EP032 - How to implement remote-first operations with Juraj Holub of Remote People
About the episode
This episode focuses on remote operations and how to implement them for companies. We will discuss the change management required to influence new meeting policies and practices, the need for a company hub, and the habit of asynchronous documentation. I have Juraj Holub, co-founder of Remote People, discuss these topics with me.
About the guest
Juraj Holub is the former Chief Meeting Designer at Slido, the role in which he consulted Fortune 500 companies to run more interactive meetings and events. After almost 10 years in SaaS, he co-founded Remote People to help companies collaborate and communicate better. His ideas were featured in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Wall Street Journal.
Connect with Juraj 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 me here.
Quotes from the show
The best way to deal with meetings is to turn most of them into async. Then, keep the crucial ones in your calendar and make them count. Those are the ones that will move the needle.
The best way to implement remote-first changes in your company is to win an ambassador who promotes the change. Who believes in its importance, believes in its benefits, and is also a power user of remote tools.
The future of work will be about flexibility. So it will be extremely important for the companies, not a nice-to-have tool, but a business imperative to get it right, to retain and hire talent, to hire new talent, because people will be choosing their employers based on this well, not only on the compensation.
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Welcome everyone, yet another day to talk about the future of work and the future of leadership. Today we will talk about remote team collaboration. We will discuss how to create a digital HQ for your remote company, how to do better on meetings, and how to wing synchronous communications. To discuss. I have Juraj Holub, co-founder of Remote People. Juraj, How are you?
Hi, Peter. Thank you so much for inviting me. Great to be here. I'm doing fine.
I appreciate your time and appreciate the perfect and professional podcast equipment and surroundings that you have. Your audience cannot see this, but Juraj is in a totally perfect and professional podcast hosting set up with a separate room and everything crystal clear. I love it.
Thanks.
So the first question is remote people, right? So what's your remote journey? How did you end up working remotely and how did you end up founding remote people?
Sure. So our story goes almost 10 years back and myself and my colleague Andrej we are one of very early employees at Slido. For those of you who might not be familiar with Slido, it's a q and a and polling platform that has been used by over 5 million users across the globe. And we joined this as team members number six and eight. So very, very early. From the get-go, we were building a global company. So if you want to build a global company, you really need to build it with a remote setup in mind. And for many years and we're talking about the years 2014 to 20, let's say 19 for most of the you know, businesses, this was, this was more or less like a sci-fi, right? Like to build a team with members spread from San Francisco the way to Tasmania. And I'm very thankful to our CEO who had this kind of a vision and was building that kind of a very international team. So that's where we were you know, we, we had the chance to experience the remote work for the very first time. Not only that, but we were able to contribute to building one of the world class global teams in a really remote setup. And you know, ultimately we joined, as I said, like as number six to eight. And when we left the company at after the acquisition by Cisco, there were almost 300 people. And we went through most awesome. Yeah, we went through most of those, you know, pains and gains. At a certain point we saw, okay, why don't we share it with the rest of the, the market with other businesses who might be struggling with the stuff that we experienced. And I dare to say, solved quite a few of those challenges along the way.
This is an awesome journey. And how did you end up founding remote people? So obviously you, with this company and you with your partner Andrej you are targeting three different pain points, I guess of other remote companies which is the digital HQ problem which helps people to align the meeting issue, which is like burning people out so much because people are not doing it correctly. And the third one is the documentation side asynchronous communication. Did you end up with, with these free pain points through your experience in Slido or what was the journey to identify those?
That's correct. At Slido, I had a sort of an official title of the chief meeting designer. And Yeah, it was fancy. It was, yeah. Yeah, it was, it was sort of like a fancy but also a bit strategic. And again, credit goes to our CEO Peter, and by appointing the chief meeting designer, we wanted to, you know, sort of signal the rest of the market that Okay, meetings are really one of the pillars for a successful team and for a successful company. If you don't get that right, you might have a problem because meetings are very often the reflection of your culture, right? Like if you've got a boss dominating the conversation during a meeting, well that says something about your culture versus you've got a boss who actually creates a context and opens up the conversation to the rest of the team. So coming back to your initial question, for us it was very, very important. And throughout the years collecting all that knowledge and insights. Firstly from the conferences, events later as we moved as a business, more into the all hands meetings and internal communication from those clients. And we wanted to basically like share it, not on implement it, not only within Slido, but also share it with the rest of the market. Mm-hmm. So I had that kind of a business slash marketing slash internal com slash culture slash user educational background. And my and my business partner, Andrej he helped to set up practically most of the tools stack that we were using at Slido, right? So when we found ourselves, you know, sort of out of the company at a certain point out of our own decision. We decided, okay, why don't we build a company that where we could both bring our own expertise. Andrej like a really passion for building the systems and setting things up, and I would be bringing in more of that like a business acumen. So that's how the whole com Whole idea for the company came about you.
You are pretty much operating like a tandem of of an operational arm for as a outside or external operational arm because marketing operations, tech stack and everything, that's really cool. Let's talk about the meetings because I think that's that's super important. And then we should address the other issues as well, the digital HQ and the documentation around it. But I agree with you. Meetings can make or break a company success. If you overdo it. You obviously burn people out if you have less meetings that people are not aligned that much. And how to, how do you handle the whole meetings? What is the flow facilitation and so on and so on and so on. These are super important for companies. So can you share some tips or learnings that you, that you had during your journey on how to have better meetings?
Absolutely. Remotely, of course. I'll come back to the moment when the Shopify made the headlines by canceling all of their recurring team meetings. Yes. And I remember a lot of people on the LinkedIn were celebrating that move. Right. And from the PR perspective. Absolutely brilliant, right? Like most of the business media picked up on that news and at a certain point, like the meetings became a scapegoat, you know, like being blamed for all the wrongdoings that happen in the organization. But I even wrote a, a short post on LinkedIn about this, and I said like, okay, maybe this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I do not really believe in this. I do not believe that it's the right thing to do to cancel all the recurring meetings because, If done right, they could still be the most effective way, how you distribute the communication and distribute information. On top of that, it's not only about the information distribution, right? Like you've got a video v cast loom and whatnot. You've got exactly all those kind of a tools where you can document it, almanac and whatnot, notion. But meetings are also about gluing the team together, about building trust, enforcing trust, and ultimately about having fun. Like honestly, I wouldn't want to be working for a company where I would be just like working in small room, you know, ticking off the task by task and barely meeting people, you know whether it's virtually or in person. So meetings have a much deeper role in our business lives than just, you know, information sharing. And I agree with you, like we might have a lot of meetings, and especially if you're in a managerial position. You know, I can imagine it's like a Tetris you know of the meeting blocks. But at the same time that that costs for a slightly different strategy, right? Like, not canceling all the meetings, but really turning some of the meetings into async way of communication and keeping the really, really important ones in your calendar, but making sure that those important meetings that stay, you make them count.
I highly agree. In terms of the example that you gave on the Spotify stuff just a note. Yes. I think also that was more like a PR stunt less likely an operational decision. Or maybe if you do have so many recurring meetings, then maybe sometimes a purge is, might be useful, but it, yeah, it doesn't mean that you won't have the recruiting meeting later on anyway. Yeah. Let's talk about as async communication then, because I also believe that this meeting could have been an email, right? So some of the meetings that you already have, some of the communications that you already have can be done or could have been done asynchronously as well by via documentation. So what are the learnings that you learned in terms of documentation and why it is important and how people can get started because, and just one more very, for one more sentence. Sorry. I found that everyone is super everyone is resonating really well when I tell them to reinforce or rethink how you meet. Everyone is resonating really well that I tell them that you should have a company HQ where you host everything, but everyone gets super freaking frightened when I tell them that you need to document stuff because it means extra work, kind of. And they also don't know how to get started. So, Share some tips how to get started because that's a really hardcore decision that managers need to make.
Yeah. If you don't mind, Peter, I would split this question or this point into two questions and two answers. Sure. Because one, it's about like deciding whether you need the meeting versus asynchronous way of communicating, and then how to start building that culture of documentation and to address the first question. I think you know, just not to overcomplicate things. I think the best yardstick to decide whether you need a, a meeting, a live meeting, or a real-time meeting versus a synchronous communication is whether the information is really transactional or whether it's more like a relationship based as our common friend, Iwo Sapar said, like, if ego is involved. Like you need to meet in real time, whether it's online or in person. Right. So that's the relationship stuff. So that can be a one-on-one. That can be an all hands meeting. That can be a tough Q and a session. That can be a conflict management and stuff like that. Please always meet in person. And then on the other side of the spectrum, you've got, for example, like a project update, right? Or you've got to communicate the new product releases, right? So those are great opportunity to record a video instead of, you know, just calling people in, right? Or you want to pitch an idea. Okay? So pitch it over the video and people can watch it at their own convenience. What I also find fascinating that these are like two of the extremes, right? Like the transactional versus relationship and in between you've got a lot of meetings that could, that actually and the live meetings could benefit from some async elements. So for example brainstorming sessions, like honestly, I haven't experienced a really, really great brainstorming session, and you know, I've been in hundreds of them. But the ones that were, that were better than the rest we're the ones that had an async element built in them. So prepare ahead of the time, like this is the problem that we want to actually, you know, solve our signup, whatever signups are declining. What can we do about it? If you ask me that question right there on the spot, without me doing a proper research without me, you know, just checking things out, I would, you know, just. You know, imagine and come up with something on the fly. So if you run a brainstorming session, make sure that you give instructions to people and you give them the tools where they can brainstorm all these kind of I ideas. So that was just one of the examples that even traditionally real-time meetings could hugely benefit from the async elements.
I highly agree. By the way, on the, on that that example it's really hard to to sit on really practical and useful brainstorming meetings. And I also believe that most of the daily standups that you have, Don't hate me agile coaches and scrum masters most of the daily standups can be distinguished or switched to an async alternative.
And you know, on that point, Peter, I think that the, one of the meetings that causes most of the pain is honest, like the status meeting, right? I've been to some that were so incredibly painful that after attending those meetings, I started, you know, like questioning my own sanity and my own professional career path. They were that bad, right? And instead of that, You know, if somebody shared the link with me where I could just, I could take a very quick glance at the progress of individual projects or tasks. Okay. Beautiful. And then let's meet, let's talk about the most problematic parts of the projects or tasks. Let's brainstorm how we can fix them. I do not recommend like ditching all of these things completely, but let's No, you know, take some of those painful parts to the async world, so to speak. Right. And let's do over home homework.
Just, yeah. Highly agree. Just a quick example to to the audience to imagine this, how it should work. Let's say you have a daily half an hour standup. Every freaking day with one of your teams together where people just report what they are working on and what they should work on today. And they also not just report, but also form some questions if they are stuck or ask for support or whatever. That is a recorded video loom shared on a asynchronous platform. Nothing more. You don't need to ask people to attend at the same time. Listen through everything, but you still need a weekly meeting. To make sure and ensure that people actually take care and support each other in terms of like listening to those loom videos and they are aware what's going on and ask the questions. Let's say you have half an hour every day, which means like, what is that? It's like five, almost like three hours of meetings. Every week and you just have one weekly meeting with one hour where you have a q and a as well. And that's it. You've saved two hours of meetings every week now timed it up for the year, and that's amazing when for the business, you can work during those meetings saved.
And that's a, that's a really good and practical example over there, Peter. And, and I think we needs to, you know, start experimenting little by little, right? Like, let's just take that kind of a status. Exactly. Meeting or status update meeting let's turn it into a video. Let's not. You know, reinvented the wheel from the scratch, right? But even these kind of a small things could be very infectious in a positive way, right? Somebody does that in the company, say like, oh, I really liked how, let's say Anne recorded the product update video. Like, okay, maybe I could, I could do something similar for our marketing updates, right? And of course, this is how you make the fire spread in a positive way in the.
Totally. Totally, totally. Let's, let's talk quickly about the server or the folder or the library that hosts all of these documented elements. The hq. Now I don't think that we need to explain, it's a, it's a place where you gather all of your documents and operational manuals and whatever. There are some best practices I think that you need to follow when you set that thing up. And what did you learn during your journey, even on Slido or with your clients? How, what are the great tips that you can share on how to set up the digital hq?
So we are currently working with a, with a client of about a thousand people spread across 12 time zones, and they want to fix this thing, right? So it's a very, very burning issue for them, and I deeply admire them and it's, it's an exciting opportunity for us to work with that. So we are very thankful in if they're listening to us. But to your point, I think two things, right? Like there's a way, or you need to come up with a strategy on how to implement this and then how to change the behavior. And again, those are two slightly different things, like how to implement this kind of you know, single source of truth. And when we're talking about single source of truth, it's usually notion, it's usually an almanac, right? I would say like start little by little, like, this is what happened at Slido. He was a colleague of, of mine. He was working with a product team and he brought it into his own, into his own team, and suddenly mm-hmm they start creating a roadmap. Into the notion, right? They started creating their own or documenting their own processes. Great. They started to capture and archive their regular standups, as you say. Right? So there was this guy, a colleague of mine, another Juraj by the way, and he was doing something cool, right? And You know, after a while I said like, Juraj is using Notion. I was like, what is Notion? Right? And as a marketing leader, I was, I remembered that feeling as like, okay, he's using a cool tool. I wanna start using it with the marketing team as well. Like I don't wanna fall behind. So there was this kind of a FOMO element as well. And I brought it to our marketing team as well. And again, you have to be slightly as a leader, a little bit ahead of the curve, right? Like I played around with that. I thought about the structure and usually the structure as goes as many websites go, right? Some kind of a lending page. This is about the marketing team. This is us, this is our mission, these are our OKRs or KPIs that we are tracking, and here is the index or here's, you know, everything else that you can basically play around, and you know, More and more teams started using it in this way, right? Like it became very infectious, as I said. So what I want to say is you need to have one ambassador who implements this kind of a solution, who believes in its importance, who believes in its benefits, but he's also, you know, sort of a power user in, in inside of the company. Let's not forget about that because notion can be counterintuitive at, at certain parts and you needs to lead the way. And if you are not able to do that, ask for an expert to show you how to set things up. And once teams started, actually, like individual teams started using Notion at a certain point we asked ourselves, can we migrate all company information over there? You know, such as the holiday policies, the culture codes and once you do that, there's no go going back. Like it becomes really a reference point for the entire company. And there's no going back.
I love the answer because it rhymes with everything that I also say to everyone. It's not like a, there is a marketing term when you're building a, I know it's like a website, but when you're building a website, the website is never ready. It can be ready to show to the public, but it's still not ready. You're still working on it. It's a journey. It's a continuous work on, on something that you own. It's the same with operations. It's the same with the hq. And I love the fact that you reference that. Yes. Start by just like creating a simple thing, meeting notes, host it somewhere organize it clearly have someone who is responsible of doing. And then, you know, it will be a journey for your company and for your team. And yeah, hopefully everyone is aligned in, in that direction.
And the second. No, totally agree with you, Peter. And, and to address the second part of your question, like how do you build that culture of documentation? That's a tough, tough, tougher nut to crack, right? Because as exactly as you said, like people will resist the change. That's one thing. And second of thing, you are creating extra work for them. Let's be plain and clear over here. Like if you are asked to take, you know, rigorous notes at every single meeting, upload them to a certain place. You know, even to organize them in a certain way, even though notions get an AI tool that helps you to do that, you still create 15 minutes extra work after each meeting, for example. That's one thing. So you have to be aware of that and communicate that clearly. And the secondly, you need to help people to build a skill. No matter how many AI generative tools we have, you still need to understand how to structural information, how to format things, how to communicate the main message first. That's when it comes to the writing skill. If you want to use Loom or Bcast or whatever video recording to, okay if you are going to record a 20 minute you know, I'm doing the quotation marks yeah, yeah over here on, on the camera video. Nobody's going to watch it. So once again, you have to be very succinct, very direct in giving the updates, shooting a video of maximum three minutes and whatnot. So you as an ambassador in internal ambassador, you will need to even teach your team some, you know, hard skills. And again, if you are not able to do that yourself, whether you don't feel confident enough or you don't have the time, ask an expert to do that. Right? But you will have to help people to, you know, ramp up those skills in order to fully roll out the culture of documentation.
I agree. One thing that I want to note or add is that yes, it creates more time on the get go. But for long term you are saving tremendous amount of time.
I agree.
So you probably will have fewer meetings and it's not just the time. Also, let's just not forget that it's more about alignment and if, yeah.
Sorry, go on. No, no, no. I a hundred percent agree, Peter, and, and just a, again, very practical example for years, I wasn't taking notes. You know, during the meetings, whether there were, those were internal or external notes. I lost and I lost that knowledge forever and ever. I didn't capture it there, and then. And you know, I, I always sort of like, You know, I'm just like so unhappy about the fact that I didn't do that. Like I lost, as I said, like so many amazing insights and they're un retrievable and this is, you know, just me as an individual. Right. But imagine, you know, multiplied it by a hundred or by thousand, how much incredible knowledge is simply lost by not taking those notes and you know, just like storing them somewhere.
Yes, totally, totally, totally. What do you think was the future for remote work, how will they teams, how will they work in the next one, two or three years? What do you think?
I think the future of work will be flexible and I use adjective, like purposefully. I really, this might be a little bit, you know, controversial because we've got remote in our brand name, but I don't think that we are heading into a fully remote future like that's, Legally, operationally, socially you know, we are not ready for that. As companies, as teams, as societies. It's not gonna happen. There will be exceptions. There are already exceptions. But those are outliers in a very positive sense of the word. I think that the majority of the business world will be located in the messy gray, middle of flexible slash hybrid work for years to come. On one hand, it's impossible to bring that gin back into the battle. The gin is out outside of the bottle. Like we cannot put the ghost back in. So people do want to have flexibility, but for every company, the flexibility will look different, right? Some will allow a month of work from abroad for example, even the traditional businesses such as consulting firms of the big four. I know this as, as a real fact because a colleague of mine mentioned that, and it's really incredible if you think about it. That is such a traditional company, you know, as one of the big four consulting companies is allowing their, their employees to work for one month from any country more or less is really admirable. So we have taken a huge and massively forward. Yes. But as I said, like the flexibility will have a different shape for a different, and that's totally okay. That's totally okay. It's really important to mention that we might not be all striving to reach the fully remote setup and even setup has got a major challenges such as isolation, such as operational challenges and whatnot. So I think the future of work will be about flexibility and about a common agreement within the companies, within the teams, and I think it will become, Extremely important for the companies. Not a nice to have tool, but a business imperative to get this right, to retain the talent, to hire the talent, because people will be really choosing their employers and the companies based on this as well, not only on the compensation.
Truly, truly, truly agree. And by the way, companies do need help in order to make sure that they can stay and be flexible. Speaking of help where people can find you?
So you can go and check out our website, which is remote people dot company, or you can connect with me on LinkedIn which is my name, Juraj Holub. And I post actually a lot of these tips that we're talking about with Peter on a weekly basis. So happy to connect on, on LinkedIn or through our website.
Juraj, This was an amazing conversation. Thank you for coming here. Appreciate your time and appreciate the professional setup.
Thank you so much for the invitation. Pleasure to speak with you.
