, but you know, it's, it's, they all have these use cases. So some things are better than others. And I just think for, for the sessions that we're doing for the virtual co-working sessions, Butter just works.
Jeanna: Yeah, cool. Well, going back to what you just said stood out to me, you run ice breaking testing sessions, which I love. So let's talk more about that and keep it kind of in the lens of like, let's say you're a VP of marketing or head of product or something and you have a team, you want everybody to get to know each other. Is the, and so is this what this is, is like testing ice breaking sessions for teams?
Lisette: Yes, and there's other reasons why you might want icebreakers. Like for instance, if you're having a session where you really need people to think outside of the box and get creative, what activities can you use to warm people up? To be outside of the box.
Jeanna: Like before a brainstorm.
Lisette: Exactly. Before you brainstorm, like here's an activity. So like for instance, one activity that we did is we gave small groups, different sets of pictures and you had to take three unknown pictures, combine them and create a product. So you would get a cat, a broom and a Snickers bar and like, okay, what product comes from that? So it starts to just generate like a different way of thinking and so that you can bring that into the activity. Now icebreakers, everybody always thinks about getting to know each other because that's the primary, like one of the primary uses of icebreakers. And I think for that as like a tech lead, if you're trying to get to know your team better, one of the best ways is to just start your meetings with a quick question and really just quick, like, you know, like favorite place to go on vacation, favorite food, favorite drink. And what happens over time is that you start to really understand the person in a more well-rounded way, right? It's not just Bob from engineering. It's Bob from engineering who teaches baseball on the weekends and loves to go to Hawaii and his favorite smell is rain. And you know, you start to really understand somebody better. And it's a good way to do it, to build it into everyday activities because I don't know about you, but I'm done with the virtual quiz nights and the pizza parties. Like I'm, I'm tired at the end of the day. Like I just wanna go and do something that's not on the computer.
Jeanna: Right. Yeah. Um, we just, I'm actually in the middle of writing a post right now for my newsletter on LinkedIn about how to do virtual team building activities that won't make your team cringe. So like, yeah, these like three-hour Christmas parties at the end, you know, the virtual Christmas parties or whatever. So we've tested a lot of that at FPS, but I think the key there that you were just saying is that it's culture is intentional. So if you're saying that like you're losing culture as a company in an office because everybody's at home, it's because nobody's like intentionally building those culture pieces into everything you do. And joining calls and having icebreakers is a culture thing that you can put in your day every single week or every single day or throughout how you work. And there's little things like that that I feel like are intentional ways to build a remote culture. What else do you think is a good way to build remote intentional culture?
Lisette: Well, Chase Warrington, who is the Head of Remote for Doist, he had a great quote that I use all the time and he says, culture is based on how you work together and not how you socialize together. So I'm thinking if your culture is suffering, then the problem is, is that the way you work is not intentional enough or is not solidified enough. So I would say I would like get rid of the pizza parties and focus on creating a team agreement together, deciding what's normal behavior, you know, like, what are the boundaries? What does everybody need? And in fact, before even creating a team agreement, I always ask people to create a personal user manual and just tell me, what do I need to know about working with you? What do you want me to know? It doesn't mean you have to put down everything. I don't need to know all your vulnerabilities.
Jeanna: Like I'm a morning person, I'm an evening person. Like I like to check out an hour in the middle of the day to walk my dog. Like little stuff like that, right? Yeah.
Lisette: Yeah. Which you really need remote because you have no visual. So I just need to know those things about working with you. It's all so many misunderstandings because we don't ever, it's not natural to assume positive intent. It's like you kind of like, I didn't get that file. Darn it.
Jeanna: People are distrusting. Yeah. And it's triple. And you and remote for sure. This idea of this, I've seen these, you know, working manuals or some people call them working with me docs crop up over the last year and people talk about them. And I've thought like, this isn't something you should have to do if you're only remote. Like, just because I work with someone in an office doesn't mean I know how they work, what they prefer, like what irks them, what, you know, all of that. And so I feel like working with me docs or whatever the name is that we want to call them, is something that everybody at every company can do, right?
Lisette: Totally agreed. I think a lot of these practices that remote is, yeah, sort of promoting are things that we've needed anyway. It's just that being together at the same place every day at the same time, all of our behavior was so implicit. Like you didn't really have to make things explicit like that. So, yeah.
Jeanna: I think about the times I worked in the office and you know, I didn't know a lot of my coworkers. Sure, I saw them in like a conference room, group conference room every day, but I didn't know them. And I think that some of those in office relationships could have been improved if I knew them a little bit better.
Lisette: I'm seeing there's a company in the UK actually that has systematized the personal user manual. They've actually every everybody in the company sort of gets their own place on the intranet of the company. But before you get on a call with anybody, you just push a button and it shows their user manual so you can really understand them before you get on a call with them. I think that's brilliant.
Jeanna: I love it. That's great. Cool. So working together as a team, what do you think are three important components of seamless online collaboration for remote teams?
Lisette: Ooh, three components of seamless online collaboration. That's an interesting one. So for me, I'm going to say the basis of seamless is one, agreeing on how to work together. The next, I would say, so in team agreements, I've been doing those for over 10 years. I think they're wonderful documents, just normalize our behavior. The other thing though is the solving the problem of information overload. All the messages, all the notifications, the, you know, I mean, I know for myself that I love my work. And so it's very difficult to sometimes turn off. And also most of us are knowledge workers and we need time for deep focused concentrated work and all of the, you know, the checking of our inboxes and our notifications and going back and forth. It's not only is it not productive, it's not giving us the focus that we need, but it's also exhausting. And I think that a lot of the burnout is coming from the context switching. So I would say that's one of the problems to tackle and you can do that by redesigning workflows. So for instance, I worked with a company that had a small team with a large number of projects and they were constantly meeting and talking just to manage this overhead of all the projects that they had. And when they learned about this behavior, and in fact, Cal Newport called it the hyperactive hive mind. So that even has a term now. But they learned about the behavior and they just put up a, they created a Trello dashboard where they added all of their projects onto this Trello dashboard. And so now if anybody needed to know what was happening on any given project, they could just check the dashboard, which was updated in real time. So that's solved. Like they went from having, you know, like meetings every day to just like twice a week. And then, you know, then, then they would get more and more efficient with how the work would flow. Or for instance, like creating a podcast, you know, exactly what needs to be done. On my team, there's no email sent in the production of any podcast because you know, the card on the Trello board goes like, okay, now it goes to this person and they know what to do. And then the card goes to this bird. They know what to do. So this is, this is, I think one of the keys to successful remote working. I think I was supposed to say a third thing, but those were two.
Jeanna: Yeah. Okay. We'll keep it at two then.
Lisette: Yeah. I'm sure I have a million.
Jeanna: Cool. And you know what, something I find interesting is, you know, I've built my company to be remote first and async and I'm involved in the Running Remote group and, um, we are an agency, however, and everybody around us working like this are tech companies, software companies. And I feel like tech and software companies really are at the forefront, startups, smaller companies are at the forefront of working like this right now. Why do you think it's concentrated to these types of companies only?
Lisette: Well, I mean, when I started, I was my audience was agile software developers. And it was that audience because one, they were focused on continuous improvement. And so they were always looking for better ways of doing things. So it was sort of a natural, you know, there was a group of people that were looking to learn new things anyway. And it's impossible to find all the developers you need in one place to solve a particular problem. Like developers have been working remotely from the beginning because it's just not enough people in Indiana that know this particular tech. It just doesn't exist. So they were the ones on the forefront.
Jeanna: I think of the whole stereotype of the developer sitting in his basement writing code, the old school stereotype of a developer.
Lisette: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That exists, but it's more sophisticated these days.
Jeanna: Yeah, right. Okay, so it's built into an ethos really of like, the type of work that these companies have been doing. And, and but what the other thing that I often think about is why is it that some of the bigger companies that are supposed to be like, the most forward thinking of them all the Amazons and the Googles of the world seem to be the ones that are really like balking against remote work and making people go back into the office. And that's what shocks me. Like, what do you think that's about?
Lisette: Quiet firing. I think it's silent layoffs. I'm just reading the news like everybody else, but I talk to a lot of people and that's what it feels like because they're getting rid of the remote. It's an easy way to cut people without giving severance. A lot of tech companies over hired during the pandemic and we're seeing a lot of layoffs now because of it. I do think that that return to office mandate was one of the first, like get rid of the rebels. It's the first wave of easy layoffs.
Jeanna: Do you think we're going to see them then once they do the cutting back that they need more willingly move into a remote-first era?
Lisette: I think that the flexibility is inevitable. Like I said, I don't think there's any, you know, uh, Seth Godin and Matt Mullenweg had an interview on Facebook years ago that really struck me. And one of the things that they said in that interview was if we had all started remote and the work culture was always, had always been remote. And then all of a sudden one pandemic day, it turns out that everybody had to go into the office at the same place at the same time. We would think of that as insane, right? It was like, like the model that we've come up with, it developed because of the history, but it doesn't make sense in the modern age anymore. So I think that flexibility is inevitable and the return to office mandates, they're not working. Like it's not solving the problems that CEOs are saying that they're having trouble with, which is people are disappearing, culture is suffering and productivity is down. So yeah, I can't imagine that it's gonna last.
Jeanna: Right. Cool. All right. Moving on to our last topic of the podcast. You recently chatted, I saw a post online about having difficult conversations. And this stuck out to me because I think that this can be one of the toughest things to get right when you are a remote team. I know that we've specifically struggled and chatted and tried to build culture and all this inside of my company on how to tackle these difficult conversations. But sometimes when you can't see someone, you can't see their mannerisms, you read into things that are said that might not be the way that they were meant, whatever, there's like a whole layer, layers and layers of that in remote work. So as team leaders and that need to give like feedback that might be difficult, what can you do differently or how should you approach this as a remote manager?
Lisette: Well, one, know that there is a formula that you can follow in these situations that will always work. So it doesn't mean that you always have to follow the formula, but that if, you know, like using the structure of how to give difficult and I actually, the workshop, it wasn't my workshop. I actually brought in an outside facilitator cause I was so interested in this topic that I wanted to offer it to the remote world myself. And one of the things that I learned in the workshop was you can start the conversation, especially when you know, it's going to be difficult. One is prepare yourself and the other person that you know, it's gonna be difficult conversation, but you can also start out by just stating your intention for the conversation which might be my flux if people are watching this my flux just disabled and it's it made me very orange all at once I'm sure you probably didn't notice I was I felt there. Okay. And I was saying I'm losing train of thought my last thing of the day today so forgive all like a...
Jeanna: Having conversations, make sure you prepare.
Lisette: Yeah, prepare and start with your intentional statement, which is like, uh, for instance, I had to have a difficult conversation with one of my facilitators and I started the conversation by saying, I want my intention for our conversation today is that we collaborate better in the future. So that's what I want the outcome of this conversation to be. And the other exercise that was very interesting to do was one that helps create empathy for the person with whom you're having the difficult conversation, which is think of several things that could be causing them to behave in the way that they are for why you're having this conversation. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what is it that could be happening for them that would cause them to behave this way. And just that exercise alone doesn't mean you'll figure it out or that you'll ever know, but just that exercise alone can be very empathy building. It could be like, oh, they relate to the meeting. Maybe their children were sick or maybe they had a really difficult day at home. Just that exercise alone really helped. So what I would say is definitely the woman who gave the workshop to Pika Shaleff is amazing. I would definitely highly recommend taking the workshop. Get training on how to have difficult conversations with your team. Because one is the training gives your team a language for how to approach the common language for how to approach the problem. Like they'll know that it's an intentional statement. They know that you've been thinking about the empathy, right? That gives you something to hold onto that reduces the amount of blame going back and forth.
Jeanna: Love it. That's great. And put in your team agreement. Yeah.
Lisette: Put in your team agreement about how you're going to handle conflict on the team, like establish that it's like a prenuptial agreement before things get heated write down how you're gonna behave. Like one, we're gonna try it directly. Like first go to the person one-on-one. If that doesn't work, maybe then go to the manager, whatever your process is. I worked for a team once where it broke down to the level where we actually got an outside facilitator to come in and help us facilitate the conversation because it had gotten so bad between the team members. That worked great. But don't avoid it. Because one, you're doing a disservice to the person who is not learning that they need to improve in whatever way, or the effect that that person is having on you, they have no idea.
Jeanna: Well, just like in any personal relationship, too, like if you have a husband or a best friend or a sister or whatever, if you let things go on and on and on, they don't go away. They just like escalate because what the person's doing is bugging you. And then when they do it 100 times more, you like people explode, right? So it's like learning how to have those adult conversations and not take things personally I think also as the other person is really important too, and just be willing to listen to feedback.
Lisette: It sounds so simple, but if I think back into my own personal training, I did not have, I wish I had learned like nonviolent communication or some of these techniques earlier in my life, because it is so much harder to learn them later. Cause I've got this defensive, you know, like instinctive defensive reaction that I have to first. So learn it early, learn it early for all you listeners out there. It's so much better.
Jeanna: And I think it's especially hard. I'll just say this last thing, because so many workers are perfectionists. We're people that are good at their jobs. We're super, there's a lot of pride and ego behind that, right? Like we've maybe succeeded in our careers, our whole lives. And when someone's telling you that you're not doing something right, that like hits a certain spot, I think. So it's the muscle to be a leader having difficult conversations. There's also a muscle to be like being a leader or a teammate to listen to those conversations.
Lisette: And one of the last thing we learned in the workshop was practice on small things before you have to do it on the big things. So practice giving feedback when it's easy because if you're doing it for the first time when it's hard, it's like you're just sweating bullets the whole time, you know?
Jeanna: Right, and you're losing sleep and stuff. That's great advice. Right. Cool. All right. Well, you have lots of conversations with various companies and teams and you give workshops. Any last advice to managers running remote teams about things that they should be looking at or doing for their remote teams?
Lisette: Ooh, I love that. So, um...Or, you know, my biggest thing I think for leaders is one, I would say you should role model the behavior that you want to see. So, you know, there's a lot of leaders who are mandating return to office that are not going back themselves, or there's a lot of people that do one thing. If you think that people don't notice, they are totally noticing. So I would say as a leader, really role modeling, you know, like role modeling, good work life balance, for instance, would be a good one or role modeling, good feedback. And speaking of feedback that I would say like my second point, I'll give an extra tip on this one. My second point is regular and more frequent feedback loops, as many as you can fit in that makes sense because the annual performance review, it never worked to begin with and it definitely doesn't work in a remote environment.
Jeanna: Right, I agree. All right, Lissette. So you have a remote working success kit. Do you want to tell people about what that is, where to find that online, and where to find more about you online?
Lisette: So the remote working success kit contains everything that, like the basic kit of what you would need in order to work well remotely. The personal user manual guide, team agreement guides, virtual icebreakers, these candy cards that you can hold up and use as like visual cues that they like, oh, you're on mute.
Jeanna: I really love that idea.
Lisette: So like a whole set of cards. So people can download that. And that's just a fun kit to just get you started. And that's at collaborationsuperpowers.com/superkit. And people can find everything else that they need to know at that link as well.
Jeanna: Great. I love that. I am going to go download it. Those cards were great. Those listening and only couldn't see the cards, but there's cute little cards that say like you're on mute that you can hold up when someone's on mute because that happens. I don't know how many times a week it's just we go through it constantly.
Lisette: Part of this new medium, right?
Jeanna: Yeah, totally. Alright, Lisette. Thank you so much for joining us on Remotely Cultured today. It's been lovely to have you. I just want to say one last thing. Let's set was introduced to me by Kaija from Running Remote, which is literally the most fantastic community and she is a fantastic community director. So if you want to join Running Remote Slack group, if you want to connect with other like-minded remote founders and leaders, I am not a sponsor of theirs. It's just benefited me greatly. So check out Lisette's workshops and check out Running Remote. And we'll see everybody on the next episode.
