EP003 - How to adapt your company to remote work with Iwo Szapar of Remote-How Academy
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About the episode
In this episode, we discuss remote work and how a company can adapt remote work policies to ensure remote work is a viable option for their employees. To discuss this, I invited Iwo Szapar from Remote First, a company specializing in remote work training for companies.
About the guest
Iwo Szapar is a Remote Work Advocate & Co-founder of Remote-how, the world’s leading platform for remote professionals powered by and for the community of 25,000+ people from 128 countries. Through various initiatives like Remote-how Academy or Virtual Coworking, together with the world's top remote companies like GitLab, Prezi, or Doist, Remote-how is on a mission to help everyone achieve freedom of choice where and when they work.
He has been featured by BBC, Forbes, or Bussiness Insider while advocating for the #remotework revolution. In his downtime, Iwo loves to write, follow global politics (which he tries to replace with cooking), and play with dogs.
Connect with Iwo on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact here.
Quotes from the show
The difference between a leader and a boss is more apparent in a distributed team. There is a lot of groundwork to do in your management style next to transitioning to tools and processes.
One thing is for sure, that micromanagement is not the way when it comes to remote work. Not to mention the Zoom fatigue – people are sitting in meetings all day long and have limited time left for their actual work. In essence, the traditional office workways (which are also exhausting, by the way) will not work in a remote work environment.
Old school management style utilized tools such as phones, calendars, e-mails. These are just a few things from the legacy coming from the traditional office environment that needs upgrading.
You can combine the traditional and remote work locations in limitless ways.
Still, selecting the tool stack is the easiest part of your transition to remote work. There is plenty of work on the mindset, on the general level of trust, processes, and policies.
In the long run, even the most hart hatted managers will need to bow to the new waves of employment not to lose talented employees.
Process management and project optimization comes with one huge benefit: working less but smarter.
Remote work thought us how to manage projects online, how to collaborate online, and how to motivate our team online. All of these have one single benefit: increased productivity.
The goal for us now is to make sure we will keep this momentum for the long-run.
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Peter: Hello and welcome. I'm your host, Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. We will talk about remote work and how companies will react to their new remote work environment of today during the COVID crisis. To discuss, I invited Iwo Szapar, founder of Remote-how and we will talk about remote work. Iwo thank you for joining.
Iwo: Hey Peter. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Peter: Cool. So my email box has been exploded in the last one and a half years during the crisis that we have right now. And I'm sure you have the same experience. So tell me, what did you do in terms of remote work in the last year, everything has changed. The world has changed. Everyone became aware of remote work, even those who pretty much not worked remotely at all before the crisis.
Iwo: Yeah. Yeah. So for us it was pretty, pretty weird because we've been doing remote work education for companies like helping their team become remote first for over two years, when pandemic started. And we've been mainly working with companies that were looking at us as an upscaling thing. Right. And then the whole world become a newbie in remote work and once something, but honestly they have no clue what they're doing. They don't know what they need to change and what the change will look like, et cetera. Right. So, so it's really a chaos. And what's what is really important to mention here, and this is a big kudos to all hardworking employees for, for the last 12 and more months during the pandemic. That's you guys made this possible that the businesses are still running gold dog. They're not prepared for that, that, that the sides effect of this is that there's a lot of overworking and people are burning out or mental health issues. So those are the things that needs to be addressed also independently from, from, from the pandemic. So when it started, we needed to really change how we operate and, and really adjust the levels also because we were not helping build their already somehow advanced remote work or like in managing remote teams, but really starting from basic. So yeah, we, we launched a free programs for, for folks to join and consume the content for free. We've been hosting a lot of live events with with our flag one, the remote future summit, which happened for the third time in the role last year. So we've been doing a lot of the stuff that we've been actually doing from day one at remote-how. So like educating the market, thought leadership, spreading the word about the best practices. And we've been lucky that we've been working with experts from companies like Invision, GitLab, Buffer, et cetera. People that have been doing this for years. So we kind of acted and ends. We still act. And right now we take it to the next level with the marketplace. We're basically being a knowledge transfer. There is an expert, there is a need for such experts. And then the question is how this expert helps this environment. So yeah. It's been an interesting journey. But actually it's just the beginning because now companies are making serious moves and creating long long-term strategy. So that, that the real non-adhock, but really longterm thing starts, starts today.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah. It's an awesome journey. And I'm following a remote-how journey closely since, I don't know, two years now for three years now. And you started as a kind of like an educational platform mainly tailored to freelancers and remote companies. And those who want to get a certificate that they are certified to work remotely, shall we say? And but now the whole focus has switched. I think it's due to because the whole remote work focus has switched. So what I saw not just at remote-how, but I talked with other experts as well that this whole remote work experience started by mainly startup companies or like agile open, transparent, horizontal companies. And it was easier to make a change in terms of policies, in terms of work style, work methods, processes for a small organization of like 20, 30, 40 people. Everyone knows for example, the buffer example, the base camp example, but I mean, remember these are small companies, right? In terms of like their larger scale, under a hundred people, so, or close to a hundred. But what I saw is that now big companies, enterprise level companies experimenting or trying out, or forced to try out remote work. Did you have the same experience?
Iwo: Yes. Sure. So that's a very interesting shift that would never ever happen at such a scale without that the emergency around the pandemic. What we've been hearing from companies from the day one when we started, it was like, no, do remote work, just like generalizing. Right. And the reasons were different. Like the main one coming from managers that people won't be working when they are working remotely. Like they will be watching Netflix and playing PlayStation and like, yeah. Yeah. But you can do the same stuff when you're in the office, you can just like change the angle of your computer and then you're you're there. Right. So it was, it was like a pure fear of something. Fear of change and also a lack of trust. And then of course we can dive deep into like operational reasons, et cetera. Right. But there was a lot of connected to like the mindset. It was just as humans being afraid of something new. If something in the office worked in the past, although there were a lot of flaws, right. And then like you said, majority of companies were rather smaller. We had some like exceptions, like gitlab, automatic companies over a thousand people, but still, this is, this is smaller, right.
Peter: Started as a remote company. So something to make a switch, they didn't make a switch because they started as a remote first company.
Iwo: Yeah. And there was, there was way, way easier. One of the few companies at the larger scale that started the switch from the office environment was HubSpot and they started this before pandemic. So they might be one of the examples, especially when we are looking at the fact that most companies will go hybrid. Hybrid remote. They've been doing hybrid before pandemic. Right? So then having this in mind when we started to like, think about how we can make the biggest impact as as remote having, what are the needs of companies. The answer is that the needs are all over the place. That the basic, maybe a one common denominator is consulting. Right? But then consulting can mean everything from jumping on a call for one hour to becoming a head of remote that is consulting and going super in depth through mentoring programs, education programs, and there's creating policies, handbook. So basically companies right now need Manpower that would help them make this transition because throughout the last 12 months, they were mainly utilizing internal sources that were like using Google as the source of source of knowledge. Right now you need to take it to the, to the next level. So that's why we decided that. Because of the network that we created at Remote-how, of experts that were parts of Remote How Academy, remote future summit, et cetera, we will allow companies to connect with these experts and work with them on projects, either custom projects or what we call productized services. So the professional services that has a clear Something to deliver. Basically if you go to Fiver, you're buying a logo and you go to our platform, you can buy an audit or a watch or whatever. Right. So that basically aims to help companies, access people, access services very easily and experts because the last thing, what was. Maybe not shocking, but sometimes a bit frustrating. And also for more of the people in the remote work community before pandemic that they were part of their community before the pandemic was a lot of new experts popped up right. Yeah, there isn't a business opportunity. So people out of the blue become experts. And that could honestly, fire back very heavily at the whole remote work hybrid concept because basically people are not experienced will be advising. And this could create a big mess. Right?
Peter: That's what I wanted to ask this because I saw the same trend suddenly everyone became a remote work expert but I think it's interesting to point out that what do you think, how much of like enterprise level clients let's say, I don't know, above a thousand people with mainly in-office structure. They forced work remotely. So things are changing .How much of their, their problems are connected to knowledge. So for example, they don't know how to set up a project management system that works in the cloud and people can work online. And how much of this problem is more like mindset change as you said that I don't know, the HR people or the leadership and their company, they're just afraid to change and afraid to experience the change. And when they experienced the change, they just realized that pretty much everything is the same like they did before in the office, it's just, there is the office, but all the project management tools that they want to use online, they already used that before. So that's not like a huge step. So what do you think, how, if you can, if you need to balance that, would it be mindset or would it be maybe knowledge because that, by the way, I think changes how the experts not just on your platform, but in general should approach a problem because it's totally different. If you need to approach it as a knowledge transfer. Or you need to approach it as a coaching problem or a consulting problem that you need to, you know, handhold the client and, and guide them through the change.
Iwo: Yeah. So that the answer is that it's both, but it really varies depending on the organization, right? This year we started to work with enterprises. There are, there are like way above the thousands. Like companies that are like 5,000, 10,000 in different countries. And in these big, big companies, you see, you see both, you see on one side if a company has a let's call them old-school management in place old school leaders Like without a stigmatizing, but basically people that are used to work with phone and email and calendar, and that's basically how they build their management processes and management style also around. So for these companies, it starts with the mindset with convincing managers that this, this could work in the long term and they would actually benefit from that. Then what pandemic did in the last year is that these managers that were against it, they actually became a part of this experiment. Right. And most of them actually are right now in a position that they also saw benefits for them personally, right. Flexibility, et cetera, et cetera. So there are more eager to adjust, but still there are the ones that are, although more pro remote work, they are not acting as a leader of a distributed team. There are still micromanaging and a ll the typical stuff that happens. If a manager doesn't know how to lead a distributed team, or just in general lacks a lot of that the basic management management skills, right. And then like transitioning to tools and, and like processes and that, and the knowledge, there's a lot to do like that the groundwork that. It's not even connected with remote work itself, because if you, if we just take an example of meetings, right. Everyone talks that there is a zoom fatigue. People are on the meetings all day and they don't have time to do their normal work. This is insane. Like first thing. And that means that the work is organized in a bad way because there's no asynchronous communication. People are not prepared well prepared for this meeting. They in many cases don't make sense, et cetera. And so like all the oldest struggles, so those are not the things that are connected to remote. This is just like in general, how you manage your team, how you organize meetings, how you set up the communication, et cetera, et cetera. So a lot of this stuff like we are bit shocked sometimes. But companies see that they need to change. And right now employees won't like them to go back to the old style. So managers need to change mindset. Yes. Tools, processes, I would say more processes and like an ongoing coaching on like changing how you do it. Because the tool stack, this is the easiest part, to be honest for, for like most cases right.
Peter: I want to reflect two things that you just said because it's really bothering me. One of the zoom fatigue is I mean, I've worked for for advertising agencies back in the day and like 80% of my time there because I was part of the mid management was around meetings. So I spent so much time on pointless hour long like no, nothing useful came out from those meetings. And so it's kinda like the same offline that you have in the online. And the second thing that I want to reflect is that I think in general, I think we can state that the internet makes everything super transparent. So what you had before and what you have on the internet it's pretty much the very same that you have had before, but in a transparent way, which it means that if you as an employee didn't work so much in the office, because you just looked busy you cannot really replicate that in the, in the remote work environment, because there should be an output at the end. And if there's no output, there's a question. Right. But it also means that the leadership also sometimes it's not the best leadership. So if people are micro-managing, you're, let's face it. If people are micro-managing gets down, it's not just naturally work on, on online.
Iwo: Yeah. Like hundred, hundred percent. And a lot of managers would have a hard time adjusting because it will be a really, it might be basically for a lot of them in to learn how to manage again, from the scratch, maybe it might be even easier. So yeah, there's a lot of legacy that needs to be needs to be fixed, but it's good. That that's very good because if we optimize how we work at the end of this change we might be working less. Like a four day work week is already a thing, right? Buffers started it this year. They decided to prolong the experiment. Spanish government just a month ago officially announced that they will be doing a pilot in 2021 for some companies. So if, if the end goal of this whole thing is that we work less but smarter. Yeah, more efficient then it's amazing, right?
Peter: Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a initiative in one of the Scandinavian countries. Yeah.
Iwo: Yeah. They are a lot of, they were also a lot of small initiatives. It's not connected to remote work. Like. They were going on for years, but I feel like now, because it's such a big change in the workplace and this optimization, but also what's, I think even more important is how people view work and what they expect from the fact that you're working it's in most countries or maybe not most countries like most well developed countries. It's less about money. It's more about experience it's about that making an impact and the people that you're working with, et cetera. Right. So that also sets changes the whole tone around, like we are working just to like grow our wallets and like and get promotion. Right. So yeah, there is a lot of interesting stuff around culture.
Peter: Yeah. So if you need to share like a few, three to five tips on how to get started with remote work, if you have a business right now, which is not a hundred percent remote. And you are the leader or the owner of the business or the founder of the business. What are the practical tips that you can get out? And, and implement right away to work more efficiently in a remote environment. What do you think?
Iwo: Sure. So the first the most important thing is to understand where you are right now. So I'm doing some sort of an internal audit of remote work would help you really understand what needs to be changed or implemented. Right. And this approach can work for small, medium and larger organizations that the framework that I will, that I will give you in a second. So basically the first the most important is that you need to get feedback from your employees. Right? We can divided them into four different groups. So individual contributors, managers, HR, if you have ones and people C levels founders, right? Getting the anonymous feedback from people around all the things related to remote work. So work organization, communication, culture, knowledge development, et cetera. So basically if you look and every businesses is different, right? So if you look at all the areas of your business, you should audit them accordingly to the new way of new way of working. So you're asking your people, you're learning more about what what they expect where they see fields for improvements. Basically, you're showing them that this change won't happen without them, and they will be contributing in this change. Right. Then of course, depending on the size of the organization, it's really good to also do some one-on-one interviews with people to, to get even more more in depth overview. If your organization is small, I'm not expecting that there are a lot of remote work policies or handbooks to be reviewed. But if there is anything that has been written down as a best practice, it's also good to gather this, right. And then at the end of the day it will be good to speak with someone that is experienced to analyze these, these results. Right? So, that's a one one thing to start with. The second more like practical things that we also touched a bit on at first communication, because this is one of the biggest challenges for more, most of our organizations, especially in two aspects, the one that we just discussed. So meetings and switching from communication, there is very synchronous to asynchronous that's that is also encouraging people to write stuff in and, and then I think what they want to communicate instead of ad hoc conversations on one-on-one on like Slack or email, right. So about two meetings. This is like a huge topic, but basically in order to become more efficient and have less meetings, they need to be better prepared. So agenda, who is on a meeting, what is their role? What do we need to accomplish, et cetera. It's like a bunch of stuff online that you can look up on that. And then the second aspect to to switch your communication, to be more asynchronous. Meaning that you're not expecting someone to reply to you immediately, their response will come depending on your internal internal communication rules, right? If something is super urgent, you have a service level agreement that people need to respond within five minutes because the website crash. Right. But if this is just a question about the meeting that is in a week, right? You don't expect people to, you should not expect people to respond because then you're interrupting them. And then you're making them less productive also. Right. So closing on that, the asynchronous communication make sure that you're writing as much as possible in a transparent way. So we're not creating the silos of like one-on-one messages, but you're opening the discussions in channels and threads. So it's also visible for people later on, or maybe also your new hires will be able to review how it looked in the past. And maybe last but not least what is connected to the productivity dimension around the messaging is deep work. So one of the like successful remote workers they are able to work without distractions for certain periods of time. And we call it deep working sessions. So basically you're starting at let's say, we'll start right now. It's 5:00 PM here in Vietnam, and I will have a one very specific thing to deliver. I need to finish one presentation. I'm putting my phone away. I'm muting all the, all the notifications and I'm just extremely focused on this one task. I can be doing this together with you, you all share with me what you want to deliver. And then at the end of this session, it should be no more than 50, 55 minutes. Then we are exchanging what we've done. And we, if we haven't done, like what was the reason, et cetera. Right? So I would say that those are the few areas that you should dive deeper into and you can pretty easily implement them in your, in your day to day operations. So I hope that would be a good start. That would take you some time.
Peter: Perfect. And what do you think, what are the thank you for sharing those? What do you think, what would be the quick wins when you, when you switch to a remote work environment? So what are the benefits by doing this?
Iwo: Quick wins. Depends on what are your motivations in life because for some people, a quick win will be that they don't need to drive to work anymore, and they don't need to spend like two hours a day in the traffic and they can spend this time playing with their children or finding a new hobby. You're right then the other benefits. And that's for example, us you can work you can work from anywhere. We are right now in Vietnam, we've been traveling through Southeast Asia previously. We were, we lived in the U S so that's that that's really opens up that the places where you can live and work at the same time. And it doesn't matter that you need to be doing this all the time. And like be digital nomads. We even ourselves at the slowmads as, so we're thinking one place for longer, like for example, here, we're over, over a year. So that's like another benefit then moving, moving to like less location related aspects. That's basically people that are working remotely are happier. And there was a lot of studies showing this prior to pandemic. And there were like, of course, a lot of reasons for that. But if you just look at the fact, if your day, if your work day can be more flexible when it comes to time, right? Then there is no fixed and imagine nine to five work, because if you're an early bird, for example, like I am, you can wake up at 6:00 AM and if you feel like doing some, some work in the morning when you're drinking the coffee, you can use this time to work. And then normally you would go to the office at nine, but then you can go to the gym, you can play tennis, you can, you can have a walk, you can go with your dog. Like there's so many options. So basically we are taking back control of our life and, and, and our time with remote work, of course, that really varies depending on the, on the organization. And then, and the type of work that you're doing. But I think that's the biggest one that people are getting back that the freedom and they can make more decisions on their own with of course, having in mind that it's still work and the work needs to be done. And maybe. Last last, last, last thing. Why remote work? Because it's also changing that the company culture, it needs to change the company culture. So at the end of the day, we are aiming to have more organizations where people feel like, Oh, it's Sunday. Oh, okay. I, I'm not I'm not. I'm unhappy about the fact that the week is starting and I need to work again so we can find Some like more happiness in the Friday, Monday to Friday time, thanks to changing how the company culture looks like, because like, we need to have this in mind that a lot of companies had these like amazing values on their career pages and how cool they are and how awesome it is internally. But at the end of the day, it wasn't the case. So it also add fields to change.
Peter: Yeah. And also it's highly undervalued by most companies. I think one of the main benefits as a company that when you are kind of like forced to switch to a transparent project management and transparent team management due to the work or working remotely you will have a better overview on your own company. Plus, as you said, All of your employees will be much, much more happier, which means that they will produce better work. They will work more efficiently. They have to work more efficiently because by the way of working more efficiently, they will keep more hours for their own life that they can spend on whatever they want. So yeah, ultimately everyone will benefit. So for those who want to get started where people can reach you, can you share some details, please?
Iwo: Yes. Sure. I'm a pretty active on LinkedIn. So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. And then if you're looking for some materials on remote work, we have a bunch of them at that remote how, free resources, remote work audit guide book on team engagement, report about remote managers, report free education programs. So a bunch of stuff that people can dive into for free and with me personally, the best way would be LinkedIn.
Peter: Cool. And then it will be the remote work summit that you mentioned?
Iwo: Remote future summit 2021 will probably take place in September. The last one was also in September. So yeah, we are aiming for for default this year.
Peter: Cool. Will it be a remote only conference or...
Iwo: We were doing this before it was cool in 2000 18. So we keep to this way.
Peter: Cool, cool. I'm wishing you the best and thank you for joining for this podcast.
Iwo: Thank you so much. Stay safe.
